flashglass 2015

glassworks

a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing

flashglass2015

flashglass Volume I 2015

MASTER OF ARTS IN WRITING GRADUATE PROGRAM ROWAN UNIVERSITY

All work in flashglass originally appeared as digital content at RowanGlassworks.org The staff of Glassworks Magazine would like to thank Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program, Rowan University’s Writing Arts Department, and The Glassworks Advisory Board: Ron Block, Martin Itzkowitz, Lisa Jahn-Clough, Andrew Kopp, Jeffrey Maxson

EDITOR IN CHIEF Katie Budris MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Davison COVER ART “Spots”

by Clarissa Colletti Glassworks Issue 9 COVER DESIGN & LAYOUT Katie Budris

flashglass, a subset of Glassworks, accepts flash fiction, prose poems, & micro essays See submission guidelines: RowanGlassworks.org

Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Graduate Program

Glassworks maintains First North American Serial Rights for publication in our journal and First Electronic Rights for reproduction of works in Glassworks and/or Glassworks-affiliated materials. All other rights remain with the artist.

Correspondence can be sent to: Glassworks c/o Katie Budris Rowan University 117 Bozorth Hall Glassboro, NJ 08028 E-mail: GlassworksMagazine@rowan.edu Copyright © 2015 Glassworks

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Table of Contents Alaina Symanovich | 1x1 | 4 Joel Wayne | Two Dogs | 6 Kate Peterson | Vail | 5 Anna Ivey | Stone Heavy and Immaculate | 7 Ruben Rodriguez | If They Sparkle and You Believe | 8 Susanna Lang | Letters, No Address | 10 Kevin O’Connor | The Son | 12 Denise Mostacci-Sklar | Dunkin Donuts | 13 Chase White | Thief! | 14 Marlene Olin | Cats, Flowers, Tears | 16 Moura McGovern |Ceremony | 17 Denise Mostacci-Sklar | Hospice | 18 Jen Hirt | Follow Me | 19 Paul Hostovsky | Deaf-Blind Convention | 20 Ryan Row | Edge of One Place, Edge of Another | 22 Will Preston | Drift | 24

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1x1

Alaina Symanovich Focus on the times-table quiz. You and Nell drilled these numbers daily during recess for weeks so that one of you might beat Daniel Lee. Read 7 x 8 and think 56. Do not think best friends, open-palmed sun, four legs collaging at the top of the spiral slide. See 8 x 11 and scribble the loop-de-loop answer. Do not notice the absence of a friendship bracelet clinking along to the motion. Do not remember that Nell gave you the spirits charm because you thought kindred was an ugly word, because she understood how much things like that mattered to you. Fill in all the easy 0 tables. Think about that—nothing. Not tomorrow’s gym class, when Nell won’t stand in front of you and catch every dodgeball. Read 3 x 5 and try to feel relieved that you won’t need to buy her a birthday present on the fifteenth. Focus. When your hand shoots up after 62 seconds and your classmates gape at you in awe, lower your eyes and pretend you are invisible. Do not look at Nell not looking at you. Pass your paper forward and file outside for recess and ascend the slide’s throne alone. Remember that you won.

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Vail

Kate Peterson A bearded man in ski boots watches me as he sips his orange juice and I wish I could drink like that. All that sugar first thing in the morning. He seems sad in that way that bearded men sometimes do when they are trying to pick up women. The waitress asks what brought me here and I see him look at me again, turn his head so that he can half listen to his friend, half hear my story. He seems to like it — Au pair... Australian family here on holiday...flew me out to visit. I wonder what I might say to a man like him if he hobbles over in his space suit. Sorry sir, I’ve got a man of my own back home. I picture his life -- pushing down a french press alone in some cabin in the woods, humming with a voice like an indie musician because all bearded, lonely men sound like indie musicians — as I cut into my toast with the edge of the fork, pull it through some eggs, hold a book open in my left hand and wonder about the way people meet. If it is ever as romantic as he is wishing this could be. He hears me order another latte and tells the waitress it’s on him. He smiles. I smile. He asks if I mind if he sits, I say of course not. He asks me my name, where I’m from. I ask him the same. Suddenly it’s hours later and he’s asked for my phone number and we begin a long distance romance. He spins me around in his kitchen on the weekends, I take him on long walks, we fall in love with each other’s friends. He ties a piece of string around my finger and a ring appears, dangling in the air above a white down comforter. People only meet this way in movies. In reality it’s work, school, sneaking away to kiss by the refrigerator when their friends aren’t looking. They fall in love fast and out faster. They are constantly apologizing for getting too drunk, for not saying good night in the right tone. For driving other women home from bars. This man thinks that because I am twenty-something, and alone, drinking coffee and eating raspberry jam on the last bit of my toast that I am different. He thinks that he is different and that he deserves me. I think that I am an asshole for this imagined dialogue. The way that I pretend to read while I am really practicing what I will say to him if he comes over here, how I will prove that life is not an independent film. But as he stands and tips the glass and empties the last of the orange juice into his mouth, and stares at me for a good long beat before he nods at me in that bearded, lonely man kind of way, picks up his yellow tinted goggles and his gloves and walks away, turning as he goes to look hard at me one last time and show his white teeth through the red web, I realize this is an independent film. The kind you have to watch over, and over, before you truly understand.

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Two Dogs Joel Wayne

“I never sit when I can lie. I never walk when I can run.”

This from the man who uses an upturned putter for a cane. But the trooper ignores him and swings his flashlight from the backseat to me, waiting.

“He has a bad back,” I explain, blinking in the belt of light.

“Any whiskey tonight?” the trooper says.

“No, sir.”

“Him?” “My father,” I say. “A few. Earlier. Not in the car. We were just...”

“I got an award tonight, a medal,” Dad calls from the backseat, Pendleton blanket draped over his legs. “Hey. Why can’t he hear me?”

“Just make sure he’s buckled,” the trooper says, returning my license. “Go home, chief.”

Up goes the window. The trooper’s headlights disappear into the night and we’re alone again, freshly debased.

Two dogs tossed in their own shit. I finger the key but don’t pull onto the road yet. My throat burns with something sour and grimy, a familiar taste – god, is it embarrassment? – and I feel ashamed.

“Ho,” Dad coos. “I might as well be a little boy again.”

This from the man who cracked his spine in Saipan, who grinded knives before returning to school at 42, who put his grandkids through college, who buried wives, a brother, children.

“Forget him,” I say and pass back the bottle hidden under the seat.

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Stone Heavy and Immaculate Anna Ivey

--for Chad A light makes slats across my thighs once we are alone. The night is thickening--swollen stone heavy and immaculate.

If nothing else I clench electricity now because the star-filled cloak is too dim for much use anymore. We evade the ruptured cuneiform thinking a few hours would be enough. I unfashion the order of sentences into movement of a tongue. I have been ready to start over though you have only seen the latticework of poets. What you say might be put on a page at any time is how I warn you I write again. See. Consider the volumes of stilled Incan rituals since my hands find the roughened edges of your jaw.

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If They Sparkle and You Believe Ruben Rodriguez

Rich stood by the tree, his hand gripped to the high end of the trunk. His gray tennis shoe balanced on the shoulder of the shovel’s blade, its face stabbed between roots. His father Stanley labored beside him, bent forward at a right angle, his shovel held in both hands childishly close to the business end. He sliced the metal through the dirt, the repetition like the sound of the earth breathing.

“I asked you out here to help me.” Stanley complained.

“You asked me nothing.” Rich said, letting his shoe leave the shovel and plant onto the dirt. “I came out here to make sure you don’t wander off into the street.”

Stanley stopped his digging. Still bent over, he looked up to his son caught in an absent glare.

“I’m not the one always lost in space.” Stanley started. “I’ve known this home since I was a child. Hell, it’s why I’m digging.”

“You’re digging because you’ve grown senile and you need something to fill the gap.”

“What gap?”

“Never mind.”

Stanley went back to his work. The shovel only picked up enough dirt to fill a sandwich bag, but piled on the patchy grass near the sidewalk, he had himself a mound calf-high.

“My father bought this place when I was three years old.” Stanley began.

“I know. I know. Bought it before the town had a single stoplight. Bought it before Main was Main and before the factories came and went. Everyone made fun, until LIFE magazine named it a top 25 town to raise a family.

Way back in ‘63” “Right around the time you were coming up.” Stanley added.

“We lived in Fresno then, pop.”

The shovel stopped and Stanley shrugged. “Guess so.”

“You know pop, you still live here, and the neighbors are going to wonder what you’re doing.”

“That’s why I thought you’d help. It’d go a lot faster if there were two shovels moving.” He stopped his work and clanked his shovel against his son’s.

Rich lifted the blade from its shallow earthen pocket and stabbed it between roots on the other side of the tree.

“When I hid them,” Stanley started. “I thought of it as a game, but as time passed, it became an investment. You’ll be shocked, boy-o. Some as big as quail eggs.”

Rich sighed. “There are no diamonds, dad. It’s a false memory, or a dream masked as memory. Regardless, there’s nothing to dig up, just the tree and its roots.”

Stanley stopped his shovel and stood almost strait. “You don’t know. You think you do, but you don’t.”

Rich stood silent.

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Stanley eyed him aggressively. “I buried them.” He shouted, pinning his thumb his chest. “I buried them, and they’re here.” He lifted the shovel and stuck the blade downward with all his might and struck a root. The reverberation sprung his rickety hand open and widened his eyes. The shovel fell from his hand, its wood shaft bounced to rest on the sidewalk. Stanley’s head trembled staring through his son at his pain. Tears filled his eyes.

Rich bent down to pick up the shovel.

“Leave it.” Stanley snapped, freezing Rich mid crouch. “Don’t help me, if you’re not going to help me.”

Stanley clenched his hand into a fist before opening it slowly, repeating the act until the movement settled the pain.

A child works fiendishly on all fours. He has stolen a gardening shovel from the garage. If his father catches him, he’ll get the belt. His seven-year-old hand grips half of the tree trunk he works under. His father told him that he and the tree will grow together, but the tree seems so big already, the boy can’t imagine how he’ll catch up. He turns the garden shovel around in his hand, lifts it up over his head and begins stabbing the earth again and again, forming soft clots of dirt before tossing the little shovel aside and using his hands to form a round cradle for the diamonds.

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Letters, No Address Susanna Lang

Victor Goines, “Joie de Vivre” Dear clarinet, Please tell that story again, the one whose grief fills our hearts with something like joy, green neon letters glowing in the glasses on each table.

The bartender frowns at two young women to listen, listen closely: their stories can wait till yours has ended.

Wind chill warning remains in effect….National Weather Service Dear winter, We understand now.

We have stopped whatever we were doing: our schools have closed, trains ground to a stop, the river frozen over.

What more can we learn from a cold that cramps our fingers, settles into the bones of our houses, breaks up the pavement beneath our wheels?

John Donne, “To Mr. R. W.” Dear John, No, not that kind of letter—you are long gone so it’s not about letting you go.

I’m just curious about this magic that brought you back to life simply by reading a few words from a friend. Every day I check the mail for a letter like that but so far only catalogs and bills.

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“Bald eagles’ numbers soaring in Illinois,” Chicago Tribune Dear eagles, I don’t blame you for not following the script.

You don’t owe us anything, certainly not a spectacle since grace is our concern, not yours-yours is the ice that seals off open water where you can fish.

I hear it’s better in Kansas: a friend writes of seeing eagles gather near a lake that’s still unfrozen. Go visit her; she’ll send me a postcard.

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The Son

Kevin O’Connor I didn’t expect them, thousands of ochre blooms spread across the hills of the village. Neither did I imagine the houses, eerily quiet streets, and gravestones flooding the main square. Leaving our rented car in the road, we trudge through weeds and turf, struggling through the bulging cemetery. A narrow creek flows loud as drums above the barren brass of the sky, the reedy grass, an echoing harmony of birds. We find a bar at Scott’s Grocery behind a wall of shelves and cooler stocked sparingly with rough brown bread, fresh cheese,and milk. A hallway leads to a dim room where men lean over pints of Guinness dressed in overalls, wool hats tilted down, boots wet with earth and dew. We drink whiskey and beer, observing the unlit fireplace and peeling linoleum floor. My father weaves our history: a man struck by a train; a woman taken by strangers across an ocean; a child baptized in Ireland; a family rooted in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Outside, the sun inches below the hills. A boy kicks a ball against the grocery’s side wall. We speak to him as we leave, warmed somehow by the colorless, staid company of the bar. In the morning we’ll wake early to hot plates of bacon and eggs, black pudding, and fried potatoes in the white tablecloth dining room of our bed and breakfast. We’ll drink coffee and tea, smear black currant on toast, and peruse the news of County Mayo, waiting for a new day to begin.

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Dunkin Donuts Denise Mostacci-Sklar

Fifty years ago, it was the smell of warm sweet dough fried up and made throughout the day that brought lines of people in to this small chain of New England coffee shops. While waiting in line you could glimpse the back room and watch dough being mixed in silver vats, then placed onto trays to be shaped, frosted and decorated. If lucky, your favorite variety will have just run out with a warm, steamy batch quickly on its way. Now the sugary deep fried carbs, all grease and glaze are packaged in a factory in a limited amount and shipped in each morning lasting only until they are sold out. But the pink and orange styrofoam cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, watery and weak but oddly still good are worth a trip in once in a while. By mid day there are no long lines in this small town coffee shop, only scattered patrons running in and out and maybe a few people under florescent lights sitting quietly in a white, sterile emptiness. The workers keep the smell of anti bacterial cleanser wafting from the floor and tables by regular cleaning throughout the day in this 2014 FDA approved iconic chain and where there remains a kind of packaged nostalgia. The DD logo appears on billboards, TV, at sports events, its counters found under bright lights at train stations and airports, tucked away in the back of late night convenient stores. It has become a big business and has grown its presence across continents and oceans, staying current decade after decade, coffee and donuts, plus… the familiar colors flash. And still alive, the memory of crowded tables, counter and stools, Sunday mornings and families after church, a dozen donuts, the parking lot filled, teens, motorcycles and Hell’s Angels, a cup of coffee for 60 cents, a cardboard sign with a hand held out, the weekday rush of businessmen and woman, policemen and workers on break, busy and well lit late nights. And retired old men sitting at the counter with an endless cup of coffee poured into a real mug. No one noticed the cigarette butts dropped on the floor, half swept up but still scattered under their feet. Or all the cigarettes in hand with smoke trailing up, mixing with the smell of hot coffee and fresh donuts made ‘round the clock.’

My husband and I pull into the strip mall to get a cup of coffee. It is one of those late, blank afternoons that seem to come at the end of summer, no longer linear but laying on its back, as if time were trying to stand still for a moment.

Around the back of the building next to the dumpster, there is a worker on break wearing a hooded sweatshirt. I watch him as he flicks his cigarette and enters the donut shop.

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Thief!

Chase White Sid slid through the crowd - over the dirt path of the market - with a girl he had by the arm.

First, to find a sucker. The new mother with a loose grip on her clutch. The target wore a flower-print dress and wicker sandals. She was begging for it. Practically, she wasn’t the beggar.She was the new mother. Old bag with a new clutch.

He made off with it. Initials were printed in gold color on the faux leather, hers along with the initials of some romantic type; N.M. + R.T. Inside the clutch were two fives.

Sid handed one to the girl. He took another and said, “we’ll split this one,” before he tore it in half.

Now to the table where there sat some know-it-all type with ratty books for sale. Sid wanted the biggest one.

Sid inquired. He talked the man down because the book was so ratty. “Those stories have been retold often,” the know-it-all said. Sid knocked over the whole stack, and offered to help the man collect them. He then stole the ratty old book - Arabian Nights - and left.

“What’s that for?” the girl asked.

“Fire starter.”

“You like makeup?” Sid asked as they walked by the Mary Kay lady. He dropped vanishing cream into the clutch the the girl now carried.

An officer, with three missing item descriptions and two suspects, attracted Sid’s attention. “Show time,” Sid said. He lit a match and held it to the book. It caught and was tossed in the trash. The law man became the fire man.

The girl’s parents found their daughter, and asked about her accessories. The girl turned to Sid, who slipped away just in time. Sid sauntered toward home and casually flipped a classical Greek coin he had made disappear.

From between two chicken shacks a jewelry maker called to Sid. “I can tell that you are a man of taste.” She wanted to know what he thought of her work. “Too easy,” he thought. His fingers grazed over the jewels. He dropped the largest stone into his sleeve.

The jewelry maker grabbed his hand and turned it palm-up. He laughed, there was nothing there, but she worked her bony finger in his hand and then said to him, “You’re playing the part, don’t you see.”

“Excuse me?”

“We are all predestined for something. I was compelled to read your place in our story.”

“Are you supposed to be some fortune-teller? You want a quarter?”

“What are you supposed to be, young man?”

“Sid.”

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“I know you by a less dynamic title. You rely on your hands. In the fingers you are dealt luck, in the palm, destiny. You are not free to choose what you take. You must take these things.Your part in the story is necessary.”

“You sound like a hack to me! A story-teller, not a fortune-teller.”

“This isn’t for you to interpret. You are not a hero in this old story, thief.”

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Cats, Flowers, Tears Marlene Olin

Cheryl’s mother didn’t call her. Instead she sent an email. Cheryl didn’t know her mother emailed. Did she buy a computer? Probably went to the library. Cheryl closed her eyes and imagined the endless line at the library while her mother demanded the librarian’s attention, taking up the allocated time of two or three people, just to get what she wanted. Her mother always got what she wanted. Cheryl could see it now.

The subject of the email was This is from your mother. Looking back, it was worse than any virus, worse than any malware a Korean psychopath could have dreamed up.

Your father, said the email, is back in my life. After fifty years! Do you believe it! The wedding’s Saturday at noon. St. Christopher’s. Hope you can make it. Love, Mom Cheryl was sixty years old. The last time she saw her father she was ten. They were in the kitchen of the only house Cheryl ever lived in. White shutters. Blue paint. A calendar with kittens on the wall. She remembered her mother crying, her father screaming, chairs being upended. A vase with limp flowers crashed to the floor. Cheryl hid in the corner with the cat. Then the front door slammed shut and he was gone.

Every day when she came home from school she expected him back. She’d walk from the bus stop hoping and not hoping, fearing and not fearing her father’s return. Past the O’Malley’s house. Then the Lopez’s. Looping the corner she’d swipe her hand over the big blue mailbox. Then she’d kick a pebble and watch the pebble bump along the sidewalk. Right. Left. Stop. Then again. Right. Left. Stop. Finally lifting her head and seeing the empty driveway, relieved and not relieved at the same time.

For fifty years not a birthday card, not a Christmas present. Her father’s name became a curse word. If the disposal was clogged, he was the grit in the drain. He was the misplaced key, the swallowed pit, the filthy puddle that ruined their shoes. The incubus. The bogeyman. He was bad luck in a suit.

A year went by. They moved to the apartment on Kendall-who could afford a house-and lived paycheck to paycheck. Her mother went back to the community college and learned bookkeeping. Each night when she came home her lipstick was smeared, a button undone. The boss had me stay late, she told Cheryl. Each year a different boss.

As soon as she could, Cheryl got her own apartment. She adopted a cat. She wallpapered the kitchen. She bought fresh flowers and placed them in a vase. But like the pattern on the walls, her life repeated itself. Cat. Flowers. Tears.

Cat. Flowers. Tears. When her children were born, she told them that their fathers were dead. It was kinder that way.

They could skip the sidewalks unencumbered, their chins high.

Dear Mom, Glad to know you’re happy.

Then she pressed delete.

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Ceremony

Maura McGovern It was bare-foot perfection and sweet, salty, crunchy laughter. It was dusty road-side stands and juicy, strawberry days. It evoked perpetual summer. Then it became an island of exclusivity and long-sold hippy dreams. It was Martha’s Vineyard.

Things always happen in between.

The first time we were there, I knew I would marry him. The second time we were there, the weather held a knifeedge of change. The Atlantic brought heavy fog and then whipped it away.

We were there for another wedding. Guests spilled onto the street. Men hugged and patted each other on the back. They lit cigars. Women in heels tottered and kissed, kissed the air. So good to see you. How are the kids? How is the job? Lovely, just lovely. Pat, pat, kiss kiss. Voices cascaded, one after another like waves on the surrounding shore.

David leaned against a rusty street sign, the red octagon—stop—a warning neither of us would heed. I will call him David, because the name means beloved. David, in history, was a king, a poet, a warrior. David, in this story, has a peace symbol tattooed on his shoulder. David was not the man I had married.

He smiled at me, took my hand; I kissed his cheek. The voices went on around us, and we looked at each other through damp, cold fog.

The crowd started to move from the street towards the beach. Side by side, we passed a low, white picket fence, along a bricked path flanked with blue hydrangeas. I did not look for my husband.

I nodded at knots of people. I sneezed at the smell of perfume. I preferred the scent of bodies, the scent of sweat, the scent of the sea.

The crowd moved slowly like a school of dead fish floating in the tide, bumping along in the ocean beyond. In the beginning, my husband and I had rented a shack near the beach. The shack had become real estate with an ocean view. We had become people at a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard.

David sighed, his shoulder brushed against mine. His head dipped towards mine. Already I was aware of the proximity between our shoulders, between our mouths, between our hands.

My feet sank into the beach. I bent down and removed my own heels. Cold sand seeped into my stockings. I shivered, my thin blue silk inadequate. David removed his jacket and placed it around me. Warmth built.

Waves foamed. People turned towards the path. A young girl, golden ringlets blowing, scattered rose petals from a wicker basket. The bride followed her, barefoot, shivering, her dress billowed white behind her.

She approached her groom. They stood side by side. They mouthed words I could not hear. I could hear the pounding of the surf on the shore, the pounding of my pulse. I could hear the sound of before. I could almost hear the sound of after.

In between, there was a marriage.

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Hospice

Denise Mostacci-Sklar the traffic lights turn red, all the way down Park Avenue. snowflakes are falling and taxi’s pile up.

Black rubber boots step onto the thick wet snow, walk from the sidewalk to curb and a cab door swings open.

Across the street is the Armory with its massive brick face of history taking up the entire block. The bus stop billboards flash slick photos of young men and women with their backs curved and bare. I step onto the slushy street and into her apartment building.

Elaine lies in bed. She is sleeping and her mouth is shaped into a perfect O. A quiet hum rises from the small machine blowing cool mist in her direction. Standing in the doorway, I wait as I watch the silver mist travel serpentine then disappears, sucked into the warm dry air. she is resting lightly in her sheets and outside the day floats in a haze of whiteness.

All day family and friends slip in and out. Heavy glass doors lead into a lobby of mirror and marble greeted by welcoming doormen who move swiftly--the elevator, gold buttons, the soft pink hallway, apartment 3G with the door ajar. Visitors walk in to the entryway, then more slowly into the bedroom. There is a hospital bed and chairs around it. On the side table sits a small paper cup with a long straw tipped and balanced. From her bedroom window you can see the Armory.

She struggles to take a sip of the warm white liquid, “ I feel like a pancake,” she whispers to me. Her body is dead weight. Her feet are swollen and her skin is so thin with multiple shades of purple underneath. You cannot touch her with too much pressure or the skin will tear and her bruises will bleed through. I look out the window and notice that the snow has stopped and I think how lucky she is to have this view of the Armory. “Do you want the painting?

Take the painting,” she tells me. Her finger points to the wall, to one of her older paintings. I see the rabbi’s back and he is standing in front of a thick stained glass window. He holds a prayer book. It is realistic and somber and not like her later abstracts that layer the canvas intricately with easy blotches of color. she searches the room while somewhere a train is rocking and eyes are opening from a sleep.

It is late afternoon now and her bedroom has become more lively with visitors. They all marvel at the view and how smooth her face looks as it rests on the pillow. Her thin white hair is combed back like a straw halo. “Photos?

Tomorrow. No now.” We put a little lipstick on her, the color she remembered and it is the high point of her day.

We all gather around her, smiling. The look in her eyes does not change, but her lips close, present and red.

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Follow Me Jen Hirt

I was a one-woman witness to your parade.

The yarn shop was empty when you arrived with eight kids. You were the first customer, just past noon.

You nodded hello but turned to the six girls and two boys, the oldest maybe 12, the youngest maybe 4.

With a voice that braided patience and prompting with promise, you stated rules. Older children take the hand of a younger. Do not touch. Follow me.

Such obedient children. Long dresses, the boys in practical cloth pants and button-up shirts. Braids and bowl cuts. Were you Amish, or Mennonite, or Mormon? I did not know and could not ask.

You walked past mohair puffing out of a basket. Sweater wool cubbied by color. Silk looped and twisted like pastry to pick up off a glass shelf. My job was to display yarn so you could touch it. Touch is creativity, an idea, and the beginning of the self and possession. I did not think the children would follow your rules.

I was born with the bloodlines of touch. My parents owned a greenhouse. Fingers in dirt and moss, palms on thorns and blossoms, arms pressing terracotta. For so long I thought all parents owned stores and all kids could within them do as they pleased.

The children followed you down every aisle, touching nothing, saying nothing, a stunning success of proper behavior. But then the real test. The store’s mascot, a grey Maine coon cat, asleep on the couch.

Her name was Blanche, like one of the Golden Girls. That cat was meant to be petted. You were supposed to choose a ball of baby alpaca yarn, infant blue, and sit with Blanche to browse patterns from the three binders. You were supposed to slide your fingers through Blanche’s long striped fur, her ruffly white chest, even brush the tufts on her ears and decide to buy a little extra yarn, just in case, plus this one extra pattern, and why not let all the girls pick out cotton for crafts, and Blanche would chirp her meow and stretch out her ridiculous fox tail, which you, all of you, could pet.

None of this happened. No one petted the cat, for the first time in the history of the yarn store.

At the door, you praised the children for listening. You turned to me and said thank you, it’s a lovely store, perhaps we will be back. Perhaps you never left, because I remember you so clearly now. I remember how your children grew up to listen and to respect, like those rules were longer bones in their hands, faster springs in their steps, tighter weaves in their worlds. I hope they also grew up to touch something decadent, something useless, and something luxurious, even though I admit there are days now when I wish you would stop me at the door, lay down the rules, and say, “follow me.” flashglass 19

Deaf-Blind Convention Paul Hostovsky

When I got home from the deaf-­blind convention, I couldn’t stop touching people. It was a week of haptics, tactile sign language and fingerspelling, touching and being touched, and it just naturally continued flowing out of me. I found myself patting the hand of the policeman as he leaned into my car window to give me the speeding violation: T​hank you, officer. ​And I couldn’t help stroking the arm of the bank representative when I stopped in to make a payment on my home equity loan: Principle only, please. ​And later, in line at the grocery store, I brushed a piece of lint off the sweater of the woman in front of me, pressing her shoulder reassuringly. When she turned around, startled by my touch, I touched her again, on the elbow, to apologize. Which only made it worse.

People are touchy about being touched. They don’t like it. They misconstrue it. They take it as an advance: a pass or a flirtation, an aggression or an invasion. But not so with deaf­-blind people. For deaf­-blind people touch is everything. It’s communication and information. It’s intonation. It’s affirmation, feedback, backchanneling. It’s connection and community. It’s practically sacrament and yet it’s as natural and necessary as breathing. All week I had brushed up against and been brushed up against, gently bumping, gingerly jostling, signing and spelling into hands, printing on palms, scratching and tapping, sketching and mapping on backs, shoulders, knees, interpreting and chit­chatting as my fingers and hands remained in almost constant contact with the fingers and hands and bodies of others. The deaf­-blind world is a different world altogether. A world of physical contact. And already I found myself missing it terribly.

In fact, I seemed to be going through a kind of withdrawal. I felt separated, isolated, untouchable in a world of untouchables. It felt like there was too much space between me and the world, too much space between people and things, too much space between people and people. I felt depressed. I began to self­-medicate: I started touching myself. Not in a sexual way, but a platonic way, a deaf­-blind way. My hands looked for each other; they touched each other and themselves, folding, tenting, twiddling, praying. And I touched my face­­- my temple, forehead, nose, cheeks, lips, philtrum, chin. My neck, head, crown, shoulders, arms, wrists, thighs, knees. I touched myself and I thought of my deaf­-blind friends at the convention, whom I longed to see again, whom I longed to touch. But the next convention wasn’t for another two years.

Especially I missed Adriana. Her slender, beautiful hands, the weightlessness of them as they rested on mine, listening. It wasn’t exactly romantic; it was more semantic: her nimble fingers, her fluent signing, the grammar of her face, her virtuosic receptive skills - ­­it was all about language. I was seduced by the voluptuousness of tactile sign language. She was my deaf­-blind delegate from NY, and I was her SSP (Support Service Provider). I guided her, assisted her, interpreted for her, clued her in and helped her out by touching her constantly, but only on her hands, occasionally on her back, or her arm, or the little atoll of her knee. “Those are the only permissible places,” the Pro­-Tactile instructor told us during the short training session on haptics for interpreters and SSPs the first day of the convention. “To tell the deaf-­blind person that someone is laughing, for example, you can spell HA­-HA in her

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hands, of course, but if her hands are occupied, for whatever reason, then you can indicate it like this on her arm, or her back, or if you’re both seated, on her knee.” Then he did a little sort of double flex­-scratch with all five fingers in the air, by way of illustration. “Nothing above the knee, though; and never on the head, or stomach, or chest, or butt, or breasts. Unless, of course, invited to, in the privacy of your dorm rooms.” There were some giggles.

I have to say, those first few days at the convention, a part of me hoped I’d be invited to. And sometimes it seemed like I was on the verge of being invited to. But the invitation never came. And in a way, I’m glad it didn’t.

Because it wasn’t about sex. It was so not about sex. And between you and me, some of us never grow wholly comfortable doing i​t, now do we? I mean doesn’t it feel a little like the blind signing their names on the signature line?

I mean don’t we often need a hand to guide our hand to where they say the ultimate expression of who we are ought to be? And then when it’s done, it’s as though our lovers take back the pen, and the paper, eyeing the sad mark that is ours, and wondering what in the world the world should make of such a squirming, illegible thing.

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Edge of One Place, Edge of Another Ryan Row

I am a hunter, she says. And fires wild into the fleeing geese.

The wide blast of the gun breaks into the spring of her shoulder. And she feels it in the bones of her chest. The spreading pellets in the sky like fistfuls of rain.

Later, he drives and she stares out the window at the running fields of twisted grass and the thin Ash woods of upstate. A natural hunting blind.

He spots dried mud under his fingernails while making a slow turn, from one narrow road to another.

He has the urge, like the urge to drink, to pull over there, in the grass, and pick the mud out with his slim folding knife, which he takes always into the wild, the grasses, but has never used.

He resists.

Did you have fun? he says.

Wish I’d hit something.

That isn’t so bad, he says. He thinks about broad sky, and their thunder in it. Shrieking calls. Loud and without meaning. Plunging into the sky as into a block of solid blue ice.

And the road is as narrow as a fine line drawn with a pen.

What’s worse? she says. She’s watching the trees for movement. A bird. A rabbit. She imagines her dinner depends on it. Her life, and the life of everyone she knows. She smells rich soil, river chalk and red clay. And it all clings to their rubber overalls balled up in the trunk.

You hit something, he says. He is thinking about clothes small enough to fit between the pages of a book. And a person small enough to fit in his hand. You hurt it. Maybe killed it. You see it struggle. Fall.

You watch it fall. You watch closely. It’s wing is broken. But when you go looking, and you look for a long time, you never find a body.

She doesn’t respond. She is thinking about what it means to provide, and the feel of the gun, cracking in her hands with all the solid presence of a newborn’s first cry. Outside the window is a place as wild as any she has ever seen. Shadows as deep as pools. Trees as crooked and smooth as broken necks.

She sets her eyes free, uncaged animals, and they claw at the landscape as if they want to destroy it.

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Something unfamiliar plays on the radio, drifting static as they move from the edge of one place to the edge of another, and she is about to speak, when, just above the trees, the jagged line of the sky, she spots a shutter of movement. The shutter of a body, and later she will swear on it, and it will become more clear and vivid in her memory. A naked man, tall and wet with long, loose limbs and a flabby chest, thin as a cigarette. Weakly cradling a small, rounded stomach. And his broad, crooked gray wings, bent out of his back, are beating hard, beating desperate, but failing. His whole, strange body knocking painfully against the glass sheet of the sky like a broken hand gathered into a fist.

A shape she recognizes.

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Drift

Will Preston “People forget years and remember moments.” - Ann Beattie, “Snow” Of everything, I remember the last time I visited you at the toy store. It was a Friday, early February, the day it really started to snow in earnest; and since I wasn’t working Fridays then, I came downtown to keep you company.

The city had already fled: traffic out of town at a standstill, high beams on, wipers going; Main Street as empty as a stage. The afternoon sprawled before us. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock: customer-less hour after customerless hour crept by, so we drifted through aisles of bouncy balls and jigsaw puzzles and deluxe backgammon sets, board games with names like Gassy Gus and Gooey Louie. ​You actually sell this shit? I said incredulously, game in hand, and you laughed and said, w ​ hat’s more, people actually buy it.

Meanwhile, the snow outside came down in curtains. It stacked on top of cars, buried curbs, drifted against the door, and it wasn’t until I stepped outside to feed the meter that I realized that every other store in sight had closed down and slipped away to the warmth of furnaces and fireplaces. I went back inside and said, ​look at this​, and we stepped out as an ambulance slid by at ten miles an hour, lights flashing a silent symphony of reds and blues against the white canvas of the city. It rounded a corner and vanished; the snow twisted in the wind like someone shaking out a sheet and covered the tracks with ease. And because it felt like nothing was quite real that day, you locked the store and we wandered off into the padded afternoon. Street after street: bars, thrift stores, movie theaters, all boarded up, desolate. There was a kind of freedom in it. Snow nestled in your hair; silence nestled in every alley.

There in the empty streets, I felt closer to you than I had in a long time.

Maybe you remember it differently. Maybe you remember only the cold, how the city had seemed -- for weeks -- to be electrified: doorknobs, handrails, water fountains, all treacherous. Maybe the tips of your ears had already begun to sting, or your coat had a hole or had been forgotten behind in the store. Maybe the whole time you were searching for another face, a set of footprints in the snow, a cough or a car horn, because there was something eerie about the lack of sound: a city on mute, where even the ambulances didn’t turn on their sirens.

Maybe there was a weight. Maybe, when you recall that aimless afternoon spent among piles of action figures and stuffed animals, you remember not ducking behind towering displays of yo-yos and shooting toy arrows at each other, but the spaces in our conversation: the cramped, uneasy silence between us. ​I’m worried we’re going stale​, you said to me not long after. ​Past our expiration date. Maybe we’ve come as far as we can. We’re not the people we used to be. But I barely heard you, because I kept trying to picture us as bread gone hard, or milk gone sour, and instead I just saw seeds struggling up through frost-bitten earth. Look back, I wanted to say. We remember beginnings, not endings. We remember the quiet beauty of the first kiss, not the banality of the last. We forget the dead air, the long drives with nothing to talk about, the arguments about the future, and we hold on to trinkets of memory:

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blues dancing at one in the morning, our bodies in slow motion; washing you in the shower, water in streams down your back, my fingers drawing lines from freckle to freckle; wandering the empty, muffled streets of our city, snow whipping around, you burrowed into my arm for warmth. Look back.

But maybe you don’t remember that day at all. Maybe all you remember is a day when it started to snow and didn’t stop for a week. Maybe everything else about that day has gone, melted away, and all that remains when you close your eyes is a world swallowed in snow, lost beneath a billowing, unending blanket of white.

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Contributors Clarissa Colletti (cover art) approaches photography in a stylistic manner. She is particularly inspired by nature and the abstract and constantly drawn to reflections and shadows. She studied photography at Denison University from traditional darkroom to digital, however, she is most happy when working with alternative processes. Her work has been shown in Chicago at Morpho Gallery, RAW: Natural Born Artists, State of the Art Chicago, and Windy City Playhouse. Roads Group, Inc features one of her pieces in conjunction with their fragrance. In addition, her photograph Strawberry Patch won second place in the Prairie Art Alliance Images of Illinois 2013. Clarissa’s work is featured in Issue 9 of Glassworks. See more of her art at: cseephotography.com Jen Hirt’s memoir, Under Glass: The Girl With a Thousand Christmas Trees (University of Akron/Ringtaw Press, 2010), won the Drake University Emerging Writer Award. Her essay “Lores of Last Unicorns,” published in The Gettysburg Review, won a Pushcart Prize. She is the co-editor of Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2016) and Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction (MSU Press, forthcoming 2017).

Her essays have also received the Gabehart Prize for Nonfiction from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and two notable essay mentions in Best American Essays. Her work has recently been published in Hobart, Ninth Letter, and Natural Bridge. She has an MFA from the University of Idaho, an MA from Iowa State University, and a BA from Hiram College. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Penn State Harrisburg.

Paul Hostovsky’s latest book of poems is The Bad Guys (FutureCycle 2015). He is the author of seven books of poetry and six poetry chapbooks. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Writer’s Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. To read more of his work, visit him at: paulhostovsky.com Anna Ivey is currently working on a PhD in poetry at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. Her most recent publications have been featured in So to Speak, The Unrorean, Antithesis, Stone Highway Review, and West Trade literary magazines. Further, she was offered a fellowship by the Summer Literary Seminars to attend a writing program in Lithuania in 2008 and 2013. She teaches high school English and lives with her husband Chad and their two children.

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Susanna Lang’s newest collection of poems, Tracing the Lines, was published in 2013 by the Brick Road Poetry Press. Her first collection, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press, followed by a chapbook, Two

by Two (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in journals including Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, and Jubilat. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

Moura McGovern’s work has appeared in journals such as BlazeVOX, Camera Obscura, the Chattahoochee Review and others. She has an MFA in creative writing from The Pennsylvania State University, where she taught writing for five years. She works as an editor.

Denise Mostacci-Sklar has had a career as a dancer and now has had the good fortune to discover writing as another way to move through life. She has been published in numerous journals, some of which include the Aurorean, Fiction Fix, Gravel, Poesy and Wilderness House Literary Review. Denise is from Hamilton, Massachusetts where she is a personal trainer in the GYROTONIC method of bodywork and where lives with her husband and two incredible sons.

Kevin O’Connor received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins and his M.F.A. from Old Dominion University. He has published writing in Slant, Anderbo, The Fourth River, Bayou, Bluestem, Literary Juice, The Tulane Review, and The Pinch. He lives in Buffalo.

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan, Marlene Olin recently completed her first novel. Her short stories have been featured or are forthcoming in publications such as Emrys Journal, upstreet Magazine, Steam Ticket, Vine Leaves, Crack the Spine, Poetica, Edge, Meat for Tea, The Broken Plate and The Saturday Evening Post online. She is a contributing editor at Arcadia magazine.

Kate Peterson earned her MFA from Eastern Washington University in Spokane where she now works as an adjunct professor. Her poetry, essays, and interviews have been published and are forthcoming in many literary journals including Willow Springs, The Sierra Nevada Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Huffington Post, The Examined Life Journal, and Sugar House Review. You can find her at: katelaurenpeterson.tumblr.com

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Will Preston was born in Virginia and has since lived in Oregon, England, and the Netherlands. He has written extensively on film, travel, music, and history, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. This is his first publication.

Ruben Rodriguez writes, paints, and wastes his time at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. He is the fiction editor of The Great American Lit Mag and author of the chapbook We Do What We Want (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2015). His work has been deemed fit for consumption by the likes of Passages North, Forklift, Ohio, Hawai’i Review, Oxford Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, The Nassau Review, and others. You can find him at: www.rubenstuff.com Ryan Row started out by publishing work under the pen name Alan Wor, but now writes under his own name.

His work has been previously published, or is forthcoming, in Bayou Magazine, the Sierra Nevada Review, Glassworks Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently studying Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Find him online at: ryanrow.com Alaina Symanovich is a graduate student pursuing her MA in creative writing at Penn State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, Switchback, Fogged Clarity, Skin to Skin, and other journals.

Joel Wayne is a writer and editor living in Boise, Idaho. His work has appeared in The Moth, Salon, and the Sun Valley Film Festival, among other places. He received the 2015 Lamar York Prize for Fiction from The Chattahoochee Review (the story was subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize). Wayne occasionally teaches fiction at The Cabin, has served as an assistant editor at The Idaho Review, and can be visited at: JoelWayne.com Chase White lives in Athens, Ga with his boyfriend of many years. He spends his time outside, writing and gardening. His best work happens to be under dirt smudges. Fortunately, some of it has been recovered, including a story forthcoming in Labello Press’ latest anthology. You can keep up with him on Twitter at @MotherNatsSon

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