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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kevin Nance is a freelance photographer, arts journalist and poet in Lexington, Kentucky. His photography has been exhibited in galleries, libraries and hospitals in Lexington, Chicago, Portland, and other cities, and published in book form in “Even if: Photographs and Haiku” (University of Kentucky Arts in Healthcare, 2020). His writing and photography have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Poets & Writers Magazine and other publications. As an arts journalist, he currently contributes regularly to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Ace Magazine and UnderMain.

https://kevinnance.tumblr.com/

How to Read 100 Books in a Year

by CL Glanzing


Reading one hundred books in a year is probably not that unusual. And yet, when I mention it to friends or colleagues, they look surprised.

Why?

I could never do that.

Now you’re just showing off.

Well, contemporary wisdom (i.e. Instagram) states that your 30s are the time for unlearning all the conformity you learnt in your 20s and returning to the feral weirdo you were as a child.

If you asked me where I could be found between the ages of 4 and 10, the answer would probably be reading a book. Under my bed. Under a chair. Upside-down on the monkeybars – now there was a trick that required discipline.

As an only (lonely) child with a Montessori school background, I was used to entertaining myself. And what better adventures could I possibly experience than the ones flickering in my mind? Ghosts, dragons, elves, mysteries, children living off the land or surviving in the woods. Books were easier to operate than a VCR.

Then, I transitioned into an ordinary, American-style Elementary school with schedules and designated snack-time, and books in a completely separate wing of the building.

I discovered quickly that reading carried no social capital. No one cared that I could read. In fact, two teachers told me to slow down – and not make the other kids feel bad. My fifth grade teacher took Hatchet by Gary Paulsen out of my hands on the playground and demanded that I go engage with the other kids.

One year, I decided to read all the books nominated for a YA award. I was terrible at sports, but having a little reading goal set a thrill inside me. I was competing against myself. It was the ultimate game of solitaire. I wasn’t looking for praise or validation, but when I finished all thirty nominated books, I genuinely felt alone in accomplishment. I’m sure that people who collect belly button lint must feel the same way.

So my hobby, along with so many other childhood hobbies, dwindled. I only read books assigned by school or university courses. I would still buy books, ones I thought would look intellectual and interesting on my shelves, and never crack the spines. During one particularly stressful exam period, I just opened fiction books at random – the middle of the fucking book – and read until I fell asleep. I couldn’t commit.

In January 2020, I decided to cauterise my festering reading habits and engage in some serious exposure therapy: 20 books in 2020. Incredibly, I achieved this goal and it was due to two factors: a pandemic and moving to a country with free libraries. Like for most people, lockdown was confrontational about how I spend my time. What do you do with the hours you should be commuting, socialising – doing literally anything outside your apartment?

But the greatest gift I received was access to a public library. ‘You know these books are free, right?’ I want to shout as I grab library patrons by the lapels.

I have actually only bought one book this entire year.

It would be impossible for me to afford to purchase 100 books per year. Let alone house them, or reconcile the environmental impact. (Would I recycle them? Pass them on? Self-entomb using them as bricks?)

I have never been more aware that access to books is a privilege. Literacy itself is a privilege.

If you don’t have a library card, I strongly urge you to get one (even if you don’t think you’ll use it) just to bump up the recorded number of users. Local authorities are so quick to close libraries thinking it’s an easy way to save money. But we have a duty to keep them funded. Libraries provide free information for those who may not be able to afford access to books, audiobooks, or the internet.

Does borrowing from libraries still support authors? Absolutely. Publishers like to allege that library sales impede their profitability (which is convenient when publishers set prices and royalties). But libraries often pay two or three times the retail cost of a book, and have a demand to buy multiple copies if it’s popular. Some libraries even have a pay-per-use system where authors get royalties for every check-out. And who says you might not go and buy the book later if you really like it? Bookshops and libraries are not mutually exclusive ideas.

But enough about that.

After I managed to read 20 books in a year, of course I needed to up the ante. 40 books. Then 60 books. And then, here we are, 100 books.

The truth is that I could not have read so many books without the work of some truly extraordinary authors. Their words inspired me, delighted me, comforted me, and made me feel grateful to be alive.

My tastes may not be for everyone, but looking back over my 15 favourite reads (or re-reads) of 2023, I realise how haunted this list is.

Firstly, haunted locations – chilling places full of mysterious atmosphere, poignant memories, or inexplicable tragedies.

The Field by Robert Seethaler showed me the entire history of a small Austrian town, told by the residents of their local cemetery, with tender poetry akin to Spoon River Anthology. Then there are the desolate, apocalyptic landscapes. I starved and despaired with a man and his son in The Road by Cormac McCarthy and then I starved and despaired again with a group of forgotten women in I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Books like these make us wonder: How could this happen? And then, worse, Could this happen to me? What would I do?

When I’m in a reading slump, I reread Shirely Jackson, inarguably one of the greatest writers in history (excuse me while I blow a kiss to her framed portrait on my desk). Dark Tales is a masterclass in horror short story writing. I re-read The Haunting of Hill House, which happens to be one of my favourite books ever. And then I had the privilege of reading this book’s modern reincarnation in Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. A love letter to Jackson with all the horrifying fears that queer and trans people face on a daily basis.

Then there were the haunted spaces of transformation. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield brought me to tears with her superb writing, beautiful metaphors, and a love threatened by a supernatural transformation. Perfect for fans of The Southern Reach Trilogy or Love and Other Thought Experiments. Not all haunted spaces are inherently malevolent though, as can be seen in Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which is a truly joyful exploration of a surreal environment. Sister Maiden Monster by Lucy A Snyder made me mutter out loud, “fucking genius” several times. Zombies, octopodes, pandemics, cosmic beings, and queerness. What more could I want?

Secondly, there are haunted characters – people stalked by their past and difficult choices, unable to cope with their present surroundings. I adore these psychology-driven works, perhaps because they make the mess inside of my own head seem just as comprehensible. 

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian was un-put-downable. Wonderfully grotesque character examinations in a stellar collection of short stories. You would think she couldn’t outdo Cat Person, but she can. On a train journey, I listened to the audiobook version of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and heard the author himself narrate vignettes of intergenerational trauma, immigrant identities, and queer first love, as tears ran down my face under my N95 mask.

Mrs March by Virginia Feito has already received so much praise this year, there’s little I can add to it, except saying that it is worth the hype – like The Driver’s Seat meets Mrs. Dalloway. There’s nothing I love more than a messy, female protagonist. And I got her in spades with Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. A feral scream of female rage that I encourage all women to read – whether you have children or are childfree. I enjoyed seeing women blossoming in callous wildernesses. Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy gave me a haunted protagonist trying to save a dying species. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook is another favourite re-read, telling the complicated, resentful story of a mother and daughter surviving in a national park as part of a climate change experiment.

You may think that 15 treasured books out of 100 (15%) are low odds, and make the process hardly worth the outcome. But you would be wrong.

I wish everyone in the world were as privileged as me to be able to read 100 books. And experience 100 different lives in a year.

So if you want to twist my arm and ask me for some digestible pearls of wisdom – CL, how can I also read 100 books in a year? Here we go:

  1. Get a library card.
  2. If you want to buy a book, try to prioritise buying from independent shops or sellers that keep high streets alive and ensure that authors are paid fairly. Fun tip: treat it as a date location. Trust me on this. It’s better than a movie or a drink in a loud bar. Take your paramour or your spouse. Walk around the stacks and discuss the book-jackets. Then buy them a book.
  3. Stop reading the books you think you should be reading. I will never read Jane Austen. I have never read Dickens. The phrase “but it’s won so many awards” will never entice me. Read what actually grabs you. What punches you in the gut. There are no guilty pleasures. If you only want to read vampire smut or nonfiction botanical encyclopaedias – that is fine. Anyone that judges your reading tastes clearly has to work on themselves, and learn how to say, ‘hmm, that’s not for me, but I’m glad you enjoy it.’
  4. If you don’t know what you like: read widely. Try a new genre. You might find a new author that speaks to you. Experiment until you find “your thing”. I know so many people that thought they didn’t like reading until they found the right genre.
  5. Join a bookgroup. Even a small one. Even a virtual one. It will give you the monthly consistency of reading at least one book.
  6. There is nothing wrong with listening to audiobooksinstead of reading with your eyes.
  7. Normalise talking about books. Ask your family and friends and colleagues what they’re reading. Ask them what they like about it.
  8. Stuck in a reading rut? Re-read a book that you liked in the past. It will remind you what you’re looking for, and you might even read it with new eyes. To quote T.S. Eliot, we might “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I am grateful that I have reignited my bibliophila and rediscovered an activity that I adored as a child. I know that I will continue devouring books for the rest of my life.

And what about 2024? Will I read 100 books again?

Maybe. We’ll see how it goes. 

BIO

CL Glanzing is an international nomad, currently living in the UK. Her work has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, The Writing Disorder, The Quarterl(ly) Journal, Jet Fuel Review, Uncharted Magazine, Meniscus Literary Journal, Minds Shine Bright Anthology, and received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently pursuing her dream of living in a haunted lighthouse.







Doomsday

by Anastasia White


I was thirteen when my mother taped a stick of celery to my right calf. She had used the old duct tape we kept in a drawer by the sink, and circled it around my leg three times. She said that it’d “ward off unwanted objects,” like a meteor coming to crush us all. I’d heard about one on route to Earth, the whole world did, but it was too small to do any real damage. Even if it did, my world had already been crushed the moment she brought out the celery. It was cold and stiff from the refrigerator. I complained about it, but she insisted that it would warm up with the weather outside. Maybe it was from shock, but instead of ripping it from my leg like I should’ve, I stood in silence. I only had two thoughts running through my head. One, wouldn’t it spoil in a week? And two, I’ll never be able to show my face in public, like, ever. 

“Can’t you just tell her that this whole thing is ridiculous?” Yasmin, my best friend of two years, inquired.

I huffed in response.  

I had escaped through the backdoor as soon as my mother left the kitchen, through the backyards of Mr. Shepard and Miss Candy to avoid any onlookers passing by my street. When I arrived at Yasmin’s chipped-blue backdoor, I beat against it in a desperate frenzy. I felt like some kind of scared soul in need of sanctuary. My glorious savior, Yasmin, opened the door. Streams of sunlight cracked from behind her like she was some kind of goddess. Now, her knees were stuck to the hardwood floor of her bedroom as she poked and prodded at the celery stick. She inspected the subject of my demise like it was an autopsy, and I almost wished she had a scalpel to remove the duct tape from my leg.

“Did your dad say anything?”

“He hasn’t seen it yet, and he’d probably just agree with her anyways,” I whined.

Yasmin hummed in agreement. 

Despite living two houses down from each other, we had only become friends in our last year of elementary school. We used to stand at the same bus stop every dewy morning, by the wooden telephone pole that had more staples in it than the entire population of Larring. And though we stood right next to each other every morning, we were placed on different ends of the elementary spectrum. She wore blush and always had a pretty French braid. She liked One Direction and spent her time at recess standing in a circle, gossiping. Meanwhile, I had chipped orange nail polish and greasy hair. I spent my time thinking about My Little Pony, which was apparently not trendy anymore, and how I wanted to become a vampire. 

I didn’t blame her for keeping distance because that’s just how it was. After all, I was cautious too. I didn’t want to be friends with someone who didn’t like the same things I did because I felt like we couldn’t have a conversation. But I was also scared of her and her friend’s power. What if she were to spread some rumor about me? Granted, I didn’t have any friendships that could be broken because of a rumor. I just didn’t want to be the subject of gossip.

Her “friends” eventually spread rumors about her, that she held hands with Tyler, the weird kid, on the rug during reading time. I guess that once she had reached that point of utter betrayal, she realized they were all the same. They would all turn on each other eventually, and so, she became friends with me shortly after that. We made the “Code of Unbreaking,” which entailed that we would stay friends no matter the rumor. Unless one of us like, killed someone or did drugs, obviously.

“I mean, it’ll rot eventually, right?” Yasmin reasoned.

“That’s what I’m scared of!” My hands slapped against my face. 

The code we made helped us, but that’s the thing, despite deciding to unapologetically be ourselves, I began to care about what others would think. Middle school was a puddle of judgment, one I became deathly afraid of splashing in. 

 “I’ll have to parade around the halls with a gross, stinking, moldy vegetable! And once my terrible embarrassment has reached its peak, she’ll probably just try to strap a banana around my other leg!” 

“Why don’t you just take it off when you leave the house and then put it back on before you come home?” Yasmin proposed. 

She was a genius.

“That’s probably what it’s going to come to,” I whispered.

“Is your mom, like, okay? Mentally?”

“Ugh, I don’t even know anymore,” I said, and crashed down onto her bed face-first. 

Her comforter was a sky blue, but with my face pushed into it, all I could see was a black void. 

I didn’t think my mother was mentally ill, and in fact, her strange antics had been a constant in my life. My first ever Field Day in elementary school had solidified that. I had been standing in line with my classmates, whose parents had just come to watch us play dodgeball and soccer. We wore orange and yellow netted jerseys, the kind that probably hadn’t been washed in a decade and sat in the gym’s storage room all year round. My classmates’ parents gave them bottles of water and goldfish with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I remember feeling jealous at the fact that their parents had actually shown up. As far as I had been concerned, no one was coming to watch me run in circles. When my mother did appear, she was wearing a sunhat with a squash glued to the top. I didn’t think much of it because I was seven, but looking back on it now, it makes a lot of sense. She hadn’t worn anything like it since that day, but started leaving vegetables and fruit in strange places around the house shortly after. It only continued as I got older. 

When I was nine, I found six blueberries in her purse, she claimed would keep bugs away. I thought that, if anything, it’d just attract them to it. When I was eleven, I found sprigs of cilantro in between our couch cushions. She said that it would help our backs so that they wouldn’t be sore. And at thirteen, it was the celery and the end of the world. Her strange antics had been present since Field Day, but I just hadn’t expected her to go as far as to include me in whatever the hell she was doing. 

“Oh my god, Cara!” Yasmin shrieked. 

I pushed myself off her puffy comforter and whipped my head around. She held her phone in her hand, so close to her face that I could see the screen’s light shining on her. She didn’t say anything else, but her wide eyes made my stomach drop. She turned her phone towards me, and I wondered if my downfall was about to come even sooner than I had already imagined.

bigman_jackson815: do u wanna hang out at the mall today with me and Dylan? U can bring Cara if u want.

“Oh my god,” I whispered. 

Jackson “bigman_jackson815” Reed was Yasmin’s crush. More importantly, he was best friends with Dylan Kim, and he had just invited us to hang out with both of them. Dylan Kim was one of those boys most girls didn’t pay attention to. He existed somewhere in between the loud and quiet type, someone who’d rather let their friends take center stage. He had brown hair that covered much of his forehead, save for the tiny part that revealed a mole above his left eyebrow. He didn’t do any sports outside of school, but was a part of a group that liked basketball. During gym he would play with his friends, most of whom I couldn’t stand (except for Jackson sometimes) because they always caused disruptions in class. I had a huge crush on Dylan Kim, but there was a vegetable duct taped to my leg, and I was too scared to tell my mom I didn’t want to wear it.

“We have to go!” Yasmin said. 

“Who’s gonna drive us? My mom? I’d have to get out of the car with this stupid thing on my leg,” I pointed to the celery. 

“You could always just put sweatpants on, or something,” 

“Yasmin, it’s like, ninety degrees out,” 

“I’m just trying to throw ideas out here,” Yasmin said, and crossed her arms. 

“What about your parents? Are they still working on weekends?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

“Shit, what are we gonna do then?”

“We could always just take the bus to Larring Plaza and walk from there?”

Yasmin started typing a response to Jackson, but all I could feel was uncertainty brewing in my stomach. It didn’t boil like excitement or fear did. It felt like someone had dropped an anchor in my stomach, and it was weighing me down to port. My palms became moist with sweat, but my blood had run my entire body cold. I wondered how I could be both warm and cold at the same time. 

 “Cara, you good?” Yasmin asked.

“Uh, yeah, I think my stomach is acting up though,” I rubbed my belly. 

“You better not be trying to get out of this. We have to go!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I whined. 

“If you’re too scared to see Dylan you can always go hang out with Harrison.”

“Ugh, Yasmin, please stop.” 

Harrison was the local homeless man. He had long, curly black hair and a graying beard, downcast eyes that seemed broken, and nine teeth. He wore a puffy, tan bomber jacket in the winter, and a thin scarlet flannel during the rest of the year. He would roll up the sleeves during spring and summer, and jest at how he was lucky it had holes in it. The two items looked like they had followed him from womb to tomb. Although he wasn’t quite at his end yet, he might as well have been. I’m sure he must have felt that way at some point. 

Yasmin told me that we’d leave in an hour. I was fine with taking the bus, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was about to get myself into something truly awful. I reached down to my calf to drag the celery stick out of the duct tape. It felt like pulling teeth. I wiggled it until it was at the right angle to disconnect. Once it was removed, I tried undoing the duct tape, but it wouldn’t budge. Yasmin walked to her oak wardrobe and pulled a drawer open. She dug inside of the drawer for about fifteen seconds until she pulled out a pair of fabric scissors. She walked towards me, the thick blade glinting, and I only felt relief when she bent down and cut the duct tape from my calf. 

“There, good as new!” she exclaimed.

“You looked terrifying,” I giggled. 

With an hour to spare until my doomsday approached, I felt the feeling in my stomach only move throughout my entire body. I sat on the edge of Yasmin’s bed while I felt my leg bounce up and down. I texted my mom that I was going to the mall with Yasmin, and that I’d be back by six. I didn’t tell her how we were getting there, mostly because she’d probably freak out if I told her we were going to Larring Plaza. She’d probably throw cherries through the bus’s window at me. 

The walk to the bus stop was short, but with the beating sun, it felt like my body was melting from the inside out. Each step felt like I was getting closer and closer to my end, even though I had covered up the duct tape and Yasmin had the celery stick in her tote bag. The feeling in my stomach became a dull throb, which turned my fingers numb. Somewhere in the haze of getting on the bus I checked my phone, to which I noticed my mother hadn’t responded to my text. I told Yasmin and she said “good luck.”

Larring Plaza wasn’t an awful place. It had its ups and downs, mostly because it happened to be a three-minute walk from the mall. The downsides of Larring Plaza involved strangers from the city, most of whom were just students or office workers trying to get a ride on public transit. I didn’t see the issue of utilizing what was available to us, especially in such a dire time. Pigeons liked to stalk the area for breadcrumbs or half eaten subs sticking out of trash cans. They liked to sit on the benches when it rained, and despite people’s best efforts, always brought new friends to spread the ruckus. 

Yasmin and I made it to Larring Plaza in one piece, and we were determined to make it to the mall in the same fashion. We strutted, not too fast, not too slow, in order to reduce the amount of sweat that would mess up our hair. Pigeons soared next to us, runners swept by, and kids ran down the sidewalk with their parents in tow. The heat was awful, but with our pace we kept a singular bead of sweat from forming on our heads. When we did arrive at the stone entrance of the mall, we passed by the alleyway.

I could see Harrison sitting on a black crate, picking at some kind of fruit in his hands. An orange. He turned his head and waved to the two of us, but we snapped our heads away and sped up towards the glass doors of the mall.  

Jackson and Dylan stood by the Auntie Ann’s pretzel stand. Dylan wore a bright orange shirt that had some spaceship on it. He wore black shorts and converse, and his hair was flat against his forehead like I had always dreamed about. My heart was thumping against my chest with each step we took. 

“Hey,” Jackson said. His voice sounded deeper, likely an attempt to impress Yasmin. 

“Hi,” she said. She was impressed. 

Dylan waved to me and smiled, to which I held up a shaky hand. 

“Do you guys wanna get something to…” Jackson was cut off.

“Tomorrow draws near! We’ll witness a rapture after its destruction!” An older man yelled.

The man held a sign which read The End of Days Is Coming: Are You Prepared? He wore an American-flag bandanna around his head. His tank top was drenched in sweat, and his green cargo pants were filled to the brim with objects in each pocket. Spit spewed from his mouth at each word. He continued his ranting about a meteor passing by that was “certain” to hit us. A security guard quickly grabbed him by his shoulder and escorted him out, which caused our group to gather in a circle and discuss what we’d just witnessed. 

“That wouldn’t happen to us though, right?” Yasmin asked.

“I dunno, my dad seemed pretty freaked out by it,” Jackson said.

“Yeah, but your dad is a wacko,” Dylan added.

“Maybe, but I mean, who’s to say he’s wrong?”

“Isn’t he a flat earther?”

“Not the point dude,” Jackson said.

Jackson and Yasmin ended up wandering away from Dylan and I. My hands had been sweating the entire time. Dylan looked at me with a smile on his face and it felt like my heart was on fire. 

“So,” he said.

“So,” I said.

“I don’t think anything will happen to us.”

“Oh.” I let out a slight chuckle. “I don’t think so either.”

“So, uh, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Next week is the end of year basketball tournament at school, and I uh, was wondering if you’d come and watch me?” He reached his hand behind his neck and rubbed it. 

“Oh, god yes,” I rushed, “I mean, yeah, sure!” Heat filled my cheeks, and I avoided his gaze. He laughed to himself and thanked me, but I felt like I was the one who should’ve been thanking him.

What felt like a talon sank itself into my shoulder and turned me around. I came face to face with the steaming, red face of my mother. Smoke should’ve been puffing from her nostrils by the way she was heaving with pure rage. The anchor in my stomach returned, only this time, it kept on pulling me further and further down with no end in sight. 

“Where’s the celery?” she spat.

“Mom, what do you mean?” Operation: denial. 

“The celery, Cara, the celery!” she rushed, her hands sinking further into my shoulders.

“I don’t know! Look, can you please quiet down,” I pleaded.

My mother’s head whipped to where Yasmin was standing, next to Hot Topic. She stomped up to Yasmin, interrupting her from whatever conversation she had been having with Jackson. 

“Where is the celery? I know you have it, Yasmin,” she said.

Yasmin didn’t utter a word. She looked at Jackson with wide eyes before looking for me. She saw my bewildered expression and matched it equally. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to play damage control but my mother was a ticking time bomb that had already gone off.  Yasmin swallowed her words and opened her tote bag. She reached a hand in, and of course, pulled out the cursed celery stick. My mother ripped it from her hands immediately, and strutted back to where I was standing in shock.

“I come here to find out that you’ve taken the city bus.” She pulled a roll of duct tape from her own purse. “Where any stranger could’ve kidnapped you.” She wrapped it around my leg and stuck the celery back into the duct tape. “And that you aren’t wearing what I told you to!” I struggled against her hands putting the celery back in.

“I’m thirteen, mom! I have to learn how to do things on my own. I was with Yasmin anyways,” I tried to reason. 

“I don’t care, Cara, just because you want to do things on your own doesn’t mean you can do stupid things!” 

My vision became red.

“Oh, I’m doing stupid things? What about you, huh? You’re the one who puts random vegetables in sinks and tapes a piece of celery to her daughter.” I pointed at her. “You’re the one who’s doing stupid things! I don’t question anything you do but the moment I want to be on my own, you have to go and ruin it with this stupid shit.” I seethed.

My mother stopped fiddling with the celery. I looked at Yasmin and Jackson, who’d been joined by Dylan at this point, and felt my anger wither. They all had embarrassment written on their faces. I didn’t have to look twice to know that I’d be dead at school, and that Dylan probably wouldn’t want me at the tournament anymore. I felt the corners of my eyes become wet with tears, and I looked at my mother crouched on the ground. Her eyebrows furrowed together in concern.

“Cara, honey, wait!” she called.

I ran. Hot Topic was littered with pictures of celery, children ran with ants on a log, Auntie Anne’s only sold celery, and my mother’s ramblings of what would ward off unwanted guests terrorized me. I huffed and puffed and ran backwards, forwards, anywhere that would get me out of this situation. Dylan probably thought I was a weirdo, just like I had been in elementary school, like I was destined to be the celery girl. The stupid, weird, end of world celery girl. 

I pushed through the mall’s glass doors. Eyes stared at me from every direction, at the celery on my leg. They dissected my appearance despite my best efforts to keep them at bay. I ran towards the brick wall on the left side of the opening to the mall. There was an alleyway most people avoided because it was home to a certain individual, but at this point I felt that nothing could harm me more than what had already been done. I slouched on the cement with hot tears falling into my palms. Everything was crumbling and it was because I had let it. 

“Miss?” a strained voice called.

I turned my head sharply to see Harrison, standing in his torn scarlet flannel.

“Are you alright?” He looked unsure.

“No,” I choked. 

He looked over my slumped figure. His eyes moved downwards, probably to look at the celery stick. If everyone did, why wouldn’t he? He didn’t say anything else, and instead of walking away, he sat down across from me. He leaned his back against the brick wall.

“Do you think the world is going to end?” 

“It already has,” I whined.

“Is that why you got that thing on your leg?” 

“Do you want it?” I offered.

“No, no,” he started, “make sure you keep that celery real close to ya.” He wiped his nose with his sleeve. “It’ll be gone before you know it.”

I looked at Harrison, perplexed, but his face remained stone-cold. I had no clue what he meant. If anything, it had caused more harm than good, and I wanted it far away from me. But despite my best efforts, it had returned to its place on my leg. Maybe he’d meant that it wasn’t the end of the world or that I needed to appreciate my mother. But he didn’t know me, so he didn’t know the situation. I started to wish that I had dragged Yasmin with me. Harrison stood up, and without a word, walked onto the busy sidewalk. He took one glance at me, at the celery, and headed towards Larring Plaza. 

I looked up at the sky and my hand moved towards the celery. It was warm now.



BIO

Anastasia White is an emerging writer who lives in Rumford, Rhode Island, with her dog-like cat, Bertie. She will be graduating from Salem State University in the spring with a bachelors in English. She is planning on attending graduate school in order to become a licensed mental health counselor. Other than writing about meteors crashing into the Earth, Anastasia spends her time analyzing film and playing video games. This is her first time being published. 






STORIES

by Elizabeth Morse


They make up stories for each other like children,
drinking tea and leaning together over the couch.
Their laughter crackles through the rooms.
Heat fills the midnight windows while each tale
bounces and glows. Even the electrical storm
beginning outside cannot shock them apart.


ESCAPE


It’s hazardous outside.
I’m double locking the door to protect you.
I’m your mother and I want to keep you safe.
You’re escaping? They’ll eat you alive.
Don’t you know they all have knives, guns?
They stick up banks and pawn shops.
Supermarkets, too. Watch yourself.

Why are you running away?
You never had much common sense,
never return books on time to the library
Do you think you can just leave?
Your father and I are so concerned.
You can’t just live on the sidewalk
or under the trees in the park.
You’d be reckless enough
to eat a pigeon.


IN THE DEPTHS

In memory of Zach Harris


My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday
in the highlands of West Virginia. He dreamed of the Milky Way,
that walkway of stars. Biscuits and gravy for breakfast,
then work. That afternoon, he fell into a lost mine,
cavern of nightmares, stepping on the paper-thin edge of sky.
Accident in the coal fields, the news reports announced.

Every song about the coal mines is a dark ballad,
a room without windows. The mines take and don’t return.
So many think they are secure from the depths of earth.
My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday,
expecting his days to be the same, counting on it in ways he couldn’t,
dreams reaching upward, away from the deep that killed him.

 

BIO

Elizabeth Morse values the quirky, the darkly humorous. She is hard-wired to be a night-owl and writes exclusively after 9 PM. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as Ginosko, Survision, and Kestrel. Her poetry chapbook, “The Color Between the Hours,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in late 2023. She was a finalist in the Blue Light Press full-length poetry collection contest and has her MFA from Brooklyn College. A job in information technology supports her writing.









Self Portrait by the Thing Within

by Clayton McMillan

Metamorphosis Phase II, Oil on Canvas 2023, Katja McMillan


There were gasps and even some laughter at the unveiling of Paula’s painting, and although she stood within arm’s length, she could barely make out the details of what she had created. This response was not what she had planned. She felt a sense of drowning.

Paula had had a following in the avant-garde art scene in Hamburg in the early 1920s, particularly among the expressionists. It was the Weimar Republic, Germany’s fledgling experiment with democracy following the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. At the exhibitions of the artist group the Hamburg Secession, of which she was a member, patrons  surrounded her in the back room where her work was on display, and marveled at her excellent German as she answered questions about growing up on the vast expanses of the Kansas prairie.

“What are the Indians like there?” someone asked.

“They are long gone,” she replied.

“Where did you learn to speak German?”

“I’ve lived in Germany for five years. What do you think of my paintings?” she prompted.

Ignoring her question they replied, “Do the buffalo herds really number in the thousands?”

“They are long gone.”

“Do you have any buffalo paintings?”

When Paula had first arrived in Germany at age 23, she made friends with a group of young Germans also trying to break into the art scene. In the art museum, the Hamburg Kunsthalle, she marveled at the broad post-impressionistic brushstrokes in Pierre Bonnard’s Evening at the Uhlenhorster Ferry House. Hamburg was a wealthy port city, with beautiful tree lined boulevards and two sweeping lakes, the Innenalster and  Außenalster, whose shores were lined with the villas of the wealthy and with foreign consulates. When she learned that Bonnard’s painting depicted an actual place in Hamburg, she asked her friends to take her there. 

On the day of the outing, the water was crowded with sailboats, as in the painting. A surprise gust of wind caused several boats to capsize, throwing Paula headfirst into the water. Disoriented, she panicked, she was a poor swimmer, and the weight of her wet clothing pulled her down. In the opaque murkiness there were vague shapes and then the light of the surface above. She swam towards it: a chaos of kicking limbs and swirling ores and masts and sails and boat hulls, and many other boaters in the water. The men, being the stronger, pushed past her. Paula was kicked in the face and several times she was pushed down by the feet of those above her as if her head were a steppingstone. It was her nature to let others go first and later she realized that was a mistake. Each time she rose she was pushed down. Finally, when she felt she would surely drown she broke to the surface gasping ferociously for air.  It was a traumatic incident which led to a suffocating darkness in her paintings. She vowed never again. She replayed it in her mind, but the other way around, with her rising quickly to the surface by stepping on the others, and this reversal helped the trauma subside. By the time she joined the Hamburg Secession she had put it behind her and adopted a brighter style consistent with the other artists.

Rumors circulated that Otto Fischer Trachau, the expressionist painter, interior architect, and founding member of the Hamburg Secession had taken her as his lover. They were seen together often, in the bars and restaurants of the Reeperbahn or strolling through Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, the luxurious and extensive park-like zoo in Hamburg.  He was 15 years her senior.

Paula was fond of animals as artistic subject matter.  Strolling through the gardens of Hagenbeck’s, beneath the lush weeping willows that drooped over the edges of the two expansive ponds shading a waddle of sleeping ducks, past the vivid, abundant flower beds, they would stop at one animal pen or another.  Trachau would school her in the appropriate German, “ein Rudel Löwen” for “a pride of lions” or, he would explain animal behaviors in the way that smart men talk to women.

“Pelicans fly several meters above the surface,” he once tutored her. “When they see a school of fish, they fold their wings and drop like a stone into the water, filling the pouch beneath their beaks. They consume as many as they can at once, swallowing them whole. It’s gluttony.”

“Fascinating,” said Paula.  The subtle sarcasm in her voice went unnoticed.

Trachau continued, “Because of their excellent eyesight they thrive, but ironically, they go permanently blind at the constant impact. Without eyesight they cannot see the fish and they starve to death.”

Paula did nothing to quell the rumors, which went on for years, of the affair. The art world was competitive and being seen with Trachau led enthusiasts to assume her work must be good. She was getting noticed. One of her paintings was featured in a local art rag.  She was referred to as the “female Trachau,” which made her seethe. She had developed her own unique style and anybody with training could see that it was not a copy of Trachau’s. But she simply nodded politely and observed, “He’s a great artist. I take that as a compliment.”

At the exhibitions and in smaller gallery shows Paula started wearing a tuxedo and smoking a cigar. In her youth she was stunning. The dark fabric of the jacket and the silky black bowtie accentuated her cascading blond hair, which she held back with a glittering headband. The red lipstick she wore encircled the cigar like a tight-fitting ring as she inhaled, and emphasized the shape of the smoke rings she could blow with perfection, one after another, until she smacked her lips shut again, slipping into a coy grin. She was featured in the mainstream daily, the Hamburger Anzeiger and its weekly supplement, Das Reich der Frau (The Realm of Woman) as simply “the American”. The appropriateness of her attire, if not her art, was discussed at length.  It had not been easy to break in and it was not easy to stay in, as a foreigner, and especially as a woman. Each time she rose she was pushed down. She learned to run with the boys. She was often in the bars in the red-light district smoking and drinking with the male artists till the wee hours of the morning. She carried a palm sized derringer in her purse for when she had to walk home after the last tram.

In 1929 Paula was offered a position as a lecturer at the St. Georg Kunstakademie, an unusual honor for a woman.  She had just turned 32. Even though she had lived in Germany for years, she had not lost her American self-assurance that was foreign to staid German culture. She moved through space with a sense that she owned it and was forgiven for regular social transgressions because she was American and thus wouldn’t know any better.  Young artists, especially the few that were women, were drawn to her cocky but seemingly kind approach to everything, whether it be dealing with the director, with the male artists, or with her own painting.

Her students embraced her brashness in their own art and Paula took satisfaction in the promise they showed, seeing herself as their source of inspiration.

One young woman by the name of Karla Offenbach demonstrated true glimmers of brilliance in her still unpolished grasp of painting. She had grown up on a farm on the remote North Friesian Island of Föhr and thus had a natural eye for animals. She had never been in a big city before and walked around Hamburg with eyes as wide as a cow’s. Paula found herself attracted to Karla, to her youth, to her beauty, as if she were looking in the mirror of just a few years earlier. Charmed by the innocent way Karla seemed to adore her, she took the girl under her wing, nurturing her in the theories of the avant-garde and the new way of visual representation.

As Karla blossomed Paula began to bring her along to some exhibitions and took her to some of the tamer Cafés in St. Pauli popular among the young bohemians. They were mostly artists, anarchists, and students, nursing a single cup of coffee and a chain of jealously guarded cigarettes over an endless afternoon of vigorous discussion in politics, philosophy, and the arts.  Karla thrived.

Eventually Paula introduced Karla to Otto Fischer Trachau. Even before Karla’s slender porcelain fingers slid from his handshake Paula could see in his eyes that she had made a terrible mistake. He looked at Karla the same way he had looked at Paula just a few years earlier, like the tigers at Hagenbeck’s Tierpark looked at the humans outside of the bars. Paula thought she saw Otto lick his lips.

“I’d like to see some of your work,” he effused.

Paula was powerless to intervene. Soon it was Karla who was rumored to be Trachau’s lover, and Paula found herself alone at Hagenbeck’s, sketching in solitude the pelicans in their watery pen. She thought of the boating accident many years earlier. She would not be pushed down to drown by the feet of others, not now. 

Karla, oblivious to Paula’s bitterness and still grateful for her mentorship, turned to her for a letter of recommendation for funding from the academy. Paula’s letter was, of course, confidential. That, along with some support from Trachau and her obvious potential as an artist should have guaranteed her the award, but somehow, she fell short. The economic situation in Germany in the early 30s had grown increasingly dire, and without the funding Karla was forced to quit her studies and return to Föhr.  Paula accompanied her to the train station, a most generous thing for a faculty member to do for a student. It was only later that Karla began to wonder exactly what Paula had written in her recommendation.

Watching Karla’s train vanish slowly down the tracks, Paula noticed for the first time that objects in the distance didn’t look as crisp as they had before. It was as if the drizzle that sometimes filled the city when the dark clouds blew in from the North Sea had moved in permanently, even when the sun was shining. She rubbed her eyes and it seemed to get better.

There were other up and coming artists whom Paula helped in one way or another, but they all seemed to encounter some unsurmountable obstacle on the verge of success.

One of these, a young anarchist by the name of Friedrich, was seen together with Paula often enough that new rumors of an affair began to circulate, this time with Paula in the role of Trachau. Paula had just turned 36. “Freddy” as she called him, loved going to Hagenbeck’s with her to look at the animals. She would take him out for a glass of wine afterwards, discussing which ones he should try to paint. At first his depictions were naïve. But over time, with Paula tutoring him in the behaviors and movements of his subjects he began to capture them in quite clever and unique ways. One of his paintings was featured in the student art journal, which praised him for his challenge of the boundaries of expressionism, particularly with respect to animals.

Freddy was invited to show his paintings at an exhibition. Paula’s face flushed when she discovered at the opening that his paintings hung closer to the main entrance than her own. Standing barefoot in front of his paintings, surrounded by a dozen enthusiastic young women, he wore nothing but the pants of a tuxedo, his muscular naked torso framed only with a black bowtie, a well-dressed Adonis. He was chattering away and barely noticed Paula as she stood to the side, fists clenched. She rushed out of the building.

“No one will come to my paintings in the back, anyway,” she thought with rage. Overcome by a sense of betrayal, she felt as if she were being held underwater, unable to breathe.

Despite the success of Freddy’s debut, he was not invited to exhibit again. Paula was on the board. Discouraged, he turned to her for advice. After several consultations they agreed that his appearance had garnered so much attention not because of his art, but because of the way he was dressed, or more precisely, not dressed. The National Socialists, the Nazis, had become increasingly active in Hamburg and stunts such as his were becoming risky. For years the party had recruited disgruntled unemployed men to wear brown shirts and roam the streets in groups, beating with impunity anyone whose face they didn’t like. The Weimar Republic was falling apart.

Freddy no longer went to Hagenbeck’s Tierpark with Paula. He was hired to design propaganda posters for the Nazis, filled with heroic Aryan characters in the traditional bourgeois, Wagnerian style. A few months later, the school director saw Freddy walking down the Mönckebergstraße, the main shopping boulevard, with a group of Brownshirts. He was dressed as one of them. Freddy was quietly asked to withdraw from the academy. He acquiesced, but the look he gave Paula as he departed warned of reprisal.

“You think you have helped so many young artists,” he said angrily. “You think you are a great artist yourself. But why, despite your efforts, do so many of them fail just when they are on the verge of success?”

Paula was enraged. “What are you talking about,” she cried. “You didn’t need my help to become a loser.”

“No,” he retorted. “You destroyed me, and you destroyed the others. You scooped us all up and swallowed us whole.”

In the mirror Paula saw a middle-aged woman. She wondered if Freddy was right, if she was lying to herself, if she fancied herself a great mentor when in reality, she was a monster sucking up and consuming anyone who threatened to overtake her. She looked through her portfolio and found it to be much less compelling than she had perceived just a few years earlier. She had learned to accept brutal German honesty in the manner it was meant. But now it was becoming harder for her to overcome her increasingly vulnerable American sensibilities.

Her painting was going badly. The streets seemed to be more and more dangerous with roving bands of Brownshirts and thugs. The general populace was blind to what was happening. With alarm she observed that her own eyesight was increasingly failing; everything looked thickly opaque. The optometrist  concluded it could not be corrected with glasses. She put off going to the doctor for fear of what he’d say.

It was 1933 when the board of the Hamburg Succession announced its final exhibition. Hitler had just been legally elected Chancellor of Germany and they could see the writing on the wall. The free-thinking avant-garde would soon be over. Paula decided to submit just one painting. She wanted to try something new; perhaps the end of the avant-garde would also be the end of her as an artist. But she knew whatever she created would be accepted by virtue of her reputation, whether fading or not.

By the time she was preparing the new canvas, her eyesight had deteriorated to a fog. She could see nothing but a blend of colored shapes in the distance. Only by holding the page right up to her eyes could she read the fuzzy newspaper headlines. Somehow, though, she was inspired by the dire times, by the sense of impending doom, by the formerly bold anarchists slipping inconspicuously around the corner at the sight of the Brownshirts and by the once vocal political philosophy students who were suddenly silent. She worked feverishly all day and well into the night until the vapors from the oil paint just a few centimeters from her nose resulted in a fierce and piercing headache. Forced to retire to her bedroom, she flung the window wide open to the winter night air, a raining coldness punctuated by the clanging of the bell and the screeching of the tram in the dark street below. She worked on it for days on end. There was a clear picture in her mind of what she was painting, but she could not be sure of what was coming out onto the canvas. She could move close enough to judge with conviction what one small patch or another contained, but how all these little patches came together into a coherent image, if they came together, she did not know.

Most of the paintings in the final exhibition hung without ceremony on the wall on opening night. Paula conceived the idea of having an official unveiling of her work, hoping to generate some mystique and excitement. She looked forward to it with great anticipation. A mere six people showed up, long-term diehard followers. Hans, Paula’s new protégé stood by her side, a handsome twenty-year-old pastry apprentice with tousled hair whose paintings she had discovered hanging in the bakery around the corner.  At the unveiling there was a round of gasps. Someone laughed with amusement or perhaps disgust. This was nothing like what Paula had painted before.  The commotion garnered the attention of exhibition goers nearby, and soon a crowd was assembling. Paula gazed out nervously at the vague shapes of faces, trying to make out through the chatter what people were saying, whether it was good or bad.

“What’s it titled?” someone called out.

Selbstbildnis,” replied Paula, “Self Portrait.”

More laughter. The back room allocated to Paula was getting crowded.

“Hans,” Paula said in a quavering voice, “why are they laughing? The light is so poor… my eyes are so tired… what is it that they see?”  

Hans described it to her as best a nervous baker’s assistant could. Rough brushstrokes and vivid reds and greens. A middle-aged woman in a brightly lit room, sitting casually on a red Biedermeier sofa as if she were waiting for her friend to serve tea. One can imagine a well-dressed middle-class Frau, perhaps a merchant’s wife. Except that she is naked. She leans slightly on her right hand, which is placed a bit out from her naked thigh. Her bare feet are crossed, one on top of the other, resting on a red oriental carpet, creating a sense of ease. To her left next to the sofa is an arrangement of red hibiscus flowers. Maybe it’s not a room after all, maybe it’s outside… or maybe a blend of inside and outside; she appears to be beneath tree branches dripping with olive green Spanish moss. A leaf from the tree hangs over the back of the sofa. The moss frames the monster head.

“Monster head?” Paula asked with surprise. She was suddenly filled with trepidation. Had the little patches she could see if she placed her nose close to the canvas coalesced into something she had not intended? Had she slipped into delirium after breathing paint fumes for several days on end? Was it something horrible?

“Well, yes,” said Hans, “you know, you painted it… the woman’s neck, it’s in feathers, it twists and turns into that of a bird’s and then it becomes a huge pelican head that fills a third of the painting. It’s a monster, half woman half pelican.”

Paula’s hand covered her mouth in horror. Trachau’s lecture years earlier came back to her. “They consume as many as they can at once, swallowing them whole. Their gluttony makes them blind.” There was Karla, and Freddy, and others. She took Hans’ hand for support, and he didn’t pull away.

Diagnosed with cataracts, Paula’s blindness was easily resolved with surgery a few months later. When she saw her painting for the first time, when she saw it in its entirety in a bright light, she wept for days in despair. Then the epiphany. She had been blind long before her eyesight went. She had been lying to herself and to the world, just as Freddy had claimed. A blind painter or a deaf composer can only create from their inner self, shedding the outside veneer that the world, and they themselves may see in the mirror. The Self Portrait was the unconscious reflection of the real Paula, executed by a connection between her mind and her fingers that blindness had allowed to circumvent the ego.

“It’s the truest thing I have ever painted,” she told Hans. She had vowed quietly to herself not to consume him, and she would keep the vow.

It was in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, hanging in the same room as Bonnard’s Uhlenhorster Ferry House.  It was a special exhibition celebrating art of the 20th century, particularly the twelve years of the Hamburg Secession, which was shut down by the Nazis shortly after the opening of the final exhibition because the group refused to expel its Jewish members. Trachau, whom Paula had not talked to in years, saved himself by retreating to the innocuous art form for which he had once been famous, interior design.

Four years passed. The Nazis confiscated modern works from art museums all over Germany and displayed them at the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, including works by Ernst Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh.

The Degenerate Art Exhibition was a Nazi propaganda device to be contrasted with the nearby Great German Art Exhibition, which displayed heroic Aryan scenes by Nazi-approved artists; the bad vs. the good. The Degenerate Art Exhibition was a huge success, receiving over 2 million visitors in just four months, many times the number who went to the Nazi’s Great German Art Exhibition. As with so many autocratic societies, degenerate art was great art. The success of The Degenerate Art Exhibition was an enormous embarrassment for the Nazis.

Paula’s Self Portrait was among them. It hung prominently in the section of the exhibition labeled with the banner, They Insult German Womanhood. As with many of the paintings, it dangled from the end of a rope as if a warning of  execution for the artist. Hundreds of thousands viewed it. She was warned by the US Consulate in Hamburg to flee Germany before it was too late.

On the crossing to New York Paula was terrified by the drop from the deck to the sea 60 feet below.  At first, she had to edge herself slowly to the railing, which she held fast with both hands as she looked far off at the retreating German coastline, averting her eyes from the water beneath. She refused to be submerged by fear, however, and within a few days was gazing hour after hour over the side. The swirling tempest of translucent wine dark sea was mesmerizing, cascading along the hull as the bow broke through the waves. She was overcome by a great sense of joy and optimism for the future.

“To be labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis,” Paula predicted with satisfaction upon arriving in the US, “will one day be judged the greatest of honors.”



BIO

Clayton McMillan lives with his wife and two daughters in Boulder, Colorado. He spent four years in Germany and taught at the University of Hamburg. More recently he has published several short stories in the Syndic Literary Journal.







Old Man Winter

By Annette Gagliardi


Snow whiffs from branches—
no thaw in sight

the white slick of January
cold enough for unseen flames

heats the blistering cold,         leaping
across space like Jack Frost

etching my window
silent scratches, making light years

string time — broken chrysalis
and webbed wonder

a caravan of long-lashed camels searching
for warmth like finding water

in the blazing desert
thread the days with a meager

wisp of transformation
smell the sweat of winter’s chill

sizeable piles of relaxing snow
let old man winter die a dawdling death



Partial Eclipse


Grey-brown creeps
                        over the horizon
on its way to sundown,
                        shading the bridges,

ridges of trees and hills and buildings
            as it gathers the troops of night

for a full-scale
            assault on the lightness
of midday, offering another brand
            of illumination

that supplies shadow by the bucketful,
            adds nuances to all the silhouettes

not seen in the brightness
                        and chases
the clarity of day away.
            “I surrender.” I say

in my most
            mysterious voice.
Like a lover, shadows oblige my request
            embracing daylight     and me with it.

We are the penumbra
            cocooned
 in the gathered gloaming.




BIO



Annette Gagliardi looks at the dimly, tinted shadows and morphed illusions that becomes life and finds illumination. She sees what others do not and grasps the fruit hiding there, then squeezes all the juice that life has to offer and serves it up as poetry – or jelly, depending on the day. Her work has appeared in many literary journals in Canada, England and the USA. Gagliardi’s first poetry collection, titled: A Short Supply of Viability, and her first historical fiction, titled: Ponderosa Pines: Days of the Deadwood Forest Fire were both published in 2022. Visit her author website at: https://annette-gagliardi.com