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Jupiter

by Jen Knox

Every dream a slip of a thing,
a sojourn into the ordinary, coveted past
until a deep quarantine sleep
pulled Jupiter toward our small Midwestern town.
Every step heavy, I trudged toward it.
The planetary pull, cartoon-like.
Its gravitational force
targeting a particular part of me,
leaving the rest enchanted but confused.
I rolled over to check the news, the charts,
the trends, and I stared out of my window.
As so many of us have. At 5 a.m., I saw Jupiter,
a slip of a thing with Saturn in its gaze.
Surrounded by stars in a sharp, dark morning sky.
And I felt hope.


Wait


The line for irregular, black shirts takes ten minutes. Forty-plus adults take single steps as stomachs hum. Necklines hang like hula-hoops.

At lunch, there is only a half-hour. A half-dozen ham and cheese. Now there’s just cheese. Thirty-plus adults with lettuce and cheese. Blankets are fibrous and prick the skin.

Warm lettuce means peeling wilted green bits off the tongue or swallowing slimy leaves whole. The tinfoil makes a perfect, silver ball. Silver balls are thrown, kicked.

Orange cheese and loose-necked shirts with twelve minutes to spare. Silver balls between blankets are reminiscent of Christmas tree bulbs.

For bus tickets, hands remain in pockets, eyes toward the street. There’s something slippery about mobility, so many remain. Those who stand take single steps. Patient steps.

Twenty-plus remain. Activities remain. Dance last week, art next, poetry this. A young teacher looks as though she is speaking to blind kittens. She closes her eyes and recites poems. She opens them and offers a writing prompt as pens and paper are handed out.

There is nothing to put the paper on. The concrete works best. The pen navigates tiny hills on the page. First come colors: purple, green, silver, and orange. The pen suggests the salty taste of ham that almost graced the tongue that was too many feet from the front of a line.

The pen moves beyond this. The pen moves much faster than the feet.


Imprint


Our shadows introduce themselves
& regulars grumble when a top set of teeth bared,
even though we all know to grab the back legs.

The dogs run in transient packs, as squirrels rustle tree leaves
& fall moves downward on a slow-moving swing.

We kiss the air when it’s time to go.

The world should know we were here, too, but our scents hug tight
& we are left to share words and walkways, to scratch the same furry heads.

The imprint of my shoe finds yours.


Canvas


I was dulled longer than you, so when I lost my sight, I wasn’t shaken.
Glass seals well, blurs lines and clarifies sight, so I wore
a glass dress & glass shoes, until you arrived with science and a string.

I felt the etching of sharp lines and gentle curves, the quiet power
beneath the watery surface & had reason to shatter beneath you. You,
with your collage of circumstance. A papier-mâché from elementary foretold.
A careful collection of porcelain shattered & glued created a map.

You described it all. You told me how, but I still struggled until I realized
the texture had to be rough to be felt, to be interpreted as anything at all.
My fleshy thumbs drag against surfaces, forever searching for the right word.


BIO

Jen Knox is an Ohio-born writer, meditation instructor, and the founder of Unleash Creatives. She is the author of Resolutions: A Family in Stories (AUX Media), After the Gazebo (Rain Mountain Press), which was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award, and The Glass City (Prize Americana for Prose winner). Her short work recently won the Flash Fiction Magazine‘s Editor’s Choice Award for 2020 and other writing can be found in The Best Small Fictions (edited by Amy Hempel), The Adirondack Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Little Fictions, Literary Orphans, Lunch Ticket, Poor Claudia, Room Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Jen is currently working on her first novel.
Jenknox.com

Nothing Better to Do

by Tom Eubanks


He comes by every Saturday—my only day off—to watch me work in the garage. Sarah, my wife of 30 years, who still works as a nurse downtown, doesn’t like him. I think he’s figured that out, because he only comes by on Saturdays when she works a day shift and I’m home alone.

His name’s Jerry, he’s retired, and he always has news. News from the neighborhood. Who’s who, who’s doing what, what’s going on, all those private stories you find so interesting but you wish, ultimately, you didn’t know, because the next time you see that neighbor, all that’s careening around in your brain is what Jerry told you.

Lately, Jerry’s especially interested in the new couple who moved in at the end of the cul-de-sac. He knows their names—Tim and Jody. He’s very, very suspicious of them, because they’re from New Mexico, and he firmly believes that people living in New Mexico are nut-jobs—as he puts it—by telling a story of how one time he passed through Albuquerque, stopped at a Denny’s, ate his breakfast and how the waitress insisted that the meal was on the house, and then after he thanked her—still having no idea why she was letting him go without paying—she whispered, “And thank you for not hurting us.” He might have a point—if the story’s true. At the time, he asserted in that “just-so-you-know” voice that Albuquerque is “right next to Area 51,” except it isn’t. When I pointed out to him that it’s 700 miles away, he snorted and said, “Yeah, well, you oughta know that’s close enough.”

Tim and Jody have lived in our neighborhood just under a month and Jerry’s been on a binge to get to the bottom of something. I don’t have any idea what that something is, but he’s trained his retired brain with laser precision to find out about our new neighbors living three doors down from him, who don’t wave at anyone and don’t have children or dogs.

Jerry says, “I got news about neighbor Tim.”

“What?”

“He’s a member of a club.”

“A club.”

Jerry nods. “He’s a member of a club—some club, I don’t know what club, but he’s a member.”

I’m fixing the latch on my back porch screen door and distractedly say, “All right.”

“They went somewhere. And then they came back—today.”

“Who did?”

“The club.”

“Be more specific.”

“They came back on a good plane.”

That confuses me. “A good plane?”

Jerry says, “Yeah, a good plane. Not a bad one, a good one.”

“What does that mean exactly?” I say, wiping WD-40 off my fingers.

“Yeah, what does it mean? Ya know, maybe a good plane’s one that don’t never crash.”

“Not crashing’s good.”

He goes on: “Maybe they got more leg room.”

“That’s a good plane that’s got leg room,” I say to get him closer to the point of the story.

But he’s got another idea: “Maybe a good plane’s just faster.”

“Possibly.”

“Maybe a good plane shows up and takes off on time.”

“Definitely a good plane,” I say, leaning the screen door against the workbench. “But I don’t see where this is going.”

“It’s what he said,” Jerry says.

“And what exactly did he say?”

“He said, ‘My club came back on a good plane today.’”

“My club came back on a good plane today. Hm.”

“There’s somethin’ goin’ on there, some work-thing, I can feel it—and you know how I get these feelings—like, really strong tuition, know what I mean?”

I know he means “intuition,” but I’ve learned not to bother saying anything. And I have no idea how he’s come to a conclusion there’s anything going on, but you have to let Jerry get around to telling his story to understand the point sometimes, so I ask, “Okay, so what’s he do? What kind of work?”

“Get this: he’s what you call a day trader—he works the stock market.”

“What makes you think he works the stock market?”

“‘Cause he don’t go to work, and he reads The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily and Traders Magazine. And I called my sister-in-law, who’s a receptionist for an accountant, told her what he reads, and she says he’s a day trader and she should know.”

“How do you know what he reads?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says dismissively, “he just does, that’s all you have to know.”

I dismiss the thought that Jerry’s committing felonies by getting into their mailbox and tell him, “Okay, well, that doesn’t make sense then. Is there a club for day traders? I don’t know. So, what does he do besides work?”

“Rides a bike, works out.”

Knowing what he reads and how he spends his free time is way more than Jerry should know about Tim. “How do you know that, Jerry?”

“I pay attention, Mike. And I followed him. He rides his bike along the greenway every morning and he works out three afternoons a week over at Body Works across from Food City. I’m thinkin’, maybe it’s a bike club.”

“Bike clubs don’t fly on planes—good or bad—they ride bikes.”

Jerry shrugs. “Okay, what about a golf thing?”

“He plays golf?”

“Yep. Seen him play today.”

“You followed him?”

“Sort of,” Jerry says, trying to be mysterious about it. I refuse to entertain his phony mysteriousness, so he tells me, “I was comin’ out of the senior center after gettin’ my toenails clipped—they have free pedicures on Wednesdays—and I seen him drive by—probably after comin’ back on that good plane—and I was goin’ in about the same direction. Ended up at Brody Springs Golf Club and played eighteen holes with three other guys. He’s been here all of a month and already he has three golf buddies? Right? See what I’m sayin’? And they played for money. And he won.”

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“I keep binoculars in the trunk.”

“You waited around for four hours while he played golf? I don’t think you should spy on your neighbors, Jerry.”

“Well, Michael, it’s not up to you to decide what I do with my day, is it? You like workin’ your ass off six days a week. So be it. Sarah likes workin’ twelve-hour shifts, waitin’ on sick people all day. So be it. Me? I’m retired, Mike. It’s a free country. Tim’s out in public. It’s not like I’m peekin’ in his window, for cryin’ out loud.”

I’ve learned not to take anything Jerry says too personal. I take a couple of breaths and ask, “So when they finished, you were close enough to tell he won the match?”

“Yep. He won a hundred-fifty bucks. Each guy paid him fifty.”

“You saw this with binoculars?”

“No. I was sittin’ at the next table in the clubhouse.”

I carry the screen door outside to the back porch doorway and Jerry follows me. I begin to screw the hinges into the doorframe and realize something. “You’re sitting at the next table and he doesn’t recognize you?” He gets uncomfortable, sniffing and looking off into the woods. “Jerry. He didn’t recognize you sitting at the next table?”

“No, Mike, he didn’t.” I stare back at him, waiting for the whole truth. He huffs and says, “If you have to know, I was . . . wearin’ a mask.”

“A mask. What kind of mask?”

“Covid?”

“Like, a cloth mask?”

“Yep. One of those baby blue throw-aways.”

“But no one wears masks around here anymore, Jerry.”

“I keep it in my car.”

“For what?”

“Occasions like this.”

“What occasion? I’m not getting this.”

He rolls his eyes. “Oh, Michael, Michael. When I need a disguise.”

“What? You’re disguised?”

“As a Californian, yep.” He pulls on the front of his T shirt, which is a print of a surfboard superimposed over a sandy beach that reads, California Dreamin’. “Part of my disguise.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“Some store, I don’t know. I keep it in the trunk with the binoculars.”

“So you’re sitting at the next table pretending to be a—what? California tourist?”

Jerry says proudly, “Yep. Drinkin’ a beer and getting video with my iPhone.”

“Sounds conspicuous.”

“Not at all. Turn it on, stick it in my shirt pocket so the camera peeks out. Under the radar.”

“So you got video?”

Jerry smiles conspiratorially, takes out his phone, scrolls and finds the video. He presses

“play” and hands it to me. I watch it. And there’s Tim, sitting in the clubhouse with three other golfers, having a sandwich and a beer, when he gets a call. And after Tim says “hello,” he tells the caller something—it’s difficult to hear what, because the audio is poor. But then he turns slightly in his seat and the sound is clearer. Tim says, “Today, my club came back on a good plane.”

“There it is,” Jerry says. “He’s a member of a club and just got back from somewhere on a plane—and the plane was—”

I stab my hand with the screwdriver. From the shock of—I don’t know—amazement? Tim was talking about swinging his golf club. Checking the extent of the wound, I say, “The plane of his golf swing, Jerry, is the angle of the circular motion of the swing!”

“Oh, wow, Mike, you’re bleedin’!” he says, ignoring that I’ve just solved the riddle for him. “Lemme get you a Band-Aid!”

“That’s all right, Jerry,” I say, tossing the screwdriver on a chair and squeezing my hand. The wound is bleeding badly and a sharp pain is coming on strong. Jerry’s already inside my house. I follow him, calling out, “What’re you doing? I can get my own Band-Aid, Jerry!”

I head for the guest bathroom. Jerry’s in my kitchen. I hear him open a drawer. I open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. No Band-Aids.

Jerry calls out: “Where’d you go? I got your Band-Aids!”

He finds me in the guest bathroom. Blood is dripping down my wrist. Jerry holds up the box of Band-Aids.

Jerry asks: “What’re you doin’ in here? Sarah moved the Band-Aids to the top drawer in the kitchen a month ago!”



BIO

Tom Eubanks’ stories have appeared in The Woven Tale Press, The Oddville Press, pioneertown, The Courtship of Winds, The McGuffin, Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, and Rivanna Review.  His novel, Worlds Apart, was published in 2009; five of his full-length plays have been produced.  He served 14 seasons as Artistic Director for The Elite Theatre Company and presently serves as Founding Artistic Director for Theater 23 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he lives as a recovering Californian. 







Arrival

By J.T. Neill



            In the winter, storms were frequent. They held the coastline to ransom. The sea that only a few months prior held waves on long leashes of refrain would wrestle with white horses that rode as far as the eye could see. It was power Islanders had understood for generations. But that was the winter. Such nights were rare in the summer, and only a particular wind, from a particular direction was able to dig down to the seabed floor. As the garden door slammed shut, she knew that that night could be one of those rare nights.

            The Island awoke the following morning as if witnessing a strange and messy argument between the sea and the wind. Seaweed was thrown everywhere, small dinghies once painted as transit marks had snapped from their anchors and washed up on the beach. Pebbles that had been thrown into the sea by children returned in their droves, forming walls of rock.

            Virginia Huntington was a third generation Islander and had a house on the seafront which she shared with her husband Mark and their three children. She had inherited the Victorian property when her father died and the house became the family’s bolthole to escape the city. Mark would drop by for weekends and bank holidays like a passing ship, careful not to dock and offload his worries in a place he had always felt like an outsider. Virginia had spent most of her childhood on the Island; playing in the rock pools to catch crabs, crying on the seafront when her boyfriend broke up with her, making love to Mark under the autumn stars, and a space she called her own to think.

            She was up earlier than usual. She picked her ‘walking Barbour’ up off the hook in the hallway and closed the door behind her.

            Down on the beach, as Virginia turned over mangled seaweed with her foot, she began to think about a problem that had been plaguing her for some time — the education of her eldest son, William. He was coming up to thirteen and Mark, single-mindedly thought the Big-Five were the only suitable suggestion, airing his frustrations as he said, ‘we’ve been over this ground before,’ annoyed that she wouldn’t see things his way. Virginia thought William was too sensitive to go to boarding school and had heard horror stories about bullying at what Mark regarded as ‘esteemed institutions.’ However, Mark controlled the money, so she knew her protestations could only go so far. She knew there were people she could talk to about it, but that would mean she had to admit she had a problem, something the Island didn’t take kindly to.

            ‘I may have to go back to work,’ thought Virginia.

            The transience of the morning’s light hung delicately over the beach, gently bringing out its sandstone colour. Her toes had managed to dislodge a clump of seaweed attached to a rock. She kicked it to the side and headed to Friars Bay, a stretch of beach that curved round like a bent forefinger, beckoning those at sea to come ashore.

            ‘Morning Virginia,’ said a local resident, whose name she could never remember.

            ‘Morning.’

            She walked past, sure to keep brooding when the Islander grabbed her by the arm.

            ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen what’s further up the beach,’ said the man, as Virginia looked startled at being accosted in such a way.

            Is it Simon?

            ‘Not yet…What do you mean? What’s further up the beach?’

            ‘Well, I must insist I come with you, because I came across them earlier this morning and couldn’t quite believe my eyes.’

            ‘Did something wash up?’

            ‘You could say that. It’s best if you see for yourself. If I explained, you wouldn’t believe me.’

            She still felt tired, and longed more than ever to know the man’s name. She remembered the fact he had a brother named James, but then thought everyone down on the Island had a brother named James.

            Was he a cousin, perhaps, of the Peridot family? Mind you most people are, I think I may even be loosely connected to them. Incestuous place this is.

            They walked briskly, and the man’s dog, not wanting to be ignored, weaved between their legs, sniffing every bit of seaweed that’d come ashore.

            ‘It’s a little further,’ said the man.

            The beach was abnormally quiet, except the excitable croon of seagulls flying above. Virginia thought perhaps she had missed some grand event that everyone else had been invited to. The seagulls dipped down to the sea’s surface, everything went quiet.

             Just past eight, she said to herself, strange.

            ‘You see,’ said the man, bending down to pick up what he thought was a torn red jacket half buried in the sand. ‘I thought you’d be interested.’

            ‘A lifejacket? I don’t suppose someone was wearing that?’

            ‘This is nothing,’ said the man, ‘there are plenty more of these further up the beach, look I’ll show you.’

            She realised she remembered his name.

            ‘Just behind that rock,’ said the man with an almost giddy expression.

            Rupert, ah yes, his name is Rupert, thought Virginia, pleased she now remembered.

            A pair of sandals were the first things to catch her sightline.

            What is this?

            Then a jumper, then several more lifejackets.

            What are these things doing here?

            Then a foot, then a leg, then a body.

            Then people.

            Resting against a large slab of a rock, a huddled mass with legs and arms all woven into a great knot, sat shivering. Their skin was blotchy with goosebumps the size of cysts. The tide was far out and Virginia stood in disbelief. Her eyes looked at the mass of bodies then to the sea, then back to the mass. They were still sodden as if the sea had given birth to them at some point during the night. The colour had drained from their Middle Eastern faces and the coarseness of their lips spoke to each second, minute, and hour they had spent at sea.

            They can’t possibly have survived the storm, she thought, it doesn’t make any sense.

            Virginia murmured something. Then she cleared her throat and said: ‘Let me help you.’

            One woman, who hugged her knees appeared to open her mouth, but her chattering teeth rang out where her voice would have been. Virginia was able to make out the word ‘water’ just before her mouth closed, her jaw shaking all the same.

            Damn it, I don’t have any water on me.

            ‘Rupert…Rupert, water, do you have any water?’

            She turned around.

            ‘What are you doing over there?’

            ‘Afraid not,’ said Rupert, whose head popped out from a rock behind her that blocked Virginia’s view of the route she’d just taken.

            ‘I think they’ll be alright. They’re here now.’

            ‘No Rupert. No they’re not going to be alright. They’re barely alive.’

            ‘They’ve made it this far,’ said Rupert, casually, like he was commenting on a flock of seagulls. ‘Now Gin I really…’

            ‘Don’t you dare say it,’ she snapped, ‘don’t you dare say you’re leaving.’

            ‘Ok, ok,’ said Rupert with palms facing her. ‘But all I’ll say is that I have to feed Mercutio, he’s been awfully unwell recently and he needs some rest. Vets orders.’

            ‘Mercutio?’

            ‘My dog.’

            Virginia’s face froze in disgust. Mercutio’s tail wagged excitedly as he ran up and licked her shoes.

            ‘Rupert, you can’t be serious. These people need our help, your dog’s belly can wait. Surely, you can see that.’

            ‘He’s an old man these days Gin, but I can see you need my help. Now shall I call the police?’ Virginia grabbed his arm as he reached for his phone.

            ‘No, they need water not the authorities.’

            ‘But they’re not our responsibility! They’re grown adults, they decided to come here, they have to live with that.’

            ‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’ said Virginia as she bent down to speak to the group. ‘Where’s the boat…the boat…the vessel you arrived on? Do you understand?’ She was now speaking as slowly as possible, like you would to a child.

            ‘Leave them to the authorities, they’ll know what to do,’ said Rupert pleadingly.

            ‘Rupert, just for one minute could you pretend to stop being such a heartless bastard,’ said Virginia angrily as she stood up to face him. ‘There’s a little girl here! Hardly a grown adult is she. Do you think she deserves being stranded on this beach until the police show up and arrest them all?’

            They both turned to look at the mass of frozen bodies wrapped in red lifejackets that displayed the fading grasp of the devil’s hands.

            ‘Ok fine,’ sighed Rupert. ‘What do you want to do with them?’

            ‘Well, there’s…’

            Virginia started to count how many there were, disentangling one body to the next. ‘There’s ten of them here, so why don’t I take five and you take five.’

            ‘What?’ barked Rupert, ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I take these people into my home. My boys are there, they’ll think I’m a madman.’

            ‘Fine,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll take them back to mine. I have plenty of space.’

            ‘I’ll help carry their belongings, or whatever these things are,’ said Rupert, picking up the sodden rags of clothes and inspecting them like they were live animals.

             It was a short walk from the beach to Virginia’s house but several times on the way she went back to encourage those who fell behind to keep up.

            ‘I think that’s the last of them,’ said Rupert like he had personally lifted each one up the stairs of the seawall.

            ‘You have a kind soul Virginia. I’ll be round later to see how you’re getting on.’        

            And you have no soul at all, is what she wanted to say, but social bridges on the Island took years to build and only minutes to break.

            ‘Thank you for your help. I’ll phone you later, we may need some supplies, my food delivery isn’t scheduled until tomorrow.’

            ‘I’ll see what I have.’

            Rupert shut the gate and walked along the seawall out of sight.

            This is a lot of people, thought Virginia.

            She surveyed the contents of her house, slightly fearful things may be stolen, and thought about hiding some of her jewellery.

            ‘Just stay here…here,’ she said pointing, ‘one, two, three…there we go.’

            She then got out the biggest jugs she had in the house, which were only really used for special occasions, and filled them up with water. She then refilled it, then again, and again. Next she went into the store cupboard and removed all the towels, leaving them in a big pile next to the kitchen table. 

            The woman, who had tried to speak earlier, pinched the salt-crusted sleeve on her arm, and tugged upwards.

            ‘Ah yes…clothes, I’ll show you. Lets get you out of those rags.’

            Virginia directed them to separate rooms along a short corridor. They each slowly went into one and closed the door and by this loose association, Virginia was able to gauge the different relationships within the group.

            ‘Finally getting somewhere,’ she said to herself.

            Now food, what do I have.

            The kitchen was in the process of being re-done so there wasn’t much. But there were half a dozen packets of dried pasta, and she started to cut up a few onions and peppers. After that she added a few tins of chopped tomatoes, moving methodically around the room. Unfixed cupboard handles were pushed to the side. It annoyed her that after six-months she still didn’t have a kitchen. The fitter came recommended from mutual friends on the Island. But in reality there was only one carpenter in the village and he was paid per job. Two-months into the project she realised he was also the local boat builder and being the only one of everything meant he rushed only when filling out his invoices.

            By now, the sun had claimed the day and the sound of running water from the shower briefly put her mind at rest. The sun’s rays cast out, bejewelling the surface of the sea.

            Suddenly, this tranquil moment was broken. A man, speaking Arabic, kept saying the same unintelligible word. She didn’t know what he was saying but he was pointing at his towel and then putting his arm up, waving his hand around.

            ‘Clothes…are you saying you need clothes?’ said Virginia.

            The man nodded, ‘come with me, there might be something here.’

            She led him into her bedroom, which was furnished sparingly, and directed the man towards Marks side of the wardrobe. He clearly was not much impressed with the selection available and turned some hangers back and forth, inspecting them, and then feeling each individual shirt.

            ‘What’s your name?’asked Virginia, with the kind of tone you would expect from a headmistress speaking to a naughty child.

            He turned around with a perplexed expression.

            ‘Your name?’

            He shrugged, not saying a word, and pointed in the direction of a woman, coming out of one of the bedrooms who was drying her hair. Virginia thought she looked quite beautiful, as her long chestnut hair fell across her back.

            She couldn’t be more than twenty or so.

            ‘Excuse me. Do you any of you speak English? I asked that gentleman over there,’ said Virginia, pointing to the man in her bedroom, who was measuring the length of one of Mark’s shirts with his arms. ‘But he just pointed to you. I don’t suppose you speak any English?’

            ‘Little,’ said the woman, whose hardened walnut eyes, both entranced and unnerved Virginia.

            ‘Well, I must insist that you tell me something about yourselves.’

            This is my house, she could hear herself say.

            ‘Who are you? Where have you come from?’

            ‘Asma,’ said the woman putting her hand on her breast, ‘that man, who try shirt is Yusuf, he came Sudan, escape war, he lost brother in storm.’

            ‘Goodness,’ said Virginia, slightly taken aback, ‘where did you come from?’

            ‘Ahleppo.’

            ‘Athens? Why would you want to come here?

            ‘No,’ said Asma pausing, ‘A — leppo.’

            ‘Oh Aleppo, you’ve travelled quite a way.’

            Virginia thought of the destruction she had often seen in the news about the ancient city, that had been reduced to rubble.

            ‘Did you come on a boat from France?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘Gosh, I mean I’ve seen on the news about the crossings but never did I think they’d be in my house.’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘It’s very brave what you did, do you understand.’

            She went back and stirred the pot.

            ‘I just can’t believe it, in my house, you’re lucky my husband isn’t here,’ said Virginia smiling over her shoulder, ‘he wouldn’t be very happy.’

            A few more people came out of the rooms, their bodies had steam rising off of them and looked at Asma and spoke among themselves.

            ‘What are they saying?’ said Virginia, pointing with a spatula.

            ‘They say you a nice person.’

            ‘Oh really, that’s nice.’

            More people came out and sat on the sofa, they each went into Virginia’s room after the man had put on his shirt and let them feel the fabric. 

            ‘I can’t believe you all came on the same boat.’

            ‘Yes, a man called it dingay,’ said Asma.

            ‘Dinghy, what man?’

            ‘The man who sold it, they everywhere in France, selling big boats and small boats.’

            ‘How big was yours?’

            Asma shook her head, then attempted to measure it with her arms, but gave up.

            ‘All of you were in this dinghy?’

            ‘Yes,’ said Asma, ‘we meant to reach Duhver but storm was too big and we were scared and held each other. When we woke, we on beach.’

            ‘Unbelievable,’ whispered Virginia, ‘I mean, really unbelievable, and Yusuf’s brother was the only one who died in that storm?’

            ‘No,’ said Asma meekly, a sorrowful expression absorbed her whole body, ‘two others also die. Now we are ten, before thirteen.’

            A girl came running into the room, where two buttoned cotton sofas faced opposite each other, in stale conversation, as long floor-to-ceiling windows, seemed to be listening in.

            ‘Mama, mama, mama,’ said the girl running to Asma to hug her leg, the sodden clothes from the beach made her physique even smaller. She looked almost like a small, soak-ridden gerbil, with raisin eyes and a stub nose.

            ‘Is she yours?’ said Virginia, stooping down to look at the child. She started speaking in gobbledygook which the child frowned at and with a rag in her mouth, dug her little nails into Asma’s legs.

            ‘Malika.’

            Asma then started to rub her back, assuring her that this woman wasn’t going to harm her.

            ‘Isn’t she just delightful,’ said Virginia excitedly.

            Malika steadily came forward, the rag still in her mouth and extended her small, delicate hand to Virginia, who shook it gently. She had always wanted a girl.

            Two more middle-aged men came out of her bedroom wearing Mark’s clothes. The daylight had done little to relax the wired expressions that seemed to be made out of stone. Then another woman, who was much older than Asma, and had a skeptical, prejudicial face, came over to inspect what Virginia was cooking. Simultaneously, a couple with the airs and graces of nobility, came over, and though they appeared graceful in their movements, there was an immeasurable gulf of loss between them. It was as if the storm had robbed them of something greater than the sum of their parts. There was a heavy smell of damp as they all sat down on the sofas with towels wrapped round them.

            ‘What are you doing?’ said Virginia.

            Pools of water gathered on the floor. The sand, still too afraid to let go, accompanied their feet on the thick fibrous rug.

            ‘Asma, Asma, please tell them to get up, they’re still wet for goodness sake. My husband would be furious.’

            Asma indicted that they stand for the time being while Virginia went about wiping up the water and sand.

            ‘If they need clothes, they’re in there,’ she said, irritatingly pointing to her room, before adding: ‘but its still warm, tell them I’ll hang their clothes up outside.’

             Virginia drained the pasta to combine with the tomato and pepper sauce. She then measured out roughly equal portions into small bowels. They each took one, and ate prodigiously, barely stopping to breath. Some stopped, but only to take a swig of water before going back to the bowel.

            Virginia watched and felt a flash of brevity in helping these people in a physical sense, rather than just giving them money, or showing them where the nearest hotel was. She had always thought that people should strive to do the right thing. It was a code of life instilled in her from her father, a vocal opponent of the government of the day in the House of Lords. His position was always the devil’s advocate. ‘It’s always useful to ask questions those in power don’t want asked,’ he used to say. Virginia took this on board and this sense of morality had dictated her life since when she was a young girl, and proved a point of contention when Mark finally met her parents some thirty years ago because he wasn’t used to being challenged.

            But now as she looked upon her latest act of goodwill, she knew her father was right, and she asked herself, what am I to the vulnerable?

            Before she could answer this question, a spasm that had started in her gut, had made its way to her mind, somewhere in the periphery, something wasn’t right. She again looked and examined the faces of momentary solace on those around her. It was when she looked at the old woman, a figure of featureless contempt for all those she crossed, imagining what her own face would look like, when in twenty years time, she would be a similar age. At all those years of difference, ten to twenty, back to ten, the number branding itself in the forefront of her mind.

            Ten, ten…it came like a message in a bottle. Then…she remembered there were ten on the beach. She looked round, counting only eight, and it suddenly dawned on her that she had been deceived, that perhaps her father was wrong, that doing the right thing was a precarious occupation.

            It opens you up to being vulnerable, thought Virginia, before consolidating, never again.

            A loud, rapid thump, was heard on the front door. The sound of which echoed throughout the light-flooded room. The sound of forks scrapping porcelain halted and everyone found themselves staring at the door. The hair on Virginia’s arms stood to attention and a gentle shiver traversed down her spine. She opened the front door just a slither.  

            ‘Virginia, sorry to intrude, but I need to speak to you,’ before adding, ‘now!’

            Standing in the doorway was MacTaggart, a retired British Army Major with a firm handshake, and bird-like face, those he commanded said he had the appearance of a raven, helped by a full head of black bottlebrush hair. He was known on the Island for his distinct voice that sounded as if he were continually shouting into a barrel.

            ‘Hello Major, what’s wrong?’

            ‘Have you heard about these people arriving this morning. I heard you met them?’

            ‘Yes, I did.’

            ‘Well,’ said Major MacTaggart, leaning away from Virginia to catch a glimpse of inside the house.

            ‘Look I’ve heard on good authority, they’re in here,’ he said pointing to her house.

            ‘Here,’ said Virginia, ‘what makes you think that?’

            ‘Half the village knows,’ said Major MacTaggart, with his hand on the door as some kind of insurance policy. ‘You know how quickly word spreads down here. Now, I’ll ask you again, are they in there?’ His eyes narrowed, as if he were on a perch.

            Virginia relaxed her slant against the front door. It slowly opened and Major MacTaggart seemed to comprehensively examine the face of each person, as if painting a picture of the different shades of villainous traits they had.

            ‘So it is true,’ said Major MacTaggart, ‘I will alert the authorities immediately.’

            ‘Wait stop, what are you doing, they’re not criminals. Why bring the law into it?’

            ‘Virginia! Are you out of your mind? The law governs this land, I suggest you look up the Dublin rules when it comes to this sort of thing because the courts will agree with me. Period.’

            ‘I’ve never heard of the Dublin rules, but they’re eating, at least wait for them to finish.’

            ‘Gin,’ said the Major stepping closer, ‘you must understand, I’m doing this for the good of the Island.’

            ‘But John…’

            ‘Please, it’s Major,’ he puffed up his chest and boomed: ‘I worked hard for such a title.’

            ‘But John, for whose good? I’m down here for such a short time. They are not a nuisance, if anyone should be annoyed its me. They are in my house. But they are not a threat, please J — Major, let them at least finish their food.’

            She decided in that moment not to disclose to MacTaggart that two people were already roaming the Island.

            ‘I don’t like this at all. Are you not worried that your life might be in danger?’

            She looked round as they were all eating and chatting, and then returned to his stern repose.

            ‘I’d say I’m more worried I’m not going to have any food left.’

            She smiled, and relaxed her shoulders. But any charm slid straight off MacTaggart’s back.

            ‘Gin,’ rumbled MacTaggart, ‘this is no joke, you can get in trouble. Does Mark know?’

            ‘John, I really don’t see how that’s relevant.’

            ‘He’s the man of the house, of course its relevant.’

            ‘What age are we living in?’

            ‘Look Gin,’ the rumble returned, ‘all I’m saying is that there are too many of them,’ MacTaggart start to point behind the door, ‘there’s too many here already.’

            ‘I simply disagree.’

             MacTaggart stood firm, then without turning took two steps back and announced: ‘we are a community here, we protect one another, can you safely say the same?’

            ‘Excuse me?’  

            MacTaggart felt he had made his point and saw no reason in responding. He marched off down the gravel drive to the road with fumes of dust trailing after him.

            She stayed resting against the door frame thinking.

            As the years ticked by, it was becoming increasingly clear that this place was not right for her. When she brought it up, Mark always said, ‘but you’ve been coming here since you were a little girl, you’ve always known what this place is like.’ But as she watched MacTaggart turn left out of sight, she wondered if she really did know what the Island was like. For lack of a better idea than to come down because her boys enjoyed it.

            I’m so sick of it, she thought, closing the door. I feel like a moth dancing round one particular type of flame.

            Standing with her back to the door, she thought: To hell with these people, I can’t take it any longer. Then she moved just a step and thought: I have to stay, what would I say to Mark? What would I say to the boys? They must never know.

            Asma was holding Malika’s arms and swinging her around the room. Malika kept giggling, asking again, again, again. She reminded Virginia of Mark doing the exact same to William. Virginia was taken back to the beach when William had just been born. For a moment, her worries dissolved. Then the phone rang.

            ‘Virginia its me.’

            ‘Hi Lizzie.’

            Lizzie was Virginia’s neighbour from two doors down and rarely called. Lizzie had all of her conversations on the beach, by the time she returned home, there was little else to say.

            ‘So how are things?’

            ‘Same as usual I guess.’ Virginia chewed her gums. ‘I did want to ask you about the Big Five, though we’re thinking…’

            ‘That’s good isn’t it.’

            ‘Yes, well…’

            ‘A little birdie told me you have friends staying.’

            ‘Only for a short while.’

            ‘Who are they?’

            Virginia could hear Lizzie in the background whispering to someone, ‘she says they’ve been there a short while.’

            ‘Just friends.’

            ‘Oh lovely,’ Liz paused, then continued: ‘well MacTaggart paid us a visit and said they were in fact migrants. Is that right Gin, you have migrants in your house?’

            ‘I haven’t asked.’

            ‘You know my husband’s very ill at the moment, terrible cough. Doctors say it’s a chest infection and well we don’t want any outside contact, you know, we can’t risk any foreign nasties, if you see what I mean?’

            ‘I thought you said MacTaggart came round.’

            ‘He’s an army man Gin, you know that.’

            ‘Right.’

            ‘Anyway, you must pop round soon, perhaps when your friends have gone.’

            ‘I will let you know. Bye Lizzie.’

            ‘Bye, bye.’

            She hung up the phone. There were numerous other messages flashing red. She put the phone on the receiver and walked over to the group. The group were huddled round one another, and Virginia felt like they were trapped birds that needed to be freed. Her boys had always been reticent to believe her when she said, ‘down here news travels like wildfire.’

            If only they could be here now, she thought. Then they’d believe me.

            ‘Who was that?’ said Asma.

            Oh whats the use. Virginia put her head in her hands. The phone started to ring again and Asma ever so gently tapped her shoulder but Virginia could no longer take it and got up and ran into her bedroom. She sobbed and sobbed, each tear felt raw as if it had been conjured up as blood. Throughout all her years on the Island, Virginia had never been in such a situation; torn between her allegiances on the Island, people she had known since she was a girl, and being responsible for those in her care. As she grew up, there were always lingering thoughts about never returning, but then she saw how much her boys enjoy it, how happy some moments are. In those moments, not a grey sky, nor rain could ruin. They were hers forever, and she wanted to keep them that way.

            Asma came and put a box of tissues near her leg. She grabbed them, embarrassed to look up. The whole day had been some strange apparition, the concept of time had floated off long ago. But as Asma stood there refusing to move, her presence diluted the syrupy thoughts that Virginia had built into monuments. She wiped her eyes, breathed in and looked up.

            ‘You have problem?’ said Asma.

            Virginia blew her nose to the point where her nostrils could give no more.

            ‘I do.’

            At that moment, Asma said something and the whole group came into the room. The couple, whose faces had previously expressed such immeasurable sadness sat either side and started to console her, while the stern-faced looking woman stood directly in front as if she had come to collect Virginia’s emotions.

            ‘It will be alright,’ said Asma, as she offered another tissue for her eyes, ‘you’re a good person.’

            ‘Oh stop it will you,’ snapped Virginia, ‘I’m not good, I’m just scared.’

            ‘We are all scared of something,’ said the old woman who had not moved.

            Virginia looked up, speechless and shocked.

            ‘Mama, mama,’ said Malika, tugging on Asma’s arm.

            She quickly turned and said something that sounded like ‘lays alan.’

            ‘You speak English, after all this time. Why didn’t you say something?’

            ‘When you’ve been through what I’ve been through, sometimes being quiet is greatest friend.’

            ‘God I wish that’d work down here.’

            ‘I hear your troubles with that man, angry one who came earlier, he’s just messenger boy, don’t worry.’

            ‘Everyone knows,’ Virginia said exasperated. ‘Everyone, people don’t like outsiders down here especially you’re…especially people who come off boats.’

            Asma was about to say something but the old woman spoke over her saying: ‘then they don’t know themselves, every one comes off boats.’

            ‘Are we going to be taken away,’ said Asma.

            ‘Oh,’ said Virginia sobbing again, ‘I don’t know.’

            She picked up another tissue and blew into it fiercely, ‘I don’t know.’

            Virginia gathered herself and stared blankly at the wall before continuing: ‘they would have told the police by now, who have probably told the Home Office or Immigration. I’ve thought about leaving many times, all the whispering and the gossip. Christ my brother’s divorce was known by my neighbour before me.’

            Asma rubbed Virginia’s back, in a similar manner to how she introduced Malika only an hour before, and said: ‘You know in Syria, we have saying, for difficult situations.’

            While Virginia looked her squarely in the eyes, Asma continued: ‘It’s better to deal with the devil we know than the devil we don’t.’

            Virginia smiled, and said: ‘And I’ve known this devil for a long time, perhaps too long, perhaps meeting you will finally get me to leave this Island.’

            Asma nodded along, pretending to know what she meant, but the food and warmth had made her own history indulgent.

            ‘I’ll never forget, you say fiancé, told me, just after the first shots were fired.’

            Virginia had recovered herself and everyone scattered themselves into chairs around the room. Asma rested against the wardrobe looking up at the ceiling.

            ‘You see, as protests started, people they were very hungry. Not just for food. I remember hearing at university about boys, what’s the word,’ she said something in Arabic to the old woman.

            ‘Graffiti,’ she replied.

            ‘Yes,’ said Asma before continuing: ‘they spray graffi-titi on school in Daraa, that say doctor you’re next. Since then we suffer hell, everyday, a hell even the devil would run from. But Faheem, my beautiful Faheem.’

            Asma’s tongue lingered on his name, as if she could taste him and then said: ‘he told me we get rid of Bashar, where we go then? Like father like son, they say over here. Same in Syria, we know too well graves the Assads dig. Too many to count. We hoped Bashar would reform Syria, give us the change he want, but just like father he couldn’t. He killed us, his own people. My family killed, my mother killed, my sister killed, even my beautiful, beautiful Faheem, killed.’

            Everyone in the room was solemnly nodding.

            Asma put her hands on her chest, and said: ‘I’m the only one of my family who got out, only one.’

            Asma’s voice started to break and the old woman picked up her story as if it were part of her own.

            ‘If Bashar listen, just listen once about reform, everyone we love would still be alive. But then came devil we don’t know. Extremists, terrorists, things people say we are, but we’re Muslim, terrorists are not followers of Islam. No Islam we know. They butcher us just like all the Assads, but your country can’t have two Assads so they start a war. Everyone follows UK, why do you think we want to come here in first place.’

            Asma traced the scars on her hands.

            In the background, Malika innocently played with the curtains, while Virginia looked on in silence.

            ‘Faheem told me only bitter people are angry, and if you suck lemon long enough, of course you’ll be bitter.’

            ‘What do you mean?’ said Virginia.

            ‘If you really want to leave, you would have done already, but you prefer devil you know.’

            ‘It’s not that simple.’

            The old woman stepped in, ‘it is, but you want more difficult because then you don’t have to make decision. Like those two people who came with us, you don’t speak about them — why?’

            ‘So you knew, were they your friends?’

            ‘Of course not,’ said the old woman raising her voice, ‘what you think all Syrians are friends, have you not been listening.’

            ‘But they came with you, anyway, they’re the Island’s problem now.’

            ‘And what about us,’ said Asma, drawing her hands to her chest.

            Virginia didn’t know what to say and rubbed her ear lobe. She always did when she was nervous.

            After a few seconds, she said: ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry, I really am.’

            A silence drifted over them. The old woman gave curt and quick remarks in Arabic to other members of the group, who were looking down at the floor. Virginia got up, hoping her absence meant they could discuss in earnest what they needed to say. But as soon as she got up, she sat back down. The way one does when you feel truly comfortable in your surroundings, where the simple act of savouring the moment disrupts time and place in equal measure, there’s no rush because there’s nothing on the horizon except more of the same and who would want to ruin that?

            Outside, the wind had disappeared high up into the heavens. The water shimmered in the afternoon light as the sun’s rays travelled along uninterrupted grooves on the surface, wiggling and waving. Virginia dreaded what would come after the moment had passed and wished for nothing else than to seize it and make it her prisoner.

            She thought about Mark and what she would say to him. Whether to tell him what happened on that fateful summer’s day.

            Later, she thought. I will tell him later.

            In the distance, the soft crunch of gravel could be heard. Virginia took a sharp breath in.



BIO

J.T. Neill is a London-based writer. Born and raised in Ealing, he graduated from the University of Manchester, where he studied English Literature and American Studies. During this time, he did a semester at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Since then, he’s worked as a journalist in Spain and the UK. You can follow him @jedtneill on Twitter.



Historic(!) Rugby

by Tim Miller

 

“Everybody loves a story.” —William Zinsser in “Writing To Learn”

 

Gather around friends and let me tell you a tale, the tale of historic Rugby, TN. It all starts with an Englishman named Thomas Hughes born in 1822 somewhere in England that ends in -shire. Thomas, known in this story hencewith as The Tomster, goes to this prominent, progressive school called the Rugby School, in Rugby—somewhere different in England that also ends in -shire.

Then in 1857 the Tomster writes this book about his experience called Tom Brown’s School Days which becomes something of a classic, ushers in an entire British school genre, becomes a big textbook in Japan, and even inspires the Harry Potter series, if you can believe it. The book, in a nutshell, “espouses the ideals of Christian socialism.” It’s all about what the Tomster feels is the ideal way to develop boys into men that will make for a good society for all— a real page-turner.

A big influence on the Tomster was his headmaster at Rugby, one Dr. Thomas Arnold. This guy, henceforth known as Dr. T-Bone, was a religious zealot that based his educational system on Classical languages. One interesting thing about Dr. T-Bone is that he pulled the plug on physical science and wrote, basically, that he would rather his son think that the sun goes round the Earth and that the stars are a bunch of spangles as long as he is straight on Christian moral and political philosophy. Dr. T-Bone had three primary objectives, in this presumably very rigid order: 1) cure of the soul 2) moral development and 3) intellectual development. It’s fair to say that 3) is probably something of a distant third.

So Dr. T-Bone had this big influence on education all over England, resulting in a bunch of schools adopting his structure and ideals. He may have had a lot to do with sport, like cricket, becoming a big part of schools, but this part is a tad ambiguous.

Anyway, the Tomster is clearly a big fan of Dr. T-Bone and really buys into his whole philosophy regarding Christian values and morals, and latches on to this idea of cooperative ownership of community businesses.

As the 1860’s get underway, the Tomster is a world famous author and English gentleman and has a bunch of author writer friends. One of which is this poet James Russell Lowell, henceforwithal known as Lowball. Lowball is a Harvard grad, a Romantic poet, and part of a group of New England Poets called the Fireside Poets. These bards earned this name, presumably, because you can read their poems to your family right at the—you guessed it—fireside. (This group managed to set itself apart from the other poetry and groups of poets of the era: the higher-quality and longer-lasting, but ultimately more costly poetry of the Beeswaxcandleside Poets; the cheaper, quicker, and unpleasant smelling Animalfatcandleside Poets—often read near mirrors to double their weak and loose meanings; the portable, racy, and erotic bedroom-reading specialists known as The Chamberstickside Poets; and the bourgeois, snooty, and ornate poems of the Candelabraside Poets.)

So Lowball is kind of a big deal. Beyond abolitionist poetry, he earns a law degree from Harvard, becomes a critic, an editor, and even a diplomat to Spain. Lowball writes a lot of satire of critics, including something called The Biglow Papers, which depicted the Yankee dialect and maybe was the first time that a writer actually wrote like people talked, which influenced Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. So yeah, kind of a big deal.

The Tomster goes to Boston in 1870 to visit Lowball and they start talking. The Tomster tells Lowball about this system in England called primogeniture. Lowball says, “primo-what?” And the Tomster says “Exactly.” So they have a good laugh but then the Tomster gets going in earnest about primo-what, which he explains is this tradition of the oldest son inheriting everything, and the second, third and so on getting nada, zilch, squat, diddly or however you say nothing in 1870’s slang. These second and third sons, the Tomster goes on to explain, end up jobless and idle and sort of like a blight on society— the exact opposite of what Dr. T-Bone envisioned for young men. Their very souls are in trouble, the Tomster says.

So long before Joseph Heller came along, the Tomster likely struggled for the right words to explain the catch 22 situation: the second and third sons are too proud to do the low-paying but honest jobs that are available, and their simply aren’t enough of the bourgeois, high-paying jobs that aren’t beneath them, in their own estimation. And meanwhile the first son gets everything and lives high and mighty over it all, for a while anyway. The economy, the Tomster confides, isn’t helping either. In fact, it’s as much a source of the problem as is the primo-what. It’s just a mess, the Tomster says to Lowball over some chowda.

Well, Lowball asks the Tomster if he has heard of the Boston-based Board of Aid to Land Ownership, which helps unemployed urban craftsman relocate to rural areas. No, the Tomster confesses, he has not heard of this program, but immediately you can imagine his Dr. T-Bone inspired gears get a-grinding.

So the Tomster goes back to England and writes this in response to criticism that Tom Brown’s School Days is too preachy:

“Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn’t do so myself.”
— Thomas Hughes, Preface to the sixth edition

(It should be noted that the Tomster wrote a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, in 1861 that basically flopped.)

Then in 1878 the Board of Aid President Franklin Webster Smith, hencewithforthcoming known as Smitty, travels to the Cumberland Plateau with an agent from the Cincinnati Southern Railway Co., Cyrus Clarke, a.k.a Clarkels. They are impressed with its “virgin forests, clear air, and scenic gorges.”

So Smitty goes back to Boston, but the conditions there are better: a lot of the urban craftsman don’t need relocating. So Smitty calls Lowball who calls the Tomster and voila the Tomster buys the land the Board of Aid offers near the Cumberland Plateau and calls it Rugby, fittingly, after his sentimental and halcyon school days.

Here’s where it gets all rubber-meets-the-road social science experiment. The Tomster starts recruiting these primo-what drunk degenerate second and third sons to come to this pristine Tennessee forest. Smitty lays out the town, choosing an area that looks like a resort even though it’s seven miles from the nearest railroad stop.

The first wave of settlers come out to Rugby around the late 1870’s; they start erecting structures like the three-story Tabard Inn which is straight out of a Capote or F.Scott Fitzgerald novel: very aristocratic and ghostly with lawns for croquet and tennis— right in the middle of the Tennessee wilderness.

They have a grand opening of the town in October of 1880 and the Tomster himself comes all the way from England. (It’s interesting to speculate here exactly how long it took this wave of immigrants and the Tomster to travel, but I would estimate it was at least two weeks and maybe as long as a month. From what I can tell, it seems like with a steel ship and steam engine they were able to cross the Atlantic in something like seven days by the 1880’s. And the railways were getting faster, too, but it still maybe took a week to get all the way out to the wilderness in between Nashville and Knoxville, even if you traveled, as I assume the Tomster did, first class.)

So the Tomster arrives and lays out his plans for an anti-materialistic, utopian Rugby in what must have been, for lack of a better term, a doozy of a speech.

I like to imagine him getting up to speak on a fresh October morn, resplendent with the beauty of changing leaves, crisp air, mild, pleasant breezes, and the overall magic autumnal wonder that dazzles with golden warmth. When I close my eyes, I can picture it:

The Tomster steps up in the bright sunshine and impossibly bright blue sky and tells the settlers that everyone will have to pay $5, like a tax, to be part of the public commissary, “thus ensuring public ownership.” He then goes on (and on) about guaranteed personal liberty and some real savory Dr. T-Bonian moralistic and political nuggets. A real sort of rah-rah, pep-rally, together-we-stand, divided-we-fall, all-for-one kind of speech, loaded like a baked potato with lots of Christian and moral preachy stuff, which he had at least a month to revise and tinker with on the trip that he makes without his wife or any of his nine children. (His wife basically wanted NOTHING, like zip, to do with Rugby.) He tells the mostly secular, alcoholic immigrants about the Episcopal Church and stresses that the church they will be too hungover to attend can be used for any denomination.

I can picture the settlers, too. A crowd of second and third sons basically on something akin to a vacation in a resort-like pristine wilderness, nodding politely through it all. I see them smiling and winking right through the parts about self-betterment, the Christian servant and productive gentleman of society, the arts and sports and library, except at the end of the speech, which hits them like a frying pan, when the Tomster says, very clearly and in no way mincing words, “No. Booze.”

I reckon he lost them then and there. Superficially he probably lost them pretty early on with his preaching, but they were willing to grin and bear it for form’s sake because they could go back to sipping moonshine at the Gentleman’s Swimming Hole once this author guy finally shuts his trap, but at this last moralistic jab, he surely lost them FOR GOOD.

So this English Victorian village social experiment is now growing right in the heart of post Civil War wilderness Dixie. All these newspapers like the New York Times and magazines like Harper’s are following it, probably somewhat skeptically. In London, too, there is lots of interest and coverage from the media. After all the Tomster is not just a famous author but also a lawyer, a member of Parliament, and a judge.

And so how does it do? What happens? At first, thanks to the beauty and resort-like surroundings, pretty well.

“By 1884, the colony boasted over 400 residents (including the Tomster’s mom), 65 frame public buildings and houses, a tennis team, a social club, and a literary and dramatic society. In 1885, Rugby established a university, Arnold School, named for Rugby School headmaster Thomas Arnold.”

Another interesting thing about the Tomster is that he establishes this library that still stands today. They built it in 1882 and arranged for some Boston bookseller, maybe someone Lowball knew or something, to provide the books— some 7,000. (When you visit the library, you are not allowed to touch the books, some of them dating back to the 17th century, so it has this sad, frozen-in-time quality, interesting and worth preserving but also tragic in the sense that the words and knowledge are forever trapped inside and doomed to the darkness of their own closed covers. Not a place that any living author would aspire to be. Sort of like in the movie Good Will Hunting, when Will tells Sean about his friends Shakespeare and Nietche, Sean responds, “Well that’s great. They’re all dead.” I imagine him saying the same thing visiting this stuffy old dusty one room library where they don’t even open the windows. “That’s great, Rugby. But these books are all dead.”)

Early on, the Tomster’s experiment is going well. The degenerate English guys have escaped a Dickensian industrial 1880’s urban jobless catch 22 misery for these rugged woods and serene streams and beautiful mountains. They’re stoked.

And then life happens. First, an “epidemic” of typhoid hits the town, claiming seven people including the editor of Rugby’s newspaper, the Rugbeian. Though only seven people die, the press and the media are the real killer as the whole reason to visit Rugby was it’s resort-like qualities and who exactly wants to visit a place with typhoid in the headlines?

The Tabard Inn has to close and there’s no one but ghosts of upper class tourists playing croquet on the overgrown grasses. So tourism takes a hit, but also the Tomster over across the pond isn’t exactly scrutinizing the details of his experiment.

Mainly, the Appalachian natives didn’t trust this Ohio railway agent Clarkels, not a surprise there, with all his options on land. So a bunch of these Appalachian folks, probably safe to say not big readers (despite the library), refuse to sell or file lawsuits and it all drags on and basically becomes one big headache for the regular old Winston Berkshire the Third, just trying to buy a little land and maybe have a cabin of his own to pass out in.

Besides the whole Clarkels land ownership debacle, there’s also a very real and T-Bone scorned physical science fact of the poor soil that Smitty chose to build Rugby on, because of it’s resort-like nature that no one will visit because of the typhoid headlines and the Rugbeian can’t even defend their own tourism because the editor himself succumbed.

But the real downfall, the nail in the coffin if you will, is that these English gent/colonists are not what you would call workers. They are in fact the opposite: lazy drinkers. And the Tomster, visiting once for about a month, probably in summer and staying in the Kingstone Lisle or the Newbury House, nice digs indeed, isn’t exactly motivating them with his speeches that included strict adherence to Christian morals and basically sober living.

So people starve and the town struggles and basically declines. In 1884 the Tabard Inn, veering into Faulkner short story territory, burns to the ground. In 1887 the Tomster’s mom dies and is buried in Rugby. The Rugbeian ceases publication. After his mom passes, the Tomster never returns to Rugby. (One can probably infer here that Tomster’s mom and his wife were not very close. In fact, it’s interesting to speculate why the Tomster’s mom chose to move to Rugby at the age of 83, away from all of her grandchildren?) By the end of 1887, all of the original colonists were gone.

Five years later one of the Tomster’s lawyers and partners named Sir Henry, hencewith known as Sir Hank comes and reorganizes the Board of Aid and tries to harvest the areas natural resources, essentially the antithesis of the anti-materialistic vision of the Tomster, but Sir Hank doesn’t fare much better with the lack of a workforce with any sort of appetite for actual work.

The entire story of Rugby would be lost along with the ashes of the Tabard Inn if it wasn’t for the son of Robert Walton, forthhencewith known as Little Bobby. His dad, Robert Walton (aka Big Bob) was the Cincinnati engineer that the Tomster and his Brit lawyer buddies put in charge of the colony in 1882, right when it started going a little south after the media-labeled epidemic of seven typhoid deaths. Big Bob does his darndest, like trying to open a tomato cannery operation, which fails once again because of the poor soil/work ethic of the colonists.

So Little Bobby basically is a child of the dying town. Once he grows up he makes it his life mission to preserve its history. He protects and maintains some of the buildings, like the library and the church and the Newbury house until the 1940’s, when the timber companies start to really devour the virgin forests in earnest and the federal government steps in to help preserve a slice of history.

In the 1960’s they form the non-profit group Historic Rugby so that, just as my dad, sister, uncle and I did one Sunday, you too can take a drive out to the country and, as the website claims, find “both exciting AND relaxing things to do!”

The Video. Begin your visit with the short twenty-two minute national award winning historical video The Power of A Dream (free of charge!) in the “comfortable” Johnson Theatre. (The name of the award is not clear.)

The Tour. For $7 ($6 for seniors over sixty, students k-12 $4, and preschoolers free) each, you can take the very same tour we did that leads through the Thomas Hughes Free Public Library (over 7,000 untouchable volumes), the 1884 Kingston Lisle Founder’s Home (including an old stove, furniture, and a piano that you can sit down and play), the one room schoolhouse (built in 1906 after a fire destroyed the original building), and the 1887 Christ Church Episcopal (with its original furnishings, light fixtures, and rosewood organ), which still has services on Sundays.

Free to Roam. After the church, if you spent any time at all sitting in the pews, you’ll want to stretch your legs and ease that pain in your lower back by heading down to the Rugby Printing Press. With it’s original equipment and machinery, a volunteer will print your name on a bookmark that readers and possessive children under eleven will really relish. Then, like us, why not head over and grab some Shepard’s Pie at the Harrow Road Café (built in 1980)? It’s a bit heavy, so after you’ll want to walk down to the Gentleman’s Swimming Hole, where so many emigrants avoided back-breaking manual labor. You’ll walk right past a cluster of trees and bushes where the Tabard Inn once stood. After wading in the cool waters of the Gentlemen’s Swimming Pool (be sure to check for ticks, my dad found two after visiting), you can head to the old cemetery and, unlike her inconsiderate, ungrateful daughter-in-law, you can pay your respects to the Tomster’s mom, who was buried in 1887.

Much of the area surrounding Rugby, which originally attracted Clarkels and Smitty and the Tomster himself, is now State Forest, National Park, and Recreation Areas. If you still have the energy, you can take a hike and contemplate the buildings and croquet ghosts and scattered hardy residents that have preserved a life that lives, on and on, through the years, like the books, untouched by time or tourist. If you can whistle, I recommend Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da.

Because life goes on, except in Rugby.

BIO

Tim Miller would like to be considered an emerging writer, but alas, he is afraid of swamps. His writing has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature, and You & Me Medical Magazine. He lives in San Marcos, CA with his wife and three daughters. To the dismay of plumbers everywhere, he shares his leaky thoughts at https://thefaucetblog.com/

The Words in Red

by
Billy Sauls

 

I was talking to two of them. True ones. I was there to interview them about a couple of dead people. One of the dead was their own.

The couple was not just Southern. They were not your average run-of-the-mill rednecks either. They were hillbillies. The real deal. Think The Beverly Hillbillies without the good fortunes of a Jed Clampett, or Deliverence minus the forcible sodomy administered by toothless moonshiners.

There was nothing idealistic about their lifestyle. They were not nestled by the mountains around them. That is a romantic kind of thinking. The people living deep in Appalachia are, in actuality, asphyxiated by the hills. The flow of modern technology is cut off from the inhabitants of Dewey Hollow, as is the flow of income and wealth. A proper education cannot find its way into the hollow either.

Even the sun has difficulty delivering its vitamin D to the malnourished citizenry. Potter’s Ridge to the east and Dewey Ridge to the west permit the sun about five hours a day to do its work. That is not nearly enough time, as could be attested to in the ghostly pale skin of the Sanders family.

Walter and Janice sat on the worn brown or beige sofa. Walter was wearing brown corduroy pants and an I ♥ New York t-shirt. I assumed he was not the original owner of the shirt, or pants for that matter. Walter’s thin frame was comically upright, his hands resting on his knees. He had a thick and pouty lower lip. It hung below the much thinner upper one. I could not keep myself from watching it bounce up and down as he spoke. Hard work had aged his face beyond his forty years. The expression on his wife’s face under her dingy red hair was one of a vivaciousness not normally found on grieving mothers. Only the dark rings circling her eyes revealed her pain. She sat, legs crossed, the top leg rocking back and forth, staring into a mug she had cupped in both hands. I imagined the contents of the mug had something to do with her demeanor.

I was there about the suicides. Their daughter’s was the second in the area in a week. I sat in a fold-up metal chair across from them. I took a sip of black coffee as I awaited an answer to a question I had asked. I had learned in journalism school to wait for an answer to every question, no matter how long the awkward silence after asking. Let the interviewee break the silence, and only with a sufficient answer to the question.

Despite my training, the quiet was killing me. I had asked where it happened and how their daughter’s body was found. Though I knew the answers, I needed to get them talking about the tough stuff. We had talked a bit about the other case. Walter told me the mute young man had a note gripped in his cold hand. I had already heard about it from a couple of other people I had interviewed. The words were barely legible. It said, in trembling red ink, I took the wrong one out the first time. It was as if he had to explain why both of his eyes were missing. A big Oh shucks.

I was about to cave in and ask another question, any question, maybe one about the gawky owl clock hanging on the wall behind them, when Walter finally said, “I can take you, I reckon. Upstairs, I mean. Where it happened.” Janice looked at him, mouth open. I too was surprised. She rose from the sofa and marched out of the room. I could hear her slam her mug down on what I guessed was the kitchen counter.

I looked at Walter and leaned forward. “That would be helpful if you don’t mind.”

I followed Walter up the stairs. He had the gait of a much heavier man, shifting slowly from side to side. Walter asked me how a newspaper in a big city heard about the suicides. The big city was Middlesborough, Kentucky. It had a population of approximately 10,000 souls.

I did not want to tell him that his personal tragedy had become a social media sensation, due, in large part, to its being so odd in nature. I merely shrugged my shoulders instead and told him my editor handed me the story the day before and told me to head up that way. I could hear Janice downstairs beginning to shuffle dishes in the kitchen.

He paused just in front of the bedroom door, hand on the knob. He lowered his head. “She was only twenty, you know? Nora. My one and only child.” He looked up at me. “Mister, are you a praying man?”

“I am.” I lied, and smiled doing it. “And call me Don.”

“Mister,” he began, locking his blue eyes into mine. “Ask the good Lord to watch over the soul of my daughter. I know a lot of folks don’t believe in praying for the de… the departed. But I don’t reckon there can be no harm in it. You?”

“No. I pray for the dearly departed every day.” Another lie.

“Have you lost some of your kin?”

“Quite a few, I’m afraid.” Well, I lost a dog once.

“Tell me about it.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. I lowered my head, shuffled my feet on the wood floor, and told him all about it. A moth circled the single bulb overhead in the hallway as I told him about the make-believe auto accident. The dreamed-up coma. The imaginary dead mother. The funeral. The burial in the pouring rain.

He hugged me. I could smell the Brylcreem in his hair.

He turned, took a deep breath, and opened the door. The room smelled of lemon-scented cleaning chemicals. The make-shift twin bed, composed of a worn mattress on a stack of wooden crates, was un-made and bare. The blood stained blue mattress was sunken in the center from its former owner’s body weight. “That there was her bed. Where Janice found her.”

There were no posters or pictures on the wall. There was a single wooden cross on the wall above the bed. It was the only decoration in the room. There was a particle board dresser and an end table. A large fish bowl sat on the dresser. A single blue fish was barely visible in the dirty water.

I asked Walter about the absence of pictures and décor. He explained to me how the family church frowned upon that sort of thing. In the Sanders home, whatever was preached from the pulpit of the Dewey Church of the Lord and Savior was law. According to the Pentecostal church’s pastor, pictures and “what-nots” were forbidden images. Idols. I wondered about the clock downstairs, and had the ridiculous image in my head of the family falling on their knees and worshipping the yellow and green owl as it declared the top of every hour with its mighty and deistic hoo-hoo. I passed on asking about it.

“Mr. Sanders, was your daughter already… gone when Mrs. Sanders found her?”

“Uh-huh. She was already in the arms of Jesus.”

“That’s a nice thought.”

“It’s a fact.”

I smiled and asked where the hand was found.

“Huh?”

“Forgive me, but I heard that she threw her hand after she removed it.”

“Oh.” He pointed to the fish bowl. “Landed in that.”

I looked at the murky water, wondering if the betta fish was traumatized in any way.

“It must have been a horrible sight for the Mrs.”

“Yep. She’s been acting odd too. Not herself. To be expected, I suppose.”

“Yeah. I suppose.” In perfect timing, a series of loud clangs rose from the kitchen downstairs.

“Your daughter just lied there afterward? She just, you know, bled to… sleep?”

“Way it looked.” Walter’s head was down. He inhaled a deep breath and blew out air, his lower lip rippling. After a pause, he said, “I’m really worried about Janice. Will you pray with me?”

I was a little startled. “Pray? Right now?”

“Is it a bad time for you, Mister?” He kept his eyes on mine and took a knee in the center of the floor.

“Um. No. I guess. Should I, uh, get down there with you? And, please, call me Don.”

“Unless you feel worthy to stand before the Lord.” His look assured me I was not.

I got down on both knees about six feet away from Walter. I closed my eyes and waited for him to begin. There was a long period of silence. I slowly opened my eyes. He was looking at me. He mumbled, “Go ahead.”

“Me?”

“Won’t you lead us in prayer?”

My heart was racing. Prayer had, in my adult years, become as foreign to me as I imagined classic literature or a quadratic formula was to him. I fancied myself a man of science. My Sunday school years were ancient history. My Holy Trinity was composed of Science, Engineering, and Math. And, as any practicing engineer, scientist, or mathematician would attest, the three of them are One.

Nevertheless, I nodded to him and closed my eyes. I began, “God, it is I and Mr. Sanders. I am Donald Peters. You know that, of course.” I cleared my throat. My hands were clenched into tight fists. “I would like to begin this prayer by giving you thanks, and, uh, praises.”

I heard Walter clear his throat. I opened my eyes.

“What are you doing,” he asked.

“I’m praying.”

He shook his head. “That’s not praying, and that is not how you should speak to the Lord.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That ‘You’ stuff. It’s not right.”

Walter sighed, closed his eyes, and said, “Let’s go to the Lord in prayer.” I closed my eyes again. He began, “Father, THOU hast made the heavens and the earth, and THY power and love know no end. We come to THEE today in prayer.” There was a long pause. I opened one eye and peeked at Walter who was looking at me. The gaze said, That is how it is done. He closed his eyes and began again. “We ask thee, Lord, to give special care to my wife and sister in Christ today. Janice is suffering, and we know that no one knows suffering like thou Son Jesus, and…”

As he prayed, I remembered seeing the bumper sticker on an old Ford F-150 parked in the front yard as I pulled in the gravel driveway. If it ain’t King James, it ain’t bible.

“Thou art the Great Physician and there is no need for the wicked medicine of men if we trust in thee. Janice is a kind soul, Lord. Thou knowest this better than anybody. We ask, O, Heavenly Father, that…”

I pictured his daughter lying there on the bed cutting her hand off with a rusty old saw blade. I saw her throw it across the room.

“That old serpent, the devil, cannot have her, Lord. He cannot keep her down and…”

She just lay there, lay there and died. Bled until she could never bleed again.

“Lift her up, King Jesus. Mount her on wings of eagles.”

He meant “Mount her up.” I meant to find out what really happened there. Who would, or rather, could commit suicide in such a manner? The other case was just as puzzling. Why remove one’s eyes or a hand? Why not slit a wrist or hang from a rope in a quicker, more painless and socially acceptable way of offing one’s self?

“And now, O Lord, I will speak to you in the tongues of angels.”

I watched Walter adjust his body, placing his other knee on the floor. He raised his hands to the sky and lifted up his head. With his eyes remaining closed, he began chanting and mumbling words, or non-words that I would not know how to spell or even pronounce. I’m no angel after all.

After a while, his arms started waving back and forth. They began trembling. His upper body would fall down, back to the floor, and then up again in a slow rhythm. Down and up.

I wondered how long he could go on like this. I was hoping it would be long enough.

I slowly got to my feet, keeping an eye on Walter. I walked softly toward the bed and looked over the mattress. Seeing nothing of interest, I lifted one side of it up from the crates. I saw nothing underneath and felt nothing as I slid my hand under the part I could not lift up. I set it back down and looked back over my shoulder at Walter. He was still in a rapturous state. He continued the up and down movement. The waving. The chanting. The slobbering. His whole body was shaking a little. The only mumblings escaping his mouth that resembled real words were something like “Mama Mia”, “Shenandoah”, and “Oscar de la Fuente”.

I scanned the two walls the bed was against. Nothing. I bent down and examined the crates as best as I could. I had no idea what I was looking for, and didn’t find it. I thought of pulling the bed away from the walls to examine the unexposed sides of the crates, but expected there was no way I could do it without disturbing Walter’s conversation with the heavenly host.

It went on and on behind me, growing in volume.

I softly made my way to the dresser. The fish was interested in me for all of about two seconds before turning away and swimming to the opposite end of the bowl. I could picture it swimming between the fingers of Nora Sanders, her hand an aquamarine obstacle course. I could not find the nerve to open the drawers of the walnut-colored dresser. I would not have felt right about it anyway. I started to walk away when I saw it on the side of the dresser. Etched in and colored in red were the initials DM. Underneath was a heart.

Derrick Mapleton’s was the other body. The young man was found dead in his church on an altar, eyeballs missing. A bloody pocket knife was found folded in one of his overall pockets. A bloody spoon was in the other. He wore nothing under the overalls. The note was in his fist.

I had suspected all along that both cases were something more sinister than suicide. The carving in the dresser raised my suspicions. Did it prove a romantic relationship between the two, which is something a few of the residents of Dewey Hollow had suggested? The Sanders girl and the Mapleton boy had been really close since they were toddlers. The two were flirty with one another since their preteen years. They had often gone on walks alone in the woods in the months leading up to their deaths.

I jumped as Walter yelled out, “Woo Glory!” I turned around and saw him lying there, his back on the floor and his legs folded under themselves. His feet were tucked under his buttocks and his arms stretched out from his sides. More clanking came from the kitchen downstairs. It sounded purposeful to me. “Yes, Lord,” Walter yelled before resuming his unintelligible chants, this time softer than before. It sounded like he was wrapping it up.

I took a picture of the carving on the dresser with my cell phone. I walked back to my former place in the room and got back down on one knee. As he was saying his goodbyes to the angels above, I wondered if it was one of the victims’ parents that killed the two. Was an intimate relationship outside of marriage forbidden in Dewey Hollow? Was the punishment death? Did the pastor of the Dewey Church of the Lord and Savior execute justice? Or was there a jealous young man or woman out there, the third member of a lovers’ triangle?

Walter fell silent. I watched him raise his body back up on his knees, grunting as he did so. He took a deep breath and sighed. He looked at me and shot me a knowing look that said, THAT was some good stuff. He reached around into his back pocket and pulled out a comb. He gave his thinning, greasy hair two strokes from the comb, one on each half of his head. His free hand followed the comb, pressing his hair down against his scalp. He looked at me with a proud look on his face and said, “I got myself the gift of tongues.” He wiped the comb on his pants leg and put it back where he got it.

“It would appear you do, Mr. Sanders.” I smiled at him.

He stood up gingerly and placed the palms of his hands against the small of his back, leaning back and grunting. “I reckon we better head back down. I don’t like leaving her alone for too long.”

“I understand. May I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Your daughter and the other guy. Mapleton. Did they have a relationship? More than just friends, I mean.”

He tilted his head. “Are you askin’ me if they were messin’ around?”

“Well, no, not necessarily messing around. Just if they were more than friends.”

Walter took a step toward me. “My daughter was pure. We bible believin’ people around here.”

I held up my hands. “I am sure she was pure, Mr. Sanders. That’s not what I’m getting at. All I mean is…”

“It is time for you to go, Don.”

“OK.” I did not want conflict. I nodded and turned toward the door. He stepped in front of me and opened it. I walked out into the hall and headed toward the steps. Mrs. Sanders was at the base of the stairs wiping her hands on a hand towel. “Walter,” she said, “Can you bring down the dishes from our room? I’ll show our guest out.”

“Yep,” I heard him say behind me. I turned to tell him goodbye, but he was already heading away toward their room. I made my way down the steps. Janice was still wiping her hands vigorously and was studying me. She tilted her head. “Mister, do you think my Nora kilt herself?”

The question surprised me. I averted my eyes and began, “I, uh…”

“Well, she didn’t. That Derrick boy didn’t either.”

I took a step closer to her. I took a peek up the stairs to make sure Walter was not within hearing distance. “Were Norma and Derrick a couple?”

She leaned forward. I could see the faint freckles on her face for the first time. I could smell the bourbon on her breath.

She simply said, “Duh.” Shaking her head like she was disappointed in me, she pointed in Walter’s general direction. “And that fool up there knows it too. He is just protecting her reputation, is all.”

“Well, then, I have to ask. Do you think there was foul play involved?”

“Foul play? You mean murder?”

“Yes, ma’am. Murder.”

She peered deeper into my eyes. She knocked on my forehead lightly with a fist. “You are a confused soul. Ain’t you?” She slung the dish towel across her shoulder. “Follow me.”

We walked into the kitchen. The back door I had come in earlier was standing open. A table was in the center of the kitchen. On it was a small, pocket-sized bible. She picked it up and handed it to me. There was a thin strip of paper marking a page.

“It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t suicide. And it wasn’t an accident,” she said. I wondered what was left. “Have a nice trip back home, Mister,” she continued. “That book has the truth you are looking for.”

I nodded goodbye to her, feeling a little frustrated and confused. I turned and walked out the door and to my truck. I watched her pull the door closed. I got in and leaned back in the driver’s seat. Frustrated, I sighed. I started to reach into my pocket for the ignition key and realized the bible was still in my hand. It was green and the perfect size for a breast pocket. Printed on the cover was The New Testament of Jesus Christ. Under the title it read, Words of Christ in Red. I had no doubt those words would also be in 17th century English.

I turned to the page marked by the slip of paper. It was The Gospel of Mark. Sections of the ninth chapter were highlighted. Seven verses were not only highlighted, but underlined in pencil. I put on a pair of reading classes I had in the console and began reading at the forty-third verse. The words were in red. Christ said, “And if thy hand offend thee, cut if off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.”

My heart rate picked up. I began feeling nauseas. I swallowed and read on.

After Christ talked about an offending foot, he stated in the forty-seventh verse, “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.”

I took off my glasses and dropped them onto the passenger seat. I closed the bible and set it down beside the glasses. I was feeling a rush of emotions.

I thought of a young Nora Sanders wanting to touch Derrick Mapleton. I thought of her hand on his shoulder. His back. His thigh. His crotch. That hand making her sin, leading her to hell, keeping her from eternal life.

I thought of Derrick looking at the young, tight curves of Nora’s body, wanting her, lusting in his heart. His eye causing him to sin. Which eye?

I took the wrong one out the first time.

I started the pickup and headed down the dirt path that led from the Sanders’ place. I turned down the highway that wound through the hollow. I felt sorry for the forbidden couple. I pictured them lying in separate places and times, bleeding to death. They expected to live up until the very end; believed to the very point they lived no more.

It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t suicide. It wasn’t an accident.

It was something else.

 

 

BIO

billy saulsBilly R. Sauls writes fiction and lives with his wife, Deborah, in Knoxville, TN where he attended the University of Tennessee. He has two sons, a step-daughter, and another on the way.

 

 

 

     THE WRITING DISORDER ARCHIVE – 2010-2024

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    F=Fiction, P=Poetry, N=Nonfiction, CN=Creative Nonfiction, A=Art, I=Interview

    To View work from 2010-2014, please click here.

    The Writing Disorder
    Winter 2023/24

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    by Lisa C. Peterson
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    Dr. Rocktopath’s Horror-Style by N.J. Banerjee The Collier Kids by Tetman Callis
    The Secret Agent by Robert Collings The Advantages of Being a Lit Mag Editor by Lou Gaglia
    Something, Somewhere Else by Margaret E. Helms Vanishing Pop-Tarts by Crystal McQueen
    Orphans of the Savannah by Adam Matson The Third Floor by Nancy Machlis Rechtman

    POETRY
    Vandana Kumar John Maurer 
    Stephen Mead Paul Rabinowitz
    Juanita Rey Hoyt Rogers
    Jason Visconti

    NONFICTION
    The Wild Child by Catherine Filloux Forged for Strength by Jean McDonough
    Beautiful Things by William T. Vandegrift, Jr.

    ART
    The Photography of Paul Rabinowitz

    REVIEW
    Writing as Recovery: Melissa Febos’ Body Work by Kate Brandt

    The Writing Disorder • Winter 2021/22
    FICTION An Analysis
    Robert Boucheron    		 Louise
    Inez Hollander    		 Sandman
    Kate H. Koch    		  
    Arrival
    J.T. Neill    		 Three Footnotes from Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, Volume 1
    Clarissa Nemeth    		 Bradyphrenia
    Justin Reamer
    Better Late Than Ever
    Jeff Underwood    		 Drive-up Christmas Eve
    Stuart Watson
    POETRY Holly Day Ash Ellison Jonah Meyer
    Bruce Parker Frederick Pollack Kate Porter
    NONFICTION Make It Go Away: Love, Loss and What I was Reading
    Joan Frank
    		 A Prequel to My Sister’s
    Donna Talarico     		 Thrice
    Emilio Williams 
     
    ART The Art of Nick Bryant    
    INTERVIEW Aesthetic Transmissions: A Conversation with Robert Hass
    George Guida 

    The Writing Disorder • Fall 2021
    FICTION On the Ground, Looking Up
    Tori Bissonette    		 Devoir
    Marcia Bradley     		 Concerto de Aranjuez, Transcribed for the Ukulele
    Paul Garson
    		  
    New Mexico or Arizona
    Ethan Klein
    		 Tom Turkey
    Justin Meckes    		 A Miraculous Takeover
    Austin McLellan
    Sleight of Hand
    Sarah Terez Rosenblum    		 Whatever Happened to Mr. Saguaro?
    Carolyn Weisbecker
    POETRY Milton P. Ehrlich Maria Marrocchino Mikayla Schutte
    Travis Stephens Jordyn Taylor Kim Zach
    NONFICTION Hashbrowns and Termites
    Jamie Good
    		 The Arraghey Wander by Seven
    Ruth Heilgeist     		 Sportin’ Life
    Graeme Hunter 
    How to Break and Mend Your Mother’s Heart
    JoAnne E. Lehman
    ARTWORK The Art of Amy Earles    
    INTERVIEW Freak Out! My Life
    with Frank Zappa:
    Pauline Butcher Bird 

    The Writing Disorder • Summer 2021
    FICTION Annual Rites
    L. Shapley Bassen    		 An Artist’s Whore
    Grace Ford     		 The Two Missing Words
    David Henson
    		  
    The Langauge of Flowers
    Jennifer Lorene Ritenoir
    		 Hollywood, Guido Orlando, The Pope and The Mother
    M.F. McAuliffe    		 Mohua
    Maitreyee
    Matters That Concern Me
    Walter Weinschenk
    POETRY Carolyn Adams Torri Hammonds James Croal Jackson
    J.R. Solonche Elizabeth Train-Brown Matt Zachary
    NONFICTION In the Houses of Others
    Anita Kestin
    		 Guide to the Ruins
    Eve Müller     		 Review: Dust Bowl Venus
    Linda Scheller 
    Marked
    Deborah A. Lott
    INTERVIEW Pauline Butcher Bird
    Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa     		    
    ARTWORK The Art of Ryan Heshka


    The Writing Disorder – Spring 2021


    FICTION

    POETRY

    NONFICTION

    ARTWORK

    The Writing Disorder • Fall 2020

    FICTION
    The Marginalia Game – Adam Anders
    Great Spirits – Arun A.K.
    Cabbage Night – T.B. Grennan
    The Sins of Father Rickman – Catherine J. Link
    The Snow Queen – Jennifer R. Lorene
    The Woman Left Behind is Still Behind Him – Shea McCollum
    Death Rattle – Kristen Roedel
    Savior – Katy Van Sant
    POETRY
    Januário Esteves
    Diana Ha
    Ashley Inguanta
    F.X. James
    Steven M. Smith
    Tim Suermondt
    James Thurgood
    NONFICTION
    The Other Daughter – Lourdes Dolores Follins
    Wonderful Vacation – J L Higgs
    Amen Sure Thing – Mindela Ruby
    California Fugue – Teresa Yang
    INTERVIEW
    Philip Cioffari by Bill Wolak
    ARTWORK
    Liz Brizzi

    The Writing Disorder • Summer 2020
    FICTION A Damsel in Bedlam
    Kat Devitt    		 Three New Names
    Masie Hollingsworth    		 The Woman in the Window
    Flora Jardine
    		  
    The Affair of the Bird
    Harli James
    		 Fishbowl Frenzy
    Susie Potter    		 Pretty Boy
    Nina Shevzov-Zebrun
    The New Reality
    Tom Whalen    		 The Poet Ray Brown
    John Yohe
    POETRY Daniel Aristi Christopher Barnes Donna Dallas
    Téa Nicolae Keko Prijatelj Abasiama Udom
    NONFICTION A Survival Guide to
    Christian College
    Rachel Belth
    		 Save Me and I
    Will Be Saved
    Riley Winchester    		 Rejuvenation in
    Fragments
    Jennifer Worrell
    INTERVIEW Judith Skillman
    by Janée J. Baugher    		    
     
    ARTWORK Carl Lozada

    The Writing Disorder • Spring 2020

    FICTION
    Words May Set You Free – Marco Etheridge
    Five Questions for Thomas Pynchon – Nathaniel Heely
    Separated by Glass – Kailyn Kausen
    The Walker – Martin Keaveney
     The UMAMI Museum Field Trip – Cecilia Kennedy
    Reflections – Regan Kilkenny
    Smitten to Spitten – Madeline McEwen
    The New Girl in Our Office – Deepti Nalavade Mahule
    Assumptions – James Mulhern

    POETRY
    Michele Alice
    Terry Brinkman
    Abigail George
    Lance Lee
    Charles J. March III
    Juanita Rey

    NONFICTION
    Fasting – Cliff Morton
     Smoke – Dennis Vannatta

    INTERVIEW
    Chryssa Nikolakis          

    ARTWORK
    Jessica Brilli

    The Writing Disorder • Winter 2019-2020
    FICTION 20/20
    A.L. Bishop    		 The Art Collective
    Robert Boucheron    		 A Better Parent
    Alison Gadsby
    		  
    Tito’s Descent
    Marylee MacDonald
    		 I as the being
    Pawel Markiewicz
    		 Natural Burial
    J.L. Moultrie
    Complicit
    Jane Snyder    		 Tony Van Witsen
    Dewey Defeats Truman
    POETRY Natasha Deonarain Kevin R. Farrell, Jr. J.A. Staisey
    John Wiley Mark Young
    NONFICTION Sozzled
    Hannah Green
    		 Painters and Poets
    John C. Krieg
    Temporary Cat Lady
    Caitlin Sellnow    		 Head of the Ulna
    Tessa Vroom
       
    COMIC ART Karl Stephan
    Mary Boys

    The Writing Disorder • Fall 2019
    FICTION Gray Yogurt
    Cecilia Kennedy    		 My GWOT, Annotated
    Paul D. Mooney
    		 The Garden
    Leslie Boudreaux Tidwell
    		  
    A Semblance
    Mateusz Tobola
    		 Hung from a Mitzvah Cross
    Mark Tulin
    		 Where the Street Learns Its Curve
    Donna D. Vitucci
    POETRY Dilantha Gunawardana Casey Killingsworth George Cassidy Payne
    Steven Ratiner Jerry Tyler John Zedolik
    NONFICTION I’m No More Rabid Than Usual
    Catherine Moscatt
    		 My Most Constant Lover
    Miriam Edelson
     
    ARTWORK Leigh Anita
    Photography    		    
    INTERVIEW Mallory O’Meara
    Author

    Summer 2019 Issue

    FICTION
    A Clean Break – Vince Barry
    Georgey-Dear – Tetman Callis
    Offing Buck – Victoria Forester
    Sore Throat – Carolyn Geduld
    The Two Potters – Norbert Kovacs
    Everyone Smile – Douglas Ogurek
    Recovery – Paul Rosenblatt
    Thick Skin, Locked Jaw, Yes Ma’am – Rina Sclove

    POETRY
    Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal
    John Califano
    R.T. Castleberry
    Laurinda Lind
    Nanette Rayman
    Roger Singer

    NONFICTION
    Historic(!) Rugby – Tim Miller
    Cochina de Mierda – Jennifer Jordán Schaller

    ARTWORK
    Katarina Zuder – Artwork

    INTERVIEW
    Author, Mallory O’Meara

    Spring 2019 Issue

    FICTION
    The River Kent – Annie Blake
    As I Lay Scratching – AN Block
    Little Nell Answers the Bell – James R. Kincaid
    Not a Seamless Lunch – Anna Linetskaya
    Day Hike – Priscilla Mainardi
    Herman Loves Brooke – Anthony J. Mohr
    Gail – Lily Tierney

    POETRY
    Holly Day
    Chris Fox
    Mary Kasimor
    Jared Pearce
    Marvin Rosel
    Zach Trebino
    Guinotte Wise

    NONFICTION
    Listening to the Voice – Eve Dobbins
    Who is Jackie Brown? – Rachel Scott

    ARTWORK
    Natalie Shau – Illustration/Photography

    Winter 2018-19 Issue

    FICTION
    The Ultra Injustice – Scott Bassis
    Surprise – William Cass
    Suit Yourself – Lindsey Godfrey Eccles
    José María Writes a Story – Annette Freeman
    Snit’s Wife – Phil Gallos
    Meetings – Margaret Karmazin
    Nothing Comes Back – Susan Lloy
    The Harmacy – Stephanie Mataya

    POETRY
    Adrian Cretu
    E.G. Ted Davis
    M.A. Istvan, Jr.
    A.C. O’Dell
    Lauren Sartor
    Alex Schmidt
    J.A. Staisey
    Garrison Alecsaunder

    NONFICTION
    In the Eye – Deborah Morris
    How to Change Your Name – Jayelle Seeley
    Book Review: The Night Ocean

    ARTWORK
    Anna Angrick Illustration

    INTERVIEW
    Kathryn Harrison

    Fall 2018 Issue

    FICTION
    Linda Boroff – Let That Be a Lesson
    Laura Fletcher – I Know
    Zachary Ginsburg – Disposal
    John Mandelberg – The Plagiarist
    Evelyn Somers – Mr. Whiskey, the Greatest of All
    Kobina Wright – Invitations

    POETRY
    Judy Shepps Battle
    Mary Bone
    Zoë Christopher
    Jim Farfaglia
    DS Maolalai
    Amber Wilkinson

    NONFICTION
    Eimile Bowden – Female, Age Twenty
    Jeffrey James Higgins – An Uncommon Hero
    Ana Vidosavljevic – A Turkish Coffee Reader

    ARTWORK
    Leigh Anita – Illustration

    Spring 2018 Issue

    FICTION
    Shamar English – KETCHUP SANDWICH
    Joe Fortunato – A MARVELOUS PEACE
    Rosemary Harp – IN THE KELP FOREST
    Maggie Herlocker – THE CAROUSEL
    Robert Klose – THE TABLE
    Michael McCormick – PINK LEMONADE
    Megan Parker – THE SWAMP WITCH
    Trish Perrault – THE BRIDGE

    POETRY
    Brad Garber
    Ricky Garni
    Susan Richardson
    Deborah Saltman
    Kimberly White

    NONFICTION
    Emmie Barron – GHOST GIRL
    Linda Leigh – UP ABOVE and the DOWN BELOW
    Rick White – STITCHES

    ARTWORK
    Stephanie Garber
    Blythe Smith

    SKID ROW ZINE
    Introduction by Ivy Pochoda

    The Writing Disorder • Winter 2017-18
    FICTION Jessica Bonder
    HAPPY HOME
    		 Alexander Carver
    THE WINE SNIFFER
    		 J L Higgs
    FINDING JESUS
    		  
    Patrick Legay
    SOUNDS OF THE ALLEYWAY
    		 Rae Monroe
    FREE AS THE OCEAN
    		 Patrick Moser
    THE MINISTRY OF BROOMS
    Richard Thomas
    HOW NOT TO COME UNDONE    		  
    POETRY Ruth Bavetta Joe Gianotti Sergio A. Ortiz
    Garth Pavell Cliff Saunders Sara Truuvert
    NONFICTION Brett Horton
    Dogs of Katmandu
    		 Anika Gupta
    An Intercourse with Ghosts
    		 Pam Munter
    Sparky
     
    ARTWORK MISS FLUFF ANNELISA LEINBACH  

    The Writing Disorder • Spring 2017
    FICTION

    Mark Budman
    SUPER
    JOHN

    		 Cameron
    THE PINNACLE OF FREE-WHEELING
    PARTICLES
    		 Brian Conlon
    SAFE HAVEN: A ROMANTIC COMEDY IN ELEVEN UNEQUAL PARTS    		  
    Joshua Dull
    THE ART OF LETTING GO
    		 Beth Goldner
    FLINT AND SHANNON
    		 Anthony Ilacqua
    THE END OF IDYLLIC DAYS

    Anna Keeler
    HALLUCINOGENIC GIRLFRIEND

    		 Leah Holbrook Sackett
    MAN IN BLACK
    		 Katie Strine
    MEDITATE AND WAIT
    POETRY Gayane M. Haroutyunyan
    		 TS Hidalgo
    		 Kasandra Larsen
    E.M. Schorb
    		 Tara Isabel Zambrano
    		  J4
    NONFICTION Rene Diedrich
    A VALENTINE FOR THE WIDOW OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
    		 Barbara J. Campbell
    I WAS THE DEAN OF FUTURES STUDIES
    		 Anthony J. Mohr
    WE’VE GOT
    SWEATERS
     
    ARTWORK Sequoia Emmanuelle
    PHOTOGRAPHY
    		 J4
    CARD POEMS
    		    

    The Writing Disorder • Winter 2016-17
    FICTION

    Christopher Branson
    The Astronaut

    		 Emma Fuhs
    Jaguar Smiles
    		 Joe Giordano
    Car Crash
    Shalen Lowell
    Revolutions and Revelations
    		 Mona Leigh Rose
    The Crossing
    		 Noelle Schrock
    Someone Has to Heckle the Rhinos

    Katie Schwartz
    Six
    POETRY Natalie Crick Joseph Farley Dustin Lowman
    Tamer Mostafa Melissa Watt
    NONFICTION Edd Jennings
    Lost Time
    		 Mira Martin-Parker
    I’m Not Afraid Anymore
    		 Book Review
    Apocalypse All the Time
    Lynne Blumberg
    Learning From My Past
    ARTWORK Cameron Bliss
    Paintings
    		 Michelle Vella
    Paintings
    		 The Strand
    Photography

    The Writing Disorder • Fall 2016
    FICTION

    Jacqueline Berkman
    Slush

    		 J. L. Higgs
    Lee’s Funeral,
    Emmy’s Wedding
    		 Martin Keaveney
    Flash Fiction    		  
    M. F. McAuliffe
    Warner
    		 Jac Smith
    Mother
    		 Jennifer Vanderheyeden
    Cogito(e)

    Tessa Yang
    The Spoiled Child

    		 Victoria-Elizabeth Panks
    Pikkake Peaks
    		  
    POETRY Christina Bavone Sarah Blumrich Seth King
    Maria Marrocchino Judy Roitman Rasool Yoonan
    NONFICTION Rachel Croskrey
    On Why I’m Not
    a Hypochondriac
    		 K. B. Dixon
    Lucida and Me
    		 Kym Cunningham
    Making Space
    ARTWORK Jenny Mörtsell
    Illustrations
    		 Blythe Smith
    Paintings
    		    

    The Writing Disorder • Summer 2016
    FICTION

    Robert Boucheron
    Very Good English

    		 Mitchell Grabois
    Art | Climate Change
    		 Stephanie Renae Johnson
    Straw    		 Paisley Kauffmann
    The Adults

    Tom Miller
    Furniture Store

    		 Bethany Pope
    A Pretty Smile
    		 Claire Tollefsrud
    Obligatory Silence
    		 T.E. Winningham
    i, Clouded
    POETRY Lana Bella Janet Buck D.G. Geis Ashley Inguanta
    Oliver Timken Perrin Brad Rose Lucas Shepherd
    NONFICTION Shay Siegel
    Don’t Quiet Down Please    		 Janet Damaske
    Bloodline    		 Jennifer Elizabeth Johnson
    Chartwell Manor
    		 Ruby Cowling
    Vertigo book review
    ARTWORK Angelo Deleon
    Paintings
    		 Letisia Cruz
    Artwork
    		 John Tavares
    Photography
    		 Brad Gottschalk
    Comic Art
    INTERVIEW Jon Wilkman

    The Writing Disorder • Spring 2016
    FICTION

    Patrick Burr
    Pushing Michaelmas

    		 Larry Fronk
    Bad Soldiers    		 Taylor García
    Monica in Georgetown    		 Jill Jepson
    Drowning Time

    Bryce Johle
    Indiana

    		 Matt McGowan
    The Bridge    		 P.M. Neist
    The Oracle    		 Janice Rodriguez
    Ground Control
    Billy Sauls
    Words in Red
    POETRY Abigail George adam l. Michael Penny
    Belinda Subraman John Sweet
    NONFICTION Stephanie Dickinson
    Maximum Compound    		 Paul Garson
    The Y Factor    		 Kristian Hoffman
    Bowie Diary
    ARTWORK Giada Cattaneo
    		 Harumi Hironaka
    		 WAXenVINE

    THE WRITING DISORDER • WINTER 2015-16 ISSUE
    FICTION

    Eric Brittingham
    Gin Fizz

    		 Tera Joy Cole
    Coyotes Don’t Litter    		 Thomas Elson
    Midnight Mass    		 Vincent Mannings
    Not Always Easy

    Jennifer Porter
    Army Mom

    		 Jude Roy
    Last of the Cowboys    		 Mary Taugher
    Crow on the Cradle    		 Chris Vanjonack
    After You
    POETRY Marcella Benton Sean Howard Kjell Nykvist
    Josey Parker Elizabeth Perdomo Domenic James Scopa
    NONFICTION Rebecca Brill
    On Texting a Guy…    		 Michael Filas
    Galileo’s Wake    		 Denis Mulroony
    Sucking Air    		 John Spencer Walters
    On Casket Readinesss
    Kyle Mustain
    Opposite of Suicide II
    ARTWORK Claudia Pomowski Howard Skrill Alina Zamanova
    INTERVIEW Alan Hess
    Writing Architecture
    FALL 2015 ISSUE Robert Cesaretti (F) Tad Bartlett (N) Michael Brownstein (P) Nuta Istrate Gangan (P)
    Jacqueline Bridges (F) Tara Vanflower (N) Tommy Dean (F) Daniele Serra (A) Dan Darling (F)
    René Ostberg (P) James Lipnickas (A) Karen Corinne Herceg (P) Pat Hart (F) Franklin Klavon (F)
    Bruce McRae (P) Sara Regezi (F) Alan Reese (P) Sarah Parris (N) Liz Gilmore Williams (N)
    Susan Lloy (F) Charles Lowe (F) Allen Forrest (A) Paul Garson (N) Lauren Vargas (P)
     
    . . . .
    . . . . .
    SUMMER 2015 ISSUE Richard Thomas (F) Dimitris Lyacos (N) Robin Wyatt Dunn (P) Emily Strauss (P)
    Daniel Mueller (F) Sarah Sarai (N) Virginia Luck (F) Daniele Serra (A) Joseph De Quattro (F)
    René Ostberg (P) James Lipnickas (A) Hannah Frishberg (P) Tim Boiteau (F) Michael Davis (F)
    Charles Brice (P) Ron Yates (F) Jon Riccio (P) L.D. Zane (N) Audrey Iredale (N)
    Dawn-Michelle Baude (F) David Haight (F) Allen Forrest (A) Paul Garson (N)
     
    . . . .
    . . . . .
    SPRING 2015 ISSUE
    Mary van Balgooy (N) Evelyn Levine (F) Lauren Martino (A) John Tavares (F) Marina Carreira (P)
    Carmen Firan (F) Natalia Jheté (A) Mitchell Garbois (F) Anna Boorstin (F) A.A. Weiss (F)
    Linda Tillman (A) Kelly Thompson (P) Sandra Rokoff-Lizut (P) Laura Wang (N) Susan Petersen Avitzour (N)
    Jon Fried (F) Claudia Putnam (P) J Hudson (F) Paul Garson (N) Kent Kosack (P)
    Gerard Sarnat (P) John Lowther (P) Walter Thompson (F) Veronica O’Halloran (F) James Gallant (F)
    . . . .
    . . . . .
    WINTER 2014-15 ISSUE
    Kyle R. Mustain (CN) Lou Gaglia (F) Ninon Schubert (F) Robert O’Rourke (F) Tim Roberts (P)
    Samantha Eliot Stier (F) Hudson Marquez (A) Norman Waksler (F) Suzanne Ushie (F) Clarissa Nemeth (F)
    Sarah Katharina Kayß (A) Kevin McCoy (P) Colin Dodds (P) Eddie Argauer (N)
    John Oliver Hodges (F) John McKernan (P) Larena Nawrocki (CN) Paul Garson (CN)
    Ho Cheung (Peter) Lee (P) Tamer Mostafa (P) Jacqueline Berkman (F) Charlie Brown (F)
    .FJa . . . .
    . . . . .
    FALL 2014 ISSUE Suzanne Hyman (F) Christopher Suda (P) Hilda Daniel(A)
    Paula Panich (F) JJ Anselmi (N) Jessie Aufiery (F) Anna Isaacson (F) Scott Stambach (F)
    David Hicks (F) Cheryl Diane Kidder (F) Bruno Barbosa (F) Amita Murray (F) Joshua Sidley (F)
    John Ronan (P) Robert Lavett Smith (P) Daniel Carbone (P) Kim Suttell (P) R.A. Allen (P)
    Dixon Hearne (I) Aurora Brackett (F) Richard Hartshorn (I) Eric Vasallo(I) Ellen Mulholland (F)
    Melissa Palmer (N) Zamar (N) Allen Forrest (A) David Armand (I)
    .F . . . .
    . . . . .
    SUMMER 2014 ISSUE Pamela Langley (F) Adefisayo Adeyeye (P) Margo Herr (A)
    David J Ballenger (F) Ruth Gila Berger (N) RV Branham (F) Beth Castrodale (F) Ruth Deming (F)
    Melissa Grunow (N) Cassie Kellogg (F) Sarah Kruel (F) Joshua Michael Johnson (F) Jake Teeny (F)
    Darren Demaree (P) Persephone Abbott (P) Daniel Fitzgerald (P) Simon Perchik (P) Joseph Ferguson (P)
    Shelby Stephenson (P) Sharon Rothenfluch Cooper (P) David Rose (I) Jacob Reecher (N) Chris Casey (N)
    Simon Larbalestier (I) Keicha Kempsey (N) Paul Garson (N) Joel Nakamura (A) Melinda Giordano (A)
    .F . . . .
    . . . . .

    ALL WORK LISTED BELOW CAN BE VIEWED HERE.

    OUR SPRING 2014 ISSUE CAN BE VIEWED HERE.

     

    To View work from 2010-2014, please click here.

    SPRING 2014

    FICTION
    Jacqueline Friedland – Just Allowance
    John Bach – Letter No. 8 — Gunslinger in the Church
    Sayuri Yamada – Dancers
    Leonard Kress – Evooshkoo
    John Richmond – The Hill
    Bobby Fischer – Three Wolves
    David Starnes – Sagging Crown
    Erin Lebacqz – Sustenance
    David S. Atkinson – Turndown Service
    Emily Topper – Something Better

    POETRY
    RAY GONZALEZ
    RISA DENENBERG
    CLYDE KESSLER
    PAUL HOSTOVSKY
    DOUG DRAIME

    INTERVIEW
    Sam Rosenthal, Author and Musician

    NONFICTION
    The Treatment by Xijing “Patricia” Sun
    God’s Junkyard by Margaret Ackerman
    Ghosts by Christine Barcellona

    BOOK REVIEWs
    J.C. Elkin’s World Class by Juliana Woodhead
    Richard Powers’ Orfeo by Sarah Sarai

    ARTWORK
    The Artist’s Window: The Work of Katerina R. Kovatcheva
    The Sundial Bridge: The Photography of Keith Moul
    The Life of an Artist: The Work of W. Jack Savage

    WINTER 2013-14

    FICTION
    Michael Andreoni
    Sean Croft
    April Dávila
    Gale Deitch
    Ceri Eagling
    Brittany Lynn Goss
    Mark Hollock
    Mercedes Lucero
    Gary Noland
    Danny Olea
    Melissa Palmer
    David Vardeman
    Shanna Yetman

    POETRY
    Angela Hibbs
    Jeffrey Lee Owens
    Patty Seyburn
    Gray Tolhurst
    Joseph Trombatore

    NONFICTION
    Stephanie Flood
    Jessica Caudill
    Elizabeth Bales Frank
    J.D. Lynn
    Elen Rochlin

    ART
    Kayla Roseclere & Ashley Inguanta
    Alexndra Straton
    Laura Watson

    INTERVIEW
    Chang-rae Lee

    REVIEW
    David Letzler on Thomas Pynchon

    FALL 2013

    FICTION
    Brian Conlon
    Catherine Nicholas
    Kelly Jacobson
    Adeline Hauber
    R.V. Branham
    C.D. Mitchell
    Darlene Campos
    Lynn Stansbury
    Molly Gillcrist
    John Tavares

    POETRY
    B.Z. Niditch
    Eleni Erikson
    Simon Perchik
    Sarah Sarai
    Aunia Kahn

    NONFICTION
    Pamela Langley
    J.J. Anselmi
    Elizabeth Dobbin

    ART
    Mable Song
    Lisa Wilde
    Vineet Radhakrishnan
    Aunia Kahn
    Christine Robakidze

    INTERVIEWS
    Ivy Pochoda
    Martin Aston

    SUMMER 2013

    FICTION
    Sophie Monatte
    Emma Bohmann
    G.D. McFetridge
    Tana Young
    Janae Green
    Lydia Lambrou
    Linda Bilodeau
    Nick Brennan
    Keith Laufenberg
    Ruby Cowling
    Rami Ungar

    POETRY
    Niall Rasputin
    Joanna Valente
    R.T. Castleberry
    Kristen Hoggatt
    Sam Alper
    Jennifer Firestone

    NONFICTION
    Krista Carlson
    Brenda Rankin
    Jacqueline Doyle
    Dorene O’Brien
    C.A. Stamidis

    ART
    Michael Vincent Manalo
    Jasmine Worth
    Van Saro
    Ira Joel Haber

    INTERVIEWS
    Steph Cha

    SPRING 2013

    FICTION
    Kate LaDew
    Robert Scott
    Samuel Snoek-Brown
    Ruby Cowling
    Valerie Lewis
    Scott Stambach
    Charles West
    Alexandra Gilwit
    Stefanie Trout
    James Lewelling

    POETRY
    Mary Bast
    Lisa J. Cihlar
    Darren Demaree
    Chris Crittenden
    Pramila Venkateswaran
    Desmond Kon
    Jenny Morse

    NONFICTION
    Rachael Goetzke
    Christine Ritenis
    R.R. Gwaltney
    Laura Callanan

    ART
    Cecile Poulain
    Janet Culbertson
    Tom Block
    Chuck Hodi

    INTERVIEWS
    Manuel Gonzales
    Isis Aquarian
    Arthur Tulee

    WINTER 2012-2013

    FICTION
    Radha Bharadwaj
    Barrie Walsh
    Emil DeAndreis
    Brett Burba
    Maui Holcomb
    David S. Atkinson
    Shannon McMahon
    Frances O’Brien
    Shae Krispinsky

    POETRY
    Judith Taylor
    Dorothy Chan
    A.J. Huffman
    Amy Sprague
    H. Alexander Shafer
    Amit Parmessur
    Rinzu Rajan
    Robert P. Hansen

    NONFICTION
    David B. Comfort
    Chase Wilkinson

    ART
    Joe Biel
    Fletcher Crossman
    Natasha Stanton
    Peter Colquhoun

    INTERVIEWS
    Alexandra Styron
    Steven Weissman

    FALL 2012

    FICTION
    Caroline Rozell
    Lorraine Comanor
    Marc Simon
    Len Joy
    Priscilla Mainardi
    Harvey Spurlock
    Max Sheridan
    Katja Zurcher
    Linda Nordquist
    Steven Miller

    POETRY
    Jasmine Smith
    Lowell Jaeger
    Jose Flores
    Corey Mingura
    Katherine MacCue
    Calvero

    NONFICTION
    Colleen Corcoran
    Chelsey Clammor
    Alia Volz

    ART
    Eric Rodriguez
    Loren Kantor
    Keith Moul
    Eric Rodriguez

    INTERVIEWS
    Amelia Gray
    Ruth Clampett

    SUMMER 2012

    FICTION
    Brian S. Hart
    Jessica Caudill
    Amanda McTigue
    Leslie Johnson
    Brandon Bell
    Marija Stajic
    Rachel Bentley
    Rebecca Wright
    Orlin Oroschakoff

    POETRY
    Gretchen Mattox
    Mike Donaldson
    Lucie Winborne
    David Russomano
    Jess Minkert

    NONFICTION
    J.J. Anselmi
    Melanie Henderson
    S.M.B.
    Annette Renee

    ART
    Judith Taylor
    Yi Gao
    Dallas Paterson
    Elias Duchowny

    INTERVIEW
    David Cowart, Part II

    SPRING 2012

    FICTION
    Eliezra Schaffzin
    Melissa Palmer
    Pamela Dreizen
    Claire Noonan
    Ben Orlando
    Joe Kilgore
    Francis Chung
    Kevin Ridgeway
    Karoline Barrett
    G.L. Williams

    POETRY
    Gale Acuff
    Susan King
    Ivy Page
    Sonali Gurpur
    Holly Day

    NONFICTION
    Henry F. Tonn
    Lily Murphy

    ART
    Leonard Kogan
    Orlin Oroschakoff
    Chad Kaplan

    INTERVIEW
    David Cowart, Part I

    WINTER 2011-2012

    FICTION
    Greg November
    Ashley Inguanta
    Brooke Kwikkel
    Tegan Webb
    Ruth Webb
    Edward Wells
    Tantra Bensko
    Keith Laufenberg
    Robert Sachs

    POETRY
    Geordie de Boer
    Amanda Hempel
    Lisa Sisler
    Garth Pavell

    NONFICTION
    Shay Belisle
    Emily-Jane Hills Orford

    ART
    Soey Milk
    Ashley Inguanta
    Brett Stout

    INTERVIEW
    Howard Junker
    Emily Kiernan

    FALL 2011

    FICTION
    Patrick T. Henry
    Matt Thomas
    Tracy Auerbach
    Marko Fong
    A. Lazakis
    Gina Goldblatt
    M.E. McMullen
    Sarah Sarai

    POETRY
    Aaron Poller
    Purdey Kreiden
    C. Derick Varn

    NONFICTION
    William Henderson
    Henry F. Tonn

    ART
    Karl Wills
    Eleanor Bennett
    Carl Lozada

    INTERVIEW
    TINA MAY HALL

    SUMMER 2011

    FICTION
    Avi Wrobel
    Taryn Hook
    San Rafi
    Jennifer Fenn
    Robert J. Miller
    Susan Dale
    John Staley
    William J. Fedigan
    Alice Charles

    POETRY
    Kathryn Zurlo
    Thompson Boling
    Felino Soriano

    NONFICTION
    G.S. Payne
    William Boyle

    ART
    Mari Inukai
    Nicole Bruckman
    Luke Ritta

    INTERVIEW
    Francesca Lia Block
    Rudy Ratzinger

    SPRING 2011

    FICTION
    Liam Connolly
    Katie Lattari
    Karen Wodke
    Sudha Balagopal
    Eliza Snelling
    Rebecca Shepard
    Ron Koppelberger

    POETRY
    Mark DeCarteret
    Margaux Griffith
    Erica Ostergaard
    Sara Swanson

    NONFICTION
    Shorsha Sullivan
    Chelsea Wolfe
    Michael Burns
    Yu-Han Chao

    ART
    Heather Watts
    John Oliver Hodges
    Luke Ritta

    INTERVIEW
    Musician, Chelsea Wolfe

    WINTER 2010

    FICTION
    Joe Kilgore
    John Oliver Hodges
    Dust, Marianne Villanueva
    The Great Emptying of the Three Triangles, Marianne Villanueva
    Jesse Aufiery
    Michael Burns
    Brett Biebel
    Tetman Callis

    POETRY
    Lauren Nicole Nixon
    Michael Fessler
    David McLean
    Jill Wright

    NONFICTION
    MIchael Campino
    Deanna Ong
    Sy Rosen
    Weisberg & Gousios

    ART
    Michael Knight
    Joseph Bowman
    Coloring Book Art

    INTERVIEW
    Author, Davis Schneiderman

    FALL 2010

    FICTION
    John Bruce
    Jim Meirose
    Sarah Smith
    Elizabeth Dunphey
    Gregg Williard
    Elizabeth Blandon

    POETRY
    Lana Rakhman
    Samantha Zimbler
    Ricky Garni
    Robert HIll Long

    NONFICTION
    MIchael Campino
    Leigh Gaston
    Sy Rosen
    Karen Joyce Williams

    ART
    Ela Boyd
    JT Steiny
    MIchael Jonathan
    Ernest Williamson

    INTERVIEW
    The Beautiful World of Pieter Nooten

    SUMMER 2010

    FICTION
    Emily Kiernan
    Joan Connor
    Stephen Meyer
    Desmond Kon
    Joel Cox

    POETRY
    Judith Taylor
    Gretchen Mattox
    Ashley Shivar
    Jesse DeLong

    NONFICTION
    Stuart Dybek
    Deborah Bradford
    Joseph Smith

    ART
    Osker Jimenez
    Steve Bartlett
    Richard Lange
    C.W. Moss

    REVIEW
    The Lava Lady by Joanne Levine & Paul Monroe

    SPRING 2010

    FICTION
    Miranda McLeod
    Heather Genovese
    DC Curtis & Bones Kendall

    POETRY
    Michael Moeller
    Steve Abee
    Aimee Brooks

    NONFICTION
    Paul Garson
    Teddie-Joy Remhild

    ART
    Alexia Pilat
    Carl Lozada
    Carly Mizzou

    REVIEW
    Burton Pressboard

      Spring 2024 Poetry
      Josh Humphrey J. A. Lane
      Dana Roeser Nolo Segundo
      Uzomah Ugwu Diane Webster

      Winter 2023/24 Poetry
      Duane Anderson Lawrence Bridges
      Annette Gagliardi Elizabeth Morse
      Frederick Pollack Charlotte Suttee
      Michal Zielinski

      Fall 2023 Poetry
      Wayne-Daniel Berard Elizabeth Crowell
      James Iovino Cynthia Pratt
      CLS Sandoval J.R. Solonche
      Scott Waller

      Summer 2023 Poetry
      George Capaccio Beatrice Feng
      Sydney Fisher Ron Riekki
      Mykyta Ryzhykh Scott Taylor

      Spring 2023 Poetry
      Lorelei Bacht John Cullen
      Shae Krispinsky James McKee
      Sloan Porter David Sapp

      Winter 2022/23 Poetry
      Phoebe Cragon Richard Dinges, Jr.
      Kristen Haggatt-Abader Arezou Mokhtarian
      Jim Murdoch Christina E. Petrides
      Brent Short

      Fall 2022 Poetry
      Gale Acuff C.L. Bledsoe
      billy cancel DeWitt Clinton
      Mark DeCarteret Megan Denese Mealor
      Stephanie Russell

      Summer 2022 Poetry
      Ali Asadollahi Christine Horner 
      Susan Jennifer Polese RE DRUM
      M.A. Schaffner Glen Vecchione
      SPRING 2022
      POETRY      		 Vandana Kumar John Maurer  Stephen Mead
      Paul Rabinowitz Juanita Rey Hoyt Rogers
      Jason Visconti
      WINTER 2021/22
      POETRY      		 Holly Day Ash Ellison Jonah Meyer
      Bruce Parker Frederick Pollack Kate Porter
      FALL 2021
      POETRY      		 Milton P. Ehrlich Maria Marrocchino Mikayla Schutte
      Travis Stephens Jordyn Taylor Kim Zach
      SUMMER 2021
      POETRY      		 Carolyn Adams Torri Hammonds James Croal Jackson
      J.R. Solonche Elizabeth Train-Brown Matt Zachary

      Winter 2020/21 Poets

      POETRY

      Jen Knox

      Kate Porter

      Gavriel Ross

      John Sweet

      Joy Williams

      Fall 2020 Poets

      Januário Esteves

      Diana Ha

      Ashley Inguanta

      F.X. James

      Steven M. Smith

      Tim Suermondt

      James Thurgood

      Summer 2020 Poetry

      Daniel Aristi Christopher Barnes Donna Dallas
      Téa Nicolae Keko Prijatelj Abasiama Udom

      Spring 2020 Poets

      Six poets present new work.

      Michele Alice
      Terry Brinkman
      Abigail George
      Lance Lee
      Charles J. March III
      Juanita Rey

      Summer 2019 Poets

      Six poets present new work.

      Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

      John Califano

      R.T. Castleberry

      Laurinda Lind

      Nanette Rayman

      Roger Singer

      Spring 2019 Poets

      New poetry from seven talented writers.

      Holly Day

      Chris Fox

      Mary Kasimor

      Jared Pearce

      Marvin Rosel

      Zach Trebino

      Guinotte Wise

      Winter 2018-19 Poets

      New poetry from seven special writers.

      Adrian Cretu

      E.G. Ted Davis

      M.A. Istvan, Jr.

      A.C. O’Dell

      Lauren Sartor

      Alex Schmidt

      J.A. Staisey

      Fall 2018 Poets

      New poetry from six great poets.

      Judy Shepps Battle

      Mary Bone

      Zoë Christopher 

      Jim Farfaglia

      DS Maolalai

      Amber Wilkinson

      Summer 2018 Poets

      New work from seven outstanding poets.

      Anthony Isaac Bradley

      Colleen Farrelly

      Anastasia Jill

      Nick Paul

      Simon Perchik

      Fabrice Poussin

      Domenic Scopa

      Spring 2018 Poets

      New work from five amazing writers.

      Brad Garber

      Ricky Garni

      Susan Richardson

      Deborah Saltman

      Kimberly White

      Winter 2o17-18 Poets

      New work from six very talented writers.

      Ruth Bavetta

      Joe Gianotti

      Sergio A. Ortiz

      Garth Pavell

      Cliff Saunders

      Sara Truuvert

      Fall 2o17 Poets

      Great new work from eight super-talented writers.

      Lana Bella

      Elizabeth Bolton

      Lillian Hara

      Kristen Hoggat-Abader

      Glenn Ingersoll

      Steven Ratiner

      Margarita Serafimova

      Keiona Wallace

      Summer 2o17 Poets

      New work from seven very talented writers.

      Charles W. Brice

      Abigail George

      Greg Hill

      Bruce McRae

      A. A. Reinkeke

      S. L. V. Stronwin

      Kailey Tedesco

      Spring 2017 POETS

      Brand new work from some very talented writers.

      Gayane M. Haroutyunyan

      TS Hidalgo

      Kasandra Larsen

      E.M. Schorb

      Tara Isabel Zambran0

      J4

      Winter 2016-17 POETS

      New work from five very talented poets.

      Natalie Crick

      Joseph Farley

      Dustin Lowman

      Tamer Mostafa

      Melissa Watt

      Fall 2016 POETS

      Bold new work from six talented poets.

      Christina Bavone

      Sarah Blumrich

      Seth King

      Maria Marrocchino

      Judith Roitman

      Siavash Saadlou

      Summer 2016 POETS

      Exciting new work from seven talented poets. Enjoy all the work featured here.

      Lana Bella

      Janet Buck

      D.G. Geis

      Ashley Inguanta

      Oliver Timken Perrin

      Brad Rose

      Lucas Shepherd

      Spring 2016 POETS

      Exciting new work from five talented poets. Enjoy all the work featured in our new issue.

      Abigail George

      adam l.

      Michael Penny

      Belinda Subraman

      John Sweet

      WINTER 2015-16 POETS

      Excellent and diverse. Exciting new work from six outstanding poets. Enjoy each writer and all they have to offer.

      Marcella Benton

      Sean Howard

      Kjell Nykvist

      Josey Parker

      Elizabeth Perdomo

      Domenic James Scopa

      FALL 2015 POETS

      Some impressive new work from six outstanding poets. Enjoy each and every one.

      Michael Brownstein

      Nuta Istrate Gangan

      Karen Corinne Herceg

      Bruce McRae

      Alan Reese

      Lauren Vargas

      Summer POETRY 2015

      Featuring some very impressive work from an outstanding group of poets. We hope you enjoy every word.

      Charles Brice
      Variations on a Buddha Shove • Ten Paintings by Matisse
      Ten Jazz Standards • Tarzan In Winter, 1955

      Robin Wyatt Dunn
      The Glowing Adventure • Live at Five • Strange Horizons

      Hannah Frishberg
      Amtrak • Danse Macabre • This Social Generation

      René Ostberg
      Bioluminescent Bay • Aisling • Coconut

      Jon Riccio
      Streaming • Prompt • Separate Recyclables

      Emily Strauss
      Going on Vacation • The Sky Leaps to Light

      Spring POETRY 2015

      Featuring some impressive new work from seven outstanding poets. We hope you enjoy them all.

      Sandra Rokoff-Lizut
      April Fool • On Polliwog Pond • As Oregon winter begins

      Marina Carreira
      Capela de Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos • Requiem for the Heart – En Route to Montreal, on Our Anniversary

      Kent Kosack
      Spent Grains • The Attic • Your Hair • Commute

      Claudia Putnam
      Ain’t Got No • This Isn’t Really Happening • Sync

      Kelly Thompson
      Legacy • Colorado • Shape of a Song

      John Lowther
      Selections from 555

      Gerard Sarnat
      Where Erasers and Wastebaskets and I am Kept

      Winter POETRY 2014-15

      Featuring some great new work from an excellent group of poets. We hope you enjoy each and every one.

      Ho Cheung (Peter) Lee
      Coffee • Without • 2700 fps • Eaden

      Colin Dodds
      Loneliness Grow Stranger the Larger It Becomes • Secrets of the Modern Race • Rooms Without End

      Kevin McCoy
      Phone Rings • A Thousand Threads • King Street Aberdeen

      John McKernan
      The Thin Scar on Susan’s Right Wrist • Why Do Soldiers • Birthday Numero 47 • Public Park

      Tamer Mostafa
      Sniper’s Rhythm • Walk to the Coffee Shop • The Dealers are Sleeping

      Tim Roberts
      from 244 Passivity

      FALL POETRY 2014

      Featuring fresh new work from an exceptional group of poets. We hope you enjoy each and every one.

      R.A. Allen
      Disclaimer • Future Bright • Side Work Sonatina

      Christopher Suda
      Wonder is a Wooden Leg • Caterpillars

      Kim Suttell
      As a Skinny Girl • Pierre • Acceptance • Pieces

      Robert Lavett Smith
      Sable • After Thirty Years • An Accident of Weather

      John Ronan
      Every Day is Garbage Day, Somewhere • Hanky Panky (A love song)

      POETRY – Summer 2014

      Featuring excellent new poetry from a talented group of writers. We hope you enjoy reading each and every word.

      Darren Demaree
      Adoration #109, Adoration #110, Adoration #111

      Persephone Abbott
      A Bucket of Water, The Pear in Her Lap, I Want for Powder, Rambunctious Love Fix Me, Short Florida Saga

      Daniel Fitzgerald
      Dust Storm, Caress, Professional Courtesy

      Simon Perchik
      New Poems

      Joseph Ferguson
      Rain on the Lake, The Hawk, Goose Woman

      Sharon Rothenfluch Cooper
      Discordant Song, Fever, Tracings, Reflections, Falls’ Bright Flush, Sweeping Gestures

      Shelby Stephenson
      Chapter 14, 28 and 47 from Country

      Adefisayo Adeyeye
      Untitled, Untitled, Untitled

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