Category Archives: Nonfiction

ODE TO THE RECORD HOLDER by Z. Shuff

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Old basketball goal with blue cloudy sky

ODE TO THE RECORD HOLDER
by Z. Shuff

You will score 135 points in your next high school basketball game. January 26, 1960, is the night it will happen. Hello, hoops history. Guinness Book of World Records, here you come. Your name is Danny Heater, and your record, 135 points, will last. But this does not come as a straight victory. It does not come without problems. And which problem is worse: that your mother missed the game or that you didn’t even get to enjoy your record? Your world record, the one that congeals and permanently attaches itself to you. It’s basketball. It’s a game. But your record makes you proud and embarrassed. It makes you happy and sad.

Burnsville, West Virginia. Your hometown. Population 700. There are fewer than eighty-five boys in your school, and the high school, junior high, and grade school all operate under the same roof. The Bruins’ basketball gym where you play home games is small, twenty feet shorter than a regulation gym. There is no scoreboard in it. You broke your wrists once running into the wall in the tiny gym. You are rangy and tall by comparison when gangling alongside the rows of lockers. Your spiked-up, blond flat top adds an inch or so to your height. You dribble your basketball in the hallways between classes. You are shy, but you smile the best you can at your fellow students.

On January 25, 1960, the night before you set the record, you are practicing your hook shot on your do-it-yourself goal outside your house. Swish. Boom. Two. The weather is typical for the dead of West Virginia winter. Irregular platy scales of the bark of the hardwood trees sheen with frost; trees’ branches bow with snow. But you are outside practicing your hook shots anyway, one after another. Someone alerts Coach Stalnaker, your coach, what you’re doing. Coach Stalnaker drives over and tells you out his car window, don’t be out shooting hook shots in eight inches of snow. He was worried about his skinny superstar.

The next night, in the historic 135-point-run, you will drain six hook shots—three right and three left. These hooks will be 12 of your 135 points.

Before the home game against Widen High School on January 26, your dad, John Curry Heater, an out-of-work coal miner, is sick. You were with your dad the day the doctor told him he had a spot on his lung and his lung might go down. He worked his whole life in the coal mine until this past year.

Your mom, Beaulah, is your biggest fan. She keeps a scrapbook on you and cuts out the parts of articles that she doesn’t like. She never misses one of your basketball games before or since, but she misses this one. On this night, she knows the home game against the Widen team will be a blowout.  She is right about that. “They probably won’t even need to put you in,” she says before you go to your game. With your dad being sick, she stays home with him.

Your sister is at a nearby hangout at tip-off. They put you in the game, all right. You are going to be in the papers. “Hotter than your last name Heater,” the Charleston Daily Mail will imply, a couple of days down the road.

In the locker room right before the warm-up, Coach Stalnaker tells you and your teammates Luther and Harold and Charlie and Donnie the game plan. The reason for the plan is to get you publicity, maybe even to get you a scholarship, because the Jerry West–famous WVU Mountaineers basketball program has not even given you a look see. And you are the poorest kid on the team, and a scholarship is your only chance at college. This will make them notice.

You and the other boys listen, lined up and matching in your Bruins uniforms. Tight orange jerseys and short shorts trimmed in black. Tube socks à la Jerry West reach your knees. The game plan is this: feed the ball to Danny (that’s you) every time. “I’ll never ask you boys to do this again,” says coach.

You could go for the state scoring record of seventy-four points in a game. Maybe you can break it. You don’t want to do it, but your teammates and the coach want you to. You say no. “No, no,” you say. Pick someone else, you say. You ask every guy on the team, “Will you get mad?”

“Go for it,” they say. They had to convince you to do it.

The first couple minutes of the first quarter, you don’t even shoot.

“Shoot, shoot,” say the guys.

“Time out,” calls your coach, forming a “T” with his hands. So you go back out there after the timeout, and you shoot. You shoot again and again. The basket slurps the ball. Up climbs the score, and your points total by unmarqueed ones and twos in the scoreboard-less gym. For a moment, the other team (Widen—whose school is smaller than your own) can’t even get the ball in-bounds because you steal it over and over and score rapid layups, bang-bang-bang at almost automatic rifle–like pace.

At halftime, some fans go up to the score table to ask how many points you have. You have fifty-five. The state record is seventy-four. Someone gets your sister from the hangout, and she comes to the game. Early in the second half, you break the state record. Coach calls a timeout to pull you off the wood rectangle where tonight, you could do no wrong. Your teammates say leave you in to go for the national record of 120. You do.

The other team’s cheerleaders included, the spectators shout out your points total each time you ace another basket in the no-scoreboard gym. “100! 105!”   You score 120 and points above; points above as useful as swords in a gunfight.

Burnsville 173 to Widen 43 is the final score. Your stats: 135 points, 32 rebounds, and 7 assists.

The fans swarm the court after the game. Your sister hugs you.

“Congratulations,” the fans say. “Congratulations,” say players from Widen. You shake hands. You go to a local hangout with the gang and have Cokes. Your 135 points goes into the Guinness Book. “Danny Heater,” the book heralds. You top Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points scored in an NBA game in 1962, and your record holds for points scored in a high school basketball game for over fifty years and counting. You are it, the record holder. 135 points—that is you.

You go home and tell your mom that night, but she already knows. The coach calls in the score to the newspaper. “Goddammit,” the sports editor tells the coach. He didn’t believe him. Danny Heater’s enduring superlative crystallizes into national news. It will make its way to the Jerry West–famous program and to the ear of a Virginia state senator.

The day after the record, on January 27, 1960, you have a game against Tanner High. You jump ball but come down hard on your ankle. You roll it. You play ten minutes and get twenty-one.

Thursday the twenty-eighth, this is the sports headline: “Plan for Heater Worked. Wanted Publicity for Scholarship.” The story starts this way, and it doesn’t get better: “Is it justifiable to beat a hapless, outmanned high school basketball team by 130 points with the expressed intention of obtaining a college scholarship for the star of the winning team?”  Your mom might as well cut out the whole article.

The next week, the scout comes, the one from the Jerry West–famous WVU. Your ankle hurts. You can’t jump on it. You don’t play well. The scout says, “Good shot you got there, son,” to you after the game. “Boy was slow,” he tells your coach, and no scholarship offer materializes.

You hadn’t wanted to do it. It was not your idea. They had to talk you into it. You’re a good kid, at least your coach and English teacher say so. Even Coach Stover, from the opposing Widen High, says you’re a good kid, too. “One of the best around these parts,” he tells the Charleston Daily Mail. “It was pretty difficult to take, though,” he says.

Thirty years later, the Washington Post says of the night, “on the other side of things, it didn’t feel like high school history, it felt like raw, open slaughter.” That’s another part for your mom’s scissors.

So no WVU basketball fame comes your way, but a college opportunity does. The retired Virginia senator who hears about you arranges for you to get a chance.  He gets you a grant to attend the University of Richmond and play basketball. But your college stint didn’t begin until second semester. Another January day in West Virginia, your cousin Jake drives your family to the Greyhound station. Your mother crying, you leave. You are crying, too. You do this, in fact, for the next eight hours of the trip to Richmond.

The team was already set when you got there to the Richmond Spiders basketball team, and they gave you a uniform three sizes too big.  You get in a few games and score a little bit.

But you are backward and homesick and lonely. They make fun of your accent. You don’t know your way around campus. You don’t last at the college chance.   

◊

Years after the record you’re a family man, and you work for an airline at Washington Reagan. You get up at 3:45 every morning to get to your job by 5:30. You work overtime to buy your kids’ birthday presents. Your daughter writes an essay about you called “Dad.” In it, she portrays you as strong and unbreakable and generous. Your son says that you’re the best father. It hurts that you can’t afford their college.

You run into coach Stalnaker at Reagan. You take him to the VIP lounge and treat him like a king. “He never wanted to show off,” says Coach Stalnaker all these years down the road, explaining your finesse with the basketball and ways you could have shown off if you’d wanted to.

And you don’t like to talk about it, the record, your 135 points, that night in the gym with no scoreboard. That night when you shot and shot. You worked hard at those hook shots, just as you work hard every day at your job. “He goes out of his way to help people,” says your boss at Washington Reagan. Your boss admits you make his shifts easier. “I’m grateful for him,” he says.

Good kid, hard worker, good dad, not a show-off. These are the things that time will tell about you. You should get to feel heroic about your high achieving score, your world record. It’s basketball. It’s a game. A guy like you deserves heroic.

Your teenage granddaughters play basketball. They like your record. They delight in it; they’re proud.  And that helps because family is everything to you. They get to be proud even if you are proud and embarrassed. Even if you are happy and sad.

Zekana Shuff author photoZekana Shuff has an MD and an MFA. She lives and works as a physician in beautiful West Virginia with her husband, their two kids, their dog, and their cat. Her medical writing has appeared in various medical journals. She has lectured on art at a national medical conference and at her MFA. program. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a handful of literary journals in print and online, including in this summer’s edition of Storyscape.

 

 

Image credit:  Mitch Geiser on Unsplash

 

 

BEFORE ROSES MEANT FIRE by Kathryn Nuernberger

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Pink, purple, and orange rose in harsh lighting

BEFORE ROSES MEANT FIRE
by Kathryn Nuernberger

A rose means many things, and only some of it is love. Desdemona means innocence. Sir Galahad, humility. Give Dainty Bess to show appreciation. Silver Shadow for admiration. You Only Live Once for gratitude. Eleanor is the lavender of love at first sight. So too is the plum of Night Owls. The Middlesbrough Football Club is the cultivar for desire and enthusiastic passion. Its particular shade of orange is as ridiculous as a riot. Red as Satchmo, red as Happy Christmas, red as City of Leeds. Red means enduring passion. From the beginning a rose meant there was an old poet who thought himself unreasonably clever and was obsessed with the virginity of much younger women. From the same, but less quoted beginning, roses meant fire.

Before roses meant fire, Dorothea, according to this and that lying storyteller of a medieval historian, was taken before a judge and tortured for the witchcraft of refusing to marry a powerful man. And then tortured for the witchcraft of returning from the tub of boiling oil unharmed. And subsequently for surviving unmarked for nine days in a deep prison without food or drink. For saying she was fed on the succor of God’s angels. For being fairer and brighter to look upon than ever before. For the descent of a multitude of angels and the sound of the demon fiends in the air wailing, “O Dorothy why dost thou destroy us and torment us so sore?” She was hanged on the gibbet. And rent with hooks of iron. On and on it went, graphic and strangely erotic, as the martyrologia always are. What more proof could a judge possibly need? It is helpful to remember her crime was never that she displayed too little of her power. Near the end of her trial, which was also the beginning of her punishment, she gave a very long speech about faith in God that only a priest could love. The judge asked, “How long wilt thou drag us along with thy witchcraft?” She answered, “I am ready to suffer for my lord, my spouse, in whose gardeyne full delicious I have gaderd rosis and apples.” Then she bowed her head, and the man cut it off.

She bowed her head, and the man cut it off, but not before Theophilus, a notary of Rome, mocked her by asking for roses and apples from her spouse’s garden even though it was midwinter. Further along her path to the place of execution, a child with star-filled eyes came to her carrying a basket with three roses and three apples. She sent the boy to find Theophilus. To convert him and save his soul and set him on his own path to glorious martyrdom, the fifteenth-century account claims. But you could also say she was trolling him. In any event, by this miracle the city of Caesarea in Cappadocia, which is in present-day Turkey, was converted and saved. A reassuring story Christians told themselves about a faraway place to which their soldiers set forth on crusades even as heretics at home began to burn in ever greater numbers. In this way it reminds me very much of our war, our president, our police beating batons against their shields as they chant through body armor and face masks, “Whose streets? Our streets.” It reminds me of every headline in the paper every morning of this year or that one. For preaching of Dorothy’s miracle in the streets, Theophilus was cut into small pieces and fed to the birds. For reasons that are unclear to me, considering she was decapitated, not burned, Dorothy was named a special protectress against fire, lightening, and thundering. For reasons that are unclear to me, the Church has decreed we take comfort in this tale. That we conclude there is nothing to fear on God’s green earth, everything is coming up roses.

Everything is coming up roses, Sir John Mandeville said, in another fifteenth-century collection of marvelous and chiefly untrue accounts of far travels. In Bethlehem, he wrote, a woman was sentenced to burn for consorting with demons. She professed her innocence with the fervency of a Desdemona in full bloom. She prayed to the lord as if she were offering a bouquet of Eleanors. When she entered her pyre, the branches that had been licking flames became boughs laden red with Happy Christmas, the branches not yet ignited became boughs of blossoms as white as the Sir Galahad. “And those were the first roses and rosers that any man saw, and thus was the mayden saved through the grace of God.” I love thinking of how those tongues of flame fell down sweet and lovely and harmless. I love thinking of how a mob could never be the same after seeing something like that. What could a crowd become after witnessing such a gentle miracle but a participatory democracy with socialist economic policies? Who could be anything other than patient with the eccentricities and shortcomings of their neighbors when their eyes and hearts had been so touched by divine mercy?

Who could be anything other when their hearts had been so touched? I am quite impatient these days with shortcomings and everything else, so I will pull the Band-Aid quickly. The Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, like the Martyrologium of the Catholic Church, are propaganda, sometimes for a crusade, sometimes for an inquisition, the colonization of a continent or the enslavement of a people. By Mandeville’s account, the place of this miracle is a great lake of rose bushes that stretch as far as the eye can see. Many crusaders clipped huge blossoms of the damask as their horses waded through. At the edge of the field you will find “the place where our Lord was born, that is full well dight of marble, and full richly painted with gold, silver, azure…” What a satisfying tale this is, some will say—God turned even that humble stable into a pile of money. The roses too are nothing more than a very old version of the prosperity gospel sermons that promise the world is already as God wishes it to be. If you are prosperous, the stories assure, it is not for you to worry. Because the Lord will know you by how your roses all turned into dollars that turned into that particular way of dressing and speaking and casting up or down your eyes that seems as holy as providence itself, and which turned then into additional roses. It is worth noting that Roman emperors all used rose water as a form of currency; sometimes it was as precious as gold, sometime more. But don’t despair, history is not all lies—the part about the fire is real.

The part about the fire is as real as the Persian legend told here and there throughout the archives: the rose is red because the nightingale so dearly loved a white rose. He embraced it with ardor. Thorns pierced the bird’s breast. The blood of his broken heart turned the white petals to a deep crimson. In another tale the foam that dripped from Aphrodite as she emerged from the sea turned into white roses. the tears she shed over the body of her beloved Adonis turned them red. In the Gulistan Saadi tells the story of a wise man who became “immersed in the ocean of divine presence.” When he returned to himself, a friend asked, “From the flower garden where thou wast, what miraculous gift has thou  brought for us?” He answered that he meant to fill his lap with rose trees, but, “When I arrived there the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated me that the skirt of my robe slipped from my hand.” This is a reflection on the unreal world to which our souls have, it is said, determined to fly. Perhaps this is why roses that have been cultivated so hard look like they are trying to prove something. People point to them in stained glass windows and mystic poetry as sign posts toward a life more real than this one. But have you ever seen a rosebush withering away of witches’ broom? It is one of the ways I know I am entirely and really here.

One of the ways I know I am entirely and really here is to walk in the fall woods among the bare and fragile trees. Witches’ broom, the common name for a deformity in a woody plant, is a disease that changes the natural structure so that a mass of shoots grows from a single point. After the leaves fall, you might see some poor tree looking over-nested or, if it is very far gone, its crown looks like a heart pin-cushioned by arrows. In roses the foliage becomes distorted and frazzled. The leaves become so red they are almost purple. They refuse to open any farther than a tight rosette and become excessively thorny. A fungus carried from one bush to the next by wooly mites, the only solution is to tear out and destroy diseased plants. I have little interest in roses. They are ugly and too precious. I just like the way a dying girl flipped off an asshole and it got called a miracle. And then that asshole had a change of heart. I like the way people could imagine themselves making a mistake and God saving them from it, though that part worries me too. The wild rose of the Teutons symbolized battle, death, the underworld. Their adolescent soldiers charged into the fight garlanded with roses. They called the battlefields where they fell rose gardens.

Where they fell there were rose gardens. Rose—Hebrew for first blood spilled on the earth. Rose—Greek for the blood of Xerxes. Rose—Christian for Mary the Mother, for virtuous suffering and virtuous joy, for virgins devoted to God. Rose—French for prostitute. Rose—Roman for decadence. Rose—English for a certain kind of power and the exchange of sweet secrets. I have never been given roses by a man who wasn’t making me uncomfortable with how hard he was, it seemed, trying to earn, or maybe even buy, me. Rose—nineteenth-century apothecary for headache, hysteria, and other female complaints. In the Gulistan, the mole on her face is something else. Her face is something else. The ecstatic sensations between you and me are something else. The love of God, maybe, or knowledge of God, or union with God. If it has to be something other than what it is, I wish it were also something other than a rose.

I wish it were also something other than a rose. A popular opinion is that roses mean beauty. A popular opinion is that the pursuit of beauty will lead us to justice. Beauty means many things, of which truth and justice are the most rare. Roses, of any color, are the symbol of people telling themselves what they want to hear and then giving a bouquet of it to someone else, with a note on the card that says in fine calligraphy, “Believe me when I say…” Because language itself is impossible. It is nothing but signs and symbols for ideas that hover just beyond this reality. We drag the words in. Sometimes we drag in rose, crown, thorn, fire. Sometimes we try but fail in any meaningful way to drag in the bigger words, love, beauty, justice. This is the failure I believe in. Aphrodite emerged from the sea because that was where Ouranos’s testicles fell when his sun Chronos cut them off with a sickle. That we think anything means at all requires first a belief that the universe is organized enough for meaning to transmit from silence into words. Whether it is or isn’t or does or doesn’t is something else that every bloom of these roses means.

Headshot of Kathryn NuernbergerKathryn Nuernberger is the author of the essay collection Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (Ohio State University Press, 2017), as well as two poetry collections, The End of Pink  (BOA, 2016) and Rag & Bone (Elixir, 2011). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, and American Antiquarian Society, she is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press. Recent essays appear in or are forthcoming from  Brevity, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Paris Review, The Journal, and Tupelo Quarterly.

Image credit: Simone Dalmeri on Unsplash

DRIVING LESSONS by Charlotte Bausch

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Person driving alongside greenery with both hands on the steering wheelDRIVING LESSONS
by Charlotte Bausch

No. 1
In rural upstate New York, kids start driving young. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds are driving tractors between fields before they start high school. A few years later, their trucks are flying into parking lots with friends piled in their truck beds, searing black streaks of tire rubber onto the asphalt.

Long car rides have become the space that strings my life together, like the acclimation chamber before scuba divers plunge into the deep—a trip to the grocery store is ten minutes, the mall forty-five. In the village where I live, there aren’t many stores: a farming equipment warehouse, a tiny, undersupplied liquor store, a “general store” that as far as I can tell now sells mostly used DVDs. If you want to go anywhere else, you have to drive.

No. 2
We didn’t have driver’s ed, but we did have agriculture class. Every week, my ag teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, would take the seventh grade class into the field behind the faculty parking lot and teach us how to drive the school’s tractor. It was stick shift, and she would lean over to make sure you were in the right gear, her breath close and hot on your earlobe. The rest of the class stood to the side and watched as you attempted to navigate around the shrubbery.

I hated Mrs. Schwartz. She made me stay after class for what she called “remedial woodshop” and would stand a few feet away from me, telling me to move my fingers closer to the saw blade as she ate cold Velveeta off a spoon. When she taught the others to drive, I hid behind a tree and never learned.

No. 3
My father whipped the Subaru around a sharp curve, sending a throw pillow and half a box of markers careening into my lap. My brother proffered the container so I could scoop them back in. I was diving for a stray pen that had rolled under the passenger seat—blueberry scented—when my mother began. “Something happened while you were at camp,” she said, taking a deep breath.

I looked up from the chase at her tone. My father, at the wheel, was impassive as he accelerated onto the highway. Three suitcases and a laundry bag shifted uneasily as he rode the bumper of the blue Prius in front of us. We were close enough to read the sticker in the window that said “Coexist.” Despite his resemblance to an aging university president, my father has always driven like an extra in a rap video. It was worse on the drive home from summer camp, when three weeks’ worth of hastily packed luggage lurched in the trunk every time we rounded a corner.

My mother turned slightly, her seatbelt locking her in so she could only half face us. “Your grandfather is dead.” Next to me, my brother looked sucker-punched, but I was already staring out the window, counting telephone poles to hold back tears.

No. 4
“You need to pull forward farther when you’re making a left turn.” My mother, frowning, watches critically as I pull into the intersection. The rhythmic clicking of the directional mixes strangely with the beat of the country song on the radio. The song disintegrates into static as we drive out of town boundaries. “No, farther.”

“Mom!” My voice is too loud, my palms sweaty on the steering wheel. “I know what I’m doing, okay? Just relax.”

She clutches her handbag to her chest, her heels pumping an imaginary brake every few seconds as we inch forward. We have been driving together, a couple of hours every week, for months now. Her feet keep moving, but the black cavern under the passenger seat leaves her helpless.

No. 5
When I was little, my mother told me stories about her first car. It was powder blue, and used. She got it on her sixteenth birthday. The next winter, she skidded on ice and rolled it into a snow bank. My grandfather could never get the dent out of the roof.

No. 6
Freshman and sophomore years of high school, my brother drove me to school every morning. My parents had given him a hand-me-down Saab convertible, which looked cool in the student parking lot because it was black and had a soft top. The car barely ran.

When I was five or six, my father used to take us for drives in the Saab on cool weekend evenings. My brother and I huddled in the back seat, a blanket slung over us to block the freezing wind, and watched the trees and fences and gas station signs rush by faster than was strictly legal. At night, the moon moved with the car as if tied to the bumper with string.

Now, the steering column had some kind of leaking problem and my brother could barely keep from burning out on hills. We got so many tardy slips that our parents got a letter home.

No. 7
At the funeral, my mother read a poem about workmen and told stories about how my grandfather used to fix cars. She was asked to speak because she was the least likely of her sisters to cry.

It was hard to imagine my grandfather as a workman. His spindly, shaking arms couldn’t hold the weight of a toolbox; his rheumy eyes couldn’t adjust to the black underside of a car. The endless loop of chemo and remission had gone on for ten years. To me, his youngest grandchild, he’d always been made of medicinal smells and oxygen hiss.

On the drive home, tears leaked silently out of the corners of my eyes. Through the windshield, the green mountains of my mother’s childhood rose in the distance, pricked with pine trees.

No. 8
In the passenger seat, the proctor is printing off some kind of receipt. It looks long, which means the list of my mistakes is longer than it should be. He looks over at me. My hands are shaking, and my dress is crumpled from the pressure of my legs clenching against the brake.

“So technically, I should fail you.” My breath comes out in a gasp. “But I’m going to knock off this point here, and you’re passing. Be careful, and work on your parallel parking, alright?”

He hands me the receipt that will serve as my license until the new one comes in the mail. I take it, and as I step out of the car I watch as it is flecked with raindrops. My mother is waiting for me on the sidewalk. The license in my hand is suddenly useless: the moment I earned it, I was no longer covered under my mother’s insurance. She must drive me home.

As the car bleeds onto the highway, windshield wipers furiously beating away raindrops, my mother looks perfectly at ease. I’m hemmed into the passenger seat once again, and her feet have power over the pedals. One last time, she pulls forward into the intersection, farther, farther, and executes a perfect left turn onto the road home.

Headshot of Charlotte BauschCharlotte Bausch is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English with minors in French and art history. She grew up half in New York, half in New Jersey, with a brief but alarmingly cheese hat–filled stint in Wisconsin. She currently lives with her two best friends in a tiny, yellow apartment in Philadelphia. “Driving Lessons” is her first published piece.

Image credit: SOCMIA Fotografía on Unsplash 

SECOND THOUGHTS by Karen Zey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Box filled with colorful crayons, with a child drawing in the background

SECOND THOUGHTS
by Karen Zey

Schools were opening in less than a week. The five-year-old boy in front of me had autism. He couldn’t speak. His eyes flitted like hummingbirds over the hundreds of colorful toys and books in the classroom. The boy’s father, Mr. Nassar, sat stiffly on a tiny chair next to his son. He had come to register the child for regular kindergarten.

I had been pushing the schools to integrate more students with special needs. The principal had called me to talk about this child. Students with the most serious of disabilities were sometimes bussed over the bridge into Montreal to attend a distant, specialized school. Mr. Nassar knew this.

The small scrubbed tables and blank walls in the kindergarten room awaited September’s finger-painting masterpieces. The boy sat with his head and shoulder pressed against his father’s arm, staying connected to what was physically familiar. I watched the five-year-old with the darting eyes observing his surroundings, a child sitting still, able to comply with what his papa was asking of him. I saw a child who belonged in kindergarten.

“He’s eligible for a special education program,” said the principal. “Can you tell us why you want him to attend kindergarten?”

Mr. Nassar folded his hands, one gripping the other in his lap, and spoke in a measured voice.  “My son is very smart. I was teacher in my country. I teach him many things and he learn. He write all his letters. He write his name. Please, you give him chance in your school.” He opened his bag and pulled out sheets of unlined paper filled with oversized, wobbly letters. The evidence of his son’s school readiness was as shaky as the faint ABC’s on the page. I think Mr. Nassar knew this.

He laid out his arguments with all the quiet logic he could muster. His other children came to this school. He wanted his son here, too. The school had mainstreamed other students with learning problems. “You have other special children here who get extra help.”

But never a child like this—never a child who couldn’t talk. This boy would be challenging to integrate. The teachers were nervous about him joining their classes. The principal wanted reassurance about extra support. I was concerned about pushing my agenda too fast. Yet didn’t worthwhile change always come with questions and doubts? Wasn’t it usually difficult? Pros and cons twisted through my head.

Like his father, the boy was lanky, almost the height of a grade two child. This alone made him stand out. He was calm and still at the moment, but the room did not yet contain eighteen noisy, whirling five-year-old explorers. The sensory stimulation of a busy classroom would initially be overwhelming for this child. Did Mr. Nassar know this?

“I’m sure you realize your son won’t be able to do all of the same activities as the other children,” said the principal. “He’ll need lots of help to be part of the class.”

Mr. Nassar looked at us with tired eyes. He was fighting for his son to have a place in this room, a place in this normal children’s world. I wondered how many closed doors he had already encountered. He tried another tactic: “It make no sense to send little children to city. Special school is too far. Bridge is very dangerous in winter. My son can learn. He come here and you help him. I help him every day.” What Mr. Nassar didn’t know yet was how close I was to saying yes.

I snuck a look at the principal, a forty-year-old woman new to the job, fired up with all the enthusiasm and idealism of a novice. I had worked at convincing her to integrate more students, and she had worked at convincing her teachers to be on board. An ally—I loved her already. Seeing the child was all I needed. The principal glanced at me for confirmation, and I nodded.

“Okay, Mr. Nassar,” she said. “Your son can start next week. But we’ll need to do this in small steps.”

He placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I will bring him and pick him up. I do whatever you ask. I help him every day.”

We called in the kindergarten teachers and discussed details: the teacher’s aide who would help his son; speech therapy schedules; and a gradual increase of hours of attendance over the first couple of weeks, a strategy to help the child acclimate to his new environment. All the bits and pieces needed for a good start. At the end of the meeting, Mr. Nassar sagged with relief. “Thank you, Mis’Zey. Thank you. Thank you.” His child was just beginning kindergarten. His biggest battles had not even begun.

Three weeks later, I returned to the school for an afternoon meeting about another student. I spotted Mr. Nassar waiting to pick up his son. I’d heard integration was going smoothly so far, and the child was using pictograms to communicate.

Mr. Nassar walked over. “My son is very happy at school. I have present for you. It is custom of my country. You tell me where your office is and I drop off.” He pulled out a pen and scrap of paper from his pocket and waited.

I imagined this man’s life—his private anguish at the impenetrable bubble surrounding his child; his hours of struggle as he worked at prompting a few words from his son; and his probable moments of despair at the child’s silence. I pictured him coaxing and coaxing those wobbly letters onto scraps of paper. I imagined his optimism as he saw tiny glimmers of rote learning in those penciled scratches on the page.

“Thank you very much for thinking of me, Mr. Nassar, but I can’t accept a gift. It’s all part of my job. I’m just glad to hear that everything is going well.”

Two days later, the school board receptionist called up to my office. “There’s a gentleman here asking for you, a Mr. Naz-ser. He says he has a large item that he wants to give you in person. What would you like me to tell him?”

The half-completed memo on my screen would have to wait. “Thanks, Susan. Ask him to have a seat. I’ll be down in a couple of minutes to speak to him.”

There in the lobby stood Mr. Nassar. Faded khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt hung on his slim frame. He held an oblong, brass planter about three-feet wide, with a small dent near the rim. A bas-relief pastoral scene was pressed into the metal: trees, men on horses, a fox, and several hounds. Not the ornamental ceramic dish or colorful embroidered cloth I expected. An English-style fox hunt on a huge brass planter, the inside slightly tarnished with wear.

“It is for you. You like, Mis’Zey?” Mr. Nassar’s eyes searched my face.

He stood and waited—a man who lived in subsidized housing with his wife and four children, one of whom had a serious disability. He waited, bearing his gratitude with both hands. I looked at the second-hand brass planter, embossed with someone else’s story. “It’s just lovely, Mr. Nassar. Thank you very much.” I took the planter from him, and he smiled.

Such a large gift for a mere gatekeeper. I carried the planter back upstairs to my office, past the shiny plaque on the door that said Coordinator of Complementary Services, and I placed it on the floor.

◊

 

When his son was in grade four, Mr. Nassar asked me to bus the child to the faraway special school across the bridge. At age ten, his son had made good progress in many ways. He had learned to read basic words and follow classroom routines alongside his peers. His classmates accepted him and had grown comfortable with his idiosyncrasies. But the child was still dependent on individual assistance throughout the day. He was still a boy with autism who couldn’t speak.

“Hello, Mrs. Zey,” Mr. Nassar said over the phone. “I thank you for everything the school has done for my son. But I went to visit the special school in the city. They have many children like him there, many autistic children.  I think he should go there. I filled out the application and he’s been accepted. I’m asking the school board to sign for the bus.”

The call took me by surprise. The support surrounding this boy had been successful. I still believed the child belonged in the community school. I pointed out to Mr. Nassar how well his son was doing on his individual goals, and how everyone at the school was committed to accommodating his son’s special needs. I couldn’t convince him.

“Yes, the teachers work very hard with him,” he said. “I have tried to help him too. But he still cannot talk. I have to spend more time with my other children. His sisters are in bigger grades now. They have lots of homework. My son will get what he needs in the special school. I have a new job, and I work in the city. I get home late, very late. Please, I need you to send my son to the special school.” His voice rose on a note of desperation.

“Let me think about your request, Mr. Nassar.” I swallowed my disappointment. “I’ll call you back later today. Tomorrow at the latest.”

I phoned the principal. “The grade four teachers are upset,” she told me. “They heard about the application for outside placement. They want him to stay.”

Her school team had come a long way. A little patch of progress on the long road to inclusive education. I knew the local school could help this child move forward and that the special school in Montreal did not offer a magic fix for the boy’s learning gaps. However, I could never know what challenges Mr. Nassar and his family lived with every day. Or what they might live with for years to come.

I had the option of refusing to sign the papers for the transfer across the bridge. Special transportation meant another hit to my budget. Sitting in my high-backed office chair, I swiveled back and forth, yearning for the certainty of easy questions and easy answers. I looked down at the pile of unread file folders on my desk. Several of them held reports from autism diagnostic clinics, each report a glimpse at a single child, each report changing the life of one family, each report demanding a decision.

I gazed at the four potted ferns nestled inside the oblong brass planter outside my office door. What I knew was never enough and never the whole picture. Mr. Nassar was waiting for my call. With a growing sense of calm, I stretched out my hand and picked up the phone.

“Hello, Mr. Nassar.”

Headshot of Karen ZeyKaren Zey is a Canadian educator and writer from la belle ville de Pointe-Claire, Quebec. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in  Brevity Blog, Cold Creek Review, Crack the Spine, Drunk Monkeys, Hippocampus, Proximity‘s True, and other places. Karen’s CNF piece, “Tough Talk,” was nominated by Prick of the Spindle in 2015 for a Pushcart Prize. In this piece, names have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the subjects.

Image credit:  Aaron Burden on Unsplash

THE WALL by Susan Knox

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Bookshelf filled with vintage books

THE WALL
by Susan Knox

“I’ll do it, Love,” my newly retired husband, Weldon, said when I mentioned our book collection needed cleaning. It took him two years to finish the job. I knew the books were getting dirty again, but I held my tongue—I didn’t want to dust them.

When we moved into our Seattle condo in 1996, we added bookshelves. Our new home had a perfect place—a tall wall in our living room, fourteen feet high. We ordered 2,548 linear feet of custom-built bookshelves made of sturdy oak covered in black laminate, with a metal rail near the top for a sliding library ladder. We filled every inch with books, and it looks terrific. The wall glows with colorful covers, and the room feels warmer. I love watching people enter this room for the first time. It’s a surprise, all those books.

Initially, I hired our building’s janitor, Jim, to dust the books every six months. He did a fine job at first, but after a few years he began slacking off, doing sloppy work. After Jim jumbled our books’ order—mixed fiction with nonfiction and ignored our alphabetic system—I decided not to hire him again.

But my books got quite dusty. Every time I pulled one out, I had to blow across the top to get rid of the accumulation. I felt overwhelmed just thinking of the task, and when I mentioned my dilemma to Weldon, he offered to take it on. Relieved, I checked Cheryl Mendelson’s 906-page book, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. She recommends vacuuming, so we bought a small Oreck with a shoulder strap Weldon could sling over his back while climbing the library ladder.

Now that he’s retired, Weldon spends a lot of time on the Internet, and he discovered Collectorz, an online book-inventory system. We can access the collection on our computers and even pull up the list on our cell phones while book shopping. This is a useful feature since we have returned more than one book after discovering it was already on our shelves. Weldon prizes efficiency and was elated when he realized he could computerize our inventory and dust books in one effort.

Weldon enters the ISBN with a small scanner. Once the program finds the number an image of the cover and all pertinent information appear on his computer screen. After he’d entered about a thousand books into the system, a third of our collection, he excitedly forwarded the list to our children. No response.

My love of books blossomed early through trips with my mother at the public library in Minerva, Ohio. The facility was housed in a small space on the second floor of city hall and seemed vast to my five-year-old eyes. Mommy had a serious look on her face as we climbed the stairs, and before we opened the library door, she would lean down and say, “Remember, if you need to tell me something, whisper. No running, and handle the books carefully.”

I grew to know my village library well. The space had its own comforting aroma. The oak bookcases released scents of timber and beeswax; calfskin-bound books suggested tobacco; hardbacks with their protective covers firmly affixed evoked the interior of Grandma’s wardrobe. I delight in the smell of books.

When I toured George Washington’s Mount Vernon, my favorite room was the library. It held a modest collection, but as I walked into the room with glass-fronted bookcases, a familiar fragrance drifted into my nostrils—the essence of aged books. I could see Washington walking into his library, taking pleasure in the books’ presence. Did he love their smell too? My nose has tuned out my own books’ redolence. I wonder, do my books give off the same soothing scent to my visitors as Mount Vernon’s gave to me?

My parents couldn’t afford to buy me books, but I did possess four precious ones—Mother Westwind Stories, Heidi, and two Nancy Drew mysteries—and I read them over and over. But in one of my periodic explorations of our attic—filled with odds and ends from the Elliott family, who’d built and lived in the farmhouse for decades before we moved in—I found two boxes of books under the eaves. Hardback books with colorful modern covers. Different from the old books I’d already uncovered in the attic, with their tissue-thin paper and pages sometimes bound out of order, that had belonged to two spinster schoolteachers who’d lived with the Elliotts.

Uncovering these modern books was like finding a treasure chest of sparkling rubies. I pulled them out of the brown cardboard box—The Good Earth, My Sister Eileen, The Yearling, Rebecca, So Red the Rose, Saratoga Trunk, Mama’s Bank Account, Mrs. Miniver—popular novels of the thirties. I couldn’t believe my find. And I was old enough to read many of them. I ran down to the kitchen. “Mommy! I found two boxes of books in the attic. Where did they come from?” She looked up from rolling out her pie dough and said, “They’re mine. Before I married, I belonged to Book-of-the-Month Club.” I’d never seen her sit down with a book, and I suddenly realized, as a farm wife and mother of four, she was too busy to read. This insight surprised and saddened me. How could she give up a wonderful pastime like reading? I vowed I would always take time for books.

I first set foot in a bookstore as a freshman at The Ohio State University. I could hardly believe the riches at the Student Book Exchange on High Street in Columbus. They stocked much more than textbooks. I had a little extra spending money from my part-time job as a telephone operator, and I started growing my personal library by buying the classics—Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, The Age of Innocence, Wuthering Heights, The Prince, Emma, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby. I bought a book every week. Possession was important to me. My roommates didn’t understand why I was reading books not assigned for class, but I was in heaven.

I continued to buy books while in college and throughout my first marriage even though my husband complained that I read too much and it gave me ideas. This was the sixties—the women’s lib movement was underway, and some men were uneasy with changes afoot. We divorced.

A year later, I met Weldon. We shared a love of books and began to collect them as a couple. Not rare, old books, but fat, absorbing novels, political histories, probing biographies, well-written mysteries, colorful cookbooks. When we combined households forty-two years ago, we discovered we owned many identical books. I took that as a good omen for our marriage, although, as we gave away the duplicates, I had a niggling thought. What if this doesn’t work out? Will I get my books back?

When we traveled, we always sought out bookstores. Powell’s in Portland; Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara; and Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle. We moved to Seattle in 1996, not because of Elliott Bay Bookstore, although that was a plus, and bought a condo downtown, near the Pike Place Market. We were thrilled to find MCoy Books two blocks from our home. Imagine: a country girl who revered books, and, as an adult, had to drive twenty miles from her suburban Columbus, Ohio, home to buy a book, now lived around the corner from such a bookstore.

We visited MCoy several times a week to browse, buy books, have an espresso, and talk politics with the owner, Michael Coy. When my book, Financial Basics: A Money-Management Guide for Students, was published, he created a big window display for it. I was so proud.

The office building that housed MCoy Books was sold as the Seattle real-estate market skyrocketed, and when Michael’s lease came up for renewal, the rent increase was so significant that he couldn’t sustain the business. He closed his doors near the end of 2008. We mourned the loss. Walking by that empty storefront was like passing a mausoleum holding the bones of dear ones. We not only lost our beloved MCoy; six other neighborhood bookstores closed too. We rode the bus to Elliott Bay and University of Washington bookstores, but it wasn’t the same.

The upshot of this loss in our lives? We bought Kindles. We’d resisted for years, even though our friends raved about theirs. We loved the physicality of books, the cover art, the heft, the pages to turn; we couldn’t imagine anything better. But in 2014, we succumbed and joined the ranks of 32 percent of Americans who own an e-reader.

I can hardly believe how much I adore my Kindle. I read in bed in the middle of the night without disturbing Weldon. I borrow e-books from the Seattle Public Library and download them from home. If a compelling book review appears, I instantly acquire the volume online.

When I read John Banville or Hilary Mantel or Lauren Groff, writers with extensive lexicons, I highlight unfamiliar words with my finger and learn their definitions. Thick, heavy books are easily managed. I wouldn’t have read Robert Caro’s 736-page The Passage of Power or Donna Tartt’s 755-page The Goldfinch while in bed. Their heft would have tired my arms, and since I do a lot of my reading there, it would have taken forever to finish them. When I travel, I don’t have to pack multiple books to assuage my fear of running out of something to read. My reader is always nearby, loaded with books. In a pinch, I can even read from my electronic library with my iPhone.

There are drawbacks. Charts, family trees, and photographs are difficult to make out. Footnotes are elusive. I have to tap the screen to read them, and I often miss the notation. I can’t easily leaf back to check a character’s background or reread a scene. Somehow, in a book I knew the relative location and could quickly find what I was looking for.

I gave up one of my greatest pleasures—browsing in bookstores—because I felt guilty using their displays and staff recommendations knowing I would buy it from Amazon for my Kindle. I realize many bookstores sell e-books through Kobo, but they only load on my iPhone, and I don’t enjoy reading on the smaller screen.

I can’t loan or borrow e-books the way I shared hardbacks. I wish the cover appeared automatically when I turn on the reader. I miss the cover artwork. I worry about the effect on the publishing industry and the small part I’m playing in this ongoing saga. Will Amazon become a monopoly? How would that influence quality and pricing and writers and readers? What is Jeff Bezos’s master plan?

I still have my living-room wall of books. I will always have them. They please me and reassure the child in me who owned few and used the lending library and county bookmobile. But I must confess that Weldon and I are beginning to duplicate our paper books on our Kindles. We’re at an age where we’re rereading favorites and we’re reluctant to open the physical book—we want the ease of an e-reader. We’ve spent decades acquiring books, and I’d be bereft if I lost them, and yet, I don’t want to read them. It’s as though I have a foot in each world, and I’m not going to budge.

Sometimes, I think of our children emptying our home after we’ve died. I can hear them asking what that unusual smell is. I can see them groaning at the sight of our collection. I can imagine them wondering why we had so many, whether we actually read them all, why we spent so much money on them, questioning whether there’s a market for books or whether they’ll have to dump them. So in the spirit of preparing them for our demise, I decided to discuss our books with them before we’re gone. Here’s the gist of what they said: You said you’re doing all your reading on your Kindles. Why not just sell the books? Or give them to the public library?

“But the wall,” I say. “What would I do with the wall?”

Susan Knox author photoSusan Knox is an essayist, short story writer, and the author of Financial Basics: A Money-Management Guide for Students published by Ohio State University Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, CALYX, Forge, The MacGuffin, Zone 3, and elsewhere. In 2014, her essay, “Autumn Life” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She and her husband live in Seattle.

 

 

 

Image credit:  Dakota Corbin on Unsplash

THE RED MOON by Mark A. Nobles

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Night sky with red moon

THE RED MOON
by Mark A. Nobles

My father turned into the driveway a little too fast, just like he always did. The Studebaker’s engine growled and the spring shocks squealed as my mother held her breath and closed her eyes, and my brother and I bounced in the back seat, almost hitting our heads on the roof. It was a Sunday night, March 13, 1946, and we were returning home from church. It was a fine spring evening.

I remember the sermon that evening being especially fiery, even for Preacher Bonds. It had been a hell and brimstone, apocalyptic, God fearing sermon, and I had been particularly caught up while mother cried, father slept, and Jim, my younger brother, fidgeted.

Preacher Bonds was as charismatic a Southern Baptist preacher as ever lived. Southern Baptists work from the premise that a good Christian is a scared Christian, and they have plenty of good material from which to work. Few denominations can wring fear from the Bible as well as the Southern Baptists. I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t count the Catholics. They’ve had so many more years of practice that, for them, rule by fear is a centuries-old art form.

Anyway, Preacher Bonds stayed pretty much in Revelations that night, and his voice was still ringing in my ears as the Studebaker coughed and died in the driveway, and we piled out into the late dusk of evening.

Jim looked up at the sky and pointed. “Look at the size of the moon tonight,” he said. I turned and looked up at the moon as it hung just over our neighbor’s roof. “And the color,” Jim said. “Look at the color.” It was red, blood red.

“And the stars shall fall from the sky,” said Father as he reached down and scooped Jim up in his burly arms, “and the moon shall turn blood red,” he bellowed in his deepest voice. “Isn’t that what Preacher Bonds said about the start of the end times?”

Jim’s eyes got about as big as the moon.

“Bill,” mother said to father in her disapproving voice.

Father paid no heed to mother. “Yes, I believe he did,” he said, putting Jim back on the ground. He turned in a way that he didn’t have to look at Mother and walked into the house.

Mother put her hand on my shoulder and softly said, “Go on, into the house with both of you.”

I look back at that time and wonder why I didn’t notice the change as it was beginning. She was pale, my mother, and try as I might to remember now, I can’t recall when the life had gone from her voice, but it was already gone on that night. I was only ten, Jim only six, but looking back I wonder how I could have missed it, not seen it coming. Then, I spend an hour watching my own children at play in their backyard, and I realize children have no yesterdays or tomorrows, only todays. It isn’t until adulthood that we try and string all those days together and look at the whole.

That night, after mother tucked us in, we lay in bed, quiet, but wide awake.

“Bent?” Jim said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Is this it? Is this the end of the world, or was Dad kidding?”

“Don’t know. Dad reads the paper and says the world has gone crazy, and with what Preacher Bonds said about the end times, it could be.”

“Have you ever seen the moon red like that?” Jim asked. We couldn’t see the moon from our beds, but we could remember what it looked like out by the car, and its light came rustling in through the curtains.

“Can’t say I ever remember it being red,” I said with all the wisdom and experience of my one decade of life.

“What should we do? I can’t go to sleep. If this is the end of the world, I don’t want to sleep through it.”

I knew where Jim was leading the conversation. Three summers ago, Father had built a treehouse in the live oak on the east side of the house. Jim hadn’t been allowed to climb it until this spring because he had been too small. It was still a new and secret place for him. We had sneaked out there at night a time or two before, but it was always a gamble because the live oak was on our parents’ side of the house, just a few yards away from their window, which stayed open to catch the breeze during the spring and summer. We had to be really quiet, and being quiet did not come naturally to Jim.

“I don’t know, Jim. If this is Judgment Day, it might not be a good idea to be caught someplace where we’re not supposed to be.”

Jim didn’t say anything, but after about twenty minutes my imagination began to run away with me as well. If the world was coming to an end, I wanted to be a witness.

“OK,” I said, “let’s go out to the treehouse, but…”

“We have to be really quiet,” Jim finished my sentence for me. “I know. I’m six, not stupid.”

Ours was a two-story, craftsman style house with a wraparound porch that sat on the southwest corner of Race and Karnes Streets. Because our house was a corner lot with a bigger yard, all the neighborhood kids came to our house to play. I really enjoyed the big yard until I grew strong enough to push a lawnmower.

All we had to do to get to the treehouse was climb out our window to the first story eave that encircled the house. Our bedroom was at the southwest corner at the back of the house. Once on the roof, we would crawl down the backyard side, around the corner, and up the Karnes Street east side until about three feet from our parents’ window, which was on the northeast corner of the house. There was a branch from the live oak strong enough and close enough for us to climb out and over into the treehouse. I don’t know if I truly believed that night was the end of the world, but I do know I believed that if Mother had ever caught us on that ledge, it would have been the end of the world for us, or at least for me. Jim, being younger, might only have been maimed.

As we rounded the corner and started down Karnes Street, I was quite surprised to find the light still on in our parents’ room. I almost decided to turn back. I thought better of it because Jim was a few feet ahead of me, and he was afraid of heights. He was totally focused on not falling off the eave. I was afraid to say anything or to grab him suddenly for fear he might cry out. I decided to forge ahead, and we crawled into the treehouse with only one small scare. Once, Jim slipped a bit on the limb and rattled the branches regaining his balance. He was a pretty brave kid, and although there was a scream in his eyes, not a sound passed his lips.

The treehouse had a ledge on the Karnes Street side that the roof didn’t cover, so we stretched out side-by-side on our backs and looked up through the branches at the stars and waited.

They looked as secure in the heavens as ever, and none fell as we watched.

Lying in the stillness, I could hear my parents’ mumbled voices drifting out through their open window. I could only catch a stray phrase or two every few minutes, and for a long time, I didn’t even pay attention. But after what must have been at least thirty minutes, I realized they were still up and talking. I began to wonder. It had to have been past midnight, and Mother and Father didn’t usually stay up past ten, eleven at the most, even on a Saturday night, let alone a Sunday night.

“Jim,” I whispered, “what do you suppose they’re talking about this late.” Jim didn’t say a word, and when I turned and looked at him, he was sound asleep. He lay there on his back with his mouth open, inhaling and exhaling the shallow, quick breaths of childhood.

I slowly sat up, peeped over the two-by-four railing, and looked into my parents’ window. A thin wind briefly brushed back the curtain, and I saw my mother sitting on the bed, holding her hands in her lap. I think she looked scared, but that could be a detail that slipped into my memory over the many years since. As I sat there looking over the railing, my father passed back and forth by the window. Sometimes it appeared as if he was carrying things, maybe clothes, but I could not tell for sure. I could not make out their conversation. I sat and strained to listen and hoped for another small gust of wind to provide a glimpse of their discussion.

Father did most of the talking. Mother only said a few words now and then. After a while, Father stopped pacing. I couldn’t see him any longer, so I assumed he sat down in the overstuffed chair in the corner, out of sight from the window.

They talked about me and Jim for a long time. Every once in a while I’d hear “the boys” mentioned or one of our names spoken. Mother kept talking about church and Preacher Bonds, but I didn’t have to hear father to know how he felt about them. He never was much of a churchgoer.

That night seemed as if it passed in an hour. I sat in the treehouse knowing what was happening in my parents’ room was important but not thinking to guess what it might be. My pajamas began to get damp and sticky as the morning dew began to form.

I had fallen asleep, my head resting on my hands on the rail, when I was startled to consciousness by the light turning out in my parents’ room. I raised up and was momentarily relieved, thinking they had finally gone to bed. I stretched out on my stomach and looked over the side of the treehouse toward Race Street. I was going to lie there a few minutes to loosen some of the kinks out of my neck and back. After I was sure Mother and Father were asleep, I’d wake Jim and we’d crawl back to our own beds.

The sound of our front door opening perked my head back up. I heard the front door close, followed by footsteps across our porch and down the walk. A man carrying a suitcase walked east on Race headed toward Karnes. The man crossed Karnes and kept on walking until he disappeared into the orange glow of the rising sun.

The full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by the gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Rev. ch.6 12-14  

Mark A Nobles author photoMark A. Nobles is a Fort Worth-based writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Sleeping Panther Review, Crimson Streets, and other publications. He has produced and/or directed three feature documentaries and several short, experimental films. He can be found on Facebook @FlyinShoesFilms.

 

 

 

Image credit: Derek Liang on Unsplash

POMEGRANATE by Rachel Nevada Wood

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Half of a pomegranate against a black background

POMEGRANATE
by Rachel Nevada Wood

Adonis was a painting. Or rather, he was a boy, but his limbs and lips looked as though they were made of artistry and creamy filaments of paint. It is no wonder, then, that Venus loved him. She kept him pillowed in her lap, far from the wars and deaths of heroes, and whispered him stories, her warm breath traveling across his lips. On days she was forced to leave him, Adonis made love to the forest instead, exploring it slowly, deliberately. On one of these days of absences and longing, a wild boar came across Adonis and gutted the canvas of his torso from stomach to collarbone. When Venus returned and found his broken body, she discovered the shape of heartbreak. Distraught, she made the spray of his blood bubble into hard teardrop seeds. And so, nourished by the blood of the most beautiful man to have ever been loved, the pomegranate blossomed into existence.

Knifing through flesh with crimson juice flecking your wrist, drowning the poor thing in a bucket of water, or beating the side of the fruit like you’re knocking on your ex-girlfriend’s door—these are the recommended methods of peeling a pomegranate.

Once you see their skin cracking and splitting, seeds like blood vessels pouring onto the table, bursting under the hard crescent of nail, the red dripping slowly in a glorious massacre, you’ll understand why the French decided to name a weapon of war after them. Grenade.

In a sea of sparkling white, newlywed Armenian brides hurl the crimson fruit at their feet, each bouncing seed that bursts forth representing the promise of a bouncing baby to come.

The right way to peel a pomegranate? Pull apart the top gently, like you’re parting a curtain. This is the polite way to ask the most of it.

My roommate, Faustine, lacks the patience for the mess of pomegranates— for the way I litter our kitchen with bits of white flesh and errant drops of juice. Rogue seeds I have neglected to pick up have permanently stained our kitchen tile.

There is none of this mess if you buy just the seeds, neatly packaged and peeled, at Trader Joe’s for an alarming price. These seeds taste like flavored water.

In 1764, barrels stuffed with pomegranates were sent to famed Philadelphia botanist John Bartram who had had no success in growing them in the North where the sun was less friendly. I am sure that these pomegranates also tasted like flavored water, perhaps with some added notes of cedar and old wine.

According to American Garden, Thomas Jefferson had great success in planting pomegranates at Monticello. This is of course a lie. It is unlikely that Thomas Jefferson ever tucked a sapling into the soil. Rather, his grove was built off of the bodies of his slaves—a new kind of blood once again nourishing the pomegranate tree.

Although pomegranates bleed easily, their flesh does not often bruise. Instead, it is difficult to discern how damaged a particular pomegranate is until you find clusters of lavender sludge rotting inside.

 

Faustine can metabolize poems into tears. She cries frequently, openly, honestly. She has only seen me cry three times, always as a sleep-deprived river of tears. Thankfully, she can read my emotions without a map of salt water etched onto my face. Once, as I was mid-panic attack, she pulled a chair up next to me and began methodically peeling a pomegranate, talking to me and plinking seed after seed into a metal bowl until I could breathe again. She cleaned up the mess and I ate seeds until my tongue burned with sugar.

The first time I tasted a pomegranate, it was on the cracked concrete steps of my high school. The fruit was a gift from some girl named Elizabeth in my French class. We sat together on the steps with the pomegranate broken between us, slowly fishing out seeds from the white rind. By the time the pomegranate was done, our fingers were a sticky magenta color and we were best friends.

It tasted like my darkest shade of lipstick, a promise.

There was a summer I spent in India where I had nothing to eat for weeks on end but tomato curry. On weekend trips to the market, I soothed my irate stomach with vanilla ice cream and fruit—mangoes oozing juice and split beaded pomegranates. These pomegranates tasted like rain and a red chair on a blue tiled porch.

Is it any wonder that Persephone gave half her life to Death for a small mouthful?

When I got home that first day and peeled off my fishnet tights, the parts of my legs that the juice had painted looked like they had grown pink-tinged scales. I felt part mermaid.

It is impossible to preserve the color of stained fingers and legs in cloth, because if you use the pomegranate to dye wool or silk, the fabric will turn a deep mustard color.

Hera, neglected by her husband, scorned by the people of Greece, and ridiculed for her extreme jealousy, clutched pomegranates to her like lifelines. In some statues, she (maddened? empowered? obsessed with the fruit?) goes so far as to wear the top of the pomegranate, the calyx, on her head. Later, men of power who knew nothing of neglect would copy the pointed style in gold and call it a crown.

Ancient reliefs from Baghdad depict men of status showing off their wealth by holding bouquets of pomegranates. So forget flowers, they perish. Bring me bouquets of pomegranates, let the ruby juice stain my lips, drip down my chin. Kiss it off of me.

No wonder some scholars consider this the forbidden fruit. Can you imagine—Eve slipping bead after bead of garnet juice in between Adam’s lips until they were cast from paradise?

It is still a dream of mine to get drunk on pomegranate wine (is this sinning too?)

I came close to this once. Somewhere in the depths of summer-hazed memories my fingers, adorned with chipped nail polish, clutched at a green glass bottle of pomegranate sparkling cider. Elizabeth and I sat knee to knee on a tattered beach towel, our picnic spread before us. We washed bite after bite of sticky cinnamon rolls down our throat with the bubbling, syrupy concoction. We’d forgotten cups, so instead we passed the neck of the bottle back and forth, our icing covered lips glossing the rim. We did this until we were tipsy on our own laughter. We lay on the ground, the grass etching faint pink marks on the backs of our calves, until the sky turned a violent shade of rose.

Headshot of Rachel Nevada WoodRachel Nevada Wood is a senior studying Classical Languages and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and as such is a strong supporter of the Oklahoma City Thunder, fried pickles, and the word “y’all.” She currently lives with her best friend and two succulents in West Philadelphia. “Pomegranate” is her first published piece.
Image credit: “Half-Peeled Pomegranate” by Prathyush Thomas on Wikipedia.

BEAUTY IN ELEVEN ENCOUNTERS by Ollie Dupuy 

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Swimming white jellyfish against black background

BEAUTY IN ELEVEN ENCOUNTERS
by Ollie Dupuy 

  1. i could blame it on the culture of america, korea, science, but i boil it down to being the first korean word i learned, yeppuda yeppuda rolling off the tongues of halmonis and imos and echoing around the room like a bullet: beautiful beautiful. they flap sun-spotted hands to my sister’s and my hair, our flat stomachs, our long legs, and the only word i could understand was yeppuda. i begin to think of it as a science, as a fact, a ledgehold in the vast canyon of earth and universe. sun is yellow. clouds are white. i am beautiful. yeppuda, yeppuda.
  2. it takes a little time but i discover tragedy backwards, and suddenly i’m a victim of a crime i didn’t even know existed and i can’t stop thinking about my mother crying into the golden light of a therapist’s office. (no matter how hard i try the image sticks in my chest and stays there, makes a home against my heart.) it’s an awareness i didn’t ask for, and now i’ve lost my fingers, my collarbone, my hipbone. i avoid mirrors. i let my body bloat & stagnate, burrowing deep inside what is now spoiled flesh. yeppuda begins to skip over me at dinner. my sister keeps her flat stomach and grows into her long legs and i begin hating her.
  3. she practices smiling and her reflection glows and she cultivates makeup brushes for fingers. i throw my makeup in a box and hide it away. the shame of being unbeautiful takes root somewhere in me and sprouts until everything i am transforms into a devotion for hiding. i become a study in survival and i see strangers behind every door in my house and sometimes it feels mysterious and painless and thrilling. other nights i lock my doors and sleep on my face and i can barely breathe.
  4. i am asked to winter formal and called beautiful for the first time in years and it just feels dirty and transactional, like he’s trying to take something from me, like him being the one to call me beautiful means that now some part of me belongs to him, is beholden to him. no. i’m done with losing my bones.
  5. i take jazz for p.e. and the walls are covered in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. i refuse to look in any of them. instead i watch the dancers in my class unfold their arms and legs like paper origami and try to pretend i am born of the same airy yeppuda, attach myself to rhythm and cadence and beat. they give their skin away in little slivers against their navels, their shoulders, and i begin to hate them too because the dull pain inside me is too airless and solid. we have changing rooms. i change in the bathroom.
  6. an eighth grade boy asks my sister to kiss him, asks her if she ever thinks about him, tells her she’s the most beautiful girl he knows. she tells him no. now he laughs at her in the halls and tells her he’s never met anyone so desperate. when she comes home crying, i’m torn between telling her it is her fault she is beautiful and punching the boy in the face.
  7. all the beautiful girls in my dance class who gave away their skin eventually hand off their bones too. sometimes their boyfriends don’t know when no means no and all i can do is write and write and write, stab my fingers into the keys, and i want to talk to them to tell them it gets better but it’s not something you talk about and i’m not sure how much of it would be a lie. maybe it would be simpler to tell them it’s better to be ugly.
  8. and then one of my friends begins to tell me gently i am beautiful. i have been brushing off compliments for forever now, not letting any of them catch my shoulders or twist my tongue. i think i laugh in his face. but over the next few weeks, without pointing at my hair or my legs, he just reminds me: hey you know you’re really pretty right?
  9. i say thank you and he says why are you thanking me?
  10. he says it until i respond with i know.
  11. and it shouldn’t mean that much but it does; beauty with nothing but me attached to it, and not even beauty but just prettiness, the cool breeze of a smile and the comfort of falling onto familiarity. it’s just something in his simplicity, in the factual way it was, like the sky is blue. grass is green. and you can just be pretty.

Ollie Dupuy author photoOllie Dupuy is a junior at Orange County School of the Arts in Southern California, where she studies creative writing and is an editor for Inkblot Literary Magazine. She enjoys history (America’s, the world’s, yours) and opportunities to overdress. Her work has appeared in Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review and gravel.

 

 

 

Image credit: James Lee on Unsplash 

THE OUTLINE OF EMPTY SPACES  by Angelique Stevens

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Empty swingset

THE OUTLINE OF EMPTY SPACES
by Angelique Stevens

I discovered a near-limitless capacity for patience on my parents’ back porch, hiding out, eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and reading Richie Rich comics. I was skipping school, biding my time until the end of the afternoon when I could pretend to come home. That first morning, I had slunk down behind an old green aluminum chair and sat in an upright fetal position, knees to chest, arms swaddling legs. I counted the boards on the floor, twenty-five. The rails along the side, forty-eight, and 360 holes in between the crisscross side rail, 250 yellow leaves on the porch, 423 reds, five points in this yellow leaf, eight in that red leaf. I counted my fingers and my toes and every letter in the alphabet, and then, when that was done, I made up a new game. I spelled out every letter:, A, AY, B, BEE, C, SEA. I spelled my name: Ay, En, Gee, El, Eye, Cue, You, Eee. I spelled out whole sentences. “Angie is skipping school today.” “School sucks.” It wasn’t long before I was bored.

I had sprained an ankle a week earlier playing with my sister, Gina. The doctor had prescribed a few days’ rest, which turned into a week out of school. Then, the night before I was supposed to go back, I asked Dad for a letter that would explain my absence. He never gave it to me; he was too drunk to remember. When I left the house the next morning, my anxiety over not having the letter grew with each hesitant step I took.

My feet skipped between the yellows and reds of mid-October leaves—should I even go to school? I could just stay home one more day, ask Dad again for a letter that night, and everything would be okay. But what would I tell him? I could say I tripped and fell, hurt my leg again, or maybe I could say I was feeling kind of feverish and came home sick. He would never believe that.

By the time I walked through the school’s entrance, the homeroom bell was already ringing. I should have picked up my pace, but my family had moved to the neighborhood recently, and I felt like a stranger still. I stopped in a corner, the gray of my shirt blending into the gray of the wall until I was just a silhouette of myself—a thin line of lead-gray traced upon bricks. I imagined that moment when you open the classroom door and all the third graders turned toward you wondering where you’ve been and why you’re late and why you never talk to anyone and why your clothes are ripped and you smell like cigarettes. Then, I snuck into the bathroom and parked myself inside a stall.

Twenty minutes later, when the bell rang again, I retraced my steps out of the building and into daylight. I might have been okay if I had just gone into my class, said I didn’t have a note, and sat down. Or maybe I didn’t even need a note. Maybe no one had noticed my absence. But it was too late; I had passed the moment of turning back.

In the daylight I was free. There was none of Dad’s late-night staggering up the stairs or Mom’s paranoid mania. There was only me, full and flesh and whole. I was substance and skin against the backdrop of the city’s swoosh of cars, white cement sidewalk and bark of oak.

I walked to the park and sat on the swing, kicked leaves, traced my name in the sand, Ang, Angie, Angelique, all the ways I knew myself. Then I left. I knew I was too young and it was too early in the day to be seen in the park. Dad always joked about truant officers. I couldn’t be sure if they were real, so I tried to force my flesh back into that silhouette, dark against the shadows of the city.

I fantasized about where I might go. Maybe I could grow wings and fly to California, sun myself on a private beach like a movie star, one knee up, one down, my long hair splayed on a towel. Or I could drive a fancy Jeep into the Colorado mountains, the way grown-up women did in the movies. I’d sit at the bar of a ski lodge, finger the lip of a sherry glass, pick it up so the ice would clink when I pressed it against my lips. I was so caught up in my dream I hadn’t realized my body took me where it knew to go.

I had unintentionally traced my steps back home. We lived in a duplex. My mother wouldn’t see me come around to the back. She would have been half-lying, half-sitting on the couch, dipping her toast into her coffee and alternating drags of her Raleigh cigarette with bites of toast—crumbs rolling down her chest to the cigarette-burned couch and onto the floor. She’d watch game shows until the afternoon when she would take her evening dose of Thorazine and sleep until dinner. She would never go out the back door to the yard. So I chanced it, steeled myself against the shadows and found a spot behind that green chair on the back porch.

◊

By the time I had finished counting and spelling, it was after lunch and I was hungry. I realized I still had the dollar Dad had given me for the cafeteria, so I left the porch and walked to the corner store. Wilson Farms only had four short aisles, but they were filled with possibilities. I scanned the shelves deciding what combination of food I could get, a soda and a candy bar or a Twinkie and milk. Then I saw the toy section. There were water guns, three for a dollar, blue, yellow, and red. There were toy caps, none of which I could buy with the money I had. I considered a plastic handheld maze game. I could pass time for hours rolling that little silver ball along winding turns and broken gaps and dead ends just to get through the labyrinth. But I didn’t have enough money to buy that and food, too. I found the comic book section. Richie Rich was only thirty cents. I picked it up and grabbed a double Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on the way to the checkout.

Back on the porch, I made a fresh start. Only two more hours until school ended and I could pretend to walk home. If I was deliberate, I could fill my time reading Richie Rich and eating the Reese’s, one hour per cup. I took one of the peanut butter rounds out of the package and held it between my thumb and forefinger, softening the cold chocolate, making it pliable, and testing my own patience. I moved my fingers around the center, being careful not to touch the hard outer ridge. Finally, it cracked in my hand and a perfect little circle of soft peanut butter and chocolate came out of the center, leaving the ridged circle intact. I ate it slowly, deliberately around the edges, savoring every taste of peanut butter, imagining each tiny little morsel of chocolate pass through my teeth and land on my tongue. I forced myself not to chew it but instead let it melt until it dissolved. When that was finished, I nibbled the outside circle, one ridge at a time. That took up the better part of an hour. I still had the second piece to go.

While I ate, I read Richie Rich from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of each page. I slowed my pace, stopped time so that the reading and the eating would last until school ended. One small bite corresponded to one small detail. Methodically, I studied every mark on every page until it was memorized. The way both c’s in Richie Rich’s name were made to look like cents symbols. The way the i’s were dotted with diamonds. I wanted the i in Angelique to be dotted with a diamond. I wanted my S to be crossed with two lines so it could become a dollar sign.

Near the Harvey Comics logo, in the top left corner of the cover, there was always a miniature image of Richie Rich. He stood near a money vault or held up a bank over his head Superman style or wore wings made of dollars. I loved the sensory opulence of it all. I imagined myself with cash wings rising above the back porch and the shadows, above the cigarette-burned carpets and hand-me-down clothes, beyond Mom’s paranoid rages and Dad’s late-night binges. I slowed my imaginings—dreamed up one image at a time until I saw myself floating in Wonder Woman pose over a world of extravagance and luxury that looked nothing like the one I had come from.

◊

When that first day ended and I pretended to come home, no one knew that I had skipped. I could keep doing it. The next day, I went straight to Wilson Farms for another comic book and some peanut butter cups. Some days I took the long way home, other days it was too cold and rainy to sit outside. One wet morning, I peeked in the living room window and saw Mom sleeping, so I creaked open the front door. If I could get upstairs without her seeing me, I could wait out the day in the warmth of my room. Mom was sleeping on the couch, cigarette smoke hanging in the air and Bob Barker chatting with a new contestant on The Price is Right.

I closed the door and pretended I was a ninja warrior on a secret mission. One step, my right toe touched the floor, then the ball of my foot, one joint at a time until my heel was flat. I tested the next step for noise, then more weight and the whole of my left foot. Then, my right toe touched the first stair. I counted seconds between movements, one one thousand, two one thousand. I breathed in, three one thousand, four one thousand. I took another step, five one thousand, six one thousand. I was all stealth. My chest expanded, seven one thousand. I was a silhouette rising, eight one thousand, nine one thousand. Then I breathed out. Let the air go, made myself invisible. I counted the number of floorboards as I moved; five on this step, seven on that step.

All along I watched my mother’s eyes. I listened to her breathing. I spelled the letters of her name in my head: Sea, Ay, Are, Oh, El, Eee. I breathed in. I spelled diamond: Dee, Eye, Ay, Em, Oh, En, Dee. I breathed out. On the top landing, I turned the corner and reached my room, where I forced my flesh into a corner of my closet and opened the Richie Rich. I could wait all day in that spot, my patience had become superhuman.

One day I came home from a fake day of classes and Dad was home early, waiting for me on the couch.

“Where’ve you been, Angie?” His Boston accent still thick after 40 years in New York. He took a long drag of his cigarette.

“School.”

“The school called and said you haven’t been there in at least two weeks.”

“I was afraid.”

He put his cigarette out and opened the jar of Noxzema. The shirt of his blue lot man’s uniform hung loose and wrinkled at the waist.  The dark cracks in his calloused hands were caked black even after washing. He rubbed the Noxzema on his hands. Mom was in the kitchen getting dinner ready.

“You were supposed to give me a note.”

“You skipped school because you didn’t have a note? I’ll give you a note, and then you will march your ass right into the principal’s office tomorrow morning.” He pointed his arthritic finger up the stairs, and I sulked off to my room.

Upstairs, I took off my shoes and sat on the bed. Beyond my window, the wind had picked up the leaves and made them spiral. I pulled the blankets up and took out an old issue of Richie Rich from my nightstand. On the cover, Richie was in bed wrapped in a green quilt, a fluffy white pillow leaned against a headboard of gold. From his bedroom window, the morning sun’s rays angled down onto his face. The robot arm of his alarm clock tapped him gently on his shoulder to wake him, the words singing from the radio, “Good morning, Richie.”

I traced my finger over each image on the front page, starting in the top left corner and moving to the book’s title. I stopped at the diamonds over each “i,” pretending I could feel the smooth sides, the edges and lines as I turned each diamond over in my fingers. I touched the swirls on the bed’s headboard, wishing I had a crayon to fill in the outline of empty spaces with another color—silver maybe. I traced the lines of the angled rays of the yellow sun above the alarm clock and out the window. Then I imagined myself sliding out of the window on the sunrays and counting the trees as I flew above them with dollar wings, two pine trees in the back yard, two maples in front. Four honey locusts on the street and on and on into the sun.

Angelique Stevens author photoAngelique Stevens’ nonfiction can be found in The Chattahoochee Review, Cleaver (Issue 8, Issue 11, and in Life as Activism), Shark Reef, and a number of anthologies. Her essay “Exposure” won silver in the Solas Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2013, and her experimental essay “Spiral” was published in the anthology Friend Follow, Text, which was nominated by Foreward Review for Best Anthology of the Year. She teaches creative writing and genocide literature in upstate New York, and she is a founding member of Straw Mat Writers, with whom she coauthored the collaborative plays FourPlay for the 2014 and Shitty Lives for the 2015 First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festivals. She holds an MFA from Bennington College, and she finds her inspiration in wandering—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger. She is currently writing a travel memoir about her trip to South Sudan and her experiences growing up in New York State.

Image credit: Aaron Burden on Unsplash

You may also enjoy:

IF NOTHING CHANGES by Angelique Stevens

KEEPING TIME by Angelique Stevens

BENEATH US ALL THIS TIME, an essay by Angelique Stevens featured on Life As Activism

 

EXIT STRATEGIES by Lise Funderburg’s Id as told to Lise Funderburg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

vintage holiday party with title "exit strategies"

EXIT STRATEGIES
by Lise Funderburg’s Id
as told to Lise Funderburg

Holiday party season is once again upon us—a time of dough-forward cookie trays and ornamental cabbages, of feigned interest and conversational quicksand. This year, why not ride the crest of incivility that has taken our nation by storm? Say what you mean. Say whatever you feel like, then get the hell out of Dodge. Examples follow:

“I thought you were more attractive from across the room.”
“It sure is noisy in here. I think it’s the sound of other people having fun.”
“Fish sauce is the ultimate umami, you say? Bye, I say.”
“I can’t hear you, and I don’t want to.”
“How do you know LA is ‘where it’s at for young artists’ when you are neither?”
“That person knows people, so I’m heading there. You stay here.”
“Was there a point to that?”
“What I’m getting from your airless and yet flatulent rant of the last eight minutes is that you, more than anyone, saw the current political situation coming. Now see me going.”
“When I said, ‘I don’t follow sports,’ I thought it implied baseball. My bad.”
“That woman blocking the food table is showing people YouTube cat videos on her phone. I think it would be better for both of us if you joined them.”
“I desperately need to refill my drink, and I will neither offer to refill yours nor rejoin you afterward.”
“Have you heard of tongue scrapers? They’re great for halitosis.”
“I’ve never put ‘home renovation’ and ‘Shakespearean’ together. I suggest you don’t, either.”
“If I understand you correctly, you’re saying jack shit about diddly squat.”
“That’s enough about your comics collection, don’t you think?”
“Oh, look! It’s my accountant! Want to meet him?”

Lise Funderburg author photoLise Funderburg’s id is based in Philadelphia and has done little or nothing of note, except to get Lise Funderburg in trouble from time to time.

EXCERPTS FROM SISTER ZERO by Nance Van Winckel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Two kittens wearing dresses holding a jump rope that a baby doll is jumping over, with the title of the piece in the upper left corner

EXCERPTS FROM SISTER ZERO
by Nance Van Winckel

Some Boy with a Football

The slow snow first and then the hard snow with left and right men shoveling, cars swerving, stalling, spinning out, and drip by drip the icicle daggers sharpening, waiting to descend as we women lug logs up the porch steps and the dogs slink off, shivering, tails between their legs.

—and “Good God,” a granddaddy shouts at some boy—with no earmuffs!—holding out a football, offering it to our great frigidity. A once-human hand, a bare beige hand, extending its offering.

And behind the hand, the young face watches us work in the world. Against the world. Some boy. I guess he was mine for a while.

⋅

Making It to Vast Old Age, So What

I dress my cat in a baby bonnet, then feel the infusion of his disdain for all that is insipidly human and most alive in a frilly disguise.

Through the clear yellow eyes of underworld lamps, he looks inside me for who I will be when dead. Will he want to eat me?

I untie his ribbons and lie down on my belly so he can climb upon my butt and survey the enormity of his ridiculous kingdom.

“First We Must Put On Our Brows,”

my mother says. But she waves away the pencil I hand her. She likes a black ballpoint or the mascara.

Mascara’s for lashes, I tell her.

“Lashes, brow slashes—who cares?”

I like this taupe color, I say, offering the pencil again.

She peers at its point. “That’s grey, honey.”

I’m her sixty-five-year-old daughter but am barely sixteen in her mind until she turns from the mirror and sees me. “You’re my sister, right?”

I pause, assessing her face for a good answer. Giving up, I try the pencil myself, easing my brow into a little arc of Say-what?

Forgetting her question, an old woman tugs twice at my sleeve. “Hey, could I use that thing when you’re done?”

Headshot of Nance Van WinckelNance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website. 

 

Image credit: Beverly on Flickr

You may also enjoy:

Excerpts from BOOK OF NO LEDGE by Nance Van Winckel

CLEARING by mud howard

FOR EVERY TOWN A WITCH by Kristin Bonilla

 

HANGINAROUND by Dan Morey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Woman with grocery bag walking while three old men watch her

HANGINAROUND
by Dan Morey

Play. It’s seven a.m. in Erie, Pennsylvania. Two young men sit at a bus stop on East Sixth Street, across from a paper mill that closed the previous year (2002). One young man, Dan Morey, is recently returned from a West Coast university, where he earned a master’s degree in English. When people ask him what he’s doing now, he tells them he’s “considering a PhD.”

Pause. This is patently untrue. Dan Morey has no intention of pursuing a PhD.

Play. The other young man goes by a variety of stage names: Grimlock, Grimes, C. Grimlock Brocklehurst. Grimlock is also a prodigal, having come home after apprenticing at the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival.

Pause. While at Williamstown, Grimlock helped Ethan Hawke squeeze into his tights and nearly ran over Paul Newman.

Play. It’s an unseasonably warm spring in Erie. The grass lot that fronts the paper mill is greening up and beginning to grow. Grimlock, clad in chinos and a corduroy jacket, stands on the bench and croons the chorus of “Hanginaround,” a 1999 hit (#28 on the Billboard Hot 100) by Counting Crows.

Pause. Dan Morey has no idea why the song is called “Hanginaround” instead of just “Hangin’ Around.” He thinks compressedpopsongtitles are stupid.

Play. Grimlock sings:

I been hangin’ around this town on the corner
I been bummin’ around this old town so long
I been hangin’ around this town on the corner
I been bummin’ around this old town for way too long

Dan Morey chimes in with “Way, way, way, way, way too long.”

“Are you sure it’s five ‘ways’?” says Grimlock.

Pause. Dan Morey is completely sure. Counting Crows will soon play the Warner Theatre in Erie, and their songs are all over local radio. In the past month, he’s heard “Hanginaround” roughly 42,000 times.

Play. “Do you remember the video?” says Grimlock. “The singer is at a bus stop.”

“Perfect,” says Dan Morey.

Grimlock sings part of the second verse:

We spend all day getting sober
Just hiding from daylight
Watching TV
We just look a lot better in the blue light

“Uncomfortably familiar,” says Dan Morey.

Rewind. Play. The bars in downtown Erie have closed. Dan Morey and Grimlock are walking home along Sixth Street.

Pause. Home for Dan Morey is his parents’ house. Home for Grimlock is with his grandfather, Grampy, a cantankerous widower.

Play. Dan Morey and Grimlock stop at a random apartment building and push some buttons on the intercom. It’s three a.m. A man answers. “Come on up,” he says. “I’m just making soup.”

Upstairs, a long-haired man in boxer shorts and a Rush t-shirt pedals an exercise bike while Dan Morey stirs a pot of Campbell’s tomato soup. The apartment is in disarray, with cardboard boxes of Tupperware, plastic utensils, and cassette tapes all over the floor. It’s hard to tell if the man is moving out or moving in. Actually, it’s neither. “Been here five years,” he says, pumping away on the bike.

“Any beer?” says Grimlock.

“No way,” says the man. “I’m on the wagon. Plenty of speed, though!”

Dan Morey and Grimlock eat tomato soup out of stained coffee mugs with plastic spoons. After finishing off a bag of oyster crackers, they exit the apartment. The man says, “Come back any time, dudes!”

Fast forward. Play. “That Counting Crows song is kind of interesting,” says Dan Morey, as a garbage truck rolls by the bus stop. “It’s very bouncy. Almost jubilant.”

“It is jubilant,” says Grimlock. “There are hand claps.”

“And yet the lyrics are depressing.”

Grimlock sings:

Well, I got all this time
To be waiting for what is mine
To be hating what I am
After the light has faded

“Yeah,” says Dan Morey, “and that bit about being ‘weighted by the chains that keep me.’ The inertia is palpable. It’s like he knows he should be moving on with life, but he just can’t get his ass off the couch.”

“Fun music, bummer lyrics,” says Grimlock. “It’s the ‘Margaritaville’ paradox.”

“And there’s a piano part. Similar to the one in that Len song.”

“You’re allowed to rip off that song. It’s called ‘Steal my Sunshine.’ That’s an invitation.”

“This piano just loops around and around, going nowhere.”

“Like the guy’s life,” says Grimlock.

“But does he really care? I mean, doesn’t the upbeat music suggest that he’s actually reveling in his indolence? Enjoying the glorious irresponsibility? Isn’t it all kind of fun?”

“Preaching to the choir,” says Grimlock.

Rewind. Play. Dan Morey wakes up in the basement of the random apartment building. He’s on the floor. Grimlock is face down on a couch. Dan Morey goes into the next room, where he sees washers, dryers, and laundry baskets. When he comes out, a janitor is shaking Grimlock, saying, “Hey, you, get out of here.”

“Where’s the bathroom?” says Dan Morey.

“Get out,” says the janitor. “Right now.”

Fast forward. Play. “I don’t think this bus is coming,” says Dan Morey. “Let’s walk.”

They head east, away from the paper mill and its idle smokestacks.

“Notice how much better this neighborhood smells since they shut the mill?” says Grimlock.

Pause. When the paper mill closed, 760 people lost their jobs. Erie bars were full of unemployed, complaining men. Some would become roofers or landscapers. Others got hired at the GE locomotive plant down the road, where they were soon laid off. Still others would enter government-sponsored retraining programs. These men were often heard to say, “I ain’t gonna be no goddamned male nurse, I’ll tell you that.”

Play. “A lot of environmental types are happy the mill shut down,” says Dan Morey. “But there’s always some jobless guy on the news whining about all the mouths he has to feed.”

“Gross,” says Grimlock.

“I know. It reminds me of birds regurgitating.”

“If they didn’t have all those snotty kids, they wouldn’t need to work in a stinking mill all day.”

“Bingo,” says Dan Morey.

As he walks along Sixth Street, past a sprawling housing project, Dan Morey ponders reproduction. What if the childbearing age changed? What if the burden of perpetuating the species shifted from young people, who know little of human suffering, to the elderly? If only old people (intimately familiar with tumors, incontinence, and a horrible array of lingering, debilitating, ultimately fatal illnesses) could create new life, would they? Knowing what they know?

“Look at that,” says Grimlock. “A garage sale.”

They are at the edge of Lawrence Park, an eastern suburb. The house holding the sale has a well-tended yard and looks respectable, so they enter the garage. A blonde woman says, “Hiya! You guys are up early.”

Dan Morey finds an old fedora. Grimlock tries on a pair of mirror lens cop sunglasses. He turns to Dan Morey and says, “You wanted to see me, chief?” Dan Morey stares back mutely. Grimlock whispers, “Put the hat on, dummy. We’re about to improvise.”

Pause. Grimlock’s latest acting obsession is improvisation. He talks a lot about the “Yes, and…” principle.

Play. Dan Morey puts the fedora on. Grimlock says again, “You wanted to see me, chief?”

“You’re damn right I wanted to see you!” says Dan Morey. “You know what your problem is, Brocklehurst? You’re a slacker. When I was a rookie, you think I spent all day loafing around donut shops and drooling on girlie mags? Hell no. I was out busting pimps. Running in dealers. Where’s your ambition, Brocklehurst?”

“I blame Bart Simpson, sir.”

The blonde woman laughs. Her husband comes in and takes a seat on a lawn chair.

“Bart Simpson, my ass,” says Dan Morey. “It was Ferris Bueller. Or Marty McFly. Or Maynard G. Krebs.”

“Maynard G. who, sir?”

“Krebs. The beatnik on Dobie Gillis.”

“Sorry, sir, that was before my time.”

“You disgust me, Brocklehurst. Who do you think you are? Shaggy from Scooby-Doo? The star of Reality Bites? Singles?”

Two young boys enter the garage, listening raptly.

“Maybe you want to move to Seattle, Brocklehurst. Grow a beard. Wear a beanie all day. Read graphic novels.”

“I hate graphic novels, sir. I’ll take the Archies any day.”

“Did I give you permission to speak, Brocklehurst? Who are you now? Peter Pan? Beavis and Butthead? That dreadlocked dope from Counting Crows? You think you don’t have to grow up and take orders like everyone else?”

“Sir—”

“Shut up, Brocklehurst. I want to see twenty speeding tickets on my desk by five o’clock. If I don’t, you might as well book that flight to Seattle. Now, get out!”

Grimlock exits as the blonde woman and her family burst into applause. He re-enters to take a bow with Dan Morey.

After purchasing the hat and sunglasses, Dan Morey and Grimlock continue their walk past old row houses built for GE workers.

Pause. General Electric once employed more than fifteen thousand Erieites, Grimlock’s father and Grampy among them. That number is now less than three thousand.

Play. Dan Morey and Grimlock enter a Polish deli in Lawrence Park. They order duck’s blood soup, which neither of them can get down.

“What are we doing with our lives?” says Grimlock. “Is this our Withnail and I phase?”

“I believe you could call us flâneurs,” says Dan Morey.

“Like the Spanish dessert?”

“Flâneurs were nineteenth-century Frenchmen who just sort of wandered around the boulevards all day making clever observations. They were of the crowd, but also apart from it.”

“Bullshit artists.”

“They declined to work, which is admirable. What’s the point, really? Is there a special place in heaven for hard workers?”

“Every hundred years, all new people,” says Grimlock.

Dan Morey and Grimlock cross the street and sit on the front steps of a bar that is not yet open.

“I been hanging around this town on the corner,” sings Grimlock.

“These days get so long and I got nothing to do,” sings Dan Morey. “I been hanging around this town way, way, way, way, way too long.”

The bartender lets Dan Morey and Grimlock in. She makes them White Russians. “The Dude abides,” says Grimlock.

Dan Morey puts some quarters in the jukebox and plays “Hanginaround” by Counting Crows.

“Great song,” says the bartender.

They all sing along:

And this girl listens to the band play
She says “Where have you been?
I’ve been lyin’ right here on the floor”

After a number of White Russians, the bartender takes Dan Morey aside. “Your friend is making googly eyes at me,” she says. “And he’s spilled two drinks. Better get him home.”

Outside, a bunch of men in Carhartt jackets are shuffling into a building. A sign on the door says “Meeting Today, eleven a.m.”

“Must be AA,” says Grimlock. “I should hit this.”

He goes inside and comes directly out. “Union assembly!” he says.

Grimlock makes his adieux to Dan Morey and cuts across the funeral home parking lot to Grampy’s house. He and Grampy drink Genesee beer and watch Turner Classic Movies.

Dan Morey goes into the woods behind the YMCA, where he runs into Psyches at the old campsite. Psyches is famous for having only worked a single day in his life. It was at Arby’s and he quit. They let him keep the nametag. Dan Morey has a beer with Psyches, then goes home to sleep.

Fast Forward. Play. Counting Crows gently rock the Warner Theatre. Dan Morey and Grimlock do not attend.

Pause.

Dan Morey author photoDan Morey is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania. He’s worked as a book critic, nightlife columnist, travel correspondent, and outdoor journalist. His writing has appeared in the Chagrin River Review, Roads & Kingdoms, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Find him at danmorey.weebly.com.

 

 

 

Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Flickr

You may also like:

LITTLE BLUE BOX by William Scott Hanna

MAZE OF THE GIANT HEART by Allegra Armstrong

[ITS SHADOW IS HELPLESS HERE] by Simon Perchik

 

BAKERSFIELD by Mickey Revenaugh

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Vintage postcard reading "Greetings from Bakersfield California"

BAKERSFIELD
by Mickey Revenaugh

We rolled into Bakersfield in 1968 the way the Okies did in The Grapes of Wrath—with everything we possessed packed into a creaking car and trailer, kids stacked on top of each other, and no place yet to call home.

Following a dust-devil down Highway 99, leaving my dad and his other wife at the Sacramento end of the Central Valley, my mom strangled the steering wheel of the Belvedere wagon until it and the U-Haul came to rest, hot and ticking, beneath the cement awning of the Capri Motel. Piling out, we could see the yellow arch across Union Avenue spelling out Bakersfield in bold black letters. Tall desert palms spindled the endless, empty sidewalk while sun-spotted traffic coursed by the motels and take-out shops and liquor stores. It was May and already close to one hundred degrees.

We didn’t know it yet, but Union Avenue was on its way down, sidelined by a newer, faster Highway 99 spur to the west. Not so long after we splashed in the pool and ate takeout fried chicken on the Magic Fingers-powered beds, the Capri Motel would be best known around Bakersfield for the hookers who posed in the doorways whenever a car pulled into the parched parking lot.

Mom’s new social work job—the one she’d taken the civil service exam for near the state capitol and then traveled down here alone on the Greyhound to win—would start on Monday, so we had five days to find a place big enough for a family with five kids. The oldest was Adrian, named after the college where my parents met and therefore spelled wrong for a girl; she had just turned fifteen when we got to Bakersfield, already accustomed to being a backup adult. Then there was me, age 10; twin sisters Merry and Melody, fraternally light and dark in both coloring and spirit, about to turn nine in a couple of weeks; and our golden-haired little brother Matthew, age four. Older brother Mark had enlisted in the Navy three years earlier and was out in the Pacific somewhere manning a destroyer and falling in love with bar girls he met on leave. He’d perhaps intentionally missed this period in which our parents’ marriage, always intermittently explosive, had finally flamed out like a Fourth of July gone awry.

We’d already moved three times since the fireworks started. This was the farthest we’d gotten, though, and there was something final about the set of my mother’s jaw as she read through the house for rent ads in the Bakersfield Californian over a cup of the Capri’s vending machine coffee.

My mom was great on the phone. She’d worked as a switchboard operator during college and later as a reporter and publisher, erasing any trace of the dirt-poor, awkward bookworm from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula she’d once been. Smooth and precise, her telephone voice was now deployed to reassure anxious landlords that they weren’t dealing with an almost penniless single mom with a passel of kids sweating it out in some Union Avenue dive, but instead a professional woman in orderly transition to the next phase in her career, whatever that might be in pre–women’s lib central California. “We’d be delighted to view the house this afternoon. What time would be convenient for you? Certainly, you may call back to confirm. It’s—” (quick squint at the motel phone atop the shiny floral bedspread) “—327-3577, ask for extension 211. Yes, that’s R-E-V as in Victor…”

We must have looked at half a dozen nearly identical ranch-style houses, all beige in my memory, with balding front lawns and chain-link backyards, before we pulled up in front of 321 Oleander Avenue. It was an Arts and Crafts cottage on a street of what realtors called “gracious older homes.” 321 had a double peaked roof and wraparound multi-paned windows in the front, a backyard with a pecan and an apricot tree, odd 1950s touches like a ceiling-wide plaster living room light fixture and island kitchen counter, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and no air conditioning.

Standing on the slide-like front porch banisters, we could see that there was a big park catty-corner from us with a swimming pool and tennis courts and bandshell. Down the block in the other direction, two kids rode Big Wheels round and round a circular driveway, the scrape of rubber on gravel making its own sullen rhythm. The beautiful, poisonous flowers for which the street was named glowed pink and white against their dusty green foliage at the end of our sidewalk.

The landlady with the hard blonde hair was giving Mom the lay of the land, waving her walnut-tanned arms for emphasis. This is still mostly a good area, she was saying. The elementary school over that way a few blocks is not bad, but Bakersfield High up the street? “That’s pretty mixed these days,” she said. “Being a grass widow and all, you can’t be too careful where you put your kids.”

She lit another Virginia Slim off the one burning low between her fingers. She looked at the five of us arrayed by size on the stairs, at my mom’s careful clipboard of houses to see, at our packed station wagon and U-Haul snug against the curb. She dropped the butt of her spent cigarette, mashed it under her white sandal, and brushed it into the street in one single, smooth move.

“You start work at the welfare department on Monday, huh? Jesus bless you for helping those people,” she said, pocketing my mom’s check for first, last, and security.  “Just don’t expect me to come running whenever something breaks.”

Within weeks, our gray tabby cat Nicholas got run over crossing Oleander. Matt broke his collarbone hurrying down from the treehouse at daycare when he saw mom’s station wagon approaching. Merry hammered curtain rods into the old plaster walls so she could have her own space, creating a fresco of cracks and dust instead. Melody snapped her toe on the cement front steps on her birthday. All of us middle kids got lice—possibly from the beds left behind by the last tenants, possibly from our new school—and spent our evenings with foreheads on the kitchen table, our long, straight hair spread out under the bright hanging lamp while Mom and Adrian hunted nits with a fine-tooth comb and malathion.

Summer came. All day, every day, it was back and forth to the park. The big swimming pool was twenty-five cents, the wading pool was free. There was a recreation program—for underprivileged kids, I now know—complete with crafts and games, lanyards and checkers and chess on the cement tables with permanent boards tiled in. A tall rocket ship structure marked the playground: You could climb up inside to the top and see the whole park through the cage-like bars, and then ride the long slide to the sand below. A little refreshment stand sold snow cones and sodas, but we rarely had money for outside snacks. We also never wore shoes. It was a point of pride to be able to walk the blazing hot sidewalks full-footed and cross the street without sinking into the melting asphalt. By July, our soles were burned black and hard as hooves.

Adrian discovered a crowd of kids her age who hung out on the hill on the far side of the bandshell, recreating their own little Summer of Love less than five miles from where Merle Haggard was writing “Okie from Muskogee.” She’d deposit us at the pool or the rec area and then go find her cross-legged quadrant in the mass of long-haired bodies, swaying to Big Brother in a haze of pot and incense. She fell in love with a tall, muscled black kid who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix as much as his parents wanted him to be Jim Brown. We’d end the days all together on our porch, Ade and Fred, Merry and Melody and their two-by-two pals from the scruffy nearby streets, me with my sixth-grade bestie, whose size thirty-six bust was a source of wonder and envy, Matt with his golden locks now nearly down to his shoulders.

One evening after everyone had gone inside but me, two brothers from the Tara mansion down the block rolled their bikes over our grass and bump-stopped at the bottom step of the porch. Like me, they were closing in on junior high—or so I guessed. They went to the Catholic school and were rumored to have started late and been held back to reach maximum size for football. They both had crew cuts and flat blue eyes.

“Y’all are nothing but a bunch of hippies,” the younger one said. I think his name was Patrick.

“And nigger lovers,” his brother Sean added.

“Dirty, nigger-loving hippies,” Patrick nodded.

I stood up slowly on the stairs. I could see their pink scalps through their hair. Patrick had a stitches scar on the top border of his forehead.

“You all should go back where you came from,” Sean continued. “My dad says.”

I’d seen their father swerve his long white Cadillac into their circular drive most nights long after dark, his shirt sweat-stuck to his back as he swayed toward the columned porch. I would have liked to have seen him now.

Instead the door swung open behind me, and my mom walked out onto the porch. I backed up one step to close the space between us.

“How nice of you boys to come visit, but you’ll have to say goodbye now,” she said in her social worker voice. “It’s dinnertime for us and I’m sure your mom is expecting you home too.”

They shifted on their bikes.

“Or maybe I should call her to check?” my mom said.

Patrick tilted his head toward home and they began pedaling off across the lawns. Without looking back, Sean lifted his hand in a peace sign, then curved his index finger down so only the middle one remained. I wasn’t sure if my mom saw it—she was leading me back inside.

“I guess ignorance doesn’t skip a generation,” she sighed.

◊

My mom spent her days driving the county car out to the farm towns of Shafter and Buttonwillow, Wasco and Weedpatch, checking up on families who counted on public assistance to keep the tin roofs over their heads and arroz or grits on the table. Her caseload included sixteen-year-olds about to have their second babies and grandmothers herding multiple toddlers inside whenever the crop-dusters flew over. She saw women whose black eyes were always fresh on Monday mornings but faded along with their resolve by Friday.

Once she showed up for a scheduled visit at a house near the railroad tracks in Oildale and saw no car in the dirt drive, got no answer to her knock. Just as she was writing up her Reminder! Mandatory Home Visit card to slip under the door, she saw the bedsheet over the front picture window move and a small round face appear in the corner. “Is your mommy home?” my mother asked, leaning down so the child could see her lips move. The little girl shook her head. Mom looked around the porch and saw the mailbox was stuffed with bills and fliers, two or three tossed circulars near the mat. She walked back to her white Pinto with the Kern County insignia on the door and pulled her sack lunch out of the glove compartment, then returned to the porch, the girl watching her every move. Mom slowly sat down on the concrete in her poly-blend, lime green A-line shift and pantyhose, opened the lunch bag, and pulled out the cheese sandwich and celery sticks she had packed herself early that morning. She flattened the bag on the porch beside her and laid out the food picnic style, then remembered the Snickers bar in her purse and added that too. She took the sandwich out of its flip top baggie, broke off half of a half and took a bite, grinning toward the girl whose nose was now flat against the glass. Mom chewed each bite very slowly, feeling the stucco of the porch pillar scratching the back of her neck below the chignon she wrestled her hair into for these long, boiling days in the field, watching a line of ants work their way up past her outstretched feet in their sensible tan pumps. She pitched a tiny piece of crust to the far corner of the porch to divert the ant train away from the main course.

The face in the window disappeared. The front door knob jiggled a few times, and the door inched open. My mom patted the concrete on the other side of the picnic sack and held out half the cheese sandwich. Dressed only in pajama bottoms and holding a bald Barbie, the little girl crouched down and snatched the sandwich from Mom’s hand, gulping down the white bread and orange cheese. Mom passed her the untouched half of her half, which also disappeared in a few bites. “Sorry I only have coffee,” my mom said, holding up her thermos, then noticed the girl was transfixed by the candy bar. “Let me peel that for you.” The child sank down next to Mom, sucking on the Snickers like a popsicle. Mom waited until she was finished and then used the paper towel she’d stuck in the lunch bag as a napkin to wipe the chocolate smears off the child’s face, now softening into sleep. Mom ate all the celery sticks, finished her coffee, and waited another hour by her Timex before carrying the sleeping child to the county car.

On the way to Shelter Care, she must have passed the towering, pastel-bubbled “Sun Fun Stay Play” sign marking the northern boundary of Bakersfield on Highway 99. There was another sign just like it south of the city line, cajoling travelers headed north. The city boosters had erected both with great fanfare the year we came to town. Across the bottom, the tagline read: “The Sign of a Progressive Community.”

Mickey Revenaugh author photoMickey Revenaugh is a Bakersfield-bred, Brooklyn-based writer whose work appears (or will soon) in Chautauqua, Catapult, Lunch Ticket, The Thing Itself, Louisiana Literature, and LA Review of Books, among others. She was recently named finalist for the 2017 Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction at Antioch University and the 2017 Penelope Niven Award for Nonfiction at the Center for Women Writers. Mickey has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington, an MBA from NYU, and a BA in American Studies from Yale.

 

You may also enjoy:

ESCAMBIA by Donald Ryan

THE SONGS OF MY YOUTH by Nancy Hightower

WELCOME HOME by Michael Fischer

 

CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF THE STRANGEST CITY IN THE EAST, a travel essay on Portland, Maine, by J.A. Salimbene

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF THE STRANGEST CITY IN THE EAST
A Travel Essay on Portland, Maine
by J.A. Salimbene

Never have I been in a city so quiet after midnight. Walking across an empty city in the rain while trying to find the hotel with my brother should’ve felt more eerie and threatening. Instead, it felt welcoming. We didn’t make haste when the rain started falling; we welcomed it just like the city had welcomed us. We also didn’t make haste when one of the many homeless people took notice to us, because there they just smile and bless you. They seemed to long more for good conversation than the change clinking in your pocket. By the week’s end, we even knew many of their names, and they almost never asked us for a dime, only how we were doing. The only regret I have is that I didn’t take the time to capture any of those moments with them, or other moments after sunset, but it’s a much different experience at night in Portland, Maine. For some reason, it feels more appropriate to use words over visuals to express a nighttime walk in the strangest city on the East Coast.

The daytime is meant for visuals. Walking around when the sun hangs high in Portland, your feet and eyes work in unison towards a mutual goal of creative and aesthetic discovery. Your eyes wander and look for opportunities to create and feel something. Your feet wander too, but they obey your eyes by following their intuitive guidance. Here, it’s all around you. In front of you is the pulsing strip of Congress Street, with all of its quirky family-owned businesses and the smell of wood-roasted espresso. Behind you is the Old Port, carrying some of the richest of New England history, and a breeze on your back smelling of salty Atlantic air. While you’re standing there, wondering where to start, there’s a constant flow of unfamiliar, but lovely faces, and they all look you in the eyes, smile, and blow their cigarette smoke above their heads.

With a such a blatant juxtaposition, it’s nearly impossible not to capture every inch and angle, but you shouldn’t. As much as you may want to, you shouldn’t. You need to look for those very few moments. Seek out those few frames that capture the essence of your destination, and the feeling it elicits from you. Being a photographer, I brought my professional setup thinking that I’d regret it if I didn’t. However, I didn’t use it once, and instead made each image using only what I had in my pocket.

They say that the best camera is the one that you have on you, and I didn’t realize how true that was until I spent an entire week walking around with just my phone and later editing in a cafe or hotel room with no laptop. When your mind is so eager to create something, and you’re in an environment that’s so strange and inspiring, you quickly realize that the limitations of what’s in your pocket are not so limiting after all. Portland has a weird way of bringing that out in you.

Universally, photography is not about the equipment at hand at all. It’s about the individual creating the image, and the voice that speaks from the work. Photography is a way of capturing a single instance and making it immortal; a way of telling an infinite number of stories that last an infinite amount of time. In Portland, these instances are around every corner, but it’s not always the right time to grant them that immortality, which is one of the many elements that make this city so bizarre and intriguing. I’ve seen compositions in certain times of day and known that I needed to go back to them at an earlier or later time the next day, because it wasn’t quite the right moment to do it. You’ll never run out of inspiration and find yourself constantly returning to spots you’ve already been just to see them in a new way.

Portland is where the nice go to be nice, where the humans go to be human, and where everyone goes to eat lobster. So yes, it’s a wonderful and liberating city to create in, but regardless of where you are or the tools at hand, it’s important to recognize that you can achieve that kind of creative liberation in all of your travels as a photographer or a tourist. A good photograph tells a story that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks or complete the story themselves. Keeping this in mind while you travel is vital to travel photography. Don’t just take snapshots, because you want people to be as stimulated as you were when you felt the moment needed to be captured. The images you make on your journey say something about yourself and the nature of your experience, so seek out the frames that will capture that essence and make them immortal.

J.A. Salimbene is an emerging writer, photographer, and filmmaker from New Jersey. He’s currently acquiring a BFA in filmmaking with a minor in creative writing, and is a contributing writer for Trill! Magazine. His poetry and photography have been published in Modern Poets Magazine and The Normal Review.

Image credits: J.A. Salimbene

FIVE THINGS by Victoria-Lynn Bell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Silhouette of several tall palm trees against an orange sunset with the title of the piece in the top left

FIVE THINGS
by Victoria-Lynn Bell

1. The last thing that made you smile.

The orange sticky note is hard to miss—the corner peels off, pricks me as I pluck it from the headboard of my bed. Your handwriting is large and round. I hope your interview goes well tomorrow. Remember to be yourself! I toss it into the garbage and get ready for bed. The next morning, I pause in front of the mirror and dig the note out of the bin before shoving it into the pocket of my dress pants.

  1. A secret.

My mother is dying. 

  1. The last thing you wrote.

I was myself.

  1. Favorite city.

I was lucky enough to live in LA for one week. I learned how to hail a taxi and dance on the beach. I dipped my toes into the cool Pacific as the sun sank below the horizon and watched a sea lion chasing fish off a lighted pier in the middle of the night. When I return home, I tell you LA wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You’ve never been to the West Coast, and you never will.

  1. What you’d place in a time capsule.

Three feet below the ground, you will not feel the earth as it presses down from above. Beside you, the peel of a Halo, the only brand of clementine you would ever buy; chapstick I stole from your dresser; a playbill for The Secret Garden; the last book you borrowed from me, The Golden Compass; and all the pens that have run out of ink in my attempts to write about you.

Headshot of Victoria-Lynn BellVictoria-Lynn Bell is a student attending Central Connecticut State University. She is editor-in-chief of The Helix, an undergraduate literary and art magazine. When she’s not climbing mountains or swallowing saltwater, she can be found with a good book and a purring cat.

 

 

 

Image credit: Stuart Guest-Smith on Unsplash

LITTLE BLUE BOX by William Scott Hanna

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Newborn baby in a small plastic box with wires hooked up to it, in a blue room, with the title of the piece at the top of the image

LITTLE BLUE BOX
by William Scott Hanna

I can’t remember how to breathe so the nurse hands me a brown paper bag along with the white jumpsuit and matching cap. Sixty seconds before that they wheeled my wife away, her belly bulging under the white blankets, in her belly, our baby choking. Sixty seconds before that, the room a flurry of nurses and someone saying, “We have to take the baby,” like there’s a place where they take babies and never bring them back. Sixty seconds before that the baby’s heart rate crashing and the pulsing alarm. Sixty seconds before that joking that I hope the baby gets born fast so I don’t miss the golf on TV later. That was four minutes ago. Four minutes ago everything was normal. Four minutes ago I assumed everything would happen as it did when my son was born. But this is different. This time I’m hyperventilating, thinking I may never see my wife again, thinking our baby girl might die, the nurse smiling, patting me on the back, saying how they always seem to forget the dads in these situations. It’s not funny, but she tries to be. Nothing about this is funny. My baby girl is choking. And this is real. And she could die. And we don’t know which way to spell her name. And I can’t remember how to breathe.

◊

The baby won’t eat. She spent her whole first day of life throwing up breast milk and bottle milk, and she’s not the right color so they’ve put her in a little plastic box of blue light with four holes, two on each side, so that we can reach in and touch her. She doesn’t move much. She seems so tired. She just lies there really still on her back, her eyes covered with a little baby sleep mask to keep out the blue light. I can see her tiny belly going up and down. My wife hasn’t come to the nursery yet. They cut the baby out and she is in pain, but I don’t think that pain is what’s keeping her away. I know better than to try to understand.

◊

The baby won’t eat. They’ve put a tube up her nose and down her throat so she gets nourishment. I sit here for long stretches of time talking to her while she lies in her little blue box. I talk to her about her mom, her big brother, and her grandparents, and the only house on the left where I grew up with her aunt and uncle, and our big St. Bernard dogs, and the tall spruce and Osage and apple and maple trees and the woods and green fields. I tell her about how in winter on a clear day you can hike up the southern hill all the way to the top to where the trees clear just at the crest and look out over the open field down toward the valley, and if you time it just right, you can watch the lowering sun turn the snow and the brown seed heads in the field to a hundred different shades of orange and gold before it finally settles behind the hills and is gone.

◊

I am watching my wife hold the baby. It was awkward for the nurse, the tangle of tubes and wires, lifting her up out of the little blue box. In the rocking chair my wife gives a speech to the baby about how she has to be strong because that is what all the women in her family do. I know for a fact that this is true. I’ve seen it. No matter what, they took care of everything. While their men went off to mine coal or to fight in wars or to mold steel, the women held it all together with their hands and their wills, always, and never complained. They’re strong. They don’t give in, ever.

◊

I am holding on to my big sister and can’t let go. I can’t breathe again and I haven’t slept. They told us they are taking the baby again. She’s been losing weight, even with the tube shoved up her nose and down her throat, and they’re all too stupid here to be able to help her. I don’t want to be here, so I keep holding on to my sister. I want to go back to when I was five and she was ten and it was summer and the trees were so green and we rode bikes and made up stupid songs and names and she dressed me up to play a flower girl in her pretend wedding. Or when she dressed me up as Horton the Elephant and tried to tape big construction paper cut-out ears and a trunk on my head. But we’re not there and then. We’re here and now, and this is happening.

◊

I know to go north, but I’m not paying attention to the road. At each bump my wife winces in the passenger seat because it was only four days ago when they cut her open. We don’t talk. We have no idea what to say. In mid-March everything is dormant and dark. I’m tired of everything being dead and brown and gray, the color of ash or closed up factories or the smoke from the stacks along the river. Even the trees are gray and dark, ticking past like seconds on a clock, only faster than seconds. Somewhere ahead of us the baby is in her little blue box in the back of an emergency medical transport. I don’t know how fast I’m going but I know I’m on Highway 22 moving in the general direction of Pittsburgh.

◊

From a high room with a big window and a Giraffe intensive care unit in the middle, another flurry of nurses, and one says, “We need your permission,” and I think, what am I supposed to say? I can’t talk or think. “Sir, we need your permission,” she says, and I say, “What will happen?” and she says, “The baby will die,” so we say, “Yes, yes,” and in the background they’re trying to find a vein for the IV, but there are hardly any places left for needles, and the baby is screaming louder now than she has in all her four days and eleven hours. And there’s pain and confusion but everyone seems calm with urgency. And I’m watching all of this from the corner of the room and can’t do anything about any of it, thinking that every minute people either end up dying or keep on not dying.

◊

Everyone is gone, just me and my new baby girl, and night coming on and the quiet calm in the room, except for the click click of the machine pushing in more blood every so often. Through the raindrops on the huge window by the ledge where I’m sitting, I see Pittsburgh all spread out below, the sky growing darker, and the city lights lighting up until backed by the full black sky. From way up here on the whatever floor, the city fully lit now in tiny lights, everything looks all held together in webs of bridges and rivers and traffic pulsing through, lights reflecting in the water.  When the traffic files in at intersections, and the signals turn red to green, all the lights start moving, floating across the bridges over the rivers that mirror the city, this way toward my window high above, little perfect pairs of diamonds, gliding over the water, brighter and closer and brighter and closer, until they’re almost blinding, until I’m almost not even thinking, until I’m not even trying to remember how to breathe.

Headshot of William Scott HannaWilliam Scott Hanna is an assistant professor of literature and writing at West Liberty University near Wheeling, WV, and a lifelong resident of the Upper Ohio Valley. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Heartwood Literary Magazine, and Still: The Journal.

 

 

Image credit: Serguei Mourachov on Flickr

MAZE OF THE GIANT HEART by Allegra Armstrong

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Drawing of organs and blood vessels with caption "Maze of the giant heart"

MAZE OF THE GIANT HEART
by Allegra Armstrong

We took seats in the back of the planetarium. I glanced over at you, my face warm with anticipation. You leaned back and looked up. When the lights went out, would you cover my knee with your hand as a deep, slow voice described which stars we were seeing? Would I rest my head on your shoulder, at peace with the world and the universe, as Orion moved West, poised to shoot?

You kept your distance. We examined placards in Space Command. The fifty million year old meteorite, the gravity well. I asked if you were happier without me and you said you’d been lifting weights.

We came to the giant, papier-mâché heart. “Remember when we tried to have sex in here?” you said. We’d finished a late-night showing of Star Wars in the museum’s IMAX theater, and rather than leave, we’d taken our own after-hours tour. We’d made it as far as the right atrium when a construction worker had found us and sent us away. The exhibit had been under repair. “We were so close,” you said. “That woulda been legendary.”

We wound our way through the maze of the giant heart, which was crowded with children on a Saturday. You led the way, took the pace of the kids, which was slower than our natural pace. At one point you turned, trapping me too close to you, your mouth inches from mine. My own heart hammered, and I stepped back.

In the giant brain, I hid from you. The brain exhibit didn’t exist when we were kids. It was new to me that October, my favorite part of the museum. Made from translucent strands of plastic and ethereal LED lights wound around clear disks, the perfect size to perch on. You stood at the bottom and I climbed. I pulled myself to the top and ran down. I invented a jumping game with two brothers I met, under-five aspiring construction workers with neon vests. A security guard asked me to please control my sons, as we were intimidating the other children.

I returned to you. “I have to go,” I said. “I’m meeting someone at three.”

“I guess I’ll stay here,” you said. “Look at more stuff.”

We exited through Optical Illusions.

“I heard you broke a glass in the garbage disposal at Cameron and Emily’s new place,” I said. “It’s weird ’cause we got together at the same time as them, and now they moved in together and we broke up.”

“I mean, we were never gonna live together,” you said. “We weren’t on that trajectory.” I thought about you asking me—eight times? Nine? to move in with you, my soft rebuttals.

◊

Our breakup was a surprise. In August, I had taken a red-eye home from a week-long vacation. I got a cab from the airport and then biked to your place straightaway. You hadn’t left for work yet. You made us eggs for breakfast. I gave you a blowjob in the kitchen. You left and I fell asleep in your bed.

You came home and didn’t kiss me hello. “What do you want for dinner?” I said. “I was thinking we could go for a picnic.”

You crossed to the fridge, pulled out several mini Twix bars. “Candy,” you said. “I want candy for dinner.” You smiled at me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I want to do something.”

We went up to your roof, arranged ourselves on waterlogged deck chairs. You had a clear view of the PECO building, which projects the time all day in dull neon. I sat facing you, looked out on the spires of the Baptist church across the street. I told you several long stories about my vacation, but stopped when I realized you weren’t talking. You stuck your tongue out at me like you were gagging. Clouds rolled overhead. I felt gently disconnected from the world, the product of too little sleep and all night traveling.

“I want to break up,” you said, and your voice cracked.

“What?” I laughed.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I thought about this a lot when you went away. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Is this a dream?” I said. “I’ve had this dream before.” Could I win a race downstairs to your knife drawer? How badly would a leap from your roof injure me? Would broken bones postpone this feeling to another day?

“How long have you known?” I said.

“I decided yesterday.” You slipped a tiny candy bar into your mouth.

“How the fuck can you eat candy at a time like this?” I said. Mid-chew, you looked up at me. “I’m leaving.”

“Wait,” you said. “Stop.” You grabbed me, half-hug, half-restraint.

“What!” I said. “What do you want me here for?” You looked over my shoulder. Several over-forty women were watching us from a neighboring roof. They could hear every word I said.

Since the day we met we’d slept together, wrapped up like a shell around an egg, four nights a week. Two months before I left for vacation you’d moved to a new apartment, away from a roommate who hadn’t liked me, and we’d started spending every night together. I had a key to your place.

I sat back down.

“This feels wrong,” you said. “Us being together. And I was really happy with you for a while. But, I mean, we’re so different. We always said we weren’t forever.”

“You always said that,” I said. “I said I was happy. And I mean, are we really that different?”

“We’re from different neighborhoods, we’re different kinds of liberals. We think differently, we talk differently. We’re not even the same kind of feminist.” You have a spreadsheet to keep track of every girl you’ve fucked. The rows list women’s names and the columns bear different sexual acts. At the end of each row, there are “comments.”

“Yeah, but I mean, we both like going to concerts, biking, walking dogs. We do a lot of cool stuff together.”

“And that was good for a while,” you said. “I just feel like something’s wrong. I’m happy when I’m with you, but when you leave, when I’m alone, I feel—not good.”

“But I’ve been worried about that, too,” I said. “I keep telling you how I’m worried you haven’t been seeing your friends enough. And you don’t like your job, and so now it’s like, you’re gonna give up the one thing that you do like? How’s that gonna work?”

In your kitchen, I cried so loudly you came in to check on me. “I’m not breaking your stuff,” I said. “If that’s why you’re in here.” You looked at me. You went in the other room. I followed. I sat on the couch next to you.

“Legs,” you said. Nobody calls me that anymore. “I’m sorry to do this to you.” Your eyes were sad. I put my hand on your knee, my head on your shoulder. You put your arm around my waist.

“I know you don’t mean to hurt me,” I said. “You’re a nice baby.” We stayed on the couch like that for a long time.

You asked for your key back when I left. “Goodbye,” you called, and I didn’t say anything, and the door closed.

◊

I haven’t seen you in the six months since we stood outside of that slanted-wall room in Optical Illusions, made to trick museum-goers into thinking the floor is crooked. You were wearing a yellow t-shirt, so handsome it was painful for me to look. We haven’t run into one another since then, which is odd because you chose your apartment specifically for its proximity to mine.

You want to rewrite the past. Every time I saw you, I realized, as I biked away from the Franklin Institute, you might try to change a different memory, starting with how serious we’d been, negating our favorite things about one another, what we’d done together. I wouldn’t have you back, that was clear, but did being friends with you mean the slow erasure of the love we’d had, your desperate attempt to ease the pain of the loss of me?

We texted sometimes, still, after that.

“How are you feeling?” I’d say.

“The same,” you’d say. “Fine.”

We texted about how much we could dead-lift nowadays, our weight training regimens. A poet and an engineer fall in love, what had we been expecting? Numbers, at least, could not be misconstrued. When we broke up I said I would call you when I could bench 185. In January I exchanged lifting weights for swimming laps.

In April I saw your stepdad walking your dog in the park. She hugged me, twice, her paws on my chest, crying, dog hair everywhere. It was the first of many seventy-degree spring days, global warming or urban canyon effect, or the start of an early summer. Summers for us had meant outdoor parties at the drum circle in Fairmount Park, bring-your-own-forty. Saturdays at the Italian market, searching out the freshest fruit. I wonder if you still do those things, now that you work in an office. I wonder if you ever wander up to your roof deck for a joint or glimpse of dim city stars and think of me.

Allegra Armstrong author photoAllegra Armstrong is a Philadelphia-based writer. Her work has previously appeared in Steel Toe Review, Underground Pool, and The Same. You can find her at the public library, the rock gym, or biking fast through traffic. She reads original poetry aloud at armstrongallegra.bandcamp.com.

 

 

 

Image credit: Kris Gabbard on Flickr

MY FATHER’S HAIR by Sara Schuster

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Line drawing of scissors with title "My father's hair'

MY FATHER’S HAIR
by Sara Schuster

He took about a week to consider.

I imagine he woke up Monday, wearily shaved his cheeks and chin in his bathroom, then stared at his hair in the mirror. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, with frustration. By Friday, disgust.

Sunday, he stood at my bedroom door with a pair of scissors and a pair of pursed lips, unwilling to verbally admit his defeat. “You swear you’ve cut hair before?”

I nodded, surprised he’d held out as long as he had.

Four months earlier, Christmas Day, my father woke up with shingles in his right cranial nerve five. We assumed a rash and a fever, perhaps the flu; he was eighty and his illnesses had begun to crash with no warning, so we had become accustomed to waiting them out. Three days later, the rash was gone, but post-herpetic neuralgia replaced it, giving way to severe nerve damage. The number five nerve extends like a hand with five fingers, if you place the palm at the ear. One finger wraps around the chin, one below the nose. One on the right cheek, one toward the right eye and eyebrow, and the thumb, running north from the ear. On nerve activity scans, all five lit up in red, which my father joked made perfect sense because it felt like they were on fire.

And that was really all he said—avoiding further discussion, he left me fuzzy on the details of his illness for most of my adolescence. I did know that he refused medication to lessen the pain, choosing hours of stony silence spent on the couch with the lights off over opiates. In later years, he’s mentioned to me that the few times he took them, he could barely keep himself awake, and for the first time truly felt old. But to a fifteen-year-old, this refusal, and the diagnosis, seemed inane—as I tiptoed through to the kitchen, I couldn’t understand why nothing was being done; no procedures, no operations, no solutions. “Incurable” made little sense to a girl who had barely had the flu. Yet here my father sat in silence for the third week, his forehead in his hands, because waiting was the adopted treatment. Petulant, teenage me was ill-equipped to partake in this stakeout, so if I wasn’t sequestered in my room with television, I was avoiding the dark living room by spending weekends at my boyfriend’s house.

The detail I was clear about was the status of his hair, which he talked about with a remarkable constancy. His standing monthly hair trim went neglected, and the fringe around the base of his skull quickly grew unkempt. He’d grumble at dinner: “I look like an old man.” “I have a mullet.” “I feel like the back of my neck is wearing a blanket.”

◊

In the early months of recovery, he’d wince if any part of his head was touched, bobbing and weaving in a self-protective two-step whenever my mother or I came near him. We stopped hugging in the mornings before I left for school. My mother, frazzled, stopped calling to find out where I was every day at five. On the nights I did come home, I quickly noted that we no longer ate vegetables (because my father hated them) and that instead my mom made pasta and put in extra meatballs because it was his favorite. Uncharacteristically, I chose not to complain.

I’d hesitate before entering the house, attempting to prepare what to say. In the way that teenagers so often do, I lacked the vocabulary to ask him about how he was hurting or what I could do, regularly scrambling for language that felt appropriate. While I had overheard murmurs of these conversations between my mother and him, emulation seemed impossible, and the strain I caught in my mother’s exhausted whisper was frightening. Scuttling in the house and mumbling a barely audible “hey” as I passed, I’d sheepishly remain hidden until dinner.

There, across the table from me, hunched over the parmesan, he didn’t look much like himself. After months of wordless observation, my gaze alit on his shoulder-length hair, and I found something to say. Between bites of rigatoni and meatballs, I volunteered.

“What?”

“Let me cut your hair.”

“Have you ever?”

“Sure.”

◊

We’re a family of vanity, so what began as tepid acceptance soon turned into a ritual. My father would peek his head into my door in the early afternoon once every third Sunday, after I had finally hoisted myself out of bed. Working up the nerve to state his intent, he’d feign nonchalance as he made his way around my room. He’d walk to the window and pull down the blinds a bit, causing the previously settled specks of dust to sparkle when they caught the redirected shafts of sunlight. He’d organize books and wipe rings of condensation off my desk. In the haze of a recently-woken adolescent, I’d continue watching Law & Order on my computer as though zombified. This round of cat and mouse would go on until he finally broke:

“Do you have fifteen minutes?”

I’d exhale, responding that I didn’t. He’d nod, and turn to leave, when I’d get up to grab the scissors. “Where are you going?”

“You just said—”

“Come on—”

“Not if you’re too busy,” but his fingers, brushed with arthritis and refusing to bend easily, were already toying with the inch or so of hair he felt was too shaggy. Not that there was even much to fuss with: the majority of his head was bald, hair only running from ear to ear, wrapped, as we joked, like a fur head-warmer. He once had thick, black hair that hung long and curly at his shoulders. A denim designer for Sears Roebuck in the seventies, he’d chosen his hair over promotions, leaving to start his own business when his boss pushed him to cut it. Though that hair left him long before I was born, I’d grown up surrounded by photographs on the walls, paying homage to his curls.

When my dad talks about his youth, he talks about his dog, King, whom he swears was half wolf. He tells endless stories about his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, where a pickle was five cents and his mother smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. He talks about the girl he tried to marry at eighteen, for whom he hitchhiked from Durham, North Carolina back to Brooklyn only to find her engaged to someone else. And he talks about his hair. For all of these vignettes, I nestle beside him on our living room couch and doze, while he watches the news and resumes his stories during the commercials— in part to me, in part to himself. As a young child, I used to bury my face in his stomach at the same time, listening as much to his voice as to the gurgles in his belly; the two together in harmony sounded satisfyingly alive and reassuring to me, and I delighted in his warmth.

◊

It took just under two years for his nerve scans to move from red to yellow, and then to a sustainable, even ignorable, green.  I went to college, and he returned to his barber.

But I can still easily feel the heartbeat in the veins beneath the silk of my father’s scalp, as though my hands are only centimeters away. I remember wondering if the pulsing lined up with the pain of the frazzled nerves, then chastising myself for creating a visible reality for an invisible occurrence. How physically tangible can the synapses of one’s nerves be anyway, or for that matter how real? I didn’t want to ask, probably because I really didn’t want to know.

The muscle memory returns, too: I can still feel the strain in my mouth, tense as I wielded the scissors and refused mistake, and feel how the the rest of my body poised like a statue as I moved the blades around the nape of his neck. I’d take barely an inch off of his baby-fine hair and watch it flutter, like feathers, down into the sink. In this real-life game of Operation, I knew intrinsically the repercussions of allowing the blades to even brush his skin.

He went from asking to demanding; I went from offering to submitting with caustic, adolescent sarcasm. We verbally scuffled every time he would scrutinize to make sure the ends were even. We brought in rulers, occasionally took photos on my cellphone to pour over and dissect how even the cut was in the back, and inevitably fifteen minutes turned into an hour.

“I don’t want to look lopsided, Sara, I’m not some crazy old man.”

“Why would I make you look crazy? Jesus, trust me for, like, one second.”

“Jesus doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall. I would trust you if it wasn’t already lopsided.” Touché.

“I think it’s your head that’s lopsided,” and our eyes would meet in the bathroom mirror. Me standing behind him with tufts of hair in one hand, big gray craft scissors in the other. Him seated below me and obstinately repressing a grin.

“Okay.”

I’d hold my breath and raise the scissors once more, knowing the hair was not even, but also that my confidence was wavering and that my fingers begged for a break. Yet, as I navigated the globe of his mostly bald scalp, he never flinched. Lost in his desire for the hair to be perfect, he’d forget the fiery nerves and the fear of being touched. Perhaps even the shingles altogether.

The truth—I hadn’t cut hair before. Somehow the blades never so much as grazed him.

Sara Schuster author photoSara Schuster is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She writes short stories and personal narratives focusing on memory, health, and bodies (especially her own). Her most recent work is a thesis on recovering from anorexia. Other published pieces can be found in the Penn Gazette.

DIARY ENTRY, by Arden Sawyer, Featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

DIARY ENTRY
by Arden Sawyer
Featured on Life As Activism

Diary entry:

The year is 2017, and it is still young. Yet already it has managed to make me very concerned about how it will turn out as it grows older.

At present, I’m staying with my aunt Rebecca in her house in San Francisco, California, under the wing of her charity. The back of the drought has been broken by a glut of rain. Every night Rebecca watches the news. She watches the news of her own will and choosing, and I am simply there for it, experiencing its noise and light because I am in the same room while it plays. Rebecca is an American, by her own identification, and lives in America. I am simply here in it, situated physically in this spot on the earth, borrowing space in other people’s lives.

The news is a series of shocks interspersed with trivialities.

A forecaster states, “Strange and exuberant bouts of unnatural weather lash the nation.”

And I think: this is what it will be like now, a series of binges and purges.

A newscaster reads, “Xenophobia and lies in the early days of the Trump administration.”

And I think: this is what it will be like now, a series of descending rungs into dystopia.

Then they discuss a new smartphone that is spontaneously combusting.

When I want to escape the noise and light, I go to the front parlor and sit by the window, looking out onto the street. School children weighted with backpacks go by. I watch them, and I write.

I imagine that this document will be found later by generations who are digging through the wreckage trying to figure out what happened. They will be humans, but different from me: mutated by waste and radioactivity; something strange and new. Thinking of this brings me hope and comfort. Humanity should be doing something new. But, all they will learn from my writing is that I was small, powerless, and lost.

I don’t know how to feel afraid for myself. The fear that I manage to feel is disembodied, like pain in an anesthetized body part. I’ve never had any hard evidence that I’m a real person, a person who exists outside of rooms where televisions play, a person who can be affected by the things out there. But, I do feel afraid for other people. I feel afraid for the people out there; the people on the TV screen during Rebecca’s news hour.

In the last segment, images played of the protests at San Francisco International Airport. There were frightened people speaking into the cameras, lamenting the sudden barrier that has dropped between them and their loved ones overseas. I stood paralyzed, first because of the sight of them, and then because of an overwhelming sense of despair at the complete absence of will in my body to move, to act, even now.

I wish people would stop saying “I can’t believe this is happening here, in the US, in 2017.” As if this is not the same place, the same country in which they live and have lived, that has contained this reality since its birth. As if this period in U.S. history arrived sans a series of traceable steps. Then I question, am I one of those shocked people who believed that modern America was a land of moral superiority, where society is a forever-ascending staircase of progress towards… what? Liberty? Did I believe that the future was a better place and we were living the future today? Did I think that love and enlightenment could be a feature of the new global monoculture?

I move into the kitchen and begin following the images on the TV screen in glances. Rebecca and I buzz around each other, making our dinners. Here I am then, watching the news, living in America, existing as an American. The news becomes a part of my nightly routine, just like Rebecca.

Maybe this is the time she and I will look back on as when everything changed, but right now everything remains the same. Right now, we are just living our lives, watching other lives in glances, hearing things from far away but feeling them only peripherally. We are not the dry aquifers or the farmers. We will not be deported. We make our dinners and then we eat them. Still I do not believe anything will really happen, because I can’t imagine the change. Even when the change is occurring still I cannot imagine it.

If I could offer the mutated humans of the future one thought, it would be that we are gone because we let circumstances advance until they were upon us, until they were irreversible; because we did not want to step away from our ordinary lives long enough even to preserve them, to abandon our projects and our routines, even when we saw a looming threat to them in the distance. We did not want to experience change, and so inevitably change came to us.

There is one good piece of news, though: I’m not pregnant. So, I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to get an IUD implanted while that is still an option. I have to enjoy as much fear-free sex as I can before my ovaries become property of the state.

Arden Sawyer is a genderless artist from Philly who utilizes the pronouns of they or them. They are an art student working on their BFA at Rhode Island School of design. They are currently taking time off of school to travel and pursue their writing.

 

 

 

Image credit: Tina Rataj Berard on Unsplash

THE SONGS OF MY YOUTH by Nancy Hightower

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Stack of vinyl records

THE SONGS OF MY YOUTH
by Nancy Hightower

Facebook has had one of those circulating memes, the ones that ask you to make lists that somehow make you feel nostalgic for a life you’re not sure you ever really had. The latest: list ten albums that influenced you as a teenager. Then: list ten albums that influenced you before you were a teenager. I do not make a list. Instead, I read your list, the choices that betrayed your rebellion or geekiness or prescient cool factor. I want to make my own list, but your list is better. I want to make my own list, but my throat catches as I hum songs I once took great pains to forget, songs that betray a disjointed yet emotionally accurate soundtrack.

1) At my grandparents’ house, I watch the Lawrence Welk show right before bed. Singers belt out “Good Night, Sleep Tight” for their final number. I am usually in my pajamas and afterwards my grandfather will tuck me in. He will touch me. He will make sure it feels good. I cannot remember him without remembering those singers dressed in bright yellow, swaying side to side, as if life will always be this grand.

2-4) In the ’70s, my mother is an amalgamation of outlaw country music songs. I sing about stolen kisses and illicit love every time she plays Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “I’m Not Lisa” by Jessi Coulter, and “Angel of the Morning,” by Merrilee Rush. I don’t understand that my mother listens to them while thinking of the other men she has in her life. I am often sad and can’t understand why.

5) Kenneth Copeland’s He is Jehovah signals my mother’s conversion to charismatic Christianity. She listens to sermons about faith, prosperity, and demons. She likes knowing about prosperity and how to make money, but demons are more interesting. She wants my thoughts to be pure. My thoughts are anything but pure. She wants to enroll me in a special Christian school, that is somehow more special than the Christian school I’m already attending. In 1982, she leaves my father and takes me to Denton, Texas, to be with her lover.

6) “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie is played on repeat in our small apartment. My mother’s reality starts breaking down as she begins to accuse me of being in the occult. She looks to Jim for strength. I begin to understand he is her endless love. I am the assassin no longer allowed to hug her.

7) After a few months, I am sent back to my father, where I have access to a record player and cassette tapes. Rock and roll is a musical gateway into a world of sex and drug use, so I am caught between Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and the evangelical crooning of Keith Green, Sandi Patti, Petra, and Carman. I don big stereo headphones to drown out my stepmother’s accusations that I am trying to destroy the family and listen to stories about Jesus and Heaven. I will step into any world just to escape my own.

8-10) By fourteen, I am sent to a Christian boarding school in order to preserve the family peace. Rock music is a vehicle for corruption and dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire so only approved music (indicated by a yellow sticker) can be played. My two years here are a strange mix of Amy Grant’s Straight Ahead, Howard Jones’ Dream into Action, and U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. I memorize songs that blare from the car radio when allowed home. When staying at friends’ houses I devour MTV videos, entranced by and envious of the men who are allowed to wear more makeup than I am.

It’s not until I leave my house at seventeen that I begin a journey towards creating my own musical collections. I learn rudimentary dance skills at college, which become more fluid once I begin to frequent the Denver clubs at twenty-three. I sing along to Sisters of Mercy, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, and Peter Murphy; my white t-shirt lit up by black light. It’s during this time that I discover Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes, an album that embodies my brokenness and ferocity, my desire to move beyond mere survival. It is a beginning, the signal of a new life no longer flanked by the chorus of other people’s pain.

Headshot of Nancy HightowerNancy Hightower has published short fiction and poetry in journals such as Word Riot, Sundog Lit, Flapperhouse, Cheap Pop, Gargoyle, and Prick of the Spindle. Her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015 by Port Yonder Press, and she reviewed science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post from 2014-2016. She is currently working on a book about digital fictions with DJ Spooky and teaches at Hunter College.

 

 

Image credit: Umberto Cofini on Unsplash

BROTHERS, BOYS, AND WHAT CAN I DO By Shannon Cothran

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Person in a dark room with a streak of light over their eye

BROTHERS, BOYS, AND WHAT CAN I DO
By Shannon Cothran

The gym floor is hard, and my butt bones are pinching my rear. I shift my weight. There are a hundred kids around me in the gym sitting criss-cross-applesauce, the way our teachers demand we sit. Why do they care how we sit? I stretch my legs out in front of me, hoping my teacher won’t see. I am caught by 5B’s teacher, Miss Stugart, and refold them.

A man in thick, gold-rimmed glasses with floppy gray hair and a tracksuit—the kind my gym teacher wears everyday—starts talking into a megaphone. I forget about my aches as he explains how we can fight back against someone who is trying to hurt us. Oh yes, he’s saying, a kid can fight back against even a big, strong man. He tells us how we can insert our thumbs into an attacker’s eye sockets in just the right way to pop them out. He tells us to make ourselves puke all over the mean man. He tells us to kick or knee or elbow or punch the man’s groin or throat.

When the presentation is over, I untangle my sleeping legs, gingerly putting weight on them, and they shake under me on the way back to the trailer outside the school that is my 5th-grade classroom. My legs are covered in bruises from falling all the time. I’m incredibly clumsy. My mom lovingly calls them chicken legs because they are unnaturally white, skinny, and bony. But it doesn’t matter how skinny and little I am anymore. I know how to pop someone’s eyeballs out.

That afternoon at home, I am straddling my little brother, his arms pinned under the strength of my thighs, and I am spitting in his face while he screams. I let the spit drip slowly from my mouth onto his face, a long string of it, so he can see it coming. My mom sees it coming too and pulls me off him, sending me to my room. I get talked at for an hour by her and then another hour by my dad. You’re almost five years older than he is, they say. Someday, he’s going to be bigger than you, they say. What will you do then?

I cannot imagine a time when my little brother will be bigger than me. Plus, if he’s going to be that big, then I will be faster, I reason. And there’s always my eyeball-popping power.

◊

My 7th-grade health teacher is talking to us about sex. I’m surrounded by pimple-faced thirteen-year-old boys who are sniggering at every mention of genitalia. My friends and I are too mature for that.

The teacher plays a movie. In it, a hot guy, a football player, is getting pumped up during a pep talk by his coach. It’s the homecoming game. He wins the game; he goes to the dance with his equally hot girlfriend, who has huge, teased bangs and even huge-er shoulder pads in her dress. They go back to his dad’s boat with a cabin in the hull, and he has sex with her even while she says no.

The class is silent. I feel something inside I’ve never felt before. I don’t know what it is, then, but later I will learn it’s the melting of my invincibility.

◊

My brother is begging me. “Come on, Shannon!” he pleads. “Come outside and play with me!” I feel a twinge of guilt. I love my brother Ethan; his ten-year-old face is always open and honest. Since his birth, I have been his primary playmate. Although I still spend time with him every day, at fourteen-going-on-fifteen, I have outgrown our imagination games. I no longer want to fight the Snow Queen in the backyard. I shake my head no. “Argh!” he cries, water welling in his eyes. We are on summer break and  live out in the country—he has no other friends nearby. Without me, he sees the long hours of the day stretching out in front of him with nothing to do. “I hate you! I want to punch you so bad!” I look at him, half daring him to hit me and half afraid he will.  He gives me one last dirty look before turning away, headed for the basement and his Nintendo.

◊

Matt is so gorgeous. We meet at a church dance. I check him out as he walks past me. When he catches me, I decide not to hide it, and instead look at him like, “What? You’re cute. I can look if I want.” We exchange numbers. My parents let us go on a double date since I am sixteen now, and my best friend Jess takes one for the team and goes with Matt’s much-less-attractive friend, Joe. We come up with a crazy idea for the date: an egg-and-tomato fight in the city park.

In the grocery store, the cold air from the dairy case makes my legs erupt in goosebumps, and I wonder, if he touches my legs later, will they feel pokey instead of nice and soft? At checkout, we decide, laughing, to have the boys pay for the tomatoes and the girls for the eggs.

It’s dusk at the park, and we divide ammo and hide before attempting to stealthily attack. I get Matt in the back with two tomatoes. “Cheap shot!” he yells, chasing me.

He catches me in less than fifteen seconds. As he tackles me—the star midfielder of the girls’ soccer team—I remember how, when I was thirteen, I ran a boy down.

He had gotten the ball at midfield, and since my team was in the wrong place, I caught up to him from his team’s defensive position and kept him from scoring. He was the best striker on their team, and my dad was going nuts—red in the face, full of pride for his girl, yelling gleefully from the sidelines, “Get him, get him, YEAH!”

Matt is a video game junkie, not an athlete. Yet that night in the park, catching up to me is easy for him; tackling me even easier. We are both laughing, and I love his hands on my waist, the weight of him over my hips, but then—then I can’t get him off. I bend my legs, twist, and lift my hips, but nothing happens. My laughter becomes high-pitched. I’m scared, but he isn’t letting up. He breaks a dozen eggs into my hair, holding my arms down with one hand while I lie immobilized on the grass in August on my first date.

I had often imagined scenarios where I was kidnapped, and in my mind I always managed to escape, despite the brute strength of the man who took me. I could outwit him, outrun him, outmaneuver him, uneyeball him. But here, in real life, I am powerless.

When Matt has exhausted his ammo, he stands and bends to help me up. The yolks glop down my hair and onto my bare upper arms. We stand there awkwardly. Maybe he knows something is wrong. I definitely know something is wrong—something has shifted. Or perhaps something is as it always had been, but I hadn’t known that truth until now.

Somehow we end up in the fountain at the park with Jess and her date. We rinse off the eggs and tomatoes and go home.

◊

At seventeen, I have a sexy boyfriend, Kris. We park his car in shadowed areas around town to make out. He is sensitive to my comfort level; his hands move slowly across my back, making sure I accept his advances. I feel safe with him. His masculine smell draws me in; it is intoxicating.

I am still unsettled about my powerlessness against Matt. How could I have won against that boy in the park last year, I ask Kris from his passenger seat. If Matt had wanted to hurt me, it would’ve been so easy. I couldn’t do anything, I tell him. It’s all about balance and not power, my all-knowing, sixteen-year-old, pothead boyfriend tells me. If you had just twisted your hips the right way, you could have beat him.

I don’t contradict him even though I know he is wrong.

◊

At college, I can’t decide on a major. You can do anything you set your mind to, my mom tells me. I read articles about women balancing motherhood with careers in male-dominated fields. I hear there are no women in the engineering major, but there should be, and that my school doesn’t have enough female mathematicians. I feel like I should step up for women, but math is my worst subject.

I take a self-defense class one Saturday morning. Our instructor Daniel is short, square, blond, and muscled. He talks for the first hour, and he says to stay safe, the most important part is making good decisions. He tells us some statistics: one in five women are raped, most have long hair—we think it’s because it’s easy to grab onto, he explains. Rapists can pick rape victims out of their high school yearbook photos years before they were raped—we know there’s something that rapists sense in their victims before they choose them, we just don’t know what, he says.

Am I carrying this thing inside me—something only rapists can sense? Something that makes me rape-able?

He teaches us how to walk down streets like we own them, how to project confidence and toughness, to park our cars correctly, to never be alone in the dark, to listen to our gut and walk or run the other way if we feel an “animal-like sixth sense telling us something is not right.” He dons a red padded suit, and I learn how to hit and where. I pound on Daniel’s protected weak spots.

I go to the movies that night feeling like every man there is a potential threat I can now take down. My date and I watch Charlie’s Angels, and Drew Barrymore beats up all the men who cross her.

The next morning I fling off the too-hot blankets and sit up to drink some water. I am wearing shorts, and I notice my legs, still white but no longer so skinny, still bruised but now from others’ soccer cleats. Across from me is a print of my brother’s new wrestling picture; all the members of the high school team get them taken for the yearbook. He has big, broad shoulders, he wins matches, he’s practically balding already. He doesn’t need me to play with him anymore. He likes to joke that he got into wrestling so no one else could ever sit on him and spit in his face. What I did to him was awful, but it’s OK now, just a funny old family story.

My legs and his picture and my guilt and my memories merge, and I realize the only reason my gigantic little brother doesn’t hurt me isn’t because he can’t catch me or because I could overpower him with a few tricks I learned on a Saturday morning—it’s because he chooses not to.

Headshot of Shannon CothranShannon Cothran is a professional food writer who prefers New England’s clam chowder and ice cream to New Orleans’ gumbo and snowballs. 

Image credit: Larm Rmah on Unsplash

ALARM by Sandra Shaw Homer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Woman in wheelchairALARM
by Sandra Shaw Homer

When it became clear my grandmother could no longer live alone, I was the one who took the initiative to find a place for her, and I wanted it to be near me.  She refused to go to the only facility in Albany, where she lived, because there was a patient there she intensely disliked, and she loathed the idea of going to Florida, near her two sons, so we found a “life-care” facility in a pretty, rural area outside Philadelphia. My sister, also nearby, handles our grandmother’s affairs while I visit and occasionally deal with the staff. This division of labor falls to each of us naturally, and I’m happy with my share.

My grandmother was only forty-seven when I was born, but because she was my grandmother, I always thought of her as old. It was only thirty years later that I began to observe that there are degrees of old. Her shoulders got smaller suddenly, her bones collapsing together. She developed an uncertainty in her step that I realized was a fear of falling (although she never stopped wearing her low-heeled pumps). To me she had always been proud and fearless, but with this new vulnerability of hers I started to assume a larger role. The shift was gradual, but my awareness of it cataclysmic. The love had always flowed unconditionally toward me. Now it was flowing the other way. It frightened me to realize that I was going to lose her. Returning that love I’d always had from her took on a special urgency, and I was grateful to be able to do it.

She enriched my life in so many ways: her frequent “rescues” from my unhappy family to her little cabin on the lake with its rag rug and bright yellow upright piano (the cabin was her trysting place—divorced before I was born, she and her lover, my “Uncle Tom,” met there for years); her constant and patient encouragement of my music (she taught voice and sang professionally); the summer orchestra concerts in Saratoga; the contented moments fishing in her little rowboat (we always tossed the sunnies back to be caught another day); the time we coasted her big old Pontiac with the amber Indian head on the hood all the way down the hill when it was out of gas (“Wheee!” we shouted.); her daily calls to me when I was in the hospital, alone in New York; her always knowing when something was disturbing me, even when I didn’t know myself; her sneakily arranging for me to take singing lessons with a colleague from Temple University. Once, when we were floating on a Thames barge through the English countryside, I looked up to see my grandmother, an unopened book in her lap, absorbed in her thoughts with a look of such serenity on her face it jerked my heart.

Every time I walk up to the door of the medical center, her new “home,” I feel all the ambivalence of someone about to visit a relative in prison. Even though it’s now called a “medical center,” everyone knows it’s really a nursing home, and we all know that nursing homes are places where people go to die. My grandmother lives on the top floor, the fifth floor (the last stop on the way to Heaven), where the patients are prisoners in more ways than one. Few eyes are turned to Heaven on the top floor, few souls prepared for death, because, in needing the greatest “medical and behavioral supervision,” most are, to one degree or another, losing their minds.

Coming off the elevator I see patients strapped into their chairs watching (and understanding nothing of) television. A gentleman in a wheelchair is facing the wall screaming unintelligibly. Near the nursing station a patient tries to engage me in nonsense conversation. Another simply grabs hold of my clothes, so fiercely that I wonder if, to these benighted souls, outsiders represent some desperate hope of escape. I feel pity, revulsion, a desire to escape this twentieth-century Bedlam myself. But for my grandmother I come. I come for myself, too, even though she’s not sure who I am.  Recently, she looked up at me from her pillow and said, “There’s always been something special between us two,” even though she can’t remember my name. Her extraordinary smile, a palpable thing like a stone bridge, was ever an invitation for my soul to cross over and give hers a hug. Nobody else in my life ever had a smile like that.

I am visiting the medical center today for a quarterly meeting of the staff to review her “case.” In these meetings, I ask, and they answer, a series of questions about my grandmother’s health, her mental deterioration, her physical needs, her participation (or not) in social or recreational programs. Four staff members and I are assembled in the “reality orientation room,” where patients come every morning to hear what day it is, where they are, who they are, what holidays are coming up, what activities are planned. All this information is spelled out neatly in large block letters on the blackboard, reminding me of a first grade school room. There are no decorations in the room whatsoever. A few plastic chairs and tables have been pulled into a rough circle for our meeting. It is a sunny winter day outside the window.

The charge nurse is just beginning to answer my first question when the fire alarm sounds. As one, the staff members rush out of the room. I sit there alone, irritated by the repeated honking of the alarm, wishing I could have a cigarette. I look out the window at the sun glare on the snow, which is still three or four inches deep, and I think that it is not a good day to take my grandmother anywhere. Even though she is having her hair done so we can go out to lunch, and even though the sun is warm, there are too many patches of ice on which an old woman could slip and break a bone.

Suddenly, a strident male voice sounds through the closed hall door: “Evacuate the building! Everyone evacuate the building!”

For the first time, it occurs to me there might really be a fire. I slip on my jacket and hat and pick up my purse, just as a male patient shuffles with agonizing slowness through the door from the recreation room. I say, “We must leave the building,” and my heart sinks as I realize he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. The charge nurse returns and, taking the old fellow by the arm, directs us both to the fire exit.

In the hall, all is pandemonium. Even the ambulatory patients are incapable of making it to the fire exit on their own. The staff is operating on adrenaline and rote training. At the exit, I hold the door open for the wheelchairs and aides guiding the patients on foot. One grand dame holds up traffic by asking me what I’m laughing about. There is a twinkle in her beautiful gray eyes. Perhaps she sees a joke and wants to share it. Perhaps there really is a smile on my face. Someone from behind gently pushes her forward. Feeling a little useless where I am, I ask one of the aides what I can do to help.

“Check the bathrooms!” she gasps. I prop open the exit door and methodically check the ten rooms along the hall. Emerging from the last one, I see an aide trying to get an ambulatory man into a wheelchair so he can be moved faster. Meanwhile, other patients are simply milling about unaccompanied. I grab the back of the wheelchair: “I’ll take him,” I say. She gives me a relieved look and dashes off to help someone else.  My passenger is tall and unshaven and wearing a baseball cap and flannel shirt. I tell him to keep his feet up so they won’t trip under the wheels of the chair. I have to keep reminding him of this. Even at this sedate speed, he could break an ankle.

There is a bottleneck around the exit. The walled terrace outside the door is still covered with snow, except for a narrow path that has been cleared around the edge. The snow makes it impossible to maneuver the wheelchairs, and there is no more space to stack people up. Fortunately, the building is set into the side of a hill, and an aide forces open the gate at the other end of the terrace and begins guiding people down the muddy slope toward the fourth-floor terrace and paved walkway beyond.

It is a bizarre collection of people out here. Some are naked, or only half dressed. Not one has a coat, gloves, or hat. In the sun, the temperature might be as high as forty degrees; even so, these frail beings will not survive out here for long. Someone comes through the door with an armload of rolled cotton blankets. I busy myself wrapping blankets around shoulders, legs, bare feet. One woman keeps up a shrill animal complaint that her blankets are wet. She’s sitting half naked in her wheelchair, a pile of soiled linen on the ground beside her. From her contorted shape I can see she is incapable of moving; I try to snake a blanket behind her bare buttocks and wrap it around her hips. Finally, I spread a blanket over the knees of the old gentleman I had wheeled down the hall. He says, “Thank you,” and I marvel at his lucidity.

The fire companies are arriving, adding their shrill sirens to the insistent honking of the building alarm. A nurse comes scrambling up the hill and breathlessly asks one of the fifth-floor aides if there is any oxygen up here. The aide shakes her head. “But I’ve got to have oxygen. Some of my patients won’t last long without it!” I tell her I have just seen one of the fire company ambulances come down the road. Surely they will have tanks. She races back down the hill.

Slowly the fifth-floor situation is brought under control. Someone does a headcount. Someone else checks names against a logbook. One by one, patients are being maneuvered off the terrace and down the hill to get farther away from the building. One of the female patients is screaming as two aides try to walk her through the muddy snow. There is still no sign of smoke or flame, but there is a rumor that a small fire in the kitchen tripped the alarm. I pray that it will be brought under control quickly before anybody catches a chill.

Finally, a breathing space. I decide to find my grandmother, who had been in the beauty salon on the fourth floor. She is standing with her back to me a little way down the hill from the fourth-floor terrace, holding herself perfectly erect, a cotton blanket draped over her head and shoulders like the Virgin Mary. I come up behind her and put my arm around her and give her a big kiss on the cheek. Her head is covered with curlers. She gives me that joyful smile and says to no one in particular, “Oh, my loving sister is here!” I whisper, “Granddaughter,” into her ear so she won’t feel embarrassed if anyone nearby has heard her.

People say she has outlived her life. Not as long as that smile is still there for me. Its shadow is on her face now, as I hug her against the cold on the snowy grounds of the medical center. If she doesn’t know exactly who I am, she knows I love her, and she knows she loves me.

Organic brain dysfunction syndrome, clogged carotid arteries, not enough oxygen to the cells. The fire in her mind is being damped out, along with the light in her eyes. Even her oldest memories are failing her now. Words fail her; sometimes they come out like nonsense syllables. The woman who stood up in front of audiences and sang Schubert Lieder in a clear, controlled contralto now can’t remember a song.

Even though I’ve got two blankets wrapped around her and my hat stretched over her curlers, she tells me that her bottom is cold. I learn later that she is finally incontinent and that she won’t wear her diapers. “She’s a lady,” the charge nurse says, which is her way of telling me that what shreds of dignity remain to my grandmother will not abide the wearing of diapers. She doesn’t resist having them put on; she simply takes them off when backs are turned. So, standing out here in the bright early March sun, my grandmother is without any underwear.

But we are giggling together now over the whole predicament. There is always confusion inherent in moving large numbers of people around, and when those people are physically or mentally disabled, it can be mayhem. When the obvious danger has passed, the whole scene takes on the quality of the ridiculous. Together we look back up the hill at all the old people milling around in the snow. My grandmother utters a rare complete sentence: “I would say they look foolish if I didn’t try so hard not to look like a fool myself.” I laugh and hug her tighter.

Sandra Shaw Homer author photoPhiladelphia native Sandra Shaw Homer lives in Costa Rica, where for years she wrote a regular column, “Local Color,” for the The Tico Times. Her writing has appeared in several print, online literary, and travel journals, as well as her own blog, writingfromtheheart.net. Her first travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews. A brief inspirational memoir, The Magnificent Dr. Wao, was published as a Kindle Book, and a second travel memoir, Journey to the Joie de Vivre was released in 2016.

BARYCENTER by Sydney Tammarine

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Black and white man
BARYCENTER
by Sydney Tammarine

Barycenter (or barycentre; from the Ancient Greek βαρύς heavy + κέντρον centre): the center of mass of two or more bodies that are orbiting each other, or the point around which they both orbit.

Things your new doctor says I am not to ask you in the middle of a dissociative event:

What’s wrong?
Where are we?
What’s my name?
What’s your name?
How old are you?
What is my name?
Look at me
Look at me
Look at me
Please, help

Last night I found you huddled in the corner of our bedroom, wide awake and shaking. This was similar but not identical to that time one year ago when I broke down the bathroom door with a hammer to find you curled in a C-shape on the tile, the way you perhaps had slept in your mother’s womb. Both times, you said you were sorry. You had lain surrounded by the glass of a shattered fifth of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, and twenty-seven acetaminophen 500mg/diphenhydramine-hydrochloride 25mg pills, which I scooped into the sink to count and subtract from the number on the packaging (100) to estimate the intake (seventy-three, or 36,500 mg, with an error margin of five to ten pills that I might have missed laying under your still, silenced body). It’s not the diphenhydramine-hydrochloride that will kill you. It’s the acetaminophen, and it’s slow. I didn’t know that part until later. People on internet forums say they’d rather burn to death than die from acetaminophen poisoning. Sometimes teenagers overdose on Tylenol PM and wake up the next morning—feeling heavy and nauseous but sickeningly, gloriously alive—and then three days later, right in the middle of doing homework or playing video games or something, they collapse. It snakes its way through the blood to shut down your liver. The Emergency Medical Technician told me all this with one eyebrow raised, his shiny black work shoes behind your curled body on the floor, as if I was hiding the real number from him, as if he was daring me, as if he would wait forever until I got just the right number, counting the blue pills two by two in the sink.

I’ve never told anyone this, but you’d tried to kill yourself in the five-dollar tie-dyed Rastafarian cat T-shirt that I’d put in your Christmas stocking that year as a gag gift. It was hysterical, can’t you see? It was so unbearably funny how you wore that red-yellow-green shirt with an orange kitten with black dreadlocks and a fat blunt stuffed in its mouth your first week in the psych ward. After seven days the receptionist kindly told me I could drop off one change of clothes for you, so I went to Walmart and bought another: this one tie-dyed blue and purple behind a grey cat whose sunglasses reflected the entire galaxy, all the stars and planets, captured for one brief and beautiful moment in static, swirling motion.

I brought you, too, a notebook with Franz Wright’s “Written with a Baseball-Bat Sized Pencil” taped to the cover. You know that poem. You read The Beforelife to me on our first night together, so late the sun was almost rising, our flushed, drunken legs thrown over your futon and each other. Remember, it starts: “You can meet them all here, these people who aren’t coming back?” And it ends: “And who knows, you might be one of them yourself by now, stranger things have happened—”? I asked you to write down all the interesting characters I was so sure you’d meet there, but you just shook your head and told me, “You know, it’s not like that. It’s not actually all that fun here.” I thought you’d misunderstood, but looking back, I’m sure it was me who had not been listening all along.

Definitions I never thought I’d know before you, and can now recite like prayer, in full diagnostic language:

DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA (also known as Psychogenic Amnesia): the inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. The most common of all dissociative disorders, frequently seen in hospital emergency rooms.

DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE (AKA PSYCHOGENIC FUGUE): a sudden, unexpected travel away from home, accompanied by an inability to recall one’s past and confusion about personal identity. Individuals in a Dissociative Fugue state appear normal to others.

DEPERSONALIZATION DISORDER: a persistent or recurrent feeling of being detached from one’s own mental processes or body, as if watching one’s life from outside one’s body, similar to watching a movie.

DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER (PREVIOUSLY MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER): the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of one’s behavior. These dissociated states are not fully-formed personalities, but rather fragments of identity that remember different aspects of autobiographical information. There is usually a host personality who identifies with the client’s real name and is not aware of the presence of other alters.

DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED (DDNOS): dissociative presentations that do not meet the full criteria for any other dissociative disorder, occurring independently or concurrent with other illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, or schizophrenia.

In the early days I read these to you like a test: A, B, C, or D? None of the above? All of the above? I even switched the order around periodically, to avoid test-taker and/or proctor bias.

The morning after you forget my name for the first time, I sit in the dark and watch television and try not to smoke cigarettes in our new apartment with its shitty paint job and toxic new-carpet smell. I try not to think about how alone we are together, 350 miles from Columbus, in a city where our health insurance doesn’t work. I try not to think about how we are here because of me, my insistence that a fresh start in the mountain air—rolling thick and real in sweet, cold clouds—might heal us, when what I’d really wanted was escape. Escape from the white bathroom tiles and its door that didn’t lock, not anymore, and the pencils you’d brought home that I tried to give away, which kept turning back up on my classroom floor, even weeks later. On the television, Detective Rossi and the Criminal Minds gang are hunting a serial killer who, like Ed Gein (and you), cared for a mother paralyzed by multiple strokes until her death. Like Ed Gein (but not like you), the killer has begun hunting women to dress up in coats made from their skin. I feel like I am wearing someone else’s skin. “What will we do?” the stoic supervisory special agent Hotchner asks, voice faltering in an uncharacteristic moment of humanity and weakness. “We will attack it with analysis and diligence,” Detective Rossi says, grim but admirable, determined. You are still asleep in the next room. I think about how to attack this, this faceless monster wearing your face, with analysis and diligence.

Around midnight I had come into the bedroom to find you wide awake, staring out the uncovered window. You had ripped the blinds right off the wall, probably from trying to draw them closed too fast, probably because you thought someone was watching you from the darkness, and now you sat cross-legged on the floor, spine strangely and precisely erect, with all the white panels fanning out around you. You were rocking side to side, hands clenching and unclenching, fingernails curling in to scrape the tender flesh of your palms. I gave you my hands to hold, do you remember? You were repeating the names of people long gone, but you were not gone, not yet, and I tried to remind you. I gave you both my hands to hold, which meant I had to crawl down onto the stiff carpet with you, let you warp my knuckles in your grip. Do you remember how we used to press our hands together, how I laughed at your short, stocky fingers ending exactly where my brittle, narrow ones did? Things I did not ask you: who I was, who you were, what would happen to us. Things you told me: Karen, Anne, James, Bricker. The names of people you had known in another life, people dead and buried, whom you wanted to save, desperately, as I wanted to save you now. I held both your hands and repeated their names back to you, one of which was your mother’s, and wondered if this—this separation from myself, watching my thumbs rhythmically stroke your knuckles while fear scaled the bones of my ribcage, clamoring up toward my mouth—was really any different from what was happening inside your head.

Things you have said after I’ve asked you my name:
3206 (your mother’s hospital room)
Dr. Bakker (your mother’s doctor)
You didn’t mean to (what you’d say after your mother threw things at you)
I’m sorry (directed at me)
I’m sorry (directed at your mother)
I’m sorry (directed at yourself)
Please don’t die (perhaps directed at me, or your mother, or one of the severed limbs you were trained to save on a Navy hospital ship, four years and 6,800 miles away)

The truth is, I do not know what it means to write down a trauma that is not my own but is so intrusive that it feels like it might be. I do not know what it would mean to forget who that ache belongs to. I want to write down what it means to live with—to love—someone who wants to give me everything, but at any moment can take away anything I’ve ever wanted, at least for an hour or two at a time, once a month or so, depending on the weather, environmental factors, various dosages. I wonder if, in this very act of recording, I am dissecting, dissociating these memories. I am making the like unlike and the unlike alike; I am seeing all at once the blue of your pills and the dusty pink of our Ohio sunrise and red of the pencils from the suicide ward in my students’ little hands—I am seeing all of these at once, and sometimes I feel so overwhelmingly present, as if everything I write only exists because I have made it so, and then sometimes I don’t see myself in it, not at all, not even a little.

Sydney Tammarine author photoSydney Tammarine is (depending on the day) a Spanish teacher, translator, and writer currently pursuing her MFA at Hollins University. She once convinced a frozen yogurt company to run a coupon series she wrote all about yeti feet. Her work has appeared in Quiz & Quill and The Missing Slate, and her most recent book of literary translations, Diez Odas para Diez Grabados, is forthcoming in Santiago, Chile, from Taller 99.

 

 

Image credit: Malik Earnest on Unsplash

FIRST, UNCLOAK YOUR COLOREDNESS, an essay by Rachel Yang, Featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FIRST, UNCLOAK YOUR COLOREDNESS
by  Rachel Yang
Featured on Life As Activism

Two weeks before Election Day, I took a new job at a private high school in Minneapolis. Faculty passing by in the hall poked their heads through my doorway and asked, “So, are you the New Asma?”

“Kind of,” I replied.

But, I am not the New Asma.

Asma is my friend and former colleague, a South Asian, hijabi, Muslim woman and previous occupant of my desk. Before she left this job for another, she had befriended and mentored a cohort of students—brown, black, Somali, and Muslim girls—who continue, in her absence, to hang out in my office between classes. For these girls, Asma had been—and still is—a role model, a cheerleader, and a guide to the moneyed halls of a predominantly white institution that wasn’t built for them.

On November 9, when these girls flocked to my office with panic and fear in their hearts, I listened and nodded and worried that I wasn’t doing enough. In that moment, I felt acutely that, for them, I certainly was not the New Asma.

◊

Before college, the only teacher of color I had was Ms. Morgan, a Chinese immigrant, who student-taught my ninth grade algebra class for half a semester. She spoke English with a thick accent. My white classmates complained that her verbal incompetence impeded their learning. They asked me if I could translate for her.

“She can’t even tell us apart!” They whined.

“I’m sorry!” She said one day after confusing one blond boy for another. “I have a hard time keeping everybody’s names straight. The only ones I know are Rachel Yang and Daniel Wang!”

At the back of the classroom, in my desk next to Daniel’s, I reddened as everyone swiveled in their seats to catch our reactions. They giggled at the irony: was it possible that all white people looked the same to our Asian teacher?

Embarrassed that my classmates saw similarities between me and this apparent joke of a woman, I pretended I couldn’t understand her English either—that her accent was just as much an inconvenience for me as it was for them. But at home, my dad helped me with my math homework with the same halting accent, and the same tongue-stumble as Ms. Morgan over the word “asymptote.”

Throughout high school, I distanced myself from Asian-American peers who had not only one East-Asian parent (as I did) but two. I insisted to my white peers that my family wasn’t that Chinese: we ate white people food and spoke English at home. We were average Americans living in an average Minneapolis suburb. I didn’t fuss when teachers mispronounced my Chinese surname, compromising, “Sure, you can say it with a long ‘A’ vowel. That’s easier.” If someone turned to me for help in math class, I brushed them off, “No, silly, I can’t help you with your calculus. I’m half white, remember?” When classmates made racially charged jokes, I shrugged, just to demonstrate that I did not consider myself aligned with their subjects.

As an aspiring novelist tween, I wrote stories that featured freckle-faced, auburn-haired protagonists, named Ellory or Anna Jo: girls who would never look like me or have surnames like mine; girls who represented the person I would have preferred to be, always. Growing up, I felt vividly close to whiteness. Yet, I knew that whiteness was unattainable for me, and I hated that.

In tenth grade, some friends jokingly nicknamed me “Sagwa” after a PBS cartoon, which featured a Chinese Siamese cat. Initially, I was annoyed. I had disliked the show as a child. Plus, the title character’s name is Mandarin for “blockhead.” But, I didn’t fight the nickname, maybe because I worried that my resistance would be misconstrued as race-based offense; maybe because I didn’t want to expose myself as Asian enough to be offended.

When I graduated high school, I left Sagwa behind. I didn’t think of the nickname again until last summer when Asma asked me what my Instagram username meant. Apparently, I hadn’t changed it since high school. It still read @mybffsagwa.

“That’s not okay, dude,” she said when I explained the story behind it.

Suddenly self-conscious, I scrambled to change my Instagram handle.

◊

Last summer, teaching in a middle school enrichment program, I gave a social studies lesson on midcentury white flight from American cities. A black eighth grader raised her hand and asked, “Rachel, are you white?”

I paused, surprised. Nobody had ever asked me if I was white. More often, I’m asked variations of “What’s your ethnic background?” or “Are you mixed?” or even plainly “What are you?”

Typically, I would respond, “I’m half Chinese. My dad came to the US from China as an adult. My mom is white and grew up in South Minneapolis.” This response communicates that my dad is an immigrant, that my mother is white and a local, and that I did not grow up overseas, nor was I adopted. It’s a succinct taxonomy of my otherness.

Yet, when I delivered this time-tested answer to my student, I immediately felt certain that I hadn’t said enough. Throughout the lesson, I had been saying “white residents” and “black families,” but where was I in this narrative? I’d answered as though Asian-Americans were irrelevant; as though they had nothing to do with the course I was teaching on the history of race in America. During the 1960’s and before, in the segregated American South, which drinking fountain would the chinks have used?

Nearly forgetting that I’d spent my entire adolescence denying my Chinese half, my first thought was: Of course I’m not white.

In retrospect, I could have given her a more thorough answer, “No. I’m not white. But, as a bi-racial Asian-American, I exist in a unique, in-between space in our country’s race relations. A space that positions me closer to whiteness than you, but that too represents its own history of oppression. My identity is laced with the after-effects of that flimsy American promise called “multi-culturalism”; with America’s history of Chinese exclusion and Yellow Peril; and, with threads of anti-black sentiments sewn among Asian-American communities. I am trying to figure out how to resist and rise up. I am also learning to claim my Asian-American identity with pride.”

Would this have been a better answer to her question? I don’t know.

◊

Ultimately, I will never completely escape my name or my almond-eyed appearance. To others, these qualities presume a wealth of Asian-American experiences that I haven’t had or with which I have refused to associate. Our bodies represent identities and ideologies beyond our individual selves, but my body codes differently depending on where it stands. As a child surrounded by white peers, I was invariably othered: perceived as a person of color by default. As an adult, over the past year, I’ve been asked more than once by black and Muslim peers whether I identify as a person of color. Do they ask because they know I’m half white? Or, do they ask because Asian-Americans’ proximity to whiteness—our “model minority” status—has allowed us to quietly benefit from white privilege; to distance ourselves from the Person of Color (POC) label? Unlike my hijabi and dark-skinned friends, my half white, half East-Asian body still affords me the flexibility to decide—to some extent—just how “of color” I want to be.

Now, it is clear that my previous need to assimilate may have put me at a present disadvantage in connecting with the young people I serve. I worry that I don’t know how to be a mentor to young women of color because I myself was never a mentee. Had I a woman of color as a mentor—someone who looked like me and who wore the full weight of her appearance with pride—would I now be better equipped for this role?

The day after the election, Asma’s girls came to my office exhausted, having argued all day with classmates who dismissed their fear and anger as melodramatic. Their steadfastness, their ownership of their otherness and outspokenness in its service, intimidated me. They wear identities that are not as readily shed as mine. They are strong in ways I never have been, in moments that I have never experienced. So, in response, I am trying to speak up more as a person of color. It is important that I wield my non-white identity visibly in the service of elevating other people of color, biting back against my long-held desire to be white enough.

I’m not sure what kind of role model I stand to be for Asma’s girls. But, so far, they haven’t stopped spending time in my office. These young women and I are figuring it out together.

Rachel Yang is an educator, writer, and emerging radio producer based in Minneapolis. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2016 with a degree in English Literature. Earlier this year, she co-organized the publication of a zine showcasing responses to the 2016 presidential election, online at recodinghistoryzine.com. Her new Instagram handle is @r_chel_y_ng.

 

 

 

Image credit: Tim Viola on Unsplash

PHOTOGRAPHY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Activist by Lena Popkin Featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

PHOTOGRAPHY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Activist
by Lena Popkin
Featured on Life As Activism

On Election Day, I went with my dad to the polling place, although I myself could not vote. The best I could do was push the button for Hillary. At the front of the line stood an elderly Vietnamese-American woman with a ballot in her hand. Although her English was limited, she tried to get information and assistance from the poll workers. My dad and I, as well as the rest of the voters in line, watched her many attempts to communicate with poll workers, the people whose job it was to help her. At one point, the male volunteer  with whom she had been speaking raised his voice the way Americans often do with non-native English speakers, as if that would help her understand. Unsure what, if anything, we could do, I asked, mostly speculatively, if she had the right to a translator. One of the election judges overheard me and answered, “I think that would be a waste of time, honey.” In that same moment, the male volunteer forced the woman to decide for herself, “button one or two!” Literally silenced, and helpless, the woman went inside the booth.

The day after the election, I went to school wearing no makeup—something I rarely do—and mourned in the company of my friends: a group of universally liberal, diverse, urban public high school students. Like the elderly lady at the polls, I now felt silenced and also—to an extent—violated. Only, in this case, my oppressor was the newly elected POTUS, Donald J Trump: sexual predator.

In near quiet, during class, my friends and I scrolled through Twitter, the silence broken only by someone sniffling or choking back tears. Teachers who tried to resume regularly scheduled classes were met with loud objections, and more tears.

A few days later, a friend showed me a Facebook event page advertising a candlelight vigil to be held in honor of women’s rights. She suggested we attend. I readily agreed, eager for an opportunity to be in the company of others who also longed for organized action. After school we bought paint and poster board, which we cut into two foot squares, and made signs that attempted to express our rising angst and frustration. On our way out the door and into the streets, I instinctively grabbed my camera.

The plaza at Philadelphia’s City Hall was jammed with people, many in their twenties. They touted signs scrawled with sharpie and held small candles with delicate flames. My friend and I joined the protest hesitantly at first, not sure how loudly we were supposed to yell, if at all. But, the longer we spent in the crowd, the more comfortable we became. We could no longer hear ourselves individually, but rather could feel the collective voice of the thousands of people marching together. Chants of “Not my President” and “Whose streets? Our streets,” flowed with mournful but angry intensity. Our voices echoed clearly against the downtown skyscrapers.

Camera in hand, I was drawn instantly to the signs: the handmade and the printed, the generic slogans, the personal reflections. Also to the quotes, the song lyrics, and the precisely executed drawings. Amid the commotion and in between captured moments, I realized that the camera isolated me from the rest of the protestors. It marked me as someone for whom they should pose. As a photographer, I became both activist and observer. The distance I gained from the lens allowed me to stand back and process the emotions of the protest, almost from an outside point of view, while still feeling completely immersed in the activeness of protesting.

When I got home that night, I plugged my camera into my laptop and discovered that the images I had shot—without any clear intention—had captured the heartbreaking intensity of the crowd. My photos—reminiscent of the images of the 1963 March on Washington that I had recently studied—made me feel as though I had done something valuable in documenting the first breaths of resistance, and as if they might give me a voice. After posting the photographs on social media, I was surprised to discover that they served as balm for many now politically-disillusioned viewers. They felt reassured that young people, in particular, would fight back.

Protests became a necessary part of life for myself, as well as other Philadelphians after the vigil for Women’s rights. Haphazard gatherings organized by groups like the Philly Socialist Alternative, Philly We Rise, and ResistTrump! began popping up more frequently around the city. Marches followed various routes, ending mostly in front of Independence Hall, the birthplace of our democracy; a place that felt symbolically and literally threatened by the incoming administration. These intermittent protests, held weeks before the inauguration, gave people something to do in a moment when no one knew quite what to do with themselves. It was real action as opposed to posted aggression: shared, liked, and tagged on Facebook or Twitter.

During this period, I began an academic research project on the 1920s fine art photographer Tina Modotti, whose earthy, honest, still life and portrait compositions gained her status among Mexican modernists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. As a young woman in her early twenties, Modotti took a chance and went to Mexico with photographer Edward Weston to join in and document the Mexican revolution. She applied her skills as a photographer for a the Communist newspaper, El Machete. Modotti put art at the service of social justice, using the classical composition skills she had learned from Weston to create compelling images of Mexican injustice. Studying her decision to pursue these inherently social subjects fueled my desire to grow as a photographer and to elevate my images into works of activism. The more I learned about the past of revolutionary photography, the more I felt myself wanting to contribute to its present and future.

Despite my active participation in the local protest movement, at school, I found that I had trouble defending myself to those questioning my motivations, especially leading up to the Women’s March on Washington.

Their questions and comments were varied but all ended with the same conclusion: my efforts were a waste of time.

“What are you even protesting anyway?”

“What’s the point? It’s not gonna change anything”

“That’s such a waste of your time.”

“You’re angry for no reason, he hasn’t even done anything yet!”

I would barely stutter an answer. How do you defend something when, no matter how strongly you believe in it, others will disagree just as strongly? How do you defend something in this new alt-world where facts have so little meaning?

These questions were on my mind when I boarded a train bound for Washington, D.C. at four am on January 21st, 2017. Now an experienced protestor—at least I felt experienced—I knew the etiquette, the signs, the chants. I knew to bring water and an extra camera battery and a phone charger, as well as to put the ACLU know your rights pamphlet in my back pocket. The Women’s March on Washington, so different from the first protest I had been to over two months prior in Philadelphia, seemed to provide me with some of the answers to these questions.

When we arrived, just after seven, the sky was gray, threatening rain and hovering between comfortable and cold. Washington swarmed with women in pink knit hats and handmade signs. The slogans on the signs varied, reading things like:

“White Silence is White Violence”

“Misogyny is so 1776”

“Mexican, Native American, angry, feminist bitch↓”

“Come on, Man”

“Dear Trump Supporter, you lost too, it just hasn’t hit you yet”

I observed how far the signs had come since November. While the first signs at the initial vigil had mostly to do with sexual assault and outrage at the election (e.g. “Not my President,” “Pussies Grab Back, Mr. President,” etc…), the signs at the Women’s March on Washington were often humorous, specific, and full of anger (e.g. “There are more people here today than there were yesterday. Just sayin’,” “Tampons against Douchebags,” and “Not Mein Fuhrer”). The specific slogans seemed to have universal resonance.

My shutter clicked as I tried to capture the magnitude of the event while continuing to focus on participants. There were families, individuals, hipsters, moms, babies, students, and senior citizens: people from all walks of life and backgrounds. It was difficult to capture everyone and everything. Some marchers gave me weird looks or posed in a way that was too obvious to create a natural photograph. Many were moving too quickly, or not moving at all. The overcast sky had a tendency to appear either too bright or too dark. Nevertheless, I continued framing photographs all day, running through a battery and a half, and almost filling my memory card. Despite the dense  crowd, I found myself turning to capture the people behind me; squatting to feel the overwhelming presence of the signs held proudly in the air; climbing onto unstable guardrails and into tree planters; and, holding my camera as high above my head, so that I might see where the marchers stopped. There was no visible end to the marchers: only a river of loud, determined, heartbroken pink hats and defiant signs. I felt as though I had an obligation to continue to documenting the moment.

The relationship between art and activism has often been a tense one. Many art critics have suggested that political art is too focused on political ends to be considered fine art, but then too aesthetic-minded to be considered activism. Critics suggest the photographer ought to focus on creating work that can be used for journalistic or pedantic purposes—or to focus on work that can be considered art, since you’re unlikely to achieve both.

But, I disagree. To me, politics and art are inseparable. As a photographer, I have found a place in which one does not exist without the other. As I continue documenting these protests, my hopes are that I capture each individual’s sense of presence and humanity in a time that has become difficult to feel heard and valued. I also hope to reflect the impact of voices raised out of both fury and need for action. As I chant and sing and march, I am a protestor, I am an activist, and I am angry. As I shoot my camera at the stream of people marching by. As I eagerly snap photos of women and men emanating emotion, I am an artist.

Lena Popkin is a junior at Philadelphia’s Central High School. She is a news editor of the Centralizer newspaper and a Cleaver Emerging Artist. Her poem “Pinto Los Flores Para Que No Mueren” appears in Issue No. 10 and her photographs appear in “The Body Politic”, an essay by Nathaniel Popkin featured on Life As Activism on November 22, 2016.

THE DAY AMERICA DIED, AGAIN… by Joel L. Daniels Featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE DAY AMERICA DIED, AGAIN…
by Joel L. Daniels
Featured on Life As Activism

shhh…

this is not an essay. no, this is not that. not a poem. not a bomb. not hydrogen. this is not blackface. not a pledge to a new allegiance. there will be no cotton picking. there are signs—a cross stump stuck in a lawn, a flag burning. there may be a march, some spring uprising to coincide with fall palettes and patterns, of bodies being flung to concretes, red pastels overshadowing the grainy elements of white hoods floating in the background.

12:58 a.m.

today could be titled the day the niggas came, but that sounds too glorious, too tied up, too bound, too tight. we are revolution in a Canon, redemption in hurricane, martyrs in a durag. revolution has chapters, too.

4:45 a.m.

the day America died again my daughter slept calm, a cough here and there but no riot in her, not like her father. he had a carousel of Watts tumbling in ribs. a parade at the burial grounds, what i imagined, feet swelling from the sweet shit circumventing the convos — “deport illegals you do not own your body more jails please”.

8:19 a.m.

pieces be unto you, America. the day you died again it was breakfast — over easy eggs, watered down OJ. hah, i remember him in those Hertz commercials. hurts, don’t it? the hearse outside smelling like 3 strikes, feeling like the Central Park Five, like all colored boys look the same in a line-up.

11:22 a.m.

some will take the anger and wear it around their neck, bandana waving, weave it into a basket or bash it down into bits for breaking atoms and spirits. yes wear us down, wear it now like those rosaries the mamì’s clutch when the diablo comes, grabbing pussy or whatever. we out here catching the debris of the lost ones peddling protest, pagans packing God in a suitcase and floating the pieces upstream.

12:04 p.m.

i heard they want us to drown. there is a sound underneath the gurgling of spirit tongue tapping the world of the drum. the word could be machine gun or filibuster, climate change or NRA. words are weapons; wounds are the way we tally progress. how much it gonna cost to vacate your rights? your baby ain’t yours until we decide it is. sincerely yours, patriarchy.

2:43 p.m.

there are several layers to death, lengthy, longing for a reprise. digging dirt for suitors. the soot and soil that tumbles over the weeds and cobblestone paved history of us, the way we lynch ourselves dry, until the bone peaks from under the skin, breaking down the roots, scaling the walls around Mexico, the waters of the transatlantic, the covert of the Bay of Pigs.

4:20 p.m.

there is no armistice here, arms legs, gone in circles, we go in to surfaces, sucking on wind, demanding acres as reparations, broken records for rhetoric.

5:55 p.m.

i have died three times already and come back a pilgrim, a Malcolm, a bishop. resurrected as rook, a King. i died and came back as nigger, catching holy wars and pitchforks for the oppressors. playing chess or die nigger die, the games we play when we run out of stories to climb.

7:09 p.m.

my friend emailed me because she needed something to hold on to. i wanted to pass her a lifeline. an okay, a be alright, a God bless, an amen. there are holes in this faith, though. they run parallel to freedom, pathways to pistols in schools and confederate flags flung inside the windows of churches. murder, a religion.

7:46 p.m.

the condos in hell are nicer than the ones my momma thought she wanted. she be playing the numbers but America is dead again, mama. you gotta read in between the lines of the amendments that men made to mend the ways we look at law, at loss, like the structure was stiff and the way the system setup whites had to build a house to put the slaves in. minute details, i suppose. the hours here don’t match anymore.

11:59 p.m.

when the dead die i will tell them after life we are not in the business of busying ourselves by selling dreams, shelling out great America fables. kitchen table got Polaroids of Tookie, posters of Bunchy. they will assassinate your character, then you. rather yours than theirs. ashes, ashes. ashé. RIP.

Joel L. Daniels is a father, writer and story-teller, born and raised in the Bronx. He was the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts BRIO Award for poetry, and his work has been featured in the Columbia Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN Money, The Towner, Fatherly, Thought Catalog, Phila Print, The Smoking Section, Blavity, Huffington Post, BBC Radio, RCRD LBL, URB, BRM, AllHipHop, The Source, RESPECT, and HipHopDX. He’s spoken/performed at the Apollo Theater, Joe’s Pub, Rockwood Music Hall, Columbia University, Lehman College, City Tech, The National Black Theater, NYU, Webster Hall, Pianos, and Brooklyn Bowl.

WELCOME HOME by Michael Fischer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Person walking up a flight of stairs, viewed through a small circle lense

WELCOME HOME
by Michael Fischer

For twenty-three years you’re free. Then you go to prison.

You arrive in an orange jail jumpsuit, thin and see-through as a dryer sheet. You sit in a cage until a correctional officer calls you out. State your full name. Any aliases? How tall are you? Yeah you wish, how tall are you really? How much you weigh? Hair color? Eyes? Any scars? Any tattoos? Where? Of what? What size shoe you wear? Pants? Shirt? Get back in the cage.

When you’re called out again it’s to have your head shaved. You walk into a cubicle and sit on a beat up metal stool while an inmate shears you with barbershop clippers. You’re told it’s to prevent lice, but you know it’s just another step in taking away your identity, your individuality, your sense of self.

You wait in line with the other new arrivals for the shower. You’re handed a set of prison-issue clothes in approximately your size and a bar of tiny motel soap. You think about the old “don’t drop the soap” joke. You can’t help it.

Out of the shower, you put on your new clothes. Your orange jumpsuit has been taken away to be burned. There is no longer a single thing touching your body that came before these walls. You’ve been here all of twenty minutes and everything about your real life has been scrubbed away. They’d scrub off your birthmark if it was in the budget.

You’re assigned an ID number and told to memorize it immediately. From now on it is more important than your name. You go back to the holding cell full of all the other new guys. Everyone’s head shaved; everyone dressed identically. You joke with each other, try to keep the mood light. It looks good, hell you were losing your hair anyway, you’re better off. You’re all going to be here for a good long while.  

Time passes. Your only sister gets engaged, says she wants to wait until you get out to have the wedding, but it’s too long to wait and you feel bad and tell her to do it without you, that her starting her new life is more important than you being there to see it. You miss the wedding.

Your aunt dies of pancreatic cancer, your grandmother of old age. Both times your dad breaks the news in the visiting room and you spend the rest of those five-hour visits crying into your hands, trying not to disturb other people’s time with their loved ones, their checkers games played on frayed squares of cardboard. The visiting room guards give your dad weird looks. What’s wrong with him? Your dad is too choked up to answer. He just shakes his head.

Your friends move, start careers, get married, graduate from law school. Some of them write to you but most of them don’t. You want to be angry about this but can hardly blame them. You settle for just feeling depressed and alone, which seems like the reasonable middle ground. A few friends get landlines so you can talk to them on the phone. It’s on these calls that you realize you have increasingly less to say to anyone: no exciting news or updates to give, no energy for the witty banter. You realize you don’t have much in common with the people on the other end, and you worry they will realize this too. The calls taper off.

You’re woken up for count at five o’clock every morning. You’re woken up for urine tests. You’re woken up for property searches. You’re woken up because the guards think it’s funny. You aren’t sleeping that well to begin with, given the metal slab covered with a two-inch pad that acts as your bed. Strange, you think, to never do anything yet still be tired all the time.

You lose touch with reality. Your mind closes in on itself. It races, triggers panic attacks in the hours after dark. You dream that Taylor Swift is in your cell with you. She has a cold and asks for medicine. You tell her you’re sorry, you don’t have any—the stuff that actually works isn’t even allowed in here. For several days, you are fixated on this dream. You don’t understand. You don’t even like her music. You worry you’re losing your mind.

You’re moved to a different prison, then moved again. You bloat your stomach like a horse being saddled when the guards shackle you up. That way the chain around your waist isn’t too tight when you eat the bologna sandwich thrown at you on the transit bus.

You watch people get beaten. You watch people get stabbed. You watch people lose hope. This is the scariest to watch, by far.

You’re released. You get out. This is the hard part. This is the transition you’re not sure you can make. You sublet an apartment from someone who doesn’t bother to run a background check. You’re grateful for this because no one else will rent to you. You call a few friends, but it’s been too long. No one knows what to say anymore. Your friendship has become a burden, a chore, a charity undertaking.

You apply for jobs. You don’t get them. Eventually you find one, just enough to get by on. They don’t ask, so you don’t say. You were at the top of your class in college, grad school scholarships to choose from. Now you’re in your twenties making eleven dollars an hour, and you feel lucky to have that. Because you are lucky. Still breathing. Free.

People tell you about Breaking Bad, about Game of Thrones. They tell you about Spotify and Snapchat and the Boston Marathon bombing and everything else you missed. You make an attempt to get caught up but it overwhelms you. You decide you’re too far behind to bother. You don’t watch the shows, don’t download the apps, know nothing about the big news events from those years. You’re happier for it.

You go to the grocery store and are overwhelmed by the selection. You look in your closet and feel embarrassed by the waste. You can’t believe there was ever a time when you thought these things would make you feel better, would fill the hole where your self-esteem should be. Years spent with two pairs of green pants, three white undershirts, two green button-ups, one pair of boots burned that out of you. You fill trash bags to donate.

Your niece is born. You love her and do your best to help with her. You pray she won’t grow up thinking you’re a loser. You watch your parents get older and worry that they already do. There was a time when they were proud of you. Now they defend you to their neighbors, their friends, perhaps hoping you might still find your way through the dark.

You become a Buddhist. You become vegan. You become active. You work. You write—sometimes in the second person. You think it would be fun to volunteer with animals, to generate some positive energy in your life, but the places you apply won’t accept felons. When you lock eyes with a stranger on the street, you smile.

You keep shaving your head because you’re used to it now. You’re sleeping better. You dream about the past, about people and things you no longer have in your life. You dream about Taylor Swift again. She laughs at you, acts like she’s never seen you before. You shrug. The dream doesn’t stick with you.

It’s not that you aren’t grateful, because you are. You’ve finally learned the bumper stickers are right: that every day truly is a blessing, that nothing is promised. But you’re in mourning, confused, lost. You just got out last year so you try to be patient, tell yourself it will come in time. For now you recognize nothing, least of all yourself.

You don’t want to be here anymore; you still want what you’ve always wanted. You just want to go home.

Headshot of Michael FischerMichael Fischer was released from state prison in 2015 and is currently earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College. He is an editor of the school’s literary journal, Sierra Nevada Review, and a Moth Chicago StorySlam winner. His work is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Hippocampus, Vagabond City, and the 2016 TulipTree Review anthology. Michael is a Cleaver Emerging Artist. 

Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Flickr

THE GRAVITY OF JOY by Charles Green

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

the-gravity-of-joy

THE GRAVITY OF JOY
by Charles Green

Recently, I ruined someone’s moment of mundane joy. The hallways of my campus building were bare—students were taking exams, or locked away in the library and various study nooks they’d marked as their territory, or sprawled on the campus greens. The end of the semester was nigh; my step had a lilt.

As I walked down the hall, a faculty member from another department—I know him by sight but not by name—exited the men’s room, tossed his black umbrella in the air, and caught it with a jaunty swing of his arm. Then we saw each other, and his fluid movement calcified into the gait of a person too conscious of his awkward stride. He glanced away, then back at me, and finally fixed his eyes on some pretend middle distance until we passed one another.

I wanted to tell him I understood. I know that small, unprofound pleasure of tossing objects into the air and catching them: umbrellas, pens, my water bottle. When I’m cooking and I need a spatula, I’ll pull it from the cylinder and toss it into the air, then catch it and step to the stove. Ease extends through the arm, and gravity becomes a toy. I move without being watched.

Of course, I couldn’t say a word to him. How do you face a stranger and say, “Yes, what a pleasure to toss and catch your umbrella”?

Maybe I could have asked him if he’d seen Singin’ in the Rain. I dislike musicals as a category, but I love Gene Kelly’s 1952 film version. The performers embody manic activity at its highest pitch. Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” is one of cinema’s great one-man scenic performances, and, in the title song, Kelly incarnates thoughtless physical joy. After he drops off Debbie Reynolds at her door after a date, he dances with boyish bliss in the rain. Throughout the song, his character, Don Lockwood, is utterly unselfconscious, smiling at strangers as if they’re figures of his own imagining, treating his umbrella as a partner. He’s soaked, he’s joyous, he’s free from all propriety—until he’s stomping puddles in the street and a police officer walks up. The social norm of the law brings his mind back to watching eyes. Lockwood steps back onto the sidewalk, shakes his legs as if to dry them, and walks off into the end of the number, handing his umbrella to a soaked stranger as a gesture of his citizenship.

Of course, that unselfconscious joy is rehearsed; he’s not Don Lockwood but Gene Kelly, knowing innumerable eyes will watch him move, and yet his body still achieves a freedom. Kelly has practiced those moves and sloughed off the inelegance that comes with being watched. The mind has ceded authority to muscle memory.

But even Gene Kelly resisted being Gene Kelly. When he was eight, his mother enrolled him and his brother in dance class, but they quit because they were bullied. He only restarted dance classes at fifteen, when he was athletic enough to defend himself. In college, he studied economics; he even began law school. When he filmed the famous scene in the rain, the water shrank his wool suit, and he had a fever of 103 degrees.

Our routes to grace are never straightforward.

In tenth grade, I had to learn to juggle. I took a mime class—yes, mime, at a public Arts Magnet—and Arkansas Power & Light hired us to entertain them at a conference. (I assume we were cheap.) At a downtown Little Rock hotel, we juggled and mimed for bored professionals frequenting the bar. By that night, I could toss a ball behind my back without dropping maybe three times out of ten, so all I really remember beyond dropping my juggling balls is one specific moment: a woman hustling away from a drunken coworker who kept trying to hand her a key to his hotel room, as graceless as Gene Kelly was graceful.

Over time, I learned to juggle well enough, because juggling three balls is actually easy once you remove the invisible fourth ball: your own fear of dropping. I haven’t juggled in several years, though. I haven’t had an occasion. I turned thirty-seven recently—not that old, but roughly middle-aged, and the birthday coincided with a back injury, weight gain, and the late removal of two wisdom teeth. My back went out as I was reaching to put away a stack of clean plates, so midlife feels like a diagnosis. With that injury came a growth, a small, hard mound that feels like a pebble. When the doctor touched it, he said, “Oh, you have a back mouse!” The back mouse—yes, that is a colloquial term doctors use for it—is an episacral lipoma, a herniation that has filled with fatty tissue. That has meant countless times reaching around to feel if it’s still there or if it has changed, so I embody the pose of old age.

I worry my last days of unadulterated joy—thoughtless, in-the-moment joy—are behind me. I know that’s not true, but knowing and feeling are an awkward, estranged pair of siblings. I used to be able to slip gravity briefly, a flame flickering at the top of hot wax, but now I’m starting to feel like the burnt wick of a nubby candle.

Yes, that’s melodrama. But the back mouse, skin tags, widow’s peaks, white hairs, moles sprawling like maps of white flight: they add up. I see and feel them, and I build a straw nostalgia for what were largely unhappy days. In high school, for some reason I no longer know—I wanted attention? I liked to perform?—I did one hundred bell kicks in a row for a dollar. I never took dance, but I’d discovered the bell kick, that joyous mid-air heel click. I was already six-foot-four, and I knew watching the incongruity of a gangly white dude doing bell kicks was its own kind of pleasure. So, before first-period trigonometry, where I was the only senior in a class of juniors, where I had no friends, I asked if anyone would pony up for a show. Joe, who at sixteen had a full beard and never got carded, pulled out a single. When forced to dance for some reason, I wore the straitjacket of everyone’s imagined eyes on me. But I did the bell kicks, got my dollar, and sweated through the start of trig.

In those days, when friends talked about what they hoped to do in life, I joked that I would die at the age of thirty-seven. I don’t believe in magic or superstition, but my high-school joke has me spooked now that I’ve reached that age. In the days before my wisdom-teeth removal this year, I feared I’d die on the operating table. When my back went out and I had to start physical therapy, I feared my youth was at an end. From here on out, just maintenance. No more grace.

I’m indulging in this melodrama for a reason: I want to send a message to some future self of mine. Whether he’s forty or fifty or eighty, I want him to laugh at my melodrama and to reckon with it. More importantly, I want to tell him something: thirty-seven feels like a turning point. Not just into the melodrama of midlife, but into a closing. Aging isn’t just the body conceding to gravity; as life moves forward, we pull ourselves into the past. I see this conservatism of so many white men in midlife—not just in politics, but in life as well. The few things we know calcify, and we see those calcifications as wisdom. We mistake the gravity that leashes us for another kind of gravity—gravitas. Straw nostalgia hardens into a philosophy. The way things were becomes the way things should be; we reimagine the rusted age—the anxiety, the segregation, the violence—as the golden age. The past becomes a superstition.

It’s easier to rehearse prayers than to believe them. But rehearsing can bring a faith. I’m not a religious or faithful person, but I know that wallowing in the melodrama of aging adds a pull to the grave. It’s that fourth ball, the fear of dropping. I don’t think I can escape that fear, so I’m going to keep rehearsing my secular prayer until it’s true. To my future self—and to my present self as well—flicker against the gravitational pull of the false past. Stay in the gravity of the present. Become the Gene Kelly of tossing any object into the air until you’re no longer yourself, or Gene Kelly, or even Don Lockwood: you’re nothing but kinesis, gravity and its release, all in the same moment.

Charles green author photoCharles Green’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction International, The Southeast Review, and the New England Review, among other venues. He lives in Cortland, New York, with his wife and cats, and he teaches writing at Cornell University.

Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Unsplash

TINY’S HEART by Sam Brighton

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Barber shaving man's hair in barbershop

TINY’S HEART
by Sam Brighton

For weeks the slush had been drying off the sidewalks, leaving trails of salty white mist, and still I hadn’t seen Tiny—not since Christmas when he tried to kiss me and said he’d teach me to cut white people hair. During warmer months, Tiny hustled past the social services building most mornings around nine. “There he goes,” somebody would say. We would stop tapping on our keyboards, lean a chair beyond the cubicle wall, and stretch the coiled phone cord to watch him go. Tiny was somewhere in his nineties and barely taller than the corner mailbox. He zipped by, en route to his barbershop, his gait just as steady as any of ours. Most people on my caseload were shut inside their houses forevermore and inched around their kitchens one step at a time. Tiny was my only employed client, although I wasn’t sure how officially employed—I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to know. He always wore a fedora, a necktie cinched tight into his collar, a long cardigan draped off his hunched bony shoulders. Tiny was always impeccably groomed and appropriately dressed for the weather, engaged daily in cardiovascular activity. I nearly finished my functional assessment just watching him haul ass.

Sometimes Tiny veered across the street toward our doors and tapped on the glass, waving at the receptionist until she put down her book and walked over to push open the door, even though she had already buzzed him in. “Misses,” he would shout, “I’d like to see my caseworker please,” holding his fedora in his hands, his smile wide and toothy, the bite of ancient cologne permeating the air. Our agency was a wide teal-carpeted room with tall white walls. The desks were squished together inside cubicles, but the arrangement did nothing to muffle the racket of two people politely yelling at each other about the overdue energy bill that couldn’t be paid. Protective services squeezed into one corner, the public guardians into another, and case management huddled throughout the rest of the building. Together we all watched over the older citizens of Pittsburgh.

Whenever Tiny dropped in for an unscheduled visit, which irritated me to no end, making me late for meetings at some senior housing high-rise across town, we stood in the lobby shouting back and forth. “Bring me the letter so I can take a look,” I would quietly holler. “Let’s call and ask.” Everyone knew Tiny, and everyone knew he was mine. “Oh, your little fella came in this morning,” someone would say in the break room.

◊

Most people who lived in Pittsburgh were born there, and when I told people I had moved there from across the country, uniformly they raised an eyebrow raise and said, “Why would you move here?” The culture, the history, the adorable row houses, I might have said, although really, to leave my alcoholism behind in the desert furnished a tangible sense of moving on.

Once I learned Pittsburgh’s resources and systems, I worked the shit out of that case management job. Biannually my manager marked me a point short of a perfect score during employee reviews—because she never gave out perfect scores, she said. My home visits were completed early, my documentation thorough. My billing far surpassed the monthly goal. I let interns follow me around. My job was my amends to the universe, it was how I lived with myself. I owed the public a thousand times for each and every drunken foul and fuck-up.

Right after I quit drinking, a combination of newfound commitment to self-care, state-imposed restrictions, and insurance policies suspicious of alcoholics endowed me with a vacation from social services. “I need a break from humans,” I would say when collating papers with the other temps in the air-conditioning while the cacti endured the sunlight outside the windows. Spreadsheets and adding machines were plenty to manage then.

Sobriety introduced all kinds of sharp and shiny feelings, though, and there was only so much data entry I could tolerate while refraining from eye-rolling and open insubordination. Clocking in even a minute late three times within twelve months was grounds for dismissal, and two firings in a row would look terrible on a resumé. Meanwhile, children across the city were chronically starved or forced by Mom’s boyfriend into horrible sex acts, and endured things more horrendous than most could imagine. I just couldn’t find the greater meaning in entering addresses into a spreadsheet for money solicitation purposes. After stringing together fourteen consecutive months without drinking, I sold my furniture and left Arizona.
Case managing older adults in Pittsburgh rather than abused children in Phoenix better suited my sensibilities anyway. Plus, an astonishing amount of work could be accomplished when well-rested. But I missed the fifty sober queers I had left behind in Arizona. In all the history of my life, I finally found somewhere to belong. Then I left them all.

◊

Tiny lived in a wooden box on the edge of a hill. His house matched the others stacked together across the rolling hills and pewter valleys. Pittsburgh skies were overcast most days, and the neighborhoods reflected a resident slick wet gray. White paint flaked off Tiny’s siding, and the front stoop leaned hard, lopsided, under the front door, where a screen flapped in the wind. Fluorescent green moss streaked the shingles and gutters dangled overhead. Someone had tagged the side of his house with nonsensical letters. Strand board had been nailed over a window. Deer vanished into crowded trees across the street as car tires grumbled over the road, plaid with bricks and potholes that rocked cars like boats. That hill was a bitch to climb whenever it snowed. It seemed, as Tiny said, that the city plowed the black neighborhoods last. When our agency dispatched us to deliver survival kits of high-sodium foods and batteries and blankets to our most at-risk folks, the roads near our office had been cleared long before Tiny’s hills.

Tiny had paid off his house in the seventies, before I was even born, but he owed a decade’s worth of property taxes and so was ineligible for county-funded home repair. The county offered no concession, not even after someone broke into Tiny’s house and carried his copper pipes away into the night while he snored peacefully in bed.

“Can’t we tell the county it’s an emergency?” I said, sitting in my manager’s office. “The man has no indoor plumbing in a house that’s otherwise good enough.”

“First see if he’s sitting on any assets, cash stuffed into a mattress, you know the drill.”

“How could someone steal his pipes?” I said, “He’s a little old man.”

She sighed. “Sounds like someone was really desperate,” my manager said, “I’m sure nobody wants to steal copper plumbing to get whatever it is they need.”

I wanted her to be mad with me, and here she was humanizing Tiny’s pipe thief. Heat spilled over me in her office, something like shame—it felt familiar. I remembered despair, dark and cloudy and toxic, smoldering inside my guts, gritty in my fingernails and exhaled through my breath, how I had once evolved into something inhuman. Maybe in my alcoholism I didn’t find myself stealing an old man’s copper pipes, maybe because I was lucky enough to find a way out first.

I reported this epiphany to my AA group during my turn to speak, that maybe I’m not terribly different from the pipe thief, that maybe what I feel is survivor’s guilt. The meeting that night was populated mostly by the young women from the halfway house down the street. When I looked up at their faces after speaking, most of the participants stared at the floor chewing gum or picked at scabs on their arm. I was glad I said it anyway.

◊

For Christmas we selected ten of our loneliest seniors from our caseloads and wrote wish lists, no durable medical equipment allowed. Do-gooders in the community picked cardboard ornaments off a Christmas tree containing vague demographics with gift suggestions and then bought presents. Our agency let us wear jeans on gift-delivery days, Santa hats and Steelers gear encouraged, and we crowded into each other’s cars to distribute gifts. I didn’t say much, but we laughed because my coworkers were funny. We sprinkled salty sand up slick porches and handed over wrapped packages containing hideous floral potholders or Steelers beach towels. A sort of tinkling danced in my stomach, and maybe that feeling was called delight.

For Tiny, I asked for wool socks and warm gloves. He rode the bus during snowy months, but I worried about him, wading down his hill through the snow. I watched for him whenever I drove around town, marching his ass across the city—as Tiny said—to cut hair because Social Security paid out jack shit.

Tiny’s gifts weren’t delivered on time—whoever delivered them didn’t read my note to just find him down at his barbershop. I delivered his gift myself mid-January.

“Whooee!” he said, wrapping his new scarf around his neck, “I thank you very much Misses, what a beauty.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Someone from the community bought you the gifts. I’m just delivering them.”

We stood in his barbershop, and the neon orange coils of his space heaters baked our legs. Tiny’s barbershop was four pale yellow walls on the top floor of an old brick building with creaky steps sure to buckle under my weight. Bass thumping from passing cars rattled his windows and the square mirror leaning against the wall. A black barber chair with gold foam puffing out on the corners squatted before the mirror.

It had taken me a while to find his barbershop—his shop unlisted in the phone book, not even a sign on the building. I got the address from his physician, “my main man,” as Tiny called him.

Tiny’s barbershop was in an old African American neighborhood, and by old I mean the free blacks lived there in the 1800s, during the era of slavery. When Tiny was a kid in the twenties, the area syncopated and grooved with jazz culture. Come the fifties, social forces displaced hundreds of businesses and thousands of residents, leaving poverty and drug crimes and structural decay in its wake. Trash littered yards, and weeds grew from the cracks of sidewalks. Buildings with busted out windows perished in rows. Along Tiny’s block, older women sat on the bus bench, and men leaned against buildings and parked cars. I felt self-conscious and white, like an invader of space and community. White social workers haven’t necessarily been the good guys throughout history. Sometimes the old men barked at the kids to clear a path on the sidewalk and let me, the white lady, through, and I was never sure how to respond—this white lady could step into the road to pass just as easily but wanted to acknowledge and accept their chivalry.

Tiny, with his scarf draped around his neck, stepped toward me and swooped his face toward mine, lips puckered. As I ducked away, I nearly tipped over backward.

“Whoa whoa stop,” I said. “Please step back.”

“Ah baby, why not?” he said, “I thought maybe you and me could, you know, hang out.” He straightened his frizzy mustard-colored cardigan and winked.

I explained the ethics of appropriate professional relationships—I didn’t even mention our sixty-year age difference, nor that I’m a lesbian. The first time Tiny and I met, we stood in his driveway and Tiny kept calling me “Young Man”—I assume he didn’t catch my name, which at the time was “Heather.” The supervisor training me watched me talk to him, and I was unsure whether to correct him or just roll with it.

“I apologize if me giving you the scarf was confusing,” I said. “It’s a gift from an anonymous family.”

I offered to set him up with a senior companion if he needed company—which wasn’t a dating service, but rather a group of seniors who were paid a small sum to hang out with folks.
The companion service appealed to me—not the friend-for-hire part, but beating hearts filling empty chairs, empty space left behind by some loved someone.

“Oh no, I don’t need that crap,” he said. “Last thing I need is some old person complaining about they sugars.”

“Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Hey, you too, baby,” he said as he flung the end of the scarf over his shoulder. “Come back soon. I’ll teach you how to cut white people hair.”

◊

By April the snow had melted, and the muck had receded. Birds chirped, little green buds unfolded on trees. Still I hadn’t seen Tiny since the attempted kiss. Knowing he was hard-of-hearing, I pounded on his front door longer and louder each week. His curtains were pinched shut. He hadn’t been at his shop, either, whenever I dropped in. His emergency contacts—three of his customers— hadn’t returned my calls. Tiny’s main man, his physician, hadn’t heard from him in years, but Tiny didn’t need pills and hadn’t been sick since the eighties.

In May, the city left a notice on Tiny’s front door, imploring him to do something about the thicket of weeds. When my car hobbled up the brick hill the next morning, the notice was still tacked to his door. My stomach felt punched. Maybe this was worry, or it was dread. The notice flapped in the wind along with the screen all week.

The risk in asking the cops to kick open his door for a welfare check was that, regardless of whether your client turned out to be alive or dead, the busted-up door was now your problem.

“Try calling the morgues,” my manager said. “See if he’s there before you break down his door.”

“That sounds awful.” I wanted to bury my face and cry at her desk, but I thought about kittens so that I wouldn’t. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and I usually weep whenever I’m tired.

 

Tiny was a pain in my ass, showing up whenever he pleased, loud-talking in the lobby, asking me to call the water company. Maybe this urge to cry was called sadness, and maybe it’s human to feel sad when people might be dead.

I’d never called a morgue before. I had been monitoring the obituaries online, typing in his name. Usually every month or two, someone on my caseload turned up dead. Sometimes we found the obituary or a family member called us to cancel the cleaning girl. I stored sympathy cards for bereft families in my desk, and wrote little notes about the departed.

None of the morgues had seen anybody by that name. One suggested I try the county medical examiner.

“Ah yes,” said the detective after I gave Tiny’s real name and birthday. “We have his body, haven’t been able to track down next of kin. You all have any names?”

My chest felt heavy and empty. Grief. Maybe heartbreak.
He was found in the street, said the detective, cause of death something about his heart, maybe, I’m fairly certain, but I couldn’t listen, couldn’t grab onto his words to store them and review later. I gave the name of the ex-wife, the numbers for the three customers listed as emergency contacts. I didn’t know of assets that might pay for cremation. He had cashed in his life insurance policies to replace his pipes.

◊

A man lived on the earth for ninety-some years, leaving behind the case managers who once stopped what they were doing to watch him zip down the sidewalk. Maybe the old men and the kids clogging the sidewalks honored him in some way without notifying the newspapers. I called Tiny’s main man, the physician, to relay the news. The receptionist thanked me. She would close his file.

Slipping off the earth without funereal fanfare seemed tragic for a whole human life. There was nowhere to send flowers, no bereft to receive my sympathy card with some bullshit sunset on the cover. I waited to close his file until my manager invited me to do so. (Tiny was inflating my caseload number.) I finished the paperwork, canceled his case management service in the computer system. His file would be reviewed by the quality assurance team. Then his papers pulled from the folder and shredded. A white label would be peeled off and then slapped over his name. A new name would be written on the white label with a marker. What was left of Tiny was a human body with a stopped heart, waiting to be claimed. A barber chair with a mirror and scissors. A box on a hill with plastic pipes, an overgrown yard, and back taxes. A white lady, sixty years younger with a habit of wandering toward the window around nine, feeling the sting of clean-burning sadness, sadness unsullied by alcohol, for the loss of him.

Sam Brighton author photoSam Brighton is currently working on a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review and Memoryhouse. She regularly contributes health and wellness essays filled with exclamation points and enthusiasm to a regional newsletter for people living with multiple sclerosis. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a nurse. Sam is a Cleaver Emerging Artist.

Image credit: Rawle C. Jackman on Flickr

 

 

Note: this essay was amended by the author on May 16, 2018.

CARDIO, LIGHTBULBS, AND A FUNERAL by Rick Bailey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Multicolored lightbulbs

CARDIO, LIGHTBULBS, AND A FUNERAL
by Rick Bailey

The day of the funeral I’m on the treadmill at the senior center.

A guy named Gordon I haven’t seen in a while stops next to me and points. I shake my head, What? He points again. So: I guess my limp is noticeable. I took a minor tumble on some stairs, more sprawl than fall. I’d rather not go into it right now. I’m listening to Ray Charles sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” on my headset and watching Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan on one of the four TVs hung on the wall. But Gordon stands there, smiling. I pause the Ray, pop out an earbud.

“You hurt?” he says.

“Not much.” I dial down the speed and nod hello. “Where you been?”

“On a yacht,” he says. “What happened?”

Gordon is a junior senior. His hair is all white. He’s retired, not yet sixty, and reminds me of the Pillsbury Doughboy. The two years I’ve worked out at the senior center, I’ll see him three days a week every week for a stretch. Then he’ll be gone for weeks at a time. He is swift on the elliptical, then swiftly done and gone upstairs for coffee and networking. I glance back at the TV. It’s confetti time on Kelly and Michael. Three days a week I watch the silent confetti drop that happens on the show. It’s goofy, and everyone in the studio loves it. I guess I do too.

I tell him I took a little fall down some stairs. There’s a pause. I’m still walking; he’s standing by. “So,” I say. “A yacht.”

“There’s no such thing as a little fall,” he says.

“Whereabouts, Caribbean?”

“Not this time,” he says. “Up in the north channel. With Don.” Don is one of the senior seniors. He says he’s too old for exercise equipment. He wears big shoes and sleds a few laps around the tiny indoor track before stopping for a long coffee. He does a couple cruises a year. Gordon must be first mate.

“Every afternoon,” he says, “cocktail hour on the flying bridge, some cool jazz. It was sweet.”

“Must be some yacht.”

He considers his answer, smiles, and says, “Not that big.”

I start to say there’s no such thing as a small yacht, but think otherwise. I kind of want to get back to Ray Charles. I point to the TV and ask what he thinks of Kelly Ripa’s hair. It’s new, a Frenchy-looking bob. I don’t think she likes it. She touches it a lot.

Gordon glances at the TV, then back at me, like, Are you joking?

Later that morning I squeeze in a trip to Home Depot, looking for lightbulbs and super glue.

◊

A few days ago my wife called to me from the basement. She said the stairway lights were out, one at the top, one at the bottom. That stairway goes down three steps to a landing, then makes a right turn to go down the rest of the way, thirteen steps in all, carpeted. I stood on a toppish step; she was downstairs. We flipped switches and talked. It was definitely dark. It turned out I didn’t know what step I was on. When I went to set my foot on the landing, it wasn’t quite there, and all of a sudden I went down in a pile; twisted and stretched muscle, bone, and fat.

“I’m okay,” I said to my wife. It was a tentative assessment, kind of a lie. It hurt like hell.

“Are you sure?”

“Probably,” I told her. I just didn’t feel like moving yet.

Falls run in the family. In his old age my father stepped off a ladder and crashed onto the cement floor in the garage. He limped for a month. When she was seventy my mother-in-law misjudged a stair-step in our house, fell, and broke her ankle. One night my father-in-law woke up, walked the length of his house in the dark to the bathroom, the one he used over by the garage, the one next to the door to the basement. He opened the wrong door and stepped into the dark stairway. There was no landing to abbreviate his fall. He tumbled straight down all thirteen stairs. Somehow, he was not hurt.

Thirteen. That should tell us something.

For some time now whenever I carry a case of wine to the basement, I imagine myself slipping and falling. You put carpet on stairs, you’re tempting fate. In this imagined fall my arms fly up, I launch the case of wine into the air, bottles fly and fall, breaking and spilling. When I roll into the glassy, winey mess at the bottom of the stairs, I cut my throat. Cheers.

In the aisles of Home Depot I decide to look for the long lasting bulbs. Bulb technology, it turns out, is taking giant, if confusing, steps forward. Really, it’s a stampede. There’s incandescent, halogen, fluorescent, compact fluorescent, and LED. Check for lumens, Watts, Kelvin value, soft light, hard light, dimmables, warm-up time. Then there’s savings per year, calculated to the penny, and year life. It’s kind of like shopping for French wine. The light steward I eventually talk to holds out a package of bulbs, recommends LED.

“How long will they last?” I ask.

He looks at me and smiles. “You’ll probably never have to buy bulbs again.” It’s an innocent remark. In my lifetime, he means. He sees something in my facial expression, intimations of my imminent demise, and offers a sheepish apology.

◊

On the way to the funeral my wife says, “They’re not supposed to die before us.”

No, they’re not.

He was fifty. He was big. He had a mountain-man beard and a soft voice, he had light in his eyes and a smile that made you want to love him. At the funeral we stand in the church vestibule for half an hour, a visitation that begins in soft murmuring and mournful glances, and by the end rises to a din of conversation and laughter so loud the funeral director can’t hush us up and herd us into the church. There’s a balm in that din, an affirmation. But still, the man is gone.

We file in, find seats in pews, and wait. Whoever made this church understood light. The floor and walls and ceiling are all white. There’s stained glass, but it’s stained glass lite. The afternoon sunlight pouring in has a kind of echo. Maybe it helps. While we wait, the pianist plays in minor keys, slowly, a lot of sostenuto. Maybe that helps too. I remark to my wife: Above the altar, the wheel chandelier hanging from the ceiling. When she looks, I whisper, A little lower, it could be a pot rack. She wags a finger: Keep quiet. Way off to the left, behind the organ, is a huge set of drums, worthy of Ginger Baker, and a pile of amplifiers, for playing God rock. The horror.

Then the pianist shifts to a major key. We stand.

Then come the family, the casket; words.

Outside afterward, we stand facing the hearse, arguably the worst time. One church bell begins to toll. I hope they’re doing it on purpose. “If a clod be washed away by the sea,” I think. We are the less.

Lying in bed that night I find my wife’s hand and remember: super glue. It’s for a ceramic lemon that she bought in Sicily and that I broke a few weeks ago. I plan to fix it. Two or three pieces, clean breakage. It will be almost good as new. We lie there, drifting toward sleep. Drifting, I think about lemons and glue, and carpet on a well-lit stairway, about my limp to wellness on the treadmill, and a yacht anchored in the north channel, floating in the dark, a couple staterooms lit by a few tiny lights, and people having drinks, feeling lucky.

rick bailey author photoRick Bailey writes about family, food, travel, current events, what he reads and what he remembers. The University of Nebraska Press will publish a collection of his essays, American English, Italian Chocolate in summer 2017. He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

 

TEACHING REFUGEE CHILDREN AFTER TRUMP, an essay by Daniel Miller, featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

TEACHING REFUGEE CHILDREN AFTER TRUMP
by Daniel Miller
Featured on Life As Activism

I was in college when the twin towers fell. The TV footage was on every channel of my roommate’s little box set with its rabbit ear antennae. Before I had finished getting ready that morning, a call went out to everyone in the dorms that classes were canceled and a vigil would take place that evening in the university chapel. Later, when classes resumed, every professor began class with some kind of discussion about the towers. They tried to reassure a scared and shocked student body, though some were still in shock themselves. I was grateful for these talks. I needed someone to tell me that everything would be ok, that love and faith were stronger than fear and hate, that no matter how hard it might be, life would eventually regain some sense of normalcy.

Those discussions following 9/11 were the first things that came to mind when I opened the email from my principal this morning. I teach fourth grade at a public elementary school in Texas. The email was sent on November 11, three days after Donald Trump was named president-elect. “Please take a moment to talk with your students about the election,” my principal wrote to the staff. I was surprised by this because my school’s administration has never discussed or expressed any political leanings, one way or the other.

In keeping with that tradition, the email’s purpose was more pastoral than political. Throughout the election season, a slow growing fear had caught hold of much of our student body. After election night, it had changed into visible despair. I should mention that my hometown has welcomed more international refugees per capita than any city in the nation, and the elementary school I work at is home to many of those families. We boast a student population that speaks 20 different languages, and represents countries from as close as Mexico and Cuba to as far away as Iran and Burma. I say “boast” because we are proud of our diversity. Daily, we tell our students that our many colors and cultures make our school special and stronger than we would be separately.

As a teacher, I can think of little that is more fulfilling; little that is more truly American than watching our school family grow and learn together. At recess, the local city kids show new refugees how to play basketball and foursquare. The little girls from Burma teach the girls from Texas new jump rope rhymes and how to weave tiaras out of long grass and dandelions. In the classroom, a student who has never shown much interest in academics suddenly shines when he can partner read with an ESL student who knows little English. This is the first time anyone has ever asked him for help, and he takes pride in describing all the new words and how they match the pictures. One of my Thai students can explain long division to her struggling friend who grew up just a few blocks from the school with greater clarity than I could ever manage. We work hard to foster an atmosphere where all of our children can feel welcome and safe.

Throughout the election season, I noticed that some of my students seemed uneasy. After Donald Trump’s election, true fear had taken hold in many of them. A Congolese boy, who I had never before seen without a big smile, asked me why he would have to go back to his country. His village did not have enough food, he told me. People were very sad and hungry there. A second grade teacher showed me a picture one of her students had drawn. It showed two men with Crayola guns standing over a woman, scribbled red.

“This is my aunt,” the girl said. “Please don’t make my family go back.”

When I took this job, I knew that I might have to console students who were going through rough times: moving, divorce, the death of a beloved pet. I never imagined I would have to have a discussion with elementary students like the ones my college professors had with us after 9/11.

After breakfast, I gathered my students on the carpet. They were curious and excited because we usually began class with a review game.

“As you know,” I said, “we voted for a new president a couple days ago.”

Their demeanor immediately changed. One boy leaned his head against the wall with an audible thunk; another student cradled her face in her hands. I needed a new starting place.

“Our school has students from all over the world, right? Just look at your friends in this classroom. We have different skin colors and some of us speak different languages,” I continued.

They looked at one another and smiled sheepishly.

“That diversity is was makes our school special. We are lucky to have friends like this and we help each other out and care about one another. We are kind of like books. Would you want to read the same book over and over all year long?”

“No,” they said.

“That would be boring,” one boy shouted.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s much better to have a library full of different books. Each of your lives are made up of unique and important stories, and we are lucky that we get to share those stories with one another.” Now for the hard part, “I’ve noticed that some of you have been worried about having to leave our school or this country. I, along with all your other teachers, want you to know that you belong here. Being a refugee means that you and your families have been legally brought to America to get away from situations in your countries that were not good. We are glad that you are here and you make our school better.

“Just like kids can sometimes say things that are not nice, sometimes adults say mean or scary things too, even presidents. But, we all know that just because you hear something on TV, that doesn’t make it right. Being nice to each other and treating everyone with respect is better than being rude or mean. Love is stronger than hate. I know you may hear things from some adults that make you feel sad or scared, but at this school we know how to treat one another. We know how to speak kind words. Remember that each of you has an important story to tell and each of you is a valuable member of our school family.”

We talked for a few more minutes about their questions and fears. Mostly they shared good memories about meeting new friends and playing with one another. To them their different races, religions, and cultures were not cause for fear or distrust. These were merely facts of life that gave more color, fun, and even humor to the stories they told of one another. I knew that soon they would have to leave my classroom and go out into a world that did not always see them the way they saw one another: an adult world guided by different rules. I was thankful they felt safe here, and proud to have cultivated such a little community. I also felt ashamed that I could offer them so little. I wondered how my college professors had felt when they had tried to comfort their classes. I wondered if they felt then that their words and assurances had been enough.

Daniel-MillerDaniel Miller is a Texas-based writer and teacher. He holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh and Duke University. He has published one book, Animal Ethics & Theology (Routledge, 2012). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals such as Alfie Dog Fiction, Amarillo Bay, Riding Light, Rock & Sling (forthcoming), Short Story Sunday, and The Tishman Review.

 

 

Image credit: atsukosmith on Flickr

BENEATH US ALL THIS TIME, an essay by Angelique Stevens featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

beneath-us-all-this-time

BENEATH US ALL THIS TIME
by Angelique Stevens
Featured on Life As Activism

The first time Salva Dut and his drilling crew flushed water through the pipes from the aquifer deep beneath the Sudan desert, all of the villagers danced and sang.  Most of them had never tasted clean water in their lives, and here it was gushing out of the ground twenty feet above them—a cool and beautiful geyser in the dusty heat of midday. One elder approached Salva after that first well was capped and said, “I can’t believe that all of this time, people have been dying and we’ve been sitting right on top of the water.” Salva told that story the first time he came to the college where I teach, and I’ve retold his story many times.

I met Salva for the first time in 2005. I teach literature of the Holocaust and genocide as an English Professor in upstate New York. A dark subject for sure, but I’ve learned over the years that students taking courses about genocide find themselves compelled to engage more purposefully in their societies. They learn that historical lessons, especially those that are emotionally painful, have contemporary obligations. So in 2005, a group of us went looking for an organization that was making a clear and conscious difference in the world. We found Salva Dut, founder of Water for Sudan, and we asked him to speak to our little group.

His story was a powerful message, especially for those of us whom water scarcity is mostly unfathomable; our own city’s water supply is some of the cleanest water in the world. We knew then that helping Salva meant making a real difference. It wasn’t long before I joined the board of directors for Water for Sudan, and in 2008, I travelled to the country, which back then was still Sudan, with five other people to see that beautiful geyser moment for myself.

Everywhere I went in Sudan, people offered me things. I was the foreigner in their country and they could tell the minute they saw me that I was different with my lighter skin and my long hair and my rounded body. They understood that it was me who needed their help. They knew that my system wasn’t used to the extreme temperatures, that I had not sufficiently acclimated to bacteria-ridden water, that my skin was too soft for hard work, my eyes too sensitive to the dust.

In January 2015, I made a second trip to the region. This time, South Sudan had separated from Sudan making it the newest country in the world. During my two-month trip, I visited eighty villages where the organization, now Water for South Sudan, had dug its 250 wells. I visited each borehole to interview villagers and to record the impact of clean water on their lives.  

The author in South Sudan

The author in South Sudan

Even in 2015 after a recent civil war in the new country, whenever I arrived in a new village to do an evaluation, people were still offering me their generosity. A chief might send a child to find a chair for me. An elder lady would escort me out of the sun under the shade of a tree. Kids offered to climb trees to harvest honey for me. People brought me mangoes and peanuts and eggs. In one village, a woman came running towards me with a chicken. She shoved it into my hands before I knew what to do. Lion, our Director of East Africa Operations and Evaluation leader, intervened and gave the squawking chicken back to the lady; he explained to her that we had a long drive ahead of us, that we could not take the chicken in the car, that we wouldn’t have time to cook it. Reluctantly, she settled for giving me a hug. Another time a local elder who was a member of his county’s parliament gifted me a goat to show his appreciation. In a place where three meals a day consisted of rice, lentils, and okra, it was a luxury to have meat. On the last day in camp, he came again to offer us another goat to take with us to the next camp.

And it wasn’t just food that people gave. They gave their time too. Whenever I had to walk into the bush to go to the bathroom, someone offered to accompany me to make sure I didn’t get lost. One day, near Salva’s home in South Sudan’s remote north, we got lost locating a number of villages. We found a couple of teens in a market center who offered to navigate us to the nearby villages. People gave their labor too; in the village where the elder man had given me the goat, one woman stayed in our camp from dawn until dusk helping to prepare meals, wash dishes, cut wood, and start fires. When I asked her why she spent her days with us when she had her own family to take care of, she said it was because we needed the help.

We in the West sometimes see South Sudan as a place of conflict, strife, and poverty. And to some degree that’s true. The country has experienced civil war most of its independent life, even when it was still part of Sudan. There is no real infrastructure to speak of, no paved roads in most of the country and no electric anywhere. Even in the big cities, the buildings run on generator power, and in most places in the country there is no potable water. In extreme heat and across harsh terrain, people spend hours walking, pounding grain, chopping wood for cooking, and tilling the earth by hand. It is one of the hardest places in the world to live; yet through all of this, there is a humanity in the South Sudanese people that strikes me as deeply unique and necessary in our global world.

Now in this post-election climate where fear, anger, and divisiveness have welled up across the country, I’m reminded of something people kept telling me the second time I visited to study those wells. In each village, I asked a question about equal access to the borehole—whether everyone in the village, even those just traveling through could share the water equally. Most of the respondents didn’t understand what I was asking. “What do you mean?” they would say, and I would rephrase the question. And then they would laugh, as if what I was asking was ridiculous. “Sister, of course,” they would say. “What kind of person would deny access to someone who thirsts?”

Indeed.  What kind?

Over the past months in the United States, we have heard calls to deny immigrants safe shelter behind our borders. We have seen people vilify whole groups of “others.” In my own, fairly progressive city, we’re hearing about racial slurs being scrawled across local high school walls and gay pride flags being burned. I have myself sensed a gritty stream coursing beneath our feet on the verge of gushing under the pressure of hate. And instead of slaking our thirst, the change in our country feels like we’ll be swallowing sand. It has been enough to make me want to shut my doors and stay in bed.

But then something happened to me last week. I had read about the rare super moon rising, so I walked my dog to the park to watch it. When we arrived, the sun had given way to a bruised and fiery sky. My dog and I walked around the reservoir, the city’s water supply on top of the hill, while we waited for the moon to appear. Because the reservoir sits on the highest point in the city, there were hundreds of people waiting up there too. As we walked, I noticed something on the sidewalk. In intervals of about every fifty feet, someone had chalked words of hope: “Believe the future is bright and you and I can be the light.” “Be the change.” “Spread love, Spread light.”

In the midst of our grief and despair, my neighbors and I had gone to the park on the hill, thirsty for something beautiful in the setting of the sun. As I read those words marked on the concrete, and as I glanced around me at the people who had joined me on the hill—the city’s skyline in the distance—Salva’s words came to me again. I realized that if there is a darkness rising from within our country, it is also joined by a stronger current of hope and generosity that has always been there. I remind myself that human kindness must and will prevail, and that it is up to each of us to do the work of digging deep in order to bring it to the surface.

Angelique-StevensAngelique Stevens teaches Creative Writing and Genocide literature in Rochester, New York. An activist for human rights, she has lived in Chiapas, Mexico, to be a witness for peace with the Zapatista Rebels; volunteered in an elephant refuge in Thailand; studied Holocaust education in Israel, writing in Paris, and she spent two months evaluating water wells in South Sudan. She has traveled to 12 countries on three continents. Her non-fiction can be found in The Chattahoochee Review, Shark Reef, Cleaver, and a number of anthologies. Her essay, “Exposure” won second place in the Solas Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing. She is currently writing a travel memoir about her life growing up and her experiences in South Sudan. She is a member of Straw Mat Writers and an MFA candidate at Bennington College who finds her inspiration in travel—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger.

 

THE ART OF TRUMP, an essay by Dustin Pearson, featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE ART OF TRUMP
by Dustin Pearson
Featured on Life As Activism
the-art-of-trump

I spent most of election night locked in my room. If I had to contend with outside voices that night, I wanted each to be of my own choosing, but I wasn’t successful. Like many over the course of that night, I watched Trump ascend to the elected head of state and government. Having taken in the concrete data that was coming from the poles and reckoning with the collective anxieties of friends and fellow writers I admire on social media, I misguidedly left my room to collect myself, to pour an emotionally charged amount of red wine into the tallest tumbler I could find. My short trek to the kitchen was interrupted by my housemate, who eyed me suspiciously.

“Who’d you vote for?” he asked.

“You don’t have the right to ask me that question,” I said.

Stunned and not understanding, he changed his tactics.

“Do you support gay marriage?”

“Why wouldn’t I support gay marriage?” I asked.

“You’re conservative,” he said.

What my housemate will never understand about me is that I’m reserved. Part of that reserve has been built into me ever since my childhood. So much of it seemed to be about minding my business and making sure to be aware of everything and my place in everything as a black person. It was about staying safe. Knowing safety when I saw it. And only when I was sure of that safety could I consider disclosing myself. I’ve never been nor do I ever hope to be conservative in the ways that my housemate implied with his line of questioning.

My housemate, on the other hand, is always disclosing himself. Voluntarily, he’s offered up intimate details of his past sexual relations, financial history, and unstable life philosophies, citing that I’m distant enough for it not to matter. His openness is incredible. His safety is all but guaranteed.

In the aftermath of the election, I overheard a phone conversation my housemate had with his friend, a conversation that was casual enough to be had while he was on the toilet. He explained he was bummed that Trump had been elected president but that he was also excited. He had plans to go out and buy a gun. He’d always wanted to play out a survivalist scenario, even if he would hate it when it finally came.

I was disgusted. It was all a game to him, and with such low stakes. Just that quickly he’d gone from being a white liberal to what I’ve always imagined as a dangerous white conservative wanting to play out his post apocalyptic American fantasy at everyone else’s expense.

He cited concrete features of his fantasy: killing and eating possums, living off the land, being forced into the mountains. He had other details and conditions, conditions that many marginalized groups in America have normalized in their daily lives. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking how privileged my housemate was for entertaining his thoughts so easily. His privilege had removed him from reality, had made him completely oblivious and ignorant and selfish. His understanding and “liberal” action in the election seemed so shallow, like he was just going through the motions.

Perhaps some would argue that my housemate is an extreme case. I would argue that even inside the academy, where I spend most of my time as a teaching artist, people like my housemate exist less overtly but are every bit as damaging. I’m reminded of such presences every time there’s a conversation about art, empathy, and political writing.

Oftentimes, what I see in the academy is a turning of literature’s historical and social importance in the world against itself, and into what feels like some highbrow entertainment, which has its own politics, and which is why so often I have to fight against my own cynical leanings. Sometimes I set myself on some morbid autopilot. One that says go ahead. Make literature about Art. Entertainment. Make it apolitical. Sterile. Write another depressed person at a bar who thinks about seeking out a prostitute. Don’t forget the pool tables, the jukebox. Make sure it’s playing a tune everyone reading can hear and has heard. Have your protagonist smoke a cigarette. Make sure he’s drinking a beer though nothing fancy because we need this to be taken seriously. Take it to workshop. Let it be praised for its gritty realism. Or, get a bit adventurous. Write another insightful piece about empathy, about how writing outside yourself increases it, rather than provide another means for you to empower yourself to do what you’ve always done: whatever it is that you want, regardless of the cost. Forget about reading the works of the groups you’re supposedly trying to empathize with. Your “research,” if you decide to do any, will be enough. I mean, if that kind of thing was effective, wouldn’t we all be getting along better by now? Wouldn’t a difference have been made?

Growing up, I struggled to understand there was a self I could write about. In grade school, I learned about the white writers and the white generals and the white scientists. When I came home and turned on the television, I watched programming that featured all white casts. During the commercial breaks I watched white men and women run their fingers through their hair, run super sharp knifes through big hunks of meat, run ads about their law firms, run me right out of my empathizing with myself and into empathizing with them. I still struggle. Of course, there was black programming, but that representation fell far short of the spectrum of blackness even within my own family. So when criticisms arise about the “political” writing of marginalized groups, I can’t help but equate those criticisms with being told that my politics, the circumstances of my art and life aren’t wanted. It’s another erasure. Yet I still exist. What would they have me do with that existence?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve engaged earnestly in these conversations, how many times people have tried to (mis)quote some prominent black writer and make it seem as though that writer would support further marginalization of marginalized writers and writing. I can’t tell you how many times someone has tried to insert the voice of a marginalized person who, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel marginalized to support that kind of negation, as if the thought process was, “that’ll do it, that’ll make me right. Even so and so is saying it.” White people disagree with each other every day over lesser and greater things, but that’s not going to reflect on them how they so often claim it reflects on “us,” right?

Then there’s the conversation about anger and the productive presentation of ideas. This complaint typically comes from “allies” whose efforts have been criticized or other well-meaning groups who have been paralyzed by the anticipation of the criticisms their well-meant actions might receive based on the criticisms that have been handed down to allies or other groups who dare to try. Oftentimes people can’t handle feeling as though they’re being discouraged with every word they hear or read when they’re already doing, have done, or imagined the perceived failures of their best (some even under the impression that their best in this context is completely selfless, as if contributing to the cause wouldn’t enrich all of our lives). I’m sensitive to that, minus the parenthetical. That’s been my experience for far too long. I’ve gotten used to it, then had to break that record of resignation.

But really, this piece is catching me at a bad time. Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have been willing to talk to anyone this way, even having gotten it much worse for a longer duration of time. I hate writing about whiteness. I hate reading “white” in pieces of writing, even as it seems to be the social currency of the world. I’d rather not spend it. I only hope to speak to the damage. Usually around this time in this particular conversation people start to think they should just ask me what I need them to do to get us all out of this mess. Maybe in every other context I would think, “yes, I’m very happy you’ve waited until now to believe I’m a genius,” and regardless of the truth of that idea, I certainly don’t have the answer. I do know, however, that the solution, convenient as it has been portrayed to be, is not to be silent.

Trump is (will soon be) our president. We don’t know what that will mean. What’s already showing is awful. At least for me, at least for the people I know and love and care about. It’s not a game. If my housemate is correct, and we’re headed toward a revolution, I certainly don’t want to go down that path having held anything back.

dustin-pearsonDustin Pearson is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University, where he also serves as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. He was awarded the 2015 Katharine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his poem “The Black Body Auditions for a Play.” He is the recipient of fellowships from the Watering Hole, Cave Canem, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Born in Charleston, he is from Summerville, SC.

 

 

Image credit: Unsplash

 

LOVE OF MY LIFE, an essay by Cody Smith, featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Berlin Wall

LOVE OF MY LIFE
by Cody Smith
Featured on Life As Activism

I am watching the election results with a friend that I’m kind of in love with. He texts me after the first polls close. I join him at the Women’s Center where they are holding a viewing party, a nonpartisan event in name only. Early numbers look bad, and then they begin to look dangerous. People leave the party visibly upset. The Friend and I decide we need a drink. I call a local Mexican restaurant to ask if they’re showing the election results on any of their televisions.

One girl suggests we come with her to a fraternity where they are watching CNN. The frat has hard liquor, and we could buy mixers on the walk over. I bite my tongue. I don’t want to come across as judgmental, but I have always hated boys’ clubs. And besides, I want to be alone with The Friend.

“The love of my life is in that fraternity,” he says. “Just kidding.”

The Friend continually cycles through moments of revealing (if exaggerated) honesty followed by sham retractions. We continue to discuss specifics.

“Do you want to go, Cody?” he asks.

“I’d be willing, but it’s up to you,” I say.

I’m hoping he’ll see the hesitation in my eyes, but he decides that we will join her.

Walking over, he inevitably tells me about the guy in this frat who he hooked up with after a Halloween party. I do not tell him how I feel like a pawn in this plan; how this night that was meant to end in celebration has taken a turn for the depressing.

Inside the frat house, there are chairs and couches filled with rowdy guys drinking cans of PBR. The Halloween Lover sits in the front of the room wearing a white baseball cap. He and The Friend don’t acknowledge one another. While I pour myself a drink, he tells me how The Halloween Lover blogs for the Huffington Post.

“His posts are really bad,” he says.

I am a good writer, I tell myself. I would write the shit out of some Huffington Post pieces.

“But he’s such a cutie,” The Friend says.

I don’t tell him I agree.

We sit together in the back of the room. A guy walks in with a girl on his arm.

“Your country is fucked!” she screams.

“Go back to Australia!” someone yells.

When Hillary wins Virginia, one frat brother cheers like he’s at a football game, and it almost starts to feel possible again.

“She has to win Wisconsin and Michigan now,” he says fervently.

I ask The Friend how he’s doing after his recent breakup with his boyfriend of over a year.

“I’ve actually never been better,” he says. He talks about his newfound freedom. He mentions his family and looming financial issues. “With all this going on, it’s just made me realize that I can’t have anything serious right now. Only casual relationships.”

I wonder how adeptly I hide my emotions.

Trump continues to pull further ahead in North Carolina and Florida.

“Fuck Florida,” I say. “I will never forgive them for this. I want them out of this country. Do you think Hillary is throwing a total tantrum right now?”

“She’s probably washing down Xanaxes with white wine,” The Friend says.

“This country fucking hates women,” I say. “Can you believe that a former Secretary of State and Senator is going to lose this election to a guy who’s never even held public office? This is fucked up. I want that asshole at the FBI’s head on a pike outside the White House.”

Numbers continue to flash on the screen and they keep getting worse. I chug my drink. Being surrounded by these strange men as they joke and get angry has lost its already minimal charm.

“We need to leave,” I say.

The Friend agrees. So we walk to a local pizza place and order a pitcher of Heineken to share.

A cashier looks distressed. “If I don’t come in tomorrow, you’ll know why,” she says to her co-worker, eyes on the television screen at the back of the restaurant.

We sit down and watch. I wonder if my dad has been following these updates. He’s probably loving it, I think. He and I had been butting heads over this election for months. He had even unfriended me on Facebook after I told him I was losing respect for him over his political posts.

In a group message I have with my brothers and parents, I text rapidly “This is a disaster right now. Dad, if you voted for Trump and he wins I might not be able to talk to you for a while!”

My brother responds that I’m being dramatic. “You act like California’s 55 votes aren’t going to Hillary,” he texts.

“The fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” my dad texts.

The Friend’s eyes grow red with frustration. Occasionally he shakes his entire body like he’s about to have a fit. I reach out and touch his hand. Maybe he retracts his hand. Maybe I retract my own hand as soon as I do it. Things are getting blurrier now and my limbs are feeling heavier. He talks about how white people, “your people” he says, have done this to America. I tell him I know. When Hillary loses Florida, we can no longer stomach being in public.

We walk to his house. He makes us drinks with gin and lemon juice. We sit on his couch watching the results on his laptop, and I black out soon after mispronouncing Antonin Scalia’s name and lamenting that Trump will be nominating justices to the Supreme Court if he wins.

I wake up in The Friend’s bed. I am wearing his sweatpants, which fit despite a significant height difference. The Friend is awake too. I am still drunk from the night before.

“Do you remember throwing up last night?” he asks me.

“Wait, are you joking?”

He assures me he isn’t. I hide my face behind my hands.

“It’s okay. Really, it’s not a big deal.”

He gets up from the bed and gathers up a ball of bedsheets to take to the washing machine.

I lie in the bed for another half-hour, still embarrassed and too exhausted to manage the walk home. A consummate morning person, The Friend showers and gets dressed. When I sit up again, I am dizzy.

“Please tell me she didn’t lose,” I say.

The Friend is digging through his closet for a sweatshirt, “She conceded last night.”

I moan, “America has fucked me up.”

“I know,” he says. “But just think, one day you’ll be able to write something really great about this.”

I don’t tell him that the thought had already crossed my mind.

The Friend leaves me to collect my sweater, jeans, and backpack. When I walk downstairs, he is sitting at his living room table in front of his laptop.

“I’ll wash your sweatpants and get them back to you,” I say.

“Well, you did vomit in them,” he says not unkindly. “So, that would be nice.”

“And thanks again for dealing with my buffoonery. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. Honestly, it distracted me from my sorrows.”

He suggests we start a book club, “just the two of us.”

As I walk out the front door, he suggests a Colson Whitehead novel.

I walk home. I charge my phone and turn it back on. I have a text from my dad, “The fat lady has sung,” he says. I can’t respond to him and I don’t know when I will feel able to respond. I climb into my own bed, still in The Friend’s sweatpants, and I sob. I miss a meeting at noon because I am still drunk and still sobbing. Friends text me to check in. I fall into melodrama.

“I have never been so disappointed in humanity,” I respond to their texts, and I mean it.

I watch Hillary’s concession speech. We have failed her. She was too good for this shitty country. I scroll through litanies of mournful Facebook statuses. I just want everyone to feel loved today. Anger has won, but we can fight back with love. It sounds clichéd but it’s true.

I send an additional two apology text messages to The Friend two hours apart. I think about everything I might have said last night while under the liquor’s influence but don’t remember how I might have embarrassed myself, how I might have told him, how he might have rejected me. I recognize that I’m becoming paranoid.

“No need to apologize,” he texts me hours later. “I’m glad we got to watch the elections together. Wouldn’t have wanted to watch it with anyone else :)”

It feels like a paltry victory in the face of such loss. So, I lie in bed and continue to sob.

And eventually, I stop.

cody-smithCody Smith is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English literature. He is from Frederick County, Maryland and is currently working on his senior thesis about spinster characters in nineteenth-century novels. He likes pop music and desserts. This is his first publication.

 

Image credit: Berlin Wall from Pixabay

Submit your work to LIFE AS ACTIVISM. More info here.

 

THE LIONS’ MURDER BALLAD by Melissa Wiley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Vintage 19th-century photos of two little girls standing next to each other

THE LIONS’ MURDER BALLAD
by Melissa Wiley

There is always a cruel sister. There is always one more beloved than the other. There is always a stronger who kills the weaker, in life as in the murder ballad “The Two Sisters,” versions of which have circulated for centuries across continents. The older sister cannot help being the uglier, making her the murderer.

Still neither sister seems to notice the landscape’s blankness as brown and leafless trees keep collapsing. Both are equally preoccupied with their appearance—one with its charms, the other with its disappointments—while thin, naked trees surrender to wind blowing the sisters’ hair across their faces, making one briefly indistinguishable from the other.

In one of the few pictures I have of my sister and myself together, I stand with my hands clasped behind my back, my stomach’s rondure thrust forward. Five years old, I have swallowed a globe, or so it seems to me decades later. An entire world beams from my navel. I resemble some town’s extremely young mayor, some town at the time I can only imagine because I have seen so few of them. I wear my turtleneck tucked inside my trousers.

I have pasted stray wisps of my hair down with saliva, wisps too short to be braided. I live on a farm where everyone is too dirty themselves to notice these pains I’ve taken. No other houses are visible beyond power lines that seem to cross in the distance yet never touch when I run and stand beneath them. My world is solitary except for my sister and parents.

I still might be running for office, so eager do I look to please the person taking the picture, who is likely my mother. I have always needed to be good for someone, however. At the time the picture was taken, I cared less about being a good sister than a good daughter. Compared to me, my two-year-old sister is reckless. She is good even when no one is paying attention.

She skulks in my shadow’s taper, her white shirt stained with ketchup that has dried into a small African continent with no ocean surrounding it. Her mouth is compressed into a silverfish. The croquet set beside us is not hers, and she knows this. She knows if only because I have told her so often. She only ever plays under rules I invent as the game progresses. If she disobeys, she knows I’ll take her ball and mallet.

Also known as “Binnorie,” “The Cruel Sister,” “Dreadful Wind and Rain,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Bonnie Bows of London,” and “The Singing Bone,” among others, the song “The Two Sisters” first appeared on a broadside in 1656 as “The Miller and the King’s Daughter” after being passed down orally for centuries. In most iterations, a suitor stokes the jealousy of the older sister by courting the younger. His ardor leads to his beloved’s drowning.

After he has paid yet another visit and charmed even the parents, the older sister invites the younger to walk with her to the sea. Pushing her in, however, proves too tempting, too easy. Yet the older sister is still more woman than villain. She cannot help exercising the strength she’s been given, strength she’s no more asked for than the younger her attractions.

Perhaps because the tale has been told so often, everywhere from Hungary to Iceland, the crime no longer shocks me. If you’ve heard the Scottish “Binnorie,” for instance, you know the murder served only as pretext for the singer to lavish yet more praise upon the corpse’s beauty. The younger sister benefited, in other words, from dying while still attractive.

In many versions of the song, a miller finds the body. The ballad becomes a panegyric to her features and proportions. Even in death, she evokes the erotic. Alternatively, the miller’s daughter discovers and mistakes her for a swan missing her lifelong partner. In still others, a harpist comes upon her washed ashore and fashions a new harp from her skeleton. The bone harp begins to play another melody named “The Singing Bone” while the harpist only listens. The harp recounts the crime of the sister still living and grown yet more repulsive.

To my own sister, I’ve been considerably kinder. I’ve done nothing to hurt her apart from making her play croquet according to rules I determined as the game advanced. “Light has legs,” I often said instead of attempting to drown her. I repeated nonsense along these lines to her over and over, a tendency that has been with me so long I cannot explain its origin.

I still pretend my chairs have kneecaps with bruises, my vases throats to swallow water. Likewise, I told my sister the peanuts in her peanut butter were brown eggs certain to hatch in her intestines. I convinced her lightbulbs harbored little men inside their filaments the lamp switch awakened.

“Light has legs,” I sang as we played croquet after my mother took the picture of us together. “Light has legs. Light loves darkness. Light loves to walk inside dark closets,” I repeated almost as an incantation meant to summon bodies from the light that made them visible to begin with. Of all the things I’ve forgotten, I remember this syllogism. I still retain the belief some truth lies buried in my own nonsense, either out of arrogance or because I swallowed the world too early.

“Binnorie,” unlike the ballad’s other versions, takes its name from a place known intimately to the writer. The title evokes the murdered sister’s longing for the home she shared with her sister and parents. Yet death means returning is not an option. She cannot revisit a landscape that itself determined how she met her end. She would never have drowned had she not lived so close to water, for instance.

Now that my parents have long since died from illness, my sister and I have no home in common. She has filled hers with children while I rent a small apartment. I can no longer visit a place where someone else now lives and, my sister tells me, breeds mastiffs. I have relinquished my old goodness toward everything except objects too inanimate to notice.

Legs, common as they are in all lights illuminating a building’s darkness, still strike me as extravagant. They are sinewed jewelry hanging from the body’s thickness. Long legs imply speed, often without any objective. They suggest restlessness, especially when a person is sitting. My legs aren’t long, but they’re longer than those belonging to my sister, who is more contented of a person, contented meaning better. “Can I be done with behaving correctly?” This is the cry of everyone with legs longer than her sibling’s.

I never wanted for my husband to call her, to tell her I’d thrown my wedding ring into a green and turgid river. I told him this was where I tossed it when I’d only thrown it on the river’s bank. I told him this so he would not attempt to recover what I no longer wanted, because for years I have tried to take an axe to our marriage. I have wanted to use this strength I’ve been given to hurt something.

Later, though, I searched for and found it among a bed of ashes. I searched for it more out of lingering goodness toward my mother than my husband. It was my great-grandmother’s engagement ring more than a century before this, and my mother wore it for decades before she gave it to me after my husband proposed while we were spooning.

Originally the ring had three diamonds. To my eyes they were mute, shining sisters from the beginning. Someone, though, had made them sit on a bench, perhaps in punishment, and two gold bars framing their tops and bottoms still keep the two sisters left from squirming. When my mother paid a jeweler to widen the band to fit my wider finger, she kept one diamond. She made it into a pendant with which she was buried.

She squeezed one sister off the bench regardless. She squeezed off the sister I assume was the youngest, who was easily too the prettiest by this logic. I can no longer remember the reason for the argument I had with my husband that made me throw away the two sisters remaining. I only know that with the last possession I have of my mother’s lost to me, I had at last murdered something.

After my husband called my sister, she started crying, because he had also mentioned the suicide I’d threatened. She reminded me it was murder, bloody and vicious. She said this as if I were a kinder person than the one she’d grown up with, as if I couldn’t kill the uglier, meaner sister before she did worse damage. Only after she stressed its wrongness did I feel more tempted. Then to change the subject, I told her the ring’s two sisters had drowned in a river. I had sent both to their deaths, sparkling and ageless. There was relief on my part followed by silence.

I woke next morning from a dream that still feels more real than reality at present. I dreamt our farm was overrun with lions that wandered through our yard where we played croquet. As my mother and sister fed them grass, I watched from our kitchen as my dad slurped coffee. He smiled while watching the lions prowl our beds of roses when I asked if he planned on doing something. “Someday they will kill us, Daddy.”

He sighed and said he supposed I was right from a practical perspective. My sister had begun letting them into the house in the evenings, petting them on our couch while watching TV as I lay sleeping, because I have always gone to bed earlier than everyone else in my family. My sister was the animal lover while his oldest daughter preferred lamps and vases, he noted, laughing. He agreed to speak to her, though it was a shame, he mentioned. They offered so much beauty. In this way I knew he meant to do nothing.

The next morning, I took a gun from my dad’s shed and shot them while they lazed in our garden. Just as my sister ran outside to witness the carnage, I awakened. Still I saw the lions’ blood had stained her shirt with ketchup dried into the shape of a small African continent with no ocean surrounding it. For the first time too I knew she saw me clearly.

If light has legs, if light loves darkness, if light loves to walk inside dark closets, it does so only because it finds dark closets wondrous places. Because brightness needs a rest from all it sees. Brightness needs to swallow darkness the same as someone needing to be good for someone who is looking also wants to inflict her cruelty. She may not want to kill her sister, but she wants to kill something. She wants at least to kill the lions. She wants to punish things of pure beauty.

The last time I saw my sister, we went swimming. She brought goggles for us both, but the pair she gave me leaked, and my eyes soon reddened from the chlorine. I pulled her leg as she swam ahead of me, when she stopped and exchanged pairs readily. For her the goggles leaked just as badly, but she said nothing. When we paused for breath, half her eyes were filled with water. They looked red to bloodied.

An hour later, we were driving back to her home where I was spending a few days with her family, and the sparkle of my ring caught her eye as she turned her car into her driveway. She stopped the car and ran her finger across the two sisters’ faces. She circled their heads with a phrenologist’s sensitivity then asked how I found it. Hadn’t it drowned in a river? Hadn’t it been sucked down, as I’d told her, with the sewage?

Hadn’t they? I corrected before answering. Then no, the sisters had only fallen. I’d thrown the ring on the bank and missed the river on purpose. To have drowned them, I would have needed more courage. Then in silence I reflected there have long been too many variations of “The Two Sisters” for there to have been only one older and one younger. In truth, there must be millions of the former as well as the latter, millions of the drowned and the drowner. Given this overabundance, I’m no crueler than average.

In response, she said nothing. She only made a noise with her lips compressed, a flat hum indicating I’d lied about something important. I’d lied, but she’d let me live with it. Lied, made up, invented—there wasn’t much difference. I’d done it ever since I’d picked up a ball and mallet. Yet in these lies—in these dark closets—deeper truths lay unspoken. I hadn’t killed my parents, but I’m the one with murderous tendencies, which have always been with me. I have become mayor of nothing.

Visiting Scotland a few years ago with my husband, I enjoyed hearing murder ballads sung in a pub in the evening more than hiking in the Highlands. And I still would partly rather have dropped my ring in a river, killing both sisters so they die together. As it is, I kill only lions. I make no attempts to murder my sister but make her less than happy. I threaten suicide every time I grow miserable in my marriage. I make no effort to be good for her now that I’m done with being a good daughter.

Over time, “The Singing Bone” has become my favorite version of the ballad, because here the younger sister lives if also stripped of her skin and organs. She lives through her bones, where we all know things. She has kept her shins and femurs. She has kept her legs that fill with light when she sings from her marrow’s jelly.

In life, the younger sister’s skin was smooth and shining. In death, though, her bones glow even more brightly. When you watch the harp playing its own music, light passes through the bones forming its strings. The bones look like sea glass washed upon a beach when the sun’s last light is receding. Glass from old bottles tossed about on the Atlantic, glass with edges rounded by waves.

The wind, however, still is blowing. Brown, leafless trees keep falling over, though neither sister takes time to notice. Yet only one now is preoccupied with her appearance. The other walks inside dark closets.

And though I am the older sister, I too like to think my bones will frost and turn to sea glass in time, should I die by drowning. I hope this rather than holding out hope of my corpse inspiring a ballad. Because what would they sing? Not that anyone pushed me into the sea but that I jumped willingly.

Sea glass from a shipwreck too is the rarest kind, I’ve heard from those who comb beaches searching for sea jewelry. And if this body is not some species of shipwreck, then I have misunderstood who I am from the beginning. If light does not have legs, then I have no idea how it goes walking. I only know that you do not have to wait for your sister to push you to drown in the sea. You do not have to drown to know your bones are sea glass in the making. As long as you live, your bones are waiting to sing, to mourn the lost love and beauty.

Headshot of Melissa WileyMelissa Wiley is the author of Antlers in Space and Other Common Phenomena, an essay collection forthcoming from Split Lip Press. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in journals such as DIAGRAM, Juked, Drunken Boat, PANK, Atlas and Alice, Superstition Review, The James Franco Review, Tin House Open Bar, Mud Season Review, Under the Sun, Pinball, Squawk Back, Gravel, Eclectica Magazine, Gone Lawn, Specter, Lowestoft Chronicle, Souvenir Lit Journal, Pithead Chapel, and pioneertown. Her travels in Lapland are also anthologized in Whereabouts: Stepping out of Place.

Image credit: josefnovak33 on Flickr

WHO’S IN CHARGE by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Empty Wendy's parking lot at night

WHO’S IN CHARGE
by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

The dining room windows of Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers beam light onto the last cars in the lot—a pale-blue Pinto, a red Camaro, and a gray Buick Riviera, floorboard littered with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Earth, Wind and Fire eight tracks. The Buick’s mine. I’m the manager. In two weeks I’ll quit to go back to college.

I squirt hospital-sweet cleanser over gluey catsup congealed onto the salad bar Formica, scraping with my finger through a rag. Then I head to the kitchen, snack on the last batch of fries and try to balance cash against receipts. Eighteen-year-old Fat Danny washes dishes and sixteen-year-old Nina mops.

Three times, I get the wrong total. Stupid, I say to the mirror on the door. My pale, freckled face looks back under a blue and white striped headscarf.

I hear Fat Danny drag garbage bins to the back door. He gets high with friends every night after work at the edge of the trickling Kern River, so he works fast now to get there. The garbage bin cage is behind our building, not out front, so Fat Danny ignores the warning taped on the back door—Take the garbage out the front door at closing! It’s about business and safety! I ignore his ignoring it because I’m not interested in business or safety.

He unlocks the back door, drags two bins out and props the door open with a bucket.

A minute later, Nina screams and I turn, annoyed.

He’s back, without the bins, dragged by two guys in black ski-masks. One holds a machete at Fat Danny’s throat. The other points a sawed-off shotgun at Nina, whose eyes are leaking, her mouth covered by a big hand.

“Who’s in charge?”

Gun-boy’s knuckles are white, his ropy forearms dry and red.

“She is!” Fat Danny points at me.

But I’m not.

◊

Yesterday Nina noticed we were selling too many milkshakes. I tasted one, dense and sweet, like the gelato I’d discover five years later.

I served Fat Danny and Nina, who agreed it was amazing.

“You put the machine together wrong,” Nina explained, pointing to the metal piece lying against the backsplash. “That’s the part that pumps air into the mix. You’re not pumping air.” She raised her eyebrows. “This is pure, uncut milkshake.”

I scraped the last bit out of my cup. “It’s better this way.”

I said nothing more but Nina reassembled the machine, biting the tip of her tongue, concentrating, getting it right.

I’ve never been known to take charge.

◊

Gun Boy’s weapon moves up and down, side to side, like a sprinkler head. His Adam’s apple bobs below the mask.

“You!” he yells at me, in a high, squeaky voice. “Give us the money.”

“I don’t have any money,” I say.  Everything’s fuzzy.

“Not your money. Wendy’s money.” Fat Danny’s lips move oddly, in the wrong shapes, at a different pace than his words.

“Bitch!” Gun Boy yells.

He has the same slight build and just-turning voice as Gary, a guy who’d sat next to me in the Algebra I class I nearly failed.

They’re kids, I think. I’m twenty.

Everything stops then, like a broken alarm clock.

“I’ll give you the money,” I say. “We aren’t going to be any trouble.”

“Get it,” Gun Boy says, voice cracking on get.

“It’s in the safe. Do you want me to take you there now?”

“Yeah?” Gun Boy asks.

“You want to come with me?”

“Come with you! Yeah!” He licks, then chews, his top lip and a half inch of mask.

We walk past two wide sinks, full of soapy mop water, a dripping onion-ringer and a laminated poster describing labor law in plain English. I ask, “Can I sit to open the safe?”

“Sit!”

I do it, opening the safe and pulling out the zippered bag.

“I can hand it to you now.” My voice slows, eyebrows raise, like I’m speaking to a toddler.

When he holds out his right hand for the bag, the gun drops in his left. He wrenches it back up again. He stands, outstretched arms and shotgun jerking up and down, money-bag swinging below the gun. Everything is moving but me.

He’s scared. I understand.

“We’ll go into the freezer. We’ll stay ten minutes. So you can get away.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gun Boy says. He flicks his gun at Knife Boy, who opens the freezer door and pushes Fat Danny in.

Nina’s regularly olive skin is soft serve white.

I back into the freezer after her.

Gun boy’s blue eyes round through the holes in his mask.

He says, “Thanks,” almost exactly like Gary from Algebra.

“You’re welcome. Come again,” I say, reverting to script.

The freezer door thunks, huge and stainless. We’re surrounded by frozen sliced potatoes and hamburger patties. Insulated. Just us three.

“Sorry,” Fat Danny says, eyes watery behind aviator glasses.  “I fucked up.”

I’ve never looked straight at him before. Even in the freezer, his forehead shines.

“It was me,” I say. “I was in charge.”

“Well—” Nina says, not finishing.  She lets her left cheek dimple.

Fat Danny’s nose crinkles. He tries to stop a giggle but his shoulders shake, belly jiggling.

“You’ve never been much of a manager.”

“I’m not,” I agree.

Nina snorts. “Sorry.”

“You were in charge tonight, though.” Fat Danny looks at me without blinking through smudged lenses.

I shiver, open the freezer door, and yell, “Hello,” protectively. I turn back. “The coast is clear.”

Headshot of Shelley Blanton-StroudShelley Blanton-Stroud teaches college composition in Northern California. Her stories appear in Brevity Blog, Eunoia Review, Mamalode and, forthcoming, in Soundings Review. She has brought pieces of her novel-in-progress to Bread Loaf, Napa and Squaw Valley writing conferences, where nice people have tried to teach her how to be a fiction writer.

Image credit: Justin S. Campbell on Flickr

DIARY OF A HOUSE by Laurie Blauner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Small white house with large windows in a grassy field at night

DIARY OF A HOUSE
by Laurie Blauner

Bedroom, Jan. 13, 2016

Every room is safe and dangerous. Ghosts squirm into action and wander, reenacting what made them ghosts. Words spoken in an empty room reverberate, returning to the speaker. In Medieval times people had only one space for everything. I, the bedroom, am nestled within a house that is nestled within Seattle, a subtle city. No sun comes through my two windows, only a frozen gray sky, a giant’s sigh or a sad exhalation.

Because I am a bedroom there is the usual furniture: a bed, dressers and tables crammed with old cosmetics, along with jewelry, scribbled papers, pennies, and crushed clothes. An animal that appears to be wearing white gloves and slippers is dying. The couple that sleep in the room, a man and a woman, have allowed this creature, with blue eyes, in, close to them, and now must learn to push the animal away. Everything else inside these rooms disintegrates too, but slowly, often imperceptibly, a chair thinning, wall paint streaking and worn, floors coated with dust and dirt, curtains torn, knobs wobbling. They have lived here twenty-six years. The animal can hardly walk and its shallow, fast breathing fills a corner, blurting out steadily. The animal is the size of a little plant and dies elsewhere, at the vet. The woman cries. But I want to tell her about unexpected noises, the tapping on floors, knocking on ceilings, the telltale scratching that she will continue to hear. I want to explain about the small ghost in the basement.

◊

Bathroom, Jan. 24, 2016

Every room becomes a story within a story. The old man with a leg brace that lived here alone before the couple arrived couldn’t get out of the bathtub. After flailing, his brace scratched the tub and a neighbor came to help him. I, the bathroom, am a lonely place where people have no available defenses and what happens is a result of the immediate time and space. They must face everything, and then leave.

In the Roman era water had religious as well as cleanliness value. In Tudor times people were afraid that dirty water spread illness, especially syphilis (BBC, History of the Home, Dr. Lucy Worsley, 4/11/11).

I am a witness. The woman is a biological room that is often remade, used, left. I have glimpsed sex and hidden fears and secrets. At another house in Montana, the woman’s angry ex-husband opened the bathroom door so violently that the doorknob left a fist-sized hole in the wall because their toilet overflowed.

◊

Living Room, Feb. 2, 2016

Every room is also a door. The woman used to drink and black out when she lived in Missoula, Montana. Sometimes she didn’t know where she was when she woke up in the morning. Here, in Seattle, once when her husband wasn’t around, she drank wine until she vomited up what resembled red pieces from a heart. She is doing better as she’s wearing herself out. Sometimes she’s living in the living room. She misses the trees, large and full of photosynthetic secrets, the fresh air, spaciousness, and the circle of snow-embroidered mountains outside or in Montana. Even though she almost ran into an industrial building when her car slipped on ice once when she tried to drive home snow-blind.

Before the 19th century, I was known as the “parlor,” from the French “parler” to speak. “Living room” was used more widely after 1918, after World War I, during the influenza epidemic, when it was known as “The Death Room” since it was at the front of the house and that was where bodies were held. Before it was a room for receiving guests and now it’s a room for leisure activity that reflects the personality of its designer (blogsurabhi.wordpress.com).

I keep the weather outside. I’m growing older, my expression changing. The man and woman peer out my windows at neighbors, watch television recreationally, calculating how much too much news costs emotionally. Sometimes there is a knock at the front door and someone or something outside comes inside. Sometimes it doesn’t open.

◊

Kitchen, February 21, 2016

Every room overfills with want and the desire to put certain ingredients in a mouth. People have illusions, certain food is better than other food, and electricity, the way it animates the refrigerator, stove, microwave, and explodes through the house, making everything suddenly alive. I’m a room people feel they should have done better in. What’s the difference between the woman’s hard-boiled eggs, the man’s bones, and rocks? I don’t exaggerate. Be careful of my knives and the mixers and shredders that escape from drawers.

The first censuses in England counted only “hearths,” a cooking fire over a stone, not the people. Consider times and places, the invention of utensils, graters, food processors. It’s not surprising that people ask for more.

◊

The Yard, March 3, 2016

Neighbors border the lawn and greenery. They come in all varieties. My nearest neighbors have claimed the spaces in front of their house as their private parking spaces. A family lives across the street whose young daughter is afraid of spaghetti horses and words made from fire. She sells homemade lemonade in front of her fence in the summer. Sometimes she gives it away for free.

When the woman walked her cat in his harness and lease she met:

the woman who loves cats, feeding them all, and yet owns none.

the grumpy bachelor whose walls are filled with chiming clocks and who owns two flightless, yellow birds.

a widow who thinks too much about everyone else’s life.

the couple who lived on a sailboat for many years and settled into a house only to travel as often as possible.

a couple who adore their classic Mustang car, spend all their free time washing it, and believe all the neighbors should be enthralled with its roar too.

It’s internally and externally satiating to own a piece of land. The sounds of lawnmowers and leaf blowers are the rhythm of something tame that is noisily dying. The children of the couple next door were always smashing a vehicle or motorcycle, and another used to shoot out street lights with a gun and ended up going to prison. At summer occasions firecrackers smile brightly in the sky, bursting with impatience. Some days I go wild, unkempt, with merchandise receipts, candy bags, dandelions littering the too-long grass, chickens clucking from a house a few blocks away. The neighbors are wary, yet friendly, waving at one another, not wanting attention, yet present. All are standing on their property.

◊

Basement, March 21, 2016

Every room wants to discover something about itself instead of its occupants. I’m the room where bones are excavated. I’m the room full of ghosts, which is about time and its attendant failures, how it is backwards and forwards, inside and out, up and down, sometimes all at once. Time is the enemy, or friend, of the woman and the man, and a part of living creatures. I see the cat that visited the basement often although it no longer resides here. The cat used to jump among the shadows, perhaps for something smaller that moved, insects, mice, rats, a bit of dropped food, or enticing smells. The woman talked to the cat, which a few times tried to say “hello” in return at night from the basement. The cat too was searching.

I’ve settled deeply into hard clay filled with sewer lines, water pipes, and gas lines. During a lengthy rain I leak through one corner and one wall. I’m made of tenacious cement with one wood-paneled room, three crude rooms, and a bathroom, with a shower that once resembled a coffin. There is an art studio, a shop, the man’s television room with a speckled linoleum floor and a large room with file cabinets and a washer and dryer. I’m a receptacle for some of the forgotten objects and projects of the humans that live here. I’m still in their dreams.

Sometimes one of three ancient wall telephones rings across from the bathroom. All are black and Western Electric:

a rectangular one with a rotary dial and a bell-shaped receiver.

another more modern phone with a handset, rotary dial, with keys, and a receiver.

the last one is an old pay phone with a G1 handset, rotary dial, coin return and pull.

The conversations on these phones are uneventful, having once travelled through the ears of ghosts.

I’m sinking imperceptibly but the whole house comes with me. I care very little. I believe in slow self-destruction. I believe in being self-contained. Will my ghosts go with me when I am gone?

◊

Stairway, April 21, 2016

Since her cat’s death the woman has become vague. Everything is blurred and exhausting. She constantly needs her glasses. She doesn’t wake well. Her mind wanders across the floors, rests on a window or ceiling, although something is screaming and clawing its way out of her. She is different and she wants all around her to act accordingly. She plucks a jigsaw puzzle, puts it together incorrectly and calls it done. She’s always missing.

Count every step, up or down, like a thought. Stairs have existed in some form or another for a very long time, since the ruins of Jericho. My old carpeted ones greet a closet turned into shelves near a corner that leaks rain. I am narrow, suffocating, and lead from the main floor to the basement. I am convenient. I prophesy unlinearly, seeing what uncoils from a mouth, a pool of red, or a former owner fighting with his mother and sister, or a door like a book slapping open, a motorcycle tangled in a fence, a dream filled with jokes, or a future where everything is too small. A flurry of feet is my reward, breath settles around me. And then it happens all over again.

◊

Door, April 28, 2016

What is rattling my knob wants to enter or leave. All these rooms want more future, even if it’s bloody or cursed, sad or deliriously happy. I’m a conduit. I have hinges and peepholes and locks. I can do what a room cannot. I lock people in and out. I watch other rooms. I have a trajectory.

My ancestors, the earliest known doors, are from the paintings of the Egyptian tombs. Our shapes include double-leaf, double door, French windows, half door, flush door, sliding glass door, etc. The oldest doors were made of timber (Wikipedia). The woman and her sister were kept in their bedroom when they were young and their mother was busy with men. What they wanted was inside the far kitchen refrigerator.

I bray and squeak and moan, gossiping with passersby or with a window. Beyond me could be anything and everything.

Headshot of Laurie BlaunerLaurie Blauner is the author of three novels and seven books of poetry.  Her fourth novel, The Solace of Monsters, won the 2015 Fiction Contest at Leapfrog Press and is forthcoming in October 2016.  Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, The Collagist, Caketrain, The Georgia Review, The Best Small Fictions 2016 and other magazines. Her flash piece “Assembling an Anatomical Life” appeared in Cleaver’s Issue No. 5. This is her first published piece of non-fiction. Her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.

Image credit: Inspriation de on Unsplash

WHAT BETSY WAS by Bruce Bromley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Large white and orange goldfish in a fish tank

WHAT BETSY WAS
by Bruce Bromley

Fin and Flesh

For years beyond counting, she lived far under water among the green things, their shine like that light before the storm comes above ground, as if seen through the veins of a new leaf, held close to the eye in a time so distant that its tale must have been whispered in her ear by a voice she no longer recalled how to speak back to. She’d look, in daylight, at the angles of the rocks that jut up from the sand below, whose bottom she was afraid to find. She’d float over the sunken ferns, the stems many-leaved and waving, watch the fish nestling there whom she called her scaly sisters, their shared kin as much a mystery to her as her own name. She thought that the moon, when it came, rose from and hovered a little above the surface of the water. That surface was the sky she knew. She’d see her hair drift ahead of her, the color of a tongue after it’s licked an apple for too long, though apples were things that she forgot, every day, except one. She forgot that she’d had a father who threw the noose of his love around her, that he condemned her to the sea because she could only refuse the rub of that noose against her skin. To fail at returning love was to be hurled into joining the heave, the burden, of water. She forgot that, once, her body didn’t taper to a fin, greeny, glinting, its fan and flap suspending her in one spot, if she chose, without end. But each year, for a single day, she remembered every part of it.

A great wind below the water hoists her up, level with what she thinks of as the sky that had filled her eyes. Pushed higher, lifted on air, she sees the water lipped by a chalk cliff coast and foaming beneath a tufty place, translucent, always moving. Then, shoved down, down, she meets the beach with its shale and pebbles and mussels, their shells opening in the sudden light. She finds her fin given way to two conch-colored legs, longer than the ferns she loved. And standing, she starts to walk across the ground that she’ll come to know, briefly, and forget again.

◊

She Looks at the Boy in the Courtyard

All this, Betsy von Furstenberg must be thinking, paused on the other side of the John Drew Theatre’s stage exit door, that East Hampton sky an iris, moodily blued by afternoon sun. Betsy imagines that the boy she turns to, whose name she believes is Bruce though it should be Bran, due to the grainy life of his curls, makes such a story of her while he sits, curled up on grass in the middle of the courtyard, waiting. He’s one of the apprentices trained to bang at the rising up of sets, to work the lights, to run over lines with actors, their memory skills gone missing, like the sun that comes and goes, like this boy’s name that wafts in and out, but out of what, she can’t wholly put a word to. He aims his eyes at her piled-up hair, dyed tomato red for the part of Mrs. Prentice in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, the words lost to her a few moments ago on stage, so that Edward Albee sent her to refocus, outside. Betsy and the boy may perform in different ways for the man she calls Edward, whom Bruce has been schooled to refer to as Mr. Albee, but both watch for the edging up of his left eyebrow, which would be partnered by thunder, if it could. It’s 1972, years after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf became a stand-in for his name, and the summer repertory company that Edward directs will fill the theater with Orton’s frenzy for all of July. That ruckus begins tomorrow, opening night. Betsy still worries at the words, at their rhythms. She moves closer to the boy, the curtain of his hair loosed across his eyes. Before running lines and standing under a linden in the courtyard’s center, its buds slowly unfolding, she scrolls in her head through the things she’s heard of him.

He’s on the far side of fourteen and fevered by a man named Stephen, who’s over thirty. They met at one of those late after rehearsal parties, in a house larger than a ship, by a wood-rimmed pool into which naked bodies plunged, like hasty dolphins. Stephen’s promise to drive Bruce home ended at his Amagansett cottage, by the dunes. You could hear wind pulling on the beach plums and piping its long vowels through the apple tree, while Stephen arced the boy’s neck back, kissing unshaven skin, and the stars seemed strung from every leaf. On the bed below Warhol’s portrait of Stephen, paid for with his mother’s money and which captured each black wave, finely gelled, Bruce misplaced what thinking was. He remembered it later, at home, when his father punched him up against the front door, and Bruce walked through the bits that were left of it. He rode his bike to the cottage, though Stephen lay in the dunes with an older boy, their sounds mingling among rolling water. Bruce broke a window, unlocked the door, and waited in bed for the Stephen who never came. And this is what love calls on us to do, Betsy thinks, shatter windows, splinter doors, and we answer it with a hunger that knows no end. Looking down at the boy while he stares up at her, Betsy sees shard-like things, dropped in the middle of his eyes. Their sound would make a shudder of the air, she knows, if he were to merge with the power to pull them out.

◊

Staging Motion

Betsy flails her arms, as Mr. Albee insists, but really she’s wondering about the horizontal people. They are those who know themselves by the speed with which they can hurry across a stage, across grass, across anything flat enough to hold them up. Betsy’s described them to Bruce, who should be Bran, in grand contrast to the vertical ones, capable of staying in a single place and looking out. At this dress rehearsal, she doesn’t know what belonging to that tribe would mean.

Was it the right decision, Betsy asks herself, to play at living in other people’s skins or to sport at raising up the Mrs. Prentice whom Orton races in a sprint, page after page, hustling for more love, more love, before Kenneth Halliwell pounded the body that wrote her into pieces, breaking his longtime lover, who couldn’t stop wanting to let him go? What does it take to decide to leave—and survive?

Betsy’s learned one of the leaving-lessons early, Bruce recalls. He sees her review it as she struts her hipbones to stage left, and Mr. Albee jabs a note into the script that he carries on his lap, which will involve a scolding.

But now she’s eight years old and in Heidelberg with her father, with her American-born mother, having left the town of Arnsberg that she can never love enough, its chorusing forest of whine, creak, crack, their stone house so wide that a day goes by before you find it possible to sniff through every inch of it and that Betsy won’t, ever again, choose to stand up in. They’ve come in 1939 to give a goodbye to what her father doesn’t want to forget, before his people, their people, ravage more lands and borders and persons than anyone could own the strength to count. Her father hikes her along what he wants to call a mountain but which looks like a hill, where the broken castle lies, numbering the time that spirals away from it. The castle’s stone, gold though seamed with grey, forecasts what will happen to her hair when she’s between husbands, many years on, her two children grown and gone to an elsewhere, without her. Betsy’s father is pointing at the Neckar that bends its arm around the city, at those pines high on the water’s other side, their needles cricket-green under snow that swoops down in a kind of time-lapse, flake by flake, her way. Booted across an ocean and in a Manhattan whose language she can’t yet master, Betsy doesn’t want the Germany that her father offered her. She wants anything except this self, inside which her parents raised her, even Mrs. Prentice, so busy scrambling for love that she never thinks to ask what might be given back to it.

What Bruce doesn’t want is the fire that yearns only for its own heat. He doesn’t want the smile that Mr. Albee flickers at his rumored bedmate of the month, at the aptly named Randy, who gets his coffee and sharpens his pencils and whose actions appear to bargain on the words, Do for me, and I’ll be done by you.

Bruce wants some mixture of Betsy’s vertical and horizontal people, as if a person could be a chord that you stare at, standing up straight on the parallel lines it clings to, the movement of its voices changing the whole that you thought was there.

◊

The Snowy Linden

They roll a water-damaged piano out into the courtyard. They’ve listened for a while, in passing, to the sound of paired bodies sticking together in the backstage shadows, most married to other partners. It’s hours after the last of Mr. Albee’s upbraidings, leveled at fumbles that will be righted tomorrow night. The moon wavers plump above the linden.  Its leaves start to rustle, though no wind stirs to push them. Betsy’s in a chair against its trunk, while Bruce plays on a cluster of chipped keys, testing their tunefulness. When she asks him to give her that song by the reedy woman who wishes she had stayed a painter, he knows Betsy means that its ache can quiet Orton’s words chattering in her head. She heard Bruce hum a few bars in the morning, and the melody’s rising curves fixed her in a doorway from which she couldn’t move, for minutes that she remembers now. Joni Mitchell’s “Willy” hymns about a man gazing through his lover’s window, unsure of his capacity for yielding to the woman next to him, afraid of finding himself like the moon outside the glass, conquered by human footprints and staked, as if he were turf. It’s about those few opening chords, moving up and down in a narrow space, gradually expanding over the piano’s range and that voice leaping widely to show how high answered feeling will take you, if you follow. Betsy concentrates on the slide of Bruce’s voice, up, up, when she sees herself, years after the death of her second husband. She sits in their Upper East Side apartment as a nurse feeds her the soupy lunch that she can manage, in a once unlikely 2015, spring flaring at the windows. The music whose source she can’t discover resembles the lone world that her eyes admit her to, at eighty-three, and it’s like sucking on a cut lime. You wake to the tart that lives in your mouth and submit to the greenness that makes a smudge of everything, later. At this moment, Bruce, who will never again be the boy or Bran, arches up his throat, about to reach the height of Mitchell’s vocal line on the words, And I feel like I’m just being born / Like a shiny light breaking in a storm, while a magpie varies its grumbly song, which springs onto a steep pitch and holds there. The linden’s a shower of snowy petals on the piano lid, on Betsy’s hair, a sugared muskiness pooling in the grass. Bruce and Betsy think of what it can mean to stand on the ground that carries every weight, the weights in the boom that the body fashions before the name of love, the weights that slam beyond hurting, those that nearly break the ones who consent to bear them. For hours, they know, the moon will speed down its stolen light, beaming over all of it.

Headshot of Bruce Bromley Bruce Bromley teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. Able Muse Review nominated his fiction for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. His poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in Out Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown; 3:AM Magazine, Fogged Clarity, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Gargoyle Magazine, and in Environmental Philosophy, among other journals. Dalkey Archive Press published his book Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us in 2014.

Of this essay, Bruce writes, “I’m interested in exploring boundary crossings, enriching what we can think of doing in fiction and non-fiction. The events in my piece are real, as are all the people, but everything is filtered through the perspectives of those involved, as experienced (in this case) by a young “Bruce” and the older Bruce, the writer, behind him.

Image credit: Brenda Helen on Unsplash

ELECTION NIGHT by Lisa Rowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

American flag at night

ELECTION NIGHT
by Lisa Rowan

I could feel his eyes on me, even though he was watching the road. “That’s private,” my father said quietly. “I don’t tell anyone who I voted for.”

He was fifty and I was on the edge of nineteen, and he was spending his night driving me back to my dorm room three hours from home. I had shown up at his door six hours prior, with almost no notice.

Earlier that day, I had paid $45 for a one-way Amtrak ticket to my tiny Philadelphia suburb. I had walked to my voting center from the train station. I had walked to my father’s house after I voted.

I had skipped class, several of them, to go home to vote, because it was my first time voting for president and I wasn’t about to miss it because the board of elections couldn’t seem to figure out how to send my absentee ballot to my dorm in time. I was sure, cross my heart, that I had done the paperwork right. It was 2004, and after the hanging chad disaster of 2000, I wasn’t willing to take any chances that my home state of Pennsylvania was going to fall other than the way I hoped.

(Two weeks later, a thick, dirty envelope tumbled out of my mailbox and onto the lobby floor. I snatched it up and waved it above my head as I stomped down the hall, a bitter victory.)

My father had a solid half-dozen reasons to be mad at me, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who held grudges. So he drove me back to Washington, D.C., a non-state that didn’t matter in this election or most elections, but still a place where you pledged your allegiance. You were red or blue or something very specific in between, and you probably talked about it with strangers without being asked.

I didn’t know what to say after he invoked his right to remain silent. He turned up the news-radio station just a bit, and I said, “But mom always tells me.” It was the worst comeback a child of parents who are no longer married could make. But she did; she always told me.

On election days when I was small, my mother hurried me into the booth with her, around seven in the morning. She was usually one of the first in our precinct to vote, because if she didn’t do it first thing, she wouldn’t have a chance the rest of the day.

We were Democrats; I knew that. My next-door neighbor, who had taken to eating dinner with us after his wife went into the nursing home, reminded me of it almost nightly across the table. He called us Dirty Democrats as he debated with my mother, always friendly but always sincere. Dad and I would glance at each other over our plates of spaghetti, as if we had cheap seats at our first tennis match and weren’t sure when it was OK to make noise. Our neighbor loved us, but he loved George Bush (the first one) a little more.

I didn’t know whom my dad loved.

For my first eighteen years, I didn’t care. Now, at year 18.75, I was concerned. Was he on my side? So there we were in the car, and I was counting mile markers, silently willing one of us to say something.

“When you vote,” he started slowly, adjusting his fingers over the top of the steering wheel, “It’s a secret ballot. You don’t get up in front of everybody to tell them who you voted for. Your name isn’t attached to your ballot. It’s anonymous. That’s the way it was designed to work.”

“You don’t tell anyone?”

“No. I don’t wear the buttons, I don’t put up any signs. I keep that to myself.” He chuckled then, just a little. “And when somebody asks me, ‘Hey, did you vote for me?’ I always tell them yes. They don’t need to know. I just tell them all yes.”

I assumed a lot about my father because of whom we were, because of where we lived. Blue state. Blue town. Union hall. But for all I knew, he was writing “Mickey Mouse” as his candidate of choice on every ballot he ever touched.

We drove three hours, and he dropped me off at the front door of my dorm, and he turned around and drove home. I don’t know whom he voted for that day. But I think he was relieved he had a daughter who cared enough to go the extra 139 miles to cast her first ballot.

And so he drove all night for me.

Lisa Rowan author photoLisa Rowan is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.C. She co-hosts Pop Fashion, a weekly podcast that discusses fashion, culture, and creativity. Her flash piece “Kitchen, 1999” appeared in Cleaver’s Issue No. 10.

Image credit: Jake Ingle on Unsplash

UNSTEADY ON by David Wolf

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

man walking on train tracks with black vans

UNSTEADY ON
by David Wolf

I

Youth felt crooked then and feels crooked now. Not in the way that New York City (once home) is, was, and will remain crooked. In various ways and perhaps none, all depending on our expectations, asinine and understandable all at once. I sought to intensify my views on life as early as I could, as soon as I grew dimly aware of what that meant, jogging into the grey fuzz flying off the newly baseless conceptualizations, concentrating on a decaying tree here, a coarse cluster of beliefs there. Some of my strengths wane, some wax and those are some facts, I guess. These are patient reflections, awaiting sufficient ice to form on the semi-frozen pond of non-narrative, waiting for the body to give way to a story or two. I have encountered/endured many approaches to treating the great textbook themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, life and death, given my line of “work” as a writer and a teacher of literature. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do,” said Voltaire, who used the word sturgeon at least once in his writing to my knowledge and likely stood at a window one morning watching the rain, thinking, I mean who hasn’t? Excuse my boyish ludicality. I was a boy and it could be that the child is father of the man. I guess I’m a man. Meaning. Am I watching memory fade, lift, hover to be reborn on the winds (in the drafts) of loving truth? What a zoo.

II

Just this morning I stood before the mirror, in suit and tie, tentative as a wolf, the happy fool of my household, poised before the exit door of time. I shut off the light and apologized for all my wrongs as my image reformed in the dark. I’m telling you, in this steady-severed voice of mine, that if you would like to see me otherwise, well… OK. Let’s go back to an earlier time, before the great dissolve of steam in that dream revealing glistening melons and the Great Schism and all the experiments of friendship unfolding in the cafés around the world as I slept. Baruch atah Adonai elohaynu melech ha’olam boray pri ha’gafen. I used to be better on ladders. I still advocate precision and find many technicalities tedious, but such is the warp and woof of nothingness. Toxic rivers course through the land of lost stewards. History remains etched sizably in the glossy mead of mind’s realization that six lacks the angle of seven, as I listen for some good news about my meager retirement funds. I’m not at the end of my rope. There is a gnat on the end of rope. Resting, I hope, and not dead. “Do insects sleep?” I asked my mom one day. We were driving in our Cadillac, passing the bank that held the savings account my grandmother started for me. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Are we rich?” I asked. “Upper middle class,” she replied. I think I appreciated her precision long before I taught the appreciation of precision.

III

What more can I say? That I’ve got it bad and that ain’t good? I could say that but as far as I can tell…relatively speaking. In the huddle I was told to go long and button-hook left. I reached for the poorly thrown pass and caught it. “The lake is like glass,” my father said, commenting on the water’s surface one summer morning. I was too young to know a cliché when I heard one. My brother threw a football into the lamppost in the front yard and shattered it. I was told to say nothing so I did. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart. Poems fell from the heavens of my imagination all week like banana-peel blossoms onto the linen roads and trippy waters. Which is why I am not a philosopher. Morning has broken, right on time, sooner or later. The cities still host scads of puritanical minds. It’s a free country, as they say. Lines are forming: on faces, in box stores, in well-read thoughts. Last night, lying awake in bed, I tried to reflect on all that had happened and all that was happening in the moment and all that would happen in the entire space-time blast of the universe (including the degree to which, the day after tomorrow, I might once more seek to transcend the fragmentary and meaningless quality of life) and my head almost… exploded.

IV

And the broad countenance of settlers? What ideas, small and grandiose, blink behind the curtains of that frontier house once a face of the myth of, say, natal feelings? “You don’t have friends, you have a phone.”  “Together we’ll eat anything.” My niece said these things to her family, of her family. It was the holidays once more. Around us, meaning i.e., Love with a capital L was playfully shredding itself in the supremely financed wind tunnel of contemporary culture. What am I saying? Just another rendition of Tolstoy’s famous formulation, “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” Which may be why I dreamed last night of a gondolier asleep and adrift across the sea dreaming of scintillating, molten freeways. Contained and shimmering in eighths, the sky fell into the lunch tray of poetry. To the tune of “The Cost of Freedom.” Ash fell as well. “Ash.”  The nickname of she who is blind justice, the light in her eyes true as her badged soul pouring fresh petrol on the smoldering city on the hill. Don’t forget.

V

The pumps are failing somewhere, no? And the text within blanks, vague, off, sleep’s recovery left to night’s assistant overcome by epic relief. Most movies these days are trash, face it, why else would they be so grossly successful? The blood tries not for new highways to soak then fade with time and traffic. Moderation is something else, I tell you. I always park in the visitor slot because who isn’t just visiting in the grand slam of things. Nixon, the French, Janet Planet. Simply surprised as I write this, so I hope the surprise in this writer is felt by you, the reader, but there are no guarantees. Frost’s formula leaves us cold again. And so another chilly week began. Who knew how it would end, how the stocks would do. How popular the Formica counters would remain. I was all ears. I decided to behave, keep the thermostat low, put on a sweater and take a nap. I awoke in the same room (of either/or light). Miasmic chimes held forth between gusts dizzy with glacial information, trimmed with the presidential motto of Business before Nothingness. It was September, securely abandoned and dismembered as Connecticut whose profiteroles proved no match for the calm felines shelving the decision to surrender to…Ted Kooser, who said, “I’d like to be on record as saying that anybody can write a poem that nobody can understand.”

VI

O ringless flings (for I am not a tree)—left my genetic fantasy at the formal, stumbling into the fog of the decentered structural so (un)consciously patriarchal and heteronormatively classist, racist, sexist, ever discursively historicized, colonial & eco-brutishly able… O. Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday, then I’ll get on my knees and pray…So I am thought, yeah, yeah, yeah. The ways of the snail came east, west, north, south, southeast, west-southwest (etc.) quickly as the holidays wound down to begin another year, finding us sprawled horribly comatose on a cracked patio strewn with canonical fodder and What ho! sniffed the saddened teachers in quasi-revelationist worship of poets and sages in bad light and some profession this is. I am waiting. I am waiting.

David Wolf author photoDavid Wolf is the author of four collections of poetry: Open Season, The Moment Forever, Sablier, and Sablier II.  His work has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Poet and Critic, River Styx, and elsewhere. He is a professor of English at Simpson College, where he teaches writing and literature and serves as the literary editor for Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.

 

 

Image credit: Redd Angelo on Unsplash

BREAK A LEG by Lisa Romeo

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Horse in a stable

BREAK A LEG
by Lisa Romeo

I was doing grunt work at the stable, filling water buckets, dropping bales of hay from the loft, cleaning grungy tack, and shoveling manure.

Kate and I—lone teens among the adults who rode at the small barn—cleaned stalls while horses were turned out to run around the ring, bucking, snorting and galloping, rolling in the August dust. She’d attack one stall, I another, our shared wheelbarrow in the aisle, both of us sweating, smelly, proud to be trusted with real work of horse care.

A few months before, my father had finally bought me a horse, and the stable manager invited me to work after school in exchange for lower board. Kate, two years younger, had been around horses since she was a toddler and showed me what to do.

First, use the heavy blunt end shovel to remove big piles of manure from the stall. Next, sift stray pieces of manure and wet hay with the pitchfork, the one with a dozen closely-spaced tines, then rake the leftover shavings. On a second pass, load a wheelbarrow with fresh wood shavings, roll that into the stall, dump and spread.

Perhaps it was raining that day. Or maybe Firestarter, a rangy Thoroughbred, was recovering from an injury—ex racers were prone to that. Perhaps Melanie, his owner, asked that he be kept inside so he’d be sparkplug fresh when she arrived; she liked spunk.

Whatever the reason, I was cleaning Firestarter’s stall with him in it. I’d done this before, with my own placid horse, and others, though not the fidgety, leggy Firestarter. Kate and I were quiet, diligent, eager to get chores done before I’d climb on Poco, and she’d straddle Speckles, the pony she’d outgrown.

I headed into Firestarter’s stall, eyes on the left corner where his manure tended to accumulate. But instead of holding the shovel straight up and down, as I’d been taught to do every time when passing a horse, I held it in the extended position.

I simultaneously saw and heard it hit Firestarter’s cannon bone, hard, inches below the knee on his elegant brown leg. The shovel vibrated in my hands. How would I explain a broken leg? To Melanie? The stable manager? My parents? I watched, afraid that majestic, lovely animal would collapse. For a small second, his leg merely imperceptibly shivered, flinched. I jerked the shovel away, lunged backward into the aisle. Firestarter only inched his leg back. Kate worked on, unaware; shovels hit the wall and floor all the time. Horses shifted.

I stood trembling, waiting for Firestarter to kick me or lift his foot in pain the way horses did when they’d stepped on a nail or sharp stone. Firestarter only eyed me.

“I’m taking him out, he’s antsy,” I told Kate, who only said, “Yeah, I know.”

I tossed a halter on Firestarter, walked him down the aisle, turned and led him back to where I could secure him in crossties. He clopped on evenly, fine and solid, not just then but for days, weeks.

I hadn’t broken his leg. Yet I’d made a terrible mistake, potentially harmful to a horse, to someone else’s horse. In the moments and days after, nausea and guilt alternated with something else. A horse-crazy girl who wanted only to ride, caught a glimmer of the kind of responsible horseperson she wanted to become, and that image winked, beckoned.

Eight years later, at a horse show in Lake Placid, someone—as the story goes—a drunk groom, possibly acting on a poker bet or maybe just mishandling a gun–shot the cannon bone of the best junior hunter on the circuit, an animal worth about $50,000. When I heard about it, two hours after the elegant bay gelding was put down, four hours after someone heard the crack in the dark and the horse’s shrill, pained whinny and called the night patrol, I was riding the fifth horse my father had bought me, warming up in the dewy dawn. Police were swarming, and everyone was talking about the hideous cruelty, the horse’s sobbing young rider. I had to dismount; my hands were shaking, my breeches soaked with sweat. Then, and again when I heard the news, ten years after, about Nancy Kerrigan, I was immediately back in the stable, a shovel in my hand, a horse’s leg at the other end, a sickly swirl in my head.

I never told anyone what I had done. What I hadn’t done.

Headshot of Lisa RomeoLisa Romeo’s work has been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New York Times, O-The Oprah Magazine, Inside Jersey, Babble, Under the Sun, Hippocampus, Word Riot, Sweet, Sport Literate, and in anthologies such as Feed Me! and Why We Ride. She is a founding faculty member of Bay Path University’s MFA program and the creative nonfiction editor of Compose. A former equestrian journalist and PR specialist, Lisa lives in New Jersey with her husband and sons. Connect on Twitter @LisaRomeo or via LisaRomeoWrites.

 

Image credit: Blake Hall on Flickr

 

ON PETER ADAMYAN’S “BLACKFACE BARBIE MINSTREL SHOW” by Tracy Jones

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Peter Adamyan, Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show (illustration)

ON PETER ADAMYAN’S “BLACKFACE BARBIE MINSTREL SHOW”
by Tracy Jones

Want to say “nigger” without taking the chance of getting beat the fuck up? Are you a white liberal tired of white guilt? Feeling a little transracial? Does everything about you seem black, but your skin? Do you sketch self-portraits using a brown crayon, instead of peach? Find yourself tweeting #blacklivesmatter, but still getting bussed to the #alllivesmatter side of town? What about that blackface frat party you always wanted to throw? Want to get shot for no reason? Can’t take advantage of affirmative action when applying for college? Is your blackness too hip to be down with that wigger shit?

Try Equality Snake Oil, established in 1776, rub it in your skin and let the oppression begin. Act now. Diminish your white privilege and enhance your simulated black experience. Enjoy the benefits of getting disproportionately arrested, shot, killed, and expelled from school. E.S.O. won’t crack, smudge, or run; guaranteed to give you that golden brown YOLO glow.

Warning: If you feel a burning sensation or develop what looks like permanent skin damage, please continue to use E.S.O. as instructed to get that full Nubian complexion. The screams and cries you hear when applying E.S.O. are the shackled remnants of slaves getting buried alive in the pores of your skin. Please do not mistake it for your soul hacking at its roots to dislodge itself from you. E.S.O. may turn you into a black caricature modeled after your white superiority complex. E.S.O. will not give you full lips, corn rolls, chiseled muscles, an afro or a fat ass. It will not anoint you Queen of the Nile or give you black beauty that will be copied, bleached, and become pop culture. E.S.O. will not make you tougher, jump higher, run faster, or anything else that is likely a result of big, strong slaves forced to procreate with each other to make bigger, stronger slaves. Take caution, E.S.O. will dehumanize you.

Side effects include low self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, or bouts of psychotic rage. Your blackness will be cut open, dissected and doubted. Your new history will be reduced to a sentence or paragraph. Your new ancestors will not be credited for birthing civilization. Their inventions and cultural contributions that are the backbone of American ingenuity will be whitewashed. E.S.O. may also cause you to be paranoid when driving, shopping, or jogging. If cops demand permission to enter your residence without a warrant, you may be at risk of getting shot and killed for failing to give up your rights to an unlawful home invasion. If you are standing in a crowd full of actual black people, you may be at risk of getting shot in the head. Keep in mind, said situations will give your rap career the boost and authenticity it deserves. If you are not sure that E.S.O. is right for you, please consult your social media friends and followers.

◊

I’ve been living in Japan for five years. My Japanese wife, Haruki, and I decided to start our married life here, so I could get to know her within the context of her own culture. For the first two years, I was like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the movie They Live without those x-ray sunglasses, and the aliens still fled in horror at the sight of me. Somewhere beyond the fourth wall I could hear a faint Bob Dylan singing, “because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

Culture shock had me like, “Don’t tase me bro!” Consumers hugged the block waiting in line to eat this exquisite food called pancakes. They crowded the sidewalks looking at menus, waiting to be seated, all for the sweet seductive taste of an intriguing snack called caramel popcorn. Purple-and blue-haired old ladies wearing kimonos shuffled down the streets. Young adult men carted leather purses and had spiked hair that rivaled Dragon Ball Z characters. Girls with long, curly blonde hair were human dolls wearing Alice In Wonderland-dresses, detailed with embroidered red roses and ribbons with matching umbrellas, decorated stockings, and glossy platform shoes. People bowed everywhere, bobbing their heads, bending their hips as if to praise each other like Olympian Gods or benevolent members of a holy covenant. Above the red-dotted land of the rising sun, a giant omnipresent eye floats through the sky, but it can’t see beyond Japan’s shores. The eye doesn’t blink or sleep. It’s overworked and wary. It’s been conditioned to laugh, obey, gawk, stare, and smile. Through the eyes of the homogenous people below it follows me.

As I would wait in line at the grocery store, locals’ mannerisms twitched and turned. The anxiety could’ve materialized into rain. A middle-aged woman in front of me did a 180 to confront me. She had a brown mole the size of a pinky fingerprint below her right nostril. The peach hairs on her cheeks broke through the makeup layers masking her face. I could smell her breath as an aftertaste of her shampoo. I didn’t know if she was afraid of turning her back to a potential boogieman prone to savagery, she wanted to fuck, or she wanted me carried away with a hand strapped across my mouth. A gap formed in the line as it moved forward while she froze. When she realized that it was her turn she gasped, swinging around to rush towards the cashier. She folded her shoulders and fumbled through her purse, discarding the spectacle that stood behind her.

To keep my paper bag of marbles from getting wet, I filtered my reality through a self-imposed veil of willful ignorance, becoming less interested in Japan’s language and culture. Video-calling family and friends, writing assignments for Hi-Fructose Magazine, and watching The Daily Show with John Stewart was my transportable version of America. They were triggers of the familiar that virtualized home. It served me well at first. Haruki and her family had lived in the States for five years while she was in elementary and middle school. She’s been to Russia, China, and the Caribbean. Unlike me, she’s well-traveled. She went to Manhattanville College as an exchange student, where we met. Before we had a daughter, my wife and I took the idea of America’s diversity, my parents’ creed of “love knows no color,” Japan’s civility and their religion of patience, and turned our apartment into an embassy. We engaged in continuous, stop-start, at times gridlocked, at times successful negotiations, deciphering cultural differences from marital conflicts, while forging our twin values, and syncing our paths of emotional rhythm. “Forever and ever,” Haruki likes to say. “Forever ever?” I ask.

Our multi-national consulate divided itself from a nation that believes its DNA to be separate from the rest of Asia, or unique, if not at one time superior, as they believed during their alliance with Hitler. The walls of our embassy laminated their own micro cracks to soundproof our xenophobic neighbors from hearing me make my wife laugh by dancing to Kelela and Run The Jewels. The second I stepped outside I was a black unicorn that could, though probably wouldn’t, gouge out an eye when I bowed. On numerous occasions people told me that I looked like Bob Sapp. Who the hell is that? My wife wasn’t surprised when I told her.

“I’m glad we don’t have TV,” Haruki said. “You’d see blackface almost every day.” My eyes lit up like “What do you mean?” I meant, like “What the fuck?” When I searched Sapp online, his massive physique and big perspiring bald dome had nothing on my growing beer belly, chicken legs, and egg-shaped head, “Duck this dude out (-Wiki),” I rapped out loud, oh, we all look a-like. He’s a black American and former professional mixed martial artist that went from kicking people in the mouth to holding a banana like a monkey in Japanese advertisements. On TV he’s a jigaboo-acting modern minstrel who speaks strange Japanese, eats raw meat, bugs his eyes out and spears the air with his tongue, while a split screen shows Japanese hosts laughing at him. When the locals think of black people, he must be one of the first to pop into their heads, along with the other mixed martial artist turned jigaboo, Bobby Ologun.

“You go to Japan, they don’t have problems with certain folks being discriminated against because mostly everybody is Japanese,” President Obama joked when talking to a Chicago crowd about immigration. At my edge of the Western media echo chamber, the staying power of the blackface children’s book Little Black Sambo has crystallized it into a lauded classic. Japanese actor Koichi Yamadera donned blackface and twisted a head off a cat to do a rendition of “What A Wonderful World” as a tribute to Jazz great Louis Armstrong. During the first year of the first black President of the United States, a blackface “Barack” and “Michelle Obama” appeared on a Japanese variety show. “Barack Obama” is a magician saying, “Yes we can” after doing a magic trick. The clapping crowd and pundits laugh, mouths open, putting their whole bobbing heads into it. When artist Peter Adamyan showed me a collection of his work to pick from, thinking about that scene prompted me to choose Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show, a contemporary take on the face of a horrible past that, through the brush of America’s ruling class, has tried to paint itself another. It’s difficult to say whether the painting is selling snake oil, or is recruiting for the military rolled into a white-appropriated show.

Cue the twinkling suburban dream-girl music and Bob Sagat voiceover: Whoopi Goldberg is Transracial-Barbie’s token black friend and moral advisor, giving ol’ Barb street cred. “Go-on girl,” she says to Barb about escaping complacency to find true love. Meanwhile, Ken is just a simple Klansmen terrorizing coloreds at night, daydreaming of raping black girls like a real live slave owner. Barbie is a brown-toasted hot-blooded doll, twerking to pay tuition. Find out what happens when fate collides the lives of these star-crossed lovers.

Barbie and Ken’s passionate unconventional love divides dinner tables and unites multiracial bedfellows. Barb’s girl-next-door swagger and Katy Perry persona catapults Blackface Barb into primetime’s most talked about and watched TV program. This year’s Halloween saw the number of young white adults wearing blackface Barbie costumes surpass those wearing costumes that look like Orange Is The New Black character, Crazy Eyes, and like the latest unarmed black male shot dead by policemen who feared their lives were in danger. From TV, Barbie’s show gets pushed out of online’s viral womb and Barb-mania is born. The show’s makeup artist gets interviewed on daily talk shows, giving tips on how to fake black features. Mattel Toys releases Minstrel Barbie, which comes with a burnt cork and red lipstick to color Barb’s face. The new doll echoes Mattel’s past releases, including Oreo Barbie, Bull-fighting Spanish Barbie, and the wrestling action figure, Junkyard Dog, inspired by the once-real-life wrestler, a shirtless black man brandishing a chain around his neck. After rigorous animal testing, The Barbie Minstrel Show execs go for the jugular, releasing E.S.O., “when ya got that glow, ya powerful,” a blackface skin cream that paints your face a color not found in the natural world.

It’s the first painting I’ve ever owned; my luck that Adamyan was purging his old work to make room for the new. As a thank you, he shipped it to me from California, not long after I interviewed and wrote a feature about him. I was geeked to get a big package in the mail from home, let alone art. Unwrapping it, I was taken aback by the painting’s detail, which I couldn’t get from its computer image. The thin acrylic layers accentuate the contorted muscles in the characters’ faces as if they’re posing for a 3D movie poster. Mounted on my wall, they look alive, though cellophane-coated, suspended in an emotional state, motivated by the cattle prods stabbing at them from behind, “C’mon, smile, Goddamnit.” The Equality Snake Oil bottle is dyed-water, the sheen of tar sand. Uncle Sam’s grimace “wants you” to help him invade other countries and oversee war-torn regions from a drone’s eye point of view. The red and white Mattel logo behind him is a bursting bomb from an airstrike. All unintended casualties are considered enemy combatants. Framed by a red, white and blue heart, Ken and Barb are Donald Trump supporters, embracing each other for the camera, reppin’ that redneck love. Whoopi flashes her brown gleaming eyes from behind her Hollywood shades, juxtaposed with the light reflecting off each bead of her ever-looping necklace, resembling something a first-world reader would see in a National Geographic.

One benefit of our not owning a TV is that it helps preserve my faith in the progressiveness of Japan’s worldview.Adamyan’s Minstrel Show hangs above my desk as a theoretical substitute for Japanese television, but if it were an actual idiot box broadcasting a local infomercial selling a race-altering ointment, it’d probably go something like…

Want to get down black, but not be black, keeping your distinctive DNA intact? Spending hours practicing your dance routine, but wait, that public school brainwashing that made you a tool won’t let your inner robot bust a move? Got no junk in your trunk? Can’t jiggle that conservative figure? Can’t copy that sassy-sexy attitude that black girls radiate on YouTube? Want a black girl servant and a sister sex slave mistress? What about touring Japan, donning blackface, singing Motown tunes, and making money actin’ a coon? Trying to get over your fear of sitting next to that foreigner on the subway? Feeling nostalgic about the mid-90’s when you used to get your skin burnt at Blacky’s tanning Salon? Wasn’t it A Different World when you were a Ganguro girl? Are you an aspiring B-Styler, looking to live that Black Lifestyle? Ever wish you could turn into a blackface gorilla and wake your kids up on reality TV? Want to look like your favorite rapper? Is Beyoncé the true face of your character? Introducing Equality Snake Oil, invented in the Edo Period, during Japan’s most famously historical pop cultural boom. One slap of E.S.O. on your face will make you look like you’re a part of the black race. E.S.O. is perfect for taking advantage of all the good things black culture has to offer, without ever having to deal with actual black people.

Warning: E.S.O. will remain on your skin until removed with paint thinner, bug repellant, or hand sanitizer. E.S.O. will make you appear to be an exotic animal possessing bizarre homo sapien-like behavior. Please notify your co-workers, classmates, and family members that you are using E.S.O. for fear of them suspecting that you have skin cancer, or that you have turned into a monster. Strangers may assume you bleed green, and that you are scary, subhuman, and stupid, but above all, they will assume you are cool. You will not, however, be a “soul brother.” E.S.O. will not give you swagger, an afro, dreadlocks, or an onion butt. E.S.O. won’t help you rap, play basketball, or ollie higher on your skateboard.

Side effects include, but are not limited to, suffering from an acute anxiety that dwarfs the usual discomfort you get when trying to read the air in normal social situations. People may keep asking you where you’re from, prompting you to say “planet Earth.” You will be stared at, objectified and marginalized. You will be compared to a talking ape. People seeking free English lessons who have a fetish for foreigners will want to take a picture with you. Every person you encounter will ask you “Why are you in Japan?” “Are you married?” “Is your wife Japanese?” “How did you meet your wife?” “How long have you been in Japan?” “What do you do?” “Where do you live?” and “What’s your email?” Keep in mind, they will not tell you anything about themselves. As soon as said questions are neatly answered to their liking, they will walk away. They will compliment you on how well you use chopsticks. And if you speak some level of Japanese, they will say, “You speak good Japanese,” which is tantamount to white Americans telling African Americans, “You speak so well.”

If you are not sure that E.S.O. is right for you, just watch everyone else and do the same thing. If you’re still not sure, you’re not Japanese. Call now while supplies last.

Before I came here, I was told that Japan is “The black man’s paradise.” We out here, but it’s 99% Japanese. Living that one-percent-life had me spending the first three years wondering whether I was madhouse-bound. Japan almost turnt me out like Ramsay Snow did Reek. Tokyo’s architecture could be remixed palm trees built by Majesticons as offerings, trying to get right with their Infesticonian brethren. The ancient wooden temples scattered throughout this island are cowrie shells and sand dollars. The boardwalks are surreal woodblock prints by Japan’s original masters that still influence the world. Humanity is the ocean, swirling its colors until they bleed into each other, eating away at those presumptuous spaces that numb empathy and denounce cultural differences. Beautiful women stroll to the beat of the folding waves. The eye in the sky is the almighty sun, bringing light to the coldest of shivering hearts blinded by darkness. Here, God is more prone to stab me with a hand-thrown thunderbolt, than a cop’s bullet is to put me down. Still, even in paradise, the same rule applies in Japan as it does in America: White is right, but if you’re black get back.

Headshot of Tracy JonesTracy Jones is an aging skateboarder, born-again human, wanna-be photographer, recovering mind reader, and a self-published author of two books of poetry: I Think Therefore I Am and still breathing…. Winner of The Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship, he graduated from SUNY Purchase College with a BA in Creative Writing. As a freelance writer, he’s written for Mugshot, Hi-Fructose, Alarm Press, Dig In, Intouch, Tokyo Art Beat, Metro Pop, Under Pressure, and Stark Life Magazine. Originally from Orlando, Florida, he lives in Tokyo with his wife and daughter.

 

Image credit: Peter Adamyan, Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show; used with permission of the author.

 

 

ATLANTIC DYSTOPIA by Ray Scanlon

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Theme park ride called "Dizzy Dragons"

ATLANTIC DYSTOPIA
by Ray Scanlon

Halfway through my seventh decade I realize I have gained in modesty, at least in the sense of exposing skin. It is partly because I have a clearer vision of my nerd body’s attractiveness. My face is a thing of no great beauty. My dear Cheryl refers, affectionately I believe, to my toothpick legs, and my cardiologist told us that my sunken chest added risk to the standard rib-cracking heart valve replacement procedure. There is little danger that the sight of my body will be inciting lust in the general public. But, mostly, I keep it well-covered because I’m a contrarian crank playing Canute to our post-modest times, in which a twerking Miley Cyrus thrives.

Cheryl and I take our customary late-summer vacation in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. It is of course ludicrous that I pine for the discreet at a beach. Any rear-guard pro-modesty defiance that I could mount is doomed to ignominious failure. Liberal expanses of fish-belly skin that hasn’t seen the light of day for many a long Canadian winter are commonplace here. In our brave new age of no shame, things better left hidden and private are routinely foisted on the casual observer. I recoil, and my mood turns bilious.

I’m walking home uphill from the beach, navigating a short crowded stretch of the main thoroughfare between the sand and the non-maritime world, a tacky interface that seems to have expanded over the years we’ve been coming here. It provides for beach-goers’ basic needs: cash-dispensing machines, purveyors of tattoos, cheesy souvenirs, deep-fried Oreos, and electronic gaming. Signs on streetlight poles warn that you can be arrested for drinking in public. Oxygen molecules fight for their lives in a miasma of fryolator grease, cigarette smoke, and nasal French. My sneaker sticks to a discarded wad of gum.

Yet for all the wretched excess and the asymptotic approach to nakedness, the throng exhibits no joie de vivre, no laughter, not a half-smile. A father snarks at his boy, “Don’t be a whine-ass.” Pained expressions mingle with vacant masks, as if everyone is here under duress, the lucky ones under sedation. The closest thing to genuine pleasure is the screaming as the nearby roller coaster slams down the first hill into its turn. People variously trim and densely-muscled or bulbous and flabby, shirtless in low-rider shorts, or tricked out in gossamer bikinis in the one place where beachwear is unquestionably appropriate—none of them can flaunt it with verve and joy.

This crass narrow strip is what one manifestation of a poisonous culture feels like. When virtually nothing is beyond the pale, experience is cheapened to worthlessness, and it shows. There’s plenty of surliness, but we’re short on vivacity, innocence, a sense that we’re alive in the midst of something extraordinary. I fear that innocence and wonder, once bludgeoned to death, are beyond resurrection. These people have only the vaguest awareness of what they’ve lost. They are jaded. At best they are complacent sheep, and even proximity to the sea’s majesty can’t save them.

Headshot of Ray ScanlonRay Scanlon is “a Massachusetts boy. He feels lucky to be above ground, lucky to have grandchildren. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. Not averse to litotes.” Twitter: @oldmanscanlon. On the web: read.oldmanscanlon.com

Image credit: Martin Lewison on Flicker, Old Orchard Beach, Maine

MEMORIAL by Peter Tiernan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Burial site and memorial for the TWA passengers of the 1956 TWA/United Grand Canyon air disaster.

MEMORIAL
by Peter Tiernan

My girlfriend Jackie and I came across the memorial in a cemetery near our house in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a slanted stone slab low to the ground with two plaques on it. The smaller described a 1956 midair collision over the Grand Canyon between a TWA Constellation and a United Airlines DC-7 that killed 128 people. The larger listed the names of the sixty-six who were buried there: three Maags, four Kites, two Crewses, and so on. My eye found the groups of matching surnames, and my mind turned them into stories.

It seemed odd that this sunny patch of grass, tucked away in the aspens, looking more appropriate for lawn chairs and bocce, would be a memorial to decompression and falling and terror.

◊

Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash on 3 February 1959. The sole Valenzuela to die in the crash, his trio is rounded out by Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson. Valens was seventeen. For my generation, he was revived in the 1987 movie La Bamba.

I turned seven in 1987. The low-budget movie Dirty Dancing became an unexpected hit on its August release, turning little-known actor Patrick Swayze into a star. Michael Jackson cemented his status as the biggest phenomenon in the universe and the idol of Crocker Farm Elementary School with the release of Bad, the first album ever to send five singles to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Some afternoons, before the busses arrived to take us home, Mrs. Kidd turned on the TV, and we watched music videos of Jackson hopping turnstiles in his leather and buckles.

The present is infallible when you’re seven. Michael Jackson and Patrick Swayze are as eternal as the sun and moon. The 1970s are as insubstantial as Atlantis.

I saw La Bamba on VHS in Kyle Stanek’s basement. The movie had swears in it, which made me nervous because Mom didn’t let me watch movies with swears. Kyle’s mom lingered in the basement, glancing at the TV as the actors volleyed the F-word back and forth. I feared she’d halt our entertainment, as my mom would have, but she didn’t.

◊

Patrick Swayze died on Bells Beach, Australia, in 1991. This was as the outlaw hero Bhodi in Point Break. A fifty-year storm, he called it: wind and lashing rain, and waves as tall as houses. This is where his friend and surfing protégé, undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah, finally tracked him down.

“Just let me catch one wave,” Swayze pleaded.

Utah un-cuffed him, and he paddled out into the awesome surf. Utah’s team thought they’d get him when he came back in, but Utah knew better.

The monstrous wave Swayze was riding crashed shut on him, and he was gone.

This ending was right. Swayze was too awesome to go out any other way.

◊

I spent the summer of 2005 in Friendsville, Maryland. It was during that summer that I first began to discover gray hairs in my beard. Also during that summer, Michael Jackson was found not guilty after being accused for a second time of child molestation. Concerts and monuments continued to memorialize Ritchie Valens, now dead forty-seven years. My friend Nate would come over to my house, and we’d watch Point Break. Neither of us surfed, but he was the best kayaker I knew—Bhodi, to my Johnny Utah. He once told me he wanted me to die in my kayak. He meant it in a good way. He wanted to die in his kayak.

“He died doing what he loved,” Nate would whisper at the movie’s finale, as though it were the ultimate expression of some principle.

◊

One summer, while working in Zion National Park, Jackie tried to hike to an old airplane crash site. After an hour of climbing up the sand and scree, she found her path blocked by a rock wall. Tiny bits of metal from the wreckage above littered the ground. Jackie took two of the larger pieces, about the size of DVD cases, home with her.

Jackie doesn’t like flying in airplanes. She imagines the time it would take to plummet to the ground, knowing what will happen yet unable to do anything about it.

In the Grand Canyon tragedy, the DC-7’s left wing and propeller struck the Constellation’s fuselage. The DC-7 was damaged beyond its ability to stay airborne, and it spiraled to the ground below. The Constellation’s tail section separated from the rest of the airplane, decompressing the interior and blasting debris into the open sky. The collision was at an altitude of 21,000 feet—about four miles. A person sucked from the Constellation would have taken about two minutes to fall to the ground, varying based on body position.

Terminal velocity in a spread-eagle position is about 120 mph. It’s faster in a streamlined position. In the movies, this is how Johnny Utah is able to catch up with Patrick Swayze in midair after jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In real life, it’s how casualties of the Grand Canyon collision might have chosen to end the terror faster, or to prolong being alive.

Whether rushed or prolonged, there was still the inescapable sensation of falling, and the certainty of lethal impact.

◊

Patrick Swayze died of pancreatic cancer on 14 September 2009. I’d shaved off my beard by then. It was an easy way to forget the gray hairs. I stubbornly believed I’d be with Jackie forever. I’d soon see the memorial with her, and hear the story of how she found her airplane part. It felt improbable that we wouldn’t be together forever.

I learned of Swayze’s illness while standing in lines at the City Market in Buena Vista, Colorado. As I’d wait with my snow peas and mushrooms and bok choy, the tabloid covers would show me what Bhodi and Johnny Castle looked like dying of cancer.

Swayze’s death was interrupted by Michael Jackson’s. One day, instead of Swayze, there was Michael Jackson on all the covers. He wasn’t waxy, as he had been for the previous decade. He was the awesome image I remembered from 1987. A few months later, Swayze finished dying, and he too was returned to his 1987 glory.

◊

Newspaper headlines and lists of names on monuments are similar in that they invite us to believe we know the unknowable.

In some cases, there’s irrefutable evidence that a crime was committed. There’s a dead body, or the money’s missing. In other cases, the only evidence is a verbal disagreement about what happened in the past. But what do we know?

We know that Michael Jackson had sleepovers with pubescent boys, and we know that we consider it inappropriate for men in their thirties to have sleepovers with pubescent boys, and we know why. We also know that Jordan Chandler, Jackson’s 1993 accuser, accused Jackson only after being browbeaten and fed hallucinogenic drugs by his father, and we know that Chandler inaccurately described Jackson’s penis as circumcised. We know that when a guy’s been accused of something twice we ought to take the allegation seriously, but we also know that the precedent of a $20 million settlement will invite more allegations whether they’re true or not.

We can arrange these details to make our own stories. I like the arrangement that does as much as possible to preserve the 1987 Michael Jackson. But nobody will ever know what happened behind closed doors. Possibly not even Jordan Chandler.

The thoughts of the 128 people who boarded two airplanes at Los Angeles International Airport shortly after 9 in the morning on 30 June 1956 are also lost. All that remains is a placid blue sky, and a block of cut stone by some grass in a cemetery in Flagstaff. We’ll never know what they thought as the DC-7’s wing split the Constellation open like a can of soup, and as they all fell to the ground at varying speeds.

A memorial is a reflection, not a portal. Here are some names, it says. You fill in the rest. Whether I memorialize outlaw heroes, FBI agents, molested children, or would-have-been Kings of Pop is up to your whim.

◊

In the early morning of 16 August 1960, as part of an Air Force experiment, Captain Joseph Kittinger departed from Tularosa, New Mexico, by helium balloon, wearing a pressurized suit. An hour and forty-three minutes later, from an altitude of 102,800 feet, the upper stratosphere, he jumped out.

Where the air is thinner, terminal velocity is faster. Kittinger reached a freefell speed of 614 mph before deploying his parachute. His descent took 13 minutes and 45 seconds. For more than fifty years, it was the record for the highest, longest, and fastest jump.

◊

Jackie discarded one of the airplane pieces when she left Zion. She took the other back to her parents’ house and put it in a cabinet in her bedroom that displayed trinkets she liked. But somewhere along the way, maybe when her parents remodeled their house, the airplane part was thrown away, or it was put in a box somewhere, never to be seen again.

I asked her why she’d kept it in the first place. She said she wanted a memento of a time and a place and an experience, and the feelings that went with it. She wanted to anchor those memories to something physical and enduring.

◊

Joseph Kittinger is now eighty-seven years old. Ritchie Valens would be seventy-four, Michael Jackson fifty-seven, and Patrick Swayze sixty-three. Jordan Chandler and I are both thirty-five. Bit by bit, the past is falling out from underneath us. Kittinger’s record has been broken. Another album has matched Bad’s five number-one singles. I haven’t spoken to Jackie in years.

I wonder if Jordan finds gray hairs in his beard. I wonder what he thinks when he thinks of Michael Jackson. I wonder whether he wishes he could buy back his anonymity. I wonder, if he could have a single moment from his life to keep forever, which one he’d pick.

There’s a picture of Michael Jackson and Jordan Chandler together, prior to Chandler’s allegations. Chandler is in the foreground, looking directly at the camera. He’s a beautiful kid. His expression is hard to read. It might be awed, smug, even bored. He’s wearing an orange button-up shirt with a stylish brown jacket over it, and a hat that looks straight out of the “Smooth Criminal” video. Jackson is slightly left of center, behind Chandler’s right shoulder. He already looks a bit ghoulish. I hadn’t remembered him looking that way until years later. In his arms, only partly in the photo, is a young girl. He’s wearing sunglasses and a black button-up shirt, and smiling just a little.

This picture lets us look back at a moment when Jackson and Chandler were only the King of Pop and an excited fan. The moment is still there. We can still see it. But with each passing year its significance evaporates more from our collective memory. The generations that experienced it are being replaced by ones that didn’t. We have the technology to record words, images, sounds—we can preserve all of these things indefinitely. But their meaning is constantly being lost.

Headshot of Peter TiernanPeter Tiernan has an MFA in fiction from Boise State University and an MA in creative nonfiction from Northern Arizona University. He was born in Maine and now lives in Idaho, where he works outdoors and spends his free time “writing, floating down rivers, and pondering the meaning of it all.”

Image credit: Chloe93 on Wikipedia. Burial site and memorial for the TWA passengers of the 1956 TWA/United Grand Canyon air disaster.

DESTROYER by Gretchen Clark

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Children knocking down pinata at party

DESTROYER
by Gretchen Clark

Canned laughter sounded from the television, but no one was smiling in the kitchen where I faced my mother, our dog’s metal chain cold against my palm. She was close to six feet tall, and I was only eight, but I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. “I can hit you,” I said. “I can kick you all I want.”

She looked at me, her green irises bisected by the deep lines etched in the bifocal lens she wore. “Go ahead,” she said.

I whipped the chain forward as I sprung up in my shiny Mary Jane shoes. It was a clumsy attempt; I barely grazed her shoulder. I swung again. And again, stopping only when the chain connected with my mother’s glasses. I didn’t break them, but they hung askew on her shocked face.

Earlier that morning, when I didn’t have time to finish my strawberry milk before leaving for school, my mother covered the top of my glass with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator. After school, I reached for the glass, but condensation made it slip through my hand, and it crashed to the floor of the kitchen where my mother was preparing dinner. Beneath my feet bloomed milk and glass.

The shattering shards cut through something unseen in my mother, and her mood suddenly shifted from its previous cheerfulness. The shadow across her face appeared, a shadow I had seen before. She was upset, I knew, but she’d never say so.

“Sorry,” I said, repeating my apology over and over, but she ignored me, yanking me out of the way to grab a broom and dustpan, the scrape of my mistake crunchy and sharp in my ears. There was the familiar shove of the garbage can, the slam of cupboards, the bang of the broom handle against the wall. This was my mother’s Morse code: violent gestures, often after the smallest provocation, even, yes, spilled milk. She never said what was on her mind, what was troubling her, a silence that forced me to become proficient in deciphering her unspoken messages. Waiting for this mother to appear, I was often on edge around her, anticipating the physical reaction she triggered: the adrenaline of fight or flight pumping through my body, turning my stomach to acid.

Until this moment in the kitchen, I had always chosen flight. When I saw the familiar shadow cross my mother’s face, I’d crawl under the dining room table, hide in the bathroom, or run upstairs to my room. I wasn’t concerned for my physical safety, but afraid of how the atmosphere changed during these episodes. Something radioactive and dangerous emanated from her, and it frightened me.

◊

Moments after our mother-daughter showdown, my sister Rebecca returned home from school, where she was studying to be a dental hygienist. She had temporarily moved back home while finishing up her coursework, which meant that in our two bedroom apartment, my twenty-five-year-old sister and I were roommates. I was obsessively fastidious and couldn’t stand anything unmade, unclean, or out of place. But upon her arrival, my sister staked her dingy gray flag of slovenliness in our communal space, turning my once-organized room into a hovel heaped with crusted dishes, candy wrappers, and dirty clothes. I couldn’t wait for her to move out, but today I was grateful she was here.

“Why are your glasses lopsided?” Rebecca asked our mother as she tossed her binder onto the kitchen counter.

Our mother brushed past her, taking the metal chain out of my hand. She leashed our dog, Max, and closed the door behind her with such violence that the apartment convulsed the way it did when the San Andreas fault line periodically bucked under our Bay Area home.

“Hello to you, too,” Rebecca mumbled, untwisting the plastic tie on a bag of bread.

With my mother gone, I climbed up into my father’s brown leather La-Z-Boy chair and picked up one of the many art books he kept stacked beside his seat. I chose one on the masters of surrealism and quickly lost myself in the dreamy, topsy-turvy visions of melting clocks, horses molded from clouds, and curved stairways rising up from the epicenter of a chaotic sea. This book showed me a world full of strange, illogical images and happenings; a place where a daughter hitting her mother might make sense. Mentally, I began to assemble our confrontation in the kitchen as a surrealist painting. I imagined my mother as a giant piñata covered in stripes of pastel tissue paper, suspended above me. I swung at her with the metal chain. Without much effort, domestic detritus spilled out onto the linoleum floor. A bottle of Emeralde perfume, Fire and Ice Revlon red lipstick, a Pink Lady cocktail, Oil of Olay face lotion, a pair of saddle Oxfords, and a brown curly wig she sometimes wore to dinner parties. None of these items satisfied me, so I kept swinging in my mind, not because I actually wanted to hurt my mother, but because I wanted to get at something else, something elusive, something she kept locked inside, and the only way I believed I could get to it was to crack her wide open.

Rebecca flopped down on the couch beside me. “Why is Mom so mad?” she asked, biting into her peanut-butter-slathered toast.

I shrugged, keeping my gaze on the book open in front of me.

“Gretchen Lee,” my sister prodded in a singsong tone. “What did you do?”

I ignored her and escaped back into my surrealist world, where such questioning would be turned upside down. Where the equally compelling queries would be: Why did my mother make me so mad? What had she done to me?

◊

Later that night, I woke to the sound of a heavy metal lullaby drifting out from my parents’ room. My mother always slept with some kind of music on. Tonight it was KISS’s Destroyer album.

I kicked my comforter off and fumbled my way in the dark down the short hallway that connected my room to my parents’. Dad, a dispatcher for a trucking company, was working the night shift. Mom lay on the right side of the bed, her back to me. Through the open window shone a streetligh