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Cleaver Magazine

Fresh-Cut Lit & Art

 
 

Category Archives: Issue 25

STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT by Carroll Sandel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 23, 2019

STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT
by Carroll Sandel

Old hospital statement of account from the Hospital Service Association of Pittsburgh

STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT
Hospital Service Association
of Pittsburgh

April 22, 1943

Patient Mrs. Margaret Smith     Hospital Sew. Valley      City Sewickley

Subscriber David Smith         Group 1143             Contract 55788

Statement of Account
This statement from Blue Cross details the charges for the subscriber’s wife and their baby’s thirteen-day stay in the hospital following the birth on April 8, 1943. The subscriber fulfills his financial obligation for this bill as he will all others during the ninety-four years that will span his life. Throughout his adulthood, he will disparage those who abdicate these responsibilities as “free-loaders,” as “deadbeats,” will flare his nostrils when talking about his brother who was forever calling him for a bail-out. In a thank-you letter to this baby when she was in her late forties, he will tape a three-quarter inch clipping from a magazine: “Depression dad, he was like so many other dads of his generation who had starved their need for love in their hunger for financial stability, for certainty—and for control.” When she receives this letter, this daughter, still in thrall of her father, will be impressed that he is insightful, will feel sympathy that he denied himself the love he deserved. She will miss his more important message, that even he knew he must always be in control.

Hospital Service Association of Pittsburgh
The subscriber at the time of this birth was a district manager for the Chevrolet Motor Company. After the war, he will borrow $2,000 from his mother-in-law and buy into a Chevy dealership in a small town in western Pennsylvania. Through time, he will remain an automobile dealer until he sells the business when he is seventy-five years old.  He will remain a devoted Blue Cross subscriber after his retirement—allegiance is an important trait for this man.

April 22, 1943
In April 1943, Allied troops had the Germans cornered in Tunisia. Mussolini’s morale was flagging in Italy. The subscriber tracked this news with worrisome fervor. Three days from the date of this statement, he will turn thirty-two and though a father, he needs to get over there before the goddamn war is over. The Army has finally accepted him as a Volunteer Officer Candidate. He will leave for basic training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia three weeks after his third baby arrives, who will turn out to be his most loyal child.

During the three months of training in ’43, the father will report that as an older enlistee, he tried to help the younger, weaker recruits. This was unfavorably noted in his record. A Lieutenant Colonel discovered the subscriber had earned his Able-Bodied Seaman card while a teenager. The Lt. C. offered the elderly volunteer an honorable discharge from the Army in exchange for a two-week training and admission to the Merchant Marines who were in desperate need of experienced men to navigate ships. The subscriber was proud to accept this proposal.

Patient: Mrs. Margaret Smith
The patient (known as “Peggy” or “Peg”) was born to middle-aged physician, Fletcher White, and humorless Anna Graff, who weighed less than a hundred pounds. Her family had a live-in cook who also functioned as a maid; a laundress who came to the house twice a week; a man who chauffeured her sister and her to where they wanted to go and who served as the butler. Peggy took golf, tennis and piano lessons. In this life of privilege, she never learned to cook more than hot cocoa and a three-minute egg, or to balance a checkbook, or to wash and curl her hair.

After two failed attempts at college, Peggy completed a course at Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School. In 1936, she responded to a newspaper ad to work for a securities firm. Her interviewer was the subscriber. With Anna’s focus on her older daughter who she was trying to marry off to a man of the proper social class, she missed Peggy’s high-octane sexual attraction to the six foot, four-inch tall, handsome salesman from New Jersey. The couple eloped in June of ‘37.

By the time of this hospital statement, Peggy’s husband had worked for Chevrolet several years, parking her in towns far from family and friends. The country was now at war. In a January ‘43 letter to a friend, Peggy confided, “It took me a long time to come around to [it] (the subscriber enlisting in the war), but I think he is right. He has had the bug since last March (long before I was ‘Preg Peg’ once more). He has tried every branch since then.” Married almost six years, she must have had an inkling that she would endure a marriage defined by bending to her husband’s bidding. In time, she will end up with six kids, not the two she had always imagined. She will live on a farm the subscriber buys without telling her. Peggy’s resistance will always be minimal and ineffectual, unknown to him. Behind his back, this baby, when a girl, will overhear her mother say from time to time, “After Dave washed out of Officer’s School, he was taken in by the Merchant Marines.”

Hospital: Sew. Valley
Of their brood of six, this baby will be the only one born at Sewickley Valley Hospital. In the same letter to her friend, Peggy had written: “My father died the day after Thanksgiving. If he were still alive, we wouldn’t have considered my going back home but it works out very well this way as Mother has room for us, Snuffy [the older son] can go to kindergarten & Mother has a colored gal & a gas furnace—so there will be no cooking, dishes or furnace.” (In her previous home in the Allegheny Mountains, Peggy had battled the coal furnace and the drafty windows that let in the snow. She resorted to chopping up the children’s wood toys for kindling.) One can picture Peggy happy to be resting for almost two weeks after this baby’s birth, relieved to be away from her noisy two- and four-year-olds left with her mother. The baby, while growing up, will hear her mother say on occasion, “Children should be seen, but not heard.”

City: Sewickley
Sewickley was a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. Families belonged to country clubs and had help to manage the household. Children were sent to boarding schools in the East. Anna married Fletcher assuming wealth in the family—after all his father was Judge White of some renown. But her husband treated doctoring as a hobby, generating a meager income. Fortunately, Anna’s bachelor uncle Harry set up a trust fund for his great-nieces. She managed it with great care, so no one in town was the wiser.

Peggy will always think of herself as a Sewickley girl. When her children meet new friends, she will ask, “Does she look like somebody?” This means, they all will know, does the friend look like they could have come from Sewickley, from old money, from the upper class.

Subscriber: David Smith
Known as “Dave” or “D.H.” by his friends, his fellow auto dealers, the subscriber will be called Dad by four of his children (Snuffy, the oldest, will refer to him as “the old man”), but this baby girl will continue to call him Daddy long after he dies.

At the time of the hospital bill, he has survived the Great Depression by tumble-weeding through jobs as an orderly at the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Epileptic Insane, riding “shotgun” running booze from New York to speakeasies in Hoboken, NJ, as a door-to-door Hoover Vacuum Cleaner salesman. When he is eighty-five, his adult children will gather at the home of this daughter. They will videotape him retelling his Depression tales, their voices chirping in the background, exhorting him to retell their favorites. He was born the oldest of three boys, named for his father, a “cold Irish Protestant” (the subscriber’s words). From whom he learned the art of storytelling is unclear, but he relished a rapt audience and could weave a yarn worth paying for.

It is known from a letter from Peggy to her husband that he shipped out of New York with the Merchant Marines in March 1944 (Dave, the romantic in this couple, saved every bit of correspondence he ever received from his wife). It can be surmised he was living with his wife in Sewickley after his discharge from the Army and during the early months of this baby’s life. To her twenty-year-old brother-in-law, a bomber pilot stationed in Germany, Peggy will write that her infant was driving Dave crazy as they tried to wean her from the bottle to a cup. She suggests her husband might willingly sell this squawking baby “for a nickel.” (Peggy is known for her sense of humor.) Indeed, the mother will recount in later years how the baby wailed so furiously, they had to close the windows so as to not disturb the neighbors. Perhaps the parents should have noted her staunch resistance to giving up the bottle might have foreshadowed the girl’s determination to figure out how to get what she needed in this family.

Dave will not see his baby again until early 1945 when he returns stateside following an injury during the Battle of Anzio. In following years, he will refer to her as “the runt of his litter” due to her scrawny size. It will sound like a term of endearment to the girl who by then has learned how to become his favorite.

Group: 1143 Contract: 55788
The fortuitous date of this birth—while the subscriber was still employed by Chevrolet and before he left for Basic Training—allowed Blue Cross to cover the majority of the charges for the hospital stay. Timing will continue to work in Dave’s favor. He will own the Chevy dealership in the 1950’s when his loyal customers buy new cars every other year, move on to Volkswagen just as the VW bug becomes a craze, then to Mazda when Americans begin buying Japanese cars. He will purchase his 109-acre farm, then all the surrounding farms as land is appreciating in value.

His children will all grow into hard-working, good-hearted people—no drugs, excessive alcohol, no trouble with the law. Yet, ever the pessimist, Dave will not view his life as a success. In his eighties, he will regularly phone this daughter with revolving complaints about his other children. Money will be at the root of his dismay as he ruminates about which ones have taken advantage of his largesse. “Everything in my life turns to shit,” he will tell her. This daughter listens without pointing out how absurdly lucky he has been.

ACCOMMODATIONS:

Private_____x__________  Semi-Private_____________  Ward______________
Seriously—could anyone consider that Peggy would not be in a private room? Though Dave will make frugality his hallmark, chanting ad nauseum “Waste not, want not,” “A penny saved is a penny earned” to his children, he will also want to be viewed as a man able to provide handsomely for his wife. In those early years of their marriage, he will never complain about bills from Lang’s, their town’s tony dress store, or for the furniture Peggy and the interior decorator select at the Joseph Horne Department Store in Pittsburgh. His bitterness about their different values around money will come years later.

HOSPITAL SUBSCRIBER’S
CHARGES    SAVINGS

Admitted___4-8-43___{a. m} Discharged: _4-20-43__ {xxx}
date
     {p. m}              date        {p.m.}
.               xxx

Days’ stay: __13______ {Flat rate  $___7.50___________      $97.50     $65.00
                      {Rate per day
……………..12               Baby   1.00                 12.00       12.00

Baby:
The infant will not be identified on this bill, but she will be listed on the birth certificate as Carol Earhart Smith. The child will learn as she is growing up that she was named for her mother’s favorite uncle, Carroll. She will also be told Carroll is how her name is spelled on her Baptismal Certificate though she has no record of it. Her mother will refer to her as Carol in letters to the father during his stint in the Merchant Marines. Carol will learn to write her name with that spelling as she enters first grade. However, when she attends a prestigious girls’ school for her freshman year of high school, she will somehow become Carroll. She will never recall how this happened, which is astoundingly odd as she will be known throughout her life for her excellent memory. Carroll will like this spelling as it differentiates her from so many other Carol’s with the popular name. Due to all the unaddressed drama in her family life, she, by the age of fourteen, will have learned to avoid questioning what she doesn’t need or want to understand.

Though a sober young child, this daughter will become chatty by first grade and, while an excellent student, she will receive “Carol talks too much” on every report card. From time to time, she will be a bit of a smarty-pants, challenging her Bible-school teacher on how many books there are in the Bible, knowing full well most people do not include the Apocrypha in their count. She will know that how intelligent she is makes her father proud. He will ignore all the “O’s” for outstanding on her report card and will suppress a smile as he finds some minor point to pick on. With the other kids, he will focus on how they need to do a whole lot better.

When she is seventeen, Carroll will ride a bus alone for two days to Rapid City, South Dakota. Though she has been led to believe there will be a job for her, it turns out there is none. She will on her own organize a program for Oglala Sioux Native American children at a community center. Liking this feeling of doing good will convince her to pursue a career in social work. For more than four decades, Carroll will treat adolescents, couples, individuals—depressives, alcoholics, incest survivors, schizophrenics, those with bi-polar disorder, conflicts with family members. During this time, she will have four children, a caring husband and will believe herself fortunate, so fortunate to have had such a normal childhood, such a happy life. Her problems are minimal compared to her clients.

Carroll will be relieved she is nothing like her mother who she has always viewed as shallow, a lightweight holding no power. She will make her father her role model—frugal, well-organized, a doer, in control of his life. Her filtered lens, in refusing to acknowledge the other parts of him, will constrain her relationships with her siblings to ones that are friendly, but guarded.

Six years after her father’s death, her reverence for him will fall apart.

OPERATING (Delivery) ROOM _____________________________$5.00       $5.00
ANESTHESIA (Administered by hospital employee No__Yes_x_)  $3.00       $3.00
MEDICATIONS______________________________________________  $2.10       $2.10
LABORATORY_______________________________________________  $7.50       $7.50
Other charges (specify)___________Phone____________ ____  $5.34

That Peggy would have a phone in her private room is no surprise (though the charge, not covered on the subscriber’s plan, equals almost half that of the stay of the infant). Who she called is a mystery. Did she talk daily with her little boy and toddler daughter, reminding them to be good, to say please and thank you? It’s impossible to imagine her telling them “I love you,” as no child will hear her utter those words while growing up. Grandmother Anna caring for them was not known to tolerate any sign of what she considered rowdiness. After Dave leaves for Officer’s Training, then months later for the Merchant Marines, Anna will complain so much about the children, Peggy will ship Snuffy to his father’s parents in New Jersey where the boy will be unconditionally adored for the only time in his life. Perhaps the phone sat idle for most of the days, used only to commiserate with a friend or two whose husbands were already overseas. Perhaps she avoided hearing how her children misbehaved by allowing that phone to rest in its cradle. Never one to consider the cost of things, she would not have worried about her husband paying for something she rarely touched.

TOTAL CHARGES_______________________________$129.44   $94.60
SUBSCRIBER SAVING__________________________ $ 94.50* [mistake]
BALANCE TO BE PAID BY SUBSCRIBER______ $ 37.84* [correct balance]

Services as indicated are hereby acknowledged:

__________________________________________________
Signature of SUBSCRIBER

Dave signs David H. Smith in his legendary scrawl, the “D,” “H” and “S” slanted to the right and large enough to smack you with. Smacking comes to mind with this father as he will be remembered for hitting the back of his children’s heads for spilling milk at dinner, for moving too slowly to complete their chores, for not grabbing piglets fast enough when he was trying to deworm them, or for any number of minor infractions. Smacking will include his badgering with vicious words and the frequent use of his belt. When his children are adults, they will have a broad range of memories about, and feelings toward, their father. Some will hold onto fierce bitterness, some a messy mix of fondness and loathing. Carroll’s devotion, for the duration of his life, will be unwavering.

The subscriber’s signature will reflect how he lived up to all his financial obligations whether they be the annual bank loans to purchase new cars, college educations for his children, the dozen years of assisted living care for the wife he stopped loving decades earlier. He will disperse much of his wealth to his children through shares in his land and auto dealerships (though he will also keep track of those he feels have taken advantage of his generosity).

Only after her father’s death will Carroll learn about the cruelty he foisted on several of her siblings, recognize his crushing control over every financial, physical, and emotional part of the family’s life. Only then will she come to understand that her father left this earth with a balance owed.


Headshot of Carroll Sandel After a career in social work, Carroll Sandel took her first class at Boston’s Grub Street Writing Center in 2010 and felt as though she had leapt off a cliff. That exhilarating, terrifying feeling re-emerges each time she sits at the computer to write again. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Pangyrus, r.kv.r.y., The Drum and Grub Daily. She was a 2014 and a 2017 finalist for the nonfiction prize in New Letters. Currently she is working on a memoir of linked essays exploring her untrustworthy memories.

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction, Thwack. (Click for permalink.)

CORPORATE CLIFF by Lauren Bender

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 23, 2019

­­CORPORATE CLIFF
by Lauren Bender

Skyscraper covered in windows against a white sky

Fist above foothold, stay invisible;
don’t open your mouth and waste words
on statues that may or may not love
you as you are on film. As you are
always, always on film. This letter,

that flutter, and a strong snatch of
sky from the night you said oh, yes,
I will be there. Who ever doubted it?
Sometimes it starts with the simplest
genuflection before you lose control

of deferential, of the movements of
your limbs, their semaphoric spasms,
and the incline of the neck becomes
a body doubled at the waist swaying
and praying the world will embrace

a servant available for any purpose.
But then there are questions, one
at a time. How to prepare to lead? When
will the better judgment kick in? Am
I bleeding too much or are the others

too intact? The guide to appropriate
behavior, you realize, is small once
you cut out the sections that repeat
what has already been said elsewhere.
The business review retains one word:

win. Which in your notes you translate
as survive, then change it to persevere
as part of your duty to accommodate two
languages at once. Are you any closer to
your goal? In terms of physical distance,

yes, but we never stop relocating across
such measurable space. You can shed your
back porch in a second. You refuse to share
your two truths but they can have any lie
they want. 1) I am comfortable in this role.


Headshot of Lauren BenderLauren Bender lives in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared in IDK Magazine, The Collapsar, Gyroscope Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review,  Yes Poetry, and others. You can find her on twitter @benderpoet.

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS, Glassworks, Essay, and Poetry by Paul J. Stankard

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by laserjApril 23, 2019
Three clear glass paperweights with ornamental flowers, grass, and bees inside them

Paperweights. (1980s) Photo: Douglas Schaible

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS
Glass Art & Homage to Walt Whitman

by Paul J. Stankard

 

HONEYBEES

In the hive
honeybees
breed
virgin queens.

Scented foragers
guided by sun
dance their language
about harvesting
to be done.

Dusted murmuring bodies
rubbing pink clover
wing repeated visits
lured by field’s odor.

Nectar
gathered in sun
made into honey,
Nature’s continuum.

—Paul Joseph Stankard, 2019

When I entered middle age, I hit a glass wall.

I felt that I was losing my creative mojo—the work was not evolving and I felt the need for more spontaneity. Feeling frustrated, I started to write poetry, seeing it as a medium to satisfy my creative need.

I was no stranger to poetry. As a child, I was a poor reader; I’m a dyslexic, a term that was barely known at that time. But my mother, who didn’t understand why I was such a poor reader, tutored me daily through my middle-school years. Books were a struggle for my tutoring sessions, but when Mom switched to poetry it was fun. She would read the poem first, and with my good memorization skills the words, rhythms and meter clicked with me, and I—for perhaps the first time—felt that I was comprehending written expression, an idea compressed into words.

Suddenly, the words were not my enemy. They were images of an expressed idea!

Three decades later, those boyhood lessons floated back into my creative consciousness as I was struggling to advance my artistic vision and interpret nature with new allusions.

So, feeling stymied with the glass, I decided to write a poem, which led to a series of poems paying homage to native plants.

BRAMBLE

Fertile decay nourishes
arched stems, green
growth; blossoms soften
thickets hooked thorns;
showy stamens satisfy
June insects; hairy
drupelets swell to juicy
blackberry.

The challenge of painting a word-picture paying homage to a flowering plant had an appeal to me. Interestingly enough, my verbal interpretation of the plant paralleled my interpretation of a crafted plant in glass—even though I had no idea at the time how to articulate this mode of expression in my art.

As an adult, I was self-taught. While enduring the stigma of being a poor student, I discovered I was not stupid, which motivated me to teach myself. Traditional education, including art school, would have just produced more frustration. I wanted to learn about art, so I began a journey of self-education by visiting museums and galleries. I wanted to acquire a broad education that would enable me to become more than a pair of hands; I wanted to become a well-rounded person in ways that would bring artistic maturity to my work, so I began listening to books on tape.

One of those tapes was Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan. I was introduced to an unusual person of heroic stature—someone who was largely self-taught. Whitman, I realized, to my delight, expressed nature in an intimate way that would come to influence my work.

After I read the line from “Spontaneous Me,” from Leaves of Grass…

Clear glass sphere with figures of bees, flowers, grass, and a honeycomb inside it

Honeybee Swarming a Floral Hive Cluster d. 8.0 ” (2010) Photo: Ron Farina

The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down…

…I went outside in the hot summer sun and captured a honeybee in a jelly jar—and was surprised to notice how hairy it actually was. That led me to experiment with the hairy allusion in glass. This made the bee a credible component that was a focal point of my floral interpretations.

But there was more to it than just reproducing the hairy aspect of the honeybee: the influence of Whitman, exemplified by his poetry, led me to interpret nature referentially. As a result, I began to learn from the process.

As I re-read my favorite Whitman poems, I noted in many instances he went beyond realism, along a journey leading to an almost spiritual realm. His words challenged me to attempt the same journey: to go beyond crafting realistic botanical models.

Like most, I didn’t connect with Whitman’s genius on the first read, and began to revisit the poems in ways that eventually allowed me to absorb the insightful intimacy of the words as they formed pictures in my mind.

The influence of Whitman’s words, coupled with my respect for his genius, led me to display excerpts of his poetry on the walls in my studio and exhibitions. Whitman was my guide through walks in the woods and Leaves of Grass became my textbook. I wanted to articulate the same depth of feeling on a visual level in glass as Walt did in words.

I was touched by the abstract idea of how Whitman portrayed a morning glory in “Song of Myself.” He elevates a simple flower to a spiritual level:

Clear glass sphere with wilted grass, daffodils, and blue flowers inside itA morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the meta- physics of books

My poem about blackberries, as well as my later glass interpretations, were complemented by Whitman’s unusual word choices, enhanced by the spiritual force relating to all living things. He expressed this in another line from “Song of Myself”:

…the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven

As a craftsperson who worked with his hands for four decades, I was heartened with Whitman’s intuitive insight into hand skills when I read this line from “Song of Myself”:

Clear glass sphere with flowers, bees, and a honeycomb inside it

Flowers and Fruit Bouquet with Swarming Honeybees d. 6″ (2014) Photo: Ron Farina

…the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery

Whitman’s poetry led me to pursue a convergence of writing, teaching, and glass art-making. I hadn’t been to art school and didn’t share the often-exotic influences referenced by my contemporaries. But Whitman infused me with confidence. His celebration of the ordinary as extraordinary gave me pride in my celebration of the familiar things into crafted glass components: blossoms, bees, roots and leaves encased in glass.

[ click any image on this page to enlarge ]

Clear glass sphere with flowers, bees, honeycomb, and fruit inside it

Honeybee Swarm with Flowers and Fruit, d. 6″ (2012) Chicago Art Institute Rubloff Collection; Photo: Ron Farina

Clear glass rectangle with a mask inside it, topped with flowers, fruit, and one bee

Tea Rose Bouquet Botanical with Mask h. 5.5″ (2004) Photo: Douglas Schaible

During his time, Whitman thought that his poetry was under-appreciated and that his worth would only be understood by future generations. Similarly, this idea of spiritually connecting to the future, long after I die, motivated me to write this poem, which I offer as homage to Walt Whitman:

Clear glass sphere with bouquet of colorful flowers inside it

Walt Whitman’s Garden Bouquet d. 4″ (2018)

Receive this glass
it holds my memories
crafted blossoms
suspended in stillness
to be pollinated by your sight
anticipating your touch
through time.

Happy 200th Birthday, Walt Whitman.

 


Close-up of Paul J. StankardInternationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in the studio glass movement, Paul J. Stankard is considered a living master who translates nature in glass. His work is represented in over 80 museums around the world. Stankard is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorate degrees. He most recently received the Masters of the Medium award from Smithsonian’s The James Renwick Alliance and the Lifetime Achievement award from the Glass Art Society. He is an Artist-in-Residence and Honorary Professor at Salem Community College. Stankard authored three books: an autobiography in 2007 titled No Green Berries or Leaves, an educational resource in 2014 titled Spark the Creative Flame, and most recently, Studio Craft as Career: A Guide to Achieving Excellence in Art-making. Visit Paul and his works at paulstankard.com

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Art, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

ME AND MRS. BEE by Rae Pagliarulo

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 23, 2019

ME AND MRS. BEE
by Rae Pagliarulo

Elderly woman looking to the side in a wallpapered room

When Mrs. Bee leaves her house, she uses a metal cane to get down the steps, the kind they sell at Rite Aid next to the plastic bed pans and ace bandages. It taps against the concrete at perfect metallic intervals, tink, tink, tink, as she lowers herself down. I hear it even when she isn’t home, when I lock things up for the night, when I nap with the windows open. It’s a small block I live on, houses jammed together in squat, red brick rows. You don’t miss much on a street like this.

◊

Years ago, on the other side of the city, I shared a second floor apartment with my boyfriend. His amusing irritation, once directed at the world, shifted at some point to contempt, aimed squarely at me. Life with him was a full-time job—I managed his moods, changes in weather, what kind of day he had at work; all factors that would dictate whether I was berated, belittled, or simply ignored. I felt more like I was living inside him than in the apartment itself. I started to carve out tiny places where I felt safe. In the bathroom, I’d curl up on the floor against the locked door. It was the only room not filled with echoes of the dinners I ruined, the fights I picked, the stupid things I must have said to make him angry.

Later, after he left me, I wandered the empty apartment with a broom and dustpan the night before I had to move out, marveling at how the lines between territories had faded. On my knees, I scrubbed that square of the bathroom floor with a brush and rag, hoping to scour away the misplaced blame I laid on myself from the grout. I wanted to leave my home in better shape than I found it.

◊

Watch it, she growls from her front step. Richie from two doors down, the husky contractor with a smoker’s cough, is parking his red Ford F-150. The bed is dirty and full of cement dust, a wheelbarrow, pieces of a ladder, errant bricks. He works odd jobs. Each time he cuts the wheel, the nose of his behemoth ride encroaches on the handicapped spot in front of her house. Her hunter green Miata takes up little more than half the parking space, Richie’s truck, however massive, is still feet away from her bumper. Take it easy, Richie whines. Back it up! Mrs. Bee barks. I’m watching you. She just wants to protect her turf. I get it.

◊

On Wednesdays, when everyone puts out their garbage, all the neighbors congregate on one stoop. I call them “The Trash Night Social Club.” Thanks to Tonya, my gossiping next door neighbor, the stoop of choice is often the one we share. The evening’s topics generally include who moved in or out, who finally left her good-for-nothing husband, or if it’s a slow week, what’s on sale at Target. There are no secrets on this block. Everybody knows everything.

For every night I’ve stooped with the club, I’ve never seen Mrs. Bee put out a bag. I haven’t seen a neighbor do it for her, either. Maybe she just doesn’t make that much trash. Maybe she puts it out after I’m asleep—she is usually out until after midnight. What could she be doing so late at her age? She must be eighty-five if she’s a day. I come up with a little narrative where she eats dinner at some relative’s house most nights. That must be where she is.

◊

I talk to my cat as though she has every intention of answering me. No one asks me if I’m going to shower or who’s shopping for groceries this week. If I want to be with people, I go out and find them. While I’m having seconds of my shrimp lo mein and leaving the phone unanswered, I wonder if this freedom might someday shift to suffocation. But here I am.

◊

In summer, there is no such thing as quiet. In the shadow of I-95, the hum of traffic is constant. Allegheny Avenue runs east to west, connecting Port Richmond, Kensington, Nicetown, Tioga. People never stop coming or going. As my neighbors arrive home from work and greet the thick August night, the air conditioners on my block click on, one by one. The narrow sidewalks soak with condensation and the buzzing merges with the static of cars. Before bed, I peek through the curtains and see that Mrs. Bee’s bedroom window is just cracked open, free of a metal box. Maybe it’s in the back.

◊

The lights and TV were on in the bedroom, Tonya says to me one Wednesday, as we sit on the stoop, swatting mosquitoes. I found her right on the floor. Musta happened in the afternoon. It took the coroner hours to show up, she complains on a Marlboro exhale. I seen worse, though. I’m a nurse. I ask how she knew to go over and check on Mrs. Bee. That damn car didn’t move for two days, she says. That old lady was at the casino every fuckin’ day, soakin’ up the air conditioning for as long as she could. I knew something was wrong when it was hot as fuckin’ balls and she didn’t leave. 

She was all alone in there, I say into the phone later. Isn’t that sad? My mother asks, Are you worried about being alone in the house now? Does Mrs. Bee’s passing makes me want a roommate, expressly so there might be a witness for my untimely death? No, I sigh. That’s not it. It’s just sad. It would be sad if I had a roommate, too.

◊

I can’t escape aloneness, and I don’t want to. I indulge in it. I wonder if building my solitude ensures that I will always love it—if I can avoid the kind of loneliness that surrounds a body like fog, the kind that begs to be filled with something, anything, a cocktail in a dark bar, pancakes in a crowded diner. I pride myself on not needing anyone. Maybe what I’m proudest of is the image of confident aloneness, not the reality. I learned to go to the movies solo. I bring a book with me everywhere. I refuse to pass up a good dinner or a night of theater just because I don’t have a companion.

Then I come home, and my house slumbers in the dark. I have to go from room to room, creating my own illumination. I’m proud of my ability to exist alone—not just to exist. To revel. But when I roam from living room to dining room to kitchen, flipping light switches and waking up the house for my benefit, I can’t help but wonder—what’s the point? Stay asleep. It’s only me.

◊

When I was a kid, I was petrified of dying. I used to try to put myself in that mindset where I knew I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. All I could think was, not ready, not ready. If I have to die (and it seems that I do), I want it to be quick and surprising. Painless, if possible. Maybe just, “Huh, I’ve got a headache,” and then boom—over. You could survive being hit by a truck. You could feel the early ripples of a heart attack for days. A gunshot could miss a major artery by a millimeter. I need to die quietly and instantly—just a flash of light, then nothing.

◊

I am the only one around to do the dishes, to clean the cat box, to pull the weeds from the cracks in the pavement, to fill the dark green water bag slung around my sidewalk tree. I resent the absence of someone to bring me my snacks and books when I am sick or tired or just really comfortable. I remember long lazy Saturdays in my second floor apartment across town, listening to that terrible old boyfriend making a veggie scramble and coffee in the next room. Even he had his nice moments. Now, I am the only one to crack the eggs and grind the beans.

When I first moved into this row home right across from Mrs. Bee, I feared the space that was suddenly mine. I was overwhelmed by three bedrooms, a basement, a kitchen, and a pantry. But life expands to fill the area it’s given. Over careful months, I spread out. I relaxed. I stopped sleeping with too many dreams of robbers and broken glass, of locks and closets and bathrooms. In time, I found a kind of power in solitude. A dangerous thing I could wield instead of run from. Sometimes, alone resembles lonely. Sometimes, I don’t leave the house for days.

◊

No kids, Tonya tells me. No family at all. Her lawyer’s got power of attorney. Is there freedom in choosing solitude—the kind you can enjoy, if you cultivate it for yourself? Maybe that’s what scares me most about the sight of Mrs. Bee’s empty house. What if her solitude wasn’t a choice—that, if given the chance, she would have opted not to die alone on a sweltering hot afternoon, only to be found two days later by a nosy neighbor?  But then I think about her signing the paper that gave a lawyer power over her life after she was done with it, and I wonder if maybe she lived just as she wanted. If one day, with the television and lights on in the middle of the afternoon, it ended quietly and painlessly, and she was good and ready.

◊

Years later, after Mrs. Bee’s house has been rented to pot-smoking college students, after the bad boyfriend has married another woman and moved to another state, I will lie in bed with someone new, someone who will ask before he stops by because he respects my need for time alone. We will whisper into each other’s hair, the quiet rumbles of dreams not yet realized, and I will hear myself ask him, Where will we live? He will adjust his body closer to mine, the closed end of a parentheses. I will feel the walls of my home expand and contract along with our bellies, the rise and fall of alone and lonely coming together. We, he will make sure to emphasize, can live wherever we want. We can even live here.


Rae Pagliarulo holding a cup of coffeeRae Pagliarulo is the Writing Life column editor for Hippocampus Magazine and works as Development Director for a Philadelphia arts nonprofit. Her essays, poems, and articles have appeared in Full Grown People, bedfellows, Hippocampus, The Manifest-Station, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, the Brevity Blog, and others. Her work is anthologized in The Best of Philadelphia Stories: 10th Anniversary Edition. She is the 2014 recipient of the Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Prize, a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee, and a graduate of Rosemont College’s MFA program. Author photo by Dave Garrett Sarrafian.

Image credit: simpleinsomnia on Flickr

 

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

THE DAMAGE IS THE TRUTH by Roy White

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 23, 2019

THE DAMAGE IS THE TRUTH
by Roy White

Cracked white eggshell on a black background

Ice on the stairs, brief flight,
pain and an impossible angle.
A minute’s blindness, preview
of coming subtractions, then
pins and wire, a ropy scar.
My arm waves a credible
good-bye, but will never
be straight again.

Sometimes the abductees report
probes, even operations.
Sometimes there is damage,
a bit of the patient
misplaced or misconnected.

In this year of entropy,
when the Festiva’s snapped axle
sends it on a final charge
into a merciful snowbank, when
Lobster dies  and we can’t bear
to hear “Tiny Dancer,” we are
the egg that can’t be unscrambled.

Always there is pain,
but we are not resentful.
It’s flattering, in a way,
it shows they care, even if
mistakes are made.
The caves of Dulce feel empty now,
now that they’re gone,
some dead, some flown away.

My dogleg of an arm’s a fitting
emblem for us who make
a knight’s move, never a rook’s.
Alice’s friend could not
stay on his horse, but had the trick
of falling off with conviction.


Headshot of Roy WhiteRoy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere, and he reads poetry for the Adroit Journal. Roy can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.

 

 

 

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

TWO FLASH FICTIONS by Mercedes Lawry

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 23, 2019

TWO FLASH FICTIONS
by Mercedes Lawry

Pair of fuzzy brown and tan socks on hardwood floorSock Drawer
In the pink glimmer streaking the bottom of the sky, crows stuttered east in pursuit of their resting place. The woman looked up and thought how they seemed right where they should be and sure of the journey. She was not. If this was a journey, it was a fractured, unsure turmoil of one. And the end of it might be soon and brutal and would erase everything that had gone before. Curled in a nook of old concrete at the overgrown end of a park she hoped was mostly forgotten, she was wrapped in a blanket she’d been given, slate gray and speckled with something that had been recycled and was now the cloak of the homeless. She’d brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the drop-in center—supper. That morning she’d told the volunteer that her son had died and now she was lost and didn’t know how she’d go on and thank you very much for your hospitality. There were no tears. She’d cried herself out. She carried a small knife not for protection but because it was handy, even if it kept her out of the shelter which was fine by her. She was tired of the stink. Tomorrow, if she was still breathing, she’d stop in at St. Agatha’s and see if they had any socks. Socks didn’t last long in street life. Before things had fallen apart, she’d had a whole drawer full of socks. Everyone had a sock drawer, didn’t they? And when a single sock went missing in the laundry, it was annoying, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

◊

Dog Sense
I was going to the doctor and I fell and broke my arm and the dogs were elated to see me back so soon, but saddened when the medics arrived and came into the house, stirring the normally calm air of our little family. The dogs were sorry for my pain and confused by the disruption but not knowing my diagnosis, which was not at all hopeful, they were not struck by this “minor” incident being a sort of insult in the light of a “major” incident waiting around the corner as I was. I had no reason to believe the dogs had any notion my end was nigh but I wouldn’t put it past them to take the route of denial. Yes, some dogs live their lives in gleeful oblivion, the la-di-da dogs, the lucky dogs. One of mine fit this category; the other exists on a higher plane and would indeed be of greater comfort in the days to come. But now, the dogs were locked into the immediate, trying to make sense of these clipped and efficient visitors huddling around me. No doubt some of this disturbance would linger in the shallows of their brains after I’d been hauled off in the ambulance and they were tucked up in their corner of the kitchen, patiently awaiting my return. Meanwhile, I was having my bone assessed and cursing myself for the stumble over no discernible impediment and thinking I must cancel my appointment with the doctor’s office—those kind people who delivered the bad news with a touch of grace. They may be thinking something far worse than a broken bone had occurred. It would, in fact, be some time before Death came to call. There’s a word few are comfortable saying aloud, when it might turn out to be the greatest relief of all.


Headshot of Mercedes LawryMercedes Lawry has published short fiction in several journals, including Gravel, Cleaver, Garbanzo, and Blotterature and was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. She’s published poetry in journals such as Poetry, Nimrod, & Prairie Schooner and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times. She has a book forthcoming from Twelve Winters Press. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.

 

Image credit: LUM3N on Pixabay 

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

THE ORDINARY IS WORTH INVESTIGATION by Catherine Chen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 30, 2019

THE ORDINARY IS WORTH INVESTIGATION
by Catherine Chen

Dewy field of wild grass in morning light

How the body performs a blockade:
I’m not here.
Everyone wants to prove they can fight a tank.
The Japanese had tanks, screams the 94-year-old woman.
Her daughter is silent.
My phone vibrates
By the river stray dogs are tanning,
Aligned by size and possibly allegiance.
What began these zones
I follow the path
As night engulfs pedestrian noise,
The morning after,
We realize how the soil must’ve slept.
That’s right. Consider the garden.
How the body performs distance:
Torn receipts scattered over dewy compost
Off they go


Headshot of Catherine ChenCatherine Chen is the author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks) and Other Monsters of Love (Container), both forthcoming in 2019. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, Apogee, Hobart, Sundog Lit, and Nat. Brut, among others. They’ve been awarded fellowships and residencies from Millay Colony, Lambda Literary, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Art Farm.

 

 

Image credit: Jen We on Unsplash 

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

VICTORY LAP by Tommy Dean

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 23, 2019

VICTORY LAP
by Tommy Dean

Purple, white, and blue firework in the sky, with the title of the piece on the bottom right

The ticker tape dropped from the unseen buckets perched high above the swarming city streets. If this was victory, the boy didn’t want another second of the crush of people, the taste of ash and paper on his tongue. His mother gripped his hand and though he couldn’t see her face, he knew she was crying. He was bounced by hips and knees, that little rubber ball at the end of the paddle until his fingers ached and he found himself alone at the mouth of an alley, struggling to breathe, sound, not air, filling his lungs. A soldier kneeled halfway down the trash-strewn pavement. The rifle that had surely kept him alive rested in a pool of murky water, the shoulder strap a sun-shriveled snake resting near his boot. The boy approached slowly as if trying to collar a witless sheep. He touched the man’s shoulder, but it was several seconds before the man turned from the oily, cracked cement. His eyes weren’t dull or drunk, but sparking, his shoulder quaking like the boy’s dog during a nightmare. The dreams had led to a hemorrhage that had leaked from the dog’s ears like a nosebleed. The boy didn’t want this man to die, not at the parade for his honor, not after surviving. The roar of the crowd pummeled the space at his back like the growl of the tractor engine, his father swatting him with his hat every time he stalled the choke, grinding the gears. His mother was out of bounds, past his imagination, probably frantic, but here was this man, saying something, his spit rippling across the puddle. The boy bent closer until his knee wobbled against the gritting road, paper shedding from his jeans, seedlings bullied by the breeze of the passing parade, thousands of people celebrating.

“I just need to find North,” the man said, his skin grey in the twilight. The stubble on his cheeks was black, a rash of pimples across his chin.

The boy felt in his pockets, but there was no compass, no map, just rocks he had been pretending were bullets or, if thrown in a handful, a grenade.

“If we went back to the street,” the boy was saying, when the soldier stood abruptly, body rigid, legs pumping, a colt bucking, and the boy was scared, so he picked up the gun, a crowbar too heavy to swing. The muzzle dragged across the ground, metal rattling.

“Wait,” the boy called, his voice bouncing around the narrow walls.

The man stopped at the mouth of the alley, gave a lopsided salute, before merging into the flow of bodies, their noise a flock of crows scattered.

The boy felt desperately alone, the gun a weight he didn’t think he would ever escape.


Headshot of Tommy DeanTommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. He has been previously published in BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, Split Lip Magazine, Spartan, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter. His interviews with flash fiction writers can be found at www.tommydeanwriter.com

 

Image credit: Julie Tupas on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Fiction, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

Two Poems by Will Stanier

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

Two Poems
by Will Stanier

Ships on the horizon of the ocean

The Garden
The stage curtain of my dreams
needs an alteration. Ka-Pow!
Ambient billiard balls. “It’s always
broccoli with you.” And it is!
Be gone, beasts of the forest! Black and green
iguanas. The infamous snake with
its head chopped off, the length
of its body a petrified curl. I walk along
the beach because it’s an easy decision.
I see ships hung like ornaments from
the horizon. I cannot reach them.

◊

Poem (In Traffic)
Some bigwig bequeathed
a circle, suddenly I’m in it,
and I’m tuckered. Notwithstanding
any upstanding upstarts, or stand-ins.
It starting with an up-and-coming
someone-or-other campaigning
for an obstacle, otherwise called
a roundabout. It’s all otherwise
with me. My inexplicable sappiness
opens two enormous eyes.
My elbows clog according
to their engineering. “People have
jobs nowadays,” you say.
Well, I disagree. I’ll curate
the sleepover, then step into
a doozy. The neon cursive of
my dream requires supplication.
So I supplicate.


Will Stanier in front of a wall muralWill Stanier lives in Tucson where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arizona. He is the author of the chapbook “Fakie” (Invalid Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in tenderness, lit; Yes Poetry; TL;DR; and Partial Zine. He edits and designs at i.e. press.

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

THIS IS ENOUGHby Charlotte Gullick

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

THIS IS ENOUGH
by Charlotte Gullick

Man standing in forest with hand in his jean pockets

Lying on your side on the table, the gown covering most of your body, you stare at the picture on the wall, placed precisely there to catch the gaze, to offer something while the unpleasantness of the female body is dealt with. No one has ever prepared you for such an encounter and because of this, you’re trying not to laugh at yourself for being here. Perhaps mocking yourself is already part of the problem.

The physical therapist, Crystal, slides on plastic gloves, sits on the wheeled examination chair, and scoots herself to your backside. First, she places a hand on your hip—then she takes what must be her index finger and starts at the top of your ass crack, pressing firmly into the muscles there. Normally, you’d be nervous, more ill-at-ease about someone you just met touching your naked backside. But the pain is a hostile takeover that has held your ass, your urinary tract, your everything down there in some sort of hostage situation, and you’re more than willing to pay this ransom.

Still, it’s awkward. So, you say, “Did you want to grow up and push on people’s ass cracks?”

She laughs. “I had a patient who broke his coccyx, and he was in so much pain, I decided to learn this technique.” Her gloved finger presses high on your mid-cheek terminus, and a wave of relief sweeps out across the plains of your ass, your lower back, even your chest.

“You’re lucky. For him, I had to do internal rectal work.”

Your muscles tighten up again. She works her way lower, pushing on each set of muscles that form the pelvic girdle, the interlocking net you didn’t know you had until they all rioted. You try not to weep at the initial cramp, then at the relief. While she works, you sometimes close your eyes, but the inner landscape is still too fraught; inside, you’re still a child, the one pressed into the corner when Dad hits Mom, the one clenching so much in fear. You left that childhood home and the weather patterns of his cyclical violence over twenty years ago, and yet, the times you held your body tightly against his hitting her still clench inside. Your teen daughter is also why you’re here—learning to take care of the body is one of the things you want to model, but, it’s so hard.

“I’m going to go lower now.”

And there’s no way to explain both the shame and the comfort of having someone else push on your ass, right there, exactly on the anal edge. The ache so deep, so complete, your shoulders hunch even on the table.

Ass crack therapy, this is your life.

◊

The pain started after peeing, making you want to creep on hands and knees. The stabbing crawled up the urethra and into your lower back. A thousand razor blades, rotating. Between teaching classes, you sat on the bathroom floor, willing the pain away. But it didn’t leave, it grew in intensity and you finally sought medical help.

After two visits to the doctor, you had no answers and so scenarios started to bloom, options presented themselves in the imagination:

  • Bladder infection (could be a sign of diabetes)
  • Kidney stones (Mom’s had many – remember that night you had to get her in the Laytonville Auto Parts parking lot, the way she looked through you when you tapped on the window?)
  • Colon cancer (what finally took Dad down)
  • Consumption (You don’t really think this but it does flit across the mental screen. You believe that so many women died of consumption because of corsets—strung so tightly, their organs compressed and withered.)

Finally, after three months of body-torquing torment, you were referred to an urologist—she decided that you probably have interstitial cystitis—basically the irritable bowel syndrome for the urinary tract. There’s no conclusive way to diagnose this except to put a patient out and distend the bladder with water (extremely painful—hence the anesthesia). Once inside, the doctor takes pictures to confirm whether a patient has hundreds of tiny tears in the bladder lining. You didn’t want to be knocked out, nor did you want this thing she says is a strong possibility, but your sister’s MS and the accompanying incontinence continued to erode her life and no one could tell you whether or not there’s a connection between IC and MS. You are told to avoid caffeine, chocolate, tomato sauce, alcohol, citrus. Online reading revealed the incidence of suicide is very high with patients, particularly women, who have IC. This wasn’t helpful.

The procedure itself brings symptom relief to one third of the women; the other sixty percent have no response; less than 10 out of 100 women have an adverse reaction. The possibility of relief was quite the carrot. But you’d forgotten, that, in most cases, you’re not in the majority.

Despite the possibility that you wouldn’t get relief, you decided to go for it. Your husband Dreux ached for you, this was clear. His brow furrowed, his lips tweaked to the side, his hand went to your arm. Despite the warmth he offered, you felt so alone in this whirlpool of agony.

After the procedure, in the days, then weeks that followed, your entire pelvic area spasmed, but most especially the ass. Certain moments, when the pain overwhelmed, made you remember that suicide was one form of relief. You couldn’t have a regular bowel movement. You didn’t go for days, and then, an urgency radiated from your rectum outward—it was possible it registered on the Richter scale, the scope so grand. Afterward, sorrow pulsed in all the muscles in your backside. You never knew an ass could be so sad.

Finally, you returned to the doctor to let her know the misery of your life, your ass. She prescribed “pelvic floor physical therapy.”

◊

When you climb off this table, step back into your clothes, and curtly thank this woman. Instead of running into her arms and swallowing her in a hug.

“Next week, we’ll measure your vaginal strength.”

“Great,” you say. Out of the office, your hips are freer, your ass calmer. Later you will learn from Crystal that fifty percent of women in retirement homes are there because of incontinence. It’s all about the core and the strength of the pelvic floor but your culture doesn’t teach this, staying ashamed to talk about the kinds of pain or accidents women have.

You remember: “You on the rag?” flung at you at age twelve by your father, a scorching flame licking through the body, a defining moment. In your small hometown, there were unshaved women who came to talk to the eighth grade, taking the girls into the library to suggest another perspective on periods—a mother who brought her daughter balloons, had a party, took her to dinner. An expensive amount of fanfare just for a girl’s first showing of womanly blood.

Now, you remember the shelves of books around the group, how you wanted to choose one and crawl into it rather than listen to these women. Even if what they suggested was appealing, it was so vastly different than your world of skinning deer and branding cattle and gathering firewood and volcanic violence lurking. In your home, care of the female body was never mentioned, not when the demands of making ends meet didn’t allow for them. To know another way, at that time, only made you sad, made you feel the distances within. The more you found out what was possible, the more isolated you became.

◊

Later that week after the first pelvic floor physical therapy, a colleague stops by your office to talk about an upcoming meeting. Suddenly, the conversation veers into personal health—he’s had a bladder infection and missed a few days of work. He’s such a together person: funny, brilliant, hip. His tattoos swirl up his left arm in a tough display of boundaries and color.

You say, “I’d had some heath issues also lately. It’s made me realize that I hold my body tightly, especially in the classroom.” Like parenting, teaching is such a rich opportunity to feel your inadequacies. You don’t say that all the time you’ve been teaching, you’ve thought you were cool, but no, in fact, you were literally a tight ass. You flounder in your thoughts as the colleague talks. You tune in when he says, “So I filmed myself in the classroom to see how I could improve my teaching.” His cheeks are slightly red—you didn’t think anything could rattle him. “And I was mortified to see that as I got warmed up on my topic, I pinched my nipples.” He crosses his arms, brings both index fingers and thumbs upward and illustrates. His hands work in what should be private action.

All you can do is laugh. The fact that you need help with your ass seems a little less pathetic, less hopelessly wrecked, more human.

◊

The next week, Crystal rolls in a contraption on a cart after you’ve stripped and are sitting on the table in the glamorous medical gown. She has you lie down and then begins to hook up nodes to your ass and inner thighs. You half-way expect leeches or bleeding to be involved. It’s going to hurt to remove those nodes.

While you try to relax, she chatters about her evening. “It’s going to be the twenty-first time I see Jimmy Buffet tonight. I just love him.” She’s got all the wires hooked up, and she clicks on the machine, saying, “You’ll feel a little surge.”

You think about your sister, Jerrie, and the muscle test she had as part of the MS diagnosis—it’s not painful, but the anticipation of the surges wore her down. It felt like a form of torture, she said. No matter what, she’d never do it again. Now, Crystal inserts her finger, then her hand into your vagina and isolates muscles within the layers there. You think of the times you have visited your sister and been stuck in the back of her tiny car in the Lincoln Tunnel in traffic, how the air grew thinner, the car smaller. Crystal’s asking you to push her hand away and it’s as if your most private of places is made solely of runny mashed potatoes.

“Jimmy Buffet is such a great performer. Push harder right here.” You’ve got nothing to give her; a woeful failure. Dreux hates Jimmy Buffet, all that fake tropical-island stuff, the songs about drinking, all those Hawaiian-shirted arms raised in alcoholic resonance.

Crystal digs deeper into the muscles; the pangs shoot outward, a billion precise needles spin through the pelvic region. “I remember when my husband and I saw him in Florida. It was the perfect setting. Try to push now.” You try, sure the little readout that the nodes deliver will be a flat line of atrophied glory. It hurts to push, to try and isolate where those muscles even are.

Finally, Crystal removes her hand and looks at the results. “You have a lot of work to do.” She orders a regiment of Kegels, of stretches to open up your hip flexors. She advises you to be very careful not to tighten the ass when doing both of these things. Lying there in all your weak, vaginal indignity, you wonder why she is suggesting the impossible.

Back in the car, Dreux says, “How did it go?”

You don’t know where to begin, how to explain how bizarre and defeated you feel. A report you don’t get to see reveals sad information about the nether regions, and you have no language for this, or the ways you’re coming to understand how your mortal coil carries the stories of your childhood, how you are still reacting to a series of violent nights that happened more than thirty years earlier. The humiliations and lessons of the body hum in your cells, in your very female form. There’s a loneliness in this realization that you can feel from the top of your head to the bottom of your under-performing vagina. To the little girl you were, to the woman you are, you send soothing serenity.

All you say is, “Crystal has seen Jimmy Buffet twenty times and she’s going again tonight.”

“She can never put her hand in your vagina again.” Then, “No. No. It’s yours. You decide who gets in there.”

You say, “Certainly not Jimmy Buffet.”

The laughter you share rolls through your body, through your chest, your ass. It’s a reminder that though the past remains, you don’t have to carry it so deeply anymore.

For now, this is enough.


Headshot of Charlotte GullickCharlotte Gullick is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. In May 2016, she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was published by Blue Hen Books/Penguin Putnam, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pembroke, Pithead Chapel, and the LA Review. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony and a Ragdale Residency.

Image credit: Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

BECAUSE I LOVE HER by Erica Plouffe Lazure

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

BECAUSE I LOVE HER
by Erica Plouffe Lazure

Waffle House sign

Because I love her we will cross four states and a time zone to find a Waffle House, because it reminds her of home, but “only the good parts.” Because I love her we will order the hash browns scattered, covered, chunked, and smothered, with a side of waffles as big as the browns themselves. Because I love her we will sit on the same side of the booth, hold hands under the table, and down the hours-old coffee that holds a dull black pall even after six creamers. Because I love her we will return the “are you together?” look the waitress gives us with a “yes, we are” and exchange hickeys as we wait for our hash browns to arrive, in case she wanted to stop wondering. Because I love her we will split the waffle, but not the tab. Because I love her we will pay the tab with my lucky twenty and I will leave the change as a tip. Because I love her we will return homeward, careening down the dark farm town roads, the crossings, and onto the Interstate. Because I love her we will stop at the McDonald’s rest stop near Lothorian because she wants fries, and when I say I am surprised she’s still hungry, she will say I ate more than my half of the waffle. Because I love her we will try not to argue while we wait in line for the fries, but we do anyway, and when I collect the fries she knocks them out of my hand, and as they sprawl across the tile floor, a kid in line says, “man, that’s cold.” Because I love her we will not bother to pick up the fries and because my lucky twenty is gone, we can’t pay for the fries we can no longer eat. Because I love her we will sit in the food court with no food or money, across the table from each other, and I tell her this is not about the waffle. And because I love her we will not leave; we will stay there, holding hands or not, our twin hickeys mellowing to brown, talking or not, about what made her mad or not, about what life I want to build for us or not. Because I love her.


Headshot of Erica Plouffe LazureErica Plouffe Lazure is the author of a flash fiction chapbook, Heard Around Town, and a fiction chapbook, Dry Dock. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The Journal of Micro Literature, The Southeast Review, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Vestal Review, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology (UK), Litro (UK), Meniscus (Australia), and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at ericaplouffelazure.com/.

Image credit: Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

TWO POEMS by Simon Perchik

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

TWO POEMS
by Simon Perchik

Man's arm upraised against a dark background

*
You no longer bathe
though a cold rain
flows through one arm

grieves the way each river
carries off its slow descent
with a deadly hold

—around these gravestones
your smelly leather jacket
still arranged so its sleeves

spread-eagle, are packed
with a sky already darkened
by the more and more feathers

that have no heading yet
and your shoulders without hope
weightless over the water.

*
These stones too steep, cling
the way the overcast side by side
lets through one star –in the open

you devour its incinerating light
and distances though the grass
has just been mowed and watered

knows all about how the night sky
stands back, erect, righteous
between each grave and winter

where you lean over to drink
—always the same cold air
two mornings at a time, and choke.


Headshot of Simon PerchikSimon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. His poems appear in issues 14, 18, and 22 of Cleaver.

 

Image credit: Cherry Laithang on Unsplash

 

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

ALL THE CHINESE FOOD IN THE WORLD by Sue Mell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

ALL THE CHINESE FOOD IN THE WORLD
by Sue Mell

Four red Chinese lanterns against a black background

I’m always sad when the gig ends. Three grueling weeks with a showroom crew I only see each spring and fall, preparing for the home textile market. I’ll especially miss the Flower Marys—a jubilant self-named group of gay men who fashion stunning floral arrangements. Peggy, Mary, Louise. Men whose real names I never learned or have long since forgotten. Over time, a musician among them will marry the showroom designer. Others vanish into illness, addiction. The displays shrink, the crew downsize with budget cuts. But this warm spring evening, in the early aughts, it’s all still in place, and I’ve got one night left in New York, where old friends, commercial photographers soon to be forced from the city by hostile buyout, have graciously lent me their tiny West Village apartment while they’re out of town.

Bags packed, rooms tidied, I’m caught in familiar disjunction between east and west coast. “Pick up,” I say, over-ordering Chinese from the place on Bethune, though it’s blocks away.

At Bleecker, a yellow cab slows; the driver stares rolling past. Exhaust trailed by a faint scent of honeysuckle. Violet dusk dissolves the thin wedge of playground ahead, memory slip-sliding into overlay as I cross the street—this neighborhood the stomping ground of my early adulthood. I was forged here, but it’s no longer my home.

Exiting as I enter, a delivery guy blocks my view. But when I reach the counter and give my name, there they are. The Flower Marys, in their casual best, gathered around a banquet table in the garish dining room.

Community’s a tired word that doesn’t capture their spirited bond. Its sharp edges of derogatory wit. The longings shared, the common drive for physical release. No late hour, no black eye, no drunken fall down a brownstone stoop, too much to preclude comfort, rescue by any means. A belonging that I—a straight woman, single, middle-aged—will never know. My envy most shameful considering the era they came of age.

Their boss, who resembles the silver-haired partner on Mad Men—and on whom I’ve always had a crush—raises his chin in smiling recognition. He tips his head; an invitation to join. I smile back, nod toward the takeout bags lining the counter. He shrugs, as if saying, your choice. Indecision races my heart.

“Twenty-nine-oh-four,” the cashier says loudly. I’m slow to realize he’s speaking to me.

“Sorry, sorry,” I say, fumbling for my credit card.

When I look over at the table again, glasses are raised, the silver-haired Mary’s head thrown back in laughter. If I walk over, someone will pull out a chair. They might even fill me in on the joke. But my lonely status, so painfully blatant, will change the evening’s tenor, their raucous pleasure curtailed. For a moment, I watch. Then the cashier returns my card, motions me to clear the way. Inside flimsy white plastic, the paper bag’s already seeping grease. I take my food and slip back out into the velvet night.


Headshot of Sue MellA graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Sue Mell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Newtown Literary. A collection of her flash fiction was recently selected as a semifinalist in the Black Lawrence Press chapbook competition.

 

 

Image credit: An Tran on Unsplash

 

 

 

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

NEUTRALITY by Yasmina Din Madden

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

NEUTRALITY
by Yasmina Din Madden

The Matterhorn Mountain, Switzerland

“Sexually, I’m more of a Switzerland,” he says to her over mediocre merlot in a sleek, dark bistro. As in later he’ll be neutral about positions, she wonders. Or he’ll remain silent and smiling afterwards—polite but distant? Perhaps what he means has nothing to do with making choices or bold pronouncements. Maybe he means that he’ll wind her up expertly, her body a sleek Piaget. Melt, stir, and stretch her like fondue? Who would say such thing about sex, and why is she here with him? Perhaps he simply means that nothing and no one is worth fighting for.


Headshot of Yasmina Din MaddenYasmina Din Madden lives in Iowa and her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in PANK, The Idaho Review, Word Riot, The Masters Review: New Voices, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, Carve, and other journals. Her story “At the Dog Park” was shortlisted for The Masters Review Anthology: 10 Best Stories by Emerging Authors, and her flash fiction was shortlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2017 and Pulp Literature’s Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction. She teaches creative writing, literature, and women’s and gender studies at Drake University.

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

FRESCO by Joan Larkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

FRESCO
by Joan Larkin
Cimabue 108 fresco painting

to Cimabue

I want to be that featureless dove

tucked in the saint’s armpit.

I want to nest where his hand

presses me to the rough cloth

as his round wound looks out.

I want to be that radiant

shape—bird only if you

step back to see me better.

His hands and feet want

to be birds, too. They bow

from sleeves and hem,

each with its dark seed,

its bloodied coin, its dove’s eye

open in sleep, watching.


Headshot of Joan LarkinJoan Larkin’s books include Blue Hanuman and My Body: New and Selected Poems, both from Hanging Loose Press. Her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Author photo by John Masterson.

 

 

 

Image credit: Wikipedia

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

THE HOUSEKEEPER by Sydney Smith

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

THE HOUSEKEEPER
by Sydney Smith

Woman standing at a sink

You can live with something right under your nose, say a dot of mustard, without ever seeing it. Well, at least for a day.

It’s like when you forget what shirt you’re wearing or if you’re even wearing one, terror absorbing you until you look down to find, just the same as this morning, you’re dressed in that blue half-sleeved puffy thing you never wear, and that’s why you felt an eerily unfamiliar cotton-graze on your elbow right before that moment of clarity.

But the oblivion grows thicker, insidious even, when perpetrated. Who can remember what one has decided to forget? We all do it, sweeping under the rug of our subconscious the dust from every time our clay hearts have groaned and cracked. And then we tread on the rugs to prove that it’s really gone. For a while it works.

Until the housekeeper comes.

I am the housekeeper.

My clients tend to watch me as I pick up their rugs and flap them out. Dust flies, and I catch it and jar it up like wild fireflies soon to run out of air. They watch me as I get down onto my knees to scrub the piss stains out from the underbelly of their toilet seats—why aren’t toilet bowls made butt-ready anyway?

Some clients are lonely and welcome my visit. With most, though, I can tell my presence makes them uncomfortable. They don’t scowl, but I can see their teeth clench when I approach tender spots.

There’s the man, father, and within the past few years, mountain biker, gardener, whittler, ex-music teacher, and frantic busy bee whose deceased wife’s belongings still rest on his layers upon layers of grief. I must thoroughly dust atop and around them, but, oh! Please don’t reach between. He’s glad to reach toward me, though, seeking—and receiving—shared joy in a gift of homegrown cherry tomatoes.

The delicate retired lady has the disturbingly nice—lead singer of the Bee Gees level—teeth and an elegantly decorated home, where the only junk is hidden on her desktop computer. The computer is the place where she goes by another name and another life; I know because of her PayPal pseudonym. Despite a recent mysterious hip break which officially ended her lifelong career in politics, she still hastily hobbles around me when I dust her keyboard to ensure my fingers don’t graze their way up to the power button.

The supposedly-treacherous husband instructs me to please do treat the fifth guest room like a bona fide bedroom from now on. It should be deep-cleaned just the same as the lavish master suite with its walk-in closets and office, now to be used solely by the Mrs. because, hey, she’s not the one with the snoring issues. And though his baggage is apparently heavy, she’s sent it through the trash compactor so it can fit in his new tiny closet, on the other side of the house from her and from what the guests see: the chandeliered entryway leading into either the parlor with the antiques and the crystal sherry glasses or the hall covered in family photos of wife and husband, daughter and son, cat and dog, all smiling perfectly.

Just as I smile while I’m there.

But see the thing about such hard candy shells is that they’re external, exposed to the elements of experience, so they tend to crack. Now, if you’re hired to shine this cover until it sparkles, you better as hell pick at those little crevices—scrub them with a toothbrush if you must—and pry out the smashed-in gunk because, if you don’t, enough waltzing around it will push that crack down and open, and you know dust-swept-under always finds its way back out.

That’s the catch with being a housekeeper, though. No one likes you digging through their clay heart’s dust, even if they hired you to, because there’s a reason they shove that stuff into the cracks. It hurts to look at, as do I.

The reason they clench their teeth when I’m around is that it isn’t me they’re seeing. It’s a mirror.


Headshot of Sydney SmithSydney Smith is a newbie writer from the South. She took a roundabout path to writing—by sharing science through short stories. Growing up with the woods in her backyard, she developed a deep love for nature. The beauty in nature is what drew her to science and informs her creativity. She’s published poetry in Collage, the creative arts journal at Middle Tennessee State University, where she recently graduated with a dual B.S. in Physics and Philosophy. She’s also soon to have a biophysics paper published in Cellulose.

 

Image credit: Catt Liu on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

SHIFTLESS by Jason Irwin   

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

SHIFTLESS
by Jason Irwin

after Raymond Carver

Man half-submerged in a lake during a pink sunset

“He doesn’t want to work. He just wants to get drunk and grow his hair long.” I could hear my grandfather’s mocking voice as I stood beneath the rusted ass of a machine that roared and spit cranberry residue. It was the end of summer. I’d just returned from California, a cross-country one-sided love affair with a hippie woman and her dog that ended in disgrace when we settled in with her stunt pilot boyfriend in a San Fernando bungalow and I realized I was the third wheel. I was twenty-six and going nowhere, back home and living with my mother, who worked nights at a nursing home. After a few weeks I was hired at a juice factory through a temp agency.

Three hours into my first shift, with blisters blooming on the heels of my hands like stigmata, a man with a toothpick between his lips and an Ewok’s beard tapped my back and motioned with a greasy thumb.

“Break time!” I followed him through a maze of metal work and fruit slop. The noise was horrendous, the heat devouring. I felt like I’d been plunged into the depths of William Blake’s satanic furnaces.

◊

On Fridays my grandfather and I would go to The Knights of Columbus for fish and a beer. He always paid, smiling as I gulped down my first draft, eager for a second. The portions were small, the batter soggy, but my grandfather liked the bartender, who looked like Andre the Giant’s kid brother and hosted a local sports radio show.  After dinner I’d drive my grandfather around town in his red Pontiac. We’d stop at the pharmacy, the grocery store—all the while he’d point out the empty lots that used to be something—a barber shop, a bar, Brooks’ Locomotive Works, the church he and my grandmother were married in.

◊

Outside the factory a soggy breeze hung in the air like bad breath. The sun had gone west, but the sky still held its saffron aftermath. I watched two men in blue jumpsuits stand against the wall smoking cigarettes.

“Screw this,” I said in a moment of delinquent inspiration and walked across the parking lot, kicking bits of gravel in my path. At the corner of Central and Second I turned left, meandered along the lakefront. Seagulls soared and screamed, fought over garbage. One stood on a tire and blinked into the wind. “Goddamn shit!” I screamed with pride, until my lungs burned, while in the distance a ship’s silhouette rose above the horizon line, beyond which I traced the jagged blue outline of Canada. I could hear my grandfather’s voice again:

“He doesn’t want to work.”

And he was right. All I wanted was to stare out at the lake, the clouds, the cracks in the sidewalk, to drink cheap beer and read Camus, to dream of all the places I’d yet to travel, the person I would one day become if I had the guts, if I could survive.


Headshot of Jason IrwinJason Irwin is the author of A Blister of Stars (Low Ghost, 2016), Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw Press, 2008), and the chapbooks Where You Are (Night Ballet Press, 2014) and Some Days It’s A Love Story (Slipstream Press, 2005). He is the winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award, and he has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He has essays published or soon-to-be-published in The Crux and IO Literay Journal. He lives in Pittsburgh. More at http://www.jasonirwin.blogspot.com.

Image credit: Sarah Diniz Outeiro on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

RABBIT, RABBIT by Andrea Jarrell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

RABBIT, RABBIT
by Andrea Jarrell

Brown rabbit peeking over grass on a hill

On the first morning after our return to the old house, I listen to Brad sleeping beside me, his full-bodied inhale and exhale bubbling slightly, like water coming to a boil. At first, I forget where I am. But fresh paint, its sharp scent in my nostrils, reminds me of this new beginning we’ve made. As I open my eyes, I remember the boxes stacked high in the living room waiting to be unpacked.

When I told the movers where to place the furniture, I was careful to set up new configurations. Brad and I agreed on that from the start. Other than the big flowered area rug and the red club chairs, most of our furnishings are different from the first time we lived here—two new blue loveseats, bookshelves, dining table, lamps. We want to move forward, not back.

In the quiet of our room now, I hold very still, fighting the urge to smooth my nightgown that’s bunched around my waist. I am trying not to disturb this man I love or the small brown eager dog and the lumbering black one sleeping on matching pads on the floor. The three of them are snoring in concert, but at any moment Brad’s alarm will sound, setting off the dogs in a melee of toenails on hardwood and jangling collars.

I want this sliver of velvet blue morning, soft as rabbit’s fur, to myself. I want time to adjust, as my eyes have done, to my surroundings: the sage green paint we’ve chosen for the long wall on Brad’s side of the bed, the new bedside tables and simple window blinds through which I can see slants of light. The new floral-patterned coverlet Brad has kicked off in his sleep.

Throughout our marriage, I have jokingly referred to him as my trophy husband because of our age difference. Half the year he is four years my junior, the other half, three. When our son was in elementary school, he thought it was hilarious that his father had been a fifth grader when his mother was an eighth grader. Today is the first day of June, so for the next two months Brad will be fifty-one to my fifty-five. Depending on my mood, our age differential makes me feel sexy or just old.

“Sometimes I’m scared of ending up a bag lady,” I’d said when we first started talking about moving. Part of a Greek chorus of fears I can hear hovering over women my age: breast cancer, losing a child, Alzheimer’s, poverty reducing us to carrying our earthly possessions in a worn-out Nordstrom bag.

But Brad and I have decided this is the year we will get serious about our future. Save our money and plan for retirement. We hope to buy a house one day to have something to leave to our children. We tried buying once before—back in Los Angeles—but at the time, we had no business being homeowners. We ended up with two mortgages right away and, ultimately, sold short and bore the tax burden for years. For us, buying has not meant security but risk, one we haven’t been willing to take again.

For the last two and a half decades, we have focused on getting our house in order in a different way—raising thoughtful kids, cultivating careers we love, making each other happy. But now we have returned to this little house, a squat, brick, 1950’s rental on the Maryland side of Washington, D.C. A house we lived in when our son and daughter were still small. We’ve arrived at its familiar red door, ready to be our older, wiser selves.

 

As I knew it would, the room comes alive all at once: Brad’s buzzing phone, his arm reaching to silence it, the feel of his torso see-sawing upright to the edge of the bed, dogs scrambling. I hear his pale feet with their neatly-trimmed nails shooshing along the floor. In the dim light, I see him, bare-chested in dark gym shorts, slip into the hallway. The dogs race ahead through the living room and onto the ceramic kitchen tiles. I hear the chirp of the backdoor alarm sound open as he lets them out. Then his footsteps as he descends the basement stairs, where he will settle on the little couch in his office, read his AA literature, pray and write his daily letter to God. For almost as long as we’ve been married, we’ve lived sober—Brad going to AA right before our first anniversary.

I, too, pray and write to God each morning in a slim, black journal I keep by my bedside. Sometimes I even get down on my knees the way I did as a child. I’m not sure when I stopped my nightly childhood prayers, but I know when I started them again—when we still lived in Los Angeles, when Brad first stopped drinking. My prayers are so much a part of my life now that I feel a little jolt to realize if he hadn’t gone to AA, I might not have found my own Higher Power. A God I think of as my constant companion.

We are both familiar with what those in AA call “doing a geographic.” Moving to change one’s outer surroundings in the desperate hope of fixing internal unease.

“Do you think that’s what this is?” Brad asked after we signed the new lease on our old house.

The question lingered in the air between us, as we considered it. “I think it’s the least desperate move we’ve ever made,” I finally said.

I can remember co-signing our very first lease nearly thirty years ago—a tiny Spanish-style with a tiered backyard garden near downtown L.A., where we’d eaten scrambled eggs for dinner and watched Seinfeld as we rolled coins gathered from pockets, purse bottoms, and the bowl Brad kept on his dresser. I enjoyed stacking towers of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters on my TV tray, the grimy film the well-traveled coins left on my fingertips. Magic money we couldn’t be too eager to cash in. Delaying long enough to feel the luck of a true windfall when the rolled coins would become green fives, tens, and twenties. At the time, I couldn’t imagine how we might grow to be people who could put kids through college, but we did.

Just last week, in fact, we were at our daughter’s graduation. Brad wearing a beautiful navy blue suit, and I in a melon lace dress ordered specially. Our ability to pay college tuitions, making good on our responsibility to our children, is what makes us believe we now have it in us to build a nest egg and secure our own future.

Coming back to this old house feels like reuniting with an ex-lover who has adopted a new hairstyle, quit smoking, updated their sex moves. The same familiar bay window and three steps leading to the front door, but new tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, new carpet in the basement. Like the aging ex-lover, the house has also seen more wear and tear. Notably, the once-smooth driveway has buckled and cracked, asphalt splitting like the top of a cake baked too long. Our move has prompted the landlord to begin the repaving process, and soon the driveway will be a curving terracotta swath.

I was disappointed when the previous tenants took out the big, leafy oak tree that once stood next to the driveway. A tree I used to be able to see from our front bedroom window. The old oak had given the modest house curb appeal, but apparently, it had been dying—perhaps the whole time our kids were growing up here, even as the tree’s root system, no doubt still underground and thriving, held a dormant seventeen-year cicada brood.

These insects had emerged not long after we first moved to Maryland. Armies of the coffee-brown bugs with their pungent sick-sweet scent burrowed up from under the tree and along the driveway. After six weeks or so, the big-eyed bugs went to ground again, their abandoned shells scattered like spent casings. At the time, I’d calculated the year they’d reemerge—when our son was twenty-one, our daughter twenty-three. A lifetime away when I’d done the math. But here we are, just a year from the next brood.

While our kids were in high school, we moved from this house and rented a bigger, nicer one a few blocks away. I’d thought the larger house signified progress, but five years flew by and still we didn’t feel like we’d quite moved in.

“We missed you!” several neighbors said, when they saw the moving truck in front of the little house yesterday. We smiled broadly at them, as if acknowledging that some misstep had now been righted.

But some friends and colleagues puzzle over our return. Only when we remind them that our kids are both out on their own do they nod knowingly. “Oh, right,” they say. “Empty nesters.”

It’s true that our life now feels more like it did before our kids were born. For one thing, we have sex in the daytime like we did before we were married. Just yesterday afternoon, in fact, after the movers had gone, I’d led Brad by the hand to this front bedroom, street traffic going by.

Pushing back the coverlet now, I step lightly to the floor and let the silky fabric of my nightgown slide back into place. Birdsong trills through the windows—a fast warble followed by a throaty thwip, thwip, thwip. I begin to make the bed, smoothing the sheets and plumping the pillows. We have kept the same big mahogany bed we had when we lived here the first time. And in this master bedroom, there is really only one way for it to fit—beneath the same window I’d looked through as a younger woman, with so much yet unknown. You think you know all about me, I can hear the house saying. You don’t know me anymore either, I want to reply.

Last night, after we’d finished the first wave of unpacking, we sat in the basement on our new charcoal gray sectional positioned in the opposite direction from the way our old navy blue couches once faced. We watched a movie in which a wife lay comatose in a hospital bed. Her grieving husband sat by her bedside helpless, hat in hand, worrying its brim. He wanted to tell this woman he loved that the world had literally opened up—that a parallel universe existed, and he’d discovered it all while she lay sleeping.

As we watched the screen, Brad turned to me and said, “I hate it when big things happen and you’re not there for me to tell.”

I scanned my memories for the big things he might be thinking of—his father’s heart attack, the job offer that originally took us East, calling me from the tarmac after the first plane hit the Twin Towers. We lived in Maine then with our children, and he’d been homeward bound from a business meeting in Los Angeles.

“Something’s happening,” he whispered into his cell phone like a cup to his lips, its string reaching all the way to my ear as I stood in the sunroom of our house in Camden, Maine, looking out at the crystal blue sky.

And what of my need to tell him big things? The car accident our daughter and I had, my stepfather’s death, my first book accepted for publication, the matching pink lines that meant I was pregnant for the first time. That Saturday morning, he’d gone to an AA meeting. When he came up the walkway to the apartment we’d lived in then, he could see me jumping up and down in the front window when I caught sight of him.

Confiding that having me witness his life is what matters may be one of the nicest things my husband has ever said to me. Because even now, even after all this time together, I need to know I am as important to him as he is to me. That he has taken up residence in me the way I have in him.

As I reach for the slim black notebook on my bedside, I whisper to no one at all, “rabbit, rabbit.” It’s a superstition Brad taught me: let these words be the first you speak on the first day of the month, and you’ll have good luck. For years, I wouldn’t play along because I didn’t want to risk forgetting and tip the balance one way or the other. But I recently took up the practice. Married for over two decades now—still in love, with good jobs and healthy kids—our winnings are piled high enough for me to place this monthly bet.

Downsizing, empty nesting—I know we could use these rational, sensible labels to explain coming back to this house. But I think our move has far more to do with the inner clockwork of our twenty-five-year marriage—a collection of decisions and choices we’ve made over the years. The way, for better and worse, our fears, shortcomings and strong suits commingle. Much of it unspoken, yet stoking the hopeful, excited way we’d looked at each other when we learned the little house we’d once lived in was vacant again.


Headshot of Andrea Jarrell

Andrea Jarrell’s debut memoir I’m the One Who Got Away was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Books of 2017.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times “Modern Love” column, Harper’s Bazaar, Literary Hub, Narrative Magazine, the Washington Post, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies.

 

 

Image credit: Gary Bendig on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

AMANDA IS MOVING BACK TO MONTANA, ALTHOUGH SHE VOWED SHE’D NEVER DO IT by Raima Larter

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackApril 24, 2019

AMANDA IS MOVING BACK TO MONTANA, ALTHOUGH SHE VOWED SHE’D NEVER DO IT
by Raima Larter

The starry night sky above a yellow house in Billings, Montana

Snapshot One: Graduation, Three Forks High School. Amanda wears a dark blue cap and gown with honor cords. The photo is out of focus and off-kilter since it was taken by Daddy who was probably drunk at the time. The principal is handing her a large envelope, which will turn out to be a full-ride scholarship to Mountain Valley State College in Billings. Granny is impressed, but Mama will say she doesn’t understand why Amanda would accept such a thing, since the money is from people they don’t even know.

Ways In Which Amanda is Like the Moon

  • The moon does not shine on her own; she only reflects the brilliance of that around which she orbits.
  • The moon was, they say, torn from her mother, the earth, by a great, cataclysmic event.
  • The moon circles the earth, both of them tugging at each other with a force strong enough to move oceans.
  • The moon’s role is simple: reflect the sun’s glory, but never, ever outshine it.

 

Snapshot Two: Family photo, Daddy’s funeral. Amanda, age 19, her sister Megan, 10, their Mama, their cousin Darlene, 21, and Brian, Darlene’s father. Uncle Brian wears an off-white cowboy hat and string tie. Amanda wears a light-colored calico dress. Mama is in a too-tight and too-short black skirt. Mama never dressed that way when Daddy was alive. The casket sits in the aisle behind them and is closed, since the body was mangled when the tractor Daddy was driving tipped over and crushed him. Granny is not in this photo since she was the one who took it. The photo is crisp, clear and perfectly centered.

Pros and Cons: Should Amanda Marry Jack Morgan?

Pros:

  • He’s smart, handsome and makes her laugh.
  • He’s not from Montana.
  • Amanda felt a jolt of electricity from his hand to hers when they first met, and when she told him this, he believed her.

Cons:

  • She may or may not love him—how is one to know?
  • He’s not from Montana.
  • Jack was engaged to someone else when Amanda met him. He refused to call it an affair. She wants his version of events to be true, but Granny doesn’t buy it.

 

Wedding To-Do List

Something Old: Jack’s paternal grandmother’s wedding ring—soon to be Amanda’s

Something New: Amanda’s wedding dress, which she made herself to save money

Something Borrowed: White strappy high heels, borrowed from a friend

Something Blue: Amanda, although she denies it whenever Granny asks

 

Snapshot Three: Family photo, Granny’s funeral. Amanda, Darlene, Megan, Mama, and Uncle Brian, who has now also become Amanda’s step-father. Amanda’s son Elliott, age eight, sits on her lap, looking sad. Amanda’s husband Jack is not in the photo since he was supposedly at a conference that day. He was actually with his lab tech, with whom he was having an affair, although Amanda will not find that out until she arrives home. Tucked under her arm is a folder holding a copy of Granny’s will, leaving Granny’s home along the Gallatin River to Amanda.

Things Amanda Will Miss if She Does Not Move Back to Montana

  • The meadowlark’s song, since that bird is a western bird and you’ll never find one east of the Mississippi.
  • The sun still being up at ten p.m. in the summer.
  • Snow in July.
  • Seeing Mama and Brian grow old and die.
  • Darlene’s little boy, who she’s never met. He’s the same age as Elliott and they could be cousins, just like she and Darlene were. Are.

 

Snapshot Four: Amanda and Jack with Elliott on their front porch in Illinois. It’s supposed to be a family photo. Amanda and Elliott are smiling at the camera, but Jack is looking at his phone.

Amanda’s To-Do List

  • Get the front porch of Granny’s house repaired.
  • Register Elliott for school at Three Forks Elementary.
  • File for divorce.
  • Buy two fishing rods—one for Elliott and one for Amanda.

Headshot of Raima LarterBefore moving to Washington, D.C., Raima Larter was a college professor in Indiana who secretly wrote fiction and tucked it away in drawers. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Chantwood Magazine, Mulberry Fork Review, Linden Avenue, and others. Her first novel, “Fearless,” will be published by New Meridian Arts Press in early 2019. Her second novel, Belle O’ the Waters, will be published by Mascot Books, also in 2019. Read more about Raima and her work at her website raimalarter.com.

 

Image credit: Alan Labisch on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Fiction, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

JUST YOU WAIT by Stefani Nellen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackMay 8, 2019

JUST YOU WAIT
by Stefani Nellen

Two girls with curly hair

Malu’s daughter Lotte and Lotte’s friend Charelle were playing their favorite game: Mutant Vampires. They pressed their arms against their ribcages underneath their tight, glittering t-shirts so only their hands stuck out of the lacy sleeves, and stumbled through the kitchen groaning blood, blood, blood. They were both eleven years old.

“Blood, blood, I need blood!” Lotte banged against the fridge and tore open the door. “Frozen blood! No! There’s no frozen blood!” She banged the door shut, bugged out her eyes and spun in place, so blood-deprived she was hallucinating. Malu sat at the kitchen table and tried to focus on her laptop screen. She worked at a call center for the Belastingdienst, helping people with their taxes. She had taken the job when Lotte was six months old; now she was a manager who trained the new agents. She also worked as a freelance writer when she could get assignments. Lately, she had started looking at other options. Maybe she could go to the university and study literature, as she’d wanted to before she got pregnant in her last year of secondary school.

Charelle collapsed on the floor, twitching and moaning and arching her back. Lotte wrapped her arms around the bag of groceries still standing on the kitchen table. “Blood, blood, blood,” she groaned.

“Damn it,” Malu said, hitting the table with her palm. Lotte let go of the bag. Charelle got up and tugged her t-shirt into shape.

“There’s butter in there,” Malu said, pointing at the bag. “Milk. Yogurt. I told you to put away the groceries.”

“We were just playing, Mom,” Lotte said.

“Funny game,” Malu said. “Blood. Blood.”

Lotte stared at the floor. She was growing again; her pants were too short. The stick-on butterfly tattoos were starting to peel off her knuckles. “Your hands are rotting,” Malu said. “Is it part of the game?” She had been a girl, too, once. Not a Lotte, chubby and blond and pretending to be too old for Barbies while hiding them in a box underneath her bed. Malu had been a Charelle: straight long hair always falling into her face, shoulders she could drop in a way that grown-ups found irritating, long legs in carefully torn jeans. The stubborn set of her jaw.

“Just keep it down, okay?” Malu said. “I’m trying to finish an article.”

“Mom wrote a book about torture,” Lotte said. “She wouldn’t let me read it.”

“I only edited a book chapter,” Malu said.

“Cool,” Charelle said. She let a strand of hair glide through her fingers. “Real writers don’t have kids, though.”

“You know what, darling?” Malu said. “I think it’s time you and Lotte play at your place for a change. I’m sure your mother has time to entertain you.”

Charelle glanced sideways at Lotte, like a girl who had misbehaved and knew it. She lived in a big house next to the park; she had a trampoline, a cat, and a stylish black bike, and her parents were chaotically cheerful academics. Still, the girls usually played here. Tomorrow would be Saturday, so Charelle would sleep over.

“We’ll go to my room,” Lotte said. “Okay, Mom?”

“All right.” Malu put away the groceries and stepped on the small balcony, one of many identical balconies in her apartment building. There was no shade at this hour, and the stone was hot. She started stacking the empty flowerpots that were taking up all the space. Her mother had given them to her for her birthday, saying that the balcony would be perfect as an herb garden; the seeds were still in a drawer somewhere.

Real writers don’t have kids. Malu wrote whenever she could, early in the morning or late at night, or next to the TV while dinner heated in the oven. Stupid text for fashion catalogues or tourism websites or a restaurant’s homepage. She wanted to show the world that she could be both, a working mother and a writer. She would not become a welfare mom who collected a check each month so she could stay home with the baby and transform her place into a giant playpen. Or the kind of student mommy who brought the children to grandma before biking through the city, lunching at a café with her friends, and attending classes on Proust.

Living in a small flat with a baby, with occasional help only from her parents (who were not rich either, and who had hoped for something better for her), and the official resources available to any single working mother: it had felt romantic at first. She was living a story. The more boring her job, the darker the stairs up to her echoing hallway, the weirder the neighbors sitting and smoking next to the building entrance all day, the better for her. She would use it all in her writing. But after more than ten years, she understood that her life, apart from raising Lotte, had consisted mainly of staying on top of her job and short relationships that usually ended with the man telling her he felt overwhelmed by the idea of fatherhood. (“I see a theme here,” Malu once told her best friend from school, the only one she was still in touch with.)

Lotte’s father had been almost two years younger than Malu. She had been his first girlfriend. His awkwardness in bed and his blushing attempts at being a gentleman (he insisted on washing her afterwards, apologizing for she didn’t know what) had made her feel more experienced than she was; a real woman. Maybe he really had been in awe of her, but she lost any control over him once she was pregnant. There was already a mother in his life, and she swooped in to rescue her young. She sent her boy to live with an aunt in Amsterdam, and soon she and her husband followed. Lawyers negotiated financial details and visiting rights. Lotte visited her father once a month; she always brought back expensive presents: a new watch, clothes, a pair of suede boots. Whenever Malu refused to buy her something, she said, “Fine, I’ll ask Daddy.”

When Malu was done stacking the flowerpots, she swept the balcony, took a pizza from the freezer, and started to chop a head of lettuce. After dinner, she turned in early; she felt a headache coming on and asked the girls to be quiet.

◊

Malu woke up. She was hearing giggles through the open window, intimate and rough. It was still dark outside. She checked her watch: three a.m.

She put on her robe, walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. The door to the balcony was closed, but Malu could see the girls through the glass. They were sitting opposite each other on a blue-striped picnic blanket, both wearing pajama pants and white tank tops, bending their spines to look at some small thing they were both touching. Malu had never seen her daughter so grown-up, and Charelle so innocent. She came closer, crushing breadcrumbs under her naked feet, and took a sip of cold coffee from an almost empty cup on the counter. Charelle handed something to Lotte: a cylinder, irregular, almost a cone. It was glowing at the end. Lotte pinched the thing between thumb and fingers and lifted it to her lips.

Malu stood still. This was the ugliest, largest joint she had ever seen, and her daughter was smoking it. After a few moments, she opened the door. A black candle stood on a turned-over flowerpot, and an ashtray and a white saucer with dark crumbs sat between the girls with their smooth arms, faces glowing in the candlelight, and their small breasts pressing against white cotton. Malu knew she should punish this. She should tear the joint out of Lotte’s hand and drag her inside for a good and righteous talking-to. Do you have any idea what this is doing to your brain?

The candle flickered, the moon was almost full, and the girls were sitting in their blue striped nest like birds. The joint looked as if it contained seedpods or walnuts. It was held together by a piece of thread, or no, what was it? A wire? And it smelled different. Not like weed at all.

“What is this?”

Charelle leaned back on her arms and let her hair fall back just so, her face a mockery of sultry seduction.

“We’re getting high.” She pulled up her knees and giggled.

Lotte carefully put down the joint in the ashtray, turning it to remove the ash. The butterfly tattoos were still visible.

“We took some herbs from the kitchen, Mom.”

“We didn’t inhale,” Charelle said.

Malu picked up the saucer and sniffed. Oregano, basil, and thyme. She sniffed again. “Mind if I join you?”

“Sure!” Charelle said. Malu felt clumsy sitting down, like a giraffe among antelopes, but she didn’t want to go back to her bed and put foam plugs into her ears. She had earned her membership in the up-all-night club a long time ago.

“I’m curious,” Malu said. “Give me that.” Lotte hesitated, and then handed her the oregano joint and a lighter. Malu lit up and tried to inhale. She didn’t manage much. The smoke tasted like ciabatta bread at first, but quickly became bitter. She exhaled, lightheaded. “Whoa. Not bad.”

Charelle laughed, showing her sharp teeth. Lotte scrutinized her knuckles and the peeling tattoos. “These are pretty gross,” she said.

Malu noticed her cigarette papers next to the saucer. “Let me show you how to do this properly.” Lotte looked away. Malu knew she was going too far, but she couldn’t resist. She took two sheets of paper out of the flat package, licked one, and glued them together. On the paper, she mixed the herbs with her fingertips, pushed them down and wrapped the paper around them. She rolled it into shape, and licked the rim. “Voilà.”

She handed the joint to Lotte, who didn’t move to take it. Charelle did, her fingertips hard and cold. She admired it from all sides. “It’s beautiful. How did you do it?”

“Fast. The faster you do it, the better.”

Charelle rotated the joint and regarded it from each side, her eyes large, the tip of her nose moving a little when she said, “It’s perfect.”

“Thank you.” Malu took back the joint. “It is.”

“See,” Charelle said to Lotte, “I told you your mom knows how to get high.”

“Shut up,” Lotte said. “She doesn’t.”

Malu tucked her hair behind her ear. Charelle was facing her, inviting her to exchange a knowing smile that would exclude Lotte. A knowing smile—as if this girl knew anything.

“Is this why you’re here?” Malu asked. “Because you want to get high?”

“What? No,” said Lotte, and Charelle hung her head like a sad puppy.

Malu wanted to shoot them a sharp reply, but her personal time slowed a fraction, and she had to smile at what she saw. Charelle was too young to be a bad girl, no matter how hard she tried. And Lotte was the type who lifted snails from the bike trail because she couldn’t stand to see them split and mashed.

“There are more herbs in the kitchen,” she said. “Only herbs. Understood?”

“Understood,” the girls murmured.

“Stay away from the seeds, they’re for the balcony. And now I’ll go back to sleep. That’s my bedroom window right there. So keep it down.”

“Sorry we woke you up,” Lotte said.

Malu got up, still dizzy, and steadied herself against the wall. A breeze lifted the hem of her robe, and she wanted to open it and spread it like wings.  “You know what?” she said. “I am going to write a book. About torture and vampires and getting high and everything. Just you wait.”

◊

In the kitchen, Malu put the coffee cup in the sink and turned around to look through the glass door again. Lotte had wrapped herself in a green fleece blanket, holding it closed from inside. Charelle carefully stubbed out the joint and again lifted and admired it. Malu envied them their friendship, and their being out there together. It felt wrong that she should sleep alone. But maybe she could change this, too. It was time.


Stefani Nellen author photoStefani Nellen’s short fiction has been published in AGNI, Glimmer Train, Third Coast, the Bellevue Literary Review, Web Conjunctions, Cosmos, and Apex Magazine, among others, and anthologized in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015). Her stories have won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Montana Prize in Fiction (judged by Alexandra Kleeman) and been runner-up for the Wabash Prize in Fiction (judged by Adam Johnson) and a finalist in the Iowa Review Awards. Originally from Germany, Nellen now lives in the Netherlands with her family.

 

Image credit: Ani Francisconi on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Fiction, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

DARK HALLWAY by Jacqueline Doyle

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackMay 8, 2019

DARK HALLWAY
by Jacqueline Doyle

Children sleeping

“Mom,” I call, “Steven’s sick!” It’s nighttime and I’m standing in the dark hall outside my bedroom, a long corridor that connects my room to my little brother’s. I am nine years old, and Steven is seven. The light is on in the bathroom at his end of the hall; it’s bright, the bathroom very white in the darkness. He’s thrown up in the hall just in front of the bathroom door. I woke up to the sounds of him heaving and the acrid smell of vomit. I hug myself, trembling in the cold.

I call out again, “Steven threw up,” and hope my mother hears me. She sleeps heavily. She snores. My father sleeps in the other twin bed in their room, unless he’s away on a business trip. Their twin beds have white bedspreads. One time Steven and I got in trouble for jumping back and forth on the beds instead of taking a bath. My father burst into the bedroom with the broad-backed pink plastic hairbrush, the hairbrush used just for spankings. That time I ran shrieking through the hallways, my father in pursuit. He spanked me anyway, when he caught up with me. Steven stood by, stoic, waiting his turn.

Steven and I spend long days outdoors on our own. In the summer we explore the woods, catching turtles and small fish at Birchwood Lake, where dragonflies hover over lily pads and invisible frogs croak on the muddy shoreline. In the winter we drag our snow coasters to Pollard Road and hurtle down the hill. I read to him. Before I know how, I pretend. We sit on the orange couch in the walnut-paneled living room, our chubby legs stretched out straight, as I recite The Little Engine That Could. “I think I can, I think I can.” I know the words and when to turn the pages from having heard the story in nursery school. My father reads to us sometimes, but he gets home from work in the city very late. My mother never reads to us and has stopped cooking dinner lately, saying she isn’t up to it. She watches soaps in the afternoon, and spends more and more time in bed. The curtains are always closed.

Finally, my mother answers, her raised voice weary. “Tell him to clean it up and go back to sleep.” She doesn’t get up and come out to us.

At nine I’m not surprised by my mother’s response. She doesn’t like to be disturbed. She’s always tired. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” is what she tells my father when he gets home from work every night. “I think I’m coming down with something,” she says, holding her hand to her forehead, checking for a fever. She gets hives when she cooks or vacuums or mops. She’s afraid she’ll catch something from us when we’re sick. She isn’t getting out of bed.

I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember how long I waited, or if my father woke up, or if he was even there. I don’t remember if I helped my brother. It is only later, when I have a child myself, that I recall this night at all.

What I remember: just that moment, outside my door. Me shivering in my thin nightgown in the darkness, the chill on my bare feet and legs. Steven’s silhouette against the bright light of the bathroom to the left. The dark hall straight ahead between my parents’ bedroom and mine. The closed door at the end of it.


Jacqueline Doyle author photoJacqueline Doyle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her award-winning flash chapbook The Missing Girl was published by Black Lawrence Press last fall. She has recent creative nonfiction in The Gettysburg Review, Superstition Review, and NOR: New Ohio Review, and recent flash in Wigleaf, New Flash Fiction Review, and Post Road. This is her second publication in Cleaver. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on Twitter at @doylejacq.

 

Image credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

CHAPTER ONE: METHODS OF THE INNOCENT by Phoebe Reeves

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackMay 8, 2019

CHAPTER ONE: METHODS OF THE INNOCENT
by Phoebe Reeves

Image from Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of the Witches"

Temporal weariness bought many women their milk,
on condition that they would promise only

a small thing, some silent iniquity. They shut
their eyes and observe the flesh.

Girls already possess their injury. And although
an old woman would promise to secretly

return, some old women had met
on the road and recognized the devil.

Through the way of sadness and poverty,
lovers have found themselves. Lovers

that spring from truth, pass over in silence.
Equal birth has proven a great anxiety, and old

friendship, silent for a time, is recovered after
having remained, for the sake of truth, supplanted.


Author’s note:
These poems are part of a book-length project which erases the Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of the Witches,” a text that was used during the Inquisition to hunt and convict witches, written by Heinrich Kramer and James Springer.  I have taken the 1928 Rev. Montague Summers translation as my source text, available at http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org. It is a deeply and disturbingly misogynistic text, including lines like “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” I’m friends with another professor at my school who teaches European History and we often have conversations over lunch about how to deal with historical hate-texts like this one. Erasure seems like one way to deflate the negative power of the words, and imagine the voices of the women (and men) who were murdered based on the warped theology of the Malleus.

The rules of my erasures were that I could delete, but not rearrange or add, except for punctuation. Although at first, I began by deleting at the word-level, as the project progressed, I became much more aggressive about my deletion, and also found myself focusing on certain repetitions. For example, almost every time the word “heresy” appeared, it became “her,” in the poem. It was in this way that I began to uncover the woman these poems speak about. Titles are anagrams of the original section titles.

 

 


Phoebe Reeves author photo

Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College in rural southern Ohio. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Forklift OH, Phoebe, and Best New Poets 2018.

 

 

 

Image credit: erico luxero on Flickr

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

DISPATCHES FROM DEAD CITY by Marie Baléo

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

DISPATCHES FROM DEAD CITY
by Marie Baléo

Love thy neighbor, but don’t stick around too long

Person holding a bottle of yellow spray paint

“Billboards?” William asked over the phone. His voice seemed small, reaching us, I imagined, from somewhere inside his mother’s house in the mountain, where he liked to play the grand piano and persecute the help, whom he refused to call by their names, calling them only that: “the help.”

“Yes, billboards,” Cole repeated. He had called us, William, Julia and me, on one of those group calls we used to love when everything was fine. They had taken on a grave, urgent tone in the past month.

I stood alone on the balcony of our home. Inside the apartment, my parents consumed the news voraciously, speaking in hurried voices. When the phone rang, I heard my mother say “Hello,” after which her voice dropped to a whisper.

“Just go outside, and you’re bound to see one,” Cole said. “They’re everywhere. It all happened overnight, apparently.”

“What do they say?” Julia asked. The signal was weak, transmitting only the structure of her words, not the warmth of her voice.

I leaned over the railing and saw, in the smaller building opposite ours, a hand pulling open the doors to the upper floor balcony. A balding man in his early fifties stepped outside cautiously, carrying a container of something I could not make out. I squinted. Next, his wife appeared, clutching what seemed like a heap of freshly cleaned, white clothes. I knew her well: as I sat at my desk trying to learn history dates by heart, I would watch her scurry into the apartment to retrieve wet clothes and out to the balcony, where she swung her arms from the laundry basket to the wires overhead. When she was not there, traces of her lingered in the soft sway of the shirts, towels, and trousers, and the shadows cast on them by the changing sun.

“Big block letters,” Cole said. “In all three languages.”

“What do they say?” William repeated.

“He who lives like a dog will die like one,” Cole replied slowly.

A strange rustling rose from the city, as though it were breathing, ribcage rising and receding like the tide. A mist appeared near the sea. The bald man’s wife laid a white fitted sheet across the plastic picnic table. Wielding a large pair of scissors, she cut across the sheet while her husband held its corners fast, then brandished the result, a rectangle one meter wide. The man was holding what I could now see was a can of spray paint, the kind our grocer, a man by the name of Badry whom I would always remember chiefly from the shameful run I’d made to his shop on the morning of my first period, sold at the back of his store, in between Christmas decorations and cord extensions. From across the street, and despite the excited voices of my friends rising out of the cell phone, I heard the distinct rattle of the can as the man sprayed the sheet with words in an ink that was blood red. He held out the result of his work for their admiration—the single loop, the several angles, the audacity of red paint on a common sheet.

I stepped back from the railing until I was certain I could not be seen from any of the high-rises that surrounded ours and collapsed into one of my parents’ deck chairs. Lights had begun to shine everywhere, on towers and in streets. By the sea, the fog lingered over the waterfront.

Across the street, the balcony was deserted. The spray can lay discarded on the plastic chair. From the railing, a plastic broom handle jutted out, two ends of the sheet tied around it. The flag swayed gently in the wind.

◊

What’s yours is mine

We had spent the afternoon parked by a field in the mountains, where the city could be seen as though from an airplane, drinking cheap wine and enjoying the safety of our position, above the turmoil that raged below, above the billboards, which had appeared three days before now and had continued to appear throughout the city since we first heard about them from Cole. 

Now William was speeding through the streets, eager to get us home before curfew, though this kind of wariness did not resemble him.

“Slow down,” Cole said.  “There’s something ahead.”

“What the fuck is this,” William asked without a question mark.

“Roadblock.”

“What the hell do you mean, roadblock? Since when?” William spat as he spoke. “This is my road. I’m on this road every day. There is no roadblock.”

“Slow down,” Cole said again.

Random shootings had multiplied; we could hear them from our apartments at night. They sounded like firecrackers. They were followed in the morning by angry diatribes broadcast on all radio channels. On TV, the enraged faces of politicians appeared nightly, animated with a sort of delight over the fury their words were eliciting.

“This isn’t the army,” William said, lower.

The car slowed to a crawl as we neared two pickup trucks parked across the road, their doors wide open. A small group of men in dark boots, who, from a distance, strangely resembled black beetles, stood under the halo of the street lamps. Looking at us.

William reluctantly rolled down not just his, but all of our windows.

He shut off the engine. Everything fell silent.

I shuddered in the cold air.

Two of the men looked at our license plate. Another made for the driver’s window. Against his white shirt, the strap of his gun seemed like a pageant winner’s ribbon, or perhaps a mayor’s sash.

The man, I now saw, was no man at all, but a kid our age. He seemed familiar, possibly because he had that air of childish boredom worn by all the boys in our year.

“Show me your ID,” he said.

William looked at him directly, their faces inches apart. He did not speak; he did not move.

I heard Julia fumbling for her bag. Cole’s hand jutted from between the seats, holding a passport.

I produced my own, from the bottom of my backpack.

Now the man held all of our IDs, save for William’s. Our friend had not moved. He continued to stare the boy in the face.

“Yours, too.”

William remained silent.

“Give me your ID or get out of the car.”

“William, hand him the ID,” I said.

“Give it to him, Will.”

William seemed to snap awake and leaned over my knees to open the glove compartment. I could sense the boy tensing up on the other side of the door. The laminated ID shone orange in the streetlight glare.

The boy took one look at the papers and raised his head.

“Be careful. You shouldn’t be out here driving late at night for no reason.”

He tossed the passports back into the car. Three of them landed in William’s lap.

◊ 

Someone knocked and came in before we replied

That night, after nothing could be done to save the last strips of blue from the darkening skies, but before the heat of the scorching afternoon finished seeping out of the pavement, something appeared in our great city of —–.

Those who had gone to bed early never heard or saw a thing, but those who wandered the streets, the disinherited, lonely, or abandoned, were privy to the strange events that unfolded that night. Smoking insomniacs, leaning against the railings of their balconies, wondering if a dream had come to them with sleep; drunks, thinking what they saw was no more than a symptom of the red drip-drip tumbling down their veins, stumbled down streets unbothered. But Karel, the homeless man, who, with pores so wide and skin so red, made small children wail, was counting the day’s proceeds in a beheaded can of condensed milk when the men appeared. They ran out of the truck like water, faces smoldering below their hard hats.

Not one of those rare people who were on the street at the time thought to do or say anything, to warn or call, to expose or confront. We believed, perhaps, that what our eyes had witnessed would become clear as the night ended, the meaning of it exposed by daylight.

By the time infants began to stir in their beds, and birds of the city began to sing, and steam slowly escaped coffee pots, the inhabitants of —– rose from their slumber to find that where there once had been nothing of particular importance—a quiet street filled with the scent of honeysuckle perhaps, a bench covered in chipped green paint, a string of fire hydrants—there was now something.

A wall, visible from the street, from apartments, from balconies a hundred yards away, clear as the billboards, the roadblocks, clear as death itself: separating, dividing us from our brothers.


Marie Baleo author photoMarie Baléo is a French writer born in 1990. She began writing fiction and poetry in 2017. Her work has been nominated for a Best of the Net award (2017 and 2018) and for Best Microfiction (2018) and Best Small Fictions (2018), and her poems and stories have appeared in Passages North, Yemassee, Litro, Lunch Ticket, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel. Marie grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and Oslo, Norway. www.mariebaleo.com

 

Image credit: Angela Intriago on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Fiction, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

ZOË by Brigit Andersson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

ZOË
by Brigit Andersson

Underwater with light shining through and word "ZOE"

i.

Born with multiple spinal malformations. Missing ribs on the left side—only flesh to guard the collapsed lung. One right lung won’t keep a baby breathing. Slice her throat, insert a trach and attach her to a ventilator. Construct a chest wall with the Vertical Expandable Prosthetic Titanium Rib. Insides on the outside. Red balloon, dark blue tether. Breathe.

ii.

Her room was a disco of yellow and red. Heart beats pulsed throughout the house. In Loco Parentis three shifts a day. Grounded by the ventilator, unable to fly. Exploring the seafloor with iron lungs, attached at the line. Kept from the warm grasp of parents by perspiring blue ridged tubes.

Five years of machinery shadows.

iii.

Gliding over creaky wooden planks. Snorkeling at the ocean surface. Weaving through the ornaments of the first floor. Cracked spongeware; Civil War phlebotomy knives; a modern, vaguely Japanese lamp, a rusted rake; a marquetry box, teeming with keys. Everlasting—like the hardware that remains dangling beneath her clavicle. Her body, crafted.


Brigit Andersson author photoBrigit Andersson is a senior at Temple University, majoring in philosophy and receiving certificates in both creative writing and ethics.

Image credit: Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

THE WAITING ROOM by Joshua Rysanek

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackMarch 7, 2019

THE WAITING ROOM
by Joshua Rysanek

I sit in the waiting room of an animal hospital, holding my phone in my lap and my head in my hands. I tap my feet and rub the dust between the tile and each shoe’s worn sole. Magazines cover a table beside me—Popular Mechanics, Martha Stewart Living, Highlights—all months old. I grab my book from under my chair and spread it open. The characters are dead on the page, interred in type. Nothing can change what befalls them. There is no “is,” no “will be”—only what was. If only my fate were so determined.

I unlock my phone, check for messages. Nothing. The time hasn’t changed. I’m alone. My two little sisters were here earlier: Pacing, pacing circles on the concrete porch of the hospital’s façade as the setting sun casts red on the mountains—calling and calling our mom, and our mom not answering, so crying instead—crying because what else are you to do when you’re twelve and fourteen, and your dog has been hiding at home in the corner for a week and not drinking or eating or licking the chicken broth from the palms of your hands, and you tell your mom, but she ignores you and she ignores you till your older brother drives with the dog in his lap to the vet where a tech feigning a smile takes the dog to a back room and still your mom ignores you? This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening. My sisters’ big eyes appeal for reason. I have none to give. We huddle outside on the concrete among the sagebrush and sand dunes. The day’s last light bleeds over the horizon. We are children. Where is our mother?

My partner Julie gathers my sisters in her arms and says everything is going to be OK and leads them away. I want to go, but I’m not twelve nor fourteen; I’m twenty years old, which binds me alone to this godforsaken fluorescent lightbox of desperation.

Two men occupy the seats to my right, one bald with neck tattoos and the other wearing a backwards cap and stud earrings. I drown my thoughts with their conversation.

“What happened?” asks Earrings.

“I don’t know, bro,” says Tattoos, twisting an orange towel in his lap. “I got home and there was blood on the floor—”

“A la verga!”

“She was shitting and vomiting blood.”

“….”

“I wrapped her up,” he extends the towel, “and took her straight over.”

“Man…. Is she gonna be OK?”

“I don’t know, bro.” Tattoos drops his head. “I don’t know.”

The blue towel in which I’d bundled my dog, the family dog of my childhood, drapes over the armrest of my chair. Hooking the towel with my fingers, I roll it in my palm. Its rough threads catch in the creases of my skin. The sensation takes me to the neuroscience lab where I work as a research assistant, where I swaddle the lab rats in dirty little towels.

Rat burritos, we call them. It’s one of the first skills you learn when handling rats in a laboratory setting—since it’s how you restrain them—and though I’ve worked in the lab for almost a year, it’s a skill I’ve yet to master. Every burrito begins by removing the wire lid to the rat’s shoebox-sized plastic enclosure. This will excite the rat—and its cagemate if it has one. The rat will scurry about, tunnel into the bedding, and scale the polycarbonate walls. You must have the right timing to pick it up. You don’t want to freak it out more than it already is. That’s how you get pissed on and bitten. I’ve found it best to reach from behind when the rat’s standing on its hind legs, leaning against the wall—snag it unawares. It takes two hands: One to cinch the shoulders together, the other to hoist the hips. You’re going to need a good grip, so it doesn’t twist loose. Don’t squeeze too tightly: Once, I squeezed too tightly and heard a pop. The rat’s bones are brittle. They feel like toothpicks through its fur. Break them, and the rat’s of no use for your experiments. Lift the rat from its cage and secure it in your hands. The rat sniffles, nostrils aflare. As it gasps, wiggling its whiskers, it might even start defecating midair. With your index finger, massage its cheek. Look at its incisors, sharp and orange. Be thankful you weren’t bitten. (Unless you were.) Appreciate its soft coat and inquisitive eyes, its short arms and tiny, dexterous hands. It might even appear cute. Not now—not while there’s a burrito to fix—perhaps under different circumstances. Discard the thought. Return to the task at hand. Procure a quality, soiled towelette. Catching a whiff of the towel, the rat recoils. Adjust your grip. This part must be quick and neat, or you’ll need to repeat it, or worse, chase the rat you just dropped on the polished concrete floor. With one hand, pinch the rat’s shoulders together so its arms make an X across its chest. With the other, slide the towel under the rat and fold a flap up onto its back. Hold the flap down and take the other end of the towel and encircle the rat till you’re out of towel. Tuck the towel’s end into the wrap and you’re done! Your very own rat burrito.

“Ahem.” A person beside me calls for my attention.

I startle, fumbling my phone. It almost tumbles to the tile. I turn my head to the sound and see the vet tech, a freckled woman with high cheekbones, that took my dog to the examining room.

“Hi,” I glance over her name tag, “Melanie.”

“Hi,” Melanie says, “She’s not looking great back there.”

“….”

“The doc wants to run some diagnostics—bloodwork and an X-ray.”

I nod.

“We just need your authorization and for you to approve the fees.”

“Yes, yes. Do whatever you have to.” I’m not ready to lose my dog.

◊

My phone rings. I answer: “Hello—”

“The girls won’t quit bitching.” It’s my mom.

“Hey, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”

“They won’t leave me alone.”

“Where are you?”

“They hate me.” Her words are a murmur among a fog of voices. She’s in a crowded place.

“The girls don’t hate you. They—”

“They hate me.”

“No, they just need you to be there for them.”

“They don’t understand.”

“Why don’t you just come home?”

“They hate me.” I’m not getting through to her.

“Mom, the vet wanted to run some tests and I said yes—”

“Good.” Her voice clears. “You did the right thing.” Each word is sharp, selective. “I’ll pay. Money doesn’t matter. The dog is family.”

“They hate me,” she continues.

“Please talk to them.”

I hang up, walk outside, and sit on the concrete porch, leaning against the stucco.

I take ten more calls in the next half hour: Julie dropped my sisters off at their dad’s (my stepdad, divorced from my mom) and is on her way back to the animal hospital. My stepdad apologizes for my mom’s behavior. He might know her better than anyone, but even he’s clueless as to what’s gotten into her lately.

My sisters want updates. How is she doing? What do they think is wrong? Is she going to be OK? I don’t know. My gut urges me to say I don’t know, but I can’t. I can’t accept the uncertainty of not knowing. Because acceptance would expose my helplessness. I tell them not to worry. She’s a strong dog. She’s been through worse—remember the coyotes? My words are as much for myself as they are for my sisters. Everything is going to be OK. I repeat the words internally as prayer.

Julie is back. I stand. Her eyes are pink and puffy from earlier tears. We hold each other. I thank her for taking care of my sisters. She has become family. Her head rests on my chest. I notice how tense my neck is, how heavy my head is. My breath slows. My hands move along her spine. My fingers comb through her hair. I close my eyes. She says she hasn’t fallen apart like this since her grandma overdosed. She says she’s worried about me. She’s worried I’ve been suppressing my emotions. She says it’s OK to let it out. I realize I haven’t cried yet.

◊

Melanie meets Julie and me inside.

“The doctor found something on the X-ray,” Melanie says. “We need to operate as soon as possible.”

“Are there any other options?”

“….”

Julie squeezes my arm.

“What are her chances?” I ask.

“It’s common for dogs to make a full recovery.”

“But what are the odds—can you put a number to it?”

“I—She’s young enough. It’s possible.”

“Let’s do it.”

“The surgeon on call has to come in. You two can visit with your dog till she arrives.”

We follow her through the door off the waiting room and down a narrow hallway. The creature comforts of the waiting room disappear. The floor, walls, and ceiling are white, colorless. A uniform gray stripe runs along the wall’s center, parallel to the floor. Somehow the lighting seems even more fluorescent, more unnatural. It hurts my eyes. The farther we go, the more the space between our heads and the ceiling seems to shrink. The windowless corridor is not an animal hospital but a diagrammatic representation of one—not somewhere pets go to be saved but somewhere they go to be put down. Melanie points us to a room at the hall’s end.

The room’s foul air transports me to the colony room—where the rats live in the neuroscience lab. Commercial-grade cleaners fail to conceal rot. My presence unnerves the stirrings of captivity—untrimmed nails, fidgeting feet, arrhythmic breath. But instead of drawers of rats, cubbies of cages stack from floor to ceiling. Most are empty. A calico cat presses itself against its cage’s door, its fur sticking out between the wire in a grid pattern. A terrier yips uncontrollably from a cage by my left ear. A tangle of tubes and wires flows from a floor-level cage. I crouch to inspect. The strands lead to a pile of blankets and pair of paws, bandaged in gauze. Beneath the fabric, wedged between heating pads, lying on a bloodstained mat is my dog. A straw stapled to her snout feeds her oxygen. I check her IV bag.

“It’s diazepam,” Melanie says from the entryway. “For the seizures.”

Seizures?! With my thumb, I knead the cold pads of my dog’s paw.

“Good girl,” I whisper.

Her ear flexes and sound rings within her, but her face reads blank.

Julie runs out the door. Melanie points to the restroom. I count out the EKG’s five-second beep interval. Julie returns and faints at the threshold, falling backward. A bespectacled tech swoops in, sliding her arms under Julie’s collapsing frame, cradling her limp neck in a damp towel. I hook Julie’s arm and help the tech pull Julie to her feet, propping her back against a wall. Melanie stands with cold towel in hand. She dabs Julie’s forehead. Julie’s legs buckle. I dive between her and the ground, only partly breaking her fall. Tremors surge through her. Kneeling, I look upon her. Her face paints a portrait of terror. I don’t know what to do. Melanie and the other tech swarm, hovering with their towels.

“Are you OK, mija?” the bespectacled tech asks.

Julie’s eyelids flitter.

◊

It’s dark out. The waiting room is silent. I still don’t know where my mom is. I’m tired of taking calls, tired of sending texts, tired of spreading news. Tired. The dog’s in for surgery: removal of the reproductive system to treat pyometra, a uterine infection common among aging female dogs that have never been pregnant. An X-ray showed how the dog’s hips had shifted, how her swelling organs had pried them apart. Bones don’t move overnight. Just yesterday, she was frolicking in the backyard, ignoring the pain.

Footsteps tread toward where Julie and I sit. Melanie:

“Your dog made it through the surgery—”

I silently rejoice. I lift my chin to face her.

“But,” she shifts her tone, “she’s in critical condition. We don’t think she’ll recover.”

Julie’s head dips to my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “She put up a good fight.”

“Will we have to…” I hold out my crooked fingers.

“It’s up to you.”

I don’t understand. All this time, I’ve wanted control, and now that I have it, I reject it. It’s up to me? Why must I make a decision that makes me sick? When either decision leads to the same outcome, can it really be called choice?

“I’m sorry,” Melanie says. “You can be in the room when it happens.”

“OK. Let’s do it.”

◊

My mom arrives drunk. I’d be embarrassed, but I just don’t care right now. I’m mute to her slurs. My stepdad comes next with my sisters. They ignore our mom. I feel bad and sit with my mom. We need to be together now. We’ll deal with the rest later.

Melanie invites us in. Julie stays outside with my sisters. We enter a small, candlelit room. My vision blurs, adjusting to the darkness. I see only figures and motion—a single tall table stands at the room’s center as an altar, a woman shuffles about, performing rites. The walls are painted in muted warm colors, a spectrum from yellow to red to brown. It’s like we’re in one of those old photos that used to be black and white but has since aged into sepia tones. My dog lies on a cushion on the altar. The woman is the vet tech who helped Julie earlier. She prepares a syringe. My mom, my stepdad, and I encircle the altar. Pay our respects. Caress her in our hands. I want her to show us that she can feel us. I want her permission to say goodbye. Her open eyes are absent. Staring in them I see my grandpa lying in his terminal spread of sheets on the hospital’s twelfth floor, not looking good, dying in fact, and I’m ten, and I don’t understand cancer: how it can start in your tongue but end up in your lungs, how it makes your Poppy do chemotherapy and radiation—which makes Poppy more sick and sad and even makes his hair fall out in clumps like the dog’s, and now Poppy wears wool golf hats tilted on his head so that they’d topple with the slightest touch and he always seems to be coughing, hacking really, like the cat when she’s got a hairball—how smoking makes cancer happen, and how my poppy had to fight it but he’s losing. Stripped down to skin and bone, he’s not even making a dent on the mattress, the crib-like rails risen above his sunken body—the cancer is ruthless and life is fragile. The bespectacled tech draws from a bottle of pentobarbital—the same chemical used to euthanize lab rats. I know it well—what it does, what it will do. Rats restrained in towels on stainless-steel tabletops envelop me. I hold a rat burrito in one hand, a syringe in the other. The rat squeaks and squirms, rumpling its wrapping. I jerk it backward as if to fling it underhand. Instead of releasing, I brake and drive the needle into a lump of flesh, emptying its contents. I let go, distending the burrito, dropping the rat in its cage, the syringe on the table. The rat cowers in a corner. It’s a healthy rat, well fed and with thick fur. I’ve spent every other day for the last two months with this rat. For hours at a time, I trained it to run along each edge of a star-shaped maze, reinforcing its behavior with Froot Loops, and often becoming frustrated in failure, then euphoric in success. I observed its sad existence, born into the confines of not much more than a square foot. I fashioned chew toys from knotted paper towels for it. I wonder now where—and whether—it would be if not here. Looking up at me, it appears confused. This is not the routine. But it is. The rat’s black eyes spell betrayal. It quivers. I wonder how I got here, how I could be so naïve to think it would be so easy to take a life. I wonder how I could keep telling myself, It’s just a rat. It’s for a good cause. How when I was doubtful I could rationalize that I was just looking at it the wrong way or how I just tried not to think about it at all. How I could compartmentalize compassion, separate feeling from action and how I was expected and needed to do so, to guard myself from grief. And as my untidy memory unravels through each wound that bleeds into another, I see how I was stupid and unrealistic and selfish. Science seemed so sure till there was blood on my hands. I forgive my mom because it’s not easy to lose something—someone—you love. Because people do irrational things in irrational situations. We are not characters in a story, bound in a book, but people with complex lives and individual experience.

The photos of memory are scarcely chosen. But as I look on my dying dog, I hope to capture the moment: The five of us shoulder-to-shoulder in a shoebox of our own. The dank air and the candles’ restless glow. Us hovering over my dog’s body. My cheeks wet with tears.

Delving for answers, we surface with questions. Subjects of fate, we supplicate to reason: Procedure is ritual. Data are emotion. Results are terminal.

The tech thrusts the syringe and depresses.


Joshua Rysanek learns and kerns in his hometown of Albuquerque, NM, at the University of New Mexico, as a writer, psychology student, and the editor in chief of Conceptions Southwest. Find more of his work with text and image here. Author photo by Julie Mowrey.

 

 

 

Image credit: Bob Jansen on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

FENCE by Michelle Geoga

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

FENCE
by Michelle Geoga

Portrait of a deer

On a February afternoon, overcast and promising but lying about snow, we pull into the long driveway, slow past the patch going natural with volunteer cedar and white pine, slow along the wide frosty lawn dotted with Norway and spruce, down the driveway, so happy to be here, snowless winter or not, since crackly woods, big sky and a morning walk alone on the beach await. But wait, hitting the brakes, pointing, look over there, someone stands in the yard, by the fence. Stop—I don’t see it. There, someone at the fence in the back, not moving. Too low to be a grown up, except by crouching down. Most important, not moving. Why would a child in a tan Carhartt jumpsuit stand at the fence in the backyard? Never mind. Let’s go in. We park, go inside, turn up the heat and let in the water, hear the loud rushing of it coming from the well to fill all the pipes, feel the furnace’s hot breath up our pantlegs, light the fireplace in all its gas-log glory and then, finally, we go calmly out back. So happy to be here. Down the steps to the fenced-in yard, woods and pond just on the other side. Look, it’s a deer. Walk closer. A deer crucified on the fence. Walk even closer. A deer hanging by one horribly broken leg, white bone exposed at the elbow, or is it the knee. A young, hubristic deer whose leap did not clear. Walk closer, see a curved trough of agony dug out with powerful front hooves, eviscerating a hydrangea, scraping, pulling the dirt closer, hoping to climb free and drag itself away on three legs, but no. Cold embraced the deer slowly and death, even slower. Right rear leg fixed, cracked in half, left rear leg free to kick at nothing, bucking to heaven, front legs digging down, pain ignored, madly mauling frozen February dirt. Now, his head rests peacefully, one eye open but sleepy. A beautiful creature, its fur the color of the fallen oak leaves, the ones that don’t turn; wounds the color of suffering, February cold freezing the exposed flesh of its flank scarlet, where after exposure slayed, others came to feed. Praying it was after. Across the front left leg, splayed over the clawed-out cavity in the dirt, tufts of rabbit-white fur from the underbelly of the young button buck’s flank, maybe torn away by opportunistic coyote, lay as if draped. Apology, eulogy, lamentation. We gawk as we never would at roadside carnage.


Michelle Geoga author photoMichelle Geoga is a writer and visual artist from Illinois. She received an MFA in Writing in 2017 and a BFA in studio art in 2015 from The School of the Art Institute. She has visual work in New American Paintings #135 and the Center for Fine Art Photography, and writing in the Ekphrastic Review and forthcoming in Five on the Fifth. In between shorter prose and larger paintings, she is working on a novel.

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Flash, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

INSTEAD by Glenn Ingersoll

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

INSTEAD
by Glenn Ingersoll

BW Person holding a mirror in the woods

found in the database of the UC Berkeley library

Instead of violence
Instead of the trees
Instead of the brier
Instead of regulation
Instead of music
Instead of jail
Instead of flowers
Instead of education
Instead of court
Instead of an animal
Instead of a poem
Instead of a letter
Instead of a journal
Instead of a gift
Instead of a cancelled debate
Instead of a book by a man too busy to write one


Glenn Ingersoll author photoGlenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California where he hosts Clearly Meant, a reading and interview series. He has two chapbooks, City Walks (broken boulder) and Fact (Avantacular). He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Recent work has appeared in The Disappointed Housewife, Zombie Logic, Neologism, and Poetry East.

Image credit:  emma valerio on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

heat wave by mud howard

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

heat wave
by mud howard

Path with pastel letters on the sides

the future is not Las Vegas, but here we are
dying and newly alive
glittering thunder dome of sweat

i can’t wake up from
this ugly ass place
out on the strip i mount my grief

the breeze crashes against my cheek
you pace and text and mouth-breathe beside me
the brassy comb of your anger is 106 degrees

my sadness is a planet
my sadness is a heat wave
we call it Vegas

your trigger shows up on a billboard
I don’t know how to communicate without popping off
without a thousand fizzy stars spilling out my mouth

can you imagine standing in line
until you’re old and hate the smell of cigarette smoke
the soles of your feet coated in agave

wearing pink floral dresses and not being afraid of money
the socket wrench of your arm loosened with time
the creamy lights of a slot machine washing over your face

I don’t know how to rub my wounds against the dried-up sky,
how to wake up early after a night of good dick
and lift my body into this city

you are a warehouse party
I never knew the address of
where they play music made of crushed metal

the future is a place where nothing is broken
everyone has a flashy jacket
no one gets cold


mud howard author photomud is a non-binary trans poet from the states. they write about queer intimacy, interior worlds and the cosmic joke of the gender binary. they hold an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster London and are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer and trans memoir structured like a tarot deck and full of lies. they have been published in journals such as THEM, Foglifter, and The Lifted Brow. you can find more of their work at www.mudhoward.com.

 

Image credit: claire jones on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

PUNCH by Josh Denslow

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

PUNCH
by Josh Denslow

BW Man looking out the window holding a fist

Until recently, I’d only traded in one Punch Voucher and that was the time I hit Chuck Mellon in the nose when we were kids and broke his glasses. He didn’t make crying noises, but his eyes sure watered. We stayed best friends, though. Right up until he hanged himself.

It was bad timing because my girlfriend had just dumped me, and I was hoping to stay on his couch. Chuck had the best couch ever. Firm but lush, if that makes sense. It was deep brown with luminescent flecks of gray sprinkled throughout as if it contained a small universe. I spent a lot of nights with my head wedged between the cushion and the plush arm, my legs splayed over the back. But now that Chuck was dead, I found myself sleeping on my sister’s couch, which was like a pile of rocks covered with paper towels.

Wanda, Chuck’s mom, asked me to speak at Chuck’s funeral, and that’s when I realized I’d left my only suit over at my ex-girlfriend’s. Way in the back of her closet with the tennis rackets we never used. I sort of blamed Chuck that I had to talk to her again, but just a little.

There were a lot of people at the church that I’d never seen sitting shoulder to shoulder in their black clothes. I wished my suit wasn’t green. After the preacher talked about how Chuck was called away too early (no mention of how), I talked about the time I hit him and broke his glasses. I got a few laughs, choked with tears of course, but it felt good to smile while remembering my best friend. I almost told them about the time I beat his high score in Tomb Blaster, but I didn’t want to brag. It was his day after all.

Afterwards, Nadine and Roger walked up to give their regards. Chuck had a huge crush on Nadine, but she never reciprocated on account of the fact that she was married. She had long golden hair like the lady in the Golden Locks shampoo commercial, but was three hundred times prettier. My sister said Nadine only hung out with us because we were non-threatening losers. My sister’s normally right about things like that.

You did really good, Nadine said. Chuck would be pleased.

She placed her delicate hand on my shoulder and smiled. She seemed like she wanted to stay longer, but Roger pulled her out by her arm, a vein throbbing on the side of his boxy head like a silent alarm.

When everyone had gone, Chuck’s mom Wanda walked up and gave me a humungous hug. My nose got tangled in her sticky helmet of hair and it smelled like baby oil.

I need to talk to you, she said. So I agreed to sit in the back pew with her while she blew her nose and repeatedly patted me on the head.

There was a will, she said, or a suicide note. Whichever you’d call it.

Did he leave me his couch? I asked.

No, she said, he put all of his stuff in a storage room the day he ended his life. Before I could get it out, it was broken into. They took everything!

It seemed fitting. If I was never going to see Chuck again, I might as well never see his couch either. But that couch was heavier than a bus full of my regrets. Must have been some pretty big guys.

When Wanda was done blowing her nose she said, He left you his Punch Vouchers.

She pulled them out of her purse. Two rectangular magenta cards, about the size of my hand, with Chuck’s name and ID number and a line for a signature. It was a completely legal transference. Wanda even had a form from Central Office saying that they’d updated my file.

She closed her eyes and said, In his note he wrote that he wished he’d punched a buttload of more people. She was pretty shy to say buttload, and I didn’t hear her the first time.

What?

Buttload, she said and it ricocheted around the church like one of those rubber balls Chuck and I used to bounce in his garage after we drank too many beers.

Chuck thought it would be worthwhile to exceed the Two Punch Quota and do Serious Time. This was news to me; he was always such a sissy. I got the feeling that Chuck was giving me a hint from beyond the grave, like in a movie, and I deduced that he wanted me to hit someone. Too bad he didn’t say who it was in his note.

◊

Chuck and I always saved our Punch Vouchers and returned them to Central Office at the end of the year for a free dinner at Spunky’s.  We’d wait for a night when Nadine’s husband Roger had a poker game and drag her along, too.

Roger always used his two Punch Vouchers on Nadine.

Now that I had the legal ability to punch four people, not to mention a mandate from my dead friend, I began thinking about how small and scrawny I am due to the genes that were passed on to me. If I’m honest with myself, I know that’s the real reason I never hit or get hit. A punch from me would be like a feather falling out of a cannon. So I did the next best thing: I went out applying for jobs. I mean, I had to get off my sister’s couch.

I was waiting for the J Train when this enormous walrus of a guy walked right into me. His belly was huge but it wasn’t jiggly, it was solid like a bag of flour. He knocked me off balance, and I staggered into a cement pole. The walrus barely faltered. He turned his bristling red face to me and said, Why don’t you watch where you’re going, pansy?

Then something happened to me that has never happened before. I talked back. I don’t know if it was the knowledge that I had more Punch Vouchers than anyone but I said, Why don’t you watch what you eat?

You’re lucky I’m out of Punch Vouchers, he said while blood vessels popped in his eyeballs like bacon in a griddle.

I still have mine, I said, but he didn’t look so scared. In fact, he got right in front of me and leaned his greasy face into mine.

Hit me, he said with a lot more restraint than I ever thought he could muster.

Of course, instantly like three Eye Witnesses showed up. The walrus looked like a dog begging for food. He knew it wouldn’t hurt him, and in the end, he would still look like the winner, even though he wouldn’t get a chance to hit me back without doing Serious Time.

I would never waste a Voucher on someone like you, I said. Besides, you might eat my fist.

I guess I was really stretching for a joke, but it felt good to stand up for myself. A couple of the Eye Witnesses even chuckled a bit.

If I see you after January 1st, I’ll have one Punch Voucher waiting for you, he said.

I can’t wait, I said and he finally pulled his face away from mine and walked to the end of the platform.

The Eye Witnesses dispersed when they realized there would be no Punch Vouchers to sign. All but one squat guy who leaned against the wall looking at me strangely. After we stared at each other for a few seconds, he finally walked over. His breath smelled like a sink full of dirty dishes. Unfortunately for me, he got real close to me when he talked. I got the feeling he wanted us to be private. I’ve got a special job for a guy like you, he said.

And that’s how I heard about the Underground Punch Market, or the UPM.

People with Punch Vouchers left, like myself, could be put in contact with people who didn’t, like the walrus for example, and that person could pay me to punch someone for them. I told him that I don’t punch very hard due to the fact that my arms are about as useful as a garden hose lodged under the front wheel of a garbage truck. He told me he knew a place that could help me. He was real nice and gave me directions to a Work Room. I couldn’t think of one reason not to go.

There was a guy expecting me. His name was Rogue, though I think it was fake. He had his shirt collar pulled up around his chin and he wore sunglasses that were so big that they covered the top half of his face. I’m no detective, but he looked conspicuous to me.

I could whip you into shape in a month, Rogue said, his voice resonating at a higher register than his massive frame would suggest. Then you’ve got the two weeks around Christmas to unload your two Punch Vouchers.

Actually, I’ve got four.

Rogue’s eyes got all big and twinkly and I could almost see the money signs appear in his pupils like in the old cartoons.

Was four Punch Vouchers a buttload?

◊

Rogue had me punch bulky red bags suspended from the ceiling, and I lifted weights for the first time in my wimpy life. He taught me how to hit someone so that it hurt the most. People paid a lot of money and they wanted the punches to be painful.

A few short weeks later, Rogue pulled me aside and said that I was ready and he handed me a big envelope with money in it. I’d never seen so much money all at once. And that was after Rogue had taken his cut. Then he gave me an envelope that had a picture in it. This was my first Quarry. His name was Clarence Eubanks.

I’ll always remember Clarence Eubanks because he was really tall. When I punched him, I had to reach up to his face, and I almost fell over. I didn’t quite do it like Rogue had taught me, but Clarence’s nose did bleed, and I don’t think he ever thought that I would hit that hard. Or even hit him at all. I appeared out of nowhere from his point of view. I hid in the alley next to his favorite restaurant (I knew that because it was written on the back of the picture) and when he walked up I ran out and punched him. It was exactly 7:34 in the morning. My hand hurt like a bastard. Clarence Eubanks got down on one knee and this other guy with a bad hairpiece began laughing hysterically. He was so excited that Clarence Eubanks got hit. He must have been the one who hired me, I figured. Then when the hairpiece guy came up and said thanks to me, I knew that I had figured correctly.

I felt bad for Clarence Eubanks because he didn’t even eat his breakfast. He got back to his feet and immediately left and the hairpiece guy laughed like it was the only thing keeping him alive and yelled after Clarence that he deserved what he got. I wonder if he did deserve it. A couple of Eye Witnesses signed my Voucher, and I dropped it in the next mailbox I saw.

When I got back to the Work Room, Rogue gave me a big thumbs up.

My hand hurts like a bastard, I said.

He handed me a bag of ice followed by another picture. And another big envelope of money. I pulled out the picture and winced. My next Quarry was a woman.

I’d never hit a woman because my mom told me it wasn’t right, even though Central Office never made a rule against it. Legally, I could punch whomever I wanted and it didn’t matter what sex they were. It didn’t help that this lady sort of looked like my mom. But if I squinted my eyes, maybe it would look like my sister. That wouldn’t be so bad.

When I left, I got the feeling that I was being followed. This guy in a black suit was taking the same exact route as me (and I know a lot of shortcuts) and we were the only two people out walking. It seemed like a bad idea to go home. I decided to go to Nadine’s house instead. If Chuck were alive, I think he would’ve done the same thing.

Nadine and Roger’s house is small, but it’s in the nice part of town where it seems like it’s always sunny. Her house looked like it was smiling; the trim row of bushes on each side were the laugh lines.

Whenever I see Nadine, my first reaction is to pull her hair because of how adorable she is. But I’ve never actually done it. She grinned when she saw me and said, Do you want some lemonade?

I looked through her front window and sure enough that guy in the black suit was hanging around her neighbor’s yard acting like he was interested in their flower garden.

I miss Chuck, she said.

I didn’t say anything but she knew I did, too. I got a job, I said.

That’s wonderful.

Actually, I think that man is following me. My job may be illegal.

I’m sure you’re mistaken, she said.

I pointed at the guy in the black suit, and I could tell she thought it was suspicious. She poured another glass of lemonade and went outside and invited him in.

Damn compadre, I thought you were never going to stop walking, he said in a boisterous voice as if he was the host of The Game Show for Kiddies. He spun his empty lemonade glass in his hands as Nadine led us into her compact front room.

It turned out that he worked for Central Office in the Black Suit division. They were in charge of apprehending people who exceeded their designated amount of punches. They also tracked down people who didn’t turn in their Punch Vouchers. His name was Mike Smith.

Like any Bureaucrat, he told us all the things we’d heard before. About how Central Office created Punch Vouchers causing Violent Lifeloss to drop 80%. According to him (and the Central Office newsletter) quality of life had also increased for all citizens.

Nadine sat really close to me and it made it hard to hear what Mike Smith was saying.  He explained how the UPM, my current employer, helped people get more punches than they were allowed. If a person went over his Punch Limit, they did Serious Time. If they paid someone else to punch for them, wasn’t the same end result achieved and shouldn’t they also suffer the same consequences?

So you see my problem here, right buddy? he said.

Nadine grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I got hormonally charged immediately. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stand up for at least ten minutes.

Let me get to the point, he said. Central Office is willing to let you go free if you help us catch Rogue.

In all honesty, I don’t see how I can do that, I said. I consider Rogue a friend.

Well, then you’re looking at Serious Time.

Oh, in that case, I can be persuaded, I said. I’ve only known him a few weeks.

Nadine looked flushed and stared solemnly at my hands. Mike Smith said that he would be in touch and that I should just keep going along like we’d never spoken.

At that exact moment, Roger came in. He has a sloping forehead and a square jaw. He looked pretty mad to see two guys in the house with his wife. Nadine jumped away from me quickly and my hand dropped heavily onto my lap.

There better be a good explanation for this, he yelled, or I’m going to ram my fist so far down your throats I’ll be able to tell the next time you need to take a crap.

Calm down Punch-o the Clown, Mike Smith said. I know you’re out of Vouchers. And I don’t think you want to mess with someone from Central Office. He flashed his badge and Roger backed down.

All the commotion sent my hormonal charge running scared, and I was able to stand and make my way to the door.

Roger blocked my path. I don’t want to see you around the house anymore, he said. You should get some new friends.

Nadine cowered in the doorway, her eyes shimmering.

I’ll think about it, I said. And that’s when I realized that Chuck wanted me to punch Roger as hard as I could. In the face.

◊

When I got back to my sister’s place, Rogue was waiting for me. I know you spoke to Central Office, he said.

Since he already knew, I figured I could tell him about it. He told me to do what they said and to go along like we hadn’t spoken. Everything was under control. I’m glad he had it handled because I was getting confused.

As instructed by both sides, I proceeded to the next Quarry. Her picture said that she would be outside of her office on a Regulation Smoke Inhalation Period at 2:15 the next afternoon. Unfortunately for me, there were fifty million women huddled on the wet pavement who could’ve been her; or they could’ve been my mom. I knew none of them were my mom though because she lived in that old folks’ house that my sister put her in last year.

The Regulation Smoke Inhalation Period lasted exactly 15 minutes or they would be docked a day’s pay, so I didn’t have much time to figure out which one was my Quarry. I narrowed it down to three based on the haircut. I wished I could take the picture out and hold it up to each woman’s face.

I was getting a few strange looks due to the fact that I had wandered into the group and was staring at everyone instead of smoking. Plus I was a lot younger than everyone else.

One of my top choices snubbed out her cigarette and stepped into the immense glass office building as if she’d been sucked up by a vacuum. I didn’t want to mess up the job. Someone had paid for this to happen at this exact moment. And I didn’t want to give the money back. I started to feel like my lungs were shrinking, like I couldn’t possibly be breathing enough air.

I knew what I had to do. I took a deep breath and looked up into the sky, and I promised Chuck that I would use my last Punch Voucher to hit Roger as hard as I possibly could. Which was a big deal because I was making too much money on these punches to dole them out for free.

Just then, a woman tapped me on the shoulder. Are you all right? she asked. She probably thought I was weird because I was staring up at the sky in the middle of their smoking group. She seemed nice, but she talked in a slow, loud voice.

I quickly turned away from her to see where my remaining two ladies went, and I accidentally bumped into a guy with a cigar protruding from his mouth like an exhaust pipe.

Get away from me, freak, the man said.

Oh leave him alone, Colby, the slow-talking woman said. Can’t you see he’s Mentally Held-Back? She turned and smiled sweetly at me as if I was a butterscotch candy that she was going to press to the inside of her cheek.

That smile seemed familiar, but she wasn’t one of the three that I had picked. I wished again that I could take that picture out and compare. Then I realized: I was focusing too much on the hair. She had cut and styled it differently and was wearing a ton of make-up. Who knew when that picture was taken?

I punched her straight in the jaw.

The cigar guy got really pissed which made me sure he wasn’t the person who hired me.  The woman began crying hysterically, her tears as big as jelly beans, and I felt obligated to calm her down since she was crying because I hit her. I like your new hairstyle much better, I said.

What is wrong with you? the cigar guy said with his teeth clenched around his cigar. It sounded like he was talking through cellophane.

A few Eye Witnesses popped over to sign my Punch Voucher. Then the cigar guy figured it out.

He yanked the cigar out of his mouth and looked around at all of his coworkers. Who hired him, huh? Which one of you hired him? Then he turned back to me and said, You’re despicable.

I grabbed my Punch Voucher from an Eye Witness just as the cigar guy pulled his arm back and rushed his fist at my face.

My brain spun around a few times inside my head. My cheek went numb and then a second later it started screaming with pain. Actually, it was me that was screaming with pain. It hurt a lot more than I ever imagined. At that moment, I was convinced I would need Facial Restructuring.

The cigar guy began shaking his hand furiously and rubbing his knuckles. The sight of him in pain made me angrier than I had ever been before. Without even thinking, I punched him so hard he fell to the ground.

This was their company’s most exciting Regulation Smoke Inhalation Period based on how many of them wanted to sign my Voucher. In the meantime, the cigar guy began calling out for some ice. I think everybody pretty much hated that guy because nobody even considered helping him. Nobody wanted their Regulation Smoke Inhalation Period to be cut short.

I grabbed my Vouchers before I accidentally punched someone else.

Feeling exhilarated, I walked quickly away from the swarming group of smokers. I had never punched someone like that before. Just on a reflex. No wonder Chuck wanted me to do it. My face didn’t even hurt that bad anymore.

Mike Smith, wearing the same black suit, popped out of an alley and pulled me aside. He told me that they were following Rogue and that they were very close. He said to keep up the good work, and then he slipped away.

I continued walking a few more steps only to be stopped by Rogue. He told me that he was following Mike Smith and that he had the upper hand. He also told me that I had a nasty shiner and that he wished I hadn’t wasted a Voucher on that cigar guy, but that I should keep up the good work.

With all the good work I was apparently doing, I decided to go apartment shopping.

◊

I signed a lease and was moving into my own place on New Year’s Day. Sure it was small, but I could leave my clothes lying wherever I wanted and watch movies as loud as the speakers would go. Who would’ve thought that I’d be getting my act together? That’s something Chuck used to say all the time.

He never got his act together.

But he was certainly going to hold me to my promise. Now that I punched that cigar guy, I only had one Punch Voucher left, and it had Roger’s name on it. I hadn’t seen Roger or Nadine since the day Mike Smith followed me over to their house. Nadine left a message at my sister’s house to say hello, but said not to call back. Somehow, I had to find a good time to punch Roger. And there better be a lot of room to run afterward.

I stopped going to the Work Room and concentrated on getting ready for my move.  I had just bought my very own Vid Gamer when Rogue appeared next to me on the sidewalk. He said, I’ve got you in mind for something special.

Only Rogue’s favorite Punchers got chosen to punch someone in a Domestic Dispute, so I was a little honored. Because of the promise though, I had to turn him down. He told me he would give me double the money due to the fact that I was the only guy in the UPM who still had a punch left. I didn’t feel so honored anymore. I still said no. Then he said triple the money. Sorry Chuck.

This woman wants you to punch her husband in front of all their friends, Rogue said.

I was feeling pretty bad about not punching Roger, but then I remembered: On New Year’s Day I wasn’t only getting my own place, I was also getting two new Punch Vouchers for the year. That was two weeks away. I decided that as a Housewarming Gift to myself, I was going to lay that jerk Roger out on the floor. That should make Chuck happy. This fantasy was quickly followed by the image of Nadine and me making intercourse (not making babies) on Chuck’s old couch, the one that was stolen. It’s not like Chuck had a chance with her anymore what with him being dead and all. Sorry again, Chuck.

I took the packet from Rogue.

When I got to the abusive husband’s work, I realized that there was a Christmas party going on. I spotted the abusive husband quickly, and I realized that he worked with Roger. They were friends it seemed, and the two were laughing loudly in the middle of the room, both trying to outdo each other for the attention of everyone at the party. I glanced around for Nadine but I didn’t see her.

It was the first time I’d seen Roger in a while, and I realized how much I actually hated him. Not just because of how much Chuck did. Nadine could do much better than that slab of beef.

I didn’t feel like wasting any time, plus I didn’t want to get so worked up that I punched Roger instead, so I stepped up to the abusive husband and wailed on his nose as hard as I could. He immediately fell to the ground, out cold.

It didn’t feel good at all.

The room got so quiet I could hear all of their hearts beating. Then a couple of people chuckled and started saying Merry Christmas etc. to the guy I knocked out. Roger looked up as I was crossing the room to find someone to sign my Voucher, and he grabbed me by the shoulder.

It would be an honor to sign the Punch Voucher of the guy who punched out that lame wad, he said. Then I saw him recognize me, like his eyes used to need glasses and then they suddenly corrected themselves. He couldn’t believe it, I could tell. I think he was impressed.

He signed my Voucher and then surprised me by inviting me to Nadine and his New Year’s Eve party.

I’d be happy to go, I said. But on the inside, I was really bothered by the fact that this was not how things were supposed to turn out. Chuck didn’t give me his Punch Vouchers to make Roger like me, so that I could be friends with him and he could invite me to his New Year’s Eve party. It would be great to see Nadine, but I couldn’t help but think I’d royally screwed this up.

As I walked out the door, three Central Office Sedans pulled up and blocked my path. Mike Smith jumped out of one of the cars along with a bunch of other guys that looked exactly like him. Mike Smith ran up to me while the others all ran into the building. I thought I was getting taken away to do Serious Time. But Mike Smith shook my hand. I’m proud of you, buddy boy, he said. You led us straight to the leader of the Underground Punch Market.

A moment later, the Central Office guys returned, dragging the abusive husband I had knocked out. There’s that scoundrel now, Mike Smith said and then winked at me. There’s quite a sizable reward for his capture, you know. Come to the office any time and collect. I’ll give you a hint, fella. It’s something that has four wheels and goes Vroom, Vroom.

I felt a little empty inside.

After the Central Office Sedans drove away, I heard a whistling down an alley and saw Rogue waving me over. He also shook my hand and told me that the abusive husband that I’d hit was not the leader of the UPM and that he had officially beaten them at their own game. I’m proud of you, he said in his helium voice. We can always use a guy like you on our side.

He told me he was going to lie low for a while, and then he slipped me a huge envelope of money.

I wished Chuck was alive, and I could go to his place and sit down on that couch and turn on Tomb Blaster. I would even let him beat me. Instead, I went straight to the store and bought my sister a really expensive Christmas present for all the time she’d let me stay at her place.

When she got home from work, I gave her an order form for the couch I was having delivered to her house. It wasn’t as nice as Chuck’s but it was better than that crap she has now. I could tell that she really wanted me to stay living with her. It was the first time I noticed how lonely she was. I told her it was time for me to get my own place, and she told me that she was proud of me. I guess everyone was proud of me.

On my way out, I handed her some of the money from Rogue.

No matter how much money you have, you’re still a loser, she said. But she smiled a little.

She’s usually right about those things.

◊

At the New Years Eve party, I was immediately recognized by people from Roger’s work. They all remembered my stellar punch. After shrugging past them all, I finally got to see Nadine. This time I did pull her hair. Just a little. I’d been falling apart until I laid eyes on her again. I tried to tell her, but I think she knew.

I can’t believe that black eye, she said. You have to be more careful.

I will, I said. It felt good to have someone care about me. It was even better that it was Nadine.

You know Chuck always had a huge crush on you, I said.

I never knew that, she said. But I think she was lying.

Roger didn’t seem impressed with me anymore, and he grabbed Nadine and took her away to talk to some of his friends.

He got real belligerent as he dank and he started saying some mean things about Nadine later in the evening. He told some secret stuff about her from their personal life that I would never repeat. She got upset and ran crying into the kitchen.

I was going tell Roger to calm down, but he saw me coming. You look like a bird with a broken wing, he said.

I didn’t really care about anything he was saying because most of it didn’t make sense. I knocked the beer out of his hand. And that’s when he started making fun of Chuck. That guy killed himself because he was sick of seeing his reflection in the mirror, Roger said.

In the background, people started counting down from 10. I pictured Nadine in the kitchen, crying into her hands as the New Year rolled around. I never liked you and I never liked Chuck, he said. My wife is too good to hang out with losers like you and I hope you kill yourself too so I don’t have to look at you anymore.

The people counting in the background yelled out the number 2 when Roger said, I’m glad Chuck is dead.

And that’s when I broke his nose. I hope Chuck rests in peace.

◊

Serious Time isn’t as bad as I thought. I don’t ever get to go outside, but I get a room that I only share with one other guy. I’d only been here two days when my first roommate got released. So for about a day or two I had the room to myself. I got to thinking about the irony of me being here. If I’d waited one more second to punch Roger, it would have been the New Year and I could have used one of my new Punch Vouchers. But there were too many Eye Witnesses.

Nadine tried to lie for me on account of the fact that she was in love with me, which I found out later when she sent me a letter. In that same letter, she told me that she had divorced Roger and was going to wait for me.

I sometimes feel sad that I didn’t get to move into that new apartment or retrieve my reward from Central Office. But I know that Chuck is happy with how things turned out. I decided when I was released, I was going to my keep Punch Vouchers so I could trade them in for a dinner at Spunky’s. With Nadine.

On the day I was taken into custody, they told me that I could bring one thing with me to my cell, my Special Artifact. I realized that I didn’t own anything except for that Vid Gamer I just bought. That was the last time I was really happy. Playing the Vid Gamer with Chuck.

Then I met my new roommate. He seemed like an all right guy. He was sort of tall and thin with a large nose. He said he was a petty thief. He also said that I would never be able to beat his score in Tomb Blaster. I told him that I was up for the challenge.

Then the door opened and three huge guards began struggling to get something through the doorway. My new roommate smiled and told me that for his Special Artifact he wanted to bring his favorite thing in the world, and it just so happened to be the heaviest thing he owned. He laughed as he watched the guards struggle.

And through that doorway, they brought in Chuck’s old couch.


Josh Denslow author photoJosh Denslow’s debut collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books) will appear at the end of March 2019 and he still can’t believe it really exists! “Punch” is his wife’s favorite story in the collection and its publication here is dedicated to her. Recent stories have appeared in Catapult, Pithead Chapel, wigleaf, Okay Donkey, and others. In addition to wearing matching sweaters with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane and edits at SmokeLong Quarterly.

 

Image credit: Paweł Michalik on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Fiction, Issue 25. (Click for permalink.)

TWO POEMS by Barbara Daniels

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

TWO POEMS
by Barbara Daniels

Moon against a blue skyTall
A woman grows taller and taller
till she looms above her friends,
brushes her head on door frames,
grows out of her sensible clothes.
Like a photograph, heightened,

altered, she transmits unease—as if
she’s a too-red barn, spot-lit church,
water so synthetic it gleams and
fumbles. Doctors say it’s nothing:
late-life growth spurt, slow-motion

ship wreck, and now her head
rises out of the moonroof as she
drives her car. Her lips murmur,
her empurpled heart. She pivots
her head, watches beech trees,

watches the young in their tiny
clothes. Leaves tumble like laundry.
She wants the souls of objects
to stop leaping forward, shiny
with meaning like dropped forks.

She sees how it ends, her head
twinned to the scarred moon, one
hand touching down in Iowa,
one in New Jersey, and all around
the unearthly music of the spheres.

◊

The Week in Words
Insomnia:
Day races toward me, waving
its sets of ratchets and hooks.
A lost parade turns
at random, drumsticks
resting on stilled snare drums.

Crepuscular:

Early morning leaks into quiet
darkness. I get up unevenly
like an untrustworthy elevator.
A neighbor set out an orange pot
of daisies but mostly it’s pines
and bare dirt here. I’m sorry
the pond doesn’t shine
like blue satin. But stalwart trees
begin to take up the weight of the sky.

Nostalgia:
Penciled names of my first
three teachers. They made me
feel like a piece of cheese.
Downtown burned, and
high school girls lost prom gowns
hung in clear plastic, partly
paid for, a dollar a week. For months
the town smelled of ashes.

Prepubescence:
We were piglings, lambkins,
polliwogs, whelps
forbidden to ride our bikes
on the street, swim in the creek,
cut through the park, walk
on dark sidewalks. We didn’t
run—or just to the center line,
guards on half the court,
forwards the other.

Equivocal:
I lost my white gloves. Or I
never bought them, put them
in a long flat box, hid
the box in another box,
climbed risky stairs
to the hot attic. I was myself
a figure of fun laughed at
unkindly despite or because of
long white gloves painfully
buttoned all the way up my arms.

Introversion:
The woman passing the peace
in the hard pew has fingers
like ice picks. Please don’t
approach me. Don’t touch
my sweating hands.

Despondency:
Grief turns out to be work.


Barbara Daniels author photoBarbara Daniels’ book Rose Fever was published by WordTech Press and her chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and many other journals. She received three Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Author photo by Mark Hillringhouse.

 

 

Image credit: chuttersnap on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg










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

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

LINES ON THE WAY TO A MARCH by Dan Kraines

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by thwackJune 5, 2020

LINES ON THE WAY TO A MARCH
by Dan Kraines

Blurry subway

My sight breaks up; orange rivulets
drop down my eye; against my chest,
a pain thwacks and clocks.
I am holding a book. I am holding a book.
Passengers clutch cardboard signs, as if my ears
were blocked, as if they were trying to tell me
something that I cannot bear to hear. I read
their markered letters and make out
the shape of guns. In a boxed car,
against a rail, I am travelling underneath
a city; hands reach above my face, holding on
to a place that so many others have touched.
We are here together, I tell myself.
Inside my head, blood rapidly leaves
one room of my body for another,
as if leaving were a solution—
the body knows what to do until it does not,
then it is malfunction, said to be ill.
Even when we work against ourselves,
there is said to be logic. This might be the hysterical
mirage of rage. I am fainting and anonymous.
There is a rocking and a stop. There is a time
without rocking and for a time we will not stop.
Let out me. Let me out of myself.
Out of this debate. I have lead myself astray
and cannot think to think. I want to carry a gun
and I am furthest from a gun, like the pollen
conceived too early and in the nectar of useless
to say. Their Medieval hands. My gilded iris
makes it seem as though this is the day
of carnival and that there is an out beyond
where each of us arrives in a square park
over a hill, the length to take us having faded,
as if what we cannot feel we cannot know.
This is a fear that stays with us
because we are guilty. The dead are around us
briefly before they go.


Dan Kraines author photoDan Kraines is a PhD candidate in queer studies and representations of loss. Time to write has been afforded to him by fellowships from New York University’s Center for Experimental Humanities, Boston University’s Program in Creative Writing, the University of Rochester, and the Betsy Writers Room in Miami. He teaches creative writing and film at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

 

 

Image credit: Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

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Published on March 27, 2019 in Issue 25, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

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Emily Steinbergs’s Comix

The writer, a middle-aged woman with long grey hair, is driving in car with her dog. She narrates: Since the end of February I've been watching the war on TV. CNN Breaking: "Russia Invades Ukraine. Ukraine strikes fuel depot. Putin pissed off."... And obsessively doom scrolling on Twitter. War Crimes! Odessa bombed! It simultaneously feels like 1939 and right now. Totally surreal.

WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg

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Visual Narratives

DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden

DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden

From KENNINGS, Visual Erasures by Katrina Roberts

From KENNINGS, Visual Erasures by Katrina Roberts

VISUAL NARRATIVES ARCHIVE

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