Category Archives: Nonfiction

SELF-TAUT by Chelsey Clammer

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SELF-TAUT by Chelsey Clammer

Chelsey Clammer
SELF-TAUT

I spend fifteen minutes of my life negotiating with an egg. Again.

How its hard-boiledness acts like a six-course meal. I have to sit down. Not at the table—too dizzy for that—but on the hardwood floor—quick—back against cabinet. Chew, masticate until it’s mush. Then, the careful, slow mini gulps as I convince myself not to gag. Salty dry yolk, the toughness of white. A slow process just to help work out the knot that’s not in the pit of my stomach, but its entirety. I blame stress that has started to reincite my relationship with restriction. But I resist, fight to get those seventy calories within me.

I will stand in a few moments to wash the too-much mass down with fizzy water and a few sips of creamer dressed in coffee—another attempt at nutrients.

It was three a.m.—no, four, the time change—when my taut stomach woke me with gnawing pains. A usual event of late. Eating has become hard work. A challenge in the act of swallowing. My body heat rises with the entrance of protein. I stay seated on the kitchen floor for now, knees up to my chest. Digest. Allow the slight chill to sprint under my flesh as I break out in a subtle sheen of sweat. A shimmering heat of success. This is me eating. At least, an attempt.

Chelsey ClammerChelsey Clammer is the award-winning author of the essay collections Human Heartbeat Detected (Red Hen Press, 2022), Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017), and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, and McSweeney’s, among many others. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. www.chelseyclammer.com

Cover Design by Karen Rile

OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT by Susan Barr-Toman

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OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT by Susan Barr-Toman

Susan Barr-Toman
OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT

My senior year of college, I was set to graduate a semester early. Instead, I took a full-time position at the university and enrolled part-time, hoping it would make things easier. I’d been working my way through college, sometimes cutting classes to meet tuition payments. Always closely eyeing that grindstone with its precarious balance. Spinning. I felt older than my classmates, more grown-up, and it was not a lot of fun.

On one of my first days, before the other students had returned to campus, my boss, an older woman named Rosalie, invited me to take a break from the office and walk outside the campus gates over to Belmont, the Little Italy of the Bronx. On our way back, she spotted a man selling produce out of a white truck on the corner and asked if I minded if she stopped to pick up a few things. She pulled fruit out of one of the buckets, and I said, “What’s that?”

She turned and held out her hand, presenting me with a soft, smooth, reddish fruit the likes of which I’d never seen.

“Try it,” Rosalie laughed, amused that I’d come this far without ever tasting, without ever seeing, a nectarine.

What did I know of fruit? As my sister Sarah says, we were raised on sarcasm and Pop-Tarts (and she’s not wrong), and even then, I did not choose the fruit-flavored variety. I favored cinnamon with its hard-crackled top coating. In the college cafeteria, I’d grab an orange plastic tray and surely pass where there must have been a station of fruit—although I truly cannot conjure it in my memory—on my way to the long row of see-through cereal bins.

I did grow up with stories of fruit, apples in particular, and women. One is cast out of paradise for her wanting of knowledge. Quite the punishment, not only for her, but for all of humanity until the end of time (at least on this Earth). The other, an orphaned teenager, escapes death at a hunter’s mercy, only to have her evil stepmother, disguised as an old woman, lure her into eating poisoned fruit. It lodges in her throat, silencing her, casting her into a deathlike slumber.

That day on the corner in the Bronx, Rosalie was old to me; I was twenty-one then and she was three times my age. I paused to study her eager offering and looked at her beaming freckled face, her soft white-gold hair, her pale eyes, before I took the nectarine from her. I bit into the exotic stone fruit of the rose family as we walked along the city street. Its sweetness filled my mouth. I knew a little more of what the world could be now that Rosalie had given me this radiant orb, this palm-sized joy.

Susan Barr-Toman is a novelist and essayist. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Citron Review, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, among others. She brings mindfulness to the blank page in her Mindful Writing workshops and is an affiliated faculty member at the Penn Program for Mindfulness. Visit her at www.susanbarrtoman.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

NOBODY TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS by Jessica Klimesh

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NOBODY TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS by Jessica Klimesh

Jessica Klimesh
NOBODY TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS

Nobody tells you how quickly the face of a dead person loses color, how quickly gray washes over you, how quickly the person who was your mother becomes a body to be cremated, transitioned into ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Nobody tells you to expect bleak silence and snow, a coldness you won’t register, or how even the air will forget to breathe and that you will need to be reminded as well.

Nobody tells you how quickly you’ll take care of the necessary notifications and respond to the trifling Christmas cards that keep arriving; your mother would want them answered immediately, would insist on it, being the first time in her fifty-four years of marriage that she will not have sent out holiday greetings. Nobody tells you how you will agonize over each note just as she did, a necessary burden, while at the same time operating on autopilot, not paying attention to anything you’re writing or to whom. Nobody tells you how later you’ll wonder if you even wrote them at all.

Nobody tells you how deathly quiet that first Christmas (or any holiday) will be without her, not just because she’s gone but also because it’s 2020 and there’s a pandemic, so nobody will visit you, your dad, and your sister, not yet. Nobody tells you that the gray shock of death lasts months, even when it’s an expected death, and that this shock will prompt you to tell the hospice social worker that you’re doing fine and to reject the grief counseling offered, even though you desperately need it, you just won’t realize how much you need it until six months later, and by then, they’ll have stopped asking, as will everybody else. Nobody tells you any of this.

Nobody tells you how death changes relationships, that longtime friends will rebuff you, won’t even extend condolences. Nobody tells you that you will reevaluate who you share your thoughts and time with, who you have energy for. Because nobody tells you how little energy you’ll have, or how much energy it will take to get out of bed in the morning, let alone figure out what to eat. You’ll recall with envy the food that arrived when your paternal grandfather died. But you were only seven then, maybe your memory is faulty.

Nobody tells you that ignoring your grief will intensify it. Nobody tells you about the insomnia and nightmares, the constant crying, the numbness. Nobody tells you that you should have, in fact, stopped, to rest, to grieve. But there was too much to do, so you went right back to doing it, attending meetings, answering emails, performing obligatory tasks, routine tasks. Pragmatic, always pragmatic. Just like your mother.

Nobody tells you that you won’t remember that first year without her. Dissociation, you’ll learn. Nobody tells you how she’ll appear to you, talk to you. How you’ll sit at the café the two of you used to meet at for lunch and expect her to walk in, hope that she will. Nobody tells you how achingly you will relive your last words to her, those last moments, hours, days, weeks, and months with her, with every moment, hour, day, week, and month that passes. Nobody tells you that you’ll have so many regrets and that each regret will make it harder and harder to breathe, like fire in your chest, so difficult that your doctor will diagnose you with asthma, and you’ll want to say, but this is what happened to her, she couldn’t breathe either. Nobody ever diagnosed her as asthmatic.

Nobody tells you that after your mother’s death, you will become her, that your body will morph into hers, your breasts, your stomach, your mind—all hers—and that her years of pain and grief will become yours, on top of the pain and grief that are already yours. Nobody tells you that you will become two people in one: your mother and sometimes yourself. Sometimes both at once, sometimes neither. Nobody tells you that you will become a floating specter, dreamlike, that you will struggle to feel real, that you will struggle with existence.

Nobody tells you that you will adopt your mother’s mannerisms, her tone, her facial expressions, what she would say in any given circumstance, that you will order what she orders at the café simply because she ordered it, not because it’s what you want, that you will watch the TV shows she loved, adding her commentary in, that you will no longer be yourself in thought and mind, that you will lose yourself. Nobody tells you that you will lay in bed some nights as her, unable to move, unable to talk, how you will stare at the night-gray ceiling, terrified that you are dying, too.

Nobody tells you that after a major loss, you will wonder what you will die of, and when, or how you will feel opaque fear with every anxious breath or twinge of muscle, every cramp, blemish, or pain, especially after you read up on the effects of grief and stress on a body. Nobody tells you how frightening it will be to trust your gut instinct, because you’ve been right too often. Because you just know things. Just like your mother knew. Nobody was able to explain her illness or even diagnose it for eighteen months, but she knew long before anyone else, and it didn’t matter much anyway because there is no cure for ALS. Nobody tells you that there’s no cure for grief either, that it will just go on and on and on. Nobody tells you any of this.

Jessica Klimesh is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Complete Sentence, The Dribble Drabble Review, Atticus Review, trampset, HAD, Brink, and Microfiction Monday Magazine, among others. Jessica Klimesh’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Jessica Klimesh is currently working on a collection of linked flash stories. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MERMAIDIA by Brooke White

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MERMAIDIA by Brooke White

Brooke White
MERMAIDIA

In Greece, there were stories about Poseidon; in the Roman Empire, there was Neptune. Before that, there was Ea, Babylonian god of the sea. Even earlier was Atargatis, the Syrian goddess of fertility who was half-human, half-fish. There was the belief in ancient times that every land animal had its match in the sea. Like so many protagonists in young adult novels, I often felt I was in the wrong place, the wrong time. When I was a child, I was sure I was magic, that I’d get my letter to a supernatural boarding school in the mail, learn to levitate, or sprout shining scales and take to the sea.

A few weeks before I turn twenty-eight, I sit down to dinner with my dad in front of the TV in his living room. We’re watching Splash (1984) waiting to see Tom Hanks fall in love with a mermaid played by Daryl Hannah. The movie opens with a little boy on a boat dropping pennies to create an opportunity to look up skirts. The boy’s brother peers over the side of the boat at a girl in the water.

As the camera scans the waves, my dad asks, “You always wanted to be a mermaid, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I say.

When I fall asleep that night, I slip into the ocean of dreams. The current is too strong. I tumble beneath the waves, push below the surface again and again, drag down the shoreline. I realize I don’t know the way back. I question if anything exists beyond this rise and crash.

I ask myself, how did I get here?

When I was young and woke from a nightmare, my mother would sit me on the couch and put a familiar VHS tape into the VCR. When faced with the bright colors and wide smiles on screen, the monsters creeping through my mind were forgotten, though I’d cover my eyes when the sea witch snapped a ship with ease.

But before the sea witch unleashes mayhem, The Little Mermaid (1989) spies on Prince Eric from the dark water beside his ship. Ariel trades her voice to the sea witch for three days as a human. She signs a floating contract and sings, her voice glowing like a moon in her throat, rising up and out of her mouth then into the witch’s hand. If the prince does not kiss Ariel by sunset on the third day, she will belong to the witch forever.

When I was a child I sang Ariel’s song. I held my legs together and bent my knees when I swam so I could practice being a mermaid. For Halloween, I wore pink plastic shells glued to a sweater and a shiny teal tail with painted-on scales. I knew who I wanted to be.

◊

My mother was trying to convince me to play with baby dolls. Even as a child I recognized babies for what they were—work. I preferred directing sprawling soap opera storylines for my Barbies.

Mom tells the story of a day when I played with my Barbies concertedly, and she asked what my dolls were doing. I explained that Barbie was going to a dance, but Mermaid Barbie was not.

Why?

“Because Ken doesn’t like her,” I said.

Why doesn’t Ken like her?

“Because her legs don’t open,” I answered.

Mom cautiously prompted, why would that matter?

I was as busy as any make-up artist or costume designer backstage, arranging and rearranging these beautiful women, brushing their hair, and assigning them outfits. I was slightly exasperated with my mother’s questions, but I took a break from prepping my girls for the dance and answered, “Because she can’t wear the pretty dresses.”

Mom was relieved. I imagine Mermaid Barbie was too. Her friends spent night after night pinching their eyelashes in cold metal eyelash curlers. They nicked their legs while shaving. They burnt their hair in the shape of ringlets and squeezed into Spanx. And then they walked on tiptoe to a wall, where they’d stand and wait for Ken to choose them. Mermaid Barbie spent her days and nights adventuring, and it’s probably for the best that her tail didn’t fit inside a ball gown.

I didn’t want to marry and I didn’t want biological children. Both seemed like inevitable fates. When I fell asleep, I sometimes dreamed of being a mermaid living under the waves where the expectations of others could not reach me, where time was liquid, and I could spend my life free from everything that made my palms sweat on land.

◊

I watched comedian Iliza Shlesinger’s stand-up and flinched when she said that mermaid fantasies weren’t anything more than escapism, and if women wanted to escape their lives so badly they should find a cabin in the woods and make jam. “You wanna be a mermaid? That means all of your achievements in life are gonna lead to you being a fictional fuck toy for a horny sailor.”

I guess she has a point.

In Ariel’s first moments as a human, she chokes on saltwater until her friends, a fish and a crab, pull her to the surface and buoy her to shore. Since she is naked from the waist down, a seagull styles Ariel in a discarded sail and rope.

From afar, she looks like a statue, stiff and alert. As Eric approaches, she springs into motion, nervously smoothing her mussed hair. Eric gasps, and we see her as he does. She has a tiny nose and peak nineties eyebrows. Her mouth is as red as her hair. The sail she’s wearing isn’t visible in the frame. Her bare shoulders peek from beneath her long, heavy hair, and she looks as she might after waking up in his bed, which is to say, she is a fantasy.

You seem very familiar to me, he says. Her already-wide smile widens until her face is hardly anything besides lips and shining eyes which offer his reflection. Soon, he’s folding her hands into his and leading her to his castle.

In that much older tale by Hans Christian Andersen published in 1837, the little mermaid has no name. She has no soul. What she does have are eight oysters affixed to her tail because, as her grandmother warns, pride must suffer pain. Still voiceless in this rendition, she must convince the prince to marry her or else she will die.

Her transformation is painful. Her new legs are cumbersome. This time, the prince dubs her his “little foundling” and she sleeps at the foot of his bed. Still, he does not marry her. As she faces imminent death, her sisters bring her a proposition and a knife from the sea witch. If she kills the prince in his marriage bed, she can cheat death. She throws the knife away.

In the animated rendition, Eric and Ariel marry. When Ariel regains her voice, I wonder if the prince will like what she has to say. I wonder, how old is this little mermaid? She’s the youngest of her sisters, rebelling against her father. Her mother is long gone.

Ariel is sixteen. I was much younger than that when I sat in a car seat, watching the passing lakes, trees, and gas stations and pretending I was a princess of the sea. Before I had the words to express myself, I sang the tune to her story. My mother fondly recalls my small, sharp voice floating from the back seat, singing aah ah aah the same sound Ariel makes when she trades her voice for a chance at love.

◊

I wanted so badly to believe. I watched mermaid conspiracy videos on YouTube, one after the other. In one grainy video, a figure which, if you squint, might pass for a mermaid, turns to look at the cameraman, then slithers off a rock and into the water. I was tipsy, night was becoming morning, and for a second I believed.

Then came the nagging suspicion. I asked myself if a mermaid would move her tail side to side or up and down. I watched the video a second, third, fourth, fifth time. Her tail moved side to side. I crawled on the floor and tried to approximate her movements. My legs moved side to side. Yes, the figure in the video was likely a human masquerading as a mermaid. I’d seen plenty of videos of women in mermaid costumes posing on the beach or swimming in the water.

When I am drunk at social gatherings, I ask innocent bystanders if they believe in mermaids. Then I pull up Google image results for “beluga whale knees” on my phone. I lean in too close and say, “Don’t you think you might mistake that for an abdomen and thighs if you were lonely enough?”

Whale song is not really a song so much as a series of clicks, squeaks, squawks, and screams, but what was the siren song rumored to sound like?

There are journal entries of Christopher Columbus from the late 1400s writing about his admiral’s sighting of three mermaids, reported to be manatees with long, flowing seaweed locks. Columbus remarked, “They are not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits” with little thought to the wonder of their existence, intent instead upon judging the efficacy of their feminine wiles.

How to say this next part delicately? A band of bros on Reddit and TikTok are convinced that tales of the Kraken are based on sightings of whale penises. Waving in the air above the waves, fleshy and pink, like the biggest tongue you’ve ever seen, the member strikes a stunning resemblance to the squiggly legs of cartoon aliens.

In the olden days, scraps from harpoon ships were sold as artifacts of mythical beasts. Back then, a whale’s penis could easily pass for a Kraken’s tentacle. An adult blue whale’s penis is typically eight to ten feet in length, and just one of its testes weighs more than I do. For reference, Google provided me with a photo of taxidermies on display at the world’s largest penis museum in Iceland, which houses 283 preserved penises from 93 species of animals, by the way. Yes, there are human specimens on display too.

Who knows what the truth of the matter is? I know that if I was sailing and saw that rise above the water, I would be about as afraid as if I’d seen a Kraken.

If I’m being honest with myself, sexual undertones have always been at work in myth, and my mermaid stories are not exempt. We first knew Ariel when she appeared on that rock, with the waves rising in foamy ecstasy. The tip of the leading lady’s tail dips into the cool water. Beneath the surface, two leering eels and Ursula, the matchmaker preying on unfortunates in search of love.

In revamped imaginings, you might see the red-haired beauty gazing into the murky light above. Her bust barely contained in the purple seashells she sports, her waist tapers excruciatingly into her slick, emerald tail. Mom recounts a time when I was watching Pocahontas (1995) and Dad walked through the room, saw the animated princess, and exclaimed, “What a rack!” In the marketing materials, Ariel’s breasts are center frame, highlighted with accentuating white lines. I wonder, who is this story being sold to?

The oldest version of this scene is said to be worth something because it includes the phallic pillar of King Triton’s Atlantian castle. I was skeptical. I looked at photos of The Little Mermaid (1989) cover online and thought no, it can’t be… then I found a diagramed version and zoomed in. The dick was undeniable. It was there all along in the story which chased away my nightmares and fueled my fantasies, though I suspect they were never my fantasies to begin with.

I wanted to watch The Little Mermaid in reverse, with Ariel escaping the castle, shedding her huge, heavy wedding dress, and taking to the sea. I wanted mermaidhood to be a safe haven, but the closer I looked at my mermaid stories, the more I saw those leering eels.

I once had a lover I routinely accused of being lazy and selfish in bed but continued to sleep with because I figured he’d change if I gave him enough chances, and some part of me just wanted to please him even if I received little in return. The women in my life tried to convince me to demand more, though I’d seen them make the same sacrifices. Honestly, I was strung out on his withholding and he knew it. One day, I confided in him about my mermaid conspiracy theories, and he said that beyond thinking manatees were mermaids, he’d heard that sailors of yesteryear would rape manatees. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him, in this or any regard, but more than that I wanted to find a way to keep a younger version of myself from ever learning any of this. In much the same way my parents tried to delay the Santa Claus talk, I wanted to preserve the myths of mermaidhood that I built as a young girl. I wanted to keep telling myself these stories and ignoring the eels. I wanted to protect the land of make-believe where I could exist just as I’d like, and spend my days in the cool waters without anyone making demands, no one’s pleasure to worry about but my own.

Brooke White is a Michigander with a penchant for prose and long conversations. Winner of the Hopwood Committee’s Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship for nonfiction, her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Entropy, Superstition Review, Iron Horse, March Xness, and Honey Lit, among others. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She’s currently at work on a book of literary nonfiction about desire, transformations, and fairy tales. Her latest ponderings and delights can be found on Instagram and Twitter at @brkthewriter.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC by Christian Chase Garner

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JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC by Christian Chase Garner

Christian Chase Garner
JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC 

Step #1: Make the curry roux

Heat a pan to medium-low heat on your stovetop, or your induction burner, if you live in a twelve-by-forty-foot rectangular building that used to be your mother-in-law’s photography studio, the one that your family wired and plumbed, where your bed lies only feet from your kitchen. It is difficult to have peaceful rest when your wife works from the same spot she tries to dream in and when you don’t have a wall separating you from the dark walnut butcher block where you slice through portobello mushrooms. When you both leave and run into town, your wife always worries about how your family’s wiring might fault, like you do sometimes, and catch fire and swallow your three dogs whole like the gluttonous crumbling of a cave system. I understand the purpose of walls now, of distance, and the lack thereof.

Using equal parts butter and flour, first melt the butter in the pan, then spoon the flour over the bubbling fat. You’re lucky if it’s butter, though, because there are people out there who carry allergies to things like dairy and eggs, flaws that lay dormant, undiscovered for so, so long. Sometimes cicadas in North America will live up to seventeen years underground, feeding on the roots of the deciduous. Sometimes I feel as though I have still yet to unburrow. My partner, though, she mourned when she got her allergen results, as if she lost a child. Habits had already been formed. Branded, within. You cannot strip butter from murgh makhani, cheese from palak paneer, eggs from a woman who has cravings and scarring and who wishes only to someday stumble upon a peaceful afterlife, eating cream cheese frosting by the bowl in a house with many windows and many walls and every animal she’s ever owned by her side. Each time she passes a restaurant, hears the indistinct buzzing of life inside it, smells the clove, the coriander, the cardamom, it is a thousand tiny cuts. She will not tell you about them, but they are there.

Let your roux—pronounced roo, or rew—toast for about eight minutes. The color will shift from lemon chiffon to light caramel, and your house will smell of hazelnuts roasting. While you wait, do not wish ill upon the French for their silent x’s and their diphthonged vowels. Your brother-in-law may come in and ask what you are making. When you tell him, he might say something like, “are you making this Indian,” and then pull back the air as if he were an archer prepping a nocked arrow, “or this Indian,” and then press his index finger between his eyebrows as if it were a bindi—a colored dot that is nestled within the space of the sixth chakra, ajna, a sacred lotus of two indigo petals. It will make you uncomfortable, but do your best to remember where he came from, the rural Arkansas town, the smell of sugarcane and diesel, the crashing of cars, the youngness of it all. Bones, tendons, they’re like walls in their own right.

Before your roux finishes, whisk together your spice mix in a small bowl. This will include your “probably haves” (salt, cinnamon, nutmeg), your “might haves” (paprika, cumin, coriander), and your “off to Targets” (star anise, fenugreek seed, turmeric). Breathe. There are no purist eyes boring into your pan from the cabinet, ensuring that you don’t take out the star anise because it reminds you of chopped licorice whips, of your grandparents who have lived in a singular house for forty-eight years, a mausoleum for each relationship that they caught fire to, swallowed whole, until there was nothing left but smoky, charcoal bones. Mix your spice mix into the browned roux, stirring and letting it aerate the room for a minute or two, letting it cling to the kitchen walls. A thousand tiny cuts, over and over again. Pour a singular cup of water or chicken broth into the roux. Stir frequently until a thick paste forms. Dish into a bowl. Place it aside.

Step #2: Prep the ingredients

First, dice your potatoes into pleasantly small pieces. They will be easy. They’ll slide into the knife without resistance, letting you glide right through, as if they were men laying themselves against the headboards of their affairs, forgetting. The carrots, though, they are quite the opposite, shooting off like little tangerine bottle rockets, finding a way into the only space where they cannot ever be retrieved from again. In Japanese tradition, before one eats a meal they will place their hands together, bow, and say itadakimasu—a humbling acceptance of the food and its laborious preparation. From the earth that housed the plants in its womb, to the farmers who once had dreams of being accountants, hairstylists, to the mothers who birthed the butchers of the meat, those same mothers who wait in loveseats for their husbands, tarlike bags under their eyes, forgetting. So, while you try to calm the seething, volatile carrots, remember each step, where the life came from. That which has been lost and that which will be lost again.

Pro tip: The carrots will be easier to cut if you halve them then quarter them lengthwise, cutting down the long portion of the carrot. Then your quarters, when cut, will be able to peacefully rest in place. If you still cut vegetables like a Neanderthal who just found a sharp-edged rock for the first time, that is okay, because I do too sometimes. There is joy in not being what you are not.

Next, trim and cut the steak, ensuring a one-to-one ratio between protein and vegetables. Whatever cut of beef you can comfortably afford will work for this, as it will be slowly simmered, stripped of its sinewy texture, broken down without ever realizing. While other children were constructing treehouses with their fathers, my wife christened the graves of her makeshift cemetery that only grew with every buried dog, goat, goldfish, anything that made her afraid to leave it. I cut the meat in our family, the cold, marbled rawness of what once was, thinner and thinner yet. The green onions, though, for eventual garnish, she can chop those, because that stripping of life does not suffer, does not scar or mourn. It is your turn now. Chop the thin and earthy scallions into small, crisp rings. Set them aside, for another time.

Step #3: Build the dish

Heat a large, capable pot over medium heat, dousing with a small dose of your preferred oil. Wait until it shimmers, like the refracted, glistening air that settles above an autumn fire. Add yellow onion—that which needed to be prepped in the last step but will always be forgotten until this moment—and stir-fry until translucent. Add your protein and a little more salt. Continue stir-frying for two more minutes, a process originally used to dry grain back in the Han dynasty. That was back when you’d want to be a butcher, because then you were not bound to your master’s home. Women who had been widowed at that time still belonged to her husband’s family, even after his death. Add chopped garlic and tomato paste. Continue stir-frying for another two minutes. It was not until the Ming dynasty, almost twelve centuries later, when the wok was reshaped and used to stir-fry consumable food. Many still continued to boil and steam though, because they could not afford the necessary oil and fuel, could not revel outside of their barriers. Chinese architecture often had screened walls on either side of a building’s main entrance, constructed from the belief that evil things travel in straight lines, cannot round corners, like tracked trains that smell of diesel and sugarcane.

Add four cups of either water or chicken broth, your potatoes and carrots, and your curry roux, stirring until the roux has been incorporated into the liquid. Add two bay leaves, a bit of sugar to neutralize the acidity of the tomato, and black pepper. Simmer for at least an hour, possibly more if your vegetables need softening. Serve with warm basmati rice. Garnish with chopped green onion. Be proud of what you’ve made with your hands, the same ones that will eventually cradle a shovel and birth four rectangular walls of dirt—rootbound, like the marbling of ribeye or the spiderwebbed, indigo veins of a sleepless mother—to house the bones of every future animal that you will ever own. Remember that which has been lost and that which will be lost again. Itadakimasu.

Christian Chase Garner (he/him) is a writer and exceptionally amateur baker from Northwest Arkansas. His work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Blood Tree Literature, Stirring, Book of Matches, Exposition Review, and Sleet Magazine, among others.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MAIN LINE by Alex Behm

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MAIN LINE by Alex Behm

Alex Behm
MAIN LINE

His voice is scratchy with sleep and a virus. I ask how he’s feeling.

What’s wrong, my father interrupts through the phone.

I’m just thinking, I say. Again. My father is in another state, trying to sleep, whereas I am in a dorm room with high ceilings and all of the lightbulbs blaring, even the desk lamp. I like to let the light in; my family lives in a river valley where I have never seen the sun set beyond those mountains that press us inward, nearer to the heart of what land is left.

My father walks down a flight of carpeted stairs, and they crack under his weight. He doesn’t want to wake up my mother, my sister, my brother. I hear him flick the light switches in his office. It is full of filing cabinets and antique toys that he has collected, whiteboards with dates and numbers and things, he tells me, I am not to be concerned with. Photos of our family.

There is a picture of my sister and me Scotch-taped to exposed drywall taken after a recital, standing with our grandmother. She wears a pink seersucker shirt with buttons and looks at yellow roses wrapped in cellophane. My sister and I smile into disposable flash.

I sang, I remember, something in Latin, and my sister played a novice composition of “River Flows in You” on the piano. I was maybe nine and she seven, whereas my grandmother appeared the same way I have always remembered, grinning with white curls locked in a perm, until the end of things when she looked younger, and so small. I had that feeling like air was catching in my throat. There was a ladybug in the curtains. In moments like this, it becomes hard to let go of my own breath.

You think with your heart, my father says to me over the phone, and I picture it inside of my rib cage, beating and blaring and blue. It is a visceral thing, something real and full. This is where you get stuck. This is where we lapse.

My father tells me, Do not live in the valley. He practices proverbs from a scuffed office chair. Live on the tops of the mountains.

Oh, my father. The valley is where we come from.

◊

When it is the time of afternoon between four and seven and we do not know what to do with ourselves, my friends and I drive through neighborhoods filled with houses where we could only ever dream of living. On a Saturday evening, we pack our things into book bags and walk outside wearing hooded jackets and sunglasses even though we cannot see the sun. All three of us.

Sometimes people let me down, but these two do not. They are both a year younger than I am in school but were my first friends after transferring colleges. We met convening at the T of three sidewalks and laughed forcedly at first, feeling like bad actors in a film where everyone grows up in the end. In the end, maybe that is what college is, just a long entertainment where they set you free with every burden in the world. Butterflies from the net. Though I do not know who they are, and often, I feel as though the world is on fire.

But now, it is raining. Cruel April. Behind tinted glass, the built world becomes fragile, as though if I tapped my nails and heard the ping, the window would shatter and with it, the film of a fabricated world beyond the other side.

Our campus is flowering. It is the kind of place sewn together with trees and enclosed in a stone wall, but outside of this sphere, there is a compounding space of syncopation, of ritual, of monotony: the Philadelphia suburbs. In these suburbs there are not streets but avenues. We slow to see the in-between where trees are like fences. Driveways wrap around to pillars and fountains. Yards have checkerboard grass. There are stone houses, brick houses, houses with glass roofs, glass walls, glass skylights, ceilings. We see gates made of metal, black and guild. Carports and pavement. Shutters painted red against white siding. Flags that are sometimes American and sometimes crests or seals. Ivy scaling walls, wrapping tight and firm. Flower boxes. Flower arrangements in concise rows that, as we drive, are smothered in a concoction of rainwater and fertilizer flowing so heavy, it could not all swirl into the drain pipes. The flooded flowerbeds. Peonies—how they bloomed, how they have faltered.

We play no music, but there is a consistent metronome’s chime, a click and tick. I have not buckled my seatbelt and listen for disregarded cacophonies; I love the way that word sounds.

We hit another red light. Stop.

◊

We coo to one another about beauty in its tangible state: the houses, the homes. We talk, as we often do, about where we might live one day. We decide, first, we are going to grow up.

Yes, we would graduate and move to East Coast cities where there are well-paying jobs. Our kitchens would be made of marble and hold latte makers and oat milk in the refrigerator. We’d go to galas where we’d carry little designer handbags and eat things like caviar even though two out of the three of us are vegetarian. We would get our nails done in salons with wallpaper and chandeliers. Our engagement rings would be the size of the knuckle on our manicured ring fingers. Our weddings would be white. We would have high-class weddings, timeless weddings, weddings with dusty pink flowers lining the runway to our life partner, and candles, and all of this would take place in front of a backdrop of some notable body of water.

And then, we would move to the suburbs. We would move to houses like these and we’d become parents and our children would throw out their arms and run through the grass that is cut like checkerboard; they’d be singing.

Our children would be happy, our children would be so happy. They’d have everything we’ve ever had and more. We would understand them. We would listen to them. We would love them. Of course, we tell ourselves, they would be all ours to love and someday, someday way off into the future, they would grow up the same way we are growing up now.

Our faces fall fast and we grow quiet, staring back out to those houses where everything is suspended in space as we hold our collective breath. So tight, so tight are our lungs. Maybe we will shout for air.

How guilty one feels in dreaming. This is our conclusion.

◊

My dorm room is a sacrosanct space. The concrete walls are painted a shade of manila and the floor is laid in commercial carpet, covered with a white rug. Moving in, I put square mirrors all over like glass wallpaper and, sometimes, I stare at myself until my pupils dilate and reflex; I think I am vain. At the end of the semester, my friends will help me cover them in duct tape and together, we will bust them into shards. We will have bad luck for the rest of our lives, but at least will not pay for damages, for messes that could not be cleaned.

Soon, my books will be packed into plastic containers and stored in my parent’s basement where it will flood while I am in another country and powerless to control the water. Fiction and memoirs and Bibles. Rust-colored water and a red algal bloom.

But before the floods, my father will drive to pick me up. I will walk him around my campus, and I will wear the only shirt I have not packed, with flowers and French text that goes down to my knees. I do not speak French, but for practice tell my friends á tes souhaits when they sneeze. Bless you. We laugh.

We will see the gym and the bookstore and he will buy us matching windbreakers that say the name of the college in a lofty print. He will see the library with cathedral ceilings, the cottage for the English Department, and “Hall” Hall where I took Latin despite having told myself I was through with it after graduating high school; I will show him the spaces where I have learned.

Together, we will carry plastic tubs and heavy boxes down two flights of stairs and into our SUV. They will fill up the back and I will worry because he can’t see out of the rearview on the turnpike.

I’ll ask him, when he is looking at the road, how he is feeling. About my grandmother. Three months will have passed and oh, he will tell me that he will be alright, he’s doing alright.

The rest of the car ride will be silent until he asks me, again, about law school. I tell him that’s where I will probably end up, knowing fully that law school is not where I am going to end up. The second part, I do not tell him.

Good, he’ll say, and he will be so proud of me. If nothing else, I can always write wills. Everybody’s gotta have a will. He will be so glad I am finally happy. That’s all he’s ever wanted. And we will go home.

But for now, I will rest.

Though it is nighttime, I look out my dorm room window toward the duck pond, the forest, the city. I feel like a debtor of morality, and so much like a kid. Outside is a light pollution wonderland, and the wishing stars are smothered.

Tonight, I do not lock the door. I am young and feel, paradoxically, powerless and formidable because of all the philosophy I’ve been made to read as of late. I shut off the overhead lights and the desk lamp.

To sleep, I imagine myself in one of those houses, one of the ones from the suburbs. Only here, it is on the top of a mountain. Yes, I imagine my face in an upstairs window, peering out. There’s a valley below me, and a river. How lucky I might be, how steady.

Alex BehmAlex Behm is a writer from West Virginia. Her work has appeared in The Allegheny Review, Milkweed, Zeniada, and elsewhere. Currently a student at Haverford College, she is the founder and leader of the Haverford Poetry Club as well as The Haverford Coterie, an undergraduate poetry magazine. When not reading or writing, she enjoys traveling and performing improv comedy. Visit her bio page here.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

AN UNNAMED ESSAY by Samantha Padgett

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Samantha Padgett
AN UNNAMED ESSAY IN WHICH THE WORLD ENDS, BUT I’M TOLD EVERYTHING IS OKAY

My mother is panicking. I know this despite her insistence that she isn’t afraid.

After days of listening to the newscaster detail the refrigerator trucks being filled with overflow bodies, my mother buys twenty pounds of potatoes from a local farmer. She doesn’t tell us until it’s done.

◊

I spend hours sitting with my great-grandmother. The air in her room is thick and gummy. She keeps her space heater on high even after Easter passes.

She’s ninety-six and lonely.

But I’m right here, I tell her.

But you weren’t there. You can’t understand.

◊

My mother and I return home from our weekly grocery store run. We strip off our clothes at the door, take turns cleaning each others’ backs with Clorox wipes.

Together, we wash each item brought into the house. We soak the fresh produce in hot water and dish soap. Everything else is sprayed down with bleach.

◊

Another day passes, and my mother is still arguing with my sister. She wants her to drive up from Dallas to get her potatoes. My sister’s exasperated voice muffles out from the receiver.

Ridiculous. Ridiculous. 

How will you eat? My mother keeps insisting. One day, I’ll be gone, and how will you eat?

◊

Growing up, my mother tells me stories of her childhood dinners: On Mondays, we’d have beans, cornbread, and bologna. On Tuesdays, we’d have bologna, beans, and cornbread. On Wednesdays, we’d have cornbread, bologna, and beans…

◊

It’s summer, and the house always smells like sugar. My mother can make cookies out of anything.

We spend afternoons at the library taking turns reading books to each other. I’m young, so young, when my mother tells me I have to get out.

Don’t be like me.

◊

Every day feels a little more dystopian. I line up outside the Walmart and watch the worker deemed essential count each customer as they go inside the store.

◊

We stop washing the groceries.

◊

I’m seeing a therapist again. I talk to her in my bedroom over Zoom. I tell her about my childhood—how my mother never let me quit anything once I started.

I’m sorry I ruined your life, my mother says to me later in the kitchen.

◊

My great-grandmother likes to tell me about her brothers. She recounts their deaths like they’re little piggies—this one died in a fire, this one was hit by a train, and this one cried wah-wah-wah as he drowned in a lake.

Only once does she tell me about a brother that made it to adulthood.

The last month of my first pregnancy, he wouldn’t leave my side. Slept on the floor next to my bed. She pauses before adding, I don’t remember how he died.

◊

When my mother finally accepts that we’ll never eat through the potatoes before they rot, she brings what remains of them to the curb. I watch as she rocks the bucket of potatoes down the driveway, and, for a moment, she’s helping a toddler take their first steps. I see the hands wrapped around my mother’s fingers, their legs jutting out one after another as if they aren’t sure the earth will still be there.

She tapes a sign to the bucket of potatoes: Free. Feed your families.

Samantha Padgett received an MFA in Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, New South, North American Review, and elsewhere. Samantha Padgett currently lives in Austin, TX with her partner and cat.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

CONTRAINDICATED by Carolyn Alessio

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Carolyn Alessio
CONTRAINDICATED

My mother once found opiates in the bottom of a used necklace box. She’d heard a clicking sound while lifting out the gold-plated necklace she had just purchased at a dying mall near her home. A half-dozen pills sat hidden under the box’s pressed cotton, like a priceless masterpiece that had been painted over with a trite landscape.

“Someone’s going to be looking for those,” my mother told me over the phone. “I’m glad I used a gift certificate so they couldn’t trace me.”

The idea of my elderly mother in her condo being a target for drug runners was a stretch, but she had always loved mysteries and police procedurals.

“What’s the code on the pills?” I asked. “I can look it up—there’s an app.” Pill Identifier it was called, part of Drugs.com and with (Pill Finder) in parentheses.

My mother paused. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I flushed them down the toilet before I remembered you’re not supposed to do that anymore.”

Looking out my gray city window, I remembered reading a report about the most common medications found in public drinking water: Birth control, anti-depressants, and pain opiates. The blend might alarm some, but it had sounded surprisingly soothing to me.

Six years later, when my mother was diagnosed with metastatic cancer during the end of quarantine, we started out using Days-of-the-Week dispensers for her many medications. During the first few months, she would call me at home so we could check potential interactions. Sitting at my kitchen table, I’d put her on speakerphone, pull up the Drug Interaction Checker app. Results showed up as Minor, Significant, Serious, and Contraindicated.

“How come the next level up from Minor is Significant?” I remember her asking. “Shouldn’t there be a gradation or something in between?”

Sometimes I heard my mother’s labored breathing as I typed in all the information, and I wondered silently if I could have detected this clue to lung cancer much earlier.

The hospice pharmacist took an extra-long dinner break the day we moved my mother into a unit. My brother and I brought all her prescription vials, but the young nurse urged us to take her Dilaudid and other opiates back home; they were fully stocked, she said. Foolishly, I sent it all back with my brother.

Four hours passed and my mother was starting to twist on her bed in her white nightgown, like a hungry infant shifting around in its bassinette. She still wasn’t quite conscious, but I could see the tension in her neck and jaw. Soon she began to mutter.

I couldn’t find a buzzer for the nurse, so I hurried down the hall to the desk to tell her my mom was ready for her next doses.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “The pharmacist’s on dinner break.”

Back in her room, my mother’s face was gray, and she was saying words that sounded like epithets I’d never heard from her before.

“Soon, Mom,” I said. “Soon, I’m so sorry.”

Freed from numbing opiates, the tumors in her lungs, liver, and bones were throwing off their weighted blankets for the first time in months. I paced, tried to stroke my mother’s hair, but even my soft touch was too painful.

A light at the top of my mother’s bed illuminated a panel of mute medical instruments. The reason we had finally agreed to transfer my mother to the unit was for more ease with medication—we’d been promised subcutaneous injections and fentanyl patches. Now that she was here, however, my mother’s pain was even more ragged and uncontrolled than at home. Anyone would’ve called it Contraindicated.

Back at the desk, I asked again, citing urgency, but the nurse tipped her head to the side. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He didn’t leave a key.”

Now, two years after my mother’s death, I sometimes think of that elusive key, unfathomably the only copy at a healthcare facility that prided itself on pain management, as they proclaimed in the hospice brochure.

Soon, the pain had forced my mother completely awake; her good eye was open (the other had a tumor behind it and had remained shut for some time). “Jesus,” she whispered, a name I’d only heard her use respectfully. She repeated it and hissed the “s.”

I paced, ran crying through the halls to find any staff member. Didn’t other patients there need pain medication? I even called the 1-800 number for the hospice company, but everyone just urged me to wait a little longer, and we remained marooned in the bland, gray office park. That morning when I rode with my mother in the back of the ambulance, she had been jostled as we wound through the labyrinthine road.

A soft knock on my mother’s open door announced the entrance of an older nurse. Wearing yellow gloves, she came inside and set up her equipment. Soon she pressed a fentanyl patch on my mother’s leg and injected her with Dilaudid. Even before the nurse left, my mother was resting, her body so relaxed and her skin so smooth I could even see some of the freckles covering her cheekbones. The following two days, her last, would be similarly serene, but I didn’t have that consolation yet.

“Would you like a blanket for the couch?” the nurse asked me after she placed one on my mother.

I thanked her, my body feeling weaker than it had after a last-minute Caesarean years before. When I went to close the curtains, I peered out in the dim light at the desolate patio just outside the sliding doors. It looked familiar, and after a moment I realized I’d seen it in the hospice brochure from months before, with a built-in barbecue promising feasts of glistening vegetables that we would share, laughing. State-of-the-Art Palliative Care, the company had boasted. I blinked at the top of the grill anchored to the ground, its shiny cover firmly shut.

Carolyn Alessio lives and writes on Chicago’s southwest side. Her work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Sweet Lit, America, and elsewhere. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her novel manuscript was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WHEN YOU CALL HIS MOTHER FROM THE PSYCH UNIT by Rebecca Grossman-Kahn

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WHEN YOU CALL HIS MOTHER FROM THE PSYCH UNIT by Rebecca Grossman-Kahn

Rebecca Grossman-Kahn
WHEN YOU CALL HIS MOTHER FROM THE PSYCH UNIT

When you call his mother, give yourself time. A half hour, at least. Give up on the idea of beating rush hour traffic home. Swipe your badge and enter through the doors of the inpatient psychiatry unit, the one with the conference room you know will be empty at 4:00 p.m.  Settle into the sparse room with its echoes and afternoon sun at a low September angle. See the light descending toward the parking structure, casting sharp lines through the metal blinds and a glare on your computer screen.

Before you make the call, notice your pinging hunger. Slip into the kitchenette off the unit and pilfer a few packets of saltines. As you walk back to the conference room, notice the faint smell of body odor and cafeteria coffee and vegetable soup. Feel the slight pull of the lanyard ID badge against the thin muscles of your neck. Clasp your hand around the keys clinking together, bringing attention to your power, your unearned escape, your license to leave. Muffle the sound with your fingers.

You’ll be tempted to use speakerphone, to type notes as you talk or to relieve your hand from holding the phone. Don’t. Bring the receiver to your ear and feel your arm work to keep it there. His mother will notice the difference in the sound of your voice, in the proximity, in your attention.

When you call his mother, describe the day’s events. Her son asked for a liver transplant to get rid of the foreign tracking device that’s been plaguing him. He believes he is a spy and is targeted by foreign governments. At least he’s talking to staff. Perhaps a bit less paranoid. He’s getting along with the other patients.

Don’t show your cards: that you’re fascinated by his delusion about the tracking device, still eager to learn the neurobiology that might explain it. Instead, report that you’ve dialed his medication up so he won’t swing a baseball bat in the street around other people again.

Are you sure? Mom asks.

Yes? You ask back. At least, pretty sure. Mostly sure. Try not to feel nauseated as you stare at the mustard-colored walls and listen to Mom’s silence. Massage the thin muscles of your neck and wonder how just a hospital ID and some keys can cause such strain.

Beyond the conference room door, hear the clatter of the dinner trays wheeled in. The TV on in the background. The whirring of a card deck shuffled and then the snap-snap of cards slapped onto a vinyl table. The sound of chairs—too heavy to lift by design—scratching across the floor. The sounds of the hushed boredom of the unit in the afternoon.

When Mom finally sighs the heaviest sigh you’ve ever heard, let it linger. You’re new to this, but she’s not. That’s okay. Listen to her sigh. When she sounds hopeless, know it’s not because you are hopeless. It’s because she’s lost her son. Her board game-loving, red-haired college freshman. And you can’t get him back. Not all the way. You haven’t learned that lesson yet, but that’s okay.

When you talk to his mother, don’t mention the drawings he’s been making in occupational therapy art group. Don’t say you think they’re beautiful, profound, worthy of an art show. Because Mom has seen more of his art than you have. The twisted lines and unexpected color juxtapositions—where you see a unique perspective, Mom sees her beautiful son’s mixed-up thoughts.

When you talk to his mother, you’re learning what she knows about her son that you don’t yet know. That you’re one young doctor of nine whom she’ll speak to this year. When Mom isn’t interested in your opinion that his auditory hallucinations have slightly improved, it’s because she already knows what will come next. She’ll hear the hope in your voice, and know you’re new.

Rebecca Grossman-Kahn is a writer and psychiatrist living in the Midwest. Her creative nonfiction work has been published or is forthcoming in Roanoke Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Examined Life Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, and The Intima. Rebecca Grossman-Kahn is working on a book of essays about psychiatry and medical training.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE RIDE by Sarah Myers

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THE RIDE by Sarah Myers

Sarah Myers
THE RIDE

You’re buying tampons, brushing your hair, cleaning the crud off the kitchen table, and the sight of your own stupid fingers reminds you that the bottom has dropped out of everything. Then you’re talking to a colleague or a friend or a weird and lovely student, and you smile with every inch of your teeth because you’re there with them (you are, you really are), but you’re also not there, hearing, as you do, the constant low hum of am I real? and isn’t it strange we’re all just skin bags for cosmic particles? and how can someone you trust with every careful corner of your bones betray you? So you picture the time when you were eight and you managed not to die when your stepmother made you bike for miles with blood streaming down your leg from that fall through the rusty sewer grate because she said you ruined the ride, or that morning when she chased you around the house with an open palm and you barely managed to get your brother back in his highchair (screaming, screaming) before you ran up the stairs two steps at a time. And you remember that this is how you did it (not die)—by acing every math test, and singing Cyndi Lauper songs at recess, and giggling at the word boner with your best friend, but keeping every day at a distance, eyes hung heavy on the horizon, there, but not there, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, trusting your small heart would hold. So you listen to that sweet student talk about her cat and her dreams of grad school and will you write me a recommendation letter? and of course! and thank you! and of course! and thank you! and of course! while your mind is moving through the madness of missing the body that betrayed you, or puzzling out (again, again, again) how you could’ve let your guard down at exactly the wrong moment, how you could’ve imagined that body would never leave you bloody and biking for miles. So you say, Yes. Yes! I will write you the most beautiful letter in the world.

Sarah Myers is a Minneapolis-based playwright, theater artist, and essayist. Her plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., Spout Press, and New Madrid and produced in New York, Chicago, Austin, and Minneapolis. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, New Letters, TDR: The Drama Review, Studies in Musical Theatre, among others. She holds an MFA in Playwriting and a PhD in Theater from UT Austin.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

AN EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT AS IT PERTAINS TO THE DIVORCE AND SUBSEQUENT ROMANCE BETWEEN CHARACTERS XX AND XY by Jon Chopan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Jon Chopan
AN EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT AS IT PERTAINS TO THE DIVORCE AND SUBSEQUENT ROMANCE BETWEEN CHARACTERS XX AND XY

Rabid
……….Which is the only way to describe XY’s love, even now, when XX is gone, when she is off and out in the world like a storm front, 1–150.

Raccoon, 51.

Race, 52.

Racket
……….The way XY and XX pretend that they are not in love, 54–55.
……….Or, the ways they are:
……….……….Late at night, with XX’s new lover gone
……….……….Talking for hours, arguing, crying, laughing about why XY is no good for XX or how XX is still wonderful and crazy
……….……….And sometimes just listening to one another breathe, imagining that they are lying there, pressed back to back because they sleep in opposite directions
……….……….And XX saying to XY “snuggle back,” meaning get close, meaning let me feel the heat in your shoulders and press your head to mine, 1–150.
……….See Also: Randy, 2–149.

Radiant, 12.

Rage, 78, 90, 100–103, 141.

Rainy Day Fund
……….And the postcard XX sent XY, reading:
………………..“Meet me in Vegas!  I’ll wear my best pair of cut-offs and cash in my rainy day fund.
………………..I’ll treat you real good.  Don’t say no, Ruthie,” 45.
……….As preparation for:
……….……….The undesirable, 1.
……….……….The unexpected, 1.
……….……….The worst, 1.

Randy
……….One of those words XY would use in bed.  And XX would smile or laugh or call him “a goof.”  Like when XY would stand there after sex, still erect, and declare himself “Boner Boy!” while striking a Superman pose, 2–149.

Ran
……….As form of confusion
……….As form of love,
……….As means of escape
……….As miscommunication
……….XY, from
……….……….Responsibility, 1–148.
……….……….Love, 1–120.
……….……….Monsters, 1–150.
……….XX, from
……….……….What is “hard,” 1–148.
……….……….Love, 1–120.
……….……….Horror Movies, 1–150.
……….How XX and XY inflict injury, Afterward.

Ravenous,
……….The way XX loved XY, Preface, 1–150, Appendix, Afterward.
……….Which can be a form of failure, Preface.

Raze

  1. to level to the ground, demolish, 1–120.
  2. to scrap or shave off, 0.
  3. to erase, 0.

Reading
……….Letters mailed from XX to XY in which she mentions missing the way he smells, and his woody the woodpecker laugh, and maybe even sometimes his jokes, 21.

Readjust, 20–120.

Realized that
……….XY misses
……….……….XX’s hands, 21–120.
……….……….The way XX’s body is so hot all the time, like a furnace, like when she rolls over and says “You’re so sweaty,” and he says “You’re making me sweaty,” 12.
……….XX may never come back, 119.
……….See Also: Regrets, 1–150.

Rear end
……….XY’s favorite part, if pressed on the issue, 13, 21, 34–39, 60–113.

Reasons
……….For XY to love XX:
……….……….Her hands, 1–20, 48–78, 130–150.
……….……….Her writing, 1–150.
……….……….Her tattoos, 1–150.
……….……….And, let’s be honest, she is beautiful, Preface, 1–150, Appendix, Afterward.
……….For XX to love XY:
……….……….He loves her, 1–150, Afterward.
……….……….He won’t stop chasing after her, 10–150, Afterward.
……….……….They have a kind of language, 1–150.
……….……….And let’s be honest, he is (in the right light) boyishly handsome, 13.

Reckless
……….The way XX could be, 1–12, 14, 20–80, 100, 149.

Red lipstick
……….XX wore to kiss XY on the cheek, marking him as hers, so that everyone at the party would know, 11.
……….That XY wore with pride, 11–12.

Regrets
……….Which XY refuses to acknowledge, any more than he just has, because it was obvious that he’d pick this word.  But he will say,
……….SEE ALSO: the index.

Regulation, 1–20.

Relapse,

  1. to fall or slide back into a former state
  2. to regress after partial recovery from illness
  3. to slip back into bad ways; backslide

Rendezvous
……….In the:
……….……….Women’s room, 10.
……….……….Backseat of the car, 12.
……….……….Street, XX singing “Why don’t we do it in the road,” 12–13.
……….On the:
……….……….Coffee table, which was not as good as they had hoped, 8.
……….……….Dining Room Table, which was a kind of accident, but was much better than expected, 9.
……….……….Floor, 13–15.
Respect
……….Self, and how XY will eventually have to walk away, how he cannot wait forever, if only because XX won’t love him anymore, 1–120.

Response
……….As way to avoid issues, 20–40.
……….As honest lie? 10–50.
……….As means of saying goodbye, 1–10.
……….As sign that there is still love, 10–150.
……….By XX to XY when he begs, pleads, professes his love:
……….……….“You know, fifty percent of these fail anyhow.  If that’s not a classic case of the odds working themselves out then I don’t know what is,” 51.

Restricted
……….By the miles between them, by the “fling” they are having, which is what XY tells people to seem
……….……….In control
……….……….Well adjusted
……….……….Over it

Rhythm
……….And the note XX left in XY’s pocket reading: “You really had the rhythm last night,” 71.

Ribs
……….Where XX would press her fingers, tracing, saying to XY “You’re so skinny,” 1–20.

Riddle
……….As means of communication
……….As constructed confusion
……….As last line of defense
……….That XX put to XY:
………………..“What is better than one orgasm?”
……….……….-PAUSE-
……….……….“Two!” 12.

Ridiculous
……….How XX gets jealous when XY goes out with other women even though she has a new boyfriend, 71, 90, 110–113, 115, 117, 119.
……….How XY makes fun of XX’s new boyfriend, calling him “Wolverine” because his hands are hairy, and “Bricks” because he likes to think the man a moron, and using other inside jokes (see Tobias from Arrested Development or Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords, shows they used to.watch and love) to belittle this man who has never done anything to XY other than step in to fill the void, 1–120.

Ripple Effect
……….How XX’s poems and letters make XY miss her, think of her light blue eyes and how that reminds him of home and lake Ontario and all the winter weather coming off it and that no matter how cold it is XX is always XY’s center, his solution for sadness and regret.

Risk
……….As leap of faith, 1–150.
……….As form of love, 1–150.
……….As starting point, 1.
……….……….Taken by XY
……….……….……….Giving his heart to XX, 1.
……….………………..Writing this index, Afterward.
……….……….Taken by XX
……….……….……….Giving her heart to XY, 1.
……….……….……….Keeping XY close, 20–120.
See Also: Responsibility, 20–80.
See Also: Rub, 41–61.

Roguish
The way XY says to XX: “I’d rip out my kidneys and live off dialysis to have you back,” 24.

Romantic
……….The notion that XY can win XX back, 20–150.
……….The feeling that XX is coming back, 20–150.
……….The idea that two people are meant for one another, 1–150.

Romanticism, 1.

Romanticize, 1–150.

Romp
As sexual innuendo used by XX after their first time: “Now that was a great romp.”

Rub
……….To stimulate, 8.
……….To comfort, 13, 25, 67–69.
……….To make warm, 1–150.
……….Creates
……….……….Friction, 1, 5, 8, 10–19, 24, 29, 31–51, 71, 80–90, 130–150.
……….……….Erection, 1, 5, 8, 10–19, 24, 29, 31–51, 71, 80–90, 130–150.
……….……….Contemplation, 1.

Rumba
……….Danced spontaneously in the kitchen to the Beatles, which was awkward but memorable, 21.

Run
……….XY, to:
……….……….Booze, 20, 34, 54, 67, 70–111.
……….……….Other women, 0.
……….……….Home, 1–150.
……….……….XX, 1–150.
……….XX, to:
……….……….Another man, 20–120.
……….……….Another city, 20–120.
……….……….Home, 0.
……….……….XY, 1–150.

Ruth
……….Also known as:
……….……….Bingo Wing, Preface.
……….……….Gatsby, 1–10.
……….……….Love, 1–150.
……….……….Rabbit, 2.

Ruthless
……….Which is what it feels like when XX says to XY: “I don’t think you will ever forgive me.  Which is why I am still with him.”  Because it fails to take into account how long XY has loved XX or how he is capable of forgiveness or that, perhaps, all he wants now is to forgive, to apologize, to analyze all his own missteps and say: “I will forgive you if you can forgive me,” 120.

……….Which is what XY intended when he wrote an index for XX, because he wants to win her back, knows that this may mean trading in a little self respect, may mean doing anything, everything, may make things pathetic, vile, distorted, may mean things will be done and/or said that can never be taken back
……….See Also: Romantic, 1–150.
……….See Also: Run, 20–120.
……….See Also: Ruth, 1–150, Appendix, Afterward.

Jon Chopan is an associate professor of creative writing at Eckerd College. He received his BA and MA in American History from SUNY Oswego and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His first collection, Pulled from the River, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. He is the winner of the 2017 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for his second collection, Veterans Crisis Hotline, which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2018. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hotel Amerika, Post Road, Epiphany, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DUNES DAY by Andrew Michael Johnson

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DUNES DAY by Andrew Michael Johnson

Andrew Michael Johnson
DUNES DAY

In the summer of 2020 we fled the confinements of our house in Kansas City and drove to Colorado. After the first three months of pandemic lockdown, my wife, three young children, and I needed to breathe some fresh air, see constellations, hike, and escape the growing sense that we might be trapped together forever.

After ninety days of seeing the same three small faces every day—faces I love but faces frequently contorting to open their word holes and say things like, “I need another cheese stick,” or, “Google Classroom can kiss my butt,” or, “Moana Moana Moana I want Moana,” three faces that light up with joy at small things like fireflies and then drown in tears at big things like not getting to see their friends—after three months of seeing nothing but these faces, getting in a minivan to stare down 400 miles of Kansas highway sounded like a gift from heaven. We drove hard, and with purpose.

During road trips my wife, Kristen, and I tend to get lost in conversation about our values and how we align, or struggle to align, our daily lives in close proximity to them. During this particular drive, while the kids gazed at windmills along the western Kansas highway, Kristen began to say, “I used to think that I valued togetherness . . .” but her voice trailed off and went silent for a moment. Then she said, “Look, bison!”

Togetherness, like many things, sounds good until you’ve had it in excess. Like a bad gin hangover, you emerge from a season of binging on togetherness only to find yourself woozy, confused, in need of being alone in a bathroom, and tasting pine needles in your mouth. It can really mess you up.

So anyway. We crossed the Colorado border, drove through the Front Range, rolled down into the central valley, and curved our way around the Arkansas River headwaters toward our destination among the Collegiate Peaks. We settled in at our cabin. We made plans for the week. We hiked. We rested. We swam. And on the fourth day, we drove to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

When you love your family but can’t stand being around them for one more minute, try spending a few hours at the Great Sand Dunes during a windstorm. You might find yourself accidentally wishing that one of your offspring might get carried off to spend a few days in the desert repenting. You might suddenly realize that you are contemplating wandering off yourself, just up and vanishing, perhaps reappearing at dinnertime down the road in Salida. You might wonder if you just survived three months of isolation during a pandemic only to die here, sandblasted to death, your face crumbling apart like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars.

We noticed the strong winds when we arrived. The entire top half-inch of the 150,000-acre park was shifting all over the place. We’ve visited the sand dunes before, but not during a windstorm. We stupidly thought, “Surely we can hike a quarter mile in this, let the kids slide down the dunes on the snow sled we brought, enjoy the beauty of this place.”

When the first gust of wind knocked off my seven-year-old son Ori’s cowboy hat, we should’ve known to turn back. But again, togetherness has done a number on our capacity for discernment. After three months of chanting THIS IS HARD BUT WE CAN DO HARD THINGS, it’s like we forgot that no one was forcing us to walk into a dune storm.

We hiked into the dunes with the strong winds mostly at our backs, occasionally coming at us sideways. For a moment the winds died down and, all things being equal, it was almost picturesque: Children sledding down the dunes, a happy stoner traipsing along with two dogs, a group of nine Mennonites climbing the slope single file, a woman in a bikini out to enjoy a day in the sun.

But all things were not equal, and eventually, we had to turn back and head straight into the wind. Imagine everyone I just described being pummeled by gusts of sand: The children collapsing on the ground unable to move; the stoner crying out while clutching his dogs to his hips; the Mennonites’ beards and bonnets blowing every which way; the woman in the bikini wrapping her thin linen towel around her face and crawling like Scarlet O’Hara, shaking a fist at the sky while falling down every three steps.

We attempted to put on our happy faces, but those wore thin back in May. What remains now is our ability to simply acknowledge when something sucks. The kids are really good at it. So is Kristen. I’ve gotten better at it. But on this particular day I was clinging to my laughter to get me through. I know this is supposed to be a season of deep empathy, grief, and compassion for others, but could I help it if I stood on a dune ridge in a windstorm laughing maniacally at the prospect of 200 of us getting buried alive in sand? Togetherness can make you crazy, indeed.

There was no real threat or imminent danger. This was not suffering. I knew this deep down. I kept shouting loudly through the wind, “Just another ten feet. If you can make it another ten feet, it will get easier.”

My ten-year-old son Annen was the only one without sunglasses, so his eyes were filled with sand and tears. Ori wore his dinosaur pajamas-slash-costume and seemed to be well-suited to crossing such terrain yet still struggled to take each step. Three-year-old Ellery clung to my back in a child carrier and eventually burrowed so deeply that she fell asleep, entering some sort of survival-mode hibernation. We walked hard for the final stretch, holding close to each other, holding the sled and our hats in front of our faces, holding hands, pushing each other forward. Turns out our togetherness was perhaps, in the end, essential.

When we finally arrived back at the parking lot we sat down, laughed and cried, emptied ten pounds of sand from our shoes, and vowed to help each other be less dumb in the future, like such as trust the weather forecast that actually warned us about heavy winds. I am considering a new tattoo across my knuckles: BELES SDUMB.

But the final image I will keep from our Dunes Day is the image of Scarlet O’Hara in the bikini, crawling her way over the dunes, half-blinded by the towel covering her face, reaching the final slope to descend and then suddenly pausing, standing upright, raising her toweled face to the sky, walking with such incredible dignity down the dune and back to the parking lot like a queen, towel-faced and bikinied. May I keep that image in my mind forever and know that even in my raw foolishness I can find some dignity to bare, and that for all its faults and excesses, togetherness just might be the very thing that will keep getting us through, whether we like it or not.

Andrew Michael Johnson is an author, poet, and essayist living in Kansas City, Missouri. His work has appeared in The Sun, Image, Commonweal, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He is the author of two books: The Thread and On Earth As It Is. He is the recipient of a Charlotte Street Foundation studio residency, an Arts KC Inspiration grant, a Vermont Studio Center residency, a Rocket Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

FLIGHT PATHS by Jacqueline Ellis

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FLIGHT PATHS by Jacqueline Ellis

Jacqueline Ellis
FLIGHT PATHS

December 2021:

I give my dad a project: tell me what you remember about making wine with your friend Franco, back when we lived in Peterborough. The task distracts him while he waits for biopsy results. Suspected mesothelioma.

It is two weeks after he called to tell me that a routine chest X-ray had uncovered nodules in his lungs, and we have spoken every day since then: 4:00 p.m. in the United States, 9:00 p.m. in England.

Each time, before I hang up, I say:

“I’ll call tomorrow. Just to check in.”

Each time, my dad hands the phone to my mother.

“Shall we come?” I ask her. “For Christmas and for dad’s 80th?”

“Not yet,” she says. “Not until we know for sure.”

My dad records his memories and sends me a digital file. I touch play on my phone and wait for his voice.

He reads from notes, takes time to enunciate, sometimes falters, clears his throat, loses his breath at the end of a sentence. He tells me how he and Franco built a wine press from steel and wood purloined from the brick factory where they worked. How Franco ordered Sangiovese grapes from Naples. How they pressed the fruit into juice, siphoned the juice into barrels. Waited while it fermented.

I watch the audio waveform, white columns that rise and fall on my screen, visualize my dad’s words. I had told him I needed the stories for something I was writing, but I don’t take notes or think about how I could shape his story, make it more literary. Just listen and rewind, listen and rewind.

September 11th, 2001:

Unusually, my dad calls at 8:45 on a Tuesday morning.

He has recently retired. I have just started my first tenure-track teaching position in Jersey City.

I give perfunctory responses to his innocuous questions:

Am I prepared?

Of course.

Am I nervous?

Not really.

Sirens fill the streets outside.

“That’s a lot of noise,” my dad remarks.

“Yeah, just fire engines.”

I glance at the TV.

We say goodbye and we’ll talk on Sunday and have a good week and say hello to mum and give our love to Dan.

The wails outside fill the room.

March 1993:

On the way to Heathrow, my dad braked too late to avoid hitting the car stopped in the line of traffic ahead of us. The impact was slight, but my body angled forward from the back seat, and I glimpsed his profile—the tightness at the corner of his lips, the curve of his forehead, the tips of grey brow hairs curled over the corner of his eye.

My dad got out of the car to meet the other driver.

“Weren’t you paying attention?” the driver snapped. “Are you stupid?”

My dad nodded. “You’re right,” he said.

I started to ask my mother why dad had been distracted, but her head was tilted up to where the top of the windshield met the roof of the car. She inhaled, the beginning of a sigh. The back of her neck was rigid. I looked down at my hands like a scolded child. As if I wasn’t a young woman whose father was driving her to the airport because she had chosen to live in another country four thousand miles away from home.

In seven hours, my flight from Heathrow will land at Logan Airport in Boston. I will present my visa to an immigration officer. One-by-one, he will press my fingers onto a purple inkpad then place each of them in the center of a square printed on a yellow form. He will not smile or speak or look at me. He will stamp the pages of my British passport in red ink. He will hand back my passport. Then he will look toward a line of people waiting behind a strip of yellow tape stuck to a dirty blue carpet and say, “Next person, step forward.”

In the backseat of my dad’s car, I had distracted myself with calculations. If I flew home once a year for two weeks, time together with my parents would be more meaningful than mundane weekend visits from a few miles away or daily pop-ins if I lived around the corner. I might miss birthdays or Father’s Days or family reunions, but those absences won’t matter if I call more frequently, if we spend whole vacations together.

I didn’t factor in unknown variables: divorce, a second marriage, a daughter.

I didn’t consider how I might weigh the options when my dad got old and sick. Didn’t measure the value of everyday time, the caring, present moments when I wouldn’t be there to help get my dad settled at home after a hospital stay or write his doctors’ appointments onto the calendar. I wouldn’t buy his groceries or make his coffee or chat with him about the Channel Four news. Ask him to identify birds that visit his many feeders. I didn’t anticipate what his final seconds might look like—the jagged green-lines monitoring his heart, the trace of ice water over his dry lips, his still, held hand, the ridges of his thumbnail against my index finger.

November 2019:

I talk to my brother on WhatsApp while I walk my dog in the park near my house. My dad has been in the hospital with chest pains several times this month. I squint against the sun, look up at where the flight path from Newark airport streaks the sky, then down at the jagged salt-lines that ring the sides of my boots.

When I was little, my dad let me sit on his lap while I steered our car back and forth over an unbridged stream. Sometimes, he would drive fast over hilltop roads and pretend our car had taken flight. I would press my face against the window, watch the road disappear below.

“This is how things are going to be now,” my brother says.

He tells me not to come. Not yet.

Jacqueline Ellis writes creative nonfiction, memoir, and personal essays. Based in Montclair, New Jersey, she is originally from Peterborough, England. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hinterland Magazine, Bending Genres, Zone 3, and The Normal School, among others. Find her work at jacquelineelliswriter.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE SECRET ANNEX by Rita Mendes-Flohr

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THE SECRET ANNEX by Rita Mendes-Flohr

Rita Mendes-Flohr
THE SECRET ANNEX

In all those years we have lived in this the old house in town so close to the sea, I have never been able to get near the beautiful turquoise water behind the row of houses on the Pietermaai. It is too dangerous to walk through the narrow alleys between those houses to the sea that is sparkling at the other end. You don’t know who is hanging around there, my Mami says.

In the backyard of the Wilhelmina School, we are even closer to the sea. If you listen hard, you can hear the rustling of the waves above the terrible noise of the scream­ing girls. But we are locked inside the schoolyard by a high yellow wall with broken pieces of glass on top to make sure we won’t climb out.

I want to get to the sea that is so close and yet so far away. I want to swim like a dolphin across the waters, jumping up and going down into the waves again. I want to sail to distant lands, far from this little island—to see the world on the other side of the sea. But I am locked inside the schoolyard, with the broken glass on the wall to make sure we will stay safely inside.

Sometimes I find a sòldachi, in our schoolyard, a little hermit crab gone astray from the sea. I pick it up and put it on the palm of my hand. But the sòldachi pulls in its little claws and hides deep inside its shell, and then I must wait patiently for the little crab to feel safe and come out again.

How I wish I were a sòldachi. With my claws I dig a hole under the tall yellow wall and crawl out to the sea, away from all the noise and the screaming. Here, on the flat rocks, it is quiet. There is only the whispering of the sea leaping onto the shore, filling up the pools and puddles and pulling back again, leaving behind little waterfalls splash­ing down the rocks until the sea comes in again, jumping and frolicking as before. It never gets tired, that old and beautiful sea. It does not even stop to rest. Sometimes it is fiercer, sometimes it is calmer, but it is always there, pushing and pulling against the rocks.

I look out over the sea, shimmering in many shades of turquoise and green. Gra­dually, it gets darker and darker until finally, in the distance, it turns into a deep dark blue, almost black, when the bottom drops down, like a precipice.

Out there, the sea is so black you cannot know what is underneath. There can be sharks lurking below the surface or ferocious barracudas with razor‑edge teeth that can rip you to pieces, there can be manta rays and giant eels that prey upon you from under­neath the deepest sea and there is no way you can see them coming.

No, I will never know the magnificent continents on the other side of the sea. I must stay here on the shore with my little shell on my back.

I am afraid.

◊

Even though the Wilhelmina School is not so far away from our house, I always get a ride so that I won’t have to walk alone on the dangerous streets. Often, it is Tio Chaco who drives me to school, especially when Papi must leave very early and does not come home for lunch because a tourist ship is in the harbor and he must keep the store open, like all the other storekeepers.

Now that I started fifth grade, I tell Mami that I am old enough to walk to school by myself. Mami finally agrees but only after I promise to stay on the main road and never stray off my path into the side streets and the alley­ways. Mami tells me to walk by fast when I pass one of those dark and narrow alleys between the houses on the Pieter­maai, those alleys that always smell of urine. She says I should never stand there and stare at the beautiful blue‑­green sea at the other end of the alley.

As I walk home from my ballet class, which is held in the gym of the Wilhelmina School, a man calls out to me. He is standing in one of those narrow alleys between the houses on the Pietermaai. The muscles on his brown arms and shoulders are shimmering with drops of saltwater. In his hands he holds a huge karkó—a conch shell that curls around an inner core of mother-of-pearl in a deliciously pink color. It is much, much larger than the shell I had found in Bonaire and that I treasure on a shelf of the bookcase next to my bed.

“Come here, pretty little girl,” he says, as he reaches out for me. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t eat you up. All I want is to show you this beautiful karkó I brought up from the bottom of the sea.”

My heart stops beating. This is exactly what my mother has warned me about. A strange man is touching me. He has his hand on my skirt. Here it is. Now it is coming. What have I done that this should happen to me?

With all my strength I push him away and run as fast as I can. I do not even look back to see if he is following me. I run back into the schoolyard and into the gym, panting. The next ballet class has already started, and so I hide behind the parallel ­bars and the pummel horses. As if I have done something wrong.

After the class is over, I ask Maritza’s mother if she can drive me home. I do not tell anyone what has happened to me. I just say I stayed at the gym to watch the next class and worry that everyone can see right through me.

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is better to stay inside the yard behind the white fence, where it is safe. Outside, on the street there are evil men out to prey upon you. Per­haps I should believe the grownups. They know better. They say that boys can fend for themsel­ves out there on the street, that they know how to fight back.

But you are weak, they say. You need to be protected. And it is you they’re after.

You are a girl.

◊

So now I walk to school on the other side of the broad Pietermaai, far from the little alleys that look out to the sea. That way I am certain not to run into the man with the karkó. And at the end of the school day, I meet Tio Chaco at his office, which is right next to the Wilhelmina School, so that I can get a ride home with him. That is a lot safer, I figure, even though I do not dare to admit the real reason to my mother.

Tio Chaco’s office is in a narrow building in the Breedestraat that looks like the tall and thin houses on the canals of Amsterdam, except, here, in the tropics, the outside walls are covered with painted plaster—green, yellow, orange, and sometimes a dark red. You enter Tio Chaco’s office through a very narrow hallway. Closer to the store-front window is another office with a glass door, but Tio Chaco’s office is all the way in the back, through a door made of the same kind of wood as the partition wall that closes off one side of the hallway.

Tio Chaco does not seem to have many visitors and I am sure they have a hard time finding the door to his office, as it does not look any different from the gray partition wall. If you don’t look carefully, you won’t be able to tell there is an office there.

I think Tio Chaco’s office, with that hidden door, must be like Anne Frank’s Secret Annex—het Achterhuis. My teachers in school like to tell me—the only Jewish girl in my class—how much I look like her and go on to describe that hiding place with the moveable bookcase camouflaging the entrance. They tell us how the good Dutch people hid the Jews from the horrible Germans who had invaded Holland.

Inside the Secret Annex, Anne was safe, and she could write her diary. The entrance to her hiding place could not be found. Outside, the sirens were blaring, and thousands of Jews were rounded up by the Gestapo on the streets of Amsterdam and sent to concentration camps, packed into cattle cars. But in the end, Anne was betrayed—the Secret Annex was not a safe place after all. Poor Anne died of typhus just a few days before Bergen Belsen was liberated. If only she could have held on a little longer.

I am relieved our little island stayed out of the war even though the Germans were after the oil from our refinery and their submarines fired several shots at our harbor. Imagine if the Germans had conquered our island during the war, then perhaps Mami and Papi and all the other Jews would have been taken away to concentration camps, and my brother Dito and I would have never been born.

Most of the time, when I come to Tio Chaco’s office, Estela, his secretary, is there, but now and then Tio Chaco is all alone. Often, I must sit and wait patiently, as Tio Chaco is busy on the phone in a heated discussion I do not understand—perhaps it has to do with the land he buys to build houses for poor people. But as soon as he finishes that phone call, my beloved Tio Chaco pours all his attention on me. He hugs and kisses me, his sweet Little Princess, and asks what special gift I would like him to buy me.

Then he starts to close the windows and the door that open to the back of the building, bolting them securely, and my heart begins to pound. When he turns off the lights and it becomes dark, I have the feeling of being closed in and I am gasping for air. Like the day the swimming teacher took me to his office and taped my mouth shut so that I would stop screaming.

Suddenly, I feel a large figure with a black cloak hovering above me like an enormous manta ray. I cannot see his face in the darkness. He grabs me from behind and wraps me in his big black cloak. I am terrified he will take me with him, down, to the bottom of the sea.

I want to get out, but Tio Chaco has locked all the doors. I cry out for my Mami to come and save me, my mother, the champion swimmer who can dive into the deepest waters. But my mother does not come. She is busy with my little brother who cries all the time.

And so, I hope and pray that Tio Chaco will hurry and finish what he must do so that we can get the hell out of there.

Rita Mendes-Flohr is an exhibiting visual artist, ardent trekker, and co-founder of a feminist art gallery. Born on the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao, she attended college in Boston and lives in Jerusalem, feeling at home only in the in-between. Coming to writing at a later stage in life, she has published (in Hebrew translation) a memoir of her multicultural Caribbean childhood and writes introspective essays about her journeys and treks in distant regions of the world. Her work can be viewed on her website.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

church by Erin Pesut

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church by Erin Pesut

Erin Pesut
church

There came a time about three years after we moved to Vermont when I decided I wanted to go to church again. Really what I wanted was to go to church at Christmas. Really what I wanted was to go to church for the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas. Really what I wanted was to see how church changed for Advent. Really what I wanted was to hear familiar hymns. To make the sign of the cross and feel holy water on my face. Really what I wanted was for church to be a portal to being a small child, a little girl again, sitting in a wooden pew at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Devine Street in Columbia, South Carolina, with my mother’s arm around me. Where I went to CCD. Where the priest once blessed our corgi. Really what I wanted was to say the words to prayers and have my mouth move in the same way my grandmothers’ mouths moved. Really what I wanted was to feel the order of things and to know what to expect. Really what I wanted was to sing out loud among other people instead of alone in my car. To unearth emotion from this stuck place inside of me. Really what I wanted was to examine all the people in the pews in front of me, their hair, their coats and sweaters, their dark lipstick and lip liner when they turned their head to the side, their features when they looked up to the choir in the loft. Really what I wanted was to have a stranger say, Peace be with you, and for me to say it back. Really what I wanted was to marvel at the color that shined upon the carpet from the warmed-up stained glass windows. Really what I wanted was to talk to the dead, and I figured I could find them here. Really what I wanted was to feel an organ fill a sanctuary. To hear the glee in its sustained chords when we sang out the last verse of the final hymn and Mass came to an end. Really what I wanted was to be in this church and in every church I’d ever been in, to be everywhere, all at once.

Erin Pesut is a poet, essayist, and editor living in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, West Trestle Review, HeartWood, and Poetry South, and is forthcoming from Whale Road Review and Raft Magazine. Her essay “Groceries (The Longest Text I Receive All Week)” was a finalist in the inaugural CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award. She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was a School of the Arts Fiction Fellow, and a BA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WITNESS TO THE ARIA by Meg LeDuc

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WITNESS TO THE ARIA by Meg LeDuc

Meg LeDuc
WITNESS TO THE ARIA

A sculpture soars in the sky of Meijer Gardens, red as a hummingbird heart, rising over the pinprick of a groundskeeper below. Of the painted scarlet steel of his public art, Alexander Liberman once said, “All my sculptures are screams.” Yet Aria shouts joy, curves a-dance, music in metal.

Meanwhile, in downtown Grand Rapids, a woman sings The Clark Sisters on the corner of Monroe and Pearl, singing the sunshine down: “You came my way / You made my day” and “I’m a witness.” Here on that city intersection, a gospel woman caresses her aria with winged voice. In the sculpture park, a groundskeeper tends his aria with downy hands.

I’m a witness. I once overdosed in the back of a car, swilling down hundreds of minute cotton-candy-colored Benadryl pills with lukewarm Budweiser. When I awoke, I wanted to hide from the police. I clambered behind the wheel. The last thing I remember is merging onto the freeway.

I am a witness to my own past. I’m a gospel woman.

Hummingbird heart stilled to the aria.

Now, today, my husband Tim strolls beside me through the sculpture park, as we discuss whether I should go back to school to study writing. We round a bend of shrubbery to find a female nude that leaves nothing to the imagination. Tim says, “If I took a photo and posted it to Facebook, would I violate Community Standards?”

I laugh, “Maybe. She’s about as curvy as your wife.”

He smiles. “I love my wife’s curves.”

In our historic downtown Airbnb, glitzed with an ancient bike behind the futon, Tim and I make love, and he calls my name in the night: “Oh, Meg, I love you.” Tears prick my eyes. I think of God calling names in the night down the corridors of time, Adam, Moses, David, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, calling each to a life with him, and my husband calls my name for love, and once, he stood at an altar and named me, to cherish until trees touch sky, and earth spins to stardust, and the River that flows through the City flows through us.

I’m no saint. Yet I am named.

Hummingbird heart witnesses the aria.

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build [God],” writes Rilke.

When Liberman died at his home in Miami on November 19, 1999, The New York Times obituary of the one-time art director of Vogue and director of Conde Nast read: “He wanted to embolden design and to break away from artifice, so he brought in younger photographers who shot outdoors in natural light. ‘No more Ophelias dancing through the Plaza at dawn,’ he said.”

To walk downtown Grand Rapids, I wear black tights patterned with maroon and sapphire blossoms, a skintight maroon shirt, and nude ballet flats. I’m not breaking away from artifice, yet perhaps I am, after all: I want my husband to see and desire me. I imagine Liberman asking, “What do you know about fashion?” Art director for Vogue, my god, but all I think when I see his sculpture is electric joy, and it’s the joy I discover in bed with my husband, when I say, “Tell me you like watching,” and Tim says, “Oh, Meg, yes!” and “You put on quite a show.”

You came my way / You made my day.

I am named.

The Russian-born Liberman fled occupied France for America in 1941. The artist had studied painting and architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts. But he needed employment to provide for his wife and her ten-year-old daughter. The New York Times obituary pronounces, “The decision came down, as it always would, on the side of money. His years as a refugee had given him a deep respect for comfort and security…”

Over enmoladas and enchiladas rojas at a hip Fulton Street restaurant, Tim says to me of studying writing, “I want you to have the chance to expand your world,” and hummingbird heart whirs in matchstick chest, and I, too, respect comfort and security, but You came my way / You heard me every time I prayed. There will be no more Ophelias in the Plaza at dawn. We build God out of the sweetness we gather. Can we build ourselves?

I will witness the aria with my hummingbird heart.

I choose to craft joy.

Meg LeDuc is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a BA in English and attends Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Writing program. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, San Fedele Press, CRAFT, and the International Human Rights Art Festival and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Meg LeDuc lives with her husband and three cats in Detroit, Mich. Visit her website.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MAGIC WINDOW by Anne Panning

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MAGIC WINDOW by Anne Panning

Anne Panning
MAGIC WINDOW (CHASING HOME)

What did you think when you cupped your hands against the glass and peered inside? Did you think the old wavy Victorian glass was a portal to the past? Did you see your mother in the kitchen, frying liver draped with onions? Was she listening to John Denver on her little boom box? Did she have a dish towel slung over her shoulder? Embroidered with kittens or vegetables? Was it soft with wear? Was the yellow-painted radiator leaking warmth? Was her heart a basket of needles? A tiny jar of yarn? If you sat at her table, might she fry you an egg? Pour you some red Kool-Aid in a juice glass? What might she tell you that you’d never heard before?

Try the other side of the house. The window back there, by the tiger lilies.

Was that your father there in his bedroom watching baseball, his ankles crossed on top of the log cabin quilt? Were the Twins winning? Could you see the score? Was his Food ‘n Fuel travel mug as stained and scratched up as ever? Full of old coffee he’d microwave throughout the day and night (and day and night)? Was he wearing his Wranglers or Levi’s? Dreaming of the lottery ticket with winning numbers? So he could quit his job at the cabinet factory and buy a little house on Lake Waconia? Did he still like his tiny sunfish filets floured and fried in butter? Was this before the rosacea would turn his face red with pain? Before Bud Light would slur his speech while he slurped hot dogs cold from the pack? Could he see you? Did he ever really see you?

Tap on the glass. Go ahead. Wave hello.

Anne Panning has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, as well as a novel, Butter, and two short story collections: The Price of Eggs and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short publications include Brevity (6x), Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, New Letters, The Florida Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, Hippocampus, and River Teeth. She is currently working on a memoir about her late father. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MEDITATING IN HELL by Megan E. O’Laughlin

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MEDITATING IN HELL by Megan E. O’Laughlin

Megan E. O’Laughlin
MEDITATING IN HELL

Age 24. The Gambia, West Africa.

I do not pray five times a day like the people in the village. When I duck into my little house, the girls ask where are you going? I tell them to pray; I don’t know the Mandinka word for meditation. Most evenings, the gaggle of girls come over for gossip and help with their homework. They ask about my prayers, so I sit criss-cross-applesauce, close my eyes, and watch the space between my breaths.

“That’s not praying. She doesn’t know!” the girls giggle. But their laughter washes away, for I know how to control my unruly mind.

I meditate even more at the Stage House, where Peace Corps volunteers convene in the city. We drink skunky beers and stay up late watching DVDs of The Ring and Legally Blonde. Dishes pile in the sink, and we rip open packages filled with melted candy and coveted books.

I make a sign: I am in here meditating, in messy, cursive writing, and tape it to the dormitory door. I sit between the bunks and imagine a circle of soft light around my body. I inhale. My clamorous thoughts retreat to a downstairs place. Much quieter now. I exhale. The external world slows, and to that space, I retreat, over and over, with the same desperate fervor I once used to guzzle a beer or smoke weed all day long.

Meditation is my new drug.

◊

Later, my friend looks at my sign and says, “It looks like it says: I’m in hell, meditating.”

Age 41. Samish Island, Washington.
I pack a bag of soft clothes and books for my seventh meditation retreat. Upon arrival, the Zen teacher orients us to the usual: noble silence, daily chores, and this new one—no reading or journaling. Though I hate it, I comply and shove my books and phone under the bed for the five-day duration.

During breaks from the meditation hall, I walk the shore and breathe in the low tide sulfur as eagles whistle overhead. Multiple times per day, the neighbor sweeps her room and our shared bathroom, a jarring sound. At the retreat’s end, we will break our silence for lunch and the neighbor will tell all of us at the table how she left a cult. She says she fears a spiritual community, yet she is eager for solace, that quiet downstairs place.

Each night of the retreat when I cannot read myself to sleep, I stare at the ceiling and will my mind to avoid images from a movie I watched just weeks before, with the demon king and its group of naked cultists. I wonder why I watched it in the first place. I dare not glance towards the inky corners of the room, convinced I may see a demon or one of its worshippers, leering in the dark at my loneliness.

I am not sure if I believe in demons, but I know fanatic humans are real. While I haven’t joined a cult, I’ve searched for systematic methods to bypass life’s difficulties, placing faith in my teachers, not unlike cult members with their leaders. We all want peace, or we want more control, or perhaps both (although I’m not sure we can have both at the same time). Years of meditation practice—hours to observe my mind—have taught me how little control I have, and how unpeaceful I can be. Still, I can choose where to direct my attention and how I will respond. Perhaps peace can be found within such determination.

Now, in the midnight quiet, my fearful thoughts are here like a mental demon. I note my body’s reactions: the breath darts like hunted prey, the gut smolders. While I cannot stop this hellacious mental tantrum, it need not dominate me. I gently laugh at the deluge, so powerful and brief. I count the inhales and exhales until my mind slows and the breath deepens. I drift into a wordless sleep.

Megan E. O’Laughlin (she/her) is an emerging writer, psychotherapist, and MFA candidate at Ashland University. Her work appears in The Black Fork Review, Defunkt Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Journal, and The Bluebird Word. Megan lives on a peninsula by the sea in Washington state with her spunky child, spoiled dogs, and surfing spouse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Black Fork Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Defunkt Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, and others.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

TO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY by Shabrayle Setliff

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TO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY by Shabrayle Setliff

Shabrayle Setliff
TO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY

Grandmother’s body was vast, heavy, and unknowable. Her belly was like an ocean in a cave. She never understood the glorious figginess of it. The tacky, seeded roundness held together with lovely bruised purple skin. Instead, she seemed concerned with its dimpled retaliations. Its heft that felt like the constant plunge of gravity, not the groundedness I knew when I fell into the soft acreage of her arms.

Despite her efforts, the field of her kept producing fractals of brown skin, smooth folds, and pillowy lipids. Her body’s growth came under constant surveillance in doctors’ offices and Weight Watchers’ meetings, on the scale, in the dressing room—and I began to wonder, to whom did this acreage belong?

She was scattered, like seed, along the perimeter of her body, alert to expansion, engaged in a loop of field exercises: chewing her food to atoms, walking the corridors of the indoor shopping mall, and doing water aerobics in the YMCA swimming pool, lifting soaked wings to the instructor’s count.

She fed my blossoming cheeks with noodles and cheese and let me discover the delights of processed meats, the salty curved edges of a piece of fried bologna. She couldn’t eat any of that, though. Instead, she ate tuna, canned in water, and an iceberg head, cleaved in half. She drank glaciers dyed Crystal Light red.

She didn’t travel much, but she did visit the ocean for a whole week once on a cruise ship. I’d like to imagine that she moved along the vast buffet like the wind was in her hair, but I don’t know if she would have allowed herself to be that carefree in front of others. Instead, I saw a picture of her sitting at an empty table with a lei of violet orchids around her neck.

I remember her smile in that picture, but I don’t remember her ever being joyful in real life. Joy was somewhere far away, like Honolulu. I wonder if she ever got off that cruise ship. I can’t imagine her toes ever touching a grain of sand. The grandma I knew would have worn Honolulu’s orchids, taken in its sunset from a lounge chair, but she would have kept the island at a distance.

I have one memory of her lit up with delight in the darkness of an early morning. She was sitting over a turkey carcass with my aunt under the glow of the low-hanging kitchen light. They plucked the stringy bits from the tiny ivory bones with pleasure, the whole country of a beast to be explored, their fingers the compass. Grandma offered me its prized gizzards earlier that day, and I, nine at the time, said “no.” She snuck them into her delicious cornbread dressing anyway, so I did eat them, unknowingly and with glee.

I was twenty-five when Grandma died. Just a few days after the funeral, I dreamed she was on a giant Naval ship. She told me the ship was heaven or maybe it carried passengers to heaven. She didn’t really know—it was all secondhand information. She could see that I was doubtful and even a little worried because the place looked dingy. The walls were institutional pewter, streaked with rust stains. She said it wasn’t that bad. She pointed to a few paperback books on her small cabin shelf that she liked to read to assure me she was okay. I was glad to visit her, so I put my worry aside. When I woke up, it felt so real that I told her I wanted to see her again.

And I do.

Newly forty, her body has resurrected in mine: soft brown mounds have sprouted where there were once none. When I sit, I spread farther outward—every part of me is in contact with another part of me. My legs have taken on the solidity of mature trees, and my steps have grown heavier. When I sleep, I sleep in the softness of myself, like the soft acreage of her arms.

Originally from Oklahoma, Shabrayle Setliff lives with her family in northern Virginia. Last year, she graduated with her MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. She’s working on a book combining Quechua folktales, the Qheswa language, and her maternal family history. In addition, Shabrayle Setliff works as an associate editor at an education nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE PRIZE FIGHTER by Lyn Chamberlin

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Graphic design image of a spilled bottle next to the Eiffel Tower

Lyn Chamberlin
THE PRIZE FIGHTER

She would go to Paris.

When this was all over, this is how she would start again.

But today she would go back to caring for him, undo the hook and eye they’d put on the outside of his bedroom door so she wouldn’t find him in the middle of the night peeing into the kitchen sink or looking for the knives she’d stashed in her car.

When she unlatched the hook in the morning—she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, it was already loose—she would find him dazed, poised like a prize fighter in the middle of a ring, hands clenched in ready fists, feet in a “come get me” stance, his eyes wild and frightened.

He didn’t recognize her until he did.

Sometimes, she felt noble and kind.

On good days—hers, that is—she became the person she wanted to be. Stoic. Sacrificial. Indifferent to the melted ice cream pint in the oven and the television remote he thought was his phone, a leg into the arm hole of his t-shirt, the car keys, his, gone.

Days of rage and calling out. But to whom?

When he could still remember that the trash was Tuesdays, that the blue bin was for recycling, the green for everything else, she was hopeful. The neurologist called it “executive function.” Blue means this. Green means that.

Until the morning she found him kneeling on the front lawn, sorting through chicken bones, rank paper towels, rusty apple cores and frayed orange rinds, crusted yogurt cups, and greasy crumpled tin foil, staring at the array that lay all around him.

As children, they had fished for minnows on the Farm Creek bridge. String tied around the mouths of brown Borden’s milk bottles. Wonder Bread for bait. They threw crabapples at passing cars. He ran away before the car could stop.

He liked to confess things to her mother at the white formica table in that split-level Connecticut ranch with the sunken living room, next door and identical to his, after school.

Her mother drank Scotch and made him baloney sandwiches. She hadn’t known that.

These were the stories he could remember. As if she didn’t. Again and again.

Someday she would forgive herself for not loving him better. Wasn’t that what love was, really? Spoons didn’t have to be with spoons. So what if she had to tie his shoes?

Him. An empty bottle. Staring at the water as it seeped into the rug. As if it wasn’t too late to get it all back in.

Headshot of Lyn ChamberlinLyn Chamberlin is a writer and consultant living in Connecticut whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere across the web. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Lyn’s flash nonfiction piece “The Prize Fighter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY by Madeleine Barowsky

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Graphic design image of a cutting board, knife, broccoli, and tomato

Madeleine Barowsky
LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY

For this task, your tools must be hot. They must be cold. They must be bone-dry or slick with hot water. Cold water. For this task, the item should be room temp. It should be completely frozen. It should be partially thawed, and I learned that lesson the hard way, goat cheese shattering with a ferocious bang of the knife. Be sure the plate does not have any hint of heat. Be sure it is still warm.

The buns should be sweaty and puffy. If the cheese is sweaty, it has sat too long. Bake them till they’re golden-brown on top. If you bake the fitascetta until they show color, they will be rock hard, unusable. Keep a constant tension on the chicken breast with the palm of your hand so it doesn’t shred as you cut. The trick to slicing loaves is a kind of looseness in the shoulder. Go as slowly as needed when streaming sugar into egg whites. Add sugar to the yolks as quickly as possible.

Lose yourself at the cutting board. Forget your body except for the hands, unfold an entire universe in the moment. Blink past individual vegetables and measure progress by the level in the big tub. It goes faster if you concentrate. It goes faster if you think of nothing at all.

During prep for dinner service, we mentally rehearse the hours ahead. Ready ourselves to be upstairs in the heat and action, feeling the flow, the push, the squeeze. You can love a thing and be afraid of it, like the roar of a freight train in close proximity. Brace for impact.

We stay busy until midnight sometimes. Saturday nights on the line are like a domino cascade that just keeps falling. The worst rush will feel like the world is ending, but the way out is through. Time passes. Do your best and time passes. Some days I do nothing but fail. I strip off my dirty whites and leave them stinking in the linens bag.

The night sky after twelve hours in a kitchen is like coming up from water for air.

Headshot of Madeleine BarowskyMadeleine Barowsky is a software engineer and line cook who lives and works in Massachusetts. Her writing has twice been named Notable in Best American Food Writing. Madeleine’s flash nonfiction piece “Line Cook: A Love Story” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

IN-LAWS by Laura Tanenbaum

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Graphic design image of a multicolored fish

Laura Tanenbaum
IN-LAWS

“In five years, I’m going to fall in love with a fish,” the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. “They will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will teach them to walk on their fin so they can come to our house. And I will teach them how to breathe. I will say, ‘It’s easy, fish. Just breathe like you did in water; only, it’s air.’ ”

His brother tells him he might need to compromise. Maybe six months on land, six months in the water, like the high-powered couples do. No, he says, concerned. The fish has to come to him. I’m watching his concern, trying to see which plane of reality he’s accessing, except that I no longer know what I mean by this.  I know only that the words “imagination” and “metaphor” are insufficient to the task. And so I take his side. After all, we’ve learned from David Attenborough that evolution has carried countless creatures from the sea to us, not one has reversed course. When you forget how to make gills, they stay forgotten.

All of this may be why, the next day, after the temperatures had plunged thirty degrees overnight and the NYC Parks department and I both failed to adjust—me without a jacket, them, blasting the sprinklers—I was the only one who didn’t rush to pull a child back from the flood. He stomped on every fountainhead, threw himself on the ground. When he came to me, shivering, and the only change of clothes I had was shorts, and I saw the mother who had frantically been calling her Juniper back from the brink shoot me the look reserved for the parents of bad-example children, it took everything I had not to shout, You don’t understand! He’s looking for his fishwife! Wants to learn to live in her world! Learning to be flexible! And aren’t they going to need that what with the world and everything. . . Because I’m sure that Juniper’s mother would understand. That, like me, she has trouble imagining the future these days. That she would be comforted as I am by the thought of my future self, a crone in a cave, welcoming in any creature still capable of both tenderness and survival, teaching my son to tend to her scales.

Headshot of Laura TanenbaumLaura Tanenbaum is a writer, teacher, and parent living in Brooklyn, NY. She has published poetry and short fiction in Aji, Catamaran, Trampoline, Rattle, and many other venues. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, Entropy, and elsewhere. She teaches at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her nonfiction flash piece “In-Laws” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DARK MATTER by Meredith McCarroll

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Graphic design image of an ornate black and white flower with a yellow burst in the background

Meredith McCarroll
DARK MATTER

“You know how dark matter is like the absence of space, but it, like, takes up space?”

“OK.”

“Well, what if dark matter could be contained and it’s like an anti-gravity solution. In a gas form. It takes up the space that is the absence of space.”

“Dark matter?”

“Yeah. Which is different than dark energy.”

“I don’t know what dark energy is.”

“Oh. Have you heard of the Big Bang, Mama?”

He is fourteen. I am in the bathtub. He is wearing the new sweatshirt he saved to buy that is still so soft on the inside that I rubbed my cheek against it when he asked me to feel it.

He is four and he explains centripetal and centrifugal force to my mom. She records it on her flip phone that is stashed now in a drawer with misfit cords, lost memories, and unanswered texts.

He is eleven and we move him from his childhood home. He stands in the center of a magnolia tree that touches the ground all around him. He slowly pulls red berries from the cones, their white threads stringing behind, and shuts quietly down.

He is twelve and the red berries sit on his bookshelf with the pottery shards from before and a handful of sea glass from now. He stops asking to visit, and learns to ski.

Some nights, we lay together and cry. About algebra, but always eventually about distance and loss and why Mom had to die and that magnolia tree.

“I like to imagine that our energy disperses and mixes with other energies when we die. Some part star. Some part tree. Some part mosquito.”

“Is that why you don’t like to kill mosquitoes?” he asks.

“No. I just figure it’s not my right to kill another living thing.”

“It’s not like you think it’s your granny or something?”

We laugh.

“Maybe it is like that,” I say as we grow quiet.

“Yeah. I think we just die and that’s that.”

He is one and I am nursing him. He grins at me so that my nipple slips out of his milky mouth. I guide him back to nurse and his eyes flutter shut. I rub my hand over his soft head, brushing the wispy dark hairs away from his face. He drifts off and I pull my shirt back down, propping my arm against the sofa so that he can rest against me for as long as he will.

“Anyway, you know about the Big Bang?”

He isn’t sure where to rest his eyes, so I lean over so only my bubbly back is visible.

“I mean, I know the theory, yes.”

“It isn’t a theory. And the way we confirmed that the Big Bang is true is that we were able to confirm that everything ever is constantly expanding outward, getting faster and faster. Dark energy is the name that we’re assigning to the force that is doing that.”

“We are?”

“We are.”

Headshot of Meredith McCarrollMeredith McCarroll is the Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Bitter Southerner, Avidly, Southern Cultures, Still, Cutleaf and elsewhere. McCarroll is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (UGA Press) and co-editor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (WVU Press). She lives in Portland, Maine. Meredith McCarroll’s flash nonfiction piece “Dark Matter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WHALE CRATERS by K. T. Moore

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K. T. Moore
WHALE CRATERS

“Had one come down overnight.”

Eden was waiting for him in the car park. Tayne felt himself sweating by the time he reached her, and as the wind kicked up, a shiver started between his shoulder blades. Eden had her hands tucked into her jumper sleeves; Tayne peered at what remained of the lookout and he wished he’d thought to bring a pair of mittens.

“One landed in Port Chalmers a few months back,” he said, staggering as he joined Eden at the cliff edge. Along with the rotted kelp, all of Matakaea smelled like an abattoir floor rinsed in brine. “Nearly crushed a group of students doing the crags.”

The whale had landed at the tideline; the impact had gauged a hole in the headland large enough to reshape the anatomy of the coast, an entire promontory crushed to rock dust beneath fat and bone and blubber. The one at Port Chalmers had fallen far enough that when it landed, the force of impact did half the disposal team’s work for them; for weeks meat chunks were turning up as far south as Dunedin.

Eden passed Tayne the pair of binoculars hanging at her throat, and looking through them, he could make out the shape of the whale’s head. The tail and fins were still intact, but the rocks had split its stomach, exposing red and slippery muscles, intestines as thick as anchor chains and already covered in gull shit. It hadn’t fallen as far as the one in Port Chalmers.

“A juvenile, I reckon,” said Eden, nodding at him. “I’ve got Terry coming in from Otago with the earwax kit, but going by its size and the fact it didn’t splatter from here to Oamaru, it didn’t fall from any real height. Young, or maybe sick.”

Tayne smacked at the sandflies, stirred to a frenzy by rotting flesh. “I think it’s the new smelter on Taiaroa Head that’s doing it. Putting toxins into the air.”

“A biopsy will tell us if it’s got any particulates in its blood.” Eden took the binoculars back. “Provided Terry gets a move on.

“At the rate they’re coming down,” she smiled, tight and bloodless, the same shade of white as the fat and viscera tangled in the kelp, “we’re going to have to re-survey half the country’s beaches and foreshores, the whale-shaped cracks in the coast…”

Tayne tugged on his hood; the palls of gray rain passed a faint pearlescence, washing clean the carcass pitched across the point. He shivered again.

The horizon churned winedark, the same color as the sea, swollen with its dense forests of rimurapa. Waves dashed themselves to spray against the body of the whale, its innards coiling in the tide and its blood gathering in crimson foam at the edges of the sand.

The wind buffeted Tayne’s back and lowed forlornly against the cliffsides, as though rushing in to fill the air left empty by the whale’s fall.

Kaitlin “K.T.” Moore (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose dissertation considers how plural cosmological systems might move towards realizing relations within and across physics, literature, ethics, and sustainability. They are an acclaimed amateur astrophotographer, and their photography has been featured by LiveScience and the Overture Center for the Arts. Between dissertation research, stargazing, and video games, they write the occasional poem or short story. K. T.’s flash fiction piece “Whale Craters” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS by Ron Tobey

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Ron Tobey
YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS

The annual flood of green from West Virginia’s vast Appalachian forest drubs me senseless. I feel lightheaded. I check my Fitbit. Why does my blood oxygen level drop? My mortality, I wonder.

At midnight, the rain slips off the ridge peak, settles, as a hen fluffs, spreads her nether feathers, wiggles a little dance, nests upon our hollow.”I lie in bed from two-thirty to four-thirty in the morning, listening to her contented cackling drip off the eaves of our log cabin.

You sleep upstairs in the guest bedroom. The foam mattress is better for your hip and leg, injured when trailering your horse, but the ache keeps you awake. Frequently, you pace in staggered rhythm the plank floor boards above me that creak like crickets. Outside, the remnant of June’s fireflies rises into the steamy clouded night sky. I worry you will become confused, fall down the stairs. It’s not a good summer. I had forgotten I love you.

Ron Tobey grew up in northern New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He and his wife live in West Virginia, where they raise cattle and keep goats and horses. He is an imagist poet, expressing experiences and moods in concrete descriptions in haiku, lyrical poetry storytelling, recorded poetry, and in filmic interpretation. He occasionally uses the pseudonym Turin Shroudedindoubt for literary and artistic work. Ron is active on Twitter, where he announces publications, discusses projects, posts personal notes and photographs, and converses with other poets and writers.  His Twitter handle is @Turin54024117. Ron’s flash fiction piece “You Sleep Upstairs” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

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HOW ARE YOU? An Antonym Story by Beth Kephart

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Beth Kephart
HOW ARE YOU?
An Antonym Story

If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned.

How are you?

Well…

How are you?

Just a—

How are you?

No, really. You first.

I am so notoriously arrantly perfectly foul at performing this simple civic duty that I become invisible to myself whenever I am asked. Uh, I stutter, and in the absence of my response, the talk salts up without me, which is to say that I can walk four hills, two cul de sacs, five point two miles, and 12,433 steps, a phone pressed to my ear, without making any sound except for the huff and the puff demanded by my exertions, and the yes, and oh my god, and so happy for you required of a listener. Sometimes, when I’m at the proximate end of my travels and my face is berry red and my hair is whipped into its high humidity frenzy, the gold finch pecking on the crust of the cone flower that I am just then passing will hear me blunder with a short-changed tale, a wedged assertion, a strike of personal news. But even the finch hops away in a flash, arrogant as hell in its pretty yellow feathers.

Five-minute rule, my husband says, when I return from my travels and sit in the drip of my sprawl and report on my latest conversational crash. It’s code for what he believes would cure me of my troubles. Tell a good tale in five minutes or less. Leave the audience desperate for more. Win every time the question is asked: How, how, how are you?

(Sometimes my husband exceeds the five-minute mark. Nobody asks him to stop.)

The thing is: What will leave the person on the other side of the phone begging and pleading for more? Does the trick of the talk live in the discovery I made (only today!) that the paints in my paint jars are moldy? Or in the fact that I haven’t properly vacationed for years, and so I read my way into adventure? Or in the very cherished secret that I sometimes sit in my battered leather chaise watching stubborn spiders spin?

How are you?

I was watching spiders.

How are you?

I was barely breathing.

How are you?

My jars of paint have mold.

Whose tide have I turned? Whose pulse have I sparked? How are you? There should be a primer.

Should I practice exclamations and declarations, bang a pair of metaphorical drums? Should I slap an exclamation mark at the end of every spoken sentence, change my pitch, my tone? Should I propel myself to a cinematic start: You won’t believe the silk that spun out of that spider. Oh my God, am I reading some book. But my quiet life resists every punctuation mark except, perhaps, the comma.

Sometimes when I’m walking with my phone stuffed in my pocket, I do some serious thinking about my absence of intrigue. I imagine hearing the trill of the phone and being How are you? prepared. But then a hawk will fly overhead or an antlered deer will tiptoe past or the sun will stun a triangle of window in an upstairs window frame and I’ll be gobsmacked, I’ll be soul-scorched, I’ll be silenced. What is is what is, and I have born witness, and if the phone were to ring at that very moment, I’d have no words for that.

Nearing now my five-minute mark, I wish to hurry in new facts, to leave you, if you’ve read this far, with this complicating truth: I am, just ask those who know me well, a professional practitioner of blue streak. I can lob opinions, debate a fact, splice the nearest contradiction. I’ve talked literature, politics, weather patterns, history, the weird stuff that happens in my husband’s family until the jar is out of cookies. I’ve delivered lectures in which it is only the sound of my low-pitch voice for sixty breathless minutes. I’ve thrown the book of my ideals at my beautiful son. I’ve been entirely conversational with strangers. I have stood in the summer heat at my parents’ grave, yielding one-sided confessions. Beneath the canopy of trees, in the proximity of bell chimes, I have talked and I have cried and how profoundly they have listened. They have not judged the small in me, the littleness of my mood, my pain, my life, my reason.

It’s the question How are you? that I can’t antonym, can’t oppose or mitigate with any decent answer. How are you? How are you? I cannot surf that wave. Ask the question, and I’ll be knocked down by its force. I’ll gasp in the froth. I’ll flail, I’ll fail. I’ll slip straight off the board. You will rush right past me.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, the co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, and A Room of Your Own: A Story Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Famous Essay. More at www.bethkephartbooks.com and BINDbyBIND.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

34 FEET by Phil Keeling

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34 FEET by Phil Keeling

Phil Keeling
34 FEET

The gun was small and snub-nosed. It looked heavy, though, attached to the lanky arm of my mugger.

Imagine it. Me! With my very own personal mugger. Because in that moment, he was mine and I was his, alone as we were at the moment. Swear to God, the gun looked heavier than the kid wielding it. Its barrel was cool against my head in the muggy Savannah night, so that wasn’t so bad. Did he keep the gun in the fridge? This was the same year my cat died. The first year I had ever lived alone after my girlfriend of nine years had left. The week after I’d been let go from my teaching position.

Sometimes the world just loves to pile it on.

“Your wallet,” my mugger said, as if I had promised him something earlier, and he just knew that I was holding out on him. I almost felt guilty.

The next day, amid phone calls of concern, I would be asked how I managed to deal with the situation so easily, so casually. He was a kid, I’d explain. No older than my youngest students. And while that made me sad, I never felt like I was in any real danger. This was never about sending my brains across Broughton Street. But mentally I was some other place.

Growing up in an army family, my father took us everywhere. By the time I was eighteen, I had moved roughly 800 times. That’s how it felt, anyway. Army brat life taught me a number of things. It taught me to be self-reliant. It taught me how to deal with people of every stripe and how to make friends wherever I went. It taught me the proper way to load a U-Haul. And it taught me about the rule of 34 feet.

We moved to one military base a total of three times, more than any other place my family had ever lived. What shocked me the most about these repeat residencies were the memories. The fact that I had any at all, I mean. It wasn’t exactly a small town that I’d grown up in, but it still provided shades of the past that my disposable lifestyle just wasn’t equipped for. We’d drive here, walk there, all the time recounting nostalgia as if we were a normal family instead of military nomads.

I got my first kiss on Cavalry Road just before curfew, snugly hidden in the plastic tunnel of an old swing set.  The girl in question, Samantha Dweezle, was the daughter of a Master Sergeant, and had fake canines attached to her retainer. I knew this because every now and then she’d remove them to catch my reaction, which was the same reaction I’d give if she were to remove any piece of her body without warning.

I got suspended for the first time at J.J. Rogers Middle School in the surrounding town. The kid I fought got suspended for fighting all the time: for him, it was just routine. For me, it was not. The fight was over a volleyball game during PE, though the details are still hazy. I remember my dad coming to pick me up, and how kind his face was when he saw me bawling. I wanted to look strong in front of him. Like a man who was used to the dull ache of a black eye. A street-tough twelve-year-old with bleeding knuckles and a callous demeanor. Instead, in the face of my father—my role model for manhood—I cried.  He was dressed in his BDUs and boots: the camouflage uniform of a soldier. This man had fired rifles and shoulder-mounted rockets. He had read The Art of War. I wore Hawaiian print shirts over a soft, untested body.  I read adventure stories and drew comics in my notebook when I was supposed to be taking notes, leading to the nerdiest way to fail Algebra anyone had ever heard of. Dad was the warrior: not me. He put a large hand on my shoulder and patted it gently.

“Come on,” he said.  “Let’s go home.”

We drove home, the windows rolled down to let my father’s cigarette smoke escape. The bellowing of the passing air did its best to hide my quiet sniffles. He had come to the school thinking he was going to pick up my little brother, who was well known for getting into the occasional scrap. He was athletic and confident with a courage that I envied, even if I was two years older.

“I knew one of you was going to get suspended for fighting one of these days,” Dad said, checking the rearview mirror. “I just can’t believe it was you.”

Any time I’ve returned to base, I remember all of these events in much the same way anyone from a civilian life would. I’ve since made friends with clusters of people who have known each other since they were too young to control their bowels. This fascinates me. Getting nostalgic in a place I’ve lived in more than once should feel normal, but it never does.
But the memory that sticks out the most are the jump towers. We’d drive past them to and from the commissary, and my dad would grin wistfully at them.

“I trained on those towers,” he’d say. The towering monstrosities were made of wood and steel and had stairs that went back and forth the whole length of them, the way a fire escape might. At the top was a box that, I supposed, was meant to resemble the body of a plane. A door was cut out of the side, and prospective paratroopers lined up in full gear.  Lines of camouflaged men and women zigged and zagged all the way up the tower until they came to the makeshift door. They were tired and strong and very young. They leaned against the frame of the door and waited for the signal. Then they hooked up to a zip line and jumped out of the tower, riding the line down, down, down to earth. Sometimes I would see them jump, and even from the relative safety of the jump towers, I envied their courage. Now I look back and wonder how many of them weren’t terrified and desperate to go home.

“The towers themselves,” my father told me, “are only 34 feet tall.”

I frowned. Thirty-four feet didn’t seem like that tall of a drop.

“It’s very specific,” Dad said. “You’re more afraid of jumping from a ten-foot jump than a five-foot jump. You’re more afraid of a twenty-foot jump than a ten-foot jump. But once you get to 34 feet, that’s the max. You’re just as afraid of 34 feet as you would be of a thousand feet. The brain simply doesn’t process any more fear past those 34 feet.”

It seemed unbelievable at the time, but in my later years it would make more sense. Once you reach a certain peak, the brain just can’t handle any more fear. Perhaps because it can’t. Perhaps because it doesn’t want to. Maybe your brain is trying to protect you from something: the way you find yourself pondering the fact that one day you’re going to die and something in your head says, “Okay: enough of this” and suddenly you’re trying to remember the words to a jingle from the ’80s. Whatever the case, the idea was set into reality each and every day a grunt was trained and then finally sent to fall from the sky.

Years after my father told me that story, I would find myself on the humid streets of Savannah with a loaded gun pressing an indention into my forehead. I would think of the 34-foot drop and the limits of fear. I’d think about my ex and the man she’d unceremoniously fallen in love with. My dark, lonely apartment that I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay for. And my cat: a little grey tabby who had died the same week that my school’s principal informed me that they were making cuts, and you know the old rule: “Last ones in, first ones out.”

It wasn’t a terrific year.

The gun in my face had officially sent me over my 34 feet. Was I really afraid of being murdered in Savannah over the forty dollars in my pocket?

Maybe.

But for whatever reason, at that moment it didn’t register. I smiled at my mugger and handed him my wallet. He transferred it to his pocket calmly, as if he’d misplaced the billfold and I was simply returning it.

“This is going to sound weird,” I said, laughing inwardly at how much this felt like the small talk of a date. My mugger arched an eyebrow. The gun wasn’t against my forehead anymore, but it was most certainly aimed in my direction. Was it my imagination or were the edges of his lips just starting to curl? As if he too understood the absurdity of this whole situation for whatever reason?

“My credit card’s maxed out, and I don’t have anything left in the bank.” This wasn’t strictly true, but true enough: there wasn’t enough money in there to warrant figuring out a PIN. “And you don’t want to use my cards anyhow, because that’s how the cops find you.”

I wasn’t sure how true this was, either. But it sounded right. I held my empty hands up in the universal sign of No Funny Business as I concluded my pitch.

“I don’t suppose you could take the cash and give me back my wallet? Save me a trip to the DMV?”

My mugger considered this for a moment and then retrieved the wallet. He took the two twenties from inside and tossed the synthetic leather billfold my way and turned away, escaping into the dark. And it might have just been my imagination, but I swear the last look he gave me was a cautious smile of commiseration. Perhaps some recognition of how frayed I must have been to make such a stupid request. Maybe a grudging respect for having the gumption to ask, even as he pointed a gun at me. Or maybe it was some uncomplicated moment of unspoken sympathy from him. As if to say, “Yeah, man: waiting at the DMV sucks. You have a nice evening.”

Phil Keeling is a writer based in Greenville, South Carolina. His work has been published in The South Magazine, Five Out of Ten, Drunk Monkeys, and All Roads Magazine, with upcoming publications in The Pinch, Scare Street’s ‘Night Terrors’ series, and the anthology 42 Stories. His plays have been performed all over the country, including the 13th Street Repertory, STAGEStheatre, the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, and Theater by the Grove. His play ‘Suprema’ was a finalist for the 2020-21 Reva Shiner Comedy Award. He is the co-host of Pixel Lit, a podcast about video game novelizations.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

AN EASIER STORY by Emily Parzybok

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Emily Parzybok
AN EASIER STORY

Around the time I had an abortion, the bathroom drain gave up entirely. For months, the drain had been slow-moving. I’d find myself in an inch of water at the end of a shower, shaking my feet as I placed them one at a time on the bathmat. Finally, it stopped draining altogether. A ninety-second rinse left a pool in the tub that took hours to clear. In the TV show Russian Doll, a character says, “Nothing in this life is easy. Except peeing in the shower.” And I kept remembering that line as I held my insistent bladder under the hot water and thought about whether or not to stay pregnant.

I found out I was pregnant on a Thursday morning. The faint double lines confirmed what my body already knew. It was my first pregnancy. It had been the first time I’d ever had questionably safe sex and thought, “I don’t need to take the morning-after pill. It will be fine.” In the weeks that followed, I began to feel alienated in my own body, as if it didn’t belong to me. My breasts swelled and disgusted me. I felt the way I once had during puberty when my breasts became embarrassing. The whole thing felt like a betrayal. My body began to unfold a story I hadn’t co-written. My digestive system ground to a halt and my breasts ached enough to keep me up nights. I desperately wanted to exit my body.

Less than ten minutes after the positive pregnancy test, I called Planned Parenthood to make an appointment for an abortion. They told me their next opening was in three weeks. The thought of letting errant hormones in my body grow exponentially made me physically sick. I called another clinic to schedule a medical abortion the following day. I’m fortunate; I live in a city with multiple places to receive care. I wasn’t sure if abortion was the right choice when I tried to logic it out, but my body screamed to be free of the pregnancy.

At the abortion clinic, I sat in the initial waiting room. I’ve sometimes wondered, in less loaded trips to the clinic waiting for a pap smear or treatment for a yeast infection, which women were waiting for an abortion.

I don’t wonder as I sit this time. It’s me.

In the waiting room, there’s a man working on his laptop. There are several Latina women and another woman translating forms for them. We are not allowed to eat or drink water in deference to those whose procedures prohibit them from drinking and eating. I am thirsty. Two hours after my scheduled appointment time, I am called back by a nurse. She guides me to another, inner waiting room. Inside, I find a Black woman on her cell phone, a woman in a hijab staring straight ahead, and a white woman dressed up in an Anne Taylor blouse and black slacks fiddling in her purse. The room has a television playing a reality TV program about people who win the lottery and use the money to buy their dream house. Simultaneously, a radio plays over the speakers in the ceiling. Both are turned to low volume resulting in a buzz of mostly indistinguishable noise.

Being in that inner room, I feel calm for the first time in days, in company that can’t judge me. There’s no guesswork. We’re all here for an abortion. We’ve all been here for hours. Between forays into our phones, we collectively gasp at the price of a six-bedroom home in Tennessee. Slowly, tepidly, we begin conversation. The 300,000 dollars wouldn’t buy a lot, let alone the house on it, here in Seattle. One woman has recently moved back in with her parents. A stylish Black woman enters the room and we marvel aloud at the way she’s managed to put an outfit together for the occasion. Most of us are in sweatpants but she has on designer shoes and a neon jacket. I’m wearing an oversize sweater with rabbits on it. The stylish woman is visiting from Chicago, taking her art show on tour. I immediately like her because she makes a face when another woman in the room talks about driving forty minutes every evening to make her boyfriend lunch for his job the next day. The artist doesn’t have time for that bullshit or the way my city is built around the desires of white men in outdoor gear. She hates the boutique breweries for people who own dogs and the lack of public transit. Says she could never move here. She’s funny. If she wrote critiques of the cities she visits, I’d read her blog.

It feels good to think about white dudes drinking heavily-hopped beers with their dogs because all I’ve thought about for days is the space between my navel and pubic bone and the way it would feel to press the tip of a knife into that soft skin. I’m afraid of blood, so I don’t picture piercing, just a pressure from without to ease the pressure within. It’s not unlike the relief of throwing up food you wish you hadn’t eaten.

When I’m finally on an exam table, four hours into my appointment, the technician tells me she can’t find a pregnancy in my uterus on her screen. She tries an intravaginal ultrasound instead. I go numb while she penetrates me. Still nothing. It’s early pregnancy. Maybe it’s just not showing up yet. The doctor I consult with tells me it could be that I’m simply not far along enough to detect. Or the pregnancy could be ectopic, growing outside of my uterus. She doubts it; ectopic pregnancies are rare. She tells me I can wait a few weeks to figure it out. Or I can go through with a medical abortion today. I swallow the pill.

I didn’t expect the shame I felt upon discovering my pregnancy. I am surrounded by people who are pro-choice. But making the choice myself felt different, like I’d failed somehow. The messages get in whether you subscribe to them or not, a slow seeping of shame. This shame will serve a darker purpose following the death of Roe. It will help to keep quiet the personal tragedies that unfold in the wake of the decision. It will help to silence the women who suffer in its aftermath. Shame and silence have always been co-conspirators in rendering women’s bodies deviant and women’s experiences unmentionable.

I’m consumed by shame and fear as I sit at home waiting to bleed. When I say I’m afraid of blood, what I mean is that I have a deep, unyielding phobia of my own blood. A cut finger leaves me paralyzed on the bathroom floor, my fingers curled into claws as I vomit. Having my blood drawn results in such severe panic that my body goes into shock and it takes me hours to leave the hospital. While my period has never bothered me, the warning from the nurses that I may bleed severely enough to require hospitalization does. I sit silently on the couch in panic that night. But, as dark falls and through the days that follow, I never bleed. And this frightens me too.

When I find out the pregnancy is ectopic two weeks later, I feel a kind of relief despite knowing this news might mean surgery. This is an easier story. In the future, if I want, I can leave out the part where I had a medical abortion altogether. Instead, in this new narrative, I become that saintliest of all creatures: a thwarted would-be mother. Never mind that I don’t particularly want to be a mother. I’m ambivalent enough that, a few years ago, the mere idea of kids started a fracture that ended a nearly decade-long relationship with the person I had imagined growing old with. I still sometimes picture our life together or wonder how I could have made it work. When I picture us together, I don’t picture children. The thwarted mother story isn’t true, but it will come in handy when I don’t want to explain myself.

I sense the pregnancy is ectopic before the bloodwork confirms it because of a pinprick of sensation on my right side. Without the abortion care I received, my suspicion might have remained just a hunch. When the clinic calls about my irregular bloodwork, they urge me to go to the emergency room as quickly as possible. Another day of waiting, this time with an IV in my arm under a heated blanket with Al Sharpton on television announcing the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. Had fear of seeking care or distance to a clinic or a law limiting my options kept me from the abortion clinic, I would have bled out sometime in the weeks that followed.

As I type an update to my friends from the hospital bed, I discover that my phone doesn’t recognize the word “abortion.” Instead, it leaves my misspellings of the word in place. Abortion is an error it doesn’t acknowledge. My phone doesn’t know the word “fuck” either, which makes me wonder if the people who programmed it decided abortion is a similarly dirty word. It’s an erasure that’s part of the larger project of erasure around women’s experiences. Long before iPhones and now through them, the stories of women’s bodily experiences have been told by men. Abortion is largely absent from these tales. I remember vividly the few films I’ve seen that reference it explicitly. It’s a lonely, unmentionable kind of shame.

There are unwanted pregnancies in our inherited mythologies. But they usually appear as a result of rape. While abortion is absent from the familiar stories and archetypes, rape and loss of bodily control for women shows up time and again. We seem to be comfortable enough daylighting the most shameful elements of male behavior. Zeus rapes tens to hundreds of women—some asleep, some his children, some in different animal and human forms. He makes a menagerie of rape and remains all-powerful. One can almost picture him—pressed against an unwilling girl the night of some party, grinding against her or trying to pull off a one-piece bathing suit while her hippocampus records. Someday he will take control of her body—and the bodies of American women at large—in a different way. A menagerie of power.

In Greek myth, there are only three outcomes for a woman after she is raped: pregnancy, transformation, or death. When a woman is raped by a god in Greek myth and becomes pregnant, she births a hero child. She carries within her body redemption for the crime committed against her. Giving birth is a redemptive act, we are subtly instructed to believe. We are not asked to consider whether or not the woman in question wanted to give birth. The redemption in question isn’t for her but for society at large. Her body is sacrificed, first through violation and then as a vessel for the greater good. This narrative hasn’t left us. In Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson puts predators behind bars: a kind of hero’s redemption for a character who was conceived in rape.

Those victims of rape in Greek myth who don’t birth hero children are left with two options. Some choose to abandon their physical form entirely. Female bodies are vulnerable to assault, so some women escape through metamorphosis and live life in another form. After her assault, Daphne becomes a laurel tree. She trades her very humanity for escape.

The final option is death.

Women don’t, in any of these versions, gain mastery over their own bodies.

As I begin to tell my own story to family and friends, it occurs to me that destruction of the self doesn’t only happen through death but through storytelling. Parts of us die in certain tellings. Sometimes we kill parts of ourselves to survive our own stories. Sometimes we substitute a myth for reality. We answer the loss of bodily autonomy with a story of our own that arrives at some semblance of justice. Survivors of rape engage in storytelling. They become mythic. They become victims. Lonely, I look to the canon. Though women have been telling each other their stories for millennia, survivors of abortion don’t have a celebrated myth or story to turn to. There’s precious little echoing in our collective narrative. In place of a chorus, there’s an empty space.

Instead, there’s an endless barrage of subtle reminders that you can’t trust your body. Even the most minute systems are often designed to infantilize day-to-day decision-making. When I realized I was pregnant, I went to a local Walgreens to buy a pregnancy test to confirm. A box with two pregnancy tests costs $13. The tests are kept under lock and key. In order to purchase a test, you have to ring a doorbell that pages the entire store, letting every shopper know that someone needs help with feminine care items. I pushed the button and paged the store four times before someone came while a parade of customers gazed curiously down the aisle. Anyone can buy a $40 bottle of Advil without assistance, but I was required to ask an employee to unlock the $13 pregnancy test and escort me to the counter, holding the test in front of him, so I could be rung up. You are not allowed to walk the test to the counter yourself without an escort; I asked. Throughout the process of deciding to end a pregnancy, I was surprised how often I just wanted to be left alone. That’s another thing about shame: it renders one distrustful of others. It separates you from the herd.

Sitting in the abortion clinic, I did feel the relief I mentioned—a relief to be among women in the same situation as me. But I had another, darker feeling too. This was my first pregnancy. How many of these women had been here before, I wondered. It seems like an innocuous enough curiosity, but it had a sinister underbelly. Which of us was the least bad, I meant. Which of us had made an understandable mistake and which of us just never learn? I don’t like these thoughts, but I own that I had them at my most pained and frightened. When I try to understand why, I can only think that I wanted to be able to still conceive of myself as good. I was reaching for a redeeming story. In a location where everyone is already condemned, I wanted to be the exception to the rule. I forgot, in that moment, that our collective liberation is the only liberation. I forgot that accusing those women to spare myself only reinforces a set-up where any of us are judged at all.

Emily Parzybok is an essayist and political consultant living in Seattle, Washington. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Balance Our Tax Code, advocating for policies like a wealth tax and guaranteed basic income. She has been published in Poetry Northwest and Points in Case, among others. Her work appears in the Uncertain Girls, Uncertain Times anthology, a collection of inspiration and encouragement for young women. She is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at New York University and a 2022 Jack Straw Writing Fellow.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WAR GAMES by Peter DeMarco

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WAR GAMES by Peter DeMarco

Peter DeMarco
WAR GAMES

In the car trip to a Pennsylvania V.A. hospital when I was twelve, my mother told us that our great Uncle Roy was a veteran of World War I and couldn’t communicate anymore.

The ride was three hours of empty landscape outside the window. AM radio. A song about a roller skate key. Jumble puzzle books and Spider-Man and Archie comics.

At the hospital, Uncle Roy was seated in a wheelchair in the visitors’ area, with a fireplace and couches. When he saw us he howled, like an animal. We stood there, frozen, until our mother motioned my younger brother and sister and myself towards him.

He drooled and stared at me, his eyes opening wide. It’s almost like he recognizes you, my mother said. Then he started crying and she made us sit on the couch, where I heard her tell him how I played Little League and mowed the grass and that we were responsible children when it came to chores around the house.

On the drive back I knew I never wanted to see him again.

When I got home my friends came over to play war games. Our battlefield was the front lawns and woods of a suburban town named for the Indian term for fertile, or pleasant, land. We had Daisy air rifles from Sears and plastic machine guns. And the best gun to play with was a real .45 from the Korean War that my friend’s father had donated to our arsenal.

Across the street, George, one of the older kids, sat on his stoop and smoked. He wasn’t the same after he came back from Vietnam. Before he left for the war he painted bases in the street between the maple trees for us to play baseball on. He had been a high school baseball star. But when he came home he didn’t bother with us, except for the time when we were playing war games and he walked over, picked up the machine gun, and said it was bad medicine. Play kick the can, he said.

Today he just stared at us.

Where did you go this morning, my friends asked.

To see an old uncle, I said. He was in the war.

Do you think he killed anyone?

He can’t walk anymore, I said. It’s hard to believe he ever shot a gun.

We separated into teams. In the woods, I crawled through leaves and waited for the enemy to come into view. The steel of the .45 in my hand made me think of Uncle Roy, playing real war games on a battlefield thousands of miles from home. I wondered if he ever shot anyone, or if he was paralyzed with fear.

A branch snapped and the enemy appeared through an opening in the bushes. I aimed the .45 at his head. Usually, when I killed someone, I’d mimic the sound of a fired gun from how it sounded on TV shows.

Suddenly, the .45 felt like a bucket of sand. And it wasn’t an enemy anymore, just my best friend, Chris.

I put the gun down and leaned against a tree. Chris walked up to me and fired away with the machine gun. But I didn’t put on my usual melodramatic death scene and roll down the hill. I just sat there.

How come you’re not playing, he asked.

Not in the mood anymore, I said.

Can I have the gun? I handed him the .45.

At dinner, I thought of Uncle Roy’s parents once staring at an empty place at the table, their clinking silverware the only sound.

The TV news in the den showed footage of helicopters landing in tall grass in Vietnam. The soldiers carried more modern weapons, not like our plastic replicas from World War II, but real weapons and artillery that deafened ears and caused shell shock, turning innocent Uncle Roys into drooling freaks.

My mother thought he recognized something in me. Maybe youth, caught up in the folly of glorifying violence in backyard war games. Perhaps his crying was a warning I couldn’t understand.

On the news, the broadcaster said the war would be ending soon.

Peter DeMarco’s first published story appeared in The New York Times in 1989 when he wrote about hanging out with his idol, writer Mickey Spillane. He has also published a New York Times “Modern Love” essay about becoming a New York City high school English teacher and meeting his wife. Other writing credits include pieces in Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus, Prime Number Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Peter DeMarco’s fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in New Jersey.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg

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Emily Steinberg
WAR AND PEACE 2.0

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WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg - 2

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Writer, driving: We grew up in the last gasp of the Cold War… We mocked it… thought it was funny. Fast forward, thirty years ago. And the events in Europe are mind-blowing. Radio: Back in the USSR…You don’t know how lucky you are… boy… Writer: Is Europe… the world,, on the brink of WWIII?

Writer, driving: A newly aggressive Russia eating its neighbors. Suddenly… trust backwards into Cold War 2.0. Radio: London calling. Writer imagines the cover of MAD Magazine with two cartoon spies holding bombs: The spy vs. spy ‘toons that live in the pages of MAD Magazine, over 50 years ago, suddenly regain resonance. Radio: A nuclear era, but I have no fear…

Writer imagines a grouping of framed, black-and-white old-world photos of people in 19th and early 20th century Eastern European garb: For me, the conflict is also personal… and has echos of an older time.

Writer driving in car, talking to dog: My family came from these parts over 100 years ago. Dog thinks: Transinistria Odessa… Kiev… so familiar. Writer: In early March, Russia bombed Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev where 33,771 Ukrainian Jews were shot by Nazis in 1941. Dog thinks: Assisted by Ukrainian guards. Writer: Sorry to be a downer. Dog: But that was then.

Black and white drawing of Putin sitting on a stool naked with legs crossed demurely: Now… Ukraine stands alone against a 1960’s comic movie villain with Empire on his mind.

Writer: As we slip into the sweetness of summer… CNN: Russia pushes deeper into Donbass. Ukrainian casualties very high. Dog thinks: The cataclysmic struggle of good and evil rages in Europe. David and Goliath 2.0! CNN: Zelinsky warns E.U. Dog: But it has slipped from 24/7 Breaking News. Sign: 499, 599, 699. Radio: Alles Klar Herr Commissar?

Dog thinking: Replaced by a steady feed of new and more heinous events…CNN: 18-year-old gunman. Used AR 15. Parents devastated. Writer looks down from steering wheel sadly. CNN: Breaking News. School Shooting. 19 children killed. Dog imagined writer turning off TV. Writer: So… I turn off the TV and poof! The war and all the bad things disappear.

Writer: And go about my business… grooving to old songs in the car. Radio: Games without frontiers… Dog thinks: Screw 5 bucks a gallon! Writer: Windows down, radio blasting. Radio: War without tears. Dog thinks: How is an AR 15 even legal? Radio: Herr Kommissar’s in town, oh, oh….

WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg - End Card
Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia. View her bio page here.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

RIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS by Deb Fenwick

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RIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS by Deb Fenwick

Deb Fenwick
RIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS

The dandelions in the front yard have the audacity to pop up screeching yellow, blanketing the lawn. I’m crouching, trowel in hand, yanking and destroying. The soil won’t easily yield. But neither will I. I’m determined to unearth every last one. Each spring, I try to get the upper hand—dig them up before the yellow flower stage—eradicate them before they turn to seed and drift through the breeze, propagate, and start the whole cycle over.

I plunge the narrow blade of the trowel around the perimeter of a large clump of toothy leaves, working it around the edges, rocking it up and down to unearth the taproot. Dandelion roots go deep.

In the halcyon haze of childhood, dandelions were daisies. Wildflowers. Wishes. By the time I had a mortgage, they’d lost their magic. I don’t try to keep up with neighbors who spend Saturdays spreading fertilizer, mowing, and edging. Although their grass does look greener. It’s more about control. Order. When I’m in the garden, I lie to myself. I imagine I have control over what will live and die.

I don’t use pesticides in the garden. Nor do I poison plants I deem undesirable, preferring instead brute force. I twist, uproot, and decapitate dandelions.

Just when it feels like a plant will give, I pull hard from the base, anticipating the satisfaction of yanking the entire thing out of the soil. Sometimes, the milky white root servers, and the longest part of the plant remains in the ground.

It’s been this way all morning. Some wins getting the roots out. Some losses. But I’ve got a pile of withering greens to show for my work. My back aches, and there’s a throb in my right knee.

Standing slowly, holding the trowel, I roll the tension out of my neck as a pack of middle-schoolers on bikes roars down the street. Mostly boys, but a few girls. They blow right through the stop sign. The leader shouts over his shoulder, and they laugh and swerve, barely missing a parked car. A smaller kid in the back pedals faster than the others to keep up. She works hard to stay with the group riding west toward the woods.

◊

I rode with my older cousins and their friends in the street. Yes, the street. I was ten years old riding my fast-as-a-rocket red bike straight into midwestern springtime. Weaving on wide lanes of black tar asphalt with city drivers and Chicago potholes meant I’d graduated to ride with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. That day, I kissed the city sidewalk goodbye and launched straight into the cool kid stratosphere.

We were a loud, raucous tribe riding right down the middle of Barry Street. Like we owned it. We laughed and headed away from home with no particular destination—just springtime-freefall riding toward some vague promise of adventure.

My stomach was alive with excitement as we swerved in unison like a flock of geese migrating through Illinois skies after the long winter. I had just shed my own layers: scratchy wool sweaters, hats, gloves, and every piece of clothing that protects a body from frost and freeze. I was liberated. Spring was short sleeves and a breeze across the skin. It was so much easier to move in a springtime body.

A swirling dust of iridescence floated through the air—a mist of silver seeds set free from earth-bound lives. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. More than we could count. Each had transmuted to lift off on a breeze, activated, exhilarated in flight. Seeds landed in hair and drifted into mouths as we laughed hard and loud.

Dappled sunshine tracked us through newly birthed maple leaves. Glints of pollen and apple blossom shimmered. For a moment, I wondered if I could make time stop if I just stopped my bike. I wanted to stay there in the glitter-green space between home and the unknown.

But I didn’t stop. The group kept pedaling, and so did I. With my oldest cousin in the lead, racing west toward the city boundary, cars and traffic were no match for us. We rode out past River Road and straight into the muddy woods. We crossed the graffitied iron bridge over the Union Pacific tracks. Bike tires kicked up gravel, and we kept going. We hooted and shouted, wild in the tunnel east of Thatcher Road. We howled to hear the power of our voices echoing and bouncing off concrete. Steering, pedaling, and weaving, we roared from deep in our bellies that day. Because no one told us not to.

Eventually, the wind carried our bikes and every soft parachute of seed back home. We let our bicycles drop to the sidewalk, reluctantly returning to earth-bound lives. I arrived back at my frame house, where there were chores, routines, and parents who had forgotten that bikes are actually rockets.

That night, in my twin bed with the lights out and the window open just an inch, my feet buzzed electric, like they were still pedaling. Even with my eyes closed, I saw speckled sunlight on black asphalt. Dandelion breeze quivered in my throat. My body was speed—awake and alive with rebellious tunnel shouts. I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to howl in the springtime air all night.

And, poof, like a childhood wish, the memory fades off into the wind.

◊

Squinting into the sun, the tension in my shoulders feels heavy. I look down to find my knee swollen from bending. At my feet, a limp heap of dying dandelions waits to be taken to the compost bin, where they’ll decompose into carbon and nitrogen—where they’ll release into an afterlife as soil, water, and air.

With a final bend, or maybe it’s more of a bow, I reach down and gather slack roots and leaves, shaking off the soil. Carrying the trowel in one hand and dandelions in the other, I walk back toward the compost bin—past daffodils and tulips, past rows of seedling tomato plants awaiting the metal cages I’ll put around them when they get unruly in mid-July.

I toss a day’s work into the bin with all the other weedy cast-offs and call a truce with the dandelions. I’ll let the grass go a little wild this year—watch yellow blooms become downy spheres. And when star-shaped seeds disperse into the breeze, I’ll watch them fly electric, spark-like, through early spring air on a rocket.

Deb Fenwick is a Chicago-born writer who currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. After spending nearly thirty years working as an arts educator, school program specialist, and public school administrator, she now writes stories that have been patiently waiting to be told. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine. You can connect with her on Twitter @debfenwrites.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL by Luisa Luo

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SIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL by Luisa Luo

Luisa Luo
SIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL

One, I am a byproduct of post-colonialism, fortunately and unfortunately.

Post-colonialism is my explanation for everything I have been put through from racism to sexism to homophobia to the Red Scare you name it. There is a root to all problems and I’m thrilled to reveal that the root is right here.

To understand post-colonialism, we ought to understand that the world wasn’t so divided back then. My land was connected to the land bridge across the Bering Strait, like the other colonized people, and the colonizers. We weren’t so different back then, all unapologetically naked and crude.

I come from a tradition more ancient than the ancient colonial invasions. Where I belong, we possess the only mythological story in the world, a narrative unlike others: we believed that a flood wiped out the entire human civilization. So devastating children lost their parents and wives lost their husbands. However, it was conquered by digging channels and building hams through the unity of the people. The Goddess Nüwa and Saint Dayu fixed the sky with broken holes and irrigated the fields. So boy, don’t shove your Christian values down my throat. You have no idea what kind of ineffable power my land has given me.

My culture originated from the river, with hundreds of tribes residing in houses made out of clay, stone, and wood. We lived thousands of years fed by our “mother river,” where heritage is documented through pottery and jades, in shapes of animals and patterns. Boy, are you telling me that you’ve got any of that in your colonizing quest?

The flood of Earth, flood like a force wiping out sins; flood like the way you, America, irrigate my thirsty, desirous heart. Or at least you thought so.

You thought I was keen for you and that I desired your salvation.

◊

Two, I am a byproduct of sick but dogmatic romances, fortunately and unfortunately.

Clearly, you don’t understand how things worked back at home, where love is expressed through sliding letters into lockers. NOT sticking your tongue down my throat and holding my hips with your palm. NOT telling me to shave my bikini line because my pubic hair didn’t please you.

I had given up. When you told me you were attracted to me so, after watching hundreds of episodes of anime, I believed you, knowing what you appreciated was the gore, the plump breast, and child-like facial expressions of the female protagonist, not me. No, not my true form deprived of the abilities to trust and love; deprived of nutrition with a flat chest. So flat you can hear my heartbeats ten feet away.

When you asked me: “what is your problem, lady?”

I thought to respond and inform you that my problem was “I love my hair sesame black and healthy. They grow where they ought to be and shall not be removed. Like wildfire shall not be retained. Like my land shall not be taken away by your greedy ancestors. Like your men shall not have impregnated my mothers and sisters and tell us they were blessings. Like your semen ain’t sacred. Like you ain’t the improved breed. Like the linkages in my genes are just as valuable as yours in history prior to the birth of Jesus Christ.”

So I figured, penetration is your way of declaring your supreme rights over me, once your colonial subject from hundreds of years ago. So I figured, your genitals are your machine gun, firing at me with no mercy. No attempt was ever made to mask rawness. Have you seen the holes in my body, caused by your silver bullets? Even when we are both equally aroused, I am still the subject of your subordination.

I don’t suppose you would allow me to lay the blame. Don’t suppose you would be happy to hear rebuttals and reasonings from this little yellow girl.

For yellow is the color of weakness. For when people say Coldplay “didn’t mean it,” I can’t reciprocate the waves of laughter.

Yellow is never the proper term, stemming from racial classification. Your excuse to conquer, subjugate, and enslave me and my loved ones. Put aside your xenophobia and listen.

AMERICA, sweet, sugar-crushed America, you gotta stop thinking that I am subservient, passive, and quiet. I will voice myself so loud my scream echoes in an empty hall and your earlobes. If only you heard Edward Said loud and clear, you would know.

Being referred to as “exotic” and “submissive” ain’t compliments. They are the labels you use to satisfy your sick, pornographic mind. The rationalization to feel erotic and unleash your impaired, incurable fetish.

◊

Three, I am a byproduct of Orientalism, fortunately and unfortunately.

I am so much beyond the “Yellow Peril.” According to my DNA test, I have Pacific Islands, I have North African, and I have Indigenous American. That has gone unnoticed because my skin reflects the rays of the Sun. But does that hurt the Sun? No. It shines as usual. Bright, undeniably yellow and orange rays of sunlight. It only hurt me. I have no reason to be ashamed either. My ancestors crossed thousands of miles to be with each other. They united as if they had previously met. Their combinations were a reunion.

◊

Four, I am a byproduct of cultural unities, fortunately and unfortunately.

I spoke three languages growing up. One of my mother’s. Complex characters, four tonal variations, spoken to my grandparents. One of my father’s. Twisted, rolling tongue, masculine, feminine, and neutral genders come before the words. One of my own. The words I play around with, manipulate and write with. The language you, reading, see coming across the paper at this instant. But what you fail to understand is that I still fear my “supposed accent” can be detected and picked apart in the ears of every native speaker, who can diminish me as just another “knock-off” and “American-wannabe.”

The lost sense of cultural unities fed me so much confusion. I wasn’t sure who to believe in the documentation of history, whether the Communist Party had saved the peasants from poverty and famine or had massacred the innocents; whether the Bible was the most important spiritual guidance in writing or the Buddhist scriptures given to me from a rinboqe in Tibet was more worth adhering to.

In the Mahayana sutras, a path is explained as any person who intends to can become a Buddha. That the nature of Buddhahood was about awakening.

They offered me very little clarity but did teach me to become premature. So I think of post-colonialism so early. Early at an age when the world is thought to be definitive and that evil is evil. Conquerors are conquerors. The abused are abused.

◊

Five, I am a byproduct of melancholy nostalgia, fortunately and unfortunately.

I hear mysterious calls from my home at nighttime, a plain terrain covered in soft grass. It cries to me, “come home,” “come home,” and “motherland awaits your return.” I wake up and my pillows get a little wet even. I think my motherland shed tears in my dream and they are somehow transferred over to my familiar bed and room in an unfamiliar nation.

I’m sorry motherland. I have been a fool. My coldness is a wall between you and me. The day I deconstruct the wall is the day I find myself standing in front of your grave. Perhaps I can bring you a floral bouquet, then set the petals aflame with a lighter. You see, the bright color, she reacts with the air and the fire chemically then decays rapidly. You see, the brightness in my heart decays as it mourns for your passing away and a little piece of it dies with you.

◊

Six, I am a byproduct of a sensitive culture, fortunately and unfortunately.

I admit that this has all been a joke and I ought to be grateful. Apparently, I am a fortunate child with a false sense of misfortune. Dear America, if you ever read this, have a laugh with me and forgive. Will you?

After all, you are the one who has taught me that these stupid ideologies rule the world.

Luisa Luo is a rising senior in high school. She is originally from Beijing, China, and currently resides in Orlando, Florida. She is an avid writer, playwright, performer, and social justice advocate with an interest in pursuing Sociology, Comparative Literature, and Dramaturgy. She has produced works in memoirs, spoken word poems, dramatic scripts, and short stories. Her pieces have been featured in The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop Anthology and recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She is exploring various genres and artistic expressions while preserving the elements of her identity that are important to her.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

BROOD X by Gwen Mullins

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Gwen Mullins
BROOD X

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.

◊

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.

◊

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.

◊

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.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden

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Jennifer Hayden
DESPINA: a visual narrative

DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden - Title

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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.

TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD by Richard Casimir

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Richard Casimir
TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD

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.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

CLEANING HOUSE by Andrea Lynn Koohi

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CLEANING HOUSE by Andrea Lynn Koohi

Andrea Lynn Koohi
CLEANING HOUSE

“Right there,” I say, pointing to the spider on the wall before leaving the kitchen. I’d rather not kill things, so I make my husband do it.

My only complaint is that he doesn’t kill faster. He has this habit of pausing an inch over the target, then moving in slowly with a gentle scoop and a delicate squeeze. I never understood why he prolongs the trauma. He says I shouldn’t criticize unless I want to do it myself.

But today I leave the room for the moment of death. I sit on the sofa and scroll through my newsfeed while I wait for the deed to be done. It’s been reminding me too much of my own mortality. How easy it is to kill and be killed.

Scroll.

Plus, there’s that mouse still lounging in the attic, nestling undisturbed in the insulation. Jake doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s thinking I’m some sort of hypocrite.

Scroll.

It was almost a week ago that I sent him to the attic with one of those humane box traps with the skylight on top and the chunk of peanut butter inside. In less than a day, I found the mouse-bearing box on the kitchen counter, which really annoyed me because why did he think I wanted to see the damn thing?

I peered through the glass, and the mouse peered back, its dark beady eyes reflecting kitchen light. Its tail was repulsive but its ears were adorable, and that had me feeling a bit disjointed. Yanked in different directions.

To quell the guilt, I fetched a larger box, black Amazon tape still adorning the sides. I filled it with bits of mozzarella cheese, two generously sized lettuce leaves, and a handful of peanuts.

“A mouse hotel,” Jake joked. Why did men never see the gravity of the situation?

I asked him to release the mouse into the bigger box and then drop it off in the park down the street.

“You know he’ll probably get eaten by an owl, right?”

I ignored his comment and grabbed the dishtowel from the kitchen sink. Placed it the box for added warmth. 

That night was tough, and tougher still at 11:30 pm. That was the time I was used to hearing it—the faint scratching and rustling in the attic above my bed. The stirring and stretching of my mini Mickey Mouse as he commenced his routine of nocturnal activities. I missed the alignment of our opposite schedules. Against my will, the picture formed in my mind—the little mouse shivering in the November cold, sharp owl eyes tracking from above. I cursed Jake for putting the image in my head.

But the very next night, I heard it again—the same exact rustling in the same exact spot. Fumbling for my phone, I consulted Google and quickly discovered that mice are geniuses. They can find their way back over a mile after being relocated.

I smiled at the ceiling as my husband snored.

Andrea Lynn Koohi is a writer from Canada with recent work appearing or forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Maine Review, Ellipsis Zine, Idle Ink, Cabinet of Heed, Lost Balloon, and others.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

REFLECTIONS by Virginia Petrucci

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REFLECTIONS by Virginia Petrucci

Virginia Petrucci
REFLECTIONS

April 2012

I do one bump right before I pee and then another after I’ve washed my hands. I suck the lingering white crumbs off the tip of my apartment key like a rapacious baby. I was anticipating this for the entire bus ride across town. I look at myself in the mirror, and the horror and humor hit me at once: Ma’am, this is a Noah’s Bagels.

It is eleven in the morning, and my expensive therapist awaits down the street. He knows about my brain, but the rest is out of his clinical reach. I leave Noah’s Bagels without buying anything. I light up a cigarette and decide that today is the day I tell my therapist about me and the mirrors I inhabit. The cocaine might be relevant, too.

March 2012

“Every one of us has had a mirror moment. We take our drugs, then look in the mirror and think, ‘what the hell am I doing?’, or worse, ‘who the fuck is in my bathroom?’” The leader of the Hollywood Narcotics Anonymous chapter keeps our large, diverse group rapt with his booming voice and charred gaze. My various lassos of identity—white, bisexual, ridiculous, lazy Pretty Woman, honor student, Pisces—have never roped me as securely as that of addict.

The N.A. leader has a lot to say about accountability. He doesn’t have any time for excuses or sob stories or young lady doe eyes—sweeping my cheeks with damp lashes won’t cash in any sympathy here. I came to N.A. voluntarily, so I don’t know why I’m already scheming about how to flee—and who to take down with me.

February 2012

I’m too tired to keep hurting myself, so I’ve found a man to do this important work for me. He reprimands me about my coke problem but drinks eight to ten beers each night. This seems reasonable because he is in his mighty thirties and I’m stuck at lonely old twenty-four.

The night with the hatchet and his hands and my throat is the first night I think I am going to die under the weight of a blue-eyed man. Twin bruises remain the morning after, and I name them horror and humor.

March 2010

My first L.A. boyfriend introduces me to the tattoo artist who will shape much of my early-twenties angst into black-inked manifestos. I get a small tattoo for my mother on my right shoulder blade: little boxes. Two words whose coupled meaning only she and I understand. She is exasperated when I show her.

July 2009

My first L.A. boyfriend introduces me to cocaine. He is, in his own small and clumsy way, a bottom-feeder drug dealer. He is the bouncer at The Viper Room and a brilliant musician in his own right. He keeps the vast majority of his life just out of my touch but leaves his heart safely in my grasp for the duration of our relationship. Mistake.

August 17th, 2007

The percocet pills are gone, and I wonder if I’ll ever get that close to heaven again. When does wanting become dying? I wonder. Welcome to college, my reflection answers. I’m a sophomore.

August 10th, 2007

My college boyfriend shows me the pills twice before I try them. What a bore, I complain. Why can’t we just keep drinking straight vodka and pretending we like it?

Finally, I take one of his mother’s percocets. She had her hip surgery so many years ago that the stupid things probably won’t work anymore. After I swallow one—no, two (good measure and all)—I begin to sink and fly at once. Guilt does not come for me.

December 2005

I see an ad for smokeless tobacco in an obscure fashion magazine. I do not bother to research its safety—if I’m not setting the stuff on fire, it must be less carcinogenic. I do know that it contains fiberglass so the inside of your nose is cut in a thousand tiny places with each use, but this is not suspicious because it’s only to let the nicotine enter your bloodstream faster.

The first time I try it, I almost fall over. This is my first high, and it is thoroughly unintended. My instincts tell me to throw my dwindling dignity to the wind and just snort the stuff in long lines with dollar bills.

September 2005

I’m a freshman in college and smoking is allowed just about anywhere on campus because a). it’s 2005 and adults are still allowed to be adults and b). this is Baltimore.

I decide to honor my newfound maturity with a pack of Virginia Slims. I choose this particular brand of cigarette because my name is Virginia, and I am slim.

I sit at a table outside my dorm building in an unusual September chill and take my first drag. I see colors.

November 2003

It’s almost winter, but I want to take a walk in the woods near my house. My parents are out being stupid; their Yuengling beer is in the fridge looking much the same. Suddenly, I decide that the time has come for me to try alcohol.

I’m unclear about the mechanics of bottle opening, so I end up with a furious cut and a frothing fount of beer from which I take one feeble sip. I force myself to swallow it because while I can handle the Lord’s wrath, I can’t possibly contend with His disgust—finish what you start. After one sip I pour the rest down the drain and rush off to the woods. Good thing I’ll never try that again.

October 2002

I am fourteen years old and am thrilled to have a Troubled Friend. We hang out at our church’s youth group but don’t talk in school. She made a real splash at Episcopal camp over the summer when she showed up two days late with platinum blonde hair, dangle earrings that proclaimed BITCH, and—wait, now—birth control.

One Sunday, during youth group, she smuggles me out behind the church to teach me how to smoke. I am horrified when I agree to try a drag of her Marlboro Red—the same brand that will kill her mother in ten years. I cough and spit out the satin tar that coats my tongue. Good thing I’ll never try that again.

Summer 1998

I wish this was the first time he saw me. I finally got contact lenses and I’m wearing the halter top Mom doesn’t know she bought me. Plus the lipstick I stole from my nanny. She left us over the summer because I’m too old for a nanny now, so I had to take her lipstick. She’s gone and so am I.

He’s watching me from his window, stupefied by my feminized transformation. He has always been The Boy Next Door, but I—? Good thing I’ll never be her again.

I see my reflection in the window of his dad’s car. For once, someone is happening. I can pull a mirror out of anybody this way.

His eyes are on me, and he does not know why. I have achieved something, but I want more. I keep on walking.

Virginia Petrucci is the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Salt and the Song and Recipes and How To’s. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Short Stories, and the Best Small Fictions anthologies. Her work has appeared in Terrain, Mom Egg Review, and Best New Writing, among others. She lives in California with her family.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PUSHING AWAY THE SCUM by Benedicte Grima

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Benedicte Grima
PUSHING AWAY THE SCUM

I have no recollection of being bathed before the age of five. Doubtless, long forgotten nannies took charge of that. But growing up in an old farmhouse with a French mother and an unreliable well water supply, I knew nothing of showers until I went away to school at age eleven. In the meantime, my younger sister and I bathed together in the upstairs tub on our own, squealing, fighting, and splashing. It was a Saturday ritual, before we dressed for Sunday mass. Our mother washed our hair separately in the kitchen sink, as we stood leaning over, submitting our heads to her massaging fingers. If we sullied ourselves between baths or just smelled bad, my mother would discreetly advise us, “Vas te laver le poum!” I have not managed to find poum in any French dictionary, although in Creole French it may refer to testicles. Did my mother, unlearned in the vocabulary of the underworld, pick up Creole slang while in Baton Rouge, her first stop in America at an age of discovering both her own body and that of children? To us children the word distinctly meant “behind.” Go wash your privates.

At my second boarding school, a British institution in Switzerland, each girl was allotted a specific day and time to bathe in the large enamel-covered detached iron tub in our bathroom shared by eight boarders. I loved watching the vessel fill with clean, clear hot water, steam hovering over the surface. Slowly, I lowered myself in, allowing the warmth to inch its way to my insides, until I was submerged to my chin. After scrubbing my body with a soapy washcloth, an initial film on the water’s surface introduced itself, a combination of exfoliated skin and dirt. I dunked myself to rinse off, then gently pushed the scum away, knowing that as I resurfaced the oily film would once again adhere to my body.

The final component of the bath, washing the hair, presented the greatest challenge. By then the water surface was thick with dirt, soap scum, and other unknowns. The first wetting of the head was of no concern since the second would chase it all away. Even the second backward head dunking went without consideration. My hair was quite long then and required time to loosen the shampoo from the scalp and beyond. Now, as I sat up, I was surrounded by shampoo suds in addition to the scum. Again I pushed it away from behind me to create a clearing, then sank backward for a second and final rinse. I became quite efficient at gauging the time it took for the scum to close in, the time I had to submerge my head and pop it out without collecting the filth. Then the final emergence from the bathwater itself, now thickly layered. I pushed away the dirty bubbles, creating a clearing around myself, and quickly rose to climb out of the tub. Maybe it’s a blessing it only happened once a week.

With great delight I discovered showers at my next boarding school, in the US. My sense of hygiene was shocked, however, to simultaneously learn that the other girls showered daily while I considered two showers per week sufficient. That may have had something to do with the teasing I received as a freshman, the slap-in-the-face introduction to American culture. Showers became a default manner of cleansing, and I was relieved when my parents added these to our farmhouse.

When I moved to my grandmother’s apartment in Paris, however, I was once again faced with a detached tub on feet, no match for the five-gallon water heater which barely dispersed two inches above the base. This would never do. I took to filling the largest pots I could find in the kitchen and heating them to boiling on the stovetop, then lugging them through the dark corridor to the bathroom. These, combined with cold water, would yield a half tub, enough to allow a repeat performance from my days in boarding school. As for washing my hair, I revived the tradition from my youth, opting to lean over the kitchen sink and use the faucet.

These hygiene practices prepared me for those in wait as I engaged in years of living in rural villages of northern Pakistan for fieldwork, where there was no running water, no tubs or shower stalls. I was lucky to find a moment of privacy in the toilet shack and to have someone heat some water in a small pail, my bathing ration, prepared on Thursday nights and accompanied by a change into clean clothes in readiness for Friday, holy day of visits. As if on cue, my child’s nanny called out “Scrub behind your ears!” Of course, everyone did the same and smelled the same, so no questions were asked or noses turned. Apart from the odors of sweat, no one ever trailed any hint of missing hygiene. Muslims are sensitive to cleanliness, and toileting is always followed by rinsing one’s privates from a receptacle dangled along for that purpose—an announcement of intention. Some traditional mountain women once even treated me to their own hygiene practice; after I had washed my hair they poured generous amounts of mustard oil onto my scalp and massaged it thoroughly through the strands and, once satisfied, set about creating thirty braids of my hair, hence ensuring it would remain oiled and plastered in place until the next washing, possibly a month away.

“Alert the media!” cried out my American husband on days when I announced I would be showering. He accepted the infrequency of my bathing habits, even if he did mention it in a teasing putdown to company. But he admired that when out in nature, I was not ashamed to pull over and take care of business, using leaves to wipe myself. I taught my children and grandchildren to do the same. And when we were out of water at home, I showed them how to brush their teeth using a single small cup of water. To this day, I am satisfied with a washcloth bathe standing at the sink, wiping rather than pushing away the scum, and my aging joints much prefer to wash grandchildren’s hair at the kitchen sink than to bend over them in a bathtub.

Benedicte Grima’s anthropological research, The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women, was first published in 1992. She self-published a collection of fieldwork-related essays, Secrets From the Field (2004), which won her an Eric Hoffer finalist award in 2019. Based on work among immigrants in the US, she then self-published a historical fiction novel, Talk Till The Minutes Run Out: An Immigrant’s Tale from 7-Eleven (2019). Her second historical fiction novel, Heirlooms’ Tale was published in 2020. This piece is from a collection of memoiristic essays, Tableaux Memories, currently in progress, some of which have been featured in ROVA Magazine and Entropy LitMag.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

ADULT SWIMS by Christine Muller

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ADULT SWIMS by Christine Muller

Christine Muller
ADULT SWIMS

Someone must have peed in the pool. From the vigor of the lifeguards’ arms waving us out, I figured that someone must have peed a lot. I tried to keep my head above water as I made my way to the end of the lane, thinking about all of the sweat, saliva, and mucus that’s already a part of the liquid-based exercise experience. At any given time, someone is spitting into the gutter, and at all times, lap swimmers exert themselves enough to be soaking wet on dry land. Swimming is funny that way; it can look clean, even though it’s probably the workout that most fully immerses you in other people’s excretions. I tried to look at it philosophically: Nietzsche says whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And The Joker says whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger. I wondered which way this might go for me as I pulled myself forward.

I noticed that my earnest but so-slow-am-I-actually-going-backward breaststroke wasn’t getting me out of the water fast enough, so I decided to walk instead. This was the instructional pool, after all. At 85 degrees and never more than 4.5 feet deep, it invited amateurs like me who relied on temperate, shallow water the way a novice cyclist relies on flat, empty roads. A few months after learning to swim, the adjacent competition pool, at 78 degrees and a depth up to 13.5 feet, still scared the shit out of me.

Finally, I hoisted myself up on deck. As I stood dripping and chilled, waiting for the chlorine blast to neutralize any insurgent bacteria, I overheard other swimmers say that a child had pooped. Well, then. Maybe something scared the shit out of that poor kid. I scanned the recreation area, now more alert to what the lifeguards were doing. But I didn’t see much going on. If there was an incursion, they probably extracted it while I journeyed single-mindedly to the wall. I thought about unwelcome fragments mingling with the less alarming substances that usually passed through my mouth and nostrils. I wondered, if the lifeguards were to find something, where they would put it. The toilet or the trashcan—either way, the process had downsides.

I had heard that the University of Maryland built this natatorium during a failed bid for Washington, D.C. and Baltimore jointly to host the 2012 Olympics. A failure, indeed, if the organizing committee could have witnessed the pool at this particular instant, so far from ambitions of glory on the international stage. The win for me, as a graduate student on the College Park campus, was inexpensive access to world-class swimming facilities I had only recently felt comfortable using. After all, it wasn’t until my early thirties when I had the time, money, and resolve to begin evening lessons off-campus at a YMCA, far enough from school to avoid recognition. I’d show up weekly at the Y, braced against terror and bedecked with blue arm floaties.

The thing is, I actually love water. I love the feeling of soft, teasing ripples lapping against my bare skin. I especially love the beach: the coastline, the ocean’s horizon. I love the intrigue of an expanse that connects continents, wields overwhelming natural power, and harbors untold, unseen mysteries akin to those of unexplored planets. I also fear being at water’s mercy. Even if it’s only a cold indoor pool too deep for my feet to touch the bottom, I fear the loss of control to which gravity has accustomed me. I understand the deep end as the potential to fall rather than to sink. I no longer fear water on my face, but if I still can’t tell the difference between sinking in water and falling in air, then I still have a lot to work out.

In shallow water, though, I could contrive a modified corkscrew, competently spinning from breaststroke to right sidestroke, then to backstroke, then to left sidestroke, then to breaststroke again. Maryland’s Eppley Recreation Center pools had speakers above and below water, tuned to Top 40 during open swim, so as I dipped in and out and around, I never missed a bridge or chorus from late-aught Justin, Britney, or Rihanna. It was a joy. No fear; only delight.

My dad, a strong swimmer, says you never should fear the water, but you must respect it. He also says he learned to swim in a rain-filled bomb crater during his 1940s German childhood, which is an amazing story about a different kind of fear and not at all like mine. At my lessons, I noticed everyone around me the way one does when apprehension heightens the senses. The swim-capped women in aerobic unison pumping their water-weighted arms. The children bapping each other on the head with foam noodles exactly the way they are not supposed to. The man removing his prosthetic leg before starting his laps. The warm practice pool welcomed all, had room for all.

And then there was me: a five-foot, six-inch adult woman, responding hesitantly but affirmatively as the instructor patiently coaxed and encouraged me at every step from basic safety to deep-end plunges. I am even now astonished at the first time I launched, because I crossed a threshold that night and I don’t know why then and not the week before or after, becoming weightless as my feet finally left the floor and I propelled myself forward without pushing off anything, without holding onto anything.

So, am I stronger or stranger for surviving what I feared could kill me? Nietzsche and The Joker both made fair points; the world gets scary and messy and weird and we all have to find a way to live in it. Or a way to swim in it, if we think of the world as a scary, messy, and weird community pool where sometimes people pee and poop, sending the rest of us into a scramble. But I think Machiavelli comes closest to how I view swimming when he asks whether it is better for the powerful to be feared or loved. I both love and fear the water, and perhaps this will always be true. But by will and a certain nonchalance about foreign bodily discharge, I’ve managed to wrest a little more space for love.

Christine Muller is a writer, researcher, and educator based in the Philadelphia area. She is especially interested in stories that explore the blurred boundaries between history and hearsay. Read her flash fiction “Antony and Cleopatra” in Cleaver’s Issue 35.

Cover design by Karen Rile

SHELTER by Bree Smith

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SHELTER by Bree Smith

Bree Smith
SHELTER

First, the wound has to clot.

In the hemostasis phase, blood vessels constrict to stop blood flow. Platelets fuse together to form a seal. Coagulation binds the wound on a molecular level. If a wound doesn’t clot, it bleeds out. After thirteen years as the director of a women’s shelter, I know: the ones who don’t clot are the no-chance girls. These are the girls with loose teeth and rib bones poking through their tank tops. These are the ones who don’t make it past their stepfathers. The ones who are always found a few minutes too late.

Krysta’s wounds were raw. At 15, her mother started pushing her to get pregnant. Babies mean child support checks. 24-year-old Krysta had two elementary school-aged children and a baby by her last landlord. When I did my nightly checks at the shelter, she stuck two spoons in a gallon of ice cream and advised me to invest in sexier pajamas. During the day, we sat at my desk planning imaginary weddings on TheKnot.com. I helped get her son into a special school for children with behavioral needs. We had conversations about why it’s not okay for her 6-year-old daughter to sit on Krysta’s boyfriends’ laps. Eventually, she ran off with a guy because the shelter wouldn’t let her stay out overnight. Last year, I saw her on the front steps of a housing project in a bra and cutoffs, a bottle of Wild Turkey between her knees.

Will these wounds bleed out?

Next, it has to hurt.

In the inflammatory phase, blood vessels secrete water, salt and protein. The wound swells. Bacteria and damaged cells are flushed out. White blood cells rush to the area. The wound turns red. Pain is initiated. These are the girls banging on the shelter door. Grit teeth, wet eyes. Enraged. How much pain can one body take? The black eyes? The broken lips? The miscarriages? Watch them walking their kids to K-4. Watch them bagging fast food at the drive-thru. They’re sleeping on their ex-boyfriend’s couch. They’re washing up in the bathroom at the 7-Eleven. Much easier, you know, to lie back and close their eyes. A needle, a bottle, no condom. A bathtub and somebody’s old Lady Bic.

Pain made Nina walking chaos. She screamed her texts to her ex-husband out loud. She threw dishes away instead of washing them. She got fired for pushing a coworker. Nina sat for hours in the shelter office reeking of menthol, waving her cracked knuckles, telling stories of her childhood. When she was ten, her dad stuck a joint in her hand and told her to shut up and watch cartoons. When she was seventeen, her brother choked her against the living room wall until she blacked out. When she was twenty-two, her husband told her he had gotten another woman pregnant. To this, Nina’s pastor said she should love God first, her husband second, and her kids third. Nina is nowhere on this list of people to love.

“Is he right?” she asked me outside her room one night.

“No,” I said.

She had tears in her eyes. I hugged her and swallowed mine.

When will the pain stop?

After that, the wound has to be rebuilt.

In the proliferative phase, new tissue grows. A new network of blood vessels forms. Myofibroblasts cause the wound to contract, oxygenating the cells. Epithelial cells reface the surface. It takes time, but some women get here. They keep a job, save some paychecks. Their kids make coloring pages for the fridge. These women have stopped listening for footsteps outside the door in the early hours of the morning. No one calls them a stupid dirty bitch for burning dinner. If you drive by the shelter, you can see them pushing their kids on the swing set in the backyard. From my office window, I sometimes see them lying in the grass under the sun, eyes closed.

Salma had to start over. Wrapped in a hijab, eyes lowered, she said: “I must make a confession. I am not legal.” She told us about her life in Morocco. She showed us how her mother lined her eyes with kohl. She told us how her grandmother taught her to cook. Salma made couscous for everyone in the shelter and when we said shoukran, tears streamed down her cheeks. She had two daughters who loved watching old He-Man cartoons. Jumping up and down in footie pajamas, they wanted me to stay in their room and watch with them. Salma had escaped with them from a forced marriage, risking their lives, leaving everything behind. She had friends and a fiancé in the local Muslim community, but her wounds were still healing.

One day, she stopped me in the hall outside the office. “I must make a request of you,” she said.

I nodded.

“When my fiancé comes, will you please hide your hair?”

I paused.

“We are all sisters here.” She took my hands in hers. “We must protect each other.”

Each week, her fiancé brought groceries up to the porch. He drove her daughters to school. He took them all to the movies. When they got married, Salma planted marigolds in the window boxes of her new apartment. She bought a tea set that reminded her of home. When they came back to visit the shelter, her older daughter waved her mathletes trophy at me, shrieking.

Does healing beget healing?

Finally, the wound closes.

In the remodeling stage, the injured area is fully repaired. Damaged cells and scar tissue are removed through the process of apoptosis. Collagen fibers absorb water forming cross-linked bonds. This strengthens the new skin, makes it flexible. These women strain like baby birds from the nest. They look beyond the backyard of the shelter. They have savings accounts, job certifications. They ask, “Does the shelter have an iron?” so they can iron their pants before they go to work. Pull up a lawn chair and you’ll see them with the other moms at school soccer games. When they move out, these women pack their boxes with care. For them, there are no more trash bags, no more middle-of-the-night escapes. They’re going to a home of their own.

When I met Jasmine, she was like a rose about to bloom. She came to the shelter with her one-year-old daughter, shy and barely bilingual. Her ex-boyfriend had threatened her with a knife when she was eight months pregnant. When he was admitted to a psychiatric ward, she was left homeless. After her daughter’s birth, Jasmine often thought of suicide.

“Is she better off without me?” Jasmine asked.

“No one is better off without you,” I said.

I included myself.

Bad in school, unable to articulate her thoughts, everyone called her “slow.” But Jasmine was determined to earn her high school diploma. She had plans, ideas. She wanted to become a Certified Nursing Assistant. She wanted to design jewelry. She wanted to start her own childcare business. I bit my tongue, not wanting to get her hopes up. Together, we pored over the pages of her GED practice book until they were wrinkled with tears. I found a counselor for her; I helped her file for child support. We filled out job applications until 2 a.m. Jasmine’s sister in Puerto Rico told her she was too stupid to work anywhere but a warehouse. But Jasmine passed the GED test. She became an assistant at a daycare, moved into an apartment of her own. Her daughter says she wants to be a teacher when she grows up.

Once we’re healed, can we finally be new?

Bree Smith is a women’s homeless shelter director and emerging writer. She holds a master’s degree in Psychology with a specialization in Childhood and Adolescence. She is currently working on dual master’s certificates in Neuroscience and Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. “Shelter” is her first creative nonfiction publication.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MAKING A CAKE by Grace Kennedy

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Grace Kennedy
MAKING A CAKE

Today is my father’s birthday and I am making a chocolate Guinness cake.

I am making this cake by hand because I do not have a stand mixer and do not want to spend two-hundred and seventy-nine dollars on a twenty-pound gadget I will only use once a year.

I am making a cake even though I do not really like cake and do not have a stand mixer because my dad is turning seventy which I know is not so old but feels very old when I watch his hands shake as he pours his beer into a tall glass.

Three years ago on his sixty-seventh birthday when we found out why his hands were shaking I got so drunk off wine and port that I do not remember if there was any cake at all.

I am making a cake but I have gotten distracted by a video of a baby eating vanilla ice cream and now there is flour all over my phone but I do not wipe it off and I wonder when or if I will have babies and when or if my father will get to hold them.

Yesterday he walked into the kitchen and told me that his friend is dying and he usually does not tell me these things for example he never told me that his mom tried to commit suicide when he was nineteen.

Last week my friend got on a plane to visit his mother in Hungary who can no longer swallow and is planning to kill herself and he would like to sit by her side when she does.

Today is the first day of spring and soon my father will dig his shaking hands into the soil and plant lettuce and in the summer we will make salad and if we don’t wash it thoroughly enough we might bite into an insect who had thought they’d found a home.

I am making a cake because my dad is turning seventy and his hands are shaking and his friend is dying and he is planting lettuce and my friend’s mom is killing herself and when I was six years old I slipped out of my dad’s hands in the ocean and I thought I might drown and that my lungs would fill with water and wouldn’t that be a terrible way to die but then he picked me back up and I did not die and now I am making him cake.

Grace Kennedy is a writer, cook, and educator based in Philadelphia. She has previously been published in Bon Appetit, Oh Reader, and more. For pictures of the food she is making and the books she is reading, follow her online @gkennedy18.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE TRUTH by Cassie Burkhardt

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Cassie Burkhardt
THE TRUTH

When I was in eighth grade, I had a terrible eating disorder and was hospitalized for most of it. When that didn’t work, I was admitted to a treatment center in Utah called The Center for Change, three thousand miles from home and everything I’d ever known. Eventually, I got out, but I still looked like a scarecrow with braces. My parents, bless them, decided to give me a fresh start, sent me to a private school, an artsy, alternative one where I could hopefully be myself, whoever that was. Ms. Johnson was my English teacher, and she introduced me to poetry, to form and meter, a structure for my feelings. She encouraged us to keep a journal, a marbled composition notebook—you know the one—and write in it every day. “Fold any page you don’t want me to read,” she said. At first, the book was all folds, an accordion of secrets. I asked for another book. At about the same time, I was gifted a CD of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair read aloud to the soundtrack from the movie Il Postino, and I think the combination of those two things that year may have saved my life. Let’s be honest, who knows. Recovery took years. But it set something in motion inside my ravenous heart, gave it words to eat. I remember sitting in front of the plastic Sony CD player in my room, door closed, propped up on my hipbones, scrawling in the notebook, “Those first faint lines. Pure nonsense, pure wisdom,” just like Neruda said. It was probably a lot more nonsense than wisdom. In fact, I distinctly remember a poem called “The Sounds of Silence” and thinking I was an absolute genius to have come up with such a phrase. But listen, there was also a poem I wrote about a tulip, a pale pink tulip that wasn’t ready to open, so everyone should just give it some water and sunshine and leave it alone, and that was the first time I felt something break loose inside of me, just as I imagined it had for Neruda and just as Ms. Johnson hoped would happen for us ninth-graders, for us poets in the class, whoever we were, if we just kept writing, kept writing, kept writing.

And writing is what I’m still doing now, these thousand years later, a grown woman with a husband, a house, three children, and five bags of groceries, home now from Trader Joe’s, sitting in the driveway, motor running, listening to a single surviving Neruda/Il Postino read-aloud from a YouTube video that just surfaced, my two-year-old still buckled, wondering what’s going on, and tears are welling up in my eyes, rolling hot down my cheeks. That little girl in her room. The notebook. I want to unfold all the pages.

Cassie Burkhardt lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three small children. She teaches kids yoga in schools and is a long-time student of The Writers Studio, started in New York by Philip Schultz. She writes poems and flash, and she is working on a collection.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SPONTANEOUS BUNGEE JUMP IN SWITZERLAND by Cassie Burkhardt

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Cassie Burkhardt
SPONTANEOUS BUNGEE JUMP IN SWITZERLAND

Twenty-six years old. Pink cutoffs. Barefoot. Day trip to Lugano with friends when we see a sign with an arrow: James Bond Golden Eye Cliff Jump. No one else wants to do it, but I do, so we hop in the VW Golf, make our way up to the tiptop. My husband can’t even look out the window. Rocks, some jagged, others smooth as elephant backs, peek from glacial water, turquoise but stop-your-heart cold. Twenty minutes later, I’m poised, arms to a T, toes on the very edge, ready to dive headfirst off a pirate’s plank on the lip of a dam so thin it’s like a giant grin in free-floating space above the world and 720 feet of sheer vertical concrete down. Someone counts. One. Two. Three. I let out a primal scream and dive off the face of it. It’s horrible. My heart is in my tonsils. I’m eating wind. Cheeks liquid, I’m dying. Nothing to save me from glacial rock death but a bungee on my ankle, when one millisecond later an incredible lightness rinses over me because I am not dying, I am flying. Slow and fast at the same time. I am a delicate female body, so light, like an earring, a charm dropped into the abyss. A heartbeat, hair, breath, a flash of pink fringe in the sky. I am unburdened and intensely me. Edgeless, boundless, elastic me. The bungee bounces me up and down like a human yo-yo. I twirl up on the rebound, plummet again, knowing now what to expect, relishing it, breathing into it, adding style even. How quickly I can adapt to my new lifestyle as a bird! I point my toes, flex my wrists, eyes wide open, wingspan stretched to its fullest capacity, and I am calm, I am found, I am high on the purest rush amidst rock and river and sky, and so I quickly exhale all the sadness pent up inside me, every drop of it as fast as I can until I am empty, watch it fall like a lint pebble from my shorts into the deep goodbye before they call, OK, it’s over! and reel me up.

Cassie Burkhardt lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three small children. She teaches kids yoga in schools and is a long-time student of The Writers Studio, started in New York by Philip Schultz. She writes poems and flash, and she is working on a collection. This is her first publication.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MASQUERADE by Dhaea Kang

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MASQUERADE by Dhaea Kang

Dhaea Kang
MASQUERADE

We’ve just arrived at prom and already I want to leave.

Should we take a photo? Chris asks.

I clock the long line, my classmates barely recognizable without their signature Hollister t-shirts and hoodies, skin-tight low rise jeans. We just took a bunch of photos in my backyard, me in my coral floor-length gown from the thrift store, he in a borrowed tux and bowtie. Around my wrist the corsage his mom made.

Nah. I don’t feel like waiting in line.

I find my friends seated at a round banquet table, introduce them to my date. An acquaintance, not in attendance, is throwing a party we’re planning to catch afterward. I wonder what’s the minimum amount of time we’re expected to stick around. One song? Maybe two?

◊

We’ve been hanging out most days since prom. Chris has the entire basement to himself, a penthouse by teenage standards. Tonight, he shows off his limited edition Beck album pressed in blue vinyl, too precious to play. He puts on The Beatles instead. I love everything after Abbey Road. None of their early pop stuff.

Before we know it, it’s past curfew and I need to get home. You know how my parents are. On my way out, I run into his kid brother, who comes up to my shoulder and is unexpectedly blonde. Chris introduces us, we exchange hellos. When I get home I receive a text:

My brother asked if you were my girlfriend.

Yeah? And what’d you say?

Yes.

◊

The theme for this year’s prom is ‘Masquerade,’ but you wouldn’t know it by the lack of masks. We leave half-finished plates at the table and make our rounds, snapping photos with my digital camera. Bass thumps from the adjoining room. People begin to file onto the dance floor.

It’s literally the equivalent of liquid cement, the stylist assured me as she sprayed my hair. Now, just a few hours later, the curls have fallen straight.

◊

I turn eighteen two weeks after graduation. Chris throws me a party at a place he’s housesitting, invites his older friend to bartend. The friend offers people their choice of Jim Beam and Coke, Skol and Sprite, straight shots. Tabs of acid to those who want it. It all feels very grown up, playing house in an actual house, serving alcohol to guests.

Later that night I’m lying in the grass, waving around a neon green butterfly net from the dollar store, attempting to catch the stars. Reality heightened to its purest form. The way we’re meant to experience it. When we’re alone, Chris gifts me the bird charm from the necklace he always wore. I want you to have this. I wear the charm around my neck for the rest of that summer.

◊

Partnerless stud earring? Keep. Tarnished quarter-machine mood ring? Trash. Handmade friendship anklet from middle school? Trash.

A visit home from college. I’m in my old bedroom, the glaring orange walls with creased posters of Jim Morrison, The Beatles, a dozen AOL free trial discs arranged in a spiral pattern. I’m about to enter my twenties. No sense in hanging onto childish things. I go through my old jewelry box. The decisions come quickly and easily, so sure I am about what needs to go.

Guitar pick earring? Keep. Bird charm from Chris? Trash.

◊

We should talk about what’s going to happen to us when we leave for college, he says.

We lie under a tarp that’s been fastened to a tree branch, a makeshift tent. The fire is dying. It’s surprisingly chilly for a summer night.

I should’ve known better than to get involved with someone. But I really like you.

It catches me off guard, the directness of this question. But I’ve already planned what to say. I think it’d make the most sense to break up when we leave. I mean, we’ll be in different states.

Yeah, he agrees. I was thinking that too. I’m open to long-distance if you wanted to. But yeah, breaking up makes sense. We’ll just have to make the most out of this summer.

We carry on until the night before my parents drive me down to campus. It’s for the best.

◊

Six months out of college. I drive to my parents’ house after work, on a mission.

I check the plastic tackle box where I keep my old jewelry. I open a plastic pencil case covered in Lisa Frank stickers, finger the broken number 2 pencils, slim packs of .5mm lead, a stale pink eraser. I open box after shoebox, through a mess of pen caps, loose buttons, neon shoelaces, floppy discs, USBs.

UMMA! I scream, as I’m told I often did as a child.

My mom’s at the door in seconds. What’s wrong?

Remember that bird charm I used to wear? On a necklace? I can’t find it. Did you throw it away? It’s really important and I can’t find it where is it I NEED IT NOW!

I kick the stupid boxes that I know don’t hold what I’m looking for. But maybe she can somehow work her Mom-magic to summon it. She rifles through some boxes to appease me, probably wondering why her 22-year-old daughter finally came for an unexpected visit only to throw a tantrum. It’s bound to be around here somewhere…

I don’t tell her why I suddenly need this charm, and she doesn’t ask.

◊

I find my old journals in the closet, stacks of spiral notebooks—the kind always on back-to-school shopping lists. They’ve been sitting here in my childhood bedroom through all four years of college, the entirety of my twenties. I bring them to my apartment, set them on a shelf in my current bedroom closet next to a pair of strappy black heels I only ever wear to weddings.

They stay untouched for months.

◊

Another couple rides in the backseat on our way to prom. A hand appears between the driver’s and passenger seat, presenting a marbled glass pipe. Wanna hit this?

I take the pipe, hold it up for Chris, who’s driving. He shakes his head and smiles when he catches my eye. No, I’m good. I want to remember this night.

◊

Where did they come from? The man’s gaze pans over us like we’re vermin infesting the train. It’s 3 a.m., and we’re crammed like cattle in the middle section between two cars, where passengers can enter and exit. The last train home from the city, and every single seat is full. The conductor, standing guard as if to protect the other riders, scoffs as he names our suburban town. Oh, you know, future drug addicts, alcoholics.

They speak as if we’re not here, as if we don’t count. Shame surges up my spine, blooms on my face. I try to keep my feet planted in the magic of the evening, but their words make me unsteady. I feel stupid, herded into this in-between space. Too old for the body glitter, the temporary tattoos littering my skin.

◊

To be completely honest, I’m really nervous playing for you.

We’ve stopped by his house to change out of our prom-wear and into our regular clothes for the afterparty. He’s perched on a stool in the garage, acoustic guitar in hand. A metal rack around his neck holds a harmonica in front of his lips. Fingernails graze the metal strings, thin strips of brass vibrate with each inhale and exhale. An impromptu private concert during the evening’s intermission.

◊

Freshman year of college, my first weekend in the dorm. The girl from across the hall and I are playing a drinking game with a pair of boys in their room, two floors below. A modified version of Ring of Fire—like Russian Roulette, if you swap out the gun for an unopened can of Mountain Dew, replace the bullets with shots of vodka. We take turns wedging the corner of a playing card beneath the unopened soda tab, praying that our card isn’t the one to trigger its release. Hold your breath. Insert. Exhale. Hold your breath. Insert. Exhale. Hold your breath. Insert. Psssst. Fuck.

After the sixth, seventh, eighth shot, fluorescent orange spews out of one boy’s mouth, a slurry of Cheetos, Mountain Dew, vodka. He ducks his head in a trash bin and jabs his finger towards the door. The girl and I run out of their room, exchange glances like two outlaws escaping a crime scene. We race down the hallway, sandals clip-clopping against the glossy linoleum floor.

I throw open the door to the stairwell that will lead us to the safety of the girls’ floor and run into a boy wrapped in a bedsheet toga. Neon green bandanna across his forehead, startled grin on his face. This is the boy who will make me forget about Chris.

◊

Over winter break, we catch up over dinner and a movie, a dating cliche we mostly avoided when we were actually dating.

Hey how’s college? Meet any cool people? I’ve really missed you.

Afterward, we return to his house. He has something for me. He grabs a folded piece of cloth and unfurls it, revealing a paisley-patterned peasant skirt he found in his student housing ‘free’ box. I’ve been holding onto this for months. It reminded me of you.

A Christmas tree emits a warm glow from the corner of the living room. His dad and brother are there, wearing excited grins. They want to show me something. I peer through a pair of cardboard 3D glasses. Each light on the tree magically turns into a tiny snowman.

◊

Have you seen Chris’s Facebook?

Chris… from prom? I log onto Facebook during my lunch break at work.

RIP Chris. God. Damnit. You were one of the good ones.

There is no words. Im gonna miss u brother. rest in peace.

Dozens of messages, going back almost six weeks. Details for a memorial that has already passed. I send a message to someone I don’t know. Someone who entered his life after that summer, just over four years ago now. I learn that after a night of partying, Chris fell asleep on a friend’s couch and never woke up.

I think of all the times I’ve let myself sink deep into a friend’s couch, into unconsciousness, trusting my body to wake up in the morning.

I click out of Facebook. My lunch break is over.

I get back to work. Check my emails, double-click on desktop icons, make some phone calls, schedule meetings. I’m twenty-two, fresh out of college. This is what adults do. My thoughts hover in the space between all those posts I just read, careful not to touch. Eventually, I land on this: Whatever happened to the bird charm?

I head to my parents’ house after work, back to my old bedroom.

◊

We head to Denny’s the morning after prom, my hair a tangled nest, stiff from the liquid cement. We each order a coffee and a Signature Slam. I’m not big on sweet breakfast. Yeah, me either. I can’t believe they banned indoor smoking. I could really use a cigarette.

When I get home, I grab my notebook, write down every detail I can remember from the previous night. I transcribe memorable bits of dialogue like I’m writing a movie script.

Chris: You’re so cute.

Me: I know. But you’re cuter.

Chris: I’m not cute, I’m burly and gnarly and pretty legitly the beefmaster 3000 yo!

◊

Nine months into the pandemic. I peer into my bedroom closet for the hundredth time, hoping to find something to organize. It’s too cold to hang outdoors, and I’m desperate for an activity that doesn’t involve staring at a screen.

I spot the spiral notebooks, next to the heels I’m not sure I’ll ever wear again. My handwriting then was much the same as it is now—the rushed scrawls of someone trying to lay down their thoughts before the onset of a wrist cramp.

May 23, 2000. Dear Journal, Hi! This is the first time writing in you. School’s almost out!!

May 7, 2001. BAD NEWS. 5th-grade graduation… ON MY GOLDEN BIRTHDAY!

December 3, 2003. Was called “semi-ugly” today.

March 15, 2005. Just had 4 shots of vodka. God dammit that shit tastes fuckin gross.

October 21, 2007. Wow. Van Halen concert. Wow.

And then.

May 8, 2008. So I’m going to prom with Chris.

◊

There’s a long-stemmed rose and a handwritten note tucked under my windshield wiper.

Prom? Chris 🙂

The cute boy with chin-length curls I sometimes meet at the burger place near our school to get weed. I’ve never been asked to a dance, never been interested in attending. But this is senior prom, a big deal.

Chris wants to know if he has a chance with you, a mutual friend texts.

Yea, he seems cool.

Great. I won’t have to break his little heart. Prom will be cute. He was really nervous about asking you.

◊

Bird charm from Chris? Keep.

In an alternate timeline, I save the charm. I stumble across the Facebook posts during my lunch break. Each time I hit refresh, they multiply. I tag him in a picture from prom, so people know. RIP miss you Chris. I pen the details for the upcoming memorial in my planner.

I return to my old bedroom, locate the charm in the plastic tackle box where I store retired jewelry. I bury it in my fist, feel the tips of its wings dig into my palm.

At his memorial, I wear it on a sterling silver chain instead of knotted hemp. I approach his family, brandish the charm like a VIP pass. Of course I kept it. 

I see familiar faces, greet them with nods or hugs. I’m the type to keep in touch with old friends, eager to reminisce. Wasn’t expecting a highschool reunion so soon, someone says. We swap stories, seamlessly weave together the past through laughter and tears. Hey, remember our bonfire jams? Yo that Flaming Lips show was fire. Show off our NA recovery chips. I’ll have six months in February. One year for me.

In this version, he’s won the race to the end, the only one to cross the finish line. Awarded the most tears shed, crowned as my muse. I cherish my participation medal. Wear it around my neck in remembrance, on a silver chain.

◊

My eighteenth birthday. The night retains just enough of the afternoon heat to make the air feel like a warm bath. Plush grass cushions my back, prickles my shoulders.

I grip the flimsy plastic handle of a neon green butterfly net, wave my arm into the night sky. The stars are dancing fireflies, elusive, impossible to catch. They tease, blink on and off, beckon us to pursue. The brightest one leads us to the edge of a cliff. I peer down into nothingness, one foot firmly planted in the dirt, the other flirting with the edge. Solid ground or reality in its purest form?

I summon my wings, jump into the stars.

When the spell wears off, we turn into ghosts.

◊

I never recover the bird charm.

I miss his memorial service. I never reach out to his family. I briefly consider sending his mom and dad the awkward prom photos taken in our backyard, but I’m not sure how they’d be received. Our time together so brief, too insignificant to warrant a reemergence in the lives of those closest to him. Just one summer out of his twenty-three. I barely talk about him at all, with anyone.

As if he were never here. As if he doesn’t count.

◊

Just one boy out of many. One summer out of thirty and counting. The charm a piece of metal, mass-produced and cast into the shape of a tiny bird.

Chris isn’t the one that got away, the great love of my life, or even my first—it doesn’t take a decade of hindsight to see that. But that summer, I believe he could be. And so I write down everything I want to remember, on those wide-ruled pages with the pale blue lines. Each entry becomes a way back in.

We’re trapped in the space in-between, traveling with more bags than we can carry. Riding the track towards the only future we can imagine. I stand at the edge of a cliff, look out into the starless night. Feet planted, no longer enchanted. From here, I can almost feel the warmth of that summer radiating through the shadow of what will come to pass. Almost, but never quite.

◊

I want to dip early from prom to attend a friend’s afterparty, where booze will be plentiful. But he insists on staying for at least one slow dance.

I step gently into this moment, a ghost from the future, and approach my younger self. I plead with her to wait out the Top 40 dance hits, that the party and booze can wait another half hour. She doesn’t hear me.

After a song or two, the boy, perhaps sensing her restlessness, agrees to leave. He takes her hand. They disappear without saying goodbye.

Dhaea Kang is from Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, So to Speak Journal, Passengers Journal, and The Grief Diaries.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL by E. A. Farro

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

PACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL by E. A. Farro

E. A. Farro
PACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL

Minnesota State Capitol May 2018 the last weekend of the legislative session

No one likes conflict, but with the smack of a fist I am a million particles of brilliant light.  However, tonight, I’m taking the punches. The letter is a direct threat, a blunt whack to the nose. I haven’t been home for dinner in days, and I can’t remember what it feels like to help my boys into their pajamas. I’m tired and mad and for a moment frozen in place. It’s Friday, well past the mid-May sunset. As the Governor’s advisor, my life has been reduced to a countdown to the end of the legislative session Sunday at midnight.

I jump up and look into the hallway of quarter-sawn oak doors. Realizing I’m barefoot, I grab heels from my bottom desk drawer.

The door cracks open: Tenzin’s long black hair and heart-shaped face. She pulls me in.

“When we look back, won’t it be obvious this was another Flint?” I say.

“We shouldn’t negotiate,” she winds her arms into the thin wool of her white shawl.

I smile, relieved that at least she and I won’t be battling each other.

Tenzin grew up as a Tibetan refugee in India, where she pulled water from a well that ran dry in summer. I don’t have to convince her that safe drinking water is a choice we make over and over.

When she immigrated in high school, I was finishing college. I admire her political instincts, and though she’s my younger sister’s age, she mentors me. In our jobs advising the Governor, our peers are our best mentors. It is too hard to trust the motives of anyone else.

“Their constituents don’t believe drinking fertilizer can kill babies?” I ask.

“It isn’t about that,” Tenzin shakes her head. I notice the big circles under her eyes. I wonder if I look as worn out as she does. Maybe worse.

“Studies show links to cancer in adults, too,” I say.

“They need a win,” she says, and hands me a bowl of candy bars. All I taste is sugar and salt. I picture the House and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairs dragging dead carcasses down their main streets.

The letter offers the Governor the choice to either sign today their bill that guts his signature buffer law protecting rivers and lakes or, if he doesn’t sign, they will kill his new rule to protect rural drinking water.

Our phones buzz and we look into our palms. The Governor. He wants a draft response.

“I’ll take the first shot,” I say and run out. Agriculture is Tenzin’s portfolio, but the miasma of Buffers, a regulation that doesn’t go far enough for Enviros and goes too far for Ag—that is mine.

I dash downstairs into a deserted hall of the Capitol to sit on a bench. A gargoyle on the base of a lamp gives me a I-just-bit-a-lemon face. To get close enough to knock the wind out of them, I write longhand.

“I am shocked and—” I cross out the words. I used that phrase only a month ago.

“I’m appalled that you are holding a hearing so that you can deny rural Minnesotans their rights to clean and safe water.” The words flow now from the ether of the building.

I run back up and edit as I type. Print. Read aloud. Edit. Repeat.

Tenzin sits at my computer adding her own words. We pass the keyboard back and forth, no laughter, no swears. We’re channeling something deeper. Together, our fists joined for ultimate impact.

◊

To pack from the kitchen: Cut fruit, cut veggies, cheddar cheese. Note: Slicing these gives a sense of control.

I’m tired. I hurt like I did a double shift of my high school waitressing job. I’d woken at five a.m. churning the hundreds of faces I passed in the rotunda yesterday, the tens of people I met with, the endless emails I pounded out responses to. Now, I take in the sounds of my young boys playing a game of sea creatures. I take in the smell of coffee and toast. I need to go back to the Capitol. It is Saturday morning, and I’ll likely be gone until Monday. I have to pack.

“I found the Lego!” my younger son runs into my room. He looks at me, his face falls. He’s been warned not to wake me. I motion with my hand and pull him close, breathe his warmth. As far as work-life balance goes, right now it’s all work. He rubs his cheek against mine like we’re bolts of silk.

My older son comes in, “Mama?” he says, but the question in his voice dies off. I sit on the edge of the bed. Both boys hold onto me. I lean into their wild curls sticking up in all directions. I’m tethered. There are things I pack without realizing it. Tenderness I will discover later and marvel at, but that kind of unpacking won’t happen until I leave the job.

“When did you get home?” my older boy asks.

“Late,” I shrug.

◊

To pack from your room: Sweatpants to go under suit dress, toothbrush, and toothpaste.

I transform before I get out of my car. Last minute item to pack: my smile. Really, most facial expressions. Along with these I pack my desire for a family bike ride, a video call with my niece, coffee with friends, curling up with a book.

I’m usually quick to smile and quick to cry. Good news or bad, it hits me like vinegar on baking soda. But at the Capitol I keep to a narrow range of emotions. The rest I put in the trunk of my car.

◊

To pack from the camping section of the basement: Sleeping pad and pillow.

An invisible umbilical cord reels me down the hill. The sun is out, and the white marble of the building almost hurts to look at. The circle of eagles around the capitol dome look ready to break free.

I start up the wide marble stairs to the main doors, realize it will be like an airport terminal in a snowstorm. The waiting lobbyists and activists will want updates. At the Capitol, information is currency. Its distribution forms and breaks bonds. I weigh the balance of engaging versus avoiding. Engaging could avoid misunderstandings, keep the lines of communication open.

The State Capitol has the fishbowl effect of high school: too many people smashed together. Like high school, clothing is a coded language that signals who you are. Fresh and in style, corporate or philanthropy. Outdated suits that smell of sweat, lobbyists or legislators. People in jeans, fleece vests, or leather jackets, advocates for everything from stopping mines to preventing helmet laws. Older people in coordinated outfits, tourists.

One weapon of the majority is to set the schedule and not share it. This morning both House and Senate members have a roll call. But after? Bills could come to the floor for votes. Or leadership could go into a room to slam together their giant spitball. This mega-bill, the omnibus-omnibus, will combine all program funding and cuts with all policy changes in all areas. Immigration policy with chronic wasting disease in deer with wastewater treatment. A shit show. If you know the schedule, you know when you can nap and eat. Exhaustion and hunger erode resolve, make what was not possible before, possible. Members of the minority party are forced into battle with their own bodies. At some point closing your eyes becomes more important than anything else.

I veer away from the main steps and go in the unadorned doors of the ground floor. Bare limestone walls, no vines or branches decorating them. My right eyelid thrashes, refusing to let me ignore my exhaustion.

Will we negotiate? If they can pull at the Governor’s heartstrings, if they are respectful, if they sit face-to-face with him—I don’t want to think about it. I’ve seen him fold and heard worse.

I don’t know I’m holding my breath until I enter my office. I notice sticky honey stains on the shoulder of my dress. I’m ambivalent about washing off these paw prints of my boys.

Hearing excited chatter I step into the hall. My colleagues are watching Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding.

“Serena Williams!”

“Elton John!”

“Oprah!”

We wonder at the whimsical hats and the Gothic buildings of Windsor Castle. “Scones and clotted cream outside the Communication offices!” a colleague shouts. A TV on the other side of the room shows House members assembling, but I turn away to watch the thousands of waving flags. A surge of energy comes from across the ocean. It’s a tailgating party.

◊

To pack from the secret code passed on by the Cabinet Members: Honey Badger Don’t Care.

Tenzin and I, we have the perspective of being outside the state agencies and seeing them from a bird’s eye view. The group of agency leaders seated at Tenzin’s table, they have the institutional knowledge.

“If we offer them—” an agency leader starts. He is lean, strong, and feral. His hair speckled gray and cheeks hollowed with the first tinge of old age. When he agrees with us, he is the best. If he doesn’t agree, he smiles and then he does what he wants. He and I’ve been in a game of cat and mouse all session.

“No,” Tenzin cuts him off.

“We need to offer something,” the leader from another agency says. He’s well-groomed, but not flashy. Always polite. Refined. He speaks in a quiet voice, only his urgency to jump in betrays his anxiety in this moment.

I stand up, pull on my suit jacket, say nothing, and maintain eye contact. To honey badger is a verb. All I need to do is be still. No scowls. More importantly, no smiles. If my poker-faced is pulled correctly taut, their threats and laughter will ding like hail on a metal bucket.

“They’re blackmailing us,” I finally say. The music from the Royal Wedding floats through the half-open door. For a moment, I entertain a fantasy of stealing the box of scones and jar of clotted cream. I’d hide in a closet and eat them one by one. I can’t imagine any place I’d rather be.

“They need a win!” an agency lawyer shouts. Her smile mismatched to her exasperation.

“This isn’t a game. It’s public health,” I snap. I remind myself: arguing back is weakness; we are a team regardless of our anger or belligerence.

Those motherfuckers, I think, their blackmail will break us apart.

“Anna, they have to have something to show. They can’t go home without another shot at the environment,” the refined one says in his calm voice.

The honey badger instinct is natural with opponents. To do it with my own inner circle sends prickles of heat across my body. If I am inert steel, he will become anxious. We are animals made to mirror each other. I let his words sour in the air. Politics is a war of endurance.

The honey badger, Mellivora capensis in Latin, also known as the ratel, a name used for a seventies South African armored military vehicle that combines mobility with firepower, has a literal thick skin. It can withstand bee stings, porcupine quills, machete blows, and animal bites. In a meme, after a honey badger is bitten by a poisonous snake, it passes out, wakes up, and goes back to eating. That is who I need to be.

The Governor’s cabinet hadn’t initially wanted him to unleash a new environmental regulation. They knew it would be a battle, and they would be on the front lines. They’ve traveled the state and fought for it, but I still don’t trust their impulses. With the administration ending, we are all on edge. All about to be on the job market.

Tenzin jumps in, “The Governor was crystal clear, we’re not negotiating. None of you are to negotiate. He sent his response, and now we wait.”

“Of course. We all get it.” The feral one starts up, “We aren’t negotiating. But we need to be ready. Really, this part of the law—”

“It’s not worth keeping if we have to lose something else,” the lawyer jumps in. She giggles in apology. As soon as she goes quiet, her face pinches back to its pained look.

“How is the Commissioner?” I ask. The Ag Commissioner’s daughter passed away only days ago. Earlier in the week, we’d stood in the back of a crowded room, crying for someone we’d never met. Someone who meant something to us because of how we feel about the Commissioner.

No one plasters a smile on their face now. “It’s hard,” the lawyer says.

◊

To pack from the children: Green ninja warrior figure so they will stop fighting over it.

Back in my office, the shouts, songs, and clatter of footsteps come through the walls of the Rotunda. The sound carries, but the marble and oak distort the words. I imagine this is what it would sound like to listen to someone else’s dream. I stand at my desk. I have no hunger, no need for sleep, no memory of bathing wiggly children, wrapping them in towels, or drying their curls. All that is distant. Here I’m part of a different and larger organism. I feel something in my dress pocket and pull out a plastic ninja. I place it on my computer to watch over me.

I’m alert to the ping ping of texts and emails dashing through air currents. The House debates a bill to dismantle government programs on my officemate’s TV. The Senate votes to overrule a Judge with legislation on my TV. My officemate’s phone rings, then stops, my phone rings. I check the number, look across the room to my officemate, and we pass a knowing look between us. A lemon-twisted smile. Neither of us answer.

Without warning I think of the blue sky outside, the way jokes with a four-year-old are silly, not cynical. I flip the telescope the other way. The room gets very small, words on the page ants. The State Capital and everything in it is tiny.

I pour a rainbow of Skittles into my hand, take a breath, and slowly force the telescope around so the photographs of my boys blur and the room snaps into focus.

I’m at the printer when the feral one walks by. “Oh, hey Anna.” His smiles verges on flirtatious. A habit from lobbying, and nothing to do with me.

“So, what have you been up to?” I ask.

“Well we were talking to the Chairman, and he likes our idea. Really, what we have to give up isn’t a big deal.”

“You were talking to the Chairman?”

“We were just talking. It’s good to keep the lines open.”

With the impact a wind rushes through my head.

◊

Things you will not realize you are packing until months later: Smiling in professional settings unless it is a strategic tool, public tears, the existence of children in professional conversation, any suggestion that it is not normal to work without knowing when you will go home.

I trail behind my boss, Eliza, into Tenzin’s office. She wears a polka dot sweater and holds a polka dot water bottle in one hand. The cuteness of dots is in stark contrast to the way she stands with her legs wide, hands on hips, eyebrows arched.

I look at Tenzin but she shows nothing.

“Did you get clear instructions from the Governor to not negotiate?” Eliza looks directly at each of the agency leaders.

“I think my staff has also said this to you today. So, tell me, why are you talking to Committee Chairs?”

“We weren’t negotiating. We were just talking. It’s good to keep open the lines—” The feral one talks fast.

“Well whatever you call it, let me be clear. If the Governor wants you to do something, he’ll tell you.” She walks out with an audible sigh of disgust.

“Anna?” The refined one bites at my name. “What the fuck are you trying? What the fuck is going on? This doesn’t fucking make any sense.” I match Tenzin’s blank face though I feel a surge in my body. Fists clench.

I think of the time this man and I drove to the western suburbs to spend an afternoon with a recently retired CEO of a Fortune 500. It was an icy winter and halfway up the steep mansion driveway the car stopped. As if we could will it with our bodies, we both groaned, but the car slid back into the street. We tried again, slid back. Finally, we laughed and gave in. In it together, we parked on the street with no other parked cars and no sidewalks, and we walked up to the door uncertain of what to expect.

Now, the tension comes off him like a crackling electric fence. Something in me shifts. I’ve always told myself that I’m just the Governor’s messenger. But this, this moment, it’s like when my brother jumped onto the seesaw and sent me flying into the air with the smack of the wood plank on my bottom. This man, he’s never been my friend. None of them have.

I take a breath and say to myself, “Honey badger don’t care.” Because my heart is thudding and my head is roaring inside, I walk out. I stand against the cold marble bathroom walls until it all settles. Until I can send it all up the hill to the trunk of my car where the rest of me is packed away.

Honey badger don’t care, because honey badger knows the prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

E. A. Farro is a climate scientist who spent several years working in politics. She is the founder of The Nature Library, a literary art installation in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her publications have appeared in Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, and The Normal School, among others. She is a recipient of a Nan Snow Emerging Writers Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an Excellence in Teaching Fellowship at the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series award. She teaches public policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and creative writing at the Loft Literary Center.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Emily Steinberg
Men O Pause

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For over a thousand years, menopause has been treated as an illness, something to be feared and fixed. Emily Steinberg’s Men O Pause visualizes the grim history of the treatment and attitudes towards menopausal women throughout history, from the Salem Witch Trials to 19th-century institutionalization for hysteria, to menopause medicalization in the early 20th century. The story ends with her own positive experience of empowerment and self-actualization. In 2021, not only do we no longer need to be ‘fixed,’ but we are quite happy to be living outside the realm of women’s historical natural function.

—Caroline Harris, from M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Flint Books, UK

“Men O Pause” was previously published in M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Ed. Caroline Harris, Flint Books, UK 2020

Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative. Her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE by Tricia Park

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Tricia Park
THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE

The other evening, on my way home from a violin recital in Gangnam, I missed a step and fell in the Seoul subway station. I caught myself on my hand, twisting my wrist. I fell hard on my foot, sprained my ankle, and skinned my knee. And because I was walking downstairs instead of up, there was a moment of full-fledged, disorienting fear; a moment when the earth underneath me vanished.

In the aftermath, the only sound was the echo of footsteps slowing down on the platform. People stopped to stare but no one offered to help or asked if I was okay. On a torrentially rainy day a few weeks prior, I’d slipped on some water in a different subway station, near an escalator. The same reaction: people stared at me as if I were mad, as if I were a crazy person. As if I’d fallen on purpose. As if there were something wrong with me.

Later, when I mentioned it to my Korean friends, they laughed: “don’t worry, no one will remember you behind your mask.”

In this city of nearly ten million people, I’m invisible most days. On this day, I was finally visible but only because I was a spectacle. I scrambled up as quickly as I could, but I was dazed and embarrassed. And hurt.

◊

Five months ago, at the Incheon airport, the scene at the immigration line was sheer chaos. We’d been waiting for three hours by then, in a room that was loud and hot as we stood, exhausted, clutching folders thick with documents and test results. Several young men dressed head to toe in white hazmat suits and goggles shouted at us in Korean to download an app we needed to pass through immigration. The scene was dystopian and overwhelming, especially after the peaceful cocoon of the plane. There’d only been twenty-nine passengers on the 747 aircraft from New York, and four of us carried violin cases.

I was too bewildered and tired to cry, though I did cry, copiously, at JFK. I felt guilty and ashamed for leaving on this adventure in the middle of a global pandemic that had claimed the lives of more than 3.5 million people.

Suddenly, a middle-aged woman collapsed onto the floor. She carried a heavy backpack, and a jacket was tied around her waist. No one did anything, said anything. We all just stared. Airport officials stared at her, too, crawling on the floor, not moving to help. I caught a glimpse of her eyes. They were unfocused and glazed over. She didn’t appear to have anyone with her, or at least, no one that claimed to know her. We watched her crawl around the floor for a good five minutes before, finally, someone thought to get her a chair. Someone thought to bring her a glass of water.

◊

Being Korean American in Korea is challenging, just like being Korean American in America is challenging. The details are different, but the feeling is the same. It’s the feeling of being conspicuously alone in a uniquely foreign yet familiar country. Because to be fair, while I don’t feel like I belong here, I also don’t feel like I belong in America, either. And in the absence of belonging, I’m a constant observer, an outsider looking in, longing for inclusion and not ever being quite “right.” In America, I sound right, but I look wrong. In Korea, I look right, but I sound wrong.

Being part of the diaspora means always floating, forever looking for a place to land, a place to call home. Perhaps that place doesn’t exist. Maybe homecoming isn’t really possible. Maybe it’d be easier in a completely foreign country, where I didn’t speak the language or know anything about the culture and, most importantly, where there’d be little to no expectations of me to assimilate. I would still feel the pain of loneliness, but minus this unique pressure of feeling like I ought to belong.

◊

Talking about loneliness makes people uncomfortable. I imagine it like a cloud of body odor; when you meet someone who stinks, you avoid them, but you also never tell them that they stink. Similarly, when you meet someone who reeks of loneliness, you walk away, disturbed by the invisible need that oozes off them. The chronically lonely feel stigmatized: the concept of the “loner” or the “loser” is deeply embedded in our culture. If you’re lonely, people assume something is wrong with you.

Loneliness is cloaked in shame, even as research shows that the rise of urbanization, single-person households, and the disintegration of meaningful community all contribute to a growing social construct that makes loneliness and alienation not the exception but the rule. In general, single people living in urban centers are lonelier than people who live communally in lower-density or rural areas.

Loneliness is pervasive, reaching across various demographics. In 2019, 61% of Americans admitted they were lonely and 22% said they were often or always lonely. 44% of the elderly are lonely and while 50% of my generation, Gen X-ers, confessed to chronic loneliness, that percentage rises with each generation, with millennials seeming to be the loneliest of all.

Another article mentions seven ways to alleviate loneliness. I do most of them on a regular basis: I make small talk with strangers, I reach out to friends, I avoid social media, I get to know my neighbors, I invite people over, I engage in creative activity (hello, I’m writing this damned essay, aren’t I?). And while these steps alleviate the loneliness temporarily, in the long run, they aggravate my alienation.

Because what I want, what I miss, is daily connection that I don’t have to initiate, with someone I can fully trust. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt that kind of closeness. But it seems this is more than I can have and too much to ask, even with the most well-meaning and loving of my family and friends. Daily connection, while fine for other, luckier, and possibly more worthy folks, seems not possible for me.

(Oh, I forgot to mention, the one thing on that list of seven things that I can’t seem to get a hold of: human touch.)

So, I’ve concluded that I’m just too much. I want too much. I’m too greedy, I guess.

◊

Social scientists define loneliness as a liminal space, the distance between the connection one desires and what one is actually experiencing. In other words, loneliness is the gap between what you want and what you have. It’s the distance between the ideal closeness one longs for and the closeness (or lack thereof) that one experiences. It’s the pain of that distance that makes every interaction feel like rejection.

In the struggle to find a “cure” this is the one constant: loneliness is subjective and hard to quantify. It’s a sliding scale of intimacy that varies from person to person, situation to situation, making loneliness a very difficult thing to address and heal, let alone define unilaterally. Because one can be completely alone and be perfectly content while another may be surrounded by people and feel loneliness like a stab to the heart.

Indeed, the effects of loneliness are physical. Lighting up the same parts of the brain that react to physical pain, loneliness registers as a supremely palpable wound. Chronic loneliness is linked to increases in many health risks, including heart disease, dementia, depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances. Loneliness is also an indicator of premature death, since lacking social connection is a bigger risk factor for early mortality than obesity and is the equivalent of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

But suddenly, the Covid pandemic made it okay to be lonely. Loneliness was normalized and for once, I felt like I belonged. Ironically, my internal sense of loneliness dissipated as the global loneliness spread. I wasn’t alone and no one expected me to be okay.

Because really, it’s about belonging. Loneliness can be especially potent for immigrants, the elderly, LGBTQIA+, minority groups, and all people living on the margins. We all have a deep need to belong; this is not a luxury, but in fact, an essential human need. Shame regulates how we behave and the tolerances we construct in our efforts to stay within the tribe.

Belonging is not a trivial matter but of biological importance to wellness and our overall ability to contribute in meaningful ways. When we experience perpetual otherness or outsiderness and then, adding salt to the wound, when these experiences of alienation are ignored or negated, we learn to sublimate our needs and, therefore, our internal compass becomes confused, and I believe this leads to intense self-loathing and internalized hatred, when there isn’t any outward way to resolve this loss.

In other words, in the absence of visibility and acknowledgement, our need to belong is so intense and essential that we will shapeshift to fit the tribe, even if this means we vanish and reject ourselves.

◊

So, what can we do? While all research points towards proactivity—putting yourself out there, making yourself vulnerable to increase the chances of connection—I’m weary of this advice and highly skeptical. Because, at the risk of sounding, truly, like a whiny baby, I have to say that I think I am, more often than not, the one to reach out. But the more I reach out, the more people pull away, increasing the gap between what I want and what I have and, therefore, I feel even lonelier. Over time, I’ve learned to keep my hurt parts hidden from the world, lest someone use this weakness to hurt me later. Better my hurt be in stasis than risk some mortal wound that I will never recover from.

◊

Why am I saying all of this, now, for all to see? After all, people are baffled: But don’t you have a lot of friends? From your Insta, it looks like you’re having a great time! What do you have to complain about? I’m so surprised, you seem to be doing so great. And all of this adds to my shame. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter how it appears, it matters how one feels. One is lonely if one feels lonely, no matter what things look like.

Of course, I don’t want the Covid crisis to continue. I’m deeply relieved that, with vaccines, there’s a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. But I do wonder, selfishly, what this will mean for loneliness, moving forward. Will people sweep it under the rug, this moment of global loneliness and trauma, and whisper: “let us never speak of this again”? Like a regrettable one-night stand? From texts and social media posts about how ecstatic everyone is to be reunited with their friends and loved ones, not to mention the promise of a second coming of the “roaring 20’s” and all the hedonism that may provide, it looks like loneliness is a parenthetical nightmare from which most people will soon escape.

Earlier in the summer, I’d texted my friends: “is it pure bacchanalia there in the US?” I was facetious but also green with envy. “Are you all raw dogging it, maskless and 2019 style?” No, they’d said, not yet, though I wondered if they were just trying to make me feel better. After all, one of them mentioned going out to dinner with her partner only to be flanked on both sides by unlikely revelers; two 50-year-olds necking like horny teenagers at a drive-thru and a pair of flamboyantly drunk middle-aged men, swaying atop their barstools.

◊

An hour-long subway ride later, I arrived at my home station. Hobbling up the stairs, I noticed a huddle of people in the corner. They surrounded a young drunk woman who was vomiting profusely; not an uncommon sight at ten p.m. on any given evening in Seoul. Two friends held her hair back, two others stood guard, drunk and unsteady but, nevertheless, protecting her from the eyes of prying Seoulites. And in that moment, I was envious and bitterly resentful; she had friends to protect her in the midst of her own, self-induced drunkenness.

While I’d done nothing more than miss a step.

The next day my wrist and ankle ballooned, and after a visit to the hospital, I called to cancel a gig. The organizer said nothing but, “how am I supposed to find another violinist on 48 hours’ notice?”

To be fair, I don’t want to vilify the Korean people for what I’ve witnessed in these isolated instances of what, I suppose, can be called a lack of good samaritanism. And because I know that people will be tempted to draw binary conclusions, (after all, we feel better when things fit neatly into a box), I want to be clear and say that my loneliness is a constant in America, too. There are shitty people everywhere: New York, Tokyo, Paris, Sao Paolo. Indifference exists all over the world, different lenses on the same telescope.

And years ago in Manhattan, when I was in a coffee shop with a man that I loved very much, who I thought loved me, too, I saw a woman sobbing. She was young and beautiful and so sad, it hurt my heart. I wanted to hug her, but I hesitated and when I turned around to find her again, she was already gone.

My Korean language teacher explains to me that people were likely respecting my boundaries, trying not to embarrass me with attention. She agrees that this is a cultural difference and empathizes with my culture shock. In truth, there’s also something humiliating about a stranger helping you up; it’s just a different kind of theatre. What I long for is not the kindness of strangers. And, in general, Koreans are wary of strangers, so any unknown person, whether they’re falling downstairs or asking for directions, is regarded with suspicion.

And there’s a part of me that understands this: as a country that, since its inception, has been battered by complicated and ongoing unresolved trauma from generations of invasion, occupation, and dictatorship, a continued US military post-war presence nearly eighty years after the Korean War ended and the constant threat of nuclear and civil war from the North, it makes sense that Koreans are always on high alert. That we always feel threatened.

But then there’s also the halmoni’s, the grandmothers who pick fallen flowers out of my hair and give me candy, praising my Korean when I offer to take their picture for them. “Why are you here all alone?” they ask, and I’m grateful for the attention even as my eyes fill with tears.

This is also part of what it means to be Korean, this jung, this feeling of unspoken connection and profound affection that all Koreans experience and feel for one another. But even this specifically Korean concept is fading, migrating from cities and into the countryside with the tidal wave of neoliberalism and cutthroat competition that makes Seoul a global powerhouse while suffocating its citizens. Nevertheless, jung is what connects Korean people across generations and continents, creating a net of solidarity that transcends time and place. I think this is what happens when there’s the fear of disconnection, when you live in a land that’s always under threat of disintegration. When there’s always the possibility that everything you know will disappear. You find ways to connect, and you cling to them. You learn to make home out of nothing, to house your loneliness.

Tricia Park Author Photo

Tricia Park is a concert violinist, writer, and educator. Since making her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is the host and producer of an original podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia has served on faculty at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and has worked for Graywolf Press. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. She is a Juilliard graduate and received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, Tricia was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Seoul, Korea, where she worked on a literary and musical project. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and F Newsmagazine. She was also a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Tricia has served on faculty at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and has worked for Graywolf Press. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. Currently, Tricia is Associate Director of Cleaver Magazine Workshops where she is also a Creative Non Fiction editor and faculty instructor, teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and maintains a private studio of violin students and writing clients.

Learn more about Tricia at: www.isitrecessyet.com. Listen to Tricia play violin at: https://www.youtube.com/c/triciapark

Cover Design by Karen Rile

EVER GIVEN by Sara Davis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Sara Davis
EVER GIVEN

Because the spring tide comes in on its own time, because the earth goes on turning and the moon goes on circling around us and the ocean eddies unevenly but inevitably between them, because the seawater rises even in the desert latitudes of the world where scorching winds blow dust in the eyes of sailors, the tide came in on the seventh day after the Ever Given lodged slantwise in the throat of the Red Sea like a crust of dry bread. It was because the seawater welled in the deep trench men cut between continents, because the seawater poured into the furrows men scratched into the muddy banks where her bow sank into the sand, because the seawater flowed under and around her steel hull, that this colossal obstruction, this beached vessel vast enough to be seen from space, this ship of shipments simply buoyed up and floated away, as light as the plastic dross she ferries across the world to waiting hands. And so you too can wait, ever grounded and ever grateful, as long as it takes for the tide to lift you out of the mud and clay when all your clawing at the earth cannot.

Sara Davis (@LiterarySara) is a recovering academic and marketing writer who lives in Philadelphia with two elderly cats. Her PhD in American literature is from Temple University. She has previously published essays on food history and culture, and currently blogs about books and climate anxiety at literarysara.net.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

AN UNFULFILLED DREAM by Anika Pavel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Anika Pavel
AN UNFULFILLED DREAM

Through the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, people were buying everything in sight. During a visit to my local supermarket, the empty shelves were familiar. In my youth, in communist Czechoslovakia, empty shelves were a norm, not the result of a pandemic.

A memory flooded in. I had to put my hand over my still unmasked mouth to hide the smile as I joined a line of people waiting for a new supply of toilet paper. I came back to the apartment empty-handed and told my husband how we dealt with toilet paper shortages back then.

Under communism, toilet paper was quite often a scarce item. There was never enough of it to store up, so we used newspapers. We children were tasked with tearing the pages of the newspaper into squares, then crushing them in our hands before putting them into a shoebox that was then taken to the WC and placed within easy reach for the would-be occupant of the throne. The idea was to make the paper softer and to get most of the ink on our hands, which we washed much more often than our behinds.

There were certain pieces, with photographs of the government officials and members of the communist party, that my father kept for himself. And the pages with Brezhnev and his Czechoslovak lackeys’ pictures on them he saved for special occasions. My father was lactose intolerant but loved cheese. Every so often he would bow to the demands of his taste buds, with the predictable results. Then it was Brezhnev and his crew’s time.

My American husband was astonished by my story and rejected the idea on the grounds that the newspaper would block the drains, though I have to say he scored points in my book because he did not object to the idea, in principle, of using the newspaper. Perhaps there were particular politicians he had in mind. There was no doubt in my mind who my Brezhnev and his enablers would be. Thanks to the narrow pipes of our civilized nation, however, such justice has remained but a dream.

Anika Pavel was born Jarmila Kocvarova in Czechoslovakia. She became a refugee when the Soviet Union invaded her homeland. She lived in England, Hong Kong, and Monte Carlo before settling in New York City, where she is a writer. She writes in Slovak and in English. Her short stories have been published in BioStories, Potato Soup Journal, Tint Journal, Nixes Mate Review, and Ariel Chart. Her story “Encounter With The Future” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. More at www.anikapavel.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

cleave. by Courtney Elizabeth Young

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Courtney Elizabeth Young
cleave.

Here are the ways I have heard it happens: in bed, waking to wheezing, breathing in loose clumps lining your pillow. Out with friends, falling into your Cobb salad, your Pinot. In the pool, raking waters in a panic, clawing to clean up the unhinged mess you have become. Wiping sweat away from your brow after removing your garden hat, now filled with clumps. In the conference room, before a presentation, onto your notecards. With windows down, enjoying a summer breeze until you see it in the rearview mirror, whipping and whirling away and out of your car. Fast, far, and away, anywhere and everywhere, because it defies boundaries.

Here is how it happened to me.

I am finished running. There was no sun, but my scalp burns, it itches. I didn’t expect this process to be painful down to the follicles, but it only makes sense. There is always pain when there is an abandon. I am trying to relieve the screaming in my scalp, Ma, so I stand in the shower, palms on either side of the spigot, head bowed in submission.

I knew it was coming, Ma, I saw it thinning all weekend, so I am ready, I promise. I have been walking within a warning, and I will do it right. I am making a proper sacrifice by bathing before a butchering, by washing before an offering. And so, I open my eyes. I see pieces of me that detach, that fall away, that coil around the drain, my tears mix with the water, Ma, pushing them all the way away.

There is a shaking in my hands when I shut off the shower, a shaking as I wrap one towel around myself and when I reach for another. This shaking does not steady nor cede but there is a deadpan I maintain, until I feel an effortless removal, when I pull the dampened towel away.

There is an animal noise that comes from somewhere inside my apartment, Ma, some deep yet distant carnal wailing I cannot track nor translate. There is a widening of my eyes, a tremor growing with violent ferocity. I ride its jagged lightning, flinging the matted mess away from me.

There is a mirror and a spastic swiping of steam, but this is a mirror that is not true, because in it is not me—instead there is a woman I have never seen. The left side of her head is completely bare, Ma, her scalp a pale slice of skin; a raw slab of meat.

This woman in the mirror, Ma, she looks confused. She frowns and I frown back, so I walk away, but she does too. She is following me through my apartment—from the mirror on my door to the mirror above my bed. So I move faster, running to the mirror in my living room, my bathroom, my bedroom, but there she is again and again and again.

I blink at her and she blinks at me. I raise my left hand and so does she. I reach to run my fingers through soft waves, but I feel only a headstone scalp—bald and bare. Then she is panicking, Ma, reaching frantically for hair. She is always reaching for what is no longer there.

This woman, she runs back to the bathroom where she finds the towel she cast aside. She lays it in front of the full-length mirror, her tears a torrent in her eyes. She kneels before it like an altar, with short and choppy breaths—she begs, “no, no, no,” her only prayer a pathetic lament. She lines up lost tresses before her where she sits, and the rest, Ma, she remembers in snips.

There is a shaking hand that calls Aimee, that calls you. There is an earth-quaking voice that manages, “the shaver,” until she goes dashing back to every room. There is the consulting every mirror for a contradiction, but they all tell her the same truth: “the woman in the mirror is you.”

There is the bedroom floor, mirror and altar again. There is the rocking back and forth, eyes oscillating between who she is and who she’s been. There are heels of hands pressed into eye sockets, pads of fingers tapping and padding toward a precipice, shrieking at the feeling of skull through skin.

There is the hair that falls around her from only bowing her head, there is the frantic picking up of pieces, of salvaging severance from stem. There are nail marks that draw blood from fists too tightly clenched, there is trying to make the shards hers again. There is the desperate holding up of them—first to the woman in the mirror, then her mother who walks in.

There is incorrigible sobbing that turns to incoherent blubbering when you find me there, holding up pieces of myself I have lost so that you may see. There is a falling of your face and then your body to your knees as you watch what happens when I cannot let go of what has let go of me. There are my hands, Ma, and then there are yours—yours—reaching for not what I have lost, but for what you have: me.

There are hands, pulling me into you, rocking me as long as I need, my muffled mumblings spit-soaking your shoulder until they cease. Hands holding my face out from yours, wiping my tears instead of your own, your eyes a red-rimmed graveyard of grief. You tell me you’re sorry, tell me you know, tell me to breathe.

There are your hands, not forcibly removing what I am not ready to release, but holding soft a death grip that opens gradually. Your hands, pulling me up when I cannot stand or see, raising my arms above my head, out of this towel and into something warm despite my pleas. Your hands, helping me rip the mirror off the wall to take outside with me, even if you don’t understand why this is something I need to see.

Your hands, I let lead. Into structured slaughter, to the dark dock where the water rushes beneath. Where Aimee takes the mirror and puts it in front of my seat. Where there is a single red rose in a vase upon a table, where there is a candle with a flame that flits in fits but does not flee. Shadows that flicker over a shaver conjure a gnash of teeth, waiting to cut and cleave, and in the dance of light, Ma, I swear it’s smiling at me.

Courtney Elizabeth Young is a 32-year-old rape crisis counselor and sexual assault survivors’ advocate pursuing an MFA at Southern New Hampshire University while in her second battle with triple-negative breast cancer. She has lived on and backpacked six continents and over thirty countries alone so far—but isn’t done yet. A proud owner of both the DRD4 and MAOA gene, she has lived out loud her wild ride through life on everything from cocaine to camels, from crocodiles to cancer. She won the Emerging Writer’s Grand Prize through Elephant Journal, was the featured travel photographer and writer in DRIFT Travel Magazine, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Palooka Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and Tipping the Scales: She Speaks and Hour of Women’s Literature.

Cover Design by Karen Rile