LITTLE ORESTES
by Nick Kolakowski
When I was a boy, my father told me the story of Agamemnon, King of Argos, peerless butcher of the Trojan War. Agamemnon was arrogant, which Dad considered a sterling quality for a man to have, so long as he backed that shit up with mighty deeds. Dad might have earned a degree from a good college and spent his life building a library of thick books, but sometimes when he drank his speech tumbled back into that crude pit from which nobody in our family will ever escape, dug by generations of pissed-off roughnecks with vicious tongues. “Agamemnon had to fucking chop up his daughter Iphigenia on a stone altar because that divine bitch Athena wouldn’t give him any wind to sail his army to Troy,” and so on.
Dad laid out the Trojan War like this: After ten years of turning the countryside around Troy into a slaughterhouse, the Greeks finally sacked the city, grabbed the lady they’d come to “save,” and sailed home. Dad thought it was hilarious, history’s manly-man equivalent of a schoolyard fight over a girl that gets way out of hand. When he described what happened next, though, his face tightened into an angry mask:
“So Agamemnon sails home, right, where he finds his wife Clytemnestra shacked up with this other dude, Aegisthus. This was centuries before shotguns, so Agamemnon couldn’t just pull a trigger and have himself a Detroit Divorce, and I guess after a decade of fighting he wasn’t so sharp anymore because Clytemnestra stabbed him in the tub, still furious over him sacrificing her only daughter to the Gods.”
Gripping my shoulder hard enough to make the bones grate, Dad told me about Agamemnon’s son Orestes, who, finding his father dead, knifed his mother and her lover. Committing a double homicide snapped the boy’s fragile psyche like a twig, but that wasn’t the point. Dad, leaning so close I could smell his high-proof breath, delivered the moral: that avenging a dead father was the most important thing you could do, ever.
That if he fell in battle, it would become my responsibility to kill whomever had killed him. In a few years, he promised, my weapons training would begin.
Somewhere out there, the Gods were already laughing at him.
I should mention at this juncture that Dad’s longtime business involved transporting bags of white powder between various cities, against the wishes of a lot of people in uniform. So maybe I can excuse him for laying some pretty heavy stuff on a seven-year-old whose life revolved around cartoons and bacon.
As it turned out, Dad would never teach me how to wield a knife like an ancient Greek. The week I turned eleven, the cops found him on the sidewalk a couple blocks from the house. They couldn’t figure out who or what might have killed him, since the body didn’t have a mark on it. How does any Orestes avenge that? Why do I wrestle with this guilt even now?
Nick Kolakowski’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Evergreen Review, Satellite Magazine, Carrier Pigeon and Shotgun Honey, among other publications. He’s also the author of How to Become an Intellectual, a book of comedic nonfiction that covers (and sometimes, lovingly skewers) everything from ancient Greek tragedies to Albert Einstein. He lives and writes in New York City.
Nick’s story “The Great Wave Carries You Forward” appears in Issue No. 5 of Cleaver.
Image credit: Jason Vance on Flickr
Julianna Foster lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of the Arts in the Photography Program and MFA Book Arts and Printmaking Department, where she received her MFA in 2006. Foster was an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia from 2006-2013, where she had four solo exhibitions—In a Vale, From Morning On, Kirkwood, Swell—and a three-person exhibit titled Relic. In addition to her individual ventures, she has collaborated over the years with various artists on projects that include artist multiples, artist books, and series of photographs and videos. Foster was a 2014 Artist in Residence at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. She has participated in international group exhibitions in England, Romania, Spain, and, most recently, Korea and Bulgaria, and her work is featured in private collections across the country.
Charlie Keys Bohem is a high school senior living in Los Angeles, California. He has had stories published on Yellow Mama and Popcorn Fiction, walks extensively, and hopes to be the first creatively published neuropsychopharmacologist.
As a Foreign Service brat, John Shea spent his early years in Europe and probably didn’t appreciate his good fortune enough. He is an editor and writer at the University of Pennsylvania, and he may be the only person to have published stories in both Partisan Review and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Other stories have appeared in Columbia, Literal Latte, Philadelphia City Paper, The Café Irreal, Ampersand Review, and Philadelphia Stories.
Robert Lunday is the author of Mad Flights (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002). He has published poems and essays in Chicago Review, Field, Poet Lore, American Book Review, Agni Online, and New Madrid, and earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Houston. A former Stegner and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow, he teaches for Houston Community College and lives with his wife, Yukiko, on a small horse farm in central Texas.
SILKWORM
Annika Neklason grew up in Santa Cruz, California. She currently resides in Philadelphia, where she is pursuing a degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Bassini Writing Apprentice for Cleaver Magazine.
David Hallock Sanders has had his short fiction, plays, and novel excerpts published in journals and anthologies that include Sycamore Review, The Laurel Review, Baltimore Review, 2000 Voices, The Best of Philadelphia Stories, and others. His novel-in-progress, Busara Road, was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2013 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Prize, and he is a winner of the Third Coast national fiction competition, the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary Autobiography Project, and the Dwell/Glass House Haiku Competition.
Charles Ramsay McCrory is pursuing a B.A. in English at the University of Mississippi. His work is featured or forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, plain china, The Cossack Review, The Coachella Review, Amethyst Arsenic and other journals. He reads fiction submissions for The Adroit Journal.
John Middlebrook lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he manages a consulting firm focused on non-profit organizations. John has been writing since he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he also served on the staff of Chicago Review. His poetry has recently appeared in journals including Grasslimb, Tuck Magazine, and the Tipton Poetry Journal. John’s home on the web is 
MELIAI
Heather Bourbeau is a Berkeley-based writer. She was a Tupelo Press 30/30 poet, a finalist for the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, and winner of the Pisk! Poetry Slam. Her journalism has appeared in The Economist, The Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs. Her first collection of poetry, Daily Palm Castings, profiles people in overlooked professions.
Samantha Barrow is the Director of Humanities in Medicine at the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education at The City College of New York, and she teaches in the Program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia. She is the author of GRIT and tender membrane (Plan B Press), Jelly (a chapbook, Tiger/Monkey Alliance), and Chap. Her poetry, prose, reviews and interviews have been published in The Ledge Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia City Paper, Off Our Backs, Lesbian Nation, Feminist Review, Moonstone’s Poetry Ink Anthology, Helmet Hair and two Uphook Press Anthologies: you say. say. and Hell Strung and Crooked.
Amanda Silberling is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, originally from South Florida. Recently, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, The Louisville Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, SOFTBLOW, and more. Her essays have appeared in PANK and The Los Angeles Times, and she regularly writes and photographs for Rock On Philly. She is the Blog Editor at The Adroit Journal.
GennaRose Nethercott is a poet, playwright, performer, and folklorist residing in the forests of Vermont. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, The Salon, Axolotl Magazine, Freeze Ray Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poem “Departures” won the 2014 Holland Park Press poetry competition, and her play-in-verse, Ghostmaker, was produced in Massachusetts and Vermont. She serves as the poetry editor at Mount Island Magazine. She knows more about shape shifters than she does about being a person.
Sanaë Lemoine was raised in France and Australia. She received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and is a graduate student in the School of Arts at Columbia. Sanaë teaches essay writing at Columbia and meets with writers in the Writing Center. You will often find Sanaë in her kitchen at work on her novel, cooking, and writing about food at 
ATROPHY
J.J. Anselmi holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from CSU Fresno, where he also worked as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor of The Normal School. J.J.’s first book, Heavy: a memoir of Wyoming, BMX, Drugs, and Heavy Fucking Music, is forthcoming from Rare Bird in Fall 2015. His other work has appeared or is upcoming in Trop, Under the Gum Tree, Weber: The Contemporary West, Word Riot, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere. He’s also a regular contributor to Splicetoday. You can check out more of J.J.’s writing here: 
Ron Burch writes and produces a TV show for DreamWorks Animation. His first novel, 
Becky Tuch is the founding editor of 
Paul Enea was born on Milwaukee’s East Side where he continues to reside. His work has appeared in Blue Canary Press, Verse Wisconsin, Porcupine, Brawler, and the chapbook anthology Portals and Piers.
Nellie used her grandmother’s perfume for the first time at her grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary party. It was a warm August day and everyone was outside under the tent her mother had rented, but she snuck into her grandmother’s room instead. She opened the drawer and found the perfume beside the rice paper facial blotters and spongy make-up triangles. The drawer smelled like oak and baby powder. It wasn’t until she twisted off the golden top that she smelled the familiar crushed flowers and fruit. She plugged the bottle’s open neck tightly with her fingertip as she turned it upside down, the honey colored liquid cool on her skin. She swiped it quickly over her wrists, her collarbone, her neck before returning the bottle to the drawer. Then she went to find her neighbor, Sammy Travers.
Nellie barely knew her grandfather. He was obligatory hugs at family gatherings, $20 checks on holidays, balloon-printed cards on her birthday.
“I want you to have something,” her grandmother said, putting down the peanut butter and jelly sandwich they had been sharing. Nellie took the plate and balanced it atop her blanketed knees. Her grandmother reached over to the bedside table and opened the drawer where Nellie already knew she kept her perfume. She knew because she borrowed it every time she had a date.
Apple crisp recipe
Most of the time she was on honeymoon in Turkey. Nellie drove to a Turkish bakery an hour away to find the bergamot jam her grandmother demanded. When she brought her grandmother a plate of toast smeared with the orange jam her grandmother blinked twice, as though she didn’t trust her eyes.
Alina Grabowski grew up on the south shore of Massachusetts. She is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has received the Phi Kappa Sigma prize for best undergraduate writing. Her story 
Mimi Oritsky is an abstract landscape painter residing in Philadelphia, Pa. She entered the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1968, and transferred to the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1973 where she earned her BFA degree. In 1976 she entered the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, earning her MFA in Painting and Printmaking. Oritsky has travelled the world and has shown extensively in museums and galleries in the United States. Her current work can be viewed at the A.I.R. and the Amos Eno Galleries in Brooklyn, New York, as well as the Chestnut Hill Gallery in Philadelphia.
William L. Alton was born November 5, 1969 and started writing in the 80s while incarcerated in a psychiatric prison. Since then his work has appeared in Main Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs, among others. In 2010, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published one book, Heroes of Silence. He earned both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. You can find him at 
William Bradley’s work appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Missouri Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, and The Utne Reader. He was a professor at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio and the author of Fractals, a collection of essays, in which this piece appears. He died on August 28, 2017 at the age of 41.
Ingrid Claire Wenzler studied Creative Writing as an undergraduate at Connecticut College and is now a graduate teaching assistant and MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. She’s at work on a collection of stories unified by subjects as tenuous and various as failure, regret, nostalgia, and solicitude—what Faulkner might have called “old verities.”
John Goodhue is a graduate of Western Washington University. His poetry has been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Knockout Magazine, Extract(s), and burntdistrict, among others. He currently resides in Seattle.
Paige Riehl is the author of Blood Ties, a poetry chapbook published by Finishing Line Press, fall 2014. Her poetry has appeared in Meridian, South Dakota Review, Nimrod International Journal, and more. She won the 2012-2013 Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and the 2011 Literal Latte Prize for Poetry. She is the assistant poetry editor for Midway Journal. Read more at 
Chris Vola’s recent fiction appears in Literary Orphans, Drunk Monkeys, WhiskeyPaper, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. He is the author of Monkeytown (2012), a novel, and E is for Ether, a book of poems, forthcoming later this year. He splits his summers between Manhattan and Old Saybrook, Connecticut and hibernates in the winter.
Sharon White’s book, Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Eve & Her Apple and Bone House. Her memoir, Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Boston Authors Club. Some of her other awards include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, the Calvino Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Boiling Lake, a collection of short fiction, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press.
Heinz Insu Fenkl is a writer, editor, translator, and folklorist. His first novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was a Barnes & Noble “Great New Writer” selection and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He serves on the editorial board of AZALEA: the Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, published by Harvard’s Korea Institute, and as a consulting editor to the internet translation journal, Words Without Borders. He is best known for his deconstruction of the Starbucks logo and his translations of North Korean comics. He teaches creative writing, comics, and Asian studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Jesse Castaldi Keen is a writer who recently moved to rural West Texas with her husband and two young daughters. She has worked in higher education in Texas, Oregon, and Massachusetts, most recently as a career counselor and grant writer. She has published several zines and small chapbooks under a personal imprint, Persnicket Press (on hiatus) and has 
Emanuel Melo was born on the island of São Miguel in the Azores and immigrated to Canada at the age of nine. He lives in Toronto. His articles have appeared in 
CHRISTMAS LIGHTS IN A TOWN WITH A POPULATION OF 500
Neil Boyack was born into State Care in 1967, married in Las Vegas in 1997. He has kids, a wife, and lives in Australian wilderness dotted with old gold mines and ghosts. He lives on solar power, and water tanks. He loves reading, writing, and cutting wood. He is the director and founder of 
Jason Newport’s writing has appeared in many fine journals, including Chautauqua, where he is a contributing editor. He is currently revising a novel about Hungarian Roma in the Holocaust and working on a collection of very short stories.
Harmony Button is a contributing editor at PaperTape Magazine and the English Department Chair of the Waterford School in Utah. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Web awards, and has appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Chicago Quarterly, Southwestern American Lit, Cobalt, Rock & Sling, Drafthorse, and Ithaca Lit. Find links to other works at 
PERFECT DISCONTINUITY
F.J. Bergmann writes poetry and speculative fiction, often simultaneously, appearing in The 5-2, Black Treacle, Lakeside Circus, On Spec, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. F.J. is the editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change; recent awards include the 2012 Rannu Prize for speculative poetry and the 2013 SFPA Elgin chapbook award.
Andrea Jarrell’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Narrative Magazine, and Brain, Child Magazine, among several other publications. Her essay, 
Gabrielle Campagnano is an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at The Foote School in New Haven, CT. She is at work on her first full-length collection of poems.
Melissa Ostrom teaches English at a community college and serves as a public school curriculum consultant. She lives in rural Western New York with her husband and children and writes whenever she can—or as much as her four year old and six year old let her.
Angelique teaches Creative Writing and Genocide Literature in Upstate, New York. Her writing can be found in Shark Reef, TravelMag, The Chattahoochee Review, and other anthologies. A travel writer and activist for human rights, she has lived in Chiapas, Mexico, to be a witness for peace with the Zapatista Rebels; volunteered in an elephant refuge in Thailand; studied Holocaust in Israel, writing in Paris, and water drilling in South Sudan. She has traveled to 12 countries on four continents. She finds her inspiration in being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, knowledge, experience, and hunger.
APOLOGY TO LOS ANGELES 
Julia Bloch grew up in northern California and Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson (2012), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Allison Corporation, forthcoming in spring 2015. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Aufgabe, How2, The Volta, Journal of Modern Literature, and elsewhere. She is also a co-editor of the poetics journal Jacket2 and has taught at Bard College and the University of Pennsylvania.
