Litro167 teaser by Litro Magazine

ISSUE 167

David Rose Sophie Hopesmith Emma Cleary

FAITH AND FAITHLESSNESS

Angie Chuang Katie DeGilio Jenny Chamarette Kevin Tosca Olivia Payne

Cover by Marjatta Cajรกn

ISSUE  LITRO MAGAZINE Editor- in-Chief Eric Akoto | eric.akoto@litro.co.uk Assistant Editor Barney Walsh | barney@litro.co.uk Art Director Elina Nikkinen Head of Development & Partnerships Maria Salvatierra Arts editor Daniel Janes | arts@litro.co.uk Online Editors James Cook | essays@litro.co.uk Catherine McNamara | flash@litro.co.uk Hayley Camis | tuesdaytales@litro.co.uk Story Sunday | barney@litro.co.uk Subscription enquiries subs@litro.co.uk or +44 0203 371 9971 USA: 646 519 2452 All other enquries info@litro.co.uk Cover image The apple by Marjatta Caján © Litro Magazine LTD December 2017

What does it mean to have faith? Can we live without faith? But faith in what? Faith in God or the gods, or faith in humanity, in ourselves? (Are these mutually exclusive?) Faith in our country, in our political leaders (surely not)? Faith in love, or (seemingly so often) faith in hate? Or faith in reason, in science; faith in faithlessness? Blind faith in anything must be unwise, and the dangers of the extremes of faith, of the unwillingness to ask questions or heed alternative views are clear – whether it’s the few extremists perverting one religion or the white-supremacist, racist religiosity of the far-right on the rise at the moment in the west. Maybe in these dark polarising days like these we don’t need more faith but less: in times of fake news and alternative facts, we need rational doubt, beliefs based on evidence not on what we want to be true. So here we have six stories and a couple of essays about faith, God, belief or the lack of belief. David Rose’s “Metaphysic” follows the rational investigations of philosophy, Emma Cleary peers into the future in “new blood”, in “You: An Outsider’s Perspective”, Sophie Hopesmith has an unusual way of looking at a relationship with God, and Jenny Chamarette in “In Chartres” tours a cathedral, a marriage, and a loss of faith all in one. There are flash fictions too by Kevin Tosca and Olivia Payne, and personal essays: by Angie Chuang, on her experience with ovarian cancer, and by Katherine DeGilio, on growing up bisexual in a deeply religious place and family. Eric Akoto, Editor-In-Chief www.litro.co.uk

@LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

www.litro.co.uk @LitroMagazine

#167 Faith & Faithlessness

Contributors

FICTION

@LitroMagazine

Metaphysic - David Rose

11 15

You: An Outsiderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Perspective - Sophie Hopesmith

In Chartres - Jenny Chamarette

FLASH FICTION

Earth Run Without You - Kevin Tosca

Anchorite - Olivia Payne

NON FICTION

What if God Changes His Mind - Katherine DeGilio

The Other Ovary - Angie Chuang

new blood - Emma Cleary

FICTION

POETRY

FLASH FICTION INTERVIEW

Art

E ART

ESSAY

NON FICTION

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5 5 CONTRIBUTORS

David Rose was born in 1949, and spent Sophie Hopesmith is a 2012 Atty Awards his working life in the Post Office. He has published two novels: Vault (Salt, 2011) and Meridian (Unthank, 2015) – the subject of an interview in Litro in May 2015; and a story collection, Posthumous Stories (Salt, 2013). He was fiction editor of Main Street Journal.

finalist and her background is in feature writing. Born and bred in London, she works for a reading charity and co-hosts a literary podcast called Papertrail. She likes comedy, poetry, writing music, and Oxford commas. All of her favourite films were made in the ’70s. Sophie's debut novel, Another Justified Sinner, was published by Dead Ink Books in 2017.

Emma Cleary holds a PhD in Litera-

ture from Staffordshire University. Her short fiction appears in Lighthouse Literary Journal, Shooter Literary Magazine, and Best British Short Stories 2015. From Liverpool, she lives and writes in Vancouver, BC.

Olivia Payne was born and raised in Sur-

rey. A graduate of the universities of both Aberdeen and Cambridge, she is currently working as a Librarian in West London.

Jenny Chamarette spent most of her

twenties in various parts of continental Europe, and loved it so much she did a PhD in French cinema and philosophy. She now lives in South-East London with her partner and cat Juno, Protector of Women. She is working on her first short story collection.

CONTRIBUTORS

Kevin Tosca's stories have appeared in

Bateau, The Frogmore Papers, decomP, Paper Darts, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and elsewhere. Poetry in Motion, a fiction chapbook, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press. The same press will publish Ploieşti, a story collection set in Romania, in 2019. After a decade in Europe, he now lives in Canada. Find him at kevintosca.com.

66 6

Katherine DeGilio is a twenty-year-old

bisexual woman living in the United States. In her free time, she likes to write and cosplay, and is an avid participator in NaNo Writing Month. She is currently working on a collection of poems as well as a novel.

Marjatta Caján is a digital artist and Angie Chuang is a nonfiction writer

and an associate professor of journalism at University of Colorado Boulder. Her first book, The Four Words for Home, tells the immigrant stories of an Afghan American family after 9/11 and her own Chinese American one. Her work has also appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Asian American Literary Review, Vela, Hyphen, several editions of The Best Women's Travel Writing, among others. She was a newspaper reporter for thirteen years. “The Other Ovary” is adapted from her second book-in-progress, The Other One, a memoir exploring choice, free will, and fate.

photographer based in Finland. Her main sources of inspiration are nature and the small details of everyday life. She enjoys wandering in Finnish forests and capturing the play of light and shadows. The presence of nature can also be found in her still-life compositions. Her work can be found at amalus.deviantart.com.

FICTION

Metaphysic

by David Rose This is where the difficulties, the doubts, set in. It is the evening for his class and of course the train was late. He will have to skip dinner, have a late supper; time only for a change of shirt and socks, and out. He makes the library just on eight, sits at the back, composes himself. Tonight’s class sounds a little dry: Philoponus contra Aristotle (WEA Philosophy Module II: the Mediaevals) but turns out to be anything but. The attack on Aristotle’s theory of the quintessence is merely a preliminary to demolishing his conclusion: that the universe was eternal because that fifth element, ether, has a circular motion; that everything comes into being from its contrary; that as there is no contrary to a circular motion, ether must have been eternally existent. Philoponus counters by arguing that things come into being from non-being, but that non-being has no such status as that of a contrary – non-being is not the material out of which being is fashioned (Against Aristotle 5 fragment 132). Joshua (Shua, to his friends) thinks there is a simpler approach, a practical one: Aristotle had had no experience of the Circle Line in the rush hour. The contrary to motion on the Circle is no motion. He is tempted to raise this in the discussion period, but is reluctant. He doesn’t want to be a smart aleck, to be thought flippant. Now, cooking his supper, he wishes he had – it strikes him as logically sound. No matter, he has been stimulated, his head is still spinning (elliptically); progress has been made. For if, contrary to Aristotle, the universe had a beginning, it must have an end. He takes from the grill his supper, cheese and mustard on toast, which, during his reflections, has been carbonized. *** Augustine on Time is presented as a sequel – or rather, prequel – to last week’s class, grappling with challenges thrown up, the tutor hopes, by Philoponus’ argument with Aristotle. For if, contra Aristotle, the universe had a beginning, it raises a question in the questing mind (he actually says this): what was there before the beginning? What Began the Begin, to paraphrase Cole Porter (he says this too). Augustine’s prior answer was, in a counter-intuitive move, to side with Aristotle, but for tactical reasons: the universe had no beginning in Time, since Time came into existence with the creation of the universe (City of God IX 4, 12). So although God pre-existed the universe, he did so outside Time, though not before Time, since there can be no before until Time begins. This must be so, in order to answer satisfactorily the objector’s question: what was God doing before he created the universe? (Confessions XI 12, 14). Shua thinks of a different answer, and determines this week to add it to the discussion. He becomes more determined as the lecture continues, teasing out the attempts Augus-

FICTION

You: An Outsider’s Perspective

by Sophie Hopesmith You are the womb and the wound. You were a dream come false. I woke up smiling. That was a rare moment when I felt free of you, when the walls weren’t made of you and I didn’t see you curled up in the spirals of my eyes. But soon I saw you again. You are always stuck out in front, a shadow I cannot keep up with; slithering and suckering, a prolapsed organ ahead of me. Ever since I killed the baby, I’ve been thinking about you a lot. While we were trying to conceive, my mind was on different things. My word, was there a lot to think about. I bandied about with thermometers for a while (and you have to get a special type), but soon I just couldn’t be bothered with that; sticking it into my backside while Luke fetched me a cup of tea and the morning was shaking all the folds from its face. After that, I moved on to these special sticks that you pee on every month, when you think it might be time. A smiley face would beam at me – affirmative – and I’d wave it at Luke so he could get his dick powered up. I took vitamins and massages and meditation, and I dialled down the drinking and the binge-eating and senseless sex, and I was so caught up with it all that I scarcely knew what the end prize was anymore – although we often held each other and wept and felt very insignificant and useless and like we had failed at something, failed at the ultimate something. Of course, back then, you were around, but it felt very normal, very unobtrusive if I’m honest. I saw you as draped over my skin, suctioned into the ins and outs, the folds and undulations of my body. You were cling film, cellophane, chainmail liquid. I could even smell you sometimes, like very damp earth where a fire had died. You were just there, don’t you see? Just there: like you had been from the earliest times I remembered, when Mum and Dad told me about the beginnings of time and the sculpting of the universe and your benevolent light that let us all be revealed. You were All Things Bright and Beautiful and you were Christmas pudding and chocolate eggs and the “I do” of a wedding. I talked to you every night. “I hope I am good. I hope I am good enough. Thank you for looking after me and keeping me safe and keeping my family safe. I trust you to help us along and keep us on the right path. I ask nothing of you but love. I love you.” Very occasionally, you would talk back, with your form pressed to my form, with the enormity of everything slurped up into an indivisible me. “Don’t worry about the baby thing, don’t worry about work, don’t worry whether Luke fancies that woman from work or not. Everything happens for a reason. I am watching over you, protecting you. Have faith in the light. Just keep looking to the light.” You were quite chatty when you wanted to be. Yes, those were the days. I remember a time when the world just seemed to make

FICTION

new blood

by Emma Cleary “what’s the ocean like?” campfire crackles, spits sparks into black sky, crackle like old woman laughter. the grandmothers sit in a ring, planted solid like the circle of rocks round the fire, and the mountains that protect us. our friends from the north here to trade, and the grandmothers gather to tell stories of before the water come. they talk of fruit the colour of jewels, fruit that quits your thirst and your hunger, too. the grandmothers speak of many things i don’t understand, but hunger’s gone from the crinkled faces glowin pretty and sweet in the firelight, and this i know, my belly full of blackened corn from the oven. i tasted melon, once, when a stranger from southwest passed through the yard. grandma muna wouldn’t let him sleep with us. she give him a blanket and pointed to the sycamore tree at the edge of the tall grass. traders call this place the shipyard, on account of the containers we live in – big boxes, blue, and red, and green, all in a row. ships carried these cross the ocean, once. they been here a long time, and the sun bleached the colours some. sleepin in them’s the closest i been to the sea, so i call our home the yard for short. makes more sense. i never seen a ship, and the lake don’t touch the ocean. “noah,” grandma muna says, “sleep callin you,” and i smile and roll over onto my hot belly, push myself up and retreat from the fire. i wander cross the field to redbox with bo whinin and snappin at the stick i use for walkin, grass scratchin at my good leg. their voices trail after me through the empty night, talkin what grandma muna calls future talk. i hear lots of talk like this, lately. feels like it’s bout me. “he’s growin,” grandma muna said, once. i knowed she meant me. everyone else here’s big as they ever gonna get. “i’m growin,” i say to cleo when she pulls back the metal door to redbox. “me too, boy,” she laughs, rubbin her belly. cleo’s belly bout to pop, makes her legs look like two skinny stalks, ’cept i wouldn’t say that to her face. cleo’s face always smilin. she tucks me into bed, kisses my forehead, and goes back to her pallet without closin the door up. cleo sleeps more now the baby’s almost here, but i reckon she misses the night-sounds, the grandmothers murmurin by the fire. two words i heard follow me back to redbox, but i don’t want to say them out loud with the night so close and black. i scratch the scab on my knee and the words pulse like my heartbeat underneath as i lie on my pallet and squeeze my eyes closed. “new blood.” there’s a red flower blooms in the brown grass grandma muna calls paintbrush and cleo calls prairie-fire. with the door open and the moon shinin bright you can see it out there at night, like the colour’s tryna creep back into the earth. sometimes you can find a rusty contraption to play with, if you dig in the right place – i found hooks and a rope grandma muna called a pulley. she forbid me to go lookin after that, said i could cut myself and die from

FLASH FICTION

Earth Run Without You by Kevin Tosca For the Faithful who’s that backward-walking man and why is that baby stroller over there, like that? no, i don’t trust that old mutt, either. did you see him? i mean really see him? i’m telling you, spies and aliens, all of ’em, and that damn Montparnasse Tower is there, staring at us. look at its angle and those evil eyes, it wants to voodoo our— Kevin, calm down. What are you talking about? Have you been watching those movies again and swilling coffee like you’re Juan Valdez? You know how you get. Come here, I’ll protect you. I’m here and everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be all— but who are you? i mean you, and i mean who! Shhhh, you know how you get. None of that old nonsense now. It’s okay, I’m here. I’m really, really here. the double really really! deviltry! de— Don’t you dare. —vil woman! ouch! why’d you slap me? I warned you. bitch! Hocus pocus! can we go back to my place now? Why can’t we ever go back to my place? because your place is cursed and i want to finish watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and i want iced coffee and i want to sodomize you. what i want to do is drink iced coffee while watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and sodomizing you in an uncursed place. You’re a real piece of work, you know that? i know it. A smooth operator. yep. A jewel of evolution. ain’t that the truth. You still want to marry me? apocalyptically. Kids? catastrophically. You love me that much? biblically. Then can we at least take the metro for once? A bus? A taxi for fuck’s sake?

NON FICTION

What if God Changes His Mind?

by Katherine DeGilio A personal essay. I remember the taste of my first kiss. Our fingers interlocked and it felt like a wave of energy had shot right through me. Something I had never felt before consumed my body, into what I could only describe as an emotional tsunami. My breath divorced my lungs and I drowned into her. I remember my first kiss, and I remember lying about it. When people asked I always said it was my first boyfriend Tommy. He was cute. He kissed me on the cheek. He never actually kissed me, but he lied and told everyone that I had sex with him in the bathroom of a café. You can see why I didn’t feel bad about lying that we had kissed. The only plausible thing to do was lie. How could I be gay? Was I even gay? The questions didn’t leave me for many years. I grew up in North Carolina and Virginia into a religious family. This seems like a redundant statement. People in the south are religious. That’s just how everyone is. God isn’t a question here. It’s a given. I remember the first time I went to a southern Baptist church. The priest talked of hellfire and brimstone. If you have sex before marriage you will live in pain for all eternity. The gays are demon spawn. The works. I was in seventh grade, and I believed it all. I did all up until ninth grade. In ninth grade, I met my first love. Let’s call her Lucy. Lucy was a liar. A big fat dot on the end of Pinocchio’s nose. In fact, she was so preoccupied by the task of “truth telling” that she became a master, a master so divine in the art that she often tricked herself into believing her own delusions. When I first met her, she told me she was a vampire. I, being a highly suggestable eight-grader, didn’t necessarily believe her, but I did believe her enough to go into the woods with her. She told me her super-secret vampire lair was hidden deep in the forest. So I trudged and forced my non-outdoorsy butt outside to see the magical phenomenon. We never did end up finding said lair, but I did end up finding that I had a pollen allergy. I tell you this because being around Lucy was like living in a fantasy, whether we were actually in one or not, and while there was no real magical component to it, I did feel a spark of something every time I saw her. She was beautiful: tan and tall. She was smart and weird and her personality was equal parts enigmatic and intoxicating. I spent every moment I had with her. We flirted in the friend way. Then we flirted in a not-so-friend way. She’d hold me when I had a bad breakup and put flowers in my hair. She’d tell me I’m beautiful and we’d cuddle. We’d rough house and dance together. I remember the move of my awkward body as I tried to match the way she swayed her hips. She loved dark literature and she could dance. She was both grim and graceful and I didn’t know I was in love with her. I didn’t know I was in love with her until we kissed. There we were at a sleepover like any other, lying down on the couch. She was doodling on my back with her finger and I was

FLASH FICTION

Anchorite by Olivia Payne I can’t escape from voices.

Autumn snakes through the suburbs, claiming one tree after another. It sheds a skin of dead leaves. The sunset is obscured by the terraced roofs; the moon comes and goes behind day-lit clouds. I can smell the barbeque outside, in the garden. I hear genteel laughs from the hired marquee, music I can’t identify. A hand comes. It offers me food, and I accept with grace. I am careful not to bite the fingers, but the meat is still burning from the flames and my mouth opens and shuts at random, wanting and withdrawing. I’m unable to contain it all. The hand withdraws. I wipe my mouth on my dress. Then the hand returns with water. I tilt my face and it pours down me, drowning me, I choke. The hand withdraws, I hear feet walking away. They stay away. It is winter and the air smells cold. The sun must not be there anymore. It’s all moon, all clouds. I’m stung all over with the cold and I can’t escape from voices. Cooped up voices, feet always walking past. More people, less to share. I haven’t seen the hand today. My teeth chatter yet I can’t move my mouth to say my prayers. I think them; but I also try to think myself warm. One trick is to picture coldest Antarctica, to imagine what it is to be a polar bear rolling in the snow, covered in snow, a polar bear in an avalanche who can’t tell up from down, who is tunnelling into more snow instead of up to freedom. White upon white. And then I’m less cold. The darkness is lifting slowly. The voices are slowly leaving, leaving for school, leaving for work, leaving because they’re no longer obliged to stay. Many hands come, many hands to kiss goodbye. I’m still cold, my polar bear trick is played out and my prayers can only be answered with time. Darkness now, light later, is the eternal promise. I keep my hands in my armpits and fold into myself. I feel my chest, I feel how there is warmth in there. Warmth I can’t get at. I scratch at my hidden heart. I feel warmer. A voice whispers to me that it is spring, and to remember the sacrifice. Jesus is a lamb. Jesus on the cross. A hand sneaks me some lamb and I can’t eat it. I bend to the light for nourishment, the promise is fulfilled but the sun still hides its radiance. It rain rain rains, but the sun stays alight behind the clouds. I hope to see a rainbow. I hope to see seven colours. Another promise. The lamb slowly rots. Warm. I no longer have to hide my hands anywhere, I can spread myself. I almost sing. The house is empty, but I can smell barbeques from somewhere: there’s fire, there’s smoke. I almost sing. The lamb is gone. It took a while to go. I saw things grow and I saw them destroyed. I saw much. The moon has been driven back, so there is much to see. The sun wants me to see. Warm. So much that I burn. They are burning. They are burning me. The hands

FICTION

In Chartres by Jenny Chamarette She mourned the dwindling of her faith… “Tell me how you came to be here,” I said to the arches, walls, and columns; “tell me how you live; tell me something real.” And they answered that there were certain things that I must learn for myself if I wanted to hold converse with them in substance as well as in shadow. —Edith A. Browne, Great Buildings, and How to Enjoy Them: Norman Architecture, 2nd edn, (London: A & C Black, 1919: v) A word rose up in her, from the board she was scanning over the top of her glasses. The vaulted arches above her head were cankered with greying matter, cracks like sea deltas rising up from the columns. Badigeon. What does badigeon mean? Regnauld would know what badigeon meant. He had always laughed at her poor grasp of French. What could she do? She had tried so hard, twenty years or more, to learn. Fixated on the idea of being somewhere else, being anywhere else in fact, she had left her dull estuary town, and France had sounded so, well, so romantic, and Regnauld had his own wry charm. His own precision. She’d learned how to manage the day-to-day stuff of life. Rituals of bread and salad, her securité sociale, even the complex litigation of la promesse when they had bought the little flat together in Les Lilas, a dull suburb to the east of Paris. She had spent her first quiet days swimming in the unfamiliar smells of the apartment, vastly pregnant, rolling strange vowels around her mouth like a boiled sweet. But when, at last – oh sweet relief! – she began to feel a little more confident, she noticed Regnauld’s smirk when she couldn’t distinguish between tu and tout. You and all. A tiny moue of the mouth, the indifference of a pout, made the distinction, one she struggled over and over to achieve. The twist of delight in the corner of his pale smile became unmistakeable, as he sprung another impossible word on her. A particular aspect of erosion in church buildings. The precise use of an archaic tense. The restraint of well-bred southern France. Sometimes, in the kitchen, while Regnauld was slicing onions with that perfect brisk motion she had never managed to master, she had wanted to press that knife through the small of his back, to cut through flesh, ligaments, nerves, discs, vertebrae, organs, brown fat. Till the tip poked through the other side of him. Wreak the destruction on his body that their daughter’s battle to the surface of life had done to her. Regnauld was somewhere further up towards the transept, turned toward the statuary of the chapel of Sainte Thérèse. She sighed, and slipped away from the blue signboards full of words that swam in and out of her grasp. The cankered-and-cleaned stripes of the giant pillars either side of her made Chartres cathedral look like a badger. A gothic, revolving badger

NON FICTION

The Other Ovary by Angie Chuang A personal essay. The first time I noticed was in yoga class. In my early thirties, I was as limber as I’d ever be – though I wouldn’t appreciate this until later – and could easily wrap my body into deep twisting poses. That morning, I twisted left, stretched my right arm over my left shin – and felt my whole body stop, as if hitting a speed bump. “Hmph,” I mumbled to myself, took a deep breath, exhaled, and shot my arm out with more force. But my torso remained immobile. It’s like there’s something in the way, I thought. I blamed that and other little things, like weight gain and bloating, on age and focused on what was going well in my life, which was a lot. In the decade since I had graduated from Stanford University, I had charted out a textbook reporting career with the goal of being a foreign correspondent. In my late twenties, I had landed in a high-profile reporting beat on race and ethnicity at The Oregonian in 2000. Within three years of the September 11 attacks, I had travelled to Afghanistan to report on a story about a local family returning to their post-Taliban homeland. My romantic relationships in Portland had been fleeting and tumultuous, a multichapter textbook on exciting but unavailable men. At the time, that was how I liked them. During my reporting trip to Afghanistan, I travelled and lived with a family in Kabul, and they assigned their youngest son, just a couple years younger than I was, to be my bodyguard. The first time I met Asad (I’ve changed his name here, for his safety – he and his family have been targeted in Afghanistan for cooperating with American journalists), I was told not to make eye contact with him in front of the family elders. Yet something grew in spite of, or more likely because of, the slow reveal: our long, risky road trips outside NATO-controlled territory; the conversations when we “bumped” into each other in the family house’s only gender-neutral space, the courtyard; and my growing appreciation of his gallant, self-effacing regard for me – as well as his long, straight eyelashes and easy smile. Returning from Kabul, my studio apartment seemed barren and silent compared to the thrumming, multi-generational Afghan household. In my homesickness for a place far from home, I developed an unshakable feeling that Asad was somehow part of this grander trajectory of my changed, smaller world and personal-professional existence. A year later the universe seemed to offer an answer. Asad miraculously secured a student visa to study in the United States – no small feat for a young, single Muslim male – and would settle near Washington, D.C. I had been interviewing with The Washington Post and hoped that within a year the newspaper’s editors would find an opening for me that would help launch me into a foreign bureau. It all felt uncanny. That he was charming and even sounded handsome on the phone provided a pleasant buzz that kept me out of my usual trouble with other men. Then I felt that weird sensation in yoga, and little things seemed not right with my body. I kept busy, wrote a lot, and would feel giddy for days after getting an email or call from

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