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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

by Ricky Garni

 

 

They discovered another earth. It’s beautiful and round and fiery orange.
This is good news. Unfortunately, it is quite far away, and not populated
by people you know. In fact, it might not even be populated at all!
Right now scientists are hard at work trying to find out for sure:
Is it populated by people you know? Is it populated at all?
They are building a super powerful telescope to find out.
I say, just use a cheap one from around the house, point it at your heart,
and pull the trigger.

 

 

INFIRMITIES

I have a friend who sits on an orange chair
that looks like a whale.
She enjoys sitting in the chair when her friends
call her and ask her what she is doing.
And she says: “I am sitting in my whale chair.”

“Wheelchair?” they ask.
“No, whale chair.”
“Wheelchair?”
“No, whale chair.”
“I don’t understand…”
“A wheelchair.”
“Oh! I thought so.”

And then she tells them where she found her
orange wheelchair,

in an old shop on 6th Avenue that sells things
that look like orange whales.

 

 

BIO

Ricky Garni grew up in Miami and Maine. He works as a graphic designer by day and writes music by night. His latest book, THE PRESSED TABLETS OF DOMINO, will be released in Spring 2018.

 

 

 

Ketchup Sandwich

by Shamar English

 

 

Growing up in poverty is phantom pain, it never goes away like hunger. It lingers for seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades and so on. You never forget because you always remember.

You have to devour whatever edible thing you can find. Food fluctuates in my home like the stock market. The one thing I can make and eat heavily are sandwiches. Particularly, special sandwiches since there isn’t always meat.

So, I make syrup sandwiches, sugar sandwiches, cheese sandwiches, wish sandwiches, and jelly sandwiches. Not too many peanut butter sandwiches. I tried a few times, but it wouldn’t stick to my stomach. It smelled like seaweed and paste and tasted like chalk.

But ketchup sandwiches are my satiety. I can eat more than one like a can of Pringles. They get me through the days pacifying my growling belly. It sounds gross, but not when you’re ravish by hunger.

Ketchup sandwiches subdued my impending starvation more times than I can ever recount. So, whenever the refrigerator and cabinets are full of food I go directly for the bread and ketchup.

 

 

BIO

Shamar English is a budding writer. He has a piece published in literallystories2014 magazine, and another piece that will appear in Better than Starbucks magazine. He’s originally from Santa Barbara, California, but lives in Douglasville, Georgia, with his family and attends Georgia State University pursuing his bachelor’s degree.

 

 

The Skid Row Zine Writing Group

Introduction by Ivy Pochoda

 

 

In 2009 I moved from my hometown of Brooklyn to Los Angeles, a city that is still both familiar and unknowable to me. Accustomed to walking or riding the subway, I found I couldn’t visualize the city’s shape even as I moved along its streets and freeways. I still can’t. But driving to and from my Echo Park apartment back then I was struck by something else that surprised me: all the ways in which people lived out of doors—the tent encampments, permanently parked camper vans, makeshift shelters of many materials all improvised for living in the elements. They made Los Angeles, amidst its evident wealth, even more mystifying, gave it a texture I hadn’t expected, a secret soul.

Two years later I moved just east of Downtown to the Arts District which was just beginning its rapid gentrification. Skid Row sits between Downtown and the Arts District. As I drove or rode my bike past its sprawling community of tents, shelters, medical and social services, murals, missions, and churches the initial impression of chaos eventually gave way to a pattern of communities each with its own character. Here were activists; here were artists; and here were the hopeless and the helpless in various associations of their own. I began to see the shape and depth of the neighborhood though I could not have imagined how much more it would mean to me one day.

One evening I emailed the Lamp Arts Program, a multi-discipline studio affiliated with The People Concern, one of Los Angeles’s largest social services agencies, and offered to give a course in creative writing. I did not know what to expect when I turned up for my first class. Would the participants be lucid, intelligent, capable? The truth is they were all of these things and more. Each of them was on a journey and they each showed up with a story to tell whether it was drawn from experience or summoned by wild inspiration. Their work is remarkable—it’s profound, smart, and quite often funny.

We meet once a week. (I am not always in charge of the sessions these days as some of the participants have stepped up to run the class.) We do warm up exercises and in class writing assignments. Some participants are working on longer projects: chapbooks, one-act plays, essays, and short stories. And out of these meetings, we formed Skid Row Zine—an independent magazine dedicated to the voices and stories of people living in and around Skid Row.

 

This is a New Series from the Skid Row Zine Writers Group:

Each issue will feature new work from the group.

This issue features:
UP ABOVE and the DOWN BELOW by Linda Leigh

 

 

 

Wildfirelife

by Brad G. Garber

 

 

The black bear peered at us, from the edge of the wood
square nose pointed toward the forest fire we were
heading toward, having smelled it washing like ocean tide
up the flanks of a mountain glowing in moonlight.

It was a full moon, orange against a starless night sky
that followed the bear into a copse of trembling aspens
lighting ripened berries like sugar lanterns in the night
the bear’s nimble lips a soft smoke drifting through.

And, on this morning, as smoke descended like wool
the black bear peered at us, passing by like ashen waters
toward uncertain tides and ducked back into the wood
confident in the fruit of the earth and her place in it.

 

 

 

San Francisco Airport

 

The fog spills over the hills
like frosty butter poured
over boiled shrimp, curled
waterfalling, thick and soft.

This, in the land of bitcoin
wealth erupting up the hillsides
waves of black information
slapping against tender brains.

Around me, fretful travelers
swirling like fog, not noticing
the thick clouds descending
upon a threatened landscape.

This, where the earth aches
to move like a falling tree
uprooting its ageless innocence
laying waste to every excess.

And I wonder where will be
this airport, this place of flight
when the waters rise to meet
a slowly pouring, terrifying sky.

 

 

 

Storm Cycle

 

There is a storm building

            across an ocean of human heat.

            Take your pick . . .
intolerance, distrust, fear, ignorance, denial:

we don’t like
we don’t listen
we fear
we don’t care
it’s not us.

            The storm surge will kill
its stupid-foot waves

            prejudicial waves
            apathetic swells

            crushing, drowning, wiping
scouring the surface of the earth.

Left . . . a pristine beach, populated
            with hungry birds, winter foam
                        silent sunsets

Until clouds build along the horizon.

 

 

 

Syrian Literature

He was writing poetry
in a waning ray of sunlight
when he was picked off
the roof like a pigeon
by a sniper, his brain
a puff of feathers, floating
with his peaceful words
down to indifferent earth.

 

 

 

Nature on the Back Porch

 

The red dragonfly, as the hummingbird
has its hunting grounds, this afternoon
darts out to capture swarming midges.

I remedy my insecurities with bourbon
staring at the imperfections of my skin
capturing what I can of confidence.

Like the dragonfly, I return to the spot
where I can scan the killing field, full
of swarming memories and expectations.

Overhead, the hummingbird sucks water
a blooming fuchsia plant a distraction
from what is sustaining and what is not.

The red dragonfly eats its fill and leaves
and the hummingbird goes to its roost
leaving me to rattle the ice cubes in glass.
 

BIO

Brad G. Garber has degrees in biology, chemistry and law. He writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. Since 1991, he has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such publications as Edge Literary Journal, Pure Slush, On the Rusk Literary Journal, Sugar Mule, Third Wednesday, Barrow Street, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Barzakh Magazine, Five:2:One, Ginosko Journal, Vine Leaves Press, Riverfeet Press, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine, Aji Magazine and other quality publications. 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stitches

by Rick White

 

 

It took me a good twenty or so years to realise that it was a feather duster, the strange alien life-form which lived in my grandmother’s airing cupboard. As a young boy, whenever I walked down the hallway to the bedroom where my grandmother lay, I’d pass the airing cupboard and I always had to stop and look inside. The feather duster I remember was red, or some sort of vivd pink and it moved and pulsated like a weird plant. Its soft, feathery tendrils moved in the convection of the warm air and seemed almost to beckon me in.

And although I was always a bit frightened to look inside that cupboard, I still had to do it every time I walked past. I only thought of it today, decades later, because a huge spider has made it’s home in the compost bin in my garden. Now every time I walk past the bin I have to open the lid and look inside at the miniature forest world, draped and festooned with fine cotton sheets of web. The spider always retreats slowly from my view and I close the lid and walk away.

There are tiny parts of this world which do not belong to us. Miniature worlds within worlds just like my grandmother’s airing cupboard which have been annexed by something other, and in to which we can never truly hope to look. Part of the fabric of our Universe, yet quite entirely apart from it in every way, hidden behind the finest of shrouds. And it freaks me out.

My grandmother was dying, although I didn’t realise it at the time because I didn’t know what dying was. She lay in her pink sheets and blankets in her bed by the window. Her small frame and short curly hair just as light as the feathers on the duster or the spider’s web. She was waiting there to float up from the mattress one day and out of the open window.

“Give me a hug to last until I next see you.” was what she’d always say at the end of my visits. And I would squeeze her tightly, just not so tight that she’d break, and I really believed that the hug would last. Of course she knew that each time might be the last time we’d see each other, but that was not something she wanted me to have to know.

She was my paternal grandmother, my dad’s mum. My father and I have never really spoken about her except for when he told me she was a spiritualist. She believed there was a connection between the realms of the living and the dead, and she believed that this connection could be used to heal.

My dad told me about a dog that wouldn’t stop snapping at its own ear, and my grandmother asking its owner if she knew anyone who had passed over who walked with a cane and smoked a pipe.

“That’s Uncle John.”

“Uncle John – I’m sure you’re very welcome to come and visit any time you like but can you not bring your dog as it’s scaring this one.”

That story gave me chills when I heard it, especially because it was so incongruous with dad’s most pragmatic nature. It seemed so unlike anything he would ever subscribe to that it must be true. I since heard somewhere or other that the whole “don’t bring your dog” trick is bread and butter to anyone wanting to pass themselves off as a Medium. It’s like telling someone in a cold reading that they’ve always wanted to write a novel.

Dad really seemed to believe it though, or maybe he believed it because his mother believed it. Maybe he found it easier to believe that story, than to admit how much he loved and missed his mother. Maybe he clung to it, maybe he needed it.

Not so many years after I heard that story, my younger brother injured himself quite badly while riding a motorbike on holiday with me and my dad. He bit through his lower lip and had to have the wound stitched without any anaesthetic, in case he swallowed his tongue.

Dad sat by my brother’s bed and held his hand while the stitches were being sown and he said that he could feel every last ounce of my brother’s pain. Later, Dad asked my brother if his pain had diminished whilst he was holding his hand, and my brother replied that yes, it was the strangest thing, but it actually had hurt less.

I had sat out in the corridor on my own as all this was taking place and heard my brother’s screams echoing through the hallway. I would suggest that sure enough he’d felt every last stab of that needle, every last tug of that thread and could still feel it later when he was being asked to relive it.

I think he wanted to make my dad feel better. So maybe you can take someone’s pain away if you want to, and if they’re willing to let you.

You just have to believe in the same stories.

You just have to give them a hug to last them.

 

 

 

BIO

Rick White is a writer and debut novelist from Manchester, UK. He currently writes for a number of online magazines including Vice and Drunken Werewolf, as well as his own blog www.badtripe.com. Rick’s first short story was published earlier this year by Storgy Magazine, https://storgy.com. Rick hopes you enjoy reading his work.

 

 

 

Pink Lemonade

by Michael McCormick

 

 

Greg, Ricky, Joel, and Sean all left the basketball court and headed over to the parking lot. Three two-on-two games in a row and now everyone was exhausted (particularly Sean, who every one of his friends and family members agreed was a monster on the court). They were now ready for some lunch.

“Where we gonna’ go?” Ricky asked, wiping sweat off his face. “Can we do something other than Sonic?”

“I’m good with anything,” Sean said, dribbling one of the basketballs on the parking lot.

“I just want a drink,” Greg said. “I don’t really care what we eat.”

“How about Luby’s?” Joel suggested.

“I’m not in the mood for Luby’s,” Ricky replied.

“I need a drink,” Greg said. “What are places that I can get a drink?”

“There’s Jack and John’s,” Sean suggested.

“Blegh!” Ricky replied. “Forget that.”

“Why don’t we just get a pizza somewhere?” Joel asked. “Then we can get drinks somewhere else.”

“Can we not make a million stops?” Ricky replied.

“What about Sam’s?” Sean suggested.

“Yes, let’s go there,” Joel said, wiping a bead of sweat on his neck. “Can we get out of the sun already?”

“Yeah, let’s go to Sam’s,” Greg said. “I’m down for some Mountain Sunrise.”

“Ricky?” Sean asked.

“What’s Sam’s?” Ricky replied. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a steakhouse,” Joel said. “You’ll like it. Come on, let’s go! It’s freaking hot!”

“Alright, whatever,” Ricky said. “I’m okay with steak.”

With that, the four friends hopped in their cars and drove away from the park. Being the very middle of lunch hour, the roads were quite busy. It took nearly twenty minutes for the four to arrive in the parking lot of Sam’s Steak Shack.

Sam’s Steak Shack had been up and running in central Houston for nearly thirty years. While hardly known outside of Houston, the steakhouse was massively popular within the city. Top quality steaks, excellent service, and a clean and relaxing atmosphere made for the perfect spot to eat. In addition, the steakhouse was known for being home to the Mountain Sunrise, a drink that could not be found at any other restaurant. Popular among young males (particularly young males who had only recently become legally allowed to consume alcohol), the Mountain Sunrise had a unique flavor and delightful taste that was very difficult to forget. Most diners who experienced this delightful taste for the first time looked forward to paying several visits to Sam’s Steak Shack in the future for the sole purpose of having the drink again.

After a ten-minute wait, a woman led the four friends to their table in the back of the restaurant. Greg was frustrated that he had to wait so long just to get his drink, Ricky was so hungry that he was about to start gnawing on the table, Joel was just relieved to finally be out of the sun, and Sean had his mind set on taking a thirty-minute shower as soon as he arrived home.

“Next time we play ball, I’m bringing a pack of Budweiser,” Greg said as he sat down. “I hope that isn’t illegal.”

“If it is, I’m not bailing you out,” Sean said.

“It’s okay, his granny will probably take care of it,” Ricky said.

“Shut up,” Greg said with a grin. Ricky chuckled.

“Hey Sean, when’s your interview again?” Joel asked, taking a look at his menu.

“Monday,” Sean replied. “Wish me luck guys. It took me five freaking months to get this interview. If I don’t get the job, I’m probably going to smash a window.”

“Then you’d better stay away from my car,” Greg said.

“Ah, I’m sure you’ll get it, Sean,” Ricky said. “Who wouldn’t hire someone with your smoking hot body?”

“I think it’s going to be a guy,” Sean replied.

“And how do you know he won’t be interested in your hot body?”

“Oh, shut the hell up.”

Ricky chuckled.

Having never been to the restaurant before, Ricky looked around. It seemed like every other steakhouse he had been to before. Walls made of wood, pictures showing the restaurant in its earlier days, pictures of the food served at the restaurant, and several other pictures of the famous Mountain Sunrise. Ricky was quite curious to see what it tasted like.

Greg also looked around the restaurant. Every table was full. Mostly with young men, though there were a few families. Almost every young man in the restaurant had a glass of Mountain Sunrise to their side. Greg could hardly wait to get his own glass of the delicious beverage. He was sure that he was going to have drunk at least three glasses by the time he left the restaurant.

Greg also noticed at least two young men who had glasses of what appeared to be water. Greg was baffled why any man would come to Sam’s Steak Shack and not order the Mountain Sunrise. It was utterly bizarre to him. Water could be found at every other restaurant in existence. Could these men just not see the Mountain Sunrise advertisements all over the walls?

After another minute or two, their waitress returned to their table with a pen and notepad in her hand.

“What can I get y’all to drink?” the waitress asked.

Greg said: “Mountain Sunrise” without even blinking.

Sean, who also had been looking forward to a glass of Mountain Sunrise since Sam’s Steak Shack was decided on, also ordered the drink.

Ricky, although he didn’t know what Mountain Sunrise tasted like, was very curious as to why it was so popular. He also ordered a glass.

Joel looked at the beverage section of the menu. The menu heavily promoted Mountain Sunrise (there was a large picture of the famous drink at the top of the beverage section), but he was not interested. He had tasted Mountain Sunrise before and he wasn’t a fan of it. There was another beverage that he was hoping the restaurant served (he had only visited the restaurant once before). Sure enough, his favorite beverage was written in clear letters at the bottom of the page.

“Can I get some pink lemonade?” Joel asked.

“Sure,” the waitress replied, writing the order on her notepad. “Okay, I’ll be right back with your drinks.”

After the waitress left, Greg stared at Joel with a puzzled expression.

“Pink lemonade?” Greg asked. “What?”

“Umm…yeah,” Joel said, looking at the steak section of the menu. “I ordered pink lemonade.”

“Are you serious, Joel? Pink lemonade?”

“What’s wrong with pink lemonade?”

Greg smiled and chuckled. “Well now I’ve seen everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. We come to Sam’s, the only place where you can get Mountain Sunrise, and you order freaking pink lemonade. I just can’t wrap my mind around that.”

“Well, what if I like pink lemonade?”

“Honestly, I would be a lot less weirded out if you got water. Freaking pink lemonade. Seriously.” Greg chuckled and looked at his menu.

“Dude, leave him alone,” Sean said to Greg. “Let him drink what he wants.”

“I’m not going to stop him from drinking it,” Greg replied. “I just find it kind of weird, that’s all.”

“How is it weird?” Joel asked. He was feeling incredibly irritated.

“Let me repeat what I said. We’re at Sam’s. The only place where you can get Mountain Sunrise, and you order pink lemonade. You don’t see anything weird about that?”

Joel breathed deeply in frustration. “No, I don’t.”

“It is pretty weird,” Ricky said. “Why would you even get pink lemonade?”

“Because I like pink lemonade,” Joel replied. “Why would you even ask me that?”

Greg and Ricky both snickered.

“He’s probably also gonna’ order a salad,” Ricky said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Greg said.

The two laughed even harder. Joel was becoming more and more infuriated.

“Guys, knock it off,” Sean said. His tone of voice showed that he was incredibly frustrated. “If he likes pink lemonade, let him like pink lemonade.”

“He can like it all he wants,” Greg replied. “I won’t stop him. But it’s still weird.”

“No, it’s not,” Joel muttered. His face was turning red.

“Hey, let’s go to a bar later tonight,” Ricky said. “Forget beer, let’s get drunk on pink lemonade.”

Greg and Ricky laughed so hard that diners sitting nearby looked in the direction of their table. By that point, Joel was very close to blowing a fuse. Sean had half a mind to break Greg and Ricky’s noses.

“Come on, Joel,” Greg said. “Be a man and get some Mountain Sunrise like the rest of us.”

The “be a man” comment ended up being what completely set Joel off. Without even trying to control himself, Joel screamed: “I don’t like Mountain Sunrise!”

Joel’s scream was so loud that everyone in the restaurant heard him. To many, a negative statement about Mountain Sunrise was practically a crime inside the doors of Sam’s Steak Shack. The diners didn’t seem to approve of Joel’s remark.

“Who said they don’t like Mountain Sunrise?”

“Dude, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Get the hell out of here!”

The other diners were clearly exaggerating, as a large amount of laughter began to fill the restaurant. Joel, however, was not the least bit amused. He now wanted to get out of the restaurant as soon as possible.

“Did you hear that, Joel?” Greg said with a grin. He pointed his thumb at the other tables. “I told you it was weird.”

Just as Sean was about to stand up to keep Joel from strangling Greg, the waitress returned to the table. She walked up to Joel.

“I’m sorry sir,” the waitress said. “We don’t have any pink lemonade at the moment. Can I get you something else?”

“Ohhhhh,” Greg and Ricky said together. They both started laughing.

Joel looked at the waitress for a moment. He took a deep breath and said: “No, nothing for me then. Thanks.”

“Are you sure?” the waitress replied.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

A confused expression appeared on the waitress’ face, but she just shrugged and said: “Okay then.” She then walked away.

Before he could hear any more negative remarks about his beverage preference, Joel stood up and began to walk away from the table.

“Where are you going?” Greg asked with a grin.

Without even looking at Greg, Joel replied: “Getting pink lemonade.” He then exited the restaurant without another word.

 

 

 

BIO

Michael McCormick is a graduate from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in English. He is currently pursuing his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. He is an aspiring author, having written stories since he was a child. His prose poem “Eight Minutes”, was published in the UTRGV journal Gallery in 2016. He currently resides in Edinburg, Texas.

 

 

 

 

 

Desert Suite #8: Red Piano in the Desert

by Kimberly White

 

for E.J.

 

It is red, because the desert is red with small pianoesque shapes of scorpions,
lavarock concertos stripped to their bones

It is a piano because the keys of the desert pound strings of yucca leaf and
spiderweb, grace notes circle the raptors, trace ochre streams, carve red-vein
strokes of piano wind.  Tiny stones shift themselves in tune with the bars of
desert movement in constant orchestration, vibrating strings of connective
air, footsteps in sync with a jazzbeat heart, beat changing tides ebbing
flowing sunforsaken red

It carries, the hidden notes rustle to the surface, create subliminal bands of
disruption, fan waves of cold and heat, scatter themselves in leaf litter and
decay, die and resurrect before the echo settles backward into rest.

 


 

The Blue Dog of Midnight

 

Clatterdog paws on a kitchen floor
sniff out scraps of night

paws hesitate, then pick up,
follow a twitchy nose along
cupboard borders and pantry doors
and refrigerator floors.  I, the
insomniac in the back bedroom,
sweat through sheets twisted
with the haunted labor of counting
down the night.  The wages of
sleep earn themselves, disrespective
of my circadian plans.

Calloused dog paws scratch the back
door, wanting out, hungry for the
call of the moon.  Sleepwalk
footsteps shuffle his way, blind to
tender toes underfoot.  The sleepwalker
checks her sleep pocket for the gun that
lives only in her dreams.  A dog barks,
her hand opens a door, the dog escapes
to the welcoming moon.  In my sleep,
I hunt, I stalk, my prey recognizes
my gun and flees.  Possibly warned by
the dog

who has padded off to someone
else’s sleepwalk, maybe his own,
or to sniff another kitchen door,
ragged nails click time counting
down another ruthless night in a
wakeful backroom bed.

 

 

natural conundrum

 

If a fat-ass robin
hits a tree and the
poet is not there
to laugh at it, does
it make a sound?

Doesn’t matter.
Coyote will hear it.

Coyote,
he can smell stupid
a mile off.

 

 

 

BIO

Kimberly White’s poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, Big Muddy, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks and two novels. You can find her poetry and collage art on her website, www.purplecouchworks.com, as well as on Facebook and various refrigerator doors.

 

 

 

The Art of Miss Fluff

 

 

Bubble Doll

 

Ice Cream Pinup Doll

 

Leopard Mermaid with Sea Kittens

 

Glamour Girl on the Moon

 

Martini Mermaid

 

Pinup Nurse

 

Sugar Pinup

 

Tipsy Martini Mermaid

 

 

ABOUT

Fluff is an enchanting design brand created by artist, Claudette Barjoud. She is a multi media artist working in both traditional and digital mediums. Her inspiration comes from childhood loves such as Betty Boop, Disney, Hello Kitty, and Vintage Barbie, just to name a few. Combined with a fascination for exploring the styles and themes of decades past including Classic Pin Up, Golden Age Hollywood Glamour, Tiki, Rockabilly, Mid Century Mod and Art Deco! Claudette founded Fluff with the mission of making people “squeal with delight” for which she designed many collections of accessories over the last 15 years. That is how she became known as Miss Fluff, the lady that creates all the Fluff!

Recently Miss Fluff has turned her focus solely to the pursuit of creating art, releasing her designs onto products only through collaborations and on demand production companies.

 

ARTIST

I was born and raised in Miami, FL, and have loved to draw since I was about five years old.  I would go off  by myself and just escape into my mind, drawing for hours non stop. I did not see it as anything more than a hobby for a long time until my best friend’s boyfriend would not stop talking about an amazing arts high school he was attending. He was in theater, but the school had all the disciplines including dance, music and visual arts!  He went on about how he got to have such fun classes and that the visual artists there were so good there was no way I could get in.  Well, I never back down from a challenge, so I auditioned.  He was right.  I was not as skilled as the other artists. But, I won over the teachers on the jury with sheer enthusiasm and got into the school, New World School of the Arts in Miami!  So that was the start of art as my life.  I had an art degree and no idea what to do with it. So I started working for different companies that required “artsyish” talents ranging from logo and brochure design to magazine layout. I was not getting to draw or really design much, but wherever I was, I always kept a little sketch book with me where I would scribble fun ideas I would do if I could do whatever I wanted. While I was working at Fredericks of Hollywood I was asked to design the packaging for some of their products: Some pajama sets and bridesmaid gifts. I decided to make them more fun and friendly with vintage inspired illustrations of cute pinup girls and animals. They became very popular and people even started collecting the products with my designs! This got me thinking, maybe I really could do my own art and design for a living.So I took two weeks off of work, put together a line of greeting cards with my art and went to the California Gift Show. They were just printouts from my little desktop printer. But I took orders on them and I have never looked back since. After making the cards I was licensed by different manufacturers that expanded my line into purses, cosmetic bags, apparel, a pet line and much more!  It was carried in over 2000 boutiques all over the world. I named my line Fluff because it is fun and frivolous, an escape into a fantasy of vintage inspired cuteness! And after the first couple of years people started calling me Miss Fluff!  Because I was the lady who designed all the Fluff!

My artwork is heavily inspired by things I loved from my childhood: Vintage Barbie, Cartoons from the 1930’s like Betty Boop, and  original Disney films. I love to mix this up with classic Pin Up , Rockabilly style and Old Hollywood glamour and burlesque. Overall I am simply in love with the art and design of decades past. There is too much to name it all here! I just think it has so much charming magic and I hope to capture that in my own work. After designing for Fluff and managing the business for almost 15 years, I am so excited to have gone solo and dedicate myself to art only! I am so grateful to be doing what I love the most as my full time thing! And even happier that people enjoy my artwork as much as I enjoy creating it. Claudette Barjoud  a.k.a  Miss Fluff

 

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Website: www.missfluff.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/missfluff
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miss.fluff/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Miss_Fluff

 

 

 

Finding Jesus

by J L Higgs

 

 

As was customary, Rabbi Zeitel arrived at his office at precisely 9:00 am.

“Good Morning, Mrs. Lieberman,” he said to his assistant, who was seated at her desk in the outer office.

She returned his greeting. Then handing him a note, said,“You have a message.”

Having removed his hat and winter overcoat, Rabbi Zeitel adjusted his yarmulke and scanned the pink slip of paper.

“An emergency meeting of the council?” he said, massaging his beard and furrowing his bushy eyebrows. “He said nothing else?”

“What else should he say to me?” she responded.  “The phone rings, I answer it.  He asks, is Rabbi Zeitel in?  I say no.  He asks I give you a message.” She pointed at the note.

“Thank you, Mrs. Lieberman.”

“You are very welcome Rabbi Zeitel.”  She smiled.  “Would you like some coffee?”

“No thank you, Mrs. Lieberman.”

“Perhaps a bagel or a danish.”

“No, I am fine, Mrs. Lieberman.  Thank you,” he said going into his office.

An emergency meeting of The Interfaith Community Council was unprecedented.  The council promoted respect and tolerance for differing religious views and practices and its next scheduled meeting was only two days away.  Its members were the ministers of the churches on the town’s aptly named Church Street.  On one side of the street, within a few blocks of each other, were a Temple, a Catholic Church, and a Christian Evangelical Church.  Across the street, splitting the distance between the Catholics and the Evangelicals were the Unitarian Universalists.  The Lutherans were separate, about a mile further down the street.

The council had been founded following an act of vandalism to Temple Beth Israel. In a show of community solidarity, the other church congregations had appeared unannounced and helped remove anti-semitic graffiti defacing one of the temple’s walls.

With his colleagues gathered in a circle in the basement of Church St. Christian, Reverend Johnson, a bald, stout, black man with a bull neck, began speaking.  “I’m sorry to call all of you here today,” he bellowed.  “A serious matter has arisen that requires the council’s attention.”

“What’s happened?” asked Reverend Robyn, the height sensitive UU minister, a wearer of always sensible black shoes, flats.

“Well, I’m sure as each of you arrived here this morning, you probably noticed it,” said Reverend Johnson.  “Our nativity scene?” he said to their blank expressions.  “Baby Jesus?  He’s gone from the manger?”

“That’s awful,” said Reverend Robyn, reaching out and touching Reverend Johnson’s hand.  “What can we do to help?”

“I don’t mean to sound insensitive,” said Rabbi Zeitel, “but this is a crisis?”

“It’s probably a prank by one of those teenage juvenile delinquents we see around town,” said Father Omyzanski of the Polish Catholic Church, Our Lady of the Assumption, not to be confused with the Irish or Italian Catholic Churches in other sections of the town.

“We don’t know that, Vincent,” said Reverend Robyn.

“When we were young, something like this would never have happened,” replied Father Omyzanski.  “And if it did?  Sister Mary George would’ve gotten a confession in less than two minutes.”

“Well, that may be true, Oz,” replied Pastor Brown of the Lutherans, steepling his stork-like patrician fingers while Father Omyzanski’s face reddened.  He hated the undignified image it conjured up of him amid a group of gaily attired munchkins.  “But, the facts are the Baby Jesus figurine is missing,” continued Pastor Brown.  “We need to focus on what can be done to find it.  Do you have any leads, Julius?”

“Just this.” Reverend Johnson held up a jaggedly torn yellow paper.  He slid his horn-rimmed glasses down from atop his head and read aloud, “My birthday is not for three more days.  I should not be here.  JC.”

“Well, he has a point.  The 25th is three days from now.”

“That’s irrelevant.  It’s a nativity display for God’s sake!”  shouted Father Omyzanski.  “Sorry,” he quickly added, seeing his colleagues shocked expressions.  “I didn’t mean to offend anyone.”

“Did you notify the police?” asked Reverend Robyn.

“Yes, but it didn’t sound like they considered Baby Jesus’ disappearance a priority,” said Reverend Johnson.

Rabbi Zeitel, who had been sitting quietly, leaned forward in his metal folding chair.  “If I may make a suggestion,” he said.  “The solution to this problem seems rather straight forward to me.  A plastic figurine molded in the image of an infant that has a light bulb above its tokus has disappeared.  We buy a new one.  Replace one tchotchke with another.  Problem solved.”

“Well, it’s not as simple as all that.”

“Please.  What is it I’m not understanding?” asked Rabbi Zeitel.

“We’re talking about something more than a piece of plastic.  The infant Jesus is an important symbol of Christianity,” said Father Omyzanski.

“And Christianity is somehow injured if we replace this symbol with another copy?”

“It’s difficult to explain, Herman, you’re not being a Christian,” said Pastor Brown.

What chutzpah, thought Rabbi Zeitel.  “Bob, Jesus was a Jew.  I am a Jew.  Please.  Explain how not being a Christian is relevant in this instance?”

“Please everyone,” said Reverend Johnson, holding up his hands.  “We need to work together.  Church St Christian has displayed this nativity set every year since its founding.”

“So, you are saying its significance has to do with tradition.  That I can understand.  Tradition is important,” said Rabbi Zeitel.  “Robyn, what do you propose we do?”

“Well, for starters, we could create posters and attach them to telephone poles.  And I’m sure the local supermarkets will let us place notices on their entryway bulletin boards.”

Pastor Brown sighed, thinking – Lost Dog.  Named Fido.  If found please call… “Sounds reasonable,” he said, smiling at Reverend Robyn.  “I suggest we email the members of our congregations and ask if anyone knows anything about the disappearance.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to search the neighborhood,” offered, Fr. Omyzanski.

“Herman?”  asked Reverend Johnson, looking at Rabbi Zeitel.

“I am happy to do whatever I can to help.”

“Thank you, everyone,” said Reverend Johnson.  “With all of us working together, I’m sure we’ll find Baby Jesus before our Sunday School’s Christmas pageant.  For as in Matthew 7:7, ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.”

The following morning, Reverend Robyn, a skilled organizer of things ranging from protests against social injustice to delivering meals to shut-ins, was in her element.  The UU church basement was full of volunteers creating colorful posters.

At Oakgrove Lutheran, Pastor Brown and the Lutheran Church’s Secretary were reviewing membership lists and composing an email to be sent to the members of all the congregations.

In Our Lady’s parking lot, Reverend Johnson, Rabbi Zeitel, and Father Omyzanski were dividing the neighborhood search volunteers into groups.  Before beginning their mission, Reverend Johnson had everyone join hands.  Then he delivered a long prayer, ending with an emphatic Amen to rousing cheers.

On Thursday, when the council gathered for its scheduled meeting, all the attendees were feeling downcast.

“Are there any positive developments at all?” Reverend Robyn asked Reverend Johnson as he entered the basement meeting room.

“Here,” he said, taking a group of photos from his suit coat’s inside pocket and handing them to her.

Reverend Robyn, thumbed through the photos, confusion etched on her face.  Then she handed them to Father Omyzanski.

“Disgraceful,” he said, handing the entire lot to Pastor Brown after reaching the final one.

Pastor Brown flipped through the photos, his facial expression altering from surprise to amusement.  He then handed the photos to Rabbi Zeitel.

On top of the stack was a photo of the missing Baby Jesus figurine in front of the Eiffel Tower.  Rabbi Zeitel turned the photo over and on the reverse side it said, “Having a great time!”  Next was the Baby Jesus lying at the base of the Taj Mahal and on the back of that photo was the same message.

“Boy,” said Rabbi Zeitel, with a twinkle in his eyes, “that Baby Jesus, he sure gets around.”

Rabbi Zeitel continued through the stack.  Baby Jesus standing alongside a bear skin helmeted guard at the Tower of London.  Lying across the tips of the Pyramids in Giza.  Leaning against the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  And the last photo, Baby Jesus scaling the Empire State Building in New York City.

His head shaking, Rabbi Zeitel said, “Talk about a wandering Jew.”

Pastor Brown burst out laughing and Rabbi Zeitel joined in.  Reverend Robyn, trying to contain herself, covered her mouth with her hand. After a few minutes, Pastor Brown and Rabbi Zeitel regained their composure.  But, when their eyes made contact, they erupted in another round of tear producing laughter.

“Hunh,” grunted Reverend Johnson taking the photos from Rabbi Zeitel.

“C’mon guys,” said Reverend Robyn, her face deeply flushed.

“I am sorry,” said Rabbi Zeitel, wiping tears from his eyes and trying to catch his breath.  “Please.  My apologies.  Let’s continue.”

“You must admit, that’s a great job of PhotoShopping,” said Pastor Brown, stifling a smile.  “But seriously, does anyone have any thoughts on what we should do next?”

“Well,” said Father Oz.  “Perhaps we’ve been overlooking the obvious.”

“Which is?”

“Praying for the safe return of Baby Jesus.”

“That’s a fantastic idea, Vincent,” said Reverend Johnson.  “After all, doesn’t The Bible say we should call upon God in the hour of need?”

“But…”

“It couldn’t hurt,” said Reverend Robyn interrupting Rabbi Zeitel.  He shrugged his shoulders.

“Fine,” said Pastor Brown.  “We’re in agreement.”

Reverend Johnson immediately dropped to one knee and bowed his head.  “Heavenly Father,” he began, “we come before you, your humble servants, asking for your help in our time of need.  As you know Lord, Baby Jesus is missing.  We’ve done our best to find him and bring him safely home.  Psalm 55:22 says, cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you. That’s why we’re asking for your help.  For The Bible says when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.  And whatever you ask in prayer you will receive if you have faith.  So, Lord, we’re asking you to please restore Baby Jesus back to our loving arms.  For this, we pray, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.”

As he got back to his feet with a big smile on his face, Reverend Johnson boomed, “I feel better already.  How ’bout you, Robyn?”

She nodded.

“Well,” said Pastor Brown, standing up. “I am sorry my friends, but I must leave.  I have promised to visit a member of my congregation who has been ill.”

“A good shepherd must attend to his flock,” said Reverend Johnson, patting Pastor Brown on the shoulder.  “I think we can call today’s meeting to a close.  We’ve done what we can.  Now, it’s up to God.”

The following morning, being Christmas Day, Rabbi Zeitel arrived at his office well before his customary 9:00 am.  He’d expected roadways clogged with holiday travelers.

“Good Morning, Rabbi Zeitel” called out Mrs. Lieberman as he unlocked the office door.

“Good Morning, Mrs. Lieberman,” he replied, bending down to remove his galoshes.  “And how are you on this beautiful morning?”

“Why kvetch.  I am wonderful.  Thank you for asking, Rabbi Zeitel.”

“Mazel Tov.”

“Would you like some coffee?  It will warm you up.”

“No thank you, Mrs. Lieberman.  I’m fine.”

“Perhaps a knish.  I made them myself.  A little nosh is always good to start the day.”

“Not right now, Mrs. Lieberman.  Perhaps later,” replied Rabbi Zeitel as he hung his coat and hat on the hooks outside his office door.

“Rabbi Zeitel,” said Mrs. Lieberman, following him into his office. “I should tell you, Reverend Johnson called just before you arrived.  He said something about a miracle.  God being good. And answering prayers.”

“A miracle?”

“Yes.  He said, when Rabbi Zeitel arrives, please tell him there has been a miracle.  So, now I have delivered his message.  There is a miracle.”

“And he said nothing about the nature of this miracle?”

“No, he did not.  The only other thing he said was that he would appreciate it if you would come see him this morning if that is at all possible.”

“Well,” said Rabbi Zeitel snatching his hat and coat off the hooks.  “We must go!”

“Go where?”

“To see Reverend Johnson of course.”

“But Rabbi Zeitel.  The goyim?” she said shaking her head no.  “I cannot do that.  Why… who will mind the office?”

“Mrs. Lieberman.  No one person or group has a monopoly on God.  Come.  We go now,” he said, holding her coat for her.  Mrs. Lieberman slipped into her coat while continuing to shake her head in bewilderment.

Rabbi Zeitel led the way, taking Mrs. Lieberman’s arm whenever they encountered a large pile of slush.

“Rabbi,” said Mrs. Lieberman.  “You forgot your galoshes!”

“Eh, no matter,” he said, grasping the handles of Church St Christian and pulling the doors open.

As the doors swung closed behind him with a muted thud, Rabbi Zeitel saw that Mrs. Lieberman was not beside him.  He pushed the doors open, took her by the arm, and steered Mrs. Lieberman inside.

“It’ll be fine, Mrs. Lieberman,” he whispered to her.  “They’re all God’s houses.”

On the dais at the front of the church, Reverend Johnson stepped from behind the lectern.  Spotting Rabbi Zeitel, he waved for him to come to the front of the church.  Rabbi Zeitel reassured Mrs. Lieberman that she was safe among the goyim and that he was not meshuggener.  Then he started down a side aisle.  As he reached the front pew, he saw Reverend Robyn, Pastor Brown, and Father Omyzanski seated there.  They each shook his hand as the congregation jumped to its feet,  hooting and hollering.

Leaning over, Reverend Robyn shouted in Rabbi Zeitel’s ear, “He’s back.  The Baby Jesus was back in the manger this morning!”

The congregation roared loudly, drawing Rabbi Zeitel’s attention back to the dais.  There, Reverend Johnson, his entire face a smile, held the Baby Jesus out toward the congregation.  Claps, cheers, and foot stomps erupted.  Baby Jesus was back!

 

 

 

BIO

J L Higgs’ short stories typically focus on life from the perspective of a black American.  The primary goal of his writings is to create a greater understanding between racial, ethnic, and religious groups in America.

He has been published in various magazines such as Indiana Voice Journal, Black Elephant, The Writing Disorder, Contrary Magazine, Literally Stories, and The Remembered Arts Journal.

He and his wife reside outside of Boston.

Drawings as well as URLs to published stories are located at:

https://www.facebook.com/JL-Higgs-ArtistWriter-1433711619998262/

 

 

 

 

 

SEEP BENEATH

by Sara Truuvert

 

If there was a way
To take that face in my hands
And skip over the time in the evening
When my spine slips between metal
And my foot drums faster than rain
When far away fluorescent scatters
Its absence on my fingers
And my eyes sink into my skull
To make room for his
Eyes

My mind flattens like
Water drops finding flesh
To flow aside for the
Hands and
Lips and
Eyelashes against oak doors
I swallow them like a seed
But its tendrils bore through the back of my face
To bloom into his
Eyes

If I could keep them from seeping beneath my door
And up the sides of my mattress
I would
I would

 

 

 

WHIRLING

 

sometimes
like tarpaulin
the tension ‘round my mouth
slips down my left shoulder
and I’m left rather slack jawed
watching pure blue whirl
as we sit and talk in hot water

I watch
whirling
as golden squares from condominiums
glide over your nose and forehead
a thousand little acts of coming home
made glorious on your skin

on the street below us
            an old man in a stained white t-shirt
            thrusts scraps of paper at passersby
            blaring at them to believe

            a miniscule woman in a pageboy cap
            gathers recycling into a plastic bag

            a young boy crosses the street alone

up here
suspended in windows
still whirling
you smooth your hair from your ears
and tell me the price of a flight to Boston

and I think that
certainly
the spidering thoughts
that tried to drown me all those nights
are cleared with one sweep
of your fingertip

 

 

 

NEVER NEVER

 

You came through the door in your black fleece sweater and red backpack
(The kind with a nice mesh pocket for a water bottle)
You hug me and I shrink
Because you still smell like seven years old
When I couldn’t fall asleep because I’ll
Miss you if you die, Daddy

I want to sink and collapse
Easy
And fold like a paper doll in the rain
Graceful
Lie quietly with my face in your shoulder
And ask you to remind me
Where my breath has gone

I want to shift
I’m missing a limb in static
But you press sink weigh down on my neck
And my hips
Take me like a throw pillow
That caught your eye on a table at the back
Buy one get one free

Would you call me the names
Our teachers only spelled out in letters
I could not imagine saying your name aloud
In a quiet cushioned office
Making you an incident
A fresh manila file folder
Maybe I’d rather be those names

But now
You sit
Comfortable like a child
Open hands cleans hands
Like a child
I tell you silly playground stories
Because how do you begin to tell
How do you say
How some mother’s son
Gripped and pulled
And here I am finally
Mattering

And you would never
You would
Never

Never never

 

 

BIO

Sara Truuvert graduated from Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she studied English, Drama, and the History and Philosophy of Science. She wrote humour articles for the student newspaper, The Strand, for which she was shortlisted for a John H. McDonald award. Her poetry has appeared in Cadaverine Magazine. Sara is also an actor and screenwriter with a short film in production with Toronto’s Labyrinth Pictures. In her spare time, she runs the web comic Marvin and Pip.

 

 

 

An Intercourse with Ghosts

by Anika Gupta

 

 

“Each word in its adult form possesses two sides: it is intelligible on one hand and moving on the other. These two qualities generally depend on each other and are therefore, in this way, contradictory. Furthermore, they are variable, because if the emotion conferred by a word increases, its intelligibility decreases and vice versa.”

– Epstein, La Lyrosophie, pp. 167-168.

*

At age 25, I live in New Delhi in a hopeless apartment. At night, the ceiling in the bathroom flakes away from its beams. In the morning I find slivers of plaster in the sink. The railing that borders the stairs curls upwards like a witch’s fingernail, and on my birthday (I can’t remember which one) the power goes out, so I eat my cake in the dark. My life feels dark and unmoving, like the green water that gathers in potholes in the street, where mosquitoes breed. I dream that I’m somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else. It’s a dream I’ve had for years, and sometimes I don’t know how to separate the dream from my life.

I dream of the future, including grad school. A friend’s cousin agrees to advise me on graduate school applications. Over the course of several weeks, he encourages me to aim high; he believes in my abilities. I write out essays, I try vainly to summarize and justify my life. In the evenings, as New Delhi’s heated rain gives way to dust, I date a few of his friends, but without much success, until one winter evening in Delhi when he invites me to a party at his house. The air is smoggy with the crumbled particulates from a thousand small fires, and the roof of his apartment building is paved flat. When my friend sees me, he asks if I’ve cut my hair. I have, but only by two inches, so instead of saying yes, I say no and look confused, as if to suggest, who told you that?

I scuttle downstairs and into his bedroom, where I find myself enraptured by his bookshelves. Years from now I’ll remember this moment, this spread. I gaze at his books with reverence, respect and avarice. They’re organized, and not by color. By genre, by historical period, by their authors and their essences. He has hundreds of them, possibly more than a thousand, and to me in my early 20s these books feel more like home than any home I’ve ever lived in. I look at his bookshelf and I remember, at age 16, climbing on a step to reach the top shelf in the Rockville Library. I remember tumbling titles out onto the floor, sifting through plastic-wrapped covers. Thinking, oh there you are, friends. Oh, there you are, future.

Everything about his life combines into a pastiche of what people can aspire to: the structure and aesthetics of a particular form of success, of maturity, of forward-moving life. I think about his stable, successful career and his graduate school diploma. I think about the business he moved to New Delhi to start. I think about myself, my life, described by a colleague a as “a startup that has received series A funding.” Make no mistake: she was talking about my dating prospects.

I leave his house feeling hollowed out by longing. Over the next few months I spend hours on graduate school applications for MBA programs in fantastic universities, because this is what I’ve been taught to want. And I do want it, in a sense. What’s the line between what we want and what we’re taught? In between writing out essays on the power of the word in my life, things that will not sway admissions committees for the types of programs I am applying to, I write a series of short notes to my friend. A sample that now makes me cringe: “You’re obviously interesting and smart and I feel like I learn things from talking to you.” After I send it, I feel like I’ve lost a limb, but instead of losing blood, I stare at my computer screen, shedding tears. He replies with an emoticon, but at least it isn’t the winking face. The graduate schools to which I apply do not, for the most part, reply.

*

I learn about Franz Kafka’s love letters when I offer to write a series of book reviews for a site whose logo features a picture of a woman reading naked in bed. The editors send me a galley for a new biography, the story of Kafka’s life as told through his love letters. In paging through the letters themselves, I find myself on the brink of someone else’s madness, and yet it offers me a comforting map. In his mid-30s fading Kafka, engaged to another woman, tubercolic, begins a series of letters to his translator, Milena Jesenská, with this bold provocation:

“The rain which has been going on for two days and one night has just now stopped, of course probably only temporarily, but nonetheless an event worth celebrating, which I am doing by writing to you. Incidentally the rain itself was bearable; after all, it is a foreign country here, admittedly only slightly foreign, but it does the heart good. If my impression was correct (evidently the memory of one single meeting, brief and halfsilent, is not to be exhausted), you were also enjoying Vienna as a foreign city, although later circumstances may have diminished this enjoyment, but do you also enjoy foreignness for its own sake?”

*

Let us enjoy the same difficult thing, for its own sake.

*

In Delhi, not prone to monsoon rains, I nonetheless find that the weather can be a generous metaphor. When it rains, the water gathers like silted treasure in metro stations and under highways, and children ford the sudden streams with yelps of delight. Motorcyclists pause under overpasses, alongside roadside vendors and English teachers, to mop their brows. The world stands still, for eight to ten minutes, and afterwards, the aftermath of rain magnifies faces and signs like a crystal prism. Brief human camaraderie – the fellowship of the waylaid – evolves, solidifies, and is lost. Maybe in my other world I’d find these rains intolerable. But these bursts of pleasure open up to me another corner of Delhi’s unknown heart. I want to love someone else like I want to love Delhi, for love’s sake, because love for its own sake does us good. I want to love someone else like I love Delhi, slowly unfolding the secrets of an unknowable heart.

Kafka populates his solitude with Milena:

“I would very much like to share Meran with you, recently you wrote about not being able to breathe, that image and its meaning are very close to one another and here both would find a little relief.”

The work they do together moves between them, shaping their correspondence, recalling it to reality in ways he cannot abide. He receives her translation of his text and lays out his disappointment: “I wanted to hear from you and not the voice from the old grave, the voice I know all too well. Why did it have to come between us? Then I realized that this same voice had also come between us, as a mediator.”

I imagine the voice from the grave as the voice of necessity, the things we do because we must. In between filing a police report for my broken door or beating back anxious palpitations over the machinations of an abusive boss, I perk my ears for a voice that heralds my work as a source of life. In Kafka’s letters, his illness becomes a transcendental state, and Milena figures as a sun burning through a darkness. He needs an imaginary cure because none of the real ones work.

In Delhi, I call my mother, my sister, just to hear their voices on the phone. My sister and I spend hours together on Skype without talking. I read, she cooks. Where’s the seam between love and love’s medium?

*

I would like to share New Delhi with you. I would like to share it at all.

I wanted to hear from you, but not the voice I know too well.

*

A friend of mine writes to me from an airport, a one-line email. “He’s engaged!” it says. I read the email six times. I swallow a grief so large it feels like if I open my mouth, I (like Krishna?) will show my mother the entire universe. The world inside my mouth is bitter and unyielding; or maybe that’s just what my mouth always tasted like and I never knew.

Not to be outdone by other writers, I pen a polite congratulatory note, even though I feel like I’m swallowing ashes. It ends, “I wish you all the best as you open this new and very exciting chapter in your life.” I feel as if something – the future? – is draining out of the cracks in my existing life. I consider an engagement gift: my copy of In the Presence of Absence, a love poem to life written by a dying author, the margins full of my notes. Love and its medium seem the same, the same.

Before he dies, Kafka gives Milena all his diaries. He never gives them to anyone else.

*

I wish I could fall asleep in my life and wake up in yours.

*

“German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting; even so, when I then want to raise my eyes to your face, in the middle of the letter – what a story! – fire breaks out and I see nothing but fire.”

*

By some strange chance, I meet another friend for dinner the same evening I learn about the engagement. My friend – my actual, flesh-and-blood friend – normally lives in Stockholm. He arrives for dinner wearing a suit and carrying flowers, and I have a terrible sense of premonition. Over dinner he says, “I would never forgive myself if I didn’t say the following.”

He has written me a poem. It ends:

“Now as you look out for pastures anew,

Your tenure in New Delhi you never should view

When the bells ring for the last post…

Know that Delhi has turned Mughal and British invaders into burnt toast

In this regard, you’ve lasted longer and done better than most.”

He’s called it ‘Inferno at Midnight,’ and long after the recitation is done and years have passed and we no longer speak to each other ever, I’ll still have it.

The cousin – my imaginary friend – does not reply to the congratulatory note about his engagement.

*

As time goes by, Kafka’s letters to Milena seem to become more urgent and more sad. He begs her to leave her husband, but she waits and waits until waiting becomes its own answer. And into this waiting, Kafka writes: “Although my own room is small, the true Milena is here, the one who ran away from you on Sunday, and believe me, being with her is wonderful.”

He persists in claiming that he knows her: “I can no longer write to you as to a stranger.” In a parenthetical, as if it’s an aside, a private conversation hidden from the mediators, he writes: “(you belong to me, even if I should never see you again).” Who is Milena? The Milena he carries like a marble in his pocket, whom he bears like a shield against life: it is impossible to address her as a stranger because he has created her out of himself. She comprises verbs and nouns and prepositions strung together across a ravine, an invisible bridge, between the world and ourselves.

Milena, the version of her that may be true or may be false but anyway the version of her that is legally verifiable, does eventually divorce her husband. By then Kafka is dead, and she writes to someone else: “I was incapable of leaving my husband…I have, however, an insuppressible longing, a maniacal longing for a completely different life than the one I am leading now or ever will lead…And this is what probably won out over everything else inside me, over love, over my love of taking flight, over my admiration, and once again over love… And then it was just too late.”

Milena wakes beside Kafka in his exile from wellness, Milena marries someone else but dreams of children she’ll never have, Milena loves Kafka and will write him a beautiful obituary.

*

My mother: “He was too old and too Indian for you.”

And then it was just too late.

*

Kafka to Milena, March, 1922:

“All my misfortune in life…derives, one might say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters. People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always have, and as a matter of fact not those of other people, but my own…Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts.

How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power.”

*

One evening, after seeing his books but before he marries someone else, I sit down and light a candle – maybe my power is out, like it often is – and write him a letter. It is three paragraphs long, but I edit it down to its essence: I like you so much, and I never expected it. Give me a chance? I fold it into a tiny square and carry it with me like a talisman, until I forget about it. I am afraid of what it suggests and the life it enables.

*

I move back to the United States. Years pass. I’m standing on a street corner in New York, rooting for something in my purse, when my fingers find the familiar softness of old, worn paper at the bottom of my bag. I pull out the letter. I recognize it and something cold passes through me, not unlike a ghost. I feel a brief sadness, a mourning for a girl I knew and a dream she had. The mourning – the way it prickles in my scalp – feels like happiness, too. I’m holding the memory of something I loved, and the memory is precious. And yet, for all its rumored truth, I never sent it. Or maybe I sent it to myself. I am Kafka and Milena, the man who loved and the girl who waited. How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! I tear it up and toss it in the trash. I cross the street. It’s gone.

 

 

BIO

Anika Gupta is an essayist and fiction writer who lives and writes in Washington DC. Her work has previously appeared in the Common Online and On She Goes. She writes about migration, literature and travel. She spent five years living in New Delhi, India, and working as a journalist.

 

 

 

 

The Art of Annelisa Leinbach 

 

Macondo

 

 

abstract houses

 

 

malawi

 

 

protest

 

 

hand

 

 

time to spare

 

 

abstract

 

 

in jail

 

 

 

ABOUT

Annelisa Leinbach is an artist and illustrator. Her work focuses on politics, fantasy, and the complex interactions of people that make up a society. She has painted in Mongolia, Iceland, Israel/Palestine, France, Germany, Barbados, around the US, and beyond. She has most recently been published in the law journal of the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic at Yale University and The Art of Eating magazine. You can find her painting a wall somewhere in the world or wandering around in the desert in her native Arizona.

See more of her work at annelisaleinbach.com or instagram.com/annelisaleinbach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ministry of Brooms
a Children’s Story

by Patrick Moser

 

 

Brad Totenberg will tell you that his title, Minister of Brooms, has no religious significance. His job is to administer. But somewhere along the line the ad dropped out, and now he’s just Minister. He’s fine with it. He has no religious convictions save the usual ones (the Ministry more or less expects them). Brad doesn’t pretend to be a devout man—there’s no special collar or hand signals or anything—but if people believe him to be some kind of religious figure, he doesn’t disabuse them. That’s their right. At any rate, the title makes his job easier.

He travels to areas where people have been swept. They call them “dust-ups.” He offers sincere condolences to the community and monitors reactions. The dust-ups are awful. People get lost. His job as Minister is to remind the people who are not lost that buying brooms is the best way to protect themselves from being swept.

Brad and I have settled into our seats on a commuter jet. We’re flying to Kansas City, an airline hub. From there Brad will take a connecting flight out to the desert where there’s been another dust-up. Fifty-eight people were swept. Our flight to KC is less than an hour, so I don’t have much time to interview him.

“Good morning, Mr. Totenberg,” says the flight attendant. “How’s business?”

“Business is broomin’,” Brad replies.

The flight attendant grins at the line and passes on. Brad takes this hop frequently, so the crew has gotten to know him well. Brad himself doesn’t smile when he uses the slogan. He understands the play on words, of course—he used to get quite a kick out of it when he first started at the Ministry. It’s not that the line has become so commonplace among people outside of the Ministry these days. It’s simply that Business is broomin’ is an accurate description of his job now.

No joke.

“You say you’re writing a children’s story?” Brad asks me.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You mean it’s for children.”

I shake my head. “No, not really.”

“But there’s children in it, right? I mean, it’s about children.”

“Well, you might say they’re the inspiration.” I reflect a moment. “But there’s not any children in the story, at least not yet.”

Brad nods politely. My explanation makes no sense to him. I imagine his water-cooler conversation back at the Ministry: How the hell can it be a children’s story if it’s not for children and they’re not in it?

The flight attendant walks by again, and I make sure my seat belt is securely fastened. If we hit turbulence, I don’t want to bang my head off the overhead bin or fly into the lavatory. “It’s hard to explain,” I tell him. “I’m not quite sure I understand it myself. That’s why I wanted to talk with you.”

“As long as you’re not one of those broom-banners,” he says leaning toward me confidentially, pushing his shoulder into mine. He’s got the aisle, I’m the window. “We get a lot of crackpots chasing after us.”

I shrug with my right shoulder—he’s got my left pinned. “I can’t vouch for not being a crackpot.”

He laughs. We both settle in now as the crew and plane make final preparations for the flight. I’m not sitting next to an emergency exit so I don’t have to read the special instructions card located by the seat. I don’t have to ask the flight attendant to reseat me because I can’t or won’t perform the functions described on the card in the event of an emergency. I’ve made sure my portable electronic devices are set to “airplane” mode until an announcement is made upon arrival.

The flight attendant begins the safety demonstration. She doesn’t talk or make eye contact with the passengers. A recording provides information as she pulls out various props and goes through the motions of what to do in the event of an emergency. I can’t tell if anyone is paying attention to her. Her face is neutral as she demonstrates how to fasten a seat belt. Mine is already fastened. She indicates the emergency exits (behind me), the oxygen mask (above me), and the life vest (beneath me). I don’t think I’ll need a life vest on this flight since we’re flying over land, but there are some deep lakes between here and KC. In that scenario, I’d be glad to have a life vest and know how to deploy it. I would not inflate the vest before evacuating the plane. Once the emergencies are covered, I’m encouraged to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. Before we know it, we’re taxiing over to the runway. We’re at a small airport, so the whole process doesn’t take long.

“You sweep yourself?” Brad asks me.

I confessed that I didn’t. It’s silly, but I’m a little afraid of brooms. I’d probably brush myself first thing if I ever picked one up. I’m sure it’s me and not the broom. To ease Brad’s mind I say, “I got my broom safety training pretty young. At camp in the eighth grade.”

He wags his index finger at me. “You see there, that’s the key.”

We zoom up the runway and lift into the air. I ask over the rattle of my tray table, “How young?”

He raises his voice over the engines: “Teachers should be sporting brooms at Daycare. There should be broomories in every elementary school, middle school, high school, and college in the country.” He points his index finger straight up to emphasize his point: “If the first thing a preemie sees from his glass bunker in the ICU is broom bristles, then at least he knows he’s got a fighting chance of getting out alive should some nut job bust in.”

We reach altitude in a matter of minutes and level off. When the flight attendant starts the drink service, Brad orders a soda. I ask for water with no ice. I’ve taken out a notebook and written down “nut job.”

Brad glances down at my pad of paper. “Know what they call a crackpot who works in a big grocery store?”

I lift my head. “No.”

“A wal-nut.”

I smile. “Know what they call a nut job in California?”

Brad lifts his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

“Picking pecans.”

He wrinkles his brow a moment, then says, “Good one.” He’s being nice. I know my nut-job humor needs work. I wouldn’t have Brad’s facility, given his occupation and constant traveling. He takes me under his wing a bit and recites others he’s heard on his latest trips—to Florida, California, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Connecticut. Apparently the jokes are all well known. I’ll just give the punchlines: pea-nut, chest-nut, hazel-nut; and of course, the funniest one: donut.

“The nuts sure add up,” I say.

“A passel.”

There’s a pause in our conversation that tells me the chit-chat period has come to an end. Brad’s a patient man. He has to deal with dust-ups, after all. And crackpot broom-banners. He waits for me to begin the interview.

I dither with my pen. It feels too soon to ask him my real questions. We haven’t even gotten our snacks yet. I’m not a professional journalist. I don’t interview people for a living. I’m just a writer with an idea for a story that I’m not sure is going anywhere. When you write a story, the reader expects you to have a point and get to it quickly. If I bumble my question to Brad, offend him in some way, it could be a very long short flight. And we’re sitting so close together, as airline space goes these days. If a nut job broke from the galley with an electric broom, we’d all be swept in about five seconds.

I pick up the thread of our conversation before the jokes. “So you want to see brooms everywhere.”

“That’s the goal. A broom in every room. Normalize them.”

“On planes?”

“Planes, trains, automobiles, motorcycles, mopeds, tandem bikes, baby strollers.” He ducks his head slightly, looks down the aisle behind us. “I’d feel a lot less naked, believe me.”

As Brad straightens up to take his soda and bag of peanuts from the flight attendant, his coat pops opens and I see a dark handle sticking out of a shoulder holster.

I’m alarmed. My armpits suddenly feel like someone is pricking them with pins. I lower my tray table carefully, not making any sudden movements. I accept my own plastic cup of water and peanuts. When the flight attendant has left, I nod discreetly at Brad’s holster. In a low voice I say, “Is that what I think it is?” I don’t know what the rules are for Ministers—maybe they’re allowed pack-a-brooms on planes when the rest of us aren’t.

Brad half-grins, the way Harrison Ford does in some but not all of his movies. He slips his right hand inside his coat and whips out a pint-sized lint roller. “I wish,” he says. He runs the roller down his sleeve a couple of times. “Optics are everything. I can’t ever have people seeing dust on me, not even a spec. That’s not going to be easy with this latest deal in the desert.” He eyes his sleeve, scans the front of his coat. Satisfied, he returns the roller to its holster. “Whisk brooms are where the kids need to start. As they get older, you graduate to the mid-range jobs. With the upgrades and converters nowadays, they practically sweep themselves. But all of them, big or small, will protect kids from being swept.”

“Will they?” I ask.

“Absolutely. And they need to know it’s their right to sweep. At the appropriate age, of course. Until then”—he jabs his thumb toward his chest for emphasis—“we’ve got their back.” The gesture is very effective. It gives me confidence in what Brad is saying.

I write down notes, mostly for something to do. I decide there is no good time for me to ask him what I want to ask. I just have to jump in and feel it out as I go.

“The dust-up in Connecticut,” I begin.

Brad nods. “Now that was a real tragedy, pure and simple. My heart goes out to those folks.” He pulls on his bag of peanuts and it explodes. Whole nuts and tiny halves fly into the air. They land on our clothing and down in the seats. Some hit the floor in the aisle where they bounce and scatter.

“Goddamn it!” he gripes. He checks his coat and pants, assessing the damage. “That really chaps my hide. Why the hell can’t they make a bag of peanuts that opens without raining nuts all over the damn cabin. Jesus, is that possible? Just lower the broom on me right now.”

I set my bag of peanuts on his tray table to calm him. “I already ate lunch,” I say.

“Thanks.” He’s gruff, but it’s not directed at me. He flicks the nuts off his lap with his hands, then gives himself a quick once-over with the lint roller. When he’s satisfied there’s no peanut crumbs clinging to him, he returns the roller once again to its holster. The second bag of peanuts he opens more carefully. Once he’s got a couple of them in his mouth, with a swig of soda, he’s back to his friendly self.

A woman walks by, headed for the lavatory. Her heels grind the tiny peanuts into the carpet. The little jobbers look oily, so it won’t be easy to get the stains out. I imagine this happens frequently enough nowadays so the airlines take it into consideration when they design the carpet. It’s probably easier than changing our whole approach to bags of snacks. You never know when one’s going to explode on you, so you simply manage the fallout. If it were me, I’d go with a camouflage design: forest-floor, or maybe hoedown-bar.

I ask Brad, “Do you ever think that we might . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . .” I run my eyes over his jacket. It really is very clean. “That we might be over-brooming?”

Brad chomps a nut. “How’d you mean?”

I let out a breath. “Well, we have so many of them. You’d think the streets would be, I don’t know. Cleaner, I guess. Do more brooms really keep the dust down? Or do they stir it up more? I guess that’s part of my question.”

Brad nods. He points his index finger at his mouth. I give him a few seconds to finish chomping. “I see what you’re getting at,” he says finally. He brushes his hands together a couple of times to clean them. “You have to understand the basic principles.” His voice is calm and clear, a professor at the podium. “You’re mistaking brooms for what they stand for. That’s freedom, which you can never have enough of. Without brooms, there is no freedom. We’d all be swept. So that’s the first thing.”

I’m taking notes, trying to get his exact wording down so that I understand the basic principles.

“The second thing, don’t confuse sweeping with being swept. That’s absolutely the worst greenhorn maneuver there is. They’re two completely different planets. It’s like Venus and Timbuktu.”

I didn’t realize Timbuktu was a planet. Then again, we lost Pluto awhile back, so maybe there’s been a discovery.

Sweeping is for normal people,” Brad explains. “Guys like you and me. It’s our God-given right. Being swept is for the nut jobs. And since there’s always gonna be nut jobs in this world—What are you gonna do?—you have to protect yourself against them. Mr. G-man can’t help you. It’s swept or be sweeped.” Brad stops, shakes his head. “It’s sweep or be swept.” He nods to himself, getting it right. “I hate to say that, and I wish it were otherwise, but that’s the reality.”

I write silently for a minute. “You don’t sell brooms to people on your trips, do you?”

“Me?” Brad shakes his head. “Not me personally. That’s a different section of the Ministry. I just minister. Make sure, as I say, that everyone knows their rights.”

“How is that?” I ask. “I mean, whenever I hear about these dust-ups, I’m shocked. I’m horrified. Afterward I feel numb. I don’t know what to do. I think that’s why I’m writing this story. Somehow it makes me feel less helpless to put words down on paper. It helps me sort out my feelings.”

“Feelings about what?”

“I’m not sure. The people it happened to, I suppose. People sweeping, people swept. I imagine myself in their shoes, losing someone I love.” I turn to Brad. “But you, you actually go to all those places. You see the sites and speak with the people. How does that feel?”

“Feel?” Brad shakes his head. “I don’t meet with the actual people. I’m there post-op. For the clean-up.”

“Making sure people know their rights,” I say.

Brad cocks his wrist and pistols me with his thumb and forefinger. He also winks and makes a clicking sound out of the side of his mouth like he’s calling his favorite horse. The finger, the wink, and the clicking sound all pop simultaneously. Brad’s timing is perfect. The combination is impressive yet folksy, a reassuring gesture.

“Do you ever want to speak with them?” I ask.

The plane bounces roughly a couple of times, and the seat belt light blinks on. A voice over the intercom tells me to return to my seat and keep my seat belt fastened. I’m already in my seat. My seat belt is already securely fastened. I pull my cup of water off the indented circle on the tray table, which is a smart convenience. It’s a very effective use of space, which the airlines are tops at.

“That wouldn’t be appropriate,” Brad says.

I spell out appropriate on my pad of paper. I hope I remember to look the word up later in the dictionary to get all of the meanings. I don’t want to short-change Brad. I know one of the meanings is fitting, which is appropriate in itself given my last observation about the cup holder. Though I suppose there wouldn’t be a connection between Brad’s verbiage and how the airlines go about their business. That would be like two completely different planets.

I take time to formulate my next question, a work-in-progress. “Do you ever feel . . . I don’t know, soiled by it all? I mean, once the dust settles. Do you bring it back with you? Not actual dust, of course, since you have the lint roller. But maybe the cloud of it might be the best way to put it. Because you know there are going to be more dust-ups. More people swept away.”

“There’s always gonna be more dust-ups. That’s a given, God forbid. But you know what?” Brad leans against me again. “The dust-ups energize me. There’s no other way to say it. What your writing does for you? I tell you what, a good broom will do exactly the same thing for people. Makes them feel less helpless. When they grip that handle and know with one little sweep of the arm they can take out a dirtbag, that’s real security of mind. That’s something they can holster and take home with them. Or go shopping, or to the grocery store.” Brad snaps his fingers and points at me. “Your book clubs. People are afraid out there. They’ve got a right to be afraid. That’s what I tell them.”

I write for a minute after Brad finishes. I look over my notes, trying to get the rights sorted out. “People have a right to sweep,” I say slowly. “And they have a right to be afraid. Brooms help them feel less afraid. And you sell them brooms.”

Brad frowns a bit and looks up, like he’s doing math in his head. Only the numbers don’t seem to be adding up for him. He pops another nut in his mouth. “I just let them know their rights.”

It’s hard to argue with Brad’s logic. Brooms carry a lot of power, I admit. Certainly more than my pen. I can’t say I haven’t felt it myself. “You know, I dream of lowering the broom.”

He stops chomping. “On people?”

I nod.

“But bad ones, right?” He shifts in his seat. “You’re not talking about . . . .”

“Oh, no,” I say. “Of course not. Not me. They’re always bad people.”

Brad looks relieved. “Well, of course they are. And you know what? I hear that a lot. It’s perfectly normal.”

The plane is humming along now. No more bumps. The seat belt light blinks off. Simultaneously a voice tells me the Captain has turned off the Fasten Seat Belts Sign. I may now move around the cabin.

“They’re not really dreams,” I say. “I mean, I’m not asleep. It’s just before I fall asleep. Usually it helps put me to sleep. They’re more like . . . fantasies.” I say the word cautiously, like I’m ready to unsay it, depending on his reaction.

Brad nods. “You and me both, brother. There’s a lot of bad dudes out there. It’s not only normal, it’s your duty to lower the broom on them. You need to protect yourself, and your family.”

I sit a moment, trying to sort out my feelings. “I worry that the dreams make me numb,” I tell him. “Or that I am numb for having them. That I’m kind of a nut job myself.” I say these last words almost in a whisper. “I worry that the bad dudes are thinking exactly the same thoughts as I am. That we’re all numb to one another. That we don’t know how to listen to one another anymore.”

“But you don’t act on those thoughts,” Brad says. “That’s the difference. You understand what’s what between fantasy and reality. The nut job, he’s way out in left field.”

“Sometimes I feel like I could cross into left field pretty easily.”

Brad turns to face me now. “You know what’s going on here, don’t you? You’re preparing. That’s what that’s all about. Should you ever need to actually lower the broom on someone—‘cause the bad dudes are out there, sure as shootin’ and God forbid—you’d be ready. And you know what?” He points his finger at my chest. “You’d be a goddamn hero. Put that in your story.”

I stare at my note pad and recite the Ministry’s official slogan, which I’ve written down: “Our lives are better with brooms.”

“Course they are,” Brad says. “Mine is.”

“What about the people who are swept?”

“You can blame the nut jobs for that.”

“What about their lives?”

Who? The nut jobs?” Brad almost comes out of his seat. Then he leans back and laughs. “Now that was a good one,” he says, slapping my arm. “You had me going there for a second.”

Brad checks his bag, but all the peanuts are gone. I can feel us descending already. Following the landing announcement, I make sure my seat back and tray table are in their full upright position, my seat belt is still securely fastened, and that all carry-on luggage is stowed underneath the seat in front of me or in the overhead bin. I actually don’t check this last one since I’d have to climb over Brad to do that, and then my seat belt would not be securely fastened.

“How’s it gonna end?” Brad asks.

“That’s a good question.” I rest my pen. In a few minutes I’ll be using caution when opening the overhead bins as heavy articles may have shifted around during the flight. A bizarre image pops into my head of chubby A’s, An’s, and The’s rolling around up there, one of them tumbling out when I pop the hatch and hitting me in the face. I try not to be alarmed by my own brain. “Endings are tough,” I admit. “They say it’s supposed to make complete sense, and yet still be surprising.”

Brad finishes his soda. He uses the napkin to wipe off any last crumbs on his hands, then wads the paper up and sticks it in the cup. The flight attendant makes a last pass and collects our trash. If she notices the peanuts ground into the carpet, she doesn’t show it. I imagine there’s a crew coming aboard in KC. They’ll hoover up any stray nuts, or blow them so far into the corners that no one will even notice. The cabin will be all groomed for the next flight.

“What you could do,” Brad says, “if you wanted to work a kid into the story. Have a tyke bust out of the broom closet, as they do, pretending to sweep a bunch of his friends, who are play-acting bad guys. That makes sense. But it’d be surprising too, like a little Jack-in-the-Box. If you did it right, you’d scare people. It’d be like Stephen King.”

“That’s a possibility,” I say.

I press my notebook in my lap. The landing gear doors bang open beneath us. I hear the wheels lever down and lock into place.

It’s always hard for me to talk about my stories. They sound dumb when I try to explain them out loud to people. It’s like listening to someone yap about their dreams. Boring.

But Brad is a friendly ear, and I doubt I’ll get the chance to meet someone from the Ministry again. They’re so busy helping people. Even if my ending doesn’t turn out exactly this way, I try it on him for size. I’m interested in his reaction as a Minister.

“What if I had parents standing in a school parking lot,” I say, “waiting for their kids to come out. A siren suddenly blasts, and a mom sees a group of boys running from the building carrying her son’s body on their shoulders. He’s bloodied, but she recognizes his clothes—his red jacket, the jeans, his white tennis shoes with the rainbow laces. Then his hair and face. He’s on his back, lifeless, arms dangling down as they race him across the playground. He’s heavy. His head and neck jerk up and down as the boys run. They’ve never practiced this before. They’re all screaming, except for her son. Other kids are doing the same thing. Running from the building, carrying the limp bodies of their classmates. This mom has her hands to her face. Just as they reach the parking lot, and the mom is running toward her son—she’s supposed to stay behind the yellow tape with the TV cameras, but she can’t help herself—he suddenly springs off their shoulders with a shout of triumph and lands on his feet.”

“He’s alive?” Brad asks.

I nod. “The mom knows this is just a drill, but she breaks down crying anyway. They’ve scared her to death.”

Brad waits for more. When I stay silent, he says: “Doe she die?”

“No,” I say. “Not literally.”

“Oh.” He nods and rolls his bottom lip out. “Does anyone die?”

“Not in this version. They’re just practicing, but they have to act like it’s real. I don’t want anyone to die, not if I can help it.”

I’m saved by the plane bouncing hard on the runway. “I’ll probably change it,” I add. “Go more with the Stephen King idea.”

“No,” he says over the sound of scraping wheels. “It’s real good. I was surprised.”

We deplane and say our goodbyes in the terminal. Brad strides off. I wish him well in the desert and wherever else his travels take him. He waves back, tells me Good luck with the story.

I find my gate and take a seat. I have a couple of hours before my flight back home, time enough to work on my ending. I look up at a television news program. I’m too far away to hear anything. I just get the visuals, four or five separate shots that are repeated so they run together in a continuous loop. They’re at a small-town church somewhere. The newscasters continue moving their mouths, though there doesn’t appear to be any new information. The story is on-going. A woman’s voice, friendly yet insistent, asks for my attention, please. And not just me, all passengers. She tells me if any unknown person attempts to give me any item, including luggage, to transport on my flight, not to accept it, and to notify airport personnel immediately. The message is so important that she repeats it five minutes later.

I look around the terminal to see if I can spot an unknown person who might attempt to give me any item, including luggage, to transport on my flight. If I do spot one, I’d like to report them.

I wonder if anyone else is listening to the woman’s voice.

 

 

 

BIO

Patrick Moser has an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona and teaches writing and French at Drury University (Springfield, Missouri). He writes mostly nonfiction about the history and culture of surfing, including essays in Gingko Tree Review, Kurungabaa, Sport Literate, and Bamboo Ridge. He is the editor of Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing and has collaborated on two books with world surfing champion Shaun Tomson: Surfer’s Code, and The Code. He is a recipient of the Carol Houck Smith Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This is his first short story.

 

 

 

Disobedience

by Ruth Bavetta

 

 

I will wake the lilies under
the window. I will bite deeply
into the apple’s defenseless cheek.
And when the man comes in the dark,
I will show him the family
silver’s shining secrets.

I will follow the seagulls over
the waves as they etch the air
with their wings. I will ride
the tide. I will not be safe.
I will not be good. What
kind of love would keep me
withered in the nest?

 

 

 

Curves, but No Edges

 

When the faint gravity of her puberty pulls
through the family, it clots and breaks.
She curves her mouth into an arc as if tasting
something soft and unexpected,
her tongue sliding forward.

Nothing means what it did before.
Words sling past each other
with centrifugal force. Thoughts
sail like a curve balls,
slamming the windows shut.

She turns away
at the approach of those whose love
has become insufficient. She lives
in her body like music, slightly
out of tune, the melody yet to come.

 

 

Elegy for the Three-Cent Stamp

 

For the postman
with the heavy leather bag,

the house on the hill,
the mailbox hidden in the hedge.

For the new blue Studebaker,
the cheerleader in the knee-length skirt,

the stolen chocolate Cherry-a-let,
the can of Ipana tooth powder.

For the edge of the bed,
the crutch in the garden,

the shiny Schwinn bicycle,
the woman who loved to hike.

For the man in the lab coat,
the swing on the bridge,

the pink-eyed rat,
the three-legged dog.

For the girl with the broken
glasses. Who is she now?

 

 

 

Dialogue

 

Coyotes in the canyon
yipping like crazy,
Coyotes in the hills, racing
through the brush, coyotes
in the gullies running in a pack.

Neighborhood dogs going nuts.
Dogs behind walls, dogs behind
fences, dogs on decks,
dogs behind glass, barking.

Dogs singing of kibble and Bonz,
of nights spent warm
on the foot of down comforters.

Coyotes crying of hillsides and stones,
the crunch of rabbit bones, wild
nights under the moon.

 

 

 

Before Dementia

 

The Middle Fork of the Feather River
flows slowly in the summer,
arrives deep and still
at the old swimming hole.
My mother swam there
almost every day. Floated
on her back beneath the trees,
looking up at the sky,
until she fell asleep,
circling slowly
under the pines.

 

 

BIO

Ruth Bavetta writes at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, Tar River Review, North American Review and many other journals and anthologies. Her books are Fugitive Pigments (FutureCycle Press, 2013) Embers on the Stairs (Moontide Press, 2014,) Flour Water Salt (FutureCycle Press, 2016.) and No Longer at This Address (Aldritch Books.)  She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, and the smell of the ocean; she hates pretense, fundamentalism, and sauerkraut.

 

 

 

 

Happy Home

by Jessica Bonder

 

There was John the Saint, rescued dollhouse on his shoulder, salvaging the damned from its curbside purgatory. The trash heap cross the street from 24 Cleveland, the punk house John the Saint calls Heaven, for what was a Tuesday, he’d been eying the lot. The amassed sinners—busted electronica, three-legged chair, neck-crooked lamp—spilled out into the street like drunks down an alleyway, unforgiven vagrants. Throwaways. Squatters loiterers deviants weirdos—to the forlorn rejected, John the Saint could relate. The family cross the street, apparently, was moving; or cleaning out their garage; or maybe they died. The dollhouse turned sideways, its insides exposed, gutted and empty. Abandoned memory, it needed saving. It needed a reason.

Love.

John the Saint’s legs like exclamation points, skinny and black, exact. Navigating a maelstrom of anarchist artists, girlfriends passed out, stepping over their bodies. A game of tic-tac-toe just to get to the door, the Saint’s paint-splattered Docs tap-dancing through chaos. In the front room, what was once a living room, before milk crates and fixies and a drum kit took over, knelt Tomás at his shrine, his sacred vinyl reliquary, spinning 7-inches. Rad. The latest Meat Sweats, limited edition LP, Do the Shit My Way, Side B. Oh the temptation! To abort the mission, pull up bucket overturned, pop a squat and flood heardrums. Talk shop. But no! John the Saint’s committed—after all, he’s a saint—committed to his calling, his ministry to the lost. Call it recovery. Of the dollhouse he spied, from his perch on the roof, dead leaves mildew cigarette butts pigeon poop. For Luz, he thought, it’ll be a gift for Luz. Mascara plastered procumbent Luz. Luz on the floor on vodka on vicodin. His almost-bride, his last-chance wife. Last night or this morning, they’d had a fight.

Hey John man, where you goin’, que pasó?

Be right back yo, gotta go get somethin’.

Luz had been a lot of places and had seen a lot of things. None had been nice—there’d been no nice things. Even on days blue sky and birds chirping, days standard beautiful, did Luz fascinate the ceiling. Did Luz lay wasted, did Luz lay waste, closed curtains on a sun so badly wanted in. John the Saint met Luz down at Veterans Park, she had been pepper-sprayed, there was a protest. Luz coiled on the ground, tight as a spitball; John a fallen angel, reluctant descendant, apostate apostolic. As it happened that day, Cupid copped the enemy—his bow riot shield, his arrow, baton. Upon John did her immolated eyes first fix, Luz the first thing saying: My name means light.

It was love instamatic, a Polaroid love.

John loved Luz because Luz knew his past. Knew the things he did, knew he wasn’t no saint. Luz had the goods on this stray of a man, his fleas, ticks and bruises. Took him anyway.

Luz coming-to is Dorothy out of Oz, from black-and-white to color, homecoming to night. What is that, she says, scrounging for a ciggy, spoon-banging Mr. Coffee to evict las cucarachas. The machine was infested again. Stuck it in the freezer, doused it with vinegar, Luz tested all remedies, swore nothing worked. God! She hated living here, really she did, this two-story infection, open-plan open wound. So what is that, plays Luz on repeat, fractured princess pointing her rusty spoon wand. Misfit bent permanent. Gone. It’s a dollhouse, says John, and lays it at her feet, her feet bare and dirty. Splintered toes. Scabby bug bites. Half-shell nailbeds coated obsidian, dagger rose ankle—she was no Venus. John says here, it’s a gift for you babe.

I got this for you.

Do you like it.

What sounds a dollhouse before it crashes, prior its defenestration, ruled not a suicide? What sounds a dollhouse launched out a window, when a tiny home humbly meets the sky once? What sounds the site before the asteroid hits, comet of pretend, implodes on the lawn? What sounds a mad girlfriend, storming up the stairs, hated gift piggybacked, she be little but she be strong? What sounds a bedroom door, kicked down and dreams flown, en route to the highest ledge in the joint? From the zenith of despond, does Luz pitch the offering, with a fuck you John, she wants a ring. A ring with a diamond. A ring that is gold. The dollhouse rots, grows dandelions in spring.

What sounds a question asked over and over.

Tell her John tell her.

Why can’t she have nice things?

 

 

BIO

Jessica Bonder is an American fiction writer. She has published short stories and prose poetry in The Stockholm Review, The Lonely Crowd, The Honest Ulsterman, STORGY Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Black Heart Magazine, The Bohemyth, Vending Machine Press, The Fiction Pool, and Unbroken Journal. Honors include: Nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize by Black Heart Magazine; Longlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize; Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open (March/April 2017);  Longlisted for STORGY Magazine’s 2017 EXIT EARTH Short Story Competition; Finalist in Split Lip Magazine’s 2017 Summer Mix Tape Flash Fiction Contest; Shortlisted for Short Fiction Journal’s 2017 Short Fiction Prize; First Place in STORGY’s 2015 Short Story Contest.

 

 

 

 

At Lúpulo’s Tavern

by Sergio A. Ortiz

 

Soft jazz, hugs, kisses,
promises and fingers intertwined.
Me, a young man afraid of the dark.
You, a man rattled by light. You dragged me
to the back between twilight and twilight.
A waiter arrives, I ask for a hot chocolate,
you order red wine, take off your coat,
put it on the armchair. I lay my hand
on trembling places. Lights lower.
Roof rises. Chair collapses.
Coat falls, the chocolate, the wine.
Outside, the rain. Tourists. Suitcases.
The smell of Burger King.
A poster advertising Cialis.

 

 

 

Sitting on my corpse

 

I’m picking up
the pieces of my life,

disabled, winged
in agony,

the latent bottom
of my illness.

Bodies like mine
               born
                              worn
flesh and bones
already ancient.

 

 

 

When the dead talk about sex

 

 

trees resurrect from their flesh.
They’re storytellers of clandestine love,
barbs of rivers that penetrate,
and those delivered to the sea.
They meander desires,
pantheons smell of cum.
They evaporate kisses in the
humidity of coffee plantations,
in canyons, and banana fields.
The dead talk about sex
and invent new caresses
on the altars of the dead,
offer flower collars in memoriam
of the pleasures of the phallus.

 

 

 

 

BIO

Sergio A. Ortiz is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee. He won 2nd place in the 2016 Ramón Ataz Annual Poetry Competition sponsored by Alaire publishing house. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in FRIGG, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and Bitterzeot Magazine. He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

 

Sounds of the Alleyway

by Patrick Legay

 

 

 

With no rain for months, the sun bleached the city. But the pear tree got its water day after day, soaking up all of that sunshine and making it green, so now its pears weighed on their branches, and of course the squirrels were after them. One little glutton was there on the ground, eating a fallen pear, spinning it in his paws as he worked his teeth.

Greta had on her gardening gloves to protect her skin if the squirrel struggled. She crouched low to the soil, stepped carefully, looking ahead, focussing through her neon-framed sunglasses. She was old. Her long, gray-black coils of hair were all pulled together at the back by a string tied into a bow. The length of her hair was tucked into her cardigan, for practicality.

She kept on stopping, smiling, cocking her head to the side, clicking her gums, and laughing a little to herself, her eyes following a bug buzzing from to leaf to leaf, or the birds calling across the sky.

Her yard was closed in on either side by tall shrubs with fences running through them, as if the chain-link had grown up with the shrubs. At the top of the fences were jagged loops of barbed wire, connecting along the roof of the garage at the back. From the alleyway, over the garage, through the barbed-wire loops, was the squirrels’ path to the pear tree.

Greta snuck between the tomato plants and the herbs she had growing in her garden. The tomato plants grew well this year. They were as tall as a man.

Something was planted in every inch of the yard that caught the sun. There was a hose set to spurt on a timer to keep everything green. She had punctured a line of holes all along the rubber to the end, and capped it with a wine cork, then crisscrossed the length of it through the garden, and around the pear tree.  The tomato rows stretched just short of the tree. The herbs were on the other side of them. Corn along the shrub/fence. Kale, spinach, collard greens, lettuce, beans, beets, potatoes, carrots. Everything.

Rascal the Cat waddled along behind her. He was a rotund orange tabby. A skirt of fur-enveloped fat was thrown up from his belly as he trotted. He wasn’t crouching like a sneaking cat would. He wasn’t paying any attention to the squirrel. Rascal was watching Greta. He followed her as she crouched along. He waited, watched her move ahead a little, then trotted up to her, and waited again. The soil was moist, and he didn’t like the feel of it. Between trots he flicked his paws behind him. When he stopped, he stuck his nose in her direction, smelling, his whiskers moving, and his eyes closing as his cheeks puffed.

She wanted to show Rascal how to hunt like a cat. It was his job. She made low meowing and cooing noises to him. He meowed back now and again, but he was meowing about the treats in her cardigan pocket.

All the while the squirrel was under the pear tree with his back to them, happily munching.

She was a little girl when her parents lifted it out of the bed of her father’s truck like it was a Christmas tree. They set it down in the yard, and let her unwrap it from the twine and burlap. Mostly her father dug the hole. They only had one shovel. But they each held a branch, each uprighted the tree, and filled in some soil. They planted the pear tree together. She had a photo from that day up in the kitchen. There were pictures all over the house to help her keep her memory. Some they painted on the walls. Her mother guiding the brush in Greta’s hand to show her the strokes.

On this block, in this house, with this yard, Greta Washington had lived. Her parents brought her here when she was an infant, before she had memory, when the house was empty and rundown. Her parents spoke of it when she was older. How the doors were warped and wouldn’t close, the windows were warped and wouldn’t open, and the roof leaked in a different spot each time it rained. Before they fixed it up. When the old, European neighbors cursed them and moved away.

Now she was 76 years of age to be exact. Sure, she smoked the odd cigarette, and drank the odd spirit, but she ate clean, stayed fit, and kept busy around the house.  Yes, she was old, but she did not feel elderly. And she had her home, her place in the world. Being a Detroiter: that was her secret to living.

On her way to the squirrel, she reached up, and squeezed a low-hanging pear. The pears had come early this year. The tree’s flowers had been early too. The tree always bloomed white flowers in spring to tell her when the pears would come.

In his grand voice, her father had threatened to shoot the squirrels for their plundering. Her mother shook her head and called them poor creatures. But, he kept on saying it, that those squirrels should be shot. When he had said it too many times, her mother raised her righteous voice, and told him that there was no reason to be shooting at those poor squirrels.  It wasn’t the time for that. And he should hope that time never comes, “when food is hard to get, and when children don’t play in the alleyway behind our tree.”

After that her father would repeat the threat, but laugh to Greta as if it had always been a joke, and her mother would laugh too, shake her head, and call him a dangerous man.

Greta was in her first year of junior high, sitting in class one day, in one of the rooms with all the windows, watching the teacher write equations on the blackboard, when she heard a bunch of loud, deep pops. Bullets shattered the glass, flew invisibly over their heads, and snapped into the wall. All the kids were in shock. The teacher yelled at them, and they ducked under their desks like they had been taught to do for the bomb. Her seat was close to the window. Glass kept falling, and cut the back of her head.

Her father picked her up in his truck. Across his lap was his rifle — the gun he had brought home from the war. Greta’s head was all bandaged up. He asked if she had seen them. She hadn’t. He told her to sit on the floor of the truck, down on her bottom in the foot space. As he drove, he kept telling her it was alright, that he didn’t see anyone bad. They watched the white hoods marching on the news.

Her father went to a meeting in the church basement. Then he sat in a kitchen chair on the edge of the front lawn, with beer cans and cigarette buts on the grass around him, his rifle held up between his legs, and a newly bought extra-long phone cord stretched out of the house. The phone was sitting beside him on the stepping stool from the kitchen.

Greta’s mind was still as clear as ever, but she had lost her hearing. She had been ignoring it for years. Tens of years. Her ears were so dead now there were times when Rascal would have his claws out, ripping at the side of the couch, with Greta lying there reading, but all she heard was quiet. Eventually, she would catch the blur of orange limbs out of the corner of her eye, mark her page, and get up to spray him with the water gun.

The kettle whistling, her rattling pots and pans, slamming the door, bounding down the stairs two at a time — nothing roused her ears. Day and night, she saw things make noise, and heard nothing but quiet.

Back when she could hear well enough to tell a calamity coming, she boarded up the front of her house with plywood. She already had the fence with the barbed wire and gate, but figured an extra touch wouldn’t hurt. She painted one special board with white primer, let it dry, and then wrote in big letters with a fine brush:

Toxic Breathing Hazard

Dangerous!

DO NOT ENTER

She painted her best rendition of the biohazard symbol in red (she had practiced it on cardboard) and signed it “By Order of the Detroit City Police.”

Now she couldn’t sleep at night because it was so quiet. Someone could be busting down her door, and she would hear nothing but quiet.

So, before she was after the squirrel that day, Greta went out to the Wal-Mart to see about a pair of hearing aids. She asked the store attendant to lean in close, and repeat himself loudly and slowly. “But, say the same words. I’m no technopeasant,” she told him.

The hearing aids were tiny buds that had these fine little stems on them that you held between your fingers when you put them in your ears. The attendant wouldn’t let her try them out before she bought them. For sanitary reasons, he said. You can adjust all of the settings once you install the app on your tablet.

She bought them with some pension money.

She took her tablet out of its drawer as soon as she got home.

When the app was installed, she put in the buds. At first they only plugged her ears, and felt like they’d let nothing through. She swiped through on the touchscreen, following the prompts to set up the basic settings. She couldn’t quickly figure out what all the bars meant — some went up and down and some went diagonally — and she was impatient to try it, so she swiped each bar to the max, clicked that she was sure about the changes (even though she wasn’t), and put the tablet back in its drawer.

She went out to smoke in the backyard with Rascal following.

The buds let the sound in, and she could hear everything. The spring scraped the bolt in the door. Her sandals squeaked. The tobacco crunched when she pinched the cigarette. The flint scratched and clicked to light. She pulled in smoke, and the tobacco leaves crackled as they burned.

When she was first out there, she stood hearing, remembering, surveying her garden, and smoking in the sun, crossing her arms with one hand holding out the cigarette.

The day the boy next door was born, James, that was her earliest memory. Balloons tied to the mailbox. Everyone shouting “Itsa boy!” She had more memory of his parents than she should. She was still an infant, and she didn’t know them long, but she had seen photographs of them, heard stories, and thought about them a lot when she was older. They were walking on a crosswalk in front of a bus that had been rigged with a bomb. Greta remembered sitting in a scratchy dress on her mother’s lap on the seat of her father’s truck in a line of cars.

James’s Auntie came to take care of him. She was loud and silly. She let teenaged Greta borrow her clothes. She lived with him in the house next door until James was in his 20s, then she moved into an apartment with some younger man she had met when she worked at the grocery.

Greta looked at the pear tree, and the sky. She listened, and was struck by sound. She closed her eyes, and let the sun hit her face. She felt strange about what she heard. Like she heard everything that touched the air. Like she heard more than she remembered ever being able to hear before.

The breeze moved the leaves of the pear tree, but didn’t shift the pears.  Bees and dragonflies did flybys in her garden. There were so many bugs on the air. So much birdsong, from all around and far away, so many different types of birds calling and answering each other. She could hear creatures moving through the weeds, crackling, in the yards around her.

Someone down the alleyway was saying slurs. A bottle shattered, Greta flinched, the birds got quiet, and there were footsteps running off. After a moment, when the steps were gone, the birds got back to their song.

The garage with the barbed wire on the roof protected her yard from the alleyway. It had a little window onto the yard, and she could see her father’s old red pickup, still there inside, tires flat, the hood rusted through, and the innards all dried out.

Annabelle was out dancing with her friends. Demetrius boasted to her and bought her a drink. They dated, in the way that people dated back then. He was drafted, sent to Korea. Greta had found their letters stacked in her father’s dresser. Annabelle’s writing was worried and poetic. Demetrius’s writing was factual and obscene. He asked for pictures. She sent a department store portrait of her with her parents.

Annabelle never went to school but she read a lot. She taught Greta. She worked different jobs, cleaning houses in the suburbs, and when she was older, she worked as a secretary. Greta had brought home a portable typewriter from school, and taught her to type.

Annabelle wore patterned dresses all year round. It was only when she got old, and had trouble with her bladder, that she wore slacks.

Demetrius was first a cleaner in the factory, then did heavy work, and then put together auto-parts. When the parts plant closed, he got a job in another place piloting a machine that bolted the doors on the cars. Her mother said he came back from Korea thinner, quieter, with less of himself. All he brought home was his gun. He took it apart and cleaned it almost every weekend.

After Greta wore her mother down enough to allow it, he taught her how to shoot. He would take her out of town to shoot at garbage.

He wore denim. Polyester shirts. His breast pocket always had the imprint of his cigarette packs. After he got sick and was told not to smoke, he kept a pack of playing cards in that pocket, with half a deck, and a bunch of cigarettes crammed in. He and Greta would sneak a puff when the coast was clear of Annabelle.

He would spend most of his time in the bedroom, listening to the radio, reading sports magazines, smoking, and drinking beer. Her mother couldn’t take it anymore. All the beer cans, and the radio at all hours, all the smoking, the snoring, and the kicking and shouting in his sleep. She had a long list. She moved into the other room, but she still picked up his beer cans, vacuumed, stacked the magazines, emptied the ashtray, made his bed, and picked up his shirts. Greta asked why she bothered, and she said that was the arrangement. She was still his wife.

Demetrius died pretty quickly of throat cancer. Started coughing at work. They made him retire, full pension though. The plant closed not long after.

Then her mother’s health deteriorated sharply, and Greta took care of her. Annabelle lived on too long, bedridden, in that deteriorated state. She couldn’t do anything but eat and sleep, and otherwise she wasn’t herself.

Greta remembered being in the yard, on the grass, before she had the garden, hearing her mother in bed, through the window in the room above, saying something loudly that didn’t make sense, just a jumble of words. But, she was saying it as if someone was there listening. Then she would hiss and shriek as if she was being burned. Greta would check on her, and she’d just be in bed, asleep, nothing wrong.

Greta would read books to her, ones she used to like. For the short bursts that she was awake, Annabelle would repeat the same questions, asking what time it was, or whether the letters had come. Greta wanted to do something, but couldn’t decide if she should, so she didn’t, and then Annabelle passed on her own.

Now for the first time in a long time, the quiet cocoon had been broken.

Greta heard a squirrel jump onto the side of her garage from the alleyway, his sticky fingers gripping the wooden wall. He climbed to the top, went through the loops of barbed wire, and across the roof. She saw him jump into the tree. Rascal was lying in the sun. Greta was still smoking, hearing everything, remembering, and surveying the garden.

Soon the squirrel settled on a branch with a pear in his mouth. She walked towards the tree, and shouted, hissed and blew smoke at him. The squirrel looked ridiculous with his tiny grey head, and his yellow and brown buck-teeth clutching the heavy pear, bigger than him. He looked at Greta a little while, then held the pear in his teeth, and jumped back onto the roof.

But, somewhere in the air, the squirrel lost the pear. It fell to the ground between the garage and the tree. After the squirrel landed without the pear, his little head looked down over the edge of the roof. He jumped back onto a branch, and climbed down to the yard, passing by all of the pears in the tree to go after the one he had dropped.

When Greta was a teacher, it was at the same school with the windows. She’d start the first class every year by stepping outside of the mandated curriculum right away. The boys and girls would come in, some stone-faced and staring, and others hunched over, keeping their eyes down, shifting in their seats. Greta wanted to get them talking about real stuff, so she told them stories, her own stories: What happened to the Fosters next door. What it was like for her when she was in junior high. How there was a man on her street who played the electric guitar — ‘Pinky,’ they called him, because he wore rings on his pinkies. He would sit on his big copper amp and play, making it sound like ten guitars, not one, warping the sound by tapping his foot on something that looked like the pedal of a sewing machine. It was fun to watch his pinky rings wiggle and dance as he played. She could hear his guitar at night and on the weekend. The alleyway would bring the sound to her window. As she spoke, she would watch the faces, and sometimes some of the kids would smile, and say they too heard music on their street.

She would tell them how one day, every summer, her street would be blocked off with cars, and all the neighbors would have a big party. Pinky’s band would play. They would grill food right on the street. They would paint the pavement, Greta with her mother and the other children. Watercolor zoo animals, trucks, trees, flying saucers, an ocean with fish in it, along with some other depictions, very colorful, but hard to say what they represented. If she put enough glee in the telling, sometimes the stoned-faced kids would loosen up, look at each other, and smile sarcastically.

She would tell about the day when she was in grade school. She got let out of school early and told to go straight home, and on the way home, she could hear there was something wrong in the city. She saw smoke. Heard sirens. Shouting. Pops and bangs. Greta ran into her mother along the way, who was sweating and out of breath, saying she couldn’t find her father. They went to look for him. Buildings were on fire. People were running around. They gave up quickly, went back home, and saw him walking down their street with his rifle on his shoulder. He wouldn’t say where he had been. He claimed he had been looking for them. He took them to the church, and they all waited inside while he stayed out front with some others. As she spoke, the class would fall silent, mesmerized.

She would also tell them about the pear tree, what the squirrels looked like when they ate, and that Greta and her mother used to paint things on the walls in their house.  In the kitchen, they painted a mural of their tree, with the squirrels like gremlins gorging on the pears.

It wasn’t long until the students would start telling their own stories: About who their parents were. About snow forts in the winter, and baseball in the summer, and the pheasants, how they would startle and rush out of the bushes if you came upon them. How someone’s brother fell in the river, and another one’s dog jumped up on the kitchen table and their father punched the poor thing in the ribs. About sad things being said or done. Beatings and illnesses. People drinking too much. The stories of living.

Sometimes they told her about things happening, and Greta had to do more. She’d knock on doors, talk to whoever needed talking to, and she’d go to meetings in the church basement. Doing that was what had kept her going.

The squirrel was chomping under the tree. The sound grated her.

Rascal was curled up in the sun, half watching the squirrel. She whispered to him: “We could both afford to be a little more cat-like.” He looked up at her. She reached into her pocket, took out a treat, and let him smell it. He stood up. She returned the treat to her pocket, and put on the gardening gloves. He watched her. Then she snuck up on the squirrel, stepping carefully, in that crouched stance, through her garden towards the pear tree. Rascal followed, sniffing the air in her direction.

The squirrel was on the other side of the tree, sitting there on the ground, filling his mouth luxuriously with pear-flesh. From behind a tomato plant, she peaked around at the squirrel, then back at Rascal. The cat flicked the soil off his paws, and just looked at her. She meowed at him, and gestured towards the squirrel. He looked only at her hand.

The squirrel was aware of the approach of the slender old black lady, and the fat, slow orange cat. He chewed more rapidly, to fill himself — the pear was the most important thing.

Greta heard the squirrel chew, then pause, then go back to chewing, but faster. She looked around the tomato plant again, and watched him with one eye.

She shifted her weight, lunged around the tomato plant and pounced, grabbing at the squirrel with her two gloved hands. But the squirrel had heard her first step. Before she got there, he jumped into the shrub, and climbed onto the fence with what remained of the pear in his teeth. She hit the ground, hands first, in the spot the squirrel had vacated.

She stayed down, rolled onto her back, breathing, and laid there listening to the sound of the squirrel escaping. She took the gloves off, and watched from below as the squirrel climbed up the chain-link, jumped into the tree, and onto the garage. She relaxed.

When Annabelle finally did give in, and allowed Greta to go shoot at the dump with her father, it wasn’t unconditional. “Fine,” she said. “But, don’t kill anything I can’t cook.”

Her father was showing off his marksmanship, and asked, “Think I can hit that gull?” aiming the rifle at the birds swirling above the garbage.

“Can Momma cook it?”

“Nah. It’s just a gull.”

Greta shook her head. He re-aimed and smashed a glass jar.

The squirrel sat on the roof and finished the pear. She heard him, but couldn’t see him from her view lying on the ground.

Rascal waddled over and lied down beside her, sniffing her pocket. She gave him a treat.

She heard the squirrel stop chewing. The pear’s core rolled down off the roof, and bounced on the ground. It tumbled along in the direction of her head, but slowed and stopped just short. She stayed lying there, looking, hearing, but not moving. The squirrel landed on a branch above her, and looked down, sniffing at her. Greta, directly below, watched him, then she closed her eyes.

The wind changed. The leaves fell silent, letting in all of the sounds. Squatters coughing and spitting. Someone snoring. Somewhere a basketball. The sound of dishes clanking. Someone hammering. Drunken screaming. Children throwing rocks through windows as a game.

She heard things moving through the dried up yard next door, James’s old place, all rundown and grown in thick with years of weeds taking over, and new trees planted by the wind. Maybe it was mice or birds, more squirrels, or other little wild creatures.

She grew up beside James, not with him. They were never kindred spirits. He was a few years younger than her and that mattered most when they were growing up.

They went to school together, a couple grades apart. He was always bigger than her. When they were teens, he started paying more attention to her. He snuck up behind her in the school hallway and threw her on his shoulders, spun her around, and said he wouldn’t stop until she said his name. The way he picked her up, the way he held her, she knew he just wanted to touch her. She refused to say it. She would punch him and claw him, but not too hard. He would get tired, and put her down. She learned to steady herself, and not to fall from the dizziness. She would kick him in the groin if she saw him coming. She liked older boys.

She had enough boyfriends. She liked some things about some of them. But, they were never worth the arrangement. She hated the arrangement. It meant doing all the work and making none of the decisions. Getting scolded like a child. She couldn’t do or say certain things, but they could do or say whatever they wanted.

It was her senior year in college when she broke up with a boyfriend, and decided he was the last one. Not the last man. The last arrangement.

She saw James one autumn night. It was late and the band was in full swing. She danced with him. He had been working outside all summer, and his body was lean and hard. He was different. Older.

She made it clear to him there would be no arrangements. He was shocked by it, but agreed. She remembered how he was then. How he moved, how he smelled, how he felt. They went on like this for a while. Years. Living next door to one another. She would come to his place. For a long time neither of them spent time, that kind of time, with other people.

Until she met the new teacher at her school. He wore a jacket and tie, and they talked about teaching. James saw them out together. He didn’t like it, and he told her so the next time she came over. He lost his temper. Greta just went right back out the door, and shut it on him. She hadn’t even taken off her coat.

A week went by until she knocked on his door again. It was Friday. He let her in. She took her coat off, spent the night, and they didn’t talk about it. The next day she cooked him breakfast and told him her doing so was a one-time occurrence. They drank coffee spiked with whiskey, and then just the whiskey. In the afternoon, he took her to a burger joint.

He swallowed down his burger before Greta had hers out of the wrapping. Sitting in the booth, mustard on his lip, he fumbled, held out his mother’s ring, and stuttered through a proposal. She sat chewing, choking. She swallowed. She muffled a laugh into her napkin. But, it couldn’t be muffled. She looked at him, that dumb smiley look on his face, holding that ring out to her in the booth, as if she should throw up her hands and scream with girlish delight. She couldn’t stop laughing. Right from the belly. He shouted for her to stop. She still couldn’t. He slapped her. Heads turned and the place got quiet. She got quiet. Shocked. She swung a punch back at him. He dodged it, laughed at her, and called her a disgrace. He got up, spat, and left.

She walked home, and his car wasn’t there. After that, time went by, neither of them broke the silence, and they settled into never speaking.

A moving truck pulled up to James’s house one day, a small one, but it came full of boxes, mirrors, dressers, and the pieces to a big canopy bed. James’s car followed, and he got out, opened the door for a woman, and got her suitcase out of the trunk. Greta saw them together on the street. One night she heard them shouting next door. After a time, the moving truck pulled up again. The woman moved out.

Greta saw James coming and going, getting older. She heard him on the other side of the shrubs raking the leaves that had blown from the pear tree. She grit her teeth, sucked in air, and went inside. When she began to lose her hearing, she liked it a little. Without her putting any effort into it, a quiet cocoon was forming around her.

Now lying there, eyes closed, with the earbuds, she could hear the squirrel’s sticky fingers on the bark, and the thinner branches bend and creak as he walked along. She could hear exactly where he was in the tree.

The squirrel paused on a branch, then reached up, and pulled on a pear with all of his weight. The pear’s branch bent down, and rattled back when the pear snapped off. Other pears hit the ground near her head.

She opened her eyes, rolled over, moved up on all fours, and stood up.

She went to the house. There was a bucket holding a spade, rake, and other long-handled gardening tools beside the back door. She pulled a garden hoe slowly and quietly out of the bucket. She breathed carefully. The handle of that old garden hoe was heavy red hickory.  She looked over her shoulder at the squirrel, then back. The steel of that old garden hoe had a shine to it. She kept it sharp to cut through the roots of weeds.

Rascal was back in his dry spot in the sun. As she went by with the garden hoe, she touched him with the red hickory end to wake him up. He opened his eyes, and looked at her dazed. She gave him another treat, and whispered for him to “Watch and learn.” Then she moved towards the squirrel with the garden hoe held high, and angled in front of her.

The squirrel was on a branch at about the height of her shoulder. Maybe just above. He was bent over the pear, spinning it, gorging. She could see his neck.

She stopped, and raised up the blade very slowly.

The squirrel sat up. He didn’t run away. He just sat there on his branch, looking at her, shifting the pear in his grasp.

She watched him, and waited for him to go back to the pear and show his neck again. They stood there frozen, looking at each other, the squirrel with the stolen pear, Greta holding the blade of the garden hoe over him. She kept her eyes on the squirrel, but her ears were with the little creatures rustling on the other side of the fence.

When they got the fences and barbed wire, James wouldn’t pitch in. Greta assumed it was because of her. She had gotten a group of her neighbors to go in together so they could all get a better deal. Some of them might not have been able to afford it otherwise. James told the neighbor on the other side of him that he wanted nothing to do with it, and to stop asking. It made it more expensive for them all.

She hosted the party after the fences were installed. Her neighbors from both sides of the street were in her backyard, eating ice-cream cake on paper plates, lamenting the cutting of Greta’s shrubs. Saying nothing about James. They talked about how strange all their yards looked with the chain-link and barbed wire.

The shrubs grew back, but those neighbors were long gone. Moved away. Got sick and died. Or just disappeared. James’s car was gone and never came back. His place got all grown in, got condemned, and boarded up from the outside. That was before the city went bankrupt.

Greta was the lone holdout of the old neighborhood. But now the place around her was something else.

She held up the blade of the garden hoe. The squirrel still had his head up, listening. Squatters were shouting by one of the houses down the alleyway. Pounding on the door. The squirrel turned his head a little. A woman’s voice screamed hysterically from inside. “Don’t you dare,” or something like that. “Don’t” something. Another voice yelled back. Then someone hit the door with something big. And hit it and hit it. The door came down. A bunch of voices laughed and hooted. The woman screamed something back. There was a gunshot. Greta flinched, the garden hoe dipped slightly. The squirrel looked up at it, then looked away, and turned his ear back to the sounds. They heard the woman scream something more. Then some sort of scuffle. Another shot. Something fell. The woman laughed, spoke, and then it all fell quiet, peaceful. Just the bugs and the birds.

The garden hoe was getting heavy.

The squirrel went back to the pear, hunched down over it, eating and spinning it. She adjusted her grip. The squirrel ignored her. She turned her head for a moment, and looked at Rascal, who had darted back near the door of the house. He was sitting motionless, wide-eyed, watching her.

She shook her head at the cat, then turned back to the squirrel, lined up the blade, and chopped it down, hitting him on the neck, taking part of his head off. The blood, the body, the partly chewed pear, and some of the branch fell down onto the yard.

Rascal shrieked, jumped into the air with all fours, and puffed up to triple his size.  He clawed at the seams, trying to get in the back door, but it was closed.

Greta put down the garden hoe, and went after him. Rascal didn’t run from her. He waited facing the door, and she picked him up. He tried to get away but didn’t scratch her, then went limp in her arms. “I’m sorry my scaredy cat,” she told him. She pet him, hugged him, kissed his head, and laughed at him. He dangled in her arms, puffed up with his limbs sticking out like he was a balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. She pet his neck and his ears, and he stretched up to her, rubbing his forehead on her chin.

She put him down, and gave him a treat from her cardigan. He ate it, still puffed up a little. She showed him another treat, and backed up with it. He followed. She gave him the treat. He ate it, then looked up at her. She showed him another treat, and moved back through the garden. He followed, pausing to flick dirt off his paws. She held the treat closer to him. He reached his mouth out. She led him a couple feet more to the pear tree, and he followed with his mouth open, trying to take the treat. She put the treat down near the squirrel’s partially beheaded body. He ate the treat, and sat down on the spot, sniffed at the body, then settled there with each ear sticking up and moving independently of the other. The cat was listening to the sounds of the alleyway.

Greta picked out a spot near him, and carefully sat down on the ground.  Both of them were listening, heads-tilted in the same direction.

They sat there well into the afternoon.

Then she was at the kitchen counter, putting some foil on the cutting board. She brought out the knife, and watched a YouTube video on how to skin and clean a squirrel. She went through the steps, wearing yellow rubber gloves, cutting under and pulling the skin, pinching and pulling out the bones. The squirrel’s cheeks and stomach were all full of mashed up pear.  Rascal meowed at her, and laid over her feet. She heated a pot of water on the stove, dropped the squirrel’s meat in the boiling water, cooked it, and rinsed it in cold water.

She put the meat in Rascal’s dish. He trotted over. On the side, his dish had a little painted depiction of the fat cat himself. He smelled the meat, licked it a little, and then gulped it down with only a few chews.  She ate a salad with kale, cubed beets, shredded carrots, and thinly sliced pear on top, unripened and bitter. It was all glazed in balsamic. Greta was a vegetarian, but Rascal was not.

 

 

 

BIO

Patrick has been writing since he was a child — his first work of fiction being a brief supernatural detective story that had something to do with voodoo in New Orleans. He was born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In most of the candid childhood photos, he is wearing a green Robin Hood costume, which he sewed using a pattern his mother ordered for him from a catalogue. Sometime after the costume no longer fit, he moved to Toronto for school, but stayed to do human rights and pay equity work with university unions. He now lives and writes by the far ocean in Victoria, B.C. pdlegay@gmail.com

 

 

 

Sparky

by Pam Munter

 

I don’t know where he came from but when I got off the school bus one afternoon at the corner of my street, my mother was holding him in her arms. He was an agitated ball of black and white fluff and he looked to me like a perfect puppy. His snout was white with little black dots all over it. The rest of his body looked a little like an Oreo cookie.

“I brought you a surprise,” my mother said.

I thought my brother’s arrival less than a year earlier had been a surprise, too, but this was something else. This one was mine.

“Oh, thank you. Thank you.” I could hardly wait to go back to my second grade class the next day and tell them my wonderful news.

She handed me the puppy and asked, “What do you think we should call him? He needs a name.”

“Uh. I don’t know.” All I could think of was the names of my movie star heroes. “How about…”

“I think we should call him Sparky,” she said, as if she had already given this some thought.

“Sparky.” I liked the name as soon as I heard it. “Why Sparky?”

“Dad’s an electrical technician. It’s perfect.”

“OK. I like it. Hi, Sparky.”

It was the late 1940s. My father worked for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California and my mother was a housewife. Looking back on it, I wonder why she chose this moment to adopt a dog, especially a hyperactive breed like a Springer Spaniel, so soon after giving birth. I was already a bit of a handful, myself, always out exploring the neighborhood on my bike and questioning most everything.

It wasn’t long before Sparky became a constant companion, trailing behind my bike as I toured the alphabet streets in the middle-class section of Pacific Palisades. He had become used to sleeping on my bed, too, even though I shared the room with my brother. A few years later, my father would build an addition on the house, allowing me my own bedroom and installing a dog door in the den which helped avoid accidents in the middle of the night. Sparky was excitable, we all knew that.

Though he was puppy-dog sociable, it seemed whenever I had kids over to play, Sparky would enact one of his frequent vomiting performances. A kid would call him over, start to pet him and, without even the courtesy of a warning cough, the dog would puke all over him. It was hard not to laugh, but, of course, I feigned concern and disgust. I wondered if Sparky was a mind-reader. It could have been a coincidence, of course, but it seemed to me he chose just the right kids.

The only accommodation we made to this emetic inevitability was avoiding certain scraps. For instance, it was clear after one especially egregious episode that spaghetti leftovers were best just thrown away.

These were the days when dogs were free to roam without a leash and he was out of the house as much as was inside. If he was gone too long, my mother would plaintively call for him, in the same tone she used for her children.

“Sparrrrrrky. Sparrrrrky. Come here. Sparrrrrky.”

We joked about his selective hearing. There was never any lag time between her call and his appearance at dinner time. In the afternoons, without the promise of food upon compliance, sometimes she’d just give up and leave the front door open so he could come home when he felt like it. She was far more permissive with him than she was with us.

Before much time had elapsed, Sparky became my best friend. When I was angry or sad, I knew I could go over to him, lie down next to him and bury my face in his furry nape. I’d tell him what was wrong and he’d kiss my face. He let me snuggle with him as long as I needed then would follow me into my bedroom when we were done, awaiting further disclosures.

The Palisades was a populated suburb but on some summer nights the distinctive aroma of skunk filled the air. We never saw the culprits but there was little doubt they had been there. They weren’t the only evidence of wildlife, either. One July afternoon, an intrepid neighbor killed the rattlesnake that she found in her back yard, the yard right next to ours. After that, I hardly ever went out in the backyard without first surveying the ground and never after dark. But Sparky did. He had no fear.

Though it was dark and I was asleep, I heard him scamper into my room and jump up on my bed, accompanied  by great commotion. The light flipped on suddenly.

“What’s going on?”

“Don’t touch him. Don’t touch him,” my father ordered.

“Why? What’s…” One intake of breath and then I knew what it was. Skunk. “Uhhhhh.”

“Fran, get a blanket.” My mother quickly obeyed and returned with a pale blue wool blanket she often used in the living room for her naps. She wrapped Sparky up and my Dad carried him outside. I followed, if only to get the smell out of my nostrils.

He held Sparky on the ground and pointed to my mother. “You hold him while I hose him off.”

“That won’t help. Let me see how much tomato juice we have.”

I was watching this middle-of-the-night excitement like it was a suspenseful drama. My eyes were wide with anticipation. What would happen next? Would Sparky be OK? Would the smell ever go away? Would I have to go to school tomorrow?

Once again, my father picked up the dog and placed him the bathtub while my mother poured tomato juice all over him. I wondered if it were some secret rite, known only to adults. Once the deed was done, Sparky remained locked in the laundry room for the night. We all went back to bed.

I’d like to report it never happened again but such events apparently were  inevitable then and could be prevented. But the next occasions were dealt with more alacrity and a ready supply of  rattier blankets and tomato juice.

As Sparky aged, I dreaded the thought of losing him. His gait was slower, his adventures shorter. I no longer rode my bike much so he wasn’t getting as much exercise. One of my other’s coffee klatch buddies down the street had two children for whom I had babysat. The parents had bought the girls a Belgian Shepherd for Christmas and was named Shirley, after the oldest daughter’s favorite doll, Shirley Temple. But long-forgotten circumstances required them to give Shirley away. My parents stepped up and now Sparky had a playmate.

Shirley was little more than a pup but much bigger than Sparky. Her favorite sport was to back up to a sleeping Sparky and abruptly perch on his head. This did not go down well but the two never fought. They didn’t play much together, either, but Shirley’s presence seemed to bring Sparky back to life a bit.

But soon, there were more puke episodes, more trips to the vet, more really long naps. He no longer cared if Shirley sat on his head. When I came home from high school one afternoon, Mom greeted me at the door.

“We had to let Sparky go, honey. It was time.”

I nodded and ran into my room, crying. I knew it was time but it’s never time. Some dogs you can never just “let go.”

 

 

BIO

Pam Munter is a retired clinical psychologist, performer and former film historian, working on a deconstructed memoir and short stories based on old Hollywood. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Rumpus, The Coachella Review, Lady Literary Review, NoiseMedium, The Creative Truth, Adelaide and Angels Flight—Literary West, among many others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free as the Ocean

by Rae Monroe

 

 

The screen door slapped shut behind her as she crossed the porch. She stepped onto the sand and walked to the water’s edge.

The waves beat her backward and forward. She walked until her feet lost touch with the sand and she began to swim. Salty spray hit her lips as the current grew rougher.

Ahead of her she saw only the cloud-filled sky and undulating ocean. A tiny fish brushed by her foot; she giggled with appreciation. Her head sank back and her legs lifted until she floated. Her copper hair caught the light of the setting sun, flashing fire above the water.

“Maeve! Maeve!” her husband screamed from the shore.

She heard splashes as he ran into the water, but of course he wouldn’t catch her, she was far away, so far away, too far away. She was free…

————-

The Coast Guard looked grim as he pulled her up from the coal-black water. The ship’s spotlight had nearly blinded her, but now that her eyes adjusted, she could see her husband, standing by the railing with crossed arms. He shoved her into a hug as soon as her feet landed on the deck. He still wore his work clothes, and when she leaned back, his carefully ironed suit and tie were wet. He grabbed her cheeks with both hands, pulling her to him again. He pressed his forehead against hers like he was trying to keep her there.

She hadn’t realized she was cold until he touched her. But his fingertips seemed to have brought sensation back, and she started shivering. The Guard wrapped a heavy blanket around her and put her in the cabin, where a floor heater glowed red. Carson sat beside her and cradled her icy hands.

He didn’t speak. After the third incident, he never said a word at all.

The boat hummed as it sped through the water that she was just a part of.

—————

At home, she collapsed onto the couch and wrapped her fingers around the coffee the Guard had given her. A residual chill remained, and she fumbled for the blanket Carson’s mom had knit them last Christmas. The yarn felt like shackles, but it warmed her.

Carson got ready for bed after failing to persuade her to eat. She couldn’t eat. She didn’t know if she ever would again. She hated that she’d left her true home for this dry cage. Her body still drummed with the rhythms of the waves.

In baggy boxers and a stained T-shirt, Carson knelt in front of her and smiled limply.

“How are you?” he asked as he tucked a strand of damp hair behind her ear.

“Fine,” Maeve brought herself to answer. “How was work?”

“The usual,” he said, scanning her face worriedly.

“What did you eat for lunch?”

“Wendy’s.”

He wouldn’t stop staring at her like she was likely to disappear.

“Are you coming to bed?” he asked.

“In a bit.”

“Do you need anything?”

She shook her head and he nodded stiffly before sighing and standing.

Just before he left the room, she said, “I’m pregnant.”

He froze, his every atom seeming to still.

She wasn’t sure how she expected him to react. Maybe anger or horror, after her behavior today. Maybe disappointment, or worse, sorrow.

Finally, he faced her. She prepared herself.

“Pregnant?” he repeated, like he’d forgotten what the word meant.

She nodded.

His face struggled with emotions before lighting up with joy. The stress and confusion of the evening dissipated. She answered his avid questions: five weeks along—we won’t find out for a while—of course we’ll name it after your Uncle Ben if it’s a boy.

They talked until he fell asleep on the couch next to her. A cool breeze rustled past her from the open window and she turned to gaze at the churning ocean. She felt it calling her.

Carson’s hand was warm on her stomach, where her new anchor was growing.

—————

There wasn’t another incident. Carson hoped preparing for the baby would distract her and for a while, it seemed to. She started walking, stopped smoking, worked more. In fact, was more productive than he’d ever seen, finishing a painting nearly every week.

Despite the incident, Maeve seemed genuinely eager to learn as much as she could. Their end tables were overwhelmed with baby books: How to Name Baby, How to Feed Baby, How to Make Baby Sleep.

Yes, he thought things were better. But a couple of weeks after the incident, he found bits of paper in the sea oats by the back porch. They were covered with words written in Maeve’s handwriting, and they were all the same word, “free”.

He worried. He knew she had a difficult childhood—her mom was crazy and believed the whole of Ireland conspired against her, so she and Maeve lived alone, in a cottage, on some godforsaken corner of the country. Carson thought Maeve’s occasionally erratic behavior was due to the trauma she’d endured then. She refused any kind of treatment, though; therapy was laughable and she had no need for “crazy pills”. And nothing she had done was ever dangerous enough to justify his intervention.

And she wasn’t doing anything dangerous now. She was better, she had to be, because in the evenings, they sat in the sand, Maeve sipping tea, Carson sipping wine, and they would talk of the future. And Carson swore she was happy.

—————–

While Carson was at work, Maeve would sit before the ocean like a worshipper before a throne. She thought about how it was always changing, always shifting…Its restlessness was addictive.

“Salt water runs in our veins, baby,” she would whisper. “They say we can never leave the water. I could never leave it. And now, neither will you.”

“My mum would carry me to the top of the cliffs,” Maeve told her baby, “so high I couldn’t see the shore, just the water and grass. The wind was so loud, it hit the cliffs like the waves.” She whispered, “But home made me feel stuck. Nowhere to run, no room to breathe…”

Carson gave her room to breathe. Ever since he met her. He gave her everything, in fact. Everything except the ability to leave.

Her fingers caressed her ballooning stomach with love.

—————

A month after he found the bits of paper, Carson pulled into the driveway. He saw Maeve’s shadow on the living room curtains, moving about sporadically. As he got out of his car, he heard music.

He walked up to the house hesitantly. When he opened the door, the music amplified, and his head began to pulse with the beat.

His wife twirled in the middle of the living room. Her hair swung out and whipped her neck, and her fingers trilled in the air. She wore only a polka-dot bra and striped underwear, and her bare skin shone with sweat.

A battered record player stood on an end-table, spinning a record with dizzying speed. Speakers screamed an old rock song.

The end-table was the only piece of furniture left standing. The other end-tables, the coffee table and the bookshelves were smashed, both couches were overturned, and the lamp lay on the ground. Wood splinters littered the Oriental rug.

Carson!” Maeve cried. She hurried forward, hair and breasts bouncing. “Oh, Carson, it’s the Eagles! The Eagles!”

She was stupidly gleeful, her eyes and smile too wide. Mascara tear streaks ran down her face like claw marks.

“What happened?” he shouted, but Maeve laughed and tugged him toward the chaos. He tripped over a broken chair.

“The Eagles!” she cried again, throwing herself into a freewheeling turn that knocked her into a fractured bookshelf.

“Love, let’s—“

He shut off the record player. Ears still ringing, he grabbed Maeve’s hands and tried to pull her back to reality.

“What don’t you like ‘bout the Eagles?” she asked.

“What’s happening? What are you doing?”

“The dog dances to jump, Levy,” she said, suddenly serious. Her gaze shifted to the front door, her face as blank as a sheet of paper.

“Maeve?”

Her eyes focused on him and she grinned.

“Pizza’s for dinner, Carson, love. Are you deaf?”

She flounced out of the room, Eagles forgotten.

Carson fell onto the upside-down couch, shaking. Somewhere in the distance, the back door slammed shut.

Carson hadn’t experienced this kind of fear before. He didn’t know what was happening to his wife. And he didn’t know what he could do about it.

He stumbled to his feet and began to pick up the mess she had made.

————–

A few days later, Maeve wandered out onto the sand. A storm was about to hit, so the waves threw themselves onto the shore with renewed violence. She felt the ocean’s rage, its mounting fury.

Maeve climbed to the top of a dune, where the wind’s arms caressed her. She closed her eyes and the arms were her Mum’s.

“I counted out his money and it made a pretty penny…”

Her mum’s arms carried her home to the peeling wallpapered walls and the bitter tea when Mum forgot to buy sugar, and the sting of her fingers during one of her uncontrollable spells.

Maeve reached out her hands and lifted her voice to the heavens, singing:

“But I couldn’t shoot the water so a prisoner I was taken…”

Maeve screamed to the dunes, to the wind, to the ocean, to anyone who would listen:

“MUSHA RING DUM A DOO, DUM A DA

WHACK FOR MY DADDY, OH

WHACK FOR MY DADDY, OH

THERE’S WHISKEY IN THE JAR.”

The last word trembled in the air before finally extinguishing like an exhausted flame, and she collapsed onto the sand, musha ring dum a doo, dum a da.

—————-

“Where the hell are my fags?”

Carson woke up. He was nearly nose to nose with his wife, who leered over him like a vengeful god.

“What?” It took him a minute to remember to his Irish wife “fag” was “cigarette”.

“I said where in the actual hell are my fags?”

He pushed her away and sat up.

“You’re pregnant,” he said. “You can’t smoke.

“We discussed this, Maeve. You decided—“

“You don’t understand!”

She collapsed onto the carpet, her fingers tugging at her hair.

“Help me, then.”

“I can’t—I can’t even think. I could think before, I was okay…”

He rubbed at the sleep in his eyes and tried to concentrate through the haze of exhaustion.

“Smoking helps you think?”

“Smoking helps me live.”

“Love, I can’t let you smoke when you’re pregnant. It will hurt our baby.”

“One fag! Just one, so I can think!” She quickly stood and grasped his sleep-swollen cheeks.

“I’m not letting you,” said Carson, his lips squished and his words distorted, “because I love you and our baby.”

It took her a moment to switch tactics.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. She clenched his face harder, then tossed him aside. She crossed over to the dresser and dug through the drawers.

“Your cigarettes are gone, Maeve,” he said, rubbing his throbbing jaw. He had decided to take precautions after the night of the Eagles, since he couldn’t predict her behavior.

And why would she want to smoke? She had seemed intent on having the healthiest pregnancy.

“You think you can take my things? You think you control me?” Her voice broke, as if it couldn’t handle the injustice. “I’m my own person, I—I control what I do. Not you.”

He took a weary breath. A storm front loomed before him, and all he wanted to do was sleep.

“I’m your wife, not your—your slave,” she said. She yanked a drawer our and it fell to the carpet with a dull thud.

“I’m taking care of our baby—“

“How? By taking away my rights? I’ll call the cops. I’ll tell them you won’t let me think.”

“You can think without cig—“

I have my rights!

She tugged out another drawer and tossed it in his direction, clothes flying. He threw himself out of harm’s way. “I deserve to be free! Free.”

She stilled, suddenly lost in that idea.

“Free,” she whispered.

Carson looked up from where he cowered by the nightstand.

“…Maeve?”

“Free from you!”

She came to life again and tripped over her feet as she ran out.

He stood and followed her to the living room, where she was throwing couch cushions into the air. He eyed the furniture worriedly; it had taken hundreds of dollars to repair the damage she’d done last time.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m getting the keys. I’m gonna buy me some fags.”

“The keys aren’t in the couch,” he said, aghast. The keys were on the dolphin hook by the front door, as always.

She started towards him.

“Taking away my rights is not enough? You want to take my car?”

She headed towards the back porch, fumbling with the door latch before stumbling outside. He followed her, the porch’s wooden slats cold and sandy under his feet.

“I want to help you, Maeve, I do,” he said. “But I won’t let you hurt our baby, don’t you see?”

They were among the dunes now, her hair twisting about her in the night wind. Her eyes burned at him in the darkness as he followed her farther and farther. She reached the surf, but kept going until the cold water was up to his waist.

“I thought you loved me,” she said, turning towards him.

“I do.”

“Then let me think. It’s all too much—too much—I can’t get away—”

“I know this is scary,” he said,  “but we’re meant to have this baby. We can do this. But we have to protect our baby. Together.”

Her gaze slipped from his. The water seemed to have captured her concentration. She smiled wistfully, and he ventured close enough to grasp her hand.

“Maybe the conch will hold the burger in,” she said. “You know?”

“Yes. Yes, love, I know.”

He led her back inside.

—————-

She began to draw up plans, in her head. Never on paper, where Carson would see and get upset. He wouldn’t understand her reasons. His love for her blinded him to truth. The baby was most important; the baby had to be saved.

She set a date. She prepared with all the care of a woman for her wedding day, rubbing on lotion, shaving her body, getting her hair styled.

She took the large cleaver they used for chopping meat and hid it under her pillow. During sleepless nights, she’d touch it longingly. She’d slice her fingertips, she stroked it so hard.

The pain made her smile.

—————–

Carson began to think his wife didn’t just have residual trauma.

He researched mental illnesses during lunch breaks and slow afternoons at work. One, schizophrenia, stuck out at him. Some of its symptoms were nothing like Maeve, but others were so exact that he grew a chill. One scientific article mentioned “word salad”—when someone with schizophrenia spoke in grammatically correct sentences, but with nonsense verbs and nouns. Maeve had done that more often than he liked to recall.

But Maeve always corrected herself. She was going through a lot with the baby; it was just stress.

Then Carson remembered the look in her eyes the night she approached him about her cigarettes and the ruined living room in which she danced as carefree as a child.

Carson didn’t want her to be sick, but something was wrong.

—————–

Maeve made a resolution: she was going to teach her baby all she could, while she could.

One day she dove into a wave, the current knocking her backwards and pushing against her striving muscles. When she emerged gasping, her feet finding the sand, she whispered, “And this, Baby? This is life.”

As she painted, sometimes she pressed her paintbrush against her stomach and whispered, “And this, Baby? This is escape.”

At night when Carson and Maeve were huddled on the couch watching TV, she whispered, “And this, Baby? This is love.”

—————–

Carson made an appointment with a psychiatrist. He described Maeve’s behavior, and admitted his fears. The psychiatrist wanted to see Maeve immediately, so Carson arranged an appointment for Monday. He’d tell her they were going out to lunch, baby clothes shopping, out for damn ice cream—anything but the truth.

On Saturday night, when Maeve was twenty-nine weeks along, they washed the dishes together. Maeve was quiet, ignoring his attempts at conversation. When they were done, he left for the bathroom, and as he turned to go, she gripped his arms.

“I love you, Carson,” she said. There was a desperate urgency he couldn’t understand in her words.

“I love you, too, Babe,” he said, but she didn’t seem comforted.

Later, as he washed his hands, he remembered the psychiatrist’s instructions: “If her behavior changes at all, call me. Cases like this are unpredictable.”

Carson dialed the psychiatrist’s number, but he wanted to check on Maeve before he called.

“Maeve?”

He searched the house futilely, then ventured onto the porch and scanned the shore. It was dark, but he didn’t see her. He stepped onto the sand.

“Maeve?”

He heard distant singing of an old Irish song. “Whack for my daddy, oh, whack for my daddy…” He followed her voice, praying to every god he knew that she was alright.

She was several houses down, almost to the pier, on a high sand dune. Her figure, silhouetted against the streetlamps, stood tall and alone. Her restless hair blew in the wind, and one hand occasionally reached up to wipe the strands away from her face. The other hand held an object that flashed with the light.

It was the knife that had been missing from the kitchen for weeks, and it was pressed to her chest.

Carson ran towards her until she screamed at him to stop.

“What are you doing?” he yelled. He was close enough now to see her features. Her eyes were hooded by knit eyebrows, and her lips shook with each breath she took. Her nostrils flared and the veins in her neck tensed.  Here was his love…his love turned monster…

“It’s too late for me.” Her voice drifted down to him lazily, like moonlight through half-open blinds.

He fumbled with his phone, erasing the psychiatrist’s number and dialing 911. He said it was an emergency and named the pier.

“Just—stay, okay?” he asked his wife as he hung up.

“No!”

The sudden shriek made him jump, and the very leaves of the surrounding trees stilled.

“No, don’t you understand?”

“Make me,” he pleaded. If he could just keep her talking until the police came…

“I’m not good. No matter what happens—I can’t be good. My mind…” She sobbed, and he watched her pride break as she confessed, “I’m sick.”

The waves were calm and constant behind them. Maeve’s eyes lifted to them and a glimmer of a smile lit up her features.

“There are people who can help you—us,” Carson said slowly, taking advantage of her change in mood. “You can get better.”

“It will never get better.” Maeve’s face closed and her gaze fell back to the knife in her hands.

“I love you.” Carson’s voice broke, his desperation choking him. He couldn’t risk running to her, but every fiber of his being longed to. “This sickness…we can get through it together. But right now, you need to put down the knife.

Police sirens blared nearby. They were going to make it. Everything would be okay—

“I can’t, Carson.” She said his name as if it pained her. “I love you, but I love our baby more.” She whispered, “And this, Baby? This is death.”

She plunged the knife.

—————–

Maeve opened her eyes. She was in a beige room, fluorescent lights flickering above her. There was an IV in her hand and a machine beeped beside her. Her head felt thick, her mouth dry.

A young woman came into the room, smiling at her condescendingly.

“Feeling better, Ms. Cole?”

She unlooped a stethoscope from his neck and pressed the cold end on her sweaty chest.

“Where’s my baby?”

Because only then did she realize the large bump on her stomach was gone. And no longer could she feel the fluttering kicks of her child inside her, the constant companionship of pregnancy.

“Your baby was successfully delivered while you were unconscious, Ms. Cole,” the doctor said.

“I was in-induced?”

Hope sprang. This was what she had wanted. It had all gone to plan…except waking up. That was unexpected.

“We had to save the baby.”

“Where’s my baby?” she asked again, floundering in the bed, like it was somewhere in the blankets.

“Your daughter is in NICU.”

Daughter.

“She was two pounds and two ounces, which is healthy for a baby that premature. You’re very fortunate.”

“And my husband?”

“He hasn’t left your baby’s side.”

Maeve leaned back in the bed, stiff hospital pillows against her back. Knowing her daughter was safe was good. Yes, she might be cursed, but if Maeve wasn’t in her life, she wouldn’t be stained by her like Maeve was by her own mother.

“Can we discuss what happened?” the doctor asked.

Before, her pain had always been internal. She’d envied the violence her mother unleashed; it seemed to relieve the pressure inside her. For the first time, Maeve had experienced that relief when she had stabbed herself, and she craved it again.

“Your symptoms resemble those of schizophrenia.”

Maeve eyed her stethoscope, limp around her neck.

“We have several psychiatrists available to advise you. We’ve filled a prescription for pills I feel you’ll benefit from.” She held out a bottle helpfully.

Maeve took a deep breath to prepare herself.

————–

(Seven years later)

Carson sat down on the sand. He set his coffee and her Coke beside him.

“Saoirse,” he called.

“Dad,” she said when she walked up, her tiny figure black against the setting sun. “You said you’d try out ‘Sarah’.”

“I’m sorry, love. But you’re not Sarah.” He reached out and tugged on one of her copper curls.

She shook him off, took a sip of Coke and said, “I’m not Saoirse, either, at school. I’m Sao-Shay or Sway-shay or soy sauce.” She glared at him over the edge of the can. “I want a normal name.”

“You should be proud of your name. It’s Irish, like you. And your mom chose it,” he said, “because it means ‘freedom’.”

She grew quiet, like she always did when they discussed her mom.

“How about you show me how many seashells you can find?” he asked.

As she left, he surveyed the horizon. The ocean was different here, in Maine: greyer, colder. He wondered if Maeve would have liked it, then remembered that he, like Saoirse, couldn’t think about her. It only reminded him of that hospital room, the strangled doctor on the floor, Maeve peaceful on the bed, purple half-moons under her closed eyes. She’d overdosed on the medication the doctor had filled for her schizophrenia while he’d been down the hall, baby Saoirse’s fingers wrapped around his thumb.

Now, his daughter’s hair flew as she spun in the sand. She dropped the seashells she was holding and spun faster.

“Look, Daddy!” she cried, the inadequacies of her name forgotten. She reminded him of Maeve, the way she did that—moved so fast past things, like they had never happened. “I’m the wind!” Waves crashed behind her, splashing her legs. This seemed to inspire her, and she laughed, “I’m the ocean, Dad. I’m as free as the ocean!”

“Yes, love, you are.” Carson smiled.

 

 

BIO

Rae Monroe is a short story writer and aspiring novelist. Born in the South, she has since lived all over the world. She has taken writing courses with Stanford University’s gifted youth program, and her short story “Marie” is pending publication with Banyan Literary and Arts Magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

FEVER DREAM

by Cliff Saunders

 

Yearning for unity, I whistle at the county fair
at just the right time and the hunt begins

for a bridal kimono. I baffle gulls everywhere
with nursery rhymes. It’s what I do.

For the first time, I need to strike a swimsuit
with a biscuit because I feel alienated,

anxious as a blocked artery. Crying and scared,
I thrash like a fish among rows of crash victims.

I bounce past three sisters beating the street
with Christmas trees but see no clouds

just over the horizon. I topple a barricade
of jellyfish and slip by a little robot

ruined by a mud ball. Along the way,
I collide with echoes of immaculateness.

Such snow and ice I have never seen!
I finally feel like I am alive again, soul

of blue and still in love with the wind.
Am I some rabbit hole? Some pumpkin king?

I’m just elated that great hair blooms
in every sea. As clouds gather, I finish

covering roses with metal whistles.
I rise before the storm gives voice

to its grief and reach for the sacred:
a glass of ice clouded by blue acid.

 

 

FREEDOM WARRIOR

 

Tonight, a drum has my name on it,
but is anyone listening?

Who inherits a self that never ends?
I, too, have a real dream

infected with tuberculosis.
It hits me when I go home and try

to sleep with stones on my heart.
I see chimney swifts returning

to lighthouses full of fast learners,
full of divers gobbling up turnovers.

Time arrives to harvest its bright spots,
its earthly campus of root, root, root.

A flutist hits the high notes, thanks to me
and my generation of painful goodbyes,

of shirtless young cousins.
I’m not one to let the grass grow

on the moon, especially in the evening.
Moral blinders still in place, I lift my dog

to find his soul wrapped like a piece
of birthday cake on the catwalk.

Better to tolerate clutter than stifle
freedom, it’s as simple as that!

 

 

DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE

 

I hate my grass, and it hates me
more than a pink skirt on a witch.

How can I get a deeper shade of blue
in my lawn? I’m just totally lost.

The lizard in the house has created
a conspiracy against me.

The shuddering beast wakes me
with his big mouth while pondering

an afternoon of drift and mastery.
As the lizard lands with a thud

on the floor, I pursue a giant snail
around the edge of the porch,

but my heart is driving me nuts,
and I carve it up into toothpicks.

This is my home — I could turn
into an old putter, an abused

French mastiff, a hard autumn,
a newly opened book.

For a sweet few hours, I probe
the batting cage of the self

with a restless intellect, then
ride off into the real world

on a bicycle wrapped in mink.
Just doing my job, man.

 

 

BIO

Cliff Saunders has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Arizona. His poems have appeared recently in Serving House Journal, Five 2 One, The Big Windows Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, and Whale Road Review. He lives in Myrtle Beach, where he works as a freelance writer.

 

 

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