HEDERA HELIX
by Claire Rudy Foster
That morning there was an email from Paul. Gemma clicked on it without thinking. Her coffee mug steamed at her elbow, too hot to drink. She forced her eyes to focus on the tiny electronic letters. Legal issues, he wrote. Looks like it’s back to jail, do not pass go. I’ll try to be out by summer break so we can meet again in the usual place. She had to read it twice, slowly. Then she slammed the laptop shut, as though extinguishing a flame.
Pouring her coffee into the travel thermos, she took care to rest the lips of the cups together. That way, even her shivering hands couldn’t spill—no messes, her kitchen spotless, not a beer can in sight, the garbage can empty and lined with a fresh plastic bag. A place where no roach dared to tread.
Don’t nobody know my troubles with God, she sang along with Moby on the radio. Traffic was light going into the city, but she tailgated the red Civic in front of her anyway. The maples and pines that shouldered together on both sides of the highway were close and dark, the ivy obscuring their trunks so they seemed like a dense wall of green. As Gemma’s Volvo rounded the final bend, and she saw the tunnel that opened to the city, the sky began to lighten in the west. A handful of leaves floated over the road for a moment, showing their yellow bellies.
“You won’t need those,” Allie told Gemma in the locker room. “She’s doped.”
Gemma hesitated, handcuffs halfway clipped to her belt. She had her taser, her pistol. Her mace, the can as slim and shiny as a tube of mascara. “Still dangerous,” she said. The wallet-sized photo of Paul, slipped under a magnet mirror on the inside of her locker. She’d cut it out of a bigger picture, and now she couldn’t remember who else had been there that night. The beginning of his legal issues, the night he’d set the first fire. Ninety months in jail, mitigated only by Gemma’s testimony, her eyewitness and sterling evidence that she’d been with him, that he’d been unwell. That the gasoline hadn’t been purchased at a truck stop outside of Portland, that he hadn’t painstakingly loaded the match heads into the tennis ball. None of it was true, she’d said to the jury. Paul had to serve six months, and then they let him go. The word of a police officer and a private-pay lawyer—the recipe for a reduced sentence. That was ten years ago, but Paul was still on paper. After all her efforts, he had proved himself unredeemable. Gemma fingered the handcuffs, felt the tiny pins in the chain.
“It might look better if we were unarmed, you know? Things are bad enough already,” Allie said.
“She’ll look less guilty.”
Allie shrugged, straightened her clip-on tie. “Everyone knew from the start.”
Gemma shook her head, fastened her handcuffs into their right place on her belt. “Now’s not the time.” She touched the hammer of her pistol, snapped the leather strap around the grip. She liked its weight, which reminded her of the way Paul’s hand used to rest on her hip, a little too heavy, a push in the wrong direction. Making dinner, she’d find herself in his bed, oblivious to the smell of scorching onions.
She caught Allie frowning, ignored it, headed towards the control desk. “Unless you’ve got clearance, you should probably arm up,” she called over her shoulder. And was gratified to hear Allie’s locker opening, the belt and gun and clinking keys sliding through the metal door.
The prisoner was not fat but had the pouchy, waterlogged face of someone who cried too much. A washed-up woman, Paul would have said, with his poet’s touch. Gemma tugged her earlobe, trying to rattle his voice out of her head. No distractions today. She nodded at the receptionist standing behind the control desk, who pressed a button by her knee to let Gemma through the security doors. The courthouse holding cells were brightly lit, fluorescent tubes giving light in pulses. The walls an industrial white, Walmart blue linoleum floors. They’d renovated upstairs, trying to make the lobby seem grand—Paul again—even judicious, but the place for prisoners was a different story. The single hallway, its row of unbreakable metal doors holding the guilty, the unsentenced, the frightened people in their orange prison suits. The accused.
Twenty-five years old, born and raised in Portland, a single white female living alone in a cheap suburb outside the city. Never had a boyfriend, and Gemma, who was not allowed to read the charts but had a quick eye and a terrible curiosity, saw that the girl’s hymen had been intact when the doctors examined her. She’d claimed a miscarriage, the baby only five weeks from being born. But the blood on the suspect’s clothes was not her own, nor did the dead infant’s DNA sample match hers. She’d been put in soft restraints, sedated. It was all in the chart. She’d screamed my baby help my baby over and over until the drugs took hold. The orderlies watched her through a security camera, and as Gemma unlocked the cell she imagined it, the woman on the bed, belly heaving, face streaked with scummy tears. The police had found the baby’s real mother—cold, stripped—hidden in a crawl space behind the suspect’s oven. Her abdomen was slashed open, uterus torn in two. The news played the story for weeks, showing every time the real mother’s picture, reiterating the details of the attack. How her nose had been broken and skull knotted by a metal baton, how the suspect had allegedly lured her into danger with the promise of baby clothes, a crib, a tiny bassinet. The real mother had been twenty-one, blond, gullible. Unmarried. And of course the baby had not survived without her.
Today was the sentencing, and the same news crews that had pumped up the grisly murder were already staking out their places in the courtroom and on the marble steps outside. They were asking the prosecutor for a statement, knowing he could be counted on to say certain things about protecting our most innocent. He’d stand behind the specially draped podium between the columns and declare a victory against evil. Nobody would contradict him—the suspect hadn’t bothered to plead insanity, wouldn’t consider it. I wanted my baby was her testimony, the only thing that made it past the courtroom doors. The clip of her sad, soft face, her voice pleading with the stony-faced jury. I just wanted my baby.
The same face greeted Gemma inside the cell. The woman sat on the edge of her cot (sheetless, metal, bolted to the wall and floor with 8-inch rivets). Her orange clothes bunched around her arms and waist, making her look like a doll whose stuffing had been taken out and then clumsily jammed back in. She was thinner than she had been at the beginning of the trial, but they’d let her wash her hair and the circles under her eyes, though dark, did not seem to age her. Gemma wondered if someone had given the woman makeup to cover her skin, or waterproof mascara for the hearing of the verdict. Though by now the woman must know what was going to happen to her, how everyone was crying for blood. It would be life in prison, possibly even transfer to one of the death penalty states for a retrial—the kind of place where no number of appeals could make a difference. The woman smoothed her ponytail, tucked a stray strand behind her ear. She looked at Gemma, her eyes mostly pupil.
“You’re here for me,” she said. The words were gulped back as though lodged in the woman’s throat. She didn’t cry, like some prisoners, or snarl. One man had thrown himself at Gemma, not anticipating her quickness with the mace and the butt of her pistol. He’d held his broken nose between his praying hands while receiving his sentence (rape and attempted strangulation of a twelve-year-old girl, ten years without parole). Gemma had watched him from her place by the exit door, secretly hoping he’d spring at her again.
❦
She’d met Paul when she was twenty-two and halfway through her online degree in Criminal Justice. She only knew that she liked him, in spite of her passion for maintaining order. “You think you can change me?” Paul had asked her when she visited him in County after his first arrest (suspected drunk driving in a rural area, exceeding the speed limit, reckless endangerment).
She’d nodded, drummed her fingers on the greasy plastic table. “I see you,” she told him, and though he laughed, she wouldn’t let him make it into a joke. “I’ll change you because you can’t change yourself.”
“Between you and outpatient, I’m really fucked, aren’t I.” But he pressed her hand for a moment at the end of the visit, and his face was so beautiful and serious that she believed that she really did have the power to bring forth the goodness in him. The transformation, she thought, would come in time. In any case, he had eighteen months of group therapy, urine tests, and AA meetings to think about what she’d said.
❦
“You’re young,” the woman croaked. She looked Gemma over, the dark blue uniform. The gun didn’t cause as much as a flicker on her drugged-out face. Space face, psych case, said Paul in Gemma’s head.
“Your verdict has been prepared,” Gemma recited. “Myself and one other female guard will escort you to the courtroom.” The woman clutched the edge of the cot, shook her head.
“Not today,” she said, but Gemma was ready for her and took a step closer, already unhooking the handcuffs.
“I don’t want them,” the woman said. “I want my lawyer.”
But Gemma had heard it before. “This is standard procedure,” she said. “Please rise and put your hands behind your back.”
She’d used them on Paul, as a game, clipped him to the enamel rail of her headboard. Neither of them was a stranger to handcuffs—Gemma having just finished her final security and firearms training, and Paul waiting for a summons from an Idaho court for charges of possession. Is this supposed to be exciting? he’d asked, but came in her mouth anyway. The chain links pitted the white paint on the enamel, like the marks that teeth make in a slice of frosted cake.
The accused (or suspect or prisoner or alleged murderer) shuffled her feet on the floor, an obstinate child. Gemma suspected that they’d given her morphine, maybe some heavy-duty benzos. Something to slow her judgment. It was safer for everyone this way.
“You’re no cop,” the woman slurred. She leaned forward as though to stand. A bead of saliva dropped between her feet, then a second one near the toe of Gemma’s boot. “Worthless. Not even a mother.”
“Are you refusing to cooperate?” Gemma asked. “I’ll count to three.”
“I want my lawyer,” the woman said, but Gemma, not wanting to risk being spat on, seized the woman’s wrist and pinned her face-down on the mattress, her knee in the middle of the woman’s back. It would only take a light tug to dislocate at least one shoulder, wrench loose the tendons around the shoulder blades. And, Gemma thought in the instant before she slid on the shining bracelets, would anyone complain? This woman had done the unspeakable—yet she got a fair trial. She got to stand in front of the jury with her hair neat and her dignity intact. Gemma tightened her fingers over the woman’s clammy fists. How easy it would be to snap the ulna, leave a surreptitious spattering of bruises on the prisoner’s back. You deserved it, Gemma could say. As though it was her choice to make, who was guilty or not.
“Your lawyer is in the courtroom,” Gemma said. She changed her grip, hauled the woman to her feet by her upper arm. That might leave a mark. The woman’s flesh was so soft, muscle-less, that it felt like bread dough that you could squeeze and squeeze between your two fists. “Everyone’s waiting on you.”
“But it’s not real, is it?” The woman asked. “Your badge, all of this.”
“It’s real, bitch,” Gemma whispered under her breath. The prisoner, goaded by Gemma’s fingers, lurched towards the door. At the end of the hallway, the double doors, and beyond that an elevator which—for security reasons—would only go one floor at a time, with Gemma’s key inserted in a special panel by the emergency button. She had a spotless record, Gemma did. Never assaulted by a prisoner, never unprepared. Never lost the upper hand. From the first moment in the cell, she commanded the accused. Her lead officer asked if she had experience with dogs, or training animals. Paul’s wolfish grin appeared in her mind, but she shook her head and said nothing. Nobody had to know about him, they’d decided that together. Except for the testimony in the arson case, there were no links between them. Even when he needed a train ticket, or a new pair of pants, she used cash and not her credit card. No traces, she told him, and in answer he brushed his fingers down her neck, leaving behind little trails of fire.
At the entry to the courtroom, Gemma put her hand on the woman’s shoulder and looked her over. They could both hear the photographers warming up their shutters, the awful hum of a room full of people paying attention. Gemma straightened the woman’s shirt and neatened her hair.
“You did a terrible thing,” she said. “Don’t know if you know that.”
The woman stared at Gemma’s badge, her nametag. “This isn’t right,” she said, and before Gemma could argue, added, “You shouldn’t be doing this—this line of work.”
“Why not?”
The woman frowned. “You like the pain too much. One day, you’ll run out of people to hurt. There won’t be anyone left but you.”
And then Allie was there, taking the woman’s other elbow, and they went into the buzzing room together, the cameras absorbing their faces, magnifying the three women—two in blue, the angels of justice, and the shuddering creature between them, the guilty one, how could she have done such a thing? It was the end of a nightmare, the prosecution said, and Gemma closed her eyes and felt the woman shivering, her body fighting the weight of the sedative and the accusations and the longing, the terrible longing, for the one she wanted so badly—the baby, she loved him, she would hold him so close that the world could never, ever hurt him. And he would grow in her like a monster, a blackened seed stretching its roots into the darkest soil inside her.
Claire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.
Image credit: marc cornelis on Flickr
CANNED HAPPINESS
Diane Arieff 
Michael Kern lives and writes in Washington, DC. He enjoys cooking, riding his bike everywhere, watching baseball, drinking good beer, making people laugh at his enthusiasm for Slurpees, and frustrating his friends by always being punctual. His work has previously appeared in Tidal Basin Review, Words Apart, and Blast Furnace. His poem “The Gas Station by Edward Hopper” appears in Issue 13 of Cleaver.
Angelique Stevens teaches Creative Writing and Literature of the Holocaust and Genocide in Upstate, NY. An activist for human rights, her travels have taken her across the globe. She lived in Chiapas, Mexico to be a witness for peace with the Zapatista Rebels, volunteered in an elephant refuge in Thailand, studied the Holocaust in Israel, and evaluated water wells in South Sudan. She writes about her travels and her experiences growing up in Upstate New York. Her work can be found in Shark Reef, The Chattahoochee Review and a number of anthologies. Her essay “
Kirsten Aguilar was born and raised in Sonoma, California. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2014 with a degree in International Studies and now lives in Chicago. Most recently, her fiction has appeared in The Boiler Journal.
Caroline Swicegood is an American writer and educator living in Istanbul, Turkey. Her fiction has appeared in Fiction Southeast, Bird’s Thumb, Prick of the Spindle, and several other journals, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Literary Bohemian. She is currently working on a manuscript of connected short stories set in Venice.
Ross Losapio’s poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, The Emerson Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. His reviews have appeared in Blackbird, 32 Poems, Rattle, and Verse Wisconsin. He earned a BA in writing and English from Loyola University, Maryland, and an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2012 lead associate editor for Blackbird.
Samuel Hovda was born and raised in rural Minnesota. He now attends the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Contrary Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find him at 
Travis Kiger was born in Thibodaux, LA, and grew up in a lot of places. He earned his MFA at the University of Tampa, and he teaches Rhetoric and Persuasion at Illinois State University. He has previously written for The Rostrum, Bull Men’s Fiction, and Bridge Eight Magazine. He is a husband, father, dog owner, and beer drinker.
Cynthia Atkins ’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, BOMB, Caketrain, Clementine, Del Sol Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Hermeneutic Chaos, The Journal, North American Review, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily, among others. Her second collection, 
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words in fire to wake the world ablaze: free verse illuminated by courage that empathizes with all the awful moments, launching a freight train warning that blazes from the heart, like a chambered bullet exploding inadvertently. His poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press), was released in September of 2014. He also has an e-chapbook, entitled physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), which was released in December of 2014. Additionally, he has also self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance and is currently working on a book of connected short stories.
Kylie Lee Baker is a student from Medford, Massachusetts, pursuing a double major in Creative Writing and Spanish at Emory University. She won two Gold Keys from the Boston Globe Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her poetry and short stories, and her collection of vignettes, All of Us, Someday, was nominated for an American Voices Award. “Voltage” is her first published work. 
Zoe Stoller is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, originally from New York City. Her writing has been recognized by organizations such as the American Scholastic Press Association, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and Teen Art Gallery. In addition, one of her one act plays was produced in a theater festival Off-Broadway in 2013.
Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Tulane Review, Hawai’i Review, Folio, and numerous others, and he is the author of two chapbooks of fiction: Ivory Children and Rolling Girl, Shepherd Hill. He has been a finalist for the Andrew Cappon Prize for Fiction and the River Styx Microfiction Award. He teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri.
FLU, 1917
Elizabeth Frankie Rollins has a collection of short fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013). Also, she has work in The Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, Conjunctions, and The New England Review, among others. Rollins has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and won a Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey Arts Council. She teaches fiction and composition writing at Pima Community College.
Tony Gorry holds a chair in management and is also a professor of computer science at Rice University. Over a long career, he published many academic articles. Lately, he has turned to writing essays, memoirs, and short stories. These works have appeared in The Fiddleback, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Chronicle Review, The Examined Life, The New Atlantis, and War, Literature and the Arts.
Shannon Viola grew up on the coast of Maine and studies Classics and Writing at Gettysburg College. She has been published in Cleaver and Wayfarer Journal among others, and in the past, she attended NEYWC at Bread Loaf and was a winner of the 2013 Mayborn National History Writing Contest. Her essay 
Mica Evans is a recent graduate of Bennington College, where she had the pleasure of studying with Michael Dumanis, Mark Wunderlich, Monica Youn, and Alex Dimitrov. Before beginning MFA applications in the Fall, Mica is excited to be participating in the Bennington Writing Fellowship, Skidmore Writer’s Institute, and Ashbery Home School.
Patricia Flaherty Pagan grew up near Boston and has lived in four countries. She writes flash fiction, award-winning literary and mystery short stories, and novellas. Her collection, Trail Ways Pilgrims: Stories, was published in 2015. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Tides of Impossibility, Our Space, and Eve’s Requiem: Tales of Women, Mystery and Horror. Find her at 
Gerri Brightwell is a British writer who teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her novel Dead of Winter is forthcoming from Salt (UK). She is also the author of the novels Cold Country (Duckworth, 2003) and The Dark Lantern (Crown, 2008). Her short work has appeared in such venues as BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines, the Los Angeles Review, Fiction Southeast, BLIP, Redivider, Gargoyle and Memorious.
Barbara Haas’s work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, Western Humanities Review, and Quarterly West. She is a repeat contributor to The North American Review, Hudson Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Prose, and her MFA is from UC-Irvine.
Alec Hershman is an English teacher living in Bangkok. He has received awards from the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts, The Jentel Foundation, The St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design. More of his poems are available in new issues of The Western Humanities Review, The Adroit Journal, Cimarron Review, Mantis, Bodega and online at 
Donna Levinstone’s pastel drawings have been included in many private and corporate collections, including Pfizer, Citibank, Time Inc, Nabisco, IBM, and Verizon. Her pastel drawings are part of the collection of the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the US Department of State. A black-and-white pastel drawing from her 9/11 Series will be part of the new 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Her work appears on several book covers and has been published in The New York Times and Drawn in New York: Six Centuries of Drawing and Watercolor, among others. As an arts educator, Levinstone has also received various grants to teach art to the elderly and to cancer patients. Her teaching work also includes working with various school aged children. She is also a member of the 
Laurin DeChae is a M.F.A. candidate for poetry at the University of New Orleans, where she acts as the associate editor for Bayou Magazine. She is active in the fields of education and composition, assisting in programs such as the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Milkfist, Harpur Palate, and S/WORD.
Michal Leibowitz is a student at Stanford University. She was born and raised in White Plains, NY. Michal is a 2015 YoungArts Winner and a 2014 commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year. After high school, she spent a year in Israel where she wrote, studied, and collected stories. She has been published in the Winter Tangerine Review, The Best Teen Writing of 2014, and The Jewish Week.
Rachael Tague grew up in the Indianapolis area and is currently studying English and Creative Writing at Cedarville University. This is her first published piece of nonfiction.
Caitlin McGill is the 2014 winner of the Rafael Torch Nonfiction Literary Award, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Digital Americana, Short, Fast, & Deadly, Solstice, The Southeast Review, Spry Literary Journal, and several other magazines. Currently, she is completing a collection of essays that explores identity, religion, addiction, war, empathy, and the destruction that results from ignoring those very issues.
Gregory Djanikian has published six collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon University Press, the latest of which is Dear Gravity (2014). His poems have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly, and he has been featured on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He teaches in the the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Laura Tanenbaum is a writer and teacher whose fiction, essays, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in publications including Jacobin, Narrative, Dissent, failbetter, Monkeybicycle, and Open Letters Monthly. She teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her blog, The Golden Notebooks, which discusses feminism, left politics, teaching, and parenthood can be found along with her other writings at 
Sarah J. Sloat lives in Frankfurt, Germany, a stone’s throw from Schopenhauer’s grave. Her poems and prose have appeared in DMQ Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. 
Tasha Coryell is an MFA Candidate at the University of Alabama, where she is working on a novel about murderous sorority girls. Her work has been featured in [PANK], The Collagist, and Word Riot, among other journals. You can find Tasha tweeting under @tashaaaaaaa and more work from her at 
