Crack the Spine
Literary magazine Issue 146
Issue 146 April 15, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine
Cover Art by Olivia Inwood Olivia Inwood is an Australian-Lithuanian, born in regional Australia. She is currently studying English and Visual Arts at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her writing has previously been published in two editions of the Poetry Quarterly (US) and Written Portraits: An Anthology of Short Stories (Australia).
CONTENTS Sharon Kurtzman
Julip Reflects on Being Left Behind at the Store
Judith Grissmer First Horn
Kalisha Buckhanon
The Incredibly Short Love Affair of Sixo Reese
Jennifer O’Rourke
The Surgeon General’s Girlfriend
Michael Brasier
The Whispering Witch of Waco Drive
Lara Alonso Corona Piece of my Heart
Tobi Alfier
Misty and Amber Get Matching Tattoos
Sharon Kurtzman
Julip Reflects on Being Left Behind at the Store
People thought they knew everything about me and my plush ears, coy smile and unblinking eyes that gazed out from the store’s back counter. My white fur was only slightly soiled from spilled apple juice at tea parties; the soles of my feet sported a few crayon smudges: red, orange, green and magenta. “Poor teddy, sweet bear, I hope they come back for him,” one sales woman said to another. The first woman stroked my ear with her pink-painted nails, chips on three of them. The second woman didn’t bother to look at me, too busy counting out the dress boutique’s registers. I’m named Julip, not Teddy. My Lydia was more creative than that. The second sales woman’s closing routine was one I recognized from when I was new—before Lydia—a time when my store’s doors had shut
at nine and worker bees straightened shelves and racks while a groaning vacuum combed out trampled carpets. Earlier today, Lydia had dropped me near the fitting room mirror in a moment of frenzied five-year-old dancing and twirling while Mother gathered up dresses that sparkled under the lights. Mother declared the blue dress perfect and handed the pink-nailed saleswoman a credit card. “Dance with me, Lydia,” I said, but she couldn’t hear me over Mother’s shepherding. And now, I waited for Lydia to return, and wondered if this was the end for me, my cotton-stuffed life having come full circle, Julip on a shelf once again.
Judith Grissmer First Horn
and the bird called, in response to the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery —T. S. Eliot
On a stage backlit by moon through glass a conductor lowers his baton. Out of the silence, the solitary notes of our granddaughter’s French horn call an orchestra into being. In the interval between Brahms composing the Piano Concerto in B-flat and tonight’s performance our lives were born. Throughout our lifetime’s incongruity and dissonance this lullaby held true to form awaiting notes of instruments yet to be assembled, a love song written for ears not ready to listen.
Is what sustains us during life’s exacting measures the hope poured forth from a composer’s pen? Or is it the unheard music of a child to be born? They say before you die, your life flashes before your eyes, but there are resurrections before dying. Tonight, wakening to a horn’s resolve I realize there has always been this song, singing beneath past and future urging us on.What we seek to hold to, waits just beyond time.
Kalisha Buckhanon
The Incredibly Short Love Affair of Sixo Reese I
When Sixo Reese arrived at the bus station in Magnolia, Illinois, a hint of Windy City soot still on his clothes and bags, he told the taxi driver his sister Mae Bell sent: “Take me to a place where pretty girls dance.” The driver, missing front teeth, smiled a wide-toothed grin and turned on the radio. The distance between Magnolia’s Greyhound stop and its only den of iniquity was Ma Cherie Amour. When the silver 1981 Buick Park Avenue sputtered up in front of the Harlem Inn on Church Street, Sixo understood why the driver laughed. The weathered, wooden sign for the Harlem Inn was hard to see; in a place with only a dozen or so stoplights, a bright neon display visible from blocks away was probably too much to expect. Too many Midwestern winters had destroyed the establishment’s battered aluminum awning; it bent and sagged down low, like a jilted lover brought to his knees. Sixo was accustomed to city grandeur, where the entrances to nightclubs loomed high and wide, to give their patrons that sense of walking into mystery. Sixo neglected to bend his head upon walking in. The awning’s angry, serrated edge grazed his bald and exposed scalp. He didn’t even know he was bleeding until the tavern’s big-boned barmaid brought a complimentary Budweiser to his corner booth and politely pointed it out. Sixo thanked her. Then he scowled at the scene before him as soon as she turned her back.
There was not one woman in the room who took Sixo’s breath away; he then knew he was really, finally back home. He saw a few tipsy couples on the dance floor—sweating, grinding, grinning with their eyes closed, all of them dizzy with the scents of spilled liquor and pheromones. Some faced each other . Others spooned back to chest, the men holding tight the hips of their women, the women holding on to their partners’ necks. It was Wednesday. So although a stranger sat in their midst, people were more concerned with finding the extra surge to get through the rest of the work week than figuring out who the unfamiliar face was. Sixo soon tired of wiping tiny droplets of blood from his forehead with rough, cheap tavern napkins, and listening to old muddy blues from a jukebox because the owner was too cheap to pay a band. Around midnight, a few hours after he had first arrived in Magnolia, he picked up his small bags and began the short walk to the house on Muriel Lane with “Reese Family” etched and painted above the doorbell. A spare key to the three-story alabaster and brick home’s back door was on the low rim of the backyard shed’s roof, just as it had been since Sixo was a boy. Also resting in its same place—adjacent to the shed—was the doghouse he and his four older brothers constructed many decades ago from scrap-yard metal, straw and bricks. There had not been a tenant since a Doberman named Poncho went rabid and broke loose shortly after Sixo’s sixteenth birthday. A twelvefoot clothesline anchored to parallel poles, thin and invisible against the night, pinched his neck as he made his way to the back porch steps. He cursed and walked under it, continued to the back door, passed the modest garden plot, the defunct well and the underground brick cauldron where his mother used to fry turkeys and fish. Sixo noticed all of these items, for they were necessary, albeit somber reminders; nothing much ever changed here. The only hope for any
alteration of the scene lay in the state of the backyard sycamore. For now it was a voluptuous and lively tree, and it would be for a few more months until gently and reluctantly losing its leaves in surrender to a long, hard winter. Sixo set his three hard suitcases of clothes and records at the back door, then walked through the dimmed kitchen. He felt like he had been here just yesterday. It had been several years. He squeezed through the narrow, cluttered hallway leading to the parlor, where he found Mae Bell snoring and cooing in the living room armchair like a baby, with a gray crocheted shawl bundled about her. She had tried to wait up for him, keep herself awake by knitting. The winding string from the shawl’s last row clung to a knotted ball of yarn like an umbilical cord. The flames in the fireplace had died out long ago. Some ashen embers flew about the room like moths trying to find their way back outside. Sixo wondered where the wind to blow them was coming from. He’d have to seal the draft. He knew Mae Bell kept the windows shut at night. There had been an intruder once, shortly after their mother died and Mae Bell became the only one in the home. So she carried a rifle around the house after dark. It was now propped up against her chair in an intimidating stance, but Mae Bell’s 80-year old ears were failing her so she couldn’t have heard a robber in time to pick it up anyway. Sixo set the gun down on the floor and grabbed his older sister’s shoulders. “Hey there, sis,” Sixo said, and Mae Bell opened her eyes. She laughed while she spoke. “I thought you was Daddy,” she croaked out in sleepwalking tones. “You look like Daddy. Is I’m dreamin’?” “Naw baby,” Sixo said, remembering why he had come back to Magnolia in the first place: a frantic call from the great-niece who looked in on Mae Bell
from time to time. She discovered hardened feces on the kitchen floor and a side of beef tucked away where stockings and underwear should have been. Now the niece and her latest boyfriend had moved up to the City in search of skyscraper jobs, so Sixo knew it was finally time for him to come down. “It’s me. Sixo. In the flesh.” “In the flesh, the flesh…” Mae Bell repeated and hugged her brother until he laughed. Her hands had grown large and roughed in the few years since he had seen her, and her fingers felt like stones against his back. Her lips had seemingly atrophied since she had no one to talk to anymore, so the kiss felt hard. Sixo had always been lithely thin, and Mae Bell’s tight embrace cut his breath off eventually. “You hungry?” she asked him. “I cooked.” Sixo had traveled over two hundred miles from his one-bedroom, fully furnished bachelor’s pad at the edge of Chicago’s Lake Michigan in South Shore. An old running buddy sublet it now. Sixo wondered if he himself would ever return. Guilty resentment had stolen his appetite, but he let Mae Bell heat up dirty rice, bacon fat, string beans and turkey legs in a cast-iron skillet anyway. As soon as the steaming-hot food was placed in front of Sixo and he tasted the first few mouthfuls, he understood why exiles could never cure their longing for home; Mae Bell’s food was perfect. He recognized what had been missing from his attempts at cooking: indeed, that the essential ingredient in most dishes was a woman’s touch. Mae Bell left her food alone. She instead watched her youngest and only living sibling scrape his plate clean. “Daddy liked turkey legs best,” Mae Bell said, when Sixo finished one plate and she scooped him another. “I thought it was Tommy who loved the drumsticks?” Sixo asked.
“No, it was Daddy. ‘Member me and Mama had to set ‘em to the side for him? Before anybody even touched a bird we had to put Daddy’s legs to the side.” She nodded and giggled from remembrance. “Daddy didn’t like nothing but white meat, he took the breast,” Sixo insisted. He knew he was right. Even at his age, he felt uneasy correcting her; he remembered too many times when, in the absence of higher authority, Mae Bell had switched him or one of his brothers to tears. “You trying to tell me I don’t know what was my own Daddy’s favorite?” Mae Bell asked with twisted lips. “Mama didn’t do it alone, you know. I helped. I cooked for you, Daddy, Tommy, Billy, Emmett and Jack. All y’all. From time y’all was little to the time y’all left. You trying to say I don’t know what y’all liked?” “No Mae Bell,” Sixo conceded. They were arguing, already. “I’m not saying you don’t know what we liked. All I’m saying is Tommy liked turkey legs too.” “Yeah, he shole did,” Mae Bell said. “You was Daddy’s favorite too, you know. He loved you best. I think he loved you best. Used to talk about you all the time, at church, the barber, when I stopped by…called you his city boy…” Mae Bell rocked back and forth, gazed at the back kitchen window as though she expected someone to walk through it. Then she noticed a speck of chewed food dangling to Sixo’s cheek. She wiped it away with the tattered towel she used for drying dishes. “How’s your dinner?” she asked, as she slowly rose to put away the leftovers. “Real good, Mae Bell. Real good,” Sixo said. They ate every night at six during that summer. Sometimes they talked, mostly about the “old days” in Mississippi where every Reese but Sixo had been born. In the daytime, Mae Bell cooked, cleaned, gardened and preserved. On
Sundays, a New Bethlehem United Baptist Church deacon picked her up for 11 a.m. service. She came home around two to sit on the porch and fan the heat away. In turn, Sixo healed the bruises and wounds the drafty, four-bedroom house had incurred in its sixty years of existence, injuries which had seemed to eagerly multiply in the last few years Mae Bell had lived there alone. Theirs was one of the only legitimate homes still left on Muriel Lane. Most original homeowners had passed on, leaving behind children who converted the laborious burden of a single house into the profitable enterprise of rented apartments. Sixo was determined the home his father and uncles built not long after the Depression ended, when hope was more essential than raw materials, would be tough again. He fixed leaks which had warped the floorboard wood and created musty smells in both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms. He corrected the impudence of vandals and replaced all the missing and damaged boards of the home’s surrounding picket fence. Then he painted it even whiter than it had been. He reinstated the backyard birdhouse, glazed the rust with WD40 and refilling the feeder with high-quality seed. Mae Bell finally realized fuller corn stalks and livelier greens when Sixo pulled up the weeds which had been choking much of the side yard garden’s yield. His improvements did not go unnoticed. “Sixo, I shole is glad you here,” Mae Bell told him one night, as they feasted on what she declared had been Billy’s favorite: green tomatoes swirled in cornmeal, then fried in peanut oil. Sixo was on his third helping. Late summer rain slid down the windows and pelted the roof, punctuating the silence as he ate and Mae Bell watched. The house smelled old, worn and safe. “I’m glad I’m here too, Mae Bell.”
Sixo lied. They had been left decent inheritance: Thomas Sr.’s pension from foundry work, Mae Bell’s social security, seven nieces and nephews who sent money, the house. But the absence of his parents’ and brothers’ voices reminded him he must think about who would be next—him or Mae Bell. The rest had all passed in Magnolia like falling dominoes in rapid, almost coincidental succession—one every few years, one after another, some quietly and some fighting, one—Jack—voluntarily with the assistance of moonshine and a noose. Mae Bell bore the extra weight of losing a husband to cirrhosis of the liver and their one son to heroin; the family also knew she had miscarried at least twice. As if cursed by God for a crime she never confessed, the matriarch Viola Reese lasted just long enough to see the men fall. And with each funeral, each burial of a soul conceived in the South but transported just two states North for opportunity, she had braved grief’s collapse to make a final eulogized declaration: My boy Tommy was a barber. My man Thomas built the Illinois Central. My baby Emmett built his own house. Jack fought for his country. Billy worked on boats. Sometimes at night, while Sixo lay swaddled in scratchy blankets Mae Bell daily stretched tight against the bed he had slept in until he escaped to Chicago at seventeen, he thought he smelled his father’s snuff and the leaf-thin pages of his mother’s worn Bibles. When he investigated one morning, after being kept up by memories, he found an old Folger’s can someone used to spit tobacco in and a Bible lost under his bed. He often wondered what his mother might have said about him, had she outlived the youngest child who had snuck into her womb, to her surprised, when she was 42:
Sixo gave me trouble. Sixo was always spoiled. Sixo never kept a job. Sixo never gave me any grandchildren. Sixo loved the City more than me. Sixo abandoned us. Viola never knew their assumption of his privilege is what prevented Sixo from full acceptance by the clan: his privilege of youth, a Northern birth, extraordinary and untraceable good looks, a childhood spent primarily in a large house as opposed to a series of shacks without running water. He had felt their jealousy all his life, fled it as soon as he could. But he never thought he would long for them as much as he now found he did. The knowledge he would never get the chance to right past wrongs was a revelation so painful Sixo could not bear to think about it. In fact, it was hard for him to even look at Mae Bell’s face. With each passing day, each carefully-prepared dinner he shoved down, each time he discovered Mae Bell crying or shouting warnings to robbers who were not there, scrambling for the shotgun he had prudently hidden behind crawlspace lattice, Sixo silently hoped she would be next. He hoped he would be around to watch her large, nearly six foot tall body, which had been spectacular in its prime, wither away to the frailty and thinness of the baby dolls—many limbless—he discovered while cleaning out the attic. He hoped he would chew up her food for her when she could no longer do it, sponge her gently when she could no longer wash herself, dress her up on Sundays and march her into church with such flair she would forget she could barely walk. Oldest and youngest now challenged each other in a morbid race to life’s finish line—only Sixo did not want to win. His prayer was that some of the nieces and nephews whom he had never taken much time to get to know might help at the end. And also he wished he might hear his mother’s voice as he was ushered into the darkness of a
permanent end, pronouncing not “Sixo was ungrateful, Sixo was selfish, or Sixo forgot about us,” but “Sixo was last.”
II
After eight weeks of what felt like an internment, Sixo found himself thoroughly involved in a task he had sworn he would never regress to—sitting alone on a park bench, feeding bread crumbs to ducks and geese along the edge of the famed Magnolia River, which the locals liked to proudly note was “one of the Mississippi River’s finest tributaries.” Sixo never had an impulse towards work when he was young, but he knew he wanted a job now. He had built up no “marketable” skills or trades when he had the time he could have never known would pass so soon. His first and only real employment was driving the #28 Stony Island bus from Olive Harvey College to the South Side YMCA. When that ended after just two months and several run-ins with his supervisor, he got by on odd jobs, pawn shops and desperate women. But available work and single women were now scarce in this heartland town, where the only enemy more contemptible than feminism in the face of marriage was a man who let his children starve. Now at 59, Sixo’s choices were limited. He was too old for both the nearby slaughterhouse and county jail, yet too young to bag groceries or clean the few town office buildings. Having coasted through school, he figured he could never pass the Illinois state exam that could qualify him to watch over patients at the local state mental facility. Pondering his escape from the monotony of life with Mae Bell and the house where he couldn’t fix one thing before another broke down, he started back home with half the bread crumbs still in the bag. A few blocks from Muriel Lane, the silver Park Avenue which
had greeted him at the bus stop approached and slowed down. The driver remembered Sixo. “What’s up my man?” the driver asked as he pulled up alongside the familiar face—womanishly round, flanked by marble gray eyes and bushy black eyebrows. He motioned for Sixo to get in. Sixo noticed Sonny’s Deluxe Car Service spray-painted in red on the Buick’s front passenger door. He had not remembered seeing that when he arrived, and wondered what was so deluxe about a car leaned to one side more than the other. Sixo recognized the incessant tick tick tick of a worn engine. There was a sick, fumbling sound trailing from back of the car, and a low vibration which sent chills through Sixo’s loins as they rolled along the quiet neighborhood. Despite his discomfort with the noise, he liked it. Sixo missed hearing the roar of public transportation, the titillating sounds of public sinning, his own footsteps on a frozen or scorched city street. “Where to?” the driver asked through the licorice twig he pushed between his two front missing teeth. “Muriel Lane—700 block.” Sixo leaned forward and whispered though no one else was in the car, “Hey man, I’m actually broke right now.” “No matter,” the driver said. “I’m going this way anyway. Don’t worry about it.” Sixo leaned back and relaxed. He remembered the plastic bag of bread crumbs in his hand and stuffed it in his shirt pocket, hoping the driver would not ask him about it. “So, did you find what you were looking for?” the driver asked with his eyes on Sixo through the rearview mirror.
“Of course,” Sixo said. “I grew up here. I know my way around. I can always get home.” The driver’s laugh reminded Sixo of an El train: it started off as a low and distant chuckle, then swelled into a throaty eruption of noise which quickly faded away again. “I meant the women—did you find your pretty girls?” “Oh?” Sixo couldn’t even answer. He only chuckled at himself, because he remembered the look on the driver’s face when he had asked the question. It was only after stepping into the Harlem Inn that he got the joke. “No man—no pretty girls. Just a pretty nasty cut where that raggedy roof caved in.” “That’s the Harlem Inn for you, a joint without the juke,” said the driver. Then, squinting his beaded yellowed eyes, “It’s been a while now—was that bus ticket one way?” “It was,” Sixo admitted, suddenly feeling dizzy. “It was,” he repeated. “Oh well,” the driver said. He clipped the curb trying to make a right onto Muriel Lane quickly. He recovered and kept on gabbing. “But anyway, Magnolia’s not that bad. Been here all my life. It’s quiet. I mean, we have some young folks around here who wanna call themselves gangbangers, but all in all, it’s about as good as any place in America. Decent schools, decent cost of living.” “Just no foxy ladies…” Both men laughed as Sixo put his hand on the driver’s shoulder and pointed to the Reese house. Mae Bell stood in the front yard, watering the lawn with a hose tangled about itself and cutting off the water’s flow. She didn’t seem to
mind only a trickle could escape. She leaned forward with one hand on her hips and scrunched up her eyes to peer into the car. “Your mother?” the driver asked. “No—my sister,” Sixo said. He wanted to drive around a little bit more. He had the guilty whim to wrestle the driver for his keys and take the stolen car to the City, down South Halsted Street perhaps, where he could smell succulent Jew Town polish sausages, watch a parade of people act up in their own special way, and maybe even buy a suit in a color he knew he should be ashamed of. But he thought of a better way to get at least some of what he wanted. Sixo had always been good at thinking on his feet and getting his way; he had learned to outsmart from having grown up with five older siblings whom he could not outfight. When he chose to, he could have a charisma and juvenile charm which made it hard for even men to refuse him. “Man, lemme repay you for the ride and fix that engine,” he told the driver. Mae Bell approached the car. The driver smiled and shrugged. “Business is really slow right now,” he said. “Really it’s no business at all. Just me, a new boy and some old raggedy cars in a garage. I’m not making much money…” “No, no cost…” said Sixo. “My daddy used to work on cars for extra money. He taught me a lot. I always stayed interested. Sounds like you about to throw a rod.” “Yeah, that’s what I been told. But, I can’t have a man work for free…” “Man, it’s no problem,” Sixo said. Mae Bell was now at the curb. “Sixo, that you?” Her thin purple, terry cloth housedress had lost its string. It flapped open slightly like an envelope someone forgot to seal. A great part of her chest, with its yellow age spots scattered like stardust, was exposed and
open to a gentle breeze, welcome but dangerous to her ailing health. Her breasts were hidden under the housedress like summer melons. She looked completely out of place outside the house. Sixo immediately wanted to carry her back inside. “I’ll just come by the garage tomorrow,” he told the driver, as he got out of the car and noted the address on the side. As his new friend put the car in drive and began to pull off, Sixo shouted, “You Sonny?” and the driver replied before starting down the street, “Yes…Sonny junior.” Sonny, Jr. was the only man Sixo had had a man’s conversation with since he got to Magnolia. After waving Sonny away, he grabbed Mae Bell’s arm and led her back to the lawn. He couldn’t believe she was watering it in an August month. It had rained almost every other day. “Sixo, is it okay if we eat leftovers tonight?” Mae Bell asked as they walked. “I was gonna cook your favorite…” “Oh?” Sixo turned off the water spigot and waited for Mae Bell to tell him what his favorite was. He caught a glimpse of the butt of the rifle peering from behind the newly-painted lattice under the porch. “I wanted to boil some sweet corn,” she went, “fry up some cornbread and catfish. I know you like your catfish.” “You’re right. I do.” “But my hands itch. I can’t stop scratchin’ em.” “You been takin’ your medication?” “Every day. Every day I do. I wish we had a stone mill here, like we did in Mississippi. I wanna grind my own corn meal. Sit on that big stone while I do it. I don’t like this other stuff. I don’t like the store no more…”
She was much heavier than he. Soaking wet, Sixo may have weighed 175 pounds. At 80 years old and looking down at her little brother, Mae Bell approached 230. When they reached the porch steps, Sixo walked up much too fast; he could tackle them two at a time, Mae Bell needed extra seconds with her back foot on one before she could find the strength to put her front foot on the other. Sixo turned his entire body around and held out his arms to provide Mae Bell greater leverage. Suddenly, perhaps under the weight of Mae Bell’s girth, the third bottom porch step cracked and split in half like a fractured limb. Mae Bell let out a slight cry before she stumbled and landed on her knees in an awkward kneel, her hands rushing to break the fall. It took all of Sixo’s might to lift his older sister up—he squeezed his arms in between her arms and shoulders, and lifted her by the haunches, as if she were a pup. “I got you, I got you…” he murmured. She managed to stand up, with Sixo’s help, once they reached the porch. A thin veneer of blood began to crust where Mae Bell’s right knee—her good knee—had landed. Her thigh-high, fleshcolored stockings had ripped in an uneven line. Embarrassed, she giggled. “Sixo, I’m sorry…I got ahead of myself.” “You alright? Can you make it or should I get the cane?” “I can make it,” Mae Bell said. “I can make it.” Sixo locked his older sister’s right arm into his and walked slower this time, cautious of Mae Bell’s wince and shaky steps, thinking not of dinner but of peroxide, bandages, new wood, a hammer and nails.
III
Sonny’s Deluxe Car Service was located on the edge of the seedy part of town. Sixo took the twenty-minute walk there and back each day. Just a few blocks from the cold, 1000-square foot garage was what the locals called the “The Red Light District.” It wasn’t a district at all but two blocks where, if they were lucky, some teenage boys might find prostitutes willing to service them for $25 each, or at least a few hustlers of semipotent dime bags to temporarily numb their libidos. The excitement Sixo had previously been looking for was not to be found at Sonny’s either. The office was a coffin-size closet littered with crumbling paper, stuffed notebooks and dusty cassettes Sonny played on an old boom box. The “employee lounge” was a sagging couch and a fold-down card table with a coffee machine and microwave on top, sufficient since there were only two employees: Donnie, a convicted drug dealer out on parole whose wife was expecting a new baby, and Sixo, whom Sonny hired for minimum wage after he fixed the Buick’s engine and returned every day thereafter to chat. The couch and Sonny’s office were separated by a broken vending machine which wouldn’t even light up anymore. The rest of the space was inhabited by five old cars Sonny had inherited when his father died: an antique canary yellow Mustang needing a floor and a transmission, an old fire-red Pontiac Sunbird, a sky-blue Ford Tempo, a dingy-white El Dorado and the Buick. Donnie did most of the driving before 9 p.m. while Sonny minded “the books,” the telephone and the Jet Magazine Beauty of the Week collection decorating his walls. Sixo picked up fares sometimes, in the rare cases two called at once. After 6 p.m., he was home with Mae Bell. By nine, Donnie was mandated to be inside and awaiting a check-up call from his parole officer. Then, Sonny pulled the telephone out of the office and slept on the couch. After
midnight, he was lucky to get seven or eight calls before Donnie showed up refreshed and energetic between 7 and 8 in the morning. Sixo showed up around noon to wash and wax the old cars, make minor repairs and gas them up every now and then. About every twenty minutes, there was a brief flurry of activity when the men received a call from someone who needed a ride from point A to point B in the ten- mile radius of Magnolia proper. Sixo and Donnie only made minimum wage. Because all his “cabs” and the garage were paid for, Sonny was able to make a small profit. In the daytime, Donnie chauffeured Magnolia’s elderly as they went about routine tasks: set doctors’ appointments, weekly grocery shopping, daylong visits with old-time friends and church activities. Sonny got the more interesting and exciting fares at night: teenage girls with hickies trying to make curfew, husbands who were regularly put out by their wives, basement partygoers who had gotten drunk and forgotten their way home. All of them were charged a flat rate of $7 to get to their destinations. Most of them either didn’t have it or pretended not to; Donnie and Sonny would often negotiate. Mae Bell reassured Sixo she would be fine by herself and alone, but it took a few days before Sixo became totally confident in the idea. He returned home that first day at three o’clock, only a few hours after he had left. He rummaged a few nearby junkyards for an engine he could rebuild and place into the Buick, and when he returned Sonny had placed a cup of coffee and a fifty dollar bill in his hands. The steam emanating from the coffee roped around and around itself like a woman swiveling her hips. But instead of sex Sixo suddenly thought of Mae Bell trying to drain a pot of something or other—perhaps losing her grip, scalding herself, crying out. He snatched the money and rushed home. After searching through the rest of the house, Sixo was forced to look into the one
room he had been avoiding. He found his sister sitting in front of the vanity in his parents’ old bedroom. Their mother had slept alone on the king-size bed, taking up much of the room for almost a dozen years after their father died. Mae Bell had checked in on her mother often during those last days, only to find Viola clinging hard to her side of the bed as though she still shared it with her husband Thomas. Thomas’s kangol and derby hats had not been moved in decades; they seemed permanently a part of the handmade mahogany coat rack, a 45 th anniversary gift from Emmett. The rest of the furniture—an ornately inscribed chest at the foot of the bed, a metal shoe rack peeking from under the bed, a threaded mural wall depicting fowl on a lake—was outdated, chunky and obsolete. Mae Bell stared into the cracked vanity mirror and brushed her heavy, coarse hair. Sixo was shocked to see it well past her shoulders. He had not seen Mae Bell’s hair loosed since he was a boy, a couple years after she had married. “You home already from your new job?” she asked him. She quickly pulled a stocking cap over her hair; it always began to tangle as soon as she released it. Then before he could answer, “Dinner ain’t ready yet. If I had known you was gonna be here early Sixo, then I would have had it ready for you. You want a sandwich?” “Mae Bell, don’t get up for me,” Sixo replied firmly. He placed his hands gently on her shoulders so she could sit back down on the child-size stool in front of the vanity. She had been complaining about her knee ever since the day she fell on the steps. Sixo wanted to move her bed and other essentials downstairs, into the parlor but far from the fireplace, so she would not have to travel up and down stairs to
get what she needed. Mae Bell had refused, even though it took her several minutes and a sweaty brow to reach the upstairs landing. “This is my house,” she said, when he brought up the idea over the meatloaf. “Not just the downstairs, but all of it.” Her eyes used to be a deep dark brown, but they were now milky and muted. Whenever she bucked them, as she did now, one could see two brown age spots near the crease in her left eye. “I know sis, but I just don’t think it’s a good idea….” “Don’t argue with me Sixo,” she told him more with her eyes than her tongue, raising her voice for the first time since she had come home. “Now don’t forget your place. My bed staying right where it’s at and that’s all there is to it. Eat your supper.” IV
Within a few weeks on the job, Sixo learned the only thing rivaling Donnie’s energy was his gift for gab. When the corn-rowed and ashy-elbowed young man wasn’t checking the gas gauges, counting his fares or helping Sixo wash down the cars, he was talking: about all the mischief he used to enact, his time behind bars, the baby he had on the way, the girlfriend he planned on making his wife once he got off parole, the “bitchy” parole officer who told him he had to be home promptly at nine even if his woman went into labor after then. “Well, I don’t care what she says,” Donnie threatened one day, shouting from under the old El Dorado. They had to tap the starter in order for the car to wake up. “I’m gonna see my baby born. I’m gonna see my son come into this world. Whether she likes it or not. If I have to go back to jail, I’ll go. But I’ll be damned if I don’t see my baby come into this world…”
“But if you violate parole, you won’t get to see him at all,” Sixo suggested as he slithered into the car, ready to try the ignition when Donnie finished. “I don’t care,” Donnie yelled. He found the base of the starter and began to strike it hard. “How’s a man supposed to feel like a man if he has to be in the bed at nine?” Donnie pulled himself from up under the car. “Try it now.” “Being a man has to do with a lot more than your bedtime.” Sixo turned the key in the ignition and the car roared awake. He let it run so the battery and alternator could charge. Donnie began to shadowbox with his reflection in the window. “Well, what is it then?” he asked while giving himself a right uppercut. “What do you say it is, old man?” Sixo leaned against the El Dorado, similar to one he had driven just a decade ago. “I don’t know.” Being nobody’s father or husband, he truly thought he didn’t. “Well, I know it ain’t being in the house at nine o’clock. I mean, I’ve made some mistakes, but I think I’ve rectified them. I’m ready to move on, move on up…” Donnie went on complaining to himself while Sixo listened and Sonny peered out from the office. Sixo did not talk much. He usually only listened to Donnie hope and lie and dream, all while making threats against the system which kept him in check with an ankle bracelet. Sixo looked at the boy who was almost 35 years his junior and wondered when he had been so crazy about a woman he would work a minimum wage job just to keep her content. Donnie tried to work so hard, Sonny had once asked Sixo to find out if the boy was on speed.
“What you want me to do now boss?” Donnie asked one day, after he worked up a thin sweat throwing punches. “Quit asking me if there’s anything else for you to do,” Sonny shouted from the office, his face hidden by the latest Jet Magazine he held in his hands. “Just trying to keep my job boss,” Donnie answered, pulling the floormats out of the Mustang and slamming them against the wall to shake loose any dust. “Parole officer say I gotta keep a job.” “Well,” Sonny said, “a surefire way to lose it is getting on my nerves.” Sonny got up and came out of the office, looking at both Donnie and Sixo. “Now look, in case you ain’t noticed, this ain’t New York City. We ain’t tv stars on Taxi. We ain’t got customers lined up at every corner, waiting to give us their money. So man, sit your butt down and wait for a call.” Sixo thought that would calm the boy down, but days later Donnie just seemed to be even more elated to be alive. Sixo secretly wished for whatever soul-stirring elixir Donnie had which made each day in this anti-paradise new. Though he had never been envious of anyone, he certainly coveted Donnie’s spirit if not his predicament. Donnie never even complained about his girlfriend’s sorry excuses for a packed lunch. He devoured whatever was inside his brown paper bags—even if it was just a pop and chips and a hot dog—like it was his last meal. Once, he opened one up and pulled out a square of aluminum tin foil. Two pieces of moist white bread were flattened together inside the foil. “Anything between that bread, my man?” Sixo asked, pulling out the plastic container of leftovers Mae Bell packed for him every morning before she put on dinner for the evening. Donnie’s nutmeg-colored face, so cherubic most people found it hard to believe he had been in jail, turned a deeper shade of red.
“Oh well, you know, Patrice ain’t been cooking much lately,” Donnie replied. He bit into the sandwich. “She say her feet hurt all the time. She in the last semester and all...” “You mean, trimester?” Sonny asked with frowning eyebrows. “Yeah, something like that,” Donnie said. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Sonny interjected. “My wife worked with every last one of our kids, up until the day she went to the hospital.” “You think that was fair?” Sixo asked. He had never had the thrilling occasion to look at a woman and know she carried his creation inside of her. He had to imagine he would be filled with such awe and wonder at her that she would probably get her way with him. It was part of the reason he had never let himself get that hooked. “Fair or not, she did it,” Sonny said. “My mother did it. I know your mother did it, Sixo. In those days, shoot…women was women.” Sixo looked at his watch: it was five o’clock, almost his quitting time. By now, the pinto beans Mae Bell had put on that morning would have finally softened and she would be dressing them with brown sugar and bay leaves. He looked down at the three pieces of baked chicken, mound of dressing and cupful of sweet peas in the bowl. He wasn’t hungry and knew there was more where that had come from. He overturned the bowl’s lid and covered it with a chicken centerbreast, a slap of dressing and a few spoonfuls of peas for Donnie. Then, he pulled out one piece of the three pieces of sour cream poundcake Mae Bell had slipped into a sandwich bag. “Looks like the good stuff,” Donnie said. He rolled what was the left of the sandwich into the aluminum foil.
“It is,” Sixo said. “My sister cooks like this every night. Don’t ask me why she does it. I think she just likes the idea of cooking for somebody…” “Well, I’ll sure be happy to take whatever is left,” Donnie said. He dove into the food with his bare hands. Sonny sauntered out of the office and, playfully jostling Sixo, grabbed a chicken wing and piece of pound cake. Before Donnie and Sonny could finish one full bite, crumbs had started spilling from their smiles. “I wish I could get Pat to cook like this,” the boy said. He slumped over low as he ate, reached down and rubbed his ankle bracelet. Sixo sat down next to him and began serving himself, half-expecting to hear Mae Bell’s voice ask him if the food was too hot or cold. “Well, I never been married,” Sixo said, “so I don’t know much about these things, but I guess she’ll start once she has some children.” “She already has two,” Donnie said. “I thought you said you didn’t have any?” Sonny asked. “I don’t. They hers, not mine,” Donnie said. He continued eating. “Two kids, one on the way, a man taking care of them all—and she don’t cook?” Sonny said. “I reckon there’s no hope.” Like a newborn’s rattle, the telephone rang playfully and unexpectedly, interrupting the men’s exaggerated chewing and laughter. Sonny was on his second helping of cake, so Sixo rose to answer the phone. A female’s voice, slow and lazy like gathering sap, was on the other end. “I need a cab at the Hamilton Inn on Wood Street. As soon as possible please. I’m running late for an appointment.” Sixo wanted to tell the woman her tardiness was not their problem, but Mae Bell’s cooking had mollified his city tongue somewhat over the months. And the
woman’s voice, free of the edge of roughness which laced most of Magnolia’s women’s speech, intrigued him. He memorized the pickup address and hung up the phone. “Sonny, I got this,” he said. He grabbed the keys to the Buick. Sonny, too engrossed in his borrowed meal, did not respond but instead threw up his hand and waved Sixo out the door. Outside, an electricity hovered in the air which signaled summer’s resistance to being dethroned by fall. Sixo could smell it. Its charge invaded his bones and invigorated him. He started the Buick’s engine, which had run like new since he rebuilt it with parts from the junkyard. Hamilton Inn, the only reputable lodging within Magnolia, was in Hillcrest, a square-mile subdivision of trailers and one-story ranch homes. It only took him a few minutes to arrive at his destination because traffic flowed so smoothly and evenly in Magnolia. There was no such thing as “stop and go” here; often drivers found theirs was the only car on the road. Sixo’s fare was waiting for him at the curb. Magnolia was not a place for beautiful people. This truth hit Sixo on the head his first night back in town at the Harlem Inn, where homely women and yellow-eyed men clung to each other as if still sharing a rib. In Magnolia, catty women dressed to the nines and fashionable men with manicured hands found no place. Looks had minimal currency in a town with no claim to fame, no landmarks beyond its river, no reason for travelers to pause at its dot on the map. Education and intellect were sneezed at, because there was no place or reason for their display. Magnolia was a place shaped by its grit, still standing on its practicality and not its appearance, sustaining itself with half a dozen fledgling factories and a state mental hospital a strip mall. Faded denim and sturdy cottons were the fabrics of choice, and perhaps necessity as well. Locals
were pudgy more often than not, since Magnolia was home to not one industry where conventional attractiveness was essential to the job. The point of most people’s lives was making ends meet, paycheck to paycheck, week to week, one day at a time. Looking stylish while they went about business was never a priority. So Sixo could tell the woman on the corner was not from Magnolia. He surveyed her from head to toe, and made the confident conclusion she was unlike anything he had ever seen walking around there. The sharp heels of her black, thigh-high leather boots hit the ground like a devil’s fangs. The psychadelic-print shirtdress clung to her body like sweat, her amber-colored hair surrounded her head like wings poised for flight. Her lips were outlined in black. She didn’t wait for Sixo to get out and open the door, the way Sonny had taught him to do for all his charges. Before he could put the car into park, she was in the back and directing Sixo. “I need to go to the National City Bank building,” she commanded. Her skin looked soft and warm like butter melting in a skillet. Tiny red freckles played around her nose. “The big building downtown?” Sixo said, the expectation of conversation held in a question he already knew the answer to. He switched the left turn signal on to head towards Empire Street, Magnolia’s only commercial thoroughfare. “Well,” the woman said, “I wouldn’t call it big. But if that’s how you want to put it, then yes.” Sixo laughed, because he thought he should. He looked at the woman’s eyes through the rearview mirror. The speedometer quivered around 20. He turned
down Church Street, estimating they had time for conversation and the scenic route. “Well, I guess it’s not as big as the buildings in the City,” he told her. “What city?” the girl asked. “Chicago,” Sixo said, squinting in disbelief. “Oh, yeah, right. That is nearby.” The girl avoided Sixo’s eyes in the mirror and looked at her watch. “Matter of fact, that’s where I’m going. There’s a little air-conditioned shuttle bus. It drives through all these quaint towns picking people up to take them to O’Hare Airport. I couldn’t bear the thought of taking a regular train or bus the whole way there.” “Where you from?” Sixo asked. He knew she couldn’t possibly be from around here, if she didn’t correctly react to him saying the city. “Well originally a little place like this in Jersey. I live in Connecticut now.” “Oh,” Sixo said and continued driving. Then, “I’m a city boy. From Chicago. I’m only here for now to tend to my sister.” The girl gazed out the window, with her arms crossed. “I’ve never been to New York,” Sixo went on, “but I always wanted to go. I wouldn’t mind seeing Harlem.” “Not much to see,” the girl said. “I lived there for a while when I was doing my undergrad at Columbia. It’s just some tall buildings and a bunch of Black folks.” “I can’t believe that’s all there is to it.” “It is what it is.” She yawned and closed her eyes. “What are you doing in Magnolia?” “Research,” she said with her eyes still closed. “I’m in the African-American Studies PhD program at Yale with a co-concentration in Visual Arts. I’m looking
at the ways in which African-American centurions have or haven’t adapted to migration to North and or Southern attempts at integration during their senior years. I mean, it’s easy to change when you’re young. When you’re older, you regress, want your roots. I’m combing my research with a photo essay on our aging ancestors. Hopefully, I’ll get my dissertation published with the photographs I take.” She pulled herself up close to the driver’s headrest, so close to Sixo’s ears he could feel her Doublemint gum breath. “Did you know there’s a nursing home here, right in Magnolia, with six women over one hundred years old?” she asked him, with her eyes wide and glassy. She smiled for the first time since seeing her driver. Sixo shrugged his shoulders, both at the fact of the nursing home and the ages of its tenants. His mother had lasted until 96, and several of his aunts and uncles had come close. “I’m traveling throughout the country looking for these people,” she continued. “Some of them don’t really have their senses and can’t remember a thing, but others can talk you to death. I got over five tapes of material and about forty pictures this trip.” “So you just travel around and listen to old people talk?” Sixo wondered. She lost her drowsiness and shot up. “Not just talk. It’s never just talk! It’s history, it’s culture, it’s human archive, it’s all of that.” Her hair shook as she spoke. “I mean, mostly I have to wade through a lot of stuff about their kids and their parents and their long lost loves and all, but once in a while I can get them to talk about the nitty gritty, the stuff which matters, the politics and social conditions of their times. You have to realize these people are our last link to that past, to what life was like for Black
Americans in this country, to what it meant to be separate but unequal. Before Martin, Malcolm and Mandela made noise about it. People like the ones I met here, they….they have the truth.” She licked a drop of sweat from her upper lip and sat back again. “It’s really fascinating once you get into it.” Sixo didn’t know what to say, so he only nodded. When they passed it, Sixo was relieved the “r” was missing in the sign announcing the Harlem Inn. The rundown dive’s reference to his charge’s old stomping ground seemed tacky and ridiculous. He hurried past and towards the National City Building, whose twelve floors made it stand out against the horizon from about a mile away. There was a weight at the bottom of his stomach. It felt like one of the hot rocks a medicine man used to use on him when he went to Chicago’s Chinatown in search of a chronic back pain cure. “Is it going to take much longer for us to get there?” he heard her say. “No,” Sixo laughed. “Doesn’t take long to anywhere here. We’re almost there.” She leaned back into the backseat and looked at her watch again. The last few buttons of the shirtdress had some undone and he could see very far up the inside of her left thigh. Tiny, fine hairs started to curl in greater numbers the further his eyes went up. She looked out of the window at a bus shelter which was one of the six stops on the Magnolia City Bus Line. Inside of it stood an elderly woman with a thin gingham scarf tied around her head and a paper bag of groceries in her arms; her back was so large it looked humped. From a distance, it could have been Mae Bell. So suddenly she frightened him, Sixo’s fare jumped and shouted, “Stop!” Startled, Sixo pulled over immediately. Before he could know what was going on, the girl had flung a heavy Minolta camera around her neck and was at the
bus shelter. She gently nudged some adolescents aside. She placed her hands on the woman’s shoulders. “May I please, please take your picture? For school?” Sixo heard her ask. She had already started staging her shot when the woman snickered, “Well, my hair ain’t fixed, but…” One of the teenage boys waiting threw down his Newport and started to grab the woman’s groceries. But the determined photographer softly pushed him away and stuffed them back into her subject’s chest. The boy took a large steeltoothed pick out of his uneven afro and waved it at his assailant’s back while the other youngsters chuckled. Seemingly without noticing or caring, she bent down so low in front of the woman her dress crept up her cream-colored thighs. She pointed the camera up in the woman’s face and flashed incessantly until there was no more film. The woman cheesed as if she was many lives younger, posing for her first daguerreotype. Her awkward smile stayed frozen onto her face until well after the young girl waved thanks and hopped back into the Buick. It all happened so quickly Sixo wondered if he had daydreamed it. Through the rearview mirror, he watched the people at the corner until they boarded the bus roared up while the girl was snapping away. “Now,” she said, panting, “we can go.” She leaned back on the seat and fanned herself, gathering her duffel bag in close. She pulled out a stately leatherbound journal and scribbled while she talked: “Old woman with groceries. Magnolia, Illinois. 2012.” “I couldn’t let that one pass me by,” she said, relaxed again. “I’m sure she wasn’t a hundred. But, she was still a gem.” “What’s her name?” Sixo grinned. “I gotta sister been here forever. She knows everybody. She might know her. I could ask….”
His fare whistled. She waved her hand with nonchalance. “Don’t need the name,” she said. They continued on. Sixo wished the young woman was not so pretty. He wanted to stop looking at her through the rearview mirror, but his imagination had already run away from him and reality couldn’t catch up. It had been months since anyone—or anything for that matter—had aroused any substantial emotion in him. Pleasure, pain, delight, satisfaction, even hunger and thirst, had all stormed together to produce a sour cloud of indifference around Sixo. He was relieved to know there was something which could still make his heart beat, his pupils dilate, his hands sweat, his mind go blank, his mouth go dry, his fingers tap mindlessly on a steering wheel. She made his body react without his will, thus she made him feel as alive as he could in Magnolia. And he didn’t even know her name. Sixo was old enough to be able to both know and admit lust. The pride which came along with being a Reese would not allow him to consider the bruise of loneliness. A few moments later, they were at the National City Building. Passengers carrying along tattered backpacks and worn sacks as makeshift luggage had already begun to board the shuttle bus. The fare looked at her watch and smiled. It was six o’clock. “Right on time,” she said and began to gather her things. “How much do I owe you for this?” Sixo shook his head and held up his hands. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It was my pleasure.” “Please let me give you said something,” she said, and held out a ten-dollar bill. Sixo grabbed her French-manicured hand, sparing the bill. “I can take you, you know,” he blurted, without hearing himself.
“To Chicago?” The young woman took back her hand and stuffed it into her pocket, and set the bill in the console. “No. Connecticut,” Sixo stammered. He forgot he had only rebuilt the engine, not the whole Buick. The tires needed rotation if not replacement, the radiator overheated now and the transmission had recently been jerking into gear. “Maybe we could make a stop in New York City along the way.” The woman looked at Sixo, then the Buick, and frowned. For a moment her pause gave him hope. But then Sixo uncovered her pity in her smirk. “Thanks, but that’s okay.” She opened the door and scurried away quickly, the sharp heels clicking against the sidewalk like chattering teeth. The graying male driver did a double take, then he helped her to board the bus with her bags. She did not look back. Sixo watched her board the slick, navy blue bus. As he put the Buick into drive, Sixo realized he did not want to go back to Sonny’s, where he would have to make small talk with his boss and the young boy who looked up to him as a father. He reasoned he could explain the whereabouts of the Buick to Sonny later. He went through only one stoplight before Church Street, which he turned onto and drove down until arriving at the Harlem Inn, where he sat and drank vodka alone until well after dinnertime.
V
Around ten o’clock, Sixo let himself in through the back kitchen door. The oven light cast a gloomy glow over the kitchen. Every towel, canister, dish, utensil and knick- knack lay in its place perfectly, like pieces on a chess board
impatiently yearning for the endgame. A large stoneware plate on top of the stove, weighted down with food and covered in aluminum foil, was the only evidence Mae Bell had even cooked. Even the heady smell a day of cooking often left behind had found its way outside of the Reese home on Muriel Lane. In the quiet, even splashes of water created dull, hollow bursts of sound to compete with the ticking of the teapot-shaped clock above the window; the kitchen faucet had begun to leak—again. Out of the darkness of the hallway, Mae Bell appeared as surprisingly as a sharp bend in the road. Over the months she had expanded her shawl into a gray blanket, holding the yarn and needle for a few hours but only knitting for a few minutes each night. It was wrapped around her shoulders and gathered at her waist, up off the floor. She had found the string to her purple housedress, and it was closed tonight. Her hair was loosed and her eyes were wet, for sure now, with tears. “Sixo, I was so worried about you,” she said. Sixo had not heard the stairs creak. He looked down at the cloth bandage wound tight around her right knee, and then he understood. She could no longer make it upstairs. Mae Bell wiped her eyes, then bent slightly to rub her knee. She leaned her body down on the kitchen table—sturdy and strong and holding itself together after so many years. It had stayed set for two well after six p.m., almost up until nine, when Mae Bell had briefly pondered calling the police before deciding to pray silently, instead. “I was worried. I thought something happened…” Sixo walked towards the window and stared at the sycamore in the backyard. Its slim, oval-shaped leaves were starting to dry out and turn colors already; it was only September. He thought it was funny how the leaves were so much
more resilient when they were green, before the color invaded them, before they had truly lived. He chuckled at how they could stay pieced together when they were green and new, but cracked like glass at the slightest trauma once they became joyously colored and ready to return to the Earth. Shouldn’t they become stronger? As he thought about this, Mae Bell crept closer to the stove. She began to unwrap the plate she had set aside for him. “Mae Bell, go back to bed,” he said. “I’ll just heat it up for you Sixo,” she insisted. Sixo walked toward her and pulled the blanket out of her arms. He walked around her slowly and tightened the blanket around her body, as he would have if he had been preparing a girl child for her schoolbus stop in the dead of winter. “Go back to bed and get some rest,” he repeated. Mae Bell nodded and limped back down the hallway towards the parlor. He heard her lie down in the squeaky armchair where he had found her when he first arrived, then heave the sigh which always preceded a night of deep sleep and dreams. Sixo then realized he was slightly woozy; there was nothing much in his stomach to soak up the drinks he had consumed at the Harlem Inn. He walked to the stove and peeled the aluminum foil off of the plate. It felt heavy in his hands, as the caskets he had helped carry for his parents and each of his brothers. Underneath the foil he found candied yams, macaroni and cheese, and pineapple ham—his favorites.
Jennifer O’Rourke
The Surgeon General’s Girlfriend Labored breathing lungs cow-heavy with tar. I can hear them in your deep sleep and speech Rise, fall, collapse, and expand they beseech your body for more red blood cells. They’re far from youth, due to your carcinogen crush. It lingers in your throat, corrodes your teeth, makes the heart weigh more, covers what’s beneath the bronchioles, the cavity that was once lush. I always close my eyes before you drift off and deliver roars instead of snores. Becoming weary of your body’s core, the animal caged screams loud when you lift your wrist to your lips. A wheeze to ignore. Twenty dirty breaths survived are a gift.
Michael Brasier
The Whispering Witch of Waco Drive
My mother, a devout Christian, kissed the car ceiling every time we passed under a green light. Her response was a heavy sigh, a wiping of sweat that hadn’t actually formed on her forehead, as if she had just avoided a major catastrophe. It was her only tick, a bad habit learned from her own mother, my grandma, a woman that, for years, would be referred to by classmates and townsfolk as the Whispering Witch of Waco Drive. The legend of a crazy cauldronstirring curmudgeon riding her broom, casting spells on children, and whispering curses had spread amongst the town years ago, though none of it was true. I never saw magic wands or a witch’s brew, although her homemade stew was pretty horrendous. She was from Eastern Europe, rarely spoke to anyone, and had feathery black hair and a bent
nose. She had lived in the shadows, keeping to herself, and then she met my grandpa, a man who fraternized with the women in town. My grandma was his last. His heart burst one evening as he hurried up to the house to see her. He wasn’t noticed until morning. People had been cautious of her since she acted different, but rumors had spread that she might’ve cast magic on him. The people have been afraid of her since. I had plenty of friends from class, but no friends in the neighborhood. Anyone within the vicinity of Waco Drive kept their distance. I invited over what friends I had, but I was instead driven to their homes by my mother, who didn’t want to go through the trouble of explaining later to families that her mother wasn’t a witch. One time, my friend Eric stayed over, but he went home early the next
morning with a rash growing on his neck. That was common among my friends who stayed. They claimed at one point to have said something to my grandma, and she had whispered something indecipherable back, something hateful. Listening to my mother try to convince Eric’s mom over the phone that what my grandma had whispered wasn’t a curse only made me feel sorry for her. My mother chose to have kids over a life of sisterhood at the St. Agatha Convent in town. When my grandmother found out about her secret marriage to my father (may he rest in peace), she scolded the man. Knowing she was angry, my mother continued on her erotically charged path with my father for three years until, during her second pregnancy with my sister, an aneurism killed him, and of course, my mother immediately recalled the old story about how her father died, and from that, she hadn’t been sure about
anything since. I remember Grandma’s loose hanging cheeks. All the warty skin on her face hung like wax melting over a mannequin head. When my sister, Kylie, was born, my grandma held her to the discomfort of my mother, and then Kylie tugged on the access skin that hung limply in reach. My mother jerked her away because she feared that she might purposely drop her. My grandmother also thought her name was very ugly for a woman, not that it hurt Kylie’s feelings over the years, being told that the name made her sound like a gypsy whore. Nothing bothered Kylie. She was immune to Grandma’s wicked words, but I wasn’t. It hurt my feelings that she was always so harsh to me. Everything I said was a filthy lie. Everything I did wasn’t good enough. She was so against men that my girlfriends were easily convinced by her that I was going to be as bad as my grandpa and my father before.
Kylie is the happiest and most successful of the family; married to a marine biologist named Tom and working a career as a traveling journalist and food blogger. I’m a grumpy manager at Barnes and Noble with constant contact from my mother about reprints of the King James Bible and new J.K. Rowling novels, and I’m still single. The morning I was doing magazine inventory, I got the phone call about my grandmother’s heart attack. I was relieved. Yet, to my disappointment, my mother told me she was holding on, somehow, and I nearly laughed. Though I couldn’t imagine the anxiety my mom was feeling about my grandmother, having moved her into the house instead of placing her in a nursing home, praying she would croak sooner than later. Kylie and Tom, driving from their home four hours away, arrived at my house a couple hours later than they said they would, not in any hurry to
say their goodbyes. When Kylie stepped out of the new Nissan she had bragged about over the phone, I broke the news to her. Grandma had already passed, and her last words were to not burn her. I assumed she meant cremate, but the wheels were already spinning in my mother’s head. Kylie guffawed, breathed that same deep sigh of relief like Mom’s at a green light, and then we went to Applebee’s and caught up. We finally went to Mom’s house that afternoon. Right away, we noticed the absence of the three bells that used to hang in the doorway, the ones we had to ring one at a time before we took off our shoes to please some spirits Grandma believed lived in the house. A pile of leaves were raked into a giant hill in the center of the backyard, and Mom was throwing extra things into the mass when we arrived. Kylie didn’t wait to settle down and helped Mom carry Grandma’s old apothecary table out back. Tom and I parked
ourselves in lawn chairs and drank hard cider. That evening, we watched from the chairs the things my grandmother had owned; her clothes, furniture, and even the brooms in the house, burn to ash.
Lara Alonso Corona Piece of my Heart
There's no way she would have known Aretha Franklin had a sister and that she sang like this and this song too before coming to this town. That's what this city does to you, right? Yuna thinks as she slips her silver bracelet on, as she takes the trombone out of its case ("big instrument for a little girl!" a bearded guy on the street cheered) but hey, what are the odds Aretha Franklin had a sister who could sing like this, as that record plays in the little changing room, and what are the odds a tiny slip of a girl like Yuna can hold her trombone without the city eating her alive. Big instrument for a little girl as she makes her way to the stage, a succession of what-are-the-odds following her but the bright lights are warm and the intimidating part is behind – the backstage mirror with its smeared corners reeking of that very particular smell of rotten tape and the photographs that used to be stuck there. This town makes you feel scared of that bit, the forgetfulness, never lets stage fright set in, more like oblivion fright, more like every time it's Yuna thinking "pretty good odds, actually.�
Tobi Alfier
Misty and Amber Get Matching Tattoos They studied hard the walls lined from dirty linoleum floor to ceiling with amateur drawings, the kind sketched on Peechee folders and book covers by lovesick schoolgirls and checked-out boys, not a serious piece of art hidden between skulls and daggers, and all the florid ways to write names of lovers. They lay down on the bed that held many luckless decisions, that cradled drunks and almost-couples from the bars lining Sherman Way, dotted between Pho restaurants and western gear stores. Cash in their fists from the ATM at the bowling alley down the street, they held hands for courage, swore they’d tell no one. “Crooked Mike� drew on their eighteen-year-old breasts and asses, they turned this way and that, looked at themselves in the mirror, ignored Mike looking at them sideways and secretly, finally settling on an amateur bluebird on the hip.
Amber went first, the pain showing on her forehead a premonition of many pains. Misty never reconsidered. Crooked Mike said the outline was always the worst. A little Vaseline, a little plastic wrap and many years later they have faded to blueberries with wings— the story they still tell after too many beers. Mike too.
Contributors Tobi Alfier Tobi Alfier is a five-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Her seventh and latest chapbook is “The Coincidence of Castles” from Glass Lyre Press. Her collaborative full-length collection, “The Color of Forgiveness”, is available from Mojave River Press. She is the co-editor of San Pedro River Review. Michael Brasier Michael Brasier is a regular contributor to American Blues Scene Magazine. He has work published in Sassafras Literary Magazine, Elder Mountain Journal, and Paddle Shots: A River Pretty Anthology. He has work forthcoming in Fiction Southeast. He received his Bachelor’s in English from Missouri State University. Kalisha Buckhanon Kalisha Buckhanon majored in English at University of Chicago and received her M.F.A at The New School. She is author of the novels Conception and Upstate, published by John Murray in London and Rouergue in Paris. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, London Independent, Mosaic, Fiction International, Hermeneutic Chaos, Intellectual Refugeand more. She was born in Illinois. Her website is www.Kalisha.com.
Lara Alonso Corona Lara Alonso Corona was born in a small city in the north of Spain. She completed her Film and TV studies in Madrid before moving to London to study creative fiction. Her fiction has appeared in ABC Tales and the Glass Woman Prize, The Copperfield Review, Devilfish Review, 50-word Stories, The WiFiles and more recently she has been published by The Danforth Review and Literary Orphans. Judith Grissmer Judith has been published in the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (finalist in annual contest 1998), the Golden Nib Online Anthology (2010 first place in poetry VA Writers Club), and the Blue Ridge Anthology (2008/2010 first place in poetry, Blue Ridge Writers Club). She was awarded second place in the Emma Gray Trigg Memorial. She has attended poetry workshops and classes at American University, George Mason University, The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and Writer House in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has been working independently with instructors from these writing centers and participating in writers critique groups for many years. Olivia Inwood Olivia Inwood is an Australian-Lithuanian, born in regional Australia. She is currently studying English and Visual Arts at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her writing has previously been published in two editions of the Poetry Quarterly (US) and Written Portraits: An Anthology of Short Stories (Australia).
Sharon Kurtzman Sharon Kurtzman’s writing has appeared in print and online at All Things Girl, moonShine Review, Scruffy Dog Review, Airplane Reader, Still Crazy, Charlotte Writers Club Anthology, Better After 50, RiverLit, the Raleigh News and Observer, the May, 2013 edition of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers, Main Street Rag’s February, 2014 anthology, Voices from the Porch, and is forthcoming in 1000Words. She has also been a short story semi-finalist in the William Faulkner-Wisdom writing competition, a finalist in the North Carolina State University short fiction contest, and the Summer 2013 fiction scholarship recipient at the Wildacres Writing Workshop. Jenni O’Rourke Jenni O’Rourke creative writing student at Cal State Long Beach, with an emphasis on poetry. Jenni is currently finishing her bachelor’s degree with the hopes of returning to Long Beach for the MFA program in poetry. She is South Bay native who currently resides in Orange County and works as a server.
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