Category Archives: Issue 37

EXTRA CREDIT by Colette Parris

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EXTRA CREDIT
by Colette Parris

The three of us together constitute a smidge of impurity in what would otherwise be an unadulterated cup of salt. Not the Himalania Fine Pink Salt that will run you $8.99 for ten ounces at Whole Foods. (That’s right. I just googled the price of pink salt at Whole Foods, because I’m all about precision. And while I was at it, I checked to see if gluten-free blueberry waffles are back in stock. Alas, no.) I mean the regular iodized salt that you can get for less than a dollar at Target, the salt that comes in the dark blue cylinder with the yellow-dress girl and her wholly unnecessary umbrella. What do umbrellas have to do with salt? For that matter, what do girls in yellow dresses have to do with salt?

I digress.

By “the three of us,” I mean me, Lakeisha, and Annette. I am Patrice. Five foot three at best on a dreaded “high heels necessary” day, I have a snub nose, average body, shoulder-length braids, thick eyebrows, and red cat-eyes glasses. Lakeisha, whose willowy frame, heart-shaped face, hazel eyes, naturally pouty lips, and relatively well-behaved long hair would cause me to hate her if we weren’t besties, is at the low end of model height. Annette, with her signature bun and pearls, has an “AKA all the way” vibe. A little bit plumper than me and glasses-free, she is my height twin. We are all in our late twenties.

I am not going to describe my complexion, or either of theirs, as cinnamon, cardamom, caramel, chocolate, cocoa, coconut (shell, obviously), coffee, or anything else that begins with c and might make one hungry or thirsty if mentioned. Nor is it necessary to discuss potting soil or paper bags. Suffice it to say that we are each conclusively in the brown family, but we are not the same shade.

The three of us are law clerks at a courthouse in a newly purple state. I started last year. Lakeisha, who already had several months of clerking while black under her belt (“Really? You’re a law clerk? To a federal judge? In this building? Huh.”) when I arrived, encountered me in the elevator during my first week, stared conspicuously at my I.D. card, smiled widely, and said, “We are going to have so. Much. Fun.” She wasn’t wrong. Annette joined us around six months ago, and we seamlessly became Destiny’s Child (Michelle Williams era), the legal version.

The first time I was mistaken for Lakeisha, I had been working at the courthouse for about three weeks. I was confused but flattered, because hello, Lakeisha is hot. And then it happened again. And again. The reverse was also happening on a regular basis, which I assume was less exciting for Lakeisha; while I’m on the right side of presentable, ‘hot’ would be an exaggeration. Annette’s arrival did not help matters. It became axiomatic that on any weekday ending in y, at least one of us would be misaddressed by day’s end.

A meeting was held. (No, we did not go to H.R. Don’t be ridiculous.) We sat at a table in the courtyard during lunch hour, eating salads and casting envious looks at two male clerks devouring meatball subs nearby. Between dainty bites of kale and arugula, we determined that the problem would not go away and that we would need to make the best of it. We ruminated for some time over what making the best of it would entail.

It was Annette who first realized the glorious benefit of our coworkers’ ineptitude with respect to cross-racial identification. Her fork, loaded with greens and fat-free balsamic vinaigrette, froze halfway between her plate and her precisely rouged lips, and a Cheshire cat grin slowly meandered across the bottom half of her face. “Oh,” she said as she slowly returned her fork to her plate. “Oh, ladies, we’ve been looking at this all wrong. This is a gift.”

Lakeisha and I simultaneously cocked our heads to the left. “How so?” I ventured.

“Think about it. What is the absolute worst part of this job?”

Lakeisha beat me to the punch. “The stupid, interminable, purportedly optional but really mandatory after-work events.”

Allow me to clarify. Much to our consternation, our coworkers are rabidly social. There are happy hours. There are soirees to honor milestones reached by various judges. There are birthday celebrations, baby showers, holiday parties. Sadly, the list continues. These gatherings are not our jam. Our workdays are beyond exhausting. Not only do we spend long hours navigating the labyrinthian maze that is federal law in order to make our judges look good, but we do it while dealing with the usual, hourly micro-aggressions (with instances of blatant disrespect sprinkled in). When the sun finally sets, our instinct is to flee to our respective sanctuaries to lick our wounds and prepare to do battle yet again the following day. However, in order to avoid hearing that kiss-of-death phrase—“not team players”—applied to any of us, we had been dragging ourselves to these affairs. Good times were not being had.

“Exactly. Now think about this. Why do we all need to show up for this nonsense? These fools can’t tell us apart. If only one of us goes to an event, we all get team-player credit.”

Lakeisha and I mulled this over and saw no flaw in Annette’s reasoning. I whipped out a pen and notepad, and with input from my fellow Destiny’s Child members, listed all events scheduled for the next month under the heading “I’d Rather Poke My Eye Out With Any Object (Sharp Or Dull, Doesn’t Matter) Than Attend The Following.” We split the list into thirds.

Three weeks into Project Extra Credit, things are going swimmingly. I was able to avoid, among other things, a retirement party for a secretary who always looked astonished when she saw me enter the code for the employee-only bathroom. Of course, Annette and Lakeisha dodged a bullet when I alone attended Judge Foxwood’s coma-inducing lecture on preemption. I doubt that they fully appreciate my sacrifice. But that’s okay.

I am currently walking across the lobby with my co-clerk, Jennifer, a green-eyed, no-nonsense brunette. While we haven’t officially crossed over to close friend status yet, Jennifer and I get along exceedingly well, and I’m fairly certain about her stance on lives that matter (although we’ve really only danced around the topic). We are on our way to the florist to select a bouquet for our judge, whose birthday is approaching.

Halfway to the lobby exit, we are waylaid by Mary, one of the court reporters. “Jennifer!” she gushes, her alabaster cheeks pinkening with pleasure. “Patrice!” she doubly gushes. “It was so nice to see you at Rhonda’s shower! We love it when the law clerks show up to these things!”

“Happy to be there.” I smile.

After a brief coughing fit, Jennifer murmurs, “Same. It was a really nice affair.”

Additional pleasantries follow, and then we delicately extricate ourselves from Mary’s clutches. Once outside, Jennifer looks at me quizzically. “What was that all about? I was at that shower from the beginning to the bitter end. You most definitely were not. For any part of it.”

True. Rhonda’s shower had been Annette’s gig.

“Well, if you must know….” I proceed to explain Project Extra Credit and its origins, confident that even if Jennifer doesn’t approve, she won’t rat us out. Winding down, I do a little dance and say, “And now I can add the tenth-floor-Mary moment to our list of successes to date.”

I glance over at Jennifer. She has the most peculiar expression on her face, and for a moment my heart skips a beat and I wonder if I have this all wrong. I have visions of her outing the three of us to each of our judges and bad things following. And then she sits on a nearby bench and laughs and laughs. And then she laughs some more.

I am now relieved but perplexed. “Okay, I know it’s kind of funny, but is it really that funny?”

“Oh,” says Jennifer. “It is. It really is. That wasn’t Mary the court reporter in the lobby. It was Barbara from payroll.”

Colette Parris is a Caribbean-American attorney who returned to her literary roots during the pandemic. She is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in Streetlight Magazine, Vestal Review, BigCityLit, Lunch Ticket, Burningword Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine (forthcoming), and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Find her on Twitter @colettepjd.

 

ODE ON BRAISES (AND ODES) by Gregory Emilio

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ODE ON BRAISES (AND ODES)
by Gregory Emilio

For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 106,” lines 13-14

“Rhyme,” according to the poet and classicist A.E. Stallings, “is an irrational, sensual link between two words. It is chemical. It is alchemical” (Stallings 2009). It is fascinating to think of how words are connected by sound—that similar sounding words may be drawn to each other like magnets. Praise and days: some subterranean, implicit contract, light giving unto light, phoneme of the first letter, the sound of dawn. And to think that consonants and vowels are all we have to work with to create the kindred spirits of rhymes. Vowels expand, billow up with breath, while consonants crack open and/or shear off the edges. In the word “praise,” the vowel sound “a” gets buoyed up by the plosive “p,” sustained for half a breath, held aloft, before “s,” and the whole sonic enterprise, goes tiptoeing away. A word as graceful (and powerful) as a ballet dancer’s leap. Sounds matter, and when they get together, gather into meaning.

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The vowel I find most appealing is perhaps the easiest to pronounce. Rhyming across almost all the parts of speech—go, slow, so, though—oh is an aural and visual (and visceral) representation of the open mouth: a puff of breath, by turns a gasp of pleasure or a sigh of despair. Oh, that’s delicious. Oh, how terrible. O, on the other hand, is a bit different, distinct from oh, its homonym cousin. O, that most useful of interjections in the odes of the Romantics, floats up like a balloon, drifting toward the poets’ objects of praise.

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Keats: “O, Attic shape!”

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Shelley: “O, wild West Wind”

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Me: “O, braised duck legs!”

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I had a revelation around the middle of my life: I began to understand the importance of slow cooking. The kind of cooking you plan ahead for, the kind that deepens the whole house with its smells over the course of an afternoon. As a young home cook, all I did was rush: eggs barely over easy, seared steaks after final exams, impromptu carbonara after last call. But around my thirties, something clicked and I slowed down. Was mortality whispering in my ear? Had the carrot-snapping thwack of my ACL tearing on the soccer pitch set off a ripple effect warning me of the dangers of sprinting? Or had I simply exhausted the limits of cooking things a la minute? Of course, all are true. But I’d like to think it also had something to do with my evolving attitude toward poetry. Just as I used to throw a meal together at the last minute, I wrote most of my poetry on the fly, whenever the intensity of a feeling or an image reached its boiling point. I took Frank O’Hara’s advice in “Personism: A Manifesto” as a personal mantra: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep’” (1995: 498).

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Simply defined, to braise is to cook something slowly in liquid. It’s a technique that turns tough cuts—shanks, short ribs, cubes of beef chuck, root vegetables—into fork-tender morsels. The liquid is most often wine—as in coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon—or stock. And it’s the latter that’s perhaps most rewarding for the enterprise of slow home cooking. When you start to make your own stock, you begin to control your culinary destiny. Fennel fronds, onion ends, rinds of parm, mushroom stems, chicken discards—all can conspire over the course of an afternoon to give you the basic currency of a good braise. When the liquid is reduced and concentrated, when the bones give like twigs and the vegetables are mush to the touch, when the stock is strained, divvied into quart containers, dated and labeled and stored in the freezer for the uncertain future, you will feel a sense of self-reliance and accomplishment tantamount to getting out the first draft of a good poem or story. Fortunes may rise or fall, but you will rest with the certitude of your stock, more tangible than money in the bank. Risotto, chicken soup, wildly delicious sauces, and, of course, a panoply of braises are now within your reach.

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I’ve come to an age where I premeditate as much as possible, tasks edible or otherwise. I used to make almost daily trips to the grocery store, but when the pandemic hit and getting groceries became a perilous, postapocalyptic excursion, I had to plot out at least a week’s worth of meals. I’d read recipes, forecast weather, moods, temperaments, and then I’d make a list. This act of slowing down coincided, as I said before, with a slower approach to poetry. I went back and dug into form, rhyme, classics, trying to expand my repertoire. Composing a first draft now took days—and only after the subject or conceit was conceived. Before diving in, I’d ask questions, and I’d make decisions. Free verse or closed form? Sonnet or sapphics? To rhyme or not to rhyme? Like any dutiful cook, I’d break down the bones into stock. I’d read and I’d plot. I’d sharpen my knives. This isn’t to say the poems are any better or that this is the way to do it. I’m just becoming more attuned to my own tastes and preferences. And when I take my time, when I cook a poem, as it were, low and slow, I become more present and more predisposed to praise.

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There’s an irresistible, meditative quality to braises. Given over to the slow, deliberate task of chopping vegetables, thawing your stock, reading the recipe, rereading the recipe, seasoning your meat, searing, developing flavors at the bottom of the pot, adding aromatic mirepoix, deglazing the sedimentary fond, then putting it all together in the oven with time, you will find the calm, condensed center of the universe. You will free yourself up to think, to pause, to go for a jog, to read, or watch a movie, or daydream, or clean, all while getting dinner (damn good dinner) done.

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It might seem a far-fetched comparison, but Keats also went on his nerve. It can’t be a coincidence that his best work—the great odes—are written less than two years before his death, in full tubercular awareness. Nor should it be surprising that in his despair he turned to poems of praise. “When old age shall this generation waste,” he addresses the urn, “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man” (lines 55-57). This doomed young man had his eyes on the clock, but he didn’t rush, and he didn’t pity himself, knowing that there were greater woes than his own. I like to think that the formal features of the Horatian Ode—stanzaic order, meter, and rhyme—were like a recipe to him: a set of suggestions, malleable guidelines, never dogma. Nightingale, funeral urn, autumn: these were some of the subjects of his praise—artifacts, seasons, sensations treated to his hyper-articulate ooh’s, aah’s, and, of course, O’s. To study Keats is to see that with enough time and attention, anything is worthy of poetry. I have to imagine he liked slowly cooked foods—deep stews, hearty shepherd’s pies. I wish I could have cooked for him.

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“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” quips Emily Dickinson, “I know that is poetry” (1891). This is how I feel about the best meals, the most singular bites. Case in point, the braised duck legs I cooked last night, per Mark Bittman’s minimalist recipe at NYT Cooking. A simple one-pan dish of mirepoix, duck legs, and stock. Like so many good recipes, it all comes down to technique, patience, and order of operations. The legs go in first, skin-down, in a ripping hot skillet. This is your chance, your one chance, to get them golden, burnished, crackly-crisp, and to render out the rich fat that duck’s famous for. Remove the legs. Then sweat and caramelize the veggies in said fat. Then return the duck to the aromatic vegetables. Then add enough chicken stock (homemade, I cannot stress this enough) to immerse, but not submerge, the legs, and into the oven for a couple hours at 325 degrees. What emerges on the other side of this passage of time almost smells of dark chocolate, earthy and deep. The hash of infused vegetables glowing with flavor, soft as candlelight. And the duck’s skin crisp as the glassy surface of Crème Brule, and almost as sweet—a stark contrast to the tender, tenebrous flesh.

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The top of your head taken off: a Zen Koan-like shock to the tastebuds; a lightning strike to the brain.

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“Rhymes may be so far apart, you cannot hear them,” says Stallings, “but they can hear each other, as if whispering on a toy telephone made of two paper cups and a length of string” (2009). I’ve tried to hold them far apart, but I assume you saw them right from the start. Praise and braise, hiding in plain sight. All this has been an attempt to say that there’s a reason for this rhyme—that it means something. Like the martyrs for truth and beauty buried in Dickinson’s adjoining rooms, they are kith and kin, whispering back and forth all night, until the glacial moss of eternity renders them one and the same. Let us now praise famous braises is what I’ve been trying to say.

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But to eat and be done is never enough. We must reflect, give back to the things we eat for our thoughts. We must sing for our next supper because we might not get one. To end with the far-flung repetition of a prayer seems fitting. We might not catch the echo of the rhymes, as distant as they are, but as Stallings says, they can hear each other. In the plague-haunted days of the 17th century, Shakespeare was prescient enough to declare that we “have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.” The declaration is somewhat ironic, coming from one so well-versed in the predilections of praise. Over four hundred years later, at the beginning of the new millennium, the Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kaminsky echoes Shakespeare succinctly in his “Author’s Prayer.” Directly addressing God, the speaker gives us this:

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

(2004: lines 14-18)

Twenty years later, hunkered down in our own plague-ridden epoch, when we are so often told that we live in an evil, uncertain time (indeed we do), we would do well to remember this prayer. Praise, like a good braise, is best served on the darkest, the coldest of days.

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References

Bittman, Mark. “Crisp-Braised Duck Legs with Aromatic Vegetables.” NYT Cooking, The New York Times, https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017472-crisp-braised-duck-legs-with-aromatic-vegetables. Accessed 15 November 2021.

Dickinson, Emily. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” The Atlantic, 1891, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1891/10/emily-dickinsons-letters/306524/. Accessed 14 November 2021.

Kaminsky, Ilya. “Author’s Prayer.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53850/authors-prayer. Accessed 20 November 2021.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn. Accessed 20 November 2021.

O’Hara, Frank. “Personism: A Manifesto.” In The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen, 498-499. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 106: When in the chronicle of wasted time.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45102/sonnet-106-when-in-the-chronicle-of-wasted-time. Accessed 21 November 2021.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ode to the West Wind.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45134/ode-to-the-west-wind. Accessed 21 November 2021.

Stallings, A.E. “Presto Manifesto.” Poetry Foundation, 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69202/presto-manifesto-.

Greg Emilio author headshotGregory Emilio is a poet, cook, and critic living in Atlanta. His poems and essays appear in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, North American Review, [PANK], Tupelo Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. Kitchen Apocrypha, his debut collection of poetry, will be published by Able Muse Press in 2022.

BROOD X by Gwen Mullins

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BROOD X
by Gwen Mullins

Brood X is the largest brood of 17-year cicadas. This brood is found in three separate areas centering around Pennsylvania and northern Virginia, Indiana, and eastern Tennessee. The largest emergence of Brood X appears as adults only once every 17 years.
—National Park Service

Back then, everyone still called me Gwendy, so it was in the body-in-progress of thirteen-year-old Gwendy that I first encountered the cicadas of Brood X. The emerging insects, like my boy cousins, were four years my senior. I was intrigued but disgusted by the intricate carapaces the cicadas left behind, and a delicious tingle of fear shivered across my skin when the living bugs slapped against my legs or tangled in my hair, their unwieldy, red-eyed forms a harbinger of anxieties that had not yet surfaced.

I spent a lot of time alone in those days—meandering through the town that is, even now, defined by the train that hums through it without stopping.

Once, as I examined a hard little sculpture—I always thought of them as sculpted, if not by a human, then by some other intelligent design—that clung to the bark of an oak, one of my cousins slipped up behind me, plucked the abandoned husk from the tree, crushed it in his palm. He laughed, just as he did when he caught lightning bugs and smeared their lit bodies on his cheeks for the fleeting effect of glow-in-the-dark warpaint. The fragments of the husk’s leg curled like clipped fingernails in his dirty palm, and the crushing of the empty vessel that once held the insect’s soft body felt deeply personal. I wanted to apologize for something I didn’t understand.

The year of that cicada summer, I learned to avoid being alone with that particular cousin, even as he endeavored to draw me to him, even as I longed to be touched.

Now, at forty-seven, I flinch at the damp, scratching smack of the living cicadas as they wing toward immortality, blinded by lust and light, though I no longer fear them or their abandoned exoskeletons. Just yesterday I came upon one of their husks, and I allowed myself to be lost for a moment in examination in the same way I had when I’d been called Gwendy. There was the amber bulge that covered the cicada’s scarlet eyes, the opening in the back as decisively split as my own body when my children came screaming out.

I examine the husk in my palm, turn it this way and that in the light.

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I am thirteen again, my grandmother calling me in for a summer supper of fried potatoes and slices of red tomatoes whose sides have fissured with swelling flesh. My hair is long and never quite clean, and I am as awkward and vulnerable as the cicadas before their wings have set and their new bodies have hardened. All through that summer, I sought out the absurd molts of the insects, collecting and marching their dried forms along a windowsill until my aunt, dust cloth in hand, let out a mild shriek at the sight of the cicada menagerie and swept them all into the trash.

“They carry germs,” Auntie insisted.

I didn’t tell her that my cousin Taffy Shea and I played with them, along with our Barbies and my discount-store Dolly Parton doll. The brown husks served, depending on the scene we created, as devoted pets, attacking marauders, miniature ponies, or, occasionally, the roast beast at dollhouse dinners, and broken bits of their whisper-crunch bodies mingled with the tiny plastic shoes and staticky toy hairbrushes in a box Taffy Shea had covered in pink glitter and gold heart stickers. Something about the form of the dolls, with their perfect but sexless manufactured shapes, next to the bulging eyes and menacing foreclaws of the cicadas made us delightfully uneasy, just like we felt when we examined a half-formed, bruise-eyed chick coiled beside the broken but still bluely exquisite robin’s egg.

Beauty means nothing in a vacuum.

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The wind picks up, and I am thirty. Rather than parting branches, pointing at delicate brown husks so that my young children could marvel at the ugliness left behind by the nymphs after their seventeen-year hibernation, I work toward a promotion at a job I will never love, under a boss I probably shouldn’t be. My marriage stumbles under the weight of unspoken-yet-somehow-still-broken expectations. We argue over how to teach our son to fold towels and who’s in charge of dinner on Wednesdays and how much to help with our daughter’s science project that’s due tomorrow. My husband’s heart collects plaque, steady and silent. The screams of the cicadas echo the brooding in my own head, and I am consumed by fears of mediocrity and mortality, as if fear and loathing could make such human notions less menacing.

Like my mother and grandmother before me, I am mired in a cycle of eating procreating and striving striving striving toward a goal that, unlike the cicadas, has not been encrypted in me and yet shimmers, teasing, at the edges of my vision in the quiet moments before sleep. The weight of the frenzied, corporeal demands of work and children and sex and what passes for love bury me in obligation. These are the hard years, and I understand why the cicadas spend so much of their lives underground, their skin thickening with each passing year, growing silently toward a dream of light, of purpose.

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It’s hot outside, or perhaps it’s only hot flashes again, but I am, at last, only me, the same age Kerouac was when he died, and I know that beauty is only enhanced by that which is broken and unbeautiful.

The cigarette burn on my grandmother’s green watered-silk blouse.

The silver-capped teeth of a laughing child raised on Mountain Dew and saltines.

The slow-healing scar on my husband’s chest from where they cracked him open to replace his clogged arteries.

The brittle husks, the wet flapping bodies, the red eyes that almost seem to glow.

These things seem designed to be as ugly and divine as my own soul. Bugs and Barbies and cousins and lovers conflate, and I see, finally, that beauty is not relative, as I thought when I was thirteen, as I still thought when I was thirty. Beauty, is, I think, an obsolete notion.

I recall an old songwriters’ voice made husky by cigarettes and gas-station whiskey and the sticky, unfragile wings of the cicadas when they first unfurl.

The cracks around my heart and the creases around my eyes remind me of the dark times when I neglected to pay attention, to appreciate the gifts of sunlight and yellow-tipped leaves and coffee-scented mornings.

I don’t know if I’ve always known this truth, or if I learned it from the cicadas of Brood X, but I am both broken and whole.

Gwen Mullins’ work has been selected for the Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2022, and her stories and essays have been featured in New Ohio Review, African American Review, The Bitter Southerner, The New Guard, PANK, and Green Mountains Review, among others. She is currently working on her second novel as well as a short story collection. In the winter of 2020-21, she served as the Writer in Residence for the Kerouac Project in Orlando. She works with writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and she holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

 

SKATE HAVEN by Amy R. Martin

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SKATE HAVEN
by Amy R. Martin

I’m already roller skating when the DJ announces it’s time for a “Couples Skate” and I see the sign light up on the wall next to the clock and the rink lights dim and I feel a whoosh and Sean—the boy who pops wheelies in front of my house every summer morning on his Schwinn while I eat Lucky Charms and watch The Richard Simmons Show, the boy who one day soon will give me an ID bracelet that I will have to return because my mom will say I’m too young and won’t let me keep it, the boy who one day after high school will move to Texas with a red-haired girl who everyone will call a slut and far worse things besides—reaches his hand out to me. He is the best athlete at school, and he has light brown skin and hazel eyes and a ready white smile and a mini-afro and his mom’s white and his dad’s black and I think that’s cool and at his birthday party I won a jigsaw puzzle of the United States of America and in fourth grade he used to take a break from playing kickball to “rescue” me from the top of the jungle gym when I called his name and also in fourth grade he asked me to “go” with him and I asked him, “Where?” I take his hand, and we start to skate side-by-side to Lionel Richie’s hit “Hello” while the strobe lights make rotating geometric patterns on the polished wood-paneled floor, which is soft and sticky and luminous. I don’t look at Sean, not once, just feel the jostling of his sweaty hand in mine, the cool air on my hot red cheeks and neck, the deep dark stirrings of something curling in the pit of my stomach, and I look over at my mom sitting, still in her wool coat, at one of the garish picnic tables by the snack bar; she’s got a Kent cigarette between two fingers, a tattered black purse from Hecht’s Department Store beside her, and before her a Diet Coke in a Styrofoam cup, a yellow legal pad, and a thick stack of white paper, a medical manuscript that she’s copyediting with a red pencil. Sean and I go around and around and around, counter-clockwise, trying not to fall but falling just the same. It’s 1984, and I’m at Skate Haven, but it might as well be called Skate Heaven, because that’s where I am, heaven, or as close to it as I can get at thirteen. As Richie sings his last, we release our sticky fingers without once looking at each other and skate to opposite sides of the rink, where I dodge a creeper who years later will be arrested for pedophilia and I slam my body onto the bench across from my mother, the sweat from the ends of my hair flinging droplets onto my mother’s STETS and itals and pilcrows, her caps and her boldfaces and deleaturs, and there are tendrils of cotton candy floating in the air, sweetening it, I could catch one on my tongue if I wanted to, and I hear the staccato pop pop pop of the popcorn machine, the click of wheels out on the rink, and I wonder where Sean is before I feel the skin on my forearms stick to the Birch beer I spilled on the table earlier, and for a moment, a breathless moment, my heart is a disco ball, a whirling mosaic of mirrors, and inside me, through me, and all around is a kaleidoscope of color and light.

Amy R. Martin is a producer and screenwriter, essayist, and medical and science writer. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Pithead Chapel, and Hungry Ghost Magazine, and is forthcoming from Variant Literature, JMWW, and Atlas + Alice. She is the Stage & Screen Editor and a contributing writer for the Southern Review of Books. She has an MFA in stage- and screenwriting and creative nonfiction from the Queens University of Charlotte. After living for fourteen years as an expatriate in the Netherlands, she now resides in Vienna, Virginia.

EVEN IN THE DARK by Cristina Trapani-Scott

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EVEN IN THE DARK
by Cristina Trapani-Scott

1.

You make sourdough bread because it’s easier to focus on the simplicity of water and flour than on anything else. You marvel at how water and flour blended can start life. You think of science and the way this pairing draws yeast from air. You remember the air in the hospital waiting room, the sour chill, and the way your yeasty thoughts bloomed faster than you could breathe, faster than you could form sentences, so the words came out lonely florets. Please, won’t walk, will walk, maybe, I don’t know.

2.

Now, you speak to flour and water in full sentences. You whisper to yeast the way you might a plant, like you did your child lying in the hospital bed. You cajole it with a gentle voice, urging it to expand and breathe, to grow and move.

Bread sustains us, you say.
I will love your crust, you say.

You told her to move, to find her space and take it even before you worried she might never walk again.

3.

Her left toe moved first, after you called her name, after you sang it to her because songs draw life from air, and she knows. You ignored the tubes that snaked from her and the thick paste of uncertainty. You focused on her feet, her beautiful feet, her toes poking out the end of the thin hospital blanket. As slight as the movement was, you wondered if the floor shook.

4.

You pour bubbling yeast into flour, add salt, sugar, oil, and hot water, and you knead. It will take hours for the yeast to expand, for the dough to double in size, but you wait like you waited for her toe to move and then her leg and then her other side. You are good at waiting. You’ve spent hours in waiting rooms. You count the hours and think they could add up to months, if not years.

5.

You wonder if the events of that week doubled in size rather than shrunk like you thought they would. You see yourself as you waited, the way you tucked your legs under you at night, knees and hips aching on the cold hard bench. Nurses appeared and disappeared like shrill ghosts. The clock ticked. Out the window from the eighth floor, you could see the front range spread for miles, even in the dark.

Cristina Trapani-Scott is the author of the poetry chapbook The Persistence of a Bathing Suit. Her work has appeared in Hip Mama Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, and Entropy Magazine, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and she serves on the leadership team for Northern Colorado Writers. She is at work on her first novel, and when she is not writing she likes to paint, bake, and hike mountain trails with her partner and their blind Lab/Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Follow her on Twitter at @CristinaTrapani.

A POEM WHEREIN I TRY, AND FAIL, TO IDENTIFY MY TUESDAY GENDER by Quinn Rennerfeldt

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A POEM WHEREIN I TRY, AND FAIL, TO IDENTIFY MY TUESDAY GENDER
by Quinn Rennerfeldt

Have you ever been forced
………….to swallow a pill of light
………….………….unguided hands rubbing

the tract of your throat
………….to slip it past the chokepoint
………….………….like a shhh and something blue

and lamplike then resides
………….inside you, threading the acids
………….………….of your stomach like an

anxious goldfish irradiating
………….the viscous liquids
………….………….in small neon pings

shining scales amongst darkness
………….morse code messages in bubbles
………….………….trying to regurgitate themselves

from your mouth
………….agitate against the fishtank
………….………….of molars and stress-clenched jaw

and yet you are still a stranger
………….always have been but now
………….………….you have an aquatic carcinogen

to fault, furtive bioluminescent flame
………….lighting the way for doubt
………….………….and the feelings cramped

in the fake sand, slowly stirring
………….the blonde grains from dormancy
………….………….like a creature where it oughtn’t be

Quinn Rennerfeldt is a queer poet earning her MFA at San Francisco State University, where she lives with her family and animal menagerie. Their heart is equally wed to the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Her work can be found in Slipstream, SAND, Mom Egg Review, elsewhere, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Her chapbook Sea Glass Catastrophe was released in 2020 by Francis House Press. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills, a graduate-run literary journal and press associated with San Francisco State University.

 

WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK by Louella Lester

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WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK
by Louella Lester

On the fifth day of the heat wave, even though the asthmatic air conditioner is faltering, Char stops going outside. Not to get fresh air. Or to exercise. Or to soak up the sun’s Vitamin D, of which a lack could cause her to…well, she isn’t sure what it will cause, but people are always talking about it like it matters. She just doesn’t give a shit anymore.

When Seth left, two months before, she lied about her feelings—told friends it was over long ago. “If he didn’t leave, I would have. Don’t worry, I’m enjoying the time alone.” So, the heat is a relief. A real excuse to stay home. A simple explanation. Wearing only panties and a tank top she melts into the chair nearest the aquarium that Seth left behind, getting up only to go to the toilet. Or drag delivery boxes through the door. Or feed the fish, though she doesn’t like fish.

On the twelfth day of heat, Char gives up reading books. Spends her time scrolling the phone, reading nothing longer than a tweet, until the screen is so smudged her finger can no longer glide, just stutters across it. When she finally looks up, the aquarium glass reflects her unblinking eyes and open mouth. In the background, plants wave above pebbles and the school of blue-backed tetras darts between bubbles.

By the seventeenth day, Char finds it difficult to get out of the chair. Arms stuck to her sides, she’s only able to flap her hands and flutter her fingers, her mouth pouting with the strain.

On the nineteenth day, when Char moves she feels a tug and her white fish-belly thighs can’t be pried apart. She rocks until the momentum sets her standing, toes facing out like a fish tail. She hobbles to the aquarium. The tetras stare side-eye as she heaves herself up and lands with a splash.

After the twenty-second day, Char would kick herself if she still had legs because she’d made no plan for food. Through the window she sees lamb’s wool clouds in a baby-blue sky. Pelicans glide on air pockets above the water. Song birds echo and gurgle. She knows it was stupid to jump into the aquarium, no guy is worth it, but now she’s stuck in the damn thing and the scruffy blue-backed tetras aren’t exactly thrilled either. They’re ramping up the side-eye, sticking to their school, and whispering. It reminds Char of her teen years, so she hides in a patch of hornwort and hears only snippets of their conversation, “…food flakes right over there…she doesn’t care…selfish…could all die in here.”

On the twenty-eighth day, when Char can no longer remember if Seth said he’d come back for the aquarium, the door knob rattles, giving her hope. “No one’s seen her since her boyfriend left, and neighbors have been complaining about a smell.” It’s the building manager, followed by two police officers.

One officer ambles off to the bedroom, while the other peers into the tank and sniffs. “This tank is the source of the smell,” he says. The tetras freeze against the glass in a clump of fear. Char, tangled in the hornwort, can’t move either.

The first officer returns from the bedroom. “Nothing else seems amiss. But that tank really is a health hazard.” They offer to help, then heave the fish tank up between them.

“Blub…blub…blub!” say the tetras, as the officers shuffle towards the bathroom.

“Blub…blub…blub!” says Char, as they drain the fish tank into the toilet bowl.

The building manager hears something as one of the officers pushes the toilet handle but tells herself it’s just the flush and swirl.

Louella Lester is a writer and photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Litro, Five Minutes, The Drabble, SoFloPoJo, Daily Drunk, Dribble Drabble, Grey Sparrow, Six Sentences, New Flash Fiction, Reflex Fiction, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks, is out there (At Bay Press, April 2021).

 

THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS by Michelle Ross

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THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS
by Michelle Ross

Andrew

It was a mini fridge, so not much. Also, it was college, so mostly beer most of the time until we drank those Heineken, one by one winnowing down to whatever else remained: a package of sliced extra sharp cheddar; a Yoplait with its silver, reflective seal that you peel off, making me think of Andrew’s tube of anti-itch cream; a crinkly plastic bag holding a few wrinkled, mushy green grapes. “Are you going to eat those?” I asked him that afternoon. Unless we were making out, I sat on Andrew’s desk chair. His bedding left a slightly sour smell on my skin. “I might,” he said. “But they’re mushy and gross,” I said. “Some of them might not be,” he said. “Even if some aren’t, they will be soon because of the company they keep,” I said. Andrew plucked one of those mushy grapes from its stem and told me to open my mouth and catch. I turned so that it bounced off my cheek.

 

Jorgé

Always there was at least one saucepan. If the saucepan was small, plastic wrap stretched tight across the top, held in place by a rubber band. If the saucepan was large, it was sealed by its glass lid, which wasn’t airtight, Jorgé lamented, but he didn’t have a rubber band that could stretch that far. In those saucepans, there might be French lentil soup with softened onions and carrots, mushroom risotto, a chunky stew, or sweet potato gnocchi he’d made by hand. When I tried to help him cook, he snatched up knives and spoons and various ingredients because I was “doing it wrong.” This was when I lived in Minnesota for a couple of years, the winters so cold that except for school (me) and work (him), we hardly left Jorgé’s apartment. Jorgé grew his own mushrooms in that apartment—inside a hall closet that he’d dedicated to that pursuit. My first visit, when I opened that closet door by mistake, looking for the bathroom, Jorgé freaked. The next time he invited me over that door was duct-taped, and it remained duct-taped all the time we were together.

 

Max

Swampy green juices in glass jars. At least two kinds of beans. Something approximating the name of an animal though it was not animal: tofurkey, ground be’f. Max was a fitness instructor, a thing I liked about him until I didn’t anymore. He was always beginning sentences with, “I’m really into” as in “I’m really into functional strength” or “I’m really into eating to live rather than eating for pleasure.” As much as Max liked to talk about himself, I didn’t really feel I knew him at all. He was like those juices in his fridge: stripped of fiber, stripped of anything solid.

 

Derreck

A refrigerator like a time capsule, the way it recalled my childhood refrigerator: white sandwich bread, packaged deli meat, condiments, pickles, peanut butter, jelly, a head of iceberg lettuce. “What about vegetables?” I said the first time I opened Derreck’s fridge, and he opened the freezer and pointed to frozen stir-fry mix, frozen corn. Staring into that refrigerator, I said, “What about pleasure?” and Derreck said, “What are we talking about exactly?” I’m not sure “ex” is even the right term for Derreck. I slept with him no more than five or six times. He’d take off his shirt, and I would envision that loaf of sliced white sandwich bread nuzzled next to a gallon of white milk on the top shelf of his refrigerator. That was another thing about Derreck, he drank milk with dinner, like a child.

 

Noah

Noah’s refrigerator was the most beautiful, most immaculate refrigerator I’d ever seen—the fridge of my dreams. It had a clear door so you could browse without wasting energy. Its contents were as organized as the books in a library. Noah was a meal prepper, so there were always healthy, macronutrient-balanced, ready-to-eat meals stacked on the second-to-top shelf: salmon with mango salsa, roasted chicken with broccoli, breakfast enchiladas. On the third shelf from the top were little glass containers of berries with measured servings of yogurt, carrot sticks with hummus, no-bake energy bars Noah had made himself. Unlike the contents of a library, though, Noah’s food was not for sharing. When he emerged from the shower one afternoon and caught me eating one of those yogurts with berries, he said, “That was my mid-morning snack for Thursday!” I said, “There’s a lot of food in here. Can’t you snack on something else Thursday?” Noah explained, once again, that he planned every meal and snack for the week out on Sundays and that there were no spares. “Well, that sounds like poor planning,” I said. “There should always be something to spare. What about emergencies? What about me?” I offered to buy him a carton of yogurt and a pint of berries to replace what I’d taken. He said, “There isn’t room for your stuff in my fridge.”

 

Trey

Trey is not an ex, but my brain can’t help but look for the details that will define him if he ever does become an ex. His sourdough starter, maybe. The way he talks about that sourdough starter—“I have to feed my sourdough today”—like it’s a pet. He stores that starter in an unmarked container in his fridge, and inevitably, I open the container looking for food only to find a bubbly, gooey glob. However, if I were to make a list of things I love about Trey, that loaf of sourdough he bakes every Saturday morning would make the top five. When it first emerges from the oven, it’s so hot, I have to hold that loaf steady with a paper towel when I slice into it so I don’t burn my hand. The way the salted butter submits to that bread. Like a lover, I think. I would seriously miss that bread.

Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (November 2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (forthcoming in April 2022). Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50 and will be included in the forthcoming Norton anthology Flash Fiction America. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review.

 

RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT by Charlotte Moretti

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RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT
by Charlotte Moretti

She chewed on a jagged piece of skin that she had pulled along her thumbnail as she drove, her right wrist dangling limply on the steering wheel. She drove quickly as she snuck glances at me—sharp, suspicious looks. I watched through a shaft of sunlight coming in from the windshield as dust billowed in through the open windows of the Jeep and settled, lazy and drifting, on my lap.

Her arm was freckled like I remembered, but now the skin was loose, bunching and drooping. I wanted to touch it, to lift it up back into place; it was as though I had closed my eyes and she had melted by the time I opened them.

I leaned down and pulled out a cigarette from the pack that was nestled in my bag between a few of my other things—a pair of gas station sunglasses, a bottle of iced tea, a jade necklace, a couple of credit cards. As I brought the cigarette to my lips, lighting it, she glanced at me, alarmed, and swatted it from my mouth.

“Don’t,” she said, instinctively. “Don’t—you don’t. You don’t smoke.” Her certainty faded. After all, maybe I did. What did she know?

I nodded, choosing to take her admonishment as an instruction rather than a question. “Okay,” I said evenly.

I glanced out of the window; the dirt road we had been barreling down was now paved, lined with squat buildings and plastic signs that had been pushed stubbornly in the hard, thawing spring grass and now stood lopsided in the heat. We passed my high school, a Taco Bell, GNS Heating & Cooling.

She switched on her turn signal—cautious, I thought—and we pulled up the steep driveway to the house she lived in with John.

I got out of the car, staring up at the condo and immediately resenting it. It was smug, with its neat grey siding trimmed with matching white shutters, wind chimes dangling from an eave. The porch steps were flanked by huge flower pots—gardenias, I guessed. I had been with a botanist once.

I walked up the steps carefully, primly, my shoulders stiff. I wanted her to know I didn’t feel welcome. She stepped behind me, and I could feel her impatience radiating from behind me. She always had a quick temper, and with her red hair, we used to call her Heatmiser, like from the old Christmas movie. I would piss her off—breaking a dish in our stupid, too-small kitchen or spilling her perfume—and she would toss her hands up, frustrated. “Goddamn it, Hannah! I mean, come on!” she would say, her voice high. Then I’d say, slyly, “Sorry…Heatmiser,” and she would slowly look up, trying not to smile until she couldn’t avoid it, and she would chase me around the house until she had me pinned down, tickling my ribs while our sheepdog Louie ran in circles around us, howling and licking us.

When I got older, she would come out of her bedroom clipping on her big gold earrings or zipping up her black leather boots, going on a date to see Ozzy Osbourne or to some beer crawl, and I would be mad and alone and hungry and tired, and I would call her a whore under my breath, it didn’t matter if I teased her and called her Heatmiser later. She’d leave, and I’d spend my night spooning peanut butter from the jar for Louie and I.

I stood facing the door. There was a wreath and a welcome mat.

“Hannah, come on,” she said, her voice low and tense behind me.

I pushed open the door and stepped over the threshold. There were a lot of words for what her house with John was—cute, small, charming—but mine wasn’t one of them.

John was boring, that much was clear. When I had been growing up, my mom had decorated our apartment with candles and gauzy drapes, Oriental rugs she had haggled for on Delancey when she had lived in New York, she told me. It was always dark and messy and ours. Girls from school would come over and take their shoes off, and my mom and I would laugh at them.

I didn’t say anything, just looked at the beige and the floral print. The decorative stone angels. “Where’s John?” I asked mildly.

“He’s at work,” she said. “Listen. If you want, you know, a night alone with just us, no men, just let me know, okay? He can stay at his sister’s.”

I shrugged. “I’d like to meet him.”

She kicked off her shoes, lining them along a plastic mat in the foyer, and made her way to the kitchen to rinse her hands at the chrome sink. “Okay, baby. That’s fine. But, you know, just let me know if you change your mind.” She opened the refrigerator—balls of cantaloupe in neatly stacked Tupperware, a carton of soy milk, a clump of asparagus.

“Okay,” I said, scooting up onto the kitchen counter. “But I mean, he is like, my new daddy, right?”

Her shoulders tensed, and she stood with her head still in the cool of the fridge. One, two, three deep breaths. She turned around and smiled. “What do you want to eat, baby? Anything you want. I can make lasagna, we can order Chinese, pizza—I don’t care. Anything you want.”

Melon balls, I thought before deciding not to bait her. The thought of my mother’s hands with their chipped black fingernails wrapped around a melon baller was alien and comical, something we would have laughed at. “Chinese sounds good.”

She rubbed her hands together, excited. “Yum. Perfect. Okay. There’s a great new place down the road; you’ll love it.” She paused, closing the refrigerator and leaning against it as she stared at me, drinking in the face she didn’t recognize, reconciling herself to the fact that this was me. “Baby…I’m sorry we don’t live at the apartment anymore. I know it’s…I know it’s hard for you to come home to this. But, you know, John already loves you. I love you so much, Hannah.”

She leaned forward and touched a lock of my hair, pulling it forward. It fell gently into place along my jaw. The last time I had seen her, my hair had been long and tangled, falling midway down my back. “I know, Mom.” She lifted a hand to stroke my hair again, and I instinctively backed away. “Can I see my room?”

She led me down a carpeted hallway to a bedroom. There were dents in the carpet, probably from a desk or maybe some exercise equipment. John loved me, my mom said, but let’s see if he loved me more than his Stairmaster.

There was a twin bed in the corner. It was neatly made, the unfamiliar duvet pressed and tucked. There was a stuffed shark propped up on a pillow, a cheap claw machine prize my high school boyfriend had won me at the bowling alley. I had forgotten what we called it.

The walls were bare save for a poster of Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of photos of the two of us she had tacked underneath it. I hadn’t even really liked Siouxsie and the Banshees, but my boyfriend had.

My mom sat down on the bed, picking up the shark and putting it on her lap. She picked at its cotton teeth, running her fingers back and forth. “We tried to keep your stuff. You had so much stuff, you know. Remember those posters? God, your walls were covered. We had a hell of a time picking the gunk off the walls. You know, Hannah, you wrote on your walls in Sharpie? Do you remember that? It took, I don’t know, something like three days to scrub all of that off. We went through two whole bottles of Lysol.”

She was talking, I knew, to cover something up. The silence, the stink in the air, the weight of the years I wasn’t here. To silence my silence, to shut up the ugly that had happened to me. If she talked and talked and talked about scrubbing and Lysol, something clean, something that smelled good, we wouldn’t have to talk about where I had been, how I wasn’t clean anymore.

I walked to the window. I had a street view. There were no blinds, just long, white, clean curtains that billowed gently. I pressed a hand to the window, my index finger catching on the corner of something. I ran my finger against it—it was tape, a little scrap of paper still stuck to it. I scraped at the tape with my fingernail until it came loose. Holding the paper up, I could just make out capital letters ‘NG’—like in ‘MISSING.’

She sighed. “Fuck. I told John to take that down.”

I shrugged. “He did.”

“Well…not enough, I guess.” She patted the spot next to her on the bed. “You shouldn’t have to see that.”

I sat and turned to her, surprised. “I’ve seen them. You used my senior picture, which you knew I hated.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Hannah. What did you want me to do? Use a baby picture?” She stiffened. “You looked different, anyway. I guess it didn’t matter.”

Six hours earlier, when my mom had picked me up from the train station, she had been sobbing—deep, guttural, animalistic cries. It was alarming, actually. I didn’t know how she hadn’t crashed her car. My first thought was that something was wrong—someone died, Louie or my grandma, until I realized that I was what was wrong—and now it was right.

When she had last seen me, three years ago, I had been seventeen. My hair was long. I was skinny—all knees and elbows and ankles. I liked Harry Potter and running track and blue nail polish. I drank Smirnoff Ice with Erin, my best friend, and hadn’t done more than give a blow job. We liked to go to the woods behind her house with her older brother and his friends and whisper and flirt. I liked racing Louie in my backyard. I was good at math, and teachers liked me, even though my mom never chaperoned on field trips or baked brownies for the PTA sales. I liked listening to Oasis and thinking about kissing Henry Nelson in his mom’s Ford Taurus, like I had done once my freshman year. I liked to dream—I liked to think and think, to be somewhere else, until the places that I was imagining myself out of were too bad to be ignored.

I thought of these things as though Hannah were a different person. She was a sweet, stupid girl who had been pissed off at her mom and had run out of the front door on August 18th and who had never been back through it. Poor thing. The irony of being a track star that couldn’t get away was not lost on me.

I was soft now, rounder, less attractive. I had a scar on my belly, a scar on my neck, a scar on my wrist. She didn’t know this, she had thought the terrible men had done it, but I cut my hair myself in the train station bathroom with some scissors I had bought from a Rite Aid.

My mom stretched out on the bed, putting her feet on my lap. “People missed you, Han. There were these shitty spaghetti dinners that…Jesus, you would have hated them. Caitlyn Burke organized one. I was like, hello, you didn’t even know my daughter. She bullied you once in eighth grade, I remember.”

I shook my head. “Who is Caitlyn Burke?”

The shark rolled out of my mom’s hands and off the bed. “Caitlyn Burke. She…you went to elementary school with her.”

“It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Oh. Well. It doesn’t matter.” She scooted up, sliding off the bed. “Well, you should take a nap, baby. It’s been a long day. John will be home around six; we can eat then.”

She left, and I crawled under the covers. Siouxsie stared at me. You wish you could pull off short hair, she said. I closed my eyes.

◊

John was short and affable. He was the exact opposite of the kind of person I would have dreamed my mother would be with. He ate his Chinese with a fork and knife, nodding happily at my monosyllabic sentences. He acted as though I were coming back from a study abroad in France—and oh, sorry, while you were away, we moved, and your dog died, and your mom started wearing cardigans. He slurped a lo mein noodle, rubbing his fingers together to wipe off the soy sauce on them. “Hannah, I don’t know if your mom has mentioned this, but I work for a travel agency.”

I wrapped a noodle around my chopstick, pulling it up as high as it would go until I nearly had to extend my elbow. “Uh-huh,” I answered.

John cleared his throat. “So, you know, I talked to your mom and we thought, whenever you’re ready, we’ll take a trip.”

I felt my face flush, imagining myself smiling with Mickey Mouse ears next to John. Three hours inside and they were already pushing me out. “A trip where?” I said quietly, the pitch of my voice betraying the calm I was faking.

“Anywhere, babe,” my mom put a hand on mine. I started to sweat. “Paris, the Grand Canyon, Hawaii,” she rattled off. I knew she had an image in her mind too, of riding a tandem bicycle under the Eiffel Tower, a baguette perched cheerily in a wicker basket up front.

I swallowed my food hastily. It was suddenly too strong, too palatable, the glistening chicken and whole snow peas seeming obscene. I could feel panic start to rise from my stomach, numbing my fingers and toes. I took a sip of water, relishing the cold of it as I ran my fingers against the threadbare tablecloth, feeling for a grip.

“Han?” my mom said, gently prodding me with a chopstick.

I met her eyes. “Do you think,” I said, unaware that I was even speaking, “that you deserve a prize?”

They were both silent for a moment. Even John’s fork clinking against his plate subsided. “I don’t know what you mean, Hannah,” my mom said eventually.

I shook my head. I could feel tears forming behind my eyes, and I knew if I spoke they would fall.

For all of his apparent deficiencies, I had to admit that I admired John’s tact in that moment, his careful disengaging from the scene as he gathered the plates and take-out cartons and edged his way into the kitchen under the guise of clean-up duty.

My mother and I sat across from each other. I could feel her eyes on me, waiting for me to explain what I meant, as if I had the words; as if I wasn’t relearning how to speak again.

“How could you do that?” I finally whispered. “How could you be dating and fucking and breathing with someone while I was gone? How did you do that? How did you just pick yourself up like I was still here? What did you guys talk about? ‘Hi, I’m John, I’m in travel.’ ‘Hi, I’m Teri, my daughter is missing and presumed dead’?”

She sat perfectly still for a moment, stunned into silence. Her lower lip was quivering daintily. She looked for all the world the perfect part of the grieving mother, each tear sliding down her cheek glossy and round, the tip of her nose blossoming into a flower-petal pink.

“Is that what you think?” she whispered.

I gestured around madly. “What else can I think?” My voice was low and dangerous and unfamiliar.

She stood up and walked to the living room, slowly easing herself down onto the arm of the couch. “Hannah, I met John at a banquet in your honor. He has a niece at the high school. I…I needed to talk to him because if I didn’t, I swear I would have killed myself.”

She rose from the couch now, catching her breath. “How would that have felt, then? It wouldn’t have been just Louie and just the apartment, it would have been me! You would have had no one!” She swiped furiously at her nostrils with the back of her hand, her gaze never leaving mine. “I lost twelve pounds. My hair fell out. It made me sick, physically sick, being in that apartment without you. I thought you were dead. Isn’t that big enough for you, Hannah?”

I stood up, my body moving of its own accord. I felt hot and cornered and panicked. I was creating a mess where there wasn’t one. Her body had been a vigil to me—there were the candles I missed so much. She had consumed them like a side-show performer, consuming every bit of me, every article that still smelled of me or bore my skin, hair, nails. She had tried to raise me from these fragments, and here I was, but changed. I felt myself crumple to the floor—how could I bear this? How could she?

She knelt on the ground with me, rubbing my back.

“I’m mad, Mom,” I wept. “I’m mad and I’m still scared.”

Her tone was hushed and reverent as she sat with me on the ground, the person, like a side-show apparition, that had, quite literally, disappeared into thin air. “I know,” she said. “I am too,” she said.

◊

The sun had just set, and the sky was the blue-purple of a bruise. I sat at the foot of the closet, lacing up my old sneakers from high school, flexing my toes against the tight fabric. I could hear the TV, the sound muffled from the living room where my mom and John laid on the couch, their bodies curled up together like smoke.

I left the lights off as I crept down the hallway, grateful, for once, for the soft padding of the beige carpet. I didn’t want the questions; the worry shaped like a whistle and a flashlight, a car creeping slowly behind me. There had been eyes on me for three years. I hadn’t been alone for three years.

When I was little, my mom had a friend in jail. His name was Thomas, and he had known my mom from when she was a bartender and he a line cook at some dive bar that had closed down before I was born. He had been locked up for some bogus drug charges, my mom claimed, and she visited him semi-regularly, eventually bringing me along when she figured I was old enough or she just couldn’t find a sitter. He was a good guy, she would say on the long drive to the prison, just a bad prisoner. He would get solitary for weeklong stretches for fighting with other inmates or giving a guard attitude. When he’d get back to “gen-pop” (it didn’t make me popular to know prison lingo by the 5th grade, believe it or not), he would be skinny and scary, his eyes bruised and puffy, his knuckles red and scraped raw. It took me awhile to realize that he didn’t go in looking like that. When he couldn’t fight with other inmates, he fought with the walls. He had to get fourteen stitches from his left earlobe to his left eye socket once, but my mom never told me why.

I thought about Thomas as I shut the door behind me, stepping into the cool evening air. Cicadas hummed as I knelt down on the dew-damp lawn, breathing in the heady smell of the grass and my own sweat. For Thomas, ‘solitary’ was a dirty word, imposing, choking, threatening. I ran the word over my lips, tasted it as though it were a fruit on my tongue, dissolving there. It was delicious and intoxicating to me. I had been solitary, when three years ago I stepped off a porch as recklessly as if I had stepped on a landmine. The thrill of independence had beckoned me until it had warped, rotting and grotesque.

I wanted it back, I realized, stepping through the long blades, carving my own path. It was my grass. It was my moon that was beginning to slice through the dark of the sky. These were my legs, scraped and long and strong, that were now running, the weeds and wildflowers grabbing at them. It was my body.

It was my mom, I thought, who had been alone for two years, who finally threw open the windows to let in some air. I was mad, and I was hurt, but I was whole as my heart kept pace in my chest with my feet, pounding and angry. I’m here, it said. I wasn’t a ghost anymore, a cautionary tale whispered with a frank yet titillated whisper at barbeques and in grocery store aisles, afforded only to those whom tragedy has never touched, just skimmed its fingers along as a flat tire or a missed flight.

I passed trees, their green branches reaching for me like fingertips. I reached back, brushing against them, feeling the cool, waxy leaves against my skin. I hadn’t been to Paris, I thought. I hadn’t been more than forty miles away from where I was born. But the world seemed to open itself to me, as if a flower blooming, and I knew that I would go—I could go. At this moment, twenty-four whole, heavy hours later on the other side of the split that had divided us, I couldn’t run to Paris or the Grand Canyon or Hawaii, just down the sidewalks I had learned to crawl on. But that was enough—and so I ran.

Charlotte Moretti is a filmmaker and writer based in Detroit, MI. She graduated from Wayne State University, where her fiction earned her the first place Tompkins Award for creative writing. Shortly after graduating, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she formed the production company Ride Home Films (ridehomefilms.com). She returned to Michigan to make the films Call Me When You Get Home (2019) and Fairmount (coming 2022). “Running Alone at Night” came from a dream about a missing person poster taped to a window, and explores themes of femininity, independence, familial ties, and the changes that slowly—or quickly—overtake us all.

 

LEAVE NO TRACE by Robin Neidorf

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LEAVE NO TRACE
by Robin Neidorf 

the full moon rises in the cleft ……………………………between rock and green-turning-
gold on gravel trails twenty miles ……………………..northwest of this circle of stones
today’s bootprints start to erode
under those traces lie yesterday’s
…………………………… …………………………… …………lower still are strata dyed maroon and olive
then grey again
each line demarcates a slow disaster
ninety-five percent of species gone in the blink
…………………………… …………………………… ………of a few million years
…………………………… ……………………………… …………………………..the glaciers are receding
…………………………… …………………………… ……………………………..the data do not lie
………………………….. ……………………………………….. ………………….each season frees

another era’s liquid

………………………….. ………and debris
………………………….. …………………………..once rock met
………………………….. …………………………………………………..rock and hove        upwards now
every raindrop makes its choice
…………………………south to delta silts          ^^      west to crashing waves and saturated sunsets

take one breath
…………………………….another
the owl’s wings beat            no soundwaves      glacial pond’s surface still as fossil
come December will we remember
how to read…………………. across the gaps in the record…………….to extract
this September evening
bonfire sparks snapping carbon
-scented smoke following the half-missed…………. swoop of a dusk hunt
……………………………………………………….D-chord
…………………………………………………………………………..fades

just one
breath
more

Robin Neidorf started a love affair with poetry via (of all things) a sestina after more than two decades of focusing primarily on creative nonfiction. Her work has been published on the blogs of Best American Poetry, TC Jewfolk, Postpartum, and Matter Press. She lives in Minnesota and actually prefers its winters to its summers.

DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden

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DESPINA
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden

Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into Italian and Spanish, soon to be out in French. It was named one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by The New York Times, Library Journal, GQ, Comic Book Resources, Paste, Mental Floss, Forbes, and NPR. Hayden’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. She has also self-published two collections of her online comic strips, Rushes: A Comix Diary and A Flight of Chickens. Recently she finished a graphic travel novella called Le Chat Noir about her disastrous yet hopeful love for France. Hayden has lectured at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Drexel, and NYU, and is currently finishing her first work in color, a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner. She is hoping to use the proceeds to hire a personal chef. Author photo by Jen Davis.

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway

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LAYERING LIGHT
Paintings by Bette Ridgeway

Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases that push the boundaries of light, color, and design. Her youth spent in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and her extensive global travel has informed her colorful palette. For the past two decades, the high desert light of Santa Fe, NM has fueled Ridgeway’s art practice.

Her three decades of mentorship by the acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Paul Jenkins set her on her lifetime journey of non-objective painting on large canvas. She explores the interrelation and change of color in various conditions and on a variety of surfaces. Her artistic foundations in line drawing, watercolor, graphic design, and oils gave way to acrylics, which she found to be more versatile for her layering technique. Ridgeway has spent the last thirty years developing her signature technique, called “layering light,” in which she uses many layers of thin, transparent acrylics on linen and canvas to produce a fluidity and viscosity similar to traditional watercolor. Delving further, Ridgeway expanded her work into 3D, joining paint and resin to aluminum and steel with sculptures of minimal towers.

Ridgeway depicts movement in her work, sometimes kinetic and full of emotion, sometimes bold and masterful, sometimes languid and tentative. She sees herself as the channel, the work coming through her, but it is not hers. It goes out into the world—it has a life of its own.

[click on any image to enlarge]

Birth of the Blues

Canyon Winds

Chroma

California Dreaming

Calypso

Coherence

For over four decades, Bette Ridgeway has exhibited globally with more than eighty prestigious venues, including the Palais Royale, Paris and Embassy of Madagascar. Her awards include Top 60 Contemporary Masters and Leonardo DaVinci Prize. Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Mayo Clinic and Federal Reserve Bank. Her work also appears in International Contemporary Masters and 100 Famous Contemporary Artists. Visit her website at ridgewaystudio.com

WHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST by Candace Hartsuyker

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WHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST
by Candace Hartsuyker

It happens like this: your sister is skipping with a jump rope, her feet slap slapping the sidewalk. You go into the house to get a glass of water, and when you come back, your sister, her sneakers that are bright as Wite-Out, and her sparkly pink jump rope are gone.

After her disappearance, your father’s restless hands will hold a length of rope: he’ll tie and untie it, reconstruct the sailor’s knots he learned when he was a boy. The figure eight, the bowline, the clove hitch.

You will deal with your grief by tying yourself into an intricate pattern of knots. You’ll step onto the living room coffee table and slowly go into a backbend. It will remind you of the game of Twister you played at parties, a foot sliding backwards and to the right, a leg crossing under someone else’s arm. Your feet will move toward your hands until you are grasping your ankles. Your head will move back until only your throat is exposed. Then, you’ll stand back up.

Next, you’ll drag your father’s suitcase from out of the hall closet, twist and bend, contort your body into its smallest shape. You’ll move as gracefully as a Slinky that is being cradled from one hand to the other. Once you are safely inside, you’ll close your eyes and pretend the suitcase is partly zipped up, leaving a small pocket of air so you can breathe. You’ll practice twisting your body into smaller and smaller knots until you are a balled-up knot that can’t be untied.

You’ll spend nights imagining your sister being picked up from the patch of sidewalk, then thrown into the trunk of a car. You’ll fold yourself into a myriad of animal shapes: a frog, a swan, a wolf. You’ll imagine what it is like to be kidnapped. On the days you are the saddest, you will tangle your limbs until your body is not flesh but rough and fibrous, a snarl of grief, a human knot. You’ll practice becoming a girl who can squeeze into spaces smaller than a fist.

One day, you’ll arch your arms over your head and turn your body into the shape of a key. You’ll find your sister behind a locked door. She’ll be there, waiting.

Candace Hartsuyker has an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. Her work has been published in Fractured Literary, Cheap Pop, Flash Frog, and elsewhere.

DON’T KICK THE DOG by Phillip Schaefer

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DON’T KICK THE DOG
by Phillip Schaefer

Just last week doves glued to the beach, stuck between
physics and chemistry. Beneath the Puget Sound. No guns,
no sharks. A simple conundrum. There is a history within history,
angles prior to geometry. Names predating language. Before before,
we thrived. Now we thumb the doldrums of memory like cattle
lost on an interstate in a country where cars hunt with their headlights.
Last week a murder in Moab: a Mormon with a throat-knife
tighter than an oath on a ledge. So we buy cheap groceries
to keep our pantomime legitimate. We smack
the television out of its static. It feels good to drink
milk right out of the carton & it feels good to apologize
for nothing. Cancer comes then goes until something worse
arrives in the hearse of our bones. Life echoes
quietly backwards. Only one person may attend
the trapeze artist’s final performance. The smartest animals
know when to close their brains to the wolves
who hover in hunger. Rather than tossing rocks, we taste
the earth, understand it better. Perhaps this is a new era.
Our burial happened on the beach. Our burial happens without us.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He recently opened a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.

EVEN THE DOGS by Ronda Broatch

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EVEN THE DOGS
by Ronda Broatch

The horses hid the day I walked out to pasture
to catch my appaloosa. Ferro, eluding the drape
of lead rope over his withers. I found him deep

in woods I’d never entered, and slipped the halter
over his dappled head. Time and distance enough
to mute the shot it took to fell the bull

back at the barn, meat truck parked, everyone
gathered around, beers in hand, to watch. I tied Ferro
to the post, curried and saddled him for our ride

along the slough, past winery and autumn fields, years
before the bike path, down the stretch of dirt we raced
until my eyes ran, Ferro’s body sinking

closer to ground as he flew, as was his birth right.
Sweating, we returned, the bull’s headless torso dismantled,
chatter of onlookers bartering who got what.

I opened the gate, led Ferro back to pasture, watched him
roll in dust. Blood on the wind that day, the dogs hanging
close by, keen, squirrelly. A wild ride

while muzzle nuzzled temple, a galaxy opening inside
the bull’s brain. To be touched by God might be so brutal,
so beautiful. The day I wandered the pasture,

found my horse, slipped the rope around his quivering neck,
haltered his roan dappled head, wondering,
what is this God, anyway?

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist for the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered.

ABLATION by Lisa Lebduska

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ABLATION
by Lisa Lebduska

Faced with a choice between freezing or burning, my mother chose burning. Her decision surprised me because she hated Florida, where she had never lived, and she hated summers in New York, where she spent July and August with a crochet-edged hankie tucked behind her ears to catch drips of perspiration.

Never known for her tractability, my mother, daughter of an odd-jobs man, had a heart that insisted its own wild beat, and a passion for cheesecake, chianti, and despising my father, who had, as she put it, “traded her in for a newer model” at the age of sixty-five. The cardiologist diagnosed her with both tachycardia (beating too fast) and arrhythmia (irregular beating) and prescribed a phalanx of pills to block the renegade signals in her atria. Over time, the meds stopped working. “She’s breaking through,” her cardiologist said. I pictured her driving a motorcycle through a barn-sized paper ring. “She has to be ablated,” he added.

“Burned?” I asked.

The cardiologist narrated the procedure in the third person, as if neither of them would be involved: The patient will be mildly sedated. The doctor threads a needle through the groin and triggers an arrhythmia, so that he can identify misfiring cells and destroy them, by either freezing or burning.

Like “Fire and Ice” I thought. The end of the world.

“No,” she said. “Just let me drop dead.”

The doctor looked to me for back up. I faltered. How could I urge her to lie awake while a stranger pierced her heart with a wire until it trembled?

I put her on the phone with my doctor brother, who had been following her condition at a safe distance.

“A heart attack might not kill you,” he reasoned. “You could have a stroke that incapacitates you. Please, Ma,” Stephen said. “You’ll have it at my hospital, with someone I know. Do this for us.”

I nodded.

“OK,” my mother bargained. “If you’ll stop cutting the cake so thin I can read the newspaper through it.” We agreed on summer, when I had a more flexible work schedule and she could convalesce outside. I stocked her refrigerator with low-fat milk and roasted broccoli.

“Go home. You have your own life to lead,” she said, touching my cheek. Her hand was thick from years of labor but still soft and dimpled like a baby’s. I left wondering where the line fell between my life and not hers. Did other people slice away their loved ones with surgical ease?

A month later she called. “It’s a sign from God. No sheesh-ka-bab.”

Eyes swollen, skin scarlet from scratching, and blisters weeping from her cheeks to her ankles: a raging case of poison ivy.

“She made a salad with it,” my husband offered.

“My mother doesn’t eat salad.”

Over the phone my brother shouted that he was resigning as her personal physician and cancelling the procedure.

“That’s good,” my mother said. “You should rest.”

I felt the same relief that twists through me when I find a sprung mousetrap and no corpse. She had escaped our best intentions.

Two weeks later, my mother’s heart rate spiked to 232 beats per minute, landing her in the Emergency Room.

We arrived to find her propped in bed, pink-cheeked and complimenting the nurse’s manicure. “Have some applesauce,” she said to me.

“You have to have the operation. This will take care of everything. I’m sorry,” I added.

I waited on a hard chair in a dim room. When it ended, they brought me to her. “We got it,” her cardiologist said.

My mother looked up at me, dazed. “They gave me the sheesh-ka-bab.” As the sedative wore off, she whimpered, and I gripped her baby hand.

A year later, my mother’s internist suffered an incapacitating stroke, and his family sold the practice. I did not tell her.

My mother never had another palpitation, though afterward she said that her heart wasn’t firing right. “Something is missing.”

Scarred tissue cannot conduct electricity, the medical books say.

When meteors enter the atmosphere, friction usually ablates them before they can reach the Earth. We need to understand this, or we will squander our days like errant signals, running amok.

Lisa Lebduska directs the College Writing Program at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she teaches courses in expository writing. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Forge, Lunch Ticket, Writing on the Edge, and The Tishman Review, among others. She lives in Salem, Connecticut, just around the corner from Devil’s Hopyard, where she and her husband enjoy hiking with other people’s pets.

 

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES by Eric Rasmussen

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MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES
by Eric Rasmussen

I.

McKenzie sees it coming. The party’s host is drunk: she’s laughing loud, touching everyone nearby, gesturing with the knife she’s using to cut whole pickles into spears for bloody marys. McKenzie should say something or take the knife, but this woman is the boss of the guy she came with. By the time the host raises the blade again, it’s too late. Her pinky is in the exact wrong place. McKenzie tries to yell, but her synapses can’t work that fast. The woman slams the knife down and cuts off most of her finger. Besides the thunk, McKenzie’s gasp is the loudest sound in the room.

Within moments the kitchen enters full meltdown. The host’s husband wraps his wife’s hand in a white cloth napkin, asking “What happened?” over and over. A semi-circle of partygoers around the island pulls out their phones to call ambulances or Google “how to treat a severed finger,” and a woman in too-tall high heels barrels towards McKenzie and the freezer behind her. “I’ll get ice,” the woman says as she busts through the other guests. “For the pinky. To keep it cold.”

As McKenzie sneaks out of the kitchen, she imagines what will happen when she tells this story tomorrow, to a friend or her sister, probably her mom. Whoever it is won’t even care about the finger. “Who were you there with?” they’ll ask instead.

“Tim?”

“You’ve never mentioned a Tim.”

“I met him at the clinic.”

“Doctor?”

“Patient.”

“You work in a urology office,” she (friend or sister, hopefully not mom) will point out. “That’s not weird?”

“We saw each other later, at a sandwich shop. What’s weird about that?”

By this point the commotion has drawn most of the partygoers to the kitchen, but McKenzie finds Tim where she left him in the piano room.

“Is there punch left?” he asks.

“I didn’t make it that far.” She turns as a shout reverberates through the condo. “Your boss just cut off most of her finger.”

Tim overacts his shock by jerking forward with eyes open wide, as if she were joking. Back in the exam room at the clinic, he was understandably quiet and timid, and these were the same traits he exhibited in line at the deli. But since then he has opened up like a comedian getting comfortable on stage, and this is what McKenzie likes most about him.

This time, as the seriousness sets in, she can tell he has no idea what to do. It’s date three, a pivotal one either way, and she had been hesitant about accompanying him to a work thing. But he insisted.

“Is there anything you need to do?” Tim asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, medically? Are you obligated to help?”

“I don’t know what I would accomplish.”

“Should I go help?”

McKenzie watches Tim consider his options. In a way, he’s like the woman staring at her recently detached digit. The action he takes now will determine much about the connections he hopes to maintain in the future.

“I think it’s best if we excuse ourselves.” Tim stands up. “Right?”

“I have no idea what party etiquette is when the host maims herself.”

“If I’m wrong, we’ll send a card.” Tim gestures her towards the door with one hand outstretched and the other on the small of her back, and that, as far as McKenzie is concerned, is the exact right choice.

“Finger reattachment surgery is way more successful than you’d think,” she says as they find their coats on the hooks behind the door.

“Yeah?”

“Seventy percent success rate.”

 

II.

Tim has been to worse parties, except his fishnets are killing him. The waistband digs in under his hip bones and the netting cuts into the skin between his toes.

“Nice legs, dude,” says the Tarzan guy seated at the rec room bar next to him. The flurry of introductions when Tim and McKenzie arrived overwhelmed him, but he thinks this is Tarzan’s house. No idea what the dude’s real name is.

The costumes were McKenzie’s idea—early 2000’s goth kids, with black boots, cutoff jeans, and the aforementioned hosiery, black hair covering their eyes and faces caked with black makeup. She can pull off the look. Tim cannot.

“My girlfriend wanted me to shave them,” says Tim. “I almost did.”

Tarzan smirks as if Tim just revealed his bank account number or his porn fetishes. Most of McKenzie’s nursing school classmates married men who sell real estate or own their own landscaping companies, and they all have enormous basements that smell of paint and new carpet, like this one. Tim has no idea how to talk to them.

Tarzan’s wife is wearing a Jane costume, and she stands in a circle with McKenzie and the other nurses. McKenzie had explained the set-up on the thirty-minute drive out to the suburbs. “Everyone’s having kids, so they’re desperate to prove they’re not old and lame.”

“Do you feel left out?” Tim had asked.

“No. Why would I?”

So far, the nurse moms are succeeding. Most of their costumes would look more appropriate at a college house party, and they’ve paused for shots three times in the hour since Tim and McKenzie arrived.

Tarzan holds up his beer. “Fucking beauty routines.”

“Amen,” says Tim. “Although, I understand it feels pretty good. Smooth legs on cool sheets. Might be worth it.”

The King of the Jungle shakes his head, then excuses himself, and Tim follows the perimeter of the room to the table with the snacks. If he never stops moving, he won’t have to talk to anyone else. Every few minutes McKenzie turns from her group to offer him gratitude with eye contact and a smile. This attention is the only thing making the party bearable.

A couple hours later, someone turns the music down, the nurses shed their wigs and shoes, and most of the gathering opts to sit. Tim’s phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s his mom. I promise I wouldn’t be texting if it wasn’t important…

McKenzie is perched on the arm of couch next to him, and he waits until she finishes her conversation with a lingerie-clad devil about the difficulties of cleaning breast pump tubing. When McKenzie turns back, Tim whispers, “My dog just died.”

“You don’t have a dog.”

“My childhood pet, from back home.”

“Was he old?”

“She was thirteen.” Tim squeezes his eyes shut as his shoulders slump. “But she got hit by a car.”

“Oh my god.” McKenzie brushes the hair away from her eyes and rests her hand on his shoulder.

“I need to go.” Tim shakes his head as he leans forward on the couch. “I’m sorry. Can I drop you off?”

McKenzie stands. “I’m coming with you.”

“You haven’t met my parents yet.”

“I know.”

Tim tugs at the ragged hem of her cutoffs. “And you’re wearing this.”

“You said I look hot.”

“How much have you had to drink?”

“Enough that accompanying you sounds like a good idea, not enough that I can’t give full consent.”

Tim can’t bring himself to react to the joke. “You really don’t have to,” he says.

“Let’s go meet your parents.” McKenzie pulls Tim up, then leans in to whisper in his ear, “They can’t be any older and lamer than these people.”

 

III.

The box has been sitting in the middle of Tim’s boss’s coffee table since they arrived, which means it’s inevitable. Before the evening is over, they will be playing Overshare: The Hilarious Couples Party Game That Will Have Everyone in Stitches! McKenzie has come to detest Tim’s work gatherings. He expects her to act like she’s having a blast and laugh off every lame comment. His coworkers expect her to share every detail of their relationship and play terrible games. Still, she keeps focused on the lid’s yellow bubble lettering because it distracts her from Tim’s boss’s pinky. A year after the pickle incident, it’s still discolored and swollen. And a little crooked.

“I’m so happy we can gather like this.” Tim’s boss remains elegant despite the finger, in a draping blouse and showy jewelry. “We have so much to celebrate.”

Their company manages civic fundraising campaigns, and they recently nailed a big one, twenty-one million dollars for an aquarium in North Carolina. Parties accompany all such victories, but this one is the smallest yet, with only employees and their romantic partners. No one will need stitches tonight, no matter what Overshare promises.

Tim leans over and asks McKenzie, “Are you comfortable?” She sits on a distended ottoman. At least Tim is on the floor.

“I guess,” she says.

Tim rests his hand on her knee. The awkward angle makes it an unnatural gesture. “Are you okay?”

“Super fucking okay. Okay?”

Tim retracts, and McKenzie considers apologizing. Instead she goes back to staring at the game box.

The group talks about nothing: favorite shoe brands, some office snafu that the romantic partners don’t understand, how long it’s been since everyone’s been to the dentist. Soon Tim’s boss directs the group to the kitchen for food, and McKenzie eats off the relish tray because everything else spread out on the kitchen island contains seafood. While they stand there, one of Tim’s coworkers asks McKenzie when she plans on getting engaged. McKenzie nearly chokes on her olive.

Finally they reconvene in the living room and Tim’s boss lifts the lid off of Overshare, which makes a farting noise. “Goodness, excuse me,” she says. Then she reads the directions, in their entirety, out loud. Overshare is basically Truth or Dare geared for church social groups. Which piece of your partner’s clothing do you find most alluring? Perform a PG-rated strip tease for your partner.

Tim must be able to sense McKenzie’s dread, because he whispers a preemptive, “Can you please try to have fun?” in her ear.

The action progresses around the living room. Butts are squeezed, sex acts are alluded to, and the accompanying laughs are gentle and polite. When it’s McKenzie and Tim’s turn, he gestures her towards the pile of cards in the middle of the coffee table. It’s a truth one. What was your first thought about your partner when you first met them?

“We first met when I was at work.” McKenzie can feel Tim wincing from the floor next to her. He hates this story, but he’s making her play Overshare and if Overshare wants the gritty details, she has no choice but to comply. “I’m a nurse in a urology office, and Tim came in for a procedure, so my first thought was… he’s really hairy.”

“Wait,” says one of Tim’s coworkers, a tall guy with slick hair. “That means you saw his…” The guy gestures a circle around his crotch. “…his ‘area’ right away?”

“Yep.”

“Nice.” The guy nods and leans back. “And I assume you were so impressed that you had no choice but to ask him out?”

McKenzie rolls her eyes. “Exactly. I was mesmerized.”

This time the chuckles sound more genuine. “Alright Tim, now I’m curious,” says the woman who handles social media. “He really is the whole package,” says the wife of the company’s vice president as she taps McKenzie on the shoulder. “Get it? Package?”

Tim waves them off. He isn’t smiling. “That’s enough. Whose turn is it?”

Later in the kitchen, Tim pulls McKenzie into the corner. “Why did you have to tell everyone?”

“It’s funny. They liked it.”

“I work with these people.” Red splotches creep up his neck towards his ears.

The last time she shared the story was at a dinner where two of her nursing school friends managed to guess Tim’s specific procedure, then referred to him as “The Strangler” for the rest of the night. After that incident, McKenzie promised never to bring it up again. “Can we fight about this some other time?” she asks.

McKenzie returns to the living room, and ten minutes later, when she tries to find Tim, he’s gone. No one saw him leave. Tim’s boss completes a quick search of the condo but comes up empty-handed. “That’s so odd,” the woman says. “Did he say something and maybe you didn’t hear? Could something serious have happened?”

 

IV.

McKenzie leads Tim into the back room of the restaurant, and no one gathered there shouts “surprise.” This is fine, because people jumping out of the dark is a bit cliché, and anyway, Tim had noticed a few text alerts on her phone that indicated she was planning something. Still, as he stands in front of his coworkers, his parents, and the handful of McKenzie’s nursing school friends who have become his friends too, he imagines how he would have reacted if he had gotten the full surprise party routine. Eyes wide, big smile, hands crossed over his heart in gratitude. Maybe he would have bowed.

“Thanks for this,” Tim says to McKenzie before they separate to greet their guests.

She kisses his cheek. “I told you I’d make it special.”

Tim finds his mom first. “What a nice party. That McKenzie is so thoughtful.” She drinks a bright red concoction out of a martini glass. “This seems like a big step.”

“Yep, she’s great.” Tim looks past her to check the line at the bar. “What are you drinking?”

“I have no idea.”

Next Tim finds Tarzan, whose real name is Jason, at the bar. He holds his beer with his pointer finger and thumb circled around the neck and gestures by waggling the bottle. “I heard a rumor you’re going to propose tonight.”

“Who told you that?”

“Or maybe my wife just thinks you will.”

Tim snaps around with a force that startles them both. “Does McKenzie think that, too?”

Jason holds up his hands and takes a step back. “I have no idea. I’m only repeating what Gina said.”

Six months ago, Tim had finally happened upon what he and Jason have in common: whiskey. They joined a bourbon club that meets once a month at a bar downtown. But their relationship is still tenuous, so Tim says, “Sorry. No surprise proposals tonight. Hopefully someday soon.”

Jason claps Tim on the shoulder. “You’ll get there.”

By the time Tim finds his boss, other guests have started to leave. He’s only had two drinks, and he’s barely touched the food.

“When you first brought McKenzie to our place,” she says, her stack of bracelets clinking as they slide down her arm, “I knew you two were going to work out. I could see the electricity between you. How long ago was that?”

“Almost two years.”

“That’s right.” She holds up her hand with the infamous yet surprisingly normal-looking pinky, and the bracelets sound again as they slide back towards her elbow. “Thanks to that little blunder, I’ll always know exactly how long you two have been together.”

Three hours after the start of his party, Tim locates McKenzie in the restaurant foyer.

“Gina and Jason just left,” she says. “I said goodbye for you.”

“Can we leave too?”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it lame to be the last person at your own birthday?”

McKenzie shrugs. “I’m still having fun. What about your friends?”

“I don’t care about them. I’d rather be with you.”

The ringing of pots and pans from the kitchen and the throb of conversation from the dining room fill the foyer, yet the absence of a response from McKenzie surrounds them like the vacuum of outer space.

“Is this a sex thing?” she asks after a moment. “We can still do it, even if it’s late.”

“No.” Tim runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. Why did you throw me a party if you’re not ready to get more serious? That doesn’t make any sense.”

McKenzie interlaces her fingers into his, and Tim believes she would give him what he wanted, if only she could. But all she can muster instead is a gathering in the back of a steakhouse. “Tonight was a lot of work. Can we focus on that for now?”

“Fine.”

“And if you want to leave, we can leave.” She glances at her watch, then twists to see who remains in the backroom. “Twenty minutes. We need to say goodbye and wrap everything up.”

“Sure,” says Tim. “What’s twenty more minutes?”

 

V.

McKenzie crouches in the boulevard next to her car and prepares for the onslaught of three-year-olds.

“Tenzie!” shouts Gina’s daughter as she dives in for a hug.

“Y’all are getting huge,” McKenzie says when she stands again.

Gina approaches across the lawn in a red, white, and blue sundress. “Get away from the road,” she instructs the kids, who scatter towards the backyard.

“Is he here?” McKenzie asks.

Gina crosses her arms. “Jason invited him. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s inevitable, I suppose.” McKenzie follows her friend, who walks slowly, almost as if she’s offering McKenzie a chance to bolster herself before seeing Tim for the first time since the break-up.

“The landscaping looks great,” says McKenzie. Gina and Jason have redone their entire yard since her last visit. Instead of evergreen shrubs and broad swaths of grass, stone paths crisscross the property, leading to juvenile trees extending upwards from bursts of hostas.

“We’re not sure the lindens are going to take,” says Gina. “The soil’s pretty sandy.”

“They look like they’re doing okay.”

In Gina’s backyard McKenzie finds the type of party she’s grown accustomed to. Some drinking, some talking, mostly chasing kids. Tim stands by the grill with Jason, and McKenzie avoids looking at him until she’s certain he notices her not noticing him. Then she pours herself a glass of wine from a folding table and joins the circle of her nursing school classmates. They used to talk about weird patient stories. Not anymore.

“They just raised our deductible,” says one of her friends. “We couldn’t afford to have another kid if we wanted to.”

“Are you trying?” asks another friend.

“We’re talking about thinking about it.”

Jason summons Gina over to the grill to whisper in her ear. Gina returns to the circle and gestures for McKenzie to lean in. “Tim wants to know if you want him to leave.”

“Are you kidding me?” McKenzie responds.

She crosses the stamped concrete patio to Jason, Tim, and the plume of greasy hamburger smoke. Tim is not a bad guy. He’s a great guy. Kind, funny, always able to make her feel special, and even some muscle definition across his shoulders. But if McKenzie has to pick one human to hang out with daily for the rest of her life, would she pick him? And that’s not even the question she’s been asking herself for more than two years. The real question is, would she pick anyone?

“We need to talk,” says McKenzie, hands on her hips, facing Tim as Jason backs away with his metal spatula up like a samurai sword.

Tim gestures her towards a boulder surrounded by fresh mulch, this time without his hand on the small of her back.

“We need to fix this,” she says. “I don’t want to make the whole party weird.”

“Me neither.”

“Good. So it’s easy, right?”

Tim overacts his shock with an open-mouth double take. “Of course it’s not easy. It’s anything but easy. But I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

He puts his hands in his pockets. “You’re welcome.”

Then, they party. Wine, burgers, a new yard game with frisbees and beer bottles. No conversation is so deep that it can’t be interrupted by a beverage refill or a handful of potato chips. When McKenzie tires of listening to toilet-training war stories, she leaves the patio and enters the yard to find Tim chasing a group of three-year-olds in between decorative rocks and tufts of waist-high grass. With his arms out he looks like a zombie trying to catch enough kids for a modest lunch. It’s obvious to everyone that this is what he wants: the yard, the kids, close friends standing around, debating whether to have one more beer.

McKenzie sits on a boulder as a thought occurs to her. For the next barbecue, if Gina and Jason only choose to invite one of them, they’ll most certainly choose Tim.

For another moment she watches the chase and listens to the screams. Then, in an instant, Tim falls to the ground and grabs his ankle. The kids stop, then return to stand over him with their fingers in their mouths.

“Are you okay?” Gina’s daughter asks. “What happened?”

The party relocates around Tim as he grimaces and inhales through clenched teeth. McKenzie keeps to the periphery. “I’m so sorry,” Gina says to him. “They needed to replace some of the in-ground sprinkler heads, but they didn’t have enough on the truck, so they left holes everywhere.” She hits her husband on the arm. “I told you someone was going to break their leg.”

“It’s not broken,” says Jason.

“I don’t know,” says one of the nurses, and the rest chime in with their opinions. “He could have fractured his talus.” “I’m sure it’s just a sprain.” “Look at the swelling. That’s an anterior tibialis tear for sure.” Before they reach a consensus, the excuses start. “I’d drive you to the hospital, man, but I’ve had too many beers.” “I just put Gwen down for a nap.” “How’s your insurance? Do you have ambulance coverage?”

And just as quickly as the injury earned everyone’s attention, Tim loses it again. A kid grabs a handful of cake, another spills his juice. A girl screams at some terrifying bug she finds on the ground. Gina leaves to find a bandage, the rest of the group drips away. Except McKenzie. She steps towards her ex-boyfriend and crouches on the brick path near his head.

“What’s your diagnosis?” he asks.

“They’ll probably have to amputate.”

“That sucks.”

“Seriously, though. I should probably take you to the hospital.”

When McKenzie tells this story (to a friend or sister, probably her mom), she’ll say that she picked him up and carried him to her car like a fireman rescuing someone from a burning building. In reality, the trek across the yard is much more awkward, with his arm around her shoulder, her trying to lift him with one arm around his ribs, and him hopping in between gasps and winces. When they reach her car, he says, “Are you sure you don’t mind leaving?”

“Not at all.” She leans forward to pour him into the passenger seat. “I hate parties.”

He relaxes, leaning back on the headrest like he’s finally arrived home. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought you did.” She grabs the seatbelt and hands it to him. “You do now.”

Eric Rasmussen is a Wisconsin writer who serves as fiction editor for Sundog Lit, as well as editor for the regional literary journal Barstow & Grand. He has placed short fiction in North American Review (2022 Kurt Vonnegut Prize runner-up), Fugue, The MacGuffin, and Pithead Chapel, among others. Find him online at theotherericrasmussen.com.

 

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 by AJ Strosahl

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984
by AJ Strosahl

A monster named Ogopogo lived in Lake Okanagan and Sylvester’s father Clyde had once seen it drown a bear, face first. It happened a few years before Sylvester was born, when Clyde was almost a boy himself. Clyde told Sylvester that it happened as these things do, which is to say: out of nowhere, on an unremarkable day. Clyde was fishing for perch on a stretch of shore where you could wade in, waist-deep, with your feet anchored in the silty lake bed. It was late in the day, with the sun high and the air thick with pollen and light. Clyde had just felt a tug on his line when a silence fell.

It was the loudest silence he’d ever heard.

“It was kind of . . . respectful,” Clyde said, when Sylvester asked how he’d known to cease all movement, to still his hands and the slow shifting of his legs in the water and even his own breath. “Like your Ma used to say: sometimes time drops a stitch. Everything stopped so he could come to the water and drink.”

The animal itself seemed to materialize out of the air, a few yards to Clyde’s left, at the lapping shoreline.  At first its form was unclarified, just a blobby haze. Then, a slow coalescence: a hulking form of textured sable, mountainous dorsal hump and questing snout, a predator stink on the breeze, glittering black eyes. It bent low to drink from the waters at the shoreline. The bear’s teeth were endless and profound; it was a grizzly, unmistakably, and barely three yards from Clyde.

“What did you do?” Sylvester always asked when he could tell that Clyde was sauced enough to tell the story the right way.

“What did I do?” Clyde would bray his screeching laugh. Sometimes, depending on how late in the evening it was, he would also hang his head in disgust, like he was shocked he could have raised such an imbecile.

“Don’t be a smart aleck! I pissed myself!” Then the laugh would come again. “Son, there wasn’t any do. A grizzly, you get me? I didn’t think one single thought, let alone do. I froze like a fawn and accepted the state of things, just like any intelligent animal does when it’s beat.”

Sylvester had pictured it so many times, he might as well have lived it: his own body cramped up in involuntary surrender, awed face slack, with hot urine running down his legs into the lake. The moment was locked in time so stubbornly it felt like an exhibit in a museum that Sylvester could visit at will.

The bear wasn’t the end of the story and it wasn’t the end of Clyde.

As soon as the bear turned its massive head and took note of Clyde for the first time—its eyes narrowing and hackles coming up—a writhing cylinder burst forth from the water and towered above them both. If the bear had stopped time, then the monster from the lake was all motion, pulling the rest of the world along at its own speed.

It was odorless and scaled, its hide pulsing with all colors at once, like an oil slick. It was as big around as the trunk of the elm tree in Clyde’s yard growing up, which his mother had said was hundreds of years old. It moved as a snake would and with such force and precision that, Clyde said, he knew instantly that what was visible was only a fraction of the whole animal. Its head darted to and fro above with dizzying, alien grace. The prehistoric scale of it—the suggestion of its true length—was sickening.

“It could have taken us both, or taken every house from here to Penticton, or plucked a single acorn from a tree five feet away. The control it had! All that tail beneath the water, the part of him I didn’t see . . . it could have been a hundred feet. And strong, like God’s own hand.”

Clyde always whispered that part, like he didn’t want anyone except Sylvester to hear him name the extent of the animal’s focus and power.

It was a serpent, and it was not. It was whalelike and it was not. It had a face and it did not. It was Ogopogo, as indisputable as the bear. Ogopogo, to whom the lake belonged. Ogopogo, who strained its massive body up and out toward the bear, moving past Clyde so quickly every hair on his body stood on end.

Then, the bear’s face was obscured by a flexing, muscular coil and its body was whisked forward into the lake, like it weighed nothing at all. The last things Clyde saw before he passed out were the ass end of the bear, dragging through the water, and his fishing pole, which had been wrenched from his hands and sucked into Ogopogo’s wake, irretrievable. The pole and the bear vanished completely, save for a rippling movement below the surface, just a glimmer of iridescent scales.

◊

As he waits inside a hollow log for his own death to arrive, Sylvester thinks of his father—who died of a stroke in ’76, just after the war—and of Ogopogo. He wonders what death will feel like and suspects it is probably already in progress. It hasn’t hurt badly so far, at least not worse than he can bear. He has shelter and there is fresh water everywhere and, though the forest has become a horror to him, it is not unlike somewhere he’d have selected as his final resting place, if he’d been given the opportunity to choose in advance.

The log is strangely dry inside, despite the rain. For the first time since he and Elias got lost on their way back to camp, Sylvester is grateful he doesn’t have a flashlight, so at least he does not have to see what insects and animals are sharing the space with him. He can feel them against his skin, crawling and burrowing. During the days, he’s been eating all the beetles and worms he can find, because he knows they’re safe. But if he puts something in his mouth without seeing it, in the damp, dark log, it could be a poisonous spider or something else he’d regret. He’s regretting quite a few things now, truth be told.

Last night, he’d ripped spongey moss in huge handfuls from the ground and stuffed it into the log around him as tightly as he could. Like eating bugs, it was another thing Clyde had told him to do when Sylvester was a young man, if he ever found himself lost in the woods. The moss helps, but it’s still getting colder. The temperature has dropped every night since the forest had swallowed Sylvester and Elias up, eleven days ago, and, once the rain turns to snow, if hunger hasn’t already put him down, exposure will.

Sylvester and his friend Elias had camped by the river dozens of times on fishing trips in the Tualatins. It took a hammer and a surprising amount of strength to finish the trout off once you hauled them in, but they were delicious charred over a fire. Elias was good company in that he mostly kept his own counsel. They’d fish and build campfires at night, sticking close to the river, sometimes hiking to Wapato Lake or setting rabbit snares. Elias was gone now, lost somewhere in the pines.

On their fifth day gone, Elias had eaten something poisonous that came back up in a froth of green vomit. Whatever it was made his mind go haywire and his forehead burn with fever. He’d wandered away from Sylvester, mumbling incoherently about running out to the store for a pack of smokes. They’d been walking so long, and Sylvester was so hungry and frigged up himself that he’d been too tired to stop his friend. He’d watched Elias stumble through the brush, the back of his red shirt vanishing slowly, then Sylvester had just kept walking. That was six days ago, he was pretty sure. Or seven. It was hard to keep track.

Things hadn’t gone wrong all at once, but Sylvester knew that they usually didn’t. It was another thing Clyde always said; in the bush, it’s death by a thousand cuts. First you find your water source fouled. Then you stumble into some poison oak and your legs swell up like balloons or you break an ankle or something starts bleeding too heavy to stop. Then there’s a storm. It’s rarely ever like it was on the banks of Lake Okanagan that day, the day Clyde dodged death twice without moving a muscle; when people die in the forest, it’s the result of dozens of little wrong decisions. And so it is for Sylvester.

The first mistake: he and Elias had followed a trail of chanterelles after they’d finished fishing for the day. They’d been south on the river, at a deep reservoir, where Elias’s cousin said he’d caught good-sized crappies and walleye. It was slightly further afield than their normal spot, but neither had registered it as particularly far from camp or taken any special note of it. The chanterelles bloomed from the forest floor like tumors, delicate and a cheerful ochre color. They were so plentiful that Sylvester had taken off his overshirt to make a pouch for them as he and Elias picked. Elias had brought a quarter stick of butter on the trip, which they’d planned to save until their last night. As they picked further and further away from the river, they couldn’t stop talking about the mushrooms, how delicious they’d be roasted directly under a fish, smothered in butter and salt.

By the time they realized that dark was falling, they’d inched a good ways down a craggy incline. They couldn’t even hear the river anymore. And two hours after that, wandering in what felt like circles, Sylvester had fallen and gotten his bell rung, hard. And instead of hunkering down in one of the logs or crevices they’d seen, they decided to walk through the night, certain that they’d come across their camp. They weren’t far from it, they were sure!

The second afternoon, Elias and Sylvester ate the mushrooms raw while they walked and spent the next night and day shitting their brains out on tree roots and ferns, their fingers clenched into the dirt. They never found camp or the river again—just an endless ocean of trees—increasing and decreasing altitude and constant unknown animal sounds, a storm that seemed to be malevolently gathering right over their heads. A thousand cuts, indeed.

And so: the log. The left side of Sylvester’s face still aches from when he’d fallen on the first day, and he keeps using his dry tongue to worry the socket of the incisor he lost and the jagged half of its neighbor that remains. The wind moving through the pines howls and the rain hitting the canopy sounds like waves. But the log is quiet, a dead structure—solid, and stuffed with live things.

Down here, low to the ground and packed in moss like a toad, Sylvester only hears the susurrations of the beetles and spiders, the rustling of ground cover as it is struck by the rain. His stomach doesn’t even hurt anymore, but it feels like his bones are made of slowly-cooling metal, like they could drop right through his skin. Thoughts float through his mind without stopping; he cannot attach meaning to them or to anything.

If Sylvester wakes up tomorrow, he thinks, he will crawl out of the hollow log with more ticks burred into him and aphids filling his mouth. He will squeeze moisture from the damp leaves he finds on the ground for something to drink and then he will walk. Maybe he’ll fall, like he did on the first night, and knock out more teeth or split his kneecap on a poorly-placed rock. Maybe the next handful of pine needles he eats will be coated in something toxic and he’ll die with his throat puffed shut and his nose full of blood. Maybe he’ll stumble on a bear, so majestic and terrible that time itself will stop. Or maybe it’s the walking that will get him and his body will come to its end that way, in shambling motion that slows and slows and slows until he is nothing but another carcass decomposing on the forest floor. Twenty-eight is too young for a long death, he thinks. I hope what’s next happens fast.

The trees moan with the wind and Sylvester trembles. It’s cold, yes, but the moss, his boots and warm socks, and his wool overshirt, long emptied of the chanterelles, are keeping him warm enough. Perhaps the cold snap won’t come tonight. It’s early October, which can stay quite mild, even in the mountains. Sylvester tries to fall asleep, if only to pass the time until he can walk in daylight again. He wishes Elias was here so there could be some companionship in the fate that has found them both.

Every inch of the forest in front of him these last long days is the part of Ogopogo his father could see: stunning, but only cursorily representative of the whole monster. All the forest beyond what Sylvester sees is the long tail beneath the surface of the water, the source of its control and power. Sylvester could walk forever, probably, and not come to the end of this wood. It is all he knows now. It is the world.

◊

Clyde’s buddies got sick of the Ogopogo story eventually—though Sylvester never did— and not just because they’d never believed it. It was because Clyde used it for everything; it never had a fixed meaning. Sometimes he’d seen the bear and Ogopogo that day because the good Lord knew that Clyde was the only mortal man worthy of viewing His most fearsome creations. Sometimes he’d seen them because he was a lucky man or a humble one or a brave one. There were other stories out there, after all, about frail sorts who’d seen the monster and collapsed, stone-dead. Even To’o Jessup, a known hard-case, had been found face down in three inches of water right on the shoreline in ’73, not a scratch on him, and he’d only been forty-two.

Sylvester was having a whiskey with his dad at the tavern in Oroville one afternoon that year when To’o’s sister Coee came in. Sylvester and Clyde were both working the orchards then, before they moved to the Tualatins. Coee came into the bar already half-drunk and Clyde was never not in his cups by that time of day. So he’d started up with her, telling her how To’o must have been unable to handle what Clyde had seen and survived and more’s the pity.

Sylvester had winced and started apologizing immediately; he liked Coee and he’d liked To’o, too, and even though Sylvester never got tired of the story, it was just not the time. But Coee had laughed in Clyde’s face, unbothered.

“You pussy,” she said when she was done. “You fucking leech. You saw N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ and you are telling me you lived because you were stronger than my To’o? Christ, you’re a donkey. Fucking moron.”

“They both could have had me, but I kept my wits and Ogopogo…” Clyde started, but Coee laughed louder, more violently.

“Don’t you call him that, fool,” Coee spat and took a pull of the sweating Budweiser the bartender had just set on the bar in front of her. “That beast saved your life. He knew you were weak. He saw the bear and he knew you never stood a chance. N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ doesn’t need to eat you; he would have spit you up like trash.”

Coee had helped Sylvester roll Clyde out of the bar later. When Sylvester asked her what she’d meant about Ogopogo, she’d told him, more gently: “Your father was never in any danger and my brother had a heart attack. Just his own dumb ticker. Your dad doesn’t even know how blessed he is, or why. God protects drunks and children, right? Well? N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ is his name. The lake god. Don’t you ever let me catch you calling him Ogopogo again. That dumbass might not get it through his thick skull, but you can. Right?”

After they’d deposited Clyde on the couch at his friend Happy’s place, which was next door to the bar, Coee walked Sylvester back to the dormitory where all the pickers slept. She hummed ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ so vigorously that Sylvester joined in. When they finished, laughing, he said: “I’m sorry about him.”

“Don’t be sorry about Clydey, kiddo,” Coee scoffed. Her teeth shone white in the darkness as she grinned. “He doesn’t need your sorry, he’s sorry enough.”

They stood in silence outside the dormitory barn for a moment more before she shooed him off to bed.

“Don’t forget,” Coee whispered as Sylvester cranked the lever to open the barn door and the sound of the sleeping breaths of the off-shift pickers filled the air. “Don’t forget his real name.”

◊

Ten years later, in the log, in the cold and rain and incomprehensible wilderness, Sylvester thinks: N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, please I beg, and it is his last thought before he falls asleep.

The next day, he is too weak to leave the log. He spends the day with the upper half of his body sticking out one side, like a half-peeled egg, watching the daylight move across the forest floor. Sylvester eats two pads of moss and three earthworms, then retches it all back up. He lets the intermittent rain wet his shirt then sucks the water from its sleeves.  He wishes for a monster, a savior, to appear, but he is in the bear’s jaws now or he is the bear, in the grip of a deity. He’s not sure. Sylvester sleeps. Wakes.

Sleeps. Wakes.

Sleeps again.

Wakes again.

Sleeps.

Sleeps.

Sleeps again.

Wakes to snow.

Sylvester uses his hands to pull himself out of the log, reaching and grabbing the earth, then dragging himself forward. His entire body shakes. Once emerged, he can see the snow everywhere; it has remade the forest under a dusting of variegated white. But he doesn’t feel the cold of it, or the wet, even as he watches his fingers turn red and then a mottled purple. He’s been wrong, he sees that now: he won’t walk out of here. He can barely crawl.

Sylvester recalls faintly that hearing is the last sense to go before death; in the end, you are reduced to your ears. He’d read that somewhere or maybe someone told him; the nurse he dated in Pocatello? Coee? His mother, Kiyiya, who had died herself when he was eleven? Sylvester can still see, mostly, though his vision is warped on his left, and on his right pocked with dark spots. The light in the forest is working strangely and he cannot tell if it is day or night. But he is alive.

Sylvester decides he will crawl to the next tree.

It takes a very long time.

When he gets to the next tree, he collapses in its roots, in the snow. His fingers are blue. There is a constant, cyclical breath that rattles his body and threatens to shake him apart. The breathing sounds somewhere outside of him, so outside that he could feel it, scalding hot on the back of his neck. But who was to say? He had lost track of where the mountains ended and where he began.

N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ or something like you, he thinks, please come.

Something does.

It doesn’t come as a serpent god from a lake. It doesn’t come as a bear.

It comes as light.

Sylvester rolls over onto his back and lets the snow fall into his open eyes, his mouth, across his cheeks. His vision wavers, but inside him there is radiation, a warlike feeling, a suffusion of brightness and energy. He can move again. He’s nearly weightless, he can carry himself with almost no effort at all. Inside, he is aglow.

Sylvester feels it suddenly, a separation of mind from body, like he is looking down at himself from six inches above his head. He can make this starved, frostbitten shell do whatever he likes. Sylvester rises, feels nothing. Just light, light. He is beyond it all. He walks forward ten paces, stiff-legged, before he can bend his knees again. Then ten paces after that. And then he begins to run.

He runs. And he is the bear blundering toward the lake’s shore on a spring day and he is his own father holding a fishing pole with lake mud between his toes. And he is life itself, he is a human animal made of skin and cells and spells, he is running toward death, headlong and heedless, an endless nova of darkness spiraling through him, dimming his vision to almost nothing, just flares of light winking out.

Sylvester knows now what his father never did: that he is blessed, he knows that death’s light is a sonic landscape of the next world, that it is his holy fortune to have found himself here, running blind and dying through a snowy forest. He is running faster than he ever thought possible, down a steep slope now, just light and light and more. More. The world is so big, so astounding. It is unending. He is on the razor’s edge between something and nothing, between mortal terror and the miraculous. If this is his lot in life, it will also be his privilege to run off the edge of it all.

Sylvester runs and runs, for hours or days, in this world or the next. He runs until he falls and then he gets up and runs even more. By the time the ground has leveled off and he thinks he can hear the flapping of canvas tents in the wind and the distant trill of children’s voices, he never wants to stop. Even when he runs into another body, feels warm living hands catching him and holding fast, he still strains madly forward, longing to stay in motion and sound and light. The hands hold him tight about the shoulders and Sylvester weeps with dry, unseeing eyes because he is saved, yes, but also he is stopped. And oh, oh, oh: he’d been absolutely flying.

AJ Strosahl is a writer and small business owner who lives in Oakland, California. She has work published or forthcoming in Oyster River Pages, Signal Mountain Review, Ruminate Magazine, and other outlets. Her essay ‘Dogs I’ve Read’ was recently a finalist for the 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction prize, and in 2022, AJ will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Vashon Island Arts Residency and the Bryn Du Art Center. ’N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, 1984’ is an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Only In Pure Air.

 

 

WALKING ON THE FURNITURE by Jessica Klimesh

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

WALKING ON THE FURNITURE
by Jessica Klimesh

In fourth grade, after Ellee and I learned how thin the crust was, how hot the mantle and core were, how fragile Earth in general was, we spoke in cautious whispers. What if? You think? Shh. We spoke of boys the same way. Curiosity mixed with innocence and fear.

At sleepovers, we held tight to the covers of our shared bed and to each other, our dreams fixed and frantic. Where were we safest? In a few years, we would explore the softness of our own bodies, the way it felt to press into another’s. But in fourth grade, shielded by darkness, we simply lied about the boys we had kissed, speaking in wary whispers, our bodies delicately intwined. And when the sun came up, we floated from footstool to coffee table to easy chair, walking on the furniture and tiptoeing lithely if we had to touch the floor. We were determined not to fall through, not to break the earth open. At school when the other kids ran, their footfalls hard and rugged, the earth shook, and Ellee and I would look fearfully at each other. Should we tell them? Shh. No. It’s our secret. But it wasn’t. After all, they’d learned about the Earth—about the crust, mantle, and core—same as us. We just understood it differently.

One Saturday afternoon, we decided to chance it. Just once won’t hurt, would it? What if? Shh, it’s fine. But as we ran for the swing set, our feet broke through the crust, and the mantle swallowed us up like quicksand, our feet melting, our legs turning to rubber and char. We fell deeper and deeper into the abyss of Earth, into the core, a hot rush of gold and darkness and light and silver. This is it, isn’t it? It is, yes. And as we fell, we grabbed hold of each other’s hands and laughed. And for a moment, life was glorious. For a moment, life was true.

Jessica Klimesh is a US-based writer and technical editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brink, Variety Pack, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, FlashFlood Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cedar Crest College and an MA in English from Bowling Green State University. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash.

THE OTHER SIDE by Ann Stoney

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THE OTHER SIDE
by Ann Stoney

When you wake up in the night, don’t flush or wash your hands. Go straight back to bed. This helps. You’ve been awake on and off. Dreams take the shape of lightning. Exaggerated versions of yourself, they crash unexpectedly, then fade away—a tide that rips, then spits you on the shore of waking.

You think of tomorrow. You’ll divide the day into three parts: (1) a business activity, something practical, (2) a bit of exercise, (3) something creative, whatever that is.

But when tomorrow comes, you fill the day with useless things and once again are left with the night to figure it all out.

So you do. You consider taking the yoga class in the morning, but it starts too early, you’ll never make it. Not now, when you’ve been up half the night.

Let’s face it, they’re all over—the mice. This keeps you awake, too.

Your mind is adrift between sleeping and waking. Is this what death is like? Or is it more like anesthesia? You worried a lot as a child about dying—Am I gonna die, Daddy, am I gonna die? Wondering in your child brain how it would feel not to exist, knowing on some level that this was a contradiction, but you wondered anyway.

Your family moved around a lot. That was hard, always the new kid on the block. Pretty much the same as not existing. Maybe that’s why you wondered about it.

You were eight years old when you’d get up in the middle of the night to guard the house. You believed this was necessary for your very survival. Because your parents were about to be kidnapped, you were sure of it, and you needed to be awake when it happened. You’d listen for any noise, tapping or knocking, stand in the hallway military-style, pacing back and forth, back and forth.

Why is it when you can’t sleep, your childhood haunts you? A distinct memory of bullying—you were twelve, kids picking hard red berries from trees, throwing them at you. You ran into the house and up the stairs, followed by a kid, the only concerned one. You turned around, snarled like a dog until he ran away.

You think about smoking pot. Your retired husband sells it part-time, doesn’t have the same problem with it that you do. He’s sleeping peacefully next to you, twisting and bending every now and again, uttering guttural sounds.

The pot is everywhere—grains on table edges, roach butts in film canisters, inside the leather pouch in his backpack. You don’t think he realizes, really, how dire it is. You could pad downstairs in slippers and robe, light up on the deck.

But that’s an issue. If you smoke tonight, you’ll want more tomorrow. Inhale it with your coffee, then all day long. In fact, that’s why you can’t sleep in the first place. It’s been two days since you quit. If you give in now, the pot will keep you awake before putting you out. Tricky. So you lie awake in a fog with your mind racing.

Your husband laughs at you when you make those silly faces. At you, not with you. Part of your past. Like your mother, he says. Don’t be your mother. Your mother, may she rest in peace, loved to amuse, entertain, scrunch up her face, howl and speak in funny voices, snort until you were screaming with laughter, gasping, Stop! Stop!

You’ve carried that with you so far, the funny faces, the silliness, but your husband says it makes you unattractive. It’s not who you really are, he says.

So you don’t do it around him. You stop the primal impulse to be silly. Other men used to laugh their asses off, proclaiming you a comic genius, but not your husband. You’re more sophisticated than that, he says, made for better things. But you love letting off steam, being wild and crazy and decadent. It’s in your nature to be so.

So, this is something that has to be resolved, one of the things you think about when the dark pierces you awake.

Exploding Head Syndrome. It has a name. You looked it up on the Internet. Another reason why you can’t sleep; just as you’re about to, it grips you in the terror of paralysis. It comes on slowly at first, a far-off wave, rendering you powerless, until it takes over and you’re drowning in noise like wind whooshing through your brain. A siren, a high-pitched ring.

A rare condition, a misfiring of the neurons, the brief article said—brief, because no one knows much about it. A condition difficult to track. Like a cougar. You never know when it will attack. What’s the point of going to a sleep clinic when it might not attack that night?

The Exploding Head Syndrome waits until you try to quit smoking pot. But at least you recognize it now, and that helps a little. You relax with the noise and hope for the best. Release yourself to the gods.

The first time it happened you were sixteen, certain you heard a woman in a voice of steel say, “And a man stood before you.” You spent years in therapy trying to figure out what that meant. Where did the voice come from? Who was the woman? Were you molested at some point in your childhood? your therapist asks hopefully.

When I was fifteen, you reply. A family friend, but it was consensual and we never had intercourse, although we did everything else. Does that count?

In school you mentioned the Exploding Head Syndrome—you didn’t know what it was called then—to Mr. Lenz, your study hall teacher, who sometimes made short films starring a student or two. He showed one of them in class once, about a beautiful girl whose name you’ve long forgotten, sitting on a blanket in the park, peeling and eating an orange so sensuously that you longed to be that girl. So you flirted with him enough to land a date, the kind a girl has when she’s about to make out with her teacher and lie to her mother about it. You tell her you’re sleeping over with a friend, which is true, but you leave out the part about how Mr. Lenz picks you up at the Wythe Shopping Center in front of the A&P and takes you to his apartment where you neck on the futon couch until you’re afraid to go any further and then he brings you back to your friend’s house where you try to fall asleep but can’t.

You wonder what it is about this experience that keeps you awake. It’s only one of many, why this one? The men were usually older, that’s what you liked. The family friend at fifteen, then the high school teacher—years and years of broken relationships, exhausting you into middle age until you finally met “the one.”

So now it’s all settled; he’s sleeping beside you. You no longer need to run to the arms of strangers. He’s only eight years older, an improvement, blessed with a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City and a house upstate with a view of the lake and a yard full of wildflowers. He really loves you and you really love him, so it’s all settled. You no longer need to run at all.

Yet your mind races as if it’s got legs, ready to run a marathon.

You bolt straight up in bed; he’s taking too much of it. You measure, just to be sure, not with a real tape measure, it’s too dark for that, but with the one in your mind. You lean over, feel the amount of space between him and the edge, and it’s huge! At least six inches, if not eight. You’re dying for a king size bed, but you know he’ll never agree. It was a major battle to convince him to buy the queen.

He’s always inching in closer, forcing you to move further away until you’re practically falling off and this is why, you suddenly think, you cannot sleep. This is the sum total of all the reasons right here. You need space. You cannot have anyone touching any part of your body while you sleep. You don’t know why this is true, but it is. You wonder why this never occurred to you before.

Is this normal? Is it normal for someone to not want human contact, even from her husband, while she sleeps? You’re not sure whether it’s normal or not and this makes you nervous so you think about it some more, about maybe bringing it up with your therapist except that you’re no longer in therapy because you decided you were okay. You’re settled and okay. Still, it’s an interesting question. Maybe you should call her about it—this problem you have—or is it a problem? Your mind races back and forth as to whether it’s a problem or not. Can you help it if you sleep better alone? Aren’t a lot of people like that? Isn’t this why older couples often retire to separate bedrooms? Does this mean you don’t love your husband? Does this mean you’re not fit to be in a relationship, that you’re better off by yourself?

But you were alone for years, you gently remind yourself, gently because you’re now in a state of panic over the bed situation having put your whole marriage on the line in thirty seconds flat. You remind yourself of all the years alone, hopping from one man to another, miserable and lonely. You remind yourself over and over.

Once you were a stripper. You took off your clothes and men rejoiced. They also hurled insults and dumped beer on you. Like slitting the throats of kittens. Who was that person? You stare at the ceiling, so black you need a flashlight to get to the john. You can’t believe someone once paid you five hundred dollars to … don’t think about it. That you did it for so long, your husband says when you finally break down and tell him. More like an eight yearlong moment, you say every time he mentions it—to support the acting career. Just a fact, nothing more. Please don’t tell any of our friends, he says.

So you don’t. No one knows about it. Except of course, the friends you knew back when, the ones you hardly ever see. Misfit friends. Let’s face it, his friends are more interesting anyway—writers, artists, a whole group of them. You’re not used to groups. But somehow, you’ve managed to fit into this one. They like you. You can’t believe it. You’re amazed.

You’re relieved you told him early on. What would you do if you had to go through all that now? You’d be beside yourself. He went on and on about it for two years in couples counseling until you were ready to pull your hair out. Waking you up at four in the morning, obsessing until dawn. Asking questions like, why? What made you do it? For which you had no answer.

But you endured. You calmed him down, stroked his brow, told him over and over how much you loved him until he finally shut up.

Was it really that big a deal? Stripping? He certainly has no qualms about telling people he sells pot, which has always been a sore point, a contradiction in your marriage. You’re muddling through the bottom drawer of the file cabinet in the office. You’re not sure how you got there, on the floor in your nightie searching for sheet music from a previous life, when you performed your original songs in cabaret. Before you transformed yourself into an English teacher. Recorded a demo that never made it. Your boyfriend at the time—the sax player who would later break your heart—helped you arrange them. You find the demo first, under a pile of tax returns.

You imagine life with the sax player. You’d probably be stumbling across condoms in the wastebasket right now, flipping through his little black book. Spending your days with the names of women fluttering in your heart.

Some of them—your songs about stripping—are buried deeper than others. Dust clings to your fingers as you hunt.

You find the songs, draw a bath and sing them, softly so as not to wake him. He’ll never know. You like taking baths, building a castle within his walls. The claw foot tub a smoke away from the window, the scented candle from two Christmases ago, sea salts with fancy names. A piece of a throne you’ve pulled together, complete with lavender scrub and loofah mitt.

You sink into the tub, sing about how you once made love on a pier and it didn’t matter. Then you sing about a stripper who steps outside to take a break, lights up a joint, then huddles alone in the alleyway. The customers think they’ve got her by the tail, but in the end she gets all their money and takes a taxi home, where she tosses and turns all night wondering if she’ll be okay.

You sing to yourself and lay down your weapons. Give up the notion that your life is nothing more than a boxing ring with the men in one corner and everything else in the other. As the construction worker you once dated said, that’s all over now. He would have given up the others to spend the rest of his life with you, which would have been okay, except that he had a habit of tearing up your nightgowns and throwing things. Let’s not forget the night you were forced to flee to your girlfriend’s place on Christopher Street.

No, these songs are private now, best sung alone. There is no turning away from the person sleeping in the other room. Not that you’d want to. You love him. Then you cry, which is what you always do when you sing your songs in the tub.

You slip back into the bedroom and grab some clothes. How about a walk to the lake? Why not? It’s not as dark as it was. You peer out the window to make sure. Dawn is slowly revealing itself, the sun beginning its journey towards the maple trees. You dress quietly, tie your sneakers and head downstairs.

You’re lucky to have the lake so close, nestled at the foot of the winding trail your husband chiseled from the woods with hacksaw and scythe. An amateur landscaper, he enjoys carving footpaths, lining them with ferns and wildflowers, transplanted from the wildlife preserve nearby. Ditto for the annual Christmas tree, rescued from one of many in the forest.

You cross the road and reach the dock, pulled onto the marshland long ago, so rickety you fear you might fall right through, though your husband has tried many times to steady it with extra boards and nails. He fixes things in a ramshackle way, as if using a Band-Aid will stop a rushing tide of blood. But he’s so proud of his efforts, you find it endearing—the driftwood he turns into yard sculptures, the broken birdfeeder from a yard sale he manages to glue back together.

The dock is a little better. You grant your husband a mental tip of the hat. You don’t usually sit here, preferring the lounge chairs further up, but the early light beckons you closer to the water, as if its ripples have something to say. You pull up your knees and cast your eyes across the lake; a row of pine trees shimmers through the mist.

You wish you had a proper dock, but you and your husband don’t have official lake rights. You enjoy the water on a neighbor’s land, originally owned by the grandmother, her ashes scattered under the apple tree. The warring grandkids can’t decide what to do with the property, so no one comes up and nothing gets done. Thank God you’re allowed to use it and keep the canoe there, too. The house itself is uninhabitable, a faded elegance complete with white plastic swans and crumbling stone steps. It wallows behind you, its paint a spackled teal blue, collapsing inch by inch into smithereens.

Sometimes you take guests down to see it. Cocktails in hand, giggling like school children, you peer through cracked windows at frayed wallpaper, wicker chairs fanning the premises as if they owned it, grimy shelves dotted with porcelain figurines. Like a scene from New Orleans. Once your husband offered to buy the piano. Hell, he tells our guests, we’d buy the whole property, house and all, if only they’d sell. They nod in agreement. We’d have lake rights and could build a dock, a little gazebo. They look longingly through the windows again.  Of course, you know that this will never happen, the family will never sell.

Your husband can’t stand things going to waste. He’s always discovering new treasures on the street and dragging them into your lives, which annoys you at first, but then you get used to it, sometimes even enjoy them when you’re not worrying about the clutter. What’s wrong with these people? he asks, as you sip cocktails on the crumbling porch.

But you understand what’s wrong with them. You stretch out your legs, watch the ducks making their way across the lake, innocent and smooth, mother in front, babies soldiering behind. The family can’t bear the idea of change, that their memories of those delicious summers visiting their grandmother will be shattered if they sell a single item. So they keep the abandoned place intact, even as it falls apart.

You keep your eyes on the ducks. Like all creatures on this land—the squirrels, birds, chipmunks, the occasional fox—they are fascinating to watch. You envy the simplicity of their lives, the purity of it, their only worries finding food and not being eaten. But you also know this is an illusion, that nature is unforgivable and cruel; their lives are as complex as yours, if not more so. No living creature can escape that.

The ducks are swimming effortlessly to the other side, where the sun is just beginning to rise. It’s more isolated there, further away from the road, no houses, at least not yet. But some of the land has been cleared, a hint of things to come. You and your husband take advantage of the privacy while you can. On sunny days, you pack up the picnic basket with beer and snacks, sometimes a joint if you’re smoking, and canoe to your favorite spot—a makeshift beach amidst the pine trees and rocky, uneven ground. You spread out the blanket, hoping the ants won’t invade, and inhale the sun. Your husband always wants to swim, no matter how cold the water, and begs you to join him, but you rarely do. You can’t swim like the ducks, and he has an annoying habit of shouting pointers at you whenever you try.

Instead, you prop yourself up and watch him through your straw hat—strong arms plowing through the water to what he affectionately calls the finish line, a tree trunk stranded in the middle of the lake. You can barely see it from where you’re sitting, here on the dock. If it ever disappeared, he’d have nothing to guide him, no marker in sight. He needs that log as much as he needs you, as much as you need him.

Now that’s something. You zip up your sweatshirt. The sun, now full in the sky, has disappeared behind a cloud. You need him, but why? Why so much? He’s strong, lean and attractive. Maybe that’s it. The best sex you ever had. Women go crazy for him. They tease and flirt. Once a couple was visiting and the wife, feigning shock at some silly sexist remark he made, threw an ear of corn at him, and he laughed it off with a twinkle in his eye. He hardly ever gets angry. You can yell and scream, which you’ve often done, and he can take it. He won’t leave. He will never leave because he loves you. You can’t understand why—you, a former stripper and pothead driving him crazy with your ups and downs, but he does. For some reason, he does.

You know just how important this is.

Yet how engulfed you are in his world, his circle of friends—this beautiful house with its deck and birdfeeder and bench in the yard, as though you’re already deep in the middle of the lake. You could swim there now if you wanted to, even though you’re a lousy swimmer. Take off your clothes, sink to the bottom. No one would know, at least not for a while. You contemplate wading through shallow mud, wild reeds tickling your face until you reach the deepest part, the crystal clean part, the depths of which your feet cannot touch, where you would swim the best you could until you could no more. You contemplate this like you did as a child when you wondered how it would feel to not exist—to disappear.

You don’t, of course. You cling to the rickety dock, fingers clenching the slats, wondering if he’s awake by now. He’s probably making coffee and breakfast and suddenly you’re ravenous, ready for fried eggs, sausage and grits. You love the fact that he cooks for you. He may be controlling, but at least he cooks. He cooks and cleans and has no qualms about doing the laundry. He’ll do anything for you if you ask.

Soon you’ll return to the house, tell him where you were. You’ll say you couldn’t sleep and went down to the lake to meditate—the truth, sort of. You’ll sit with him on the deck and leisurely eat the breakfast he lovingly made. You’ll kiss him, thank him for making it. You’ll both watch the birds, talk about what the day might bring.

But for now, you linger a little bit longer, staring across the lake to the other side, where nothing exists except the sweet smell of pine, and the rocky ground beneath it.

Ann Stoney is a writer based in NYC. She is the most recent winner of the Tampa Review’s Danahy Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in PIF Magazine, Duende, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She has been recognized in several contests, most recently as a finalist in the Cutthroat Journal’s 2021 Rick De Marinis Short Story Contest. When she is not writing, she’s busy reviewing stories for the Bellevue Literary Review.

TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD by Richard Casimir

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TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD
by Richard Casimir

There is an image etched in my childhood memory from Haiti, which I find hard to erase. I admit I never try to block it out because it looks like a natural backdrop in my field of vision. It is indeed a troubling view but one from which I cannot escape. Therefore, I grow accustomed to it, absorbing it, despite myself, into my world of thoughts, dreams, and aspirations.

My vision of the image has altered over time, dimming some details, such as the age of the little boy it features, sitting on a school bench, sobbing inconsolably, under the menacing eyes of an exasperated teacher waving a leather whip. I do not recall the circumstances which prompted his punishment. But I remember the mournful tune of his lament, hovering over the dissonant sound of a merciless whip searing into his flesh. Finally, when his agony subsided, this desolate soul stretched out his little arms to feel his battered posterior. His short blue pants adorning a pair of skinny legs were soaked in blood, sticking to his skin. For days, he refused to take the pants off, dreading the discomfort of peeling his skin. Soon after, his wound got infected and did not heal for many weeks. Following his recovery, he suffered several epileptic seizures due to the constant stress he faced at school. One day, he recalled experiencing a seizure attack at the exact moment the teacher was about to hit him. He tried asking for help in vain, managing only to mouth the words without any sound.

Most victims of violence, namely children, suffer from three different kinds of pain: physical and emotional pain, and a feeling of guilt originating from their inability to rationalize their ordeal. They believe there is something wrong with them, which elicits deservedly the punishment they receive. I am the little boy represented in that image, and I have suffered from the same kinds of pain. My parents later told me that the school would have terminated the teacher who had so cruelly punished me had they not intervened on his behalf. They conceded they were indeed distraught by the ordeal, but they did not want me to lose the opportunity to get an education, provided at the time only to a select few in the country.

For many years, the trauma of my childhood experience haunted me, not only in my dreams but also in my daily life. It altered my attitude towards people, towards love and friendship, leading me to reevaluate the purpose of knowledge. Hence, I predicated every enterprise in my life upon the operant conditioning of reward and punishment. Thus, I was afraid to fall in love, to go to college, and to start a family, dreading a chastisement that no longer existed. I did not know what fueled my fear to explore life and uncover its hidden promises until a peculiar incident happened in my final year of undergraduate studies.

Following an acoustics final exam, which I thought I had not done well, I went into the course teacher’s office to inquire about the results. Seated behind a small desk with his hand solemnly folded, the latter directed a severe look at me standing at the door before inviting me to come in. I burst out in tears, asking for his forgiveness, convinced I had miserably failed the exam. It was an impulsive reaction, prompted by the fear of reprimand I had come to expect for “missing the mark.” I was relieved to find out later that I had passed the exam. But most importantly, I discovered from that experience that my motivation for learning was sadly the fear of punishment.

I often wonder why we are so hung up about maintaining order, discipline, and the fear of authority in our schools. It is evident we have structured our educational system with a military approach, assembling students in a geometric enclave, requiring them to wear the same uniform, and teaching them antiquated knowledge to maintain order and continuity. If any of the students fail to conform to these conditions, they get severely punished.

The framers of early childhood education such as Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, and Maria Montessori understood the fragility, the uniqueness, and the limitless potential of children. For that reason, they laid the foundations for an education that primed above all their humanity and their individualities.

In my native tongue, we use a poetic term to describe children. We call them “timoun,” which means: “little world.” That is because we believe that children hide within themselves an intimate world of thoughts, longings, and ambitions associated with the realities of their life. However, the endless potential for growth they possess is affected when they experience traumatic situations that are too complex for them to rationalize. When that happens, their memory often compresses that experience in a snapshot image. My snapshot image is that of the little boy sobbing on a school bench. To escape the anguish that vision provoked in me, I took refuge in teaching music. In that capacity, I try to repair the wrongs that I endured as a child. I see the face of that little boy in my students, who I try to provide with the love, attention, and understanding he did not receive. Even in the most stressful situation, I try hard not to injure their pride, crushing their motivation for learning. I repeat to myself, like a litany: they are just “timoun,” planted seeds entrusted to me for their cultivation and personal growth.

I learned two decades ago with relief that corporal punishment was no longer allowed in Haitian schools. Coincidentally, as if by magic, my nightmares and daytime visions suddenly stopped. Thus, the mournful lament of the little boy has turned into an aubade, which today inspires the adult he has become.

Richard Casimir conducting the Sagrado Corazon Youth Orchestra for a benefit concert in the Parliament of Navarra, located in the city of Pamplona. That concert entitled ¨Music against Inequality¨ was organized by Oxfam Intermon, to raise public awareness in combatting poverty around the world.A native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Richard Casimir graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with both Masters and Professional Studies degrees in Violin. He worked as a violin instructor at the Preparatory Division at Temple University and as a String teacher in the Philadelphia Public Schools before moving to Spain in 2006. Until that time, Richard focused his attention mainly on teaching music and performing. But the recent social and political upheavals taking place in his native country have awakened in him an irresistible urge to write. Recently, his essays on arts and culture in education have been published both in his home country and in the United States. He believes that opening a debate about the usefulness and the adaptability of these topics to the challenges of our times can help foster tangible social changes.

 

BREAKFAST SOLILOQUY by William Erickson

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BREAKFAST SOLILOQUY
by William Erickson

After breakfast I discovered
an accretion disk around
the empty container of
raspberries, an iridescent
plate of ablated drupelets
circling recyclable clamshell
like discarded astral projects
on the kitchen counter.

God is summer fruits
and moldy gauze.
God is absorption.

Our new light fixture
is the Hubble beaming images
of war and elections over
history while the dishwasher
counts another minute
from its dry cycle. An arid star
blinking the name of cleanliness.
We do not understand,
but nonetheless we orbit
one another’s names like
the last ring of cereal,
saturated and without integrity,
evading the spoon in an expanse
of milk as thick as the emptiness
contained in our daily need to eat.

God is an expiration date.
The streaky windowpane
is an event horizon.

William Erickson is a poet and memoirist from Vancouver, Washington. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in West Branch, Heavy Feather, GASHER, The Adirondack Review, and many other publications. He is the author of a chapbook, Monotonies of the Wildlife (FLP).

 

WE WERE NOT SO BIG by Windy Lynn Harris

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WE WERE NOT SO BIG
by Windy Lynn Harris

There were three marriages and three sets of children, a pair for each union. For some reason, my father could only hold four children at a time. He told me this once, really tried to explain it to me. What I remember most was his sincerity in that moment. He wanted me to know things were different for me.

When my father called, I would listen to him tell me what he wanted me to know about his life and then I would ask about his family. He would tell me what he wanted me to know about them, too. He’d ask about me, politely, and I knew he’d report some of my things to the rest of them, but that wasn’t the same as being part of a family. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

It was a while before we visited the house where he and wife number three lived. My sister and I were invited to dinner one Saturday, and I saw their wedding photo for the first time. I’d imagined the ceremony we weren’t invited to as something plain-clothed, quick. A judge or some official-looking man from Town Hall, but in the framed photo, I saw elegance and planning, the whole lot of them smiling. There was space in the photo, off to one side, and I thought, We could have squeezed in. We were not so big.

Windy Lynn Harris lives in Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by cacti, lizards, hawks, and sunshine. She has received fellowships from the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and The Maribar Writer’s Colony, and has been supported in part by professional development grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, which receives support from the State of Arizona and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been featured in The Sunlight Press, JMWW, Brevity, and other places.