Author Archives: thwack

EVER GIVEN by Sara Davis

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EVER GIVEN
by Sara Davis

Because the spring tide comes in on its own time, because the earth goes on turning and the moon goes on circling around us and the ocean eddies unevenly but inevitably between them, because the seawater rises even in the desert latitudes of the world where scorching winds blow dust in the eyes of sailors, the tide came in on the seventh day after the Ever Given lodged slantwise in the throat of the Red Sea like a crust of dry bread. It was because the seawater welled in the deep trench men cut between continents, because the seawater poured into the furrows men scratched into the muddy banks where her bow sank into the sand, because the seawater flowed under and around her steel hull, that this colossal obstruction, this beached vessel vast enough to be seen from space, this ship of shipments simply buoyed up and floated away, as light as the plastic dross she ferries across the world to waiting hands. And so you too can wait, ever grounded and ever grateful, as long as it takes for the tide to lift you out of the mud and clay when all your clawing at the earth cannot.

Sara Davis (@LiterarySara) is a recovering academic and marketing writer who lives in Philadelphia with two elderly cats. Her PhD in American literature is from Temple University. She has previously published essays on food history and culture, and currently blogs about books and climate anxiety at literarysara.net.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

AN UNFULFILLED DREAM by Anika Pavel

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AN UNFULFILLED DREAM
by Anika Pavel

Through the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, people were buying everything in sight. During a visit to my local supermarket, the empty shelves were familiar. In my youth, in communist Czechoslovakia, empty shelves were a norm, not the result of a pandemic.

A memory flooded in. I had to put my hand over my still unmasked mouth to hide the smile as I joined a line of people waiting for a new supply of toilet paper. I came back to the apartment empty-handed and told my husband how we dealt with toilet paper shortages back then.

Under communism, toilet paper was quite often a scarce item. There was never enough of it to store up, so we used newspapers. We children were tasked with tearing the pages of the newspaper into squares, then crushing them in our hands before putting them into a shoebox that was then taken to the WC and placed within easy reach for the would-be occupant of the throne. The idea was to make the paper softer and to get most of the ink on our hands, which we washed much more often than our behinds.

There were certain pieces, with photographs of the government officials and members of the communist party, that my father kept for himself. And the pages with Brezhnev and his Czechoslovak lackeys’ pictures on them he saved for special occasions. My father was lactose intolerant but loved cheese. Every so often he would bow to the demands of his taste buds, with the predictable results. Then it was Brezhnev and his crew’s time.

My American husband was astonished by my story and rejected the idea on the grounds that the newspaper would block the drains, though I have to say he scored points in my book because he did not object to the idea, in principle, of using the newspaper. Perhaps there were particular politicians he had in mind. There was no doubt in my mind who my Brezhnev and his enablers would be. Thanks to the narrow pipes of our civilized nation, however, such justice has remained but a dream.

Anika Pavel was born Jarmila Kocvarova in Czechoslovakia. She became a refugee when the Soviet Union invaded her homeland. She lived in England, Hong Kong, and Monte Carlo before settling in New York City, where she is a writer. She writes in Slovak and in English. Her short stories have been published in BioStories, Potato Soup Journal, Tint Journal, Nixes Mate Review, and Ariel Chart. Her story “Encounter With The Future” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. More at www.anikapavel.com.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

cleave. by Courtney Elizabeth Young

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cleave.
by Courtney Elizabeth Young

Here are the ways I have heard it happens: in bed, waking to wheezing, breathing in loose clumps lining your pillow. Out with friends, falling into your Cobb salad, your Pinot. In the pool, raking waters in a panic, clawing to clean up the unhinged mess you have become. Wiping sweat away from your brow after removing your garden hat, now filled with clumps. In the conference room, before a presentation, onto your notecards. With windows down, enjoying a summer breeze until you see it in the rearview mirror, whipping and whirling away and out of your car. Fast, far, and away, anywhere and everywhere, because it defies boundaries.

Here is how it happened to me.

I am finished running. There was no sun, but my scalp burns, it itches. I didn’t expect this process to be painful down to the follicles, but it only makes sense. There is always pain when there is an abandon. I am trying to relieve the screaming in my scalp, Ma, so I stand in the shower, palms on either side of the spigot, head bowed in submission.

I knew it was coming, Ma, I saw it thinning all weekend, so I am ready, I promise. I have been walking within a warning, and I will do it right. I am making a proper sacrifice by bathing before a butchering, by washing before an offering. And so, I open my eyes. I see pieces of me that detach, that fall away, that coil around the drain, my tears mix with the water, Ma, pushing them all the way away.

There is a shaking in my hands when I shut off the shower, a shaking as I wrap one towel around myself and when I reach for another. This shaking does not steady nor cede but there is a deadpan I maintain, until I feel an effortless removal, when I pull the dampened towel away.

There is an animal noise that comes from somewhere inside my apartment, Ma, some deep yet distant carnal wailing I cannot track nor translate. There is a widening of my eyes, a tremor growing with violent ferocity. I ride its jagged lightning, flinging the matted mess away from me.

There is a mirror and a spastic swiping of steam, but this is a mirror that is not true, because in it is not me—instead there is a woman I have never seen. The left side of her head is completely bare, Ma, her scalp a pale slice of skin; a raw slab of meat.

This woman in the mirror, Ma, she looks confused. She frowns and I frown back, so I walk away, but she does too. She is following me through my apartment—from the mirror on my door to the mirror above my bed. So I move faster, running to the mirror in my living room, my bathroom, my bedroom, but there she is again and again and again.

I blink at her and she blinks at me. I raise my left hand and so does she. I reach to run my fingers through soft waves, but I feel only a headstone scalp—bald and bare. Then she is panicking, Ma, reaching frantically for hair. She is always reaching for what is no longer there.

This woman, she runs back to the bathroom where she finds the towel she cast aside. She lays it in front of the full-length mirror, her tears a torrent in her eyes. She kneels before it like an altar, with short and choppy breaths—she begs, “no, no, no,” her only prayer a pathetic lament. She lines up lost tresses before her where she sits, and the rest, Ma, she remembers in snips.

There is a shaking hand that calls Aimee, that calls you. There is an earth-quaking voice that manages, “the shaver,” until she goes dashing back to every room. There is the consulting every mirror for a contradiction, but they all tell her the same truth: “the woman in the mirror is you.”

There is the bedroom floor, mirror and altar again. There is the rocking back and forth, eyes oscillating between who she is and who she’s been. There are heels of hands pressed into eye sockets, pads of fingers tapping and padding toward a precipice, shrieking at the feeling of skull through skin.

There is the hair that falls around her from only bowing her head, there is the frantic picking up of pieces, of salvaging severance from stem. There are nail marks that draw blood from fists too tightly clenched, there is trying to make the shards hers again. There is the desperate holding up of them—first to the woman in the mirror, then her mother who walks in.

There is incorrigible sobbing that turns to incoherent blubbering when you find me there, holding up pieces of myself I have lost so that you may see. There is a falling of your face and then your body to your knees as you watch what happens when I cannot let go of what has let go of me. There are my hands, Ma, and then there are yours—yours—reaching for not what I have lost, but for what you have: me.

There are hands, pulling me into you, rocking me as long as I need, my muffled mumblings spit-soaking your shoulder until they cease. Hands holding my face out from yours, wiping my tears instead of your own, your eyes a red-rimmed graveyard of grief. You tell me you’re sorry, tell me you know, tell me to breathe.

There are your hands, not forcibly removing what I am not ready to release, but holding soft a death grip that opens gradually. Your hands, pulling me up when I cannot stand or see, raising my arms above my head, out of this towel and into something warm despite my pleas. Your hands, helping me rip the mirror off the wall to take outside with me, even if you don’t understand why this is something I need to see.

Your hands, I let lead. Into structured slaughter, to the dark dock where the water rushes beneath. Where Aimee takes the mirror and puts it in front of my seat. Where there is a single red rose in a vase upon a table, where there is a candle with a flame that flits in fits but does not flee. Shadows that flicker over a shaver conjure a gnash of teeth, waiting to cut and cleave, and in the dance of light, Ma, I swear it’s smiling at me.

Courtney Elizabeth Young is a 32-year-old rape crisis counselor and sexual assault survivors’ advocate pursuing an MFA at Southern New Hampshire University while in her second battle with triple-negative breast cancer. She has lived on and backpacked six continents and over thirty countries alone so far—but isn’t done yet. A proud owner of both the DRD4 and MAOA gene, she has lived out loud her wild ride through life on everything from cocaine to camels, from crocodiles to cancer. She won the Emerging Writer’s Grand Prize through Elephant Journal, was the featured travel photographer and writer in DRIFT Travel Magazine, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Palooka Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and Tipping the Scales: She Speaks and Hour of Women’s Literature.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

manic / depressive by Savannah Slone

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manic / depressive
by Savannah Slone

i only exist in spectrum extremes
floating amongst personality binaries
hard cut offs…….. prescription intimacy
learning to top
the in betweens dusting for my own
fingerprints in a house made up entirely
of stained glass ………………………of sunday
bath mat moldings …………….erotic velvet
desert mirrors

floor ………………………………………………..ceiling

violet skylight
blue flame rage
love concentrate
false memories
sky flood
my marionette hands
choreographing
hillscapes folding in on
themselves
constellations
underwater, ……spot lit
haunt
monochromatic weekdays
i am only wallpaper
self-gaslighting, a welcoming
home.

Savannah Slone is a queer, bipolar, and disabled writer. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Homology Lit and the author of An Exhalation of Dead Things (CLASH Books, 2021) alongside two chapbooks. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

NITS by Marsha Blitzer

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NITS
by Marsha Blitzer

The native mums told me it was inevitable,
……………………………………………………..nobody’s fault.
………………..In the changing room
………………………..……………………………they swapped
………………..uniform jumpers and caps.
Soon I saw my sons scratching their skulls.
………………..Sesame seeds,

 

each louse

……………………………………………………..had claws attached to hair
………………..where it was warmest—
……………………………………………………..the nape of the neck
………………..or around the ears.
They laid nits,
………………..ten or so a day.

 

The brown pinheads hatched,
……………………………………………………..first into nymphs,
………………..then adults — left behind empty egg cases
……………………………………………………..glued on. Neat rows
clung with military precision
………………..to the shafts.

 

Mother swore by mayonnaise
……………………………………………………..to suffocate the tiny
………………..wingless insects, or vinegar
……………………………………………………..to dehydrate them.
Gasoline or kerosene, a less acceptable
………………..alternative, even for her.

 

I chose disinfecting shampoo,
……………………………………………………..used a fine-toothed
………………..comb to tease them out
……………………………………………………..at night – parsed one section
then the next, egg by egg,
………………..each strand of hair.

 

We talked about the day at school,
………………..missing Dad,
……………………………………………………at work in America.
Before bed, I soused them
……………………………………..in lavender oil,
their stuffed animals,
………………..too.

Marsha Blitzer has published poems in The American Journal of Poetry, The Banyan Review, and 166 Palms. An alumna of Sarah Lawrence, she completed the coursework for a PhD in Russian Literature and Linguistics from Georgetown and holds a JD and a MS in Education. She has practiced law in Moscow and London and now lives with her husband in Tucson, Arizona.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

HOW A GIRL GROWS UP by Lindsay Rutherford

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HOW A GIRL GROWS UP
by Lindsay Rutherford

I don’t remember who suggests skinny dipping (me?), but none of us have our suits on anymore. At least I don’t. I am twelve, and we are at a friend’s remote lake property for a swim team picnic. It’s after 9 p.m.—many families have left already—and dark, so there’s not much to see, just the occasional fleeting glimmer of something pale beneath the lake’s surface. Flesh, ghost, or fish, it’s hard to tell. It smells like the end of summer—tang of smoke from burnt bluegrass fields, the day’s heat evaporating from boulders and docks, pine needles crushed in dirt beneath bare feet. Naked bodies slip through the water around me like otters.

On shore, our parents shake their heads and laugh and hold towels for when we decide to emerge. Some of the less intrepid swimmers huddle in sweatshirts or wrapped in towels. A bulbous half-moon hangs above and the sky feels massive and close at the same time, like the whole universe is right here with us.

I am giddy with the water’s cool touch on my body, all of my body, the thrill of someone’s leg grazing mine. The crescendo of laughter and voices builds in my chest until I am slithering out of the water, onto an inflatable raft, and standing, clumsily, on its undulating surface. The night air envelops me; my skin erupts in goosebumps. Someone on shore points a flashlight at me.

The white glare catches my dripping pubescent body, transforms me into someone else, or maybe someone more than I am on land. The night sounds—rhythmic lap of waves, occasional mosquito whine, nervous giggles of naked kids, chorus of bewildered parents’ voices—fall silent.

Am I thinking about everyone watching? I don’t think so. Not yet. I raise my arms, triumphant, and cry, “I’m not ashamed of my body!” My voice crashes into the quiet, sending sound waves rippling through the night. For one glorious moment, my body is a beacon, then I dive into the water, mooning the moon before I disappear into the underwater hush and the shock of my own declaration, something I didn’t know how much I wanted until I said it. Later, I will turn each word over in my head, examining them from every angle, searching for hidden meanings. But here, submerged in lake water, the words drift around me, flickering with hope and possibility. Then another thought slips in: what except shame could elicit such a declaration? My words begin to sink toward the dark lake bottom as my body begins to rise.

When I surface, all I hear is laughter. But it’s not the same laughter that lifted me onto the raft. If I were wearing a bra, this laughter would snap the strap. If I were walking to class, this laughter would thrust out its foot and trip me. I become acutely aware of a group of still-clothed swimmers sitting together on shore, away from the parents. They are my age and a couple years older. I can’t look at them, but I feel every one of their eyes on me. Near the raft, heads bob and limbs splash, oblivious, and only now do I notice that everyone in the water is younger than me. I am the only naked one with breasts, the only one with pubic hair, the only one who failed to understand some unspoken rule about which bodies should stay hidden. Even in the cold water, my face burns.

I debate how long I can stay underwater, consider how far it is to the other side of the lake, how long I can swim in the dark by myself. The younger kids begin to get cold or bored and paddle to shore, where chuckling parents wrap them in dry towels.

Submerging myself again, I wonder how much the older boys saw and what they thought. As I float underwater, I still feel their eyes on me, but something has changed. My skin prickles with a feeling I can’t yet recognize, a shapeshifting mixture of pleasure, power, and shame. I kick my legs slowly to feel my body against the water, the water against my body.

Later, after I wait as long as I can, after most people have disappeared into their sleeping bags or gone home, when I am pruny and shivering and alone, I tiptoe out of the water and, as quickly as possible, wrap a towel around the body of which I am not ashamed. Over the next few weeks, moms will stop me on the pool deck or in the locker room and say things like, “Good for you!” and “You tell ‘em!” while not quite meeting my eye. I don’t know how to reply. I want to ask them how they learned to hide their bodies, what other rules I should know. I want to ask how many ways our bodies can surprise us, betray us, thrill us, mislead us. I want to know who makes the rules, what happens when we break them. I want to ask them if women have always worn shame like skin. I want to ask how long I will feel exposed and if it’s worth that moment of standing naked and brave in the spotlight. Please, I want to say, tell me I will always remember the light on my skin, before everything changed, even when my perspective shifts and I can only see her from shore. Isn’t this how a girl grows up—by offering her body to the world?

Lindsay Rutherford is a writer and physical therapist in the Seattle area. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Lunch Ticket, The MacGuffin, Mothers Always Write, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 

DOUBLE FOLDED by Tricia Park         

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DOUBLE FOLDED
by Tricia Park                                                           

Every Korean girl I know freaks out about going back to Korea. Some are yuhaksaeng, the Korean born who study, work, and live abroad. Some are like me, American born and returning to Korea for the first or third or one hundredth time. We represent a range of the diaspora, living in various states of exile.

“I’m so ugly,” we sigh, pulling at our faces as we peer at ourselves, our noses close to the mirrors, examining every pore, every hair, every line, imagined or no.

“Oh, I’m so fat,” we moan, pulling at our arms, our thighs, our middles. “I’m going to get an earful. My mother/my grandmothers/my aunties will be so angry that I’m so fat.”

We count calories. We run for miles. We sweat to YouTube workout videos with cheerful, taut-bodied White girls, bouncing up and down, hopped up on endorphins and hairspray. We do snail mucus face masks. We max out credit cards, buy new clothes we can’t afford, even though we know we’ll need to buy more in Korea because people dress better in Korea than in America. Bring some nice clothes.

But it’s too little too late. This is an exercise in futility. We know there isn’t really anything we can do about it. It’s too late.

◊

I’m about to go live in Korea.

◊

The last time I was in Seoul, my uncle took me to brunch at the Ritz-Carlton. I sat gaping over his shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” He turned around to see.

She could have been eighteen or thirty-eight, it was impossible to tell. Tiny and delicate, her face mummified with huge white bandages, a sling holding up her chin, another thick piece of gauze and metal across the bridge of her nose. At first I thought she was wearing eye shadow until I realized they were bruises. Her eyes were blackened like a prize fighter’s. Her nails were perfectly manicured, a pale blush except for one nail on each hand, encrusted with crystals that sparkled as she daintily held silver tongs, plucking two perfect slices of watermelon from the extravagant buffet table, laden with fruit like jewels, crab legs and roast beef and bacon and eggs and cakes and pastries.

My uncle shrugged, and with a rueful chuckle he said, “It’s shocking, huh? You probably don’t see that in America, do you?” And then, “Welcome to Gangnam.”

◊

The ideal Asian female form and countenance is highly standardized and uniform. We see this ideal across all manner of Asian countries. In a world where medical pilgrimages are made to worship at the temple of manufactured perfection, South Korea is the mecca, the epicenter for cosmetic surgery.

The Gangnam district is one of the most expensive and desirable pieces of real estate in Seoul. The hustle, the urgency, the skyscrapers, are so overwhelming they make New York City seem like a backwater, a country town, slow and lumbering when compared to the sleek, modern efficiency of Seoul. Everyone is well dressed, everyone is on a mission, in a hurry. Everyone seems to be moving as fast as they can.

When you emerge from the immaculate subway station, the first thing you notice are the signs. The giant pictures everywhere, above and below ground. Beautiful Korean girls, large eyes, tiny perfect noses, pale translucent skin, pointy chins, glossy hair. Even I can’t tell one from the other, they are so uniformly lovely. I gaze past these images, at the endless signs up and down the sides of these immense buildings. Storefronts advertise plastic surgery procedures, every window a portal to a prettier face, a better body. A better life, a step up the ladder.

A chance to improve one’s destiny.

◊

When I was a kid, I didn’t have double folded eyelids. If you mention double folds to White people, they look at you like you’re crazy.

“What are you talking about,” they ask as they peer closely at your face. “What fold?”

It never bothered me or even occurred to me to notice it until my best friend mentioned it once. She was Korean, too. “Rub your eyes,” she said, miming a finger over her eyelid. “That way your eyes will look bigger.”

I went home and rubbed my eyes and, wouldn’t you know it, it worked. My eyes seemed to double in size. But the trouble was the folds didn’t hold overnight. When I closed my eyes to sleep, they would vanish and I would wake up to the same eyes, now small. I could no longer ignore that my eyes were ugly. To make things worse, the folds were asymmetrical—sometimes one side would hold and the other wouldn’t, giving my face a lopsided look, like a stroke victim.

I learned all of the tricks. I learned to rub my eyes raw and bright red. I would stand in front of my full-length mirror, stomping my feet when the folds didn’t appear, a panicky feeling rising in me as I saw one round eye emerge and one flat one. The best days were when they folded neatly and stayed; on those days, I felt pretty.

I learned about the glues and the sticks to poke the skin back. I learned to cut tiny crescents of scotch tape and sleep with them on, training my face overnight. No more lost hours, these were literal beauty rests. I still travel with a spool of scotch tape in my makeup bag.

“How prepared you are,” people say backstage when their sheet music falls apart, relieved when I hand them the familiar clear tape.

My eyes are now folded. I don’t know if it’s the result of years of scotch tape and willing them to be rounder.

“You had the sanggapul surgery, right?” my female Korean friends ask me.

“No,” I say, and their eyes widen.

“Oh, how lucky you are.”

At Juilliard, a White boy once asked me: “You’ve had that surgery right, the eye one?”

I was unprepared for how to answer—I knew it wasn’t any of his business, but I was blindsided by his question. Years later, I still think about how I was both ashamed to be asked and relieved that I could honestly say no. No, I hadn’t altered my appearance—at least, not to that extent.

Many of my female Korean friends have had the surgery. In Korea, matchmakers demand pictures of their female clients from when they were in elementary school to verify whether their double folds are authentic. I don’t think they ask the same of the men. It used to be that getting sanggapul suseul was a gift your parents gave you as a high school graduation present, with the understanding that college was the most valuable time. The time when you would meet your future husband, so you should be the prettiest you could be. You can tell when they close their eyes; you can see the deep groove where the incisions were made, often they’re still red. Sometimes, drinking brings up the redness.

A tell-tale mark. The permanent scar that makes their eyes round.

◊

An American surgeon, a White man, David Ralph Millard, developed surgical procedures after the Korean War to make Asian eyes rounder, redistributing cartilage to elevate Asian noses. Soon, this surgery was performed on Korean women, war brides and sex workers, stitching up their eyes to make them more appealing to White men.

Known as an upper eyelid blepharoplasty, this procedure is done to reshape the eyelid to create a double fold. It’s the most common cosmetic procedure done in East Asia and in parts of India. And it’s the third most requested aesthetic procedure amongst Asian Americans. This procedure is also one that can be deemed medically necessary, for example, for heavy eyelids that can block vision.

The earliest recorded documentation of this kind of procedure is from 1895, when an unnamed reporter wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the surgery as it then existed in Japan: “In their efforts to acquire recognition in the civilized world, the Japanese have found their greatest barrier in the unmistakable mark of their Mongolian origin. The prejudice against Mongolians is undeniable, and among the Japs, the slanted eye being its only evidence, the curse is being removed.”

◊

About 50 percent of East Asians do have double folds, we insist, so it’s not necessarily that we want to look more White. It’s that we want to look more pretty. We want to be prettier. We aspire to a “universal beauty.”

But what the hell does that even mean? Pretty according to what? According to whom?

◊

The idea of the innocent vixen-lady in the streets, freak in the sheets is even more exaggerated in Korea. Women are infantilized; just take a look at the K-pop girl groups for a glimpse of this distressing message of hypersexualized prepubescence. And across Asian porn is this idealized figure, this woman-child waif who weeps and wails in a performance of protest as she gives in. The man’s role is to push her, to override her protests. Her repeated denials are not meant to be taken seriously, but instead, she is meant to be fetishized. The message is this: the Asian woman’s body is meant to be raped and plundered, her protestations are flimsy and false, her conquest inevitable. It is the man’s role, nay, responsibility, to command the Asian woman, to take over, to pillage and seize what is rightfully his.

I can’t think of a clearer metaphor for the West’s colonization of the East.

◊

One Sunday, when I was small, my mother took me to church alone. A Korean church, where, of course, the congregation whispered and stared at this new parishioner, this young mother with her small daughter. They speculated that my mother had married a White man, the easiest explanation for both the father’s absence and my light brown hair and round eyes. A White husband would also explain other invented stories in their minds: that my mother was a single mother—unusual even in 1980’s America and a scandal in Korea—and a White man would have likely been a GI during the war and my mother would have been from a poor background, because everyone knows that only prostitutes or poor girls married White soldiers as a way to get out of Korea, to escape poverty or a bad family, or even worse, a broken hymen.

They invented a whole narrative, based on my face, my hair, my skin, my small body.

So, the next Sunday, when my mother returned with my father holding my other hand as we walked into the church, the hostile, suspicious congregants gave a collective sigh of relief.

“Annyeonghaseyo,” they greeted our young family differently this time, with respectful bows, a full ninety degrees from the waist instead of the insolent head bobs of the week before, and warm smiles, the women bustling around my mother and me, the men slapping my father on the shoulder. The fact of my parentage—Korean on both sides—transformed my light hair and round eyes.

“How pretty,” the church parishioners cooed at me, stroking my hair that glinted nearly blond in the light as I stared up at them with my eyes, round as coins. To have a fully Korean baby who looked like she could be part-White: what had been tainted the week before, was, this Sunday, my family’s great good fortune.

◊

In the years following the Korean War, South Korea was swept up in “American fever,” which peaked in the decades of the 1970’s and 80’s, a cultural tsunami that infiltrated and watered the underlying cultural beliefs of the country. The ongoing and substantial US military presence in South Korea gave rise to the idealization of all things American, this belief that America was powerful, wealthy, and modern. Superior.

The brutal years of Japanese occupation, and then the devastation of the Korean War, a “forgotten” war, overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War, a war of containment that the US implemented as its Cold War privilege in its ongoing battle to beat back communism. It left the country literally broken, divided in half. Korea, 4 million dead, war-torn and impoverished, looked to America and Americans as an example to be emulated.

After all, Korea relied completely on America for what remained of its economy. Why would I want to be Korean—small, pathetic, impoverished, sitting bewildered in the rubble of a war-torn country, with nothing to eat or wear, no future to hope for—if I could be American, walking its streets paved of gold?

America as pathological liar.

◊

I wonder if this is where it really began, this elevation of Whiteness in the Korean psyche. Is this a dot on the timeline of the toxic obsession with Westernized beauty that continues to dictate and oppress Korean women? Is this how we learned to despise our own culture and aesthetics in favor of chasing after Whiteness, the all-American beauty? And perhaps it makes sense.

After all, if the land of your birth is also the foundation of your trauma and pain, where the very intergenerational inheritance is one of self-loathing, oppression, and colonization, of course then, it makes sense. I, too, would reject myself in order to strive for the other, so that I might have a fighting chance in a world that I’ve learned, generation after generation, will always forsake me.

◊

If I am perfect enough, good enough, maybe then I don’t have to grieve. Maybe I can be perfect enough that I won’t have to look back. If I’m perfect, if I’m beautiful, then maybe I can stop running, stop chasing so hard.

Maybe then I can finally rest.

In Korean there’s this way of saying, my heart aches too much so I cannot express it. Wordless heartache. A heartache so big that it catches in my throat and I cannot speak it.

When I am in Korea, I feel a peculiar longing, this strange feeling of, oh, this is almost it. This is almost belonging. This is almost beautiful. I am almost home, but not quite.

I think of the ways my parents don’t belong anywhere. The Korea they left no longer exists, philosophically and even geographically, and so there is no way to return.

And what is returning, homecoming, homegoing, really? Is it actually possible?

And I think about the ways America will never be home either, not for me or for my parents. How assimilation is both impossible and entirely too costly.

Because to assimilate would mean to disappear, to sound and look and act so White that our Koreanness would no longer exist. And the material impossibility of this; after all, no amount of plastic surgery will ever make me White.

And I think of all the Korean parents who deliberately never taught their children Korean, fearing that their children might have an accent, might not sound American enough. How we relinquished our identities in the hopes for a better future. And how this created yet another loss, another chasm there, between generations and culture and language, separating all of us.

Tricia Park Author PhotoTricia Park is a concert violinist, podcaster, and writer. She is a music graduate of The Juilliard School and received her MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tricia is a 2020-2021 Fulbright Grant Awardee in Creative Writing and currently resides in Seoul, Korea, where she’s working on a literary and musical project. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and F Newsmagazine. She was also a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Since making her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and has received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is the host and producer of an original podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia is on faculty in the Music Department at the University of Chicago and also maintains a small private violin studio. She has taught creative writing for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa and currently teaches writing privately and for Cleaver Magazine, where she is a Creative Non-Fiction editor. Tricia is also the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. Learn more about Tricia and listen to her podcast at: www.isitrecessyet.com. Listen to Tricia play violin at: https://www.youtube.com/c/triciapark

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE SKULL by Marc Tweed

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE SKULL
by Marc Tweed

Marv.
Teenagers found him washed up on the sand, bloated and bright in his favorite Hawaiian shirt. A crowd gathered and called the police, but not before those who found him took his wallet, wedding ring, car keys. The car itself. Authorities appeared, took pictures, bundled him up and drove his body past the palm trees and liquor stores to the morgue in Oakridge on 31st. There were several other bodies already there so he waited his turn, something he’d always found difficult.

◊

Lorraine.
Around dinner time, a Broward County detective came to Marv and Lorraine’s condo in Plantation with two shoegazing deputies. He told her he wished everyone had their names sewn into their clothing because it would make his job a lot easier. Lorraine just looked at him with her mouth open. It was late when they left. She drank a whole bottle of Lakeridge Southern White and lay on the couch staring at the ceiling until daybreak, when she loaded herself and another bottle of Lakeridge Southern White into the Volvo. She transported what tears she could muster to the beach and spent an entire day rusting in the sun next to an ocean she couldn’t stop thinking briefly, fatally contained Marv. She sat there cradling her grief like a baby, careful not to break it or fray its edges as it was suddenly and without ceremony her only possession of any consequence.

She rocked gently back and forth, ignoring passersby, recalling certain details about her husband, a big, booming man in flip-flops born in Romance, Arkansas. She made a list in the air with some whispering. He loved to golf. He was kind to animals and children. He could drain a double gin & tonic fast. He was impatient. He served in the Coast Guard and had three missing fingers, as well as a human skull he found in an abandoned rowboat and kept for himself. She spoke the empty platitudes and idioms he’d liked best. Quick as a whip. All that jazz. Drunk as a skunk. Life isn’t always fair. Big deal, champ.

And this: he’d taken special interest in their new neighbors, a mother and son from Indonesia with whom they shared a wall. A very special interest and a very thin wall. She picked up several more bottles of Lakeridge Southern White on the way home from the beach. She bought a whole case, which is twelve bottles.

◊

Putri.
She had a list of complaints and spit them one-by-one into the phone at her hunched mother listening in Bali. Uh huh, her mother said.

The boy will only eat food that has been deep fried. He grows sullen if there isn’t anything deep fried close at hand for him to devour. America is ruining him. He is only age thirteen. He is inflating like a balloon. And sugar. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his breathing becomes heavy with little exertion. We are having disagreements over food and video games and school.

Silence on the phone.

He is failing school, Mom.

Just breathing.

I told you about Marv already. He’s dead, it was on the news. Before that, he was helping and there was some hope, but now Marv has disappeared just like Mauli’s father—well, he drowned—and there does not seem to be any more hope. What Marv would do; he would take Mauli on walks. To get his heartbeat up. And he would pay him one quarter for every block. And he would talk to me. And his wife hates me. And I’m scared to tell Mauli he’s gone.

Uh huh. Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Putri’s mother’s voice dipped to its lowest possible octave.

◊

Lorraine.
The teenagers took the Cutlass on a lengthy joyride, and she had to retrieve it from an impound lot on the edge of Pine Island Ridge. The attendant, too animated for such a quiet place, looked at Lorraine with vast, watery eyes. He’d seen it on the evening news. That man your husband sounded nice, I like the way they say about him, just a nice guy all over. He was really sorry, sincerely sorry. His wife wasn’t dead, but his parents were, he offered. He said they were murdered right in front of him when he was only seven. He made a stabbing motion with an empty hand. The teenagers had slashed the seats and ceiling of the Cutlass, which Lorraine now considered an ironic name for this particular car.

◊

Putri.
Before she could tell him, a note was slipped under their door.

Perhaps you’ve heard Marv has drowned is gone. Whatever agreement you had is now null and void. Please return any belongings he loaned you by leaving them outside the garage. Your neighbor, Lorraine. Mauli stood in the foyer gripping the note with both of his thick hands and began to sob.

Putri worried at how depressed, how angry the boy had been since Marv didn’t show up Friday night to take him to dinner as promised. She worried about the secret time in his room. She worried about the fact that he was a teenager, a huge sullen teenager with no friends and a thick accent. She worried even more when she checked on him in the middle of the night and found him snoring in the glow of his night light, holding the skull Marv gave him to his chest, his eyelids open, his eyes rolled back in his head.

◊

Lorraine.
Lorraine’s shopping list was brief and sundry: onion rings, lube, cough syrup with codeine, a Komodo dragon. She veered onto 842 West from Plantation toward the shopping centers of Fort Lauderdale, reveling in a claptrap serenade: air conditioner drone, ice in her gin & tonic as castanets. She shook her head to the feral rhythm, the landscape a swerving, indistinct blur; a whoosh of charcoal pavement decorated with cerulean smears of rippled sky.

She looked at the coupon. 20% off select reptiles. The passenger seat occupied by several empty cans of gold spray paint. She had a lot of spray paint on her face, around her mouth. She rolled down her window and shouted something incoherent to even her at a passing car. Its driver frowned, as did she.

She turned on the radio full blast. Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue: The deafening distorted squeal was just a whisper to her. Tell me no secrets, tell me some lies. Give me no reasons, give me alibis. Tell me you love me and don’t let me cry. Say anything but don’t say goodbye. She ran her fingers through her loosening perm, ripping roots, and opened her mouth wide in a full-throttle yawn that turned almost seamlessly into a deafening scream.

Marv had been dead for thirteen days. Thirteen days since he’d waded into the Atlantic. She remembered the garish Hawaiian shirt and a blank look when he left the condo. She imagined his face framed in seaweed, his lungs spilling their last effervescent treasures, his body softly sinking to the ocean floor. She took a big sip of her drink. Fort Lauderdale loomed on the horizon. The Cutlass still reeked of weed and musky cologne. Long strips of ceiling fabric billowed in the wind, occasionally touching her face, covering her eyes. Oh Marv, Lorraine muttered sorely brushing it away as she steered unevenly past Galaxy Mart, Firewood City, Pump & Go, Sandy’s Place Too.

The night Marv drowned, the deputy had said, We’ll do everything we can to help you, ma’am. We know you’re feelin’ pretty bad, and I would, too. Do you have a friend or neighbor that can come sit with you? Neighbor. Lorraine frowned bitterly at the word and the thought of Putri. She thought of the day Putri moved in, not wasting any time sucking up to Marv. In her tiny white shorts and halter top, prancing shoeless in the kitchen, showing speechless, grinning Marv how to dance the Topeng while Lorraine and Putri’s son Mauliwarmadewa stared unhappily at each other over bowls of melting sherbet.

◊

Putri.
She stretched out on her bed in the afternoon, thinking of Marv, imagining him walking out of the ocean, covered in seaweed, mouthing words she almost knew as the ocean receded behind him. She fell asleep that way, and her dream carried the vision forward: Marv taking her by the waist, kissing her neck, suggesting with his soft brown eyes that she might consider loving him—at least consider it—as he guides her into the waves, under the ocean surface. Putri wanted to say that she had done more than consider it, but the words came out in a clump of oblong bubbles: Lorraine.

She woke and felt a presence, and the presence was her son. He was in the hallway, just outside her bedroom, where she sat up, squinting. He was moving in sweeping gestures. He was dancing? Mauli? What are you doing, please? Why are you awake? She rose and went to embrace him, but he shimmied away into his room and locked his door behind him.

◊

Lorraine
About five minutes from downtown, a highway patrol car pulled her over. Lorraine ducked and drained her gin and tonic, watching the officer in the side mirror as he approached, muttering into the radio clipped to his stiff blue shirt. She attempted a sweet smile and rolled down her window. What did I do, officer, she slurred.

Do you remember me? He adjusted the angle of his broad-brimmed hat. His teeth were huge. She felt her scalp crawl. With pursed, spray-painted lips, she shook her head and fidgeted with the tortoise shell clip in her hair. She couldn’t remember meeting him, but there had been so many policemen in such a short amount of time.

Ma’am, I was at your house three days ago. Your neighbor called us for the noise? The pounding on the wall and cursing?

Lorraine nodded slowly.

You were swerving pretty good back there. Can you please step out of the car?

What did I do?

You’re driving recklessly, endangering yourself and other motorists. We’ve had several complaints. Let’s step out of the car, okay? You got spray paint all around your face, you a huffer? Have you been drinking?

Of course not, it’s only one in the afternoon, Lorraine spat, her demeanor turning sour. She struggled out of her seat belt and, once she was out of the car, rushed past the officer and ran clumsily down the side of the highway until she collapsed in a bawling heap. As the officer carried her to his cruiser, she stared into the cloudless sky, her head rolling limp from side to side like a rag doll’s. The patrolman spoke into his shoulder radio as Lorraine sat handcuffed in the backseat of his cruiser. She squinted out the window into the sun, let its enormous glare swallow her whole, let herself float briefly, blissfully into a blinding white vacuum as they hummed down the highway.

◊

Putri.
She told her mother the truth about her arrangement with Marv, about the condo, the skull. Her mother wanted to know where she’d met him, and Putri surprised herself by admitting that Marv had contacted her on the internet. There was silence. And that is how I am in Florida, Mother, not working.

Uhh nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Her mother’s voice found the bottom of the well.

◊

Lorraine.
At the Broward County jail, Lorraine was issued a thin, scratchy sheet and an outfit like she’d seen on TV. She scrubbed her face hard over a sink. There were too many women in her cell so she’d have to sleep on the floor. She curled up next to a radiator and watched a group of unpleasant women play cards and roll their eyes at each other. She wondered who else among them had been awake for five days straight. The TV was on but nobody was watching. Something about a new kind of microwave oven: The convenience will simply. Blow. Your. Mind. The speed is incredible. And listen to that … total silence. See? Total silence! The studio audience exploded.

There was an argument between several of the women playing cards, and Lorraine asked them to speak more softly. A burly one with matted hair and bloodshot eyes struggled to her feet and loudly explained that she’d jam a pipe up Lorraine’s ass if she didn’t shut the fuck up that instant. Lorraine shut the fuck up. She retreated back to her blanket by the radiator and lay there, watching the last bloodless remains of daylight struggle through the milky-filmed window of the jail cell, angry at Marv for the shabby circumstances she found herself in. The Lakeridge Southern White and gin & tonics and gold spray paint had worn off completely. Her head throbbed. She pulled the sheet over her face and considered how wide-open her eyes were, how cavernous her expression likely looked. She felt the crazy electricity that comes with days upon days of vigilance, of keeping your eyes wide as saucers, anticipating every single molecular vibration and total catastrophe, the world coiled at the ready like a pit viper.

◊

Putri.
She took Mauli to the beach at night. They drove there in the car that would be repossessed. The car payments his wife would find out about if she hadn’t already. They went to see the place Marv died. They sat in the sand and cried. They had come a long way to be with Marv. She’d done some things for Marv, physical things that didn’t make sense to her. But over time something had begun to tug at every corner and curve of her, a little at first, then more. A fondness and a warmth and something else. But the plan was now dashed, as they say. Mauli’s head fell and his shoulders shook, silhouetted by bright moonlight.

When they returned home, she sat outside on the front stoop after the boy went in to sulk or sleep in his room. She heard someone call out for their cat across the lake behind the condo. She saw a tiny lizard scamper up a drain pipe next to the garage. It stopped here and there to cock its head at something only it could see. It went up, it went down. It had nothing in mind or everything at once. Maybe it just liked the feeling of its tiny claws scraping the painted metal of the drain. Maybe its son or daughter spent too much time cradling a stranger’s skull. Maybe it had just gone too long without sleep.

◊

Lorraine.
Someone sat down nearby and touched her hip.

I’m Shari. There’s no cause for concern.

Lorraine was extremely concerned.

All you need to do here is let it go, tell someone. See, I have done some unthinkable things.

She poked her head out. Shari was long and tough, buck teeth shining in the stripe of early-morning light the triple-pane window allowed. She had long, dirty hair and little wire-rimmed glasses. Lorraine sat up. So my husband always had this skull, skull of a little girl he thought. And he found it in a rowboat. He was in the National Guard and had missing fingers. I’m not sure, but I think he paid someone, a woman from Bali, to come live next door to us. And he spends…spent a lot of time with him, this woman’s son.

Shari said, Okay?

And then my husband, he died. I think he took his own life. And I don’t know if it was out of guilt or what. But I’m going to figure out how this bloodsucker got ahold of him.

Shari, sitting cross-legged, casting a thin shadow against the yellow-painted cinder block wall, asked, And what exactly are you going to do? 

Lorraine had no time to answer that question, as the sergeant came to inform her she was to be released immediately. She looked at the big metal clock above the lunch table. The place that sold reptiles opened in twenty minutes, and it just happened to be only two blocks away.

◊

Putri.
She and Mauli sat on the sofa looking away from each other. On the coffee table was the skull Marv gave him. Putri wanted nothing to do with it. But then again it was a gift from Marv, and Marv had paid for a lot of things over the last six months. There was a sound coming from the air duct high on the wall for the last day or so. The vent cover was off. It was a wheezing sound and scratching, then almost a hissing. And the room smelled foul. If Marv were alive she would call him, let it ring five times then hang up. He would use his key, and she would ask him to see what’s wrong, get on a ladder and poke around with a golf club. With Marv dead, they just sat silent until dinner and its necessary arguments began. Then the foul odor and hissing would be the least of her worries, at least she assumed so.

Marc Tweed’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in NOON Annual, New World Writing, The Normal School, Juked, X-RAY, and more. Marc has recently completed a collection of short stories. He lives in North Seattle, USA and also creates paintings, drawings, and music. www.marctweed.com

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LOAVES by Lizzy Lemieux

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

LOAVES
by Lizzy Lemieux

My daughter tells me her dream while I pack her lunchbox. What a terrifying nightmare! I say and kiss the top of her head. She narrows her eyes. Mom, she says, It was not a nightmare. It was a dream. She smiles, showing off two lost teeth.

I do not correct her. Even though it is polite, when you dream up terrible things, to pretend that they are unwanted. But she is still learning, still puzzling over the sound an ‘o’ makes. When is it a short exhale? When is it a sharp howl? I add a sticky note to her lunch and make myself proud. Motherhood is contained in small gestures. Later, I get the call. My daughter has decided today the ‘o’ makes the howling sound.

When I arrive at her school, the teacher says, Your daughter is crying because she cannot read the sticky note in her lunchbox. She pronounces love like loaves of bread. I bristle. She is very fragile, I say. I collect my daughter from the timeout corner.

As we are leaving, the teacher grabs my arm and says, I’m worried about her dream. I say, It was just a nightmare. No, the teacher says, It was a dream.

I drive to a department store. What are we doing here? asks my daughter. I maneuver the minivan into a parking space. We are shopping for a solution, but I just say, Shopping. Inside, I let her ride in the cart’s basket and she pokes her fingers through the holes. Which do you prefer? I hold up two nightlights. One is pink and pig-shaped. The other is a white rabbit. Bunny, my daughter decides. I agree.

Look what Mom bought me! my daughter shouts, at home, holding the gifted light out to my husband. He takes it, studying the high gloss packaging and the color-coated cardboard, and hands it back. It’s my money, he says, Mom did a very nice job picking it out. My daughter wraps her arms around his legs and says, Thank you! Thank you!

Then she plants herself in the middle of the kitchen and holds Bunny at eye level. They stare at each other, and she lisps words I cannot understand. Sometimes, she falls silent so that Bunny may respond. I want to sit with her and speak her language, as I had imagined we would commune before she was born, but I sense that Bunny holds answers which I do not. This must be how she feels when I spell secrets to my husband. I-c-e-c-r-e-a-m. B-e-d-r-o-o-m.

Eventually, she forgets the novelty and leaves the nightlight on the hardwood floor. When I tuck her in for the night, I pull it from the inside of my bathrobe, like a conjurer performing a trick. Look who’s back! I say. She yawns, waves lazily, and drifts off to sleep. I leave Bunny in the electrical socket. Light radiates from his nose.

I had the dream again! my daughter tells me on our way to school. Everyone was burning! she announces. All my teachers and all my friends! With each word, air escapes from the spaces her teeth left behind, filling our car with morning breath and a low whistle. She continues, My best friend Hannah said she saw the light, so that’s where I put her. Now that she is dead, she is going to live with us. With each detail, my daughter defeats me. Bunny was meant to soak up her nightmares like a sponge, leaving me an untroubled child, the clean surface I was promised.

I swerve to the side of the road and turn around to face her. Do not tell Hannah about your dream, I say. The fire would frighten her. Not everyone is as brave as you. My daughter laughs. Don’t worry Mom, she says, I won’t tell her. But I do not trust my daughter’s judgment. She is a child without pity. Or, she is without pity because she is a child. Either way, I cannot stop myself. I clean the kitchen. I make her bed. I launder her clothes. I worry.

The phone rings. My finger hovers over ‘accept call’, the sound echoing in our high ceilings. I am a brave woman. I answer. I say, Hello, who’s calling please? and I am glad, at first, that I do not hear my daughter howling. Instead, I hear the cries of a dozen children. I’ll be right there, I say, thinking the teacher must be on the other side, although she has not spoken since I picked up.

Blue mats are spread out on the kindergarten floor. The children have tired of screaming and instead rest their surprising weight on the ground. Some snore. My daughter is wide awake, sitting upright in the corner. When she sees me, she averts her eyes, burying them into her knees which pulls close to her chest. She is scared. She has disobeyed.

I go to her, crouch down, stroke her hair, do not ask what happened because I already know. What could scare them more than death? Most of them are so young they have not encountered it. Maybe they have squashed a beetle. Maybe the cat has brought in a mouse.

My daughter clings to me as I carry her out of the classroom, and I allow it, because she is only now learning that there are things our family can stomach that other people can’t. Tragedy is our common trait. I blame my husband. He is an oncologist who specializes in a rare form of cancer. He makes a lot of money off dying people, which makes death seem advantageous, joyous even. Although he would blame me, I’m sure.

In the hallway, we pass a weeping mother speaking softly to the principal. I eavesdrop. I gather the story. A child gone missing in the night. No windows left open. No doors unlocked. You never think it will happen to you, says the mother, dabbing tears with her shirtsleeve. This is how I confirm my fear; Hannah is gone.

I have no words. As we drive home, my daughter is the one who breaks the silence. I didn’t tell Hannah, she says, All you told me was not to tell Hannah, and she wasn’t even there today. This is true. So I forgive her and ask, Where is Hannah? even though I do not want to know. My daughter chews her lip. When we arrive home, we sit in the garage for a long while. Finally, my daughter offers an answer or at least, an action. Upstairs, she says. So we go upstairs.

She disappears to her room without me telling her. In this way, she is a good child. She knows when she needs to be punished. I drift to the backyard. I smoke a cigarette, a habit I kicked before I had kids because it was classless and repulsive, and which I picked up again for the same reasons. Sometime later, she pads her way down the stairs and peeks around the corner. Yes? I say, inviting her over. An object is held behind her back. Here, she says, placing it in my lap. It’s Bunny.

Your daughter did a very bad thing today, I tell my husband at the dinner table. He looks down at her and cocks his head to one side, silently asking our child if I am lying. Well, he says, I’m enjoying my meal. We will talk about this after. But we never do.

In bed, my husband says he’s sorry. He tells me, Sometimes I have to limit the day’s amount of sadness, and I nod, Boundaries are important. He is not a talkative man. His mouth is a straight line. I removed a patient from life support today, he tells me. I fondle his earlobe. You pulled the plug, I muse, That must be a hard decision. He closes his eyes, nudging my hand with his cheek, resting his face in my palm. It was sad, he tells me, But it was easy.

Tonight, I sleep with Bunny on my nightstand, and when I wake in the middle of the night he is the first thing I see. He has circular eyes and an X-shaped mouth, like a stitch sewing shut a wound. There is something strange about his milk-white body, how the usually luminous plastic has dulled. I flip him face down and shut my eyes but cannot shake the image of the metal prongs affixed to the back of his head, like the tines of a fork in soft meat.

I give in. I get up. I kneel down at the wall, feel blindly for the socket, and plug him in. Light floods his face like water fills a footprint. Then, the thread of his mouth comes loose, opening wide. I peer inside. It is like a dark tunnel. It extends so far backward that it collapses into a single point.

And from this blackness emerges a pinprick of light, like an eye floater. I rub my eyes with fists. The bright white circle grows larger. Now, it is the size of a match head. Now it is the size of a cheerio. Now, a wedding band. Now, a bottle cap. Now, a clementine. A coaster. A compact disk. A pancake.

I jerk away for fear I might be absorbed or go sunblind. The light grows and grows. Until it is no longer circular. Until it sprouts appendages. Until it takes the shape of a six-year-old girl. I know before the face forms that it is Hannah.

With a soft thud, she steps out of the mouth and lands on my carpet. I am kneeling and she is standing and so we are around the same height. Her torso is flesh. Her head is flesh. When she reaches out to see if I’m real, I feel her hands, and they too are flesh, mushy, fat, and balmy. I cover my mouth but cannot stifle the scream.

I yank Bunny from his socket. The light goes out. And so does Hannah.

My husband lifts his head, searching for the sound.

Night terrors, I explain, and crawl back into bed.

Morning beats on slowly. I watch my husband stir awake. The wrinkles around his mouth return first, then the ones on his forehead. The bags under his eyes fill up, like Michelin tires, with exhaustion. Of course, I get up first. I make breakfast. He eats and is gone before I rouse our daughter. I move to lunch making. No sticky notes. Just peanut butter and Wonder Bread and fluff.

I am glad when I drop my daughter off at school. We are lucky they let her return at all. I count my blessings. An empty house, erotic fiction. I chain smoke. I hide the remains. I have dug dozens of pits in the backyard that hide orange butts and several with other substances. Those holes are deeper.

Today I do not expect a call. I don one of my husband’s oversized undershirts, with armpits that smell like men’s deodorant. I lounge in bed. I pull the duvet over my head. I read a woman’s magazine. Bunny still sits where I left him, underneath the outlet. I ignore him successfully for half an hour. Then, I cannot resist. I get up. I go over. I plug him in. Legs crossed, as if I am meditating, I wait for Hannah.

This time, when she asks where she is, I have an answer. My house, I say. She looks around. It’s big. Where I live now is not so big. She begins to cry, tears tinged like ash, which she catches by pressing her hands to her cheeks and crushing the murky droplets like beetles.

I lean in, envelop her in a hug I have perfected as a mother. The cotton of my shoulder absorbs her sobs as I rub her back, remembering this same methodical motion drew her out of the nightlight and landed her here in my bedroom. She sniffs and says, You smell like my dad. Would you like something to eat? I ask. She smiles and her face glows orange, like a finger held against the warm, vibrating surface of a flashlight.

Do you know how I got here? she asks, sitting at the kitchen island. I set a glass of chocolate milk in front of her. It clinks on the granite countertop. Drink up, I say. She vanishes the liquid and then inhales, suctioning the empty cup to her face. Stop that, I say, grabbing it by its plastic bottom and pulling it off with a pop. You’ll leave a ring around your mouth. She shrugs. Does it matter?

I have no answers for Hannah but am working on several for myself. My daughter was scared. It was unintentional. Already, I am making excuses for her. I remind myself this make-believe danger has tangible consequences.

The microwave flashes half past one. Hop in the car, I tell Hannah, We’re late to pick up my daughter. But we do not make it to the minivan. Hannah is stopped by the threshold. She goes through the motions of walking but only manages to kick her legs out faster, as if riding a treadmill while the belt picks up speed.

I weigh my options. I tsk, tsk, tsk, in contemplation. Upstairs, Bunny still sits in his socket. I hate to do this, I tell him, But I cannot take any more disasters. I wish my husband was here because I do not limit my sadness and it is not easy when I pull the plug. Bunny dulls. Circular eyes stare blankly ahead. Is she inside you? I ask, already certain that she is. My daughter has always been gifted. Before I pocket him and Hannah, I hold his four-inch face up to mine. Tell her I’m sorry.

The longer my daughter stays at school the greater the chance of calamity. I am a good driver. I take stretches of road at seventy miles per hour. I put on the radio to revel in tragedies that eclipse mine. An oil spill in Lake Erie. A series of three celebrity suicides. A civil war in a country the US does not recognize as legitimate. All these to distract from signs tacked up to every telephone pole. Have you seen our Hannah?

I drive home slowly, pointing each one out to my daughter. Count them, I tell her, Count how much they miss their child. Don’t you see the consequences of your actions? My daughter counts. One, two, five, twenty. She has a good grasp of numbers. Maybe she will be a mathematician. On thirty-three her lip begins to tremble and I ready myself for a flood, securing hazardous items, seeking higher ground. How, she sobs, How, How, How, How many would you put up for me? I do not have a definitive answer. I do not know the ratio of signage to loss.

At home, I plug Bunny in, rub his nose, and will Hannah into existence again. My daughter squeezes her in a hug. When she is finished with sentimentality, she announces she is hungry. I make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut diagonally, and serve them on plastic dishware.

Now can we talk about it? I ask my husband before bed. He massages his bagged eyes with his ring fingers and says, I bet this is the rarest condition in the world. He searches his nightstand. Leaves the sex dice but takes the stethoscope. The girls are playing dress-up. I gave Hannah all my long skirts, even the sarong I bought for the Bahamas. Leave them be, I tell him, Her heart can wait. He’s already inserted the eartips, he must listen to something. I unbutton my blouse, reveal my clavicle, my breast bone, my bra, so he can press the cold metal bell to my skin and diagnose my heart murmur for the millionth time. What is it saying? I ask. He retracts, winds the tubing in wide circles and returns the instrument to the drawer. He says, It’s saying no.

Out of fear that the missing person posters might have multiplied overnight, I keep my daughter home from school. To entertain your guest, I explain, doling out playdough and washable paints. On slabs of blank paper, Hannah and my daughter finger paint pictures. Hannah draws a yellow crescent. My daughter, a yellow disc. That does not look like the sun, my daughter critiques. I know, says Hannah, This is the moon. My daughter dips her index finger into yellow and turns the half-circle full. There, she says, I fixed it.

Hannah begins to cry.

I shut myself in the living room to watch subtitled television, as if I can keep Hannah’s disappearance from even herself.

The newscaster announces a vigil. Tapered candles to be provided. Hannah’s parents stand on screen. Her mother fidgets with her wedding band, working it on and off her pale finger. At one point, she drops it, its hollow toll echoing on camera. When her husband bends down, his hand feeling blindly for precious metal, she snaps, Leave it, and the broadcast cuts. I touch my own rings. Not the ones we exchanged vows with. My husband bought these later, after graduating med school, and I feel a pang for the original.

The door rattles, and I investigate. My daughter’s eye sits in the keyhole. What are you doing? I demand, A shut door means a private room. I breathe deep. Remember she does not know love from loaves. How could she comprehend their grief as it scrolled across the screen? As if to prove me wrong, my daughter wonders, Does this mean Hannah has to leave? My heart swells. A tender bruise. She is brighter than I thought. These things take time, I tell her, which makes her happy. She darts off, and I no longer want for my wedding ring. Just a cigarette.

On the stoop, I revise my theory: besides the rush of nicotine, what I like about smoking is its meditative quality. Forced deep breathing. Thinking in repetitive pairs, In and Out, In and Out. Letting myself gather and assess. It is like in sleep when we solidify all that is significant and discard the junk. My daughter slept so deeply her dreams calcified, a bone among soft tissue. I grind the butt into the ground.

Tonight is moonless. I drive to the community park. Tomato plants climb chicken-wire and koi swim counterclockwise in their ponds. Those mourning Hannah amass in front of the gazebo, holding candles which they flame by passing a lighter like at a concert. Some of the mothers carry meager gifts: lasagnas, casseroles, hams. I hold my candle with both hands.

On stage, a portrait of Hannah sags under the weight of floral wreaths. Her parents shuffle towards it, wearing slippers instead of shoes. The crowd murmurs. I bow my head and channel my husband, how he soaks up sadness without spectacle. It is his practice, listening without feeling too deeply.

Please come forward if you have any information, finishes her father.

We queue to present our condolences. The mother in front of me brought a lasagna. The mother in front of her, a casserole. My candle still burns in my hands. Thank you for your thoughtfulness, says Hannah’s father, relieving the woman at the front of the line of her ham. It is the least I could do, she tells him, honestly. The way Hannah’s father shoulders the ham, it appears he is holding a baby in a football hold. He looks so lonely.

I know why my daughter brought Hannah into our world. It is the same reason I brought her into this one. I was lonely. I had a secret I needed to share. I head home, to my child. The light of my life. The porchlight is left on, as I requested.

It’s well past my daughter’s bedtime. I sneak upstairs and peer through the crack in her door, casting a pillar of light onto her shag carpeting. There is my daughter, and there is Hannah, asleep like spoons, a shape my husband and I will form later that night. I know we are all holding onto something, but my daughter is simply too young to hold so fast.

That is for the adults to do. My husband has left a note on my pillow. He has an early shift at the hospital but wants me to know all is forgiven. He does not believe in anger for it has no healing properties. I stare at Bunny’s luminous face. When I exhaust sleeping positions, I pace. It must be done, I decide. The second time is easier than the first. I do not apologize, just pull. Bunny separates easily from the wall, his metal prongs warm to the touch.

Breakfast is hard-boiled eggs, prepackaged. I cannot bear boiling water or hot surfaces. On TV, new disasters are announced every minute, and I do not keep them to myself. How can a fairy sink if they have wings? asks my daughter. A ferry is a kind of boat, I explain. Where’s Hannah? she asks, and I place Bunny on her plate like a leftover yoke. I say, It’s time for Hannah to go home.

I make my daughter carry Bunny with two hands while I ring the doorbell. Careful, I say and she pets his furless face with her thumb. Before the door unlatches, we hear the rustle of slippers, the clink of fork to plate. Hannah’s father answers with a mouthful of ham and eggs. His wife appears behind him, resting her chin on his shoulder to peer out at us. Her wedding ring has returned. She fiddles soundlessly, on and off, on and off. Have you found our Hannah? she asks, the words dry in her mouth, as if she has been reciting this question in her sleep. My daughter holds Bunny out towards them, as an offering. Yes, she says, Here she is.

Lizzy Lemieux recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied English. Her work can be found in the Best New Poets of 2018, The Massachusettes Review, and Penn Review.

 

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

Shelter by Esther Ra

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Shelter
by Esther Ra

Every evening before we climb into the car,
I tap the hood politely, and wait for the street cats

to leap out underneath—gray cloudbursts of mist-
matted fur, supple flash of muscle and sinew.

Even in the winter, slices of sunlight
butter the walls, caress the faceless

square windows. Last night I dreamed
about laughing with someone I missed,

the cold trickle of fear when I felt myself
stirring awake. In English class, my student

signs his letters to his mother with
—softly, your son— and I don’t attempt to

correct him. The cats are screaming
hoarsely in the night, so crazed with joy

in each other’s thin warmth, they long
for the whole world to know.

If only everything could be a little bit
softer. The snow falls soundless

in the golden light, blurring every edge
to a gently rubbed-out mistake.

Esther Ra is the author of book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018) and the founding editor of The Underwater Railroad, a literary reunification project. Her work has also been published in Boulevard, Rattle, The Rumpus, and Border Crossing, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize and the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. In writing, as in life, she is deeply interested in the quiet beauty of the ordinary. (www.estherhaelanra.com)

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SMALL CONSOLATION by Diana Rickard

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SMALL CONSOLATION
by Diana Rickard

you make an offering to posterity 

ghastly aesthetic cauterizes the virile 

there is a corniness to the late wave and you absorb 

because of resemblance 

because of what drifts 

and sifts through the sieve 

all of it 

you fought and then you learned and then used humor to veil your motives 

the prosaic shame of waiting, a penny dreadful of anticipation 

in half-hearted syntax you question risk 

a lilac apple flecked with gold 

the edifying volume that is always put off, and the cuteness of everyone’s pets 

nostalgic for an attention span, you are moved by a hesitant apology 

the inbox contains an update. a question about snacks. a second confirmation 

you recognize a silhouette on the toilet 

familiar like that dull bonding when a celebrity dies 

you love the bottle but hate the fragrance 

merely balancing, on coiled spine 

porous and commanding, generous and small 

before you a darkening and amputated image  

a woman falters then takes the stage 

tipping on a generation, glad for the notebook  

your robust materialism made from mutant fascination 

a cultural deformity  

decaying fort 

a doll that always says no 

Diana Rickard is a poet and true-crime scholar. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines. Her next book, on long-form documentaries, is forthcoming from NYU Press.

 

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg

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THE RECKONING
by Emily Steinberg

The Reckoning is a 22-page full-color visual narrative, that illustrates our planet’s stark environmental crisis on a visceral gut level in words and images. It explores how our sustained misuse of natural resources is intertwined and connected, on micro and macro levels, impacting everything from climate change to how the Covid 19 Virus was transmitted from animals to humans. It imagines how we can do better.

The Reckoning, supported by a grant from The Studio for Sustainability and Social Action, Penn State University, was created in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption and Production.

—Emily Steinberg

Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by Christine Muller

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ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
by Christine Muller

They sat the way they wished they could always sit: together, with wine at their fingertips, a cooling breeze in the air, and the fading day’s light sparkling like magic across the terrace’s gold fixtures. Cleopatra told a story.

“He was so funny, you know. Well, of course you know, you knew him. This one time, he told me, he said to me, he said, ‘Hey, Clea: workin’ hard or hardly workin’?’ Oh, so funny. Too funny.”

“That’s—kind of funny, I guess.” Antony took another sip from his cup.

“And so wise. This other time he said to me, ‘Clea, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ So true, you know? So wise.”

“Mm.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh. Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“Are you OK? You seem, I don’t know…bored.”

“I’m not bored. It’s just—”

“What?”

“I just don’t know what you ever saw in him.”

“What I saw in him?”

Antony was undeterred. “Yeah, I mean—he wasn’t much to look at. Like, literally. Just by proportions. Next to other people he looked like he was drawn to scale. Small guy, is all I’m saying.”

“He was Julius fucking Caesar, Marc. Demolished Gaul? Crossed the Rubicon? Came, saw, conquered? Jesus Christ.”

“Who?”

“Look. If you’re jealous… Jules is dead. He’s gone. You are all I see and all I want. You have nothing to worry about. It’s just you and me against the world. Ride or die. You and me.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

They both smiled then pulled together for a kiss, Cleopatra slowly lifting her chin for a tender, playful peck against Antony’s forehead while he barreled forward, straight for the mouth that was rising half an inch higher than his aim. The unexpected impact with her lower jaw crushed his lips against his teeth.

“Um, OK,” said Cleopatra, slightly sobered. “So, um, what do we know about what they’ll do next?”

“Who, the Romans?”

“No, the Nile United Club Team. I hear their top defender is up for transfer.”

“What?”

“Yes, the Romans.” Cleopatra paused to stay focused. “What have you heard about their next move? What’s that upstart insecure little bastard Octavian up to?”

“I mean, he’s got a lot of ships. I don’t think he’s messing around.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“You. This. The Mediterranean.”

“Right, but access for trade with Egypt? Or total control? Like, am I a partner who just needs to submit to better terms? Or am I so 46 B.C. and he’s totally over it?”

“I think he’s over it. I think this, you—he wants this done.”

They looked at each other, this time with the same impulses, the same intentions. Anger. Sadness. Resolution.

“Well, I’m not done.”

“I know you’re not. That’s what I love about you. That’s why I’m here for it.”

“And that’s what I love about you.”

“Ride or die?”

“Ride or die.”

On the horizon, a cluster of ships’ masts crowded out the setting sun. In the garden, an asp slipped back into the dusk shadows.

Christine Muller grew up at the South Jersey Shore and currently lives in the Philadelphia suburbs. She earned a BA in History and Psychology and an MA in English at Villanova University, as well as a PhD in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. In her academic life, she has published cultural analyses of contemporary US film, television, and literature. In her emerging fictional life, she is interested in stories that explore the blurred boundaries between history and hearsay.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

NIGHT VISION by Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross

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NIGHT VISION
by Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross

They were cooling off in Amanda’s pool—three women submerged to their necks. With the moon behind them and the stringed lights on Amanda’s porch ungenerous in their glow, Amanda’s and Louise’s faces were silhouettes. Toni had the most unfortunate position, facing the moon. Light beaded her skin like sweat as she listened to Amanda talk about whether or not she should break up with Boone, whom they’d referred to for months as The Hot Chiropractor, even after Amanda had started dating him.

The problem with Boone was that he was boring. “When he talks, my mind drifts,” Amanda said. “I try to focus, but it’s like trying to listen to my CPA, or to Miss Engler, my PreCalc teacher back in high school. I actually had to dig my nails into my arm to stop myself from falling asleep in her class. It was a first-thing-in-the-morning class, but still: there was something about her voice, droning like a bee, like the waah-waah grown-ups in the Charlie Brown specials. I would leave class with these gouges in my arm.”

As the married one, Toni felt her life was shorter somehow than her friends’ lives. She pictured herself as a squat succulent surrounded by ivies trailing their long, glossy stems all over everything. Amanda’s and Louise’s years were broken into so many different chunks demarcated by who they were involved with at the time. Toni had only had one “relationship” before Nick, and that had hardly lasted a year, not to mention it was so long ago, and she’d been so young, that it didn’t count in the way that her friends’ adult relationships counted.

“Does it really matter that Boone is boring?” Louise said. “I mean, he’s good-looking. And he’s good in bed, right?”

In the dim light, Amanda’s blush was only visible because she pressed her hands against her cheeks. In Toni’s opinion, Amanda could have been a hand model. Her fingers were long and tendrilly and looked like something one would sculpt. Amanda said, “It’s fine when he isn’t talking.”

“There are skills to deal with boring people,” Louise said. “I can teach you. Seriously, I have the most boring patient ever, I’ve been honing my repertoire.” Louise was a therapist. “And there are plenty of people in your life whom you can turn to for interesting conversation: me, Toni. Boone doesn’t need to fulfill every need. This is the biggest cause for unhappiness: people expect their romantic partner to supply everything—stimulate them, soothe them in that fucked up Plato ‘you complete me’ way. It’s delusional.” Louise looked to Toni. “You don’t expect Nick to fulfill all your needs, right?”

Toni manufactured a laugh. “Are you kidding?”

When she talked about Nick with her friends, she did so gingerly. She might admit, for instance, that Nick’s slovenliness drove her crazy and that sometimes she asked him questions she already knew the answers to just to get some attention. But there was so much about marriage that she didn’t tell them, wouldn’t even know how to explain.

Like the fact it had made her a suspicious person.

She was suspicious, for example, that Nick timed their fights to serve ulterior purposes. Last night he’d picked a fight with her at the end of the second day straight of record-breaking high temperatures. Their bedroom was the hottest room in the house, the most impervious to air conditioning, and their home office was the coolest, with by far the prettiest nighttime view—a skylight through which one could see a splash of stars. The couch was a pullout bed but tricky to pull out—you had to untangle the legs from zippered pockets. Toni lay in their bedroom alone, staring at the ceiling that badly needed repainting, and imagined Nick, if he wasn’t sleeping soundly, looking instead at those strewn stars. She felt certain that Nick had picked this more-than-stupid fight just so he’d have an excuse to sleep on the couch. It was too hot to sleep in the bedroom. Toni sweated, brooded, and contemplated the word “suspicious”—a strange word, in that to be a “suspicious person” implied both that one suspected and that one was a suspect.

It takes one to know one.

Here and there, a bat fluttered over their heads, gobbling up mosquitoes. The jerky, mechanical way they flew made the bats seem unnatural somehow. “Human” was the word that came to Toni. Every time she went to see Boone for an adjustment (Toni had introduced Amanda to Boone), after pressing his weight into her five or six times along various parts of her spine and neck and hips, he said, “Stand up and give that a go.” Then he watched Toni as she took a few steps across the room. She always felt self-conscious in this moment, but also, weirdly, she felt a separation from her body. It was a vehicle she took out for a spin, and Boone understood more about how it worked than she did.

Amanda is ungrateful, Toni thought suddenly, disloyally. What one wanted in a partner was someone who understood one’s body, how to soothe it, fix it, please it; not someone cunning and selfish, someone who strategically picked fights like picking ripe loquats from a tree, who slept soundly while one irradiated and burned, so even a pool in the Arizona evening couldn’t cool her off. “Interesting” was entirely overrated. Toni looked up to calm herself, to swallow the rage she felt now not only towards her husband but also towards her best friend. But the sky felt wide and shocking, full of bats with meaty wings and strange, kitten-ish faces, and behind them, aggressive stars.

Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collections How Far I’ve Come, forthcoming in 2022 from Gold Wake Press, and Undoing (2018), winner of the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award, and the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com

Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award, and Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (and forthcoming in 2021). Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, Witness, and other venues. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and other anthologies. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MICE by Meg Pokrass and Rosie Garland

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MICE
by Meg Pokrass and Rosie Garland

The cork shoots out of the bottle, bounces off the wall and loses itself behind the sofa.

Don’t bother, she says.

It’s too late. He’s already clasping the curved arm of the Chesterfield and trying to shift it away from the wall, one grunting millimeter at a time. He’s puffing, face screwed up. He makes the same face when he’s on top of her. She almost laughs but manages to keep her voice steady.

Why are you…?

Corks attract mice, stupid, he says. Your happy little furry family. He points a fat finger, laughs at his joke. His nickname for her is ‘Mouse’. It never used to feel this heavy, Ms. Mouse, he grumbles, wrestling with the sofa.

We haven’t got rodents, she says, staring at her toes. They have no pattering of small feet, of any description.

Leave it to you to wish for an infestation, he says.

Yes, leave it to me.

Anyway, remember I got you the swivel-head Dyson, he wheezes.

She sighs, pretending not to love the thing. What she loves is the way it breathes between her thighs. He goes into a mood because she doesn’t show a sufficient amount of gratitude for his expensive gift. She is grateful, but if she lets him know, he’ll find a way to break it.

Not that you bother using it, Mouse.

I’m hopeless, she says.

His face is puce with the effort of talking and shoving. Her face a locked room.

Think of your heart, she murmurs. The doctor advised…

There’s nothing wrong with me, he gasps, not pausing for breath.

Let me do it, she says. I moved it just this morning after losing an earring. It was rather light. Really, you should take it easy. In your condition.

He growls something she can’t interpret. Goes such a funny color when he’s angry. He grapples the sofa, pulling harder and harder. His face takes on a frozen look. There’s a noise, a pop, like the snapping of a weak branch. Like a woman’s water breaking.

Meg Pokrass is the author of six flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, two novellas-in-flash, and a new collection of microfiction, Spinning to Mars, recipient of the Blue Light Book Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, Waxwing, and McSweeney’s. She is the Series Founder and Co-Editor of Best Microfiction.

 

Rosie Garland writes long and short fiction, poetry and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Her work appears in The Guardian, Under the Radar, Spelk, Interpreter’s House, New Flash Fiction Review, The Rialto, Ellipsis, Butcher’s Dog, Mslexia, The North, and elsewhere. New poetry collection What Girls Do In the Dark (Nine Arches Press) is out now. Latest novel The Night Brother was described by The Times as “a delight…with  shades of Angela Carter.” In 2019, Val McDermid named her one of the UK’s most compelling LGBT writers.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

GIRL ON FIRE by Courtney Thorne-Smith

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GIRL ON FIRE
by Courtney Thorne-Smith

She is bent over the sink. The ends of her long dark hair dip in and out of the bubbles as she circles the sponge slowly over the already clean pan.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she says, watching a single tear drop into the sink and disappear under the soapy water. I’ll have to remember this feeling, she thinks, in case I ever need to play a woman with a broken heart. As an actress, only half of her attention is ever in her actual life. The other half is watching, directing, mining moments to use later in her work.

“I can tell something is wrong, Juliet. Just tell me.” He reaches over her to take a glass from the drainer. She flinches when his chest brushes her back. “Really? I can’t even touch you now?”

“You hurt me.”

“Just now? When my chest touched your back for a split second? Really?”

“No, you hurt my feelings when you said I was stupid.”

“I never said—”

“You did, just a minute ago—”

“I said you were acting stupid.”

“Yes, you said I was stupid.”

He sighs loudly and crosses to the freezer to pour two fingers of vodka. “I can’t have a conversation with you if you’re not going to be precise.”

“Fine,” she says through gritted teeth. “It hurt me when you said I was acting stupid.”

“That’s better,” he says, a smug smile spreading across his handsome face. She feels for the cast iron skillet in the drainer behind her. She could wipe that smile off his face with one swing. No jury of women would convict you, her girlfriends always say. They also offer to bury the body. She is lucky in her choice of friends.

He crosses to the table and sits down. “Now, why don’t you come over here and we can talk like adults.” He pats the chair next to him like he’s calling a dog.

“I don’t want to sit down.”

“Come on, sweetie. Don’t be petulant.”

“I’m not being petulant, and please don’t call me pet names when we’re fighting.”

“Is that what we’re doing here? I thought we were just talking.” With a smile, he adds, “Sweetie.”

Her grip tightens around the handle. “I’m just trying to tell you that you hurt my feelings.”

“No, that’s not what you’re doing, and you know it. You’re blaming me based on incorrect facts. And you know what? That hurts my feelings.”

“I’m just saying—”

“No. Stop it.” He jabs his pointer finger at her then downs the last of his drink in a single gulp. “You do this all the time. You get upset about something I never even said and then expect me to apologize for it. I won’t. I won’t apologize for something I didn’t do.”

She takes several deep, shaky breaths and says, “You called me stupid.” She can hear how small her voice sounds, and she hates herself for it.

He slams his hand down on the table with a loud BANG! Then he is up and moving toward her. In two strides he is inches from her face. “I did NOT call you stupid. I said you were acting stupid. Get. It. Right.”

She feels his breath on her face; the alcohol stings her eyes. She is trapped between his body and the sink. She grips the pan for stability, tries and fails to meet his gaze. I can use this feeling, she thinks. I can remember this moment when I’m playing a woman who is trapped and scared, who has no way out. I can remember the feeling of not being able to breathe, of choking on my own rage.

“Come find me when you’re done with your little tantrum,” he says, spraying spittle on her face. “I’ll be in the living room when you’re ready to grow up and apologize.”

She loathes him. She loathes him with a burning, searing passion. She hates him almost as much as she will hate herself a few moments from now when she goes in to beg his forgiveness in exchange for a few days of peace. She has nowhere else to go, and they both know it.

In the movie, it will be different. In the movie, she will grip the cast iron pan in two hands and swing it in a powerful arc, knocking the smile off his face and his brains across the room. When she—her character—calls her friends, they will come over to help her bury the body. “You had no choice,” they will say. “You did the right thing.” Then they will join hands and dance on his grave. The camera will slowly pan out. She hopes the studio will pay for Girl on Fire for the closing credits.

Courtney Thorne-Smith has spent most of her professional life as an actor who dabbles in writing. She is now in the midst of the radical transformation into a writer who dabbles in acting. To that end, she is currently a full-time online student at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on Creative Writing. She lives and writes in Los Angeles, California, where she gets her best ideas while walking her dogs.

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PAPER MACHE ON THE DRAIN by Soheon Rhee

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Paper mache on the drain
by Soheon Rhee

The day of Chuseok,
I remember that you wanted
to cut my dress and how
you made confetti of silk on
the basin with the remaining
the cloth of my hanbok jagged.

I had closed my eyes,
and when I woke, darkness
descended through the window
panes and eomma
was wearing an apron and
looked at me oddly.

I cannot hear her words
from the pounding rain
outside, I can see the shadows
hanging in between the skinned
branches of an oak tree.

Mother is now cleaning
the dishes and I hear your
footsteps receding before
you find me, you are holding
on the silk I had planned
to wear today, smiling
as if you had forgotten.

Soheon Rhee is a thirteen-year-old student who is currently attending International School of Manila. During her free time, she likes hanging out with her friends and reading books such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Her works have been accepted in Second Chance Lit, Stone Soup, and others.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

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PLENTY OF FISH
by Dylan Cook

Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ocean, already strong and getting stronger as the light shifted from orange to white.

On a good day, no one bothered him on this beach. He could expect to see one or two old retirees fishing too, but they usually kept their distance and never said anything to him besides the obligatory “How’re the fish today?” to which he’d respond with either “Not a nibble” or “Got a few keepers.” Beyond that, they all had a tacit agreement to keep the peace by keeping to themselves.

Matt baited his line with some baby squids he’d picked up on his drive to the shore. He had a good feeling about today. High tide was just about to peak, so the fish would be caught up in the swell and dragged in towards the coast. That was the theory, anyway. Matt believed in it when it was working and blamed his luck when it wasn’t. He cast his line out about a hundred feet from the water’s edge to test it.

He wasn’t alone. Overhead, he saw a hawk circling, stirring the wind. Matt supposed the hawk saw something moving in the grass. Both of us are looking for something to eat out here, he thought. Further down the shore, a man, also fishing, kept stealing glances in Matt’s direction. Beneath the man’s baseball cap and behind his sunglasses, Matt felt smugness radiating off him. He didn’t appreciate any of the judgments this man must have been making about him, that that’s not how you should stand or cast your pole, that a teenager like Matt was too young to know how to surf fish anyway. Matt averted his eyes from the man and spat into the water lapping at his ankles, in and out. He tried to sync his breathing to the pull of the waves.

Still, he could feel that man getting deeper under his skin every time he looked over. He rested his fishing pole against his hip to free a hand for him to pull out his phone. He texted his girlfriend Good morning 🙂 and snapped her a picture of the sunlight glaring on the waves. He knew it would be a few hours before she woke up and saw the messages, but he wanted to make sure that she knew that he was thinking about her. He flipped through a few notifications and picked his phone again, returning to earth. He was back where he started—nothing on the line, Peeping Tom, and the hawk. But he didn’t mind the hawk so much; his stalking wasn’t anything personal.

He reeled in, hooked some new bait, and cast again. After he did, he noticed that the man did the same. Copycat. Soon, Matt saw his fishing pole bend over like a tree in the wind. He twisted his feet deeper into the sand to stabilize himself as he gave the pole a sharp tug to sink the hook into the fish’s cheek. He cranked on the reel to bring it in, each turn only bringing him a few inches closer. Eventually, he saw the waves frenzy as the struggling fish surfaced.

Matt held it up by the line and studied it. He’d caught a fluke, and a nicely sized one at that. Fifteen, maybe twenty pounds. Looking to his right, he made sure that the man saw him, that he caught the first fish, and he gave him a smirk. Serves you right, Matt thought. He didn’t need to fish anymore for the love of the sport. He had his lunch and that was enough, so he stuck his thumb in the fish’s mouth and carried it back to his car.

There, he dropped it on one of the wooden podiums where fishermen cleaned their catch. Now the necessary part. He took out a hammer and with one deft swing he hit the fluke in the head to kill it. He accidentally hit its eye, which popped and leaked a creamy white juice. Some of it landed on his shirt’s shoulder, but he just flicked it off and moved on. He took out a knife and started cleaning, first cutting off the head and then spilling the guts. He tossed the remains into the seagrass, hoping maybe the hawk would find it before the seagulls got to it.

Matt threw his catch in a cooler he’d brought with him. A new car pulled up with a new retiree fisherman. “Fishing’s good today, I take it?” he said with a smile.

By this point, Matt had lost his daily patience for nosy old men. “Good enough,” he said.

◊

Scarlett rolled over, for good this time. She had already partially woken up a few times but none of them had stuck. She was in the middle of a dream where she was rock climbing, where one day she’d grabbed a hold of a rock wall and was able to pull herself up as if she were weightless. She liked the feeling enough to want to stay in for as long as she could. Now, she reached her hand out into the half-light and searched her bedside table for her phone. 12:10 PM. It always gave her a great sense of satisfaction to get more than nine hours of sleep.

At the bottom of her notifications was a good morning text from Matt. She replied good afternoon 😉 and sifted through all the other messages she’d gotten.

She went to the kitchen to pull out some leftovers to eat for breakfast. Or was it lunch? It didn’t matter to her; she wasn’t very pedantic. She put two slices of pizza in the microwave for thirty seconds (she didn’t like her food hot, just warm) and started aimlessly scrolling through her Instagram feed. The sliding glass door to the backyard whined open and Irv walked in.

“Look who’s finally awake,” he said. A necklace of sweat was saturated into his shirt. “Sleeping Beauty.”

“Like I’ve said, I don’t have anything to wake up for these days,” she told him.

“You’re missing half the day! Don’t you want to get out there and do something?”

She hated that moralistic sense of superiority felt among people who wake up before seven. It was things like this that made Scarlett tolerate Irv’s presence rather than enjoy it. “I’ve worked and worked and worked. Now, I’m resting.” The microwave beeped and she took out her pizza.

“It’s not about work,” Irv said, pivoting, “it’s about getting out there and seeing some of the world.”

“I see plenty.” She was a little muffled by the food in her mouth.

“Just try to wake up before noon. It’s the least you could do.”

“Don’t tell me what’s the least I could do. I promise you I could do less.”

Irv pointed his finger at her. “Don’t talk to me like that in my own house. I’m only trying to help you.”

Scarlett had meant it as a joke, but if he wanted to argue, so would she. “You don’t boss me around if I’m not doing anything wrong. It’s not your life, so leave me alone.”

“Now’s the time in your life when you should be forming good habits instead of bad ones. Once you’re in college, you won’t have us there to help guide you.”

“Oh, how horrible my life’s going to be without you breathing down my neck every day. I wonder how I’ll survive.”

“I’m sure your mother agrees with me on this.”

“I don’t care. I can disagree with her too.”

As if she’d summoned her, Scarlett heard her mother walk in through the garage door carrying groceries. “Hello, hello!” she chirped.

“Maureen, we were just talking about you,” Irv said.

“What about me?” she said, unpacking items one by one onto the kitchen counter.

“I was saying that you’d agree that Scarlett should be up and dressed before noon. Wouldn’t you?” Irv said.

“Well…”

“And I said that it’s no big deal,” said Scarlett.

“Well, neither of you are wrong,” Maureen said. Irv looked at her, lowering his gaze and raising his eyebrows. “But Scar, it wouldn’t hurt you to get up a little earlier.

“Mom!”

“Please don’t raise your voice at me,” Maureen said.

“The both of you are overreacting,” said Scarlett.

“Don’t talk to me like that in my own home.”

“I didn’t choose to live here, Irv. Give it a month and I’ll be out of your hair anyway.”

Scarlett grabbed her plate and retreated back into her room. She scrolled through her phone between bites of pizza. She got another text from Matt, a picture of the fish he’d caught fried up with some rice.

looking good, chef, she replied.

Still good for later?

            of course 🙂

A soft knock on the door told her that her mother was there. “Can I come in?”

“It’s open.”

Maureen shuffled in and sat at the foot of Scarlett’s bed. “I think you owe Irv an apology for what you said to him.”

“What did I say to him, exactly? He’s a big boy. I’m sure I didn’t hurt his feelings that badly.”

Maureen cleared her throat. “That’s not the point. The point is—”

“What is the point, Mom? Illuminate me.”

“That’s it. I don’t want any more lip out of you. And you can cancel any plans you might have.”

“That’s not happening,” Scarlett said with a laugh.

“It is if I say it is.”

“Are you going to let me go to college?”

“Excuse me?” said Maureen.

“Answer me. Next month, are you going to let me go to college?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Because when I’m in Boston you won’t have any control over me anymore. So either make your peace with that now or help me look for secretary jobs.”

Maureen huffed and scowled, chewing on some thoughts before leaving without saying a word of them.

mom and irv are really up my ass today, she texted Matt.

That’s shocking, he sent back. Tell me about it later.

◊

After their dinner, Matt and Scarlett walked along the beach. The sun had recently set, and the last swathes of orange and pink were evaporating over the western horizon. The dividing line between the sea and the sky was blurred into a deep blue-black, but there were still plenty of lights twinkling along the shore and, up north, from New York City in the distance. No moon.

As usual, they weren’t holding hands. Their friends thought it was a quirk of their relationship that was an indication of some latent problems. In truth, neither of them really liked it. Holding hands got too warm and clammy, and they both felt like it attracted undue attention since nobody likes PDA. To them, the fact that they both hated this mawkish little thing was proof that it was all working.

“You see that?” Matt said, pointing out into the ocean.

“See what?”

“That light flickering out there.” He waited for Scarlett to focus on the ocean. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and, lovingly, tilted her in towards the water, threatening to push her in.

“No!” Scarlett yelped. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Matt pulled her back in and Scarlett gave him a gentle slap on the arm and smiled at him. “Bad boyfriend.”

“What, afraid of getting a little wet?” he said.

“You know I’m jumpy.”

He knew. The pair kept walking until they didn’t feel like it anymore. The wind picked up, wiping away the last scraps of warmth for the day. They made their way to an overturned lifeguard stand and used it as something to lean against. Scarlett rested her head on Matt’s shoulder, and he rested his head against hers.

“I should really try night fishing out here sometime,” he said. “That’s how you catch striped bass.”

“I don’t know how you do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Like not the fishing itself. I don’t get how you can just kill them and eat them like that and not feel bad about it.”

“They’re fish. They don’t have rights.”

“I know. But to kill them with your bare hands like that. It’s brutal.”

“That’s how I get my kicks: brutalizing fish,” he said.

“Stop, you know what I mean. And you love fish, too, which is the part I really don’t get.”

“I don’t think it’s that strange.”

“Tell me about all your pet fish again,” she said, nudging him.

“I’ve told you that story a million times.”

“And it’s still funny. Tell me again.”

He told her about his three fish, all named Rex, which had all killed themselves in quick succession. The first two leapt out of their fishbowls in the middle of the night, leaving Matt to find them flat and crunchy on his floor the next morning. The last Rex, somehow, buried its head in the neon pebbles at the bottom and drowned itself. “I never understood why my dad kept giving me another fish.”

“And now you’re the expert in killing them.”

“See? Now you’re catching on.” Matt turned his head to smell her hair, clean with a whiff of salt. She felt his hot breath spilling out of his nose. “You know, it’s never too late for you to go to Rutgers instead. If you change your mind.”

“I think it actually is too late.”

“What are you gonna do in Boston anyway? Throw yourself a little tea party?”

“My dad went to B.U. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“And that accent, Jesus. It’s unbearable.”

“Matt?”

“Pahk ya cah, ya chowdahhead.”

“Matt? Look at me. I know this isn’t exactly how we pictured things, but this is what’s happening. Hey.” She put her hand on his cheek, and he recoiled from the cold. “I’m sorry. You know I wish we had more time too.”

Matt sat there, breathing. He almost felt like he was being lied to, so he tried listening to the ocean instead, still saying the same thing it had been that morning. “You don’t really think that.”

“Of course I do,” she said. To Matt, it sounded like a beg. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it because that was the reassuring thing to do, and he didn’t have any words for that at the moment.

They sat like that for a while, seconds or minutes, it was hard to tell. Scarlett lifted her head and turned to face him. Her eyes were too dark for him to find any emotion in them. He leaned in and started kissing her, sweetly at first and then with purpose. He was trying to sap as much out of this moment as he could. Scarlett pulled back to catch her breath and look at him. There was something shiny in his eyes that felt off to her. He looked frustrated.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“I know when you’re lying. Just tell me.”

He sighed and looked away, then turned back and kissed her on the head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do out here in Jersey without you.”

“You’ll be perfectly alright. You’ve survived this place without me before.”

“But it’s different now,” he said. Scarlett focused on the measured in and out of his breathing. Once she felt the rhythm change, she knew he was about to speak again. “I really think you should consider staying here.”

“I told you that’s not happening.”

“Rutgers would be so much cheaper, and it’s still a great school. You see how much of a problem student loans are. I don’t want you to have problems with that down the road.”

“That’ll be my problem. Not yours.”

“Your problems are my problems.” He kissed her head again. “I just care about you.”

“I think right now you only care about yourself,” said Scarlett, and she already regretted it. She was usually a bit more careful with her words.

“What was that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you really think I’m that selfish?”

“I didn’t mean it. I’m upset too, so I wasn’t thinking. I know you’re not selfish.”

“Good.” He started running his fingers through her hair. “It’s okay, I’m not mad. You’re lucky you’re cute,” he said. His father used to say that to him, but he’d only recently realized he could use it on Scarlett.

“Who knows,” she said after a minute or two. “Maybe I won’t like it in Boston. Maybe I’ll go there for a year and hate it and want to come back.” With her head against his cheek, Scarlett could feel Matt’s face tense up into a smile.

“That would be nice,” he whispered.

They sat there with the sound of the waves. It was fully dark now, and the wind had wiped away the last shreds of warmth from the day, bringing in cool, salty air.

“We should get going soon,” Scarlett said. “I won’t want to be out too late.”

“If you insist,” Matt said groggily. They got up and shook the sand off themselves.

“I can drive if you want. You got up so early; you must be exhausted.”

“If you want. Do you know the way back?”

“I think so. But you can be my GPS if need be.”

“I’ll just drive,” he said. “I could spin you around and you’d get lost. And I feel fine.”

“Alright,” she said. On the drive back to her house, she counted the turns in her head. She knew them all.

◊

A good morning text from Matt was waiting for Scarlett again. She swiped it to the side so she could deal with it later. She had gotten up early, around ten, and he wouldn’t be expecting her reply for another hour at least.

In the kitchen, Scarlett scanned the fridge for food. There was nothing immediately appealing for her to simply heat up. There were eggs and pork rolls and other things she could make, but she decided that she wasn’t hungry enough for the effort to be worth it.

She went back to lay on her bed, already bored with the day. It was Monday, so both her mom and Irv were out at work. Not even anyone around to bother her.

Flipping through her apps, she realized she hadn’t spoken to her father in three days. She sent him a text, and her phone started ringing soon after.

“Hi, Daddy. Aren’t you working?”

“I can’t take a break to talk to my favorite daughter? I’ve been meaning to call you anyway. I booked a house in Lavalette this weekend. It’s right on the beach; it’s beautiful. What are your plans for this weekend? I know I should’ve asked you first.”

Scarlett thought about Matt. She couldn’t remember having any specific plans. “No, that’s fine. That sounds great.”

“Wonderful. I can’t wait to see you. I actually do have to run, but talk to you soon. Love you, sweetheart.”

“Love you too.”

Scarlett went back to her messages. She finally texted back Matt. good morning! i just talked to my dad. he’s coming down for the weekend 

That’s nice, Matt responded almost immediately. When? We usually get dinner on Sundays. 

we can move that around. it’s not like we have anything else going on lol

On the other end, Matt scrutinized every letter of her texts. He didn’t want to sound too pushy about their Sunday dinners, even though it did bother him. Should it bother him? He paused on that thought. What were they as a couple without their routines and habits?

Sure, he sent back. That should be fine.

Matt pocketed his phone and started pacing in his room. Before too much time had passed, he picked up his phone and added, It would’ve been nice if you said something first though. He liked that. It was the shortest summary of what he was thinking. He put down his phone again and it buzzed.

this is me saying something, Scarlett wrote.

He swiped the notification aside. He could deal with it later.

He got up to make himself some lunch. His father worked mornings, so he had just gotten home. Matt took out some sandwich materials.

“You alright, Matty?” his father asked. There must have been something about the way he was slathering mayonnaise on his bread.

“Fine. Why?”

“No reason. You just seem a little aggravated.”

“That’s odd,” Matt said. “I feel fine.”

“If you say so.” His father took a beer from the fridge and plopped onto the couch. “You gotta learn how to relax like your old man. You’re so stiff.”

“Maybe,” he said on his way back to his room. He tore through his sandwich without tasting it.

◊

Lou pulled up to his ex-wife’s house to pick up his daughter. He kept his eyes on the garage door since he knew Scarlett would come out of there instead of the front door. He saw the door list, and Scarlett walked out. He craned his neck to see if he could catch a glimpse of Maureen. Not to be nosy, just curious. But he didn’t see her.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said as Scarlett dropped a bag in the back seat before climbing into the front.

“Hi, Daddy,” she smiled at him. She wished he weren’t wearing his sunglasses so she could actually see him.

“This summer’s going too fast. I can’t believe you’re off to Boston next month.”

“I know,” she said flatly.

“Where have all the years gone?”

Scarlett had been asked this question so many times recently that she’d made the blanket decision to not answer it. Lou drove the familiar route to Lavalette. The way he always drove with one hand made Scarlett nervous, even though it had never been a problem in the past. They pulled up to a little bungalow with a white pebble lawn. It was decorated appropriately with shells and anchors and kitschy signs about how life is perfect down the shore. They put down their bags and went to the back patio to sit in the Adirondack chairs and plan the weekend.

Lou went on: “So we have this next two days, but I gotta see you a few more times before we send you off.”

“Whatever you have time for. I’ll be back soon for fall break. And Thanksgiving’s early this year,” she said. She had been studying the B.U. academic calendar a few days before.

“Sure, but you’ll probably want to spend that time with your friends.”

“I can always save some time for you, Dad.”

“Well aren’t you sweet,” he said, mockingly and lovingly. “Speaking of, how’s Matt doing? I haven’t heard anything about him in ages.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” said Scarlett. The last time she’d seen him was also the last time she’d seen the ocean. Here, twinkling under the sun, the water didn’t seem like it could be the same. “He’s upset that I’m leaving.”

“Are you gonna try to keep it going into college? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I think so,” she said. She and Matt had avoided that particular conversation for so long that they both assumed the answer was yes.

“You have to do what makes you happy, Scar. So if that’s what makes you happy, then go for it. And there are so many ways to keep in touch with people these days.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. He turned to her and flashed a winning smile. She didn’t want to talk about it any further than that.

They spent the afternoon idling around their little beach house. Lou had brought some drop lines, which he baited up with chicken and threw over the dock on the edge of the property. It was too late in the day for them to catch much of anything. A few crabs here and there, but nothing worth keeping, so they threw them back.

“I’m hungry,” Lou said after a while. “And there are easier ways to get crabcakes.”

They went to a restaurant on the water where everything was cheap and greasy and served with fries. Lou watched Scarlett eat her scallops carefully, as if she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Scarlett watched her dad eat in big mouthfuls and finish his crabcakes in a few minutes.

“Take your time, Scar,” Lou said. “I’m in no rush.”

Scarlett covered her mouth so she could speak between chews. “Thanks.”

“You remember Dr. Fiore? Your old dentist?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I read in an article that he’s got assault allegations against him from one of the technicians. His whole practice is already shut down and everything.”

“Oh my god, that’s horrible,” said Scarlett.

“I know. He was a good dentist.”

“I meant for the technician.”

“Oh yeah, her too,” Lou stammered. “That is horrible. It’s just crazy how someone can make a few claims and like that,” he snapped his fingers, “your whole career is over.”

“It’s not like he didn’t deserve it.”

“Sure, but you never know if someone just has an axe to grind and’s saying that you’re a creep just because they know it’ll ruin your name.”

“I think that’s pretty rare,” Scarlett said, trying to sound flat so she’d be taken more seriously.

“What if someone said something like that about me? What, would you jump on their side right away?”

“I don’t know, Dad.” Scarlett gritted her teeth. “What if I told you Matt did something to me. Would you say there was room for doubt?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Matt’s a good kid. I know he wouldn’t do anything, like you should know that I wouldn’t do anything.”

“You don’t know Matt that well. I don’t think he’d do anything either, but you can’t be that sure.”

“You’re right, you’re right. You know I would believe you, sweetheart. But I hope that you’d believe me too.”

“Well let’s hope that it never comes to that,” she said as she drank some water to cleanse her mouth. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Me neither.” Lou reached over to grab a small fry from Scarlett’s plate. “Do you know what classes you’re taking for your first semester?”

Scarlett sat up straighter. “I do, but they’re all introduction and requirement classes, like writing and calc I and stuff. The only one I’m really looking forward to is intro to anthropology.”

“I thought you were doing archaeology.”

“No, it’s always been anthropology. We’ve talked about this before.”

“So is anthropology the Indiana Jones one or the Jurassic Park one?”

“It’s neither, really,” said Scarlett. She had answered this question for him once or twice before, so she wanted to answer it this time in a way he’d remember. “It’s like… You know how scientists go into the jungle to study frogs or birds or something? Anthropology is doing that for people. So I want to study how humans work as a species, if that makes sense.”

“Sure it does,” Lou said. “You want to be like an alien studying people from outer space.”

Scarlett half-smiled. “Something like that.”

“You should still take some business classes, though. Just to make me happy. It’s always good to have some business smarts about you, and I really think you’d like it.” Lou watched his daughter shovel in her last few bites. The sun was set, and the ocean was unusually rough. Wave after wave fell over the sand with a violent hush. The ocean knew it was going to rain before either of them realized. “We should get going soon.”

Lou looked at their waitress and snapped his fingers in the air to get her attention. Scarlett looked down at her phone, embarrassed to be around someone beckoning a person like they would a dog. She quickly texted Matt: this is gonna be a long weekend

How so? he replied quickly.

i’ll explain later. it’s like he doesn’t know me. Scarlett paused on that last thought before sending, considering if it was fair for her to say that he didn’t know her or if she was expecting too much. She sent it anyway.

Matt was lying on his bed when he read her texts. He wanted to go fishing in the morning, so he was already half asleep, but now he felt a bit more awake. He got an odd satisfaction from knowing that Scarlett wasn’t wholly enjoying her time with her father, especially since it was impinging on their time together. This is perfect, he thought. He realized that all he had to do was be Scarlett’s better option. If she came to him whenever she didn’t feel great, he’d always have her crawling back.

Tell me about it over dinner, he sent her. I want to hear all about it.

He rolled over and slept well.

◊

Lou and Scarlett had been holed up in the beach house for the entire weekend waiting for the rain to pass, and by the time it did the weekend was over. Irv was outside pulling weeds when Lou came to drop her off. Scarlett hated every second that the both of them were in each other’s presence. Maureen was the only thing that the two of them had in common and knew about each other, so they always acted like they were in a silent competition with each other, sizing each other up with their eyes, even though there was nothing to win.

Lou got out of his car to hug Scarlett goodbye. He waved to be nice. “How’s tricks, Irv?”

“Same old, same old. And yourself?”

“Great. Just great.” Lou turned to Scarlett and pinched her chin with his thumb. “See you soon, sweetheart.”

Scarlett lugged her bag towards the house as Lou sped off.

“So how was your weekend?” Irv asked.

“Fine,” Scarlett said.

“Just fine?”

“I said it was good,” she huffed as she passed through the storm door in the garage. Irv tossed his weeds into the garbage can and then set up a sprinkler to water the grass. He went back inside and found Scarlett lying on the couch with her phone suspended over her face.

“Your mother’s not around tonight,” he said. “I was wondering if you wanted to get dinner later. Wherever you want.”

“I can’t. I’m seeing Matt later.” She didn’t look up.

“That’s still a thing?”

Scarlett let her phone fall on her chest with a thud. “Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”

“I know you don’t like me, Scarlett,” he said. “And I don’t know if you’ll ever like me, so at the very least let me speak my mind and be honest with you.”

She rolled her eyes.

“You should think about calling it off with that boy. Going to college with baggage like that is only going to hold you back.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m eighteen. I can make my own decisions.”

“You can, but you can still make the wrong ones. I could be wrong too.”

“Thanks, Irv, but I don’t need you meddling in my business.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Have fun later.”

◊

“I can’t believe he didn’t remember.”

“Right?”

“You’ve always wanted to study anthropology.”

“I know. He can never keep track of those things.”

“Well I remembered,” Matt said. He tightened his arms around Scarlett. It had been a week since they were in that same place, on the same beach, leaning against the same lifeguard stand. The water was so gentle that it was almost silent. It was this calm after the storm that Scarlett preferred.

Matt was in good spirits. His fishing in the morning had gone well, and all-day he had the night to look forward to. Now, he could relish in the moment. It all seemed to be falling into place.

“I really like the idea of you coming back after a year in Boston. That’ll be a nice change of pace for you. And a year we can manage,” Matt said.

Scarlett didn’t respond immediately. She was trying to remember if and when she’d agreed to something like that. “Yeah, a year can go by quickly.”

“So you’ll get some time in a new city, and I’ll be here patiently waiting for you.” He tightened his arms again, but Scarlett didn’t feel comforted, she felt fastened down. She squirmed away from him.

“Sorry, it was getting too hot,” she said.

He tried to decode the expression on her face. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.”

“I’m fine.”

“I can tell when you’re lying. Tell me.”

Scarlett turned to face him. “I don’t want to make a promise that I’ll only be in Boston for a year, even though I do want to be with you. I just don’t know how things’ll go.”

“I think this can work. But you have to want this to work. You do want that, don’t you?” Matt said. Scarlett could see the muscles in his neck tense up as he swallowed. She waited a moment too long. “Don’t you?”

“Right now, I think so. But I can’t promise what I’ll think a month or a year from now.”

“That’s not the plan.”

“Maybe it’s not your plan.”

“It’s our plan. We work as a team.” Matt wrapped his fingers around her arm, just above the wrist, and squeezed.

“Let go,” Scarlett said. He didn’t. She slapped the back of his hand. “Don’t grab me like that.” She started shifting her weight to stand up.

“Where are you going? We haven’t figured out anything.”

“I’m done for tonight. I want to go home,” said Scarlett.

“Okay, we can talk on the car ride back.”

“I can take an Uber. I’m out of your way, anyway. And you’ve had a long day.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Scar. We’re not done here.”

“For tonight we are at least.” She got up and swatted off some sand. Matt got up to follow her. She pulled out her phone to call an Uber. “I don’t want to eat the cancellation fee. Go home, it’s okay. I’ll see you soon.” She put her hand against his cheek to make him feel fine enough for the moment.

He walked off, routinely checking over his shoulder to steal looks at her. Scarlett sat down on a bench and waited for her ride. The wind picked up until it was louder than the waves on the shore behind her. She held her skirt down with one hand and hugged herself with the other, occasionally removing it to comb down her hair with her fingers. It got cold enough that she was shivering, but she didn’t mind because the breeze felt crisp and clean.

Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

More by Dylan Cook on Cleaver:

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

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PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ...
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THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two ...
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THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy ...
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CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
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MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli  translated by Elisabeth Jaquette New Directions Books, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Buy this book on Bookshop.Org Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as ...
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SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins ...
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MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
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A PIERCE OF ANGELS by KC Pedersen

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A PIERCE OF ANGELS
by KC Pedersen

Light airs! Light airs! A pierce of angels! Theodore Roethke

…it is not the skill of the hand / That writes poetry, but water, trees, / And the sky which is clear to us even though it’s dark. Czeslaw Milosz

I was torn between the desire to show how well I was dealing with things and the imperative to show that I was not O.K., that this man’s actions had derailed my life in a thousand ways. Rebecca Makkai

Each time, Greta recreates her grief from scratch. There is no mercy for time served. She bobs to the surface like some stupid laughing doll. 

Well, what did he know? How many times had he been raped? Greta could tell him that you went numb and left your body to float somewhere near the sparkly sprayed-on ceiling. That way, you weren’t really there. But afterwards, your body bled and bruised. You hit your head against the wall to shake out thoughts: how you wanted to die, how you should die.

Then, two days later, you walked around as if you were just like everyone else: worried about exams and what you were going to be when you grew up. Greta could also tell him you were never the same. The rapist coiled inside like a snake, and no matter how many times you made love because you chose to, the rapist had always been there first.

◊

This is one more narrative about a young woman, a child really, trying to navigate a fucked-up predatory world. I dream I’m in some kind of ceremony where I am free to shout at the top of my lungs as I’ve never shouted in my life. Girls aren’t supposed to shout.

With rape, I see this again and again. The girl (Greta) marches off bravely to her rape, although of course she never anticipates that’s what she’s marching off to. During the assault, she hunkers down, hoping not to be injured or killed or even to offend. Either she doesn’t tell anyone because she’s so ashamed or she tells lots of people. They say (a) it didn’t happen, (b) what happened wasn’t rape, (c) he used the oldest ruse in the book, or (d) girls are meant to be raped.

◊

All I ever wanted was to be a forest bodhisattva. Writing about rape, my own and that of one of four girls and one in six boys before we reach eighteen, I feel empty, like death. If my partner or a friend turns away for one instant, I feel abandoned.

As a child, I wasn’t safe. When I was in elementary school, a houseguest fondled me. When I told the family friend who brought that guest, he told me that men did that. Then he started in too.

My college was a predator’s playground. Many male faculty members, single or married, had relationships with students. While writing this, I called four of those faculty members I most trusted, even revered. What they said was off the record, I assured them. I just wanted to know their thoughts. One asked, “Do you think it hurts students to have affairs with married faculty members?”

◊

As I headed off to college, the man who molested me as I was growing up asked, “Do you think what I did hurt you or damaged you?”

Of course not, I assured him.

And I believed it.

◊

Turns out the professor who asked whether affairs hurt students fathered a child with one. He refused to acknowledge her pregnancy. Later, the son turned up on campus to confront his father. They looked like twins.

Many who are assaulted don’t blame the assailant. We blame ourselves. There’s something wrong with me, I thought as a child, as a teen.

Though for the years I counseled survivors of rape and assault, never once did I blame the woman. Or the girl.

◊

When I arrived at college, I was still a child. Although I believed myself ancient and wise, able to handle anything, I knew little about the world. My confidants were my journals and books. I felt and still feel safest surrounded by wilderness and the calls of wild creatures. After I was assaulted on campus, lacking loving mirrors, I failed to comprehend how severely I was injured. Predators stalk easy prey.

◊

The male plot line in so many novels and stories: I saw her. She wanted me. I fucked her. She loved it.

My plot line: when walking in the forest or writing, I feel the best or almost the best that I ever feel. Time vanishes. Writing is anesthesia. The forest heals.

◊

At first, I could only write about being raped if I used third person. Sometimes, to further distance myself, I wrote third person in Spanish. I was ashamed to admit I was so incredibly naive. When my college work-study supervisor asked if I was interested in art modeling, I was flattered. The wage he quoted was three times what I earned baby-sitting for professors, waking at dawn to serve bacon and eggs in the campus food service, or collating and stapling course materials in the print shop.

My roommate modeled for the art department. I was already jealous. She must be prettier than I and certainly sexier; she had a boyfriend, and I did not. When I told her I didn’t want a boyfriend, that I came to college to learn, she told me I needed to surrender. But when she and her boyfriend had sex a few feet from my head in our tiny shared dorm room, it didn’t sound fun. I’d rather be buried in a pile of books, reading my way through the nights.

“Boring,” my roommate said. “Posing in the art department? So fucking boring.”

◊

I heard about classmates jumping from windows. As our dorms were only four stories high, I wondered how they died. I became obsessed with literary suicides. I read journals and letters of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. I was angry they died instead of sharing secrets for survival. Assigned a literary biography for a class, I dressed as Virginia Woolf and reported her life story as if it were my own. The prof asked me to stay after class. He said the presentation was brilliant. “If you ever need a rec, come to me,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant and was too shy to ask.

I wrote my research paper on the Artist as Madwoman. Plath and Woolf again. A+ on that one.

◊

Six years ago, graduates from my college were invited to participate in something called the Memory Project. The four editors, two of whom I knew, provided prompts: Who were you when you were a student? Who were your friends, enemies, or nemeses? What was the craziest, funniest, or most memorable event from your college years? What were the most important themes of your studies and the most valuable skills gained from your undergraduate experience?

Describe a pivotal learning moment.

“Expect classmates to respond to your story from their memories and version of events, which will also become part of the public record,” the invitation concluded.

Although grateful to attend college at all, I’d never felt much affection for my alma mater. As I responded to the prompts, I found myself waking at three in the morning frozen in terror. At random moments, I would cry. When I called those four professors, the ones I’d trusted most, I learned our campus was much darker than I’d known, and that few had perfectly clean hands.

All four assured me I must share my memories. “I’m glad you’re finding closure,” one said.

◊

After I was assaulted, I rode my bicycle to a remote cottage maintained by the college. With a blue fountain pen, I filled a spiral notebook with self-blame. I began with, “how can I live after this?” I ended with a poem about mosses, which I was studying in botany class. After being crushed underfoot, I wrote, moss springs back.

I wrote about Greta. I wrote in Spanish. I wrote in third person.

Although devastated, Greta was strong.

◊

When I sent my pages to the Memory Project coordinators, one responded that my contribution reminded him of our “attempts to find freedom and joy to replace fear and coercion.” Then, a few days before I was to set off to share my piece with other contributors, I received a call from someone I’d never met: the new college dean.

“I have bad news for you,” he said. “Your piece can’t be included in the Memory Project.” He’d showed my contribution to university counsel, he said. They said it could be libel. “Maybe you don’t care about that,” he said.

“The rape?” I asked. “Or the student who harassed me afterward?” I pointed out I’d written only in the most general terms. I’d used no names or identifying details. As for the student who pounded on my dorm room door afterward, shouting that I was a whore and should fuck him too? He’d dropped out of school, only to later confess he and his roommate had placed bets on whether they could get me to kill myself.

“I’m asking you to withdraw your piece,” the dean said. “I don’t want to be discriminatory, but if you don’t pull yours, the Memory Project can’t go forward.”

As I’d already made reservations for the event at my college, I headed north with my husband and our ailing collie. We parked a few feet away from where the assault began. My collie peed on the very spot.

The dean and others gave speeches about why alums should donate financially to the college.

“Rape isn’t good for fund-raising,” my husband whispered.

A student of color described how the college had empowered her. I wondered if she was safe. In the restroom, stacks of poppy-colored cards listed nine places to contact “if you experience sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, or other sexual misconduct.”

Later, sleeping in our rented room, I awoke gasping, as though a gigantic foot was planted on my chest.

◊

Jonathan Shay writes that Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is a kind of moral injury, a “betrayal of what’s right in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power.” Traumatic memory enters the body and “stays there forever, initiating a complex chemical process that not only changes the physiology of the victims, but the physiology of their offspring.”

Hortense Calisher says, “Speaking out loud is an antidote to shame.” Nancy Mairs disagrees. “I know the rules of polite discourse,” Mairs writes. “I should have kept my shame, and the nearly lethal sense of isolation and alienation it brought, to myself.” Dorothy Allison describes how she tried to kill herself, because erasing the self meant erasing the shame.

Yearning to die, writes bell hooks, is about a “longing to kill the self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill the self in writing.”

 “If every cell / inside my brain / is replaced // after seven years, / then why can’t I excise this,” writes Cathy Linh Che.

“I am a savant of survivor mode,” writes Jessica Knoll.

◊

I wore a baggy brown dress I’d sewed myself. I was scheduled to meet my work-study supervisor in the dorm parking lot at 10:30 on a Saturday morning. It was April 9th, my mother’s birthday. In my teenaged cocoon of magical thinking, four details rendered me safe: Nothing bad could happen at ten-thirty in the morning. Nothing bad could happen on my mother’s birthday. A baggy brown dress rendered me sexless. My work-study supervisor was a college employee.

Also: Tuition had just tripled. My savings from high school and college jobs were nearly gone. If I couldn’t make tuition, I’d have to drop out.

◊

As a counselor/advocate for rape and assault survivors, I heard my own story from an eighteen-year-old first raped at eleven. She described how the man tossed a bill onto her bare belly. Another was later murdered. Many said they needed money to put themselves through college or to support their extended family.

◊

When my former classmate called to confess his roommate’s plot to make me commit suicide, I laughed. Or maybe Greta laughed. “You picked the toughest person in the school,” I said. I had other things to do. A life to live. I wasn’t going to let him or anyone derail my life. I didn’t yet know derailing can happen in other, subtler ways. I wanted the rape never to have happened. My solution was to devote myself to healing everyone else.

◊

My husband wondered why I engaged with the Memory Project at all. “The invitation says we’re going to have a dialogue,” I said. I wanted to share my experiences with the people who’d been there. Maybe my story would help someone else.

As naïve as confiding in my former mentors turned out to be, even more naïve was my belief that someone might want to get to the bottom of what happened when a college employee used his position to lure young work-study students, already in need of funds to attend college, into danger. Because I’d also learned that I was not the only one.

◊

Five months after the alumni event, while washing dishes in my sink, I overheard an NPR news clip. My alma mater was the subject of a federal investigation for Title IX Civil Rights violations. In April, shortly before the new dean’s call to head me off, a local news source had announced the investigation for failure to respond appropriately to reports of campus sexual abuse. If one of five women is assaulted on campus, the news source stated, that meant four hundred assaults on my former campus each year.

In the preceding three years, the report continued, only twelve reports were filed. Of those, three resulted in disciplinary action.

The school was further accused of silencing survivors of sexual violence by dismissing their cases. When one contacted a campus office listed on the poppy-colored card, they were told (by a man) that crying, going numb, or being silent did not mean that what happened was rape. Another had to face her assailant when she walked into her first seminar the next academic year. According to the local news source, the young man saw himself as the victim.

◊

While serving as counselor/advocate for survivors, of fifty women I met with in a two-year span, only three chose to contact the police. I was courtroom advocate for one of the rare cases that went all the way to court. The fifteen-year-old was badly beaten as well as sexually assaulted. As I saw it, the defense attorney objected to almost anything asked of the defendant, while the young woman was questioned endlessly. Why did she go into the house with him? How was she dressed? Was she a virgin? How many other men had she slept with? Did she lead him on?

Only two jury members were women. After the assailant was found innocent, I asked one why she voted for acquittal. “Who hasn’t been knocked around a bit?” she asked.

◊

As a college student, I helped start a women’s group. One night someone suggested we each describe how we lost our virginity. Maybe I was still working around to sharing what had happened to me, but at the last minute, I dodged. I described not the rape, but my first voluntary sexual experience a year later. I did learn, though, that of nine smart, ambitious young women, only one described her first experience as positive. I envied her. She was my age yet absolutely confident about her sexuality, her right to occupy her own body, and to use that body as she chose.

◊

I still have my spiral notebook filled with self-blame. For years afterward, through helping others, I sought to dispel my horror. “Conquering the rapist,” my psychiatrist called it. I want survivors to tell their stories and be heard, to speak out with courage and strength. I enjoy my alma mater’s prize-winning magazine featuring campus programs. Yet amidst the smiling faces and world-class accomplishments, I’ve never read a single reference about how to address campus assaults. I get it. Rape isn’t good for fund-raising. Neither is hiding the truth that adversely impacts students’ lives.

KC Pedersen’s writing appears in numerous journals and includes nominations for the Pushcart and other awards. “Getting a Life-Coming of Age with Killers” was selected as notable by Hilton Als and Robert Atwan for Best American Essays 2018. More of Pedersen’s writing can be found at www.kiriepedersen.com

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

 

 

SPONGE BATH by Tracy Rothschild Lynch

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SPONGE BATH
by Tracy Rothschild Lynch

The no-nonsense, middle-aged Filipino nurse tells me, pushing up her smudged glasses, that I need to clean up a bit down there. She waves her tiny hands dramatically around her own groin area and then shuffles over to me, all action. Am I embarrassed? Maybe. For some reason I feel like I’ve let her down. On day three in the hospital, day three with no breasts, day three of forcing a smile each time a visitor says knock knock out loud like it is funny, I guess it is time to get back to life.

I simultaneously hate her and feel bad for hating her because she is only doing her job. Vera, her name is. I see the pleasant serif font on the RN badge dangling around her neck. As instructed, I stay as still as possible while she hustles. Does she know how hard it is to do anything other than stay as still as possible? I am staring at the cheap tiled ceiling, and she is moving around me, adjusting IV lines hither and yon, preparing for the big adventure of cleaning my crotch. Now she has pulled the remote off of the bed, oh great—and now she has turned off the House Hunters International that I’d been enjoying very much, thank you. I’ll never know whether Ken and Elaine in London will settle with the cozy, updated mews in Kensington or the expansive, sunlit flat in St. John’s Wood. She closes the door. Knock knock, I think to myself. She yanks the privacy curtain closed, and the metal hooks pull along the top with a long, mechanical scratch.

I have to sit up; I have to remove my gown; I have to stretch both shoulders in a way that hurts too much. Are you serious? I want to shout, but Vera is only doing her job. And I’m not a big yeller, especially at strangers. Vera doesn’t uncloak me all at once, which is kind. Right arm first. Then left, the painful one. I stare at the ceiling as the warm soapy water slides all over me and becomes icy in a second flat because it’s June and the air conditioning is cranking. I stare at the ceiling and look at all the holes and remember when all the boys in eighth grade would toss their pencils up there and try to get them to stick and I wonder if anyone has ever done this in here. I stare at the ceiling and try to remember those boys’ names. I’m sure Jamie and Paul and maybe Doug were involved in the tomfoolery, and I wonder if my daughters have yet seen that trick in elementary school. The holes make deep pockmarks in the foamy tiles. I see the shape of my chest, the concave-looking basin that I guess is me now. My bandages are in full view. I see them and have nowhere else to look because Vera turned off House Hunters.

Tracy Rothschild Lynch has written poetry and creative nonfiction for more than twenty years. She holds an MA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. When not writing or reading, she plays mediocre tennis, watches movies, and divides her time exploring the surrounds of her home in Glen Allen, Virginia and in London, where she currently resides. Tracy recently completed a memoir about her mother’s sudden death as well as a collection of flash essays exploring micro-moments of breast cancer treatment.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY by Myriam Steinberg, reviewed by Brian Burmeister

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CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY
by Myriam Steinberg; illustrations by Christache
Page Two, 304 pages
reviewed by Brian Burmeister

The graphic memoir Catalogue Baby shares the deeply personal fertility journey of Myriam Steinberg. Compelled to leave her career, passion, and life as a festival organizer to pursue motherhood as a single 40-year-old, Steinberg’s immensely honest memoir chronicles the intense challenges she faced getting pregnant and carrying to term.

Throughout the five years of her life covered in the book, Steinberg skillfully navigates shame, guilt, and loss in ways that help us understand the pain and frustration she was experiencing while balancing those brutal realities with humor. Among other amusements, we are welcomed to the literal “Carnival of Dreams Brought to You by I.V.F” where at the egg-shot carnival game you are given “10 shots for the price of your dignity and patience.”

Myriam Steinberg

One of Steinberg’s many strengths is making her journey accessible through playfulness. In addition, her narrative is clear and relatable—even though her story is very much uniquely her own. Her desire for a baby and the difficulties she faced along the way are shared by many, and she welcomes us into her life through carefully and regularly integrating humor and hope along the way.

Illustrator Cristache’s wonderfully expressive art perfectly complements the mood of the narrative—from the ten-gallon hat-wearing, shot-gun toting biological clock that stalks Steinberg throughout the memoir to the 8-bit video game depictions of the ups and downs of her health journey. Steinberg’s powerful and compelling saga is wonderfully brought to life through Cristache’s gift of visual storytelling. He helps us feel Steinberg’s highs and lows as she holds firm to her dream of motherhood and struggles through cycle after cycle of in vitro fertilization and weighs her shrinking options.

Within the Preface, Steinberg makes clear her hope is the memoir “will help de-stigmatize a terribly lonely experience and address a void in materials that cover not only these issues but also the devastating decision-making process around fetal genetic anomalies.” Steinberg’s tale is an important reminder for those on similar paths to her own that they are not alone. She stands—and stands tall—with them in solidarity. And it is the hope of this reviewer that those who read Catalogue Baby come away from the experience knowing that community and compassion exist.

Brian Burmeister is a writer, educator, and cat cuddler. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

DEAR BEAR, poems by Ae Hee Lee Platypus Press, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

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DEAR BEAR
by Ae Hee Lee
Platypus Press, 42 pages
Reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Dear BearDear Bear begins with the gripping dedication, “For Daniel, to the end,” and from there, takes its readers to the end of the world it introduces. This is author Ae Hee Lee’s world that exists in a collection of letters addressed to the titular Bear—who is both a real and parabolic bear.

The book is set in a forest, “at the border of every ruin, of every past home.” The forest is also both real and parabolic as a form of borderland, acting as a Romantic landscape: sublime and shaped around the speaker’s psyche. Because of this, the forest becomes a vessel for the speaker’s exploration of the relationship between her and Bear. Ae Hee Lee establishes the forest as a post-apocalyptic setting to navigate both the relief and anxiety that comes from surviving an old world and entering a new one. In this case, Lee’s ‘Dear Bear’ speaks on the annihilation of an old life that comes with falling into new love. The “crossover from one to two” simultaneously contends with its own borderland: the end of two singular people and the beginning of a couple, the end of a world into the beginning of the next.

Lee does not shy away from the paradox of a relationship showing the self in the other, rather, she uses her epistolary poems to show clashing identities and clashing tones at play in the same moments. In the book’s first poem titled [Dear bear,] we see this example,

Dear bear,

I’m writing these letters in the innermost layer of your heart. You’ll never escape them. Having written them myself, I won’t survive them either.

Sincerely,

The poem’s tone moves from sentimental to dangerous. This is a technique well-utilized by Ae Hee Lee, giving the reader no sense of peace, no room for settling, and, like Bear, for the reader, there is no way to escape.

Ah He Lee

Ae Hee Lee

Lee strays away from the normal valedictions found in letters, moving from typical “sincerely,” to “with longing,” “whole,” “untaking,” and “open.” Considering valedictions as displays of the relation between the sender and receiver of a message, the reader can begin to recognize that Lee embraces them as a new form, another border for her poetry to balance on. Using these sign-offs in unexpected ways with atypical phrasing allows Ae Hee Lee to signal the fluctuations and endurance of the larger relationship ‘Dear Bear’ details.

At its height, the use of letters as form for each poem in this collection provides a sense of voyeurism, giving the sensation that we as readers are becoming intimate with information clearly not addressed to us. As if we, as the readers, are not meant to be reading these letters. Because of this, the speaker can be vulnerable and divulge secrets only known between her and Bear such as his “fetish for small feet,” and intense moments of vulnerability such as,

How is it you say you prefer me naked after all I’ve done, after all everyone has taught me to do? I stop my twirling, my twisting. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh.

Still, when Lee is not letting us into a brief, yet potent moment of intimacy that fits incredibly well these letter-poem hybrids, the poems loosely invoke the epistolary tradition’s religious roots. Still, they are less didactic and more meditative– more constructing of the self than of a larger narrative, musing on the ecology of the forest to explore and explain Lee’s feelings of partnership. There is a loose motif of religious imagery that is weaved throughout this book that seems out of place until we find its origin in the narrator’s first-ever meeting with Bear where she

Used to go to church wearing heels, I would hide those little leather cages in the garbage can the moment I got back into the house– I would trace the arch of my foot with my pinky, paint dandelions on my soles. Then, I met you, remember?

This moment, which is one of the most grounded in reality throughout the entire book, roots the speaker in her origin: being from outside the forest. She is a stranger of this curious land. Using the form of the epistle throughout each poem, she gives us insight into the borders of her own language in which this new world and new self-being constructed throughout this book, can only be explained through the lens of the speaker’s old self.

These limits shape the tension of this book: the speaker’s somewhat inevitable annihilation into the forest. It also serves as a reason why this book exists. The speaker complains that the forest does not have ears for her to, “nibble, hiss– drip my words into the hollow.” She goes on to compare the writing of the forest as making a diorama of it as “pretending to leave.” She does this “To keep myself [The speaker] away from the forest, to practice separation. Independence. I would lose myself otherwise.” This looming end carries the reader through each pungent poem, admiring the gorgeous piece of the forest’s ecology while watching it slowly consume Lee; as each flora that Lee admires in one poem devours her body in the next.

Ae Hee Lee takes great care in circling back to some of the most emotionally charged images within the book. Or rather, the images come back to overwhelm her. For example, the camellia who, “Whirls with the voiceless music of planets,” returns to be an agent in the dissolving of her body. Even when so many parts of the forest have contributed to some form of annihilation of the speaker, she still begs for more annihilation from one of the forest’s inhabitants: Bear. She becomes a fish and begs for Bear to chase her down the river. This moment harkens back to our first introduction to Bear in the book where the speaker claims that Bear was looking at as if she were a fish in a river.

Like the flora and fauna of the forest, the metaphors Lee makes of them overwhelm you, only to return to their roots when you are completely consumed by them later in the book. Because of this, Dear Bear becomes a collection of forty short poems that is best read twice: once to let yourself be consumed by the indulgent and palpable imagery of the forest until you find itself at its roots, and after you know the roots of the forest (and the speaker), again to witness how Lee constructs the self through her own annihilation.

Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Juniper Jordan Cruz is a writer and body artist from Hartford, Connecticut. She is a 2019 graduate from Kenyon College, where she studied creative writing. Her work has been published in Poets.org, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic. Her works have also been recognized by Gigantic Sequins and the Academy of American Poetry Prize at Kenyon College. Email to query Juniper about poetry book reviews.

THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD by Krys Malcolm Belc, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD
Krys Malcolm Belc
Counterpoint Press
304 pages

Reviewed by Beth Kephart

Krys Malcolm Belc—nonbinary, transmasculine, and talented—begins his memoir with an Irish dance—“all jumping and pounding, the tight black laces against my calves, the bang of hard shoes on the floor.” He is young and the music permeates, and now, he writes, “I try to remember what it was like then, when I was four and five and six, if I was unhappy. I am supposed to remember being unhappy, but mostly what I remember is what it’s like to stand there knowing the dance is about to start.”

Supposed to remember. Supposed to be. Supposed to become. But suppose does not fit the life Belc will live. Competitive, just like his father. Prone to moments of rage. Enrolled in an all-girls’ Catholic school, dressed in the costumery of girlhood. A girlfriend who becomes a boyfriend who becomes a partner, a parent, a “natural mother of the child,” according to legal documents, and then, at last, following the birth of his child and testosterone treatments, a human being who, with his beard, shaved head, and Cross-Fit body, is assessed by perfect strangers as an awesome dad.

In six long essays, most adorned by fuzzy photographs and court material, ultrasounds and birth certificates, plays on and with margin settings (think W.G. Sebald, think Susanna Kaysen), Belc tells the story of being who he has become, of who he is still becoming. He is neither prescriptive nor defensive; rather, he is at work on understanding himself. Not just the trajectory that his life has taken, but the complicated feelings that still arise in him, the yearnings he sometimes has not just to birth another child, but to speak more openly of his own funny, playful, endearing Samson, who is one of three children Belc is raising with his partner, Anna:

Krys Malcolm Belc

When I am around another pregnant person, I feel an emptiness where Samson used to be. A professor I respect deeply tells me she is pregnant and I know it’s irrational, I know it isn’t fair, but the surprise on her face when I tell her about Samson hurts me. She doesn’t seem repulsed, just surprised. Who would think.

Who would think.

Belc handles fragments and confoundment with ease. His work—which reaches deeply into childhood, speaks honestly of anger, acknowledges intense interior battles, ponders Anna’s place as a woman who loved a woman who now is married to a man—coheres. Artfully. If Belc still has questions about his body and what it carries, if he wonders how the world sees him, if he wishes the past could be both more present and somehow more distant, no one will wonder, in reading this book, if Belc is an authentically gifted writer.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and a widely published essayist. Her new memoir in essays is Wife | Daughter | Self, from Forest Avenue Press. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

RESONANT PLACES: Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing, a Fiction Craft Essay by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

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RESONANT PLACES
Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing
A Fiction Craft Essay
by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Memory and imagination cast spells. Fiction is inspired by places as well as temps perdue. Many of us have dreamed last night that we went back to—well, not Rebecca’s Manderley but to a place from our past, one that resonates. Some places are lost to us even if the building remains because we can never again enter and live there. Perhaps we can peer in, but we cannot look out the windows again, never see the way the world is framed from within that particular shelter again. Sometimes indeed an entire small world is lost to us. Although years later we may wander through a campus again, a neighborhood, the people are gone or so changed as to be unrecognizable. Without our remembered familiars, it’s empty as a stage set.

But story-telling, imagining, can open the portal to the lost place. Writing fiction, just as we can write from the point of view of people we have never been, we can inhabit resonant places we’ve never actually lived in. We can step over the threshold of the real or imagined house, into the skin of the house’s real or imagined occupant. Resonant homes contain lives, shelter, hide, even expose, the hopes, dreams, sorrows, and joys played out beneath the roof.

Such places for me are often the initial wellspring for a story. Sometimes, I re-inhabit a truly remembered place—a former home of mine. Sometimes I visit, I take a long-term lease, to a place I have never lived.

I’ve always loved, and frequently visit “house museums” and I’d argue that, in a way, all houses are museums. Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House was first on my list, Emily Dickinson’s not too much further down. Perhaps a personal best day of sightseeing was visiting the white garden Vita Sackville West designed to be seen by moonlight, followed by the coziness of Henry James’ Lamb House in Rye. A close second would be the evening on the patio of Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox, Massachusetts, hearing one of her stories read aloud by an actor from the theater down the road.  I “collect” house museums the way some collect bird sightings.

A couple of years ago, I stood in Herman Melville’s study—the only comfortable, light-filled room in the awkward rambling house. Looking out the window—at fields, not waves—was to imagine looking through his eyes, at what he saw (or blotted out) as he wrote.

But it was a visit to a different kind of house, one empty of furniture, in the midst of restoration, not a museum of the famous former occupant, that spurred the process of writing my novel Frieda’s Song.

For years I lived a couple of blocks from the Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. The Lodge had once been renowned for innovative treatment of severe mental illness, and the psychiatrist who put the sanatorium on the map was Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Frieda, as everyone including her patients called her, came to the Lodge in 1935, fleeing Nazi Germany, losing her home, losing the hospital she had founded there, losing her family, colleagues, friends. She soon proved invaluable to The Lodge, and other envious institutions wooed her. A competing hospital offered her a house. How tempting, especially to a refugee who had been dispossessed of everyone, of everything.

The Lodge’s director did not want to lose her, so he counteroffered—promising not just a house, but one custom-built to her specifications. She accepted, took active part in designing the house, and remained to live and work in what is still called Frieda’s Cottage for the rest of her life, dying in her home in 1957.

About thirty years after her death, I moved to the neighborhood, where I practiced psychotherapy at a community clinic. I attended the annual symposium for mental health professionals on the expansive green lawns of the Lodge. Many of us had read Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, authored by Frieda, who remained an iconic absent presence. Her Cottage was by then shabby, used as office space.

The Lodge itself declined and in the latter days of the twentieth century, the hospital closed and stood empty as attempts to repurpose it failed. But the local historical society purchased Frieda’s Cottage, and began restorations. Visiting the Cottage during its renovation, I felt a tug: a resonant place, a resident ghost, pulling me toward story. Restoration complete, the Cottage was rented; Frieda’s Cottage was once more a home.

The remaining hospital building went up in flames one night in 2009 and its rubble was bulldozed, erased. But—miraculously it seemed—Frieda’s Cottage, just yards away, survived.

The invisible shadow of the vanished Lodge, the mysterious fire, the resilient Cottage, all pulled me in. I researched, I imagined. I began to write a story, from the point of view of a current-day psychotherapist living in Frieda’s Cottage. The therapist’s teenage son demanded his say, and soon Frieda herself—rather my Frieda, my imagined Frieda Fromm-Reichmann—demanded hers.

In strange parallel progression, my novel was finished and then accepted for publication almost precisely as Frieda’s Cottage was nominated and then designated as a National Historic Landmark. (I had testified before the Landmark Commission along with Frieda’s biographer, historians, architectural historians—a rather surreal experience for someone who makes things up.)

Not too long ago, the Cottage was available for rent again.

Tempting, I’ll admit, to imagine, living and writing in Frieda’s Cottage.

It is time for me to move again. But not to move homes. It’s time for me to move on again, move in again, to a different resonant home. I’ve already found my next story abode, though it’s vanished. A truly lost house this time, though once a real house, once inhabited by a local artist’s family. House, artist, and family are all gone. Which makes the place perfect for me in some ways: free-range. I’m just opening the door, looking around. Seriously considering a long-term lease.

Ellen Prentiss CampbellEllen Prentiss Campbell’s new novel is Frieda’s Song. Her debut novel The Bowl with Gold Seams received the National Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Her story collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award. Known by Heart: Collected Stories appeared in May 2020. She lives in Washington D.C. Learn more at her website.

AFTERBURN: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | August 8-29

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AFTERBURN
A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision
Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa

3 weeks
August 8-29
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication.

I’m no longer afraid of the revision process. Kathryn arms you with resources, tools, and exercises that build confidence, then puts you in the editing chair with your own work and others. A well-paced, excellent class.

I loved having the ability to work on the material at my own pace, at my own time. I met several writers who I will continue to stay in touch with.

This was a great workshop that led me places I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. It also resulted in a recent publication. Woot!

I loved the prompts! And Kathryn’s astute feedback, of course!

Revisions are something I tend to ignore. I write pieces and let them sit and gather dust. This workshop helped me to think about writing as a process and not a one and done activity.

Some amazing exercises that I will use over and over for other projects!

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

 

 

 

FLASH BOOTCAMP, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Four Weekend Sessions in June-July, 2021

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FLASH BOOTCAMP
4 Summer Weekend Bootcamps
Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa
June 4 – 6
June 18 – 20
July 9 – 11
July 23 – 25

Saturday and Sunday Zoom sessions 2-4 pm ET

$150 for one session; $275 for two sessions; $375 for three Sessions; $425 for all four sessions.

Register Now

*Get focused!* *Get motivated!* *Get writing!*
This generative mini-workshop is designed for busy writers who need to carve out some writing time to generate new work, and who crave deadlines and accountability to stay motivated. This class combines writing prompt “homework” you do on your own with group writing and discussion sessions. In just three days (Friday through Sunday), you will have six new micro-stories ready to revise!

Format: Combines asynchronous (writing prompts you do on your own time Friday and Saturday) with two, 2-hour Zoom sessions on Saturday and Sunday.
Focus:  Flash pieces 500 words and under.

The exercises and feedback were excellent. I also appreciated the Zoom classes which helped me connect with other writers and discuss work.

The workshop was incredibly helpful. Kathryn’s critiques, prompts, and synchronous sessions were marvelous. The community of writers that formed was strong and committed. Plus, three pieces I wrote for the workshop have been published or are forthcoming in different journals!

Great exercises, good zoom meetings, interesting writing, all jump started me, as I have been languishing a bit during the pandemic.

I enjoyed the readings and thought provoking questions. The prompts were challenging. The high quality of the other writers raised the bar and pushed me to write better.

Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and received the First Series Award in Short Fiction for her story collection Pleasant Drugs(Mid-List Press).  Her work has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Evansville Review, and she serves as flash fiction editor for Cleaver magazine. Kathryn leads writing workshops in public libraries throughout Rhode Island and has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College. She was born in a small state, and she writes short stories.

PLAYING WITH POINT OF VIEW A Workshop for Fiction Writers, taught by Cleaver Founding Editor Karen Rile, June 9-30

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PLAYING WITH POINT OF VIEW
A Workshop for Fiction Writers
Taught by Cleaver Founding Editor Karen Rile
June 9, 16, 23, 30, and July 7, 6:30 – 8:30 pm ET
Class Limit: 12
$200
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

“Point of view” is more than just the vantage point of the narrative voice telling your story. It’s the filter that colors and controls your readers’ experience of the characters and plot you create. The possibilities are infinite. In this generative, craft-focused workshop you’ll experiment and explore, creating new work each week to share and discuss in a supportive online group.

Each week we’ll read a few stories and/or novel excerpts illustrating different approaches to point of view. Story discussions take place in a private online discussion group. During our Wednesday workshops we will write to prompts, followed by discussion and optional sharing.

This class is appropriate for prose writers of all levels, including prose-curious poets.

Karen RileKaren Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, Superstition Review, Tishman Review, and has been shortlisted among The Best American Short Stories. Karen has published articles and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and others. She is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver and the Director of Cleaver Workshops.

Karen lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA from Bennington College, and a certificate in satire from The Second City. She is also the mom of four adult daughters with more interesting careers than her own: an aerialist, a glass artist, a violist, and a playwright.

Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.

VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, July 10 – August 14

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VOICE LESSONS
Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry
Taught by Cleaver Senior Poetry Editor Claire Oleson
July 10 – August 14, 2021
Asynchronous with optional Zoom meetings 11 am ET July 17 and 24
$200
Questions: [email protected]
Class Limit: 12

Register Now

In this course, we will plunge into the murky waters of what is meant by “voice” in poetry. Each week, we will look at two to three poems by a single poet and investigate how they bring something of the same perspective, tone, specificity, and selfhood to different poetic projects. In light of this investigation, participants will be invited to work on their uses of voice in their own poetry. This class is designed to create a platform on which to find, develop, and hone the connective tissue between different works by the same writer. For five weeks, participants will be encouraged to find themselves within their language and explore the ways in which they may take on an identifiable style while maintaining flexibility across different pieces.

We will work primarily on generating new work, encouraging participants to push their boundaries and hone their voice to create memorable and authentic work. The workshop model will facilitate constructive responses from both peers and the instructor. Particular attention will be placed on the spaces between poems that the participants bring to class.

We will read a few selections of poetry weekly that demonstrate the application of different uses of voice in poetry. By the end of the course, participants will have a better handle on how and where their voice exists in their own work, allowing for more intention and awareness of its application. Far from considering poems as singular revelations in a void, this class is one that is fundamentally about context. Inevitably, we bring our lives and ourselves to the page when we might not mean to: how can we begin to do this with consciousness, control, and thought to how our poems talk to each other?

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

A final optional Zoom meeting will be held as a reading of our work.

Instructor Bio

Claire Oleson is the winner of the 2019 Newfound Chapbook Prize and a graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. She has participated in graduate writing workshops with the Kenyon Review, where she also worked for the entirety of her undergraduate career. She has worked as a TA for Northwestern University’s summer creative writing courses. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Sugar House Review, among others. She currently serves as the poetry editor for Cleaver and lives and works in NYC.

 

Schedule (July 10 – August 14)

New Modules posted on Mondays,

Pieces due by Friday, 11:59,

Feedback from All Due by Sunday, 11:59

Optional Zoom sessions on Saturdays at 11 am ET

SYLLABUS

1: Introductions: What is voice?

We will open with an investigation of what “voice” means and how its both employed (and oftentimes, entirely ignored) in poetry. This week will focus on learning to see how the voice of a poet can be seen across different works of theirs that have totally different goals, but still carry the same author in their stanzas.

2: Joy and Grief

We will take a look at how the same poet approaches heartbreak and celebration. We will explore what places change and what uses of language and mood are maintained between two different emotional extremes captured by the same artist.

3: The Picture and the Lecture

This module will invite an analysis of poems that “show” and poems that would rather drag out their soap box and have you sit down, no pictures included. We will ask how the same voice illuminates the imagistic and the didactic and what survives or dies off between these modes of communication.

4: Caged and Free-Range

In this second to last week, we will dive into two poems: one that embraces a strict form and one that shirks most formal elements in favor of free verse. We’ll ask what it looks like to dress a voice in constraints and what it might mean to let it lead itself, and the language, on instinct and whim.

5: A New Tone

In this final module, we will take a moment to look at pieces by an author that look completely different in both project and voice by the same poet. This week, participants will be invited to make work that encapsulates something totally outside the voice they’ve begun to develop, allowing both the use of voice, and its absence, to become intentional.

 

GRAPHIC PSYCHE: A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir taught by Emily Steinberg, June 5-26, 2021

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GRAPHIC PSYCHE
A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir
taught by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg

Four Saturdays on Zoom
12-2 pm ET
June 5,12,19,26
$200
Class Limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

Visual Narrative, the marriage of words and images, both ancient and modern, is a potent mode of storytelling that can often be more gripping than either practice on their own. In this workshop, we will discuss the history of visual narrative and the myriad ways of composing with text and image. By the end of our time together, you will create your own short graphic narrative response to the bizarre, upside-down covid, quarantine, lockdown, political circus world of 2020.

In 1996, I worked my way out of a deep painter’s block/depression by writing obsessively about the events of my daily life. In 2005, I pulled the writings out and started drawing them. And I’ve been hooked ever since by the immediacy and vitality of this generous practice that beckons you to write, draw, be playful and explore absolutely anything in the world that captivates you. There are no limits here.  —Emily Steinberg, MFA

Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

FUND WHAT YOU FEAR by Marnie Goodfriend

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Graphic design image of uterus, title, and author name.

FUND WHAT YOU FEAR
by Marnie Goodfriend

I lie in bed, my eyes fixated on the fruit trees outside my bare windows. I do not have insomnia. I am bone tired. Recently, my pain is nocturnal. My body waits until my head makes contact with the pillow before fireworks burst in my pelvic cavity. I bend my knees like an upside-down V and press my feet into the mattress. V is for vulture. violence. victim. vampire. vagina.

The other day, my friend Melissa told me about the fund-what-you-fear philosophy. Her words bloat several text bubbles. They remind me of our distended stomachs: agitated, acting out, hardened. There’s something like less than one dollar a day that goes toward endometriosis research and when the medical world is predominantly men … it’s easy to see why they never push money towards diseases that only affect people with a uterus.

Is this a philosophy or just reality? I google “Fund What You Fear Philosophy.” The first entry is the 80s English pop duo Tears For Fears’s Wikipedia page. Other entries include a punk band, a first-person shooter video game, and a 2013 British psychological horror film where the characters are trapped in the same place regardless of what road they take to escape. Knowing these subjects weren’t what I was searching for, Google suggests I drop the word “fund.” “Missing: fund ‎| ‎Must include: ‎fund.”

I met Melissa while interviewing sources for an article I was writing about energy work and endometriosis. She told me it took twenty-one years for her to be diagnosed. At that point, endo had eradicated her right ovary, covering it with black disease her surgeon described as “rotten fruit.” She had a tumor on her right fallopian tube, two endometriomas on her left ovary, clusters of adhesions on her diaphragm, eighth rib, abdominal sidewall, bladder, uterus, and lower pelvis. The disease had chewed a hole through her rectum requiring two layers of separate stitches.

My boyfriend holds onto my left arm; the other dangles off the bed, clicking a control button up and down, the settings high medium low. For other interviews, endo women have shared photos of burn marks on their bodies from extended use of the high setting. If I fall asleep with the red light on, I worry the bed will go up in flames. But sleep never comes to me. I coax my legs to stand and walk to the living room couch which doubles as a sickbed, the heating pad’s electric wire dragging behind me like an umbilical cord attached to no one.

Melissa’s diagnosis is horrifying, but it does not shock me. It reads like one of my own post-op reports, cysts and adhesions covering my pelvic region, digestive tract, and rectum. I stare at my sweatpants’ elastic waistband cinching my stomach and wonder what’s growing inside me right now. Which of my organs looks like rotten fruit? Our front yard is littered with deformed oranges in black, gray, and green mold fallen from a neighbor’s tree. At night, rats feast on the decomposing fruit. We pick them up, but there are always others to replace them.

Melissa and I are getting to know each other the way people with chronic, invisible illnesses do. Once alone, we now know someone who understands our pain, confusion, anger, isolation. We stick together like magnets, offering up our insides, in case one of my pieces fits with hers and we discover something new that could alleviate some of our pain. She is a painter and educator. We are both accidental activists, doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists, social workers, researchers, nutritionists, healers.

If a room of men in powerful positions who are in charge of allocating funds for research on diseases or treatment, they are more likely to fund things they can empathize with. This isn’t new information, but knowing it is unjust, someone gave it a name. I take a highlighter to it, write it on a sticky note. Every time we are seen, I underscore the words so they will glow in the dark. I imagine a million tiny pieces of paper illuminating unlit hallways from beds to couches or guest rooms across the globe. We are guests in our homes and in our bodies. We have no control over when the pain arrives or checks out.

Sometimes I wrap the plastic heat around my stomach. Other times my pelvic muscles cry for me to loosen them from their vice grip. Recently, I’ve been fastening the hot rectangle between my legs like a giant maxi pad. In the medicine cabinet, there are countless bottles of antidepressants and opioids in fuzzy peach, butter yellow, and baby blue pastels. I am not sad or bereft. The capsules are dress up costumes of people I don’t want to be. They’d grow fuzz inside my head, mask the pain, my personality, creativity, identity. Their child safety locks go unchallenged.

In 1990, Ellen Goodman wrote an article about a congressional hearing of the House subcommittee on health and the environment and how in scientific and medical research, testing is primarily done on white male rats. Females are “usually excluded because of what might be called ‘raging hormonal imbalance.’ Not only are men studied more, so are their health problems. All in all, about 13 percent of NIH’s $5.7 billion budget goes to study the health risks of the half of the population that is female.”

In the living room, I prop myself up with a pillow to write a fairytale about a place and time when there was no pain. The truth seeker in me is offended by my attempt to wring out the blood stains and backspaces to the beginning when women were set on fire for claiming to be sick.

In another article, “Endometriosis Sufferers Long Blamed,” Dr. Camran Nezhat, a Stanford University gynecologist, suggests that our 4,000-year history of blaming women for their “angry uteruses” has perpetuated the medical belief that pain with menstruation is normal.

My boyfriend pads into the room and rests his hand on my forehead. You okay? he asks. Mmm hmm. Okay, I nod. He’s told me he can see the pain on my face even when I try to hide it. I fear that if I complain too much, I’ll sound like a hypochondriac or he’ll think that I’m depressing to be around. Too much time on the couch and I’ll appear lazy or privileged. How people imagine bedrest: woman in silk pajamas eating pints of White Halo, online shopping, writing in her journal while binge-watching insert your favorite show. What bedrest actually looks like: unshowered woman in ripped sweatpants not sleeping, not eating, not journaling, crawling out of bed to press her head against the hardwood floor when the pain is too much.

According to Dr. Nezhat’s research, women were strapped into straight jackets, sent to asylums or prisons and subjected to leeches, hanging upside down, and bloodletting because they were attention seekers, experiencing “love sicknesses,” nymphomaniacs, drug addicts or suffering from mental illness. Others were deemed witches and burned at the stake. It is now believed that these women most likely had endometriosis.

I guess I never directly answered his question. I am not okay. What I meant was I will be okay because I can’t not not be okay.

Plato believed a woman’s desire to have sex was intrinsically tied to her innate need to have children. If she does not fulfill this desire, the womb will wander around her body “like an irrational, roaming animal” that will cut off her breathing. In the 1700s, this suffocation was rebranded as hysteria. Women were still hysterical until The American Psychiatric Association ceased using the term medically in 1952.

My GI doesn’t think the burning sensation I liken to someone pouring acid on my heart is endometriosis-related. He suggests I go to the emergency room the next time I have a flare-up and buy some Miralax, the equivalent of liquid Tums, from Costco. The one with the purple cap, he adds as he pats my back on our way out of the examining room.

The Ob/Gyn says he can’t see it, but my endometriosis has most likely grown back because I haven’t been taking care of it. When I decline his script for the hormone injection Lupron developed for chemotherapy, he shrugs his shoulders and suggests pregnancy because it would be the best of both worlds. He never asked me if I wanted to have children (I do), so I have no idea what two worlds he’s prescribing to all of his endo patients.

In pristine white scrubs and a halogen light above her head, my urologist Christine looks like an angel. A decade after my diagnosis, she is first to acknowledge my pelvic floor myalgia, another condition common for those with the disease. Reading the prescription for daily doses of Macrobid in my chart, her forehead wrinkles like a folded fan. Stop taking that. Immediately. And while she can’t help with my endometriosis, I should make appointments with other GIs and Ob/Gyns who have better advice to give. We have to work together as a team. It’s both a pep talk and an admission of what little information is available to women, even female doctors.

The Endometriosis Foundation of America confirms that pregnancy as a cure for endometriosis is a myth. There is no cure for the 200 million women staring out their windows at night while others are sleeping. Many who had taken Lupron developed osteoporosis, permanent joint pain, and nerve damage. A few days after my Ob/Gyn appointment, I read about a woman in Atlanta suing the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture it when her body began attacking her bones after two injections and is now confined to a recliner.

My pain comes in waves, small ones that break into white water before swallowing the shore. Other times they are four-to-six footers, rising, curling into themselves. I paddle wildly to get on top of them, stand up, and ride safely to land. Instead, they pull me under, dragging me like a rag doll. Suddenly, I am without breath and it feels exactly like almost choking to death. I struggle to resurface and find air again. When I do, my mouth opens wide to let all living things pass through—minnows, clams, stingrays, jellyfish. I breathe sharply like a black key, slippery, discordant, jarring, burning. It is my siren song.

Melissa sends me a Facebook group invitation connecting me to 50,000 endometriosis sufferers. Late at night, I stop writing stories and read all the things I could have done to receive better care and take control of my condition. It’s my daily shaming hour. If only social media existed back then, maybe I would have been able to have children. Maybe I would have slept more nights than not. Maybe it could have is the most painful symptom of all.

It’s five in the morning, my boyfriend tells me. In ninety minutes his alarm will fire. I follow him back to bed, grateful he is warm and there is no fire. I lay on my side, abandoning my heating pad to watch him drift into sleep like a dream. I am still wide awake.

Headshot of Marnie Goodfriend.Marnie Goodfriend is a writer, activist, installation, and social practice artist. She is a 2018 VCCA fellow, recipient of the Jane G. Camp scholarship, and a 2016 PEN America fellow. Her memoirs: Birth Marks, a coming-of-age story about a black market baby illegally sold by an infamous baby broker, and The Time It Takes To Leave My Body, chronicling the double rape of two young women by a serial rapist dubbed The Top Gun Rapist, are forthcoming. Her essays, articles, and other writing appear in TIME, Washington Post, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Marnie is essays editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

AT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE by Kate Peterson

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AT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE
by Kate Peterson

She’s in the garden all the time
and I’ve got my bridge,
and the next thing you know
you’re living different lives.
One asks the other, If she finds another guy
do you think you’d still be friends?

I wonder if this is generational
or national, men talking this way
out in public, over a cup of coffee.
My ex was absorbed in his book
and didn’t notice, which may also
be generational or national.
After a while he eyed me taking notes
and guessed I was writing about him.
He looked up to say he just realized
he is more American than he wants to be.
Wind lifted in my chest, waves of loneliness
and love I’ll never understand. The way it rises and falls.

The men started up a game of Mahjong
and my coffee was gone so I got restless,
which is obviously generational
and national. Finally, we moved to the water.

Kate Peterson’s chapbook Grist won the Floating Bridge Prize and was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2016. Her poetry, prose, and interviews have been published in Sugar House Review, Glassworks, The Sierra Nevada Review, Rattle, Willow Springs, Hawai`i Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Kate is the director of Get Lit! Programs, home of Spokane’s annual week-long literary festival.

LAST GESTURE by James Miller

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LAST GESTURE
by James Miller

We eat on the porch
when evening heat recedes.

Lamps hang from the oak.
The Conrad novel rests

between us—eighty-nine
pages left to speak aloud.

As you reach out for a drink,
we see a tiny frog, its soft green

curves still as summer, perched
on the lip of your glass. He leaps,

alights on the secret agent,
then the near-blankness

of our table, dry and smeared
with tree sap. Motionless,

aware. You offer a thumbnail
of water and he rests there,

half-submerged. We fall silent,
but miss the last gesture.

He is gone.

James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typehouse, Rabid Oak, North Dakota Quarterly, Yemassee, Phoebe, Mantis, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, Grey Sparrow Review, Blue River, 8 Poems, After Happy Hour, Two Hawks Quarterly, Concho River Review, Sweet Tree Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @AndrewM1621.

LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020 by Laura Tanenbaum

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LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020
by Laura Tanenbaum

“But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rages of fog
where we stood, saying I”

—Adrienne Rich, “In those Years”

Today we took the kids to the cemetery, for escape.
No, it’s fine we explain to bewildered out-of-towners.
A place to go. Historical.

You ask, am I grieving:
OK, then, yes, I’m grieving.
The last day on the playground.
Someone sent me a picture and a joke.
Said we were all doomed; we touch our faces so much.
Remember that?
I thought then that I had never touched that person’s face,
not even by accident, and now I never would.

The kids find graves of two brothers
from Maryland who fought on opposite sides
of the last battle of the Civil War.
Reunited at a field hospital,
One said “peace,” the other “traitor.”
“The war between brothers” was propaganda,
but once in a while true. Like everything.
The kids have bandanas; call themselves bandits.

Years ago a teacher blindfolded us &
we touched each other’s faces. It was
acting or dance or maybe anthropology.
I don’t remember but I remember Michelle’s cheeks.
She thought the exercise distasteful.
“I’ve only touched the faces of people I’ve been with.”
I wasn’t with her but we drove to New Hampshire together.
Bad teachers are good at bringing people together.
She met my mother, likely brushed her cheek.

I don’t remember Michelle’s last name.
It’s not true, what they say about now:
People can still disappear from you. Happens
all the time, even before all this.

Did I remember her last name? That first morning?
Honestly I was shaky on her first.
You said that once, about someone now lost to you, and I loved you for it.
You say you don’t miss that now, her, then, any of it,
and neither do I.
Or so I say, sitting softly,
brushing no one’s cheek.
Each day I lose a hundred names.

Laura Tanenbaum is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Aji, Catamaran, Narrative, Entropy, and other publications. She has also published essays and book reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere.

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN by Nick Olson

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Graphic design image of mountain range, green PS2 controller, title, and author name

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN
by Nick Olson

I remember back in the day Nick used to try to get to Heaven. Heaven was a glitched-out place in San Andreas where nothing made sense or seemed quite real, and Nick would come home most days, boot up the PS2, and try again to get into it. There was a specific building in San Andreas where, if you went inside and used a cheat code to spawn a jetpack, you could fly through a certain part of the ceiling that didn’t have proper clipping. There was just one spot where you could fly through, a place that the developers had overlooked. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. This wasn’t something you were ever supposed to be able to come across just walking and jumping around. But if you knew what to look for and you did everything in just the right way, you could lift off and go through the ceiling. Fly right above the interior. From up there, I remember it looked like you had ripped the roof off a dollhouse and were looking down at its insides. And everywhere around the interior, where the outside world should’ve been, there was nothing but blank gray. Gray as far as you could see, in every direction. The way the game worked was that in order to save resources, only the exterior world or the interior world would ever be loaded at any given time, depending on what the character chose. The developers never intended for the player to see beyond the place that had been loaded for them, but Nick had found a way to clip through.

I remember every day he’d go straight back into that building and continue where he left off. You couldn’t save in Heaven, so he’d have to just repeat the glitch every time. There were no waypoints, no markers, so Nick would fly through gray nothing for what seemed like forever before coming across a new interior, some place he had never seen before. He’d go there and take mental notes of everything he saw, then fly back up through where the ceiling should’ve been and look for another place: a space explorer trying to chart new worlds. He’d find interiors you’d only see in passing in random cutscenes, abandoned test areas, and places you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the game. Many of these places were unfinished, so he’d land there and find himself able to walk through the walls, glide through props. It was like he was there but not at the same time.

The wild thing is, he committed so much of that to memory. There was no real way to map all that out. Once you were in the air, there were no landmarks to guide you, nothing but gray everywhere. If you checked your map in-game, it said that you were still at the building you’d originally entered. It was like you had never left. Like you were stuck, even though you weren’t.

I didn’t play San Andreas for years after Nick died. For a while, I just couldn’t. Then, when I wanted to, I couldn’t get it to work. The audio/video wires were old and frayed, and the electrical tape was coming apart, and it was years back, when I was still little, that Nick had spliced in old wires from a stereo system that no one was using anymore to replace the ones that had gone bad. He could’ve just gotten new wires, and I guess I can now too, but I remember how he cut and stripped them down, rubber to copper, demonstrating how you had to twist the proper wires together, like for like, but the two pairs you twisted together could never touch each other. They’d be taped down or pushed in opposite directions. They could be parallel, but they could never make contact again.

I think of checking eBay for a fresh set or searching how to properly splice wires, but I want to see if my memory is still enough. As they come untwisted, gangly and with their individual strands pointing in every possible direction, I have to remind myself that sights and sounds are transmitted through these things. Memories are. I cut a little further into the wires, past the unruly strands to get at the fresh portions, untouched. I cut too much off, if I’m being honest, but it’s just enough to get the two pairs connected again, pushed down onto either side, not touching, and I don’t have electrical tape to make it official, but that’ll be enough. It should hold.

I boot up the old PS2. It’s too early, and the sun is on the screen so I can barely make anything out, but I can hear that familiar old boot-up sound. And when the game cycles through, and I find that Nick’s old save file still works, and I track down that old handwritten jetpack cheat tucked away inside the game manual, I go back to that corner, from memory, and I fly straight up. Away and past it all.

Black and white headshot of Nick OlsonNick Olson is an author and editor from Chicagoland now living in North Carolina. He was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and he’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, decomP, and other fine places. When he’s not writing his own work, he’s sharing the wonderful work of others over at (mac)ro(mic). His debut novel, Here’s Waldo, is available now. Find him online at nickolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @nickolsonbooks.

FALL OF MAN, a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden

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FALL OF MAN
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden

Scroll down for an interview with Jennifer Hayden by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg
"Fall of Man" by Jennifer Hayden, 2021. Sketch of two nude individuals falling with leaves surrounding them."On October thirtieth, seven months into quarantine, my husband slipped on the stairs." Sketch of man flying through air next to stairs screaming "Fuck." "I was at the post office. And can I have a roll of forever stamps?" Sketch of postal worker behind plexiglass wearing a mask and woman wearing a mask with the words "anti-droplet curtain" "sanitizing station" and "social distancing spot" in cursive around her."Without my phone. Mom? Mom, where are you? Dad just fell down the stairs and I think her really hurt his shoulder I'm calling 911." Sketch of phone left on dashboard in car."Our very-together grown up daughter who's living with us during COVID got him to the E.R. Nothing's broken or dislocated. Well, let me tell you, this shit hurts." Sketch of Dad, daughter, and doctor talking."Following up with the shoulder guy: I bet it hurts. You tore three tendons, not to mention your bicep. You're going to need surgery and several months of P.T." Sketch of Dad, shirtless, talking to doctor. "So we're down one guy for the dishes, garbage, and heavy lifting in our prison cell of three. You're not loading the dishwasher right. What, do I need a Masters for this? I said, get. Out. Of. My. Kitchen." Sketch of Mom, Dad and daughter frustrated."I'm driving to pick up takeout a few evenings later when it all stops." Sketch of Mom wearing winter hat with the word "WHOMP!" above her."Soft heavy impact. Then incomprehension. Suspension." Front view of Mom driving car."Followed by" Side profile of Mom with word "FOOSH!" floating above her."And I'm sitting in my car in a dark field and I am showered with glass." Sketch of small car in field with crescent moon in sky."My turn to call 911. I was fine. The deer that had hit me had lumbered off." Sketch of large deer saying "ow" with car in background."But the incomprehension and feeling of suspension stayed. I just dropped my husband off for surgery. They said I can't wait here, so I wanted to use your bathroom before I drive home. Let me take your temperature." Sketch of Mom in hospital next to worker."Last spring. We can't just stay in our houses for eighteen months until they come up with a vaccine... Can we? Oh God." Sketch of Mom looking out the window."Or maybe it had been there all the time." Sketch of Mom and Dad falling, nude, with leaves surrounding them."Summer. He's going to challenge the election results if he loses. They're going to have to forcibly remove him from the White House. Jesus. We're fucked." Dad looking at iPad with coffee on table."January. I believed in science. I believed in the constitution. I believed they would protect us." Mom wearing cable knit sweater, holding coffee, looking out the window. "I guess the first thing you learn in the fall from innocence is how naked you really are. I need another hug. But now pretend you're someone I haven't seen in a long time." Mom and Dad hugging.

Headshot of Jennifer HaydenJennifer Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with breast cancer. She wrote the webstrips Rushes: A Comix Diary, and S’Crapbook. Her first book, Underwire, was featured in The Best American Comics 2013, and she has appeared in anthologies. She is working on a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and a travel novella called Le Chat Noir, about her dicey relationship with France. She has lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, and is currently quarantining in New Jersey

I AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS by Valerie Loveland

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I AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS
by Valerie Loveland

Scientists call everything an experiment,
…………………….even when ……iit is actually a meme
even when …………………………..it is actually a spiderweb beauty contest
Scientists don’t realize
even when they talk about drugs,
………………………….…………………they are still nerds.

……Who hasn’t been…….. an accident,
an experiment, a copy of an experiment,
……………..another copy of an experiment?

Everyone always tells me I am…………………… so ………………….…..……right:
I am proof there is a part of us all that can be normal.

But I forgot to tell you spider moms die before the babies are born so
…………nobody teaches spiders how to make their webs. I forgot to tell you
a spider doesn’t bother to go back and fix their mistakes.

……………………………………A fact becomes a fun fact
when everyone attempts to tell it to everyone else
……………………………………but everyone already knows it.

…………One time, a person tried to tell this group of photos
……………………………………………………about this group of photos.

I usually display …………………………high contrast black background with white webs
but when I am angry I switch
…………………………………………………………………………to beige background with black webs.

My psychiatrist told me I need to find a new doctor
…………………………………………because he is not allowed to prescribe drugs
………………………………………………………………farther than the fence in his backyard.

Look at this one photo …………and it looks like I am doing better,
…………………………………………………………………………look at the other photos
and it looks like I am doing worse.…… I am doing both.
…………………………………………………………I am not pictures of spiders or drugs
………………………………………………………………but I am constantly asked about spiders and drugs.
I have never been asked if messed up webs still catch bugs.

Valerie Loveland is a poet and programmer living in Philadelphia. She enjoys audio poetry, video games, and fountain pens. Her most recent two books are Female Animal, and Mandilble, Maxilla (Dancing Girl Press). She recently finished [Unsolved Mysteries Theme Song], a manuscript of poems about the 1990’s TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

AMMONITES by Ann de Forest

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AMMONITES
by Ann de Forest

mountains once were ocean  evidence coils beneath

our feet  prehistoric curlicues  not yet nautilus  not yet

snail  not yet calcified turban washed up on the beach

………………………void of any tender

……………………………….creature

 

barely old enough to remember  tasmanian devil’s cyclone

wake  cartoon cat’s stiff armed stumbles  vertiginous eyes

hypnotize  pulsing black & white  watch dangles

………………………sways  eyelids

………………………………fall

…………………………………………………………………..where does time begin?

 

crack the case  find the spring  sister crouched beneath

a crib  a finger flick sends silver spiral shimmying up

spinning down  mesmerized by tiny revolutions

mesmerized by bounce and drop

………………………by boing

…………………………..and hum

 

………………………………………………………………………danger up ahead

 

rattler on the trail  vortex in the toilet bowl  fingers

furled to pack a punch  lobster thrashing in a pot  fallen

leaf and flame-licked letter  go in green  come out red  tail

………………………rolled up between

………………………………your legs

 

tentacles sweep across the map  tempest whirls  turns

one blind eye  twists wind and water  flattening palms pounding

the panhandle  whitening the gulf  your thumbs

………………………too cold to leave

………………………       any imprint

 

………………………………………………………………………curl up & die

 

old woman tends her labyrinth  plants boxwood seedlings

ankle high  a lifetime pulling weeds curves her spine

………………………downward

…………………………….eyes drop

 

fiddlehead unfurls to fern  colors swirl across the page

to seal a book  adorn a spine  ossify as marble  boxwood grows

high  grows round  the generation’s last survivor

walks her labyrinth  sprigs fill to hedge  path

………………………vanishes

…………………………….as maze

 

………………………………………………………………………so easy to lose your way

 

split the pod  find the bean

split the bean  find the finest curling

tendril waiting for instructions to unwind

our own little bean a blip on a screen

………………………nestling in

……………………………a hurricane

 

………………………………………………………………………look down

the rosy sidewalk slabs dotted

with fossils  spinning right under

………………………our eyes

…………..       ………….ammonites

 

………………………………………………………………………look up

obscured by light  expanding

overhead  nebulae  no need

………………………for any

……………………………witness

Ann de Forest’s work often centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, Found Poetry Review, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Timber Creek Review, Open City, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. She is currently editing an anthology of essays about walking, Slow Going, to be published by New Door Books in 2021, a project inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.

I’M NOT SORRY by Ali Kojak

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I’M NOT SORRY
by Ali Kojak

They say I should write you a letter. As a goodbye, they smile sadly, for closure. They say closure like it’s a literal thing I can touch, can put in my Amazon cart and click, it’s here. Aha! Now you’re closed. But how do you close a life? Maybe it’s like sending guests home after a party. Thank you for living, I say quietly, as you stand in the doorway not looking ready to leave. I gently push the door in your direction, biting my lip to stop from changing my mind. It’s late, and my kids are tired, I plead, so you step back but keep staring—sadly, silently, into the warm house. Now I push hard and fast, heart-pounding, sweaty fingers turning the bolt frantically. As if you might push back. As if it really matters. As if you’re not a ghost. I sink to the floor—back against the door, head in my knees—and sob. Wait, I scream, come back. I’m not ready. You never respected my privacy anyway.

The official cause of death is an overdose of carfentanil, but cocaine metabolites, fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and a positive screen for cannaboids all played a supporting role. I think that means you were high AF, but I also hope it means you were peaceful. I hope you were dreaming of floating on your back in a wide, sleepy river, arms and legs spread generously, sun on your face. A current lazily carrying you downstream, breaths deep and rhythmic, each exhale releasing tension that gets carried away by the ripples. Completely content, at last. Of course, that’s also the guided meditation my new therapist uses to keep fear from hijacking my mind, so, you know, take it for what it’s worth. While you survived the wounds of our childhood by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, I relied on anxiety and perfectionism. It turns out one of those coping mechanisms has higher odds of survival. The unfairness of that threatens to shatter me daily, a sledgehammer of guilt, suspended.

In 2017, the year you died, the U.S. Department of Health and Human services declared a public health emergency to address the national opioid crisis. More than 70,000 Americans died of a drug overdose that year, and Ohio (where you were cut open at 9:05 a.m. on a Saturday morning in October) was the state with the second-highest rate of drug overdose deaths. The heart of it all, we’d roll our eyes as kids, unimpressed by our pedestrian Midwestern life. A heart stopped by the opioid epidemic, apparently. I know these details because in an attempt to make sense of, or maybe find meaning in, your death, I tried to find its place in some larger narrative. Like a puzzle piece, useless in isolation. Oh, I see, he fits right there, that spot—there’s a pattern to all this dying. It’s okay now. I’m okay now. Right? Unsurprisingly, it all still feels meaningless. Did it feel as meaningless to the medical examiner, I wonder, when she coldly cataloged your clothes?

White adult male received in white short-sleeved V-necked t-shirt, pair of white on black plaid boxer shorts with waistband of black, white and blue checked fabric, pair of white Nike sneakers, and pair of short white socks with gray heels and toes. Did she wonder what happened to your pants? Why you had on shoes but no pants? Why is there a description of the waistband of your boxers but no question as to the location of your pants? Maybe she was too busy noticing how clean your white Nikes were, a fellow shoe aficionado. Or maybe when she documented the cutaneous tattoo of a lion with an axe and crown in the lateral upper right deltoid, she thought of her own ink work and questioned the story behind yours. When she charted that your scalp was brown with scant gray and mild bitemporal hairline recession, there’s a chance she thought of her own husband’s impending baldness. Likely though, she kept her mind blank, focused solely on the medical undertaking, professionalism giving her the distance required to do her job. And yet, I can’t help but feel defensive. Did she describe the kind old man who died of natural causes, surrounded by dozens of friends and family, with the same detached tone? Or when she looked at you, did she only see another dead junkie?

I wish I could show her the pictures of you as a child, the ones I collected for your funeral slideshow, the tow-headed toddler with bright eyes and a disarming smile. Sitting confidently on our mother’s lap, looking curiously at the camera. Look, I’d say, at him here. Before all this. Isn’t it obvious he mattered? Don’t you see who he could have become? I also want to show them to the doctor who saved your life the summer before you died, the one I assume now realizes his effort was wasted. All that time, all my talent, for what? Six months? I imagine him thinking, and I resent him for that illusory judgment. Anger always feels better with a target. But also, I can’t shake that first impression.

That summer it had taken your girlfriend days to find you. She knew something was wrong, a sixth sense, and she tried to get everyone to worry. She called every hospital in Cincinnati (blind optimism ruling out morgues), and finally, there you were. You’d been there for at least a day already, brought in after calling your own ambulance when you realized you couldn’t walk. Confused by the searing pain in your arm and leg, you’d waited until you felt like you actually might die. You were dying, it turns out, rhabdomyolysis setting off a chain reaction of muscle death and kidney failure. It’s hard to imagine the pain you must have been in, how much you suffered in the name of self-sufficiency, or embarrassment, or fear of breaking parole, before finally asking for help. I blew through the drive from Chicago to find our parents already in the ICU (together! at the same time!), hovering helplessly over your cord-entangled body, while staff reminded us you were lucky to be alive. Or maybe I just sensed that, as the beeps and dings and whooshes crashed against the walls, a cacophony of uncertainty. So much support, to keep one heart beating. It seems ironic now.

They’d come suddenly to take you to another surgery, and you’d already had a few, so this one was risky, but without you’d die. Not much of a choice, and anyway, they said after we’d know better whether or not you’d live, and what kind of life that might be. A surgeon spent hours cutting out all the dead tissue and muscle from your body, saving whatever he could, giving you the best chance. Of what, we’ll never know. We spent hours in a massive, impersonal waiting room, getting on each other’s nerves and looking at our cell phones. It was more of a lobby, really, with a fireplace and a front desk and hundreds of chairs. So many chairs. A seat for every memory. I didn’t know it was possible to feel claustrophobic in such an open space, and I thought about that time we got in a fight and you ran away and swallowed an entire bottle of Benadryl. How scared I was trying to visualize what it looked like for a 12-year-old to have their stomach pumped, how mom screamed at me, Now look what you’ve done!

Sometimes, I’m caught in that space, in those hours, still waiting for you, checking in relentlessly with the woman at the information desk. A memory stuck on loop. The doctor knows we’re here, right? I ask, over and over, frustrated by how much time has passed without a single update. Hoping she might sympathize with the agony of spending hours not knowing. Because what if you’re back there, dead, and I’m out here, sipping a latte? Sighing, she repeats the line about the note she put in your chart asking the doctor to come out and brief us. (S.O.S., it probably said.) Please, I implore, shoulders sagging. It’s a long surgery, she finally softens, and my system shows they’re still in there. Eventually, I exhaust every gossip magazine on every table in that cavernous room, worn out by trying to equalize the time I sit near each parent, neither comforted by my presence. I make another approach. Don’t be rude, our dad hisses. Asking for information isn’t rude, I snarl back, before switching to what I hope is my most polite smile. She’s typing before I even ask, your patient number memorized. I’m so sorry, she greets me, eyes wide and apologetic, it actually looks like the surgery is over and the doctor has gone home for the day. What in the actual fuck?

My mind spins, and suddenly the room feels small, options closing in around me. I feel like I’m going to pass out, the effect of three cups of coffee and my inability to control the universe threatening to bring me to my knees. The elevator bings loudly, the noise interrupting my spiral. Two men in white coats get off, and I focus on the details to slow my heart rate. Breathe in: they are talking familiarly, an ordinary end-of-day exchange. Breathe out: white rectangular hospital name tags still attached to their pockets. Wait—it’s your surgeon, I realize, and beeline. Tell me everything, I demand, hoping my anger is more apparent than my terror. He frowns, tilting his head to one side. Unprepared for an ambush at the elevator, he apologizes to his colleague. His father, it turns out—they are both doctors and sometimes work at the same place. It’s sweet actually, but in that moment I hate him for it.

He asks calmly (too damn calmly) what I’m talking about, accustomed to anxious family members insisting on answers. I watch his face as I regurgitate all the details, the girlfriend-couldn’t-find-him, just-got-out-of-his-halfway-house, really-trying-to-get-better-this-time, two-boys-who-need-him, I-asked-the-front-desk-over-and-over, they-said-you’d-talk-to-us details, and finally, I see it register. Oh, she’s talking about the addict. But he says slowly, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize he had family here. And I translate internally, I didn’t realize anyone gave a shit. He does, and we do, and we’re here now. Tell us about the surgery, tell us about my brother, their son, her partner, their father. Tell us about the kid who collected baseball cards and Smurf figurines, a tiny pink-onesie-clad baby Smurfette on all fours his favorite. Tell yourself he’s important. And he does tell us all the details, kindly. It’s not enough to make me like him, though later you tell me he’s pretty nice. Thanks to his skill, you didn’t die then, though I think you might have wanted to.

You lost the use of your right arm and leg, and somehow it fell on me to break the news. You called yourself crippled, and useless, and unlovable, and mourned that you wouldn’t be able to wait tables—one thing you were always good at, one job you could always count on. Tears welled up in your eyes, and you asked, Why does this stuff always happen to me? I felt like the obvious answer was because you keep using, but saying so felt cruel, and I figured you knew that already. But the metaphorical question was one I didn’t (never will) have any answers for, so I mumbled something about how this time would be different, would be okay, you’d get through this, you had to, for your boys, and we both pretended to believe it. Both desperately wanted to. Would the exact right words have made a difference? If I had been able to explain God or the meaning of life, would you still be here? Did I even say I love you?

And then they let you leave, which surprised us all. But healthcare isn’t free, and you don’t get insurance on a server’s paycheck. Or in prison. And I know, I know, you tried. You always tried. I found a letter recently you wrote to dad right before you got out of prison the last time, lamenting over how much you’d missed with your boys. I’m going to use this to make a change and live a whole different life, you optimistically scrawled. I have plenty of time to make it right. It wrecks me still, reading that. And even though I spent most of my life waiting for the inevitable call, I thought you had plenty of time too. It’s ironic, how even though the brain uses hope to protect itself from trauma, that same hope can blind us. When I actually got the news, I refused to believe it. That’s not true, I told dad, I talked to him yesterday. Are you sure, I asked him, because sometimes they are wrong? Remember, this summer they thought he would die. Please, I pleaded, have them check again—too blinded by my own grief in the moment to consider his.

In the day/weeks/months that followed, I wrestled with this constantly. How much grief do I get? What is the allowance, for a sister? I am not your parent, or your partner, or your child. I didn’t know that kind of loss—the parent, partner, child kind—and felt greedy taking more than my share. As if grief were a pie, limited in slices. (Although, as an aside, dad died last spring. Presumably from lung cancer but also, I think, a broken heart.) I googled “sibling death” and “sister grief” and “my brother overdosed,” but only one article offered even the tiniest solace. I found a therapist and begged for homework that would help me get over it. Getting over it seemed like a reasonable goal at the time. She suggested the letter. I left when she couldn’t stop the hurting.

It hurt to talk about it, and it hurt to not talk about it. I blame Joseph Heller, because blaming you might crush me. When you do talk about death, after the pleasantries, the requisite I’m-so-sorrys, people usually ask questions. What happened? Were you close? The shame those questions surfaced surprised me. Well, we talked for a couple of hours the day before he died, I’d stammer, not offering up that despite our shared blood, sometimes it felt like we lived in different universes. You were worried about parole, and rent, and feeding your kids. I was worried about piano lessons, and date night, and Netflix. But we understood each other, always, bound by shared history. That counts for something, right? Telling them you overdosed, that was harder. Was I worried what they’d think of you or of me? He overdosed, I’d say quietly, eyes misting. It was terrible, I’d hurry on, before they might think it wasn’t. He was really trying, you know. A friend stopped me once, told me I was reminding her of a grandmother in her building who’d recently lost her grandson to gang violence. The grandmother was fumbling around for the right words to say about her grandson, and her pain, and how the way he lived was connected to his death. Listen, my friend had said to her, you don’t have to apologize for loving your grandson. I caught my breath at that part of the story, empathetic already. She waited until I looked up to personalize it. You don’t have to apologize for loving your brother. You don’t have to be sorry for your grief. Something cracked open in my soul, and I stood there weeping silently, relieved.

My grief is cyclical, the scab picked open again by a song on the radio or someone else’s tragedy. By our birthdays coming up next month, exactly one week apart. You would have been forty-three. Instead, you are dead. And I’m turning forty, the age you were when you died. My seven-year-old self would have thrown a thousand pennies into the mall fountain to be the same age as my older brother, but my almost forty-year-old self just feels sad. It’s disorienting to realize I’m the same age as you, physically impossible, except that death has frozen you in time. And time, for me, has moved mercilessly on. Mercifully too, of course, as distance softens the edges of hard memories, amplifies the tender ones. Even though we were only three years apart, you always felt so much older. Maybe because you were already here when I was born, and I never knew life without you. When you died, forty still felt so far away, like an age I couldn’t possibly imagine. But now, on the precipice, it seems so young. Too young. Too vulnerable. Too much left to do. It’s not fair, I want to scream into the wind, it wasn’t enough time. Is it ever? It wasn’t enough time for you to beat the odds, to find a sponsor who changed everything or have some meaningful experience that somehow resuscitated your will to live. It wasn’t enough time for the right prescription or right therapist to change the distorted patterns in your brain, for doctors to discover an addiction treatment that actually works. It wasn’t enough time for you to watch your boys grow up, teach them all the important things, leave them a legacy marked by redemption. It wasn’t enough time for a happy ending. Maybe it never would have been. That’s the hard thing about death. It steals the possibility of a plot twist, finishes the story, ready or not. Even if a turnaround is improbable, with life, there is hope. With death, there is nothing. More than anything, I wish your story had a different ending.

But in the beginning, you were my brother. And I loved you.

Ali Kojak is a writer, storyteller, and oversharer who frequently realizes she said too much. After spending nearly two decades as a nomad courtesy of the US Air Force, she and her husband put down roots in Oak Park, Illinois, where they are currently raising three wild children and a naughty French Bulldog. You can connect with her at alikojak.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

LEPIDOPTERA by Lorette C. Luzajic

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butterfly

LEPIDOPTERA
by Lorette C. Luzajic

Pheasant Falls, end of the line. There is only a diner and smoke shop at either end of a triplet of small houses. On the other side, city-potted geraniums and a path to the waterfalls. An arrow points past the narrow choir of pines to the museum.

You have come together from the city to see the birds and the bears, and the butterfly room. You will see mineral specimens, too, a treasure chest of agate and amethyst, geodes and fossils transporting you back in time and deep into the earth. Sticks and Stones, a little known gem of taxonomy.

You come to a dilapidated house, with antlers and boulders strewn through a scraggly garden. There are no signs to confirm you are at the right place, but a cold-faced ibex glares through the window at your approach.

The proprietor is a sleazy little man who looks like he should have been an American rattlesnake preacher instead. He is small and sinewy, but his face is pitted and his lips are rubbery. He sprays when he talks. He ushers you in with a sweep of both hands. There are over four thousand specimens of butterflies here, he tells you, fanning at the grid walls, floor to ceiling. It’s just a drop in the bucket, he explains. There are more than 180 thousand kinds of lepidoptera. I wanted one of each, he says, but then I started collecting bones, too.

The man is scrubbed to shine, as if his mother still takes fingertips with spittle to his hair, and his halfway undone shirt is pressed and white. All this in contrast to the rooms of reindeer and weasels, undusted for years. Lloyd.

You almost understand his passion, his obsession, for fowl and fauna. Yours is for art history, but it is parallel in a way: galleries of still lifes and evolution in painting could be seen as kinds of taxidermy.

Even so, he makes you both uncomfortable with those claw-like little hands of his waving around and also all over you. He thwacks Mike on the back, pushes you both into the next diorama, where a grimy moose head greets you with an empty stare. A bear’s jaws are propped open in mockery of a threat long ago extinguished.

We don’t kill ‘em, Mike, Lloyd assures your man, who has been taking close-up photos with his phone. We just collect ‘em. He thumps him again. We get a call, you see, one bighorn sheep down, do you want it? And we say yes, we’ll take it. His stubby fingers linger for a moment on your upper arm, steal a squeeze.

You see, the big museums, they want whales, dinosaurs, mummies. Lloyd says he’ll gladly take a cache of broken crystals or a marsupial that needs work to get back into one piece.

Lloyd is a leading expert on cadaver restoration and posthumous surgery. Not so skillful with the living.

To make polite conversation, you say you love rocks, too. You flash your mammoth ring, a chunk of blue and Bedouin pot metal from the Jordanian desert. It might be lapis, or it might be dyed. You know how I tell what kind of rocks? Lloyd asks, taking your hand to better see the specimen you’re wearing. Before you or Mike can react, he raises your hand closer, opens his mouth and rakes his tongue, wet and wide and flat across your ring.

You and Mike both freeze, recoil. Lloyd drones on about how you can identify minerals by taste, then something about fixing the wing of the last known passenger pigeon before extinction. You flee to the ladies’ room, washing your prize ring and your hands for a long time. You think about Lloyd, speculate about him growing up unliked by people, retreating into the kingdom before man. You imagine him with a lamp and a needle, putting a small wing back into place, antennae, sorting slides, licking stones, speaking the language of layers of sediments and dead birds.

Lorette C. LuzajicLorette C. Luzajic writes prose poetry and flash fiction that has been widely published, from Unbroken to New Flash Fiction Review. She is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Lorette is also a mixed media collage artist whose works have found homes in at least 26 countries, from Latvia to Peru.

TRADE CRAFT by Jason Jobin

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TRADE CRAFT
by Jason Jobin

On the walk home from the bakery, spelt loaf in hand, I look back—because this is the part of town where you look back—and see a guy. He’s late thirties, soft looking, salt and pepper hair, very familiar. Familiar from where? He doesn’t make eye contact, but if he was a serial killer, would he? A real serial killer would feign disinterest and appear much like a normal stranger, maybe even exactly like a normal stranger. I run the rest of the way home. Safe in my room with all the doors locked, I roll a joint and blow the smoke out the window, stinking up the whole place, too worried to go outside. It’s rude to smoke inside. If it wasn’t an extreme circumstance, I would never. And then I roll and smoke another joint, and another, and another, and try to sleep. Who was he? I recognized him. From where? Memory so bad of late. Has he followed me before?

I begin to get concerned.

◊

Smoking on the apartment’s stoop the next morning, I get concerned for real. What’s the deal with this killer? I’m barefoot on the concrete in front of our door. Cold rain starts to fall, the wind-blown drops landing on my toes.

My lungs ache. Breathless. Black goo. All that paper and resin. I keep burning my lips.

But this serial killer. I get to thinking about how he’d attack. My roommate, Angie, wouldn’t be able to save me. She manages the vagina waxing place downtown, and is a saint, but she’s no martial artist. This killer probably came up in the clandestine services. Tours in the Middle East. Wet work squads. He’ll glide in during the darkest stage of night, having watched me for weeks, months even, and no one will stop him.

◊

I start sleeping with an old utility knife under my pillow. A birthday gift from my dad. There’s black tar on the blade from when I use it to scrape resin from pipes. The first night, I keep the knife folded closed under the pillow. The second night, I keep it open.

If you want to be high all day every day, it’s important to plan ahead. Have water, rolling papers, already busted up flower, at least five lighters, bagged snacks. Small sober patches need to be sprinkled throughout the week for grad school. It’s getting difficult. Brain fog. Lethargy. The killer always on my mind. First semester I write epistolary stories where the protagonist runs over a child with their car and is awaiting trial and writing deep meaningful letters to the kid’s parents. Because that’s how you heal.

I’m forgetting more and more words when trying to talk to people. Easy words. Basic nouns like road or pomegranate. Writing’s still going okay, at least. Novel progress. Ideas. But feeling like a fake writer, basically just copying Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it’s so fucking obvious, all the stuff I’m stealing from that, and anyone who reads the book will know and shame me. Usually writing at like 3 a.m. or later, the single lamp hot on my eyes, weird auras on everything.

I try quitting weed. Again and again, I try. It’s disgusting. Smoke so hot it hurts. Marks on my teeth now. Can’t remember the day of the week. And when I run out, kneeling on the carpet looking in the fibers, sure I dropped some earlier, at some point. Running a playing card or knife along the inside of empty bags—the knife works better, yellow crystal dust in a thin line down the blade, carefully scraped into a pipe, so strong, reeling. But no one at school has mentioned anything. They are so kind to me. And as long as I keep the knife under my pillow and stay vigilant, as long as I consider all the angles, I’ll get through.

The killer might be in for a surprise. Can he possibly know I grew up reading every Tom Clancy novel in print? Devouring them. Tradecraft, reversals, secret skills.

I start to place a door trap when I leave the apartment. In case the killer wants to sneak into my room. What you do is: take a small bowl, fill it with loose change, and when you leave whatever room you don’t want someone snooping in—the door must open inward— you close the door most of the way, kneel down, and put the bowl of coins against the door such that anyone who opens it will knock over the bowl. But this isn’t everything, no. Leave one coin on the carpet next to the bowl.

◊

We’re studying the short form with Lorna Crozier. She’s brilliant, gentle in the right ways, firm in the right ways. Her husband comes in and says I look like a novelist, and it’s the best thing anyone’s ever said to me. The other students are smart and can talk about technique and publish in journals. I try to keep up, writing weird shorts about a drug dealer who made us smoke weed off a homemade contraption of blowtorches, shorts about brewing vodka in university bathtubs, shorts about the girl I had a crush on in 5th grade telling her mom, in front of me, that I was the class clown, and how that felt unfair, and good, and mean.

The paranoia stays. I know they are delusions by now, but I’m still afraid. Knowing, and still. Each day when I get back from the university, I check the coin-bowl and the single coin on the floor, and each day it is unchanged. No one has been in my room, no girls, no friends, no one. Sometimes I forget about the trap and knock the coins everywhere, unable to know for sure if, that one time, the killer had been in there.

Squads of spiders are the only thing sneaking into my room for sure. There must be a gap somewhere, in the window, in the baseboard heater. Big spiders, maybe the size of a tablespoon, are invading. I’ll sometimes feel them on me in bed and have to get up, turn on all the lamps, and put socks on my hands to smash them. It’s the thing where you have a vague sensation something is on you, a brush, a tickle, and then rationalize that, no, it’s nothing, nothing is on you, but recently, when I’ve turned on the light, there has been a real spider. The spiders are real.

The spiders are real.

I almost never leave the apartment, and when I do socialize, like at a bar, I black out. Sometimes also doing cocaine with an old Whitehorse friend who is in Victoria for school. He gives it to me for free because he knows my brother or he feels sorry for my having had cancer, maybe, I don’t know. And then me and him and whoever else is there will yammer and talk circles for an hour, the drip in my throat a split-open battery, and then we do more cocaine, and so on, in the way of cocaine, until much later, and then it’s morning and I’m back at the apartment in my room, naked, grey light spilling through the blinds, and I’ve peeled an orange and impaled it on my thumb and I just sit staring at it, unable to blink, sticky juice down my arm like thread.

Jason Jobin was born and raised in the Yukon. He completed an MFA in writing at the University of Victoria. His stories have won a National Magazine Award and been anthologized in the 2018 and 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. He has been a finalist for American Short Fiction’s Halifax Ranch Prize for Fiction and The Fiddlehead’s Short Fiction Contest. He won The Malahat Review’s Jack Hodgins and Far Horizons awards for fiction. Jason was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is at work on a novel, a memoir, and a collection of stories.

FISH FEEL NO PAIN by Michelle Renee Hoppe

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FISH FEEL NO PAIN
by Michelle Renee Hoppe

My little brother held a trout, a rainbow burning bright enough to eclipse reflections. The fish did not reflect, but the stream did, and he took a mighty brown watery rock to spill the brains of the flesh, white and red onto the grey wooden dock, a spilling of color all over the dock, and when I screamed he said, Fish feel no pain.

I told him he could not know fish’s mind, not at ten or twenty or a thousand years could he know the inner worlds of slippery things, but that day I learned eating took no feeling.

He picked up the dead limp thing that once swam bravely, meant to be swallowed by dolphins or sharks, whales singing underwater, pelicans that fly without invention, alligators who were also dinosaurs, flamingos that were too, and asked if I’d like some.

When I screamed, he told me, ​Pipe down,​ for what was it but the way of things? Then he killed a mother trout, hooked by her tail and reeled her in backwards. No fisherman could bait her.

She was gutted and her eggs served beside the flesh—red eggs, white flesh.

Michelle Renee Hoppe holds a BA in English from BYU, where she ran a nonprofit for struggling students. She was a NYC Teaching Fellow in special education and a top private educational therapist, working on cases for disabled students. Her work won court cases against the NYCDOE. Her written work can be found in Saw Palm, South 85 Journal, and HoneySuckle Magazine, among others. She is the founder and Creative Director of Capable, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting and funding the voices of disabled and chronically ill authors and artists. She lectures in Saudi Arabia, where she lives down the street from a Bedouin tribe and a Starbucks. She recently adopted two wild desert kittens.

WEBSITE INSECURITY QUESTIONS by David Galef

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WEBSITE INSECURITY QUESTIONS
by David Galef

What was your first pet’s favorite color?

How many pets have you neglected since then?

This is about your father, isn’t it?

How often do you think about sex?

What did you drink on your first date with Janet?

Who was she there with?

Did you really think he was her cousin?

When you drive from I-78 to your house, what exit do you take?

What little winding road do you always miss right after that?

How old were you before you learned to drive with a stick shift?

This is about your mother, isn’t it?

What do you always quarrel with Janet about?

Why?

How many times has she said in the past year that she’ll leave you?

What’s your favorite Netflix show?

What was your favorite show five years ago?

Which show does Janet prefer?

Who’s told you repeatedly, “Will you ever grow up?”

What food do you most dislike?

Why does Janet cook it at least twice a week?

When did you hire a maid?

So what’s her name?

How could you not even know her name?

Oh, so you could do a better cleaning job?

Where do you think Janet is right now?

Who really goes grocery shopping that often?

How often do you feel inadequate?

Why are you blaming that on your father?

When you can’t sleep at night and stare out the window at the neighbor’s lawn, glowing green-black in the moonlight, then reach out for Janet, her limbs at rest, mouth parted in a perfect bow, where do you think you went wrong?

What joke do you tell that’s made you unpopular at the office?

Which delicatessen do you go to for your favorite sandwich?

Who’s still willing to have lunch with you?

What is the point of your existence?

What would/will life be like without Janet?

Is that pathetic or what?

Where is Janet right now?

Is that just what she told you?

Did she accompany it with one of those false smiles?

Do these security questions make you feel insecure?

What do you suppose Janet’s security questions are?

David GalefDavid Galef has published extremely short fiction in the collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize), extremely long fiction in the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (Kirkus Best Books of 2006), and a lot in between. His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook from Columbia University Press. Day job: professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University. He is also the new editor-in-chief at Vestal Review. Website www.davidgalef.com. Twitter handle @dgalef.

PANDEMIC MOTHER’S DAY, STOKOE FARMS, UPSTATE NEW YORK by Anne Panning       

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PANDEMIC MOTHER’S DAY, STOKOE FARMS, UPSTATE NEW YORK
by Anne Panning

Cost of admission: purchase of two dozen apple cider donuts, delivered to cars by a masked grandmother. As part of the donut deal, you earned drive-through privileges to view exotic animals. The albino wallaby scootched behind a rain barrel; two camels, fully reclined, glanced off to the side: a fuck you to photo ops. We were four of us again: our son, Hudson, had been kicked back to us from freshman year at Pitt. He’d roosted with us again, whipped up gooey onion omelets at midnight, jacked the Volvo seat so far back I couldn’t reach the pedals. Our daughter Lily’s high school would slam shut momentarily: you could almost hear the silence of the greatest pause on earth.

We grew hungry. Rain muddied the road. Where was the baby kangaroo they’d promised? Didn’t they know there were limits to our patience? Finally, an old man stepped out of a tiny shed as in a fairy tale: he snuggled the baby kangaroo inside his flannel shirt. “It’s just too cold out here for this little guy.” He told us we could take a photo. I can’t remember why we didn’t.

By then, I had to pee urgently. We drove up a pale, empty hill. There’s a photo of me crouched behind a pile of old tires: waving, peeing. Which still makes us laugh. Sort of.

Anne Panning has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss. She has also published a novel, Butter, as well as a short story collection, The Price of Eggs, and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Four of her essays have received notable citations in The Best American Essays series. She is currently working on a second memoir about her late father, a barber and addict. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM by Sandra Florence

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GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM
by Sandra Florence

We are playing Concentration. First, she finds the Jacks and then the Queens. Her head was lopsided when she was born, and she stared up at me with rolling grey eyes. I unwrapped her and thought, this is the pure one. Lightens up my life. Released. Escaped from personal injury.

Potatoes. Ducks in a green sky. A turquoise moon. All these things in her. My daughter in red rubber boots crossing the street in rain.

◊

She has not seen her father for some time now. They used to watch prize fights and play dominoes. “He’s going to love another kid,” she says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Now the big mouth scream. The other kid wriggling in her crib. “It’s it,” she says. “The name I can’t remember.”

Diapers flap in winter air. He drives to the bank and opens the vault.

“My hands are so small with the nails painted cherry fudge and my teeth hurt,” she says. “Let’s send him the olive with my teeth prints. Then he’ll know we need the money.”

He takes the money and hands it to the other kid. What we deserve.

◊

A studio garden apartment in the Sunset. The rooms are chopped up and boxy. Frosted glass obscures the garden view. We are so far away. The only night we stay there, we eat in front of the gas heater and then curl up in sleeping bags. She puts her head in my lap, and I stroke her hair and listen as her breathing becomes deeper. Her small body is warm and heavy against mine. I feel small. Swallowed by the night and the fog devouring streetcars. Is there someone in the garden? Moving?

Dream? Water near the pier laps against the dock.

“I dreamed my friend got hurt and the next day she came to school with a black eye.”

“That’s psychic,” I tell her.

“What’s that?” she asks.

She’s hysterical. I’m going to cry tonight. She has pink curlers in her hair. She moves the rubber animals around in the sand tray. Trees, plastic fence, bridge, boat. Mama cow and her baby off in the distance by themselves.

“We know what that means,” the therapist says. “It’s significant.”

“Today at school the boys were chasing us, trying to hit us. We hid in the bathroom. We decided not to run anymore. When they came after us, we hit back. I picked up one of them and threw him in the air.”

At East of the Sun, a long line of children stand by the tables running their fingers through the small toys. Metal leap frogs, water guns in the shape of fish, wooden horses dangling from strings, animals masks, magic rocks, and blue marbles. Every toy for a penny or nickel. My daughter has ten cents. She is rich.

We take Highway 5. I’m going to a wedding. She’ll stay with her father. I drive fast through Altamont Pass and down into the San Joaquin. Rows of business parks and warehouses give way to green fields and the flat farmland. It is hot. Scorching. Waves of heat blast through the floor of the car. At the wedding in the garden, some friends play guitars and a violin. A young woman sings. There is laughter and later tears over the phone when he calls to say he has to bring her back early.

“My wife doesn’t understand. I can’t see her anymore.” He sets her suitcase on the porch steps, climbs into his car, and drives away. Back to the new wife and baby.

Up on Mt. Tamalpais, the kids are piled into tents. Wind whooshes through the eucalyptus trees, and the jagged surf crashes on Stinson Beach. When the bus returns them, their faces are covered with dirt. And later there are photographs. My daughter sitting on a picnic table holding her white hands up to the sun. Her blonde hair is tangled and wild.

We ride the bus downtown to the babysitter’s. She lives in a railroad flat on an alley near the Civic Center. Later, she’ll take my daughter up the street to the childcare center, an old storefront on Hayes St., the only one I can afford. I call from work two or three times a day to check on her. Is she okay? Can I talk to her? Winos stagger past the windows yelling angry threats at the air. The kids play in the cold sun. She makes chalk marks on the dirty sidewalk.

“What’s that?” an old man asks, pointing to her drawing.

Tonight, I go into her room to check. Her small body is there under the covers. I bend low until I feel her breath on my cheek.

We sit in wet sand. July fog. I’ve brought sandwiches and apples for a picnic on the beach, but it’s too cold. The windmill flutters in the tulip garden in Golden Gate Park. She digs in the wet sand, picks up driftwood, seaweed, pieces of shell. I keep my eyes on the green waves crashing under white water and wish I wasn’t afraid to dive in. Surfers ride the waves dangerously close to the rocks. She shudders and says, “Can we go now?” We move into the shelter of the park, and she puts her hand in mine. Squeeze. Quiet.

We get off the trolley and walk up the street to the corner of Arguello and Fulton, and stop in front of the Jefferson Airplane house. It looms large and gloomy. “Are they in there?” she asks. Huge pillars glisten in moonlight as we stand on the sidewalk waiting for music. Nothing. We tiptoe up to the house. She goes all the way up to the windows and peeks in. Nothing.

A card comes in the mail. A picture of a little girl in a pink jumpsuit holding a teddy bear. “Happy Birthday To A Sweet Six-Year-Old.” There’s a check for fifteen dollars in it. She jumps up and down. “See,” she says, holding the card in front of me. “He did remember.” I take the check and think groceries, coffee, cheese, eggs. I do midnight shopping at Cala Foods with the after-hours crowd cruising for someone to take home, and the panhandlers. One old man stretches his hat out to me, and I drop in a dollar.

When I get home, she’s lying in a puddle of moonlight. The card pressed under her cheek.

I read her a story while she soaks in her bath. “Outside,” a story with a girl hero. “We should paint toenails on the tub,” I tell her.

“It’s got claw feet,” she says.

“I’ll give the tub a pedicure,” and I take out red paint and paint each claw. She goes under water giggling. While she soaks, I paint. Vines coming out of the closet. Green vines all the way down the hall. And later in the kitchen, a green zebra appears over the stove. For a whole month, I spend my afternoons painting. There’s a park emerging on one wall in the hallway. Bicycle riders sneak in and out of the trees. Each day when she comes home, I’ve added a new item to the park: a castle, a quarter moon, a ballerina, and a winged horse sailing over the tops of the trees.

“I’ll never be able to let the landlord in here,” I tell her.

“It doesn’t matter. It belongs to us now,” she says.

She looks like her father. Has his round eyes. His mouth and perfect nose. Even his facial expressions. His way of sagging in a chair. His devotion to television. The only thing she has like me is a gold-brown color. I say, “Let’s take a walk. It’s drenched and stormy outside.”

“What about my favorite program where the dad comes home after being gone for years?” she asks.

“He’s not coming,” I tell her and go out into the street. The light is dying and I forget time and the wind pushes me up the hill and I get lost. Dogs rush toward the fence as I pass. It’s dark when I find my way back. She is under a pile of blankets in front of the TV. The blonde ends of her hair poke out. My own daughter who looks nothing like me.

Thirty parents arrive at the school in icy rain to hear about “the rules” and “respecting each other’s space.” We do an exercise, stare into each other’s eyes without blinking. Later, in the science class, a woman stands holding a small boa constrictor. The woman tells me all the kids handle the snake. She offers it to me, but I shake my head and leave the meeting early, thinking this will be the next exercise. I take the long way home through the park. Enormous dahlias unfold in the Tea Garden. Cherry blossoms drop petals into water, and the museum glows in its chalky skin.

At home I find her curled up in my bed. Crayons and magic markers scattered over the floor. She’s been drawing pictures. A girl on horseback. Shooting stars. Rainbows. Flying Sufi hearts. The giant hearts hurl through dark blue skies. She tucks herself down into the pillows. I tell her not to fall asleep in my bed. “I’m not falling asleep,” she says. “I’m just resting my eyes.” Later, I climb into bed beside her. She’s too heavy for me to carry now.

Her grandmother calls to tell her about the new baby girl. “Did you know you have another sister now? Your dad was hoping for a boy, but things don’t always go like we plan.” She hangs up and says, “There are two of them now.”

She writes a story. “The Cool Girl.”

Once there was a girl and her name was Susan and she was 18. And she loved motorcycles. But her mother did not like them. But anyway Susan bought one. The next day Susan and her boyfriend wanted to ride the motorcycle to school. But her mother would not let them. So Susan got very mad. And she and her mother had a fight and her mother would not let her go to school. So Susan thought of a plan. She thought of running away from home. So she did. And when she was riding she got hungry so she stopped at a cafe for a bite of something. And after that she went to France and had a great time and so she lived there. The End.

There are pictures. In one, she’s a dark-haired girl diving off a board into a turquoise pool.

Ballet class in an old Victorian in the Mission. In the purple light of winter, cold wooden floors creak as we walk up three flights of stairs and into a room of mirrors. Legs, white tights. A boy strutting back and forth across the open floor. She whirls around in her black leotard. Catches a glimpse of herself. The teacher is Japanese. Lean muscles. Years of work.

“Hard work,” she says over the heads of the tiny dancers. “She has good feet,” she says, bending to grasp my daughter’s feet in her hands. “Strong feet.” And my daughter’s feet carry her through rain. Through afternoon wind, to the corner store for bread. To the Swedish Bakery for butter cookies. Down littered sidewalks to catch her bus. “Do you pick her up at the bus stop?” Mr. Fiji, her school teacher asks. “Your neighborhood is not safe.” Smiling, he tells me he will teach her to read and speak Japanese.

She speaks to me in Japanese. The words are red and black. Choppy and deep. She presses her hands together, bows her head and says, “Good morning, Mother.” She paints characters on rice paper. Translates for me, “Happiness.” I put the painting in a frame and hang it over our door.

In Japan Town, paper fish fly through the air on sticks, and yellow umbrellas twirl in wind. We buy a pencil box and incense. Drink tea in a shop with red booths. Tea, almond cookies, and spicy crackers. She picks up chopsticks and holds the bowl of rice to her mouth as she eats.

My fortune: “The more you know, the less you understand.”

Hers: “Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.”

In our house on a street that opens to battered storefronts, bars, bookstores, The Purple Heart Thrift Shop, she waits by the phone for him to call. She chews on her thumb, picks up a hand mirror and brushes her hair till the long blonde strands fly up, fan out with electricity. She waits, gives up, puts on a record, and asks her friend who lives upstairs to come and dance with her. Her friend is small with long brown hair. Smaller than my daughter who looks like an awkward fawn as she bows and stretches and turns in the living room with a naïve grace. The two girls whirl and their dance becomes more frenetic, wilder as they fly and laugh and fall. Till the neighbors begin to pound on our floor.

Every day she rides the bus to Valencia and 16th and gets off. She walks home passing Aunt Lil’s Antiques and dodging drunks as she goes. When she comes in the door today, I can hear her hurrying up the stairs. She tells me in a rush, out of breath, “A man tried to get me to go with him. He said come here, angel, I’ve got a lotta money. I ran but he started to come after me, then these two guys chased him. He drove away real fast.”

I call the police, but when they arrive, she can’t tell them anything about the man—just the car—a black Seville. And the money—”hundreds of dollars lying on the front seat.”

She gets a letter from her grandmother. In it there’s a photo of the two girls—one of them about six and the other a toddler. They’re dressed in identical pink jumpsuits. Her grandmother writes a few lines. “Here’s your baby sisters. I thought it was time you got to see them. Aren’t they dolls? And I want you to know I haven’t forgotten you. Love, Gran.”

She studies the photo for a few minutes, holding it tightly in her fingers. Then she turns to me and says, “I don’t know what he sees in them.” She tosses the photo onto the table and begins examining a broken fingernail.

Low riders rumble through the damp air past Mission Dolores and the Integral Yoga Institute where Swami Sachatinanda’s beatific countenance smiles down on his devotees, and just next door old women in old lace cluster under their icons of joy. Church bells and shirtless men returning to their women. My daughter wants to dress in black. To wear the uniform of another culture. A blonde chola in her black derby, black pants, and Chinese slippers. She pulls her hair tightly to one side and pins it back. Takes a red rose and sticks it over her ear. She lines her eyes with black. She looks ten years older than she is. Her lips a deep red. Her friends tell her, “You’re a wannabe.”

“Nam picked a fight with me today,” she says, staring into the mirror rubbing a bruise on her cheek. “We used to be friends, but she belongs to the Wa Chings now. She started yelling at me, calling me honky, saying, come on show me how tough you are. So I did. I forgot all the karate I learned, but I went for her anyway. I was swinging my fists and punching her head. Her friends were yelling, okay girl, okay, okay, stop.”

A boy appears at the bottom of the stairs. He has walked blocks in the rain from the Mission Flatlands where dogs roam freely and women sell tortillas on street corners. Hot and fresh, La Taqueria. Watermelon juice, papaya, mango. He tells me he has come to see my daughter. A silver cross dangles from one ear, and he smiles at me with his eyes.

Boys appear at our door. Black, brown, their hair in cornrows, hairnets, and shower caps. Protecting their most valuable asset. They walk her home from school, come up the stairs quietly, and sit in her room drinking soda and listening to the soul station. Their names are T.J., Bugsy, and Helio. They wear leather pants and Members Only jackets. Their mothers work in factories. They live in Bay Area Hunter’s Point and the Outer Mission. They don’t have money, so they walk and run to get where they’re going, and sometimes they boost what they can’t buy. Helio is wearing his flannels today. A blue bandanna around his forehead. Their names appear all over the city—in the Fillmore and Western Addition. Upper Market and the Embarcadero. “Helio Was Here” and “T.J. the Cool One.” Mexican hieroglyphs bloom on walls covered with bougainvillea. Rise above the salty air.

At school, the girls threaten her. Sometimes on the bus they swear at her, “Girl, you gonna get your ass whipped.” And she tells her grandmother these things, proud of her ability to stir up trouble. The phone rings and her grandmother asks, “Is your boyfriend black? I’ll disown you.”

At the concert the black man at the piano. “I’ve gotta get closer,” she says. She is clapping her white hands. I want to help her find her way down the stairs, through the crowd below. Ushers move toward us. Threatening. Flashlights. I don’t understand. Strange. Alien. My own daughter. The man at the piano, fluid and female as he moves to his own music. His hair braided into a thousand silver beads. He is smiling upward at my daughter.

Sandra Florence taught writing for forty years in Tucson, Arizona, ran two NEH projects in Tucson, and currently writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and blurs the boundaries between them. She has published creative and scholarly work and has just completed a short story collection entitled Everything is Folded.