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Cleaver Magazine

Fresh-Cut Lit & Art

 
 

Category Archives: Issue 33

LAB RAT VENGEANCE by Sarah Schiff

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 23, 2021 by thwackSeptember 23, 2021

LAB RAT VENGEANCE
by Sarah Schiff

In the neuroscience lab where I worked as an undergraduate intern, we were studying what makes mice experience the sensation of fullness. You can just imagine who’d want access to those findings—the know-how to regulate people’s appetites. The primary investigator, Dr. Hillbrawn, suspected a specific subnucleus of being the moderating agent of satiety, so my job was to locate and then lesion it (which is fancy scientific jargon for destroy, and, just so you know, I am pretty fancy). Once I could do the surgeries without supervision, I started coming in late at night so I could work without the distractions of other people’s gossip and smells. One grad student played Nirvana on a loop, so the whole white room consistently felt filled with dismay.

On a late September night, I had an adolescent mouse head-fixed into the stereotax, a kind of miniature operating table. The mouse, big for his age, lay belly down. While his red eyes looked blindly up at me, shiny with ointment to keep them from drying out, I shaved the white fur at the top of his head, made a slice, and pulled the pink skin apart into a vaginal-looking wound. After I drilled a hole through his skull, just as I was about to lower the electrode, I saw the mouse’s whiskers twitch. Or I thought I did. From ethics training, I knew we were supposed to give a booster of anesthesia if we sensed the mouse waking so I pinched his tail, and his whole body flinched, a clear indicator that the dope wasn’t enough.

But what if it had to be? If I continued the surgery how would this mouse react, skull-cracked, brain-exposed, but alert to the world? What if I just—

At the electrode’s pulse, his sticky eyes filled with dampened terror, followed by screeches that rent the antiseptic night. When I pulled the wire free, his body and limbs thrashed across the metal surface, his head locked in place.

I watched with a kind of thoughtful horror. This writhing mouse has touched death, must sense himself on the brink, caught up in the suck toward oblivion.

What a rush it must be. I could almost feel it myself.

After sealing the mouse’s scalp with vet glue, I set up an arena and video camera and grabbed one of the female mice we kept for breeding.

Even among mice, males are considered the norm, the females too inconstant, so to ensure we always had female mice in estrus, all hot and bothered and ready to rut, we had to keep them separated. Just like us, female mice get on the same cycles with their fellow cage-dwellers. Whenever a new litter of pups was born, we’d wait the twenty-one days until they were weaned, pick out the surplus of females, dump them into a tank, and fill it with carbon dioxide, slowly at first to put them to sleep, then full blast. Their very own girls-only gas chamber.

At least they were spared the life of a lab rat.

During my training, I’d watched some videos of mouse sexual behavior, which happened to be even more formulaic than human. The male would dally before sniffing the female’s backside, and that sniffing would go on for quite a while, in all kinds of positions, before mounting, then withdrawing to lick his junk, then mounting again, and soon done after several quick-time humps and rapturous squeaks. The technical term for mouse foreplay is, get this, anogenital exploration.

Feel free to use that next time you’re looking to spice up your dirty-talk.

This mouse, whom I would dub Ladies Mouse, was having none of it. He must have been woozy from the drugs, but once I put him in the cage with the female, he leaped at her like Superman, or rather, Mighty Mouse, snort. It was as if it was his last lay, his final chance to pass on all the genetic material that defined Ladies Mouse and Ladies Mouse alone. He did it for the same reason shipwrecked men carve their last words into the bark of trees. Because even the most is never enough.

The going theory was that if you stress out animals, they’ll do all they can to return to homeostasis. The last thing they’d be up for, supposedly, was the agitation of a courtship ritual. But Ladies Mouse defied the theory. He didn’t fight or flee but found a way to do both, to force himself on another and allow his DNA to escape.

I put on a pot of coffee, already planning my next experiment. First I had to confirm that I’d lesioned the part of Ladies Mouse’s brain I’d been aiming for. Stereotactic surgery only gives you a suggestion of which part of the brain actually gets hit by the electrode. Mouse brains are small, after all.

Which meant I’d have to kill Ladies Mouse. Wishing I hadn’t named him, I put him in a cage and marked it: “Surgerized mice. Save for Deb.” It would take a couple weeks for the neurons to die off, if I’d destroyed them at all. Maybe I’d just stimulated them. Or maybe the burned neurons had nothing to do with it. Was the stress of waking during surgery enough to explain Ladies Mouse’s desperate and freakish last lay?

Over the following weeks, I prepared for Ladies Mouse’s final surgery, and when the time came, I laid him down in a tray of crushed ice inside the fume hood. This time I was sure to inject him with a healthy dose of anesthetic—actually it wasn’t so healthy, har har.

This final surgery, a transcardial perfusion, would be belly up.

A draft from somewhere rustled some hairs that had escaped from my bun as I made a horizontal incision just beneath his rib cage and pushed apart the skin with my thumb and forefinger. The twitching bright redness of his organs made me stop. I could just glue him up now, virtually no damage done. But I kept going, remembering the steps of the surgery in my head like a telephone number. With the scalpel, I traced the shape of a shield along the edges of his ribcage and, as if peeling away a sticker, lifted the skin, followed by the sternum. There his heart pumped wildly, I couldn’t believe with what tempo and vigor. His system was drugged and irreparably damaged, but his heart beat pertinaciously on. Holding my breath, I pinched the pulsing heart between the forceps, pierced a hole in the right atrium to let the blood ooze out, and, with a trembling hand, inserted a needle into the left ventricle. I didn’t exhale until the saline, then paraformaldehyde began their journey through his organs. Ladies Mouse’s whole body moved as if in a seizure, then just his fore paws, as if waving goodbye. In less than twenty minutes, his body had gone stiff, all the organs paled to a chalky white.

Rather unremarkable scissors are sufficient for cutting off mice’s heads, but I thought Ladies Mouse deserved the guillotine that we reserved for tough-necked rats, the royal treatment.

With his head in my blood-dappled gloves, I scissored away his skull as if it were a cuticle on a nail, and the clattering sound of me dropping the scissors back on the tray made me jump, an alarm bell shrilling its warning in my head. I looked around, expecting to find someone who’d been watching me this whole time.

But, no, I was alone. What was the next step again? All I could think about was the bloody, decapitated body and a missing witness. Had I pickled Ladies Mouse for nothing? Then I saw the mini-spatula and knew what to do.

After severing the cranial nerves, I popped Ladies Mouse’s brain out like a pea from its pod, and my heart clamored against my chest as I caught it before it fell to the floor. Concentrate, I told myself as I slid the brain into a vial of paraformaldehyde for post-fixing. Then I tossed Ladies Mouse’s corpse, wrapped in a surgical glove, into the freezer with the other carcasses, bound eventually for the incinerator, and tried not to feel sad for him. All the next day, I stayed in the lab, drinking coffee and keeping my eye on the solution, making sure no one disturbed it. That night, after everyone had finally left, I cut the solidified brain into sections, stained them, and searched for the missing neurons under a microscope.

It was a miss. I’d put Ladies Mouse through all that, only to hit a neighboring subnucleus.

But maybe it was a happy miss. Discoveries can’t be anticipated, after all. Maybe, I thrilled to think, males also have an ever-elusive g-spot, and maybe it’s in the brain.

The next morning, I was woken by Jason, the grad student responsible for supervising me. I didn’t like sharing what I’d been up to, but I’d need his help, and Jason was always railing against the Man, by which he meant academia, its rigidity, its unpredictable hesitancies, and its general stinginess. He usually spoke in a low, emphatic tone that sounded on the verge of angry, but once I’d explained my plan, his voice seemed to jump an octave. “Sweet, nice work, Deb. Way to stick it!”

He set me up so I could spend the next few months breeding my own litter of mouse pups, which mostly just consisted of him signing forms I put in front of his face. After I’d put aside half the weaned mice as the control group, I dove into my experiments. How could I get them to take that desperate lunge toward whatever life remained rather than retreat to nurse their wounds? The findings, I knew, could have huge implications. Forget controlling appetite. Whoever knew the formula for invigorating the sex drive could rule the world. Or at least buy it—and was there a difference?

◊

Over the holidays, the city was aglow with Christmas spirit, but I was in the lab, trying to figure out what I was missing in my research. As the new year approached and as more and more mice failed to live up to their predecessor, I started to suspect that my initial results had been an anomaly, related more to Ladies Mouse’s distinctive qualities than anything endemic to mice, let alone humankind.

There was no payday in sight.

Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Jason delivered a presentation to the whole lab, complete with PowerPoint slides. The topic: my research.

I was sitting at the back of the conference room, in denial. This couldn’t be my hypothesis, my experiments and data, my potentially field-changing findings he was claiming as his own. I considered briefly, and absurdly, that he’d been working on a parallel experiment this whole time. But no, I even recognized my mice in the videos, the ones whose neurons I’d been destroying and whose sex acts I’d been filming. The more he spoke, his voice assuming that self-righteous tone of being the only person in the room to have thought of something previously unthought, the more insistently my heart pumped, and the feeling of it nearly bursting through my chest made me remember the blood draining out of Ladies Mouse. What did Ladies Mouse ever do? The undeserving one was Jason.

I wasn’t even a footnote.

After the presentation, I found him in the cafeteria, a huge building, airless as a shopping mall, with a daunting design of hatched wooden planks on the high ceiling. Fight or flee? I went up to where he was sitting and slid his plate of salad bar salad down the length of the table like an air hockey puck. When I put my face in front of his, the clatter of his dropped fork, just like that of the scissors I’d used to trim away Ladies Mouse’s skull, made me shiver. But his obvious fear made mine manageable.

“Deb.” Even in that one syllable, I could hear the quavers in his voice. “How was your Christmas?”

“Bullshit, Jason.” I got so close, our lips were almost touching. From afar, the moment might have looked romantic, like I was willing to vault a cafeteria table just for a kiss.

“There’s nothing to say,” he went on all aquiver. “I was the lead on that experiment, set you up, supervised you.”

“It was my idea, Jason. I did the work. You just gave the okay.”

“More like you were the manual labor, the benchman.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it.”

“I provided the materials, the animals, the equipment, got the go-ahead from Dr. Hillbrawn. You don’t even have a college degree. Everything you used was mine, which means so are the findings.” He sneezed, and it sounded like the karate chop yip—hiya!—of a cartoon ninja.

Maybe he’d done those things, but none of it was enough to justify taking my work. Authority too often gets the glory, without even showing up. “I’m telling Dr. Hillbrawn everything.”

“He’s been kept apprised this whole time. We even got IACUC approval and had to cover up some of your shadier techniques in the process, I’ll have you know. As far as he’s concerned, the experiment’s mine, and that’s because it is.”

“That’s some false reality you live in,” I said, but to my own ears, at least, my voice sounded thin. He couldn’t have me beat.

“I tell you what, Deb,” and he hopped his chair forward and picked up his fork as if about to dive into an invisible meal. “I’m presenting the findings at the conference in April over at NYU. You can join me at the poster session, help me answer questions when it gets busy.”

“I’ll be there.”

He lowered his eyes to my short black skirt and rainbow leggings. “Just make sure you look the part.”

I made my best holier-than-thou face. “I thought you were all about sticking it to the man.”

“I am. But sometimes you have to play the game.”

And here I was, thinking I was playing.

When I left the cafeteria, it was snowing. As I watched my step over the sidewalks, I wondered why it didn’t thunder in a snowstorm. Where was the protest of the sky?

◊

Since ketamine is a schedule three controlled substance and hallucinogenic, any lab that uses it is subject to DEA inspection, thanks primarily to a rather experimental bunch of 1970s California yoga instructors with a death wish. Dr. Hillbrawn kept it in the lab as anesthesia for the mice and rats. The problem, though, was the dosage: I’d need to hoard it for months before collecting enough to cook down and concentrate, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Or patience.

How ironic, then, that powder AP5, just another antagonist of NMDA receptors, was readily available for a couple hundred taxpayer dollars. In Dr. Hillbrawn’s lab, there was AP5 to spare.

So when it came time for the neuroscience convention, I was ready. In a single bathroom off the main conference hall, I took out my stash of AP5 in dimethyl sulfoxide, since it can dissolve chemicals that are hydrophobic (afraid of water, of all things). It’s also great for transporting substances through skin.

As I stirred deliberate figure eights into the solution, I could feel the heat building under my arms with the prospect of revenge, but that was soon chased by doubt: Was I the bad guy here?

Feeling like a witch above her brew, all I could think was I needed to come out of this without losing my dignity, even if meant doing something as rotten as the smell drifting up from my potion: a heady blend of spoiled milk and asparagus-laced urine.

All vengeance really was was self-defense after the fact, a welcome balm to helpless feelings.

As I looked around to ensure I hadn’t left anything incriminating behind, I caught a glimpse of myself in the streaky mirror. It was the nicest I’d ever dressed: gray twill pants and a white collared shirt, complete with a narrow snake-skin belt.

No witch was I.

After pulling on fresh surgical gloves, I donned another pair, these made from black lace. The left-handed one was soaked in my solvent. Before leaving, I doused myself with patchouli to cover the smell and thought, it’s not just mathematics, firefighting, and rock and roll that young girls get dissuaded from. Our potential for bad doings gets stymied too. We unlearn our capacity for trouble. Beamed to us daily, we hear the messages that we’re built for good, for caretaking, obeying. Boys will be boys, but girls aim to please.

How deep did the lesson run in me?

Across a sea of ambling scientists, there was Jason, setting up his poster at the far wall. In all his high fashion sense, he was sporting a short-sleeved collared shirt with a bowtie. Feeling as if my gliding body was a substitute for the real me, I weaved my way toward him, protecting my left hand as if it were broken. I felt unbound, sipping on trouble, a drink like liquor that rouses and dulls.

“No hard feelings,” I said, clutching his arm and holding on a few seconds longer than a casual greeting merited. He grinned, reached for my shoulder, and said, “That’s my Deb.”

With my most innocent smile, I withdrew my hand, claiming nervousness. “Gonna go to the little girls’ room before the big show.”

“You might want to wipe off some of that patchouli or whatever the hell it is. It reeks. And lose the gloves, Elvira.”

“I guess I got carried away,” I said and hurried back to the bathroom, feeling as if I’d had too much caffeine and might be propelled into a topple. To get the stink out, I rinsed and scrubbed the glove, wrapped it in a couple plastic bags, and buried it deep in the nasty bathroom trash. Then I splashed some cold water on my face, trying to tame the flush in my cheeks.

“You go here,” Jason told me when I returned, indicating the spot against the wall. He stood on the other side of the easel that held a rather shoddily designed poster. The sheets of data pinned to the board hung askew, and the small font was hard to read. Shockingly, he hadn’t asked me to design it for him, but probably—rightfully—he hadn’t trusted me to give it my best. My kind of crafty wasn’t for him.

He didn’t seem at all conscious of his poster’s inadequacy but stood with hands on hips, looking out with a devil-moon grin at the meandering scientists. When he bent to tie his shoe, I scribbled my name into the bottom corner.

As the scientists made their way toward us, they stood close to the poster, as if about to grab the easel up in a waltz. Soon they were gathering in droves, intrigued by the originality of the research, not to mention the fact that it was about the sex drive. Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk about Sex” was stuck in my head, and I hummed it to try to still the nerves. When would the AP5 kick in? As he handed out ivory-colored business cards, Jason’s voice rang with confidence, and with each card, I worried more. Maybe I hadn’t held on to him long enough. Had I screwed up the dosage? Maybe AP5 didn’t work the same way ketamine did. If nothing happened, I told myself, nothing would happen. Maybe it would even be a good thing.

Motivated by the size and stature of his audience, Jason kept expounding, but after he’d been through the spiel multiple times, handed out at least thirty cards, and answered dozens of questions, his responses grew suddenly curt. He shuffled the cards in his hands. Was this it? When he stared at the ceiling, mouth agape, I took over the presentation. “As you can see, the results far exceeded the expectations of my hypothesis.”

The next time I glanced at Jason, his business cards were strewn across the floor, and each hand was clasped to the opposite shoulder, his elbows draped in a V across his chest. He started rocking, alternately standing on his tiptoes and falling back on his heels. Accustomed to eccentricity, the scientists looked at him out of the corners of their eyes.

Then Jason growled, and the real hallucinations set in. “Fuck you,” he started yelling at the scientists. I flinched at the first one. “Get the fuck out of here!” He was moving erratically, like a bee was after him.

Now my fears were upturned. Maybe I’d given him too much. What if he became violent? What would an overdose of AP5 look like?

“Are you okay?” one of the scientists asked him. Her name tag told me she was Dr. Chelsea Pak from Stanford.

What if he died?

“Get off me!” he yelled.

“Is this normal?” a Dr. Brian Alexander asked. I’d all of a sudden become Jason’s handler.

What if there was an investigation?

What else hadn’t I thought of?

“Shut up with your incantations!” Jason got up close to the scientists, who wiped his spit from their faces. Then, as if they’d bared fangs at him, he jumped back, dabbing his forehead, chest, and shoulders before holding up his two index fingers in the shape of a cross. Like a sprinkler, he moved the cross back and forth, forming a barrier between him and some of the smartest people on the planet. “Christ!” he screamed. “Christ, save me! Save me from Satan’s children.”

“Anyone an MD here?” Dr. Pak asked. Another scientist, Dr. Portia Green, was inching toward Jason, making shushing sounds. As she approached, Jason crumpled to the floor and crawled under the table, wailing hysterical tears, ringing the pathetic tones of a lone child finding himself at the end of the world. “Oh Christ, Oh Christ! Save me from this hellscape.”

As the scientists looked at each other in nervous horror, I slipped Jason’s business cards into their unfeeling hands, feeling fine and redeemed.

But the next morning, I woke in sheets that felt marinated in sweat. What if there was a comeuppance? I’d covered my tracks well, but would Jason suspect me? After all, he knew I had a motive. I spent the next several nights drinking late, feeling by turns monstrous and vindicated, sip by sip.

But time passed, and I was left alone. Vindicated then. I’d done Ladies Mouse proud.

Why had I even doubted myself?

I’m not sure what was more damaging to Jason’s credibility, the delusional hysterics or his invocation of Christ, but, as far as I know, he never got a job in academia.

Dr. Hillbrawn, though, became the director of a major sexual dysfunction research center in Manhattan. Last I heard, none of his products worked better than placebos. But sometimes that can be enough—just thinking things are so can be pretty damn persuasive.

At other times, though, you need every corrective at your disposal.


Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta. Her stories have appeared in Raleigh Review, J Journal, MonkeyBicycle, and Fiction Southeast, among others. One has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Lab Rat Vengeance” is excerpted from her novel-in-progress, As Though to Breathe Were Life.

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

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Published on September 23, 2021 in Fiction, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

FUND WHAT YOU FEAR by Marnie Goodfriend

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

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

FUND WHAT YOU FEAR
by Marnie Goodfriend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

LAST GESTURE by James Miller

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

LAST GESTURE
by James Miller

We eat on the porch
when evening heat recedes.

Lamps hang from the oak.
The Conrad novel rests

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

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

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

alights on the secret agent,
then the near-blankness

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

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

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

He is gone.


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics by Constance McBride

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by laserjMarch 29, 2021

SENSITIVE SKIN
Ceramics by Constance McBride

“Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” — Chantal Joffe

When I was a kid I discovered Seventeen Magazine and it really messed me up. I recently googled it and was shocked to see that it debuted in 1944. I always had the impression that it began in the ‘60s or ‘70s when I was a subscriber. From Wikipedia: “It began as a publication geared toward inspiring teen girls to become model workers and citizens. Soon after its debut, Seventeen took a more fashion and romance oriented approach in presenting its material while promoting self-confidence in young women.” I have to disagree with this idea of promoting self-confidence in young women.

What I think it really did was cause many young women to angst about their faces and their bodies; something I did for a very long time. That and having a beautiful mother led me to focus on the topic of aging in a youth obsessed culture when I began my art practice.

I use clay (a medium historically excluded from the fine art world) to investigate the aging process, a notion rejected by many and specifically linked to failure as it relates to women. Through unidealized female faces and figures, I explore themes of identity and memory; referencing my own body to claim agency as the subject and owner of my work. I hand build my pieces with stoneware and paper clay. Colorants including under glazes, stains, oxides and graphite are applied to a figure’s surface to further magnify a countenance of grace and wisdom seen in senescent women.

I create my work through a lens of empowerment to address contemporary issues faced by women.

Bust (sculpture) of a woman with large red wounds and black wires coming out of them

Lonely Girl Room 315

Close up of woman's face and large wound on head

Lonely Girl Room 315, detail

Back of the sculpted woman's head with black wires pouring out of open wound

Lonely Girl Room 122, back view

Sculpted body in fetal position with arms outstretched

Truth from Within

Front view of sculpted body with large black wound on head

Truth from Within, front view

Sculpted body laying flat on sand next to shells and driftwood

Between Two Worlds

Close up of head and chest of sculpted body

Between Two Worlds, detail

Three faces made of clay stacked on each other horizontally

Whisperers

Side view of three clay faces stacked on top of each other

Whisperers, side view

Sculpture of woman's chest and torso laying horizontally

Time’s Relentless Melt

Works

Lonely Girl Room 315
2013
Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
14″ x 10″ x 6″
(photographer – Mike Healy)

Lonely Girl Room 315, detail
(photographer – Mike Healy)

Lonely Girl Room 122, back view
2013
Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
14″ x 10″ x 6″
(photographer – Sean Deckert)

Truth from Within
2016
Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire
20″ x 36″ x 14″
(Photo courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum)

Truth from Within, front view
(Photographer – Amy Weaver)

Between Two Worlds
2020
Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire, Desert Debris
21″ x 57″ x 9″ (figure)
(Photographer – Joshua Steffy)

Between Two Worlds, detail

Whisperers
2015
Ceramic, Graphite
10″ x 13″ x 11″
(Photographer- Chris Loomis)

Whisperers, side view
(Photographer – Chris Loomis)

Time’s Relentless Melt
2014
Ceramic, Graphite
8″ x 18″ x 7″
(Photograper – Aaron Rothman)

 


Headshot of Constance McBrideA native of Philadelphia, PA, Constance McBride’s work centers on issues most experienced by women. When residing in the Southwest, observations of the desert made a transformative impact on her practice. Her work has been supported by grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum, Philadelphia Sculptors and the Arts Aid PHL program. Museum exhibitions include Phoenix Art Museum and Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art in AZ, Las Cruces Museum of Art in NM, San Angelo Museum of Art in TX, The State Museum of Pennsylvania and Biggs Museum of American Art in DE. Notable gallery exhibitions include Craft Forms at Wayne Art Center and The Clay Studio National in PA, America’s ClayFest International at Blue Line Arts in CA and Beyond the Brickyard at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in MT. McBride’s work has received attention from Yahoo News, Visual Art Source, Philly Artblog, Philadelphia Stories, Schuylkill Valley Journal and the international platform Ceramics Now. Now living and working in Chester Springs, PA, she is actively involved with art communities in the Philadelphia metro area. McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. See more of her work here.

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Thwack. (Click for permalink.)

LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020 by Laura Tanenbaum

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020
by Laura Tanenbaum

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

—Adrienne Rich, “In those Years”

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN by Nick Olson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

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

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN
by Nick Olson

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Fiction, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

Sensitive Skin: Ceramics by Constance McBride

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by laserjMarch 20, 2021

SENSITIVE SKIN:
Ceramics by Constance McBride

 

“Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” – Chantal Joffe

When I was a kid I discovered Seventeen Magazine and it really messed me up. I recently googled it and was shocked to see that it debuted in 1944. I always had the impression that it began in the ‘60s or ‘70s when I was a subscriber.   From Wikipedia: “It began as a publication geared toward inspiring teen girls to become model workers and citizens. Soon after its debut, Seventeen took a more fashion and romance oriented approach in presenting its material while promoting self-confidence in young women.” I have to disagree with this idea of promoting self-confidence in young women.

What I think it really did was cause many young women to angst about their faces and their bodies; something I did for a very long time. That and having a beautiful mother led me to focus on the topic of aging in a youth obsessed culture when I began my art practice.

I use clay (a medium historically excluded from the fine art world) to investigate the aging process, a notion rejected by many and specifically linked to failure as it relates to women. Through unidealized female faces and figures, I explore themes of identity and memory; referencing my own body to claim agency as the subject and owner of my work. I hand build my pieces with stoneware and paper clay. Colorants including under glazes, stains, oxides and graphite are applied to a figure’s surface to further magnify a countenance of grace and wisdom seen in senescent women.

I create my work through a lens of empowerment to address contemporary issues faced by women.

 

[click on any image to enlarge it]

Lonely Girl Room 315

Lonely Girl Room 315, detail

Lonely Girl Room 315, back view

Truth from Within

Truth from Within, front view

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds, detail

Whisperers

Whisperers, back view

Time’s Relentless Melt

 

Works

  1. Lonely Girl Room 315
    2013
    Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
    14″ x 10″ x 6″
    (photographer – Mike Healy)
  2. Lonely Girl Room 315-detail
  3. Lonely Girl Room 122-back view
    (photographer – Sean Deckert)
  4. Truth from Within
    2016
    Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire
    20″ x 36″ x 14″
    (Photo courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum)
  5. Truth from Within – front view
    (Photographer – Amy Weaver)
  6. Between Two Worlds
    2020
    Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire, Desert Debris
    21″ x 57″ x 9″ (figure)
    (Photographer – Joshua Steffy)
  7. Between Two Worlds 3
  8. Whisperers
    2015
    Ceramic, Graphite
    10″ x 13″ x 11″
    (Photographer- Chris Loomis)
  9. Whisperers – back view
  10. Time’s Relentless Melt
    2014
    Ceramic, Graphite
    8″ x 18″ x 7″
    (Photograper – Aaron

A native of Philadelphia, PA, Constance McBride’s work explores themes of identity and memory with an emphasis being placed on issues most experienced by women. When residing in the Southwest, observations of the desert made a transformative impact on her practice. Her work has been supported by grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum, Philadelphia Sculptors and the Arts Aid PHL program. Museum exhibitions include Phoenix Art Museum and Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art in AZ, Las Cruces Museum of Art in NM, San Angelo Museum of Art in TX, The State Museum of Pennsylvania and Biggs Museum of American Art in DE. Notable gallery exhibitions include Craft Forms at Wayne Art Center and The Clay Studio National in PA, America’s ClayFest International at Blue Line Arts in CA and Beyond the Brickyard at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in MT. McBride’s work has received attention from Yahoo News, Visual Art Source, Philly Artblog, Philadelphia Stories, Schuylkill Valley Journal and the international platform Ceramics Now. Now living and working in Chester Springs, PA, she is actively involved with art communities in the Philadelphia metro area. McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. See more of her work here.

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Art, Issue 33, Thwack. (Click for permalink.)

FALL OF MAN, a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackJuly 7, 2022

FALL OF MAN
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Nonfiction, Visual Narrative. (Click for permalink.)

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

AMMONITES by Ann de Forest

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

AMMONITES
by Ann de Forest

mountains once were ocean  evidence coils beneath

our feet  prehistoric curlicues  not yet nautilus  not yet

snail  not yet calcified turban washed up on the beach

………………………void of any tender

……………………………….creature

 

barely old enough to remember  tasmanian devil’s cyclone

wake  cartoon cat’s stiff armed stumbles  vertiginous eyes

hypnotize  pulsing black & white  watch dangles

………………………sways  eyelids

………………………………fall

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

 

crack the case  find the spring  sister crouched beneath

a crib  a finger flick sends silver spiral shimmying up

spinning down  mesmerized by tiny revolutions

mesmerized by bounce and drop

………………………by boing

…………………………..and hum

 

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

 

rattler on the trail  vortex in the toilet bowl  fingers

furled to pack a punch  lobster thrashing in a pot  fallen

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

………………………rolled up between

………………………………your legs

 

tentacles sweep across the map  tempest whirls  turns

one blind eye  twists wind and water  flattening palms pounding

the panhandle  whitening the gulf  your thumbs

………………………too cold to leave

………………………       any imprint

 

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

 

old woman tends her labyrinth  plants boxwood seedlings

ankle high  a lifetime pulling weeds curves her spine

………………………downward

…………………………….eyes drop

 

fiddlehead unfurls to fern  colors swirl across the page

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

high  grows round  the generation’s last survivor

walks her labyrinth  sprigs fill to hedge  path

………………………vanishes

…………………………….as maze

 

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

 

split the pod  find the bean

split the bean  find the finest curling

tendril waiting for instructions to unwind

our own little bean a blip on a screen

………………………nestling in

……………………………a hurricane

 

………………………………………………………………………look down

the rosy sidewalk slabs dotted

with fossils  spinning right under

………………………our eyes

…………..       ………….ammonites

 

………………………………………………………………………look up

obscured by light  expanding

overhead  nebulae  no need

………………………for any

……………………………witness


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Poetry. (Click for permalink.)

I’M NOT SORRY by Ali Kojak

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

I’M NOT SORRY
by Ali Kojak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

LEPIDOPTERA by Lorette C. Luzajic

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

butterfly

LEPIDOPTERA
by Lorette C. Luzajic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

TRADE CRAFT by Jason Jobin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

TRADE CRAFT
by Jason Jobin

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

I begin to get concerned.

◊

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

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

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

◊

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

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

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

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

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

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

◊

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

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

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

The spiders are real.

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Issue 33, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

FISH FEEL NO PAIN by Michelle Renee Hoppe

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

FISH FEEL NO PAIN
by Michelle Renee Hoppe

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

WEBSITE INSECURITY QUESTIONS by David Galef

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

WEBSITE INSECURITY QUESTIONS
by David Galef

What was your first pet’s favorite color?

How many pets have you neglected since then?

This is about your father, isn’t it?

How often do you think about sex?

What did you drink on your first date with Janet?

Who was she there with?

Did you really think he was her cousin?

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

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

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

This is about your mother, isn’t it?

What do you always quarrel with Janet about?

Why?

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

What’s your favorite Netflix show?

What was your favorite show five years ago?

Which show does Janet prefer?

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

What food do you most dislike?

Why does Janet cook it at least twice a week?

When did you hire a maid?

So what’s her name?

How could you not even know her name?

Oh, so you could do a better cleaning job?

Where do you think Janet is right now?

Who really goes grocery shopping that often?

How often do you feel inadequate?

Why are you blaming that on your father?

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

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

Which delicatessen do you go to for your favorite sandwich?

Who’s still willing to have lunch with you?

What is the point of your existence?

What would/will life be like without Janet?

Is that pathetic or what?

Where is Janet right now?

Is that just what she told you?

Did she accompany it with one of those false smiles?

Do these security questions make you feel insecure?

What do you suppose Janet’s security questions are?


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Humor, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

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

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

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

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


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

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

LOOKING UP by Sarah Berger

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

Looking up

LOOKING UP
by Sarah Berger

One thing I did when I was twenty was fall in love with a Roman Catholic boy and get all confused. I was a half-Jew-half-gentile quasi-Lutheran atheist, led as in a trance to the burly God of Ceiling Paintings like a little girl in a gossamer nightgown. The boy was a convert himself, and his zeal was real. He tried to baptize me (baptise; he was British) using the water pitcher in his college dorm room. He cited doctrine. I said no; I hadn’t gone completely off the deep end of the holy water pool. But I did cherish plans for baptism, someday, in my already-flayed heart.

Another thing I did when I was twenty was rise early, brush my teeth in the cavernous bathroom of the 1964 Rome-Olympic-village-turned-youth hostel, dress and pack and leave with a hunk of unsalted bread in my hand, and hasten to the Vatican Museums. I shuffled with the crowd through room after room of staggering opulence, all as prelude to the best room of all, the Sistine Chapel.

I knew the Sistine Chapel was a big deal, but when I summoned thoughts about it, all I really pictured was Michelangelo in the act of painting it: wearing some sort of burlap poncho, yelling at his assistants, getting paint in his eyes and a great stiffness in his neck. I didn’t know that the recently restored colors would flow in saffron and cerulean waves; that the portraits of prophets and sybils and the scenes from Genesis would play like the arias and choruses of Handel’s Messiah; that it was so full of living, fighting, striving people, so full of thigh meat and flippy little penises and women with fantastically muscled arms and shoulders. The prophets and sybils wore the faces of a dozen grouchy uncles and disappointed aunts at Thanksgiving or Passover. They made me think for the first time about the terrible loneliness of prophets. My group was ushered in and allowed fifteen minutes of astonished communion. Then we were ushered out.

When I was in my forties, I revisited the Sistine Chapel. It happened during the coronavirus pandemic, during the interval between Christmas and New Year’s. I found myself toiling over a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, one of a series of famous paintings. Neighbors had exchanged some puzzles via porch-drop some months before, and I’d ended up with this one. Work took a break, school took a break, and I took a break. I lacked the intellectual energy for a new knitting project or even for watching a new TV series. So I opened the box and began staring at tiny puzzle pieces.

I didn’t know I needed to see my heavy-hearted friends Joel and Zechariah once again, and all the bizarre cruelty of the Old Testament God who created and then punished humankind, and dared Abraham to cut off his son’s head, and sent a fish to swallow Jonah (who faces his fate with bravura foreshortening). All while lads and lasses with finely-turned ankles and tennis-pro hip flexors cling to trompe-l’oeil plaster and gawk and giggle and gasp. It is such a deeply weird work of art. And the weirdness drew me right in. Michelangelo, as usual, shows us worse suffering than our own, deeper despair than our own. Even the rampant nakedness—all those sassy babies and imps and tennis pros—gave me something approaching gratitude for the numbing rotation of hoodies I lived in night and day that winter.

I still check in with the Roman Catholic boy. We’ve video-chatted every few weeks since we’ve been in isolation. He’s still Roman Catholic; I’m once again a half-Jewish half-gentile quasi-Lutheran atheist, after a good run at clinging to the rock face of faith. Maybe it’s a ceiling. Maybe it’s only easy to cling to it when you’re paint on plaster, when you’re sitting on a plinth with a scroll in your lap, and nothing ever happens to you but five hundred years of stunned faces staring up at you. Conservators have always wished those staring faces were wearing masks, because their breath is slowly killing you. But you love them (even their breath) because, somehow, you still love humanity.


Sarah Berger author photoSarah Berger is a writer and classical singer living in Baltimore. Her essays and stories have been published in Prometheus Dreaming, Shards/Glass Mountain, Big Whoopie Deal, Passengers Journal, and The Nasiona. She is writing a novel about a cohort of music students graduating in 1965, and she’s currently in the University of Baltimore’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts. More of Sarah’s writing can be found at www.sarahbergersoprano.com/writing.

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

CHERRY BOMB by Todd Clay Stuart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

CHERRY BOMB
by Todd Clay Stuart

The object of the game is to see how long we can hold a lit Cherry Bomb in our hand before tossing it away. Ray-Ray Campbell claims he’s champion of the fucking world. Took the title from his dirtbag dad before a judge sent him up the river on weapons charges. It’s like playing rock, paper, scissors or hot potato, except for the ferocious explosions.

Our moms are at work, so Ray-Ray and I are down at the creek on a hot summer day, raiding crab apple trees and smoking Marlboro Reds bought at the bowling alley from the cigarette vending machine with change swiped from his mom’s purse. Unlike his dad, Ray-Ray was pretty good about sharing things he’d stolen.

We patrol the creek in our bare feet, looking for something to kill, something other than time. It hasn’t rained in days, and the water is still and clear, the minnows and tadpoles skittering away in a frenzy. I’ve stripped down to the camo shorts Mom bought me at the Army surplus store the day before a truck bomb surpluses Dad all over the corrugated steel walls of his barracks in Beirut.

Ray-Ray pulls out a wrinkly, brown paper bag from the back pocket of his cut-off jeans. Hands me a plump red Cherry Bomb with a short green fuse. “Ladies first,” he says.

I take a slow drag off my cigarette, use the tip of it to light the fuse. Sparks fly and at three Mississippi, I flip the explosive into the creek and it blows a bunch of crawdaddies out of the water.

“Not bad for a pussy,” Ray-Ray says.

It’s his turn.

He lights the fuse. Raises his fist in the air triumphantly. Closes his eyes. The cicadas are at full song. In a week they’ll all be dead and gone.

At four Mississippi the Cherry Bomb goes off. Ray-Ray just stands there, stone-faced, swallowing his pain, watching his blown-off thumb sink slowly in the cold, clear water. He holds his hand up to his face and looks at it like he’s not sure if he’s won or lost. 


Todd Clay Stuart Todd Clay Stuart is an emerging American writer from the Midwest. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. His work appears or is forthcoming in Milk Candy Review, New World Writing, Bending Genres, and Emerge Literary Journal. He lives with his wife, daughter, and two loyal but increasingly untrustworthy pets. Find him on Twitter @toddclaystuart and on his website at http://toddclaystuart.com.

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM by Sandra Florence

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM
by Sandra Florence

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

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

◊

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

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

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

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

◊

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

Dream? Water near the pier laps against the dock.

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

“That’s psychic,” I tell her.

“What’s that?” she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?” an old man asks, pointing to her drawing.

Tonight, I go into her room to check. Her small body is there under the covers. I bend low until I feel her breath on my cheek.

We sit in wet sand. July fog. I’ve brought sandwiches and apples for a picnic on the beach, but it’s too cold. The windmill flutters in the tulip garden in Golden Gate Park. She digs in the wet sand, picks up driftwood, seaweed, pieces of shell. I keep my eyes on the green waves crashing under white water and wish I wasn’t afraid to dive in. Surfers ride the waves dangerously close to the rocks. She shudders and says, “Can we go now?” We move into the shelter of the park, and she puts her hand in mine. Squeeze. Quiet.

We get off the trolley and walk up the street to the corner of Arguello and Fulton, and stop in front of the Jefferson Airplane house. It looms large and gloomy. “Are they in there?” she asks. Huge pillars glisten in moonlight as we stand on the sidewalk waiting for music. Nothing. We tiptoe up to the house. She goes all the way up to the windows and peeks in. Nothing.

A card comes in the mail. A picture of a little girl in a pink jumpsuit holding a teddy bear. “Happy Birthday To A Sweet Six-Year-Old.” There’s a check for fifteen dollars in it. She jumps up and down. “See,” she says, holding the card in front of me. “He did remember.” I take the check and think groceries, coffee, cheese, eggs. I do midnight shopping at Cala Foods with the after-hours crowd cruising for someone to take home, and the panhandlers. One old man stretches his hat out to me, and I drop in a dollar.

When I get home, she’s lying in a puddle of moonlight. The card pressed under her cheek.

I read her a story while she soaks in her bath. “Outside,” a story with a girl hero. “We should paint toenails on the tub,” I tell her.

“It’s got claw feet,” she says.

“I’ll give the tub a pedicure,” and I take out red paint and paint each claw. She goes under water giggling. While she soaks, I paint. Vines coming out of the closet. Green vines all the way down the hall. And later in the kitchen, a green zebra appears over the stove. For a whole month, I spend my afternoons painting. There’s a park emerging on one wall in the hallway. Bicycle riders sneak in and out of the trees. Each day when she comes home, I’ve added a new item to the park: a castle, a quarter moon, a ballerina, and a winged horse sailing over the tops of the trees.

“I’ll never be able to let the landlord in here,” I tell her.

“It doesn’t matter. It belongs to us now,” she says.

She looks like her father. Has his round eyes. His mouth and perfect nose. Even his facial expressions. His way of sagging in a chair. His devotion to television. The only thing she has like me is a gold-brown color. I say, “Let’s take a walk. It’s drenched and stormy outside.”

“What about my favorite program where the dad comes home after being gone for years?” she asks.

“He’s not coming,” I tell her and go out into the street. The light is dying and I forget time and the wind pushes me up the hill and I get lost. Dogs rush toward the fence as I pass. It’s dark when I find my way back. She is under a pile of blankets in front of the TV. The blonde ends of her hair poke out. My own daughter who looks nothing like me.

Thirty parents arrive at the school in icy rain to hear about “the rules” and “respecting each other’s space.” We do an exercise, stare into each other’s eyes without blinking. Later, in the science class, a woman stands holding a small boa constrictor. The woman tells me all the kids handle the snake. She offers it to me, but I shake my head and leave the meeting early, thinking this will be the next exercise. I take the long way home through the park. Enormous dahlias unfold in the Tea Garden. Cherry blossoms drop petals into water, and the museum glows in its chalky skin.

At home I find her curled up in my bed. Crayons and magic markers scattered over the floor. She’s been drawing pictures. A girl on horseback. Shooting stars. Rainbows. Flying Sufi hearts. The giant hearts hurl through dark blue skies. She tucks herself down into the pillows. I tell her not to fall asleep in my bed. “I’m not falling asleep,” she says. “I’m just resting my eyes.” Later, I climb into bed beside her. She’s too heavy for me to carry now.

Her grandmother calls to tell her about the new baby girl. “Did you know you have another sister now? Your dad was hoping for a boy, but things don’t always go like we plan.” She hangs up and says, “There are two of them now.”

She writes a story. “The Cool Girl.”

Once there was a girl and her name was Susan and she was 18. And she loved motorcycles. But her mother did not like them. But anyway Susan bought one. The next day Susan and her boyfriend wanted to ride the motorcycle to school. But her mother would not let them. So Susan got very mad. And she and her mother had a fight and her mother would not let her go to school. So Susan thought of a plan. She thought of running away from home. So she did. And when she was riding she got hungry so she stopped at a cafe for a bite of something. And after that she went to France and had a great time and so she lived there. The End.

There are pictures. In one, she’s a dark-haired girl diving off a board into a turquoise pool.

Ballet class in an old Victorian in the Mission. In the purple light of winter, cold wooden floors creak as we walk up three flights of stairs and into a room of mirrors. Legs, white tights. A boy strutting back and forth across the open floor. She whirls around in her black leotard. Catches a glimpse of herself. The teacher is Japanese. Lean muscles. Years of work.

“Hard work,” she says over the heads of the tiny dancers. “She has good feet,” she says, bending to grasp my daughter’s feet in her hands. “Strong feet.” And my daughter’s feet carry her through rain. Through afternoon wind, to the corner store for bread. To the Swedish Bakery for butter cookies. Down littered sidewalks to catch her bus. “Do you pick her up at the bus stop?” Mr. Fiji, her school teacher asks. “Your neighborhood is not safe.” Smiling, he tells me he will teach her to read and speak Japanese.

She speaks to me in Japanese. The words are red and black. Choppy and deep. She presses her hands together, bows her head and says, “Good morning, Mother.” She paints characters on rice paper. Translates for me, “Happiness.” I put the painting in a frame and hang it over our door.

In Japan Town, paper fish fly through the air on sticks, and yellow umbrellas twirl in wind. We buy a pencil box and incense. Drink tea in a shop with red booths. Tea, almond cookies, and spicy crackers. She picks up chopsticks and holds the bowl of rice to her mouth as she eats.

My fortune: “The more you know, the less you understand.”

Hers: “Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.”

In our house on a street that opens to battered storefronts, bars, bookstores, The Purple Heart Thrift Shop, she waits by the phone for him to call. She chews on her thumb, picks up a hand mirror and brushes her hair till the long blonde strands fly up, fan out with electricity. She waits, gives up, puts on a record, and asks her friend who lives upstairs to come and dance with her. Her friend is small with long brown hair. Smaller than my daughter who looks like an awkward fawn as she bows and stretches and turns in the living room with a naïve grace. The two girls whirl and their dance becomes more frenetic, wilder as they fly and laugh and fall. Till the neighbors begin to pound on our floor.

Every day she rides the bus to Valencia and 16th and gets off. She walks home passing Aunt Lil’s Antiques and dodging drunks as she goes. When she comes in the door today, I can hear her hurrying up the stairs. She tells me in a rush, out of breath, “A man tried to get me to go with him. He said come here, angel, I’ve got a lotta money. I ran but he started to come after me, then these two guys chased him. He drove away real fast.”

I call the police, but when they arrive, she can’t tell them anything about the man—just the car—a black Seville. And the money—”hundreds of dollars lying on the front seat.”

She gets a letter from her grandmother. In it there’s a photo of the two girls—one of them about six and the other a toddler. They’re dressed in identical pink jumpsuits. Her grandmother writes a few lines. “Here’s your baby sisters. I thought it was time you got to see them. Aren’t they dolls? And I want you to know I haven’t forgotten you. Love, Gran.”

She studies the photo for a few minutes, holding it tightly in her fingers. Then she turns to me and says, “I don’t know what he sees in them.” She tosses the photo onto the table and begins examining a broken fingernail.

Low riders rumble through the damp air past Mission Dolores and the Integral Yoga Institute where Swami Sachatinanda’s beatific countenance smiles down on his devotees, and just next door old women in old lace cluster under their icons of joy. Church bells and shirtless men returning to their women. My daughter wants to dress in black. To wear the uniform of another culture. A blonde chola in her black derby, black pants, and Chinese slippers. She pulls her hair tightly to one side and pins it back. Takes a red rose and sticks it over her ear. She lines her eyes with black. She looks ten years older than she is. Her lips a deep red. Her friends tell her, “You’re a wannabe.”

“Nam picked a fight with me today,” she says, staring into the mirror rubbing a bruise on her cheek. “We used to be friends, but she belongs to the Wa Chings now. She started yelling at me, calling me honky, saying, come on show me how tough you are. So I did. I forgot all the karate I learned, but I went for her anyway. I was swinging my fists and punching her head. Her friends were yelling, okay girl, okay, okay, stop.”

A boy appears at the bottom of the stairs. He has walked blocks in the rain from the Mission Flatlands where dogs roam freely and women sell tortillas on street corners. Hot and fresh, La Taqueria. Watermelon juice, papaya, mango. He tells me he has come to see my daughter. A silver cross dangles from one ear, and he smiles at me with his eyes.

Boys appear at our door. Black, brown, their hair in cornrows, hairnets, and shower caps. Protecting their most valuable asset. They walk her home from school, come up the stairs quietly, and sit in her room drinking soda and listening to the soul station. Their names are T.J., Bugsy, and Helio. They wear leather pants and Members Only jackets. Their mothers work in factories. They live in Bay Area Hunter’s Point and the Outer Mission. They don’t have money, so they walk and run to get where they’re going, and sometimes they boost what they can’t buy. Helio is wearing his flannels today. A blue bandanna around his forehead. Their names appear all over the city—in the Fillmore and Western Addition. Upper Market and the Embarcadero. “Helio Was Here” and “T.J. the Cool One.” Mexican hieroglyphs bloom on walls covered with bougainvillea. Rise above the salty air.

At school, the girls threaten her. Sometimes on the bus they swear at her, “Girl, you gonna get your ass whipped.” And she tells her grandmother these things, proud of her ability to stir up trouble. The phone rings and her grandmother asks, “Is your boyfriend black? I’ll disown you.”

At the concert the black man at the piano. “I’ve gotta get closer,” she says. She is clapping her white hands. I want to help her find her way down the stairs, through the crowd below. Ushers move toward us. Threatening. Flashlights. I don’t understand. Strange. Alien. My own daughter. The man at the piano, fluid and female as he moves to his own music. His hair braided into a thousand silver beads. He is smiling upward at my daughter.


Sandra Florence taught writing for forty years in Tucson, Arizona, ran two NEH projects in Tucson, and currently writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and blurs the boundaries between them. She has published creative and scholarly work and has just completed a short story collection entitled Everything is Folded.

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Fiction, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

ADDING APPETIZERS
by Claire Oleson

She was sitting on a stool in the basement of the restaurant watching the octopus spin. It was on a cold/cold cycle in the washing machine. This was how they tenderized it, Ellis had told her, overjoyed he had something genuinely interesting to offer. It was this nauseous moving smudge, the octopus, not his telling. She was coming to adore it, the borderless slosh. No, more than that, she could believe she loved it, adjusting her over-the-knee pin-stripe skirt in the cold-damp of the concrete room, it was good. A man she also loved was upstairs, drunk, frying things, cutting real close to his fingers, and working someone else’s shift, and Ellis was on his way down to her, in his unadorned state, in an apron, having been washing dishes, walking down the concrete stairs to finish talking to her about the new crudo option on the menu so she could finish her little write-up for some hyper-local culinary column that at least her dad liked to read. The suckers and the head were a singular hum.

When had she started with the rabbit traps? Seven winters ago when her grandmother had shown her, when they were up north and the snow had settled in whipped-cream heaves on every roof/road/sidewalk/way of getting anywhere at all. It made everybody a trudger. You’d look out past the exhale of farmland and someone would be getting to their truck, in the over-the-knee white, forcing themselves into the day, trudging. No one was delicate. No one was flashing with glimpses of dorsal appendages or outer gills, even though this, she supposed, had been a cold/cold cycle too. That thought was nothing. Her knees looked a little blushed against the stark border of black cloth. Her grandmother had liked French cooking. Her grandmother had tied barbed wire into halos for the rabbit traps and left them in the snow by the wood’s edge. They were attached to something else (Ellis was on his way, she could hear him upstairs), but she could never complete the traps herself. She could only bend and knot the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and pass the circles to her grandmother. Her mother would look on. Her mother would pass through the kitchen in little steps and look at the both of them, her eyes stinging with salt water, as if they were killing a man. Her mother’s whole face, one pang. She might have stopped making the circles if her mother didn’t also love the rabbit, the French rabbit, accompanied by glazed carrots, steaming up a frosted window, beyond which some neighbor was dredging their thighs through the snow. She just made the circles and slid them across the table.

The octopus was still making its own feverish orbits when he finally got down to her. His face was so pleased as it ducked under a ceiling pipe. He got to talk to her, her on the stool in the skirt across from the washer, he got to talk to her about the crudo. She had her recorder out, extended towards him. She looked politely happy. This was only a little worse than if she’d looked completely bored. Ellis knew she cared more for the prep chef who did cocaine sometimes, but the prep chef was upstairs getting paid more, not down here in the concrete enclosure with its stagnant fluorescence and one woman gazing at a thrashing cephalopod; Ellis was lucky. What if he just said he loved her and could get her good dinner, good dinner for years. Sure, he didn’t love her yet, but oh he knew he could muster it up, given some time. The tape recorder had its mouth towards him but hers was slightly parted and facing the washer. She was supposed to be asking him something, for sure, but she was tired and crowding her brain with full-fat pictures of brutal winters. Ones where the snow got over the height of the shed, once, but they’d gone on separating rabbit thigh from bones with their teeth like it hadn’t. Biting like they weren’t in any actual danger. Biting like the pale outsides were just salt hills, not the guts of snowstorms. She was supposed to ask him things, but what did he care. There wasn’t another stool. He sat on the floor in front of her. In between her and the octopus. He took up her sight and smiled. His face was so open, teeth haunting just behind his smile, words about to breach. His face was so open; one pang; she thought.

“So after an hour on rinse, we take them out and they are quickly cleaned, chopped, drizzled with olive oil and smoked sea salt, and accompanied with basil leaves and blood oranges and sectioned grapefruit. It’s plated on a dipped plate, not quite a bowl, but with sloped edges that makes a wide pool of it all. Everything is, absolutely, sliced as thinly as feasible. We take the tentacles through a deli meat slicer. They should be like meat-paper. It’s clean and refreshing on the palate. It’s a beautiful opener to a meal, scrapes the long day out of your mouth and sparks it with sodium and citrus.” She was looking at him now, realizing he wanted, almost, to just write the column himself. That no one said “sparked” unless they thought up the word beforehand, hauling it through their brain like an extra body, an extra life to push into the light. It would be a trim and sparse paragraph, thin and shoved to the corner, probably no wider than the sliced crudo itself, certainly not terribly thicker, if he’d meant what he’d said about paper. Okay, why not let him basically do it, him and all his hoping at her.

Her grandmother’s neighbor had come in weeping once. Around her ankle: pinching wire, and out of her grandmother: so many apologies, then an invite to dinner. An invite to the rabbit her neighbor could have been. Her grandmother kneeled and cut the wire off of the jeaned ankle. Nothing had broken skin, but the area was strained and swollen. Her grandmother had traced the red circle with the pad of her thumb, checking. She had been thinking that her grandmother ought to just marry this neighbor. When had her grandfather died? Well before she herself knew how to make halos for rabbits, that was certain.

Just look at her, the neighbor, sitting while a white-haired guilt kneeled by her legs. She was sitting and not crying and trying to let the feeling of being an almost-animal fizzle off her leg. Someone had to marry her. The wet sat in her eyes, poised bright like someone’s waiting child in a too-large chair.

“Is it good?” She pushed the recorder forward half an inch. It was the laziest, most inane question. He knew that. He could love her. Give him six months. Someone, give him six months.

“What? Oh, yeah, I mean I think it’s superb, and I have had it. They, I guess we, test all the new menu additions with the entire kitchen staff. Even if you’re only washing dishes, you get to eat the entire restaurant. It’s truly a stunner and certainly a very unique dish to have offered this far from the coast. I assure you,” he placed a palm on the washer window behind him, “that despite the distance, the octopus is incredibly fresh. Now, it’s not the Italian coast by any means, but show me better in small-town Montana and I’ll quit working here and move in with you.” He hadn’t meant it. Or sure, he had, but he hadn’t meant to mean it. She brushed it off like it was nothing, like it was stray hair on her shoulder, like he wouldn’t absolutely take a blushed knee in this basement and set a hand on her skirted leg and talk himself into already loving her. He watched her write something down about smoked salt. His palm thrummed. It was still on the glass, blocking the picture.

Something upstairs crashed. Something upstairs yelled and balked at flashing oil. What she was in love with was above them, she remembered. He took his hand off the glass and raised a finger. He ran up the stairs under a deluge of swears. He ran up the stairs to where she actually held some adoration. He started swearing along with them, to make it better, to slide into the hurt of the room like a knife into a block. The cycle stopped. The body stilled and slumped. The washing machine beeped four blissful robotic notes.

By the time the day was cleaned, by the time any glow bled out of view of the singular basement-alley window and Ellis came back down to her with new oil burns on his wrists and one on his neck that he’d have to find later, she would already be holding the octopus in her lap. She would be washing fingertips down its legs to check for bleeding, to check for signs of being an animal. Her hair would linger and stick to its damp bulbous head. A few blonde tips would cling to the wet of a cornea when she finally turned to find his face, his coming down.


Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson is a Brooklyn-based writer hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She’s an alum of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the L.A. Review of Books, and Newfound Press, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize and author of the chapbook Things From the Creek We Could Have Been. 

 

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Fiction, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

THE LOBSTER by Gabby Capone

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

Pink Lobster

THE LOBSTER
by Gabby Capone

It was winter, mid-December, much too cold to leave him there—the lobster, on my porch. I don’t know how he got there, whether he’d walked or hailed a cab. But it was snowing, and he looked so sad, bright red with embarrassment to ask for my help. And so I decided, I would open my door instead of my arms. I’ve heard that lobsters don’t like to be hugged. He scuttled over the threshold, leaving a damp trail in his wake.

For a few moments we sat at the dining table, staring at each other from either end. I offered to cut the rubber bands from his claws, “You’ll be so much more comfortable that way,” I told him as I reached for my kitchen shears. He didn’t answer, but I could’ve sworn he let out a small sigh of relief when the scissors sliced through his elastic cuffs.

“I’d like you to stay here,” I started, “with me.” I waited for his answer, chest full and heavy—a fishbowl hidden inside my rib cage. Silence leaked into the room. We were quiet for a long time, and at one point, I was certain he was unable to speak. “You need to kill me,” he said, “but I might hurt you. You freed my claws.” My chest deflated, confusion and sadness tapped at the glass of the fishbowl. “No. I can’t kill you, why would I do something like that?” He did not answer this time. He just stared at me with sad, glazy lobster eyes.

Lobsters are not good pets. I wasn’t suited to care for him. He wasn’t suited to be cared for. So we sat, in my warm kitchen, discussing the plan for his demise. “I could buy lobster anesthesia, then boil you,” I offered. The lobster winced. “I could take a sharp knife through your underbelly, hack through the softest spots.” Again, he refused. “I don’t want to kill you,” I whispered, placing my palms flat against the wooden table. “You have to. You know you have to,” the lobster said.

We drove to the beach, my car racing against the setting sun. I left the windows down for fresh air. I thought it would make me feel better—lighter, but it didn’t. As we got closer, the smell of the sea got stronger, and it only made me sadder. The lobster sat in my passenger seat, toying with the radio. The sound of static and washed-out voices came and went. I didn’t even mind that he was getting the leather wet. It didn’t bother me that my car would smell like sand for weeks. We drove for what felt like a long time.

“I’m going to miss you,” I smiled sadly, turning off the engine. He wouldn’t look at me. He just kept trying to open the door. “I hope you survive this,” I said, allowing him to crawl out of the car and onto the pavement. “You too,” he called from over his shoulder, heading towards the wetness and salt. Lobsters that have been captured cannot survive in the wild. The ocean will reject them, and they will die.

Sometimes, you will find a lobster on your doorstep. And you’ll want to love him, but won’t know how.


Gabby Capone is a sophomore at New York University. She has a passion for writing, reading, and creating. Gabby is majoring in English Education and hopes to teach creative writing in the future. Poetry and literature exist at the center of her life, alongside her family and her loved ones.

 

 

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33. (Click for permalink.)

WE’VE WAITED FOR VACCINES by Rebecca Entel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by thwackMarch 29, 2021

Graphic design image of title, two syringes, and author name

WE’VE WAITED FOR VACCINES
by Rebecca Entel

Of when my father had polio, I’ve heard disjointed details but no narrative. Scalding baths, quarantine, how many adults held him down for the spinal tap, the iron lung, paralysis that one day disappeared.

In the world outside, my grandmother lengthened his Hebrew name with Chaim, Life, and my grandfather delivered bread through the night. Under the covers, his sister plucked the braces from her teeth with scissors.

Each time visiting hours ended, my grandparents stood outside the hospital staring up at a window.

Polio came to him in 1954. The vaccine came to him in 1955.

We’ve spoken of 2020 itself as a golem. We’ve started posting pictures of injections or envious responses to others’ pictures of injections.

No social media archive exists indicating whether my grandparents dreamt of a vaccine/knew it was coming/raged it had come belatedly for their kid/had never felt such relief when it came, even when they thought they could feel no more relief than three of them leaving the hospital, six legs walking.

There’s one photograph of the bicycle bought for him after, with pooled money, and in it my father’s blurry with motion.

We’ve let words into our hourly vocabulary: quarantine, distancing, strains, herd, cases. Daily math problems so vast we can’t see each individual number. We’ve said/meant we, but we’ve been mostly wrong.

Both of my parents remember waiting their turn at school for the shot. When I ask them for memories of receiving the vaccine, that’s the only one: standing in line.

My mother tells me I had the Sabin oral vaccine—drops on my tongue—rather than the Salk injection. She tells me to google, just for curiosity’s sake, the sugar cube version. My mind conjures an image of children not chewing or sucking but letting the cube slowly, slowly dissolve. Thinking of it, I can feel it. A year of sheltering has been something like this: mouth, tongue, et cetera, holding still but activating in anticipation of the sweet.

We’ve reached for metaphors.

Salivating sounds bestial, carnal, silly. I mean more like a waiting that demands all focus. I mean more like a wanting that can’t be helped.


Headshot of Rebecca Entel Rebecca Entel is the author of the novel Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Her short stories and essays have been published in such journals as Catapult, Guernica, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, and Cleaver. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches U.S. literature, Caribbean literature, creative writing, and the literature of social justice. You can find her at rebeccaentel.com, on Twitter @rebeccaentel, and on Instagram @rebeccaentel.

 

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Published on March 29, 2021 in Flash, Issue 33, Nonfiction. (Click for permalink.)

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Dear June, Since the start of this pandemic, I have eaten more and exercised less, and have gone from a comfortable size 10 to a tight size 16. In July and early August, when the world seemed to be opening up again, I did get out and move around more, but my destinations often included bars and ice cream shops, and things only got worse. I live in a small apartment with almost no closet space. I know part of this is in my mind, but it often seems that my place is bursting at the seams with “thin clothes.”  ...
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