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The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

There is nothing in the museum of words but the Father of Christ
Dream sporangia reach intuitively for granular sunlight
The world is already ready to eat
Everything in the world has already happened and been said

The olive of hearts turns to thorns
Meat and fish become flesh
The intonations of silence thicken
Molecules and atoms play in motion
Every second

Every second someone dies instead of me on the cross





Clouds, grass, parents’ sleds, a rusty shovel, worn-out sandals, an arbor, a fat neighbor’s code, grandmother’s screams – there is no way to convey the feeling of a home that no longer exists.





the bird accidentally dropped the heart and broke it on the rocks

heaven turned inside out and swallowed the rain
~
my mother did not return from work and became a seagull in the eyes of the beholder
±
the house turned into a horse and blew away and commotion
.
a lot has changed since the beginning of the last war
…





Someone covered the tracks with snow
Someone inappropriate is out of sight
The eyes pretend to be a bird flying into the unknown
The path is the essence of the bird’s path
Death and birth of grass
Every person is grass
Every person is an animal
Snow fangs bite travelers
Where did the travelers go?
A trip to a fairy tale is like a trip to Kafka
The boy stimulates the imagination with caresses
The girl mentally turns into a mermaid
The impregnable stone sings an ode to silence
Delimiters are converted to spaces
Ragged shirts of syntax envelop the syncopations
A little man is looking for happiness
A small person plays with happiness
The dwarfs look at Snow White to rape her
Wolves feed us minced meat from grandma
Babysitters pretend to be adults
A boy stimulates a girl’s prostate
The girl becomes a thought
Torn skin shirts envelop a heart lost in bones
The eyes are looking for a mirror
The lips silently repeat the same thing:
Please





The knot on the neck of the rope is compressed
The crunch of bones that cannot be filled with any passion

Someone in a golden gaze mask stands by a silver fire
Someone pours semen on the mint from which we were born

The latex of the night sky puckers at the hips
A casual smile puffs with mystery

The heather rises up like a phallus
The clouds part in front of a couple in love with life





BIO

Mykyta Ryzhykh: Winner of the international competition «Art Against Drugs», bronze medalist of the festival Chestnut House, laureate of the literary competition named after Tyutyunnik. Nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published in the journals “Dzvin”, “Ring A”, “Polutona”, “Rechport”, “Topos”, “Articulation”, “Formaslov”, “Colon”, “Literature Factory”, “Literary Chernihiv”, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals “Literary Center” and “Soloneba”, in the “Ukrainian literary newspaper”, Ice Floe Press.











No Funeral: The True Story of Richard Petrowski

by Steve Schecter


Aside from influence, Richard left almost nothing behind. He never married, he had no family; his few belongings were abandoned, stolen, or confiscated. I have no photos of Richard, or phone numbers of surviving friends–I don’t even know their last names. Consequently, his story must be told solely from memory. And every word of it is true.

I met Richard Petrowski when I was nineteen, shortly after moving to Austin, Texas, and knew him until I was twenty-six, when he passed. Though I learned a great deal from Richard, what little I know about his life outside of our friendship can be summarized quickly: Richard was born in Abilene, Texas, in 1962. He played drums in a rock ‘n’ roll band during high school and graduated with the class of ’81. He then worked in the West Texas oil fields for nearly a decade before serving a year in prison for a drug charge. During his oil field days and before prison, he owned a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a Corvette Stingray. After prison, he moved to Austin where he successfully kicked a heroin habit, then methadone, spent nine years on parole living in a one room apartment and eventually kicked that too. Then Richard again owned a Corvette Stingray, and a travel trailer that he lived in while saving for a plot of land in the Texas Hill Country, where he planned to build a house. But in 2003, after living with Hepatitis C for many years, Richard died from cirrhosis of the liver. He was forty-one years old.

That’s Richard Petrowski’s life on paper. He was exactly the type of person who was underestimated, overlooked, and taken advantage of, especially by people of low character. Because most people missed it–who he really was, an image of moral integrity. Richard once said to me, “Steve, you’re young and you may make a million dollars in your life,” he always waxed positive. “But I’m not gonna make a million dollars in my life. The only thing I have is my word. Without my word I ain’t worth shit.”  It reminded me of the Bob Dylan lyric “if you live outside the law you must be honest,” but sounded even more poetic somehow; one of many things Richard said to me that still rings true.

The Deville

In 1996 Austin, Texas, offered the perfect backdrop for unambitious dreams. After arriving with little more than a guitar and a backpack I took to open mics and temp jobs, like a then typical Austinite, and moved into The Deville apartments at 2020 S. Congress Ave, apartment 1313. (No kidding, it’s an address I’ll never forget.) Congress Avenue runs from the State Capital downtown for ten blocks, before crossing the bridge famous for its bat population and becoming South Congress, a main artery that continues dead south all the way out of town. My one room efficiency twenty blocks south of the bridge was four hundred dollars a month including utilities, plus an extra thirty dollars a month from May through September when they turned on the central A/C. The Deville was originally a motel, you could tell by looking at it; a two-story building connected by cast-iron walkways to a three-story building behind it, with a parking lot and swimming pool in the middle. Half the apartments faced inwards, towards the pool, the other half faced out, with narrow hallways running down the middle of each building. My apartment was on the third floor facing in, providing a clear view of the Seven-Eleven across the street and the swimming pool below. I never swam in the pool, I didn’t even own any swim trunks, but that was where I first saw Richard Petrowski. He was often down there lounging.

Richard was over six feet tall with a deep tan, a big belly, and a faded tattoo of a Harley-Davidson eagle across his chest. He had brown hair kept short in the front and long in the back–halfway down his back, the ultimate mullet–with a thin mustache and thick rimmed glasses over silver-gray eyes. Richard always wore shorts and flip-flops, and hardly ever wore a shirt. During the almost eight years I knew him, I only saw him in a shirt a handful of times and long pants even less. There were a lot of interesting characters at The Deville, but Richard stood out. He was a fixture.   

The Deville had a stairwell running up the side of the building that briefly dropped you into the hallway of each floor before entering the next flight of stairs, and every time I passed the second floor it reeked of weed–the thick stench of Texas dirt weed emanating from finger-sized doobies­­. It was obviously coming from the first apartment, the only door you passed before reentering the stairwell, and was so constant that I even contemplated knocking and inviting myself in–a thought only my nineteen-year-old self would entertain. Then one day I walked by just as the longhaired shirtless man from the pool was standing in the doorway seeing someone out. I gave him a quick wave and he returned the gesture, and this went on for a few weeks, a nod in the hallway, the simple acknowledgement between neighbors.

Eventually I mustered up the courage to introduce myself followed by the pertinent inquiry, about weed, imposing on him right in the hallway of The Deville. My appearance back then was as noticeable as Richard’s, though probably more naïve. (I was skinny as a rail with a greasy pompadour and always wore torn jeans, black boots, and white t-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, or white undershirts often referred to as a ‘wife-beaters,’ which I’m campaigning to rebrand as ‘wife-lovers’ since their common name is gross and inaccurate, but I’ll use it here for descriptive clarity.) So I assume Richard didn’t take me for a cop but he was cautious nonetheless, and I later learned his response that day was somewhat uncharacteristic. Only slightly taken aback, he half-smiled and said he might be able to find a joint. He didn’t invite me to his apartment, where I would later spend hours on end, but instead asked which apartment I was in and said he’d drop by shortly. Within a few minutes Richard was knocking at my door with a small baggy and some rolling papers.

My apartment had little furnishings. No television, two folding chairs facing a stereo in the middle of the room, a guitar against the wall, and miscellaneous music equipment strewn about. Next to the stereo was a small stack of records with a recently purchased Buddy Holly at the front, a double LP with a pink gatefold cover called Legend – from the Original Master Tapes. And it was that record that first endeared me to Richard Petrowski.

“You like Buddy Holly?” he asked, surprised and intrigued.

“Yeah man, Buddy Holly’s a genius! If he’d lived there’s no telling, he could have been more influential than the Beatles!” It may sound like bullshit, but it’s a reply I’d still give today, and I could tell by Richard’s expression it was the right answer. That was the first time I saw Richard’s broad, completely unselfconscious smile that engulfed the lower half of his face and showed him to be missing most of his front teeth.

“He’s from Lubbock, you know?” I did. “I’m from Abilene! Up there in the panhandle,” he added with pride. Richard spoke with that lilting West Texas accent. It isn’t a drawl, it’s more eloquent, like a perpetual politeness with a heightened awareness of vowels. “Do you mind if we listen to that?”

Of course not, so we passed a joint while listening to Buddy Holly. When we weren’t talking Richard sang along quietly, not in a disruptive way, more out of pure pleasure as if it was impossible not to. He knew every song, which didn’t seem to fit his appearance, but I was just beginning to understand Texas. And Richard was a Texan through and through.

“Man, I seen you around, but I thought all this was just a look,” he mused, gesturing to my hair. “I didn’t think you were into the music, or that anybody your age listened to Buddy Holly!”

“Yeah, I love rockabilly, ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll,” another reply that I’d still give today, “old country, blues … I grew up more with punk-rock stuff, you know, but then followed it back,” it prattles on and concludes with something like, “I mean, I dig all kinds of music.”

“Rockabilly. That’s what you are, isn’t it?” He said it kind of rhetorically, as if reintroducing himself to a forgotten term. “Yeah, you look like a rockabilly, don’t ya?”

Richard thumbed through my records approvingly, then asked me a little bit about my guitar playing, and if I’d ever heard of Pat Travers. I had not. This was only the first time Richard told me about the inimitable Pat Travers, hands down his favorite musician, stating with no uncertainty I should check him out immediately, especially since I was a guitar player. In later conversations I learned that Pat Travers hailed from Canada, oddly enough, but played in Austin once a year at The Steamboat downtown on 6th Street, and that every year Richard went to see him–the only time Richard ever went down to 6th Street.

After listening to the entire Buddy Holly double album, Richard left me what was left in his small baggie along with some rolling papers and his phone number.

“Give me a call sometime. I can usually find a bag for a friend.” In truth Richard sold pot, it was his sole source of income, but like everything else he played it close to the vest.

It wasn’t long before I made the call, and from then on we met in his apartment. The Deville apartments were all exactly alike, though Richard’s was the mirror image of mine being on the opposite side of the hall; a narrow kitchen on one side of the door, living room on the other, leading out to a motel style balcony with a small bedroom nook and bathroom around the corner. Richard’s apartment was cozy and well-furnished compared to mine; he had clearly lived there for some time. The living room was filled with a small couch and coffee table surrounded by bookshelves, houseplants, and neatly stacked rows of books and magazines; the balcony was overrun with potted and hanging plants. Richard usually dwelled in the bedroom nook, reclining on the bed watching a small TV at the foot of it. I would cop a squat on the floor across from him, leaning against the wall next to the bathroom door. Our relationship grew organically from conversations that began on the floor of his apartment and continued for years after we both left The Deville.

Spacecrafts & Chicken-fried Steaks

We talked at length about everything from the serious to the abstract, with no inhibitions or awkward silences–as unselfconscious as Richard’s smile. Our visits lasted indefinitely, sometimes going on so long that we reconvened for breakfast up the street at the Richard Jones Barbeque, where a chicken-fried steak and eggs with coffee was under six bucks.

One of Richard’s favorites topics was UFOs and extraterrestrials. Richard believed aliens had a long history on Earth and was versed in alleged encounters from the famous Roswell incident to passages in the bible, and everything in between. His favorite show was The X-Files. I hadn’t seen The X-Files–no television–but Richard swore that some of the episodes were based on real occurrences and suspected that part of the show’s intent was to familiarize people with events that would one day be made public, in essence softening the blow. I have always been game for speculation, the wilder the better, which may be why Richard enjoyed my company–I never dismissed his opinions or told him he was crazy. Some of his most compelling ideas involved the moon landing, what really did or didn’t happen, and why we hadn’t yet returned–at least not to the public’s knowledge. In Richard’s defense, none of his theories have been disproven in the twenty years since he passed, and some have been supported.

“Rockets?!” Richard would rant. “Shit, you think rockets are any way to travel through space. You think launching an object straight up, fightin’ the Earth’s gravity, with a fossil fuel engine, is any way to reach other planets? Hell no!” He would answer his own questions. “For one, you burn up too much energy just leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. Hell, rockets for space travel, that’s just a farce!”

A quarter century later, in July of 2021, Virgin Galactic launched a craft resembling more of an airplane than a rocket. The spaceplane was launched off the back of a carrier plane, or mothership, after being piggybacked up to 50,000 ft–not straight up fighting the Earth’s gravity–then conducted a sub-orbital space flight before gliding safely back to Earth on its own momentum. Witnessing the event, I couldn’t help being reminded of Richard’s rocket rant. I wish he had been here to see it and wish I could have shared his reaction.

But it wasn’t all spacecrafts and conspiracy theories. After I got to know him, Richard told me about his former addiction to heroin, and how through treatment he had since become hooked on methadone, which was even harder to quit but at least a habit he could afford. “Hell, the only reason I go to the methadone clinic is heroin cost me two or three-hundred bucks a week just to maintain. Believe it, that shit’ll take everything you got.” This all caught me by surprise. Richard was nothing like the junkies I’d known, or the recovering addicts who feel the need to immediately and constantly share their story. His was purely a cautionary tale told by a humble narrator.

Richard never talked about his time in prison, only that it happened and what put him there. He was pulled over somewhere in West Texas holding enough pot to be charged with a felony and sentenced to ten years in prison; his Corvette was impounded. After serving a year in the notorious Huntsville State Penitentiary his sentence was commuted to parole, which he was still serving. Richard was lucky (his words) to have only been in Huntsville a year and said any longer may as well be a life sentence; the effects are too devasting and permanent. But life on parole made everything touch and go. Any violation could mean serving the remainder of his sentence in prison, and anything he owned could be confiscated. Consequently, Richard kept his savings and valuables in a safety deposit box downtown. No bank account, nothing on paper. Doing just enough business to get by with those who he completely trusted. Richard’s line of work hadn’t changed but his operation had adapted.

When I had my own legal troubles and faced a mere thirty days in the Travis County Jail, Richard provided support and perspective. “Hell, thirty days is nothing. Keep your head down and you’ll be fine.” He knew the game, “you play you pay.” Later, when facing two years of probation, he again offered vital counsel. “They want you to fuck up, so they can have you on paper the rest of your life. So don’t make it easy for ‘em.” ‘On paper’ was Richard’s term for being in the system, on parole or probation.

Having experienced it all, Richard also brought a necessary dismissiveness and humor to legal predicaments. Like when I was subjected to regular drug testing as a clause of probation–the humiliating act of peeing in a cup under the watchful eye of a government employee. “Man, that guy ain’t nothin’ but a peter-gazer!” Richard laughed. “Can you imagine havin’ that job? I tell ya, he’s gotta be one miserable son of a bitch!” But in the end, his advice was always sound, straightforward, and simple, “Play it smart, get it behind you, and keep ‘em out of your life forever. Then get back to playing your music.”

Richard had become a fan of my band, an outfit that gigged regularly in Austin through the late nineties. He first saw us playing just up the street from The Deville, at an early show he could walk to. Labeled Texas Rockabilly, mainly due to our location and appearance, the band was greasy and sleezy, and right up Richard’s alley. He nodded approvingly flashing his wide grin throughout our set. After that, Richard came to see us any time we played in South Austin at a reasonable hour. He wouldn’t go downtown, where most of our gigs were, but would always brag about us when introducing me to his friends.

“This is Steve, he plays in a rockabilly band!” Richard seemed to love saying that forgotten term as much as he loved plugging us. “You gotta go check ‘em out! When are you guys playing next, Steve?”

Richard’s apartment could be a scene, due to a combination of his generosity and the friends he kept. There was often someone coming or going or staying too long. One of the mainstays was a pleasant character named Mikey who Richard had known since his oil field days. (Pronounced ole-field, with Richard’s accent.) Mikey was a small guy with a grey beard and ponytail who always wore a headband and spoke with a thick east-Texas accent–a nasally drawl emphasized by hard stops, almost a barking sound. He had that former meth-head-hippie look about him, but Mikey was alright, and one of Richard’s only friends who stayed around throughout. Besides me. Plus a fellow named Jim who had been Richard and Mikey’s “Oil field daddy,” a term I haven’t heard before or since but gathered it was an endearment for the boss of the rig, their de facto caretaker. Jim was there for Richard when he was released from prison, a standup guy by Richard’s account– which makes it so­–and Mikey was too. That’s what it took to maintain Richard’s friendship.

He was never one for a handout, but always one for a helping hand. When Richard’s friend Britt who he’d known in Huntsville was released from prison, he found his way to Austin where he was living on the street and occasionally staying at the nearby Salvation Army. (The Salvy, as Richard and his friends called it, another term I haven’t heard before or since.) After seeing Britt on the street one day, Richard did everything he could to help him get back on his feet and for two months Britt’s bedroll took up a corner of Richard’s efficiency apartment. Britt was a likeable guy who had paid too dearly for a victimless crime, his deep-set brown eyes revealed both a kind soul and a tremendous amount of pain. But Britt’s time in Huntsville was well over a year, and by Richard’s own admission possibly too long to endure. When he wasn’t floundering, he was spiraling. Sadly, Britt eventually wore out his welcome at Richard’s, couldn’t stay sober enough to stay at the Salvy, and ended up back on the street.

“He knows the damn rules! The Salvy won’t let you in if you’re fucked up. He shows up in the evening and they can tell just lookin’ at him,” Richard’s disappointment was palpable during our last conversation about Britt. “He stopped by the other night and had the balls to ask me for money. Gave me those sad eyes and his whole bit about just needin’ twenty-five bucks to rent a room and get cleaned up. So, hell, I gave it to him.” He could tell that part surprised me, and Richard’s venting then shifted to the tone he used when imparting wisdom. “Whenever somebody like that asks me to borrow money, long as it’s a small amount, I just give it to ‘em. I know they won’t pay me back, and that gives me a perfectly good reason to never see ‘em again. Hell, it’s a bargain. Twenty-five bucks to get him out of my life for good.” Even though Richard cared deeply for him, Britt had proven to not be a standup guy.

Life After Paper

It never occurred to me that Richard had been biding his time, deliberately stagnant, until I pulled up to The Deville one day and saw a pristine, white Corvette parked in the space just below his balcony.

“Did you see my new ride?” he asked with a grin that simultaneously showed off his new teeth–dentures, as white as the Corvette. “It’s an ’82 Stingray, just like the one I lost. Come on, let’s go for a ride.” As the V-8 rumbled through the neighborhood Richard pointed out all the minor differences between this Vette and his old one, while still managing to wave and flash a smile at everyone we passed. Richard’s spirits were soaring, it was more than just the new car: He was finally off parole. Gone were his fears of losing everything to the whims of bureaucracy, a new chapter was beginning beyond the confines of paper. A cause for celebration commemorated by the Corvette and new teeth, both paid for with cash from his safety deposit box.

Shortly after, Richard bought a travel trailer and left The Deville, his home for the last nine years, renting a nearby spot off Radam Lane where a handful of trailer spaces lined a gravel alley behind a row of duplexes. The trailer was ten-by-twenty-feet, even smaller than his apartment, divided into two parts; through the front door a tiny kitchenette opened into a room with a dining nook against one wall and small couch against the other, the living room, then up two steps a narrow doorway led to the equally sized bedroom and bathroom. Though it seemed barely enough room for a guy Richard’s size to turn around in, it was his castle which he proudly owned. Richard immediately started eyeing land in the hill country outside of Austin where he planned to move his trailer and eventually build a house. A dream that never came to fruition.

With the new neighborhood came new neighbors, which were more of a step over than a step up from The Deville. The only one I remember was a character named Vinnie from the trailer next door, a short-haired, clean cut looking guy who always wore a baseball hat. Richard often referred to him as “that fuckin’ crackhead,” but was neighborly towards him nonetheless, and later, Vinnie would be there for Richard as a good neighbor should be. Like Britt, Vinnie had the eyes of a decent person, buried underneath the trials of addiction.

Furnishing his new digs, Richard bought a desktop computer with a printer that permanently filled the dining nook. Internet access brought Richard’s UFO research to new heights; on numerous visits I was met with unparalleled excitement accompanied by printouts of recent discoveries. The internet also put Richard in touch with his former high school rock ‘n’ roll band and got him invited to his twenty-year class reunion taking place in Abilene the following spring.

One of my favorite memories of Richard comes from stopping by to find him seated behind a newly purchased vintage Pearl drum set taking up the entire front room of his trailer and completely blocking the path to the bedroom. Not only was he planning to attend his class reunion, but his old band had been booked as the entertainment. Determined not to be the rustiest of the group, he was practicing drums for the first time in twenty years. Richard was beaming. The neighbors were complaining. He was especially proud of the twenty-six-inch ride cymbal, explaining to me that a cymbal that large was both hard to come by and integral to his style. Richard had often talked about his days in a rock ‘n’ roll band, he couldn’t have been happier that they were getting back together, to play for his old peers no less.

Just when I thought Richard couldn’t surprise me any further, he introduced me to his live-in girlfriend, and even dabbled with a straight job.

The girlfriend was a petite blonde named Crystal who dressed neatly and always wore her hair in a tight ponytail, appearing to be nothing like the hardcore-white-trash girls that used to gravitate to Richard’s apartment. With Crystal in tow, Richard started frequenting the gambling boats in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Blackjack was one of his favorite pastimes, Richard was as close to a card counter as anyone I’ve ever known, and Crystal liked to ride along and play the slots. They were together for close to a year and during that time Crystal accompanied Richard to his class reunion where his old band was a hit and showing up in his Corvette with Crystal on his arm felt like nothing short of a coup–directly contradicting any small-town gossip about his time in prison with his larger-than-life presence. Then just as quick as she showed up, Crystal was gone.

“Trust me, I’m better off” Richard concluded, and we never spoke of her again.

Richard’s straight job was in a small office, coincidently right next door to a place that rented music equipment where I worked at the time. Even more coincidently, it was just a few blocks north of The Deville right on South Congress Avenue–that street representing the center of South Austin still playing a central role in both of our lives. I never figured out exactly what Richard did in the office next door, and admittedly the term ‘straight’ may be an overstatement, but for a few months he would poke his head through the backdoor of the rental shop brightening my day with small talk and the novelty of seeing him in a button up shirt and long pants.

Though neither the job nor relationship lasted, both were notable examples of Richard’s dynamic character and broad potential during the brief time when the world was his oyster.

Perhaps the most profound side of Richard Petrowski was that which I witnessed the least; the Richard Petrowski I read about in the newspaper, in an article about a long-running support group for recovering drug addicts. Pictured just below the headline encircled by the other members, Richard was the focus of the article with his characteristic wisdoms and candor quoted throughout. He talked about originally joining the group as a requisite of parole, and why he still attended even though he was no longer required to or involved in treatment. He talked about the importance of being there as a tactile example, and the support he felt fortunate to now be able provide others. He even touched on the role spirituality–what sounded like a loose form of Buddhism–had played in overcoming his addiction to heroin, and the ensuing battle with methadone. The article painted Richard as the natural leader and kind soul that he truly was.

No Funeral

Unfortunately, Richard’s uplift period didn’t last long. He had only been off parole for three years when he fell seriously ill. How long he was living with Hepatitis C, and for how long he knew about it, are among the things I’ll never know about Richard Petrowski. He contracted the virus through needle use, which means he carried it for at least a decade before it noticeably affected him. By the time he said anything it had developed into cirrhosis of the liver, his organs were shutting down. I didn’t know anything about Hepatitis C then, I associated cirrhosis with alcoholism and Richard didn’t even drink. Hep C has since become largely treatable, even affordably so, especially when it’s caught early. But at that time interferon was the only successful treatment, and whether it was too expensive or simply too late is another thing I will never know–my guess is the latter. Richard was given temporary relief through pain medications and the periodic draining of fluids. He needed a liver transplant, but his history of intravenous drug use made him ineligible for the donor list.

Richard went downhill quickly. The consistent sparkle in his grey eyes never returned, replaced by the fog of illness. He started retaining fluids to the point that trips to the doctor’s office or emergency room became weekly occurrences. That’s where Vinnie stepped up. No longer able to get in and out of it, much less sit for long drives, Richard had sold his Corvette putting the money towards his ongoing medical bills.

During his final months it became more and more difficult to visit him, but in his typical style Richard still tried to wax positive even when he was visibly suffering. My most recent band had split up and I had just begun performing and touring as a solo act–a project I’ve stuck with to this day–with jaunts taking me as far as the upper Midwest and eastern seaboard. Richard loved the open road but had never traveled beyond Texas and Louisiana. He always prodded me about my recent tours and mused about joining me. “Man, I’d love to go on the road like that. You gotta take me with you next time… Maybe next time you head over to New Orleans you can drop me off at the gamblin’ boats in Lake Charles and pick me up on your way back.” And I always told him I would. That we would do all of that, next time. Even though we both knew it wasn’t feasible.

Knowing what was ahead, Richard composed a will and confided in me, Mikey, and a few others about a “chunk of change” he was leaving behind to be divvied up between his closest friends. More importantly, Richard insisted on leaving me with his vintage Pearl drum set. I didn’t play drums, and Richard knew this, but he wanted to see they were put to good use and said I was the one he trusted to do so. I was his musician friend. Nothing good ever came of the will, but he did leave me with his drum set, though earlier than originally planned. He called one afternoon sounding defeated, “Steve, you gotta come pick up these drums. I can’t play ‘em anymore. I just keep trippin’ over ‘em.” I should have known he was giving up, usually just looking at his drums was a source of pleasure. “Nah, they’re just in my way now. Besides, I’m leavin’ ‘em to you anyway.” I reluctantly went by that evening, and that was the last time I saw Richard.

He didn’t greet me at the door, just hollered to come in and propped himself up on the edge of his bed. He was no longer able to move around easily, and no longer went to the trouble of putting in his teeth. Richard’s smile from my earliest memories was the last one I saw. After I loaded up the drums we talked for a while, but he kept the conversation light, familiar. “Jon Bonham, Keith Moon. They were like the Gene Krupas of my generation.” Our final conversation, like our first, was about music. I promised I would take care of his drums, and even said that I’d bring them back once he was feeling better. I couldn’t accept what was happening. I still needed my friend to live.

Two days later I got the call from Vinnie at my work, Richard must have told him I worked at the music rental place on S. Congress. “Richard died last night,” his voice was breaking up over the phone. “I drove him up to the hospital, but they didn’t do anything for him. They just left him sittin’ there for hours, finally I brought him back. But when I checked on him this morning he was layin’ beside the bed, and I knew…”

I struggled to give Vinnie a reply and barely made it out the backdoor–the same door Richard used to poke his head through–before losing it completely. As I’ve learned since, even when you know what’s coming, death is impossible to be prepared for. That evening I spoke to Vinnie again, one last time. He told me how Richard had been draining his fluids at home by puncturing a hole in his naval with a safety pin, leaving his sheets and bed an awful mess. It still pains me to know that Richard’s final days were spent suffering and alone.

Richard Petrowski’s body was cremated. That responsibility fell to Jim, his oil field daddy. I have no knowledge of what happened to Richard’s remains. There was no funeral. No service of any kind. It was as if according to some unknown standard Richard’s life wasn’t worth formally commemorating. Mikey, Vinnie, and a few others gathered in a nearby park and said a few words the day after Richard died, but no one called me. I only heard about it when Mikey called out of the blue a couple weeks later.

I couldn’t have cared less about Richard’s “chunk of change” at that point, but Mikey, among those Richard promised would be included, wanted to fill me in on the bitter proceedings. Unfortunately, Richard’s will had turned out to be no more than a file on his computer. Nothing printed, nothing signed. Even worse, the file appeared to have been recently edited to include Vinnie’s name at the bottom, which Mikey and others suspected was done by Vinnie himself the morning he discovered Richard’s body. So maybe Richard was right about “that fuckin’ crackhead” after all. Or maybe after so many rides to the hospital Richard changed his tune about Vinnie and added his name hastily at the end. Either scenario is conceivable. By default, Jim was acting as executor of the estate, but by Mikey’s account wasn’t honoring Richard’s wishes. When I told Mikey I didn’t want to be involved, he informed me that I already was.

“Well, I told Jim, Steve already took the drums. So, why can’t I get my share? Ya know, what’s comin’ to me?” Mikey’s accent was more grating than usual with an animosity that blindsided me.

I told Mikey I only took the drums because Richard asked me to, but he was missing the point. To Mikey it was something of monetary value, but to me Richard’s drums were now something much greater–his prize possession left under my care with specific instructions.

I lugged Richard’s drums around with me for the next ten years, through several moves, always stored safely. Eventually they were given to worthy musicians I knew would put them to good use, including the ideal heir for his twenty-six-inch ride cymbal. I did exactly what Richard asked of me, what was promised. I still have his canvas stick bag with two pairs of drumsticks and his sweat-stained wristbands inside. It lives permanently in the corner of my music room. And I incorporated part of his kick pedal into a foot-percussion device that I still use for shows and touring. So in a way, Richard finally got to come with me on the road, to Louisiana, and everywhere else I’ve been.

Legends

Richard was fifteen years my senior, which means I am now unfathomably a few years older than he ever lived to be. I’ve since lost more friends than I care to count, perhaps due to running with musicians–a fragile group with a high mortality rate. When I started writing Richard’s story, I was in the process of losing another close friend to illness, who also happened to be a drummer. Again, I knew what was coming and again I found myself completely unprepared, clinging to hope, praying for a miracle. So maybe writing about Richard was a transference of sorts. But I don’t think that’s it. Richard has always stayed with me, he regularly visits my dreams, always smiling, sometimes giving advice. At times I become aware it’s a dream and can enjoy getting to spend a little more time with him. Other times the dreams are mistaken for reality, and I awaken with a renewed sorrow following the realization that he’s gone. Dreams are strange that way–dead friends are strange too.

I sometimes wonder if the reason Richard’s death affected me so profoundly, and his presence stayed with me for so long, is because it was the first time I lost a close friend. But I don’t think that’s it either, at least not all of it. Richard was truly an exceptional person, an unassuming role model who I’m still learning from. Richard led by example, proving honesty is a virtue regardless of circumstance, and that with enough will, any hardship can be overcome. And his death revealed how little we actually control, and how unjust our final outcome might be. Richard endured so much, undeterred, only to face greater suffering and ultimately be struck down by mistakes he seemingly already paid for. And through it all, he somehow stayed positive. Richard could have been bitter; he could have been cynical or remained stagnant. But he never succumbed to those burdens, instead he accepted his mistakes and kept his sights fixed on the future. Richard demonstrated strength and perseverance right up until he no longer could.

I believe it’s for all these reasons that Richard Petrowski has stayed with me, and for all these reasons that I continue to honor his person and his memory. I honor him by remaining unselfconscious and independent-minded through this ever-changing world. I honor him by not wearing a shirt outside, at least from May through September. I honor him by finally watching the X-Files–and wanting to believe. I honor him by ignoring authority wherever possible. I honor him by steering clear of trouble. I honor him by trying like hell to wax positive, something I struggle with. And I honor him by focusing on my music.

Most of all, I honor him by never forgetting the man he was, or the lessons he taught me. I regularly pass by all the old haunts. The Deville has been remodeled as condos and rebranded as ‘The 2020.’ The Richard Jones BBQ is now the site of a Wells Fargo. The trailer spaces in the alley off Radam are gone but the duplexes next door are still there, more dilapidated than ever, triumphantly defying their surroundings as if saying, ‘not everywhere can be gentrified,’ at least not yet. When I cruise through the old neighborhood and see the people living there now, walking dogs, and pushing strollers, I wonder if they have any idea just how different it was not so long ago. How seedy it was, and how easy our lives seemed then. Can they even imagine a typical day at The Deville apartments? Or that a character like Richard Petrowski once ruled the roost?

Though much has changed, anytime I want to revisit those days I can count on Buddy Holly, specifically Legend – From the Original Master Tapes, a double LP I picked up while living at The Deville. The pink gatefold cover takes me right back to that small apartment with the view of the seven-eleven across the street. And the music brings me right back to that first conversation with Richard Petrowski. Within a moment I can hear the lilt of Richard’s voice singing along quietly, then hear the cadence of his laughter, and feel the warmth of his smile. As missing friends has become a part of everyday life, so has enjoying their memory, and savoring their presence whenever I stumble upon it. Along with always wondering why their time was cut short… Yeah man, Buddy Holly’s a genius. He’s from Lubbock you know.

BIO

Steve Schecter is a musician, songwriter, and writer, living in Austin, TX. Born in the rural community of Friend, Oregon, Schecter began his musical career as a teenager in the Portland area, before moving to Austin in 1996. Performing under the name Ghostwriter since 2002, he has published over a hundred songs and released ten albums on his own independent label, End of the West Records. Steve Schecter’s first book, “No One at the Circus: The Story of Ghostwriter through Place and Song,” was published in 2022 by Gob Pile Press. For information on writing, releases, and upcoming shows, go to endofthewest.com.


Website:
http://endofthewest.com

Socials:
http://www.facebook.com/ghostwriter/
http://www.instagram.com/ghostwriter_tx/

Mercy
gave the prodigal son
a second chance.

Love
gave him a feast.
—unknown

resonant

by amy g dahla


     taciturn| Her father didn’t know she was coming. Well, perhaps he did. But not because she’d told him—she hadn’t told anyone. She didn’t want to count the years since she’d last seen her dad, but she’d had no contact with him since she was a child. Back then he had an uncanny way of knowing things. And it always seemed to be greater than her skill in hiding them. So, after all these years, she thought that, somehow, he might sense that she was near.

she swallowed
the bitter taste
what she had done
  settled
caustic
in her stomach

     echoes| For the moment, her memory spiraled backward three decades. When she was a child, she and her father were inseparable. The pair were architects, building forts and playhouses out of appliance boxes in the backyard. On other days they were explorers, forging new adventure trails in the wilderness. The two built a special world to explore. Together.

     As she grew, her relationship with her dad flourished. He enjoyed hiking and running, and she joined him on these forays from infancy in what she would later call her “running buggy.” The stroller, designed with all-terrain tires and extra ground clearance, allowed them to log many a mile through neighborhoods and along park roads and wilderness trails where her dad was a park ranger. As she grew, they learned to rollerblade together, expanding their exploration. When her baby sister was born, the three of them continued the tradition of togetherness. He would run, she would rollerblade, and her new sister assumed the seat of honor in the running buggy.

     Later came snorkeling— first in a bathtub, and later in the sparkling Caribbean. Her baby sister was snorkeling by the age of four. At home, the three constructed and painted plywood Disney characters for Christmas decorations—enough to fill the entire front yard. It became a tradition for the neighborhood kids to come and help paint each year’s new addition.

     And then there were the other moments that seemed at the time not so terribly important. Peanut butter on a shared banana, one dollop at a time. Two sisters and a dad rolling down the hill in the front yard, lawn clippings and laughter.

     She smiled—only a bit— as she recalled how she and her father spent more days chatting than she could ever hope to count. Sometimes about silly things, and other times she was in tears over a problem with friends at school. Her father was a storyteller. He’d spin a tale about a young rabbit or small bear facing a similar situation. Then they’d talk about how the outcome of a story can change, depending on how the character chose to respond. Her dad never gave her an exact answer, but through the stories and discussions, things had a way of working out.

     Now, she was a parent and holy cow! It was not as easy as she had hoped. When she was a little girl, her father had once given her the advice that for every word she spoke, she would be wise to listen to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. As she reflected, she hoped she had inherited his knack for listening.

listening
in this moment
more than any previous moment
the single word
listen
echoed in her mind
 a shout into a deep canyon
and the resounding voice
was her own

     silence| She coasted the car to a stop beneath the shade of a grand old oak tree, not yet ready to open the door. With the ignition off and the windows closed, she became acutely aware of the silence around her. At this moment there was no sound whatsoever. The term deafening silence suddenly took on a specific meaning, as the resonance of her own voice slowly faded in her mind. She gasped as she realized she had been holding her breath—a moment too long! She abruptly engaged the ignition and lowered a window. The car was immediately filled with fresh air and the sounds of life outside the vehicle.

silence settles
shadows linger
echoes fade
destiny awaits

     Perhaps it was her silence for so many years that haunted her. Most people knew her father as a bit quieter than most, especially in large gatherings. Many who knew him well had determined that his life and experience on various islands around the world had simply instilled a laid-back attitude. Maybe that was part of it, but he was also content to sit back and soak in his surroundings. And of course, listen.

     resounding| She directed her attention outside the car. Her father had moved here only months before. The elements of nature were what she would have expected. Here in late summer, in a place far removed from honking horns and exhaust fumes, she noticed that the melancholy drone of cicadas was the first sound to shatter her reverie.  Drifting in through the car window the hum was hypnotic, as she once again drifted through the mist of memory. Some of her favorite times, she now realized, involved listening.

     The sounds of nature illumed the shadows of memories in the long-darkened recesses of her mind. There were tranquil afternoons of swinging in a backyard hammock with her dad by the river, listening to the twilight chorus of frogs and crickets. He’d explained that the nocturnal symphony could only be brought forth by a composer powerful enough to create the entire universe.

     Rewinding her memory next brought back evenings of lying under the stars on a Caribbean island, locating constellations. In this remote location, a dad and two daughters could scan the dark skies and imagineer their own personal, mystical constellations. She’d reveled in these creative tales, spun wildly together, as the constellations slowly swirled around the North Star.

the night sky
held its own music
one simply
had to
listen

     And how many evenings had they swum at sunset, watching the sun porpoise into the Caribbean Sea? If you didn’t blink, you might see the elusive green flash, and hear the haunting resonance of the momentary exodus sonata.

     She and her father shared many sounds through the years.

     She realized that her father often spoke in poetic verse. Here amidst the time- machine-whirr of nature sounds in her car, this was the first time that she noticed her thoughts about her father following that same, sing-song pattern.

     strain| One thing she would never comprehend is what kind of elixir her father held within his soul that drove him to pick up an acoustic guitar and tease from six strings and an imperfect voice the songs of his soul. The first song he wrote was about her. Well, in truth the song was about losing his father and gaining his first daughter. But the final chorus was about finding comfort with a new child.  

a new life to love
in place
of one recently lost
that was definitely
about her

      Then there were her favorite songs over the years, and he added many of those compositions to his big songbook with the well-worn pages. How many evenings had she fallen asleep to those refrains, wafting down the hallway outside her bedroom? Which reminded her…

     She picked up an envelope from the car seat beside her. Her name was printed on the outside in her father’s careful hand. He must’ve kept the contents for decades before mailing them to her. In truth, the receipt of this letter helped inform her decision to make today’s visit. She carefully pulled out the yellowed paper inside. Inscribed thereon, by her twelve-year-old fingers, were her own words about her father. “The Soloist. Being a seventh grader, I come across many problems. Dad is always there.”

     She could not help but glance into the rear-view mirror, as seventh grade seemed an entire lifetime behind her now. The road behind the car was empty. But what she saw was a mirage-view of her own life path. Grown, now. Married. A family of her own.

     She glanced back down to notice a slight tremble in her fingers, grasping the page she’d shared with her classmates so long ago. The final words read, “Years from now, I’ll still remember how he had all the answers to my troubles, helped me play the guitar, and stretched my imagination as far as it would go.  So, when

 i hear that beautiful guitar
strummed gently
with my dad’s soft
 encouraging voice
i smile
i know he’s there
to love me
as long as i live.”

      reverberate| She reached up and tilted the mirror a bit to find herself staring into her father’s eyes! She spun around to see the seats empty behind her.

     It took her a moment to recover from the fright of the apparition. She caught her breath and angled the mirror to reflect her own face, more fully. The eyes she had glimpsed were her own, after all. But for the first time, she noticed that her eyes could easily have been his.  In a way— much more real than she wanted to admit— her eyes were her father’s.

     She took a moment to allow her heartbeat to return to normal. In the rapid-breath moments of recovery, her thoughts turned toward fate and the inevitable. There are many things over which we have no alternative. But there is also Choice and Consequences that we live with. Sometimes for too long. That the eye in the mirror could have been her father’s: that was fate. That she was here today to speak to her father for the first time in decades was a choice. But not without consequence.

     The recovery from her disconcerting glance into the mirror provided her with the impetus to notice the faded paper, still in her hands. She carefully folded and placed her seventh-grade self on the seat beside her.

hand-scribed words
bearing witness to memories
long repressed

she opened the car door
and stepped out
into her father’s world

     translation| She found herself cloaked in dappled sunlight, filtering through the leaves above. Lofty branches swayed in the dog-days breeze that beckoned the changing of the season. She remembered lessons of nature from her youth, and how her father explained to her that a dry summer can bring about an early,  faux autumn when the lack of moisture in the ground can cause trees to turn color and drop their leaves early.

     Leaning back, she peered upward, squinting. She soaked in the blue sky shining through the playful kaleidoscope of leaves. Raising her hand for shadow, she absorbed the foliage glowing in flaming color as the sun shone through. She shifted her stance and heard a familiar crunch. She dropped her gaze to see beneath her feet the beginning of what would be nature’s winter carpet.

fallen leaves
 faux autumn
august 31
anniversary of her birth
a dry summer
here
her father’s new place

     The calico collection of leaves and the haunting of seeing her father’s eyes in her own reminded her that her father was partially colorblind. But he always told her that once someone pointed something out as a certain color, in his mind he could then see the color. It had been many—too many—years since she helped him see a tree with brilliant yellow, flaming orange, or deep red autumn foliage.

     She could never quite understand how his mental image could be so transformed, vicariously, through her own eyes (the picture in his mind’s eye being inexplicably not colorblind).

     She closed her eyes and heard echoes of her own youthful voice painting the world anew for her father. She smiled as she recalled the sparkle of wonderment in his eyes. She knew that her words had transformed his world.

words have power
in the yin and the yang
of life’s precarious
balance

yet silence
has an equal
perhaps greater
power

     hearing| Her father’s new environs were both familiar and foreign to her. He had moved away many years ago and had lived in several different locations, as witnessed by the return addresses on the letters he had written over the years. She’d never bothered to acknowledge any of them. It wasn’t until after they stopped that she decided to visit him. Her feet began to crunch the leaves, slowly guiding her in his direction.

     As she absorbed the song of cicadas and the whisper of a late summer breeze through the trees, her silence descended upon her again, like a darkness. The void of that silence had broken her father’s heart.

     The notions of Living and Life mean making mistakes. When her father left her mother, that was a mistake she could not accept.

     “I HATE you and never want to speak to you again!”

     Her teenage scream echoed through the decades. And she meant it. She felt abandoned. It mattered not that her father intended to retain the relationship with his daughters. Her mother would not allow that. Her mom’s bitterness became her own, as she witnessed the destruction of all remnants of a life that had previously given such great comfort. Over time it simply became easier to hold onto the anger and the hurt than to face the challenge of healing. She chose silence.

colors fade
memories linger
words fail
not so
destiny

     discord| It is human nature to look for things that validate our choices. In alienating her father, she fortified her justification over the years. The extended divorce battle between her parents was enough to buttress this for a lifetime.

     Through the years, he had never stopped trying to reach her. Sure, there were some tough times in the beginning when they were both angry, but the final decision was hers, alone. Over the years she fought dreams of a life that had been forever lost. They fed a creeping awareness that had become a dark-shadowed burden on her heart.

     As a few years turned into many, his methods of contacting her diminished. She made sure of that. Despite her persistent evasiveness, he would somehow find a way to reach out to her. The cards and gifts were never acknowledged. Many were discarded, unopened. Over time, the wall she built around her own heart was stone-solid. But no barricade could insulate her from a world that brought back memories for fleeting moments through a song, or a sunset, or a twinkling star.

     In the end the strength of nature, and the universe— and a father’s love—all proved to be stronger than her wall. Here she was, walking toward him after all these years. Once again, she had a deep sense that he was prepared.

     pause| Her pace slowed as she came into view of her father’s humble abode— nothing at all like her childhood home. Moving closer, she was not fully prepared to see her maiden name—his name—

 in writing. Somehow this made the moment more real. There was no mistake. This was the place. Now was the time.

     She froze and could not swallow, choking on the moment. Her breath came as a struggle; her heart stuttered. Looking around, she found no other person in sight. This was her preference, and it calmed her. Only a little.

     She was uncertain what she might say to her father. She only knew the word she would say first. Then she hoped to trust her instinct for what might follow.

     Maybe she would describe the colorful leaves. Breaking such a long silence is not easy.

     In this instance, she realized that fate had as much to do with her presence as did choice. Shaking with emotion, she moved forward with silent resolve.

     Over the years, she’d entertained brief thoughts about what it might be like to dial her father’s phone number or knock on his door. She always knew that when this moment arrived, she would break the chasm of silence. Unannounced.

     But this was more difficult than she had imagined. An inescapable sense in her heart informed her that he already felt her presence. She felt his, unmistakably.

in all the time
all the distance
through all the silence
she always knew
the last moments
the last few steps
would be the most difficult

     deafening whisper| The daughter found herself at last on her father’s doorstep. She reached out her hand. The last few inches felt impermeable. She stood frozen in the moment, in a chill of her own making. The final barrier between her and her father was not fancy. It held no window through which her father might glimpse her. She was powerless to knock. The gravity of the moment drank her thoughts, her breath, her resolve.

     Her chest and shoulders quaked as she fought to inhale, hoping to steady her voice. She felt unready, as if in not speaking to her father for so long, she had never spoken at all. Would he listen?

     For a moment she battled the urge to turn and flee. Standing there, far from resolute, she struggled to say the one word that she knew she must utter. Her eyes glistened as she sought her voice. This was not going as she had planned.

     “Dad?”

     She was startled by the sound of a single escaping sob, as her eyes struggled to focus on the face she knew she would someday stand before.

     Time had taken its toll. Nature created his visage. The years had shaped it. But in the end, her father made the final choice. A man with eyes the color of granite, but now there was only… cold marble.

simple
quiet
few words
simply his name
nothing else
carved in stone
 save one exception
that reached her
still

     His epitaph read: “I Will Hear.”

     She dropped to her knees on the soft earth, turned barely a month before. It took a moment to still the quivering of her mouth and throat. Her body convulsed as her tears watered her father’s grave. She began again.

     “Dad?

     —quietus—  




BIO

amy g dahla is a retired park ranger and naturalist who spent a career writing creative nonfiction for museums, visitor centers, and magazines. Their work has been featured in national visitor centers, museum displays & brochures, as well as by the Associated Press and the National Science Center. Their current work in poetry and prose combines both natural and human elements, sometimes aligned but often juxtaposed. amy currently resides on the slopes of Mt. Ogden with their partner, thirteen guitars, and a well-worn pair of hiking boots. “resonant” recently received awards from the League of Utah Writers for best fiction.






When You Find Selma in the Bare Branches

by Beatrice Feng


‘Selma was deeply thoughtful rather than talkative, and her silence was a kind of music that carried onto a world of dreams and made him listen to the throbbing of his heart and see the ghosts of his thoughts and feelings standing before him, looking him in the eyes.’
—Kahlil Gibran, Broken Wings


Summer has taken her shower
and turned off the heater, abandoning

the bare branches that are knotted threads
of her lost hair to the yet undissolved white steam
of clouds and blue shampoo vapours of the sky.

‘Ghostly notes of flowers withered, leaves fallen,
birds departed and their songs evaporated, still linger
in the intricate net of branches. They were from

Summer’s conditioner. When the branches are exiled
from her and consequently take a life of their own,
the faint notes become crystallised as their memories.

And are memories not weavers and conjurers
of soul? The notes are inseparable from the branches
as smoke from a pipe.

If you smoke a branch, you can preserve
a copy of the notes in your lungs,
a manuscript of its soul.

Let the brisk air you just inhaled
and warmed with your body temperature
incarnate that manuscript,

and let your every breath
be a memoir of a forgotten branch
before all your breath
is returned to the air, when it would be the time

for the branches to write your memoir:
an aria of flowers blooming, leaves flickering,
birds nestling and singing.’
Selma’s silence rustles in your trachea.


The Lighthouse of St Blanche

‘BLANCHE: […] And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard–at noon—in the blaze of summer—and into an ocean as blue as
[Chimes again]
my first lover’s eyes!’
—Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire


…and Blanche Dubois’s dying
wish is fulfilled. She’s turned
into an abandoned lighthouse.

The trauma haunted her human life
refuses to abandon her now. It comes
as myriad mirrors of raindrops capturing
the beautiful world and showing it to her.

Then, as always, the mirrors crash
down on her without rhyme or reason,
as if only to smash that lovely picture
they just promised.

And the cold and clear music
of the mirrors’ shattering
washes the pristine snow of her skin,
tarnishing it over time.

And the mirrors’ sharp fragments
glitter in the red scars
they’ve cut into the pale birthday cake
she has gradually become.

Yet she, kneeling
on the harsh edges of rocks,
keeps praying
to the clouded crystal of the sea.

Would it grant her three wishes
like the angel did Dwynwen?

No. Her faith lies not in God, but buried
deep in her beloved, sinful one
who had destroyed the beauty of her world.

Instead of imprisoning his image in ice
for his crime, she makes his eyes
the origin of ocean with all her magic
at the expense of her whole life and soul.

The sky is grey and cloudy,
but the crepuscular rays have descended,
that holy passage waiting
for the bride who has drunk the divine poison:
her scars red as fresh lips,
her frail white skin an ethereal wedding dress.


La Petite Mort

‘She smiled a bright hot smile which was forgetful of time or place or anything but the memory of his mouth on hers.’
—Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind


The sweets cast
their variegated glance at you
from the glass case.
What? Do you call them art?
You know how frail
their allure is, a phantom tower
whose only support
columns are but fantastic shapes
and dreamlike patterns.
If you look into its windows, you will
not see anything
deeper or richer than a seductive ratio
of clarity and intensity.
It’s the most crude and basic form of fairy
tale: creamy basketballs,
green jade chess, sunflower cameos,
miniature peaches
and magnified cocoa beans, chocolate keyboards
insinuating their thirst
for fingers and the melody sealed in them,
a dainty raspberry storm
fueled by dark pink fragments of a mysterious flower
happening on the summit
of a cupcake. Streams of magical hair
sprouting from a fudge violet, 
somehow finds a heart as hair clip, and somehow
ends up being a lovespoon.

After caressing them all with the childish
love bite of your eyes, you go
for the prettiest one.
That elderflower picasso. It’s half a planet,
nebula blue with rivers of cirrus
and a flower of blood.
Though the planet is not the hemisphere
you’ve bought, but only
the paint on it.
This blue world is thinner than sequin,
the rivers have no depth, the flower
is no more than a red dot.
But you will live here
for this moment,
will you not?
You will fall in love
with the story
the deep blue runestone and snow white inscription
tell you about the sanguine blossom:
when the Countess of Nosferatu
bleeds for the first
and last time,
she looks at her own blood
with awed fascination.
Realises what
she is composed of, and what
she could express.
Shattering the cold porcelain cups
of life and death,
she lets the magical red fluid escape
from the prison of her
cadaverous
skin.
Yet the spilled blood, doomed by its former dwelling
in the frail chamber of her heart,
cannot become anything
else. So it instantly blooms
into this bleeding heart
flower here.
Look! The balmy heart spreads the velvet wings
of its petals
and a graceful teardrop descends
from its core. Come
closer. Can you see another heart
enveloped
in this teardrop as if sitting in a glass
capsule of a Ferris wheel,
watching sunsets
concentrated in the flight of the petals?
Doesn’t it look exactly
like your heart?
You cannot deny. But it is truly absurd
that you have lived without a heart
for so long
and you shall find it in a sweet shop.
Is that why you are not bleeding
even if the little vibrant world
you are eating is as thin as the blade
of a knife and the cut it makes.
And certainly as sharp.
But wait! Its blade has cut
through your whole
being.
It’s so sweet…you scream, groan, weep
The world, it’s really so sweet
underneath its nonchalance
and your heart is, in fact,
oh how can it be…
so sweet.



BIO


Beatrice Feng studies Creative Writing at Lancaster University. They are an aspiring writer.







The Mission Rooms

By Jennifer Blake


            Records, records, up to the ceiling, records all around and on top of me. They’re my children and they will smother me, what if the Big One comes and they all topple down? Daddy, save us. At least they will need me, Joel doesn’t need me and so must not want me. Tired of me doing nothing, playing that one show and then none, the only one and to no one, no one listened. There was so much art and was any of it mine?

            Music and children thumped upstairs and shook the dangling ceiling light so it tap-danced. Traitor. Daniel played music and the lamp never danced. How dare those people above him vibrate his walls with their bodies? Their vibrations touched him, vibrations from their clammy bodies reaching down and across the building to search through him.

            There had been so much noise on the walls that night, some of it art, the rest of it awful. Joel’s paintings were strung along the brick walls. Daniel had seen each one born but along the brick wall on display they were proud and aloof, not giving him the time of day. Daniel wanted to sink into each one. They were Joel’s, his, he made them, his brain and heart, smeared on the wall, privately Joel’s. Paint me. How can I be part of it? He couldn’t respond with his piano. He could only repeat the work of others. The notes fell in a different sequence and the pedal punctuated different points but it was the work of others. He couldn’t answer Joel with his own bright shapes, with something to admire, to watch others admire about him. He had nothing for Joel to envy, Joel was jealous of no one. There were no new eyes locking onto Daniel’s; Joel needn’t swallow Daniel’s music to keep it from the prying world. Daniel was fading and Joel could barely hear him. There was so much art, and the artists took it back to their breasts and hid it when Daniel passed. Art didn’t want him. Joel didn’t need him.

            Mariachi from upstairs and Daniel’s records pulsed through Alex’s walls and she found it interesting how they interrupted her heartbeat. She listened for her heart and it retreated mutely, not certain where to go next. Take my hand, heart. We’re all we have. We’ll lie on this bed right against this window that touches the street, where anything can happen. I can’t believe I sleep right by the street. Metaphorically, and actually, so close to being on the street. Oh God, just one feather landing on the scale – she and Daniel and Joel spreading their weight on the quicksand and if anyone took a sick day or got bad tips they would be swallowed. Now Alex felt her heart. Every time she thought about money. I hate it hate it HATE IT SO MUCH, so much, but I need it, I have to keep going. Being dragged through life in chains.

            She sat up in her bed and pried the blinds apart to make a tiny aperture in the corner. If anyone looked in, would they see her eye? Her eyes were small and she had an inordinate number of acquaintances who possessed large, wide, captivating eyes, an inordinate number for a girl with such small eyes.

            It was night and her light was on, so she would be visible in the window. She drew back further so that it was necessary to read the picture outside through the blinds line by line. When she moved her head down, there was streetlight glow. She moved it up, and through the aperture she caught the line of the street like an astronomer moving from the moon to something black and disorienting, and felt like she was falling.

            Satellites crossed her view. Boys? Young men? Neither quite fit the entities who slunk along the sidewalk, with hands shoved into the pockets of pants that displayed every lack of bulge. Boys and young men dabbled in each other’s purview in this city so that neither they nor the onlooker knew quite what they were looking at. The all had in common black sock hats and wallet chains, as though they’d gotten dressed together before hitting the town. Can I borrow your sock hat? Sure, can I borrow that shirt with the New Wave band we’ve never heard of? Sure. Now let’s all go to a fancy bar and pretend to be miserable. Their eyes leant forward to convey that they belonged in the neighborhood and weren’t born yesterday but at a warily brisk pace that betrayed their panic. Alex watched them until they left her frame and became all laughs and headlights.

            Alex stayed secure in her gatehouse, reigning her slum, praying for those who ventured through and out, long since having discarded the notion for herself. She sighed, the long-suffering queen. She had to be at work at five AM. It was now a quarter past ten the PM before. She found she was more cheerful at work when delirious with sleep deprivation, so she had at least another two hours with which to consider the world.

            Something growled and ripped through the floor, the sonic bray of an injured dragon. It reached Alex as just another percussion in Daniel’s music, and it reached Daniel as just another violation from upstairs. It was in fact Joel’s contribution to the voice of the walls. His credenza was out of place amongst his new paintings, the lines were off, the gravity was wrong.

            The credenza was a pity purchase but Joel loved it like an ugly dog whose odd lines represented God’s experiment. Putrid yellow and green enamel mermaids; wood—light ash; compartments soaked in stale cigar. As he pulled its bulk across the hardwood floor, the woods gnashed and screamed. Joel relaxed for a moment, face-down on the credenza’s surface, and let his ribcage melt into the wood. Always bends and wilts like a sad flower, Daniel had said to him. Have you a fat fairy sat on your head? Joel possessed only enough biology to communicate movement. No wasted skin, and everything long – his toe to his finger one line on the right, the same making another line on the left, and a graceful head with a sharp face through the center.

            How many conversations and fights and decisions must have been had and made in here. Joel’s room was technically the dining room in the 1920s apartment. He turned his head so his right cheek felt the freezing surface of the enamel mermaid and caught sight of the built-in bookshelf on the next wall. Or, it just occurred to him, china shelf. Pantry? Jars of pickled onions and preserved fruits and peppers, like he’d seen in estate houses during his summer art program in England. Decades had taken a couple inches of brine from the tops of the jars, but the vegetables remained, browned like newspaper and shedding small particles that made muck at the jar bottoms. Joel was always in awe of the onions that had been grown and picked in an entirely different way, and which probably had a genetic makeup that has long since been lost in the onion of late. I am a brined onion from 1910. Nothing modern in me. Perhaps people look at me in awe, perhaps I’m sepia-toned.

            The latest painting was composed of four square canvasses. It was, all together, a grinning chimera. The southeastern canvas contained only the monster’s clawed hand, which held in its palm the moon. The piece was dense with hard color, bright, with each hue adjacent to its wavelength antonym so the whole business seemed to shift. You’re too incongruous, even for me, Joel said to the credenza. You’ve got to go. I’m taking the monster over the mermaid.

            Joel sadly realized it was the opposite choice he’d made when he chose Daniel. Mermaids are flighty and want nothing more than to take you under with them. Joel wanted so to believe Daniel didn’t desire that he drown, but simply assumed everyone could live while submerged. Joel loved that joy in Daniel. Myopic ebullience, like Peter Pan. But why can’t you come with me? We can fly, can’t we? Joel planted his feet on the ground, guilty, terrified, resolute. Is it always either fairy dust or drudgery? Daniel implored. Couldn’t there be a life in tempered starlight?

            The credenza was maneuvered to the wall that divided the apartment air into Joel’s on one side and Daniel’s on the other. It was not a smooth landing—the corner of the floor was warped.

            Daniel started and dropped the record he’d chosen from the top shelf. Joel knocking? No, Joel fussing. Joel has never knocked on a wall, or a door, he floats through walls and under doors and materializes, a sprite, his shoulders must actually be furled wings. Blades, blades, sharpening until he cuts through the wall and into me. He hasn’t been in my room in a week. How is he happy in a deli? Those hands on meat, all day. Is it that the hands make such beauty that they must be punished? Extremes. He lives in extremes. From this over here to that. An alien perhaps in a human suit, tasting the world.

            He should knock on Alex’s door and get outside into the air. Maybe he could catch her in the middle of a tryst. She always had a boy in there. Alex is lovely, loverly. Isn’t it difficult for us pretty people, he had once sighed to her. She had crossed her eyes and shoved her finger into her right nostril.

            He stayed put, paralyzed by the options of life. Take to the night and wake at noon. Mornings were for panicking people, swishing and cramming. He winced when people panicked at him. He couldn’t stand panicking, tense veins and wrinkly mouths and hard eyes, this insistence upon unhappiness. But am I happy now? Melancholy and her sycophants joined in a circle round his floor-bound mattress and sang with tinny voices through pointy teeth.

            The image sent him shooting up onto his knees. He shoved the blind of the window above him upward and looked hard out of the glass to be sure he wasn’t surrounded. Beige wood planks filled his eyes, as though his window were boarded up, and he felt trapped until he pulled his eyes inward and the dimensions popped out again. His view was of the tiny vent space between apartments, a little ledge, the opposite wall, and a narrow two-story plunge. He plugged his nose and pretended to dive down through the window, through the hole. He would look up from the bottom, like a well, and long for the tiny point of the sun. Tiny point of sun? Could that be a song? He spun round to his piano and slammed the keys.

            Daniels’ muddy piano made Alex suddenly restless. She needed fresh air for her ears.

            She’d been fitfully napping, vanishing under headphones to consume alternately shameful pop music and obscure classical voice, and staring out the window since she returned from work at three PM. Too weary to shower, she still reeked of coffee grime. A clean, pressed man with solid shoulders and a smile that knew all the solutions had yelled at her about a bagel that morning.

             Alex had the room in the apartment that she liked to imagine had been the sitting-room, since it had a (non-functioning and now bricked up and strictly decorative) fireplace. It had more likely been, unromantically, always a bedroom. She’d never actually thought about it until now – where would the chimney have gone? She would have to remember to look for it the next time she went outside.

            Turn, pull up, arch toward, pull down – the secret to opening the warped door in the crooked frame without scraping the floor or drawing an explosive crack of wood. As it was, the opening of any door in the place sent a whisper of pressure release through every room that all could sense in a tiny pulse of their own doors and a mild loss of equilibrium.

            Alex slid down the hallway past Daniel’s door to her left, then the shower room, then the toilet room, which she supposed was technically a water-closet. Joel’s curtain was closed. This was the only formidable obstacle she faced in the tiny, lively place. To get to the kitchen, one needed to pass through Joel’s space. He was home so rarely that it didn’t much come up – but now she gritted her teeth and announced, “Knock, knock.”

            “It’s OK!”

            Alex swung her hips to the left to avoid the credenza and said “Oh! Your piece!” It wasn’t in the spot she’d learned to avoid in the last couple days.

            She found Joel considering it alongside its new wall, his hands on his hips. Was he a flamingo? No, more of an egret.

            “It wasn’t happy over there.”

            “I guess it didn’t like competing with your moon-creature.” Alex looked carefully up at the monster. Joel’s paintings all have this…distortion. A caught-in-a-windstorm insult, taken by surprise, an impersonal cyclone smearing their faces just enough out of proportion to breed a bit of disappointment in the viewer who was craving something that couldn’t easily be done. But still they lived, beseeching you from the wall. Alex admired how prolific he was. Notebooks, sketch books, walls and coasters spewing words that made pictures and pictures that made worlds. One’s envy of the collection was not excited by any unique or trained skill, but by the exclusivity of the new reality created. Alex looked back at Joel from his wall of paintings and didn’t immediately perceive a difference.        

            “Moon-creature – I like that….” Such a working girl, Alex. Independent. San Francisco was bursting with them and they were each composed mostly of flighty, shrill fear, shirted in insincere jubilation with a shade of overwrought flower-child. Joel knew that Alex penetrated that diseased shell that coated her surroundings with keen regard and found it all terribly funny. Joel could catch her eye across the madness and laugh. The unspoken joke shared between them was that of the state of the whole universe.

            Joel watched her as she passed into the kitchen. She tended to beat her curly hair straight with tools that sent a slight singe into the air in the mornings, but there was always a missed bump or a frame of irritated strands awakened by the morning fog. Everything on her was just so slightly deconstructed, as though she’d begun to decorate herself on the outside, but had gotten distracted and her brain had left her body for other endeavors.

            The boys are both home but locked in their rooms. God, how uncomfortable. Alex searched for her almonds in the cabinet. Taking on the goal of eating cleanly provided for her an excuse within an excuse. Everyone in her neighborhood and most in her city were jumping onto the organic-local-whole-food horse (well if this or that wasn’t whole and a food, then what had she been eating all this time?). Doing the same not only helped her meld into the fabric of the zeitgeist so that she could someday speak wistfully of her days in the “slow food” revolution; additionally, she could justify that the time it was taking to focus on her health was better spent than it would be by picking up her cello again. It stood in the corner of her closet, dusty to the point of stickiness. She had been competent—talented? But she’d forgotten – and now she was so, so tired. Two jobs and the rest of the time spent in ways to forget them.

            The roommates shared a flowerbox of a backyard balcony with the people in the next flat, but she’d never seen a sign of them. Joel had claimed their half with one of his pieces used as a platform for another piece used as an ashtray for their frequent guests, only distinguished from your everyday squatters by confessions of intellectual aspirations blown out languidly with their smoke.

            Joel had brought a cat home one night, a soft ball of fright and need, colored mystical blue-grey. Joel proclaimed him to be Crumpet. Alex had adored the animal and fancied the two of them particular friends until Joel hosted a beast of a cocktail party and the animal had taken to Alex’s bed, as far away from the kitchen and the balcony as he could get, horrified. Crumpet had wet through everything that Alex was interested in sleeping on or in. She had started shutting the door and chucking him off her lap.

            This memory tore at her heart a bit as she gazed from the flowerbox into the world. Maybe she should apologize.

            The balcony, or landing, or incompetent extension of the floorboards beyond the intended dimensions of the kitchen, whatever it was, made Alex wonder if she was just one cell in a panel of identical balconies with one person in each, staring wistfully as she was, each taking a deep breath to prep for the first note in a spontaneous musical.

            Meatballs? Something was wafting from the restaurant whose backside their flowerbox balcony faced, and it must be the remains of the day’s sauce slowly dying in the pot. It was hard to reconcile the tiny relic of any old lady who owned the place with the angular red and black communist pop art hung in a line on otherwise neon-white walls. Who could eat meatballs in that situation? The skeletal proprietress had promised the residents of their apartment building that she would furnish dinner for them all sometime, her treat. The offer had been made months ago. Alex cringed at the memory of this platitude between new acquaintances, the promise to connect that both parties knew would never manifest, a social grace covertly rooted in sadism that Alex thought should be stricken from human expectation. It did far more harm than saying nothing at all.

            There was a fundamental flaw in Alex’s thinking, she knew. Why do I assume there won’t be any follow-up? Certainly, she could take it upon herself. When she’d first gotten to San Francisco, she’d begun consciously exuding hostility, once she found out what the bus was like. Something right below her ribcage flipped as it occurred to her that maybe she had forgotten to stop once she had gotten off the bus.

            Sirens. In every angle of her shadowy radius something was happening that would change or end a life, and the dust left would settle into cursory blurbs in the newspaper. Alex used those reports as bookmarks for her own fortune. Where had she been at approximately quarter-past-eleven on Friday night when a twenty-three-year-old male was found with gunshot wounds on the corner of 24th and Tennessee? She’d been eating almonds on her flowerbox balcony. She’d escaped again. It had been that time for the twenty-three-year-old male. He certainly hadn’t seen it coming. If her moment was next, she certainly wasn’t seeing it coming.

             Daniel ripped open his bedroom door and played through it. The chords progressed through the hallway and around the kitchen table. His hands were built for this. Not for Joel, not for nothing, but for this.

            The cacophony ceased and Alex realized she could once again hear birds.

            “RAR.”

            Alex’s almonds went over the balcony. “Jesus on a stick,” she said, “where did you come from?”

            “Don’t speak to me of Christ and sticks,” he enunciated haughtily. “I am a servant of the waves and clouds and twinkling—“

            “I cooked chicken in your pan last night.”

            “WHAT?” Daniel was a vegan dancing perilously on the ledge of a raw diet. “I told you—”

            “I’m kidding.”

            Daniel jumped in front of her and narrowed his eyes. “Listen!” He sprinted back into the house. Alex looked after him quizzically. The piano timidly trickled out onto the balcony.

            Alex strained forward to hear the tinny plinking. Daniel was like a lion who reared up, unhinged his jaws, and belched out a peep. He returned, breathless, wide-eyed.

            “What’s that, Liberace?”

            “No, you twit, it’s me, it’s all me.”

            “Oh – have you been composing in there? That’s great.”

            “No. Composing is boring. I’m bleeding.” Good lord—Alex took in her unhinged roommate—most people are so boring. You can see the air around Daniel change color with his mood.

            “Well, if you have the kind of talent that lets you just pump out art out of nowhere, then you’re the luckiest man alive.”

            Daniel took a step back and lowered his chin. Taking a compliment was like accepting the egg of an endangered animal. It was the burden of new responsibility toward the giver and toward the entity of the sentiment. If he didn’t receive it correctly, he’d be slipping on the yolk of the last dodo, and everyone would hate him. “Do you think I’m talented…?” he asked in falsetto, batting his lashes. Humor was the best way to deflect a kindness.

            “I guess I’d be tooting my own horn—get it, music joke—because I can play a cello—though I haven’t really lately, who knows if I still can—but it’s pretty hard to do what we do, isn’t it? I define talent as being in a minority, I guess.” Was that right? Did that make any sense? So, the skeletal proprietress of the neighboring restaurant was talented because she was one of few specimens possessing both visibly slouching compression stockings and a delicate understanding of deconstructed communist propaganda as art? Alex vowed to think through her newly realized convictions before she spouted them off. “So, yes, I do think you’re talented. How about that?”

            “How do I use it?” His mouth was purple with suspense; his eyes leaked out of his head.

            “So, those who can’t, tell other people how?”

            “I’m serious. How do I make this in to something? I’ve been slaving away for THE MAN in these revolting cafes, and so have you, serving up puke to pathetic people who just drag themselves around and don’t LIVE. No one has ever understood me, or hell, anything. And I thought San Francisco would be the place of all places that would get it, you know?”

            Alex shook off the fantasy of jumping off the balcony to escape this emotional confrontation. She figured she may need someone to blow up at someday and Daniel may be the nearest one at the time. The accusatory finger of her mind pointed through the kitchen door and paused at Joel’s walls and floor and surfaces that were choking with art, good and bad, so long as it existed, then floated down the hall, into her room, and alighted on her cello. The finger plucked a string, pointedly pizzicato, the cello raising a reproachful eyebrow. The vibration shook the drops of guilt concentrated in her heart to the surface and they pulsed through her arteries. Do you know what it means to be alive? Breathe, send air to where the blood is waiting, and it carries oxygen on the backs of its cells, runs with all it has and knows, which is dedication to you. Drops the oxygen and cycles back for more. Breathlessly, because they’ve starved for a millisecond, bone and string and lever and pleasure, moles and nails, hair and pain take the oxygen and turn, make and remake constantly, tear down and turn over in chaos and what must be a roaring racket up close. To make me again. Why do I not feel all of that? Why do I not move when I’m not moving? All of that happening and I’ve never said thank you.

            Her cello still rang. She struggled to see Daniel.

            “It has to be the most important thing. Everything else has to be food. All your experiences, the people who like you, the person you love, you have to secretly feed them to your music. It has to be the most important thing. You can just take life and be happy I guess, but if you want to make something, you need to take from somewhere else.” She threw a surviving almond off the balcony. Wheeee.

            Now that she was uncorked, she spilled. “I suppose I’m telling you to stop being so lazy. The trick to doing things is to do them.”

            Daniel spoke quietly. “Joel came up to me after my gig at his art show, while I was on stage.”

            The stage had been the waxed wooden floor of a corner of the gallery. One exhibit had cancelled and the event organizers, faced with an empty wall, were presented the choice of a rejected entry of canvasses chunky with flung used condoms (a young local up-and-comer) or a makeshift stage for a piano interlude. Daniel had been offered the space for two hundred and fifteen dollars. The owners had thrown in a drink ticket. Joel had lent him one hundred.

            “I was sweaty and all jazzed, man, people were grooving– and anyway everyone in there was a fetus and had no clue what I was playing anyway. So Joel comes up to me after I finished and said I can’t. That he couldn’t, I mean.”

            Alex was impatient because she’d heard this before. From Joel. But she had to reverse and remember all the receptive faces she’d made when the news was fresh, one and one-half weeks ago. Remember them and alter them according to the following possible emissions from Daniel: whimsy, fury, suicide, petulance.

            “He said I like myself. That he liked himself, I mean. I mean, what did he mean? He’s in love with himself? Is he celibate now? Are you celibate if you love yourself, or no? He said, I like myself and you’ve made me start to dislike parts of myself. I remember every single word.”

            Joel’s account: I can’t keep taking care of you.

            “I said, what, did I embarrass you? That all I needed was this one opening onto the scene, that now I can talk to the owners, and they can refer me to other places. That I can get gigs without him, you know, and he didn’t need to see me play, if it embarrassed him and all.”

            He leaned at Alex and spoke with mortality. “He meant that it made him sad to watch me. I know it. And he was losing himself. That too.”

            Joel’s account: I’m losing myself with him.

            The roommates saw the point at which their three knowledges met and made sense. They breathed and smiled in relief: Joel was satisfied with the resting place of the mermaid and leaned over it to breathe it in; Daniel writhed with the loss; Alex grieved for them. What was beyond this meeting place was something they didn’t yet know, and whether this ignorance was for the best was a different matter. It was that Joel was genuinely out of love with Daniel, out of that thing that both parties thought, when it began, would not necessarily hold forever, but would at least become perpetual motion in one another, virile enough to be called upon again someday. Daniel mucked himself in this idea, rolled in it and smeared it in his hair, cozy and warm in the safety of uncertainty. Maybe not? Maybe?

            Joel wasn’t inclined to dismiss possibilities and hardly knew what to expect from himself most of the time. He knew that his love for Daniel could open a cautious eye and emerge, fully functioning and less childlike, again; because of this he couldn’t tell Daniel that his love was obsolete. The mermaid felt the waves of finality beating through the wall between their rooms, the last imprint on each other as they’d like to be remembered, and the resigned, tight smiles of farewell they unconsciously gave one another. At the level of white light and perfect quiet, they were done. The more superficial levels would be harder.

            Maaaahw.

            “What is it, Crumpet?” Daniel cooed into the kitchen. “Is it your gout?”

            Alex had a (rather useless, she thought, unless being commanded by a serial killer fond of psychological mayhem to shut her eyes and pick her loved ones out of a circle of people singing together or else they’d all die) talent for recognizing voices. “That’s not Crumpet.”

            “Have you ever heard him make a sound? He hasn’t, once.”

            “He has, twice. That’s not him.” Another indignant squeal.

            An animal issue could usually distract Alex from a human one. She usually regarded human issues as animal, anyway, but other animals were nicer. She leaned over the flowerbox balcony but could see nothing through the blanket of the security light.

            Three successive meows. “It’s panicking. We should find it.”

            “It sounds like it’s inside. I tell you, it’s that stupid Crumpet.”

            Alex wandered slowly into the apartment, stalking the sound. Joel peered out of his room. “What is that noise? Have you seen Crumpet lately? It doesn’t sound like him….”

            Alex turned an eye to Daniel. “Aren’t you a musician? Where’s your ear?”

            Daniel snarled.

            The roommates peered under every cushion (which weren’t many) and each of Joel’s pieces (which were many), including their drawers (though, the two roommates convinced it was Crumpet were dubious of the chubby cat’s dimensions being compliant with those of the drawers).

            “There’s no experience in that meow.” Joel stood straight in the terminal posture of decision. “It’s not Crumpet – but it’s in here.”

            “It’s in the walls, maybe.” Alex placed her palms against Daniel’s closed door. “Daniel, are you hoarding kittens? I wouldn’t put it past you.”  

            “Yes – for roasting.”

            Alex sent an impulse to her arm to open Daniel’s door but the wall held her back by the wrists. What’s the matter with you? the wall asked. Have some respect.

            “Daniel, it’s in your room.”  Maaaah! “Would you mind if we checked?”

            Daniel sniffled and asked for a password.

            “Dead cat,” said Alex. Daniel opened the door.

            The room dripped wearily, in contrast with the subito dynamics of its owner. The room was at its wit’s end. Stacks of records cackled, spit, shot up, and otherwise squatted in the calm cube that had simply found that it existed one day.

            Maah. Maah. Maaaah!

            “It knows we’re here! We’re coming, keep meowing, don’t give up!” Alex crossed the wooden floor and contorted over the head of Daniel’s frameless mattress to peer out of the window. She saw only her reflection and, shaking her head to recalibrate, shimmied her gaze through her own chest. She threw open the window with the violence needed to release it from the frame to which it had been painted stuck.

            Cold and fresh and reviving. Alex breathed and nearly forgot the cat. The cat reminded her. Alex looked at the sound, and it was orange and huddled on the ledge of the vent space, horrified.

            The creature needed someone, and in light of this, leaning out of a two-story window didn’t seem nearly as stupid as it might usually have.

            Joel and Daniel saw the rear of Alex as she walked on her hands out of the window and onto the ledge. Joel seized her ankles. “I’ve got you! Go get him!”

            Alex considered her several past encounters with terrified cats. They became very sharp when vexed. Vexed. She thought that was the perfect word for cats in general. She expected the kitten to eviscerate her with impressive aplomb for such a small thing, or to launch itself out of her reach, death at such a young age being preferable to human whim.

            The kitten fit in one hand. It shrank itself around her palm. Alex could have fanned her fingers open and the cat would have remained.

            “He’s in!” The room sucked them back in. The roommates regarded the kitten and were warmed by looking at it. It pinned itself to Alex’s sweater. Each claw that Alex removed, the kitten replaced. The front right paw was removed, then the back one sunk in, and on and on. They danced like this for a minute while Joel and Daniel softly prodded its back and ears.

            “So – there’s a kitten.”

            Responsibility fogged them in and they stood and frowned. Now what?

            “Now what?” Alex asked.

            “If Crumpet notices him, they’ll fight,” Joel mused.

            “More probably he’d run away,” Alex corrected. “Crumpet is a chicken shit.”

            “Let’s put him in the bathtub.” Daniel stared the kitten in the eye, trying to reach him telepathically. “He needs to think. That’s where I go when I need to think.”

            “Sure. I don’t think he’s old enough to have any stereotypical comic-strip cat phobias of bathtubs.”

            He paced in the tub. Less agitated, but aware that his life was now new. He wanted the soft sweater again. The curving surfaces of the tub caught every speck of light so the kitten felt he was being orbited. He chased the bowl of the tub. The humans cackled. Crumpet was forgotten, and he felt it where he hid, in a place of which the roommates had no inkling. Crumpet shrugged, trotted down the back stairs of the flower box balcony, and made his way forth.

            “We have to find out where he came from.” Daniel, firm and exasperated as a lioness, reduced the kitten to obedient folds of fur by grasping him by his upper back and looking him in the eyes. Joel focused into the scene. Dominance and nurture were forces that Daniel absorbed from people until they found they had none left when they pulled the trigger one day. These virtues (which they were, in context) existed in Daniel, but were kept in a glass box to be seen and not used, until now, when he unleashed them on a kitten. Joel didn’t process the observation as a personal affront. Daniel could only be contrary – he could give the kitten these things because the kitten had none.

            “I’ll take him around the building, at least.” Alex held out her hands and Daniel glared and squeezed the kitten. He handed the bundle over with a pout.

            “Farewell, Furlingame!” Daniel threw his hands in the air. “The light of Bast is in you!”

            “The light of Bast is in you,” Alex and Joel repeated at the kitten.

            The floors absorbed the moment and built it into the specter the next occupants would feel without knowing why or what. The structure was becoming fossilized, organics replaced with notions and glances and sobs behind doors and bonds formed through repeated nonchalance. For the sake of the kitten, Alex spoke to strangers and knocked on apartment doors. When she found the kitten’s new guardian, she smiled in tandem with the girl, looking her in the eye. Maybe now, cross the bridge, say something! The door closed.

            On occasion, Daniel peered out from behind himself and made others laugh, with or at, or made them recoil, but he made, not in the manner he wanted for himself, but still, he made.

            Joel was the last to leave the apartment, eventually, after life came for the others. The apartment remained just another organ in the city system. Joel smelled the damp air cooling the old wood through the window once more and closed the front door cheerfully. He walked through the beating aorta and was willingly lost in the weary, pounding heart. 



BIO

Jennifer Blake was raised in Los Angeles but grew up in San Francisco. Her work is inspired by human idiosyncrasies and the belief that cities are characters with souls. With a graduate degree in anthropology from San Francisco State University, she has spent much of her career as an archaeologist, but words are her first obsession. She now resides in the magical Eastern Sierras. 




The Box in The Closet

by Eric Lee

 
Everyone must learn this truth at some point.  I only wish, at seven, I hadn’t been so inquisitive, then maybe I could have enjoyed the magic a few years longer.

I was sitting on the living room floor watching TV.  It was a week before Christmas, and I could see our tree with the lights on it.  Everything sparkled and reflected all these different glittery colors; it was beautiful.  That’s when I heard Freddy and Bob in the kitchen talking with Mom and Dad about Santa.  Their voices were a little muffled, so I crawled closer toward the dining room table to hear better.

I could hear Mom say, “Keep your voices down.”  Then Freddy said, “But we know all about Santa.”  I leaned in closer underneath the dining room table not wanting to miss a word.  Somehow, I knew this must be important information, but I couldn’t let them know I was listening.  “We know that it’s you who buys the presents, keeps them hidden somewhere, and puts them out on Christmas Eve.  That’s what some kids told us at school.”

My father looked annoyed, “If you two don’t believe in Santa, well then I guess you both will be on his naughty list and won’t get anything for Christmas.”

That’s when Bob started in, “I didn’t hear anything, I only heard what Freddy said.” 

“Bob, you said you heard it too.” 

That’s when my mom spoke up. “Now just a minute, why don’t you both start from the beginning and tell us what you heard, and we can sort this out.”

I knew what I had to do.  I crawled out from under the dining room table and sat thinking for a moment in front of the TV.  My brothers were older than me, and sure they could punch me harder than I could punch them, but I’d proven in card games that I was smarter than them both.  As I sat all alone in the living room, I was looking right into my parents’ bedroom and could from where I sat, next to the TV, just a little ways away, see their closet door.  I needed to check it out. That’s what I would do.  I quickly crawled into their bedroom and opened the closet door.  There on the floor sat this giant box.  A box I’d not seen before.  I didn’t look inside; I was too afraid of being caught or maybe afraid of what I might find, I didn’t know at the time.  I stepped back, quickly closed the door, and went back out into the living room and stared blankly at the TV.  I thought about what Freddy said a few minutes earlier, and then wondered about that big box.  I kept what I’d seen a secret.  I didn’t tell Freddy or Bob.  I didn’t tell anyone.

A week after Christmas, one day when the house was quiet, I snuck back into my parents’ bedroom and opened their closet door.  What I saw was a big empty space; the box was gone.  In a way I was surprised, but then I wasn’t.  I was suddenly sad because I’d learned the truth, the secret which Freddy had talked about two weeks ago, that the magic about Santa wasn’t real.  I didn’t know what to do with what I’d learned.  There was this large emptiness inside me, and I felt like crying.  Why had I looked?  What made me do it?  I thought I wanted the truth, but then, sometimes the truth hurts.  That’s when I started to question what I’d seen.  I mean, I didn’t look IN the box, but I knew.  I just knew.

After I closed my parent’s closet door, I went back into the living room and sat on the couch, alone.  Knowing what I’d just learned hit me like a wave and I realized the impact was more than Santa alone.  It was Frosty, and Rudolph, all of it.  I sat there and looked at the Christmas tree and wondered why did we put all those ornaments on the tree?  Why are there so many other decorations all over the house when none of it was real?  Yet, I liked how shiny and bright they looked.  Even now that I knew the truth, I still liked all the decorations. 

Then I saw how my mom and dad acted together when they sat and looked at the tree all lit up.  I saw how they smiled at each other and held hands and it made me wonder if it was something else that was magical that I didn’t yet understand.  That maybe it wasn’t Santa alone but something bigger.

 Everything about the holidays made everyone in our family happy.  We would go up to Grandma’s farmhouse and all our aunts and uncles and cousins would be there, and it was just like at our summer picnics.  We all had fun together, laughing and playing games.  All my aunts made delicious pies to eat, and my dad and uncles would tell jokes, and stories and we’d all laugh.

I kept the secret I’d learned about Santa to myself.  I didn’t even tell Loretta, my favorite cousin.  I realized, why would I want to ruin the Christmas magic for her?  Or anyone?  Yet I knew that there was more to Christmas than just Santa.  I just hadn’t figured it out yet. 



BIO

Eric Lee, a scientist for 40 years, retired from the corporate world and turned to writing in 2021.  In addition to crafting poems and short stories, he’s also writing his memoir, An Intentional Journey, and is completing the last book in his trilogy, The Secrets Beneath Nantucket Sound.  Eric’s story, The Box in the Closet is his first publication in a literary magazine. He lives and writes between the woods of Andover, Massachusetts, and the mountains of Newry, Maine.







Apptitude Test

by Tina Dolly Ilangovan


It was a dark and dreary night, a night just like any other. The sort of night where abounding terror abides. The kind of night where your imagination alone can send a chill or two, or ten, down your spine. The type of night that beckons you with the beauty of its all-encompassing darkness while simultaneously begging you to stay put inside.

On such a night as this, marked by the absence of the moon to lead his way, Kevin found himself on a lonesome road, save for the dimly waning lamps and the shadow that followed. With anxiety seeping out of him through beads of sweat, he cautiously made his way forward, head lowered, dressed inconspicuously enough to blend into the night. A night he was incredibly concerned with, though not for any of the reasons stated above.

This was an important night for Kevin, one filled with nervous excitement and fearsome nerves to the point it could make or break him, his reputation, his legacy. After all, it’s not every night a monster from the underworld ventures among the living to make their first kill.

Albeit a monster in our most objective sense of the word, he’d rather call himself Kevin. Though the name he originated with and was referred to by all who knew him was The Minute Man. Armed with a couple of sharpened clock hands, his life-leaving stab wounds point to the exact time his victim’s life leaves them. At least that’s what he’d been preparing for at Underworld University. Technically he should’ve been known as Clock Hand Man, although he was more “Boy” than “Man”, but everyone agreed “The Minute Man” just rolled off the tongue better, while he was left enamored with “Kevin” thanks to a “Human Pop Culture: Movie & TV Medium” course he attended during Hellfire Camp.

Kevin dived behind an empty car as the human he had been waiting for stepped out of the gate and into the road three houses down. He made sure not to touch it in case that set off the car alarm, recalling that was how they got The Hide & Kill Seeker. A travesty, considering he was so close to attaining the ability to silence car alarms as well! Kevin had done his due diligence, though. Learning from others’ mistakes was one of his covert assets (and favourite classes) that was already lending its hand tonight with his very first victim. As the saying goes, “You never forget your first!” and Lincoln was no exception to that rule.

Bright-eyed, broad-shouldered, benevolent-heartthrob, Lincoln. If he had a tail, it would undoubtedly have been bushy. But neither looks nor personality were ever a concern of Kevin’s. What he did have his sight set on was status, and being one of the most popular kids on campus, Lincoln was swimming in it.

“The higher the status, the deeper the mark.”

This solitary sentence rang through Kevin’s head as he zeroed in on Lincoln during his preliminary research. A straight A student, teachers’ pet, track star, quarterback star, debate star, the velvety voice of an angel star, all rolled up into one swarthy stud, loved and respected by anyone lucky enough to know his name, let alone bask in his presence; he was the most suitable prey to bring Nolok University to its knees and subsequently establish it as his haunting.

His colleagues and mentors said he was aiming too high, that he had to start low and make his way up, but he didn’t see the point in that.

“Life is for the living. And the more they live, the more we lose our patience.”

It’ll catch on after tonight, he thought, because from his observations, that’s exactly what some of his predecessors got wrong. They went low, underestimated their target, and spectacularly lost their patience along with everything else they’d worked hard for.

Any sown seeds of doubt stopped sprouting and uprooted themselves from his head upon seeing Lincoln make his way back home on the lonely road after a successful midnight rendezvous, given the skip in his step. It’s a well-established fact that horny young adults make the most satisfying prey.

With minutes to accomplish what he had set out to do, he came out of hiding and continued onward with his new travel partner. Maintaining enough distance between you and your prey where they remain within your sight while being oblivious to your presence is an artful science that Kevin was currently excelling at.

Kevin did not consider patience one of his virtues. To be fair, he had no virtues. Nevertheless, he couldn’t ignore its importance in this next step. The enveloping darkness set the scene with a shudder-worthy atmosphere, playing its part in the induction of fear. Tangy, sweet fear, ambrosia for the soul, or whatever constitutes a soul in the undead. It was their fuel, their drive, their strength. It wouldn’t be too far off to say that it was the sole purpose of their existence. He’d been preparing for this for as long as he could remember being, and was now mere moments away from tasting it.

It was time to start pulling out the big guns. Or in Kevin’s case, a flip phone. He’d read a magazine blurb in Undead Weekly that said humans never went anywhere without this tiny device that could connect them to the entirety of the living world. Not even in the most private of spaces reserved for the human body’s daily evacuation needs did they let go of it. Rather, especially there. Yet, what some feared the most was a call to connect.

“Phone Privileges” was still out of his curriculum’s reach, but he’d be damned if he didn’t utilize this tried & tested harbinger of dread to his advantage. Well, he was already damned, so it didn’t take much convincing for his senior to lend him a phone.

He dialed the number he’d memorised from the soul book. Lincoln didn’t stop as he took one look at the smartphone already in his hand and answered. Granted, it was an odd time for a phone call, and an unrecognizable number such as this would usually prompt him to silence the call and ignore it until it went away, but he was in an obligingly curious mood.

“Hello?” his smooth voice rang out on Kevin’s end.

Kevin’s natural voice was deeply demonic enough to raise hairs, but this was a do-and-die situation. Mustering newer, lower depths of ominousness, the words flew out of him just as they had in front of the mirror all week, “Hello, Lincoln. I have been following you…”

Lincoln slowed down in confusion. All he had to do next was turn back, witness The Minute Man’s daunting silhouette–sorry, Kevin’s–and begin to walk faster. At this point Kevin, matching his pace, would reiterate his stance, adding the fact that he could try all he wanted to run and hide, he was still going to get him. Once Lincoln would start running, Kevin would catch up and seal the deal. Textbook horror haunting.

Instead Lincoln asked, “On Twitter?”

Now Kevin wasn’t one for social civilities, but he couldn’t help blurting out, “Sorry, what?”

“Twitter! Or is it TikTok? Facebook? Maybe Instagram?”

It was Kevin’s turn to slow down in confusion. “I… I do not know what you are talking about…”

“Oh, you are missing out bud! Are you a Snapchat guy then? YouTube? Soundcloud?” The enthusiastic kindness in his quick speech was hard to miss.

“I am? Uhh no… wait…”

“LinkedIn? ResearchGate? Wattpad?”

If anyone had been around to sneak a peek at Kevin, they would’ve instantly caught how visibly flustered he was at that moment.

If anyone had been around to sneak a peek at Lincoln, they would’ve instantly caught him entering the front gate to his apartment building at that moment.

But no one was around except for Kevin, stuttering and mumbling to himself, still too visibly flustered to notice.

“HitRecord? Letterboxd? Apple Podcasts?” Lincoln prodded, a little too helpful, a little too hopeful.

“I do not care for apples.” Disdain was catching up to him. And so was the alarming realisation that he needed to catch up to his prey.

Lincoln chuckled. “You don’t? Me neither, bud. Okay, last resort… Goodreads? WordPress? Ravelry?”

Kevin, now in a full sprint ahead, answered between pants “I suppose… technically… I am your rival, yes.”

Lincoln, mishearing Kevin’s mishear was elated. “Mystery solved! You should join our knitting club! We’ll provide the yarn and needles unless you’d like to bring your own.”

“Oh, I will bring my needles, alright.” Kevin sneered into the phone, his free hand reaching for his sharpened clock needles, confirming they were ready for the kill.

“Perfect!” Lincoln continued, “I’ll see you at the club.” With heartfelt earnestness he ended, “And thank you. It means so much to me that you’ve chosen to follow me. Good night!”

Click

Kevin stared at the bolted building door between him and his victim, now housed safely inside because his hunter wasn’t born with the ability to walk through walls, and neither had he learned it yet. Then he stared at the useless piece of metal in his hand, that just like his currently useless self, had been drained of its power and minutes. He stared back and forth between the two, exchanging looks ranging from incredulous rage to appalling dread to sheer, painful defeat. His first chance to prove himself, and he had failed, not even spectacularly.

Unable to sit right within his system, these mixed emotions bubbled to the surface and spilled out in an earsplitting shriek. Fortunately for the residents of Nolok University, their ears were saved for at that exact moment, a solitary gust of wind amidst the still night pulled Kevin away from the mortal world and into a void that had no choice but to bear the brunt of his feelings.

Panic set in as he realised where he was going. He wasn’t ready to face his peers and superiors moments after the most embarrassing blunder of his existence. Not without processing any of it at the very least. Where he was from, embarrassing blunders never faded away. They grew, and grew, and grew right in front of your face until they could grow no more. Diminishing just enough to linger. Hovering across the expanse of the inferno. Floating into every crevice available. Haunting the hurt hunter for the rest of their unlife.

But he would have plenty of time to process all that and more as the void dropped him off on a high stool in the middle of Underworld University’s sprawling lobby. The same solitary gust of wind stuck a large conical hat on his head with the letters “D U N C E” vertically emblazoned upon it, and left with the very swiftness it had arrived.

He had always been on the other side, generous with his raucous laughter before exploring the error of their ways with careful precision to prevent himself from ending up in their position. Now here he was, on the receiving end of raucous laughter, in the very seat he’d desperately worked hard to stay out of. Their laughter continued to ring through his ears, as it would forever, leaving him in a state of perpetual seething. The Highchair of Humiliation left an indelible mark on one’s career. Success was rare to those whose behinds landed upon it. With Kevin’s behind now added to the list, it became further incentive to prove what he originally set out to do.

As much a motivator as fear is to Kevin’s kind, so indeed is shame.

To the point that Kevin’s sole focus now rested on Lincoln’s demise and the destruction of Nolok University. Depending on the generosity of his superiors, who were anything but generous, he would be let out of that chair in weeks if not months. More than enough time to reflect on every detail that brought him here and to strategise his way forward between bursts of humiliation.

It was already working; he knew exactly what to do first. Sign up for every single class about cell phones, and weave his way into the ancient art of alternative needle stabbing. Or as Lincoln called it: knitting.



BIO

A budding writing enthusiast from India, Tina Dolly’s short story, Apptitude Test, is her first foray into the world of storytelling. She strives to dive deeper into said world with humour and heart on her sleeves. You can find her on Instagram @tuna.tries where she dabbles in prose, poetry, as well as anything in-between and beyond.









Too Late to Save the F-word

by Rita Stevens


            It was an overheard conversation.  Older Man A said to Older Man B: “He used the F-word. I just had to tell him I considered the word unacceptable.”

            Jack and I were seated in the hotel’s breakfast room, the two men at a table near us. The unacceptable word, we learned, had been uttered on the golf course the previous afternoon. The pro had put together a foursome of single players, one of whom was Older Man A. Unfortunately, another of the four turned out to be the eventual F-word offender. We lingered over warmish coffee as A and B continued to remark about the young man who had been “out of line,” as B diagnosed it. And it got worse: Older Man A had heard others use similar language later in the day.

            Wives A and B arrived from their rooms for breakfast. Older Man B spoke with his wife at once. “Young people drinking beer were outside around here last night using the F-word,” he told her. I saw her nod and look serious as she sat down.

            The four went on to other topics, but my mind lingered on the F-word.

            In an abstract way, I’ve long been a fan of the F-word, although probably never was it considered a polite term. (For what it’s worth, I’m also a fan of the despised word “ain’t,” but that’s another issue.) My appreciation of the F-word lies in its being an old Germanic verb with timeless features. The universally popular action it names gives it emotional weight and some erotic usefulness. As an interjection, in the way it was once used — rarely, and under extreme circumstances — it delivered as intended. It’s short, compared with the Latin derivatives “fornicate” and “copulate,” both wishy-washy intransitives, unlike the punchy F-word.

            “Just think of a synonym verb that takes a direct object,” I said to Jack on the drive home after breakfast. “There is none.”

            “Screw?” Jack suggested.

            “Well, yes, but that’s a late-comer euphemism with the wrong consonant sounds. When you take it out of the toolbox, it’s a third-rate word.”

Jack had to agree.

            We both remembered an F-word incident from many years ago involving a cousin on Jack’s side of the family. It came up under circumstances that all of us have experienced at one time or another – the “no good deed shall go unpunished” scenario.

            We had tried to intervene for the benefit of a worthy cause and were opposed by the cousin, whom I’ll call, “Clyde.” Because of Clyde, we had no success in our intervention, which eventually led to the kind of many-tentacled horror we had predicted. Before Jack and I finally gave up, Clyde sent one more letter. “Dear Jack,” it started. It proceeded mildly but soon elevated into cold sarcasm, then became slightly heated, and in its last sentence fired the F-word, followed by “you and your wife.”

            Jack and I remembered how shocked we were. But even at the time I considered it an especially good use of the F-word in its attack mode.

            As far back as 1951, J.D. Salinger’s fictional Holden Caulfield was driven to distraction by proliferation of the F-word in its knee-jerk presentation, written on walls. Holden was a sensitive soul, but very young. I’ve never been able to figure out if, at heart, he most objected to the triteness of the signs, or to their random belligerence, or if he had internalized a generational revulsion for the word. Salinger certainly didn’t intend him to come across as protective of it, which I am.

            I’m sorry, for example, that dramatists in recent decades have sprinkled the F-word around so liberally. Like the rubber belt on an old vacuum cleaner, it has been weakened by too many uses. Back in the day, any of the impolite four-letter Anglo-Saxon words uttered in a play would be met with either nervous giggles orstraight mouths and sour facial expressions. Casual reviews would often emphasize the play’s “bad language.” The F-word was the next-to-last of the bunch to be taken in stride by the cultivated crowd.

            Sometimes movie scripts deliberately throw in so many F-words that, after a while, the audience hardly notices — becomes, in fact, bored by them. The movie “Pulp Fiction” employs that brand of audience manipulation 265 times. The most, I thought. But no, only the most in moviesI personally have seen. “Goodfellas” reaches 300 and “The Wolf of Wallstreet” makes it to 569. Unacceptable, as Older Man A declared.

            Losing a golf ball or hooking into the rough may call for a tension-relieving snarl of some kind, but using the F-word seems to me like overkill. It has become a common substitute for the S-word. Or even for “Rats!” Or “Darn it all!”

            I’m doing what I can, but I fear it’s too late. I hate to see the F-word overused because that undermines its value. Unlike vacuum cleaner belts, it can’t be replaced.

BIO

Rita Stevens has worked as a teacher and as a writer and editor for a small newspaper. She lives in Portage, Michigan.








The Hot Spring at Spetterhorn

by Brad Gottschalk


            Visitors to my home often comment on a large brass statuette that stands on a cylindrical pedestal near the fireplace in the living room. About two and a half feet in height, it is in the form of a young woman, tall and slender, blindfolded, treading on the heads of four men that lay on the ground beneath her feet (the heads lay on the ground that is, they have no bodies.). In the crook of her left arm she holds a cornucopia filled with large coins; in her right hand, she holds several of these same coins in a position that suggest she is about to fling them away. I often tell people that it was created by the obscure American artist, Jacob Giraud, and was bought from his studio years ago by my uncle, Philip. The truth is, I got it at a junk shop and know nothing about its provenance.

            The figure is, of course, Tyche, the Greek goddess of chance. Sadly, we of the modern era have lost our respect for chance; we like to believe that we are in control of our destinies, and that everything happens for a reason, but that belief reveals itself to be an illusion with every accident, diagnosis, flood, and tornado. And many a less drastic occurrence. In the past, when we had fewer creature comforts, fewer machines, and less medical knowledge, we were much more aware of chance’s importance. For the gambler, who courts chance by vocation, the replacement in popularity of faro with poker is a perfect metaphor for our attitude. Faro is openly a game of chance—that was part of its appeal. Poker players, on the other hand, have fooled themselves into believing that theirs is a game of skill, and a good player will win no matter what hand they are dealt. But a pair of twos is a pair of twos at any table, and winning with a bad hand is a matter as much of luck as of skill.

            The events I am about to relate will demonstrate this assertion beyond doubt. They occurred some time ago, in the summer of nineteen eighty-seven, and they effected broad changes in my life, both for the better and for the worse. At the time, I was two years out of college, living in Chicago with two roommates, and working part time in a store that sold vinyl records (these were common at the time), and in the office of a magazine catering to collectors of beer and soda bottles. I was not exactly prospering, but I was paying my own way and had quite a bit of free time. I mention this only to point out that it was a sacrifice to leave, but not a great one. In May of that year, I was called back to my hometown, Spetterhorn, by my aunt, Carissa, and my cousin, Elliot. A number of people in town had been stirring up trouble for Aunt Carissa, and, having no one else to turn to, as my parents had both passed away the year before, she asked for my help. So I packed a suitcase and boarded a Greyhound (a bus, another common feature of life in nineteen eighty-seven) bound for my former home.

            Spetterhorn is a town of about eight thousand residents, scattered about the eponymous Mount Spetterhorn and its surrounding plain. Mount Spetterhorn is what geologists refer to as an “inselberg,” an isolated hill or mountain on otherwise fairly flat or rolling ground. The hill itself is about a mile long, running from the southwest to the northeast, about a quarter of a mile wide, and, at its crest, about three hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding terrain. It was formed by volcanic activity and contains granite, basalt, and chert overlain in places by sandstone, limestone, and shale, and while there have been no volcanic eruptions in human (or at least white people’s) memory, there is some remaining geothermal activity that feeds a hot spring which happens to be on my aunt’s property, about thirty yards downhill from her house. The spring, while increasing significantly the value of Carissa’ property, was also the root of her trouble. A gang of people from town was pressuring my aunt to give public access to it, and to understand why this would cause my aunt grief, one must understand some of the peculiarities of Spetterhorn’s history.

            The town was founded in eighteen seventy-one as a farming community dedicated to the raising of Finnish pygmy sheep, a breed that produces exceedingly soft wool used for luxury coats, throw rugs, and sacks, and these sheep live almost exclusively on the leaves and fruit of the takiainenberry plant, which then grew in abundance on the plain around Mount Spetterhorn but not on the hill. Because of this, the hill was used mainly for recreation, such as snipe hunting, hiking, and adultery, while the houses, shops, churches, and saloons of the town were constructed exclusively on the plain. However, even in prosperous times, people sometimes lost their farms through drinking, gambling, or other such missteps (such is chance), and those who did so and did not have family to support them moved up to the hill, where land could be claimed simply by staking out a plot. Hill people built houses, a few roads, and even a general store, but the area continued to be regarded as uncivilized, undesirable, and unworthy by the people who lived below. Long before any of us were born, my uncle Phillip’s family suffered this fate. I call him my uncle only out of custom; he was really a distant relative the precise nature of which I have never really known. Shortly after the Civil War there was a rift in the family involving railroad speculation, and my uncle’s ancestors lost their farm and reluctantly claimed a piece of land near the top of Mount Spetterhorn. Tensions from this rift continued well into the twentieth century.

            The move soon turned into a boon for Phillip’s ancestors, though, owing to the presence of the aforementioned spring. Soon after its discovery, people from town were paying modest fees to relax in the steaming waters, especially during the long winter months. The average water temperature was 102 degrees Fahrenheit, and people could relax in the pool while looking down at the snow covered streets and farmland. In the summer it was common practice to loll in the spring for half an hour or so then run down the hill and jump into the Pishwaukee, a wide and slow moving river running through the town. However, for the majority of townspeople, visits to the spring resulted in nothing more than a transactional relationship with its owners. Attitudes towards people on the hill never varied, and social circles in the plain below were ever closed to everyone in my uncle’s family. One story, related to me by Carissa, involved my uncle’s great grandfather, who, in the flush of new prosperity bestowed by the spring’s entrance fees, traveled to Evanston and purchased a motorboat of the kind that was coming into fashion at the time. However, when it was transported to Spetterhorn, the board of the boating club refused to give him a dock on the riverfront. At considerable expense, my uncle’s great grandfather had the boat hauled up the hill to the house where it gathered dust and rust and was eventually broken up for firewood.

            Directly after the end of World War One, everything changed. An influx of inexpensive Bolivian alpaca destroyed the market for the wool of the Finnish pygmy sheep, and in a few short years, all farms but three stopped operation. Many of the plains people tried growing other crops, but the takiainenberry plants had leeched acids into the soil that rendered it unfit for growing anything other than that and dwarf potatoes, a crop with small yields. A silverware company that had made mess kits for the army provided a small number of people with meagre incomes, but Spetterhorn’s prosperity had come to an end. As the people of the plain sank into poverty, their negative regard for the hill people began to dissipate. At the same time, the hot spring’s reputation spread past Spetterhorn to the larger towns in the area and then beyond. From the late nineteen twenties through the fifties the spa was visited by people from Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Omaha, and smaller cities throughout the Midwest and Great Plains. My uncle’s grandfather artificially expanded the spring using man-made basins and aquifers, built a shelter over part of it so that people could enjoy the waters even in bad weather, added a funicular which brought guests up from the town, and christened it Magnum Balneum. And other hill folks took part in the enterprise. At the peak of Magnum Balneum’s popularity there were two small hotels, three restaurants, a hunting park, and a peep show, all primarily serving the spring’s guests. My uncle’s grandfather, no longer dependent on the patronage of Spetterhorn residents, became a grim and rigid gatekeeper. He allowed almost no one from town to use the spring, and those who were admitted paid exorbitant entrance fees. It mattered little to him that the people he was shutting out were but the poor descendants of those who had snubbed his family, his rules were the embodiment of fifty years of resentment.

            Of course, Dama Fortuna does not linger in one place for long. Throughout the late nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties interest in Magnum Balneum waned.Ease of travel and the proliferation of the tourist industry with its endless series of novelties lured guests away, and by nineteen seventy, the spring’s customers were too few to support the hotels, restaurants, and live nude girls, all of which closed. Phillip was running the place at that point. Faced with the choice between shuttering the business or opening it up to the people of Spetterhorn, he chose the former. He died in nineteen-eighty, and afterwards Carissa, out of both dedication to Phillip and her own inclination, kept the waters private.

            I had not, in fact, thought much of any of this during my four years of college and two years in Chicago. Even before that I spent only a little time at the house, as my immediate family was not included in the group considered eligible to visit the spring. However, the summer after my uncle died, for reasons I never understood, I was often invited up to the house where Carissa entertained small groups of friends and relatives, parading around in a bikini and sarong but never going into the waters herself, enjoying her high social standing as hostess and “Queen of the Spa,” a soubriquet she claims was dubbed her by a guest, but one I suspect she gave herself. I and a few distant relatives would lounge in the various pools drinking lemonade and lying about the people with whom we’d made out and the various bases we’d rounded.

            The shadows were long across the street as the bus pulled into the terminal, an ancient gas station with pumps that no longer operated. I gathered my bag and walked up the side of the hill. Carissa and Elliot met me at the front door. Carissa was at the time in her early fifties but still held at least the outline of the shape she bore as queen of the spa. She was able, I learned, to keep the spring shut to outsiders by running a thriving mail order business in antique postcards. Travel cards were her specialty, and though she had never been anywhere farther away than Omaha, if one were looking for historical postcards of the Hagia Sophia, the St. Charles Bridge, the brothels of Pompeii, or the Suq of Marrakesh, she would, using a network of contacts, have them in the mail to you within a week. Elliot had turned into a handsome young man, though thin and not robust. He was studying botany. He greeted me politely but seemed a bit resentful at my presence. This is understandable, considering how I treated him while visiting the house as a teenager.

            It was early evening by the time I settled in, so we did little but put away dinner and a bottle of bourbon then went to bed.The next day, I inspected Magnum Balneum. The shelter over the main pool had decayed from lack of maintenance and had long since been removed. The only structure left was a storage shed containing a couple of pool skimmers, metal folding chairs, and twenty-year-old rat poison (the speckled egg rat, native to the region, frequently infested houses on the hill, but their numbers had decreased sharply after World War Two). The spring itself consisted of one large pool, about twenty feet across and five feet deep, with four smaller pools, ten feet down the hill, fed by two man-made aquifers dug into the hillside and lined with rocks and concrete. There was no one around, so I stripped, slid into the main pool, and lounged there for half an hour or so. After drying in the sun, I walked into town. Out of pure nostalgia, I went past the small, old house in which I had grown up. My parents’ families both had given up on farming before they were born, and my grandfather had supported his with a store that sold radios and second-hand furniture. My father then took over the business, which was far from lucrative, and the house, a one-story two-bedroom, was the best he could afford. After my parents’ deaths, I was unable to sell it, and it still stood deserted, with crumbling siding and a yard of grim weeds. One of the windowpanes facing the street was missing, but I declined to enter.

            On High Street, near the park at the town’s center, I happened to run into Joe Peachum, one of the people agitating against Carissa. He offered to buy me a cup of coffee, so we walked over to the Screech Owl Diner (specialty coffee shops of the type that litter the contemporary landscapes were rare in nineteen eighty-seven). At the diner, I found myself seated at a long table facing not just Peachum, but Sally Kohl and Ed Dewey, all sitting in a row opposite me. I was but twenty-four years old, facing people my parents’ age, all in positions of authority. Peachum was a successful realtor, and no doubt had commercial reasons for wanting the spring open to the public. Kohl was a pharmacist, knew every person in town, and wielded a great deal of influence. Dewey ran a shoe store, but he also sat on the town council, and as he was able to produce a hot cloud of invented information from his mouth at a moment’s notice, he was often able to convince other members to vote his way, even when what he wanted was baldly idiotic.

            These three pretended to explain to me that opening up the spring to the public was in the town’s best interest, and that Carissa’s desire to keep it closed was not only selfish but unpatriotic. Dewey mentioned eminent domain, but I knew that was a long reach. Peachum declared stonily that the three of them would encourage people from town to trespass on our property and take over the spring by osmosis. They then asked for my help in persuading Carissa to concede. I told them I was here to support her and would not be a party to any backroom deals. They were all eating cherry pie, and I fancied they were pretending that Carissa was baked into it. I did not touch my coffee.

            Upon returning to the house, I related the essence of the conversation to Carissa. She then presented her plan to dynamite the spring rather than let the rabble from town take it over. This was not an idle threat; she had, in fact, been in touch with a demolition company and had already obtained an estimate for the work. I tried to dissuade her. I asked her to give me a week to figure out a course of action, and at the end, if I could not come up with anything, I would support the spring’s destruction.

            That night, after darkness had spread completely, I stole quietly out to Magnum Balneum. Peachum’s comment had struck me ominously, and I suspected that it was not just a threat, but that an invasion had already begun. The path was overgrown from disuse, and the trees obscured the moonlight, so I had to feel my way along, moving slowly, grasping trees and hedges. At the spring, moonlight shone through an opening in the trees, and by it I could see that there were indeed two trespassers there, a man and woman, middle-aged and naked, rolling in the water like a couple of walruses. As I watched, they stood up, moved down to one of the lower pools, slid in and submerged. Moving as quietly as I could, I made my way back to the house to get my uncle’s hunting rifle. I did not plan to shoot the couple, but if Peachum was going to set the town upon us, I was determined at least to make it uncomfortable for them. However, when I got back to the spring, the couple was already dressed and moving down the hill. Staying out of sight, I followed them as they walked back to their house and made a note of their address. (I did so only in case we might be forced to resort to legal action over the affair.)

            I spent the following week pondering the situation and doing what research I could at the public library. We had no internet then of course, so I was limited in what I could discover to the few books mentioning the ownership and management of springs, to newspapers on microfiche, and to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature which, unsurprisingly, yielded little useful information. I even phoned my record store boss, thinking he, as a business owner, might have some useful insights. In the end, inspiration struck as I drove Carissa’s car past Kochliche, a former supper club and Spetterhorn’s oldest restaurant. I advised Carissa to invite Peachum, Kohl, and Dewey to the house for a dinner during which we would discuss my plan, and afterwards we would have a round of cocktails in Magnum Balneum.

            That Saturday evening, the guests arrived. Kohl was looking smart in a business suit with gray pinstripes, and Peachum always dressed as if he worked in a bank. These were the Reagan years after all, and Wall Street set the tone for clothes as well as behavior. Dewey wore a painfully loud Hawaiian shirt and maroon and ochre wing tips. Elliot wore a Cramps t-shirt and was asked to eat in the kitchen. Salt encrusted salmon steaks were served with fingerling potatoes, but the resentment that filled the room did not abate. We each had a second glass of wine, then I outlined my proposal. It was simply this: the spring would be run as a private club. People from town (some) would be allowed to purchase memberships, and members would be free to use the spring during daylight hours as they might wish. In return, members would pay to have a privacy fence constructed between the house and spring to hide their revelries from my aunt’s attention. Carissa would have strict control over whom would be allowed to join and could refuse membership for any, or no reason. Dewey objected. He wondered how in a democratic society one person could exhibit such a high level of snobbery. Peachum and Kohl concurred, though with little enthusiasm. At this point in the discussion, I produced the estimate for dynamiting the spring along with a report from a geologist I had hired claiming the destruction of the spring was necessary to protect drinking water obtained from private wells on the hill. The documents were quite persuasive. If the sign of a productive negotiation is that no one is happy, this one was a great success. Taking to various rooms, we all changed into our swimsuits, gathered together some bottles of gin and tonic water, and headed down to the waters.

            Here, I would like to remind the reader that my original point concerned the importance of chance, for this is the moment in which chance re-wrote the story. As we walked down the hill, Kohl and Dewey were in the lead, followed by Peachum, then by Carissa and me, carrying the garnishes and bottles. Kohl suddenly let out a shriek that echoed through the entire hillside and caused owls, nightjars, and whip-poor-wills suddenly to take flight. I stumbled down as quickly as I could and stood at the edge of the aquifer that drew water from the largest pool to the others. In the large pool, two people were floating, face down, not moving, bloated bodies white in the moonlight. It was, in fact, the couple I had spotted trespassing the week before. We called the authorities, the bodies were removed, and Peachum, Kohl, and Dewey left without taking advantage of their opportunity to bathe.

            This might have been but a temporary obstacle in our plans, but at the autopsies, it was determined that the couple died not from drowning, but of arsenic poisoning. Apparently, they had been drinking the water of the spring, not simply bathing in it, and the water contained a high level of the poison. Arsenic is, in fact, often found joined with sulphur, a common element in igneous rock, and will be dissolved in whatever water passes over or through such rock. When the water is heated, as in a hot spring, the effect is magnified. The townspeople’s interest in bathing in the spring waned quickly after this incident, and my aunt was left in peace.

            Unfortunately, it was a short-lived peace. Two years later, Elliot and Carissa died as well, also of arsenic poisoning. It seems there were cracks in the bedrock between the spring and their well, and water from the spring was travelling through those cracks and seeping into their drinking water. It is a bitter irony that the feature of Carissa’s property of which she was so possessive in the end caused her death. As it was, as her closest living relative, I inherited Magnum Balneum, and two years after Carissa’s death, I re-opened it to the public. Now you may wonder how a spring the water of which caused four deaths would be an inviting destination. Almost miraculously, the arsenic levels abated. The geologist I hired assured me that this is quite normal, as arsenic levels in spring water often fluctuate owing to rain and groundwater recharge. Besides, people’s memories are short, and there has been no illness and not a single death since Carissa’s attributable to the spring. Since nineteen ninety-one it has continued to provide healing waters to the people of Spetterhorn and surrounding communities, and even to the occasional visitor from Omaha. And those of an egalitarian cast can be assured that there is no restriction on the spring’s use other than the cost of admission.


BIO

Brad Gottschalk is a writer and cartoonist who has lived most of his life in Wisconsin. His comics, illustrations and fiction have appeared in numerous journals; most recently his fiction has appeared in Caveat Lector, Sangam, and Rosebud. You can see more of his work at www.silenttheatercomics.com. 






To Devour Heaven

by Syndey Fisher


It’s a familiar taste upon my tongue–
The flesh and blood of my flesh and blood

I bite and chew and grind and suck
Yet my hunger…. It lingers

This instinct, it gnaws at me, making my stomach gurgle and kick like a memory inside of me–
Like elbows slamming into my ribcage and muffled screams obscured by muscle and sinew

From where you stand it is a quiet affair.
The squelching is minimal- its jaw unhinges and he swallows the body whole.

“I see you,” his eyes say to you.
“You can’t look away,” the tiny body begs- as if that will change anything at all.

It’ll be your turn next, you know?
And it’ll be his turn forever.



The Cartographer


Every breath adds a fresh mark on the map
Every sigh forms a new landmark in remembrance
Every stumble leaves a scuff in its wake- a frowny face here, a scowling skull there
My inkwell is full and ready to touch fresh parchment

Sometimes I meet another cartographer in my wanderings
We compare our maps and let our quills touch each other’s hearts
Beware the deadends, the dark alleys, and the precarious ledges
Stay here if you’re ever in town, talk to this person if you are blessed with the opportunity

Sometimes when I don’t like what I see before me I look to my map
My map has changed so much since the day I first shakily dragged a quill across its surface
I can’t help but sigh and say, ‘But look how far I’ve already come.’



BIO

Sydney Fisher is currently getting her undergraduate degree in English at Azusa Pacific University and plans to get her master’s degree in Library Science. She also is pursuing minors in Screenwriting and Biblical Studies due to being a queer Christian artist with a love for all things cartoon. 






Getting Serious

by Paul Perilli


I had played two exhibition games in Madrid. I had been to Mallorca for other reasons. I liked Spain. It’s a beautiful country. Yet, when my agent called to tell me about an offer from a team there, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it. He reminded me it was the best deal I had on the table. While others were sure to come in, Sevilla was a first-rate squad in one of Europe’s top leagues.

“Two years, a million two five zero Euros per. You get an apartment and a car. An opt out to go back to the NBA. You can thrive over there.”

So here I am in the city founded by Hercules, walled in by the Romans, sacked by the Arabs and Vikings, and conquered by Ferdinand III. These days it’s known for its festivals and flamenco dancing. Its tapas joints and heat too.

My name is David Garri. I play guard for the Ocho Nodos. I’m six-foot tall, on the small side for a professional basketball player, but I can shoot the lights out. Halfway through the season we’re in third place in the Spanish League and first in our EuroCup group. I average fifteen points and five assists. Those might not sound like much, I topped them in three of my NBA seasons, but Europeans play a different style of ball. Over here it’s team and system oriented. Defense is emphasized. The games are shorter. The scores lower. Besides Spain, my teammates are from Slovakia, Turkey, Italy, France, and Lithuania. Tony Daniels is the only other import from the States. Newcomer I might be, so far they’ve treated me well. So has the press. The fans act like fans everywhere. After the games they approach me outside the arena wanting my autograph. The kids get a kick out of my Boston accented Spanish. Which I know is rough, but passable. My tutor’s surprised how fast I’m picking it up.

“Rápido como eres en la cancha,” she told me.

“Como un rayo,” was my reply.

All this love for me won’t last forever. I say that from experience. Eight seasons in the NBA, I went from a second-round draft pick out of Providence College to a starter with a four year thirty-million dollar contract to a player cut by two teams in one season. From good to nothing special to a twenty-eight year old reserve getting in ten minutes a game.

My home here is the six-room apartment the team’s front office set up for me. It’s a fine enough place in a modern building even if I prefer the architectural styles of the older ones. It has new furniture, a giant t.v. screen, a balcony that looks out over the Plaza de Toros. There’s a parking spot for my Peugeot in a private lot across the street. I don’t take it out much. Sevilla’s a walking city. A city you want to walk in. With time on my hands, I did a lot of that my first weeks here. I checked out the Cathedral, the Plaza de España, The Mushrooms. I went to a soccer game. I packed away plates of delicious food in Triana tapas bars. I made two trips to the Royal Alcazar where I knew scenes for the Principality of Dorne in Game of Thrones were filmed. Outrageous as it sounds, one of those trips had a lot to do with my getting together with a journalist for Diario de Sevilla. An outgoing woman with dark hair, Valentina and I met at a casual eating and drinking spot near my apartment. I remember it well. It was a Thursday evening. Back from the Royal Alcazar, I was at a table by the windows drinking a beer and waiting for my serraitos, a Sevilla specialty. At the next table with a couple of coworkers, Valentina recognized me from the photo her paper had published two days earlier alongside an article about the team.

She caught my eyes, and said, “You’re the new guy.”

“I am him,” I said.

“Welcome to Sevilla.”

“Nice to be here. Who are you?”

That started things off. But instead of news or basketball we got to talking about Game of Thrones. She was as big a fan of the series as I was. She had written about its filming in Spain. We became so involved in the discussion we must have bored her friends. They finished up, said so long and left us alone. One drink later we were back at my place. The new mattress was firm, but it didn’t hinder our enjoyment. After that, we took glasses of wine into the living room and streamed the final episode of Season 1, where Daenerys emerges from the pyre as the Mother of Dragons. When it was over Valentina went into the bedroom, put on the rest of her clothes, came out and said, “I am sorry but I must leave. I have to be up early to go to Gibraltar for a story.”

What could I say? Maybe we’d see each other again?

“I will let you know,” she said.

Whatever. Except in a few cases, those were the days I could go around Sevilla without being recognized. I could eat in a restaurant or go to a museum without being approached for an autograph or selfie. Since the season got underway that’s no longer the case. In the third game on our home court we beat Barcelona, one of the league’s best teams. It was tight until the end when I drained a couple of threes in the final minutes to seal the win. When the final buzzer sounded the fans went wild, cheering “olé olé olé” in celebration. The next day the media was all over it. It brought me the kind of attention I hadn’t had in a while.

However it was for me, it was the start of a nine game winning streak for the team. As the season progressed and we kept winning, my teammates and I became a tight knit unit as winning teams tend to be. We hung out after games and practices. Sometimes, instead of going to a bar or club, we played poker at my place. We had fun. Most of us were away from our home countries and I think it was something we were looking for, that feeling of family. Though I’ll say in my case a lot of that had to do with Tony Daniels.

Tony and I had crossed paths in the NBA. By then he was a journeyman and except as competitors on the court, we didn’t interact much. What I remember most from those days was the profile Sports Illustrated did about him. Tony Daniels, you may not know, is a fine trumpet player. He would tell me one night in the bar of our hotel in Ljubljana he saw being cut loose from the NBA as a sign he should retire to be a professional musician.

“The trumpet was calling me,” he said. “It was powerful.”

What I didn’t know until then was he had gotten a degree from Julliard and in the off season traveled with a quintet called “The Five Spots.” Yet, he wasn’t quite ready to give up hoop. So here he was playing for the Ocho Nodos.

That aside, we had hit it off from day one when he picked me up at the airport after my flight from the States. On the drive into the city I knew he was glad to have someone from back home to hang out and chat it up with.

“Man, I’m happy you showed up,” he said. “It ain’t the NBA, but it’s a great place to be.”

“I know it’s gonna be good,” I said.

During those early weeks he showed me the ropes. He took me to his favorite haunts. Dražen, a hot shot guard from Croatia, was with us most of the time. Marco, a gym rat from Milan, and Rudy, a board crasher from Bratislava, joined us on a regular basis. As the season went on we stayed out later and later. It didn’t take long for word about us to get around, yet it didn’t seem to matter what we did off the court. We beat Baskonia by twenty-three points on the road for our seventeenth win in the Spanish League. It might have been our best game of the season. Everything clicked. Dražen led the way with twenty-six. I went for seventeen. The victory put us one game behind Barcelona for second place in the standings. We had a joyous time in the locker room. We were on a roll and saw big things ahead. Coach Lolo praised our pressure defense. It was his system and game plan, and the chant went up, “Coach, Coach, Coach.” We were about to get on our way to the airport when the team manager got a text saying a thunderstorm was about to sweep in and our charter flight to Belgrade was cancelled. The good news was, the hotel we had stayed in had enough rooms for us. It was eleven o’clock by the time we checked in. Except instead of staying put to rest for our game against Partizan the next night, Tony, Dražen, and I went to a club off Vitoria-Gasteiz’s main plaza.

Dražen had been to it the year before when he played for Žalgiris. It was a bustling place with a restless Friday night crowd. Lights were blinking. Electronic music blasting. On the dance floor people bounced and gyrated. At the bar Tony bought a round of marianitos. It went down pretty easy and in no time we had fresh glasses in our hands. We stood there watching the goings on until a few people recognized us and asked if we’d take selfies with them. Then more folks came over. After a few more pictures my drink was on the bar and I was dancing, though I’m not sure if I asked her or she asked me? I recall her name was Lia. She was on the slender side with short hair. A bit tipsy I could tell, but it didn’t interfere with her moves. She had some fine ones, though I’ll add I’m no slouch out there. I matched her step for step, spin for spin. It wasn’t long before Tony and Dražen were bopping to the beat with their own partners.

We must have been out there an hour. When one-thirty came around we were out the door on the way to our hotel to party some more. I’m not sure how much sleep I got. Three hours at most. In the morning I was late getting to the lobby. Tony and Dražen were there looking tired as I was. It was obvious Coach Lolo was on pins and needles. He didn’t say anything to us, but I had a hunch the good feelings he’d had in the locker room after our win were past tense.

I suppose it wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you we lost to Partizan? We were never in the game. Tony came through with some decent play, but Dražen and I never got going. Our energy was low. Our production was too. I had six points when Coach Lolo pulled me for the last five minutes hoping my replacement would hit a few buckets to give us a chance. That didn’t happen. After it, Dražen admitted the hour he slept on the plane was the only shuteye he got.

“Can’t dance all night and expect to play well the next day,” he said.

“I hear that,” I said.

We had a couple of days off before our next game to get back in sync. Instead of that, we hit a snag. We lost our next three games, two at home, the other away against Joventut. We were in a bad way. Our shots weren’t dropping. Our on court communication was out of whack. Me, I sucked. My scoring and assists were down. My confidence took a hit. I didn’t think Coach Lolo would bench me, but I knew I had to pick up my play. As it was, I was on the court fewer minutes. In our last loss I hit two shots, that was it, and Coach Lolo sat me the entire fourth quarter. Walking to the bench, a few of our fans started getting on me. Booing and tossing out their hands. Just a few, but it was enough to get my attention. I mean, I’d been booed before. It was no big deal. Part of being a pro athlete. The fans pay to watch you and they have that right. And since I was from the US, the pressure was on. I was the team’s main acquisition that year and there I was shooting bricks.

The next day a few sports writers ripped me good. One said I was a big reason we had dropped from third to fifth place in the league. Another questioned if I was worth it? Along with that, we continued to go south in our EuroCup group. We had lost focus. Coach Lolo had lost patience. At the next practice he read us the riot act. He put us through a string of grueling drills. He used his whistle a lot to point out what we were doing wrong. We heard rumors he planned to shake up the lineup if our bad play continued.

On my way home that evening my phone buzzed. I’d been expecting the call. My agent wondered what was up? Was I injured and not telling anyone?

“I’m good,” I said.

But I think he knew all along what the deal was. What came next was no surprise. I had to cut out the late nights, get my shit together, or I could kiss off any chance of getting back to the NBA.

“They’re not looking for partiers to take up a spot on the bench,” he said. “It’s time to get serious.”

“Too many other things that don’t have to do with hoop,” was how Valentina described it when we were out at dinner. She had dated two professional soccer players. She knew what went down on road trips. She heard the whispering about our adventures to Sevilla’s clubs.

Of course, I said that wasn’t what we were about.

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“Uh huh,” she said. “I was not born yesterday.”

The restaurant we were in served some of the finest seafood in Sevilla. We took our time eating and splitting a bottle of French wine. When we finished, we went back to my place to watch Game of Thrones. Some weeks before that we had decided to replay the entire series. We looked forward to doing that together, though as I mentioned, the nights she stayed with me were sporadic. Anyway, we were up to Season 3, episode 4, the one Daenerys trades Kraznys a dragon for his Unsullied army. You may recall after the transaction Daenerys orders the Unsullied to kill their slavers and her dragon to burn Kraznys to death.

“Ocho Nodos needs to be that dragon, to be slayers instead of the slayed,” Valentina said.

I was laughing. She was laughing. Then I got an idea. Crazy as it was, and it was crazy, I aired it out.

“I should have the team over to watch this. As a way to get everyone on the same page. It might help. We need something. Anything. Even this.”

“That is crazy. But I like it. You should do it right away so you’re all on the same page, as you say.”

“You’re right. It can’t wait. Tomorrow. I’ll mention it after practice.”

I called Tony the next morning to find out what he thought? If he didn’t want to do it, that would be the end of my bizarro idea.

“No Coach?” he said.

“No Coach. Just us.”

“We tell him though. Otherwise, if he finds out he might think we’re planning a mutiny.”

“So you’re into it?”

“Did I say no? Yeah, I’m all for it, man.”

In our street clothes after the next practice, Tony and I asked our teammates to wait in locker room while we went to see Coach Lolo. They couldn’t figure out what we were up to. We didn’t want to tell them in case Coach didn’t like the idea.

In his office, he stared at us as if for the first time. Game of Thrones? He laughed. But to our surprise, it turned out he was all in. If we thought it would help, why not?

“Can’t hurt,” I said.

“We need something,” Tony said.

“Not too late,” Coach Lolo said.

We played Unicaja the next night. The stands were sure to be packed. We had to be ready.

“In by five out by nine,” Tony said.

With a bit more back and forth, Coach decided he liked the idea so much he told us the team would pay for the food and drink. “If we win Sunday night,” he said. “Only if we win.”

It was a bet we were willing to take. “Since it looks like you’re buying, we’re ordering from the best restaurant,” I said.

I have to admit I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure what affect watching Game of Thrones would have on us. I had a hunch Tony thought the same.

Back in the locker room, Tony explained the situation, “Coach gave us the go ahead. Don’t bring anything but yourselves. No spouses or companions. No snacks or wine.”

I said, “Coach is buying dinner if we win.”

“When we win,” Dražen said.

I took six folding chairs from the practice facility’s storage room and brought them to my place. I set them around the screen with my couch and chairs. I wanted it to be casual, eating, talking, while watching Game of Thrones. The next day at four o’clock two men from Triana’s best tapas restaurant arrived with a banquet table they set a white cloth, tableware, and tin platters of food on: charcuterie and cheese plates, potato croquettes, chorizo, roasted asparagus wrapped in ibérico ham, skewers of pork and shrimp, tarts and cakes for dessert. Bottles of beer, wine, and sparkling water were set on the kitchen counter.

At five my doorbell sounded out. Tony, Dražen, and our other teammates began showing up one or two at a time. When all were present I handed out drinks, then I told them to make themselves a plate and get comfortable.

“I’ll fire up the screen,” I said.

“What’s on?” Marco said.

“Game film of a sort,” Tony said.

With a few clicks I had Season 3, Episode 4 ready to go. That got a laugh.

When six-thirty came around, I said, “Let the Game of Thrones begin.”

So there we were, gathered around the screen. I could feel the excitement in my teammates as the scenes shifted from Kings Landing to the north, then beyond the wall before it moved to Astapor where Daenerys, Kraznys, the dragon, and the Unsullied army were gathered. As it unfolded even those who hadn’t seen it knew something big was about to happen. Daenerys was giving in. With a dragon Kraznys would be dangerous. Then it happened. Daenerys took charge. There’s no reason to rehash the ending, except to say in the closing scene Daenerys leads the Unsullied out of Astapor as the dragon soars overhead.

At that point I stood up and said, “We want to be like Daenerys and the dragon. We want to be the slayers.”

“Hear hear,” Tony raised a hand.

Other joined in.

“Don’t mess with us.”

“No way.”

The next thing I did was tell everyone to eat and drink some more, then we had to call it a night. We had to be fresh the next day.

“For the shootaround. Then we…” I left that hanging.

“Win!” was the undisputed reply.

A moment later we were on our feet smiling and slapping high fives. I got everyone to huddle close together. Then I set my camera on the table of food and jumped into the frame in time for the photo. An hour after that everyone was out the door on their way home in high spirits. Tony was last to leave.

“It worked,” he said. “I can feel it.”

After he left I looked around, nodding my head in the belief we had come together. My whacko idea had been a success.

There were leftovers in the tins. Wine, beer, and water on the kitchen counter. I covered the food and put it and the beer in the refrigerator. I made a phone call. Not long after that the two men from the restaurant came back to take everything else away.

It was just ten o’clock when they left, but I was tired. Much as I wanted to call Valentina to tell her how it went, I decided against it. She had the ticket I gave her for the game. I expected her to be there. I figured she would be curious what came of it. Game of Thrones as a device to unify the team. It sounded ridiculous. Maybe it was.

Any doubts I had were erased the next day. We put on a clinic, beating Unicaja by twenty points. After our string of losses, a victory felt good. Tony was our high scorer. The first time that season he led the team. To go with those, he chipped in his usual rebounds and blocks. I hadn’t seen him play with that much energy in weeks. The next day the press said it was a solid team performance. A win we needed. Some wondered if we could keep it up?

Of course, they didn’t know our secret weapon. We weren’t going to tell them, though we assumed it would get to them in time. As it turned out, after our next game it was the basis of a Diario de Sevilla article: ¿Game of Thrones Inspiró a los Ocho Nodos? When the reporter inquired about it in an email, I avoided the question and instead told her whatever the reason, it was about time we turned on the afterburners.

The question for us was, do we keep it going? We had two days off before our next game. When I talked to Tony on the phone, I asked if he thought it was a good idea? Did he think the other guys would be in on it?

To my surprise, he said, “We do it again. At your place, but not right away.”

Four days later we traveled to Italy for a EuroCup game against Germani Brescia. It was one of those games I was deep in the zone. My teammates got the ball to me. I was one step ahead of the defense. By the time Coach Lolo took me out I had scored thirty-five in a blowout win. Walking off the court, a few Germani Brescia fans applauded me. Of course, many more booed. One threw a cookie my way. It happens.

Two Sundays after that we met up again at my place for eats, drinks, and another episode of Game of Thrones. With Valentina’s input I showed “Battle of the Bastards.” The episode where the epic clash for Winterfell ends with Ramsay Bolton being eaten by his own dogs. After it, we went on a six game winning streak. We won our fans back. They were cheering me again. The rest of the team too. By season’s end we climbed back to third place in the league standings. In the playoffs, we lost in the second round to the eventual champ Real Madrid three games to two.

Our season wasn’t done. We finished second in our EuroCup group to make the playoffs. A final Game of Thrones get together at my place started us on our way to the championship game. Played on TürkTelekom’s home court, it was close all the way until Dražen knocked down three straight shots that included a dagger with thirty seconds left to lead us to the win.

Back in Sevilla the next day, the Mayor held a parade in our honor. Standing on decorated flatbed trucks, we rode through the center of town. Along the way our fans clapped and cheered. Many wore hats and jerseys bearing the team’s logo. The procession ended at the Plaza de Espagna. A stage had been set up and we gave speeches to the jubilant crowd. When it was my turn, I mentioned how at first I was hesitant to join the Ocho Nodos but now I didn’t want to leave it or Sevilla. At the end I thanked them, raised a hand and led a fist pumping chant: “olé, olé…”

It was an exclamation point to a glorious season. I hadn’t known what to expect when my plane landed nine months earlier and Tony greeted me in Arrivals. A lot had happened. It turned out better than I ever imagined.

Without a firm offer from an NBA team, I decided to stay with the Ocho Nodos. Instead of Boston, I spent most of the summer in Sevilla. Valentina and I were together much of that time. I was happy with her and I believe she was with me. In August we traveled to London and Iceland, then spent a week at the beach on the Portuguese coast. That was where I got the message Dražen signed with the Miami Heat and two other teammates were off to European teams in Italy and Israel. Their replacements were from Spain, Russia, and Senegal.

The Senegalese player was a nineteen year old six foot nine high flyer Coach Lolo had met at a basketball camp in that country four years earlier. His name was Moussa Sene and he was OKC’s second round pick in the recent NBA draft. He was lanky, unpolished, but his shot was good and skill set developing fast. He was in Spain to get a year of professional experience under his belt. It was rumored his family didn’t want him to go right to the States. That seemed sensible since he’d only played three years of organized ball and there was no way to know how he would react to NBA life in one giant leap. That said, he arrived at our practice facility a week after the rest of us. His parents, who came with him, wanted to be sure the setup was right.

The practices Coach Lolo put us through were hard as ever. He had no intention to let us rest on our laurels. Far as he was concerned, the EuroCup championship and advancement to the Spanish League semifinals were in the history books. Winning the EuroCup had qualified us for the EuroLeague, the top tier league in Europe. We would have to play at the highest level to compete with the best teams. There would be no coming back from a letdown like we had last year.

That first week we were back I met Tony and Marco at Diez Puntos, a blues and jazz joint on a side street in the Macarena district. It was a favorite of Tony’s, which meant it was a favorite of ours too. How could it not be? The music was excellent. The vibe cool.

Since it was a Wednesday night we got a table easy enough. We drank beer and listened to a jazz quartet improvise some fine tunes. Between sets we talked about Moussa, the other new guys on the team, and the EuroLeague. Tony was sure something good was about to happen. He was always sure big things were ahead. Feeling the magic, he banged his chest. Despite losing Dražen he thought our team was stronger than a year ago.

“Remember,” I reminded him, “All the best teams got stronger, not just us. And the EuroLeague…” I stopped. I didn’t want to sound negative.”

“Very soon we’ll find out what we’re about,” Marco said.

Before we hit the sidewalk, we signed autographs. We did that every time we were there. I know some players get touchy about it. They don’t want their personal space intruded on. I get that. But to me it’s no bother. It would be that way if they stopped asking us to sign, was how Tony looked at it.

Outside, Tony and Marco grabbed taxis. I lived closer and decided to walk. There were still a lot of people on the streets. For the first time since my early weeks in Sevilla I saw it as it was, a city easy on the eyes. Full of energy and enjoyment. Then out of the blue it struck me. My mind hadn’t been going in that direction, but the question popped up. Should I repeat our winning device of last season? With the new players we might be better, but the team had a different character. It might not sync as well. I figured Tony, Marco, and Rudy were sure to be in. Four or five of the others. What about the Russian guy Vilensky? We didn’t know him well. He was a serious dude who kept to himself. A Game of Thrones gathering might not be to his liking. And Moussa? Would his parents let him get in on it? We would have to find that out. It seemed doubtful. I decided to wait and see if someone else brought it up.

It turned out Tony did. After a practice he wondered if we should try it before our first game? He figured Coach Lolo would buy in on it. Why wouldn’t he after last season?

“Read my mind,” I said.

“I knew you would want to do it,” he said.

“Has to be at my place,” I said. “Keep everything the same. The food. Everything. Why push our good luck?”

The night before our first game the team got together. Everyone was present. Moussa and Vilensky included. I ordered tapas and drinks from the same Triana restaurant. “The Winds of Winter” was the episode I decided to show. Not only was it a turning point in the series, but much of it was filmed in Girona and Almeria. As usual we broke ranks at nine. Before we did, we got in a circle with our arms around each other listening to Tony give a rousing speech that fired us up. The next night we kicked off the season with a win over Bilbao. With Dražen gone I had more scoring opportunities. I led the team with twenty-four. Yet, most everyone’s eyes were on Moussa. In his first game he had nine points and four rebounds. He looked comfortable on the court against players with five and ten years more experience. In no time he was a fan favorite. They stood and cheered when he capped off his debut with an alley-oop dunk I fed to him. On the court at the time, I remembered Tony looking over at me as if to say, now we know he’s for real.

My second year with the Ocho Nodos turned out to be almost as successful as the first. We didn’t win a championship, we did make it to the finals of the Spanish League playoffs, where we were again knocked off by Real Madrid three games to two. In the EuroLeague we finished sixth. A loss in the semifinal round to Anadolu Efes sent us back to next year’s EuroCup.

To my surprise, when the end of year awards were announced I was named a Second Team Spanish League all star, one of the league’s top ten players. I was happy with it even if it was Moussa who got most of the attention as the season progressed. He showed off his explosive moves around the basket. He got better every game. And that was it for him and the Ocho Nodos. The day after we lost to Anadolu Efes he took off back to Dakar with his parents. Before he left a few of us met him outside the arena to wish him well. He thanked us for everything we did for him.

“Since you have the talent, it had nothing to do with us,” Tony said.

“We’ll be calling you for free tickets, the best seats too,” I said.

Moussa laughed and shook his head. “You guys,” he said.

High fives went around. Then he and his parents got into the van the team manager drove them to the airport in.

It so happened Valentina and I were still an item. Only by then we were more so. We had stopped looking for other partners. Once in a while we eyed each other in surprise, as if to say, you’re still here? One night at my place we decided to live together. In fact, she brought it up. A month later we found an apartment in the Santa Cruz district. A month after that we moved in. It was a settling down for both of us. I admit I was losing interest in the late hours, clubbing and drinking.

Since there was no way I could leave Sevilla and be with her, my agent and I rejected offers from other European teams to sign a second two-year contract with the Ocho Nodos. That would take me to age thirty-two. I didn’t know how many more years I would play. I didn’t have a retirement plan. While I had been an okay student, I was drafted after my junior year and never got a degree. Basketball had consumed my life since I was ten. Meanwhile, Valentina’s career was going great guns. Her column in the Diario de Sevilla appeared three days a week. She was called upon to contribute to radio and television. She was doing what she set out to do.

In the off season she came with me to Boston on a family visit. I was happy to see that my parents and siblings liked her. In fact, they got along better than they had with any of my other partners. At night we hung out with friends I grew up with. She heard the stories about me. Not the athletic successes but the wild stuff we did as teens. One night we went to a Red Sox game with two other couples. I scored tickets for us behind the third base dugout and we cheered the team on in what turned out to be a lackluster two to one game.

“It is not as interesting as soccer, but I like your fans, they’re noisy like the Spanish,” Valentina said.

I agreed. What else could I say? I was one of those noisy fans. Always had been.

From Boston we traveled for ten days. Valentina had been to New York and Washington so we started off in New Orleans. We stayed in a hotel on Bourbon Street, went to the clubs Tony emailed to me; Preservation Hall, Maple Leaf Bar, Tipitina’s. We took up a two of his restaurant suggestions; Cochon and Dooky Chase’s. From there we flew to Los Angeles for three days, then we rented a car and drove up the coast to San Francisco. After that, we spent two nights in a lodge at Yellowstone National Park. It turned out to be a special trip for us. There wasn’t a dull moment.

Back in Spain I came to the realization the country would be my home for as long as I was with Valentina. When marriage came up, we agreed to wait.

“I intend to marry once, have children, and live as normal a life as possible,” was how she put it.

I did too, I said, and I meant it.

The next season was a rebuilding year for the Ocho Nodos. With four new players we came in sixth in the Spanish League. This time we lost in the first round of the playoffs. We missed making them in the EuroCup. And that turned out to be Tony’s last year with the team. Not offered a new contract, he decided to take up the call of the trumpet. His loss hit me the hardest of any teammate I had played with. He had been my guide in Sevilla my first year. We became tight on and off the court. I understood where he was at. His group in New York was waiting for him. It was time to make the move to music full time.

As a team it appeared we were heading into another down year. Marco and others left for new teams. We had more new players. But instead of struggling, we came in first in the Spanish League with a twenty-six and eight record. We beat Real Madrid in the playoff semifinals and from there went on to win the league title. Then in what might have been the highlight of my basketball career, three weeks later we won the EuroCup championship for the second time in four years. What more can I say? Winning two championships in the same year was a huge achievement. One still talked about in Sevilla.

“Man, wish I was there with you,” Tony wrote in a text the next day.

“No way you did that without me, no way,” was Dražen’s comment. That was him for sure.

The following week we were paraded through the city center to the Plaza de Espagna. It was a sunny day. A perfect day for everyone to have a good time and for us to be celebrated. The crowd that showed up was bigger than the one three years earlier. Once again, a stage was set up. Coach Lolo and my teammates took turns to say something. When my turn came up I led the fans in another olé, olé chant.

I would play one more year with the Ocho Nodos. That made five, the longest I had spent with one team. The team I look back on as being the best time of my career.

I’m not saying I was done. I wasn’t. I spent a season with AEK in the Greek League and another for Treviso in the Italian League. I had other high scoring games. There were more wins against good teams. Yet, it wasn’t the same as my glory days with the Ocho Nodos. When Treviso’s season was over I hung it up. It was the right time. I was thirty-six. I had played professional basketball fifteen years. I was still in good shape. I could put points on the board, but I’d lost some of my quickness and ability to get an open shot. Which was a lot of my game. The game that had attracted me to coaches and scouts since junior high school. And I admit, I didn’t want to end up like a lot of others, having my minutes cut to the point I was getting a few here and there before being let go a final time.

Did I mention Valentina and I got married? I don’t think I did. Well, it worked out. The woman I met my first week in Sevilla became my great love and wife. By the time I left basketball we had a two year old daughter named Gabriella. We nicknamed her The Olé Kid, and I spent much of my first year away from the game taking care of her. I had much needed help. A woman named Marta was around during the week. Valentina’s parents moved from Zaragoza to be close to their grandchild and took her when the need arose. Gabriella was our bright light and I admit I enjoyed being a daddy. It was something I never imagined was possible.

My basketball career might have been over but Valentina’s continued to thrive. She was promoted to one of the top editor slots at Diario de Sevilla. She continued to write two columns a week, along with doing radio and television. She was one of the newspaper’s public faces. Then, after a successful screen test, I caught on as a basketball analyst for a television station in Barcelona. It was in English for a European wide audience. Most of the time I worked out of the studio of a local affiliate, though I did have to travel fifty or so days during the season. It was another thing I never imagined, me with a job requiring I talk into a camera.

Then that spring I got an email from Tony saying his group was heading to Europe. They were booked to play in Madrid for a week.

“Check us out if you can make it, would be great if you could be there,” was how he ended.

I hadn’t seen him since he left the Ocho Nodos. I looked forward to getting together.

“I’ll be there, count on it,” was my reply.

I checked out his group’s website. He was doing well. “The Five Spots” were doing well. Tony looked happy in the splash page photo, holding his trumpet and smiling wide as he could. On another page I looked over the list of their recordings. On another I read the press and reviews written about them. “Their arrangements are a pleasure to hear” and “there is undeniable chemistry between these five master musicians.” I clicked the links and listened to their sounds on YouTube. Some pieces were white hot. Others toned down. Different as they might have been, I detected an urgent message coming through in each. Something troubling that needed expression. I dug their music a lot.

The next month Valentina was pregnant with our second child when we left Gabriella with her grandparents and rode the bullet train up to Madrid. It was a Friday afternoon, the first weekend we had to ourselves since Gabriella was born. For the entire ride we couldn’t stop smiling.

“We have made this new life,” Valentina said. She patted her stomach. It wasn’t yet evident she was pregnant.

“It happened this fast,” I said with a snap of my fingers. “But here we are with a weekend off to do what we want.”

“It might be many years before we get another one,” she said.

Our hotel was adjacent to the Puerta de Alcala. At nine-thirty we took a taxi to the club Tony was playing in. It was one of the best in Madrid. In all of Spain, I should add. In the door, we were told Tony had reserved a table for us. We ordered dinner, and before his set Tony came out from the back to say hello. He looked sharp. Dressed in all black. His hair longer. First thing he did was congratulate us.

“I’m still running around as a single man,” he said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said.

“Yes, David wishes he were one of those again,” Valentina said. There was a smile on her lips.

Tony sat a while with us. The whole time I could feel a pregame tension vibrating off him. I imagined it was a lot like that, and I admit I missed it. The heightened anticipation waiting for the game to get underway.

I don’t know which of us started it. It might have been Tony, it might have been me, but we were telling stories about things that happened to us on the Ocho Nodos. Funny stuff about Coach Lolo’s brutal practices. About Dražen, Marco, and Moussa. The tight games, big victories, and bad losses. About how Game of Thrones was the catalyst that turned around one season. I had forgotten about that. Valentina hadn’t. Had she recommended it to me and then I to the team? Neither of us was sure. As we laughed about it, I looked at Tony thinking he was the reason I had stayed in Spain instead of moving on. In fact, he might have been the reason I was there at all. The reason the Ocho Nodos decided to sign me. I recalled him saying he told the front office and Coach Lolo to get me while I was available. And I was still there with a wife, child, another child on the way, and a new career as a basketball analyst.

Before Tony went on stage, he introduced us to the group. Then they took their positions, checked their instruments, and got to it full speed ahead. It was a pleasure to see him on stage. He was a forceful presence with the trumpet in his hands. At one point he took the lead, stepped forward and came out attacking. His fingers pumped the keys. The sound leapt out at us. He didn’t leave anything on the field, as the saying goes. He put his whole self into it.

By the time the second set was over it was two o’clock. Valentina and I had just enough left in us to chat with Tony a while. The waiter brought over a night cap on the house. Valentina shook off hers, so he brought her a sparkling water. The three of us toasted to the future though after that we talked about the past. In the middle of the conversation the waiter came back to see if we needed anything else? I waved him off. Then he asked if he could take a selfie with Tony and I? He recognized us from the Ocho Nodos. Of course, we asked him if he was a Real Madrid fan? He smiled. Tony smiled. I smiled. It was okay, I said, we wouldn’t hold it against him. Anyway, it was something that hadn’t happened in a while. Fans wanting to take a picture with us. It was like a trip back to our days of championship fame. People wanting our photos and autographs. To be honest with you, I had just gotten used to not missing it.




BIO

Paul Perilli ives in Brooklyn, NY. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in dozens of magazines in the US and internationally. His recent fiction appears in Fairlight Books, The Write Launch, The Fictional Café, and others. His recent essays appear in Rabble Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L). Another essay is forthcoming in Otoliths final issue. His website is: https://paulperilli.com/





grain of sand

by Scott Taylor


i’ve gotten myself
screwed up somehow.
i sit here on the floor in the dark
with music playing,
and pangs of loneliness
conflict with
a vague revulsion
that would prohibit
anyone
from being here
right now.
a little bit of cocaine
and suddenly i am terrified,
needy,
a pilgrim fawn,
i am living a life
unsupported and unsustained,
no one here
but perhaps that is
because
i don’t want them here.
i listen to notes
like raindrops
and wonder why mine
don’t sound like that,
i wish my thoughts
could be beautiful,
i wish i
could be beautiful.
like a dead end
in hell,
i frown in the dark
with a mind and a dick
that just won’t work right,
and still pine
for the women
that i don’t want
anymore.



call to arms


O malcontents who hide in computers and books,
perk up your ears and harken to me,
turn off the TV and unite under a new flag.
we can band together like worker ants,
no uniforms or handbooks will
point the way for us.
O collection of ragtags,
heed the call,
the earth will one day take us all,
your routine is the disease
and you are the cure,
each of us a universe
in defiance of
a collective nothing,
fuck macdonalds and the prom
and the new york yankees,
beauty is found in second-hand stores
and genius in the babblings
of lunatics in chains.
O cellar denizens,
creep out from the sewers
and reclaim what is ours,
everyone’s,
i repeat,
EVERYONE’S,
not just for the politicians,
not just for the bankers,
not just for the inherited wealthy,
not just for the supermodels,
you’ve been told what to like,
you’ve been shown your place,
you’ve been told what to be satisfied with,
now decide
just once
for yourselves.



there’s a death in their eyes


there’s a death in their eyes, deeper and darker than any pit
if ever there was light there
it is gone now forever,
the world has won
and there is no going back.

there is a pain in their smiles
that chills me to the bone,
the heads bob and the mouths work
but they can’t mask the scent
of their fear.

i watch them on television
and on the sidewalks,
in bars and in checkout lines,
all agenda and ambition,
praying for the American Dream
and only finding
the universal nightmare,
confused and angry
but always
coming back for
more.

the spirit wanes
until only survival remains,
it is understandable
and tragic,
childhoods forgotten,
replaced long ago
by some murderous job,
now you accept the lie
because you have to,
it’s too late to object,
might as well go out to dinner
with the wife tonight
and plan this spring’s
vacation.



BIO

Scott Taylor is 49 years old, and hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler.







The Art of Courtney Parsons


Dream Room

Look Around You

Are You Listening?

Blind Date

Reconnection

Back Off

Generations

Rainy Day

Depths Below

Go To Sleep

BIO

Courtney Parsons is a graphic designer and illustrator from northern Virginia. She is the co-creator of a coloring book series titled Color Your Way USA, a history-themed coloring book series. She derives the inspiration and themes of her work from animals, nature, and the universe around her.

View more of her work at courtneymparsons.com.

Dream On

by CL Glanzing


Sinead Simon has a toothache. She prods it with her tongue hoping to find a dullness through the sting. In the night, curled in her sleeping bag, with the wind whipping the tent against her knees and head, she imagines using her adjustable spanner to rip the belligerent bastard from her aching gum. But it is unlikely she could remain silent throughout. She will not even make a fire to draw attention to her presence. She has become accustomed to softening her steps, keeping the gas stove on low.  She knows where the ivy is pulpy and easiest to step through, and where the blackberry brambles make trip-wires across the forest floor.

Ten metres behind her lies the wall, above the moss-drenched ditch with its lattice of dead logs. Narrow, wrought-iron slats — four inches thick and six feet high. A row of dense boxwood lines the inside of the fence, prickling branches through the slats and obscuring the house on three sides. The only breach is a narrow, but regal, iron-framed gate with wood infill. But it never opens, and the red eye of the camera on its shoulder never dims.

Sinead paws her feet in her sleeping bag, flexing and curling. She is snug, being so constricted. She knows where she is. The immediate world is known.

At 06:50 she emerges from her nylon cocoon. She wiggles the hot water-bottle from the feet of her sleeping bag and tips the cold contents into the bushes. She sometimes likes to end the evening with it zipped into her jacket, stroking it like a pregnant belly.

She laces her boots and pockets her waterproof notebook and pen. She hangs her field binoculars around her neck. Her hands circle the trunk of the beech tree under which she camps. She finds purchase on a low branch and a deformed knot at shoulder height, lifting her weight. She steps into the Y of the beech and swings carefully as she climbs higher and higher. She straddles a thick branch running parallel to the ground and jutting forwards in the direction of the house. She slides herself forward like an inchworm, buttocks raising and pushing her torso forward until the glass box house is in clear sight. She lifts her binoculars and points them towards her subjects.

The Lady in White sits at the kitchen island, sipping from a porcelain espresso cup. From the beech, Sinead has a clear view of the entire lower floor – the black leather sofa, the oak dining room table, the chrome kitchen. The french doors leading to the manicured lawn and, a little ways down, the tasteful gazebo and koi pond. Above this floor is the master bedroom, just behind a balcony with frameless glass.

Sinead watches the Lady waft to the sink and carefully rinse and dry her cup. She wipes her finger along the underside of the espresso machine and then rubs her fingers together. She then wets a cloth and rubs where she has found the dust or grime or whatever has displeased her.

The Lady returns to the kitchen island and kneads her temples in a circular motion for a while, slowly, until she is sitting with her fingers framing her face, as if attempting some trick of telepathy. She stares out the window of the glass house in the direction of the lawn.

Sinead wonders where the Lady’s mind has gone. She is coldly vacant, expressionless. Perhaps melancholy.

The Lady is warm and dry, cuddled in a cashmere cardigan and soft slippers. There is fruit on the kitchen island, central heating, a teepee of logs in the fireplace. And yet, she does not want to be here.

Sinead thinks about the two blue macaws in her aunt’s house. ‘I think they want out,’ Sinead had said, looking at the majestic birds perched in their cage. Looking into their black eyes, still like shadowed caves, she convinced herself she could see a light within, pleading and restless. ‘Don’t anthropomorphize,’ said her aunt.

Sinead does not want to be biassed. She reminds herself not to interpret, just record the physical phenomenon in her little notebook: lips turned downwards, unfocused eyes, sighing.

And then she reminds herself: Confirmation bias – the experimenter interprets results incorrectly because they are looking for information that confirms their hypothesis and overlooks information that argues against it.

She is probably the worst scientist for this job, but also the only one that can perform it.

Another figure comes into the room with the Lady. She watches her speak some words as the figure packs a suitcase on the dining room table. The Lady is kissed on the cheek and she smiles warmly. Then she is left alone.

Sinead cannot see the Mercedes departing the garage, but she can hear the gravel crunching under its weight, and the electric gate drawing back and then piercing shut in the car’s wake.

The Lady goes upstairs and changes out of her cream robe and into grey leggings and a grey sports bra. Sinead knows the rest of her morning routine. Elliptical for an hour, followed by a green smoothie. Then she will sit on the sofa and play CandyCrush – she once left her tablet propped on the sofa facing the window. There is only one computer in the house, but it’s in the study and the Lady never uses it. She has her tablet.

She lets the Waitrose delivery in through the gates on Friday afternoons. And the maid comes Mondays at 10:00. Sometimes she’ll read a book – Sinead’s binoculars are not sharp enough to read the titles.

Sinead knows the Lady has a PhD in mediaeval literature. And used to teach at the University of Essex until three years ago. Now she is on sabbatical, returning tee-bee-dee. Conducting neither research or maternity leave. Snow White pacing in her glass coffin.

Sinead should call the Lady by her real name – Dr. Elizabeth nee Marjoribanks. But the Lady in White feels better. Makes it more objective in her reconnaissance, and gives a mythic power to her observation. Like debunking a ghost spotted by a local farmer. A ghoulish folk-story moulded and churned in the minds of the frightened villagers – an obscene blemish on their perfect town. And Sinead wants nothing more than to prove it wrong, methodically, scientifically. Pull the mask off the ghost and declare, ‘Ah-HA! It was the janitor all along! And here are the missing church alms.’

Δ

Sinead is not new to science.

At a bioengineering conference, she stood in row EE of the conference hall in front of a vinyl poster describing the impact of deep brain stimulation on phantom limb pain. As second author, she began to feel wholly anonymous in the rows upon rows of colourful posters. Only the young researchers seem to be standing next to their work, searching for eye contact from passersby, like hopeful puppies in a department store window.

Just the week before, her gladiatorial pursuit of a PhD grant bestowed by the Scottish Research Council had gone to another student with whom she shared a closet office. Her career prospects were seeming their bleakest. 

Then a handsome man with walnut hair and panto glasses approached. 

He frowned as he read the text behind her head, not looking at Sinead directly. Indicating with his cup of Starbucks and still avoiding her eye, he spoke: A little derivative of Jenkins et al, don’t you think?

‘Well, unlike Jenkins, we used aggregated data,’ she replied.

He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows as if to say, Perhaps, perhaps.

He eyed the other bodies mingling around the rows of posters, and said offhandedly, So, tell me something I don’t know yet. It sounded rehearsed, clearly directed to every new person he encountered. She did not really want to engage in such an obvious goading, but she felt compelled. She did not know who this man was, but she did not want any conference gossip painting her as a poor sport, or unenthusiastic.

‘Well, I think this technology will be in everyone’s homes in 20 years.’

He exhaled sharply through his nose, half-laughing at a private joke. Sooner than that, he said.

He handed her a card – ‘Jack Delaney, Founder’ – and told her to stop by his start-up’s stall. By the end of the evening, he had offered her a job and she waved goodbye to her PhD pipedream.   

He was fascinating, pensive, with a penetrating stare like a harrier. He did not suffer fools gladly. The slightest unintelligent or unoriginal opinion, he nipped at its heels, sometimes fearcely enough to draw blood. He was sarcastic, with a dark humour bordering on cruel. But his observations on chemistry, biomedicine, and neurosurgery were astonishing. He was a database, casually referencing literature like he was pulling light from the aether. Not just citing, but deconstructing, destroying, and reassembling the pieces into an empire of his choosing. He cackled like a young boy when something delighted him, and he stabbed his finger in the air to punctuate displeasure.

At dinner, after the conference, his colleagues started talking about their new project – the use of delta sub-4 frequencies to de-synchronise abnormal oscillations in brain neurons.

‘Interesting,’ said Sinead. ‘What for?’

The table laughed. They looked to their leader seated at the top of the table, waiting for the word of God. He took a sip of his beer and said, We’re going to cure mental illness.

Δ

Sinead shimmies down the tree. She takes her gas stove from out of her tent, and twists the dial to snap the blue flame into life. Nothing happens. She clicks it a few more times before concluding that the gas canister is empty. She had to order them online especially before she left.

No more hot meals. Her hot water bottle will remain empty at night. Which is not really a problem, considering it is May.

And she has learnt to ignore ‘wants’. The meringue-softness of a duvet, porcelain sinks, plastered walls. She has concluded that wanting comes from the stomach; needing from the head. And wanting is weakness. It says you are not self-sufficient, that there is a hole inside you that you cannot fix with a hot meal. It means that you may not survive. You are looking down from the tightrope – suddenly aware of your precarious existence. Un-wanting is self-preservation and acceptance.

But the inability to boil water from the stream – that will be a problem. She will have to walk the seven miles to the petrol station with the small corner shop.

In this sleepy Surrey village, the roads cut through steep embankments with few shoulders or gutters. They are punctuated by wide driveways that declare the property names in large, rustic fonts – Badger Cottage, Oak Stables, Mosswood Farms, Bramble Lodge. The ‘cottages’ always seem to be the size of aeroplane hangers. These kinds of properties are never sold – only if the occupants are childless and needing to go into specialised care homes. Otherwise, they are inherited and exchanged between the hands of the same small group of upper middle class snobs. There was always the nouveau riche outlier – actors, hedge-fund managers. Tech billionaires.

Parts of these open fields make Sinead angry – all that space just sitting there when twice the population is stacked in high-rises half the square footage in the city. Despite the majestic breathlessness that stirs in her when she sees a horse cantering through a field, she can empathise with the current political movement to have them banned in Britain. Too much space for a creature that does nothing but offer vein entertainment for rich cunts to stroke and brush and race. Not that such a bill would ever pass through those very same rich cunts sitting in the House of Lords.

When Sinead arrives at the petrol station, she is feeling parched and her knees ache. She first checks her balance at the cash machine outside by pressing her thumb to the fingerprint reader. £56. Fuck.

After she has purchased enough canned vegetables and bags of peanuts to fit inside her backpack and two gallon water jugs, Sinead reluctantly walks into the public telephone booth next to the cashpoint, and presses her thumb against the screen to access her cloud contacts. She simultaneously hopes and dreads the end of the dial tone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi Natalie. It’s Sinead.’

‘Oh my god, where are you?’

‘Listen, I’m going to be a while longer and -’

‘-I haven’t heard from you in three weeks. I’ve been going out of my mind.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. My solar battery died.’

‘When are you coming home? You can’t possibly still be camping. My mobile says you’re calling from Dorking… Why – why are you in Dorking?’

Sinead’s mouth is a hot, dry cave sloshing saliva around and around. Get to the point, she tells herself.

‘Natalie, I need you to give my two weeks’ notice. Please can you cancel the standing order with Mrs. Tobakias for my half of the rent so that I don’t get charged next week.’

‘Why are you in Dorking?’ Natalie repeats. ‘You’re not doing what I think you’re doing?’

Sinead squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Got to go. Love you, bye.’ She ends the call and sinks her head against the telephone screen. She opens one of the water gallons and slurps as much as she can manage by tilting the heavy container to her mouth. The cold water shocks the spot in her teeth that has been worrying her.

She walks the miles back to her camp. The road is narrow, twisting, rising and dipping over the gentle hills. Passing cars could almost clip her arms swinging the water jugs. She steps into the narrow gutter a few times or scrambles up a steep bank to let a large lumber-carrying truck past. The drivers raise a polite hand to her in thanks. It is generally a friendly place, just not one built for one on foot. Who is poor enough to walk here?

She does not take the same route back in case anyone begins to recognise her around the area. This time she cuts through the woodlands, damp from recent rain, and the mud sucks her boots into the gelatinous, yellow paste. Overhead a woodpecker raps against an oak. A pair of sparrows flutter out of view as she snaps her way through fallen twigs.

She saw a goldfinch several weeks ago when she was feeling disheartened and nearly ready to bundle up her camp. It was that night that she heard the Mercedes roar from its garage and screech down the country road. The house lights were left on. Sinead scrambled up her tree in the dark, barefooted, her feet pierced by bark.

The Lady was standing in the bedroom window looking out at the woodlands. From the steep angle, Sinead could not see the bed or the rest of the room, only the Lady from the waist upwards.

The Lady was crying. Despite the light behind her, her shoulders were shaking heavily. Her chin was practically to her sternum and her hands were locked at the back of her neck, forearms pressed tightly against her chest.

She withdrew for an instant and when she returned, she opened the bedroom window and hurled something out onto the lawn below. The window closed and the Lady disappeared out of sight again.

Sinead dismounted the tree, landing on her feet and then knees. The impact stung her joints, but she scrambled to the back gate, just behind the camera’s eye, which pointed sharply downwards to the gate’s entrance, as if obsessively glaring at an invisible doormat. She peered between the gap between the hinges of the door.

Whatever was launched into the garden, it swivelled in the air clockwise and landed on the ground like a frisbee. It was pigeon grey, with a soft blue light flashing to one side. Sinead shone the torch from her pocket across the lawn, just for a moment. The beam of light caught the object, now visible. Circular – no, donut shaped. But thin.

She recognised it. A Somnus XE7. Retail price, £399.

Why did she fling it, for it to be ruined by dew? A light on the ground floor turned on, and Sinead hastily switched off her torch. The Lady appeared in the living room and unlocked the French doors. An alarm whistled and she punched her fingers against the unseen side of the wall, presumably to disarm it, because the noise abruptly stopped.

She glided across the lawn in her white robe, clutching it closed to her breast. Sinead could hear her breathing, sharp and shrill. The Lady located the device and sighed – perhaps with relief? – and her breathing slowed.

She wiped the Somnus with her sleeve and carried it into the house, resting on her palms like a dead bird. As she turned to close the French doors, the living room light caught her face, and Sinead saw her furrowed, anxious brow. Her shoulders were bent, heavy. This was a resigned woman. This was a defeated woman. Returning to her aviary.

I know you, thought Sinead. I won’t leave you.

Δ

The public footpath snakes between two empty fields and then ends at the junction of a public road. Temptation gets the better of her, and she walks leftwards, down the road past a wide, electric gate hugged between two enormous rectangular pillars. Hound Hall declares a shining plaque. As if that was not austentatious enough, two stone bloodhounds sit poised to attention on each pillar of the gate. Her nose crinkles seeing them again. So subtle.

The stone guardians came with the property when it was purchased three years ago. It’s just surprising they remained – could anyone actually like them?

Sinead is unable to take her eyes off the house’s brutal asymmetry and feature floor-ceiling windows. Two shoeboxes of concrete and glass stacked precariously. The bust of another hound guarded the chrome knocker on the front door. The idea that anyone would need to knock after gaining entry through the draconian security gates seemed odd.

But this sleepy Surrey village was full of contradictions. Loud signs declaring ‘Beware of the Doberman’ while a plump Yorkie yips along the fence. Front gates only a metre high containing elaborate security keypads. Electric doorbells pointing away from the open shed offering £1 for a dozen eggs – honour system. They were optimistic, but paranoid. Good fences make good neighbours. Longing for the comradery of their father’s generation but also fearful of the present, as the Daily Mail tells them to be.

A voice interrupts Sinead’s thoughts. ‘Would you like some mint?’

She stops in her tracks. On the other side of the barred fence is the Lady, on her knees in front of a tidy flower bed running the inside periphery of the front fence. She wears yellow gardening gloves and a wide sun-hat. She holds a pair of pruners and wipes her brow with her sleeve.

‘Sorry?’ says Sinead, surprised.

‘It’s turning into a bit of a hedge and I feel sad hacking it back and letting it go to waste. Would you like some? You could make some tea.’

Sinead looks at her earnest face, and the beads of perspiration forming near her eyes. She has never seen the Lady this close. It is unnerving, like examining an impressionist painting familiar only from postcards. She has never imagined how the Lady’s eyes were coloured. Now she can see they are brown, with a touch of green by the irises.

‘Thank you,’ says Sinead. ‘That would be very nice.’

Observer effect, she thinks, disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation.

The Lady passes a bushy stem through the barred fence to Sinead. ‘Here, take some more,’ she adds, passing more, one by one. They both laugh politely at this slow activity. The slats brush against the mint, releasing the fresh oils into the air. Sinead’s mouth waters, thinking about chewing the leaves. She had been without toothpaste for at least six weeks. It could explain the toothache.

‘Do you live around here?’ asks the Lady.

‘I’m renting,’ Sinead says, having practised this explanation in her head many times. ‘A shepherd’s hut in one of the North fields.’

‘Oh, how marvellous. For how long?’

‘A few weeks. I’m working on a novel.’

‘Goodness. Well, I hope the village is inspiring for you.’

‘It is. How long have you lived here?’ Sinead already knew the answer.

‘Three years. Or thereabouts.’

‘With a partner? Husband?’

‘My husband. He works in the city but he – we – always wanted to live in the countryside.’

‘Is your husband nice?’

The Lady begins to smile and laugh, but then notices the intensity on Sinead’s face, the ferociousness in her eyes. The Lady does not know why, but it is in discord with the innocence of the question. Her smile lowers in.

‘Yes,’ the Lady says. And then the smile suddenly flickers on again like the revved engine of a hotwired car. ‘I should get out of the sun now. It was nice meeting you.’

‘You too,’ says Sinead, and watches the Lady take her basket of gardening tools inside the house.

Sinead picks up her water jugs again and walks back to the road. Once she reaches the end of the fence, she drops one jug to the ground and strikes her face once, twice, three times with an open palm. Stupid stupid stupid. She frightened the lady with her rough questioning.

The fence ends, and the woodland begins again. A narrow stream trickles out of the roots, twisting into a gutter and disappearing into a culvert pipe under the road. She steps onto the bank of the stream, and follows the void of trees until she reaches the end of Hound House. Then, it is a sharp ninety degrees through a thicket of young saplings and trees until she reaches her campsite at the back of the house.

The jugs were heavy and the stream battered her with every step. She should eat, but she does not feel like she deserves it. 

Δ

Twenty hour shifts. Sixity days until the funding from their private donor ran out. They had promised results by quarter-one, and now they had crept into quarter-three. They had moved into cheaper accommodation in the basement of a former paper warehouse. Enough space to rig a sterile lab and operate their £300,000 MRI machine sparingly. No windows or natural light.

The storage cupboard was converted into a shift-room with three rows of bunk-beds. Jack woke the sleeping bodies by turning on the lights and clapping his hands loudly. Come on, you pussies. If I’m awake, you’re awake.

Sinead was the only woman in the R&D team, and it showed. By the end of six weeks she smelt just as pungent as the others, and she stopped blanching when she walked past the blow-up sex doll by the watercooler, with a rotating A4-printed face of various celebrities and politicians. When Davidson pretended to hump one of the subjects in the MRI machine, spanking the air above the sedated body, she did not laugh with the other boys in the control room. But she also said nothing.

The lack of sleep and poor, freeze-dried noodle diet had caused her to gain a stone, which she hid under baggy band t-shirts and sweatpants, which seemed to be the dress-code anyway.

And driving her unwavering momentum was the desire to impress Jack. One evening – or perhaps it was so late that it was early – they were hunched over a Mac together, rerunning the analysis code for the umpteenth time, and Sinead finally spotted an errant parenthesis in row 74 of the R code. Jack put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against his chest. She was conscious of not having showered in two days, but she knew that he was admiring her mind, not her body, which was a greater intimacy.

I knew you were brilliant.

And Sinead beamed. 

Before she could dismiss it with the trained modesty instilled in all young women, he kissed her fully on the lips. The bunks were all occupied, so they got into his car in the parking lot and fumbled under the glow of the streetlight like a couple of teenagers.

Δ

She moved her bags into his office. They shared the single mattress on his floor, tucked between the file cabinets and his desk. No bottom sheet, only a thin duvet and Jack’s chest to keep her warm. The entire floor kept at a chilly 14ºC in order to offset the heat of the servers which lined the hallway.

At first it feels cosy, working next to Jack, their laptops back to back. Sharing gastronomically questionable take-out from the greasy spoon across the road. He demanded perfection with an urgency that felt like a dizzying rush. Pygmalion effect, he reminded his staff. High expectations lead to improved performance. And all the while feeling like her status in the team had been elevated to queen regent.

The fluorescent lights were always on, and the lack of windows made it impossible to determine day from night. One long night in a casino, with her career sitting on the pass line of the craps table.

Then, a potential investor got cold feet. A marathon of an ethical review application failed. A successful reduction in symptoms for a volunteer with treatment-resistant depression – their accountant, Henry – but an inability to replicate it with five more volunteers.

Jack bristled when Sinead placed her arms around him. When she closed her laptop and lay down on the mattress to close her eyes, Jack would exhale sharply. By all means, get your beauty sleep. I’ll just be over here trying to save the company. She would rouse herself and make them more instant coffee with hot water straight from the tap.

Days blurred together. Punctuated only by minor milestones of progress. The rest of the team began to resent her for perks they imagined her getting. They distanced themselves from her, she and Jack becoming isolated in an echo chamber. He made paranoid assertions about the team, and wielded them against her as well when she did not agree.

When she slept – for the few precious hours when Jack was off presenting to investors or haggling for new equipment – it was a putrid, dark sleep. She felt like a seagull doused in oil, unable to move or breathe. Rousing herself was becoming more difficult as she went for longer and longer stretches without.

Sometimes, she would be woken from this cavernous sleep to the feeling of Jack’s mouth on her neck, his hands pawing at her sweatshirt. Unsure if it was morning or night. You can’t get enough of it, can you, he would grunt. His body began to repulse her, and he noticed. This made him bolder, wanting to force his way into her like a mole sensing a coming frost. His kisses became sloppier, his fingernails catching on the folds of her skin. He pounded into her with a desperation bordering on a scream.

Δ

The world has a breath. The swell of grass in the breeze. The hush before rain, inhaling, and the spurt of life in the exhale. This is how we learn to count: in and out.

The darkness creeps over her tent. It seeps in her bones – the cold, the futility. The day has circled back to eat itself. She must be fierce, she must warm herself with her resolve, even as she hugs her knees to her chest and coughs with the damp crawling down her throat.

She is the fearful watcher, the unwinking. sentinel. Often she awakes, sitting upright, not remembering what impulse had hinged her body so forcefully. She wakes holding her foam earplugs, despite having wedged them in her ears an hour ago – what was she trying to hear? Or was it in a dream?

After midnight, awake and trembling with cold, she emerges from her tent. The ivy rustles underfoot. The house is dark, with black eyes. Staring at the house feels insidious – like gazing at the black water at the bottom of a well, tipping yourself forward and daring gravity not to seize you and smash your face into that cold, foetid water.

She imagines his clammy hands around her body, clutching her frame like ivy smothering a house. Trying to soften her angles and the tension of her bones. She was moist when he wanted her to be, and soft when he wanted her to be. She was naked – but more than naked. Peeled. Skinned.

She remembering how she buried deeper within herself to escape. Pulling her elbows in towards her body, squeezing her legs together. His flaccid wetness against the back of her thigh. It might as well have been a hook, having pulled something deep and solemn out of her, and left to shrivel under the cold, fluorescent lights.

Don’t sleep, she had thought. Don’t leave your body. You must keep watch.

And a part of her does want to leave, to sink into a warm, velvet pool away from the body that failed her. But sleep is surrender. Not just to yourself, or to the dark waves of your unconscious that can cast any number of terrifying shadows, but you also must surrender to whatever surrounds your hollow body. The air, the sheets, and whomever you lay beside. You are absent, you abandon your meat suit. Every night.

The body and the mind are an unhappy marriage. How can the body forgive the mind every morning? The mind says: I’m sorry, I left you with Him. I had to go, I had to leave – because I could. You would have done the same. 

‘And what did she do?’ you are asking yourself. ‘When does she put her hands up and leave?’ But the truth is that she hated herself for being repulsed, unable to take the intensity that he flung at her. Most women are raised to never disappoint – a worse sin than being stupid or lazy or cruel. She was no different. And she was frightened of making him angry or sad. She feared his intensity could backfire, like a loaded shotgun and destroy them both.

One night sitting in their car, he unfastened the glove compartment and showed her the loaded Glock he kept ‘for protection.’ Her first thought was not ‘I am a strong, independent woman who deserves better.’ It was, ‘I don’t want to die. Say whatever it takes to keep that thing out of his hands.’

The world consists of facts, she tells herself, rubbing her arms for warmth. We are stuck between the cosmos and the atoms. With enough time, all effects can be measured. All truths are revealed. She must observe and quantify.

She can feel the invisible weight that she must drag behind her everyday. If she can prove it real, then she can prove the pain to be real.

The prospect of disproving her hypothesis is frightening. Did she have the wrong subject? Could her variable not have a measurable effect on her subject? Illusory correlation: perceiving a relationship between variables even when no such relationship exists. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. After all, three hundred scientific papers were published about N-Rays which amounted to be nothing but a fictional phenomenon created by experimenter bias. And astronomers once believed a planet Vulcan orbited next to the Sun, drawing Mercury into its bizarre dance.

This research is cauterisation, an exorcism, she tells herself. A course of antibiotics stronger than radium. Strip the marrow – suck it dry. She read that the body replaces all its cells in seven to ten years, but this seems like a lie. What of the parts of him she swallowed? Did they become part of her muscles and bones? She shudders and wants to tear her veins apart, unspool them like yarn.

Sinead knows the Lady. She was the Lady. She knows where she goes when she sleeps, and she knows what remains, defenceless and silent.

Δ

Her fingers are numb, they feel as stiff as chopsticks. Her mouth throbs. She takes out her torch and shines it between her gum and lower lip. The reflection of her Swiss army knife reveals a black cross on the surface of her left premolar. She wonders if she could scrape the decay out herself. Risky, if it has penetrated the root. She swirls more water around her mouth and swallows.

In the morning, the pain is worse. The gum is puffy. Her neck lymph nodes are swollen like robin’s eggs. She can barely swallow. She does not want to have to return to the shops two days in a row. But she needs paracetamol. Maybe some Bonjela will tide her over. Help her get back up in the tree.

She changes her shirt and ties a bandana around her hair to look as different as possible. She adds a pair of sunglasses to the ensemble. Hopefully someone different will be operating the shop this morning. She exits her patch of woodland and takes a shortcut across a sheep field, shortening the journey by two miles.

When she turns the corner in the village, there is a police car parked outside the petrol station, a policeman leaning on the bonnet. She lowers her head and decides to walk past discreetly. Then, the door opens, and Natalie steps out.

‘That’s her,’ she says, flapping her hand to get the policeman’s attention. Natalie lunges towards Sinead and embraces her. ‘Thank God, you’re okay.’

The policeman approaches and Natalie lets go. ‘Sinead Simon?’ he says, ‘We’re here to check on you. Your friend was very worried about you.’ He approaches with his palms facing her, like she is a bridleless horse about to bolt. His partner emerges from the shop and flanks her. She feels constricted, trapped.

‘Do you want to have a seat?’ says the first policeman. ‘And we can have a chat?’

‘Not really,’ says Sinead.

‘We just want to check if you’re okay.’

‘I’m fine, really.’

‘Where are you staying?’ asks the second officer.

‘Glamping,’ she says. The policemen exchange glances.

‘Your friend is concerned you’re not taking your medication.’

Sinead laughs, unsure why. Raw embarrassment perhaps. ‘I only took those to help me sleep,’ she says, frustrated by the need to reveal personal information.

‘They’re antipsychotics,’ Natalie stage-whispers to her.

‘Also prescribed for sleep disorders,’ declares Sinead, now realising she has raised her voice. She threads her fingers though either side of her hair. This isn’t happening. If only she could let her body float away with her mind like the basket of a hot air balloon.

‘Your friend is worried you might be a danger to yourself or – perhaps it would be best if you came with us to a hospital and we could get you checked out.’

‘What are you doing in the area?’ asks the second officer. Clearly the bad cop.

‘Hiking,’ she says.

‘You wouldn’t happen to be visiting a Mr. Delaney, would you? Or staying nearby?’

Sinead glares at Natalie. She never should have told her.

It had just come tumbling out of Sinead’s mouth when Natalie had found her trying to toast and butter a Wheetabix at four in the morning – having been awake for three days and stoned for two of them.

‘Is that the guy?’ Natalie had asked, pointing to the open copy of Fortune magazine on their kitchen table. The face above the headline, What’s next for Mr. Sandman? had been burnt into a black circle with a Bic lighter, the scorch penetrating into the table.

Sinead had nodded, her shoulders wedged high under her ears. She stood in the middle of their broom-closet kitchen, clutching the counter like a drowning woman clinging to a buoy.

Natalie gently closed the magazine and carried it to the recycling box as if it contained a live spider. 

‘Good riddance,’ Natalie had said. But Sinead had read it too many times by now. The words created a scalding stew in her mind, slopping around and around. As Natalie tried to put her to bed, she could still feel them.

Wunderkind Jack Delaney will return to the UK after four years in silicon valley. On the eve of his company going public, with a £5 billion valuation, ‘Mr. Sandman’ has opened a new head office in East London’s Tech City.

‘It’s a far cry from our humble broom–closet in Shoreditch,’ laughed Delaney, referencing the start-up which discovered he and his team discovered the revolutionary method for administering delta-waves in order to guarantee sleep within 3 to 5 minutes. What Elon Musk recently described as ‘The biggest disruption to the tech market since the iPhone.’

‘I wouldn’t go so far as saying “discovered.” It was a happy accident,’ explained the Oxford alumnus. ‘We realised that when we administered delta-waves to participants as part of our mental health study, they were falling asleep – and staying asleep – until we turned off the wave machine.’

Last month’s study in the Lancet revealed that with the Somnus™, the quality of life of shift-workers has risen dramatically.

‘In a 24-7 world, we should be able to control exactly when we need to sleep,’ said Delaney. ‘Doctors, pilots, bus drivers, coal miners … now able to get the rest they deserve and wake up refreshed whenever they are needed. No more insomnia. And no more health problems associated with circadian rhythm disruption.’

The Somnus™ will be released a new, 200 gram lighter XE edition, available in a choice of colours, by Christmas.

When asked whether he uses the Somnus himself, he said, smiling, ‘No, but my wife can’t get enough of it.’

Natalie knew that Sinead was lying when she said she was going on a research trip – for what kind of research does a Boots Pharmacy send its junior pharmacy technician? It hurt to lie. Natalie had been a good flatmate, kind and quiet. Probably the longest relationship Sinead had ever had.

But right now, standing a metre away from two armed policemen, Sinead is a canister about to blow. She is the sharpness in the eye of a cottontail.

She nods slowly, and pretends to take off her backpack from her shoulder. Then she flings it in the direction of the policeman – assuming the surprise would give her a few seconds – and she bolts down the road.

She knows these back gardens better than them. She darts right over a low fence and snakes through an orchard, and over another fence. She veres left and meets a public footpath that turns sharply and intersects a farm road. She whips off her bandana, and throws it leftwards up the path in an act of misdirection, and then sprints in the opposite direction. She hops a cherry laurel hedge – one of the houses advertising a dog despite not having one – and lies flat with her belly against the lawn. She waits several minutes, listening for the sound of running footsteps.

Δ

Your voice is too pitchy in the mornings. The coffee is too cold – make it again. You’re sabotaging me. You don’t believe in me. Corporate espionage. What is that car outside doing? Write down the licence plate – I shouldn’t have to ask. You are empty. You were nothing before you had our goals – look how far you’ve come. I’m proud of you. You challenge me. It’s okay to disagree with you. Are you being intentionally dense? Are you trying to get a rise out of me? I just want to fucking relax. Kiss me. Like you mean it. You’re so hot. Turn around. Come on. You can’t get enough of it.

Δ

Sinead and the Lady. Two data points – that’s a line. Plus time – that makes a vector. She never liked vectors at school. They made her queasy with their untidiness. She preferred natural logs, which felt like launching a kite on a string and then pulling back to the ground. Doing and undoing your work, safely on a string. The laws gave you a path to follow and they held you safe.

The lawn grass tickles her face. She watches the slug trail on a dandelion glint in the sunlight. In the distance, she hears the sound of pounding feet approach, along with the static and consonantless word-garbage from a shoulder radio. Then the noise trails away into nothingness.

Slugs are just wriggles of muscle, she thinks. Perhaps she’s delirious from her sprint on an empty stomach, which is now pressed uncomfortably against the ground.

But from this angle, everything seems connected to grandmother Earth. Some creatures are capable of peeling off her skin for a moment, but always return to the bosom of her gravity. The hare leaps, the mayfly zips, the fox pounces. Natural arcs of creation, destruction, and recreation. Man is the only creature to struggle against this natural concept, and resistance breeds despair. He grieves. He thrashes violently, wanting to seize control of his natural parabula. I am bigger and mightier, he says, attempting to cast off the net. And none are more hubristic than scientists. Beating their fists in the dark.

She lifts herself off the lawn and climbs over the garden fence. Back onto the residential road, she zig-zags down the path, onto the public footpath snaking between two fields.

She runs to the front of Hound House and pounds the buzzer with her fist.

‘Yes?’ says a female voice.

‘This is the writer from up the hill – could I talk with you for a second?’

‘Oh, um, what about?’

‘Better in person,’ she pants. ‘It’s about your husband.’

The crinkle of the autocom soothes into a dead horizon. ‘Just a second.’

The longest wait of Sinead’s life. A car passes and she turns to hide her face against the gate, breathing heavily. She is compromising the experiment. She’s sticking a finger on the scale. But she cannot imagine leaving this valley without knowing.

The Lady emerges from the front door. She looks flummoxed when she sees Sinead, who is still panting hard, her nose and cheeks flushed. The Lady keeps a wary distance from the gate, her arms holding another cream cardigan closed.

‘What’s this about?’ she says.

Sinead swallows. ‘I knew your husband,’ heaving the words from her body like stones. ‘He was cruel. He was a monster.’

The Lady looks bewildered, as if Sinead has just slapped her.

‘I need to know whether you’re safe,’ says Sinead.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Are you safe? With him?’        

A car engine builds to a crescendo behind her and screeches as it cuts the corner of the road and comes to a stop on the driveway. It honks twice, rudely, attention-seeking. Sinead flattens her back against the fence as the horn ornament comes into view.

From the black Mercedes emerges a tall man, chestnut hair, a pale beard trimmed to sharp perfection along his cheekbones. He’s wearing a navy suit and paisley shirt with no tie, just a baby-blue pocket square. He is shorter than Sinead remembers.

Darling, He says to the Lady, leaving the car door open and the car purring. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a mobile phone. Get away from the gate.

‘What is going on,’ says the Lady, frightened.

There was a message from Surrey Police waiting for me at the office. They wanted to do a wellness check and something about a former lab assistant stalking our house. So I came right back.

Sinead wants to curl inside herself like a snail. She presses her back against the bars. A terrible anachronism stands before her. Beneath the crows-feet and greying eyebrows she can see the outline of the young man she used to know.

‘Stay away from me,’ is all she can manage.

‘Do you know her?’ the Lady asks her husband.

No. He raised his phone to his ear. I’m calling the police.

‘Tell her about the mattress in your office. About the hotel room in San Francisco,’ says Sinead. ‘And the Ambien you gave me for jet lag.’

She’s crazy.

He grasps her arm and flings her in a sharp arch away from the gate. She stumbles to the driveway on her knee and then hip. She is infantilized sitting on the crazy-paving, her arm aloft in his tightening grasp. She looks up at the underside of his chin and the softness of a belly spilling over his belt. She sees the echo of a body she used to know – like a soldier staring at his own severed limb, watching the fingers twitch. 

‘Listen to me – listen to me,’ Sinead says, twisting her body to grasp the bars of the fence. ‘Elizabeth – Dr. Elizabeth Marjoribanks-Delaney. I know you. If you need  help – if you need to get out – when you need to get out, I’ll be here. I’ll be here for you. You’re not alone.’

Sinead’s eyes are watering, begging Elizabeth to see the sincerity. Recognise her reflection.

Then Elizabeth looks towards her husband. ‘How long until the police?’

The light in Sinead flickers out. The planet Vulcan shadows her face. You can observe phenomena, watch a brain shrivel – it’s another thing to try and intervene. That takes years of clinical trials. And this trial has failed.

Prospect theory: a loss is perceived to be more significant than the equivalent gain.

Sinead walks her hands up the gate bars until she is standing, Jack’s hand is still on the arm of her jacket, leashing her. He is speaking the address into the phone in his palm. She thrusts her elbow into his chest, unstabling him for an instant, and then sprints down the driveway as soon as his grasp releases her sleeve.

She runs until her lungs sour with the metallic taste of blood. She runs until her gasping breath smothers the sound of her weeping.

Δ

Natalie parks the Prius in the driveway leading to a field of black-nosed sheep.

‘Just here?’ confirms Natalie.

Sinead nods, removing her forehead from the passenger window. ‘Thank you for doing this.’

‘I don’t like helping you violate an injunction.’

‘We won’t have to get that close,’ says Sinead. ‘Ten minutes, I promise.’

Natalie does not protest, considering the value of the items left at the campsite and the back-rent that Sinead owes. She takes two Ikea bags from underneath her seat and shakes them out. It’s been two weeks since Sinead left Hound House and walked aimlessly into evening, eventually following the signage to Gatwick. She spent the last dregs of her savings on a night in a hostel. And in the morning, she called Natalie, who quickly borrowed her brother’s Uber vehicle.

They cut across the field, and turn left into a thicket of ferns, Sinead leading the way. When they reach the familiar pocket of woodland, Sinead catches sight of her green tent. She tries not to eye the wall behind it, imagining it to have a piercing quality to her eyes like the sun.

The wind or a curious animal has managed to unzip the tent, letting rain flood the base. Together they begin to pack the remains of her campsite. Her gas-stove, binoculars, good wellies, cutlery, and pans. No sense leaving them to rot and litter what countryside we have left.

After Sinead has dismantled the tent and tucked the frame parts into the Ikea bag, she stands and wipes her hands on her jeans. She allows herself to properly look at the fence. Slowly, she approaches.

Natalie is rolling the sleeping bag into a soggy roulade. ‘That’s not twenty feet,’ she warns.

‘Give me a second.’

Sinead creeps to the gate. There is something thrusting from the gap between the door and the fence. Something green upsetting the smoothness of the wall.

There, resting on the hinges of the gate, is a bouquet of mint stems.



BIO

CL Glanzing is an international nomad, currently living in London. By day, she works in healthcare research, trying to use those ridiculous letters after her name (MA, MSc, PhD). By night, she does heritage crafts and runs an LGBTQ+ bookclub. Her story “Fishbone” was recently included in Issue 51 of Luna Station Quarterly.







loneliness rides my bed.

By Lorelei Bacht



furled sail: i failed to boat around
goodbye. could not, would not –

nobody left to ripple these linens.

i should have bottled a message,
apologised, red flared. now crest-

fallen, doldrummed, i raise a single
malt to my failing fictions: no

map, trade wind, turbine. dwindling
supplies of fish and oranges: i am

turning forty. no ghost fishing,
bottom trawling, no mouthful of

nacre – herringbones all. i looked
a captain for a while, then not so

much, then not at all. fallen hook,
line, sinker. others make love while i

flush upon flush, anemone fever.
fading instead of adding up, frayed

pyjamas starfished across, my body
neither vessel nor halo. something

said no. did not say try again. said
shut up, sit here for a while. do not

cast nets, do not searchlight. do not.

you must moon your own sky.



felling



hands of tree bark.      on me, a mark
that you could not, would not

axe out. the undercut is where we part,

a pity of heartwood.

medullary anatomy once
treasured, wished sapped and replete – 

now led afraid, tangled veined leaves,
congealed, blank molasses.

what is a mess for? a forest

now hysterectomised. my floors
will abstain from growing lemons,

apricots, pears. you stare
at the damage, wishing yourself away,

a bird, a light, something singing,
still. the process of

cutting, gutting a tree repulses you.

you say your song of feller from
fortune: catch-a-hold this one,

catch-a-hold that one. the song

is not enough. is not ever:

you won’t be home
in the spring of the year.



apart



is how he takes the mechanical
heart: hacksaw, bradawl, diagonal

pliers. my mood reduced to paper
moon, tinfoil – only the nuts and bolts

matter. statistical champion, a clamp
instead of the open hand my lonely

demands, he claims: you, me – a mere
blood count, a column addition.

i inhale his red lines, broken mercury
beads. are we lost or failing rusty

fire ladders? hit hell. hit square
one and as you attempt to drag your

broken wing up that catwalk once
again, consider this: with him, it was

never your when.



i could drop this black stone. i don’t.



i hold onto the lightning rod and tell
myself fables, collect the little hurts,

invent a reason why, or a reason
why not: knuckle, jacknife, golem.

i could drop this black stone. i don’t.

i refuse to look for colour, refuse
to walk the orange grove, collect 

petals, prismatic, kite, marble, shoe-
shine. don’t care for anything but black

and blue – i document and document,
fingerprint ghosts, deform every

morning. you call me out: sew that
sleeve into a white flag, you know

how to. but i sit and sulk, eat my own
red chalk. one day, i might grow tired of

holding myself hostage. not yet, not
yet, i mumble, treasuring the hurt.



let’s dance.



home: not a yellow brick house, not
fortunate, four solid square windows,

but precarious, tumbled rainbows, a wild
stone throw of fireflies, ephemeral

at best, a test of all the medals you
carry: allan, carrie – some decade or

other, you decided upon a game and
played every single friend along the road:

losing, losing, finding yourself gutters
once more, trucker piss bottle full

of stars – one time, two times, seven
times unlucky. when will you learn to take

the shoe off, throw away that stone?





BIO

Lorelei Bacht is a fabrication whose poetic work has appeared / is forthcoming in The Night Heron Barks, Queerlings, Feral, Barrelhouse, Sinking City, Stoneboat, OyeDrum Magazine and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @bachtlorelei and on Instagram @lorelei.bacht.writer. In a past life, they wrote and edited fiction. They are currently watching the rain instead of working on a chapbook.





What The F*ck is Going On?

By Arlene Rosales



I don’t quite recall the last time I fully understood something that happened in my life. Two seconds ago, I was just entering high school and worrying about keeping my room clean, and now I am working five days a week, going to school, and trying to sleep more than 4 hours; and I am doing it all in a different country. For a long time, I begged for a pause. The world finally heard me —the novel Coronavirus hit the world in March of 2020. My life took a 180-degrees turn, just like everyone else’s. However, I was not affected by the shortage of toilet paper, Criminal Minds ending after 15 seasons, Zoom classes, trending workout videos, the emergence of TikTok as the new Vine, and not even having to spend five months by myself. What impacted me was time and how suddenly, what seemed like a blessing turned into a curse. It is 2 am, and my wrist hurts from awkwardly holding my phone; I have been trying to sleep since 11 pm, but my mind keeps running: What the f*ck is going on?

*

As a child, there was a point when my parents had to beg me to go outside to play, but it wasn’t always like that. My parents tried to keep me away from social media for as long as possible. For years, I only cared about finishing my homework and playing soccer with my brother and cousin. Those years when I was innocent, when I could wear long basketball shorts and bright t-shirts, when having one friend was enough—the years when I did not care about what the rest of the world thought about me. Now, I find myself stuck living in a time where my presence online is more important than who I am. I feel the pressure of the whole world watching me, waiting for the moment I finally make a mistake.

I opened social media for the first time when I was 12 years old. As I scroll through my friends’ requests on Instagram, kids no older than 11 have sent me requests. It makes me cringe. I don’t want to sound old-school or dull, but life has become monotonous since everyone has become obsessed with social media. We all follow the same people, trends, and music; we even shop for the same clothing items. For example, I bought a $100 pair of jeans just because my Tiktok page told me I needed them. I am sure I am not the only person who has surrendered to what the internet tells them. New trends come and go; some are good, like metal straws and the ice bucket challenge. Some others just bring the worst of each person out — like the Birdbox Challenge and Pokemon Go.   

The hard pill to swallow when it comes to social media is that it has taken control of everything. But, honestly, how do you explain to someone that having less than 100 likes on an Instagram post is okay? We have created such a toxic online culture that likes define how much you are worth. Now that I am older, I can see what is wrong with that mindset, but growing up, I remember how self-conscious I was about every pic I posted and how important it was to follow the steps:

  1. Selfies. Full body pics are for girls with good bodies, and mine was not it.
  2. Editing. A plain picture is a mediocre one. It needs to be touched, and if your friend with a thousand followers does it, then it is better. If the image is not good, black and white always does the job.
  3. Time. Anything before 6 pm is lame. Cool and older kids always check and post their pictures around 7 pm, but never after 8:30 pm. Time = likes = popularity.
  4. Tell everyone. The moment you post, you need to tell the whole group chat you posted, so they can go like it and comment, which will boost your post.

Now that I am typing these “rules,” I realize how stupid they sound. It also reminded me of one of my favorite songs – Crazy by Simple Plan.

Tell me what’s wrong with society
When everywhere I look I see
Young girls dying to be on TV
Won’t stop ’til they’ve reached their dreams

Diet pills, surgery
Photoshopped pictures in magazines
Telling them how they should be
It doesn’t make sense to me
Is everybody going crazy?

Now, is everybody going crazy? Or am I the problem?

What would happen if I did not fit into the world created for me? A world where I need to study and then work for the rest of my life; a world where I need to dress girly but not like a teenager; a world where religion is not necessary anymore and having kids is not a dream anymore. For years, I have seen how cruel the world can be, even worse if you are naive. The idea of “wanting to grow up” to finally be free was and probably still is the biggest scam I have succumbed to. At the end of the day, half of the things you see on the internet are fake, but so many people take them as the ultimate truth. And wanting to go against the majority is scary.

I dreamt about finding love, getting married, and raising kids with the perfect husband for years. However, the more I thought about these dreams, the less likely they seemed. I can summarize how each relationship I’ve had has gone using five words: a different idea of love. I had my first crush. Then, the older guy, who I thought was more mature, and since he liked me, I was also mature (none of us were). After that, the first t heartbreak — I fell in love with my best friend, and he then fell in love with my girl best friend. By 14, I was sure love was not for me. Two years later, I decided to try again; however, the naive part of me was unaware of how much things change when you enter high school.

Parties, alcohol, drugs, and sex, but love was never an option. Every Friday, while all my friends were out partying and making out with strangers, I was alone in my room watching their Snapchat and Instagram stories. What a loser, you might think. I was a loser, but was I wrong for trying to find love? Was I wrong for wanting to fall in love with someone and stay together longer than three months? Was I wrong for thinking about the future? When did society start to tell me how I wanted to love was wrong? When did love became a competition to see who could hook up with the most boys? When did still being a virgin mean that you were wasting your life? The world was not stopping, and social media kept adding to the struggle of growing up in the internet era.

I saw my friends post about their perfect relationships when I knew about all the fights and cheating scandals. I read posts about lovely moms for Mother’s Day when half of my friends couldn’t even communicate with theirs. Pictures about a current disaster were everywhere, asking for help and donations when I knew my friends were the first to ignore a homeless man begging for food. Wanting to be someone else was the norm because showing who you are meant social suicide. Many still fail to realize that the word suicide has slowly started becoming a reality for many young teenagers – teenagers who fail to live up to the expectations of many faceless trolls hiding behind a screen.

According to the Global Health Organization, suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds. I wish I could act surprised, but this is something well known among my generation. I was 14 the first time I thought about dying, the same age I was when my “friends” started bullying me for not using curse words, going to church with my parents, wanting to find long-lasting love, and many other views. Years later, I still think about death constantly. I know there is something wrong with me, but nowadays, everyone wants to die, so I don’t know what to believe anymore. It is a coping mechanism for me, but I know deep down I am scared. However, I don’t actually fear death and how it might present to me, but how fast it is approaching. There is no point living in a world that is slowly dying, thanks to global warming and an older generation that cares more about two girls kissing each other than the well-being of their children. Dying is this generation’s joke, and if that does not make you wonder what the fuck is going on with society, you are part of the problem.

It is 2022, and I deactivated my Instagram 6 months ago. The Coronavirus is here to stay. I eat two meals a day and go to the gym, so I don’t kill myself. I listen to sad music when I am happy. I stay up scrolling down TikTok until 2 am. I drink more coffee than water, and I ignore my parents as much as possible. I follow clothes trends, and I dye my hair. Welcome to the world where teenagers are “talking back” to their parents if they express how their actions make them feel. A world where having no social media is a red flag[1]. A world where having a college degree does not take you anywhere most of the time. A very warm welcome to the world where nothing makes sense anymore, and at the end of the day, the same question goes without an answer — What the f*ck is going on?



BIO

Arlene Maria Rosales Alvarado, born and raised in El Salvador, I left my house when I was 16 to study in an international high school in rural India through the United World College program. I fell in love with writing and film while there and once I graduated I was accepted into the University of Oklahoma on a full scholarship. I am currently 21-years-old and a junior in college pursuing a double major in Creative Media Production and English Writing. I plan on going to Grad school for Creative Writing and I hope to write a book that I can later turn into a movie. 



[1]  Red flag: a sign or warning of any impending danger, disaster or doom. This is the Urban Dictionary’s definition, which is nothing less than another fake source teenagers (myself included) use to feel like they are making a difference.





Trying to Tell You

By John Cullen


Imagine a group of ten. Include your grandfather,
briar pipe in hand, puffing a wreath of Borkum Riff
over his chair; and Mr. Allen, your math teacher,
Kroeger bag in hand escorting his poodle a quarter mile
down Clark so Sparkles can crouch at the cul de sac;
and the wallpaper hanger with the barbed wire tattoo curling his bicep;
and your neighbor the postman, who tucks ash in his cuffs
while weeding dandelions. Add six individuals from your local
State Farm. Most likely, this collection couldn’t agree
whether to order frosted doughnuts or pecan rolls.
So let’s gift each with one simple item, say a plastic kayak.
Set them sailing down Main Street after a storm early Wednesday
morning to avoid snarling traffic and misdemeanor tickets
written by police for the operation of unlicensed transports.
Now the group has a mission. This should make the day simple,
like peeling Macintosh apples into grandmother’s stoneware bowl,
adding one cup of sugar with cinnamon and clove to spice filling.
About this time, some Einstein tweets there is never enough water after rain
to float a kayak down Main Street, and Mr. Investigation complains
there’s too much ground clove in the filling; the pie tastes like potpourri.
(Which might be true!) Like when fire hosts a meeting;
before you lift a pencil, timbers and struts disagree and screech,
even grumbling after engines and tankers return to the station.
Now imagine this case in court, your ten individuals annoyed.
Are kayaks paddling in one direction traffic or protest, rally or riot?
Do traffic laws apply equally to boats, bicycle riders, and the occasional
turtle moving through June as fast as nature to lay eggs?
What is the implication of all this on the Endangered Species Act?
Boats never use turn signals! Now, the prosecution rejects a potential juror
who states for the record David Kirby is his favorite poet.
At this point, the people you imagined demand to leave the poem.
If you look quickly, you can see them sailing toward the horizon.
And now they are gone.
The poem is defunct, hanging by a few loose lines and rhymes,
and a boodle of kayaks causes backups and one shooting. 
People will wake tomorrow to the smell of the sea
and lost dreams, and news headlines will announce an emergency
town council meeting to discuss next year’s kayak festival. 
At least we can end with something simple: An old man
wearing a lazy fedora plays guitar in the key of E while sitting
on a Borden’s milk crate. He looks like Robert Johnson.
A half dozen children listen and tap their feet to the music.
Most of them wonder why his monkey smokes a cigar. 



Revolution


When your dad swung at you
and connected with mad dogs running drunk
through his blood, you howled,
grateful your mother wasn’t pummeled.
She cringed, and hunched
her flesh, an umbrella for you and the puppy.
Then you ballooned from kid to punching bag.
At first, arms and legs snarled on the floor
and you wondered if you could shelter mom
under the deck where your dog, Jack,
deaf in one ear from a haymaker, dug
foxholes under a cracked plastic pool.
Eventually you parked dad on his ass.
It had to happen, and he sat, dizzy,
crouched but growling. You felt you won,
and the world tasted safe.
You learned the world fist first,
and so you’ve got to understand your own
will plant you wordless, nose bloody,
and puzzled, just like your old man
wiped spittle and blood that day
from busted lips on bruised knuckles.



Harsh Words


Trained by whistle
to race to my side
and growl, they ate
from my hand. Chipped
on the shoulder, they
returned and slept
in my bed, muzzles
on my heart.

My mother asks
what happened
with my girlfriend
and why these lines
are so short.
I’m typing this
explanation
with one finger.
They bit the others off.





BIO

John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Recently he has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and New York Quarterly. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press. His piece “Almost There” won the 52nd New Millennium Award for Poetry.







The Sad Princess of Highland Park

By Cara Diaconoff


In her bedroom in her father’s house, the wealthy daughter sat staring out the window. Six months she’d sat this way, since she’d graduated from college last winter, watching the workmen, who were renovating the fountain at the center of the circular driveway.

The fountain renovation was part of her father’s “statement piece,” a massive grounds project being built in memory of Francesca’s mother, dead now eighteen years. This was how her father was spending his earnings from the two celebrity criminal cases that had made him a household name. It would be the wonderland her mother had always dreamed about.

The grounds would be ready in time for what would have been their twenty-fifth anniversary. Francesca’s father had requested topiary in the shapes of dragons and mermaids and devils from the Polish tales of her mother’s childhood. And he had envisioned terraced hillocks of poppies and geraniums and mazes lined with evergreen hedges so intricate that a wanderer might really get lost. The fountain was the coup de grace. Its centerpiece was a rusalka, the water nymph of Slavic tales, sitting naked on a bank with head thrown back, throat gushing water.

The fountain was taking longer than projected. The pipes had needed to be rerouted, permits from the city secured. For weeks the fountain had been a pile of unattended rubble, baking sullenly in the Texas sun by day, and by night glinting in the moonlight like the ruins of a temple to some ancient, bored god.

But now the work crew had returned. The statue of the rusalka was raised, presiding over the piles of stones and tools.

One of the new crew members caught Francesca’s eye—although why, she couldn’t say. Was it just that he was tall and skinny? He wore a kerchief tied around his crown that made him look like a very tall woman, long hair gathered in a bun on top of his head. He was gentle in all his movements, in contrast to the irascible foreman, chronically red-faced.

The foreman called him Marco. She could understand most of what they said to each other. With her window open to the fresh air, in the morning before it got too hot, she would listen and watch as they carted blocks of cement around the grounds.

It was good to have a diversion. Usually, the most exciting thing that ever happened in this neighborhood would be a sighting of Miss Clara, the Argentinian widow, suffering from dementia, who lived next door and sometimes came out to wander the border between the two properties, dressed in a pea-green jumpsuit like a huntress or a wood-sprite.

Francesca was twenty-two now and hadn’t laughed since her twenty-first birthday. Every morning, she would wake up at nine to Carmelita, the housekeeper’s, rapping on the door.

“We are just making sure you’re alive!” Carmelita said this every morning, always in the same bravely joking tone.

“I’m alive, dear!” Francesca would call back, as merrily as she could muster. Carmelita had been with the family for years—for as long as Francesca could remember.

She could have stayed in her own condo, out in the high-rise by Turtle Creek. But most of the friends she’d had in town were elsewhere now, working or traveling. Without knocks on her door, she would have lain in bed till nightfall at least. She barely needed to eat. She didn’t know why she felt this way. It had only gotten worse since she’d finished college.

So it was good, she told herself, that she was forced to haul her body from the bed, push her feet into felt clogs, and shuffle downstairs to the east dining nook to pick at a toasted bagel. Yes, it was good, even if the effort would exhaust her so much that, again, it was only the need to avoid alarming the help that could motivate her to shuffle back upstairs.

Her father was working on a case, which meant that he left home at dawn and didn’t return till dinnertime or later. She found herself often alone in the house except for the help, who came and went, distantly heard. Times when she felt more wakeful, she would wander the halls, listless yet ready to be detained by anything sufficiently interesting—like scrapbook photos of her late mother, with the heart-shaped face and dark eyes.

Her mother had died, by her own hand, before Francesca had been able to form any memory of her more than a scent of Chanel and a pair of black sunglasses that covered half the face. Her mother, Julia, had met her father when he was visiting Warsaw on a Fulbright. Smitten, he had been, with this girl behind the law-school office counter who smiled so demurely yet also so slyly. And she, perhaps, had been entranced by the self-assured man with the piercing green eyes. When the school year ended, he had spirited her back with him to the United States, and in a picture in his scrapbook, taken after they first arrived, he is staring at the camera with a hint of jauntiness, and she, sitting by his side on a doily-covered couch in someone’s living room, is gazing away.

Francesca always wondered if really her mother had never wanted to expatriate.

From the outside, this house she had lived in her whole life was a massive hacienda with Moorish turrets, presiding impassively at the center of its two acres of land. Inside were enough twists and turns to supply a Tudor castle. On one of these languid afternoons, she entered a sub-wing and counted four doors. She could swear she had been in the same one the day before and counted only three.

Try the knob of the seemingly extra door. Ah yes, it gives—so obligingly, as they all do. She is grateful to her father for not ordering the unused rooms locked.

And it was in the drawers of an old cedar dresser in this room that, this afternoon in early July, she found mysterious treasure. A pile of empty jewelry boxes, encased in rococo gilt. Pencil drawings, on crumpled graph paper, of a rusalka seeming to transpire from a woodland creek, limbs and hair intertwined with the grasses of its banks. Other knick-knacks like the detritus of a toy garrison: tiny metal horses and swords and helmets. And, in the midst of it all, a wedding-cake topper that Francesca could not imagine had ever been used for a real cake. Could it be a joke? The groom was grim-faced, apparently bald under a top hat, while on his arm hung an emaciated bride wearing a crown of roses and a red-lipped mouth (the paint looked freshly applied) stretched in a ghastly grin.

The next day, she was afoot again, too restless to stay in her room after the crew had broken for lunch. Would she be able to find that drawer? Down the main second-floor hallway, through a door, up a small flight of stairs, and there was the choice of two wings. She chose one, and, yes—four doors again, and the fourth one led into the room with the stripped four-poster and the cedar dresser.

She took hold of both handles, and with a sound like a yawning cat, it creaked open. Everything in it looked the same as before. There was the wedding couple, poking from a mess of miniature rifles. She ran her fingers through them and touched the edge of a spiral notebook she hadn’t noticed the day before. Curious, she pushed aside the toy weapons.

The notebook had her mother’s name on the outside. Just her first name, Julia, felt-penned in careful cursive. Inside were a series of drawings, some in color. Even the black-and-white ones exuded lushness, lavish in their precision and level of detail. One of them showed a row of wombs, each encasing its own monstrosity. One fat fetus was covered with bloodshot eyes, another with scaly stumps. Francesca turned the page to find a sketch in color. Again it was set up in rows: four rows of four identical figures. On looking closer, she saw that the figure was a spreadeagled female body, the wrists tied to what looked like chain-fencing; this background covered the whole page. Between the spread legs of each figure poked a bloody flower. The pistil of each of these was a tiny head, madly laughing. None of the spreadeagled bodies had a face. They had just a neck and a chin that pointed to the heavens.

With shaking hands, Francesca snapped the notebook shut. A ribbon of graph paper fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and unfolded it, expecting to find another pencil drawing.

Instead, it was a note, written in her father’s spiky, preternaturally vertical hand. The paper looked new—white, uncreased. She had most definitely not seen it the day before.

It seems you must be feeling better? Scouting secrets? Better to ask me anything you want to know. Takes the guesswork out of it.

Think of the times when a wrong guess can be fatal.

Her knees went spongy. She backed up to sit on the bed. How could he know her movements? Her eyes scanned the walls; there was no sign of a camera, a blinking light. Would they be lining the corridor? In the years she had grown up with him in this house, she had never known him to do anything like this.

Once when she was about eight years old, she and her father had spent a long Saturday at the country home of one of his old friends, and by the time they were to leave, she had fallen into a groggy half-sleep in an easy chair. Her father hadn’t tried to rouse her; he had gathered her up without a word and carried her in his arms to the car.

That was her father—decisive, protective. She would never forget the feeling of being cradled, like a precious thing. She would reserve it to call to mind whenever needed: her arms around his neck, face crushed to his chest, the papery smell of his crisp linen shirt.

There were people in public life who called him a monster because of the evildoers he had defended: the wife-killer, the mad bomber, the abusers of the public’s trust. She knew that his thirst for fame and fortune had led him down paths most would eschew.

But most were not haunted the way he was by some mysterious anguish. She knew he was in pain by the way he’d pace his bedroom late at night and by the sharpness of his tone as he whispered to himself in the breakfast alcove in the morning.

Had someone hurt him? She didn’t know. He talked so little about the past. She’d never known her grandparents on either side. She only knew his family hadn’t been rich. They had been small-time ranchers, devout Christians. He had a younger brother and sister he rarely saw; they had stayed closer to the family ways. He had been the oldest—the odd one, a light-eyed changeling: too solitary, too brainy, standing always apart with a twitchy smile.

In college, he had chosen to study law over science. But he had never told her the rest: the reasons he came to specialize in defending the truly terrible. Now that she too was an adult, couldn’t she guess it? Couldn’t she guess that he was drawn to other changelings, others who loved mysteries, others who loved to try to reveal that which was kept hidden, by means of complex, long-running, live experiments, manipulating everyone around them?

Her mind racing, she made her way back to her room still clutching his note. At one point as she wound through the corridors, she thought she heard the creak of someone else’s pace several steps behind her, but she was too preoccupied to turn around. It was probably just a member of the help staff, and she didn’t know all of them well.

Through the window, the workmen caught her distracted eye. The windows were closed against the heat, but she could make out the dumbshow of Marco patiently showing the newest crew member, a boy who looked no more than fourteen, how to maneuver the wheelbarrow over bumpy terrain.

The stocky foreman was always impatient with such displays. She could see him striding and snapping.

She kept watching, today, as up the path came a lanky young man with a clipboard in hand: a canvasser, by the looks of him. Not a common sight in this neighborhood. He must be a brave one.

Marco held out a hand to the young man. The canvasser, startled, almost dropped his clipboard. Then he recovered his equilibrium and handed it over, and he and Marco conversed solemnly over it for several minutes, with Marco finally taking out a pen and writing on the page, as his crewmates stopped eating and stared. Eventually, with many nods and smiles on both sides, the canvasser retrieved the board and made his way up to the road.

Francesca could see the other men laughing, and Marco gamely joining in, and the foreman getting up in Marco’s face, doubtless yelling at him to stop getting distracted.

He’s beautiful, she surprised herself by thinking, as her eyes followed Marco’s tall figure, the womanly bun on his head in poetic contrast to his broad shoulders and flexing biceps.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had gotten pleasure—let alone lust—from looking at anything or anyone. She could recall a time when she had laughed at herself for ogling men. She didn’t do that now. No laughing. She observed the feeling—the throbbing, the happy yawn that engulfed her torso.

Somewhere, though, she heard someone else laughing—a cackle. She couldn’t tell where it came from. Miss Clara from next door? It didn’t quite sound like a noise she would make, and the windows were closed anyway. But it must be her.

When it was time for dinner with her father, she emerged obediently, having changed out of her sweatpants into a blouse and pencil skirt and the stiletto pumps she had always worn so gracefully. In the pocket of her skirt this evening, she carried his ribbon of graph-paper note.

At the dining table, she watched him—the peremptory flick of his wrist as he rapped a spoon against the side of his water glass to summon Carmelita to remove their plates.

There was a thread of iron in him. He was staring at her now—his big, imperious face—as if he knew what she was thinking. She lowered her eyes to her plate, feeling the heat of his gaze on her cheek. She had seen him smiling his intimate smile, the one that said he could wait until you figured it out, the secret you both were in on.

Monster, they called him. Was he her monster?

Carmelita came in, well-disciplined with her blank expression. It was a relief for Francesca to have her to look at. But she was gone again inside half a minute.

“You’re quiet tonight,” said her father.

She gave a small smile. “Am I usually so talkative?”

He flashed a grin in reply. It was so quick that perhaps she had imagined it.

“The fountain is coming along,” she observed.

Her father took a sip of his coffee, catching her gaze briefly above the rim.

“It makes me think of Mom,” she said. She felt the blood surge to her cheeks. But why shouldn’t she know more about her own mother? “What would she say about it if she were here right now, do you think?”

Her father’s mouth was spreading in another grin, unreadable. “I must say I have no idea. Your mother was always a quiet one. I’ve told you that.”

“I suppose,” she said. “Do you know—today I happened to find an old art notebook of hers.” She looked him square in the eyes. “The images are quite disturbing.”

He studied her, still grinning. “Perhaps another subject,” he finally said.

“You never told me she made art,” Francesca persisted. You never told me what made her so unhappy, she didn’t add.

“I don’t know that I would call it art,” observed her father.

“Would you call what I make, art?”

She knew she was skirting risky territory. Indeed, her own art—the painting and ceramics work she used to do, before she stopped feeling like doing anything—had already been a bone of contention between her and her father. During the initial planning phase for the statement piece, a year before, she and her father had discussed how she might contribute her own work to it. But after a while, his emails about this had stopped, and eventually she had grown tired of her father ducking her direct questions. She supposed he had thought better of involving her, had decided that the statement piece was worthy only of professional contributions.

She had been disappointed at first, frustrated. Now, she didn’t really care anymore.

Lord knew, it was hard to sustain any strong emotion in this exhausting room, its walls hung with gilt sunburst ornaments and lit by Tiffany lamps, centered on the heavy table with its sticky wood. The maroon silk drapes over the French windows were pulled back to let in the last sultry rays of sunlight. The reflections of the crape myrtle bushes just outside the window wavered prettily on the opposite wall.

The bushes would survive the grounds-renovation project, but beyond them the soil was dug up for the planned poppy terraces. The house was surrounded by rutted earth; to enter at the side doors, one had to walk across plank bridges the crew had set over the ravaged ground.

It was like she was cast on a desert island with him.

 “I swear,” he said suddenly—it was the daughter’s turn to startle now, hearing his velvety drawl—“that if someone could get you to laugh, I’d give them your hand in marriage.”

She tried to arrange her face into an appropriately ironic smile.

“My hand, Daddy? You have my hand to give?”

His lips parted slightly. He could wait till she understood the joke they both were in on.

Then he said, “You never do see anyone. Would it be terribly old-fashioned of me to suggest that all this could be cured by some healthy romance?”

“What do you mean by all this?”

His smile turning sly. “What should I mean by it?”

Now was her cue. She drew the crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket and put it on the table between them.

He favored it with one raised eyebrow.

“I found this,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you having me followed?”

“Am I—” he began, then stopped himself, and now she was a witness for the prosecution whom he was grilling, and humiliating, in court. He turned to throw a disbelieving smile in the direction of an invisible jury, then back to her. He furrowed his brow in a look of staged pity.

“I know that depression is a disease,” he said. “I understand that.”

“Daddy,” she said, “you wrote me a note. This is your note.”

“Daughter,” he replied, as if to match her syllable for syllable, “I did not write that. I never saw it before.”

“Oh please. I know your handwriting!”

He rocked his head back and settled upon her a long, expressionless gaze. He was beautiful and mean, a bald-headed snake with those emerald eyes. She would have said she was prey for him to mesmerize but for the surprisingly chilling thought that she was too far below him even to eat.

Still, she willed herself not to look away.

“It’s a shame,” he said at last, “how you’ve let yourself go. You had a sharp mind. Maybe not the most original. But you were sharp. It’s a shame.” He paused. Tapped the glass with his spoon. “Well,” he said. “Dessert?”

That night, she slept even more fitfully than usual. Through her unquiet brain flickered creek-side sprites with pointy breasts and a shack that stood on chicken legs next to a rushing river that she kept trying to swim across. At dawn she finally fell into a deeper doze. When her eyes next opened, she reached for her phone and saw to her surprise that it was noon. Had she slept through Carmelita’s knocking?

Groggily, she sat in the window, hugging her knees. Outside, the workers were back. The weather today was heavy, the sky a moody gray. The heat was a miasma. Reports on her phone said a storm would come tonight.

One could see that it was getting to the crew. The men kept peeling off their shirts and tying them around their waists and then stopping and retying them around their necks. Even the foreman seemed too sluggish to rage with his usual gusto.

Down the driveway, Francesca saw a familiar, gliding figure: Miss Clara, from the property next door.

Miss Clara looked the same as she always had: the girlishly thin, long-legged figure; the green jumpsuit, the wispy gray braid that hung over one shoulder. She had been a widow as long as Francesca had known her, living in the bungalow next door.

In this neighborhood’s terms, the family were the local charity case. The talk was that when Miss Clara died, the property would be sold and the modest three-bedroom house razed.

Now, Miss Clara wavered at the gate, and then, with a mild nod as if accepting an invitation to dance, began to pick her way up the drive.

The workers didn’t notice until she was almost abreast of the fountain. “Ay! Senora!” they cried. “No, Senora. You will hurt yourself.” A couple of them moved gingerly toward her; she, meanwhile, held out a hand to each one.

“No, no, Senora. Not forward. Back.” Politely, each of the men had taken one of her elbows and were trying to guide her back up toward the road.

The foreman stood in the drive and roared at the sight. “Will you let go of that crazy old bitch right now and get back to work! We are behind enough today as it is!”

“What was that? Say that again!” It was Marco, his meekness suddenly gone. He got around in front of the foreman. He said something else Francesca couldn’t hear, holding his arms tensely by his sides, his hands in fists.

The foreman gave a bark of a laugh. He said something that ended in, “your mother?”

“No, she is not my mother. But she is someone’s,” said Marco. Then he took a step backward—as if he were about to land a punch or maybe just to get out of the foreman’s path. His intentions would never be known for sure, because before he could do anything more, the foreman bellowed that he was fired.

“Get out! Don’t you stay behind to grab your things—they’re ours now—get out!”

And Marco did. He turned to walk down the drive and passed Miss Clara, who had suddenly grown more definite, standing in her flip-flops glaring at the foreman. “Son of a whore!” she said, in the high, distinct voice she might have used in happier times at tea parties.

“It’s all right, Senora,” said Marco. “Let’s go.”

Francesca closed the window, feeling troubled. Should she tell her father? Then she realized that she had no idea what connection he had, if any, with the hiring of the grounds crew.

But she felt too on edge to stay in her room. Through her head flashed images of Marco’s arms around her, punctuated with those bulbous fetuses she’d seen in her mother’s notebook. Her head, her body, felt full, the way she used to feel back in the days when she made art, when something needed to billow out of her, and she would go to the ceramics studio and work it through the wheel’s thrumming.

No studio here, but perhaps she could find a pad and charcoal pencil. She slipped into ballet flats and out her door and began to pad down the hallway, peering through the just-ajar doors into all the bedrooms: the long-unused ones with furniture covered in plastic, the ones that had been renovated last year and that were supposed to be open again when the landscape project was unveiled.

But her mother had died in one of these rooms. Had she not? Her father had never told her details. She wasn’t even sure of the manner: Hanging? Pills?

She opened a door at the end and walked up a short flight. A gloomy vista, this corridor. She headed for a room at the end, a smaller room that she vaguely remembered about fifteen years ago being something like a study for her father. It had been modest, dusty, with stray cardboard boxes in the corners. She hadn’t stepped foot in it since she was eight.

As she moved toward it, she heard a rumbling in the atmosphere. The storm was coming sooner than predicted.

She tried the doorknob. It didn’t budge. Tears sprang to her eyes. She felt bereft. She wiped her hand on her pants, like she did when she was working to open a tightly sealed lid, took a breath, and tried again, doing her best to be slow, patient. Could she jiggle it? Was it just stuck? The varnish so thick on every surface of this place, outside of her own room … and then it gave. She turned the knob and opened the door.

On the far wall inside, seeming perfectly natural, was an old woman standing over the desk at the window with a feather duster. She was tiny, her back bowed double, and dressed in an old-country style unusual for help in this neighborhood: gray shawl and brown corduroy skirt, checked kerchief over wisps of hair.

“Oh, hello, ma’am. I’m so sorry.” She was ready to give up, go back to her room.

“No, please, dear,” said the old woman in a strangely silken voice, youthful-sounding to be coming from this bent body. (What labor laws must her father be breaking to employ this sibyl-in-a-jar?) And Francesca felt herself drawn in, as if an unseen hand took hers and directed her to a seat on the molded wooden chair.

“Do you work here, ma’am? I don’t remember ever seeing you here before. My apologies—I’m the daughter of the house.”

“I know, dear,” said the crone. “I’ve practically watched you grow up.”

As she spoke, she moved away from the window and around the side of the desk. Francesca could see her more clearly now. The woman’s hair was tightly pulled back to reveal a face just like a beak: a forehead that proceeded into the nose in almost a straight line and small eyes on either side like fish-eyes; Francesca didn’t know which one of them to look at. The face was a checkerboard of wrinkles, so that one might expect a toothless mouth, but the mouth was in fact full of long, white, snaggle-teeth. Beneath a brown smock that covered her body, she tottered on a pair of stick-like legs.

“Oh my God!” murmured Francesca. “How is that possible? I never saw you before! Does my father know you—”

“Your father—oh, psh!” snorted the otherworldly-seeming creature. “Master Christopher is guaranteed to know nothing of me. I am not one, my dear, who has to do with fathers. I am all about the mother.”

Francesca could feel her breath coming rapidly. “Please don’t come any closer.” She was gripping both armrests of her chair. Somehow, she didn’t think to stand up.

“My dear, I don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t give me reason to,” said the crone, but, obligingly, she stopped where she stood.

“What do you mean that you’re all about the mother? What do you know about my mother?”

“I know much about your mother,” said the crone, almost singing, her voice so almost obscenely lovely, melodic, and Francesca wondered if she would have to resist being hypnotized. “Your mother brought me with her from Poland. She wanted to leave me behind, but I insisted.”

Of course, her father had never said anything about an old woman accompanying him and Julia on the journey from Warsaw. . . .

“I flew with her in a bottle in her suitcase,” said the crone as if she had heard Francesca’s thought. She spoke with a faint Slavic accent that sounded like a real babushka. “At first,” she went on, “she seemed not to need me, so I stayed back, and perhaps for a while she believed that I was gone. But then, when it became clear that her joining with Christopher had been a grave mistake . . . well.

“Your mother’s problem, my dear, was that she was too uncertain a soul. She was weak, timid—and even after she had you, that didn’t change. Oh, she tried to be kind. She tried to reform Christopher through kindness, but the effect was pathetic. Like giving a dictator a goldfish to try to soften his heart. Into a vacuum, stronger spirits will step, and I am sorry to say that at the end she made it a battle between me and Christopher, which she would never survive.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” whispered Francesca around the lump that had begun to rise in her throat. “I never knew anything about how my mother died.”

“I was with her when she died,” said the crone, and never would Francesca forget the smooth nursery lilt of that phrase as the crone spoke it, the uptick on with, the flat straightaway of when she died. “I was with her in the pool—when she drowned. Her dying was the most definite thing she ever did. You know that she did it on your parents’ wedding anniversary?”

“No—no! Of course I never knew that—”

“Well, it is so. I was with her then. I closed her pretty eyes, so they wouldn’t stare so wide and scared. Pretty eyes just like yours, dear, and you should not look so scared yourself. Please, my dear . . . .”

But Francesca had found her feet. The back of the chair clattered to the floor, and somehow she managed not to stumble as she backed away, into the hall, and then turned to run, crashing down the stairs, making for the kitchen, where Carmelita and her helpers would be. She would have called Carmelita’s name if she’d had a voice. But they would be there, the familiar faces, just past the swinging door to the kitchen.

She hadn’t noticed how dark and cool the house was. Now she saw the kitchen in shadow. She saw the cutting boards stacked, untouched, in the corner of the prep counter. She heard the cuckoo clock, sounding its warning rattle that brought all the blood to her head, and then its four clacking calls—with that vomit-rattle between each one.

Just then, the thunder rumbled again, shaking the windows, and immediately the rain began, in true Texas fashion, an instant, raging sheet.

But she could not stay in the house. In her panic, she at first couldn’t remember which exits were the ones with the makeshift bridges, but then the first one she thought of was all the way on the other side of the house, nearer the covered port where she and her father kept their cars parked. She spun in confusion. Another crack of thunder sounded, and then she heard another series of thuds, she didn’t know if it was just more thunder? or steps, from upstairs—world-shakingly heavy steps, and so now she just had to get out, it didn’t matter how, and the closest exit she knew was the front door, and she ran out down the center of the cavernous lobby and threw herself on it, and it actually gave from inside, it wasn’t bolted or barricaded, but as soon as she got it open, the world was rushing black water, and the next thing she knew, she was airborne and then submerged in it. She choked, inhaling mud. She flailed.

She had landed in a makeshift moat, and it was deeper than she’d ever have imagined, or maybe it wasn’t but it was only that she couldn’t stand up, and she couldn’t see. She whirled, in a prone position, from side to side, grabbing, and only felt more mud. Oh, it was all she had ever been able to do. She was a useless creature, dropped into a world in which there were none but useless parts to play.

The mud oozed and flowed through her fingers, but now something was grasping her ankles and pulling her from behind. Touching her. Outrageous. So, now she fought. She would not be a weak soul. But it tugged with a grip on each of her ankles now, and it had too much force and knew too much what it wanted, and without even the energy to give a cry of despair, she gave up, she let go of the fight.

And then she was curled in a ball—on solid ground, although still being pelted with rain. And she felt a light hand on her shoulder, and she screamed, by reflex, but then she heard a familiar voice, “Senorita, no, no, por favor,” and she opened her eyes enough to see Marco standing over her.

He was laughing as he helped her struggle to her feet, as he raised an umbrella over her head. “Come, come. Please, miss, come,” he was saying in English. “Come to be dry. I am sorry I laugh.”

“I know some Spanish,” she said, “un poco—it’s all right.”

They stood, sheltering, under Marco’s umbrella. “But, senorita,” said Marco, “what are you doing here? We thought no one was supposed to be in the house today. My aunt’s friend, Carmelita, she told my aunt the whole staff had been, just this morning, given a paid day off. She said that that had not happened in almost twenty years—a paid day off on a day that is not a holiday. She said that the last time it happened . . . but I am rambling on.”

“That is strange,” she said. “I know nothing of that. But I can’t go back in. It’s impossible. My father will be home soon—or maybe he won’t. I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s all right, senorita.” He squeezed her forearm.

“I’m called Francesca,” she said.

“Francesca,” he repeated. “And”—touching his chest—“I am Marco. I tell you, it’s not a problem. We can go next door. Miss Clara’s son and his wife are there with Miss Clara.”

“You know Miss Clara?”

“Of course,” he said, and he caught her eye and started to laugh again, his nose crinkled and eyeteeth bared. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her into him, and she stood under the drenched umbrella, smelling mud and wet hair.

And it was like that, by the half-finished fountain, that the staring, recessed eyes of the Bentley’s headlights caught them as it pulled in through the gate and crept slowly up the drive.

She didn’t think to move. A scene with her father was necessary—inevitable.

With the same slow deliberation, her father lowered his window. He kept his head inside, safe from the rain.

“Well, well. And what have we here?” He wore his spreading grin. “Looks like the one about the daughter who ran off with the hired hand?”

“Oh, that’s funny, Daddy. Well, you did say I was unoriginal.”

He made a pouting face. “No matter, dear. It’s an overrated quality—in women in particular.”

She had no idea what that meant and wondered if he did either. It was like all his jibes: a line thrown out for effect. She thought of the looks he would cast toward the invisible jury when she was talking to him. His strutting, his mugging, his everlasting pacing and self-scolding: oh God! she suddenly thought—the poor man. He was never not on trial.

“I’m sorry, Daddy!” she cried. And for the first time in months, she made a move of her own volition in the presence of her father, pulling Marco away from the car, in the direction of the property-boundary fence and the house next door.

She was in Miss Clara’s house, working to get dry. Miss Clara’s daughter-in-law had ushered her into one of the bedrooms and brought her one of Miss Clara’s housedresses to change into out of her muddy shirt and sweatpants. Francesca had drawn the shades over the windows, which looked out onto a back garden.

So snug and bright was this little house. It was hard to believe that the castle-like home she’d forsaken was only a few yards away on the other side of a stone ledge.

Was forsaken too strong a word? She didn’t know yet.

“Don’t worry,” Marco had kept saying. “You’re safe.”

“I know! I really owe you,” she assured him.

Through the closed bedroom door, she could hear him, conferring in a low voice with Miss Clara’s son and daughter-in-law. He was like her father in that he seemed to be used to people listening to him.

She could smell cornmeal and beans, cooking in the kitchen. The house was adorable—so tiny, after the expanses she’d been used to. But what was she doing here, really? She’d loved his comforting arm around her shoulders, the way he’d taken charge. But Marco’s life had been something she had watched through a glass window.

(The way the crone had watched her—?)

And where was Miss Clara? This was, at least nominally, her house. Of course, she wasn’t capable any longer of taking care of it, so, in practice, it was her son’s. Her son and daughter-in-law had made the sacrifice of letting her live out the end of her days in her own house rather than relegating her to a memory-care ward.

As if on cue, she heard what sounded like a sigh. A sigh of female impatience, she would call it, although not bad-tempered. It seemed to come from outside. Miss Clara, flitting around the garden? The rain had stopped, but Francesca imagined that Miss Clara’s family would probably want her back inside.

She raised the blind, raised the sash above her head. “Miss Clara?”

Suddenly, the screen was filled by the face of the crone.

“Oh, God help us,” gasped Francesca, startled. She backed away from the screen. “How did you get inside the fence?”

“My dear,” said the crone, “if you haven’t yet grasped my nature, then I suppose I must put on a show-and-tell.” And then, a hiccup in the atmosphere, and the world went black for several seconds. The wings of some massive creature seemed to beat the window glass—perhaps even broke it, for Francesca felt battered, herself, by draughts of air.

And then her vision returned, and she was in a dark corridor lined, as in a gallery, by the spreadeagled bodies she’d seen in her late mother’s notebook. They seemed to be behind glass screens, yet these were close enough to touch. She saw the chained wrists, the bloody flowers sprouting from between their legs. Their chins were still pointed skyward; she still couldn’t see their faces. They were broken, headless rusalki.

But now, come to life, they were no longer silent. As she passed each one, she heard a screech like a barn-owl’s, trailing from a desperate peak to a hot and panting echo that seemed to pass up through her and braid itself with her own entrails.

The sound was horrifying. But if her first instinct, earlier, had been panic, her impulse now was anger. Why must the crone always be looking to trap her?

“Mother!” she cried, furious—and she didn’t know if she meant Julia or the crone.

“Motherrrr!” She felt her voice trailing off, the tears rising. She looked, in vain, for something she could lean on.

But just then she heard another noise: the busy, fussy trilling of that familiar Texas warbler, the mockingbird. The thing was hovering in front of her face, its tail feathers trembling. It looked toward the screens of rusalki and then back at her, urgently repeating the same phrase.

She couldn’t help herself. Her face cracked in a laugh. It was the sheer incongruity.

You laugh! said a trilling voice. The sad girl laughs.

“Yes—yes, I’m laughing,” said Francesca.

Then the spell is broken. Do you feel it?

“I don’t know.”

Obstinate girl. Now do you? Another blink, and the gallery was gone, and she was back in Miss Clara’s spare room, conversing with a mockingbird that hopped along the sill.

You’re a nervous little one, said the trilling, but you’re not your mother. Go now!

“You mean leave?”

Yes! This is just a waystation. You won’t find rescue here.

The little bird was singing, fit to burst. The noise itself drove her from the room.

She found herself weaving through the kitchen, speaking words of reassurance. She was just popping back to her own house, she told them, now that the rain had stopped—so that she could get dry clothes of her own. She reached up to give Marco a hug. They would keep in touch, she told him; she would make sure he got rehired or maybe even help him get set up in business. There would be time for all of it—for whatever he wanted, whatever she decided.

And she meant it. She could reason with her father, the sad monster. Her mother’s nightmares were not her own.

She let herself out the little house’s front door, still chuckling.





BIO

Cara Diaconoff is the author of Unmarriageable Daughters: Stories and a novel, I’ll Be a Stranger to You. She has taught writing and literature as a Peace Corps volunteer at Russian institutes, at Southern Methodist University and Whitman College, and currently at Bellevue College, near Seattle.







The Best Detective There Was

by Leila Alliu


            The name “Richard Strong” until recently was never that popular as far as detectives went. It was a gradual growth of interest, however, when three years ago, the publication of Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes as well as the Whitechapel murders in 1888 gave the British public a sort of morbid fascination with crime. I found more and more people became familiar with Detective Strong (the name I go by) as everyone wanted to know the whereabouts of everyone in their circle. I will not complain — I find keeping a job to be rather convenient, thank you very much. It was only in the past year where I received an influx of new customers.

            Like Holmes, I am a private investigator. I do not associate with organisations. Therefore what you will see is the product of my intellect alone. I begin my story with the introduction of a woman known as Mrs. Frederica Barker looking for her husband, who had gone missing.

            “Are you Mr. Strong?” She asked at my doorstep. The poor girl was young, around two and twenty, and in such a state of fright when I first beheld her. She was clutching her handkerchief to her heart in a shaking gloved hand.

            “That is certainly the name on my postbox,” I responded with a slight grin. “May I ask who you are?”

She introduced herself, and I received her into my home and had her tell me every bit of information she could give.

            “He works with Scotland Yard,” she said as she gently dabbed her eyes with the  handkerchief. “About five days ago, George told me he would only be gone for a little while. I pressed him that he might tell me where he would be off to, and after such a long while of my begging, he told me he was after some murderer. I asked nothing more after that, only that he may be careful. And now he’s gone!” She let out a quiet sob “He said he would be gone for three days at most and I still haven’t heard from him! Oh, Mr. Strong, please help me find where my George is!”

            I gave her a reassuring smile. “I will do my best, my dear. All I need now is some time and a confirmation that you have told me everything.” I glanced down at my notes to make sure I had everything she told me.

            “Yes, that is everything. Quite everything. I’m so sorry I haven’t anything more to tell you, but I couldn’t ask where he may be — I didn’t want to know about it.”

            “Completely understandable,” I assured.

            “Can you really begin an investigation with so little information? I’ve told you barely anything. And if George is in danger…”

            “You musn’t worry about such things, Mrs. Barker. Bad for the health. I’ve solved investigations with much less evidence before.”

            “Oh, thank you, Mr. Strong! Thank you!”

            “You’re very welcome, my dear.” I led the trembling girl to the door. “I will write to you should any breaking event occur. In the meantime, rest assured that a professional will be looking for your husband.”

            She smiled- a gentle, graceful smile, and left with a little more confidence in her step.

            A week passed from this meeting until I met with her again, to my surprise. You see, I hadn’t asked her to visit, but the girl took it upon herself to come back and ask herself! I swallowed my anger allowing her in, and attempted with all my might to keep my impatience in check. I admit I might not have been very good at it, because as we spoke her demeanour slowly changed from excitedly asking about how far I had gone in the investigation to becoming more shy, reserved, and might I say, frightened. I almost said it served the girl right- she had no right to barge in on such pressing matters.

            “Have you any other clients you are assisting?” She asked, eyeing me.

            “None at all. Your case is all I have at the moment, and I am working with all due diligence.”

            “But again, Mr. Strong, you haven’t told me what you’ve found.”

            It was at this moment where I almost, and I say almost, snapped. However, I managed to only take a deep breath.

            “The information I have gathered at the moment is not fully conclusive, and I don’t wish to give you any false hopes.”

            “Oh,” she said, almost sinking into herself. “If that is all then. And I forgot to say, I’ve been speaking with the colleagues of my husband at Scotland Yard, and they have also looked into the circumstances into his disappearance. Nothing has been found yet, but how wonderful is it that we can have more help?”

            This was it- the moment I have had enough.

            “That was not necessary whatsoever, Mrs. Barker, not necessary at all,” I firmly stated. Her face fell. “I have told you time and time again that I require no assistance, and that I will inform you of anything in the case, and yet you decide to show up unannounced anyway! I must bid you good day, Mrs. Barker, before you take it upon yourself to continue the investigation yourself.”

            She cocked her head, her eyebrows furrowed.

            “I haven’t-”

            “Good day, Mrs. Barker. You know the exit.”

            She slowly rose and led herself out the door like a child after a chastisement. But after recklessly intruding on my investigation, I suppose I had to say such. I listened to the door quietly shut and reveled in the silence to follow.

            I did not hear from Mrs. Barker after that. It was easy to guess she was not happy with the work I had done with her case, and turned to Scotland Yard. I dropped the case entirely and decided that Mr. Barker was dead.

            A few more days passed from that fateful meeting. I continued with my work, accepting new clients as time moved on. To lose one was a disappointment, I admit, but not the end of the world. There always seemed to be someone going missing, therefore a detective such as myself would not be out of work for long.

            There was a part of me that was tempted to go to Scotland Yard and ask after that case. I wondered if they had gotten any farther. I thought it impossible, though stranger things have happened. I decided not to, however. I mean it once more that I do not enjoy associating with organisations such as that one, and I was not planning on beginning over a singular grieving widow.

            I was sitting in my home and reviewing a case when I heard a knock at the door. I can still hear that knock.

            Upon opening the door, I found a constable with an officer behind him. The grave faces on the both of them could have silenced a party.

            “Mr. John Coleridge,” the constable announced. “You are under arrest for the murder of Richard Strong one year ago, as well as Mr. George Barker and several other victims.”

            You see, I had never stated my name was Richard Strong. It was easy to get rid of him and take over the business- he had no one living with him and no acquaintances close enough to recognize the change between us, poor man.

            But therein lied the question of how people would go to me to solve their disappearances. I had underestimated the amount of people in need of a detective. Therefore, I may as well do the work I had done before with Mr. Strong, and bring the clients towards me. No one seemed to recognize the fact that every person that had gone to me left with the knowledge their loved one had died.

            One man “fell off his horse” as he was travelling a great distance, and I was the one to inform his grieving sister. Another “was caught in a fire,” I am afraid, and your son, madam, did not make it.

            I had no regrets for my work; a man is to make a living. But when a certain second-born nobleman who shall remain nameless went to me to do the same thing I have been doing to people for months, then I decided my wages could be far better made. More and more people of rank came to me with their “problems,” and I would be the unfortunate detective that would discover that, oh dear, your poor brother has drowned! Yes, sir, it is an unfortunate tragedy, and without an heir besides yourself as well! No one would question them, and when I walked away with my payment, I forgot their face and name entirely.

            But it was that girl. That nosy, irritating girl that had ruined it all by having friends with the police. I should have been angry, infuriated, out for blood, and in a way, I was. But I could not help being impressed. After all this time of my creating my own disappearances, she found me out herself.

            And now here I was. Caught.

            “Gentlemen,” I said with a cool smile growing over my face. “You will witness no resistance from me.”



BIO

Leila Alliu is a history enthusiast, focusing on fashion history, who has spent years studying and making her own garments of the past. When she is not doing this, she is usually reading classic literature and writing stories inspired by novels of that genre. After six years of short stories, poems, and even a novel of her own, she wrote this story as an acknowledgement to her love of history and the gothic mystery genre. Leila has also been published in the Copperfield Review Quarterly with her short story “Suffragette.” She can be found on Instagram @victorian.historian, where she displays her works of historical fashion and discusses and posts about her favorite books.







Selling Out the Nation

By Stephanie Daich


I stared at the bank foreclosure. “I’m sorry, Dad.” Four generations had successfully farmed my land. Not only did I control the largest farms in the Midwest, but I also owned a legacy. Of course, I didn’t have to lose it. The government made that clear with its deceitful proposition. But could I ruin our nation to save my farm?

I picked up a handful of miniature microchips about the size of a strawberry seed.

My daughter Grace entered the kitchen, and I quickly stuffed the microchips into my pocket. She had prominent bags under her eyes, dark and sorrowful like a middle-aged man would have, not a young girl in her prime.

“Is this my last day at school?” she asked behind sniffles.

I couldn’t look at her. Tomorrow, the police would escort us off our property. If I didn’t team up with the corrupt government with their plan, that was. I put my hand in my pocket and fingered the little microchips.

“Please, Dad, tell me you found a way to save our home.” She bent forward into my face. Her long hair draped over my shoulders.

“Grace, let’s go,” my wife Samantha said as she walked into the kitchen. She looked more emotionally wrecked than Grace.

“Please, Dad, tell me you found a way to save our home.”

“He could save it if he just went into business with the government.” Samantha opened the cupboard, pulled out two glasses, then slammed the cupboard shut. I jumped. “But he has too much pride. He would rather lose his great-great-great-granddad’s land than go into business with anyone.” She banged the glasses on the cupboard.

She didn’t know what the government intended to do. She believed it was just a partnership, an expansion.

“Such pride.”

It tore me apart to see my family so unhappy.

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

Grace threw her arms around my neck. “Really, Dad, really?”

I couldn’t look at her or Samantha. They didn’t realize what they were asking of me. Selfishly, I would save our home, but I would screw the nation.

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Samantha said as she filled the cups with orange juice. She didn’t hug me. We had way too much tension between us for that. She handed a cup to Grace and with her free hand, grabbed her keys.

“Let’s go,” she said with a much happier tone.

“Thanks again, Dad,” Grace said as she left the kitchen, blowing me a kiss.

I ripped up the foreclosure letter. I thought it would bring satisfaction, but it didn’t. I called Josh from the Government office. “Fine, I’ll sign,”

“I knew you would come to your senses.”

I hung up on him.

I pulled the microchips out of my pocket. Within the year, these would be enlaced in all my produce. I would keep a section of my farm untainted, only for Samantha, Grace, and me to eat from. And within the year, the rest of the nation would succumb to ultimate government control.

But at least I saved the farm.



BIO

What transpires when Stephanie Daich observes life? She creates stories. What happens when you read her stories? Your imagination explodes. Stephanie Daich works in corrections and writes for the human experience. Publications include Making Connections, Youth Imaginations, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Kindness Matters, and others.







The Scarecrow Cross

by Erik Priedkalns

 
           Along Shuka River’s edge, around Nishinomiya, Japan, solemn stone walls coldly sit on either side of the narrow river’s flowing waters. The walls cast shadows on the grassy strips, separating them from the river. Above the walls and river, the town sits. On the east side, across from the stores, apartments and houses, there is a red dirt path that runs the length of the river. On the path, walkers walk, runners run, and bikers scoot up and down.

            On weekends, in the unbearable heat and humidity of the summer months, families pitch little tents and eat and drink, throw balls back and forth, swim, and enjoy the time.

            On rainy days, the water picks up speed as it comes down from the mountains above the town. There are cute little cartoon signs that warn children of the danger of flood waters. They show screaming children in their baseball hats and school backpacks fleeing a torrent of roaring water.

            Along the path you come across the occasional park bench, tree, shrubs, or wildflower gardens. Sometimes you find old stone markers, statues, or signs. Nothing really explains why things are where they are. They are just there.

            On a certain day last July, if you were on the path, just a kilometer or so from the Shukugawa train station, you may have seen her; an old Japanese lady, not an inch more than four feet tall, shuffling her way to a certain spot.

            The lady is about eighty-five years old. You probably notice the strange roller coaster rise at the top of her back and realize she can barely look up, so she just looks down at her feet. Her gray hair is tied back in a bun. She wears grey, light cotton pants that stop at her calves, and a grey jinbei top.

            The old Japanese woman, her name is Mayumi, gets passed on the path by a mother on a bicycle. The mother on the bicycle politely rings her bell to let Mayumi know she is passing. Mayumi steps to her right, and the mother on the bicycle does a quick bow of her head.

            The mother has auburn red, dyed hair and is in her thirties. She wears a white, cotton, short-sleeved blouse and a flower covered, black skirt that goes down to her ankles. Her name is Chie.

            Chie has a newborn baby, about five months old, in a pouch on her chest. The baby’s body and face are pressed against her chest. A little straight-haired, four-year-old boy wearing a yellow baseball cap and red shirt is on the back seat. Mayumi hears them talking in serious tones. Mom speaks to the boy without mocking baby talk.

            Mayumi smiles and says out loud, to herself, “The baby will soon get a seat on the bicycle, but the press of the body will stay on mama’s chest.“She remembers her mother telling her that she spoiled her little girl too much by showing too much affection and protection. “They need to be taught to stand alone,” her iron-stern mother said.

            Mayumi watches the mother on the bicycle until she disappears into the line of the horizon.

*          *          *

            Chie breathes heavily. Her puffy white knees pop out of her long skirt’s front slit each time she pedals. She tries to cover her legs because she does not want them to burn. Chie slows a bit because the rays of the sun are burning her face. She stops and pulls an orange baseball hat from her purse.

            Chie is careful not to bounce the little baby on her chest because she is asleep. All my padding is still left from when she was born, Chie thinks. Time for a diet.

            “Why did we stop? asks the little boy.

            “I’m putting on my hat, don’t you see? You ask silly questions.”

            “Oh.”

            Chie’s beliefs are old. She feels bad for scolding the boy, but he needs to learn how to pay attention.

            To her right, Chie notices a black, wrought iron fence around a marble, grey stone statue. The statue is about two meters high and is pentagon in shape. The black fence bars are each speared at the top, and the black color of the bars is dull and peeling in places. This is the first time they have ridden the bike this far up the river.

            Just beyond the statue, there is a growth of three gnarled, knotted trees. The trees are hunched over. Their leaves are dark green on top and mint green underneath. Under the rough shadowy circle of trees, tall grass and wildflowers are growing. The grass and flowers all lean in towards something pink.

            Chie starts to walk with the bicycle towards the trees. As she gets closer, she thinks she sees a little girl in the middle of the tree circle. She sees a pink flowery summer top, a yellow straw brimmed hat, and a baby-blue skirt. The wildflowers surrounding the feet are red, orange, and purple.

            Chie moves closer. She sees that the figure is not a little girl, it’s just some clothes draped on two sticks, one vertical, and near the top the other is horizontal, like a Christian’s cross.

            Little girl scarecrow, Chie thinks. She says a quick prayer. The trees are watching like loyal dogs.

            “What is that?” asked the little boy.

            This time the Chie does not respond. She studies the figure, looking for a reason as to why it is here.

            She notices a small bottle of soda and dead, dry flower stems at the foot of the cross.

            “What is that?” asks the little boy again.

            Chie gently shushes him. “A little girl,” she says in a half-whisper.

*          *          *

            As Mayumi moves along, she shifts her bag from her left to right hand. The little red purse she brought jiggles around the inside of her bag. She sings a made-up song in her head, the same one she used to sing to her daughter.

Make sure your daughter is pretty,

cute like a little doll,

cute shoes, cute tops, cuteness all because of love.

*          *          *

            “Mama?”

            Chie hears her son but does not respond. She studies the kaleidoscope of flowers surrounding the girl’s little skirt. A zinging coldness springs out of Chie’s stomach and spreads through her entire body. Her throat tightens and fills with sadness.

            What’s wrong with you? She asks herself. It’s probably just a child’s robot, or imaginary friend. But the thing stuck in her throat won’t swallow away. At the corner of her eyes, and along the bottom rim, she feels sharp nips as tears start taking shape. Silly woman, she scolds herself, don’t blink.

            She can hear the river. It is so small and slow it barely makes a noise.

*          *          *

            Mayumi takes a break and sits on a bench. She watches all the children running up and down the trail and splashing in the water.

            She thinks about the thigh-high child she saw wandering alone in the store today. He was a little boy about four years old. He was wearing rubber sandals, a blue baseball shirt and blue shorts. She asked him his name, but he wasn’t paying attention because he was talking to his hands. As Mayumi was about to ask him where his parents were, she heard a woman’s voice call a name from across the store. You could barely hear the voice among all the other voices, but the little boy looked up and started walking towards the sound.

*          *          *

            Chie nudges her bike up to the iron fence. She takes her son out of the seat. He grabs the iron bars with both hands and rocks back and forth.

            “Is she a scarecrow?” he asks.

            “Shush,” says Chie, “do you see any crows?”

            “Maybe she scared them away,” says the little boy.

            Chie just stares at the figure. Her son starts walking around the fence surrounding the stone.

            “Lift your feet up when you walk,” Chie says absent-mindedly.

            Each time he passes, his hand brushes the back of her legs just above the knees. His touch is electric and bounces her breath each time.

            Where was she going? Chie wonders. She turns and looks to the river below. It’s only about four meters wide, and maybe two meters deep. The rocks in the river are covered with moss and are very slippery. Chie shivers a bit, turns away from the river, and looks back to the stone and the little girl.

            Her son’s small hand brushes the side of her leg as he makes another pass. The touch pulls all the strength from her legs.

*          *          *

            Mayumi gazes at the water. It is so calm today, she thinks. It is calm almost every day of the year. She closes her eyelids as the sun’s reflection skips off the water.

            Mayumi remembers that day with her daughter. It was at a spot just up the river a bit.

            “Stay close,” she had said to the little girl, “I just need to get some bread.”

            “Yes,” her daughter promised. She was four and had a bad memory. She had straight, black hair that was cut to the base of her neck and hung in a razor straight line just above her eyes.

            Mayumi watched her skip/run towards the river. The river was loud and fast that day. There had been heavy rain during the last week.

            “Not too close,” she shouted to the little girl.

            The girl turned and said something. Mayumi couldn’t hear her over the sounds of the cars and water. She turned towards the store. It was getting close to sundown, and she needed to hurry to get home and make dinner. As she opened the door to the bakery, she heard the little bell on the door tinkle. She gazed at the pastries, buns, muffins, and bread behind the glass. Mayumi still remembers exactly how the bakery smelled that day.

            Mayumi gets up off the old bench and starts walking. Not much further she thinks.

            She sighs. She can remember the bakery smell, but she has started to forget her daughter’s smell. Before she left the house this morning, as she was busy gathering up the incense sticks, chocolate pieces and the little red purse, she pulled out one of her daughter’s old shirts. She had to be careful, because it was so old it felt as though it would crumble under her touch. She put it near her nose, but the smell was gone.

            Mayumi knows her daughter had a smell, a little sour and a little sweet, but she could no longer bring its details to memory.

*          *          *

            Where was the little girl going? Chie wonders. Was she wearing that hat?

            The baby wiggles a bit but stays asleep. Chie feels her puffy cheek rub her breast. She rubs the baby’s tiny back.

            The little boy runs back and forth on the trail.

            Chie looks down to the river and frowns. She knows that occasionally it swells and runs violently down this bed. On those days, she doesn’t let her son go to the river, even though some of his friends get to go.

            Maybe the sounds of the river and world killed the mother’s call? Chie thinks. Nonsense. You don’t even know if it was the river. Stop this thinking.

            Chie is struck with a strange feeling, like a warning, and looks around to find her son. She sees his red tee-shirt disappearing up the trail. “Jiro,” she calls, but he doesn’t stop. She sighs, gets on her bike, and starts peddling after him. She catches him not far away.

            “You should never leave me like that, and when I tell you to stop, you must stop,” she says sternly.

            “I’m sorry,” he says.

            “Let’s sit on the grass a little. Mama is tired.”

            The boy sits next to her and lays his head on her thigh. She feels the weight get heavier as he gradually falls asleep. She puts her palm on his warm, red face. The little baby wakes up briefly, tilts back her head, and looks at Chie with tiny, groggy, brown eyes. A smile materializes from the little face. She smacks her lips and falls asleep again. Chie bows her head down and kisses the top of the baby’s head. A milky sweet smell fills Chie’s nose.

            She looks over to the little girl. Through an opening in the circle of trees, Chie can see the figure clearly. She closes her eyes for a moment and then opens them. She sees a bent over, old woman, with a bag in her hand, walk to the trees and to the little girl. It’s the same woman Chie remembers passing earlier.

            The woman puts down the bag and wipes the back of her hand across her forehead. She takes out some incense sticks, puts them in the ground and lights them. She then reaches into her purse and pulls out some little, shiny objects and scatters them around the base of the little girl. Finally, Chie sees the woman take out a little girl’s red purse and put it on the horizontal stick.

            The old woman puts down the bag and touches the palms of her hands together in front of her chest. She stays like that for a long time.

            Chie understands.

*          *          *

            Mayumi stares at the little pieces of silver-wrapped chocolate at her daughter’s feet.

            She remembers the exact moment her own spirit vanished. It was gone after thirty-two minutes. She remembers the instant the sun went down and her hope for a good life disappeared. After thirty-two minutes of searching, she knew everyone could stop. The line from her heart to her daughter snapped, and Mayumi knew what that snapping meant.

            And at that exact moment. . . .

            Mayumi walks over to a park bench, as everything comes back once again. She sits with a heavy drop. The bench creaks.

            At that exact moment, she thinks. She has tried to put it in words for forty years.

*          *          *

            Chie sees the old woman walk over to a park bench and sit down heavily. From afar, the rise at the top of the woman’s back seems to be pushing her body down, and it looks as if the woman is about to topple over.

            Suddenly, Chie feels the weight of her son lift off her leg. She sees his head pop up.          “Look mama, the woman.”

            He springs up and starts to move to the woman. Chie’s hand shoots towards him. She grabs his arm, and feels her fingers and nails sink into the flesh.

            “No,” she says firmly. “Why do you want to bother the woman and the little girl?”

            He looks surprised, and his eyes water a bit. Chie loosens her grip, just a little.

*          *          *

            Mayumi sees the little boy in the red shirt start to get up. The young mother’s hand catches him.

*          *          *

            Maybe it would be okay if she let the little boy come over, thinks Mayumi.

*          *          *

            Chie wonders if she should let the little boy go. No, she thinks, he will just make it harder.

            She turns back to the river and stares at the cold stone wall across the way.

*          *          *

            Everyone had tried to get Mayumi to stop coming here, but she was stubborn. She would never leave the place that brutalized her every day. Even her husband tried to make her give it up. He tried for years, and it made her so angry. “Heartless one,” she’d say. Then he died, and she couldn’t tell him sorry.

*          *          *

            The little boy sits down next to Chie and takes her hand. He puts his face into her palm and nuzzles it with his little nose. Chie feels the warm breath, and the tickle of his nose on the most sensitive spot of her palm, where the lifelines meet and cross.

            She jumps a little when she feels the tips of his bangs move lightly across her wrist.

            She sees the crescent indentations of her nail marks on his arm.

            She feels like a fool when the clinging tears finally drop.

            “What’s wrong?” says the little boy.  

            He gets no response.

*          *          *

            Mayumi sees the little boy take mama’s hand and touch it with his face.

            She sees mama’s head bow to the ground.

            Chie looks away and turns to the river.

            At that exact moment, she thinks.

            For forty years, every single moment, down to the second, has felt like a 5 p.m. on a Sunday night in January, when it gets so dark, cold, and lonely, and nobody is around, and you try to think about getting through another week, while you sit in your house and feel like everything is crumpling around you into pure pitch black, and you cannot go to sleep because there is so much time left in the day, and you wonder what the rest of the world is doing, you look outside, but you cannot see anything outside and all you see is you and the room you are in and it looks like a faded picture from a photograph in a magazine, and your only thought is “my god, morning will be back again.”

            And you bargain with whatever god will do the trick. You plead for the little one to keep living on. And every day your prayers and grief pour out.

            Mayumi built the little girl on the cross ten days after it happened. She remembers how they all watched her with sorrowful eyes as she put the stick into the ground, tied the cross-stick at the top, and hung her daughter’s picture where the two sticks met.

            And every day for forty years she has begged the little stick figure girl to come alive, fill up the clothes and get off.

*          *          *

            “You’re spoiling her,” Mayumi imagines her mother would say. “For forty years, that’s all you have done.”

            At that exact moment.

            Mayumi hums her daughter’s song.

            For forty years every day, she’s hung her life on the Little Girl, Scarecrow Cross.



BIO

Erik Priedkalns is an attorney (non-practicing by choice) who grew up in Thousand Oaks, California. He graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in English with a creative writing emphasis. Currently he lives in a small farming town on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan with his wife and dog. He hopes to one day become a farmer himself. His extremely limited Japanese gives him motivation to write, and say everything he wants to say to the people around but cannot. He has found endless writing material in the country, writing about the people and the surrounding countryside. He believes everything here has a story, and that the forests, trees, rocks, and streams all speak if you listen closely enough.







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