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FLIGHT PATHS by Jacqueline Ellis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FLIGHT PATHS
by Jacqueline Ellis

December 2021:

I give my dad a project: tell me what you remember about making wine with your friend Franco, back when we lived in Peterborough. The task distracts him while he waits for biopsy results. Suspected mesothelioma.

It is two weeks after he called to tell me that a routine chest X-ray had uncovered nodules in his lungs, and we have spoken every day since then: 4:00 p.m. in the United States, 9:00 p.m. in England.

Each time, before I hang up, I say:

“I’ll call tomorrow. Just to check in.”

Each time, my dad hands the phone to my mother.

“Shall we come?” I ask her. “For Christmas and for dad’s 80th?”

“Not yet,” she says. “Not until we know for sure.”

My dad records his memories and sends me a digital file. I touch play on my phone and wait for his voice.

He reads from notes, takes time to enunciate, sometimes falters, clears his throat, loses his breath at the end of a sentence. He tells me how he and Franco built a wine press from steel and wood purloined from the brick factory where they worked. How Franco ordered Sangiovese grapes from Naples. How they pressed the fruit into juice, siphoned the juice into barrels. Waited while it fermented.

I watch the audio waveform, white columns that rise and fall on my screen, visualize my dad’s words. I had told him I needed the stories for something I was writing, but I don’t take notes or think about how I could shape his story, make it more literary. Just listen and rewind, listen and rewind.

 

September 11th, 2001:

Unusually, my dad calls at 8:45 on a Tuesday morning.

He has recently retired. I have just started my first tenure-track teaching position in Jersey City.

I give perfunctory responses to his innocuous questions:

Am I prepared?

Of course.

Am I nervous?

Not really.

Sirens fill the streets outside.

“That’s a lot of noise,” my dad remarks.

“Yeah, just fire engines.”

I glance at the TV.

We say goodbye and we’ll talk on Sunday and have a good week and say hello to mum and give our love to Dan.

The wails outside fill the room.

 

March 1993:

On the way to Heathrow, my dad braked too late to avoid hitting the car stopped in the line of traffic ahead of us. The impact was slight, but my body angled forward from the back seat, and I glimpsed his profile—the tightness at the corner of his lips, the curve of his forehead, the tips of grey brow hairs curled over the corner of his eye.

My dad got out of the car to meet the other driver.

“Weren’t you paying attention?” the driver snapped. “Are you stupid?”

My dad nodded. “You’re right,” he said.

I started to ask my mother why dad had been distracted, but her head was tilted up to where the top of the windshield met the roof of the car. She inhaled, the beginning of a sigh. The back of her neck was rigid. I looked down at my hands like a scolded child. As if I wasn’t a young woman whose father was driving her to the airport because she had chosen to live in another country four thousand miles away from home.

In seven hours, my flight from Heathrow will land at Logan Airport in Boston. I will present my visa to an immigration officer. One-by-one, he will press my fingers onto a purple inkpad then place each of them in the center of a square printed on a yellow form. He will not smile or speak or look at me. He will stamp the pages of my British passport in red ink. He will hand back my passport. Then he will look toward a line of people waiting behind a strip of yellow tape stuck to a dirty blue carpet and say, “Next person, step forward.”

In the backseat of my dad’s car, I had distracted myself with calculations. If I flew home once a year for two weeks, time together with my parents would be more meaningful than mundane weekend visits from a few miles away or daily pop-ins if I lived around the corner. I might miss birthdays or Father’s Days or family reunions, but those absences won’t matter if I call more frequently, if we spend whole vacations together.

I didn’t factor in unknown variables: divorce, a second marriage, a daughter.

I didn’t consider how I might weigh the options when my dad got old and sick. Didn’t measure the value of everyday time, the caring, present moments when I wouldn’t be there to help get my dad settled at home after a hospital stay or write his doctors’ appointments onto the calendar. I wouldn’t buy his groceries or make his coffee or chat with him about the Channel Four news. Ask him to identify birds that visit his many feeders. I didn’t anticipate what his final seconds might look like—the jagged green-lines monitoring his heart, the trace of ice water over his dry lips, his still, held hand, the ridges of his thumbnail against my index finger.

 

November 2019:

I talk to my brother on WhatsApp while I walk my dog in the park near my house. My dad has been in the hospital with chest pains several times this month. I squint against the sun, look up at where the flight path from Newark airport streaks the sky, then down at the jagged salt-lines that ring the sides of my boots.

When I was little, my dad let me sit on his lap while I steered our car back and forth over an unbridged stream. Sometimes, he would drive fast over hilltop roads and pretend our car had taken flight. I would press my face against the window, watch the road disappear below.

“This is how things are going to be now,” my brother says.

He tells me not to come. Not yet.

Jacqueline Ellis writes creative nonfiction, memoir, and personal essays. Based in Montclair, New Jersey, she is originally from Peterborough, England. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hinterland Magazine, Bending Genres, Zone 3, and The Normal School, among others. Find her work at jacquelineelliswriter.com.

 THE SECRET ANNEX by Rita Mendes-Flohr

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THE SECRET ANNEX
by Rita Mendes-Flohr

In all those years we have lived in this the old house in town so close to the sea, I have never been able to get near the beautiful turquoise water behind the row of houses on the Pietermaai. It is too dangerous to walk through the narrow alleys between those houses to the sea that is sparkling at the other end. You don’t know who is hanging around there, my Mami says.

In the backyard of the Wilhelmina School, we are even closer to the sea. If you listen hard, you can hear the rustling of the waves above the terrible noise of the scream­ing girls. But we are locked inside the schoolyard by a high yellow wall with broken pieces of glass on top to make sure we won’t climb out.

I want to get to the sea that is so close and yet so far away. I want to swim like a dolphin across the waters, jumping up and going down into the waves again. I want to sail to distant lands, far from this little island—to see the world on the other side of the sea. But I am locked inside the schoolyard, with the broken glass on the wall to make sure we will stay safely inside.

Sometimes I find a sòldachi, in our schoolyard, a little hermit crab gone astray from the sea. I pick it up and put it on the palm of my hand. But the sòldachi pulls in its little claws and hides deep inside its shell, and then I must wait patiently for the little crab to feel safe and come out again.

How I wish I were a sòldachi. With my claws I dig a hole under the tall yellow wall and crawl out to the sea, away from all the noise and the screaming. Here, on the flat rocks, it is quiet. There is only the whispering of the sea leaping onto the shore, filling up the pools and puddles and pulling back again, leaving behind little waterfalls splash­ing down the rocks until the sea comes in again, jumping and frolicking as before. It never gets tired, that old and beautiful sea. It does not even stop to rest. Sometimes it is fiercer, sometimes it is calmer, but it is always there, pushing and pulling against the rocks.

I look out over the sea, shimmering in many shades of turquoise and green. Gra­dually, it gets darker and darker until finally, in the distance, it turns into a deep dark blue, almost black, when the bottom drops down, like a precipice.

Out there, the sea is so black you cannot know what is underneath. There can be sharks lurking below the surface or ferocious barracudas with razor‑edge teeth that can rip you to pieces, there can be manta rays and giant eels that prey upon you from under­neath the deepest sea and there is no way you can see them coming.

No, I will never know the magnificent continents on the other side of the sea. I must stay here on the shore with my little shell on my back.

I am afraid.

◊

Even though the Wilhelmina School is not so far away from our house, I always get a ride so that I won’t have to walk alone on the dangerous streets. Often, it is Tio Chaco who drives me to school, especially when Papi must leave very early and does not come home for lunch because a tourist ship is in the harbor and he must keep the store open, like all the other storekeepers.

Now that I started fifth grade, I tell Mami that I am old enough to walk to school by myself. Mami finally agrees but only after I promise to stay on the main road and never stray off my path into the side streets and the alley­ways. Mami tells me to walk by fast when I pass one of those dark and narrow alleys between the houses on the Pieter­maai, those alleys that always smell of urine. She says I should never stand there and stare at the beautiful blue‑­green sea at the other end of the alley.

As I walk home from my ballet class, which is held in the gym of the Wilhelmina School, a man calls out to me. He is standing in one of those narrow alleys between the houses on the Pietermaai. The muscles on his brown arms and shoulders are shimmering with drops of saltwater. In his hands he holds a huge karkó—a conch shell that curls around an inner core of mother-of-pearl in a deliciously pink color. It is much, much larger than the shell I had found in Bonaire and that I treasure on a shelf of the bookcase next to my bed.

“Come here, pretty little girl,” he says, as he reaches out for me. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t eat you up. All I want is to show you this beautiful karkó I brought up from the bottom of the sea.”

My heart stops beating. This is exactly what my mother has warned me about. A strange man is touching me. He has his hand on my skirt. Here it is. Now it is coming. What have I done that this should happen to me?

With all my strength I push him away and run as fast as I can. I do not even look back to see if he is following me. I run back into the schoolyard and into the gym, panting. The next ballet class has already started, and so I hide behind the parallel ­bars and the pummel horses. As if I have done something wrong.

After the class is over, I ask Maritza’s mother if she can drive me home. I do not tell anyone what has happened to me. I just say I stayed at the gym to watch the next class and worry that everyone can see right through me.

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is better to stay inside the yard behind the white fence, where it is safe. Outside, on the street there are evil men out to prey upon you. Per­haps I should believe the grownups. They know better. They say that boys can fend for themsel­ves out there on the street, that they know how to fight back.

But you are weak, they say. You need to be protected. And it is you they’re after.

You are a girl.

◊

So now I walk to school on the other side of the broad Pietermaai, far from the little alleys that look out to the sea. That way I am certain not to run into the man with the karkó. And at the end of the school day, I meet Tio Chaco at his office, which is right next to the Wilhelmina School, so that I can get a ride home with him. That is a lot safer, I figure, even though I do not dare to admit the real reason to my mother.

Tio Chaco’s office is in a narrow building in the Breedestraat that looks like the tall and thin houses on the canals of Amsterdam, except, here, in the tropics, the outside walls are covered with painted plaster—green, yellow, orange, and sometimes a dark red. You enter Tio Chaco’s office through a very narrow hallway. Closer to the store-front window is another office with a glass door, but Tio Chaco’s office is all the way in the back, through a door made of the same kind of wood as the partition wall that closes off one side of the hallway.

Tio Chaco does not seem to have many visitors and I am sure they have a hard time finding the door to his office, as it does not look any different from the gray partition wall. If you don’t look carefully, you won’t be able to tell there is an office there.

I think Tio Chaco’s office, with that hidden door, must be like Anne Frank’s Secret Annex—het Achterhuis. My teachers in school like to tell me—the only Jewish girl in my class—how much I look like her and go on to describe that hiding place with the moveable bookcase camouflaging the entrance. They tell us how the good Dutch people hid the Jews from the horrible Germans who had invaded Holland.

Inside the Secret Annex, Anne was safe, and she could write her diary. The entrance to her hiding place could not be found. Outside, the sirens were blaring, and thousands of Jews were rounded up by the Gestapo on the streets of Amsterdam and sent to concentration camps, packed into cattle cars. But in the end, Anne was betrayed—the Secret Annex was not a safe place after all. Poor Anne died of typhus just a few days before Bergen Belsen was liberated. If only she could have held on a little longer.

I am relieved our little island stayed out of the war even though the Germans were after the oil from our refinery and their submarines fired several shots at our harbor. Imagine if the Germans had conquered our island during the war, then perhaps Mami and Papi and all the other Jews would have been taken away to concentration camps, and my brother Dito and I would have never been born.

Most of the time, when I come to Tio Chaco’s office, Estela, his secretary, is there, but now and then Tio Chaco is all alone. Often, I must sit and wait patiently, as Tio Chaco is busy on the phone in a heated discussion I do not understand—perhaps it has to do with the land he buys to build houses for poor people. But as soon as he finishes that phone call, my beloved Tio Chaco pours all his attention on me. He hugs and kisses me, his sweet Little Princess, and asks what special gift I would like him to buy me.

Then he starts to close the windows and the door that open to the back of the building, bolting them securely, and my heart begins to pound. When he turns off the lights and it becomes dark, I have the feeling of being closed in and I am gasping for air. Like the day the swimming teacher took me to his office and taped my mouth shut so that I would stop screaming.

Suddenly, I feel a large figure with a black cloak hovering above me like an enormous manta ray. I cannot see his face in the darkness. He grabs me from behind and wraps me in his big black cloak. I am terrified he will take me with him, down, to the bottom of the sea.

I want to get out, but Tio Chaco has locked all the doors. I cry out for my Mami to come and save me, my mother, the champion swimmer who can dive into the deepest waters. But my mother does not come. She is busy with my little brother who cries all the time.

And so, I hope and pray that Tio Chaco will hurry and finish what he must do so that we can get the hell out of there.

Rita Mendes-Flohr is an exhibiting visual artist, ardent trekker, and co-founder of a feminist art gallery. Born on the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao, she attended college in Boston and lives in Jerusalem, feeling at home only in the in-between. Coming to writing at a later stage in life, she has published (in Hebrew translation) a memoir of her multicultural Caribbean childhood and writes introspective essays about her journeys and treks in distant regions of the world. Her work can be viewed on her website.

MARK MY WORDS by Christine H. Chen

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MARK MY WORDS
by Christine H. Chen

Ah Ma tells me what a lucky girl I am, I am the only child, Ah Ba spoils me with toys I break within a week, dresses I dirty within minutes, shoes I muddy after one wear, what a lucky girl I am who has everything now that we live in America, the land of big-box stores with acres of surface and shelves filled with people’s dreams of things to buy and accumulate in their vinyl-siding homes with manicured lawns, who never had to fight for the last ladle of porridge with a brother or a sister, never had to watch Grandpa paraded on the streets by juvenile Red Guards, younger than Ah Ma, never had to be called dirty words like Bourgeois, never had rotten cabbages thrown on unwashed hair because there was no running water, never been denied to study because Grandpa was listed as Enemy of the Proletariat because he worked for a bank in Shanghai, never had to get up at four a.m., wake up the youngest brother, bundle him on her back sling to queue for rationed rice, never had to suck on an empty spoon for the last drop of watered-down rice because she’s the oldest who had to give up everything for the younger-than-her and the older-than-her, never had to watch your brothers and sisters being whisked away to labor camps to rid them of Capitalist Thoughts, never had to see your second brother return from the rice fields with leech bites all over his legs, never had to watch your little sister shrivel in size while her throat ballooned into a tumor, never had to fan the dying coal to heat cold feet, never had to bandage Grandpa’s beaten bloody head while Grandma whimpered under soiled bed sheets, never had the burden of the family like boulders on your shoulders, never had to accept to marry an old blind man to escape from the Communists, never had the luxury to throw tantrums, to pout, resist, frown, spurn, sulk, disregard, protest, shout back, defy like what I’m doing in this minute instead of washing the dishes, and that’s when Ah Ma slaps me hard right across the face leaving these four red finger marks.

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction work has been published in CRAFT Literary, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel My Lemon Tree, forthcoming in 2023 by Spuyten Duyvil. Her publications can be found at www.christinehchen.com.

SAHARA DREAMS by A. J. Jacono

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SAHARA DREAMS
by A. J. Jacono

The first night of the tour, after the guides had hitched the camels and secured the mess tent and laid out the steaming tagines and plates of couscous, Cash decided to make some friends because he hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in days and sat with two people from either New Zealand or Australia. One of them held out a hairy hand and introduced himself as Reeky; the woman with him, he said, was Queen.

“Super hot today, wasn’t it?” said Ricky. “Sweated out half my body weight by noon.”

Quinn squinted at him, said, “No shit,” and stuck a spoon into her couscous mountain. “We’re in the middle of the fucking Sahara.”

Cash wasn’t sure of their relation. Quinn was too comfortable snapping at Ricky to be even a close friend, and they didn’t resemble each other—he was large and had a doughy midriff, whereas she was five feet tall and bony as a ghoul. So, Cash glanced at their left hands. Quinn wore a ring; Ricky had a tan line where there’d recently been one.

“It’s pretty noticeable, isn’t it?” said Ricky, lifting the hand. “It fell off on the way. My camel kept scooting out of the line to sniff the females’ asses and then tried to mount the one in front of me. Flung me back pretty far, but I didn’t break anything, thank God—little bruise on my shoulder. I didn’t think anything else was wrong until we linked up with your group here and Quinn was like, ‘Where the hell’d your ring go?’”

Ricky chuckled, but Quinn glared out of the corner of her eye. He cleared his throat and forked a few more chicken chunks while Cash, unsure of what to say, perched his chin on a fist and wondered whether he could’ve convinced Sarah to come with him anyway. Flying to Morocco together wouldn’t have made her forgive him, but at least he wouldn’t have had to sleep in every hotel bed alone, walk through unfamiliar cities alone, explain to people why he, a young professional with a high-rise New York City apartment, had come all of this way alone. And at least he wouldn’t have to practically force himself to banter with a couple that reminded him of his and Sarah’s own dysfunction, and of how, after five years, he couldn’t fathom how to be a better partner.

For a time, they didn’t speak; Quinn sighed, Ricky chewed, and Cash looked around, wondering if the other guests would be easier to befriend. Then someone lurched into the tent coughing and kicking up plumes of sand. They wore a patchwork scarf that shrouded their face and a dangling, off-white tunic, but Cash sensed that they weren’t a guide; their stiff, robotic gait indicated a certain discomfort, as though they weren’t sure how to walk without the constraint of a pair of jeans. The person coughed again and scanned the tent’s many faces before settling on Cash’s. Then they wobbled over, sat next to Quinn, and unraveled their scarf.

“Join the party,” said Ricky, offering the man his hand. “I’m Reeky, that’s my wife, Queen, that’s our new buddy, Cash—and who do we have the pleasure of meeting?”

An effusive greeting, not that Cash could blame Ricky. Though the man was sunburned, out of breath, and speckled with sand, he reeked of mystery—where had he come from, and why hadn’t he been at camp earlier, and why had he chosen their table—and he was also, Cash noticed, quite handsome: curly auburn hair, jungle-green eyes, tiny brown birthmark on his upper lip. Even Quinn smiled when he introduced himself as Gareth in the same round-voweled chirp as hers and Ricky’s.

“Another fucking Aussie,” Ricky beamed. “You’re the fifth or sixth we’ve met on this trip. It’s like the whole continent relocated here for the winter.”

“We are a pretty unoriginal bunch,” Gareth wheezed, pouring himself a glass of water from the pitcher in the center of the table. He finished it and turned to Cash. “But you—you’re an American. That right?”

Cash raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t know it was possible to see nationality.”

“It’s not how you look. It’s the name. I’ve never met anyone called Cash except white trash and Wall Street bankers.”

Cash might’ve been offended had Gareth’s tone not been so jocular, and he smiled when the Australians burst into laughter—yes, they meant well, and maybe they’d let him join their posse for the next few days. Gareth was slapping the table when he fell into another coughing fit and went back to hogging the water pitcher.

“You okay?” Quinn asked. “You’re hacking up a bloody lung over there.”

“You should’ve seen it,” Gareth said, holding back a belch. “This old man in our group collapsed in the middle of the route—fell right off his camel. Everyone freaked out, thought he died, and the guides, they spent an hour using up the water reserves to make cold compresses until he came to. Not to be an asshole, but the whole time, the other twenty of us were shriveling up in the heat. You ever sweat so much your eyes burn? By the time we got back on our way, it felt like someone’d massaged them with bushfire ash.”

Cash nearly laughed, but Ricky frowned, and Quinn whispered, “You shouldn’t really be joking about that.”

The table, and coincidentally the rest of the tent, fell so quiet that Cash could hear Gareth’s boots shift under the table. “Sorry. Insensitive,” he said. “Although I do think I have the right. I’m one of those poor fuckers who lost his home.”

And so began a story that Cash had only ever heard on the news: Gareth and his girlfriend in a cottage in Cessnock, two bedrooms because they wanted children and in the interim could use the extra space as a painting studio (they were hobby artists, had met in a class)—a simple life they weren’t aware was as flammable as grain alcohol. Gareth would never forget the night he and Alana woke to an explosive whoosh in the backyard forest, stuffed a backpack with food, and ran barefoot into the glowing orange dark, where they watched the fire devour their home. They weren’t hurt, but they’d been branded: Gareth became prone to rages, smashing mugs and plates and once a chair in their cramped new apartment, and his girlfriend slipped into a depression that would have her attempt suicide twice and, eventually, leave him for another man.

By the time Ricky and Quinn offered their own stories—friends who’d lost pets, neighbors who’d lost businesses, a cousin who’d lost his life—Cash could hardly listen out of a shame that he’d comparatively never lost much: his mother, but she’d had cancer for a decade; a few thousand dollars in the stock market, but he had plenty saved; his wife’s trust, but she would probably forgive him eventually. He wondered, too, why he had to be jealous that the Australians were bonding, especially when that bonding occurred in the name of unspeakable trauma; was Cash so desperate that he half-wished his own life had turned to dust?

Cash caught Gareth leering at him, either angered or confused by his silence. Cash did want to contribute but felt like he didn’t have the right, so instead, he thought of how, back home, Sarah was probably searching for another man, one who was less reactive, less unfaithful, and less emotional than he—a man who didn’t like to cross his legs, watch reality television, and drink sangria with her mother when she visited.

After what felt like an eternity, Ricky raised a glass: To Good Health And An Even Better Excursion In This Desert Wasteland. Gareth and Quinn lifted their glasses, too, then stared at Cash, who, tired of straying in the social sidelines, grabbed an empty cup and thrust it forward. It hit Quinn’s glass, which tipped out of her hand and soaked her clothes.

She said something that began with “Fuck,” but was interrupted by Ricky’s half-shocked, half-amused laugh. Quinn’s face went a violent red, and briefly, Cash was certain that she’d lunge forward and beat him over the head with the water pitcher, but she wound back a hand and smacked Ricky instead. There was a loud, wet crack; heads turned, and Quinn rushed for the exit. Ricky gawked after her, holding his cheek.

“Well, I . . .” There were tears in his eyes, though whether they were from emotion or the impact’s force, Cash couldn’t tell. “I should—”

He got up and ran out. A woman at a nearby table said, “What the fuck did he do?” and a guide across the tent shouted in Arabic what Cash imagined meant, “That? That was true entertainment!”

Across the table, Gareth put his face in his hands. “That was . . . that was really—”

“Unexpected?” Cash offered.

“That’s generous.” He shook his head. “I wanted to ask the guides for food, but that whole thing kind of did away with my appetite.”

Cash considered apologizing, as if it would erase the last few minutes of their lives, but at the same time, he didn’t want to appear weak and possibly melodramatic in front of Gareth, a man who looked, and probably was, much stronger than he. So, instead he said, only realizing after speaking how dull he sounded, “Agreed.”

They stared at Quinn and Ricky’s empty chairs, the meats and sauces coagulating in their tagines. The tent grew louder, guests chatting and laughing and one of the guides telling a group of women a corny knock-knock joke, and Cash, unsettled by his table’s quiet, said, “Seems like it’s impossible to escape fucked-up relationships. Even in the middle of the desert.”

He didn’t mean to be funny, but Gareth snickered. “Bad relationships are common as trees.”

“Do you see any trees out here?”

“A lot of sad little shrubs. Which might be worse.”

Cash sighed. “Just expected a little more peace. You know, desert for miles, no civilization. You’d think people would wind down.”

“Are you sure that’s not a you problem?”

Cash cocked his head.

“If you wanted peace,” said Gareth, “you could’ve locked yourself in your bedroom for a week or something. Not flown halfway across the world for a social vacation in the desert. So, either you’re kind of an idiot or there’s another reason you’re here.”

A nosy way to pivot to another subject, but Gareth was right; it didn’t make sense to have come so far for some elusive quietude. So Cash said, “My wife was supposed to come along but couldn’t make it. I spent a lot on the tickets and didn’t want to waste them, so here I am.”

“Alone?”

“You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing. It’s a good way to meet people.”

“At times, sure. But I’ve been alone in this country for, what—five, six months now, and most of the time, it’s brutal. People coming and going, nobody there when you really need them.”

“Are you sure that’s not a you problem?”

Gareth smirked. “No, it’s you, too. When Ricky and Quinn were with us, you kept opening your mouth, but you didn’t say anything. It almost seems like you’ve been alone for long enough that you’ve forgotten how to talk to people.”

Cash must have made a face, because Gareth laughed, then reached over the table and put a hand on Cash’s. Cash’s heart sputtered; he tried to pull away, but Gareth clasped harder. “I’m out of my right mind, too,” he said. “Hardly spoke to anybody for almost two weeks before this trip. So excuse me if I’m a little socially challenged.”

He stuck a hand in the pocket of his robe’s thigh, took out a flask, and swigged. Cash watched him drink but too eagerly because Gareth said, “If you want some, I’d prefer you asked, not eye-fucked me across the table.”

“Please?”

Gareth extended the flask but withdrew before Cash could take it. “Wait. Keep forgetting you can’t drink in public in this country.” He stood up, tucked the flask away.

“Where are you going?” Cash asked.

“Outside.” He started for the exit. “You’re welcome to join. Or you can, you know, keep sulking in this perfect peace and quiet. Sober.”

A circle of middle-aged men two tables away burst into such rowdy laughter that Cash’s ears buzzed. Gareth shrugged and left. Shortly after, Cash followed.

Outside, the sky had gone black, and the air was cold, though considering how warm it had been earlier, Cash took the change as a relief, and so, it seemed, did Gareth, who lifted his hands and proclaimed, “Thank the Lord for the miracle of heat redistribution.” He turned to Cash. “You don’t seem nearly as thrilled.”

“I’m not the one who got stuck in the desert.”

“And be thankful you didn’t.” He peered into the distance, pointed. “See that? That little dune over there?”

Cash followed Gareth’s finger. It was hard to spot in the darkness, but about a half-mile ahead, there was a low sandhill that glowed silver in the moonlight.

“Don’t tell me you want to walk there,” said Cash.

Gareth grinned. “Why not?”

“I’m tired. It’s dark. We’ll get lost.”

“It’s a straight shot on flat ground. There are lights all around camp.”

“And if the guides turn off the lanterns?”

“Excuses, excuses, excuses. Stay behind and rot, then. But here’s the truth: there’s no danger. Worst comes to worst, we can’t find our way back tonight and sleep on the sand. It’s as comfortable as any mattress. We’d be back by breakfast.”

“What are—”

Gareth was already waddling away, boots carving lines in the sand. Cash called out, but Gareth kept moving, arms out to his sides as if he were about to fly. Maybe it was better that Cash didn’t join—he would get rest, wouldn’t get lost—but he couldn’t go back to the mess tent, which had just begun to shrill with the sound of an oud. He also didn’t want to go back to his own tent, because he’d have to fall asleep to the thought of Sarah’s magmatic words—cheating fucking pansy—and to the sound of his own breathing, which had become a disturbing reminder that nobody else’s breath was there to harmonize with his.

He broke into a scurry after Gareth, who was already chuckling.

“You proved me wrong,” he said.

“What?” Cash asked.

“That stick in your ass. It’s there, but it’s not as deep as it looks.”

Cash coughed to mask his laugh. If Gareth was fooled, he didn’t say, and he picked up speed; Cash tried to keep up but trailed far behind. It took longer, too, to arrive at the base than he thought it would—thirty minutes slowed by stumbles and shifting sandpiles—and once they crested over the summit, he fell on his back, drenched in sweat.

“Christ.” He stared up at Gareth, who looked dry and bored. “Do you run marathons?”

Gareth squatted next to Cash. “You don’t get out a lot, do you?”

Cash wiped his forehead. “Too much work.”

“Modern problem for a modern man.” He nodded at the countless taller dunes scattered among the flatness beyond them, then reproduced the flask and drank. “What do you do?”

“I’m in management consulting.”

Gareth almost choked on his next sip. “Management consulting?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s it supposed to mean? You’re quiet and on edge and can barely hold a conversation. Aren’t consultants big, loud, douchey types?”

Cash swiped the flask and took a long pull that burned his insides. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to make judgments. You might end up offending someone.”

Although Gareth’s lips curled into a defiant smirk, there was a certain embarrassment in his eyes, as though he were trying to think of a redeeming excuse, but that could have just been the moonlight, the shadows muddying the contours of his expression.

“I don’t enjoy it, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Cash sighed. “I’m good, but there’s no satisfaction. Schmoozing’s fine at parties, but it’s different when you’re getting paid for it. There’s something really underhanded about monetizing your social aptitude and making promises you know you aren’t qualified enough to execute. And yet people trust you anyway, because you’re the funny, popular guy they hired to drag their company out of the mud.”

Suddenly, Gareth looked somewhat annoyed. “You realize you’re complaining about a situation that’s entirely within your control to change, right? You don’t have to be a consultant, but you do it anyway. And why? My bet is it’s because of all the money.”

Cash swallowed back a marble of existential chagrin. Not so much because Gareth had slighted him, but because there was a rift between them that couldn’t be mended by emotional sincerity; their existences ran, and would likely always run, in opposite directions, and that had to be true between Cash and billions of other people.

They stared into the night, Gareth slurping on, until Cash said, “I’m sorry about your house. And your girlfriend. Really, I am.”

Gareth nodded, circled the flask’s rim with a finger. Then he asked, “Do you at least know what you’d rather be doing?”

Cash shrugged. “Going new places. Trying to believe there’s something more.”

He expected criticism—traveling aimlessly wasn’t a job and implied that Cash had means—so he was surprised when Gareth said, “Home’s that rough, huh?”

Cash didn’t know how to respond. Gareth had been too abrasive for him to reveal anything else about himself, yet he couldn’t smother the urge to lay himself bare, if only to prove to himself that he was capable of creating, and not simply tarnishing, sincere connections. If Sarah had been on that dune with them, hurling all sorts of vitriol, it might have been easier to answer, but she was too far away—always would be, now—so Cash pinched an ankle to ease his nerves and said, “Maybe.”

Gareth watched him, waiting for more that didn’t come. Only when he turned away did Cash continue, “Have you ever made a mistake you wish you could take back, but only because it’d make things easier to deal with, not because you actually want to?”

Gareth crossed his arms. “If you wanted to do it and stand by it, it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe an inconvenience, but not a mistake. A mistake means whatever you did was an accident. That you did it in spite of better intentions.”

Was that really so reassuring, or was Cash just getting drunk? There was an alcoholic buzz in his fingers, but he felt as clearheaded as his exhaustion would allow, and anyway, he hadn’t taken much from the flask. So if not drunk, then either he was as weak-willed as Sarah thought him, or Gareth was so charmingly self-assured that Cash couldn’t help taking his word as truth.

“This is about your wife, isn’t it?” Gareth said. “She didn’t come because of what you did.”

Cash didn’t answer. Gareth drew a circle in the sand between his legs.

“I don’t know what you did,” Gareth said. “But even if it was atrocious, she’s out of her fucking mind to have passed up the opportunity to come here for free.”

Cash snorted, because it was true, and Gareth laughed, too. There they were: two adult men giggling like boys, two dissatisfied idiots under the infinitely pinpricked sky, two giant flecks of sand among a sea of incalculably more. And was there not something beautiful in it all, or was Cash just so soft to think there was? Still, he felt that beauty within himself, and he saw it in Gareth’s gently glowing skin, in his sandy, glimmering robe, in his endearingly crooked front teeth. And they were becoming friends, or something like it, and the gulf separating them snapped closed as Gareth leaned in, his lips cracked and bleeding and tasting much the way they looked.

It felt good. As good as when, a month prior, Cash had met Marvin at a bar in the East Village and ended the night, naked and breathless, with him in the very bed he and Sarah had always shared. And how ecstatic it had been to touch and harness and make love to a body just like his, how much more he felt like a man with that boyish stranger than he ever did with his wife. He could say the same as he fell into Gareth, whose breath was so warm and whose face was so soft, and what a pleasure he was, what a delight.

Then Sarah was jabbing his shoulder, and he was a faggot and a man-whore and a pole-smoker, and he was saying he was trying to figure things out, please listen, it had meant nothing (but of course it had meant something), and she was saying she’d known the whole time, so many years she’d wasted trying to prove herself wrong, and he wrenched himself out of Gareth’s reach.

“No,” Cash said. “No, no, no.”

Gareth sat so still that he looked like a mannequin. “What?”

Cash couldn’t string together the proper words, so he started to scamper down the dune, sand flying, some catching in his hair. Almost immediately, Gareth was scrambling behind him. Cash wanted to stop, to let Gareth’s hands, and maybe even his tongue, track the landscape of his body, split ends to toenails, but he kept going, and near the bottom of the dune Gareth called out, “What are you doing? Let me apologize, at least,” as if remorse would help, as if it would untie the rabid, starving knot under Cash’s ribs.

Gareth pleaded for another minute before he gave up to plod mutely in Cash’s wake, at which point a cold wind picked up and thrust them in the camp’s direction. Cash wondered whether he should let Gareth catch up so they could share each other’s warmth but couldn’t decide before they reached the mess tent, outside of which fifty people were huddled around a firepit. One of the guides was playing the oud Cash had heard earlier, and Ricky played a somber accompanying melody on a battered guitar. Quinn was nowhere to be seen.

Cash swept into his tent and, in the bedside lantern’s light, searched for a zipper to seal the entrance, but there wasn’t one, so he fell back on the mattress the guides had prepared and hoped that Gareth wouldn’t bother him again.

Thirty seconds later, there was a shuffling outside. “Can we talk?”

“If you haven’t noticed,” Cash said, “the reason I ran away is because the answer’s no.”

A sigh. “If I wanted to lie, I’d say it was a mistake. But I don’t want to lie.”

Cash stared at a hole in the tent’s ceiling. Through it, he could see a dark patch of clouds.

“You know,” Gareth enunciated, “that was the first time I’ve done something like that.”

How was that possible? Gareth had put far more passion and confidence into that kiss than Cash, who had gone so far as to have sex with another man.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d like it,” said Gareth. “I mean, I wanted to do it from the moment we met. But I didn’t know how to get there. I’ve only been with women my whole life. I don’t know how to be with men as anything other than a mate.”

It was then that Cash recalled that what they’d done, at least in that country, was illegal, and the fact that Gareth was talking about it with such public impunity alarmed him enough to say, “Just shut up and come inside.”

Gareth entered looking hopeful, but frowned when he saw that Cash was scowling.

“Do you know how loud you are?” Cash hissed. “You could get us thrown in fucking jail, Gareth. This isn’t a joke.”

Gareth scratched his arm. “Yeah,” he said. “I know that. But you can’t expect me not to react. I’m having a moment here, for God’s sake.”

“If you’re going to react, then do it quietly, please.”

Gareth sniffed, nodded to himself, then walked over and sat down. In Cash’s head, Sarah was railing again, and the guides had probably heard them and were on their way to drag them to some remote desert gulag, where they’d be forced to work until they died on the desiccated ground.

Then Gareth said, “Hey,” and touched Cash’s chin. Cash gasped and pulled back.

“What’s wrong?” Gareth asked.

“I’m not—I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

“Not supposed to? According to who?”

“It doesn’t—we’re putting ourselves in danger, Gareth. And my wife, she’s—we’re still married, and that’s how things are, so we shouldn’t have done anything, you and me, okay? And my wife, she’s angry, and she already doesn’t . . .”

He trailed off, hoping Gareth wouldn’t press, but he did: “Doesn’t what?”

Doesn’t like me anymore, Cash wanted to say; loves me out of obligation, but doesn’t like me. Doesn’t know that the only reason I married her was my friends were getting hitched and I felt like the odd one out, and I’ve always hated feeling like the odd one out, so when she came around, I stuck that ring on her finger and carried her off into the fucking sunset thinking, stupidly, that it would right my oddness. And she also doesn’t know that, ever since the morning after the wedding, when I looked at her naked, sleeping body and felt neither attracted to nor protective of her, I’ve felt guilty for sucking her into my shameful, insecure vortex, because she deserves a real man, one who actually wants her and one she actually wants in return, and isn’t it a tragedy, Gareth, isn’t it such an awful tragedy?

The only sound Cash could produce was a low groan. Gareth sat there for a time with his brow caught in a furrow before he hugged Cash—didn’t kiss him but held him as though he were a child. And he was gentle and smelled of argan oil, and he rubbed Cash’s back, which made him tired. He started to fall back on the bed; Gareth followed him down until they lay facing each other.

“It’s okay,” Gareth said. His skin was almost translucent in the lantern light. “You’re right here. I’m right here.”

He dabbed Cash’s eyes with his thumbs and licked the tears off those same thumbs. Strange, maybe even funny—nobody had ever done that—but Gareth was so serious that Cash wept more, and Gareth dabbed those tears and licked them, too.

“What are you doing?” Cash asked.

Only now did Gareth chuckle. “I . . . I know it’s weird. But I want to. Is that okay?”

Cash nodded. Because in a way, he was now part of Gareth, those tears metabolized into care from the sorrow they began as.

Gareth licked one, two more tears, then said, “You look tired.”

Cash’s eyes were shut before he could finish nodding. Gareth made a noise—neither a sigh nor a moan—then pulled Cash closer. Gareth’s breath was on his forehead, his hands were in his hair, and he heard Gareth’s heartbeat, or maybe it was his own, or maybe it was both of theirs.

He slept without dreams.

◊

In the morning, the air smelled of chickpeas and baked eggs. Voices hummed and plates clinked outside. Cash turned on his side. Gareth wasn’t there.

He’d slept in his clothes, so he got up and went to meet the group. The day was hot and the mess tent was still flapping in the wind, but everyone was eating around the coals of the previous night’s fire.

He searched the crowd for Gareth but couldn’t spot him, so he sat next to a woman with cropped red hair and a mole on the back of her neck. She smiled but said nothing. A bearded guide handed Cash a plate of eggs, which he was about to eat when he saw Quinn and Ricky across the firepit. Ricky was saying something to Quinn, who was turned away.

Ricky was the first to notice Cash. “Morning,” he said, waving his dirty fork in the air. Quinn looked over. Cash wasn’t sure if she was glaring or trying to remember who he was.

“Morning,” said Cash. He looked once again at the faces around him.

“Looking for Gareth?” asked Ricky.

Cash nodded slowly.

“He left about an hour ago,” Ricky explained, licking his fork clean. “His group was only here for the night.”

Cash pursed his lips. His toes went numb.

“He told me to tell you it was nice to meet you,” Ricky continued. “Said he didn’t want to go into your tent and wake you—said you needed rest more than a nosy friend.” He smiled. “You know, I saw you two coming back from the dunes last night. Thought to myself, ‘Wow, those fuckers are brave, going all the way out in the dark like that.’”

Cash looked down at his plate. Only now did he notice that the eggs were overcooked, and that the reddish sauce in which they swam had already congealed. He forked one egg, hand trembling, and stuck it in his mouth. It burned his tongue.

A.J. Jacono is a proud Manhattan native who has been writing ever since he could hold a pen. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, Upstreet, and Lunch Ticket, among many other journals. He is the recipient of the 2019 Herbert Lee Connelly Prize and is the founder of The Spotlong Review, an online literary and arts journal. He is also the owner of Bibliotheque, an upcoming bookstore, café, and wine bar based in New York. If you would like to learn more about A.J., you can visit his website.

MESENTERIC PANNICULITIS AT NINE MONTHS by Robin Kinzer

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MESENTERIC PANNICULITIS AT NINE MONTHS
by Robin Kinzer

Today, they applied electrodes to my abdomen,
then told me to slowly up the voltage.  With each
added jolt, it felt more like a hundred bumblebees
burrowing beneath my scarred and dimpled skin.

I apologized to my doctor, who apologized right back.
Said: It’s likely the pain is too deep within you for electricity
to penetrate.  Said he would refill the two prescriptions
for pain medicine I need, but would rather dump riverward.

I picked up a 32-pound package today, insisted on not asking
for help.  Tripped over the cardboard edges, sliced open
my palm, fell so hard an oof scurried loose from my chest.
I sat on the long, dark floors of my building people liken

to The Shining.  Let myself wail.  Watched the dozens of doors
as voices poured under their edges, as laughter and cilantro
and cannabis spilled loose.  But nobody bothered to crack
a door, to peek outside, to dart their kind eyes my way.

I do not want to take oxycodone or fentanyl any more.
I do not want to require quartered pink globes of adderall
to stay awake.  In turn, I don’t want to need the one-two punch
of klonopin and cannabis just to sleep through the night.

Knees bruised, ego too shaken to come much more unmoored,
I kick the box back to my apartment with thick black clogs.
Collapse, back against dark chestnut of door.  I dream of a time
when I’m not two weeks away from being an entire infant’s

worth of sorrow.  I try to forget carnivorous sickness.
I wail like a siren calling her own name.  Calling herself
back to the blue-grey pebbled shores where only joy
knew her name.

Robin Kinzer is a queer, disabled poet, memoirist, teacher, and editor. Robin has poems and essays published, or forthcoming, in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Blood Orange Review, fifth wheel press, Delicate Friend, Anti-Heroin Chic, Rooted in Rights, and others.  She’s a Poetry Editor for the winnow magazine. She loves glitter, Ferris wheels, vintage fashion, sloths, and radical empathy.  She can be found on Twitter at @RobinAKinzer and at www.robinkinzer.com

 

WITNESS TO THE ARIA by Meg LeDuc

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WITNESS TO THE ARIA
by Meg LeDuc

A sculpture soars in the sky of Meijer Gardens, red as a hummingbird heart, rising over the pinprick of a groundskeeper below. Of the painted scarlet steel of his public art, Alexander Liberman once said, “All my sculptures are screams.” Yet Aria shouts joy, curves a-dance, music in metal.

Meanwhile, in downtown Grand Rapids, a woman sings The Clark Sisters on the corner of Monroe and Pearl, singing the sunshine down: “You came my way / You made my day” and “I’m a witness.” Here on that city intersection, a gospel woman caresses her aria with winged voice. In the sculpture park, a groundskeeper tends his aria with downy hands.

I’m a witness. I once overdosed in the back of a car, swilling down hundreds of minute cotton-candy-colored Benadryl pills with lukewarm Budweiser. When I awoke, I wanted to hide from the police. I clambered behind the wheel. The last thing I remember is merging onto the freeway.

I am a witness to my own past. I’m a gospel woman.

Hummingbird heart stilled to the aria.

Now, today, my husband Tim strolls beside me through the sculpture park, as we discuss whether I should go back to school to study writing. We round a bend of shrubbery to find a female nude that leaves nothing to the imagination. Tim says, “If I took a photo and posted it to Facebook, would I violate Community Standards?”

I laugh, “Maybe. She’s about as curvy as your wife.”

He smiles. “I love my wife’s curves.”

In our historic downtown Airbnb, glitzed with an ancient bike behind the futon, Tim and I make love, and he calls my name in the night: “Oh, Meg, I love you.” Tears prick my eyes. I think of God calling names in the night down the corridors of time, Adam, Moses, David, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, calling each to a life with him, and my husband calls my name for love, and once, he stood at an altar and named me, to cherish until trees touch sky, and earth spins to stardust, and the River that flows through the City flows through us.

I’m no saint. Yet I am named.

Hummingbird heart witnesses the aria.

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build [God],” writes Rilke.

When Liberman died at his home in Miami on November 19, 1999, The New York Times obituary of the one-time art director of Vogue and director of Conde Nast read: “He wanted to embolden design and to break away from artifice, so he brought in younger photographers who shot outdoors in natural light. ‘No more Ophelias dancing through the Plaza at dawn,’ he said.”

To walk downtown Grand Rapids, I wear black tights patterned with maroon and sapphire blossoms, a skintight maroon shirt, and nude ballet flats. I’m not breaking away from artifice, yet perhaps I am, after all: I want my husband to see and desire me. I imagine Liberman asking, “What do you know about fashion?” Art director for Vogue, my god, but all I think when I see his sculpture is electric joy, and it’s the joy I discover in bed with my husband, when I say, “Tell me you like watching,” and Tim says, “Oh, Meg, yes!” and “You put on quite a show.”

You came my way / You made my day.

I am named.

The Russian-born Liberman fled occupied France for America in 1941. The artist had studied painting and architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts. But he needed employment to provide for his wife and her ten-year-old daughter. The New York Times obituary pronounces, “The decision came down, as it always would, on the side of money. His years as a refugee had given him a deep respect for comfort and security…”

Over enmoladas and enchiladas rojas at a hip Fulton Street restaurant, Tim says to me of studying writing, “I want you to have the chance to expand your world,” and hummingbird heart whirs in matchstick chest, and I, too, respect comfort and security, but You came my way / You heard me every time I prayed. There will be no more Ophelias in the Plaza at dawn. We build God out of the sweetness we gather. Can we build ourselves?

I will witness the aria with my hummingbird heart.

I choose to craft joy.

Meg LeDuc is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a BA in English and attends Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Writing program. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, San Fedele Press, CRAFT, and the International Human Rights Art Festival and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband and three cats in Detroit, Mich. Visit her website.

church by Erin Pesut

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church
by Erin Pesut

There came a time about three years after we moved to Vermont when I decided I wanted to go to church again. Really what I wanted was to go to church at Christmas. Really what I wanted was to go to church for the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas. Really what I wanted was to see how church changed for Advent. Really what I wanted was to hear familiar hymns. To make the sign of the cross and feel holy water on my face. Really what I wanted was for church to be a portal to being a small child, a little girl again, sitting in a wooden pew at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Devine Street in Columbia, South Carolina, with my mother’s arm around me. Where I went to CCD. Where the priest once blessed our corgi. Really what I wanted was to say the words to prayers and have my mouth move in the same way my grandmothers’ mouths moved. Really what I wanted was to feel the order of things and to know what to expect. Really what I wanted was to sing out loud among other people instead of alone in my car. To unearth emotion from this stuck place inside of me. Really what I wanted was to examine all the people in the pews in front of me, their hair, their coats and sweaters, their dark lipstick and lip liner when they turned their head to the side, their features when they looked up to the choir in the loft. Really what I wanted was to have a stranger say, Peace be with you, and for me to say it back. Really what I wanted was to marvel at the color that shined upon the carpet from the warmed-up stained glass windows. Really what I wanted was to talk to the dead, and I figured I could find them here. Really what I wanted was to feel an organ fill a sanctuary. To hear the glee in its sustained chords when we sang out the last verse of the final hymn and Mass came to an end. Really what I wanted was to be in this church and in every church I’d ever been in, to be everywhere, all at once.

Erin Pesut is a poet, essayist, and editor living in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, West Trestle Review, HeartWood, and Poetry South, and is forthcoming from Whale Road Review and Raft Magazine. Her essay “Groceries (The Longest Text I Receive All Week)” was a finalist in the inaugural CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award. She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was a School of the Arts Fiction Fellow, and a BA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College.

MAGIC WINDOW by Anne Panning

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MAGIC WINDOW (CHASING HOME)
by Anne Panning

What did you think when you cupped your hands against the glass and peered inside? Did you think the old wavy Victorian glass was a portal to the past? Did you see your mother in the kitchen, frying liver draped with onions? Was she listening to John Denver on her little boom box? Did she have a dish towel slung over her shoulder? Embroidered with kittens or vegetables? Was it soft with wear? Was the yellow-painted radiator leaking warmth? Was her heart a basket of needles? A tiny jar of yarn? If you sat at her table, might she fry you an egg? Pour you some red Kool-Aid in a juice glass? What might she tell you that you’d never heard before?

Try the other side of the house. The window back there, by the tiger lilies.

Was that your father there in his bedroom watching baseball, his ankles crossed on top of the log cabin quilt? Were the Twins winning? Could you see the score? Was his Food ‘n Fuel travel mug as stained and scratched up as ever? Full of old coffee he’d microwave throughout the day and night (and day and night)? Was he wearing his Wranglers or Levi’s? Dreaming of the lottery ticket with winning numbers? So he could quit his job at the cabinet factory and buy a little house on Lake Waconia? Did he still like his tiny sunfish filets floured and fried in butter? Was this before the rosacea would turn his face red with pain? Before Bud Light would slur his speech while he slurped hot dogs cold from the pack? Could he see you? Did he ever really see you?

Tap on the glass. Go ahead. Wave hello.

Anne Panning has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, as well as a novel, Butter, and two short story collections: The Price of Eggs and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short publications include Brevity (6x), Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, New Letters, The Florida Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, Hippocampus, and River Teeth. She is currently working on a memoir about her late father. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

THE PHANTOM BABY by A. C.

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THE PHANTOM BABY
by A. C.

The baby dies on garbage day. It’s a Monday, very cloudy, with a sixteen percent chance of rain. There’s a little cough, a little spit, then nothing. The collection truck comes on time.

It was not a Monday when the baby first revealed itself—in my table drawer, wrapped in something now a far cry from my best cloth. The police found it hard to believe that the baby in my house wasn’t mine. It didn’t help there was no documentation of that time it had happened to my grandmother. Only after I offered my birth canal for their examination, did they begin the search for the baby’s family. Still, I was obliged to care for it as more officers came and went, their theories more and more unsettling. The mother would be found in the worst neighborhood. The mother had to be an inmate at the local institution. The mother just didn’t want it.

Your mommy loves you, I told the baby. She’s on her way. She just stopped to get a little tan by the lake.

It was much more difficult to speak to the baby about its father. I knew as little about men then as I do now, so I signed up for a story-telling workshop. Then I remembered the baby and called up the place, asking if it could come. The receptionist had to confirm with her boss. It’s fine, she said eventually, as long as they’re quiet.

It’s a baby, I wanted to say, it’s never quiet. I said thank you instead. I then wrote an e-mail, hoping for a refund.

Being in public with the baby made me miserable anyway. People I didn’t want to speak to came over in the supermarket, day after day, with questions I continuously didn’t want to answer. I only care for it temporarily, I’d say loudly, hoping to be heard by the people I did want to speak to, who now hid from me and the baby in the cat food aisle. I cried a lot in the supermarket. Everybody but those I cared for showed understanding they should’ve saved for actual new mothers since I really didn’t want it.

At home, the baby took enthusiastically to television. It had an elaborate taste. It wanted authentic suspense, exquisite acting, and superior cinematography. I became an HBO subscriber, but within a week, the baby was over all the breasts. I got Netflix then and hooked it on the IV of complex people and their very real crimes. Mostly murders. It bothered me, it really did, but the crying bothered me more.

The baby didn’t like music, so we didn’t listen to any. Some days the sounds of my insides wouldn’t leave me alone and it drove me a little insane. Sometimes I heard birds chirping in the garden and wondered how long they’d lived there.

In the only piece of writing on the phantom babies my grandmother left behind, she mused about their purpose. Her own grandmother believed it was to share certain much-needed wisdom before fading away into a spring night. For a time, I believed my lesson was that I should spend more time at home and never go to the supermarket. Long after I considered it learned, however, the baby was keeping me up each spring night. Every other night, too.

The birds and the isolation lost their charm after the baby and I survived what I believed to be a home invasion. I put the baby to sleep early that evening, but still bitter over my singing sending it into seizure-like fits, I came back later to recite poetry over its little limp body. I found cigarette ash on the floor. The baby didn’t smoke. I ran into town where a young drunk man drove us to the hospital. The doctors had many peculiar questions. Was I sure I wasn’t a smoker? Could the butt be left by a friend? What friend? Postpartum hormones, they whispered back and forth. I couldn’t correct them as I watched myself from the outside, hyper-crying and hyperventilating, clinging to a baby that didn’t want to be with me very much. What was this wailing creature? What happened to the one I used to be? The things doctors administered turned out to be lovely. Perhaps the baby’s wisdom was that sedatives were my friends.

It was that night we stood outside the house for an hour, the baby’s cloth left inside, and I’m convinced that’s where the illness came from. Many people came to tell me it wasn’t so. Nurses, therapists, cousins. Even my neighbor came over to claim he saw us that night and that it wasn’t so. But I am convinced. I am convinced the baby sneezed.

In the first three days after the “incident”—“Young mother distressed after potential home invasion,” the paper said—nothing much happened. On the fourth day, the illness began. My mother had been grieved by no one in town, and deservedly so, as she broke even more marriages than she did municipal laws, just for fun. But all that fever, and wailing, and acidic saliva in my shirt made me wish she was here. Not because she’d help, not because she’d know how. She’d be someone, though, and if there was someone, I could force the baby into their arms and run, run, and run.

The hospital didn’t want us to come. They told me to take the baby’s temperature via its anus. I refused. If she’s not desperate enough, it can’t be that bad yet, I heard a nurse say. But then, a baby shouldn’t pay with its health for an unfit parent. But then, the ward is full. They then discussed the underfunding. I put the phone down when they moved onto workplace relationship policy.

I sat down with the baby, and we had a conversation. I told it about my mother, and the men she’d left me with, and that I couldn’t take its temperature because I’d had things done to me and it would undo years of intensive therapy. I informed it that therapy was expensive, and how expensive, and that it wasn’t covered by insurance. I told it about capitalism and that the world had a lot of issues. The baby got better. As a token of my gratitude, I took it for a stroll by the river, which it hated.

The illness came and went after that, seemingly with no logic behind it, but always accompanied by a small-scale peculiarity. Once the baby’s eyes went back to the post-natal deep dark blue. Once a bird died in its drawer. The one time the hospital agreed to admit us, they reached no diagnosis. So the illness came and went, marking fleeting moments, grandiose or not. St Patrick’s Day. Christmas. Wednesday. Valentine’s. Sunday. Grocery day.

I went to the foster services to enquire about the appropriate day for the baby’s birthday celebration. I received little advice. Whenever is fine, they said, since you will not keep it anyway. If you insist, the file says it was probably born in early spring, mid the latest. I chose the first day of May. I booked a clown and an ice cream truck and made an invitation list of twenty children. Then I made a list of ways to convince their parents the illness was not contagious.

All that’s left to do now is to cancel all that because the baby is dead.

Things move quickly now, where they used to drag and crawl. Everybody listens to me, too, now that I have nothing to say. It’s because I took it outside, I said once. They didn’t like it, so I’m quiet now. I don’t want to see any more therapists. Or neighbors. Most of all, cousins.

It’s a Monday, garbage day, sixteen percent chance of rain. The baby’s dead, and the collection truck comes on time. I smile at the driver, ask her about her cat. She says it’s responding well to the chemo, its appetite is back. She says that God is good. With no answer, I place my plans and affection among the rubbish.

A.C. is an aspiring computer scientist, ballet dancer, and learning addict. She has published fiction and poetry in spots such as Litro, Maudlin House, Sideways Poetry, and Pulp Poets Press, and she thinks this writing thing just might stick.

PISSER CLAM by Yujia Li

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PISSER CLAM
by Yujia Li

Learned today that clams break
with the slightest pressure
between forefinger and thumb.

I jumped at the crack, admiring
a broken shell, gray and soft
and more vulnerable than I—

a bed of them clamoring northeast, pressed
ridge to ridge against each other,
their mantles against the shore

like an embrace. Thereafter, another
timezone away, my grandma is hit
with a rock, for no reason other than a trip

for groceries and some broken English
spoken to strangers, a cracked skull opening
like a letter warning each of her daughters—

reciting this poem a thousand times until the gap
between mandarin oranges and English pears
disappears.

What does it mean to harden a shell? Does it not
mean learning each American vowel while
being a quiet girl, a thousand good girls hiding

behind a white man’s book?

Yujia Li is a senior at William Mason High School in Mason, Ohio. Her work has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and she participated in the 2022 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Double Yolk, an emerging publication featuring poets of color and their journeys.

SHAPES by Meg Pokrass

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SHAPES
by Meg Pokrass

He is kissing his wife goodnight on the cheek as she slips off to the spare bedroom with Tylenol and a hot water bottle. “I smell like a seal,” she says. Before that, she’d been at her surfing lesson while he waited at home in the big dog’s chair, listening for the snap of the car door. He was wondering why he could no longer remember the feel of her cold foot skin in the middle of the night, recalled that she used to press her toes against his shins, how he missed that ice. Before that, she had gone quiet after he suggested that they fix up the little room that was supposed to be painted with elephants and birds, but they had never wanted to jinx things, so they left the walls plain. “It can be like a hobby center,” he said, but he had no idea what that meant, and he didn’t have a hobby. Before that, they were trying and failing and trying again, and he remembered sitting in the cold car at the seafront, holding her hand, staring at distant shapes that were probably not really dolphins, saying, “Whatever happens next time, we will not let it hurt us this much.”

Meg Pokrass is the author of eight flash fiction collections. Her work has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and the WIgleaf Top 50 2022, and has been anthologized in three Norton anthologies of flash fiction: Flash Fiction International, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and Flash Fiction America. She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction.

HUMMINGBIRD SKETCHES by Evan Anders

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hummingbird sketches
by Evan Anders

 

iced ruby oolong—

hints of soothing baked pear, cedar, cacao, the miscarriage.

precarious masculinity drizzled upon lamb tikka masala
golden basmati rice, boisterous cumin, ginger, cordial turmeric.

there are fragments of you inside me

jubilant kachumber salad days, peshwari naan, pudina chutney,
single malt ginseng whiskey.

himalayan salt besprent smoked salmon.
avocado toast smeared with truffle butter,
truffle butter, mango jalapeño pepper jelly.

tragedy advances like all the prayers wasted—

jesus christ outstretched upon a toy crucifix accumulating dust
desiccated piers morgan feuds with himself over meghan markle

the president of the united states bombs syria
antiquated armament asphyxiates pristine sky

pope francis releases a dove amongst the antiquity of mosul,
a former isis stronghold.

we do not achieve

we bury our brothers and sisters
law enforcement condemn.

besieged, this flesh i prune devoid of mercy
the sphinx devours the ruin.

elizabeth stood in the kitchen a series of intricacies—

“i liked us better when i was drinking.”

“perhaps couples therapy is a healthy solution for our relationship?”

“i don’t have the capacity for this conversation.
everything you do is in your self-interest.
i’m not perfect either, but when i’m the only one trying,
it’s fucking exhausting.
you don’t understand reciprocity, only consequence. here’s your consequence,
after the pandemic, we are getting a divorce.”

“i thought we were trying for a baby?”

“i’m from florida. everything rusts. you’re an enthusiastic father, but i deserve
a fastidious lesbian who will teach me to knit.”

revolting into mundane delicacies—

cardamom-cinnamon milk chocolate, black turkish coffee
figs, figs, all summer, figs were plentiful.

i am a harvest of traditions.

bestowing locust to the deity
suckling upon my earlobe

the swarm is you and the mouth
shivers at last.

Evan Anders brews coffee for mass consumption in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, decomp journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is a retired stay-at-home dad who thinks Bob Dylan was best in the eighties. Visit Evan online at his website.

THE TATTOO by Wendy MacIntyre

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THE TATTOO
by Wendy MacIntyre

Wita’s mother had a tattoo that colonized her left forearm. Six words, sinister and enigmatic: “Keep me safe and kill me.” The dyes that needled this sentence into her flesh were sea-green and Prussian blue. Wita was sure she had an infant memory of trying to clutch at the shimmering sea-green stuff beneath the bath water where her mother held her snug.

What had she thought the tattoo was? Pretty. Dazzling. A fish perhaps? But she was then not long out of the womb and did not know what a fish was, or even how to distinguish her mother’s body from her own. What she saw was all of a piece, amorphous and ever-shifting, with sometimes these patches of dazzle and gleam that made her want to reach out and grab them fast.

Ouch. No, Wita. That hurts. By two she had learned the tattoo was part of her mother. The lovely colors lived on her skin. To pluck at them was to cause Mother pain. Don’t!

When Wita mastered sounding out the letters of the alphabet, the words of her mother’s tattoo were among the first she ever read. Two beginning with a high-kicking K. Two me’s. (Was that selfish?) Two words she recognized as in some way opposites of each other: “safe” and “kill.” To kill was always bad, wasn’t it, except mosquitoes or poisonous snakes about to bite?

“What is your tattoo saying?” she asked. “What does ‘Keep me safe and kill me’ mean?”

“It’s only nonsense,” her mother said. “A silly thing; like, they sailed to sea in a sieve, they did; or there was an old woman who lived in a shoe.”

“It must mean something.”

“No, just silliness.”

For some time Wita accepted this explanation even though she found it deeply unsatisfying, like being read stories without a proper ending. Meanwhile, her mother covered up the tattoo with long-sleeved blouses and dresses for her work teaching piano at the university and at home on the Steinway Grand. The blue-green words were also hidden for parent-teacher meetings and visits to the doctor and dentist. When her mother went out with friends on summer evenings, she left her arms bare. Why was the tattoo hidden some times and not others? Why was it there?

There was no one else to ask. Wita had no father. He had died in a ferry accident in Indonesia before she was born. The boat was in bad condition, her mother told her, and over-crowded. There were not enough lifeboats for people to escape when the ferry began to sink in waters dark and deep. Her father had been on his way to visit his grandparents who lived on the island of Lombok. They were originally from the Netherlands, as he was: the country of wooden shoes, windmills, and tulips, like the Darwin Hybrids her mother grew. In springtime, when the garden was its own rainbow of white, scarlet, orange, and purple tulips, her mother would make twice-weekly cuttings, slicing the stalks near the base with her special curved gardening knife. She would arrange these proud flowers in blue and white vases throughout the house, although never on the Steinway Grand.

Wita found the cut tulips fierce and forbidding, particularly when her mother put the white ones together with the red. They were too much like scarlet lips and teeth withholding terrible secrets. We saw your father drown. We know what the tattoo means. They laughed down at her from the height of the marble mantelpiece, and she saw their true nature was cruel rather than lovely. The worst part was when they dropped one or two of their long, broad petals to reveal the naked stamens within. The stamens looked like little men. She imagined them growing full-sized overnight, haunting the house and whispering her father’s name.

It was Michael. Michael De Witte. Witte meant “white.”

She was not De Witte but Spens, her mother’s name. That was Spens with an “s” as she would have to clarify with good grace many hundreds of times throughout her life for people who believed they knew better than she how her name ought to be spelled.

Nor was she called Wita after De Witte. Wita was a Polish name. Her mother chose it for its music and because it had the English word “wit” inside it. Her name was a blessing and a reminder, her mother said. She must remember that wit meant a sharp, quick intelligence. She had to cultivate her mind the way you looked after a plant. “Study hard. Think before you speak. Watch closely what is happening both outside and inside your head.”

“Inside?”

“Yes, by looking at your feelings and the questions they raise, like ‘Do I trust this person?’ or ‘Is this situation safe?

”

“Should I never trust someone without thinking first?”

“Never, Wita. Never.” The white exclamation mark appeared between her mother’s eyebrows.

“Did Michael have a sharp mind?”

“Yes, very.” Her mother frowned. She did not like to speak about Michael. Wita assumed this was because it hurt her too much to think of him dead at the bottom of the sea.

There was only one photograph of Michael in the house. It was not on display either in a stand-up frame or hung upon the wall, but stored in a brown envelope in the four-drawer, steel grey filing cabinet in the basement. Her mother, under duress of pointed questions, had shown Wita this picture once. Thereafter, Wita regularly sought out the photograph on her own when her mother was giving a piano lesson. As long as she could hear the rippling music and the thump of the pedals from the floor above, she was free to examine the face of the tall, lean man whose hands rested on her mother’s shoulders. Wita knew he was tall because the top of her mother’s head did not even come up to his chin. They stood together beneath a tree whose spreading branches cast leaf-shadow, like a school of tiny fish swimming across his face. Although this meant his features were in part obscured, she could still make out the marked hollows in his cheeks beneath clear ledges of bone. These hollows made him look hungry and fierce in a way that knotted her stomach. His eyes were dark, as was his hair, swept back from his forehead in a thick wedge.

He did not look at all like the image she had conjured up: a grown-up Hans Brinker with a floppy blond fringe, round blue eyes and ruddy cheeks. Michael was at first a shock, with his height and cavernous cheeks. She tried and failed utterly to imagine him hugging her. His boniness would hurt. Then she worried this was a wicked thought because Michael’s bones were all that were left of him.

She searched the photograph repeatedly for any way in which she resembled him. Her cheeks were softly rounded, like her mother’s, and she was not particularly tall for her age. Her hair was neither straight nor black, but a wiry, dark red-gold that hung about her face in unruly curls. There were some days—how she hated them—when she looked like a cocker spaniel.

The sole resemblance to Michael she could glean from the sparse pictorial evidence was long fingers. People often remarked on Wita’s and said: “You must be musical, just like your mother.”

In fact, she was not. The piano keys repelled her touch, chilly as ice cubes and as slick. Her fingers slipped off, and she was relieved to have the alien contact ended. Nor could she relate musical notation to sounds that she heard played or sung. When she looked at the books of piano music open on the Steinway Grand, she saw only little pot-bellied birds balancing on wires. They will fall off, she thought, just as her fingers fell off the cold, slippery keys.

One day she ventured the question: “Did Michael play the piano?”

First the frown; then: “No.”—Only that.

“Did he…?”

“Enough, Wita. I’m busy now.” Once again, her brave foray yielded next to nothing. She sometimes thought her ignorance of her father was as deep as the fathoms of seawater that washed over his bones.

She wanted to ask, “Did Michael also have a tattoo?” but could not gather up the courage. Her dead father and her mother’s tattoo were mysteries of equal weight.

 

For some days after her tetanus-diphtheria inoculation, Wita’s arm was stiff and sore. Nursing a dull remembrance of the alien prong in her flesh, it occurred to her that her mother must have suffered countless similar needle pricks for the sake of the six “silly” words that made the sea-green banner of her arm. From the Internet, she learned that some people passed out from the pain of the tattoo artist’s work, while others cried and could not continue. Given the various colors and expanse of the nineteen individual letters inked into her mother’s arm, Wita guessed the ordeal must have taken two or three sessions of six to eight hours each.

Her mother was fine-boned and literally thin-skinned. Wita was sure she sometimes saw light shining through her mother’s wrists as they flew over the piano keys. Wouldn’t the tattooing have hurt her more than someone whose skin was thick and coarse?

Try again, Wita. “Did it hurt much?” she asked one dinner time when her mother appeared particularly preoccupied. She was half-hoping the question would take her by surprise.

“What? Did what hurt, Wita?”

“Getting the tattoo.”

“Oh…a bit, yes, I suppose so. It’s long ago now.”

“Why…?”

“Not now, Wita, please. I’m playing.”

This meant her mother was running over the notes in her mind. She had a concert coming up with the piano trio of which she was a member. Wita liked to have a seat at these events where she could see her mother centered just behind and between the violinist and cellist. As their bows flashed round her, she became a living jewel in her long-sleeved ruby or navy dress, framed by the string players’ lightning motion. Now her mother’s eyes were closed, the long lashes resting on her cheeks. Like a portcullis coming down against Wita’s questions. Wita liked the word “portcullis.”

 

At ten, she began an instinctive assault on her mother’s fortress. Her weapons were words, because the English language was for Wita what music was for her mother: sustenance and empowerment. The sensuous sound of fine prose, as much as its meaning, could make her feel she was flying. Or stir her with a thrilling fear.

She sat spellbound when she first came upon her own surname in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. Poor Sir Patrick, whom the Scottish King sent on a fruitless mission to “Noroway oer the faem,” his grim fate foreshadowed by an image of the moon distorted and doubled.

I saw the new moon late yestreen

Wi the auld moon in her arm;

And if we go to sea master

I fear we’ll come to harm.

 

This verse, and the one etched with the sparse, sorrowful detail of her forebear’s (was he?) shipwreck, Wita took to droning in her mother’s hearing:

O forty miles off Aberdeen

‘Tis fifty fathoms deep

And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens

Wi the Scots lords at his feet.

 

She tried as best she could to assume a doleful tone, to become a kind of living bagpipe. In fact she was genuinely sad for the Scots lord and his attendants, who had perished in the same way her father had.

“Wita, would you please stop that tuneless droning. It is maddening.”

“It’s from the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. Perhaps he was our ancestor?”

“Perhaps. But it’s still painful, Wita, to hear the same lugubrious verses over and over. The words become meaningless.”

“I have to look at the words on your arm over and over, every day, all my life, and you’ve never explained their meaning in the first place.” She pointed rudely.

“Oh, Wita, Wita.” The sigh sounded twisted. Her mother sank into a chair. She sat with her slumped shoulders and her fists pressed against her eyelids, all hurtful for Wita to see. What had she done? Was this like Pandora’s box? Would letting loose the secret harm them all?

Her mother’s knuckles were turning white. This made Wita frightened.

“Mom, are you all right?”

The arms lowered. The eyes opened. Her mother stood and returned to the kitchen counter and the cutting board. With her back turned to Wita and her head only slightly inclined, she said, “Tonight, when you have finished your homework, I will tell you about the tattoo.”

At 9:10, she entered the living room where Emma sat on the couch reading, the book in her left hand, and her right drawing the fluid shapes of her finger-flexing exercises upon the air. Wita assumed her best listening pose in the chair opposite, back dancer-erect, and her hands cradled one within the other, thumbs precisely crossed. There should be some ceremonial symbol for the occasion, Wita thought, like a glass of wine, or, in her case, something that looked like wine, or music with a trumpet fanfare.

Her mother put down her book and drew out from between its pages a photograph, which she passed to Wita. She saw a fair-haired teenage boy with a heart-shaped face dominated by a spatula-shaped nose and large blue eyes. The way his arms were wrapped around the cello he held told her, as much as his wide smile, how much he loved this instrument.

“That is Alastair Kos,” her mother said. “He was my best friend through high school and then in our first two years in music school together.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“No, Alastair was gay. But we were very close. We played so well together, for one thing. It was as if we shared the same body and breath so that our response to each other was seamless. Music rippled through him, just as his laughter did. He had a zany sense of humor. I adored him.”

How heavy a thing the past tense could be, thought Wita. She knew before she asked the question that death had come into the room along with Alastair’s picture.

“What happened to Alastair?”

“He died—in an accident. He was just twenty-two. It was a terrible thing because he was such a rare person, so kind and generous-spirited, and truly gifted. Alastair could have played with one of the great orchestras of the world, the Hallé or the Concertgebouw.

“And it is because of Alastair I have the tattoo. One very hot day, in our first year of university, we were cycling to class along the river and I stopped at a drinking fountain. Very close to the fountain there was newly painted graffiti on the pavement. Whoever did it had used a stencil. The letters were all very neat and uniform, two-inch capitals in glistening white.

“I think we were both intrigued because it was one of the strangest graffiti we had ever seen. The words made no sense but they stayed with you.”

“Keep me safe and kill me.”

“Yes. That’s how it first came to us, in those white stenciled letters on the bike path. And Alastair found the words so funny. ‘How bizarre,’ he kept saying. ‘How absolutely bizarre.’ He was laughing the way he did, so that his whole body shook with its rippling through him. Even after we rode away, the words lodged with us.

“When we met for lunch that day, Alastair had already come up with the idea that we should both get the words tattooed on our forearms. It was a crazy suggestion, of course, and a late teenage act of rebellion, I see now. But he had a strong belief the tattoo would create a lifelong bond between us, like a blood pact.

“‘No matter where we go, no matter what happens, we’ll always be joined in this way,’ he said. We both knew he would be going away soon. He was just too brilliant not to get a scholarship to a school like Juilliard. I was never of his caliber, so I knew it was inevitable we would be parted.

“Getting the tattoos was like a marriage ceremony for us, foolish as that may sound. And that is the story, Wita, behind my tattoo. So you see, the words themselves are meaningless, as I told you. The sentence is only a sort of strange found object that Alastair and I fixed on that morning and then used to make a visible bond between us.

“That is why I keep it. In memory of him. I still miss him. Every day.”

Every day. She had never said that about Michael.

“Thank you for telling me,” Wita said, handing back the picture of the young man with his cello. “I am sorry about Alastair.”

Her mother started, as if surprised to hear the name on Wita’s lips.

Wita lay in bed unable to sleep, picturing her mother and Alastair at their discovery of the peculiar painted message on the pathway. Downstairs her mother was playing The Moonlight Sonata on the Steinway Grand. It was a piece Wita liked and knew well. So her nerves tightened in surprise when her mother jumped from the end of the first movement to the beginning of the third. Why had she omitted the second movement? Her mother had told her Franz Liszt described the middle section as “a fragile flower between two abysses.” Emma was playing only the abysses. Why would she leave out the flower?

It struck Wita with a sickening clarity that her mother was deliberately tormenting herself. She was making the Sonata discordant because she had not told Wita the whole truth. It was still a dark glass her mother held up for her, and she was playing that darkness now.

A desolate weather beset Wita’s mind, like the curdled skies of the Old Ballads. What if Emma never gave her the full truth of the tattoo, if it eluded her always? Like a sleek fish darting off into those dark waters where her father’s bones stirred. What if your sole living parent remained as much a mystery as the dead one you had never known?

Would you still find yourself in the end and know who you were?  Or would you be clutching always at that blue-green flash and dazzle, wondering and longing?

Downstairs Emma continued to play only the two abysses. “O forty miles off Aberdeen, ‘tis fifty fathoms deep,” Wita recited. Her drone tonight was strong enough to drown out her mother’s music altogether.

Wendy MacIntyre is a Scots-born Canadian who lives in the small town of Carleton Place, Ontario. She is drawn to myth and archetype, the visual arts and perplexing moral issues as inspiration for her work. Her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh focused on the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson. She has published short fiction and essays in literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. Of her five novels published with Canadian independent literary presses, the most recent is Hunting Piero (Thistledown Press, 2017). Details of her books are available on her website.

PARAÍSO by Mark Williams

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PARAÍSO
by Mark Williams

Henry Hoover is in his bedroom, mastering the G-chord on his Martin acoustic, when his father walks in and brings up Science Camp. With Henry’s sophomore year of high school behind him and all of summer ahead, he couldn’t care less about Science Camp. “You need to expand your horizon, young man,” says Henry’s dad, giving the Martin a thump.

Henry thinks there is no horizon to expand. It’s filled with coal dust and shit. We’re toast. He almost says something about his father’s horizon (he’s an orthodontist) but instead asks, “If I go to Science Camp, will you buy me an electric guitar?”

“What’s wrong with the guitar you have? It was good enough for me.”

Here it comes, thinks Henry.

For about the hundredth time, Henry hears how his father paid his way through dental school by playing in a bluegrass band throughout southern Illinois and western Kentucky. “Do you know why I named the band Midnight Oil?” asks Ronald. Henry calls his father Ronald. It’s his name.

And for about the hundredth time, in a disinterested monotone Henry has perfected, he says, “Because that’s what you were burning.”

“You bet I was.”

But though his G-chord still needs work, Henry has mastered Ronald. “Kevin and I want to start a band, like you did.”

Kevin Kallbrier is Henry’s best friend. Kevin has twelve fingers. His parents’ religion didn’t allow them to cut off the extra two when Kevin was born.

“What kind of band?” asks Ronald.

“A band that plays my songs.”

“Since when are you a songwriter?”

“Since when I get an electric guitar.”

The next day, Ronald takes Henry to Pawnstop and buys a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Minuteman amp. That night, Henry is in his room, screaming, “The sky is black. The earth is scorched. Expand my horizon, girl, before it goes dark” (in G), when Ronald drops his phone on the bedspread. Henry puts down his guitar, brushes a purple forelock from his eyes, and sees a list of Science Camp classes on the screen: Marine Biology, Nanotechnology, Projective Geometry . . .

Great, thinks Henry. But there, just below Stalagmite? Stalactite? is String Theory.

Henry knows there is a theory to music, some kind of math or something. And he could use some help. “This one,” he says, pointing with his thumb pick.

“That should expand your horizon, all right,” says Ronald.

 

Science Camp is being held at The Surf & Turf. Or at least that’s how Henry thinks of it. Two years ago, the surf consisted of a pool full of kids and fish sticks at the snack bar. The turf consisted of a miniature golf course and burgers. Ronald paid one hundred dollars a month so Henry could backflip and putt-putt.

It was there that Henry felt his first breast (his only breast) when Kevin Kallbreier pushed Sophie Beardsely beneath the high dive as Henry flipped and descended. When Henry hit the water, his right hand went down her top. In return, Sophie gave Henry’s balls a painful squeeze and said, “We’re even, Hoover.”

With the construction of a nearby public pool, a private school purchased the club and turned the pool into tennis courts, the miniature golf course into an archery range, and the clubhouse into classrooms.

The day after persuading Kevin to enroll in String Theory with him, Henry and Kevin are walking to class. It’s hot. Too hot for Henry to carry a Fender and a Minuteman. But not too hot for a Martin. Kevin is carrying drumsticks. He hopes to buy drums soon. So far, Henry and Kevin are the only members of their band, Scorched Earth.

Nearing the school, Henry asks, “Why’d you bring drumsticks to class? It’s about strings, not drums.”

“I can back you on a school desk or trash can,” Kevin says with a stick-twirl. (As far as stick-twirls go, Kevin’s extra fingers are a bonus.) But as Scorched Earth passes the tennis courts—site of Henry’s hand-plunge—he thinks not of Kevin’s fingers but his own. It felt like a water balloon, only with water on both sides, thinks Henry. Fingers tingling.

As they enter the classroom, Henry and Kevin are greeted with a hearty “Greetings, multiverse travelers!” by an old smiling dude with a gray ponytail, satellite-dish ears, and weird eyes. One looks one way. The other looks the other. Multiverse Travelers? thinks Henry. Cool name. They must be late to class.

“No, sir, we’re Scorched Earth,” says Henry as Kevin performs a dual stick-twirl.

“Welcome, Scorched Earth,” says the old dude. “Prepare to be transported.”

Turning toward the seated students, Henry sees he won’t be the first to transport. For there, flanked by Pam Peters and school geek, Troy Short, sits Sophie Beardsley—as if brought here by Henry’s breast-thoughts.

“I see you brought your strings,” says the old dude as Henry takes a seat behind Sophie. “Good man.”

Why wouldn’t I? thinks Henry, though other than his guitar and Kevin’s drumsticks, he sees no other instruments in class.

“My name is Felix Capshaw,” says the old dude, pointing to his name on the whiteboard. “In this universe, I’m a retired physics professor from SIU. Pluck us a string, Pythagoras,” he says with one eye on Henry and the other on the Martin.

Pythagoras? thinks Henry. “Which string?” he asks, pulling his Martin from its case.

“Give us a low E.”

Henry plucks his E.

“What do you hear?”

“My E.”

“Pluck again and listen closer.”

Henry plucks.

“What do you hear? Anyone.”

“Vibrations,” says Troy Short.

“Correcto!” says Professor Capshaw before launching into some bafflegab about real-Pythagorus, who plucked a string and discovered it vibrated in ratios. And now scientists think everything inside the atom is nothing but vibrations on little strings, and these vibrations are the music of the spheres. Or did he say years? wonders Henry. Because time can be bent so we might be sitting in this classroom while also traveling to a black hole, through a wormhole, and out the other side. Or maybe we’re in another universe already and also traveling through this one. It’s confusing.

By the time Professor Capshaw wraps up, Henry is fairly sure he won’t be learning any new chords. But with his eyes on the monarch butterfly tattooed on Sophie Beardsley’s right ankle, it occurs to him that maybe in another universe he and Sophie are getting it off. On a bed of dry pine needles in Shawnee National Forest, say.

“And tomorrow we’ll discuss how to make a black hole,” says Professor Capshaw. “Safe travels.”

Turning in her seat toward Henry, Sophie says, “You thought this class was about music, didn’t you, Hoover?”

“No,” says Henry.

“Bullshit. See you tomorrow.”

She spoke to me!

 

That night, over a dinner of spaghetti and clam sauce, Ronald asks Henry how class went.

“Okay.”

“What did you learn, honey?” asks Sheila. Henry thinks of his mother as Sheila. He’s never known why. Her real name is Alice.

“I learned that another me might be somewhere else.”

“How is that?” asks Sheila. “Pass the Pinot, Ronald.”

Jiggling a noodle on his fork, Henry says, “Because we’re all made of strings, and their vibrations can send us to another universe.”

“You seem to be there most of the time,” says Ronald as Henry flicks the noodle to Whizbang, the Hoovers’ toothless Yorkie.

“Now, Ronald,” says Sheila. “We agreed to be less judgmental. Please, Ronald, the Pinot!”

Just before midnight, Henry texts Kevin Kallbrier, Dog park in ten? After receiving a 👍 from Kevin, Henry opens his bedroom window, crawls down the porch roof, grabs an oak branch, and drops to the ground.

“I’ve been thinking,” Henry tells Kevin at the dog park, the halfway point between their houses, “We could be someplace else right now and not even know it.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. A Cardinal game.”

“At midnight?”

“In another universe, it might be daytime. Or maybe Scorched Earth is onstage at Full Terror Assault. It can go on all night.”

“We don’t have a lead guitarist or a singer. Or drums.”

“Or maybe we’re screwing around in my uncle and aunt’s living room,” says Henry, pointing past the poop can to his Uncle Duncan and Aunt Darlene’s house, kitty-corner to the dog park.

“What are we doing there?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go see.”

Uncle Dunc grew up in the same house he lives in now, in Arcadian Acres—named for the kind of well water that went to all the houses. Many years later, it was discovered that the water had been polluted by Ivory Laundry & Dry Cleaning. After Uncle Dunc’s parents croaked, he moved back into his childhood home with Aunt Darlene, Sheila’s older sister. It was then that the dry-cleaned water that Uncle Dunc drank as a kid kicked in and messed up his grown-up mind. Uncle Dunc hears voices.

One night at Henry’s house, Uncle Dunc told Henry that Ricky Gervais didn’t believe in either religion or security systems. “He told me so,” Uncle Dunc had said. “And he said I shouldn’t either.” Plus, Uncle Dunc said it was scary enough hearing voices without also hearing alarms every time he forgot to punch in a code he could never remember. “And who’s going to find a front door key in a backyard birdhouse anyway?” Uncle Dunc had asked.

Henry, that’s who.

“What’s his name?” whispers Kevin as a large, one-eared orange cat brushes against his legs in Uncle Dunc and Aunt Darlene’s foyer.

“Robinson Crusoe,” says Henry. “They found him at an interstate rest stop.”

Looking down a dark hallway, Kevin asks, “What’s that gurgling?”

Henry had heard Aunt Darlene complain about Uncle Dunc’s snoring. And he’d heard her complain about the noise the machine Uncle Dunc wears to keep him from snoring. “I’m surprised you don’t hear it at your house,” Aunt Darlene had told Sheila. “It’s loud enough to wake his dead parents.”

“His snoring or his machine?” asked Sheila.

“Both. We sleep in separate rooms with both doors shut,” said Aunt Darlene.

Stepping from the foyer into the living room, Henry tells Kevin, “It’s coming from a machine that helps my uncle breathe.”

“It must be shit to grow old,” says Kevin, gathering Robinson Crusoe in his arms.

“We’ll probably never know. Unless we move to Mars before Earth ends.”

Henry’s been in Uncle Dunc and Aunt Darlene’s living room a thousand times. His parents usually sit on the couch, over there. In Henry’s mind, he sees them now. And across the room stands Uncle Dunc. Other than at meals, Henry has never seen his uncle sit down. Ronald says it’s because of the drugs Uncle Dunc takes because of the water that polluted his mind. Usually, Uncle Dunc paces while everyone else sits. Like now. And when Henry was young, Uncle Dunc used to pick him up by his ears. Like now. It hurt. It hurts, thinks Henry, giving his ears a rub as Uncle Dunc hoists young Henry up in front of the fireplace. What did the old dude say? Time bends?

Turning from the fireplace, Henry imagines his imaginary parents scooting over on the couch to make room for Kevin and Robinson Crusoe. Robinson is in Kevin’s lap. Kevin is using one of his extra fingers to scratch behind Robinson’s only ear. Henry’s parents are staring at Kevin and Robinson as if they’d rather not be sitting next to a boy with twelve fingers and a cat with one ear. When they turn toward Henry, they look pissed. They’re like, What are you doing here, young man?

“Everybody’s got to be somewhere,” says Henry.

“Very funny!” says Ronald—loud enough to frighten Robinson from Kevin’s lap and send him running down the hallway toward the gurgles.

Imaginary my ass, thinks Henry.

“Who were you talking to?” asks Kevin.

“Let’s get out of here.”

 

In class the next day, Professor Capshaw explains how scientists made a black hole out of 8,000 rubidium atoms and a laser beam. “You mean we don’t have to go into space to find one?” says Kevin.

“We’ve gone boldly where no man has gone before—in a laboratory,” says the professor. “Yes, Miss Beardsley.”

“I hope we make a better world than the one our parents stuck us with.”

Going boldly, Henry says, “Yeah.”

“You kids have good reason to be worried,” says the professor. “But we’re getting off the point.”

“What other point is there?” asks Troy Short.

“Totally,” says Sophie. “We’re even afraid to have kids. Aren’t we, Pam?”

“Totally.”

But instead of addressing the point, the professor talks about how some guy in a wheelchair thought he might be able to understand God’s mind if he, the guy, could come up with an equation that solved everything. An equation no longer than a thumb. But then the wheelchair guy died, and scientists are still trying to come up with the answer.

“As long as whose thumb?” asks Kevin.

“Very funny!” says the professor, whose words transport Henry to last night.

Upon return to the dog park, Henry had said to Kevin, “I’m telling you, my uncle and my parents were in the room with us. I heard Ronald talk.”

“You were just remembering stuff, that’s all,” said Kevin.

“You saw how freaked Robinson was. He heard Ronald too.”

“This string shit’s got you freaked. Later, Dude,” said Kevin, skirting the poop can and heading for home.

Now, as Professor Capshaw drones on about dark matter, Henry wishes he’d never heard of string theory. He’s okay with living in one place, even with the shit shape it’s in—guns, floods, fires, Republicans. And he has Scorched Earth to look forward to. Doesn’t he? As if to punctuate his thoughts, a loud explosion outside the classroom sends all five students beneath their desks. “Well done,” says the professor. “But it was just a backfire by the sound of it. Dual exhaust backfire, I’d say. Have an out-of-this-world weekend, earthlings.”

Dual Exhaust Backfire, considers Henry. But he still prefers Scorched Earth. Then, strange as last night was, it’s nothing compared to what happens next. Still crouched beneath his desk, Henry sees a monarch butterfly walking toward him. “What’s up, Hoover?” says Sophie Beardsley, bending down to Henry’s level.

Aside from the pool that day, Henry has never been this close to Sophie. Her eyes are the color of my Fender, he thinks. Mystic Seafoam. She smells like mouthwash and roses. In the monotone he uses on his father, Henry says, “Oh, hi, Sophie,” as if she finds him huddled beneath a desk every day.

“I see you didn’t bring your guitar,” says Sophie. “Why not?”

“The professor only asked me to bring it the first day.”

“Bullshit.”

But now the strange thing to top all strange things happens. As Henry crawls out from beneath his desk and stands, Sophie asks, “Would you want to do something with me sometime?”

“Uh, sure. Like what?”

“Like talk about this stuff. Maybe at the pool tomorrow.”

“Which pool?”

“The pool.”

“Oh, yeah.”

In his room that night, instead of practicing his C-chord (he’s got the G down), Henry spends the evening cutting off his blue jeans to an appropriate poolside date length, adding strategic slashes so that, wearing no underwear, hints of thigh and butt cheek might show through.

“Goodnight, honey,” says Sheila from the hallway. “Oh, and I found a nice, bullet-proof backpack for you to wear when school starts.”

“And you’re always safe at home with Pete and me,” says Ronald. Pete is Ronald’s Glock 19. It’s like Pete’s a part of the fam.

“Thank you,” says Henry.

 

Sitting on towels at the pool the next day—with Sophie looking pretty fine in a yellow two-piece—they share their recent stories, in Henry’s case, time-traveling in Uncle Dunc and Aunt Darlene’s living room; in Sophie’s case, crash landing a twin-engine Lockheed Electra on her way to Howland Island.

“I was sunning myself like this, only in my backyard and without you, when all of a sudden, I looked up and the sky was an ocean, and I was flying over it. I’d never even heard of the pilot, but I know that’s who I was. I looked her up. She’s famous.”

“When I saw Uncle Dunc pull me up by my ears, they hurt all over again,” says Henry, wishing he’d been someone famous too. Kurt Cobain? “I think it really happened, sort of.”

“I think so too. For me, I mean. And you. I know, let’s close our eyes and see if we can go somewhere now,” says Sophie. “Where do you want to go?”

“A bed of dry pine needles in Shawnee National Forest.”

“You’re weird. But okay, lie on your back and hold my hand.”

Fucking A, thinks Henry.

With his eyes shut and the sun beating down, Henry sees Sophie and him walking hand-in-hand down a tree-lined trail, she in her yellow two-piece, he in his ratty jean cut-offs. A little more butt cheek than he’d intended.

Walking down the leafy path, on lookout for the needle bed, Henry’s glad he signed up for String Theory after all. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be with Sophie now—either at the pool or in the forest. He wouldn’t be holding her hand anywhere, and he wouldn’t be seeing a gazillion monarch butterflies up ahead in the forest. They’re flying in the shape of a word.

“Do you see what I see?” asks Henry.

“A gazillion,” says Sophie. “They’re beautiful. Everything is. The sky is so blue. The trees are so leafy. What are the butterflies spelling?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s Spanish. Monarchs live in Mexico most of the time, don’t they? I bet they don’t speak English.”

“Look, over there,” says Sophie. “Honeybees! Lots!”

It’s like there are two hims and two Sophies. One pair by the pool and one pair in the forest. For sure, the poolside world is fucked. Try telling dads like his to drive Leafs or give up their guns. And like everything else, aren’t monarchs pretty much history? But look at all of them here. Plus, bees. Henry wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t polar bears and white rhinos somewhere.

Maybe here everything is okay. Maybe laundries don’t dump poison in the ground and uncles don’t snore or hear voices. No guns, no fires, no batshit crazy politicians. We can have all the kids we want, thinks Henry, giving Sophie’s hand a squeeze.

“It seems so perfect,” says Sophie. “Do you think we can come whenever we want? Stay as long as we want?”

Here, my mother’s name is Sheila, thinks Henry. Whizbang has all of his teeth. Robinson Crusoe has two ears, and Kevin Kallbreier only has ten fingers. Here, there’s no need for bullet-proof backpacks, and our band’s name is God’s Mind.

“Sure,” says Henry, “why not?”

Mark Williams’s fiction has appeared in The Baffler, Eclectica, The First Line, and the anthologies American Fiction, The Boom Project, and Running Wild Novella Anthology, Volume 4, as well as other journals and collections. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. Kelsay Books published his manuscript of poems, Carrying On, in July 2022. In this universe, he lives in Evansville, Indiana.

CREATION MYTH WITH CHORUS OF WORMS IN MY BRAIN by Jordan Ranft

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CREATION MYTH WITH CHORUS OF WORMS IN MY BRAIN
by Jordan Ranft

nothing springs forward it spills
as it would from a drain pipe
or falling through a solid sheet
of glass. there may have been
a man with a spear. you poured
forth from between his fingers.

shook, the mountains shook again

how will you inherit this want?
trembling like an addict watching
the sugar cool. we cannot address
the world. it’s a history of sculpture
where the heads and dicks
were crushed with a hammer
years before you learned of it.

fever swept the village and boiled
the tongue from every mouth

if something created you it should
have gone to therapy instead.

their roadways thickened at the fringe
with lemongrass and bloodweed

the stage remains empty.

every record of debt shredded and
festooning the central plaza

it was entirely political
ending the way it did.

Jordan Ranft is a social worker and writer living in NYC with his partner and small dog. He writes poetry, fiction, and music criticism. His work has previously appeared in Bodega, Rust + Moth, Bayou, Impossible Task, and other outlets.

SHUTTING DOWN by Thomas Johnson

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SHUTTING DOWN
by Thomas Johnson

Stevie watched the road. Driving right now made him nervous. Cars moved tightly in each direction on the highway. Stevie’s wife, Ruth, was next to him in the passenger seat, and their friend, Helen, shared the backseat with the dog. Everyone sat in silence, Stevie driving, the others thumbing a phone. Stevie tried to concentrate.

“So many more cars than I expected for a Sunday,” said Stevie.

Helen spoke up from the rear seat. “Normal for this part of the country.”

Stevie started to say, “Maybe it just feels crowded because of,” but he trailed off.

“Whatever it is that’s happening,” said Helen.

“When do we get home?” asked Ruth. She thumbed her phone without looking up.

“Best guess a couple of hours.”

There were lines of cars on the interstate. Every lane was congested. It had been Stevie’s second time in Philadelphia, but the first since he and Ruth moved to D.C. on New Year’s Eve. They met Helen shortly after the move and decided a trip together for St. Patrick’s Day would be a nice way to get to know each other. But now they were heading home, worried they might get sick. The virus had come to the States, and it seemed like every minute some city or state ordered a shutdown of all businesses. But there were so many cars still on the road. He wasn’t sure if this was actually normal, or if it was just the typical end of a holiday, or if he was just nervous from the lack of any direct answers about what was going on.

Traffic sped up at intervals in places and slowed down in others. Cars darted between lanes and cut people off. There weren’t as many billboards along the road as he was used to either. Unlike the open highways of Texas that were cut wide and deep, these coastal highways cut narrowly through the thicket of the woods, the dense forestry standing so close to the pavement it almost leaned over onto the road. It didn’t help that clouds covered the sky and held back rain, casting darkness on everything. All Stevie could see were all the taillights of the large trucks he couldn’t get around and all the trees looming over their place there in the road. It felt claustrophobic. From the driver’s seat, it looked like everyone was trying to escape to somewhere else. Stevie didn’t like it.

“What is happening out there?” asked Helen.

“I have no idea,” said Stevie. He looked over at Ruth in the passenger seat. “Have you seen anything yet?”

“Nothing we don’t already know.” Ruth thumbed her phone.

“We don’t really know anything,” said Stevie. “That’s the problem.”

“Everyone is guessing that people are heading home to prepare.”

“I thought they already were home,” Stevie said. “It’s Sunday.”

“We’re the only losers who went out this weekend,” said Helen.

“We barely spent any time inside with other people,” he said. “That’s how you get sick.”

“But people are dying,” said Helen.

There was a pause.

“Again, you get it just like any other virus,” said Stevie. “And you didn’t make out with any strangers, that I know of.”

Ruth laughed. “Such a shame for Rick,” she said.

Helen laughed along. “Oh, my god,” she said, “why did you invite your friend to join us from New York City?”

“We live four hours apart, now,” said Stevie, “and I hadn’t seen the sumbitch since the Army.”

“Maybe there’s a reason for that,” said Helen.

“Don’t be so hard on the guy,” said Stevie.

“He walked into my room at three a.m. and asked me to make out with him.”

“Your loss.”

“And what if he brought it with him?” asked Helen. “How close does he live to New York City?”

“You can see it from his house.”

“Christ,” said Helen.

“That doesn’t mean he had it.”

Everyone fell silent again. Stevie was looking for a gas station and trying not to think about everything going on out there. Why had they gone to Philadelphia? He had been excited to finally live in the mid-Atlantic and to finally see his friend. He didn’t ask for all this to happen. It was nice to see his friend. Even when the concert they were going to attend was canceled, he didn’t feel like it was a wasted trip. The city still celebrated St. Patrick’s Day and everything remained open.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do anything or go anywhere if there was something to be worried about,” he said. “And we’re going home now.”

“Who really knows,” said Helen. She sat in the backseat looking out the window. Helen slouched into the corner of the backseat where it met the door, and Stevie could sense that she was worried. Next to her slept Stevie and Ruth’s dog, undisturbed.

“Let me say, thanks for coming along,” Stevie said to Helen.

“You said that earlier,” she replied.

“Positive reinforcement.”

“I just needed to get away.”

“Might have been the last time,” said Ruth.

Stevie found an exit with a Wawa. He couldn’t see the gas station from the highway, but he knew it was a popular truck stop in the area. It would be big enough to get in and out of easily. Stevie took the off-ramp and felt relieved to be away from the busy highway. The exit led from the interstate and into the tree line for a half-mile before opening up at a small shopping center. The traffic light had only two gas stations on either corner, and Stevie saw the Wawa to his right. A line of cars stretching the entire parking lot and out into the road waited to get to the gas pumps. There, tucked into the small intersection carved out of the swamp, cars gathered in a frenzy and fought for space. It felt claustrophobic again, like everything coming down on them all at once. Stevie moved the car into the first line and then saw an open parking spot. He quickly moved out of the line and parked instead.

“We can make it home,” he said, and then again, “We can make it home.”

“Do we have enough gas?” asked Ruth.

Stevie looked over the console. The reading showed the car could make it up to 110 miles, but the GPS indicated the drive would be 98 miles to home. Stevie didn’t like cutting it close. With every passing minute it felt like they were already cutting too many things too close, and needing gas was getting in the way. Stevie looked again at the gas station. This intersection off from the highway should have been free of traffic, but there were cars surrounding the building and people were walking in all directions.

“There’s enough to not get into this mess,” Stevie said.

“Is it a run?” asked Helen.

“What?” asked Ruth.

“Panic buying,” said Helen.

“Why would they need gas to stay home?”

“People will buy anything in a panic,” said Stevie.

“Are you going in?”

“Could use a piss and a water.”

“Let me know what it’s like inside.”

Stevie walked through the commotion of the cars and then into the station. It looked like all convenience stores, except people inside were rummaging through everything. Servers paced behind the deli counter, and cashiers barked out orders from behind their face masks. When did that start? Stevie thought. He didn’t remember hearing anything about masks. He found the restroom, used a urinal, and left without touching anything. He wondered if he could touch anything, even to wash his hands. He didn’t know for sure.

Outside the restroom, Stevie paused as other customers rushed by on their way to somewhere. He grabbed the few water bottles remaining in the refrigerators and the only bag of chips. Stevie laughed to himself. He didn’t think that single-use bottles or bags of chips would save anyone, only that he was thirsty. Then, he stopped himself from laughing out loud because that seemed out of place as well. He didn’t really want to laugh right now.

Checking out didn’t take long. Everyone moved quickly. Being outside again relieved him. He got in the car and handed a bottle of water to Ruth.

“Has there been any news?” he asked.

“What more is there to learn?”

“In the absence of everything, anything would be sufficient.”

Stevie sat in the front with the air conditioner blowing on his face. Cars backed up now through the parking lot and into the shopping center next to the station. He wasn’t sure how they’d get out of the lot. A sign pointed traffic in one direction, but with so many vehicles coming and going, it all kind of just ran together senselessly. It made Stevie anxious. He knew it was going to take a few minutes just to get in a line to leave the gas station. He tried not to think about it. He set the navigation on his phone and plugged it into the dashboard.

“This is pretty wild,” said Helen.

“I can’t tell if it’s panic or not,” Stevie said.

“Like, it’s a disease,” said Ruth, “not a hurricane.”

“I think that’s why everyone is so confused,” he said.

Stevie got the car into the line exiting the lot, but it took half an hour to get through the traffic light and back out onto the road. Thick forestation crowded the road on either side, and nothing could be seen for miles but more trees and traffic ahead. It felt to Stevie like everything, including home, would never be reached. He just wanted to get moving again. He just wanted to get home. Just then his phone buzzed with a text message from work: telework starting Monday, acknowledge.

“There it is,” he said. “I’m not reporting to work tomorrow.”

“But you still have to work?” asked Ruth.

“From home,” he said.

“Lucky you.”

“You’ll get a job, hon,” he said. They had only been in Washington, D.C. for two months, but he still felt like that wouldn’t be a problem for her. It always took time to get a new job, and there were more opportunities for her in the District than there were back in San Antonio. It would just take more time. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said.

Stevie finally got the car onto the interstate. It looked like there were more cars than before. They were moving along, but he didn’t like being stuck behind so many others. He could never guess what someone else might do, and it made him tense. He just wanted to be in his apartment. He wanted to be in his bed. He wanted to be home with his wife and his dog. He wanted to feel safe.

“All this for something we can’t even see,” he said.

“Aren’t people choking on their own lungs?” asked Helen.

“Didn’t they say it was just like the flu?” he asked.

“Who knows,” said Helen.

“There should be something,” he said. “Not all this… nothing.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” said Ruth.

“Maybe we’re being misled.”

Helen replied, “Maybe no one really knows anything and everyone is just guessing.”

Stevie wanted to know what was going on. Everyone he met this weekend joked that it was nothing to worry about, but he worried that he just didn’t know. Some information was saying the virus would spread around the world, but all the governors and mayors held press conferences to talk about patience. Stevie didn’t think there was anything to be concerned about, but he was worried that, in the end, he just didn’t have any information at all. He worried now that they had made the wrong decision. The trip had been paid for in advance, though, and they weren’t going to get the money back, and even then they didn’t go to the concert because it was canceled, and also, they hadn’t really been around too many people, and now they were heading home. That should have been enough, but he worried he was compromising. It was hard to make sense of it all. It was hard to hold back regret. He wished he’d been smarter.

Stevie calculated the distance to their home over and over. Even as they rounded Baltimore and passed through the harbor tunnel, he kept looking down at the console over and over. There was an old tale about cars, that they held a gallon in reserve, but he could never remember if that was calculated into the distance reading or not. He tried not to worry and kept his focus on driving them home. The interstate would lead them all the way back home without a break, a stop, or a turn. It was going to be a long drive. He wanted it to end. It was a disaster. Stevie had an awful thought.

“This is just like 9/11,” he said.

“That’s a statement,” said Helen. She sat in her slouched posture in the seat, still staring out the window. She never broke her gaze. He didn’t know Helen well, but he could tell she was worried, too.

“There was this whole thing happening somewhere,” he said, “but I couldn’t see any of it from where I was.”

“I was only seven years old,” said Helen.

“Marching band rehearsal was outside that morning and when I got to second period, a girl I knew leaned over my desk and said something like, ‘Two planes hit the Twin Towers, and there’s smoke coming out of the Pentagon.’”

“She wasn’t wrong,” said Helen.

“Then, the teacher walks in and says we’re not allowed to watch the news ‘because we have things to learn.’”

“I swear.”

“To her, it was just something happening on the news,” he said. “It was all just something going on out there.”

“But looking back on it now,” said Helen.

“Changed my entire life,” said Stevie.

“Governors are recommending to stay home now,” said Ruth. “Like, ‘if safely possible, it is recommended’ or whatever.”

Stevie wondered if that meant anything. He asked if it was an official statement or an emergency, but Ruth couldn’t tell if it was just guidance or a mandate, or a rule, or however it might be called. It remained confusing, and Stevie didn’t think it would help anything. He didn’t feel any better and just wanted to be home.

“You know, I met these younger kids here in town a couple months ago,” said Helen. “Like just turned twenty years old or so, friends of a friend.”

“College kids are going to be so fucked up with all of this,” said Stevie.

“And these boys had no idea what the Watergate Hotel was,” said Helen.

“What do you mean?” asked Ruth.

Helen said, “They didn’t know the building, they didn’t know anything about Watergate, they didn’t even recognize the term or know a single thing about Richard Nixon.”

“Watergate takes up entire chapters in even basic history books,” said Stevie.

“Who reads books anymore?” said Helen.

“People still score it as the root of all distrust in this country,” said Stevie.

“We even talked about it,” said Ruth.

“In Europe?” asked Helen. Ruth nodded.

Stevie rushed through all his childhood memories learning about these events. He remembered his journalism professors spending entire months picking apart the Washington Post coverage of that election, and he remembered studying the coverage of race during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He thought of all the patriotism surrounding 9/11 and how he ended up in that same war fifteen years after it began, just to pay off that education. So many years before now, with this thing happening now out there, without any explanation. It never felt like he was going to get away from it all.

Traffic held up all the way home but seemed to disappear once they were inside the District. Stevie looked from the road to the console and back again. There would be gas enough to get all the way home, and he could fill up in the next couple of days.

The sun remained overhead when they got back to D.C., but there weren’t any cars on any of the residential roads and it didn’t look like a single person was out anywhere. No one walking on the sidewalks, no one buying groceries, no one going anywhere to do anything. It felt more abandoned than empty, like everyone had not just gone inside but had actually gone away to somewhere else. Stevie thought to get gas now while it seemed easy, but he could sense that everyone just wanted it to be over.

He drove to Helen’s apartment in Georgetown and parked in the road, opening the hatch to get her bags. Everyone exited the car and stood on the steps of the sidewalk leading to the door of Helen’s duplex. The sun had come out of the clouds. There were no sounds of the city. Everyone just sort of stood there.

“So, we’ll see you soon,” said Ruth.

“Oh, I know it,” said Helen.

Everyone hugged. It was brief.

“What do you think happens next?” asked Helen.

“I just want to get to the other side of this,” said Stevie, and after another minute, “Then we’ll be able to look back.”

Stevie and Ruth got back in the car, where their dog waited for them. It was only a few blocks until they were parked and inside their apartment, at last. More news spread of shutdowns all across the country and all over the world. Messages came in from family members and friends. It would be months later before the car would need gas again.

Thomas Johnson works as Associate Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. He holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and afterward enlisted in the United States Army. He is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Washington, D.C. His work is available in the Museum of Americana Literary Review and forthcoming from Valparaiso Fiction Review. All credits and biography are available at ts-johnson.com.

BULLY BOYS by Gay Degani

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BULLY BOYS
by Gay Degani

Her brothers are rough-and-tumble types roaming the streets after Mother and Father go to bed. They are expert at sneaking out, know every creaky floorboard, every groan in the front door hinge. Robbie greased their window sash. Willie blazed the perfect trail down the ancient oak. They say it’s important in any escapade to have a perfect plan. They learned this from Saturday afternoon movies, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, The Dead End Kids. They want to be tough. Too old to run around with tin-can tommy-guns anymore, they drink, they smoke, they swear. She wishes she could be tough too, a torch singer, a reporter, or a runaway heiress like Claudette Colbert. Her friends are tame, boring, all wishing to be Shirley Temple on the Good Ship Lollipop.

In bed at night, in the room next door to her brothers, she listens to the scuffles and grunts and titters as they make their great escape. The oak is their favored route, and she often watches them leap from the tree and scamper down the darkened street. Boys have all the luck and all the fun. She does not like it one little bit, so a plan begins to form as the moon shines through her frilly curtains.

She steals Willie’s striped T-shirt and baggy pants from the laundry, sneaks Robbie’s leather jacket out of the downstairs closet. Stashes her loot beneath her bed.

The next night, she listens for her brothers’ muttering. They always mutter, lucky for them mom and dad are down the hall. She quickly, quietly, dresses in their clothes, hides her hair under Willie’s baseball cap, and, slipping through her window, she shimmies down the oak the minute she sees them turn the corner. She races down the middle of the street, elation shivering through her, the cold night air feeling like freedom against her cheeks.

Several boys congregate in the darkest corner of the city park, her brothers, their pals, and a few she doesn’t know. Now that she’s here, squatting behind a shrub, she’s not sure what to do. She watches them pass around a bottle filled with yellow-brown liquid, taking sips, running their coat sleeves across their mouths. They smoke cigarettes. They talk in voices sometimes deep, sometimes squeaky. They fake-punch each other, left hook to stomach, fist to shoulder. Tease and taunt and laugh. They learned this, of course, at the Bijou, this daring, easy comradery.

The air grows cold, her legs begin to cramp. She straightens up. She wants to join them. She wonders how to do it. Curses heaven that she hadn’t been born a boy. They seem so comfortable, independent, daring. No stupid lollipops for them.

If her brothers weren’t here, maybe she could pull it off, but there they are, all blustery and loud. She stays in her hiding place until her toes feel frozen and her nose begins to drip.  Reluctantly she turns her back on the boys. Snaps a twig.

“Who’s there?” one of them asks, then stands and looks around.

She’s off, running fast, like she’s the sail of a ship, down the middle of Main Street, the Spanish Main, she thinks and grins, wind battering her chest, her hair a banner flying out behind her, glancing back as they begin to slow behind her, one by one, giving up.

She runs until she can’t run anymore and sprawls onto Mrs. Halloway’s front lawn.

She’s exhilarated, laughing, flat on her back, smelling grass, dirt, and her own sweet sweat. She rolls over, grabs a hefty stick, sits up, and shoves it deep into the soft spring turf and claims it in the name of herself. A girl, a pirate, on a daring new ship called, not Lollipop, but Her.

Gay Degani has received nominations and honors for her work including Pushcart consideration, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, and won the 11th Annual Glass Woman Prize. Her story “Scablands” placed fourth in the 2023 Saturday Evening Post‘s Great American Fiction Contest. She’s published a full-length collection, Rattle of Want, (Pure Slush Press, 2015), and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). She occasionally blogs at Words in Place.

RED SUN by Mary Lewis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

RED SUN
by Mary Lewis

Using the full twelve-foot length of the handle, Jake pushed the floater over the last slab of new concrete, then pulled it slowly back towards him. This was his favorite part of the job because after all the heavy work of ground preparation, framing, pouring, leveling, and compacting, he could watch the new surface turn glossy and smooth under his touch. Daryl could have done it, he was as good at it as Jake, but as the business owner he liked to give himself the pleasure. Daryl could start the cleanup while he had these moments to himself.

But with thunder growling nearby, they did need to wind it up. Concrete likes moisture while it is curing, but hard rain or hail would pockmark the surface, so they’d better put a tarp on in case. He’d had to take chances with the rain this strange summer with so many days over ninety. Still, it was better pouring with rain in the forecast than in hot weather when it sets so fast you’ll never get a really smooth surface.

He leaned on his truck and admired their work. With all the increased traffic on the river, the old muddy put-in lot for kayakers needed this upgrade. Daryl brought over the big tarp and they laid it down with two-by-fours weighing down all edges.

Then he lit up, took a long drag, let it out slowly. “Don’t look at me that way, Daryl. I live for this moment.”

“Sure boss. Your lungs.” Daryl was halfway to his car. “We doing Byler’s place tomorrow, right?”

“Yup. Your shoulders good for swinging that sledge?”

With his small front loader Jake would lift the edge of a slab of old concrete that was too big for the bucket while Daryl swung his sledge like John Henry over and over at the right spot to break it into pieces. Jake’s back told him to stay away from that these days, he’d done his time.

“Long as I use my trusty Aleve.” Daryl got in and waved through the open window.

Jake ducked into Kwik Spot for a six-pack and on the way dodged rain that splatted down hard from the dark sky. That sure came up fast. He couldn’t understand this kind of rain, too big to be drops, it was like someone was dishing out water in cups and throwing it down from the clouds. Good timing about that tarp.

By the time he got home, the sun had edged past the swift-moving clouds and made the dripping trees in the front yard sparkle. Sarah in the front yard yelled, “Dad look, a rainbow!”

She’d been the rainbow finder in their family since she was ten. Now at nineteen, she still danced barefoot on the soggy lawn every time she found one.

He pried himself out of his truck, joined her on the wet grass, and squinted at where she was pointing.

“Are you sure?”

An old game.

“C’mon Dad, it even has a double up on the left, see?”

He squeezed his eyes harder, shaded his brow, looked in the wrong direction, and she turned him back.

“Ah that little thing, sure enough.”

“It’s a full bow, what do you want?”

“What’s at the end of it?” He put his arm around her and they stood there while it brightened in one spot, dimmed at the ends.

“Did you have a good day, Dad?”

“Fair, finished the pour on that river site, but then the rain came. Should be OK though, we covered it up.”

She pranced over to the big oak, bounced off it somehow, and raced back to him, like some erratic planet careening around him. He tried to remember the last time he’d hurled himself like that. Maybe never. “You know, Dad, this is a world worth saving.”

She’d just started her second year at community college and couldn’t stop talking about environmental stuff.

“Let’s go see what Ma is cooking.”

“No, Dad, wait a minute. I want to ask you something.”

“If it’s about a boyfriend, I want to meet him first.”

Now she stood with legs apart, arms akimbo. Like she did last time he said that. “Do you think I do nothing but think about boys?”

“Not at all, you’re going to pester me about doing something for the environment, I can see it coming on.” He headed around the house to the back door, which had a mudroom like the one in the farmhouse where he grew up.

Sarah followed him, still bouncing. He could hear it in her footsteps. “You are in the perfect business to make big changes.”

“Wait here.” He went in and stripped off his work clothes, put on a fresh T and pants he’d laid out in the morning. He still felt smug about his idea last month to place them right there, should have figured it out years ago.

It was like he’d stopped a hose for a bit and now the water came out with more pressure. “Dad, you know concrete puts a lot of carbon dioxide into the air, not just from the fuel it takes to make it and move it, but because of the curing.”

He was already in the kitchen, lifting pot lids, hugging Martha from behind at the sink. “How’s my tropical flower?” Something from their honeymoon, so long ago, when she put on a Hawaiian dress in the middle of winter, and they turned the heat up so it would feel like a summer day.

She kept the faucet on and didn’t turn around but reached one arm back to land on his bottom. “Nice clean butt, did you do any work today?”

When Sarah came in she retrieved her hand. She was modest that way, don’t let the children see.

“Mom, you missed the rainbow.”

Martha turned off the faucet, dried her hands.

“You’re in that stupid basement all day, why wouldn’t you want to see it?”

In the safety deposit section of the bank. He could never take it, but it didn’t seem to upset her.

Martha brushed them aside to cross the kitchen. “You’re all lucky I have bank hours and come home and make you supper.” She opened a cupboard and gestured like some game show bimbo presenting the grand prize washing machine. “See, plates, glasses. Will someone put them out please?”

Being a boss all day at work, it was kind of nice to have one at home, as long as it was something small like setting the table. He and Sarah went at it, then he sat down.

“Call Kim will you, Sarah.” Martha said from the stove. It wasn’t really a question.

“Do I have to?”

Martha was ready. “Do as you’re told.”

But Sarah didn’t have to because just then Adam streaked in to land on Jake’s lap, while Kim ambled to the doorway. Adam squealed even before Jake began to bounce him and watch the flash of brown eyes streaking up and down. “Little tyke grew since this morning.”

Kim, in a bathrobe, slid into her seat. “He loves his Bapa.”

If it weren’t for the little boy, that girl might not get out of bed. Well, he couldn’t blame her, almost done with cosmetology school and COVID hit. Still, she could contact the salons that were opening up again, see if they needed help.

“Kim worked on reception favors today, how about it honey, want to show Dad?”

“Maybe later, Mom.”

How those women could make such a deal of wedding stuff amazed him. But not Sarah. He turned to watch her.

She stood in the corner of the counter, arms folded. “You could be looking for an apartment instead of tying little ribbons around bags of mints that look like flowers but you bite into them and find out they’re soap.”

He put a napkin to his mouth to stifle a laugh. The two kids were so different. Kim a lot like her mom, Sarah, like herself. Maybe a little like him but much braver about speaking up.

Kim sat Adam in his highchair and tied on his bib. “Some people like weddings.” She gave him his juice cup and then daggered a look at Sarah. “You know I could find another bridesmaid.”

He could try to stop their squabble, but they were grown up now, let them figure it out on their own. Of course it didn’t help that Sarah had to give up her room to Kim and Adam when they left their apartment and moved back home. This little house was doing the best it could, but he’d be happy when they finally moved out, better be by the time of the wedding in a couple of months. At least Gabe had a job, working in construction and saving money living with his parents for now.

Sarah filled the teakettle with a blast from the faucet, then marched to the stove and banged it down on a burner. “It’s incredible you’re having a wedding in the middle of a pandemic. Do you know that’s the best way to spread COVID?”

Martha turned the heat on under the kettle. “Sarah, you know we’re going to be as safe as we can. Outdoors, masks, dancing six feet apart.”

“Oh yeah, that’s going to work. Everybody jerking around like zombies spilling wine all over their wedding finery. How are they not going to run into each other?” Sarah illustrated with a crazy dance that made it look like her limbs were about to fall off.

Jake didn’t hide his laughter this time. He loved the way Sarah zinged into everyone. Of course, he could be the target too.

Martha leaned back against the counter, arms folded. “Stop it Jake, you barely have to lift a finger, let us do this right. She’s got this wonderful guy who loves her and her kid, even though it’s not his. How often do you find a guy like that?”

True enough, he couldn’t do that.

 

For supper they had tuna surprise, which he actually liked, especially with potato chips on top. Then, for dessert Martha brought out these godawful cupcakes from the bakery that was going to make them for the wedding. They needed to decide on which ones. The yellow ones weren’t bad, but the frosting on the brown ones looked like the concrete he’d poured this afternoon.

It wasn’t till evening that Sarah cornered him about her great environmental ideas. While Kim put Adam to bed and Martha knitted in the living room in front of TV, he sat in an adjacent small room with a little bay window. Sarah pulled up a chair to sit next to him.

Before she had a chance to speak, he said, “Dear Sarah, I know what you’re going to say. You think I don’t know my own business? Yes it uses a lot of energy, yes it puts out CO2, but it’s a great building material that’s not expensive and it’s what our cities are made of.”

“I know Dad, but I’ve been hearing how we could do it better, especially for driveways and parking lots.”

“Which don’t let the water through so the rain washes off into the rivers and causes flooding.”

“Yes, and those slabs absorb a lot of heat, and we really don’t need that these days.”

He looked out the window where yellow streetlights cast cones of light on the street. “And we don’t need all that light either, and some of it goes right into the sky where the astronauts can see it.”

Sarah stood up and went to the window. “Don’t make fun of me, Dad. For one, I’m the next generation who’s going to have to live with all of this.”

“You’re right, we left a great mess for you all. But darling, it’s not going to be gloom and doom. This climate stuff, way overblown.”

“You said yourself you could barely find a day under ninety to pour this summer.”

“We live in the Midwest in case you’ve forgotten. What’s to say it won’t snow next July?”

Sarah clasped her hands and stretched her arms way over her head. She did that when she was frustrated. “I know you do a great job, Dad, best concrete man in town. That’s why you can be the one to make changes and rake in money at the same time.”

“I suppose you mean porous concrete.”

She looked at him like she used to on Christmas morning. “That would be huge. The water could go straight through it into the ground, not even get to the storm sewers.”

“Except that it’s more expensive and not as strong. Leave out the sand, leave out the smooth surface.”

“But you don’t need that strength for parking lots. And think of how nice it would be to our river.” Sarah in one move sat down, hooked one leg over the arm of her chair, and leaned forward. “So many people want to do something about the environment. You could say, here, do this. And grassed paving, have you seen that driveway on Oak Street?”

Jake put his elbows on his knees. “Sure, network of concrete, with little clover-shaped spaces for soil and grass. Pain in the neck to lay out by the way. And after the pour, you have to go and punch out each of those holes. I can’t see Daryl wanting to do that, and I certainly don’t want to.”

Jake picked up the paper, and Sarah went to the kitchen. But she came back with a couple of beers in hand. “I’m going to save homework till tomorrow,” she said as she handed him one. “Should have started out this way.”

She picked up a mag and they read side by side while they sipped their beers. She knew when to back off and still be friendly. Not everyone does.

 

Two days later when he left for work a strange whiteness filled the sky that wasn’t clouds but smoke from the fires out west, blown all the way to Iowa. He went to check on the parking lot they’d poured by the river, but when he got out of the truck, it felt like he’d come to the wrong place.

The river was much too wide, like a lake, and roiling along in muddy waves. It took him a moment. How could it have risen like that? They hadn’t had much rain. He jumped out and walked to the edge of this new river. There were other people looking too, at where the river had covered up the trail. Under the bridge nearby, the water lapped to within a few feet of its underside.

Someone pulled up in a car and got out. Daryl. The two of them looked at the place they’d poured two days ago. Daryl said, “You wouldn’t even know it was there.”

Jake threw a stick into the river. “That pour is too new, it’ll be ruined.” He’d never had a job flooded this soon after a pour but knew the water could wash out so much cement from the concrete it wouldn’t hold together.

Daryl shifted from foot to foot. “Good thing the job we’re doing now is up the hill.” Not much could rattle Daryl, which was great but maddening too.

“I can’t understand how this happened.”

Daryl adjusted his cap to shade his eyes. “Didn’t you hear? Rained eight inches last night up in Overbake.”

God, upstream ten miles. Sarah would tell him, lots of parking lots by the river up there with the new Allmart shopping center. Runoff. Of course plenty of that from farmer’s fields and feed lots too.

“I suppose we’ll have to do it all over again.” Daryl sounded like he was reciting a grocery list.

“We’ll look at it when the river goes down.”

What good would one of Sarah’s fancy parking lots have done? Not much. But a whole shopping center? A whole town?

They couldn’t do any work that day because the city closed the bridge to the Hauzher addition where the Byler’s job was, for fear it might give way. So, they spent the day cleaning equipment, organizing tools, and he caught up with bookwork. At the end of the day, he went back to the site of their parking lot pour. Water even higher than this morning.

And way upstream on the far bank something odd. It looked like someone had climbed a tree that overhung the river. That made no sense until he saw an empty kayak hung up in a tangle of tree trunks fifty yards downstream.

He called 911 and then raced over the bridge on foot since they weren’t allowed vehicles on that one either. It wasn’t just a matter of walking to the bank though, as the water had risen well over it all the way to the road. So, he went back to the bridge for the height that gave him a better view, but he could do nothing but squeeze the railing and will that poor sucker to keep hanging on. By the time the water rescue team arrived his knuckles were white and his head ached.

Two trucks with half a dozen guys in red and black gear and helmets arrived. They drove way upstream of the person needing help and launched a motorized raft anchored by long cables to their trucks, and with another cable to a point downstream where one of them could direct the boat toward the bank or away from it. Two guys in the raft. To save one person.

Over the next half hour, the raft bucked the raging waters like a ship on the stormy Atlantic, moving closer, then bashed away, then closer again until the cables held it in position right under the tree, but it jerked so much, how were they going to get the person down?

They did though, somehow, because when they began to pull the raft to shore, three people were in it. He let out a breath that he must have been holding. From his distance, he couldn’t see clearly, but maybe it was a woman the rescuers helped onto the shore. She flung herself to the ground, and it looked like she kissed it. And then he knew. That’s something Sarah would do. He ran the 500 yards like he was doing the 100-yard dash in high school.

She was sitting up now, with a blanket around her shoulders. He sat with her, cradled her in his arms. There was nothing he had to know right now. Let her come back.

Gabe, Kim’s guy, came over with cups of coffee. Really, he didn’t know he did this. Turned out he was one of the guys in the raft. “Hi Sis, didn’t know the middle of the river was one of your hangouts.”

Sarah took the cup with shaky hands. Her mouth couldn’t make words yet, but she smiled and socked him with her blue fist.

When she was able, they took her by truck to the ER where Jake watched them taking vitals.

“I’m so sorry, Dad.” She stood up from the bed, but the nurse made her lie down again.

Martha came bursting in. “Sarah, you OK? Oh my god, what on earth were you doing?”

Jake held her and put a finger in front of his lips. “We’ll figure it out later.”

 

It took a day or two before Sarah bounced back to her normal self. She and a couple of her friends had gone kayaking that morning before the waters rose and got caught in the flash flood. Why hadn’t they checked the weather? He could ask the same of himself for timing the concrete pour. The other two managed to make shore OK, but her kayak ran into a snag and capsized. Her friends lost their phones, and by the time they found help, the rescue operation was already underway.

Since she didn’t have a firstborn to give to the guys on the rescue team, she wanted to send them big baskets of fruit and cheese like they have at Christmas. Martha wanted to adopt them. Luckily, one was already joining the family soon. A son, Jake thought for the first time, that’d be something.

On the third day, Sarah sipped coffee in the sunshine by the window where she and Jake had talked before all this happened. When she took up the concrete reform idea again, he was so happy he told her, sure. He’d try anything to help prevent a flood like that again.

“But Dad, there’s so much more we need to do and we can too. Like with the fires out west. It’s all about climate change.”

Sitting next to her in the sun, he could think of nothing but how good it was to have her there, prodding him again.

“Sure honey, we’ll tackle that next.”

He said it in jest, and she knew it. But when he went out for a walk at sunset, he saw the red sun. He wanted to watch it set, but in the thin white of the sky, it disappeared before he had a chance to watch it vanish over the hills. Because of fires thousands of miles away.

Mary Lewis has an MFA in creative writing from Augsburg University, an MS in Ecology from the University of Minnesota, and she taught in the Biology Department of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She has published stories and essays in journals including Antigonish Review, Blue Lake Review, Book of Matches, Litbreak Magazine, North American Review, Persimmon Tree, RiverSedge, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, Sleet Magazine, The Spadina Literary Review, Superstition Review, Toasted Cheese, Wordrunner, and The Woven Tale Press. Forthcoming: Allium, Evening Street Review, Feels Blind Literary. FInd links to some other stories at her website.

VILLAINS by Samantha Neugebauer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

VILLAINS
by Samantha Neugebauer

Back then it was impossible to do anything with my mother sleeping. In the evenings, we watched Prancer and ate turkey clubs; in the mornings, we drank coffee, then Bloody Marys. It was when I worked in the afternoons that she liked to sleep, so I schemed to thwart her efforts (although I did celebrate her condition in the abstract). I’d give her small tasks; send her out for a forever stamp, or to Dunkin’ Donuts, or to pick up her prescriptions, things like that. My bank account had become anorexic, so we kept our overhead low.

It was a transitional time for both of us. My mother, sixty, had recently gone on disability after an injury at her job. I, thirty, had moved back after working abroad for ten years, although no one was interested, so I tried not to think about it.

In general, my mother was more maudlin than me, while I was more calculated. What my mother saw as human nature, I saw as flaws in a design. I couldn’t help it, I’d gone to college. She was a size twelve and I, a sixteen, although we could wear each other’s clothes—sizes, like everything, had become so negotiable. Every day we missed my father, and my brother, and her parents, also Walter, my best friend from high school, and Byron and Flake, our family dogs (miniature Border Collies), and Agnes, her childhood cat, and less so, my father’s parents, her sister, the aunts and uncles, and the parakeets, not because we didn’t love them, but we had to draw the line somewhere.

We lived in Philadelphia, in the town where she’d grown up, the place I’d always considered “my grandmom’s house” and she’d considered “home.” The town had seen better days, but so had everything. The neighborhood, Burholme, was sliding off into the suburbs though we were technically still part of the city. On certain blocks, the downtown was visible, thumb-sized. The mail came every day, and the trash was collected once a week. The trash collectors were angels (everyone said it) because they made the boxes disappear. There was an epidemic of boxes—big, small, very little, boxes everywhere all of the time. Nobody liked it, but we all loved shopping online. The old neighbors criticized the young neighbors for not collapsing their boxes, while the young neighbors blamed the old neighbors for still being alive. The old said the young didn’t know how to do anything. The young said the old had never taught them anything. The cure, I insisted to anyone around, was that the companies themselves ought to recollect the boxes! Some neighbors agreed with me, others threw up their hands. I became a broken record. An old neighbor hissed that my idea wouldn’t change a damn thing. Still, my mother and I would run outside, and give the trash collectors Gatorades or water bottles whenever we heard their trucks.

Nothing changed. Nothing happened.

I never told anyone about us watching Prancer or our afternoon Bloody Marys or my mother’s long conversations with the dead while she slept. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was trying to be quirky or unique. That was the last thing I wanted, although there were years when I had wanted that more than anything; my years between eleven and twenty-nine to be exact, which I can’t help but know are the ages of Jesus’ lost years too.

Quirky is to surreal what anxiety is to leprosy. “I really hope,” my mother liked to say during or just after Prancer when we would have a cigarette on the back porch, “that people from the way future watch this movie, so they know we weren’t all airbrushed and self-interested, that we had double-chins and buck teeth and wondrous instincts.”

Instincts. I had one. That winter I had become obsessed with the villanelle. I’d convinced myself that if I could write one good villanelle, I could be happy forever. That was the work I was trying to do in the afternoons while my bank account dwindled and my mother rolled around on her bed.

I had the younger neighbors to thank for this obsession. They were rowdy and gloom-struck. They wore their clothes tightly, their weight like some stubborn disappointment. They congregated at the Red Rooster after work, smelling of Old Bay seasoning and Little Trees car fresheners. Many were married. Some had children. Cashiers, managers, and teachers, they were, yet they were not the same boys and girls I’d gone to elementary school with, only a similar variant.

From my grandmother’s house, the Red Rooster was a short, L-shaped walk, which I took almost every day as the sun set. I turned off my block to Dungan Road, a steep street, which began with nice trees and houses and descended into brick apartments and no trees at the bottom. At the very end was the Red Rooster on one side, in the middle of a small strip mall, and on the other side, a rather large and ostentatious old folks’ home, although the old folks were rarely seen since the mall’s grocery store had transformed into a Dollar Tree.

One Thursday in November, I sloped down Dungan Road, fighting my authoritarian streak as usual. I admired the houses, even the iron dragonflies staked in their bushes and the polyester garden flags, which said ‘welcome, we’re human, God bless’ in various manners. These weren’t the kind of doodads my mother and I liked, but I no longer wanted to mock them. Outside the apartments, drug doings and domestic disputes transpired. Heavy music pounded, and a man emptied the plastic trash from his car into the gutter. If only there were trees, I thought, if only the apartments were nice and tidy. If only, if only. I had all the answers. All the solutions. I liked to blame this streak on college, but it has something to do with the Gateway Hypothesis too, a concept introduced to me as a child during D.A.R.E. in my inner-city elementary classroom. If there were seemingly harmless Gateway Drugs to worse things, I supposed, there had to be seemingly innocuous Gateways to better things, too. Trees are to godliness what weed is to opioid euphoria, or something.

The sky turned a murderous pink, then the buildings shone redder and grayer. Behind me, the pines and oaks shivered. I loved the color, the whole feel of it. I thought of a line from somewhere—“What do I love when I love my God?”—it was a question I considered often though I’d been a follower of atheism for some time. I regularly switched around the words: What do I love when I love the sky and leaves? What do I love when I love my poem? My old dog? I had no idea. Was it just the thing or was it something within it? If it was something within it, I feared all I loved was nostalgia and myself and art that didn’t harm me.

Between the apartments and the old folks’ home was a grassy strait owned by PECO, the electric company, for giant pylons. The black pylons stretched endlessly around the city, turning slightly, like disciplined sentries heading to a cosmic battle, or illustrations of sentries in a children’s flipbook, except not a flipbook with a beginning and end, but one encircling as if on a metal ring. My mother and grandparents would always say it was lucky to live in front or behind land PECO owned because it would never be developed, but it was already developed in a way, of course. I wanted the pylons in my poem, only I didn’t know what for and where to put them; they seemed so useful and steady where they were already.

Inside, the Red Rooster was thick with attitude and history, the way I liked places to be. I couldn’t find places like this in the cool neighborhoods where my college peers from the suburbs moved after school. Those suburb kids never learned how to blend and invest. From what I’d witnessed, they kept to themselves and considered their transactions at restaurants and bodegas as their neighborly interactions. Also, I was bitter because I could never be them, and I could never be the old me again either. Nostalgia makes you old prematurely. One of my mother’s doctors told me that. I’m not sure if she was a real doctor, but I liked her a lot. The poem is to help me with my bitterness. So is the walking and drinking.

I sat down at a table across from the bar. There were a dozen adults, more or less, and two children. To borrow from Mark Twain and Lorrie Moore, as I had been taught to do, they were men with hammers and women with hairbrushes. One child was leaning over the bar stealing maraschino cherries from a foggy box. The other child napped in a sack on a man’s hunched back. Mona, the waitress, ferried over my dirty martini and my extra cup of olives. With her high cerulean eyeshadow, she came toward me like an eel in a dark cave. Mona was definitely in my poem.

I opened my notebook and sipped my cocktail. My notebook was filled with doodles and notes like: I am peasant stock and to peasant stock I shall return. The doodles were nothing special, mostly lines and houses forming my grandmother’s neighborhood and my childhood neighborhood. I tagged each house with the name of the family who lived there or had lived there. On other pages, I drew little squares representing desks in the various classrooms I’d learned inside; I tried to remember the names of people in those desks and mark them too. A neighborhood is to a classroom what a handbag is to a wallet. Only some people don’t carry handbags anymore.

Mona brought me my third martini. Game after game blared on the TV screens. The lights dimmed more, or so it seemed. It was too difficult to see my notebook. I put my notebook away and began to feel young. I wanted to be touched and noticed. In the dark back, a group of men had begun a game of pool. I sauntered over and introduced myself—Liz. “Well, Liz,” they said. Their names, like mine, had all belonged to saints first.

In the morning, I woke up in a rowhouse closer to the downtown than to my grandmother’s town. The man, a nice one, left me a note “to help myself” to a box of Cheerios. I took the box with me and Ubered home. My mother didn’t ask too many questions, yet she did remind me twice how she hated waking up alone. It rained for hours, then it was too hot for a jacket. Our day, otherwise, was the same.

Why the villanelle? It started after I repatriated. In my online dictionary, I’d gone to look for the Italian word for peasant, and an etymological rabbit hole revealed itself to me. Villano and villana were the old words for peasant and peasantess. In time, the word inspired the English word villain because then, like now, the people who lived outside of the city centers (the downtowns), the rough people without the right clothing, manners, and speech were the villains. The first villanelles were their peasant songs.

I’m not sure any of this is true, but I’m choosing to believe it. Belief is to knowledge what cake is to torta. If I checked my online bank account before working on my poem, I couldn’t work on my poem at all. I would get lost in worries of how the abroad money was running out, how I would need to get a job soon, how in three months I wouldn’t have enough to pay my student loan bill.

The next few evenings, my mother fell asleep during Prancer. I continued to watch it alone while my mother laughed and chattered. I couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded like happy ones.

The following night at the Red Rooster, I found myself telling Mona about the villanelle. I told her how the old peasant songs weren’t very structured. The rhymey-ness and formalness came later as the educated French and English and Americans took the song over. The original songs were longer, messier, more improvised. I don’t care about meter or rhyme, I told her. I wanted the five stanzas and the closing quatrain. I wanted to capture the pastoral, or what was left of it. I wanted the song to be small, like me, so that if anyone ever read it, they would know that I knew what I was. That even though I’d gotten too big for my britches, I’d found my way back. “That’s great hon,” Mona said, “that’s real great.”

Most of all, I was interested in the repeated refrain. I wanted to create a refrain that would extract more meaning each time it reappeared, creating a theme that built in intensity.

“Hey,” a bearded man said as he slid over and sat down across from me at my table. “I’m Manuel.” He was handsome, younger than me, or he looked like it.

“Liz.”

“Elizabeth, I overheard what you were saying.”

“Yeah?” I was interested.

“And I got to tell you, you’re wrong. Your bitches are shredded.” He drank from my glass. “Your britches.”

I danced my fingers on my notebook.

“Listen,” he said. “I know because I know.”

I had a fantasy of him and me together.

“Another!” I called to Mona, then to him, “You listen…” I lost my train of thought.

“I had a professor once tell me that repetition in verse works best when what’s repeated isn’t quite the thing repeated,” he said.

“I can do that.”

“Is this doing that?”

I had no answer.

“Let me show you something.” His eyes glinted like the whiskey bottles behind the bar.

“Please,” I said, rolling my shoulder.

“Not like that.” He sighed. He held up his hand. “I’m married.”

“Oh.”

We paid our tabs and walked across the lamplit street and into the PECO strait. “I’ve never walked through here,” I said. The grass fronds were spiky and sharp. Manuel was wearing a maroon sweatshirt and black joggers that were tight around his calves. My legs were exposed and cold. I wished I had on his joggers. “Humans are getting to a smarter space,” he was saying. “We can appreciate the acausal now even if we don’t like it…” Crazy is to drunk as chongkukjang is to legumes. I’d worked awhile in Japan and sometimes I vacationed in Korea.

Fermented drunkenness. “You can’t talk yourself up into somewhere, and you can’t talk yourself down into nowhere either…” Manuel continued explaining.

“Listen,” I said finally, “I’m sick of new wisdom, and also old ideas.”

“Okay. Come on,” he said. He opened a back door to the old folks’ home, and I followed him inside. “I work here.”

Maybe, I thought, he’ll let me work here too. I was beginning to sober. “How’s your job security?” I asked. “Is it a good place to work?”

“They’re not hiring,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I have a job.”

“Alright.”

“But maybe there are sometimes volunteering opportunities?” College career websites always advised volunteering as the train to opportunity.

“Possibly,” Manuel said.

We entered the elevator. It had a gold handrail on every side. There was hay all over the floor. “What’s with the hay?”

“I been meaning to pick that up.” He reached down and began collecting the hay, and I followed suit until the elevator stopped with a jolt. In the hallway, the lights were low. A dank and fertile smell suffused the corridor.

“I’m pivoting to animals,” Manuel said. He took the hay from my hands and bunched it with that in his own hand. “Look here,” he said, and I followed him to a door with a window on it. I looked inside, and on a queen mattress, I saw a pair of foxes curled in bed together.

“What the hell…”

“Shh…” he said.

I ran to each window, checking the occupants: bats, dogs, cats, deer, coyotes, squirrels, moles, rabbits, raccoons, voles, egrets, and wolverines. “Where are the people?”

“I’ve got them all on the bottom floor.”

“And they let you do this?”

“Nobody let me. I took over.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Follow me,” he said, and I followed him down a flight of steps to the next floor. These rooms had bars on their doors. “Meet Bear,” he said, leading me to the bear’s room. It was an American black bear. I sobered. “Where is Bear’s partner?”

“I could only save one at a time.” He nodded at me as if he trusted that I was understanding him. “My next paycheck, we got to buy the girls, my daughters, new winter coats, then I’ll go get Bear’s partner.”

I clasped my hands around the bars. The bed had buckled and Bear was sleeping on it. His coat was thick and lovely, like nothing I’d ever imagined. He snored too, like my father.

“I’ve got otters in the pool in the exercise therapy room.”

“I see.” I turned to him.

“Do you?”

“How has no one noticed?” I asked.

“No one pays attention to old people.”

“You know I did notice they weren’t around so much…”

“Don’t get defensive.”

“Okay.”

“Aren’t they squished all on one floor?”

“They like it. They don’t mind. They believe in the project.”

“Really?”

“Well, some of them don’t understand it, but they don’t understand much anymore, so it’s no better or worse for them.”

“My mind hurts,” I said.

He smiled widely. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? My mind doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Aren’t you worried you’ll get caught?”

“Sure, sometimes. I’m human.”

I wondered if I had entered a dreamworld like my mother, if my intellect had forced my senses to infuse people and events from the past with things from the present. Was I talking to Noah? Or was it something else, something new?

“Would you like to see the otters?” Manuel asked me.

I imagined the otters, slippery and playful. “Yes,” I said, letting go of Bear’s bars. It was true. I wanted to see the otters. I wanted Manuel to show me a new way, even if it felt a little unreal and somewhat repetitive.

Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly, and a podcaster for Slush Pile. She is also a 2022-23 D.C. Arts Fellow with Day Eight through which she is writing for the Washington Independent Review of Books. At the moment, she lives in Baltimore with her husband, their two cats, and books, etc. Visit her website.

MEDITATING IN HELL by Megan E. O’Laughlin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MEDITATING IN HELL
by Megan E. O’Laughlin

Age 24. The Gambia, West Africa.

I do not pray five times a day like the people in the village. When I duck into my little house, the girls ask where are you going? I tell them to pray; I don’t know the Mandinka word for meditation. Most evenings, the gaggle of girls come over for gossip and help with their homework. They ask about my prayers, so I sit criss-cross-applesauce, close my eyes, and watch the space between my breaths.

“That’s not praying. She doesn’t know!” the girls giggle. But their laughter washes away, for I know how to control my unruly mind.

I meditate even more at the Stage House, where Peace Corps volunteers convene in the city. We drink skunky beers and stay up late watching DVDs of The Ring and Legally Blonde. Dishes pile in the sink, and we rip open packages filled with melted candy and coveted books.

I make a sign: I am in here meditating, in messy, cursive writing, and tape it to the dormitory door. I sit between the bunks and imagine a circle of soft light around my body. I inhale. My clamorous thoughts retreat to a downstairs place. Much quieter now. I exhale. The external world slows, and to that space, I retreat, over and over, with the same desperate fervor I once used to guzzle a beer or smoke weed all day long.

Meditation is my new drug.

◊

Later, my friend looks at my sign and says, “It looks like it says: I’m in hell, meditating.”

Age 41. Samish Island, Washington.

I pack a bag of soft clothes and books for my seventh meditation retreat. Upon arrival, the Zen teacher orients us to the usual: noble silence, daily chores, and this new one—no reading or journaling. Though I hate it, I comply and shove my books and phone under the bed for the five-day duration.

During breaks from the meditation hall, I walk the shore and breathe in the low tide sulfur as eagles whistle overhead. Multiple times per day, the neighbor sweeps her room and our shared bathroom, a jarring sound. At the retreat’s end, we will break our silence for lunch and the neighbor will tell all of us at the table how she left a cult. She says she fears a spiritual community, yet she is eager for solace, that quiet downstairs place.

Each night of the retreat when I cannot read myself to sleep, I stare at the ceiling and will my mind to avoid images from a movie I watched just weeks before, with the demon king and its group of naked cultists. I wonder why I watched it in the first place. I dare not glance towards the inky corners of the room, convinced I may see a demon or one of its worshippers, leering in the dark at my loneliness.

I am not sure if I believe in demons, but I know fanatic humans are real. While I haven’t joined a cult, I’ve searched for systematic methods to bypass life’s difficulties, placing faith in my teachers, not unlike cult members with their leaders. We all want peace, or we want more control, or perhaps both (although I’m not sure we can have both at the same time). Years of meditation practice—hours to observe my mind—have taught me how little control I have, and how unpeaceful I can be. Still, I can choose where to direct my attention and how I will respond. Perhaps peace can be found within such determination.

Now, in the midnight quiet, my fearful thoughts are here like a mental demon. I note my body’s reactions: the breath darts like hunted prey, the gut smolders. While I cannot stop this hellacious mental tantrum, it need not dominate me. I gently laugh at the deluge, so powerful and brief. I count the inhales and exhales until my mind slows and the breath deepens. I drift into a wordless sleep.

Megan E. O’Laughlin (she/her) is an emerging writer, psychotherapist, and MFA candidate at Ashland University. Her work appears in The Black Fork Review, Defunkt Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Journal, and The Bluebird Word. Megan lives on a peninsula by the sea in Washington state with her spunky child, spoiled dogs, and surfing spouse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Black Fork Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Defunkt Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, and others.

RANDOM PRECISION by Caleb Murray

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

RANDOM PRECISION
by Caleb Murray

I woke up in the morning with a hemorrhage in my brain that made me think that life is some kind of nightmare even though, logically, such a state of affairs would be irrelevant to life—after all, if life is a dream, or if there is no such thing as reality (there is and there isn’t, as it were), it would make no difference to how we think about practical matters. Through the kitchen window I saw my neighbor, a heavy woman with dark hair, standing in the road with a black blob in one hand and a stick in the other. The stick opened into a wide, flat scoop against the asphalt. It was a snow shovel. The black thing seemed to be a small duffel bag. She tried to scoop up some unresponsive, wiry lump in the road. Her face was wet, and it took me a long time to understand what was happening. She had to hold the thing with one hand while pushing the shovel with the other. She lifted the shovel with both hands, although it couldn’t have weighed more than ten or fifteen pounds, because then she held it in her armpit while she unfurled the trash bag with her free hand. Then she dropped it in the bag. It was a trash bag. She wiped her face with her forearm and went inside.

The spot where the cat had been looked like an oil stain. I stood at the window and looked at the spot for a while. In my head it grew—from a mirage of desert oil to a psycho-sexual inkblot to a monster that tried to strangle me, the same thing I fabricated for Yang the first time I met him—while it stayed the same in the road.

The coffee in the pot was done. It smelled like tires. I’ve always enjoyed the smell of tires. As a child, I would lie in the driveway, next to the car, looking at the sky, and my father would say, “Craig, what’re you doin’ on the concrete?” Later, I would be so up-ended I couldn’t drive, and I would lie there, before the stars, answering to all my childhood concepts and beliefs, no matter how remote—whether infinity was a number, whether my mind was a thing able to be controlled, how far away something has to be from earth until we cannot see it anymore—as if the four-foot tall version of myself were there, standing before me, asking me questions. I used to think often about my childhood. The reason I think I don’t as much anymore is because it used to be so much more immediate, more of a living memory, and now my entire childhood is like a stack of cassettes I’m trying to get to play on the screen of my phone. How stunning, how immediate and visceral it is that I can watch a video of Charles Mingus showing off his shotgun on a phone the size of my palm! Culture is so self-aware it no longer has imagination. All I think anyone would say, looking at me now, would be, “Craig, you’re sitting there, all relaxed-like, drinking coffee out of your blue abstract mug, thinking too much about yourself. Why don’t you tell us a story?”

Why don’t you go to hell? I turned around, but no one was there, and I couldn’t remember if I’d yelled those words or just imagined myself yelling them. I stood up and poured myself another cup. The porcelain cow clock on my kitchen counter read 15:15. The Beaujolais was on top of the fridge. I held it in my hand, passed it to the other, looked to the ceiling, and set it down. Early afternoon was too early and, after all, I was not trying to be an alcoholic.

My phone rang. It was on the coffee table in the other room. I didn’t recognize the number or area code.

“Hello, is this Craig Perkins?”

“Yes. May I ask who this is?”

“Mr. Perkins, this is Alyssa from Pacific Gas and Electric calling to inform you that, unless you pay your bill from the last three months by the end of the week, we will be shutting off your power to your residence.”

My power to my residence? What was this idiot trying to say? “I’ve paid that. I’ve been paying you people online for months and haven’t heard a single word until now.”

“Okay, well, let’s see if we can’t find some information on you, Mr. Perkins.”

Mr. Perkins.

“It looks like you set up online bill pay with us back in November. Is that correct?”

“November? Yes, it was November.”

“Okay, sir, let’s just see.” I could hear her tongue and lips smacking together and pulling apart. “Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Sure, but, what’s your name again, please?”

“My name is Alyssa.”

“I’m Craig.”

“Okay, Craig. Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Okay.”

I imagined her, the way her voice reached out to me, her melancholy eyes pleading up to me, her plastic-blonde hair spread over her hands and shoulders. I reached for my blue coffee mug and touched the bottle of wine—still on the phone, I walked the Beaujolais to the kitchen and found my coffee on the counter. If this were a dream, I thought, then how would I react to such sleight of mind? Would I try to run but be stuck, as if in water? Or would someone appear, one of my friends with another’s face, or would I start to have sex, dirty, mean sex, with some childhood friend even though I knew I was back together with Cara? I would never get back together with Cara, that addict bitch, and therefore I would know it was a dream, but assuming that I wouldn’t and didn’t—would it be any different? I can’t think so. It would make no difference to how I lived my life and no difference to how I thought about practical matters. My dilemma, the wine on the table, was much more immediate, a thing in fact physical and real, and thus not even analogous to a dream. My mind had slighted me. That was all.

“Okay, Craig? Are you there, Mr. Perkins?”

What?

“Craig?”

“What?”

“Mr. Perkins, our records show that we have received no payments for the past three months.” She was silent.

“What does that mean?” I said.

She said, clearing her throat, “Well, sir, it means either there is not enough funds in your account to withdraw—”

“There are funds, there’s funds there, that’s not the problem.”

“Okay, Mr. Perkins, okay. The other option is that we are unable to withdraw funds from your account.”

“Why?”

“Why is that an option or why would that be?”

“Why would that be? Why would that even be an option?”

“Excuse me, are you…”

“What other options are there?” I was pacing. “Someone is controlling my account and taking my funds? Is this a case of identity theft?”

“Mr. Perkins, perhaps I should transfer you to my supervisor…”

“Because if my identity has been stolen, I’m gonna need all those funds I paid you back.”

“I cannot speak to that,” the girl said. “If your identity has been stolen, you’re going to need to contact your bank.”

“I’ve been sending my funds to you, not to my bank.”

“Let me transfer you to my manager, Craig, okay?”

“Because I’m not gonna repay all those payments.”

“Okay, Mr. Perkins? Okay, here you go.” She pressed a button, and I heard a ring.

I went to the kitchen, pulled the cork out of the wine, poured myself a glass and drank it. I wished I had strawberries and brie. Maybe dark chocolate, and grapes and dried figs.

Click. A male, faintly Hispanic voice said, “Hello, this is Todd Phillips. How can I help you?”

“I assume my employee told you that my identity might be stolen?”

“Your who?”

My whom. “Your employee. Lisa or Susanna or whatever.”

“I believe you spoke with Alyssa.”

“Alyssa. That’s her name. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Todd said.

“I’m not sorry. I’m just trying to remember.”

“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

“What?”

“How can I help you, sir?”

“Are you a machine?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who are you?” I screamed. Then I hung up.

I pressed play on the stereo, and some acoustic bass banged through the surface of the speakers in an alien rhythm, soon followed by piano and drums that, had I not recognized, however belatedly, Sir Duke, would have made no sense to me. My shoulders and knees kicked at unseen targets as I made my way across the room. I uncorked the bottle to let it breathe even though it was a few days old and thus nearly vinegar. All that remained in the fridge were green grapes and cheddar cheese, which I scarfed with my wine. The milk, bread, and eggs would wait for the morning—and the Samson and Delilah Seasonal IPA for the following evening. It was unbelievable that a racial enigma and Human ATM such as Mr. Todd Phillips would ask me what my problem was. If he knew what it was like to be a real human being, he wouldn’t ask so many questions. I laughed, and with my head back, spine arched, and arms raised like a goblin, I poured the rest of the wine from the glass into my mouth. An awkward splash in my throat made me cough, and even as I tried to breathe, even on my knees, I could only choke and cough, and I spit a little bit of red on the carpet. I was sweating by the time I finished and could breathe again. The stereo was playing something I couldn’t understand—random drums, then piano parts, back and forth, while the bass played continually though not, apparently, the same song the other two were playing; if understanding and “appreciating” music like this is what studying music or what being a clinical musician is all about, then I would rather be self-taught, well-versed but nonacademic. I turned it off. I stumbled past the table until I could sit on the couch. I imagined Yang saying, “You’re so drunk you can’t stand up.”

Such a deep interpretation of my current state of mind, you hack! No wonder you aren’t getting any more payments.

I ran a bath and opened the IPA. Next thing I remember I woke up on the couch with all the lights on, in my underwear, while in the bathroom the bathtub was half-full of cold water. An unopened bottle of beer lay flat under the water next to the bar of soap.

◊

The pattern on the pillow at my feet ebbed and pulsed so that everything around it was flooded with a golden light that mashed everything out of my vision. I kept hearing the phone ring, but when I turned my head it stopped. This happened a few times. I was lying on the couch, trying to read some propaganda assigned to me, but the patterns kept changing, like constellations, though flickering and rearranging out of impulse, not convention. My eyelids were difficult to hold open—when I was a child I didn’t know how to describe blurry vision, so I said, “Just make everything look like dots,” and then I would cross my eyes, slowly at first, then quicker and more relaxed while dropping my eyelids.

I was awake. An intruder was in my apartment. Maybe he’d kicked in the grate while I was asleep and had slid between the sidewalk and the windowsill. I jumped and looked behind the couch. He was gone already. A few blueberries remained in my refrigerator, the “fridge-berries,” those trite little monsters with inflamed eyes like vaginas that popped and tasted like dirt, blood, and sugar between the teeth and on the tongue. As I ate them, the intruder kept jumping back into my apartment, behind my couch, and even as I turned and beheld the room empty I would hear him say something, some inaudible and wordless version of, “Crab-leg, I am here in your room whether you like it or not.” I tossed my hands in the air and walked to the stereo. I pushed play, and some clunky piano music came on that I remembered liking. Someone was making goat noises in the background along with the piano solo. The rhythm kept stopping, suspending a chord in the air as a delirious, audible self-portrait. Every time I looked back a different song was playing. When I looked up, the album was over and the sun was going down on mother earth. Before long her great monolithic eye closed in ecstasy and her billions of synapses flickered into view. Their intimate, unconscious connections—Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion—were barely apparent and profoundly beautiful. An entire LP had passed while I mouthed the words, “delirious, audible self-portrait,” and the lights of Polaris, Betelgeuse, and Sirius were all there. I lay behind the couch, but no one showed up. If I moved he would be there again, so I stayed. The phone rang, but when I turned my head it stopped. Otherwise the sky was still and the room was peaceful.

I awoke in bed with all of my clothes off. The sheets gently scraped my crotch. I went to the kitchen for orange juice and decided to put wine in it because I didn’t have a job. Through the kitchen window, I saw a garbage truck lifting my neighbors’ industrial-size dumpster—I watched for a cat-shaped trash bag in the load but saw nothing. If I owned a cat, I would never let it outside to die in the street.

The garbage truck drove away in the fog. It was a little after 5:30. The second glass of red wine and o.j. was more difficult to finish because I kept imagining myself in the street in the earliest hour of the morning, crying, scooping my dead cat up in a snow shovel that I kept in a corner of the garage.

The phone rattled against the glass table. I imagined alarms going off, trying to scare my subconscious away, flashing its lights at me as if I had just walked through an emergency door. If I had known who was calling, I might not have answered—although, more accurately, if I had known what she had wanted, I wouldn’t have answered because I might have assumed she wanted something else—had I only known who was calling.

I answered the phone.

“Hello. Mr. Craig Perkins?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Is Mr. Perkins available?”

“Yes. I think so.” I put the phone against my chest. Somebody was singing some version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the stereo, but that’s all I remember. “Hold on a sec.” I opened the front door, went outside, looked at the bug-eyed puppy making its way toward me on the sidewalk, walked around the block, through the door, into my apartment, and said to the phone, “This is Craig Perkins.”

I overheard her saying something like, “Na, he’s not there,” to someone. After a while she said, “Mr. Perkins, this is Alyssa from Pacific Gas and Electric, calling to inform you—”

“Wait,” I said, closing the door. I poured myself a cup of wine and sat on the couch. “What is it?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m calling to inform you that you’re three payments past due. Therefore we will have no choice but to shut off your power if you fail to take action within one week.”

When she finished the statement, I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. I exhaled and was static until I reminded myself to inhale; then I couldn’t find a rhythm natural enough to become involuntary, so I had to breathe as if manually controlling my lungs, and the longer I consciously controlled my breathing the more aware of it I became until I imagined I could never forget the breathing process and let it become unconscious—perhaps, after enough time, my lungs would no longer work involuntarily—and I would be stuck this way for the rest of my life.

“Didn’t I pay that already?”

“According to our records,” she said against some moist background noise, “you set up online bill pay in November, and yet you haven’t paid the funds in three months.” It sounded like she was chewing.

“Three months?”

“Yes. Our computer wasn’t able to pull your funds. They were not available for them.”

What in God’s name was this girl babbling about?

“Are you there, Mr. Perkins?”

“Yes.” Again with the Mister Perkins.

“If you think there’s been a mistake, you might want to contact your bank regarding your account.”

“You mean if my identity has been stolen?”

“Exactly.” Bingo. “Or something else.”

I had her. “Who are you?”

“My name is Alyssa. I’m with Pacific Gas and Electric—”

“No,” I said, scanning the list of last names that scrolled in my head: Alyssa Mubarek, Harquist, Aronson, Moehler, Krugher, Jarvis. “Do you know me?”

“Mr. Perkins, I—”

“Let me speak to your supervisor.”

“But I—”

“Put him on.”

“I’ll put her on,” she said quickly.

I heard a click and then realized my bathwater was still running. I turned the water off, opened a can of beer, and undressed. The phone, on a towel on the floor, was set to speakerphone. When I awoke, however, the bath was a quarter full, the water lukewarm, and my beer can was floating at my feet.

◊

The neighbor scooped up the dead animal carcass with a snow shovel in the road in the afternoon. I watched her while drinking a soda. I wiped my face. Underneath the road’s surface people were scooping up our debris. The floor sank, the walls lifted, and as a person was scooping a pile of trash another was pointing and screaming, “Move faster! Work harder!” The man kept scooping, without wiping the sweat from his eyes, until his back was unable to stretch taut, whereupon he was thrown into the furnace by his coworkers, and his sizzling flesh smelled like steak, and his screams, loud at first, were subdued and drained. I beheld this kind of thing beneath the ground’s surface and felt like a tourist—this ancient, bizarre, impossibly magical place, this cathedral, this mausoleum—this underground tradition, the disappearing act. I watched the man’s flesh peel from his fingers until the gleaming light revealed bones like talons. When I blinked, the fire’s negative was suspended in directionless, spaceless black. Horseshoed by a series of fire pits in massive asymmetric gourds, packed in between hundreds of workers sweating into their shoes, without a view of the street or the walls that rescinded from my house, I was lost. A man screamed from his gut, then another from his nerves and tongue. A woman herded children behind me. They were gone before I could see them. I sat in the lounge chair, the big brown recliner, and watched the parade—Dmitri Shostakovich, Thelonious Monk, Syd Barret all walking in procession, angrily, chained together, their hands oily and black and spider-webbed. I shook my face of it.

I pulled the telephone from the recliner’s furry armpit and dialed the number for Pacific Gas and Electric.

“Hello?” a female receptionist answered.

“May I speak with Alyssa Eliot please?”

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling to inform you that I think my identity has been stolen. My bank contacted me the day before yesterday and said I’ve been withdrawing payments for electric bills that have not been delivered to the electric company. Now, I’m confused. Should I take action to see that my bank pays what I owe, or are you responsible?”

“Let me transfer you to my supervisor.”

“No,” I said, watching as snow began to fall through the windows—the snowflakes looked like falling coals against the sooty orange background. “I want to speak with you.”

“Me?” she said. “Why me?”

“Because you know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

“Craig Perkins.”

“Mr. Perkins?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Crab-leg.”

“I still don’t know you.”

I laughed, and another man threw himself in the furnace.

“How do I know you?” she said.

A piece of fingernail broke off between her teeth, and though it may have been painless, I imagined her mouth full of blood, her finger curling under enormous pressure, blood dripping on the keyboard.

The intruder was back in my apartment, this time in one of the back rooms where he couldn’t be seen, and he was screaming through the vents so that his voice resonated throughout like brass, “Crab-leg, I’m here to eat your soul.”

Only he would say such an impossible thing.

Thus I don’t know why she said, “What are you talking about?”

“Um…”

“I’m here to eat hers, too.”

“Craig, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my hands waving in the air like swords—if she were there in the room with me I could have explained myself better.

“You need to stop calling here.”

“Just give me your home phone number, and I’ll call you there. I promise I’ll stop calling you at work.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Are you still there?”

The snow had put out all the fires. All four sides were glowing so that my skull squeezed against my brain and I could feel my heartbeat in my temples. I decided to walk to the store to buy more red wine and cheese and perhaps some dark chocolate. I grabbed my jacket and scarf. In the mirror I looked like I could be a legal aide or a medical intern. I took the phone off the couch—

“Are you still there?”

The phone’s screen was black. I set it on the end table by the couch, zipped up my jacket, and left my apartment. The first person on the street likely worked for an advertising company, but the second person—dumpster-snatched jacket, untrimmed beard, wool cap, milkshake eyes—was a junkie. I walked to the store with my hands in my pockets, filed alongside my money clip, watch, and keys. The faces I saw were unreadable, but I hadn’t come here to analyze humanity—even when we do, it doesn’t amount to anything substantial because we got it wrong in the first place: we are never not human, we are never not real, and therefore certain analyses are impossible. I watched an old woman, wrapped in curlers, a robe, flip flops, and bracelets, as she pushed a cart carrying several frozen dinners, a bottle of lotion, a box of wine, and a can opener. She paused at a couple different aisles before going down the frozen foods and dairy aisle once again. She checked an entire row of milk for expiration dates before picking one half-gallon carton and putting it in her cart. A man walked past the aisle, but I didn’t realize who it was until he was out of view. The woman began to walk toward me. I didn’t know what to do. I stood still and tried not to look at her, but she kept staring at me and wouldn’t look away. She had dark eyebrows that almost touched above her nose. She wore a retainer where saliva had pooled and would flap against the roof of her mouth as she breathed. The underwear under her sweatpants was loose-fitting, with large elastic bands on the edges. Her eyes darted around an awful lot for someone with not much going on upstairs.

Caleb Murray is from Montana and currently lives in Western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and Garfield Lake Review.

TWO POEMS by Nathan Lipps

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TWO POEMS
by Nathan Lipps

Controlled Burn

To the north
they have set fire
to a thousand acres
of a very real forest
to prevent future fires.

Walking through the ash
it makes sense to him
the many ways
we handle a decadence
not our own.

The trees survive, of course
their bark seared
but intact
the ground charred and gray
with the exhalation of hope.

It makes sense to him
burning down the fear
before the greater pain sets in
singing praise in a cloud of smoke
watching the animals flee.

 

Dipping For Osmeridae, Upper Peninsula Michigan 1988

They make a fire
along the riverbank
to keep their hands warm
and for something to do.

Wading out to their knees
they dip for smelt.
Their long nets straining
with moving gems.
Enough to fill a bucket each.

The smoke from the fire
rolls beneath their bodies
and will live within
those heavy coats for months.

Later they’ll dump the buckets into a truck
and go back for another wading out deeper
dipping the net again and again
until it becomes fruitless

and the trucks depart
and the embers cool
until some wind
makes a god of them.

Nathan Lipps is the author of the chapbook the body as passage. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Colorado Review, EcoTheo Review, North American Review, TYPO, and Third Coast. He currently works as an assistant professor at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Read more at his website.

TO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY by Shabrayle Setliff

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TO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY
by Shabrayle Setliff

Grandmother’s body was vast, heavy, and unknowable. Her belly was like an ocean in a cave. She never understood the glorious figginess of it. The tacky, seeded roundness held together with lovely bruised purple skin. Instead, she seemed concerned with its dimpled retaliations. Its heft that felt like the constant plunge of gravity, not the groundedness I knew when I fell into the soft acreage of her arms.

Despite her efforts, the field of her kept producing fractals of brown skin, smooth folds, and pillowy lipids. Her body’s growth came under constant surveillance in doctors’ offices and Weight Watchers’ meetings, on the scale, in the dressing room—and I began to wonder, to whom did this acreage belong?

She was scattered, like seed, along the perimeter of her body, alert to expansion, engaged in a loop of field exercises: chewing her food to atoms, walking the corridors of the indoor shopping mall, and doing water aerobics in the YMCA swimming pool, lifting soaked wings to the instructor’s count.

She fed my blossoming cheeks with noodles and cheese and let me discover the delights of processed meats, the salty curved edges of a piece of fried bologna. She couldn’t eat any of that, though. Instead, she ate tuna, canned in water, and an iceberg head, cleaved in half. She drank glaciers dyed Crystal Light red.

She didn’t travel much, but she did visit the ocean for a whole week once on a cruise ship. I’d like to imagine that she moved along the vast buffet like the wind was in her hair, but I don’t know if she would have allowed herself to be that carefree in front of others. Instead, I saw a picture of her sitting at an empty table with a lei of violet orchids around her neck.

I remember her smile in that picture, but I don’t remember her ever being joyful in real life. Joy was somewhere far away, like Honolulu. I wonder if she ever got off that cruise ship. I can’t imagine her toes ever touching a grain of sand. The grandma I knew would have worn Honolulu’s orchids, taken in its sunset from a lounge chair, but she would have kept the island at a distance.

I have one memory of her lit up with delight in the darkness of an early morning. She was sitting over a turkey carcass with my aunt under the glow of the low-hanging kitchen light. They plucked the stringy bits from the tiny ivory bones with pleasure, the whole country of a beast to be explored, their fingers the compass. Grandma offered me its prized gizzards earlier that day, and I, nine at the time, said “no.” She snuck them into her delicious cornbread dressing anyway, so I did eat them, unknowingly and with glee.

I was twenty-five when Grandma died. Just a few days after the funeral, I dreamed she was on a giant Naval ship. She told me the ship was heaven or maybe it carried passengers to heaven. She didn’t really know—it was all secondhand information. She could see that I was doubtful and even a little worried because the place looked dingy. The walls were institutional pewter, streaked with rust stains. She said it wasn’t that bad. She pointed to a few paperback books on her small cabin shelf that she liked to read to assure me she was okay. I was glad to visit her, so I put my worry aside. When I woke up, it felt so real that I told her I wanted to see her again.

And I do.

Newly forty, her body has resurrected in mine: soft brown mounds have sprouted where there were once none. When I sit, I spread farther outward—every part of me is in contact with another part of me. My legs have taken on the solidity of mature trees, and my steps have grown heavier. When I sleep, I sleep in the softness of myself, like the soft acreage of her arms.

Originally from Oklahoma, Shabrayle Setliff lives with her family in northern Virginia. Last year, she graduated with her MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. She’s working on a book combining Quechua folktales, the Qheswa language, and her maternal family history. In addition, she works as an associate editor at an education nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

THE SHAPE OF A FOG by Kevin Eguizabal

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THE SHAPE OF A FOG
by Kevin Eguizabal

It was in the water, the shape
Of a fog. Surrounding me with ambiguity.
Western shadows. I had so many questions.
A begging dog. A valley flowered in spring—
Hanging in the air. A drag queen // changing as
a ghost in the driveway—
Expecting nothing from the fog. Every iron soul—
Like a bone made of steel. If only weather could move
mountains of darkness…
The lightweight flees, steady in the
Fountain of my brain. This is it!
The softest almond perished on the soil.
We are not growing anymore. The
Belly we try to sell on AliExpress. The loss of appeal.
The snaps nobody sees on Snapchat. The world
of men– In the hands of
OnlyFans tips.
We are cerulean waters. The sea—
Like a dewy cloud of tragedy. The insults
Breaking our jaws. The fog abroad—
And somebody bleeding in the playground. To grab a smile
during the phenomenon.
Another school shooting on the news. The shape
Of a rattlesnake. Obscurity. The grayest eel—
choking on her own electricity.
The virgin lake shimmering. A venom queen,
The murderer of the green; opened for snow. The fog I
cannot stop from expanding. Lonely and young
to leave

Kevin Eguizabal is a new poet born in El Salvador. He lives in Silver Spring, MD, where he is an undergraduate student at Prince George’s community college. His poetry deals with the impact of modern American culture and feeling boxed in a never-ending tragedy. This is his first major appearance in a literary magazine.

THE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER by Kelly Pedro

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THE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER
by Kelly Pedro

The baby shower was on a Sunday, a day that was supposed to be about peace and rest, but Connie felt anything but peaceful or restful. Her hips still ached from a terrible night’s sleep. The body pillow she draped her leg over at night was no use. And now she waddled around a conference room in the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville like a rusty can opener, stilted and slow, but still getting the job done. The job today was to be sweet and smiling, grateful and, mostly, surprised, even though her mother told her weeks ago she was planning Connie a baby shower.

Natalia picked the Four Seasons against Connie’s wishes. With its plush carpet the color of steamed milk, cherry wood furniture, and a brocade couch with ornate carvings, the conference room was meant for high-powered meetings and not the sticky hands of her cousin Louisa’s son or the full red wine glass a tipsy Louisa was now holding. Connie had wanted something small and simple, something at the little Portuguese café her parents owned with their family friend Luis, or the Portuguese club or even her own condo.

“Bah,” Natalia had said. “If we do it at your place, everyone will know you know. Where’s the fun in that?”

Connie knew the day was not about fun, it was about her mother showing off. Her parents had always felt the weight of immigrant responsibility—Connie and her sisters never had dirt under their nails, never tangles in their hair, never a cavity to find at the dentist, her parents with cars never more than five years old. This sheen of perfection that coated their lives.

Louisa, who married money last year, had offered to pay for the location as Connie’s baby shower gift. And Natalia had picked the Four Seasons, promising Connie it would still be small and intimate. Just their family. Just their closest friends. But when Connie walked in an hour ago, feigning surprise that she thought she was just meeting her mother and sisters for brunch, she knew her version of simple and her mother’s lived on opposite poles.

A foldable wall that separated two conference rooms had been pushed back, and the two blended rooms were the size of a small hall. Natalia had arranged a brocade couch in the center of the room where Connie would later open gifts. A table, covered in a white tablecloth and small bouquets of white lilies in glass vases, held tiny gold-trimmed china plates of macarons and smoked salmon sandwiches, the sight and scent of which made Connie gag. Lately, all fish smelled rotten, like carcasses that had been left floating on the surface of the ocean for days before being skimmed off. Connie had told her mother she couldn’t handle fish during her pregnancy. Why had her mother made smoked salmon sandwiches a menu item? There were also tiny quiches, bacon-wrapped scallops, and small plates of potato pavé with thin slices of rare steak. Tiny elegance that Connie struggled to hold with her swollen hands. Absent, Connie noticed, was the Portuguese food she had dreamt last night would fill the table. She had taken such care to write out a menu for her mother. Where were the mini strawberry shortcakes she loved? The pasteis de nata, the São Jorge cheese, the grilled chourico, the creamy shrimp rissoles? Or Luis’ piri piri chicken—the hotter the better she had written and underlined twice?

She found her mother in the crowd and gently pulled her close. “Where’s the food I wanted?” Connie whispered.

“What, you don’t like this?” Natalia asked, her mouth drooping toward the loose skin around her neck. “Louisa said the hotel would cater, and they said this was what all the new mothers had at their baby showers.”

“I don’t care what all the other new mothers have,” Connie hissed. “I’ve been craving Portuguese food.”

Natalia stepped back and tilted her head, looking Connie over. “You can have that stuff any time,” she said. She took a plate off the table. “Here, have a smoked salmon sandwich.”

Connie pressed her hand to her mouth and turned away. She wondered why she even bothered talking to her mother these days. She was like a one-way radio, constantly blaring noise.

She turned back to her mother, defiant. “I’ll pick up some chicken on my way home then.”

“The café isn’t open today. Inspectors are going through it,” Natalia said.

“Inspectors? What for?” Connie asked.

“Didn’t you hear? Louisa bought the place. She’s taking over next month.”

Connie looked over at her cousin who was holding her wine glass out to the bartender for a refill. They were supposed to have bought the place together, but Connie’s husband Jeremy didn’t want to take the risk with a new baby on the way. Connie didn’t begrudge Louisa for going ahead without her, she just never thought Louisa would. When she was younger, Connie always imagined taking over the café. When her father spent long hours working at the place, Connie would beg her mother to drop her off so she could spend the night helping her father place the dough for the Portuguese buns in clay bowls so they’d be ready for the oven in the morning, covering each with a warm cloth like she was tucking in one of her dolls. She sighed. Smile, be sweet, be grateful, act surprised, she reminded herself.

“What is that?” Natalia asked, tilting one ear to the room.

Connie could hear people playing musical instruments in the next room, the notes falling all over each other with no discernible harmony.

“It’s mus—” Connie started to say.

“Music? That’s not music, that’s noise,” Natalia said. She hurried over to Louisa, and a few seconds later, Louisa left the hall, and soon after that, the music stopped.

Connie watched as her mother frowned at her from across the room. Soon, Natalia was standing next to Connie again, her breath hot in her ear. “Connie, you didn’t iron your dress.”

“I steamed it this morning,” Connie said, pulling at her neck where the sheer fabric of the high-collared dress made her feel like she was suffocating.

“Steam?” Natalia shook her head. “Not good. You need the weight of the iron to straighten everything out. Then you won’t have,” her mother fingered the wrinkled edges of Connie’s sleeves, “this.”

Connie pulled her arm away and headed for the bar. Her mother was too much on any day, let alone today when Connie’s body strained with pregnancy, with a blood volume that was doubled, she thought as she placed a swollen hand on the edge of the bar to steady herself.

“Can I get a club soda with ice in a wine glass please?” she asked the bartender.

Natalia approached, motioned to the bartender for a bottle of red wine. “You can have this,” Natalia said, pouring wine into Connie’s glass, and Connie watched as the club soda, turning red, frothed and bubbled. She quickly set the glass down and looked around the room.

Natalia shook her head and sighed. “When I was pregnant with you, your father mixed a raw egg and some red wine in a cup for me every day. And see? You’re fine,” she said, waving an arm over Connie.

And that’s why I’m never asking her for parenting advice, Connie thought, turning her head, before she faced her mother again and smiled sweetly. “How comforting,” she said.

Connie searched the room for her cousin. Maybe Louisa would keep the café open or at the very least share the piri piri chicken recipe with her. But before she could spot Louisa, her aunt Edith sauntered toward her. She placed both hands on Connie’s belly and squeezed slightly but enough that Connie felt her bladder strain under the pressure.

“Oh, it looks like a boy. Definitely another boy in the family!” Edith said.

“Bah,” Natalia said. “Look how low she’s carrying. I carried like that. It’s a girl.”

Her aunt waved her hand over her mother’s face, then turned to her. “What do you think, Connie?”

Connie, standing between her mother and aunt, clasped her hands to her belly. “As long as it’s healthy, we don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl.”

But ever since she discovered she was pregnant, Connie had been secretly hoping for a girl. Of course, she wanted a healthy baby first. Of course, she told everyone she didn’t care what she had, that she and Jeremy were excited for the surprise of their firstborn child. But in bed before turning out the light, while Jeremy snored softly next to her, Connie would place her hands on her burgeoning belly and whisper, “C’mon baby, be a girl.”

She had had enough of boys for now. Louisa’s son, Carlos, was a raucous nose-picking child who constantly swept things off Connie’s coffee table when they visited the condo—the books and architectural magazines Connie had delicately fanned across the glass table, the aloe vera plant she had positioned so it caught the golden beam of morning light that peeked through her window. When Carlos scratched himself—because he was always scratching himself—Louisa would pick off part of the aloe vera plant and rub the oozing liquid on his skin. Connie was annoyed at how her cousin felt entitled to her things. But she would just smile and ask, “Don’t you want some Polysporin instead?”

Now that she was pregnant, Connie wanted a daughter she could teach to be firm and outspoken, proud of who she was and where she came from, confident and secure—all the things Connie felt she wasn’t. But she wasn’t sure how she’d manage that with her mother hanging over her, pushing Connie to do things her way, and when Connie resisted, doing it her way anyway. Like this baby shower. She had plans to be her own kind of parent, much different from Natalia. She was taking her full maternity leave even though her mother had already bragged to her friends how Connie was too important at work to take a full year off. Natalia acted like Connie was constantly on some kind of stealth mission instead of someone who worked at a bank.

Standing on the brocade couch, Louisa wolf-whistled and gathered everyone for a game. Every night as Connie settled in to watch House or Rescue Me or Lost or Desperate Housewives, the titles like a prime-time lineup of her life, Louisa called and kept her on the phone for hours, asking about her parenting style, parenting goals, and the do’s and don’ts Connie would follow as a first-time mother. Then Louisa pressed Connie to hand the phone to Jeremy to answer the same questions long after Connie had missed the end of the House episode where a woman’s aching wrist was really a blocked artery and she was rushed into surgery.

“Did she survive?” she asked Jeremy later that night when they were already in bed and snapping off the lights.

He shrugged. “No idea.”

Now, in the conference room with its wainscoted walls, Louisa carried a cardboard box plastered with robin’s egg blue and dusty rose question marks and explained how she had been interviewing Connie and Jeremy all week and the box contained the results of those interviews.

“Everyone has to guess who said what,” Louisa said, setting the box down and picking out a piece of folded paper.

“When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on,” Louisa read. “Connie or Jeremy?”

“Has to be Connie. It sounds like something she read in a book,” Natalia said quickly, placing her hand on Connie’s shoulder and squeezing gently. She was standing next to Connie like a bollard, as if ready to protect her from some impending impact.

“Not a book,” said a woman Jeremy’s mother had earlier introduced to Connie as her cousin, whose name Connie had now forgotten. “Our mother always said that.” The woman’s glasses were slung low across the bridge of her nose so that she looked like a teacher scolding Natalia for not paying attention in class. “That has to be Jeremy,” she said.

Natalia frowned, and Connie wondered whether her mother was searching her own mind for similarly convincing evidence. Natalia looked up at the woman and smiled deferentially the way Connie had seen her do so many times before with English-speaking Canadians.

“If you say so. My Connie reads so many books, it’s hard to keep up. When she was a little girl she’d disappear for hours, and I’d find her sitting on the toilet with a book.”

“Mother,” Connie said, her voice slicing the air like a paper cut.

“What?” Natalia asked, looking around and sipping her wine.

“Okay, okay, that’s enough guesses,” said Louisa. “It was Jeremy.” She handed the woman a small clothespin. “Whoever has the most pins at the end of the game wins a prize,” Louisa said, stretching the word “prize” into four syllables.

Louisa swished her hand in the box, notched her chin, and raised her eyebrows as though she was choosing a golden ticket and not a piece of paper that Connie knew her cousin had pulled from her recycling bin the night before.

“Children learn what they live. If a child lives with shame, they learn to be guilty. If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, they learn to find love in the world,” Louisa read, before turning to the room. “Who wants to guess this one first?”

Natalia snorted. “Now that’s Jeremy.”

Connie felt the air shift. “Why would you think that?” she asked. The words came stilted from her mouth. The letters, once organized neatly, were jumbled, and she had to unscramble them before saying them out loud.

“Shame?” Natalia said, her voice deep, the heat of her breath washing over Connie. “My kids have never lived with shame.”

Rivulets of sweat dribbled down Connie’s back, soaked into her dress, which was now chafing her neck. She desperately wished she had worn something different, but her mother had surprised her last week with this dress, and Connie knew she’d feel guilty if she hadn’t worn it today. She looked around for sparkling water or a dabble of wine—just a few drops to settle her down—and noticed that everyone was looking at her except Louisa, who was quietly ripping the sheet with the quote into tiny pieces as if she were peeling an egg.

“What’s this?” Natalia said to Louisa. “Who said that?”

Louisa looked up, clenched her fist and the pieces of torn paper. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s move on.”

Natalia whipped her head toward Connie. “You said that?”

Her mother was giving her the look, the one she gave in public when Connie was younger, when she and her sisters were bickering in the grocery store or at the local Biway and Natalia wanted them to stop but didn’t want to yell at them in public and make a scene. The look Connie and her sisters called “the golf balls” because her mother’s eyes protruded as if she had stacked them onto tees.

Edith came over and rubbed Natalia’s arm. “Let it go, Natalia,” she whispered.

But Connie knew her mother would never, could never, let it go.

“Well, if your childhood was so shameful, then I don’t know why I’m here,” Natalia said. She swiped her purse up into the crook of her elbow and padded across the carpet, past the uncomfortably hard black chairs wrapped in bleached white covers and knotted with yellow satin bows, and out the heavy wooden doors, a whoosh sweeping into the room as she left.

Edith started to follow, but Connie stopped her aunt. “I’ll go, Tia. Sorry everyone,” she called over her shoulder. “Have some smoked salmon, we’ll be back soon!” Eat it all, she thought as she waddled out of the room, her hips aching from the kitten heels her midwife told her would ease her lower back pain. She pushed opened the doors and looked up and down the long hallway, empty except for a wooden pedestal with a sculpture of two elephants, their trunks entangled. Connie headed for the front desk and approached the dainty woman behind it and asked whether she’d seen her mother go by.

“Why yes, she went left,” the woman said, pointing to the hotel’s glass revolving doors.

On Yorkville Avenue, Connie stood in the bright Toronto afternoon sun next to a red-tiered fountain her mother had used as a landmark in the directions she had written out on each baby shower invitation. Connie crested her hand over her forehead and headed left, past a fire station, where a fire engine was wailing out of the driveway, and the public library with its long stone steps, and she thought of the irony of some place so loud next to some place she found such comfort as a child. She walked past town hall square with trees in round concrete planters and thought of old Portugal Square and St. Mary’s Church where she went for Portuguese lessons as a girl, not far from here but which, to Connie, felt a world away from the Portuguese seafood shops whose walls were lined with large slabs of stiff salted cod that stood erect like signposts in white buckets. She came out at Scollard Street, where she saw her mother slip into a café at the base of a behemoth building. She followed her into the café and was confronted with the hisses and pops of an espresso machine that lined a white quartz counter along the back wall.

“Mom, wait!” she called. “Please.”

Her mother turned, her face carved into a frown. “Why you want to embarrass me in here too?” Natalia spat.

Her mother’s whole life, Connie thought, had been about avoiding embarrassment.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I haven’t embarrassed you at all,” Connie said.

“Oh, so now you’re telling me how to feel?”

Connie pinched the space between her eyes. This was not what she had intended when she followed her mother. She needed her mother to listen to her for once. To just have a normal conversation. She had come to explain the line came from the poem they saw framed in the baby store while Natalia was helping Connie register for a Diaper Genie and a baby bathtub that came with a handheld shower hose. Connie had scanned the framed poem too. She had pictured it hanging above the changing table to remind her of the parent she wanted to be. It wasn’t a look to the past, she wanted to tell her mother now, it was a promise for her future, something she could hold on to when she became preoccupied with the details of parenting and forgot everything she wanted to be.

“Are you going to order something, or are you just going to stand there and argue?” The woman behind the counter leaned over onto her elbows, her high dark ponytail rising above the shelf of espresso mugs and saucers.

Natalia approached a glass cabinet with colorful pastries and pointed. “Duas,” Natalia said, falling into Portuguese the way Connie saw her do whenever she was flustered.

“Which one? And how many?” the woman asked, her finger sliding back and forth along the shelf.

“This, this,” Natalia said. She pressed her finger in front of delicate pastries with brown and white stripes along the top and layers of thin pastry and custard underneath, leaving a ghost of her finger imprinted on the glass when she pulled it away.

“The mille-feuille? And how many? One?”

“Duas,” Natalia said.

The woman shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Two,” Connie said, stepping up to the counter. “My mother wants two.”

“They’re six dollars each,” the woman said, her eyes bouncing between Connie and Natalia. Connie held her face very still. Her toes were jammed into the front of her kitten heels and liquid-filled blisters were sprouting from the back of her feet and she knew she’d clip off a piece of aloe when she got home and ask Jeremy to rub it all over her soles. The skin around her belly was so taut it itched, and she felt as though she was suffocating in her damn dress. But she refused to show any of this to the server standing in front of her.

Smile. Be sweet. Act grateful.

Connie stretched a smile across her face as tight as the skin that pulled across her eight-month pregnant belly. “In that case, make it three,” she said, making her voice light and tempered the way she did when she was talking to an irate executive at work.

The woman folded a shiny white cardboard box into a square and placed three mille-feuille inside. Natalia paid in cash, and they stood at a counter by the door and bit into the flaky pastry, Connie brushing golden buttery flecks from her mother’s cheek.

Natalia chewed and scanned the sky and the clouds, grey and pulled like wool. “Bah,” Natalia said, shrugging. “Luis’ pasteis de nata are better.”

Connie laughed. “And they’re not six dollars.”

“Maybe I’ll tell him to raise the price,” Natalia said.

Connie shook her head. “I’m sure Louisa will do that when she takes over.”

Natalia took another bite. “Too much sugar. Too sweet, even with a coffee.”

Connie nodded. Change is hard, she thought. Her mother was accustomed to Portuguese custard tarts, not fancy French-named desserts served in a cold café. “It’s because you have the taste of Luis’ natas in your head. Nothing is ever as good as the best thing you remember,” she said.

Her mother looked at her a long time, then licked her finger and wiped a spot on Connie’s cheek before sweeping crumbs off the counter and into a napkin, throwing it in the trash.

They left the café, Natalia holding the white box with the last mille-feuille inside, and walked past the square, past the round concrete planters where a young girl was tiptoeing across one of the edges, a woman by her side holding her hand as the girl counted each step. Connie threaded her arm through her mother’s as they headed back to the Four Seasons, and she decided not to bring up the poem or why she picked it. Let them just be happy right now, she thought, let them just be mother and daughter, two people who were doing their best, who offered each other grace when they needed it most.

Kelly Pedro’s fiction has appeared in PRISM and The New Quarterly. She was short-listed for Room’s 2022 fiction contest. She’s currently revising a collection of linked short stories and lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada located on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbek, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Find her on Twitter at @KellyPatLarge.

SCENE OF THE CRIME, a novel by Patrick Modianom, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

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SCENE OF THE CRIME
by Patrick Modiano
translated by Mark Polizzotti
Yale University Press, 157 pages
reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

I write down all kinds of little snippets of thought because otherwise they will float away.

For example, one day in the small notebook I keep in my car, I scrawled, “I think I am losing my fingerprints.”

Sometimes I write as if in a trance. I must—otherwise it’s difficult to explain this command that I recorded one day: “Map my brain.”

You could say it’s a call for a decoder ring of sorts, or simply my secret instructions to an artist I have yet to find, one who can draw the ideas that paper the walls of my mind. Someone who can decipher the permanent mosaic of thoughts, from the moment as a child that I poured the bottle of Prell shampoo on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and my father swooped down to administer my punishment, to certain lines from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life (“How would you like living in the nicest house in town?”), plus the insistent rhythm of that French song partially sung in Spanish with a looping melody that’s about an endless journey, and which cannot be evicted from my brain.

The flicker of memories and thoughts we all have, in other words, but some of us pay very close attention to it.

To wit, French novelist Patrick Modiano. The flicker of thoughts and memories fueling his latest novel, Scene of the Crime, published by Yale University Press, largely concerns an event from decades before. An event that the main character recalls in dribs and drabs, and which he tries to capture in a notebook:

He jotted down thoughts as they flitted through his mind … It took only a detail, one that might have seemed insignificant to anyone else. That was it: a detail. The word “thought” wasn’t right. Too solemn. A multitude of details gradually filled entire pages of his blue notebook, apparently having no connection with one another, and so cursory that they would have been incomprehensible to someone trying to read them.

Modiano is already mapping his brain, and the results are on display in his 30-plus novels and books. In this new novel, the main character asks at the outset, “But how could he marshal all those signals and Morse code messages that stretched over a distance of more than fifty years? What was the common thread?”

These are seminal questions in the work of Modiano, and questions that undergird nearly all of his books.

In this new slim novel, he explores a remote period in the life of a character called Jean Bosmans who stumbles upon a series of coincidences involving his childhood home and a group of shady individuals who are alarmingly interested in his past.

The plot is par for the course for this French Nobel Laureate who has dedicated his literary career to exhuming the ghosts of wartime Paris through semi-autobiographical fiction.

The plot is also beside the point—and in some ways, I love that.

Patrick Modiano

Nearly all of Modiano’s works touch on memory and childhood, as the author pieces together fictionalized episodes with his father, a shadowy figure who was on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free. Born in 1945, Modiano has trained his gaze permanently on the war years that immediately preceded his birth, and the post-war years that are often referred to as the Thirty Glorious Years. As Alice Kaplan noted in a 2017 article for the Paris Review, Modiano likes to say he “is a child of the war.” She quotes him as saying: “Faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.”

Modiano has been accused of writing the same book over and over. Many writers have been the subject of such an accusation and it’s probably true, but few are as magnanimous about it. Indeed, Modiano has admitted it during interviews, perhaps because he doesn’t see it as an insult or a problem.

I don’t either—I keep reading his work searching for the same elements, and am mesmerized by the tapestry of references and questions he puts together.

In fact, when I learned Yale was publishing yet another novel by Modiano, I scrambled to get a copy, secretly hoping it would be one more attempt by him to reconfigure his childhood. As it happens, the news that a new novel of his had been translated—in this case by Mark Polizzotti who has translated many of his titles—reached me after I’d gone on a Modiano tear.

I don’t often binge on books or movies. But last fall, I read Dora Bruder (in English and an Italian translation), The Black Notebook, and Invisible Ink, all by Modiano, in the space of a month while also re-reading Suspended Sentences (like the new book, translated by Polizzotti) and So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (translated by Euan Cameron).

This last title, about a writer whose address book goes missing, was my first Modiano novel. The book of addresses is found by a mysterious man who alerts him to the discovery only after perusing its entries—and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I find his obsession with maps and addresses and half-remembered episodes from his childhood (often involving walks he took around Paris) fascinating. The new novel repeatedly references a particular street, Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. He also mentions an old phone number before Paris converted to seven-digit numbers: AUTEUIL 15-28.

In a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine for the “Talk” column, Modiano suggested people might be surprised to learn he has old directories and phone books on his shelves. But the information would come as no surprise to anyone who has read a few of his books! His slim noirish novels are packed with references to street names, addresses and statistics culled from directories, which he also often references. To tell the story of a young Jewish girl who goes missing in Dora Bruder, for example, the author consults decades-old school registers, phone directories, arrest reports, and so-called “family files,” which were used by the prefecture of police after the Nazis took over. These tools aid him as he laboriously and endlessly tries to recreate the shape-shifting world that beguiles him, and many of us: childhood. I love the way he presents childhood as a puzzle we spend the rest of our lives trying to solve.

Take the reference to Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. It is no idle detail. Glancing at Pedigree, his memoir (also translated by Polizzotti, who channels Modiano’s voice superbly), I see it’s a street where Modiano himself lived as a child. Oh, and the character named Jean? Well, that’s Modiano’s actual first name.

His obsession with perennially reconstructing his childhood mirrors my own (why can’t I forget the moment in the hallway when I poured the shampoo all over the floor? Perhaps because as memoirist Patricia Hampl says, our minds naturally hold onto memories with a heavy, emotional toll). But he is careful to point out in Pedigree that he does so without nostalgia (perhaps that’s why he writes fiction and not memoir). His father along with his mother, who performed in theater, frequently left Modiano in the care of friends. They were careless with him and his brother, who tragically died at age ten.

As Kaplan wrote for the Paris Review, Modiano’s father, Albert, traded goods on the black market, often mixing with unreputable characters, composites of whom show up in all of these novels. Albert Modiano eluded capture and Kaplan writes, “His son has spent a lifetime trying to fathom the combination of wit and accommodation that allowed his father to emerge from those years unscathed.”

A lifetime trying to fathom the mystery, and documenting his queries in semi-autobiographical novels that often feature a writer.

This constant work of excavation keeps Modiano busy, and as noted, he is quite prolific. Perhaps because of this approach, Modiano is not aware or doesn’t mind that Scene of the Crime falls short of his normally winning formula of suspense, mystery, regret and longing.

The new book is considered a kind of sequel to Suspended Sentences, which came out in 2014 in English and is the superior of the two books. What I love about Suspended Sentences is that we’re plunged into the life of one very sympathetic character, a young boy left in the care of friends of his parents (sound familiar?). Where are his parents and who are these people with whom the boy is forced to stay? It’s a natural mystery whose tension mounts as Modiano gives us pages about the boy going to various schools, and playing at an abandoned chateau with friends, including “the florist’s son.” He writes with great tenderness about this boy who is perennially watching the mysterious adults around him. Modiano also sketches in that previous novel the shaky relationship between the young boy and his often-absent father, imbuing their scenes with incredible longing.

That air of earned mystery, of longing, of remembrance is missing here. Jean Bosmans isn’t a character I find particularly sympathetic, in part because he’s not fully drawn. Indeed, Jean Bosmans turns out to be a writer—a detail that emerges somewhat late in the new novel. Modiano writes, “He had finished his book, and for the first time he had the curious sensation of getting out of prison after years of incarceration.” It’s an interesting image—to suggest he had been incarcerated by these memories, by the threat of confronting the shadowy people who wanted to know what he remembered. But Modiano hasn’t built up enough tension for this to work. It isn’t earned.

And I don’t care about Jean’s relationships—including his rapport with a character who’s nicknamed “Deathmask,” a nomenclature which rankles. Not the way I followed the boy’s meetings with his father in Suspended Sentences. And some of the key plot points emerge late. Toward the end of the book, Jean is told, “Apparently you witnessed something, fifteen years ago, in that house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.” It takes 100 pages to elicit this remark, at which point I had already stopped caring about the house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.

For Modiano obsessives like me, it doesn’t matter. I will read the next Modiano title that’s published and I am glad to have this one on my shelves. And when the next book or the one after that shows a return to form, I will be elated. The good news here is that the master is still at work. And his work may be different from what I seek as a reader—his work is the work of excavation, of putting the puzzle pieces together. This time, the solution to the puzzle wasn’t as satisfying. But he will keep trying to solve it—and I will keep reading his books to see if he does.

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor, and literary translator who was a 2022 NEA literature fellow in translation. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, Longreads, The Millions, and Brevity. She blogs about writing, translation, and her reluctant exile from Italy at ciambellina.blogspot.com/.

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS, a craft essay by Ian Clay Sewall

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ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS
by Ian Clay Sewall

1.

Writing stories and essays about the people I remember and the people I know requires stretching out moments, staring through a square piece of stained glass that’s purple and blue and orange, soldered a long time ago against strips of silvery-looking zinc. The stained glass is a few feet from my stained desk, and looking at it helps me remember that what I am writing, the colors I use, the tools of creative nonfiction, are many. And they’re both new and old.

At times, when I’ve wanted to explore further inside another person’s interiority, when I’ve wondered what those people wondered, I’ve written in a draft, “I imagine,” or “perhaps,” or “maybe.”

When I write about my memories, I’m a first-person narrator limited to my own experience. But when I speculate in these narratives, “maybe” is a round trampoline of possibility. It allows an excavation of what, for example, my parents, born in 1949, think about everything from the snowy weather to horses on the prairie.

When we, as writers of memoir or personal essay, look back at what someone might have been thinking, where their eyes moved, how their words connected or belied the content of a conversation, how nothing and everything telegraphed meaning—a speculative sentence or two in a story can reveal what could have happened and didn’t, what could have been said but wasn’t, what notes may or may not have been played.

Speculation in creative nonfiction is a moment where we come right up to the line of fiction—though we don’t cross. It’s that experience of being in the creative writing sandbox—a writing portage that picks the readers up and out of bustling narrative rapids, and then sets them down on the banks of the river story. The speculative gesture is an arrow of maybe; one that reveals new angles on the muscles of a story.

2.

And there is a danger, too, in all of that. And that’s the mythopoeic nature of writing about yourself. You become the hero. This certainly wasn’t the case in every remembered event. Many times, there were no heroes. Sometimes, others were heroes.

And yet, the very act of creative nonfiction means you are telling your own story. There is some sort of mythologizing of the moments.

I imagine that the people who love us, those who despise us, and those who are indifferent about us—everyone has myths, in which they are the ones who are seen or distorted or refracted.

My father wrote a book about folklore, and early in the text, he compares storytelling to a cowdog that’s been kenneled—and that cowdog begins to herd the birds he sees on a power cable. The story about the dog begins with the phrase “They say” and that makes me wonder who exactly is they? Who is saying this?

My father created a myth out of that cowdog; to me, the cowdog represents any story that’s told again and again. And there’s the paradox of what my dad is saying about narrative—the notion that it can be exhausting. The notion that telling stories can be fatiguing, on the surface, seems contradictory.

But maybe so. Maybe so.

My goal is to present images, stories, and the human beings I know and knew in a truthful light—a light framed in letters that relives and reimagines and retells. But what truth? Whose truth?

 

3.

As I write vignettes about rural Canada where I grew up, and stories of Los Angeles, where I live now, I’m often pulled towards the phone, towards my two Dunvegan Hill parents, as they sit at the oak table of their farmhouse overlooking the winding, crystalline Peace River. It sparkles from that table view.

The lively conversation begins with a textual primer. They’ve been given a page or two that I’ve written about our 160 acres or maybe about the farm animals. My parents come to the conversation primed and prepared. They come with insights and memories that might not precisely match mine—though there is plenty of overlap. They are young again in these conversations and now they are living in the topcoat. Often, they’re telling me stories about when they’re the age I am now. The story will last longer, I imagine, because of the primer coat they help provide. The words will stick better.

“Dad, could you tell me about our mule, Red Jenny?” I asked on a recent call. I can’t imagine what his response will be. All I can remember is Jenny’s single blinded pale blue eye, her slow and steady trot, her towering height against my brambly, skinny body.

“Jenny and her brother Jack were separated, son, after we bought her from a Nebraska jail.”

This detail surpasses any sort of textural note I suspected he’d supply—something about her coat or the way she once wintered with a moose during a particularly cold winter. There’s a bifurcation where both their voices begin to meander and split into streams. My mother added, “Jenny was in that prison to work with the prisoners.”

Truly, they are invaluable, these interviews with my parents, who are often the main characters of my collection. One might argue the subjects of a memoir should not be able to see the work as it is written. For me, their stories help deepen my own.

4.

While I write my collection of essays, on the freshly trodden side of my MFA at Antioch University in Los Angeles, I’m also peering into craft books on nonfiction like the lush flash nonfiction The Best of Brevity, edited by Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore. The concise and taut essays push their sentences. The essays are full. They are braided, graphic memoir, fragmented, hermit crab, lyric, micro, numbered—like this one—and researched. I feel as though I’m at the Getty, looking at art from all over the world.

In Christine Byl’s braided essay, “Bear Fragments,” she shares several bear stories from different locations, and then one patch of her essay includes fourteen instances of bear as a verb and lists a variety of expressions. How can one not be impressed?

In Jane Alison’s craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode, she writes: “Super-short paragraphs and line breaks can aerate prose, throwing light into density, giving the reader space to think.” The notion that prose is something to be aerated—this gorgeous metaphor—how can a writer not be inspired to experiment in such literary soil?

I’ve gone from writing sentences to appreciating sentences to experimenting with the way sentences move and flow on the page.

5.

And what happens when my hopefully well-aerated vignettes and short essay story bits get published? There’s a family text message in Canada, where all sorts of text moves from Alberta to British Columbia to here in Los Angeles.

I see a thumbs up or a heart and congrats.

And then, back to the drawing board. I’m in need of more stories, I’ve decided, for this collection. I find new stories when I become more sensitive to narrative, more open to the sounds outside my window, more able to listen in a conversation. So, I begin my writing once again.

Coffee helps. Walks are good. Traveling is especially effective. I think back to Utah.

The car I’m driving there, then, is cold. The back window is covered with morning frost. Several inches of airy snow layer up in the parking lot. I remove the ice on the windows with a snow scraper. The plastic end pushes on ice that formed overnight. The ice flies off, scattering to the asphalt and my weathered cowboy boots. I flip the tool around, and the bristle broom feathers and fusses until the glass looks new.  A new story idea emerges about rural cars and trucks that need to be warmed for minutes before getting inside and driving. I have to write the idea down before it vanishes. The cold is just the tactile imagery needed for transportation and story mining.

There are thousands of these types of feelings and stories in me from Canada. The stories are in little containers, waiting to become words on a page. Waiting for a juxtaposed layering with Los Angeles.

So, I come to the typewriter. An old Olympia that was repainted locally, in Brentwood. The blue matches the California sky. The clacking sound of the keys makes me aware of each stroke, each moment the metal key collides with the inky ribbon. I study my hands, suddenly new, covered in rings. One ring is textured like the bark of a redwood. Another is silver like moonlight—blue with turquoise from an old mine in New Mexico, the shape of an eye. A gold signet on my pinky, a bear paw engraved.

Perhaps while I sit at my stained desk in Los Angeles, my parents are out on their deck, peering out at the Peace River, wondering what it all means.

A brown dog’s tail wags near my writing desk. Fresh coffee is about twenty feet away, ready to be poured into a worn cup. The stained glass does what it always does: lets the light in, acts as an inspiration, and leads the way to prose.

Ian Clay Sewall is a Canadian based in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from Antioch University and his stories have appeared in The Malahat Review, Canadian Notes and Queries, Prairie Fire, and elsewhere. His films have won awards in both the US and Canada.

RIGHT THIS WAY, novel by Miriam N. Kotzin, reviewed by Lynn Levin

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RIGHT THIS WAY
by Miriam N. Kotzin
Spuyten Duyvil, 339 pages
reviewed by Lynn Levin

They say it can be done, but it is hard, very hard, for most betrayed wives to regain trust and forge ahead in a marriage with a husband who has cheated. This may hold true even if the man has ended the affair, even if he feels remorse, even if he is not a repeat offender, even if he tries to repair the marital bond. Warranted or not, suspicion, like a persistent shadow, may stalk a woman’s thoughts. She may not be able to rid herself of the notion that somewhere out there the enticing forbidden fruit still dangles or ripens anew.

The concept of transgression without redemption goes all the way back to the myth of Adam and Eve. Miriam N. Kotzin, in this wise and heart-wrenching new novel, reimagines the foundational Genesis text and adapts it to our times. The author situates the action in early twenty-first-century Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a comfortable middle-class town in which people have steady jobs, play tennis, eat healthy, go for manicures, have social lives with friends, care very much about their homes, and where, sorry to say—at least in this Cherry Hill—everybody knows everybody else’s business.

Kotzin is both a poet and a fiction writer, and this is her second novel. The author has a profound sense of the moral and philosophical. She also has a flair for describing the detail of daily lives. Her characters are educated and thoughtful people, and Kotzin depicts their struggles, even those of the antagonistic characters, with sympathy and understanding. The protagonist of the novel, from whose perspective the story is told, is Ely Cutter, a Jewish, middle-aged, moderately successful seller of residential real estate, who having wounded his wife Lynne by his affair with Eleanor, a woman from the community, is doing his level best to hold onto his marriage. Ely, whose name means my God in Hebrew, has also taken a spiritual turn, reciting the blessings over all manner of things, from vegetables to water.

Miriam N. Kotzin

One day while tending to tomatoes and pole beans in his backyard, Ely looks up and sees a face in the sky. The face looks curiously like a garden ornament of the sun. But is this a figment of his imagination, a true spiritual presence, perhaps even the watchful countenance of the Lord? Does it matter if the sight is real or imaginary? It is real enough to Ely. Wrapped up in his guilt and fear, Ely takes this as some sort of admonition and sign from above. Amazed and confused, Ely tells his wife Lynne of the vision. Lynne coldly advises him not to tell a soul, then promptly gabs about her husband’s vision at the beauty salon. Soon it seems that everyone in their social circle knows that Ely Cutter has seen a face in the sky that looks like a garden ornament of the sun. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing confidential? Not only does the whole town know of Ely’s garden vision, it also turns out that everyone knows of Ely’s prior affair with Eleanor. Betrayals and betrayals of confidence abound in pleasant Cherry Hill.

Throughout the novel, Ely and Lynne keep trying to talk through the rift in their lives. Husband Ely tries to be affectionate and helpful around the house, yet quarrels persist. Something as small as Lynne’s gripe with Ely’s desire to use the wild green purslane in a salad will start a cranky back and forth. Lynne can’t help throwing Ely’s guilty conscience in his face, but even through the most disruptive times, Ely observes, “Who would want to be on the wrong side of 50 and looking at a life alone? He and Lynne have had their rocky moments, to be sure, but their worst of times together is better than the life he’d have without her.” The care and sympathy with which Kotzin allows Ely to examine his own feelings is most impressive.

Ely’s relationship with former lover Eleanor has been downgraded to a talking friendship, but she’s still actively reaching out to him. Just as it seems that the man’s extramarital love life is under control, in slithers seductive Grace Cooper. Beautiful, wealthy, often braless, a yoga aficionado with a thirst for vodka, Grace is going through a divorce and is actively house hunting. She is a client of Ely’s. Plenty of chances for the two to canoodle in the properties that Ely shows her. As he squires Grace from house to house, she tries repeatedly to seduce him or at least to indulge in suggestive talk.

After a pleasing discussion of her interest in a butter-yellow kitchen at one property, Grace’s conversation with Ely takes a vaguely naughty turn and the sexual tension rises.

“I don’t want to look at split levels,” Grace said. “And cathedral ceilings make me nervous. Picture windows facing the street…I could never see the point. You have to cover them up with curtains, or you’re the picture.”

“OK,” Cutter said. “We’ll keep that in mind.” Grace knows what she doesn’t want, he thought, and what she does. “This next house has a yellow kitchen, but not the yellow you want.”

“I’m not expecting to find a perfect house,” she said.

“You’re flexible.”

“Yoga,” Grace said, laughing.

“But no cathedral ceilings,” Cutter said, picturing Grace in a leotard or less, which, he assumed was her point.

Grace also has a knack for creating compromising situations, and her moods swing from flirtatious to snippy to weepy. And still Ely resists the temptation to go to bed with Grace, refusing her as politely as possible at every turn. An expert at close interior monologue, Kotzin reveals Ely’s thoughts: “He wasn’t sure what had kept him from touching Grace: loving Lynne, a shred of conscience, or a fear of discovery.” Poor hapless Ely, caught between old flame Eleanor, seductive client Grace, and mistrustful wife Lynne. Like the three Fates of Greek myth, the women seem to manipulate Ely’s life, regardless of his will and his agency.

Right This Way is a moral and philosophical novel. It is a story of trying to be good and aiming for redemption. It is also a tale of bad influences and entrapments and a reflection on causality. Kotzin’s characters find themselves embarrassed, tempted, and entrapped by surprising meetups that may be sheer coincidence, crashes on the slippery roads of chaos; they might be due the machinations of others in their lives; they might even be determined by a higher power. This philosophical conundrum, which may be beyond answering, is debated in the novel. But it is Kotzin the novelist, playing the role of the Fates, who draws the action to its final shocking unpredictable conclusion that leaves Ely in the midst of both relief and grief.

Read this gripping novel. Contend with its nuanced moral and philosophical questions.

Lynn Levin photo credit: Melina MeshakoLynn Levin is a poet, writer, and teacher. Her most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky). Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com.

A conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories by Kathryn Kulpa

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FLASH-WRITERS: TRUST YOUR READER: a conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories (Snake Nation Press, 2022)
by Kathryn Kulpa

I had the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Ludmerer, a student in one of my Cleaver flash fiction workshops, about her full-length flash collection Collateral Damage: 48 Stories, published by Snake Nation Press. Nancy’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been widely published in journals, and she moves effortlessly from brief, lyrical microfiction to longer, more complex stories that push the boundaries of flash fiction. A master of compression, she can unfold a lifetime in a paragraph, as she does in this piece from the collection, originally published in Night Train:

Bar Mitzvah

When Benjy started to choke on a piece of celery stuffed with scallion cream cheese, I turned from the buffet table and asked, are you okay, and when he shook his head, I said raise your arms but he kept choking, so I slapped him on the back of his fancy new suit, and then two words clicked in my head Heimlich maneuver so I punched my fist into his stomach even though this was the wrong way to do it, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t think of the right way, his gray eyes huge and terrified, I had never seen him that scared, so I cried we need help over here Benjamin is choking and then she was there, Dinah, the wicked stepmother in her fuchsia gown, the airline stewardess (flight attendant, Benjy had corrected me once, don’t be sexist, ma) and she clasped her arms around him from behind and jerked back hard and the celery flew across the room on angel’s wings and I said thank you God while this woman who had wrecked our lives ten years earlier hugged my son and I knew then, on his Bar Mitzvah day, that for everything there is a purpose under heaven.

Five Questions for Nancy Ludmerer:

Kathryn: I love your cover image! Was it something you chose, or did the publishers provide it? Can you tell me a little bit about the photographer and the subject?

Nancy: After accepting the book for publication, Jean Arambula of Snake Nation Press almost immediately asked my thoughts for the cover. The book is in two sections: Part I “Collateral Damage” and Part II “In the Repair Shop.” The stories in Part I turn on a loss and end in uncertainty. Those in Part II tend to offer hope or redemption at the end. It may be fleeting but it’s there. Before responding to Jean, I looked at the websites of three or four artists who are friends and whose work I admire. Chrystie Sherman is a brilliant photographer; the cover photograph, featured on her website, immediately spoke to me because, as I perceived it, it depicted an artist repairing a massive sculpture. There were so many details I loved, from the relative size of the artist and the work to the small mannequin of a graceful woman off to one side. Given Snake Nation’s limited budget, I paid to use the photograph and was thrilled with how it came out. Something else rather extraordinary: Chrystie took the photo several years ago in Ukraine, one of many journeys she took—to India, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Cuba, and Eastern Europe—to photograph the remnants of Jewish communities there. You can see more of her wonderful work at chrystiesherman.com

Kathryn: Thanks, Nancy! I love the sense of scale in that cover photograph, from the larger-than-life sculpture to the human artist to the tiny wooden figure. Everything is relative, and the details are perfect, down to the smallest object. That’s also true of the stories in this collection. “Bar Mitzvah” was one of my favorite pieces, especially the airline stewardess/flight attendant correction and “Don’t be sexist, Ma!” The story’s form, the mad rush of that one breathless paragraph, fits the subject perfectly, and it’s a wonderful exploration of some of the recurring themes, like the mysterious role of fate in people’s lives, also seen in “Dream Job” and “There I Will Take Your Hand” and “Tale of a Fish.” 

I think this is leading me to question two. Do you see fate—the working of chance, or perhaps God—as one of the themes of the book? There are stories where characters agonize over what is the right action to take, sometimes to comic effect, as in “Hal’s Sleep Showroom” and “Reasons Why You Should or Shouldn’t Sleep With Your Son’s Piano Teacher,” and other stories (“Dream Job,” “There I Will Take Your Hand”) where a random happening or thoughtless choice have life-shattering consequences. How much control do any of us really have over our lives? 

Nancy Ludmerer

Nancy: Your question reminds me of Hamlet’s response to Horatio in Act V, Scene II: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” The book recognizes the things we cannot control, yet that doesn’t stop the characters from trying to “shape [their] ends.” None of us can escape loss, but how we respond to it can shape the future. In some stories, the protagonist cedes control—an example would be “St Malo” where the protagonist stays with a man who diminishes her. In others, the narrator has made a decision she wishes she could undo. One of these, addressed to a cat, is aptly called “The Decision.”

For me, one of the most heartbreaking stories is “Clementine” where a young girl, forced to take her dog Clementine to the ASPCA because her family can’t afford to keep her, dreams of a bright future for Clementine (in spite of her friend’s dire prediction) because the dog’s bark is always saying “yes!” As readers (and as the writer), we worry terribly for Clementine’s future—and the narrator’s—but for all of us, saying “yes” is critical to continuing after devastating loss. In “There I Will Take Your Hand” the grandfather finally tells his adult granddaughter a long-held secret about his childhood in Vienna, revealing that he had a sister who perished in the Holocaust when she was unable to go on Kindertransport and he went in her place. What happened certainly was not in his control (he was six at the time) but telling his granddaughter about his sister, after not speaking about her for decades, most definitely is.

I often say I know I’ve found the perfect ending to a story when I read it aloud and can’t help crying as I approach the end. I usually get over it with repeated readings but “Clementine” and “There I Will Take Your Hand” are among the stories where I still have a difficult time reading aloud the final sentences.

Kathryn: Those two stories and “The Decision” definitely got to me as a reader. Another question I have is about the structure. As someone who has worked on putting together flash chapbooks, but not yet a full-length flash collection, I’m fascinated by how writers structure a long(ish) collection of very short pieces. In your acknowledgments, you thank your son for suggesting you put together a collection a decade ago, and I wonder if you see this as a kind of career retrospective—your best work over a number of years? Or did you pick stories that fit together best, or that expressed the ideas of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘repair’? Did the title come first, and then the stories, or did you choose the title after looking at how the group of stories you’d chosen worked together as a whole?

Nancy: Collateral Damage: 48 Stories is definitely a career retrospective.  The “oldest” story in the collection was published in 1996; the two most recent in March 2022.  That said, there are many stories that didn’t make it in. The four stories in Collateral Damage that are not flash fiction still are no more than around 2000 to 2700 words; I have other 5000- to 7000-word stories that I never considered including. There are also many flash stories I’m proud of—“How Are You?” (published in Vestal Review) and “Learning the Trade in Tenancingo” (published in KYSO Flash), among them—that are not included in Collateral Damage because they are ‘making the rounds’ in other collections with a different focus. Regarding those two stories, I have under submission to various presses a story collection (both full-length and flash) in which all the stories concern the law in some way (tentative title In the Shadow of the Law).

When I first thought about what stories might belong in Collateral Damage, I was aware that many of my stories concern children, who are often the collateral damage of their elders’ mistakes and bad behavior.  But soon that expanded to include stories where a marriage or relationship itself is the collateral damage, or even a narrator’s self-image is damaged, as in “Do You Remember Me?” As for the title Collateral Damage, it came first. Indeed, before it was the title of the collection, it was the title of a microfiction, the first story in the book. With most stories, I remember the moment or experience or prompt that eventually led (perhaps years later) to the story, but with this micro “Collateral Damage”—where a common housefly, a witness to domestic violence, is the “collateral damage”—its origins remain a mystery.

Kathryn: Another structure question, but focused more on individual stories. There are many kinds of stories here, from tiny micros to flash fiction to traditional-length short stories, but flash definitely dominates the mix. Can you talk a little about how you came to writing flash fiction? I know you mentioned Pamela Painter’s class in your acknowledgements. Are there other workshops, anthologies, or writers who inspired you? Does flash feel like your natural voice now, or do you find yourself alternating between flash and long-form prose depending on what kind of story you want to tell? I noticed some of these pieces, like “13 Tips for Photographing Your Nephew’s Bar Mitzvah When You Still Can’t Forgive Your Brother-in-Law,” make excellent use of a hermit crab structure. Do you find that writing to a specific form, such as a list, or setting a strict word limit can be a way to make creativity bloom?

Nancy: I began writing flash fiction over 30 years ago in a workshop taught by the wonderful Pamela Painter at the University of Vermont summer program. The next summer I followed her to the Kenyon summer program, where I returned many times, frequently studying with Nancy Zafris, another extraordinary teacher and writer. (Collateral Damage: 48 Stories is dedicated to the memory of my parents and Nancy, who became a dear friend.)  Having to produce one or two stories a day in Pamela’s and Nancy’s workshops was exhausting but also confidence-building, as were some acceptances that followed.

Back at home, where I was a full-time lawyer and single mom, I could manage to revise and polish a flash fiction; this was harder with a 15- or 20-page story. The form is one I particularly love. Indeed, some of my favorite writers are masters of flash (as well as longer works), including Chekhov, Kafka, Paley, and Tillie Olsen. In terms of creative inspiration, I don’t consider myself a master of the hermit-crab form (“13 Tips” is one of my rare hermit-crab successes), but do find prompts and word limits helpful. For years, Beth Ann Bauman’s weekly Filling the Well workshops (previously at the West Side Y in New York City, now on Zoom) have kept me writing even when life intervenes. As to whether flash is my natural voice, I’m not sure. I’m thrilled to say that my novella-in-flash chapbook, set in 17th-century Venice, is soon to be published by WTAW Press. When it comes to my longer work, Karen Bender’s advice and guidance have been invaluable.

Kathryn: Finally, so many of these stories are about failed relationships and family structures. Romances that fizzle out (“Waiting,” which reminded me of that wonderful Stuart Dybek story “We Didn’t”), children disappointed by their parents (“Foley Square, July 2019,” “Fathers,” “Family Day”), single parents struggling to cope after death or divorce (“Adventureland,” “Security Device”) and partners conflicted about the overwhelming responsibility of parenthood (“Hal’s Sleep Showroom”). Yet other stories, like “There I Will Take Your Hand” and “Cara Cara,” present a more tender picture of family bonds. This makes me think again of the titles of the two sections, “Collateral Damage” and “In the Repair Shop.” Did you think consciously about including more ‘hopeful’ stories to balance out the darker pieces?  More broadly, is it necessary for art to provide us with hope or redemption, or is it enough for it to reflect something true about life, even if it’s a tough truth?

Nancy: I definitely chose to include stories that end on a more hopeful note in Part II of the book. The original manuscript I submitted to Snake Nation Press had the same number of stories as the published version, but was not divided into “damage” and “repair.” Given the two years that elapsed between submission and acceptance (mainly due to COVID), SNP let me revise the manuscript to include around ten new stories and make other changes and deletions. In that process I realized it made sense to divide the book into two sections, giving readers some breathing room. As it is, readers occasionally tell me they need to stop after reading a story and continue later because each story creates its own universe. Another way I see this is that, in flash, the reader must fill in the blanks, what’s left unsaid. As a writer of flash, you must trust your reader to do some work and engage readers enough so they are willing to do it. (And yes, Stuart Dybek’s brilliant story “We Didn’t” remains an inspiration; I was beyond thrilled that he wrote a blurb for Collateral Damage).

There are several stories that could have worked in either section, ‘damage’ or ‘repair.’  In the final revision stage, my goal was to make the sections roughly equal. In response to the final part of your question, I don’t think a story has to provide hope or redemption. If it changes or engages the reader in some way, that is enough.

Collateral Damage:48 Stories (134 pages, $20, ISBN 978-1-7346810-7-9) is available from Snake Nation Press and signed copies are available on Amazon. Additional purchasing information is available at nancyludmerer.com.

Kathryn Kulpa is the author of Girls on Film, a flash chapbook (Paper Nautilus); Who’s the Skirt?, a micro-chapbook (Origami Poems Press); Pleasant Drugs, a short story collection (Mid-List Press); and Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, forthcoming from New Rivers Press. Her work can be found in Flash Frog, Five South, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, Unbroken, and Wigleaf, and her stories have been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist and nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. Kathryn is a senior flash editor at Cleaver and leads writing workshops.

A conversation with Christopher M. Hood, author of The Revivalists by Hannah Felt Garner

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I Tell My Students All The Time, “Your Job Is to Make Art. Your Job Is Not to Explain Shit,” a conversation with Christopher M. Hood, author of The Revivalists (Harper 2022)
by Hannah Felt Garner

I met Christopher M. Hood in the English teacher’s lounge at the Dalton School in New York City, where he’s been a teacher since 2008 and where I periodically substitute. Starting out as a high school English teacher, Christopher went on to found Dalton’s Creative Writing Program, which he now runs full-time. My first impulse for this interview was envy-tinged curiosity: how does he approach creative writing to college-bound high-achievers? And how did building a curriculum for teenagers impact his vision of the craft? Which brings me to the interview’s other major impulse: to discuss Christopher’s debut novel, The Revivalists. The premise: Bill (our narrator) and his wife Penelope are surviving in Westchester in the aftermath of a devastating shark-flu pandemic in the near future. When they hear disturbing news from their daughter Hannah, stranded in California, the couple set out on a cross-country road trip beset with obstacles both comedic and horrifying. Christopher and I sat down to chat during school lunch hour, where Christopher reflected on the making of his pandemic-inflicted family drama, and the impact of its release last fall.

Hannah Garner: While I was reading your book, I found myself thinking a lot about genre. Maybe the obvious generic traditions that we could put it in are the pandemic novel, the dystopian novel, disaster, road trip…But then I noticed the structure of the narrative, which is rather episodic. I was starting to see how different episodes seem to veer into different genres. For example, there’s a little Wild West moment, there’s a man-versus-nature moment with the lions, Utopian moments where we encountered the black feminist collective,  maybe even the gothic, the comedic? So I was wondering if we could start there, by asking: how were you thinking about genre as you were writing this book?

Christopher M. Hood: First of all, part of that episodic nature is that every chapter is directly inspired by a book of the Odyssey. And so that gave me some of the creative impulse moving along. I think of it as literary fiction but my definition of literary fiction is pretty expansive. I loved Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel. I think some of the tropes that you find in genre—so many of my favorite books use those in literary fiction! I think to me, what keeps it from being a dystopia novel is that it’s about a marriage. And it’s interesting because the feedback to the book—when I do get negative feedback—can be people saying like, “This isn’t what I wanted it to be. This was a dystopian thriller, but I didn’t get the conclusion that I wanted to get.” Because to me, the conclusion is: we’ve arrived at the family, you know? Like if it’s the Odyssey, and he’s trying to get back home, that’s where he has arrived at the end.

Hannah: Still keeping in that genre line, I was thinking that there’s an arc in which you go through all these disaster genres—or genres of violence you could say—and what wins out, what the book ends up being is domestic fiction. I wanted to read a passage where your book was telling me this. It’s towards the end of the novel, when Bill has finally been reunited with his daughter Hannah.

“We just want you to be hap—” My voice trailed off as I saw her mouthing the words along with me.

“To be happy. Yeah, I know,” she said. This is so fucking classic.”

“How is this classic?” I waved my arms at the Armageddon-haze of the cult encampment around us, but I knew precisely what she meant. Like a tsunami casually obliterating a seaside resort, our domestic drama was sweeping over the firelit scene and drowning it. A man with a rifle could have dropped into the ditch, barking orders and firing warning shots into the dirt at our feet, and we would have spun toward him in unison and said, “God, do you mind, we’re talking!” until he backed away, apologizing, palms up.

Christopher: That was so much fun to write by the way. I was like, this is exactly it, right? This is the thesis of the book: sure, the world ended, sure, the majority of the population died, sure, it’s dystopian yada yada yada—we’re still going to be fighting about the same shit. If there’s a thing that made me write the book, it’s that. This sense of like: all these things are going to survive the end of the world—gender, or like the family dynamics. Bill’s still going to say this wrong thing and Penelope’s still going to be like, why did you say that?

Hannah: It seemed to me that one of the things the book is most interested in figuring out is what survives after devastation. What it is that withstands in humanity. Thinking more specifically about what survives in America—since this book takes place in America and we don’t really have a sense of what’s happening elsewhere in the world—what ideas about America informed the writing of the book and then maybe did new ideas about America come to the fore for you?

Christopher Hood

Christopher: I think the way I survived the writing of the book is really by focusing on the couple. For me as a writer I’m more trying to stay narrowly focused and then hoping that this all says something about the broader picture. I’m not going in saying “I shall now share my thoughts about America.” But I think it’s inevitable that they would come in. I think the easy answer is that I’m writing about race and class and gender and the ways that those survive the apocalypse and the ways that those split apart and unite and stratify America. A friend of mine was talking about why novelists aren’t being asked to explain our moment. I guess I find myself shying away from that idea—that that’s a novelist job. I don’t think I can really explain for anybody. On some level I’m just trying to talk about this couple and trying to get it right. I tell my students all the time: your job is to make art. Your job is not to explain shit. Your job is not even to necessarily know what you have written. Maybe you just feel like it’s done. It’s the reader’s job to figure out what it means.

Hannah: I want to start making a connection to your teaching. The central couple in your book leaves their very verdant, fertile home in Dobbs Ferry, where they have certain resources to get through the pandemic world they live in. And then those get stripped down over the course of the narrative. There’s a pivotal moment in the desert in the West where they no longer have any means of transportation and—it’s kind of a funny moment—all they’re left with is a gold bar and a San Cristobal necklace, which are just vestiges of things that used to be useful in their former lives. That felt like a very symbolic moment of this stripping down process that happens in disasters. Colloquially, we talk about the COVID pandemic this way, that it brought us down to bare bones. That was one thing that I really connected to in your book, that felt very true. And it got me thinking, by an association with the metaphor of “bare bones,” of what you might do in the classroom when you’re teaching writing. This seems like a weird connection but I’m curious, what your “bare bones” of writing are, and then maybe has this kind of stripping down effect we’ve been experiencing over the last couple years affected what your take on that is?

Christopher: My teaching—the core belief—is that I take my students seriously as writers, even before they take themselves seriously as writers. So, some of my baseline things. One is: your goal as a writer, the baseline, the very rock bottom goal, is to keep the reader turning pages. So that’s partially why I wrote something that is sort of a page turner. Because that’s the goal! Then the other piece as it relates to fiction. You were talking about the gold bar and the necklace with San Cristobal. Both of those things end up serving these super important purposes at the end of the book. And a reader could think, “Oh how smart, he knew he was going to need these things.” And if you’re writing a paper about the book, you might write about the symbolic importance of St. Christopher who protects travelers and why that necklace, dadadada…Why did I put those in the book? Because with the necklace I had some lines of dialogue and I was like, “Oh, I need a thing because I’ve had too many lines of dialogue.” So I put in a thing. I tell my students all the time: this is how it works! You don’t plan it all out, you don’t have to know. That’s not your job. I put stuff in the book, like I populate it with things, because then those things give me material, they build the world of the book.

A huge part of what I do is I have all these students who are very earnest and hardworking. And they’re high school students, which means they have an incredibly difficult job. They’re being asked to juggle seven subjects, to get an A in all these subjects, and it’s all so much stuff that the only way to survive is to be organized, efficient—all of which are death to writing. So much of what I do is I’m like, “Just play, stop trying to make sense.” My theory of writing that I’m trying to teach them is you build the world and you populate it with characters and with things—and then you see. Because otherwise you’re just trying to be super smart. And it may be that there are people who are just super smart and that’s the way they write, in which case: great. But I think for the most part when writers are writing a poem or a story or a novel, they know some of what they’re doing, but they’re also trying to create something where things will happen.

Hannah: I want to ask you about your article, “The Gold Standard” that you wrote for Writers and Teachers. In it you write that one of the problems you see with schooling’s emphasis on grades is that students start to lose the connection between the works of literature they study for class and the writing they produce for class. You write:

“Many students today don’t really understand that writing can be judged on its own merits, that it can be good and bad, more and less interesting. They only know that it can be graded.”

You argue that teaching creative writing in high school, as you do, helps them make that connection by teaching “contextual thinking.” Quoting you again,

“I’m not trying to teach Joey to write Heart of Darkness or The Great Gatsby. But I am trying to teach him that they are written documents; that they are the product of human decisions made on the basis of criteria that he can understand. They have lessons to teach. Not moral ones (although they may have those as well) but stylistic ones. Lessons about writing.” 

I was curious if that’s still how you’re thinking about teaching and also if you have any anecdotes of instances where you see that working in the classroom.

Christopher: I think that even more than I used to. One of the things that I say to my students—and let’s be very clear that I am really aware of my privilege that I teach creative writing and run a creative writing program in a high school. I tell my students, “I will read whatever it is that you write. Do you know why? Because they pay me! It’s my job! But your goal is to produce writing that I would read even if I wasn’t being paid. In other words, your goal as writers is to transcend this dynamic.” Because that’s how writing works. You go into the bookstore and you’re not like, “Gosh look at all these books, the writers must have worked so hard, I better buy all of them.” No! You are selfish, you read what you want to read, you read what you like. What I’m saying is: if you’re teaching writing, the goal has to be to produce writing that matters. I have multiple students—lots of students!—that have written poems or stories that rattle around in my head along with ones by Emily Dickinson and John Berryman and James Baldwin and all these writers that I love. Because they’re great! They’re really good poems. Or, wow, that was a really good story. And the kid wrote it eight years ago, and I still remember it. Because when I was reading that story, I wasn’t a teacher evaluating a piece of writing within a rubric. I was a reader wanting to know what happened next.

Hannah: You shared with me some documents that go into your teaching. One of them is articulating the ethos of your classroom which is informed by this workbook Dismantling Racism. One of the tenets of white supremacy culture as outlined in the workbook is “urgency.” And I thought that one was particularly interesting for aspiring writers, for writers, for young people who might be even more susceptible to the sense that they need to achieve a certain thing in a certain amount of time. I was curious how you integrate resisting this culture of urgency in your classroom.

Christopher: So, I just finished writing a new essay about running and commitment and talent. And one of the things I write about in it is that I thought for a long time that as a runner at Haverford College, I’d been a failure. Because I was never an All-American, which I had somehow arbitrarily decided would be the thing that was my apotheosis. And then I could finally, as Emily Dickinson says, “put myself away as a completed man.” And of course, it’s just a piece of paper, right? And at some point I realized, “Oh, I’m just beating myself up for no reason.” And I would never in a million years say to one of my teammates who wasn’t an All-American, “Oh, so you were a failure.” Oh my God! Like, I don’t think that: that’s horrible! And yet I totally said it to myself.

Publishing a book is a complicated thing, partially because you have all these ideas of what it’s going to be like. And then it isn’t! And you know, there’s disappointments in that. Then you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t make this list and I didn’t make that list and I didn’t this and that and the other thing.” And like, I don’t know, there lies madness. I mean, I’m human. I feel that stuff. There are things I wish had happened for the book that haven’t—at least yet. But also, there’s all these people who have read it and loved it and had a real experience reading it. And wouldn’t it be just a terrible shame if I let attachment to whatever and that sense of urgency deprive me of feeling proud of this book that exists in the world and that is meaningful to people? There are people who are like, “I love that book,” and that means that to them, that book belongs to them. And that’s amazing.

One of the great blessings of this fall has been that it has been a great fall of teaching. My classes are absolutely wonderful. I love the work I’m doing with them. It’s super meaningful. I’ve got great students. And I don’t want it to stop. So do I want the book to explode in the zeitgeist and start selling like crazy? And would I love to see it on the New York Times best-seller list? Of course. That would be amazing. But I also don’t want to lose the thing that I have. And why this interview is really fun. Because I’m a teacher. I was a teacher before I was a writer. I love teaching high school. And I think you can hear it. Probably if we listened to this interview, we would hear that when my voice is most excited is when I’m talking about my students and my teaching. And I’m lucky that the teaching and the writing are—I’m clasping my hands together—because they’re one and the same, you know?

Hannah Felt Garner is a writer and teacher of prose living between Brooklyn and Paris. Her short stories and criticism can be found in Cleaver, Paris Lit Up, and Revue Profane. Besides teaching literature and composition, Hannah also contributes editing to Mother Tongue and Cleaver’s own interviews section. You can follow her writing on Instagram @hannahfeltgarner.

FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS: The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication by Ona Gritz

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FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS:
The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication
by Ona Gritz

The oldest version of my forthcoming middle-grade novel that I can access on my computer is dated 2010, though I know the drafts go back much farther. For one thing, these pages have equal signs where apostrophes should be, indicating that it was wonkily converted to Microsoft Word from WordPerfect. Anyone remember WordPerfect? I recall that the initial glimmer of the idea came to me soon after the release of my first book—and only other children’s novel—when my now twenty-six-year-old son was two.

As is often the case with fiction, the idea was born out of an image from my own life: me, as a little girl, staring at a childhood photo of my much older half-sister and noting the similarities in our faces, along with something else I recognized, something beyond appearances yet somehow there, even in a black and white snapshot. This wasn’t a sister I was close to. In fact, I barely knew her. For most of my childhood, my parents had passed her off as a distant cousin. Still, our resemblance was unmistakable and that fascinated me. Meanwhile, the sister I lived with and loved fought with our mother constantly and, the year she was twelve and I was six, she ran away. Back then, running away and general “incorrigibility” were illegal offenses for minors. My parents brought her to court and she was sent to reform school, a situation both heartbreaking and complicated.

Even in my thirties, when I saw that glint of a novel in the memory of a small, lonely girl holding a photograph, I barely understood the fraught dynamics of the house I’d grown up in and had no intention or desire to try to capture them on the page. What I was interested in was much simpler and more universal: a younger sister’s longing for an older one who is out of reach.

I named my fictional half-sisters Molly and Alison and separated them, not by the kind of family secrets and strife that kept me from my own sisters, but by mere distance and logistics. Ten-year-old Molly lives with her parents in upstate New York, while twenty-year-old Alison lives with her mother in London. I began a first draft in 1998 when email was still a rarity in homes and video calls were far in our future. Without these luxuries of communication, the sisters write letters on slender sheets of airmail paper. But technology wasn’t the only thing missing from my earliest manuscript drafts: so was a plot. If I had to sum up that original story in an elevator pitch, it would have sounded like this: Ten-year-old Molly begins to worry that she’ll ruin her older half-sister Allison’s long-awaited visit after Molly’s best friend complains that she finds her own little sister clingy and annoying.

A friend who is a literary agent read my first less-than-fifty-page draft and gently told me that more had to happen, and that without trouble there was no story. Fine, I thought, and threw in a necklace that Molly had stolen from Alison the one other time they saw each other, back when Molly was five and Alison fifteen. The truth was I didn’t really buy that such strife was necessary. While reading, I tend to wade through conflict the way I wait out chase scenes in movies, anxious to get back to the good stuff: beautifully rendered scenes and sentences, characters whose inner lives reflect and inform my own.

I should mention that my background is in poetry, which may be why my focus, as both reader and writer, has never been on action and tension, but on sound, resonance, and well-drawn moments. I say may because it occurs to me now—and perhaps you’re ahead of me here—that the very thing I became a reader to escape was the tension in my childhood home and the devastating actions of the adults around me.

That 2010 draft—the oldest salvageable attempt at my novel—ends abruptly in the midst of its one tense passage: Molly returns Alison’s necklace, meaning it as a kind of welcome gift, but is met with her sister’s hurt and fury that Molly had taken it in the first place. It’s an overblown response and a completely unbelievable scene, which I’m sure is why I stopped there and went back to poems and personal essays, genres where I felt sure of myself.

Yet I pulled that fragment of manuscript out of the drawer periodically through the years. I can see why. Molly has a captivating voice, even in her earliest iteration, and the pages contain lovely moments. And there was something necessary in that undeveloped story. While there was no lack of children’s books about divorce or newly blended families—the young protagonists living through the trauma of unexpected, unwanted, and often colossal change—I hadn’t found any that explored the unique but also common experience of being a child of a parent’s second or third family. I still haven’t, and I get why that situation is overlooked. Place a story years after the painful decision to divorce or the dramatic reshaping of a family, and you miss out on some good plot-driving, page-turning material. But what I know from the inside is that, if the children of those latter marriages have siblings they don’t live with or fully know, it’s likely they long to have them in their lives. And one thing that propels a more internally focused story is desire.

“What does your character want?” the gurus of story structure ask in the many books I read as I oh-so-slowly taught myself how to write this novel.

It’s hard to explain why in retrospect, since I had my desire line from the start, it took me so long to find Molly and Alison’s story. Especially given that I’d already written one middle grade novel and sold it to a big five publisher. But my first book, inspired by the quiet lyrical children’s novels I loved—Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall, Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May—made it in just under the wire before most agents and editors would only consider books, especially for kids, that had Plot with a capital P.

Here are some notes from my agent friend after reading one of my many revisions: “Give Alison an inheritable disease, or let Molly discover Alison is a drug addict…Don’t just give Molly one big thing to contend with, make it five.”

I held the phone to my ear and wrote this all down, disheartened but not entirely surprised. In my day job as a librarian, I watched children’s fiction, by then frequently set in fantastical worlds, growing busier and more action-packed. Though I knew my novel needed higher stakes, when I thought of throwing one dramatic event after another at Molly, my mind grew cloudy, and I put the manuscript away yet again. What kept drawing me back were the exceptions to this trend— beautifully written, realistic, and compelling books by Jacqueline Woodson, Rebecca Stead, Rita Williams-Garcia. I read and reread them, trying to understand how they were made. I also continued to read craft books, including Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, where I found this:

“Plot can be as intricate as a whodunit, or as simple as a character experiencing a small but significant shift in perspective. But invariably it comes from the people we create on the page.”

◊

By this time, I had inserted the Internet into my manuscript, not simply to bring the story up-to-date, but I had begun to see how its use could deepen the sisters’ long-distance connection. With video calls a regular part of their lives, their relationship can already be in place when the novel begins. Alison is no longer just an idea to Molly, but a person. As Molly puts it, “…what I am is worse than being an only child. Only children don’t have someone in particular to miss.”

Someone in particular. Plot comes from the people we create on the page. What does your character want?

Molly wants her sister. She wants her the way I wanted my own after she left our troubled family, the way I still want her (though she’s no longer alive). But after you ask what a character wants, the next question is: What is she willing to do to get it?

That’s where I was stuck. Alison lives thousands of miles away. She’s twice Molly’s age and has her own life. Molly could do no more about that than I could have done about what kept either of my sisters from me. This was the wall between me and my plot. Molly needed agency where she had none.

Unless…she thinks she has agency? Buried in my notes from that long-ago call with the agent is this: “Show Molly moving forward and fouling up.”

Make Molly foul up. That, at long last, was it.

I changed the opening so that when we meet Molly she’s operating under a misconception. Having learned that Alison is finally coming to visit, she assumes that Alison is moving in with the family. This makes sense to her because, in every other family she knows, siblings live together. Upon learning this isn’t the plan, Molly does everything in her meager power to try to make it so. As she attempts to bend things to her will and fit them into her deeply felt belief about what a family should look like, conflicts arise, along with enough twists and surprises that I found myself excited to know what would happen next. Also, because Molly comes to us flawed, she’s able to grow. Over the course of the story, she develops a fuller understanding of who Alison is and what she’s been through and finds her way to a compromise that serves everyone. Molly also comes to the realization that there are many ways to be a family.

By taking my time and uncovering my novel’s plot in my own way, I’d discovered its theme.

I am sometimes frustrated with myself and embarrassed that it took me nearly a quarter century to complete a hundred-page novel. But all along, I worked on writing projects in other genres, each informing the other: my ear for poetry evolving into an ear for dialogue, attempts at plotting the novel teaching me to add more movement to my essays.

“Things take the time they take,” as Mary Oliver says. Still, I’m startled to realize that the children I originally imagined reading August Or Forever are now all grown up. My hope is that they’ll pick it up anyway, to share with their own kids.

Ona Gritz’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Brevity, River Teeth, One Art, and elsewhere. Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, and a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project. Her new middle-grade novel, August Or Forever, will be out from Fitzroy Books on February 14th. Find her at onagritz.com

 

 

 

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS, a craft essay by Ian Clay Sewall

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A Conversation with Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love by Michael McCarthy

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Wisest is she who knows she knows nothing: a Conversation with Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love
Thirty West Publishing House, 2022

by Michael McCarthy

Read Alison’s poem “Grand Slam” in Issue 39 of Cleaver.

I first met Alison Lubar at Fergie’s Pub in Center City Philadelphia. Kind of. The Moonstone Art Center runs poetry open mics every Wednesday there. One night I took to the stage to read a poem I had written in an online workshop. When I stepped down, Alison came up to say they recognized my poem. Only then did I recognize them as the leader of the very same workshop for which I’d written it. A digital interaction became a real-world one, though I suppose COVID-19 collapsed the border between digital and real-world realms a while ago. Anyway, we met. I went to Fergie’s every week and often heard Alison read there. Their debut poetry collection, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, draws upon their encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophy and retells select myths in bracing, piercing, harrowing verse. This makes it sound rather heady, but it’s also a delight for the senses, a playground for the intellect, and a cleansing of the soul. Take, for example, this excerpt from the poem “Two Carbon Atoms Reunite After 500 Years”:

            I was on the wing of the last bird
            too—those nitrogens party
            until what’s left of champagne
            are sticky tire prints. I stumble
            into the metaphysical.

            Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

            Science is a shadow of the divine

In this interview, which has been edited for clarity, we discuss finding a poetic voice, the Orphic turn, and the philosophical implications of stubbing one’s toe.

Michael McCarthy: So we met for the first time at Fergie’s, first time face-to-face at least. You saw me read a poem, and I saw you read yours. One question I have for you as somebody who reads their poetry frequently is: what do you think is changed about a poem when it’s performed as opposed to read on the page?

Alison Lubar: A lot of my writing uses brackets and line breaks, and that doesn’t always translate. Actually, I don’t want to say that. I think it’s different when it’s read aloud because it’s hard to mirror—or no, honor those in reading aloud. But I think something to be gained through reading a poem aloud is a setting of tone or a removal of some ambiguity, which is in some ways a removal of some possibilities.

Michael: It’s interesting that you spoke of tone because the tone of the chapbook is the subject of my next question. Fantastic, first of all.

Alison: Thank you!

Michael: I thought it weaved together a lot of different themes and ideas, but I still got the impression of a single poetic speaker. I saw that some of these poems were first published in 2020 and 2019. That caused me to wonder: how did you find the voice for Philosophers Know Nothing About Love?

Alison: The real grounding for the voice lies in the title, really. A philosopher can’t know everything about love—or they know nothing about love. But then, if we’re thinking of that in the Socratic way—that “Wisest is she who knows she knows nothing”—then in a way she knows the most. I approached this chapbook [by] organizing the voice around someone who’s trying to figure out what that means in terms of a dawning or awakening as happens in the cave. It’s the way that knowledge is both a narrowing and expanding of the world. The speaker is really caught in all these limbos between knowledge and experience and understanding.

Michael: Is that something you find yourself trying to sort out in your own life?

Alison: Yeah. I mean, I always think of what else is shared besides the physical. Obviously, there are atoms, and I always tell my students, “Oh, you could be breathing the same atoms of oxygens as the dinosaurs breathed, and how cool is that.” But then I think about what kind of metaphysical exchanges are there that we have no physical measurement for because they’re metaphysical. We can’t know what those are. So is there some kind of larger, invisible, cosmic exchange that we just don’t know about? I have a line in the collection about “what metaphysical building blocks / have we shared to shape a soul?” What kinds of things exist that connect us to other people and that we carry around. We shed our skin cells every seven years. I think that’s true; I don’t know. But what about things that are emotional or things like memories?

Michael: We’re in some dense philosophical territory here, and philosophical ideas appear many times in the book. You hold a degree in philosophy, as a matter of fact. In what way do you think that education informed Philosophers Know Nothing About Love?

Alison Lubar

Alison: (Laughs) I feel like I had struggled with dualism my entire life! My dad was a philosophy major, so I guess it runs in the family because [philosophy degrees] are incredibly useful (pauses for a laugh). Sarcasm.

I was really trying to find answers to aspects about identity, and even though the book isn’t explicitly queer or about intersectionality—right now I’m doing a lot of writing about being mixed race—it was a lot of trying to figure out what things are and what things aren’t, trying to figure out where I fit in and who I fit in with. If we think of Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, that’s also in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, it was such a formative myth for me. I realized at the end of the film that no one else completes you. The speech really understands how the parts of you complete who you are because at the end Hedwig walks off with the complete face tattoo. It’s not two different people fitting together. It’s the parts of herself uniting.

I think studying philosophy has been a way to understand the world and my experience. Once I started getting into yoga teaching—and not being scared of having feelings—I realized, wow, this Western priority on solely the intellectual is so incomplete. There’s that Hamlet quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth […] than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I’m constantly overwhelmed in the best way by what I don’t know. The more I do know, the more I realize I don’t, and that’s really fascinating and liberating, rather than scary now.

Michael: Speaking of dualism, the collection definitely engages the intellect, but it also engages the senses in very tangible ways. I was wondering what role the body plays in your poetry.

Alison: The body is one way to access knowledge and understanding in a non-intellectualized way. Using sensual imagery connects the mind and the body in the same way that the breath does in yoga practice or a running practice. It’s something that draws the whole self together because even though we can imagine ourselves unembodied and say, “Oh, am I a bodiless brain in a vat? Am I in the matrix? Let’s have some philosophical thought experiments,” my stomach is still going to growl. If I stub my toe, it’s still going to hurt.

Michael: Would you consider the feeling of love to be one of those experiences like hunger or the pain of stubbing your toe in that it’s directly tied to the body?

Alison: Yeah. With the types of love that I know I’ve experienced, there’s been that love that feels like your heart’s been ripped out of your chest, and there’s the feeling that you’re being swept up. In the Divine Comedy, in the Inferno, there’s Paolo and Francesca, the lovers that are being whipped around in this wind and they can’t find each other, so this sense of love and love lost—which are two separate questions—is a warming. It can be a sense of warmth and expansiveness. I think of love as blue and calm, but the speaker in the book doesn’t necessarily experience that. They’re also experiencing the tremendous loss and absence of love. Another question is: does self-love feel the same as love with another person?

Michael: Sharing however much you’re willing to share, what kind of personal experiences informed this collection?

Alison: Names are omitted to protect the guilty, of course. But will people recognize themselves? Maybe. I want to take the Carly Simon approach—if you think this poem is about you, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. But everything that I’ve written is based on some experience I’ve had whether it’s dreamt or real or imagined.

Michael: Speaking more specifically to your professions as an educator, have your experiences as a high school English teacher and yoga instructor informed your poetry?

Alison: Absolutely. I actually only started writing seriously as I was ending my yoga teacher training because I had been so confined in many ways in my past and hadn’t felt the freedom to access that aspect of the emotive, hadn’t felt a safe creative space. With the amount of journaling we did in yoga teacher training, it just opened that little zipper or valve or plug and it started pouring out. I had always loved poetry, and I ran poetry club in school. Granted, I don’t have an MFA, I haven’t taken English classes, I’ve never taken a creative writing class. A lot of it came from the deep study of poetry in my teaching. I have to know a poem really well to be able to teach it. Learning poetry with my students is really getting into it, really scrutinizing craft. I always try to get my students to find something they love. If they say, “I don’t like poetry,” I say, “Go on poets.org or poetryfoundation.org. I dare you to find something you love.” I feel like I’m a bit of a poet-pharmacist in that way.

They’re all things that work well together and can still stand in a singular way and have a separation, that none of them is exhausting in their totality. But teaching can be . . . I’m very tired.

Michael: If I can hastily construct a Venn diagram, who are some of the poets you teach who you are also personally inspired and influenced by in your own writing?

Alison: Going back to my tenth-grade English teaching experience as a student, my high school English teacher had us read “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka. This poem exploded my world in that I realized I didn’t have to fully explain something to love it. A good friend who’s a poet and a sculptor—his name is Zach Osma—has this bumper sticker that says, “Don’t let me intellectualize this experience.” I always think about that. But that Amiri Baraka poem is the first place I learned that. I may or may not have gotten a tattoo of my favorite stanza at one point. I bring my students the poems I love and am also trying to keep myself, by virtue of being a poet, on the pulse of what poets are doing. Two years ago, C.A. Conrad posted part of their shard series on Instagram, and I decided, “We’re doing this poem tomorrow as poem of the week.” So I love C.A. Conrad and what they’re doing with form. Chen Chen’s writing has given me the permission I didn’t know I needed to write explicitly about my identity being mixed-race and queer. I’ve always loved Gwendolyn Brooks. Rita Dove has an incredible two-part poem called “Parsley” that’s about the Parsley Massacre. The first part is a villanelle, and that’s a way I really love tying history and humanity to the role of poetry, which I think is to deepen our humanity.

Michael: Your collection uses many allusions to Greek myth and Christian imagery, and two that I found to have a particular resonance were one, the allegory of the cave and two, Adam and Eve eating from tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Do you see those two stories as being resonant in a similar way?

Alison: Absolutely! That’s a great observation. They’re about the warnings that happen regarding wisdom. To know is to increase suffering. There is increased suffering when there is more knowledge. If we think of Plato’s prisoner freed from the cave, he comes back and tells everyone the truth, and in some versions, they beat him to death. They kill him. Ideas are dangerous. No one wants to change the way they think. If we think of being expelled from the Garden of Eden for wanting to know things and for being curious, there’s definitely a common thread. Does knowledge increase capacity for pain and suffering? And does it do so for compassion? I don’t think so. I mean, it might. But that’s a really great connection. Thank you for making that!

Michael: The way the Allegory of the Cave was described in the book was intriguing to me because you also invoke the myth of Orpheus, which involves the famous Orphic turn which causes Eurydice to be plunged back into the underworld. I noticed the back cover quote is “If I was leading you out of the cave / I would turn around.” Is that a reference to the Allegory of the Cave or the myth of Orpheus or some concatenation of both?

Alison: Directly, I would say, to Orpheus. But it also pertains to that idea of the danger of knowledge. If you’re experiencing something with someone else, to what extent are you both complicit? Or is there someone who is more responsible than the other for that knowledge? It’s almost Adam-and-Eve-ing the connection among the three, of Eve offering the apple and Adam saying, “Oh sure!” But Eve faces the fallout. What is our responsibility to the other person in a relationship or in that experience of love? Especially if it’s something that’s dangerous or something that can’t be continued or pursued. Is it best to end it and let this be the death of something, rather than to draw out the suffering?

Michael: I was so intrigued by what compelled that Orphic turn because it’s something that Orpheus couldn’t help doing but also ensured Eurydice’s doom. That provides a lot of insight into what compels the lover to look back towards the beloved.

Alison: And he knew it! He knew what would happen, and he did it anyway. He couldn’t help himself. And therein is the question: can you know something and still think, “I have to do it anyway”?

Michael: Earlier, we talked about your use of parentheses in your poems. When did that become a facet of your poetry?

Alison: It’s always appeared in my writing. I remember being high school and being told “You use too many parentheses” and I would say, “But that’s how I think.” In poetry, I can do whatever I want, so I can use those parentheses to add meaning, to flex meaning, to add clarification. I have a poem called “Conservation of Matter” that uses brackets really heavily and essentially has two different poems in it. So it’s a tool that I think I’ve always gravitated toward. Only in the last two years have I really enjoyed using them.

Michael: Do you have any poetry projects planned for the future?

Alison: Oh absolutely! My second chapbook came out right before the New Year: queer feast, making the bitter sweet with Bottlecap Press. I have another coming out in March 2023 with CLASH!, an imprint of Mouthfeel Press. It’s called sweet euphemism and examines my relationship with my great aunt, who survived imprisonment during the Japanese Internment in Tule Lake, along with my grandfather and their mother. In fall 2023, It Skips a Generation comes out with Stanchion Books—I’m super excited to collaborate with another Philly-area publisher. Both 2023 titles are part of a larger, full collection that I’ve been working on, that’s still looking for a publishing home. I also have a hybrid work I’ve been flirting with and making slow progress on. As always, there are some other seeds, but they’re still subterranean for now.

Michael: I have just one more question for you. Are you still reading at Fergie’s?

Alison: Yeah! I try to get there whenever I have a friend who’s featured. A friend of mine who reads there just went to pursue her MFA in California, so she won’t be there. But if I can get a crew together or find a friend who’s going, I’ll try to show up. It’s a great community.

Michael: If you find yourself there soon, let them know that Mike says hello!

Alison: I will!

Michael McCarthy HeadshotMichael McCarthy’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Antithesis Journal, Barzakh Magazine, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His debut poetry chapbook Steve: An Unexpected Gift is forthcoming from the Moonstone Arts Center in 2023. He is currently an undergraduate student at University of Carlos III in Madrid, Spain.

 

 

 

 

 

I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN by by Gemini Wahhaj

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I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN
Sarabande Books, January 2023

by Gemini Wahhaj

Chaitali Sen’s short-story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books, January 2023) won the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her novel A Pathless Sky was published by Europa Editions in 2015 and her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction Online, New Ohio Review, and Colorado Review. The daughter of Indian parents, Sen grew up in the US and now lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an important part of the literary community. In the fall of 2022, we participated on a panel about Bengali women writers at the Conference on South Asia and I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of her manuscript.

In “Uma,” a young woman emigrates from her native Calcutta to the US, where she is ultimately reduced to a guest in her brother’s atomized suburban home on Long Island. In the opening pages in Calcutta, though, Uma is surrounded by an abundance of human relationships and hilarity: she is deeply connected to the city, the streets, and the local politics. A romantic portrayal of her husband opens onto a rumination on the leftist heritage of West Bengal:

After eight years of marriage, his smile still excited her. He held a booklet they both knew well—Make the 1970s the Decade of Liberation. She always liked the simplicity of the first line, “The year 1969 has ended,” while the next two sentences were poetic, extolling the great victories of the revolutionary masses, culminating in the exclamation “What a year it was!” She wondered if those words had tethered their revolution to a kind of nostalgia in lieu of progress. They sounded distant to her now, from another time and place that could not be revisited.

Rereading A New Race of Men from Heaven, I became aware of the bones of Sen’s stories, as well as the laborious work of laying down their skeletal structure. I had to go back and ask, as a jealous writer, how she did this. I found, underneath a perfect skeleton, a long set-up.

Gemini Wahhaj: In so many of the pieces in the collection, you think you are following one story, but then at the end, it opens up, cracks open, and becomes a much bigger story. This happens for me in the title story, in “The Immigrant,” and also in “The Matchstick, by Charles Tilly.” You’re following a rather enjoyable, contained narrative about a woman trying to get a date, or a little boy lost, or identity theft, and then suddenly there is the gut punch, and you are forced to see a whole universe. Can you talk about how you make this happen, as much are you are willing to share? Is that how your stories operate, by entertaining us, by offering the plot we enjoy and expect, to lead us to a deeper question at the end. And for writers, are there ways we can set up our stories in this way?

Chaitali Sen: Thank you, that’s such a wonderful observation and I’m glad that the stories open up a kind of universe at the end.  For me, short stories are like puzzles or codes that have to be cracked, unlike novels, which are less mysterious to me. It is somewhat a subconscious process, but I think the universe, or maybe what could be understood as the theme, is what I’m interested in, even if I don’t know exactly what that is when I’m starting or where the story will end up. I start with the characters in a situation, confronting a certain problem. Without that, I can’t really get anywhere. But once I have that, I look for the unexpected places the story could go and unexpected ways the problem could be solved or not solved. There is also a fair bit of trial and error. I have many, many stories that never get to that next level, or never even get off the ground. One thing I tell students is to think about what the story is about after a first draft after you’ve done some exploring. Then, once you have a handle on what the story is about, let that be your guiding star to help you make decisions during the revision process about what stays and what goes. Which choices best support what the piece is about? Even if the readers have their own interpretations of the story, if you have a sense of what you are trying to say, you’re more likely to have a well-structured and satisfying story.

Gemini: The title of the book A New Race of Men from Heaven is the title of one of the stories in the collection, but how do you think it defines the whole collection? After I read the last story, I looked back through all the stories again through new eyes, and they all seemed to come together for me. In one way or another, they lay bare the pretenses of our lives, the injustices of society, or colonial violence. As if the stories expose the fragility or imperfections of our humanity. Also, each story brings us to such deep, heart-breaking empathy in the end. It’s such a tense experience. On the one hand, you lay bare the pretense or violence or flaws of the characters we are following, and on the other hand, we are left with such a feeling of empathy for someone else at the end.

Chaitali Sen

Chaitali: First, the title comes from what I believe is a mistranslation of a Latin inscription of a painting at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, depicting the arrival of the royal House of Hanover. The official translation is something like, “A New Generation of Men from Heaven.” But when I was doing research, the first blog I read translated it as “A New Race of Men from Heaven” and this was one of those uncanny, serendipitous, ‘divine’ interventions—I say that as an atheist—that gave me the title of that story and the collection. I think it points to the whole absurd way human society has been organized around hierarchies and divisions by race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and other arbitrary distinctions, and how much that affects our lives whether we are aware of it or not. So in every story, there is some straining against or grappling with these divisions and hierarchies as a constraint or chain on our aspirations. Maybe the empathy comes from the fact that we all live like this, under these constraints, and no one can escape having their lives shaped by them. We may experience them differently, depending on our circumstances or social status at any given time, but we are all shaped by them.

Gemini: You have mentioned that you do not speak from one identity, and you are not trying to represent an identity. And this is true. Many of the stories are not necessarily about Bengalis or Indians. In many instances I was surprised at first, reading from a wealthy, older male writer’s perspective. And yet, would you say that there is a philosophical consistency? That you’re rooting for the underdog? The children, the secretary, the young man in prison?

Chaitali: I’m definitely interested in the underdog, and I think it’s fair to say that I’m rooting for them. But in general, I’m also interested in power and powerlessness, and the ways that can shift from one moment to the next even though there are definite entrenched power relations in society that are set by the system we live in: class structure, patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, ethnic hegemony, etc. I’m interested in vulnerability because no one is invincible and no one is immune from the chance that their world might be turned upside down. I’m interested in those small moments of instability, and how people get back their equilibrium, often going back to the status quo or some semblance of normality. And in the background, perhaps unstated within the story itself, I’m interested in the lingering question of what going back to normal means for all the people we don’t see and we don’t hear from. In “The Matchstick, by Charles Tilly,” only one person ultimately benefits from that situation, while the other disappears.

Gemini: There is a lot of wicked fun in some of the stories. You seem to be poking fun at characters that could be most like you/me/readers of short fiction: a writer, a liberal woman living in Texas, a yogi, an academic. And yet, there are very sincere, painful stories told from the perspectives of people who are very removed from these positions of narrative power. For example, the story “Uma” is told in a very serious tone. What do you have to say about that?

Chaitali: Honestly, I wish I could write more stories that are outright having “wicked fun.” The tone of the story, like the structure, sort of asserts itself as I write. I like to think that all of my characters have a good sense of humor, even if the story is serious, and then sometimes there is a narrative voice that is poking gentle fun at the characters, because people like me—writers, liberals, middle-class people, Americans, immigrants—we are full of contradictions and often delusional about ourselves and how we live. For example, in “The Catholics,” every single character is lying to themselves about their convictions. So yes, I think sometimes if we are able to poke fun at ourselves, if we are able to recognize our own tendencies in a character that is lying or acting irrational, we can also come to ask more questions and think more deeply about our lives and our world.

Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel Mad Man (7.13 Books, fall 2023) and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, spring 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Chicago Quarterly Review, Press 53, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Arkansas Review, Valley Voices, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. She is an Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.

INVENTORY by Nicholas Claro

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Four-square graphic design image with two male silhouettes, a female silhouette, and a handprint

INVENTORY
by Nicholas Claro

My therapist asks me to create a list of people I’ve known who have died. To order their deaths from biggest impact to least and provide some details from when they were alive, or after they weren’t.

1.

I don’t use my brother’s name or say how he died. The therapist asks that I do both, but I refuse. Elementary through grad school, whenever a situation arose where I had to use his name, I’d write or say “narrator,” “character,” “protagonist.” It’s how I’ve always coped with him. A lot of the time I’d use the initial. Somehow, I always got away with this. I remember one time when I nearly didn’t. A professor accused me of “being too familiar” when examining the little boy in an O’Connor story, who I called “J.” She told me that when I speak like that, it’s easy to forget we aren’t talking about real people.

2.

Identical twins, and completely different. I skateboarded and smoked pot with Josh. Gabe was a water-drinking jock. Popular. Varsity football since freshman year. Always in his letterman. Josh was the one who found him. No note, nothing. He and his family moved after that. Months ago, we reconnected on Instagram. I scrolled his photos. Wife. Kids. Two boys. A girl with hair so blond it looks white. He’s smiling in every picture.

3.

My cousin Evan fell off scaffolding. He painted houses during summer breaks. At sixteen, he’d grown tall, lanky, had reach. Bragged how people held him by his overalls while he’d reach with a paintbrush to get to places everyone else had a hard time reaching. One afternoon, someone held him while he painted a gable vent three stories up and both clasps on his overalls snapped.

4.

My mother’s parents died before I was born. Car accident. I’ve only seen pictures; they looked nice. My father’s folks I barely knew. Few times they came around, they brought toys or comics, and my brother and I were encouraged to play or read in our rooms, outside if it was nice. Later, I’d learn my grandmother had Alzheimer’s. Near the end, she wandered into a golf course in North Albany. Picked golf balls up off the green and dropped them into a basket she made from her nightgown while golfers watched. She thought she was little again, collecting eggs on her parents’ farm in Brownsville. My father called it a blessing when she died. Not long after, my grandfather died. This, he called mercy.

5.

“Kristen isn’t dead,” I say. “We’re just divorced. Does that count?”

Headshot of Nicholas ClaroNicholas Claro is an MFA candidate in fiction at WSU and serves on the editorial board for Nimrod International Journal as a fiction reader. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Heavy Feather Review, Cleaver, Fictive Dream, Identity Theory, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Necessary Fiction, and others. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. Nicholas’ flash fiction piece “Inventory” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

THE PRIZE FIGHTER by Lyn Chamberlin

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Graphic design image of a spilled bottle next to the Eiffel Tower

THE PRIZE FIGHTER
by Lyn Chamberlin

She would go to Paris.

When this was all over, this is how she would start again.

But today she would go back to caring for him, undo the hook and eye they’d put on the outside of his bedroom door so she wouldn’t find him in the middle of the night peeing into the kitchen sink or looking for the knives she’d stashed in her car.

When she unlatched the hook in the morning—she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, it was already loose—she would find him dazed, poised like a prize fighter in the middle of a ring, hands clenched in ready fists, feet in a “come get me” stance, his eyes wild and frightened.

He didn’t recognize her until he did.

Sometimes, she felt noble and kind.

On good days—hers, that is—she became the person she wanted to be. Stoic. Sacrificial. Indifferent to the melted ice cream pint in the oven and the television remote he thought was his phone, a leg into the arm hole of his t-shirt, the car keys, his, gone.

Days of rage and calling out. But to whom?

When he could still remember that the trash was Tuesdays, that the blue bin was for recycling, the green for everything else, she was hopeful. The neurologist called it “executive function.” Blue means this. Green means that.

Until the morning she found him kneeling on the front lawn, sorting through chicken bones, rank paper towels, rusty apple cores and frayed orange rinds, crusted yogurt cups, and greasy crumpled tin foil, staring at the array that lay all around him.

As children, they had fished for minnows on the Farm Creek bridge. String tied around the mouths of brown Borden’s milk bottles. Wonder Bread for bait. They threw crabapples at passing cars. He ran away before the car could stop.

He liked to confess things to her mother at the white formica table in that split-level Connecticut ranch with the sunken living room, next door and identical to his, after school.

Her mother drank Scotch and made him baloney sandwiches. She hadn’t known that.

These were the stories he could remember. As if she didn’t. Again and again.

Someday she would forgive herself for not loving him better. Wasn’t that what love was, really? Spoons didn’t have to be with spoons. So what if she had to tie his shoes?

Him. An empty bottle. Staring at the water as it seeped into the rug. As if it wasn’t too late to get it all back in.

Headshot of Lyn ChamberlinLyn Chamberlin is a writer and consultant living in Connecticut whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere across the web. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Lyn’s flash nonfiction piece “The Prize Fighter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

 

 

 

 

LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY by Madeleine Barowsky

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Graphic design image of a cutting board, knife, broccoli, and tomato

LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY
by Madeleine Barowsky

For this task, your tools must be hot. They must be cold. They must be bone-dry or slick with hot water. Cold water. For this task, the item should be room temp. It should be completely frozen. It should be partially thawed, and I learned that lesson the hard way, goat cheese shattering with a ferocious bang of the knife. Be sure the plate does not have any hint of heat. Be sure it is still warm.

The buns should be sweaty and puffy. If the cheese is sweaty, it has sat too long. Bake them till they’re golden-brown on top. If you bake the fitascetta until they show color, they will be rock hard, unusable. Keep a constant tension on the chicken breast with the palm of your hand so it doesn’t shred as you cut. The trick to slicing loaves is a kind of looseness in the shoulder. Go as slowly as needed when streaming sugar into egg whites. Add sugar to the yolks as quickly as possible.

Lose yourself at the cutting board. Forget your body except for the hands, unfold an entire universe in the moment. Blink past individual vegetables and measure progress by the level in the big tub. It goes faster if you concentrate. It goes faster if you think of nothing at all.

During prep for dinner service, we mentally rehearse the hours ahead. Ready ourselves to be upstairs in the heat and action, feeling the flow, the push, the squeeze. You can love a thing and be afraid of it, like the roar of a freight train in close proximity. Brace for impact.

We stay busy until midnight sometimes. Saturday nights on the line are like a domino cascade that just keeps falling. The worst rush will feel like the world is ending, but the way out is through. Time passes. Do your best and time passes. Some days I do nothing but fail. I strip off my dirty whites and leave them stinking in the linens bag.

The night sky after twelve hours in a kitchen is like coming up from water for air.

Headshot of Madeleine BarowskyMadeleine Barowsky is a software engineer and line cook who lives and works in Massachusetts. Her writing has previously been published in The Florida Review and Fourth Genre. Madeleine’s flash nonfiction piece “Line Cook: A Love Story” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

2020 APRIL by James LaRowe

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2020 APRIL
by James LaRowe

My kids’ new favorite game is searching for signs of life in satellite photos. They crowd around the family computer to hunt for civilization in the most far-flung, godforsaken places on Google Earth. They’ve grown adept at spotting thin dirt roads etched along shorelines and valley floors, the needle-straightness of airstrips or docks, the unexpected glint of a lone, distant roof.

I drink rosé in the kitchen doorway, waiting for the lasagna to cool, flicking through news on my phone: New symptoms have been identified…stores are running out of toilet paper and water…the stock market is up…the President tweeted.

“Guys, look, buildings,” Emma says. “On an atoll.”

“And a clay tennis court! They must be French,” Grace says.

On the monitor, a dented sandy ring floats in azure, pocked on one side by a red smudge and a cluster of beige buildings.

I walk over to kiss my kids’ heads. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

“Why?” Quinn, my youngest, asks without looking up.

I refill my wine glass.

“What’s the northernmost settlement in the world?” I yell from the kitchen.

Emma googles. “Dad, it’s called Alert,” she says. “In Canada.”

A map appears on the screen with a dot on the upper rim of the great northern archipelago. Emma clicks and zooms us down into Nunavut and Qikiqtaaluk and further still until the tiny arctic settlement of Alert emerges—a nestled clutch of buildings half-buried in snow.

“Kids,” I say. “This summer, let’s escape to Alert.”

◊

After dinner, Grace mentions an online survey a friend texted her which supposedly assesses the degree to which someone is a psychopath. We each agree to take the test separately.

“Answer honestly,” Quinn chides us beforehand.

Quinn scores the lowest: four out of forty. Grace gets an eight. I get nine. We’re all rated Minimally Psychopathic. But Emma scores a ten, just over the line into Mildly.

“That test wasn’t meant for kids,” Grace assures her. “Especially the parts about promiscuity, delinquency, and criminality.”

I start to say, “Yeah guys, had I known…”

“And that question about ‘parasitic lifestyle’?” Grace cuts me off. “Aren’t kids supposed to live off their parents?”

I help her clear the plates.

After dessert, the children decide to retake the test together to see if they could become Moderately Psychopathic without stretching the truth too much—an act which, Emma jokes, seems moderately psychopathic.

Soon the synth-xylophone chime of an incoming FaceTime fills the room.

“Mom!” my kids sing at the computer. “We miss you!”

“Hey, guys,” Sandra says, looking tired and grainy on the screen. She has changed out of her scrubs and into a sweatshirt. Anodyne hotel wall art hangs behind her.

“We took a test to see if we’re psychopaths!” the children shout.

“Don’t worry. We’re not,” I add, sipping my wine.

Sandra smiles. “Rosé in April. Everything okay?”

I consider how to reply as Quinn tells her, “Mom, this summer, we’re escaping to Alert.”

James LaRowe is currently pursuing his MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars where he is working on his first novel. He writes fiction that explores privilege, loss, and evolving notions of masculine identity. He lives in the suburbs outside of Boston with his wife, three children, and dog, Cali. His flash fiction piece “2020 April” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

LET’S LICK IT by Amanda Hadlock

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LET’S LICK IT
by Amanda Hadlock

The first night I spent with the guy I dated last summer, he told me we had just snorted the last of our coke when I asked for more, so I said, “Turn the baggie inside out and let’s lick it.”

So, we did. We tongued the corners and crevasses of the sandwich bag to save every last bit of residue we could, and my teeth and lips went so numb I couldn’t even feel it when he kissed me.

◊

In the beginning, not much happened: We would meet at his apartment, stretch out on his bedroom carpet, and snort lines off the cover of the physics textbook from the class where we’d met that spring, which he would have to retake the next fall. We would take turns playing songs on his laptop we thought would make the other like us. And it worked for a while: sniffing lines, singing off-key, fucking on the bedroom carpet. It was great on nights when we weren’t too numb from drugs, and nights when we were too numb, we were content just lying there, side by side on the floor, sharing the silence as we came down.

◊

Then, suddenly, something did happen. As it turns out, it is dangerous to mix your prescribed SSRIs with uppers you got from some line cook at the Applebee’s where your boyfriend who you barely know works, and there is such a thing as “serotonin syndrome.” The body, ironically, can produce too much of the thing that makes it feel happy, and hurt itself.

A build up of serotonin in the brain can cause a hot, sweaty fever, and muscle rigidity so severe your hands curl up like pincers and are rendered useless, and diarrhea so sudden you find yourself shitting your favorite Eeyore pajama pants in your sleep on your new boyfriend’s bedroom carpet, waking both of you up from a come-down at the ass-crack of dawn and necessitating a drive to the Emergency Room. Likely, he’ll hardly be able to hide his disgust. He might offer you a shower and a pair of his basketball shorts to change into, after you ask. He also might make you sit on one of his crusty towels the whole way to the hospital, and never call or text you back again after dropping you off.

Anyway, serotonin syndrome can cause all these things. That doesn’t mean any of these things will happen to you.

Amanda Hadlock is an MFA candidate in fiction at Florida State University, where she also serves as Assistant Editor for Southeast Review. She is originally from Missouri. She received her MA in English from Missouri State University, where she also worked as the Graduate Assistant for Moon City Review. Her fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narrative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Florida Review, Fractured Literary, WFSU/NPR’s All Things Considered, Essay Daily, Hobart, Wigleaf, New Limestone Review, Past Ten, The Lindenwood Review, Esthetic Apostle, and others. Amanda’s flash fiction piece “Let’s Lick It” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

THE TUMMY BRIDGE by Andrea Marcusa

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Graphic design image of a gray bridge resting on top of a bare stomach

THE TUMMY BRIDGE
by Andrea Marcusa

Right now, it’s an old wooden bridge spanning railroad tracks, a rickety structure that’s fun to cross on her way to the beach. Its steep incline causes her car to jump when she zips over it too fast, and then her stomach to lurch into the air. Her two children and husband love the bridge. When she calls out, “Here comes the Tummy Bridge,” they wait in anticipation holding their stomachs and then erupt into gales of laughter.

She presses the brakes, and her husband, who is in the passenger seat, reaches his hand across the gear box onto her knee and travels up her thigh to her bikini bottom and says, “I can’t help it when you pump your leg and arch in that wet suit,” and doesn’t leave her thigh until she swats him away and whispers, “Later!”

After the kids are asleep, she’ll lower herself onto him, the room flooding with a chorus of crickets and the ding-donging of wind chimes outside their bedroom window. The sheets soon a damp tangle, her hair matted, they’ll both collapse euphoric, out of breath, feeling each other’s hearts pounding along with their own. Propped on her side, she’ll trace the outlines of his face, the cleft in his chin, strong jaw line, and touch his dark, thick eyelashes with her pinky.

 

This is before arrhythmias send her husband’s heart racing and skipping like mosquitos swarming at dusk. Before his stricken look with each erratic beat sets her teeth on edge. Before the arrival of his tan box filled with life-saving morning, noon, and evening pills, colored discs that dull his eyes and puff his lids. Before physicians, five separate times, thread probes up a vein in his thigh to his heart where they make tiny burns, scarring the tissue from which love had once flowed so freely. Afterward, he still climbs the stairs nightly to their bedroom but gasps at the top, the sound thrusting into her like a blade.

This is before sleepless nights spent wondering if she could have foreseen some weakness years ago when, after lovemaking, she held her head to his chest to hear his heart’s reassuring thump, thump, thump. Was there something they could have done?

This is before wildfires destroy the bridge and nearby barns that dot the region and clapboard houses with quaint, listing front porches and baskets of hanging geraniums. Although their home is spared, the charred ruins nearby are sold off in small lots and rebuilt with tract houses and tiny, cedar chip yards. The bridge, remade in cement, now provides a smooth, ordinary ride, no fun at all.

Today, none of these changes have happened. Wildfires and his weak heart are years away, the smell of summer perfumes the air, the motor shifts gears as it starts up the hill, the kids in the backseat chant, “Tummy Bridge!” under a wide, blue summer sky, as fields of corn sway and baskets of pink geraniums swing, and they are still young.

Headshot of Andrea MarcusaAndrea Marcusa’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, CutBank, Citron Review, Cherry Tree, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Glimmer Train, Raleigh Review, and Southampton Review. She studies with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Twitter @d_marcusa. Her flash fiction piece “The Tummy Bridge” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

MOSAIC FOR MY MOTHER by Emily Hoover

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MOSAIC FOR MY MOTHER
by Emily Hoover

1.

When I was a teen, she’d sit on the porch cloaked in a cloud of cigarette smoke with pruning shears in her hands. She’d whisper to herself while cutting photos of George W. Bush out of the newspaper because she couldn’t stand to see his face on the front page, especially after 9/11. I thought it was normal, but my friends’ moms cut chunks of cookie dough into hearts while baking. They didn’t talk politics, especially when no one was listening.

She’d open mid-day beers in the closet and fall asleep on the porch at dusk, her hair kinking from the humidity. Smoke plumed from the ashtray, a grayish ink.

Dad would watch reruns of Seinfeld, laughing at the same jokes while piecing together the sports section.

 

2.

I am twenty-eight when she is diagnosed for the first time and prescribed a cocktail of mood levelers and antipsychotics. In other news, Dad says, her aloe plant had pups, and her garden swells with eggplant. 

We end the call. I end up on Facebook and see an Amazon ad for Birkenstock two-strap sandals with a Monstera deliciosa print. Plant parenthood is her tether to reality, so I order them, choose the option for two-day shipping.

On her birthday, Dad calls. He passes her the phone.

What if it’s the same people who are poisoning the food?

We talk for an hour about Amazon and government surveillance. She tells me she understands the purpose of the box and my gift.

She wants to gain some weight.

Then, after a beat, she tells me there are people living in the attic. She can hear them shuffling.

 

3.

Dad calls. She is tending to the echeveria wearing the Birkenstocks with socks. She has put on ten pounds after quitting drinking, and she is smoking less than a pack a day.

He passes her the phone.

She tells me the therapist looks just like Huey Lewis. I hear Dad’s laugh, like thunder, in the background.

She wants to make the eggplant dish I like, the one with the capers, the next time I’m in Florida.

No one remembers it’s my twenty-ninth birthday, not even me.

 

4.

She calls. It startles me. She believes someone has stolen the car. I ask for Dad, but he’s at the store. She tells me there’s no more chatter, but I can hear her whispering to someone no one else can hear.

 

5.

The window is open. The sheer curtains sway. I argue with acquaintances on Facebook, denouncing Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Later, I stand in the mirror, my grayish blond hair kinking in desert monsoon mist, and wonder what else I have inherited. Monstera cuttings root in water near the bathroom window. I wiggle my toes in Birkenstocks. I listen for the phone, Dad’s laugh, her sigh. My own voice echoes in my head.

Emily Hoover is the author of the novella in stories, Snitch (Wordrunner eChapbooks, 2021), and the zine of micropoetry, Portrait of My Mother Living with Mental Illness (Rinky Dink Press, 2022). Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have been published by or are forthcoming in Sundress Publications, The Disappointed Housewife, The Citron Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Bending Genres, Limp Wrist Magazine, BULL, Necessary Fiction, The Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares blog, The Rupture, and others, and her fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives in Las Vegas. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter as @em1lywho. Her flash fiction piece “Mosaic for My Mother” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Sarah Freligh

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THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Sarah Freligh

They come from everywhere, come to us hungry. They wheel in suitcases that they park tidy under tables, drag in trash bags or carry backpacks that they ease off and set on chairs. Sometimes they bring pets—dogs and cats and once an iguana in a plaid harness—though they’re told not to. They’ll claim the damn dog just jumped into the car and wouldn’t budge, and what was I supposed to do about it anyway? We tell them we understand completely and send for the Pet Whisperer, who pulls up in her dusty grey Jeep with endearments and a pocketful of treats and sits with the owners until they’re ready to let go.

The restaurant at the end of the world never closes. We serve eggs-over-easy late at night, bowls of chili with extra spices, and pitchers of beer at daybreak. Our customers will often tell us that this is the best meal they’ve ever had, and we smile and say we’ll tell the chef. Sometimes the chef himself appears, but only after changing from his stained apron into the pressed white jacket he keeps for such occasions. They ask what was in the eggs—chives? mint?—that gives them that extra something. Sometimes they stand and shake his hand or write down a recipe and stick it away for later.

We’re taught never to ask questions—What brings you here? Where are you from?—instructed instead to listen if the customer tells us why they can’t bear to live in this world anymore. Sometimes they show us things they’ve brought from their old lives: a jeweled brooch that belonged to a wife who died of a lingering illness or a crayon drawing of the school where a couple’s six-year-old son was gunned down. There are always stories. Sometimes they ask us what it’s like at the end of the world, and we smile and tell them their slice of pie is on the house.

Afterward, they pay at the register, help themselves to wrapped mints or a toothpick, and take a last, long look around—at the busboy tenderly collecting glasses in a rubber tub, at the couple waving and blowing kisses into a cell phone, at the waitress unfurling a fresh linen tablecloth on a corner two-top. When it’s finally time, we point to the back of the restaurant, tell them to walk past the men’s room and the ladies’, to the red door at the end of the hallway. Goodbye, we whisper.

Hello, we say to the customers who come to us hungry.

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22), and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation. Sarah’s flash fiction piece “The Restaurant at the End of the World” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

 

IMPACT by Lisa Lanser Rose

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Graphic design image of an airplane with a light purple background

IMPACT
by Lisa Lanser Rose

A voice above proclaimed: No automobiles may be left unattended within three hundred feet of the facility. I blinked; an imaginary avalanche of flame slammed through the airport.

“Where is everybody?” I asked at the empty ticket counter.

On board at Harrisburg International, the flight attendant lectured us on safety features, and I relished my front-row seat in the almost-empty puddle-jumper. Fifteen days after 9/11, and so far I avoided the news blazoning Bin Laden’s face in satanic black and red. Limp children draped over firefighter’s arms. Immune, I knew not to give it too much thought, even when ashes from Manhattan dusted my Pennsylvania town like plant spores from outer space.

“Which emergency exit do you want?” I asked my seatmate. “That one’s mine.”

“I hate prop planes,” the big guy said.

“Why? Because those propeller blades could zip through this aluminum can and cut our legs off mid-thigh?”

“That’s one reason,” he said. “I’m with the Air Force.”

“Pilot or bombardier?”

“Manager of the commissary.”

“So you’re an expert,” I said. “Everyone told me to cancel this trip. Should we be afraid to fly?”

“Nah,” he said. “Odds are it’s safer now than ever.”

“That’s what I thought,” I nodded. “I teach critical thinking.” So much to not fear. Lightning. Shark bite. Columbine.

Conversation prevents boredom, loneliness, and the temptation to dwell on what my daughter’s schoolteacher cried to the kids, “My best friend ran the daycare in the Twin Towers.”

In a halting, disembodied voice, our pilot reported altitude, weather conditions, and flight duration. He paused. “Folks? Can I just talk to you a moment?”

“Sorry.” The flight attendant shook her head. “He’s Southern.”

“Let me ramble,” said our pilot. “I know you’re thinking about recent events. And I want to say. . . if any of you are thinking about. . . this cabin—”

I strained to hear him over the engine thrum.

“You can use blankets to deflect knives. . . Throw things at the hijackers. Aim for their faces. . . I agree with our president that. . . if anybody gets into this cockpit. . .”

“What the actual fuck,” said the big guy.

“He’s having a tough time,” I said. “But he’s pragmatic.”

The plane banked, lifting the twin cooling towers of Three-Mile Island into view.

“I used to fish there as a kid,” the big guy said. “I was there the day it happened. We got a whole week off from school. We didn’t have to make it up.”

“Silver linings,” I said.

We landed in Philly. Everyone phoned someone, and the rubble of Ground Zero still emitted 1600 cell phone signals. Already slipping into anonymity, my seatmate lowered my carry-on, making me almost love him. Dust motes danced in the gangway, and I remembered how my daughter and her friends sang, “It’s snowing!” running across the sunny September lawn, catching ashes on their small pink tongues.

Headshot of Lisa Lanser RoseLisa Lanser Rose is a trick dog trainer and the author of the memoir, For the Love of a Dog and the psychological mystery, Body Sharers, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel. Other honors include the Briar Cliff Review Nonfiction Award, The Florida Review Editor’s Award, and a Best American Essay Notable Essay. Founder of the award-winning blog co-op, The Gloria Sirens, she gets lost on dog agility courses throughout Tampa Bay. Her flash nonfiction piece “Impact” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

 

A CONTENTED SUN RISES by Joe Alan Artz

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A CONTENTED SUN RISES
by Joe Alan Artz

Envelopes of Very Small People keep arriving in my mailbox. I bring each envelope in and gently slit open the top flap. The people come out slowly, gasping in awe, looking all around. They spread out across my apartment. They explore, find small nooks and crannies, settle in. They raise magnolias in tiny pots. The peculiar charm of a magnolia breeze wafts through my four rooms along with Celtic music, or something similar, that the people play and sing.

The settlers, hardly aware of my presence, require nothing of me. Farmers plant small grains and leafy greens in the soil built up in the gaps between floorboards. Shepherds tend flocks of dust bunnies in the gloom beneath the couch. Come spring, they shear fleeces of lint from the bunnies that others weave into fabrics to be scissored and stitched into clothing, using patterns centuries old.

The Very Small People prosper. Market towns spring up. I live in terror of crushing people underfoot, but as they establish fixed roadways between settlements, I adjust my routes to theirs. Where our paths must cross, they set flashing red lights on poles, turned up at an angle to catch my eye as I approach.

Every new envelope that arrives increases their population. The economy and birthrates grow apace. The roads grow congested, a trend that continues until butterflies begin arriving in small boxes, delivered by Amazon. The boxes have air holes and are labeled “FRAGILE: Living Things.” When the Very Small People get a text saying a box has been delivered, they text me to bring it in. Those knowledgeable of butterflies gather round as I lift the flaps. “Stand back,” they shout as butterflies burst forth in iridescent swirls. Floor traffic dwindles as travel goes airborne. The smallest butterflies carry one passenger, lying prone along the thorax. Larger ones carry up to seven, seated, bent knees gripping the thorax tight. The largest—tropical giants—carry cargo.

Population and prosperity increase at Malthusian rates. Very Small People inhabit every flat surface in my apartment, anywhere gravity allows. Butterflies spangle the airspace, everywhere that gravity has no influence. Wherever I choose to stand or sit, suburban sprawl encroaches. In the end, I find myself crowded into a corner with only my laptop, minifridge, and a chemical toilet. Sitting cross-legged on the fridge, I gaze, mesmerized, into and across an exuberant New World in motion. I feel bliss. I’ve never known what it’s like to belong. I’ve never felt so much at home.

A group of developers clusters below, debating whether to demolish the minifridge and build houses or convert it to luxury apartments. “Apartments,” I call down. “Great view from the top floors.” The developers look up, astonished. Their generation has forgotten I exist.

Gravity lets go. I rise to the ceiling, the only place left where I’m not in the way. Lying there, on my back, hands behind my head, I beam down on their realm, the contented sun of Very Small People.

Joe Alan Artz, a native of rural Kansas, is a retired archaeologist. He writes short fiction and poetry in the coffeehouses of Iowa City, Iowa. His published work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Beecher’s (now Landlocked), Prompt Press, Wapsipinicon Almanac, Daily Palette, and Diverse Arts Project. Joe’s flash fiction piece “A Contented Sun Rises” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

LOVE OF YOUR LIFE by Kris Willcox

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LOVE OF YOUR LIFE
by Kris Willcox

They say you fall in love with your children the moment they’re born, although this was not my experience. Paul was a nice baby, but his needs and insistent gestures confused me. Fifty years ago, it was normal for fathers to feel that way. Babies weren’t worn in pouches from dawn to dusk, and no one had ever thought of a jogging stroller. Paul’s carriage looked like a tiny hearse, and I’m sure I never pushed it.

One Saturday, when he was not quite two, Carol went shopping during his afternoon nap. She left me with instructions for the casserole (into the oven at five) and for Paul (wake him if he sleeps past four). I spent an hour circling the house with a push mower, and when I noticed that the light had become golden, I knew it must be time to wake him. I removed my shoes at the front door and went upstairs to his room.

He wasn’t there.

I spun around as if someone behind me had spoken, but there was no one—just Paul’s bed, and blankets. Panicked, I gave myself simple directions: Remain calm. Look. He’s here somewhere. I checked the closet, his toy chest, behind the curtains. I looked in our bedroom and in the bathtub.

“All right, Paulie,” I said, running downstairs. My socks slipped on the wooden treads, and I grabbed the railing to keep from falling. I jammed my feet into my sneakers and rushed around the first floor, then again upstairs. I got on hands and knees to look under the claw-foot tub, a space even he could only have fit by crushing himself, but how could I know his mind? Each night, he’d wave to me as I came up the driveway, then hide when I tried to talk to him.

Now he simply refused to be anywhere—not in the garage, the cabinet, the cellar. My limbs were heavy; the blood was silting up in my veins. I couldn’t think. That’s how Carol found me, grunting like a bear and yanking keys from the pocket of my overcoat.

“He’s gone!” I shouted. She bounded upstairs with me directly behind her, yelling that I’d already looked there, for Christ’s sake.

“He’s right here,” she said. I stumbled in.

And there he was, so small I’d mistaken him for a twist in the blankets. Our voices woke him, and he began to cry. Carol soothed him against her shoulder, and I shuffled downstairs, a fool gripping my keys.

Paul’s sneakers were beside the door. A blue pair, and a red. When I saw them, I realized what Carol must have known from his birth: that if he left us, by choice or by accident, we’d have to rid ourselves of every trace of him, starting with those shoes. It was the only way we’d survive.

That’s what they mean when they say you fall in love. It’s true. It’s terrible.

Kris Willcox lives in Arlington, MA with her family. Her writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review online, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cimarron Review, Tin House online, Vela, Molecule, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction piece “Love of Your Life” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

HIRAETH by Paul Joseph Enea

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HIRAETH
by Paul Joseph Enea

Ever since she’s lived in the village, Hanna’s floor fan sounds more like static than white noise. She’s certain the static taints her dreams, which used to be innovative, like prestige television. But these days her dreams are closer to reality TV than a nuanced narrative. They play like reruns of her day at work, where she blurs through long corridors dispensing meds to post-ops. Every day, she rests her hand on the shoulder of a doomed patient. She wonders why she doesn’t dream about people she knows and loves. It scares her that she only thinks about Oliver when she’s awake. She misses him in her dreams. When he was alive, smooth white noise filled every room in their home.

At one-thirty in the morning, it’s hard to tell the difference between bored and haunted. Hanna rolls out of bed, dresses in jeans and a pullover, then walks three uphill blocks to a park perched on a bluff. Sitting on a bench outside the glow of a lamp post, she watches a bright moon scan the surface of an ocean-like lake. A breeze carries the sway and scent of rye grass and wild flower. Hanna forgets her eyes are closed until a chorus of teenagers enters the park, headed for a railed platform jutting off the bluff. If Oliver was here, he’d say, “Let’s hope they survive their youth.” He’d say this because he said it before, when they were on a different shore, gazing at people. He enjoyed speaking his mind in her company. By the time the teenagers reach the platform, she’s sorry she can no longer hear their voices.

The following afternoon, Hanna skips her nap and goes for a walk. Besides locating the grocery store and hospital, she hasn’t explored the village until today, even though this is where Oliver was born and raised and where she felt compelled to live soon after he drowned. But when she first arrived she had a hard time identifying the casual village he often described. Her apartment building sits kitty-corner to a church compound and a middle school. On weekday afternoons the cutthroat traffic of minivans and cyclists diminishes her faith in people. Taking refuge on the sofa, she wakes from naps with a dry throat and a longing to be elsewhere.

Today, however, the sky is vintage blue and she remembers Oliver liked to say the next best thing to sailing was walking. He had wanted Hanna to visit the village, certain she’d experience some sort of communion with the lake. Once, during sex, she received on a prescient frequency a sense of life without him, as if he was already a ghost. He noticed the abrupt stillness in her eyes and became very still himself, waiting, as if someone should say something. Today, the distinction between ghost and flesh is tenuous because she can still feel the pulse of his gaze. “I’m pregnant,” she says, beneath her breath, in case he’s listening.

Paul Joseph Enea’s poetry, fiction, and journalism has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Porcupine Literary Arts, Portals & Piers, Blue Canary Press, Verse Wisconsin, Brawler Lit, and The Irish American Post. His flash fiction piece “Hiraeth” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

IN-LAWS by Laura Tanenbaum

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IN-LAWS
by Laura Tanenbaum

“In five years, I’m going to fall in love with a fish,” the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. “They will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will teach them to walk on their fin so they can come to our house. And I will teach them how to breathe. I will say, ‘It’s easy, fish. Just breathe like you did in water; only, it’s air.’ ”

His brother tells him he might need to compromise. Maybe six months on land, six months in the water, like the high-powered couples do. No, he says, concerned. The fish has to come to him. I’m watching his concern, trying to see which plane of reality he’s accessing, except that I no longer know what I mean by this.  I know only that the words “imagination” and “metaphor” are insufficient to the task. And so I take his side. After all, we’ve learned from David Attenborough that evolution has carried countless creatures from the sea to us, not one has reversed course. When you forget how to make gills, they stay forgotten.

All of this may be why, the next day, after the temperatures had plunged thirty degrees overnight and the NYC Parks department and I both failed to adjust—me without a jacket, them, blasting the sprinklers—I was the only one who didn’t rush to pull a child back from the flood. He stomped on every fountainhead, threw himself on the ground. When he came to me, shivering, and the only change of clothes I had was shorts, and I saw the mother who had frantically been calling her Juniper back from the brink shoot me the look reserved for the parents of bad-example children, it took everything I had not to shout, You don’t understand! He’s looking for his fishwife! Wants to learn to live in her world! Learning to be flexible! And aren’t they going to need that what with the world and everything. . . Because I’m sure that Juniper’s mother would understand. That, like me, she has trouble imagining the future these days. That she would be comforted as I am by the thought of my future self, a crone in a cave, welcoming in any creature still capable of both tenderness and survival, teaching my son to tend to her scales.

Headshot of Laura TanenbaumLaura Tanenbaum is a writer, teacher, and parent living in Brooklyn, NY. She has published poetry and short fiction in Aji, Catamaran, Trampoline, Rattle, and many other venues. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, Entropy, and elsewhere. She teaches at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her nonfiction flash piece “In-Laws” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

DARK MATTER by Meredith McCarroll

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DARK MATTER
by Meredith McCarroll

“You know how dark matter is like the absence of space, but it, like, takes up space?”

“OK.”

“Well, what if dark matter could be contained and it’s like an anti-gravity solution. In a gas form. It takes up the space that is the absence of space.”

“Dark matter?”

“Yeah. Which is different than dark energy.”

“I don’t know what dark energy is.”

“Oh. Have you heard of the Big Bang, Mama?”

 

He is fourteen. I am in the bathtub. He is wearing the new sweatshirt he saved to buy that is still so soft on the inside that I rubbed my cheek against it when he asked me to feel it.

 

He is four and he explains centripetal and centrifugal force to my mom. She records it on her flip phone that is stashed now in a drawer with misfit cords, lost memories, and unanswered texts.

 

He is eleven and we move him from his childhood home. He stands in the center of a magnolia tree that touches the ground all around him. He slowly pulls red berries from the cones, their white threads stringing behind, and shuts quietly down.

 

He is twelve and the red berries sit on his bookshelf with the pottery shards from before and a handful of sea glass from now. He stops asking to visit, and learns to ski.

Some nights, we lay together and cry. About algebra, but always eventually about distance and loss and why Mom had to die and that magnolia tree.

“I like to imagine that our energy disperses and mixes with other energies when we die. Some part star. Some part tree. Some part mosquito.”

“Is that why you don’t like to kill mosquitoes?” he asks.

“No. I just figure it’s not my right to kill another living thing.”

“It’s not like you think it’s your granny or something?”

We laugh.

“Maybe it is like that,” I say as we grow quiet.

“Yeah. I think we just die and that’s that.”

 

He is one and I am nursing him. He grins at me so that my nipple slips out of his milky mouth. I guide him back to nurse and his eyes flutter shut. I rub my hand over his soft head, brushing the wispy dark hairs away from his face. He drifts off and I pull my shirt back down, propping my arm against the sofa so that he can rest against me for as long as he will.

 

“Anyway, you know about the Big Bang?”

He isn’t sure where to rest his eyes, so I lean over so only my bubbly back is visible.

“I mean, I know the theory, yes.”

“It isn’t a theory. And the way we confirmed that the Big Bang is true is that we were able to confirm that everything ever is constantly expanding outward, getting faster and faster. Dark energy is the name that we’re assigning to the force that is doing that.”

“We are?”

“We are.”

Headshot of Meredith McCarrollMeredith McCarroll is the Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Bitter Southerner, Avidly, Southern Cultures, Still, Cutleaf and elsewhere. McCarroll is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (UGA Press) and co-editor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (WVU Press). She lives in Portland, Maine. Meredith’s flash nonfiction piece “Dark Matter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

THE EGG by Dawn Miller

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THE EGG
by Dawn Miller
Third Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition

“The Egg” is a story of conjugal love gone rotten. In this frightening study of betrayal, the author’s fine use of startling and original metaphor is something that knocked me out. Reading this story, I imagined staring into the raccoon’s terrible, crazy eyes. I couldn’t get the image of the egg-sucking animal out of my head. And though the plot might be familiar, this writer treats us to a fresh engagement with the subject through a horrific outside-the-body vulnerability that I have rarely read in such a compact flash. It is in the tiniest creepiest details that the heart of this story lives. —Meg Pokrass, Contest Judge

Graphic design image of a raccoon's face against a navy blue background

The raccoons are at it again, shuffling under the deck with their bandit faces and jailbird tails. Wanting. They think I don’t hear them, but I do. A snuffle. A scrape. An I’ll-knock-this-over-before-you-run-me-off skittering below the wooden boards. They’re after the robin’s nest tucked in a niche under the floorboards.

In the daylight, I hoist everything out from beneath the deck.

Why bother? Jay says, hands on his hips while I wash the items, stack, and rearrange them.

I pull out a split hose, a broken hockey stick to soldier limp tomato plants, a half-empty propane tank, two mismatched lawn chairs, and a storage box full of nothing.

They’ll find a way, Jay says.

The mother robin squawks and flaps from its treetop perch as I clomp under the porch, shuffling items, putting sticks inside the box, shoring up nooks and crannies because I don’t want raccoons living under there. They’re pests. Scroungers. Scoundrels and cheats. They’ll damage the foundation. Chew the wood. Keep me up all night with their rooting and rummaging.

Jay goes back into the house and I’m glad of it.

On top of the storage box, a tiny half shell, blue as Peyto Lake in Banff where we honeymooned, rolls off the lid onto the ground. Craning my neck, I glimpse three newly hatched birds, tiny as tulips, mouths hinged open, and the gentle curve of one unhatched egg dotted with brown freckles.

3 a.m. I push aside our let-nothing-come-between-us mound of blankets. The mattress dips on either side—our separate weight imprinting the foam. I pull up the blankets to mask the distorted shape and creep past the study. Jay sits at his desk, his pale features ghostly blue. A flash of skin flickers across the screen—an arm, maybe a leg—and he pivots the laptop shut.

Can’t sleep, he says, and I murmur something about raccoons.

I prowl the perimeter of the house, waiting for the onslaught. I’m armed with two high-beam flashlights and a bicycle horn because the rascals only stare at me when I clap or stomp my feet. They act like I’m invisible. No different than a tree or a stone.

Curled on the wicker loveseat on the porch, I rouse with every shuffle, every pattering of feet. I shine my light. Blow my horn. Yellow spills over the horizon and I check the silent blue egg in the nest. The baby birds’ mouths stretch wide in perpetual need. Wanting. Wanting. Wanting.

Beady eyes peer around the broken pot. It’s not afraid. It scuffles across the gravel, curls a dexterous paw around the smooth, speckled egg, and scoops it from the nest like plucking a berry from a vine.

I blow my horn and the raccoon pops the egg into its mouth and chews, mouth dripping stringy albumen and yolk as it watches me.

Headshot of Dawn MillerDawn Miller’s most recent work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Typehouse, Jellyfish Review, Guernica Edition’s This Will Only Take a Minute anthology, and The Maine Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect at www.dawnmillerwriter.com and on Twitter @DawnFMiller1. Her flash fiction piece “The Egg” is Third Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

WHALE CRATERS by K. T. Moore

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WHALE CRATERS
by K. T. Moore

“Had one come down overnight.”

Eden was waiting for him in the car park. Tayne felt himself sweating by the time he reached her, and as the wind kicked up, a shiver started between his shoulder blades. Eden had her hands tucked into her jumper sleeves; Tayne peered at what remained of the lookout and he wished he’d thought to bring a pair of mittens.

“One landed in Port Chalmers a few months back,” he said, staggering as he joined Eden at the cliff edge. Along with the rotted kelp, all of Matakaea smelled like an abattoir floor rinsed in brine. “Nearly crushed a group of students doing the crags.”

The whale had landed at the tideline; the impact had gauged a hole in the headland large enough to reshape the anatomy of the coast, an entire promontory crushed to rock dust beneath fat and bone and blubber. The one at Port Chalmers had fallen far enough that when it landed, the force of impact did half the disposal team’s work for them; for weeks meat chunks were turning up as far south as Dunedin.

Eden passed Tayne the pair of binoculars hanging at her throat, and looking through them, he could make out the shape of the whale’s head. The tail and fins were still intact, but the rocks had split its stomach, exposing red and slippery muscles, intestines as thick as anchor chains and already covered in gull shit. It hadn’t fallen as far as the one in Port Chalmers.

“A juvenile, I reckon,” said Eden, nodding at him. “I’ve got Terry coming in from Otago with the earwax kit, but going by its size and the fact it didn’t splatter from here to Oamaru, it didn’t fall from any real height. Young, or maybe sick.”

Tayne smacked at the sandflies, stirred to a frenzy by rotting flesh. “I think it’s the new smelter on Taiaroa Head that’s doing it. Putting toxins into the air.”

“A biopsy will tell us if it’s got any particulates in its blood.” Eden took the binoculars back. “Provided Terry gets a move on.

“At the rate they’re coming down,” she smiled, tight and bloodless, the same shade of white as the fat and viscera tangled in the kelp, “we’re going to have to re-survey half the country’s beaches and foreshores, the whale-shaped cracks in the coast…”

Tayne tugged on his hood; the palls of gray rain passed a faint pearlescence, washing clean the carcass pitched across the point. He shivered again.

The horizon churned winedark, the same color as the sea, swollen with its dense forests of rimurapa. Waves dashed themselves to spray against the body of the whale, its innards coiling in the tide and its blood gathering in crimson foam at the edges of the sand.

The wind buffeted Tayne’s back and lowed forlornly against the cliffsides, as though rushing in to fill the air left empty by the whale’s fall.

Kaitlin “K.T.” Moore (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose dissertation considers how plural cosmological systems might move towards realizing relations within and across physics, literature, ethics, and sustainability. They are an acclaimed amateur astrophotographer, and their photography has been featured by LiveScience and the Overture Center for the Arts. Between dissertation research, stargazing, and video games, they write the occasional poem or short story. K. T.’s flash fiction piece “Whale Craters” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

SAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR by Christina Simon

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SAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR
by Christina Simon

My first horse, a palomino mare; horse shows from Del Mar to San Francisco; high school when possible; ran from the red-haired, freckle-faced bully who called out oreo, zebra, half-breed, fucking mulatto; pretended his blows to my head were no big deal; learned to care for my dying mother at home when we were both too young; saved those acquired skills for later; figured out there was a dark side to their hippie life, the darkest possible color in all the universe; twinkle twinkle little star/I know what the hell you are; scheduled a courthouse wedding, just the two of us; married the blue-eyed guy from Philadelphia who is in the Harvard Law Review 1990 photo with Barack Obama; we hung the picture on our apartment wall, the sign of a historic first yet to come, one we dared only dream about; President Barack Obama; gave birth to a baby boy, brown skin and blue eyes; baby girl, pale skin with hazel eyes; at last, hands to hold tight; learned to cook as the symbol of a functional home; noodles with lots of chopped garlic; curry with golden-red saffron; big salads with four types of delicate lettuce; Barefoot Contessa’s roast chicken; her baked shrimp scampi; her beef pot roast; her lobster potpie; her organic turkey meatloaf; her coffee cake topped with crumbled brown sugar; cooked my way through her first cookbook, then her second; memorized the details of her perfect Hampton’s home with the chef’s kitchen; stopped; exhaled; made Hoppin’ John from a soul food cookbook, but only on New Year’s Day; said screw it, Hoppin’ John whenever we wanted; framed family photos all around the house, the sign of a functional home; sent kids to a fancy prep school with uniforms and AP multivariable calculus; made Los Angeles my forever home after a magnificent palm tree winked at me, saying, there’s beauty here, as she batted her long-lashed green eyes, fronds of lush hair blowing in the warm Santa Ana wind; told the doctor I wouldn’t sue him because my sister’s death was not his fault; she hoarded the pain pills; listened to the relief in his shaky voice, realized he was younger than my thirty-eight-year-old sister; buried pain deep in the dirty beaches of Venice and Topanga, hippie towns where I grew up. Never left a marker, a headstone, a place for my grief. It will find me, always.

Headshot of Christina SimonChristina Simon is the former nonfiction editor for Angels Flight Literary West. Her essays are forthcoming in Slag Glass City and have been published in Salon, The Offing, Columbia Journal (winner of the 2020 Black History Month Contest for Nonfiction), Another Chicago Magazine, The Citron Review, PANK Magazine’s Health and Healing Folio, CutBank Literary Journal’s Weekly Flash Prose, (Mac)ro(Mic), The Santa Ana River Review and Barren Magazine. Christina received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MA from UCLA. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Christina lives with her husband in Los Angeles. She misses her son and daughter who are away at college. www.csimonla.com. Her flash nonfiction piece “Saffron and Brown Sugar” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.