The Best of Loose Change: Volume 4, Issue 1

VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1

THE BEST OF LOOSE CHANGE

MARCH 2014

! ! ! ! ! ! !

!

VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1 THE BEST OF LOOSE CHANGE Summer 2010 to Spring 2014

!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! ! !

All work is the property of the attributed writers and artists.

Copyright Š Loose Change magazine 2014 www.loosechangemagazine.org

! !

! ! ! ! !

Our first print issue is dedicated to the writers and readers of these ink and paper pages.

!

! !

You are the best of Loose Change.

Editor’s Letter

!

!

Molly Dickinson, Managing Editor

On July 10, 2010, a crowd gathered at a bar in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. It was a Saturday night. The drinks sweated against the heat. Voices rose to half-shouts over piped-in guitar and bass. A woman walked to a waiting microphone. Someone turned off the music.

Everyone listened.

!

This issue holds the best writing we’ve published since that first Loose Change reading celebrating our debut issue more than three years ago. It’s our first anthology, and our first issue ever in print—which also makes it the seven-by-ten-inch realization of one of the first goals we set when we decided to start Atlanta’s literary magazine.

!

Thank you for bringing us here. Thank you for listening, for writing, for reading. I would say that there are no words to express how much your support means to Loose Change, or how proud we are to finally, gratefully place this book in your hands. But, after all, here they are…

!

!

Table of Contents

! !

Cover Art, Poncho 3, from the Ponchos Series (2011), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh !

Dedication !

Editor’s Letter !

Table of Contents ! !

Art Notes, poetry by Howie Good 1 !

Gonzo the Weirdo, fiction by Robin Wyatt Dunn First Place, Loose Change Fiction Contest 2013

2

!

The Row, fiction by Evan Guilford-Blake 7 Third Place, Loose Change Fiction Contest 2013

!

Some Men, poetry by Kristian Rodriguez 10 !

Laundry List, poetry by Amy Herschleb 11 !

Ponchos Series, oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh 13 !

Poncho 1 (2011), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh 14 !

What We Go For, fiction by Christine Hoffmann 15 !

Oriental Ashtray, poetry by Rachel Trignano 22 !

Littoral, Thalassic, Pelagic, poetry by Jessica Temple First Place, Loose Change Poetry Contest 2013

23

!

Poncho 5 (2011), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh 24 !

Riverwatch, fiction by Jan Thompson 25 !

We Can Be Heroes (2012), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh !

Weeding, poetry by Hank Backer 37 Second Place, Loose Change Poetry Contest 2013

!

The Reprieve, fiction by Hank Pugh 38 Second Place, Loose Change Fiction Contest 2013

36

Poncho 6 (2011), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh

40

!

Phos Hilaron, nonfiction by Christopher Martin 41 !

Two Possums, poetry by Christopher Martin 46 !

Poncho 4 (2011), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh 48 !

Connections Made in Retrospect, poetry by Paige Sullivan Third Place, Loose Change Poetry Contest 2013

49

!

Try to Forget, nonfiction by Cheryl Wollner 50 Second Place, Loose Change Nonfiction Contest 2013

!

The Sucked Orange, nonfiction by Natalia Castells-Esquivel Third Place, Loose Change Nonfiction Contest 2013

!

52

Cowgirls are God’s Wildest Angels, nonfiction by Tricia Stearns First Place, Loose Change Nonfiction Contest 2013

!

The Mad Years, nonfiction by Randy Osborne 61 !

Bones to Pick, poetry by Kathleen Brewin Lewis 65 !

Domesticated (2012), oil on canvas by Johnathan Welsh !

The Failed Sketches, poetry by Anton Frost 67 ! !

Contributors 71 !

Acknowledgements

74

66

56

Art Notes

!

!

Howie Good

1 William Burroughs wouldn’t appear anywhere without his hat.

!

It just swam around inside the clear plastic bag like a goldfish.

!

2 The first paint was probably animal blood.

!

Art is dangerous. !

3 Everything that happens, they say, happens for a reason.

!

The sun will shine for at least another 6 billion years. 

"1

Gonzo the Weirdo

!

!

Robin Wyatt Dunn

“I don’t know, I feel like America is going somewhere these days, somewhere new, somewhere exciting,” he says.

“You’re a complete idiot,” I say.

“Don’t go overboard now,” he says.

“Overboard? What boat are you on?”

“Maybe this was a bad idea.”

“Calm down. Go get your coffee.”

He comes back and I smile at him.

“Good coffee here,” he says.

“Yes.”

“So. You realize that we can’t hire you. A criminal record just isn’t in keeping with our mission statement, to uplift the people. But we could send you some work under the table, you know what I’m saying?”

“What do you need?” I ask.

“We need a new life. We need a new destiny. We are a voice and we want you to be part of it. We want you to be part of the smile of the city of Los Angeles. We want you to be true. We want you to be yourself.”

“Right,” I say.

“Is this something you can do for us?” he asks.

“What’s the pay?”

“Piecework.”

“Yes?”

“We’re open to negotiation.”

“Okay, well, tell me the first assignment, then, and we’ll see.”

“Sure. Occupy LA has been picketing downtown, you know, and we thought it would be great to put together a kind of mood piece, you know, something that really shows our audience what this unique event means for modern living.”

“Uh huh.”

“The color red is important for this one.”

“Okay.”

“You think you can handle that?”

“You got it.”

We shake hands. He is a man and so am I. We share a lot of DNA, being of the same species. I want his head on my wall.

"2

*

!

I squat amongst some other folks on the grass by Union Station and listen to some mariachi music. A little weed drifts through the air, making me nostalgic. I keep my ears open, but it’s basically a lot of depressed people. They’re not angry enough. There isn’t going to be a riot. I don’t think they’re even going to sleep outdoors. Some are already leaving.

I snap some photos of people. I’ll put in some red tint in photoshop or something.

Write some poetic captions.

I wish I could buy a gun.

!

!

*

“We’ve decided to send you to Switzerland,” he says, and that’s when I know he needs to die, that Switzerland has to go with him. A suitcase nuke, a warhead, a Holocaust in Bern. I am the only sane person left.

“When do I leave?” I ask.

“Tomorrow.”

!

!

*

Switzerland, Switzerland, those bold men in their mountains who kept their borders secure and then helped rape the planet. Finance.

Switzerland, Switzerland, highest income per capita nation state in the world.

I’m there to do a profile on Jimmy Duffrey, a “Re-Muzak Experience.” I think what he does is performance art in elevators.

The Swiss are really polite people.

My hotel room is amazing. It almost makes me want to change teams, vote Tory and Republican, change my name and brand of toothpaste, date blondes.

I pick up the telephone and dial.

“Hello, is this Mr. Duffrey?” I say.

“Who is this?” A young woman’s voice.

“This is Jack Messing, I’m here in Bern for an interview with Mr. Duffrey. Is he available?”

“It’s after midnight,” she says.

“I was told he keeps late hours.”

Part of me wants to ask her, must ask her, needs to ask her: is she my salvation? Young pussy, uncomplicated values? A trust fund? Does she shave or wax her cunt? Has she read more than ten books in her life, cover to cover?

"3

“Yes, he does,” she says.

“Is he available?”

“Not at the moment, no. Are you staying at the Schweizerhof ?”

“Yes.”

“So are we. What floor are you on?”

“Seven. Room 705.”

“I’ll be up in a minute.”

I think I misremember how to seduce women. Luckily alcohol is preprovided in hotel rooms. What else is involved? Music? Fuck music. I hope she’s really pretty, pretty enough for me to hate her.

I light an herbal cigarette, which is an absolutely disgusting invention, a more disgusting invention than actual cigarettes, and then remember that smell is important in seduction too and so I put it out, turn on the ceiling fan.

There’s a knock at my door. I open it.

“Hi. Mr. Messing?”

“Yes. Please come in.”

She’s beautiful. Kind of a tight ass. Lip gloss. Black pants, white blouse, some chopsticks in her hair, holding it in a loose arrangement.

“You want a drink?” I ask her.

“What are you drinking?” she asks.

“I haven’t yet.”

“Kiss me,” she says.

“You want me to kiss you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

So I kiss her, just a little kiss. No tongue. She remains almost motionless.

“Let’s run away together,” I say.

“Not just yet,” she says.

“Whiskey?” I ask.

“Bourbon, please.”

I hand her a little bottle and crack open my own and take a sip. It tastes good.

I watch her eyes.

“Mr. Duffrey is unwell,” she says.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Take off your blouse,” I say.

She looks down at the line of buttons down her chest.

“You do it,” she says.

"4

*

!

I am having coffee in Switzerland. The year is 2012. The month is December. I am looking out at the snowy Alps from a sheltered expensive hotel dining room. A beautiful young woman is in the restroom. The company is paying my bills.

“Anything else, sir?” the waiter asks.

I shake my head and smile. I want to cry. She comes back to the table then. It looks like she’s been crying.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I just quit.”

“Oh.”

“I hate him.”

“Okay. I think I should still do the interview though. I need the money.”

“Really?”

There’s a lot of phlegm in her throat. She proceeds to hack it up into a napkin.

“Sorry.”

“It’ll only take fifteen minutes. What room is he in?”

“206.”

“Wait here.” I kiss her.

!

!

*

I knock on the door. He opens it, and he’s so much older than I expected. In his late 70s. “Mr. Messing?” he asks.

“Yes, sir. I’m here to interview you.”

“Come in.”

“Thank you.”

I walk to the hotel table and sit, turn to look at him as he joins me. He has perfect posture, like a dancer. Dressed in all black, like I used to be.

“Thank for you your time, sir. Tell me, how is your art coming?”

“Let us get to know each other for just a moment, do you mind?” he says, in a noblesse oblige voice.

“Sure, okay. I only have a short time though, unfortunately. The company wants me back on a plane.”

“With my assistant,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You’re not her type at all,” he says.

“What is her type?”

"5

“Fools.”

I say nothing.

“Why don’t I just email you the interview,” he says.

“Well, let me ask at least two questions so I don’t feel like a complete tool.”

“Very well.”

“Why elevators?”

“They are obscene on their own. I make them palatable by transforming the social expectations of the space of elevators.”

“You were born rich?”

“My family owns a series of mines.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Duffrey,” I say, standing, holding out my hand. He takes it.

!

*

!

I am on a plane. The young woman is asleep next to me. My bank account just increased by $15,000. I checked. It wasn’t the company. It was Duffrey.

I am flying west over the Alps. Then I will cross the Atlantic, change planes in New York. Then back to Los Angeles.

Does money always keep revolutions at bay? I only want to live; we all do.

"6

The Row

! !

Evan Guilford-Blake

The Row is quiet. It is early Sunday afternoon, the weather has just turned crisp, and in parts of The City where such things flourish, leaves crackle underfoot. Not here. The Row is quiet: empty cement sidewalks, metal gratings and brick. It is void of leaves.

It is, almost, void of people as well. Those who live outside The Row rarely venture inside its de facto borders. Instead, they skirt them: It’s safer and cleaner and more comfortable where they are.

Marcus—That’s the whole name, he will say, if asked: first and last or first or last, what does it matter?—sleeps in a doorway. He dreams, of hot meals and bonded bourbon.

The last food was Friday night: dry chick’n and mash’ ’tatos at The Mission. Last night, he had a pint of Wild Irish Rose. It made him vomit. He wandered away from the green pool, across the street, up further on The Row to Tacy’s, but Ricardo the night clerk wouldn’t give him a bed— “’Cardo, c’mon, I give you t’ other couple dollars t’morra.” “Forget it, you fuckin’ drunkie, wino prick. You don’t got ten dollars you ain’t gettin’ no fuckin’ bed here. G’ on, get out.” Ten minutes later, still in the “lobby”: “You gettin’? Or I’m kickin’? Fucker.”

Ricardo does not like winos or Tacy’s or his job or his wife, or that they are both illegal aliens, which Tacy knows and uses to keep Ricardo the night clerk and his wife the day clerk at incomes barely higher than they had in Tuxtla Gutierrez. But, hey, Tacy tells them, “Y’ got a free room, somethin’ to cook on, refrigerator, bed. And your ’lectricity.” And a radiator. Two fans, no air conditioning.

So Marcus leaves Tacy’s and wanders up The Row where he meets Arno McGregor, who has a quart of Pabst which Arno (who can always remember, proudly, that he is seventythree, unlike Marcus who sometimes forgets that he is sixty-four) shares with him. Marcus has known Arno forever: Arno was there when Marcus came seven, eight years ago; Marcus doesn’t remember that either; Arno showed him around, The Mission, the dumpsters behind the pizza palaces and corner convenience stores, most of which are gone now. Sometimes they sit in a doorway or on a cement bench among the sparse trees and dry grass of the park and pass a bottle back and forth and talk. Arno talks: There are “old days” in his life which he recalls, sometimes with pleasure. Marcus had old days, too, but like so much else they’ve slipped from memory. He gets flashes, now and then—a picture of a face, a swatch of a song, a vision of a tree lit up with ornaments and tinsel—but they are as tenuous as his life is, and as ephemeral as the taste of the warm beer he swallows when it’s there. Sometimes he wonders: Where did I come from, how did I get here? He thinks he used to know the answers, but they are part of his past and the only thing he knows is his present. He asked Arno once, but Arno didn’t know, either.

"7

“Whyn’t you go to The Mission?” Arno asks. Marcus shakes his head. He was at The Mission last night. They sat him down to listen to the Word of God and words of hope, they fed him, they gave him clothes and offered him a mattress and a blanket (both disinfected daily); he muttered his thanks and left. Marcus doesn’t like Bibles and Hymns and Jesus Christ Will Save You, Lean On The Lord. He doesn’t like dry chick’n or prune faces in starched collars and he doesn’t like the smell: not clean; sterile.

Arno finishes the bottle and sets off. He will probably go to The Mission, or he will stay at Tacy’s if he has the ten dollars. Arno is tall and lean and, despite his age and the alcohol and his long time on The Row, alert. He goes to The Clinic every month, where they take his pulse and his blood pressure, give him medicine and advice.

Marcus walks further up The Row. It’s late, Saturday night, there’s a full moon and The City is blinking and yawning. Neon and smokestacks. Noises he can hear beyond The Row. Another world; he hasn’t been in it for…he forgets, because he chooses to. Choices are left: to stay where he is, to go somewhere else. The Mission: eat and sleep. Down The Row: maybe share another bottle. Touch the fringe: beg another couple dollars for a bed at Tacy’s.

He reaches in the side pocket of his brown tweed jacket, the one that isn’t torn, and fondles the six dollar bills, the three quarters, three dimes, six pennies. Saturdays, it’s harder to get money. People are in even more of a hurry than they are during the week, and there are fewer of them on The Row—fewer visitors anyway. Sundays are his best days, if he’s up to making the rounds of the churches on the fringes. People will give him a quarter or a dollar, kids—little girls in white dresses with bows and boys in dark suits and somber ties—will ask their parents to give him money. He stops and jingles the coins: they clink, clink softly. He checks the pants; the pockets are still empty. He nods absently and rubs his hands against his thighs. The shiny gray serge irritates his palms. The pants fit well and are still crisp: last night’s bounty from The Mission. He jingles the pocket again. The coins make a dull, unsatisfying noise.

He starts off once more but is stopped by a tall figure emerging from the dark of an alley. Marcus knows no fear; his life cannot be jeopardized. The tall figure steps in front of him and, in a ratchety baritone, commands “Give it to me, man,” then, as an afterthought, adds, “or I’m gone cut you’ motherfuckin’ eyes out.” Marcus raises his face, but not his hands.

The figure stands there, blocking the moon. All Marcus sees are the eyes: bright red. “Where you got it motha-fucka?” the figure cries quietly and grabs the brown tweed lapel. It tears.

Marcus silently watches the rip extend down the front of the jacket.

The figure says nothing else. It curls its fist into Marcus’ stomach. Marcus doubles, hears the serge tear, feels the pants pockets being turned out. Then the tweed tears again and he hears the plink of copper and silver on cement. He hears “Shit” and a scrambling sound and, “All you got is six dollars and some fucking change?” before he feels a metaled heel brand his back and propel him forward onto the sidewalk, where his forehead slides and the "8

skin abrades, pores filling quickly with blood. He lies there while the metal heels click down The Row. He tries to breathe in slow, shallow gulps. He wants to vomit again but his stomach isn’t strong enough. He lies there, waiting.

When he finally gets up, it’s with the help of Freddy, who has stumbled against him in the night. Freddy is nearly blind, he carries a white cane, which, like now, he often just carries, and sells chewing gum and rolls of candy on a street corner beyond The Row. Freddy, unlike Marcus, isn’t always on The Row. He is sixty-six and was in The War in Vietnam. He got syphilis there. It wasn’t diagnosed until years later; he has been growing blind ever since. The Veterans Administration offers to help him, and sometimes, Freddy lets them. Marcus envies Freddy that help; Freddy has his own room and never goes to The Mission.

“Who is that?” Freddy asks uneasily. Freddy fears most things, except the people of The Row. They are his friends, for he alone among them always seems to have the ten spot for Tacy’s, or the three sixty-nine for a half-pint at Danny O’Lea’s, when they need it.

“Marcus.”

“... Happened?” asks Freddy.

Marcus explains. Freddy nods and offers a bottle: Canuck Rye. Marcus drinks from it, knowing he will regurgitate moments later. The stomach muscles have come back. Freddy offers him a bed at Tacy’s. Marcus shakes his head and grunts, “Nah,” and Freddy does not press the issue. He walks away, down The Row, to his room, nine by twelve feet, a bed, an (illegal) hot plate like the one Ricardo the night clerk and his wife have, a hanging sixty watt bulb, three neatly folded shirts and two pair of slacks in one drawer, four pairs of underwear and four of socks in the other. And, on the wall, a black and white snapshot of Freddy with his arm around a young Asian woman in khakis. On the back of the photo is written “Nov. 72”: when Freddy returned from Vietnam. The woman in the picture is a whore.

Marcus bends over but doesn’t vomit. Instead, he sees a dime, overlooked by his assailant. He picks it up, then walks further up The Row, finds a recessed doorway, sits, takes out the dime, looks at it, turns it in his hands. Some words, a phrase, reach his mind, something about building a dream, and slip away again. He tries to remember them, leans back against the door and licks his lips in concentration. He continues to think, but the words have fallen away. In the distance he hears a train whistle and an elevated car rattle against the night.

Gradually he falls asleep.

When he wakes up, The Row is quiet. It is Sunday afternoon and the weather has turned crisp. Marcus gets to his feet, bunches the brown tweed in front of him and sets off, going down The Row.

!

"9

Some Men

!

!

Kristian Rodriguez

Some men stand with their thumb out, no cost Some men go away to the mountains and get lost

!

Some men stretch themselves so wide they turn to stone, Like dams or clouds they hold rivers Some men are loose in the gardens but roam alone They are the best peach pickers

!

Some come out like myths from the fog Like fairies or anacondas or lazy groundhogs

!

Some sit in a machine and beg to get blown Some walk a line so clean, its all their own

!

Some wait around for a while Comment on the weather and smile

!

Some daughters, mothers, boys have never seen Some so translucent they are obscene

!

Some come in from the rain and sit and listen and weave In the morning, they lay their clothes out to dry and never leave 

"10

Laundry List

!

!

Amy Herschleb

woke up startled by a loose metaphor crawling around the bed, roach or mouse, woke up thinking “who’s in my bed?”

oh. this bitch.

bad blood in these sheets that may or may not smell like sloppy joes (I won’t get into it) add them to the lists of Things That Must Be Washed, Things That Must Be Checked For Stains, and Things, Regardless

we’re not friends: we’re rivals

high self esteem but easily led astray, and I don’t mean by the hair of a maiden. you can tie the unicorn up and haul it home with the shirt off your own damned back. cotton is a resilient fiber, unlike meat, which you may pound until it howls and chews the pillow.

my housemate doesn’t know I cook, comes home to pots boiling. this is what I call reverse tapioca: boil five minutes, then cool rapidly in an ice bath. the water seethes pink & lace. you make panty pudding your way, and I’ll make it mine. a decade of underwear on the clothesline, these I may someday need, these I wear, generally, these I stopped wearing so I could hang them on the wall and consider problems of art, of artifice, of home-decorating, of hygiene.

!

there are places around town I should probably wear underwear, or long pants, like the coffee shop. or the bar. what is the incidence of Yes and No at either of these, anyway.

Things On Which The Stain Is Indelible: my bridesmaid’s dress, my leg, my pride, my chief internal organ.

!

the Principle of Adornment states: (and I do not quote, I don’t give a hot damn for accuracy or hurt feelings) or better, the Principle of Hurt Feelings states: everyone who cares how they are dressed will be better-dressed according to how much they care, and how badly they are hurt.

!

These Things Are Not Reciprocal: how much I love to fuck and how much you love to fuck me. and when you know what I mean, the whole sky will light up like the interior of the laundromat where we used to spend Monday nights in Eagle Rock.

!

"11

my friend says it is when you are folding their laundry that you may come to know, and be overwhelmed by, the feelings of love you have for your family. I know I can never love a man who uses scented laundry detergent, even if only because his mother or last girlfriend did, or who objects to my preference for him to wear boxer briefs, or who takes offense to the remaking of history into soft architecture.

!

the way my skirt draped across your belly was kindness. and in the same moment my kindness ran out.
 
 the record of everything I wore for months is similar to the List of People Not To Do, but with a different pathetic quality. it is the point at which you may still laugh at yourself and the point at which you stop laughing.


!

"12

Ponchos

!

!

Johnathan Welsh

In this work, the abstraction induced by the mask of the poncho allowed me to explore the human form in new ways. I created what I thought was a more primary representation of that form. In doing so, I also created questions for myself and the viewer. What lay beneath these plastic coverings? Who was it that inhabited these coverings? Was it protecting them from some elemental force, or was it protecting us from them? How do you describe gender and race without the readymade visual cues we are so used to seeing? Whenever I make work that can illicit a question, I think I have done my job as an artist. 

"13

"14

What We Go For

!

!

Christine Hoffmann

Friendship is an invitation, Boyd is sure. Say nothing of the strings attached. Say nothing of requests for gifts, for time, ideas about the menu. Say nothing of regrets: old pains flaring, old flames flaming, past times, a child who passed away. The man Boyd is, he’s discovered already that, as in a room, there are ways to accentuate the best parts of people. In the right light, with the right things about us, we’re fine, not slapped together and eating in front of the TV. All this in mind, Boyd has invited Merritt to help him arrange his new place—a large loft, with three floors! Boyd tells everyone, though the floors are only levels separated by a few small steps. Merritt has already tripped, twice.

“It’s so big, so open.” Merritt speaks solemnly, as if leading tourists underground.

Boyd isn’t sure whether she suspects or not, that her husband is cheating on her.

He’s been trying to tell her every day of the week it’s been since he saw Charlie with the other woman. A girl, really.

“It’s like a womb,” Merritt says next.

Boyd is puzzled. Like a womb? Were wombs big and open? Pear-shaped, he recalls from health class. Also hollow. Whereas his place bursts at the seams.

Merritt runs her fingers along various fabrics, peers at Boyd’s pictures; she zeroes in on a hand-painted frame with his daughter Jane in the center, sprawled in the snow in Vail, the trip courtesy of the Make-A-Wish foundation. Boyd is in the picture too, sort of; his bent legs and one snow-encrusted glove. Boyd is surprised to see Merritt frown at the picture, as if it were an ashtray or urn. When she turns away she has to blink a few times, reorienting.

“You really like it here?” she asks.

“You bet.” It’s crowded, but that satisfies Boyd, somehow. Even the view of the beer can-strewn backyard of the fraternity house directly behind him. Even the front door opening directly onto a sidewalk, spilling him out onto rutted concrete slabs reeling with coeds—this every college-version of the weekend. That’s Thursday night through all of Sunday, he’d announced to Merritt, with the air of a movie mad-scientist announcing his demented assemblage. Behind Boyd the Sig Eps drink themselves into an oblivion more significant than any of the suckers who’ve elected not to Go Greek can claim. In his own college days, Boyd was thin as a reed. And the girls didn’t like him. He’d make fists and rotate them beneath his eyes, “Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.” He became a poet.

(Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.)

“Let’s talk slipcovers,” Boyd says. “But first look how the Bowflex fits perfectly in the corner. Merritt, it practically nestles.”

"15

“Mm-hmm.”

Boyd stares fondly at his gleaming equipment. Since Jane died he’d lived like any bachelor: 200 thread-count sheets, scratched Teflon pans, tilting bookshelves put together with screws. With the move, it felt nice to pay attention to color schemes and place settings, like opening a new part of himself, a part Boyd assumed most single, straight men never explored.

“Laying it on a little thick, aren’t ya?” Merritt asks, gesturing toward the entrance of Boyd’s bedroom, which is separated from the main room by heavy drapes tied with thickly braided rope. At night Boyd draws the drapes, feeling like Lord Byron, or The Continental.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, and then he shows Merritt the gilt edges of his antique mirror, meets her eyes in it.

Tell her now! says the voice of his poetic sensibility, crotchety usually, but which occasionally assumes the authority of Indiana Jones. Now! As if the job were to swing from a vine across a gaping chasm.

Merritt checks her teeth in the mirror. “Okay, forget it,” she says. “But I mean it about the womb. I can’t see you getting laid here, Boyd. I can see you getting PMS.” Maybe it’s the brick walls, Boyd thinks, the red streaked with darker red, or the messy abstract he’s centered over the couch; the splotches of thickly layered paint might come across fleshy, striated.

Boyd retreats to pour drinks. “Tell you what,” he calls from the bar. “I’ll buy a bunch of Washington monument paper weights. And a model train set. To counter the feminine imagery.”

“Or just get a real girlfriend.”

“A what?” Boyd hands Merritt her glass, then scratches his head in exaggerated confusion.

Merritt rolls her eyes.

There is a chance she knows about Charlie’s affair already. At the high school where she and Boyd teach, she has taken to spending off-periods alone, head on her desk. She reads self-help chapters aloud to her Earth Science classes. The substitutes suspect she’s the one stealing all the desserts from the faculty fridge.

Away from school, Merritt and Charlie share a ranch house in the Hills that is so unnecessarily big, according to her, that the hallways actually stretch when you walk down them, like in Poltergeist.

Merritt arranges the National Geographics on Boyd’s coffee table in an unimaginative stack, centering her sweating glass on the top. The Unbeatable Body, reads the topmost cover.

What are its limits?

“Probably I’m the one who needs a housewarming, not you,” Merritt says. “Or a house-thawing. I still consider me and Charlie a hot couple, but then I remember the second "16

law of thermodynamics: heat is the least useful form of energy.”

“Right, I always forget that one.” Boyd shakes his head. If he were to tell her about Charlie this minute, she might sob into his arms or clock him with a candelabrum. She might laugh or sprout wings—Who knows? Merritt has two speeds, Boyd is aware, like a penguin; but she tries to live her life at both, simultaneously. She will eat Ben & Jerry’s while on the treadmill. She will read Boyd’s poems, frown, but frame them anyway, or clip them to the visors in her car. “I like a raised fist,” she explained to him two years ago, during a short-lived faculty strike. “But that’s where I stop. A fist in the air is worth two in the gut, that’s my thinking. That’s what I go for.”

“I go for blondes,” Boyd had said. “I go for the gold.” He had not known what to say to her, had not understood the strike, its demands, and he missed his students, all of them, even the stupid ones.

“No, I don’t really. I go for the goal, maybe.”

“Oh Boyd,” Merritt said then, her voice soft. She touched his cheek, and maybe he began to understand.

“This I like,” Merritt says, moving into Boyd’s bedroom, which is sparse in comparison to the rest of the apartment. “You move to a new place, and you have to make your life over, right? You take the heat for it. Or from it, maybe,” she adds.

“Go on,” Boyd says, following her into the room.

“So now’s your chance to disown everything in your life you’re embarrassed by.

You can claim it got delivered by mistake. Wasn’t it tempting to pack all the most important stuff in one box? You’d have to be particular. No bowling trophies.”

“You know what? I did this!” Boyd says. “I put all of Jane’s stuff in one box,” he explains, thinking of the pictures, finger-paintings, old Baby Einstein DVDs he should really sell on eBay, drawings Jane had made for her mother and begged Boyd to roll up inside IBC bottles and throw into the sea. “Once I got it here, I spread everything in it all around.”

“That’s what I mean,” Merritt says.

Cancer took Jane two weeks after her sixth birthday, several weeks after Boyd first met Merritt, who pushed her way into his grief—brought him meals, wrote him notes, walked him to his car after school—made him feel, somehow, she could hear even his soundless mourning. Past all that now, Boyd is surprised to see fresh pain collect in Merritt’s features.

“Have you ever heard from her? From Fran?” she asks.

Boyd winces. Jane’s mother was a woman he met years ago when he was still working as a librarian in Van Nuys. No, he hasn’t heard from her, as Merritt well knows.

“Why would you ask me that?” Boyd walks to his bedroom window, lifts the blinds to reveal the neighboring fraternity’s half-completed homecoming float, the boys around it, laboring. Some have put on togas over their t-shirts and jeans. They pose for a photo, headlocking each other.

"17

Fran had responded despairingly to all his chit-chatty queries the day they met, reserving a half-smile for the very end of the conversation, which Boyd would like to say smote him, reeled him in. Fran was quiet, pretty the way unhealthy girls can be, flushed and hiding behind their hair. She worked in a thrift store, where she spent her time chewing gum, trying to blow bubbles inside bubbles. “Maybe you should try library school,” Boyd suggested once. She’d sneered, the anger in her always near and protective as a dog. “Should I give it a whirl? Try it on for size? Jesus, Boyd.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe you should try pregnancy.”

That she’d laughed at, actually. And when she did get pregnant, she went meek and silent, until Jane came, and then she was just gone.

“I don’t know why I asked,” Merritt says. “You never talk about her.”

“She’s not part of my life.” Boyd isn’t even sure if Fran found out about Jane’s death. He doesn’t wish the knowledge on her, though sometimes he wishes other things: car trouble, acne, a tax audit.

“At least you never married her,” Merritt sighs. “Marriage confuses things. Six years and I’m still wondering the stupid basics: Are we happy? How can we make each other happy?”

Boyd says carefully, “If you can depend on each other, that’s happiness. A husband should be someone you depend on.”

“Depend on?” Merritt scoffs. “A mailman should be someone you depend on, Boyd. A husband’s something else.” She joins Boyd at the window, picks up his drink and drains it. She leans in, resting her head and the glass on his chest.

“You know this like I know this, Boyd,” Merritt speaks half-into his chest. “It’s not just that people damage each other; it’s how they make it look so easy.”

“Yes,” Boyd says. Like in front of the restaurant, the pretty girl holding Charlie’s face in her hands.

Boyd strokes Merritt’s hair. “Merritt, look…” He hesitates. Look where? Look up?

Look out?!

She is so close. She knows, Boyd thinks, she must! So he won’t have to tell her.

Merritt will do the hard part, but afterwards there he’ll be, handsomely unsurprised, telling her—what? Of all the unfit men women like her must encounter, be wounded by, and come away from unspoiled? That? Boyd searches for better words. All week he’s been searching for them, he’s unpacked and looked around. But all he has is what he’s always had—that’s the thing about words. They’re the least fleeting of possessions. They sit there sagging and stained with use, like an old couch.

She is so close. He is holding her face looking up at him. He is kissing her lightly on the mouth. And then not so lightly.

“Well…” Boyd mumbles inside the kiss, as if it’s already over and ponderable.

"18

Merritt pulls away, stares at Boyd, his mouth still open, gawk-width, foolishly silent.

He can remember how, after three weeks of rented movies and conversations in which he had to ask her, constantly, to speak up, he said “I love you” to Fran, and he was so eager to get it said—a rushing filled his head and he’d missed her reply, heard only a few syllables, what he decided later sounded like a drawn out ooooookay, and later still, more like Nooo Waaay. That’s another thing about words—you couldn’t rely on them. One moment you need a hero; the next you’re ordering a hero sandwich. You have a gun and suddenly you’re gung-ho. Gyp. Gypsy. Gypsy moth.

“I’m not some beggar maid,” Merritt is saying. “I was a hot ticket once. Swear to God.” “I know that! You think I don’t know that? Walk outside to any one of these frat boys, Merritt. They’ll be all over you! They’ll think they’ve died and gone to you know where.

They’ll think they’ve ascended!”

Outside, the boys lean against the float in a line, drinking beer from cans held in multicolored cozies. Merritt, unimpressed, it would appear, drums her nails on the sill, and the sound seems to fill Boyd’s ears, become a pounding, steady music.

At his old apartment, the nearby airport test-flew their new Boeings over the roofs of the neighborhood. The sound they made was the sound Boyd imagined Death affected, when it approached the dying, as he believed it did, many times prior to the death itself, only to pass, only to remind its listeners of its speed and screaming charity. Boyd hated Death for this, that Death could have patience for what it wanted, patience but not love. Love was strictly for the living, the ones who remained.

Merritt bites her lip, watching the boys. Boyd senses something broken in her. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, and what he senses is rather her crowded elements beginning to mob.

“A while back,” she says, “I got pregnant, and then I, uh, wasn’t anymore.”

Boyd’s heart skips, flips in his chest.

“There was something growing there, but it stopped. I mean I miscarried. When I told Charlie, I told him, This was our chance. I didn’t plan on saying that, but suddenly there it was in the room with us.”

“And?” Boyd says, “He agreed with me.”

Merritt waits to see what Boyd will do with this, what he will say. And Boyd should know what to say, shouldn’t he? Given what he knows about Absence, how it is the worst blow, how it shocks the whole body, all its poetry. All we want is to fill the spaces, the ones in us, around us, everywhere.

Boyd did not look for Fran for long. It’s hard to say when he stopped loving her. For a while he wrote her letters, but he had nowhere to send them, so he kept them, folded, with "19

his unfinished poems. He began to think of her as Jane did: alone, on an island, waiting for messages in glass.

Maybe he never loved her.

Boyd inhales. “Merritt,” he says, ready to speak, ready to take the heat for this sham invitation, not to mention this place he can’t quite afford, the poems he never finished, the woman he never loved. Maybe it’s all connected. But for Boyd pain was never any cracked mosaic discovered pieces at a time. Perhaps it’s what made him a bad poet, that he kept his losses disconnected, singular. They were part of no larger tour de force. They were separate works of separate art. He could stroll from pain to pain leisurely, making no unnecessary connections, only ambling between each sharply drawn, precisely rendered, disaster. All of which he could explain to Merritt now, and maybe she would be comforted, even as he strung up more bad news. But another thing about words is they sound better in your head. Spoken, something escapes, is wasted, like heat.

“One thing I’ve learned is if you listen to life long enough you’ll start to believe nothing inside it belongs to you. You have to convince yourself not to hide everything under the floorboards.”

Merritt looks at him, no doubt wondering, is this advice? Confession? Some old poem folded into eighths in a drawer?

“I mean we convince ourselves that we don’t have choices. We stick to the things we know. Why do you think nobody reads poetry in this country? Because the mind has limits—it’s beatable. But the body can take us places. I believe that.” He grasps one of the fists Merritt’s hands have made.

“The body can take us places,” she repeats. “I believe that too, Boyd. But what you’ve got to understand is I hate my body. I wouldn’t go anywhere with it. I would say to it, if I could, I never want to see you again.”

Merritt disentangles her hands from Boyd’s; she moves quickly away from him and out of the room.

“God, Boyd, the things that come out of me lately—my own mouth,” she calls back. “It’s like it’s not up to me. What’s going on in here? Matter created, matter destroyed.”

As she walks, Merritt slices her hand through the air in two swift chops. “And here I’ve been teaching that both are impossible.”

Boyd stays where he is by the window. Words fail him; he fails them. Merritt searches for her keys. He should call to her, Wait! He should give it one more shot! That’s what a man did, after all. He gave things a shot. Bang! He shot them dead when the goal was to wound. Or maybe the goal was to miss completely. Boyd doesn’t know. He thinks this not knowing is what drives people away from each other, and he wants to apologize, on everyone’s behalf, even with no assurances, even knowing what people want is the promise. That’s the thing about words—people love them. Gyp. Gypsy. Gypsy moth. This is what people go for.

"20

But for what, Boyd wonders, will they stay?

“Merritt,” he says, meeting her in the living room, reaching for her. “We spread ourselves so thin…”

“Oh Boyd,” she stops him, and she is warm, her fingers, all of her, even her breath still chilled from the liquor, sweeping over him. And then she is gone. Boyd hears his door slam, before he knows it, her car start up and drive away.

Alone, absently, Boyd picks up a picture of Jane. Age three, curls past her ears, reaching for the camera.

No doubt in his mind, she is the best part of himself. The perfect part—Science be damned. Everyone is entitled to their portion of perfection. We invite it in; we offer what we can; we say things, and we try to say these things correctly. Like, we are imperfect matter, space going stale. These are things we might say.

Boyd writes this down. He is also a poet.

Not everything people do is a waste of energy. The wish to keep someone from pain, there is something beautiful about it, even though it is never quite perfect, like a picture taken on the count of two. This is what he could explain. To Merritt. To Fran. To the boys outside his window. Yes, he’ll start with them. They’ll have to learn sometime, these boys, what real men do: they take women into their homes and make them feel warm. It is how it sounds. And who could call it wasted effort? Words are said. The human capacity for grief is vast enough to be miraculous. It becomes belief, this capacity, and belief is always miraculous, even or especially when it’s wrong. Suddenly people are filled with what they’ve created out of nothing! Boys, Boyd will say, we are always defying the laws of science. Easy! Yet how could one not marvel? We grieve for losses not quite lost. Spaces never filled.

The lives not lived.

"21

Oriental Ashtray

!

!

Rachel Trignano

Unliving eight years is appealing and impossible when sifting down to the sparest remainders, all stuff unstuffed, each nook uncrannied, the dust prolific and of its own decibel, settling like a Paleolithic talc among zodiacs of jettisoned debris, edited endlessly and left to the sunny dinge of an off-kilter attic, where the et cetera of said scene goes unknown. It’s funny, though, what slows the last notes of a coda composed in exit: a whole house dismantled, and I spent two days wondering if I should take the Oriental ashtray. 

"22

Littoral, Thalassic, Pelagic

!

!

Jessica Temple

Pieces of sea drip from you: the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico. The fishhook scar.

The second scar from falling through the top deck to whatever is below.

The way you swear that sailboat sank one night with your whole sleeping family aboard and resurfaced by morning, your things drenched and salty.

The way you casually mention the mizzen mast and remember red on the right returning.

The way, beneath me, your body turns to waves, your breath the roaring ocean in my ears.

"23

!

!

"24

Riverwatch

!

!

Jan Thompson

“I seen some fool planting one of them crosses on Fury’s Ferry, truck just barely missed him. Could’ve been two dead fools stead of one. Lamont, he got a plot with his name on it over in the cemetery. Why you want to plant some fool-ass cross for him over on Riverwatch?”

Wakeen chipped at the chair between his legs with a knife. Ofelia took the knife out of his hand and wiped a spot of his blood off the blade. Then she carved a flowering vine up the side of the two-foot pine slat. Wakeen looked at his palm, the drops on the floor. After a couple minutes, when Ofelia didn’t take any notice, he got up and slammed the screen door behind him. A month before, he would have also said some mean and nasty thing on his way out. There was no AC in Ofelia’s place, just a rotating fan stirring the air around, with colored streamers attached, to make you feel like you were cool. But that didn’t cut it with Wakeen.

When Lamont went to Afghanistan, Ofelia rented a converted garage close to where she worked, so she wouldn’t have to use Lamont’s car while he was away. Lamont said she could use it, begged her to use it. He was going to buy a brand new one when he got back.

But Ofelia didn’t want to drive Lamont’s car. Now she did, but she never did when he was in Afghanistan. Or, that is, she drove it twice while Lamont was away, but both times were emergencies. When Lamont’s daddy got deathly sick, which was why Lamont got leave to come home, Ofelia drove over to the VA hospital to visit him. She drove Lamont’s car, but that was because she was doing something for Lamont that he couldn’t do himself—because he was away from home, off in a dangerous place, fighting for his country. Ofelia treated everything she did while Lamont was away as a way to bring him home safe. No matter what she did, missing meals, praying on the hard floor before she went to bed, it was to bring Lamont home safe. Turns out she was praying for the wrong thing. But how was she supposed to know that?

She also drove it, Lamont’s car, to pick up Lamont when he flew into the airport the night he came back home on leave. This was the night before he got killed. Ofelia had never been on a plane, nor had she ever been to the airport, and the distance Lamont had traveled away from her, just the thought of it, sent chills up her spine. Now he was even further away.

But the earlier trips, into the night sky, to places far away, strange and dangerous, she should have seen them as signs. The world had been moving toward Ofelia whether she wanted it to or not. It was full of scary things. Lamont knew about them, had he tried to warn her before?

After Lamont passed, a hit-and-run on Riverwatch, Lamont’s sister Zenobia came to Ofelia and said she wanted Lamont’s car. Lamont had promised he would give it to her when he bought a new one, she said, when he got back from Afghanistan. He got back from "25

Afghanistan, and now the car should be hers. Ofelia didn’t let her have it, though, but it wasn’t an easy decision. Lamont did come back from Afghanistan, but he got killed when he was home on leave. That wasn’t the same thing as coming back from Afghanistan and buying a new car. Zenobia was Lamont’s sister, but…

Ofelia looked at the little table set up against an aqua painted wall, (aqua was Lamont and Ofelia’s favorite color) where there was a framed photo set on top of a lace doily. Lamont was wearing his dress uniform, and he had a sober expression on his face. It was an expression no one had ever seen on his face in real life. This was a clue he was leaving, so folks would know that he knew then, on that day, what the future was going to be. Then, it was the future; now and forever after it was going to be the past. She had a future, but Lamont didn’t. Now she had to carry it all by herself.

In that photo, you could tell he already knew it was all laid out, just waiting to happen. Ofelia wondered why she hadn’t seen it before, when Lamont was still alive. Like the day he came back home on leave? She’d been looking at that picture day in and day out for months, and she never saw it until it had already happened. Lamont was smart, so why didn’t he do something to get out of it, going to Afghanistan? Then she remembered, and it wasn’t the first time she had to remind herself. Lamont didn’t die in Afghanistan. He died at home, on leave, taking a walk on Riverwatch. Which he had never done before, so far as anybody knew. What was there on Riverwatch for him to see? Motels, lots of trees, a dry cleaner’s, not even a sidewalk.

When she looked at the photo, she saw now that Lamont wasn’t looking at the camera. He was looking at something else, something behind the photographer, maybe something in the corner of the room, high up in the corner by the ceiling? Would she ever know what Lamont saw, what turned him from a lighthearted joker into a sober man? Which did she prefer? She wished they were both back in school again, pushing each other off the picnic tables, laughing so hard the soda squirted out of their noses. But Lamont was so handsome in his uniform. Her girlfriends oohed and ahhed when they saw him. He was a different man in a uniform. Lamont, too, he saw himself in a different light once he put on that uniform and looked in the mirror and walked up and down the street. It gave her shivers; he was different.

Different than she had ever known him.

Ofelia opened the black paint and started to fill in the letters and numbers she’d etched into the wood using a craft knife and a stencil. Some of the crosses she’d seen had letters and numbers that were painted on without being etched. The paint chipped and ran in the rain. Some of the crosses were set crooked and shallow into the clay by the side of the road, wreathed with plastic flowers that faded paler and paler the longer they set. They’d stand for awhile, then you’d see them starting to tilt, then one day they’d be gone. Trash by the road, the same as a beer can or a road kill. Lamont’s cross was going to be better than those. She had it planned out, down to the post-hole digger she was going to use, and the con"26

crete she was going to pour so Lamont’s cross would stand, for as long as she was alive, anyway.

Ofelia set the wood aside to dry. She made herself a sandwich, and sat in the living room drinking ice water when she heard a knock at the door. It was the mail lady with a registered letter. It was Lamont’s government insurance check. She sat and looked at it. They didn’t give him a shooting party, because he didn’t die in combat. Nor did she get a flag folded up into a triangle and presented to her at the gravesite. But they did send her a check.

Lamont wanted a baby before he left for Afghanistan, but Ofelia decided to wait. She wondered now if she would have decided differently if she, like Lamont, had known what was going to happen ahead of time. She didn’t think so. She wasn’t like Lamont. She couldn’t bear sadness of the kind she would be feeling every day, day in and day out, for how long?

Years, probably. When her Grandma died, her mama’s mama, she’d cried every day for weeks, for months. It rested on her shoulders like a big hunk of concrete, she couldn’t think or study, even, and her own friends made fun of her because she was moping around long after everyone else in the neighborhood had forgotten all about Ms. Dardell who used to walk uptown everyday for her groceries, and went to church every Sunday wearing a new hat. Lamont’s baby would have been saying to her, every time she looked into its face, I am Lamont’s fatherless child. That would have ripped her heart like a knife. She, Ofelia, wasn’t going to look for a new husband anytime soon, maybe never, and she would never have trusted another man with Lamont’s child. Not until that man proved himself to be pure gold inside and out, that is.

Ofelia had been crying every day, big, ugly, heaving spells of crying that left her belly sore. Nobody wanted to be around that, so she did it at night, in bed. A new man…not that she was even thinking about one…would have been sympathetic at first, then he would’ve started getting jealous and down at the mouth. She’d only had Lamont back for one night, then he went for a walk on Riverwatch. And now she was lonely again, worse than if she’d never had Lamont at all. If she’d had a child, how would she have been able to take care of it, when she couldn’t get through the night without sobbing so hard she wondered why she wasn’t turned inside out? Lamont was so good. She didn’t know what he saw in her, but he was so good she knew no other man would ever see in her what Lamont had seen.

Lamont was worried sick about his daddy. He’d sent her worried emails, text messages asking her to go see his daddy, to call his step-mother and ask her how he was doing, and she had done everything he asked. Ofelia didn’t love Lamont’s daddy, but she respected him because he was Lamont’s daddy. Ofelia was actually kind of scared of him. Lamont’s daddy had a bad temper. True, he could be a lot of fun sometimes, but he also had a bad temper. He didn’t drink like he used to, but it wasn’t because he reformed himself, it was because drinking made him sick. Because he saw how his daddy was when he drank, Lamont didn’t drink. Or not just to get drunk, he enjoyed a beer now and then, or a margarita at a "27

barbecue. Lamont’s daddy, well, Ofelia heard stories about what he’d done, drunk and sober, when he was mad, and so Ofelia never really trusted him, even when he was behaving himself.

And after all the trouble, all the heartache and worry, after Lamont flew back all the way from Afghanistan to visit his daddy who was lying on what was supposed to be his death bed, it was Lamont who died, and his daddy who made a recovery and went home.

Ofelia knew it wasn’t fair, but she blamed Lamont’s daddy for what happened to Lamont. Just today, he was nosing around about the government insurance money, telling her he had expenses and how Lamont had always been such a good boy, helping him out, and dropping hints that, back in the old days, Ofelia would have found impossible to ignore. But not now. It wasn’t her choice. The things that happened to Lamont had made her hard, and she looked at all of them, every single person in her life, in a different way. None of them were fit to walk in Lamont’s shoes.

Why did it have to be Lamont who walked into the Army recruiting office two years ago, and not her own worthless brother Wakeen? Or Lamont’s brother Lebron? He was even more worthless. He broke into houses to support his crack habit, and spent time in jail, and fathered babies on worthless crack whores and left them to raise his children without a cent.

When Lamont would’ve died to have a baby, would’ve loved and supported three or four, and couldn’t do a dishonest thing if somebody held a gun to his head? It wasn’t fair. It was worse: it was cruel, it was a waste to make the skies weep tears for fifty years. The plain fact was, that the Army wouldn’t take Wakeen or Lebron because they were no good. In Wakeen’s case, it hurt Ofelia to even think the thought, but she knew it was true. Not that Lamont ever saw things that way. He thought everybody who walked the earth was better than him, he never saw anything but the good. And up ‘til Lamont died, wasn’t she, Ofelia, pretty much the same? Living in a fool’s paradise, seeing nothing but the good, not knowing what God had in store for her and Lamont?

Ofelia put the insurance check into her purse. Then she showered and put some ice on her eyelids to bring down the swelling. Then she washed the breakfast dishes, and set a spray of statice in front of Lamont’s picture. Then she put the cross in the trunk of Lamont’s car, and drove to work. It was just a couple of blocks, but she didn’t want to look like a crazy woman walking up the street wearing her work uniform and carrying a big pine cross.

It was hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk and her tires made grooves in the tar.

She turned on the AC, and it was like Lamont wrapping his arms around her. His cool, loving arms. Only Lamont cared enough to cool her off on a hot day.

The restaurant rose up in the distance, like a bad dream, all wavy in the heat, and it made her queasy. The deep fat fryers, the greasy food wrappers, the mountains of trash going sour in the heat. Her boss, an enormous man, was out in the parking lot wearing a longsleeved shirt and a tie, and Ofelia wondered how he could stand out there doing what he was "28

doing without falling down with a stroke. Ofelia got out of the car just as he was leaning into the corner of a filthy dumpster and pushing it into its place behind the restaurant. Then she spotted Wakeen in the parking lot, sitting on a patch of grass in the shade. He was waiting for Ofelia to buy him a meal. He knew she wouldn’t give him any money. Ofelia stood and stared at her brother, waiting for him to say the words.

Her boss was done. His huge round head streamed with sweat, and he wiped his face and neck with a white handkerchief. There was a bulge in the back of his neck that swelled up when he got mad. He hated the heat.

“Wakeen,” he said, “You ready for a job? You ready to earn some real money of your own?” Wakeen laughed nervously, his hands clasped around his ankles. “Shoot,” he said.

“Tell you what. You come back around eleven this evening, I give you a job. You wanna be a man? Well, it takes a man to do a man’s job.”

“What you got in mind, Mr. D.?” said Wakeen.

“Cleaning the fryers. Cleaning the vents. You want to stand tall with your friends?

You do that job for a week. Then you come back and maybe I’ll give you a cushy job. One where you get to keep your apron clean. How’s that sound?”

“Shee-it, I hear what it’s like to clean them deep fat fryers. Shee-it, Mr. D., ain’t you got no other jobs for me to do? How ’bout what Ofelia do? She keep them little hands soft and fine. And she ain’t got no man to use ’em on, neither.”

Mr. D. moved like a lineman, in a split second he was holding Wakeen with both hands, one in the collar of his T-shirt, the other in the waist of his loose jeans. For a second, it looked like Mr. D. was going to toss Wakeen over the edge of the dumpster right into that mountain of reeky trash. Instead, he dropped him on his butt, with his jeans around his knees.

Wakeen looked stunned, then there was a look of pure hatred on his face. He jumped straight up, both hands around his pants.

“You git on home now, Wakeen,” Ofelia said, spinning him around so he was headed in that direction. Once he got walking, he could wave his stinger at whatever he came across but he wouldn’t be doing it at Mr. D. Wakeen held a grudge, but he’d work it out on whatever else got in his way: cat or dog or God forbid, some kid on a trike. Wakeen was like a sevenyear-old. But he wasn’t seven years old. Ofelia loved Wakeen, but he was good for nothing.

Except shame and grief.

She lowered her eyes so Mr. D. could collect himself. He pretended to be busy arranging the trash cans next to the front entrance and she pretended to be looking for something in her purse while she headed for the side entrance.

She was glad to be able to forget things for awhile. Work was good for that. The afternoon shift was busy and she had a thousand things to do. Sometimes the customers were friendly and polite, but her heart was empty. They didn’t touch her.

Mrs. D., Mr. D.’s wife, stopped by the restaurant around seven. She smelled clean and "29

fresh, right out of the shower, with bright lipstick and a manicure and she carried a clothes bag with a change of clothes for Mr. D. They were going to a church event. Mrs. D. stood at the counter making small talk for a few minutes. The other two girls at the counter were shy and polite, laughing mostly, not really saying anything. They were listening to Mr. D.’s wife, agreeing with everything she said, lapping it up. They were young, the way Ofelia was when she married Lamont. If Lamont had lived, someday she would have been like Mrs. D., welldressed, confident, a woman who could hold her head up anywhere. Lamont was ambitious.

He would have been somebody and therefore Ofelia would have been somebody. Ofelia didn’t mind living like nobody while Lamont was in Afghanistan, because it was all going to come out right when he got back. He was going to go to school. It was one of the reasons he enlisted. For the first year he was in the Army, they budgeted carefully so he could make the $100 monthly deductions from his pay so he’d get the GI Bill.

Mrs. D. looked over at Ofelia, who wasn’t saying anything, just smiling politely, without paying much attention. She was a ghost listening to live people talk. Mrs. D. had already told Ofelia, twice, right after Lamont passed, how sorry she was about Lamont, and last week she asked her how she was doing. Now, the worst grief was supposed to be over, and Ofelia still looked like the news had just hit. Mrs. D.’s smile wavered, and Ofelia could see that she was displeased. Then, for a second, Mrs. D. looked like she was downright mad at Ofelia. But just then Mr. D. emerged from the men’s room in his suit, and she was laughing and talking again. Mrs. D. wasn’t going to make any more comments to Ofelia, Ofelia could see that.

Mrs. D. was going to wait until Ofelia was over it so she could joke and lord it over Ofelia the way she used to. The way Ofelia used to let her.

Ofelia closed that night. She made up the deposit and zipped it into the bank bag and stopped at the drive-through ATM to make the drop. Then she took out Lamont’s insurance check and the deposit slip she had filled out earlier, but when she put her hand out to punch in her passcode, her mind went blank. She sat with the engine running, and her hand sticking out the window for a minute. She knew it wasn’t safe to sit there in the drive-through with the engine running. She always hated making the night drop. Ever since she started driving to work, after Lamont passed, Mr. D. saw it as his chance to get off early, to put her on the late shift so she’d be the one to close and make the deposits. She was grateful for his trust, it probably meant he was going to offer her the assistant manager position. He’d been dangling it in front of her and one other counter help for about six months. But it was callous. Mean and thoughtless. She was a young woman, and the bank was in old town, not itself on a bad street, but separated by only one block from the worst part of town. How would Mr. D. like it if some manager made his wife do the night drop at the bank? Wouldn’t he go have words with that manager and put him straight about the way he was treating his wife? Tip him into the dumpster, maybe? Lamont surely would.

Then she knew she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t deposit Lamont’s check. She put it "30

back into her purse, in the zippered pocket on the side, where she kept her lucky charm and a picture of Grandma Dardell and her allergy medication. Then she headed home. She was tired, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She didn’t mean to, but she headed home the long way. Down Riverwatch. She thought she’d planned it all out, how she was going to do it, but she really hadn’t. She’d been thinking she’d do it after work, in the cool of the dark, but now she realized how scary it was. It was out there, the strange…well, she had no word for it, but it was a blackness that flew in from Afghanistan to destroy her world.

Lamont was hit around a blind curve, where some lady, a nurse at the VA, who hadn’t been drinking, cut into the curb too deep, just where Lamont was walking. She took off, but they traced her by the paint she left on the guardrail. And the clump of Lamont’s hair stuck on her front bumper. The guardrail was still dented, and there a cop car was pulled over, its blue light spinning, right on the spot where Lamont fell. Ofelia’s heart nearly stopped. It was just the way it was the night Lamont died. Except it wasn’t. The cop tonight was white and he was leaning over a late model sports car, red. The driver was flashing big teeth, her elbow on the open window. Casual and cool, like she got pulled over every night by friendly cops. She threw back her head and laughed, and the cop’s voice rose. She was appreciating something he said. Or pretending to. Skank, thought Ofelia. Lamont died right there. Ofelia’s eyes blazed. On Lamont’s sacred ground, they were acting like nothing happened. Laughing and whoring while others wore sack cloth and ashes.

Ofelia slowed down to a crawl, and lowered the windows, and gave the pair such a look. They stopped talking. “Can I help you, ma’am?” the cop said.

“Wasn’t a man killed here last month?” said Ofelia.

“Sorry, ma’am. I can’t tell you that.”

“Well I can tell you he was. Seems to me they should leave that yellow tape up for a good long time, so folks remember.”

“That may be, ma’am. You have a good evening, now. Better keep moving, this is a blind curve.”

The lady in the sports car didn’t even look at Ofelia, she was flicking at her eyelashes in the rear view mirror. If it was Lamont, she would’ve looked.

When she got home, Ofelia found the front door wide open, and a cut in the screen door where somebody got at the knob to pick the lock. It was pitch black inside, and she felt like something big and evil was in there. She used her cell phone to call the police, then she went next door and knocked. Ms. Swearingen, Juna, her Grandma’s old friend, came to the door bleary eyed. Ofelia was renting the Swearingen’s converted garage, set behind the house.

Then Ms. Swearingen’s husband went over to Ofelia’s with a flashlight, and came back and said there was nobody in there, and everything looked OK, but that Ofelia would be the judge. Then the cops came, another blue light spinning in the street. Lamont’s picture was face down on the little table and the glass was broken. And the jar where Ofelia kept her "31

laundromat quarters was empty. Other than that, everything was in place.

Ofelia slept on the Swearingen’s couch that night. She slept better than she’d slept for weeks. She saw Lamont the way she’d seen him in the pictures he’d texted to her from Afghanistan. Dressed in camo, his face dusty; he looked tired. Unsure of himself, haunted.

Like he hadn’t had a shower in a week. Like he was in some kind of movie. Not a war movie.

Sci-fi. He didn’t look at her. He was looking away the whole time, at something she couldn’t see, something out of the picture. A blue light was spinning next to Lamont. It was on the top of some kind of Army vehicle along with a big gun that stuck out of a hole in the roof. Then Lamont was standing up in that hole holding onto the gun with both hands, and the blue light kept spinning.

The next morning Mr. Swearingen walked next door to Ofelia’s house with her and they went through the bedroom and the kitchen and the bathroom together. Nothing else was disturbed, just Lamont’s picture and the laundromat jar. The only other things of value in the place were the flat screen TV, an old model, and some jewelry in a box on the dresser. Ofelia picked up Lamont’s picture, took it out of the frame. She gathered the doily up by the corners, with all the shattered glass inside, and threw it away, doily and all.

“Looks to me like somebody knew what they were after,” said Mr. Swearingen, looking at Ofelia. “Only folks we saw around here last night were the usuals. Wakeen and one of his friends came around a little after dark. Didn’t stop by our place, though.” They wouldn’t have. Mr. Swearingen hated Wakeen and Wakeen hated Mr. Swearingen.

Ofelia looked at her bed. A double, still made up from the previous day. Lamont slept in that bed with her only one time. All her craft supplies were still in a Wal-Mart bag on a chair next to the bed. When Mr. Swearingen left, Ofelia went out to the car and brought in the cross. She set it on the kitchen table and she started working on it some more. She let it dry while she got ready for work, then she put it in the trunk again.

That night, she went home by Riverwatch. This time, there was no cop car. Ofelia pulled over and sat in the car. She rolled the window down a little. The cicadas were screeching and the kudzu hung heavy on the trees. The cicadas all screeched together, like the crowd at a football game, then they’d die down. There was no breeze. She felt helpless in the blackness that surrounded her, all by herself. But finally she got out of the car and opened the trunk. She set the cross up against the inside of the guardrail, at the exact spot where Lamont passed. Then she walked across the road to see how it was going to look. It was a bitter disappointment. Even when she turned the flashlight on it, it didn’t look right. It was homemadelooking, crooked. The lettering didn’t show up, nor did the camo she’d painted on one side, the blue car on the other, the specialist stripes on the top, the photo of Lamont in a plastic casing in the middle. It looked like something a grade-school kid would make for family night.

It wouldn’t do. She put the cross back in the trunk and drove home. When she parked the car, she shined the flashlight on the front door to see if somebody broke in again. It looked OK. "32

But she slept on the Swearingen’s couch. She didn’t know how long it would take before she could even walk into her own place at night. Daytime was different. Then there were no dark corners.

Next day, Ofelia called the funeral home that did Lamont’s cremation. Mr. Poteet told her what monuments and concrete crosses cost. Concrete was less; granite was more.

Ofelia had the money to pay for either. Even without Lamont’s insurance, there was enough left in their joint savings account to cover it. It was what she’d used to cover Lamont’s cremation, even though Mr. Poteet said he’d wait for the insurance money. Lamont didn’t like debts, and so neither did Ofelia. So when she called Mr. Poteet, he had no reason to ask her about the insurance money. Nevertheless, Ofelia took out the check and held it while she talked to Mr. Poteet. She liked the look of the lettering, the stamped signature in rainbow colored inks. It was made of special paper, thick and heavy, and it even smelled dignified. It was divided in two by a perforated line. Ofelia was supposed to tear off the check and keep the top part for her records. But without the check on the bottom, the top part had no weight. It was just a piece of paper that could end up in the dumpster or blow away in the wind. At that point, Ofelia put the check back into its envelope, facing the correct way in the clear window, and back into the zipper pocket of her purse.

Mr. Poteet told her he didn’t think he could erect a monument next to the side of the road. When she asked about the wood crosses that folks put up by themselves, he said he believed the highway department looked the other way when they saw those, but probably wouldn’t do that if they saw a monument. He used the word “fixture.” A fixture wouldn’t be tolerated. That meant something sunk into the ground. Like a post hole and a cross sunk in concrete? Yes, Ms. Attaway. That would be a fixture. He spoke soft and slow. He was nice, and she knew it wasn’t just because he had her future business in mind.

That night, Wakeen showed up at her work. She hadn’t seen him for three days. He had blood on his shirt. He was out of breath. Ofelia could see it wasn’t food he had on his mind. Right behind him four burly cops came bursting through the door. They had him down on the floor in two seconds flat, handcuffed. Then they hustled him out the door and into a patrol car. All the time he kept saying, “I’m just a petty criminal, I didn’t mean to hurt nobody.”

That night, Ofelia didn’t drive by Riverwatch. Instead, she sat in a chair in front of a bail bondsman’s desk in a rattle trap shack next to the county detention center. The sign in front was bigger than the building. The bail bondsman, built like a bouncer, with a skimpy red ponytail and three rings on each hand, talked on the phone to the court. “Ah hah,” he said over and over again, making notes with his left hand.

Ofelia couldn’t make Wakeen’s bail. Even Lamont’s check wouldn’t make Wakeen’s bail. Wakeen had stabbed a Marine who was standing in the entrance to the Best Buy, opening up the Toys for Tots drive for the season. The Marine was in his dress blues. Wakeen tried "33

to get out of the Best Buy with a bunch of merchandise in his pants, with an employee in hot pursuit. The Marine tripped Wakeen and they both fell on the floor. It was then that Wakeen stabbed the Marine using a knife with a four-inch blade. Then Wakeen got up and took off.

The Marine lived, but it made the news all over the country. Wakeen was screwed. Ofelia knew, deep down, that he was never going to get out of prison this time.

Ofelia got home about noon the next day, after Wakeen was charged and booked.

She was working the late shift. She showered and took a two-hour nap, and she slept so hard she didn’t dream. It was purely physical, the sleep she had. It was like something was finally put to rest. She didn’t have to worry about what Wakeen was up to. She knew where he was going to be for a long, long time.

After work, Ofelia drove up Riverwatch. This time, she parked in the empty parking lot of a place that had gone out of business. Pitch black, except for a street light about a block away. It was cold. All at once, summer was over.

She wasn’t sure how long it would’ve taken for Lamont to walk from her place to Riverwatch, but probably a good half hour at least. “I need some time,” he said. He was dressed in a black jacket she’d never seen before. The whole time he’d been home, for one full day and a couple hours extra, he was quiet and sober. Not really there. Joyful to see her, yes. He sank his head into her shoulder and closed his eyes when she met him at the airport.

And he was glad that his daddy was better. He seemed to look around and realized things were OK for everyone. He sighed a big sigh. Like he’d been carrying everyone’s problems at home as well as the ones he was carrying in Afghanistan. The ones he wouldn’t talk about because they wouldn’t understand. They hadn’t been there. He, Lamont, had been both places. He was never going to be able to live in just the one world. Or it would take him a long time to forget the other one. Or maybe that would never happen.

Ofelia took the flashlight and walked up Riverwatch, in the direction Lamont would have walked that night. The kudzu swayed in a cold breeze, high up in the trees that made a black wall between the sky and the road. Cars passed by, a few, most slowing to make the blind curve. Down there, someplace in the dark, was the river. She thought maybe she’d move across the river, where there were some newer apartments. Some had swimming pools. Mostly young folks lived over there. Lamont’s check said beneath the signature, Void if Not Endorsed Within Six Months. That meant, it would just be another worthless piece of paper. Not heavy with value, the value of Lamont’s life and death.

Before she and Lamont got serious, she was thinking about cosmetology school. She used to like cutting her friends’ hair, doing their makeup. She was just a kid then, seeing only what was on the outside. It was what she thought was important. But now, it was different, and she could never go back to the way she was then. She had some brochures for a nurse anesthetist program. Lamont would approve of that. Even if Lamont had become an important man, after his schooling, he wouldn’t have to be ashamed of a wife who was a nurse "34

anesthetist.

The moon rose up over the trees, its mouth making a sad O. Or was it opened in surprise? When Lamont walked up Riverwatch, it was hot, and the moon was full that night, too.

He walked up along this guardrail, thinking his thoughts. Knowing things she would never know. Remembering, as she knew he would, how much he loved her, and the long hours they had spent together that day in her double bed. Never again.

“He never knew what hit him,” the doctor said. “It was over quick. When I go, I’d like to go like that.” But Ofelia knew that wasn’t the case. Lamont felt from the top of his head to the tip of his toes the pain it took to end his life. Then his soul sailed high up over the trees, and looked down where his body lay, as if he was asleep, on the side of Riverwatch.

"35

! ! ! !

!

"36

Weeding

!

!

Hank Backer

I. And suddenly, a toad I’d never have seen had he been still, the perfect brown of just-turned earth. And the riot of birds with the wind, how it must partition the sky into bulbs and chutes, and how vacant the ground below them, how sky-ending. The toad winks into grass and is gone. A skull-sized box turtle pokes through the edge of the lawn.

Weeks ago, Dad caught him at our tomatoes, put him in the backseat of the Camry and drove him to the other side of Brightleaf.

Still, three days later the tomatoes were pecked again into tapered hearts.

!

II. Mustard plant, dandelions—stalks wide as my thumb droop their tiny flowers from the wheelbarrow, where the dirt rattles off their roots into dust.

The compost, caged in dog-fence, bakes under a crust of flies. I toss the weeds in, then start on the Asian pear, lousy with thistle. Dad’s fruit trees grow out of their intended row—the cherry’s gnarled limb propped on a 2 x 8. The spot we cleared for a firepit is now a bramble of wild rose and poison ivy. Beyond that, the creek works its muddy channel through the forest: on a slab of limestone, the curled etch of a mollusk fades.

"37

The Reprieve

Hank Pugh

!

Clay knew a good place to die, and it wasn’t hospice. He’d known the mountains since he was a boy, and after a long hike he slid into the shaded Appalachian hollow. Before getting to this place, he’d wandered, alone. If he’d cared about getting back, he’d have said he was lost. But a sound like liquid wind pulled him to the top of a ridge, and there he caught sight of the stream through the forest. I know this place, he thought. To slow his descent down the ridge, he used the 12 gauge side-by-side shotgun as a staff. His pancreas had betrayed him, but his old legs were still strong, and he kept his balance on the scree. At the bottom, he rested and looked over the familiar place. Against the opposite ridge, the stream roiled out of its banks, wilding with spring runoff. At his feet, a sinuous line of twigs, matted grass, and the occasional drowned vole proved the water had been much higher. It had scoured the soil from around a great oak, which fell in the spring’s high winds.

The empty eye sockets of a bleached skull urged Clay to the tree. High water had tumbled a dead buck into the oak’s crown, its neck wrenched into an impossible position, its antlers locked in the tree’s dying branches. The carcass was legless, just a head and the forlorn ribs arching out from the spine. Ants and beetles carpeted the jerked buckskin on the ground.

Maggots and putrefaction had come and gone and so had the emetic reek. What odor remained distilled the forest’s intimate mix of the living and the dead. Clay leaned in for a closer look.

When the buck’s heart stopped, the bacteria in his intestines started eating him. The infinitesimal odor of that process attracted emerald blow-flies and ruby-eyed flesh-flies. They laid their eggs in his anus, open mouth, nostrils, and the wound in his shoulder that killed him. Some oviposited in his ears and on the tiny ledges under his exposed eyeballs. In a day those eggs hatched. Maggots burrowed into him, each excavating a shaft to mine the nutrients of his flesh. Within minutes of death, carrion beetles arrived and commenced the work of dismantling the body, bite by bite, their flattened bodies squeezing, turning, and rummaging in places. The gay yellow capes of the beetles made a caprice of their dirty work. To the flies and beetles, the body was more than food; it was incubator, too. Even as the maggots devoured the stag, microscopic mites carried on the beetles’ backs prepared the nursery for the beetle young, consuming fly eggs and maggots that would compete with the beetle larvae for the buck’s flesh.

Vultures found him, and those hunchbacks approached and retreated––hunger warring with cowardice––until they mounted him and feasted, their bald red heads buried to the collar in his guts. Later, feral pigs took their turns, stripping his flesh and scattering his bones "38

along the creek to be heaved and tumbled by the impetuous water. So it went, day by day, and by small degrees the stag’s body was returned to the indifferent earth.

I wonder who got the pancreas, thought Clay. He held his open hand to the ground and a carrion beetle crept onto his palm. The beetle seemed to regard him with a vague personal interest. Clay studied the beetle’s scabrous features. There was nothing he recognized. The true other, he thought. No face. No emotion. No memory. Nothing to hold him. He returned the bug to the carcass. Between the dead buck and the beetle, he couldn’t have said which he most identified with.

Clay opened the gun and slipped the deer slug into the right-side barrel. No need to load the left. The sharp smell of Hoppe’s NITRO gun solvent chased the scent of earth and water from his nostrils. He leaned the gun against a root of the fallen oak, stripped off his clothes, and sat with his back against the upturned root ball. His skin pebbled and contracted around him in the cool air. His nipples hardened and his penis withdrew, turtle-necked against the chill. Moist, black earth sprinkled his shoulders. An opportunistic ant passed from a root to the nape of his neck and tickled its way into his coarse gray hair, still dented from the band of the baseball cap he had hung on a dogwood branch. He regretted the cap’s gaudy colors, so out of place there.

Clay bent his legs and laid the gun’s stock on his raised knees. He rested the muzzle against his chest and held it there with his right hand. With his left, he passed the forked end of a stick he had cut through the trigger guard and touched it to the gun’s single trigger. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back. His skin rippled like water to his heart’s pounding. He forced deep breaths. Only the air of his life’s first breath had felt fresher. He calmed. Free of the words at last––unresectable, neoplasm, the hateful palliative––he’d never been more alive to the world. In a reverie he pressed the trigger. The hard metallic clap of the firing pin in the empty left-side barrel pealed through the woods and across the stream, reverberated off the folded ridges, plumbed the sky, and echoed through the universe. The trout in the river shuddered.

The earth-bound awakened. The airborne gathered around him––all the birds that had fallen before his gun––everything forgiven.

Clay recoiled. Alive. The selector button, he thought. The selector button’s set for the wrong barrel. He dropped the stick and with his left hand found and pushed the selector button located behind the trigger. His mind turned to the decomposed stag. He felt again the beetle’s sharp-tined feet pricking his skin. He hesitated. Then he remembered.

It’s time, he thought.

"39

! ! !

"40

Phos Hilaron

!

!

Christopher Martin

I guess you could say I’m scared. Not so much because it’s nightfall and I’m lost in the Smoky Mountains backcountry in a downpour, but because come December—just six months away—I’m going to be a father.

I’ve got five miles or so already behind me, no telling how many to go, no map, wondering whether the ranger I spoke to gave me bad directions to the campsite or if I just misunderstood her. Didn’t I pass that rock already? And how do I plan on raising a child if I can’t even follow simple directions in the most frequently visited national park in the country?

A strap on my pack breaks, and the sudden shift in weight sends me stumbling through a rising, root-woven rill. The rain picks up with the rumbling of a charcoal sky. I’m going to be a father.

I let those words soak in with the rainwater soaking my shirt and socks and pack and everything else. I stop to fix the strap, cussing, fumbling around in the mud and darkness. I’m going to be a father.

! * !

Tradition tells that the ancient Christians of Jerusalem kept a lamp burning in Christ’s empty tomb, and at times of worship and celebration, they would venture out to the tomb, light a candle by the perpetual flame, and use it to illuminate their gathering place.

They called this flame phos hilaron. Gladdening light. Hilarious light. But there’s no such light here on this night in the Smokies—just an unseasonably cold rain, a worry in my heart, and a dense darkness settling among the hemlocks.

It strikes me that I should’ve thought this through a little better. There were ambulances at the trailhead, for Christ’s sake. When I pulled up earlier, just before the rain set in, rangers were stationed in the parking area orchestrating an emergency rescue for a park visitor who’d injured herself while tubing down the creek.

About a quarter-mile in I passed the convoy of trucks that had gone back far as the trail would allow to rescue the tuber. She was in a stretcher in a truck bed, accompanied by a number of paramedics perched on the wheel wells, heads ducked to avoid the outstretched rhododendron branches. Several rangers were leading the way back to the graveled parking lot where half the Bryson City fire department was waiting. I didn’t get a clear look at the tuber or hear exactly what happened, but I saw the swollen, rocky, deadfall-snagged creek, and could imagine.

"41

Lowering my gaze in an awkward expression of deference for the injured party, I stepped off the trail so the cavalcade could pass, just as the rain began splattering through the forest canopy. That’s when a rosy-cheeked, baldheaded ranger caught sight of me.

“Where you headed?” he grunted from his window, stopping his truck and halting the procession.

“Campsite 60,” I said. “Ranger back there told me it’s about three miles up the way, right at the fork.”

“You by yourself ?”

“Yessir.”

“Got a permit?”

“Yessir,” I said, fumbling through my pockets for my receipt. “I dropped it in the box back past the trailhead.”

“So you’re all by your lonesome?”

“Yessir,” I said again, still digging in my pockets.

“So you’re camping out all by yourself—on a night like this?”

“Yessir, I am. Everything okay?”

“Okay, I guess.”

He glanced at the driver of the truck behind him and gave a little nod, as though signaling he’d approved my clearance. Then he nodded at me in the same manner, easing off the breaks, preparing to lead the injured lady back to civilization.

! !

*

A few miles, mud puddles, and mountains later, I come upon a familiar rock, veiled with the same mosses and ferns I admired the first time I passed, and soon realize I don’t know where the hell I’m going. But just as I’m about ready to pitch my tent in the middle of the trail and risk a citation should any ranger pass by, I notice a signpost through the mist.

Deep Creek Trail, reads the sign, with an arrow pointed to the right. A couple hours ago I bore right onto Indian Creek Trail, which I now understand was not the fork I was supposed to take.

I head up the mountain alongside Deep Creek, sloshing all through the muck, surveying the dusky woods around me for a place to camp. Before too long I spot a clearing in the middle of a rhododendron thicket adjoining the creek. Stepping off the trail to get a closer look, I see a fire ring and a nice level spot for a tent blanketed with pine needles. The only thing missing is any indication that this is Campsite Number 60, but at this point I don’t much care. I pitch my tent in the rain and sit down on a log, hoping to gather my thoughts before settling in for the night.

"42

The chill and the weather and the unfamiliarity of this place lead to a somber mood, which leads to worry. I begin to think about my wife, who is back at home just north of Atlanta, two hundred or so miles from this rainy Appalachian hollow in western North Carolina. I am on my way to Vermont, and this is the first of many nights that I’ll be away from her and our unborn child.

This realization brings misgivings about my trip north, and I begin to feel sorry that I ever left home in the first place. This sort of self-doubt and its attendant fear are quite familiar to me, and now that I’ve set camp and no longer have to worry about hiking around in the sodden darkness, I have time to mull them over. In doing so, I realize with a child on the way —no, with a child here, just hidden and protected behind layers of muscle and bone and skin —that these wisps of doubt and fear are much more acute. How am I, who still so often feels like an insecure, scared child, going to raise a child to be secure and unafraid?

I find the moment overwhelming.

Soon my child will come into a world that, so I’ve been told, is fallen. That the world is fallen is a belief I am shedding, but to do so in light of daily exposures to violence— whether firsthand or through the various media outlets—is a difficult thing indeed. Because I worry so deeply about the world—a world I love and find essentially good, though it is being overrun by people bent on poisoning and destroying it—I worry all the more about my child who will soon enter it.

I’ve read that about two in a hundred babies born each year in America could have been exposed to enough mercury in utero to cause lifelong brain damage, and that, in my child’s umbilical cord right now, there are likely to be traces of hundreds of industrial chemicals that have invaded the sanctuary of the womb, some of which may have disabling or lifeending potency.[i] I do not understand how some cannot find it within themselves to care about even this, let alone the murdered mountains just northwest of here, razed for coal to fuel power plants from which mercury seeps like blood, and into the blood of fish, the blood of human beings, the blood of mothers, the blood of unborn children.

If this will all be redeemed by Christ’s blood, I don’t know. I’ve already been told that I should accept what I once so readily did—heaven and hell, lost and saved, and all the other old dualities—to prepare myself for fatherhood. They wonder how I’ll be able to raise a child of sound spirit when I am so unsure of my own spirituality. They ask what I plan to teach my child. Yet these wet woods speak, too, and in hushed tones still the waters speak.

!

!

*

On my mossy seat, with Deep Creek murmuring on by, I settle into the rain, chewing on these thoughts and a granola bar, having given up altogether my attachment to a good night’s sleep. I figure I ought to hang up my food so bears won’t raid my camp later, but I "43

have no rope in my pack, and, as this is probably not Campsite 60, there are no lines or posts for hanging food. So I take the bungee cord from around my sleeping pad, find two white pines about five feet from one another, and rig my food sack between them in such a way that’s probably good for nothing but to give the bears a better view of it. The sky opens up again, and what was a steady rain becomes a deluge.

“The rain I am in,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton from the porch of his hermitage in the Kentucky hills, “is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound…And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.”[ii]

I remember hearing my baby’s heartbeat for the first time, the day we went in for my wife’s first sonogram. An unexpected feeling came over me when I heard it, a feeling of needing to cry but not being able. Whether I was unable to cry because the sound came amplified through an engineered machine, or because a nurse who I did not know was in the room with us, or some other reason, I cannot say. But I do know that I heard my baby’s heartbeat, which, like this rain, is a rhythm I have not yet learned to recognize. Like this rain, it tells me to be still and know. I will spend the rest of my life learning to hear it for what it is.

Presently the rain eases and I return to my log seat to finish off a peanut butter sandwich before calling it a night. From the woods beyond the trail, I think I see the flash of an approaching headlamp, and immediately recall my encounter with Ranger Fife back near the trailhead. I rattle off all my sins in my mind—setting camp in an unauthorized spot, improperly storing my food sack, camping out all by my lonesome on a night like this—trying to summon a defense for each. But then I see another flash, and another, and soon the misty forest is filled with the pale green light of blinking fireflies, like holy ghosts emerging from the hollows.

Soon I notice another light, this one emanating from beneath a cluster of ferns across my camp. I stuff the last bite of sandwich in my mouth, leave the log for a closer look, move the ferns to the side, and there, atop the rotting forest floor, illuminating her fern canopy with an emerald radiance, I see one of the strangest and most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen. It is a larviform adult female of the family Phengodidae—a glowworm beetle of the same tribe as the fireflies lighting the woods all about me. But unlike the blinking fireflies of the thickets, she is curled around tiny eggs, protecting them from nocturnal predators, and her light is unwavering. To this creature, taking her light from beneath a bushel is not so much an exercise in preaching or a means of saving souls, but a measure to stay alive, and to keep her unborn children alive. It is an instinctive act of belonging to the world. Had I a small enough book, I could read by such a light.

!

*

"44

Minutes pass before I realize that I’m on my hands and knees on the damp earth watching this glowworm. Of course I know it’s just an insect, however radiant it may be. I have seen plenty of insects in my life that I did not pause to consider. And of course this particular insect—though I’m sure she’s aware of my presence—knows nothing of the wonder she’s stirred in me, much less of how she’s got me thinking of parenthood and religion, of how I find her literal light far more gladdening and practical than much of the artificial light spread by industrial Christianity. Whether I’m a ridiculous man lying on the ground or a hungry skunk snuffing through the underbrush probably doesn’t matter much to her—I’m a potential threat and I’m sure she wants me gone.

But still something vital is happening here. No longer am I the troubled man on the log dreading a long, cold night away from my pregnant wife; rather, I’m acting somewhat like a child, nestled among dripping ferns looking at a creature I’d only read about before, not so much oblivious to the chilly mist and the grubby forest floor as part of them.

After awhile I retire to my tent for a little reading. A couple chapters later, I set the book aside and turn off my headlamp, settling into my sleeping bag and the cadence of chattering insects, the psalm of the gurgling creek. It is cool and damp but soon the tent warms and the possibility of sleep seems less remote. I wonder what Christ meant when he said that to enter the kingdom of heaven we must become as little children—an idea drenched with new meaning for me as a soon-to-be father. If we take heaven to be a supernatural realm dotted with mansions and crisscrossed by golden roads that we’ll get to in the next life (so long as we say some version of a “sinner’s prayer” in this one), I don’t suppose crawling like a fool among a ferny creek bank is going to get anybody any closer to it. But if the kingdom of heaven is within us and in our midst, a thing to be relished here and now, I imagine becoming like children in a very pragmatic sense is the only way to fully enter it. There is heaven here beneath the hemlocks.

Every so often I look out the tent flap to see if the beetle is still aglow there beneath her ferns; I will be in dreams by the time her lights fades. Droplets from the needles and leaves of the treetops above gather and descend in intermittent patters upon my tent. I rest unhindered at the doorstep of a sanctuary, as does my child in the timbre of his mother’s heartbeat, miles and miles from these mountains. The clouds diffuse into milky wisps, like estuaries for the foundling stars, and I sleep. Truly there are lights in this world the darkness has not understood.

! ! !

[i] I first encountered these statistics in Erik Reece’s “Notes from a Very Small Island” (Orion, Nov./Dec. 2008), and later in Sandra Steingraber’s “The Story about the One” (Orion, July/Aug. 2009).

!

[ii] Merton, Thomas. “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions, 1966. p. 9.

"45

Two Possums

!

!

Christopher Martin

for Cannon Martin I. Sometimes I’ll call my son little possum for the things he does possums might do— for the way he grunt-laughs, chews my ball cap’s salty bill, paints his face with sweet potatoes, noses down in the sticky jar for the last drop.

For the way he belongs, small mammal in the world— a mind uncluttered save thoughts of milk, of mother, of sweet potatoes and sleep.

!

II. My dog caught a possum this morning— picked it clean off the fencepost before I knew what it was, and wrestled it to the mud of the mist-shrouded earth.

She licked the neck and sniffed the still body of the creature at her feet among sweet gum balls and overgrown weeds.

Soon the coyote dispossessed her.

She trotted back into the house to her stainless steel food bowl with a blue rubber grip on the bottom so it won’t slide while she eats.

"46

III. I watched the possum from the kitchen window— presently it rose, hair still matted with saliva, and faded into the pines beyond the fence.

Later, as I sat with my son, reading to him, my dog walked by, sweetly licked the child on his cheek and wandered away— the taste of a possum, perhaps, still on her tongue.

!

"47

!

"48

Connections Made in Retrospect

!

!

Paige Sullivan

I. Books were for hiding: Dad’s very own catacombs.

He did pushups to forget the months that fit in his single sentence.

I learned the art of forgetting by making stacks of his letters, hiding the origami of apologies.

!

II. A few years before, he bought us a parakeet that I hated for the fecal doughnuts sprinkled wherever it perched.

I was relieved, then, to find it dead one morning, still as a potato, in the bottom of the cage.

!

"49

Try to Forget

!

!

Cheryl Wollner

When you meet your Great-Aunt Thelma give her a hug. You’re in the airport and people will stare if you don’t hug her back. She and Great-Uncle Jack did invite you to spend the week with them, after all. The least you can do is show a semblance of affection. Just give her a hug and try not to think of your grandma when you see how Aunt Thelma is dressed.

Your grandma never wore a yellow cardigan, but your grandma did dress in bright chic styles and smear her lips with a similar shade of burnt red. Give Aunt Thelma a hug. You don’t have to mean it.

When you drive back from the airport with your Great-Aunt Thelma try to be the grand-niece you think she would want. Speak quietly. Deliberate on your words. Sit up straight in the backseat, let Aunt Thelma and Uncle Jack start the conversation. Answer politely, if with a hint of rote memorization, when they ask about your classes. Aunt Thelma knows already from your last letter, but tell Uncle Jack. He is more focused on watching the road, but tell him anyway about your literature class and how you’re reading Rudyard Kipling. Then go silent. This is what they want: an obedient child. Give it to them. You don’t have to mean it.

When you arrive at their apartment in Boca Raton, Florida try not to laugh at all the jokes your mom makes about how fitting it is that they live in a place translated as the mouth of the rat. Try to imagine Uncle Jack when his hair was flaming red and still covered his scalp.

Try to picture him snooping around in your grandparents’ bedroom years before you were born, when your mother had to send him downstairs. Your mother loves to tell this adult version of cops and robbers. Think on this story when Uncle Jack, thin, narrow at the shoulders with white hair dotting a whiter scalp, tries to take your luggage from the car. Insist—as politely as you can—that you can do it yourself. Then, go silent. Let them lead the way into the apartment.

When you see Aunt Thelma’s apartment is lined with paintings she’s done, try not to think of your grandma. Try not to compare Aunt Thelma’s paintings to hers. Your grandma was the artist, and she may have been younger than Aunt Thelma, but art belonged to her alone. Aunt Thelma has none of the artistic nudes your grandma painted, none of the shadows spilling out of the corners of knees and elbows, or framing delicate necks. Aunt Thelma is a good artist, but she is rigid with her work. Don’t let your eyes linger on the Chinese women staring at you through the canvas. She’s not that good.

When you go to the guest room, lock the door at night. Aunt Thelma and Uncle Jack are people you’ve only met once before, after all, almost a year ago, in a hospital in New York.

You sat across from Aunt Thelma in the cafeteria and ate chicken-flavored soup. Don’t let "50

your mind linger in that hospital. Think of her letters to you these past months instead. Remember that she left New York before you were born. She’s only writing to you now because your grandma is dead. She doesn’t care about you. She came back to New York only to watch her sister die. In the guest room, scribble in your journal. You are her way of atoning for the past twenty years she was not in your life. Jab the pen into the paper. Double-check that you locked the door.

When you get a call from your grandpa, months later, that Aunt Thelma had a stroke, try not to cry. Try to keep watching Star Trek in your friend’s apartment. Cry silently and tell yourself she’s not worth your tears. You spent one week with her. Try not to think of pouring Aunt Thelma tea in the mornings so she wouldn’t have to get it herself with her bad back.

Try not to think of the piano concert she took you to and how perfectly your fingers fit together when you held hands. Instead, think of her very first letter to you and how much you lied in your response, and every response since, when you signed Love, Cheryl. Think of the time she told you to wear makeup and dye your hair auburn to look more mature. Think back to hugging her in the airport and how you didn’t mean it.

Don’t mean it now. Try to forget. Cry because you need to, but try not to mean it.

"51

The Sucked Orange

!

Natalia Castells-Esquivel

It occurs to me that I’m writing about a city with more lovers than there are sidewalks—her heart will never be mine. Is it possible to take a bite out of an apple long gone? I’d always had a craving for The Big Apple, or as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, a sucked orange. Though it probably wasn’t his intention—I’ve learned he wasn’t the biggest fan of our Batman-less Gotham—he managed to compare it to something sweet, yet bitter, rounded, yet with a flawed texture. Which are exactly the words I would use to describe myself when I moved there, in the summer of 2011.

I woke up at seven on a Sunday morning in a yacht, though technically, I wasn’t sleeping. My back felt cool against the silky warm wooden surface I was lying on as I opened my eyes. We were parked in the middle of the Hudson River, and how or when we got there I had no clue. Not that it mattered. What I do remember is the water being bluer and colder than expected, and how the tips of my fingers tingled into numbness when I dipped them in. I remember one of the guys sat next to me, and in between lines of coke, told me that the word “yacht” came from Dutch and that it means “hunt.” There were six of us, and at some point, before the sun was out, they all took off their jeans and dresses and socks and flew into the water. They became blurry silhouettes against the Manhattan skyline. And if I remember anything for sure, it’s that almost everything was blurry. That was the blurriest night in the brightest summer of my life. I was on a hunt. And I remember being in love with it all.

When I showed up in the city there were thirty dollars in my pocket. Probably stupid, but I was twenty-one and it seemed brave. What doesn’t at that age? I had just survived my first rock-bottom. I’d swallowed two bottles of pills a couple months earlier and spent a week in the hospital—depression runs in my family; drowning is something we do well. But as I walked off the MTA bus carrying my tiny bag, in the middle of a sizzling July day, and felt the warmth of the pavement seep through the soles of my not-a-New-Yorker flip-flops, I knew thirty dollars had to be enough. I wasn’t leaving the place without succeeding. So I raised my chin, put on my best not-a-tourist face, slung my bag over my back, and proceeded to get lost in the subway. Luckily, a friend in the Lower East Side let me crash with him for a couple weeks. He was an RA, a resident assistant at NYU and, to the envy of everyone in the five boroughs, he got to enjoy free housing. This sweet, sweet soul shared his already cramped dorm with me and all my baggage for a whole fourteen days for free (my bag might’ve been insignificant, but the tear-filled nights weren’t). In a city where even cigarettes are so expensive that people won’t bum them anymore but sell them a dollar apiece, sometimes two, this was a Gandhi-sized act of kindness—if Gandhi played guitar like an angel and liked painting

"52

his nails purple and watching “Titanic” with me on replay. Boy was busy though, and I was down to twenty dollars on the second day, so I ventured off to find a job.

As it turned out, getting a job to survive was easy. It was almost like all the bad luck I’d harbored for the past year had been blown off of me the first time I walked over an air vent on Bowery and 2nd. I walked into an Italian restaurant on a busy corner in the LES and straight into a tall man with “I miss the Old New York” tattooed on his forearm. He had nice shoes. Self-conscious about my shoes for the second time in two days, I made a mental note to buy new, fashionable ones. Probably not heels, because of all the walking, and I’m not one to wear heels, but maybe some cool oxfords or something.

“How can I help you?” he looked at me waiting with his head cocked to one side.

“Oh, hi, are you hiring?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Are you sure though? Because I just moved to the city and have twenty dollars left and tons of experience in restaurants and I’m already hungry so please?”

I called my dad as I walked out of the restaurant and gave him the good news.

“Just like that?” he said.

I said, “Just like that—training starts Monday.”

My reward: a soft pretzel with spicy mustard on the steps of the Met, the city around me painted the color of clementines and beer.

Within two weeks I’d forgotten all about depression and anemia and sadness in my gasping lungs. My days were spent happily serving amazing pizza to people from all over the world in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the world. I mean, St. Mark’s dollar pizza is good and all but the burrata pizza at my place could make Upper East Siders move to Bushwick and stay. Okay, maybe not, but it was pretty damn good. The people, though, are what won the grand prize. It’s said that New Yorkers are colder than their winters—this unfavorable reputation precedes them. World, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree. My New Yorkers were warm, the kind of warm that makes your eyes droopy and sleepy like a cuddled child’s. There was Amelia, a black-haired beauty with an intense love for everything Amy Winehouse, who put up with all my drunken nights. There was Michael, who taught me how to play chopsticks on a piano in the middle of a Williamsburg park. There was Laura, the hopeless romantic with the amazing voice, and Mickey, the Romanian bartender and crepe connoisseur, and Ben, the homeless boy who shared calzones with me in Alphabet City. They made me feel welcome and for the first time in years, I could be whoever I wanted to be— maybe, even, myself. I could be the Mexican child and the still-Mexican-but-now-living-inthe-godawful-American-suburbs confused teenager. I could be the happiest girl in the world, which is what my first boyfriend used to call me, but I could also be the depressed suicidal mess. I could be Hispanic, yet white, middle class, yet broke as hell. Everyone in New York is a transplant with the words “Just Be” tattooed upon their hungry chests. I fit right in.

"53

It’s funny what minds choose to remember. In a society so intent on looking at the big picture, a world with such a small attention span that we went from TV to YouTube to Instagram video, it’s curious how what we remember isn’t big chunks of information at all. New York City’s constant sensory overload left me only with how warm the Nutella inside the crepe that I bought at that little place on Ludlow St. was. It left me remembering the spice on my tongue on my first (ever) dinner out alone at that Indian place with the hundreds of Christmas lights strung along the ceiling and the bizarre twin restaurants next to it. The cold of the rail against my face on the stoop where I spent a night. The dull green of the water and the trees and the exact line where it met the gray of the bloated Central Park sky. The sign on the street that said “Don’t even THINK of parking here” and how hilarious it was because it was an official city sign and oh my god New Yorkers are the craziest.

I remember the sparkling bloody knees of the girl at Union Square. Her roller skates looked brand new, baby pink with glitter stars, but she was quickly putting scratches on them —she kept falling and falling and falling. The black sequin skirt she was wearing was getting dusty, it had lost some of its shine. Her grandmother, an eccentric woman with bright platinum hair, really strong biceps, and orange sunglasses, would tirelessly pick her up after every single fall. She would smile encouragingly, dusting off the girl’s skirt with wrinkled hands, a bagful of Band-Aids in her pocket.

Above all, New York made me remember the crazy girl, me, who sat on the steps outside a bar at too-many-tequilas a.m., on her 17th day in The City That Never Sleeps, sobbing uncontrollably because the insecurity rocks in her stomach apparently couldn’t be drowned. It wasn’t all perfect. But anyone who’s ever lived in New York will tell you this: tears aren’t as salty in that place.

I spent the last two weeks sleeping on a deflating air mattress thrown across the kitchen of an over-priced, under-sized, underground studio apartment, compliments of a very generous family friend. I’ll say it again: Anyone willing to share their living space in Manhattan deserves a damn prize...or at least a diploma with smiley faces on it and unlimited frozen margaritas from Panchito’s in the Greenwich Village. Rodrigo, my host, was an absolute champ about letting me stay with him. After all, I was invading his bachelor pad. But before I knew it, it was August and my last night.

New York had worked wonders—after four weeks of pizza and beer and gyros I was finally back to my normal weight. My baggage didn’t seem as heavy anymore; the hunt was almost over, the arrow cutting fast through soggy air. Bags were already packed inside and I sat on the cement stoop on 7th smoking a cigarette, drinking Arizona tea, sucking an orange dry (because hey, I thought it was poetic) and thinking about anxiety and summers and going back. The city’s spontaneity had saved my life and I was worried that going back home would somehow break the spell. I’d tasted rock bottom, it tasted like blood, and had no intention of ever doing that again. The street was unusually busy, a loud buzz of unknown faces every"54

where—a pack of teenagers on longboards, a lady screaming into a cellphone, an awkward first date looking at everything except each other, an old couple walking slowly and holding hands. I looked down at my feet for a second and was startled when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. The old man stood in front of me, grinning.

“Everything is going to be okay,” he said, as he squeezed lightly, “I’ve learned that much.”

He turned around, held the woman’s hand again, and walked away.

After a stunned second, I dropped the cigarette and slid my shaking hands over my sparkling bloody knees. With skyscrapers stuck in my throat, I quietly thanked the patient city that tirelessly picked me up after every single fall.

On my way to the airport the next morning I made one last stop. I bought myself some damn fancy shoes.

!

"55

Cowgirls are God’s Wildest Angels

!

Tricia Stearns

!

I grew up quick as a child. The fourth daughter in a line of daughters ahead of me, I was out to prove that I could be the son my father always wanted. It was the 70s and Nixon ran for President; go-go boots set the fashion scene and I lip-synced in my bedroom to Nancy Sinatra’s song, “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” but my boots were red cowboy boots. I wore my red cowboy boots everywhere, even to the cardiologist with my eldest sister, who at 17 was a heart attack away from death. I slipped them on with pale blue Bermuda shorts, the back of my legs sticking to the vinyl seat covers of the family Impala as we commuted to the epilepsy research center with my second sister who lived her teenage years with wires to her head. Sundays required a dress; I defiantly anchored the boots to a lime-green-checked sundress with tiny yellow daisies, caring little that my boots failed to match (my sister, who resided at the Richmond State School for the mentally ill, couldn’t even recognize me, bad fashion, or my boots). I was out to prove that I could survive just about anything, and my boots became my uniform and hope.

My boots were the first to be packed when my parents decided that, at age twelve, I was at a vulnerable stage and should spend time with one of the two Catholic priests in the family, Uncle Bob. Now, Uncle Bob wasn’t like most priests—reading, writing, and praying in a cool, dark office that smelled like last week’s incense. No, my Uncle Bob wore the obligatory black shirt and collar, but his shirt topped black jeans and a black leather belt, with a large, silver, longhorn cow as the buckle. The tips of the buckle, the actual longhorns of this four-inch silver cow, held up Uncle Bob’s small-but-growing beer gut. And he liked his beer. His boots, black ostrich, held dust in the fine creases of the leather with the outside heels leaning an inch lower than the inner heel. He walked bow-legged, with a slight limp.

When I stayed with Uncle Bob, there was no telling what the average day would look like. It started out simple enough: morning mass at 7 a.m., held with reverence in an un-airconditioned bingo hall that served as the church, since the parish was too poor to have an actual church yet. Two six-foot-by-four-foot wide fans flanked the altar, which was just constructed of a folding table on cement blocks. The fans circulated the hill country heat through the hall in a meditative hum. Blue, my uncle’s mutt, the derivative of a love affair between a black Lab and hound dog, howled outside. The dog’s vibrato echoed through the fans in an eerie way when my uncle said the Our Father. He often stopped mid-sentence and yelled, “Blue. Shut up. Shut the hell up, ya damn dog!” He continued with the sacred prayer, not missing a word.

"56

This morning ritual was followed by a breakfast of Cheerios, Dr. Pepper, and a brownie for dessert. He usually sat and smoked a Lark, placing a new pack in his black shirt pocket along with his lighter—a little Bic with a naked woman on it. He flicked his ashes in between his lectures to me on life and love as I washed down my breakfast with a second Dr. Pepper. When a phone call interrupted him and he talked in his office awhile, I started a new game of gin rummy with my grandmother, who lived with him. Also with a Lark in her hand, she smoked fast and with passion, but she moved slowly with a replaced hip.

I heard the office door open and I got the nod it was time for his rounds. Most days I got to ride with him wherever he went. It may have been to the convent down the street, where Sister John and Sister Helen were the last of the parish nuns. Sister John and Sister Helen had been ordered to return to Italy, when their order decided that the smallest of Brazos County parishes could live without their services. However, they decided to defect, preferring Uncle Bob’s brand of priesthood and the offerings of Texas A&M down the road. With room for twelve nuns, and one chapel in the center of the convent, Sister John used the space to set up a kindergarten and day care in the summer. Sister Helen worked at the hospital over in Brennan. Both were in school at Texas A&M, seeking official degrees in teaching and nursing, and they served as organizational liaisons for Uncle Bob’s annual fundraiser, “The Somerville Stampede.” Although Somerville was a one-stop-light town, it was a hopping place one weekend a year, since my uncle’s rodeo was on the official Texas Rodeo circuit.

Hundreds of horse and cattle trailers would line up side by side, with most entrants camping at the rodeo site, in lieu of driving over to Brennan, the next town, 30 miles away.

Even the Blue Bell ice cream, a landmark in Brennan, couldn’t beat the local parishioner ladies’ BBQ and authentic Mexican food. The hand-rolled tortillas and BBQ sandwiches created enough profit for the ladies not to have to work for the rest of the year. For one weekend a year, Joe Esparza’s small ranch became a rodeo Woodstock, and all the proceeds blessed St. Anne’s parish.

My uncle’s claim to fame—earning him his nickname, Bullet Bob—was the fact that he was the only bull-riding priest in Texas. Before he embarked on his yearly ride (which usually landed him in the ER), he would ride through the ring with a ten-gallon Stetson, circling for cash all in the name of Jesus and St. Anne’s parish. This took at least an extra thirty minutes, with the aid of the rodeo clowns picking up the cash, making up a skit to increase the donations, and Bullet Bob trotting his horse slowly around the ring as he laughed and cajoled people out of their Benjamins, Hamiltons, and Jacksons.

Most of the weeks preceding the stampede were filled with organizational duties— little did I know that most of our errands pertained to critical issues like beer sponsors, prize money, food, parking, you name it. I often sat reading The Secret Garden anywhere from an office to a barn to a bar.

"57

One day, we went out to a ranch lined with short mesquite trees following a dusty gravel road. Although I was only twelve, I was already 5’10” and Uncle Bob needed help backing up a trailer. I stood tall and waved him back so that he would not hit the back of his denim-blue ‘69 Ford truck on the front hitch of a long black trailer—the kind that is so big it could fit six longhorns steers. After directing the truck to line up to the trailer, my second lesson was to include how to load a bull. The bull, who I renamed Pepper, needed to be delivered to the rodeo site where I was going to get real and not just I-dare-you-to-ride lessons on bull riding. Every twelve-year-old girl from Houston needs to know how to properly load a bull in a trailer, right? Right.

The large, grayish bull circled the trailer, bucking and spewing, and I was smart enough to jump on the hood of the truck and watch while Bullet Bob and a bevy of Mr. Hernandez’s ranch hands talked Pepper onto the trailer. The only thing I really learned is that the best place to be when loading a bull is on the hood of a truck, and that men are not as brave —or as smart—as you think. Eventually, the bull got corralled into the trailer, and we were off to Frog’s for a greasy hamburger and another mid-day Dr. Pepper.

Frog’s was the kind of place where all the locals went. The air was cool; the place was light with large windows revealing a field of yellow wildflowers across the highway. The tables and benches were dark, made from an old barn from the back of the property. The tablecloths were the typical red-checkered plastic, complete with an occasional fly stuck to leftover BBQ sauce and, like many of the patrons, too comfortable to move. The jukebox honored Willie, Johnny Cash, and the Rolling Stones. Willie blended the hippies and the cowboys together, and so did Frog’s. Everyone was welcome, young and old alike.

Once when I was reading a crucial scene in Secret Garden, I ignored my manners and the waitress as she served me another Dr. Pepper. She was missing a tooth and her extra-long Benson and Hedges fit right where her tooth should have been. She wore a man’s navy blue sleeveless shirt that at one time did have sleeves, and it seemed snug on her large breasts. I could smell her deodorant vanishing as her cigarette bounced up and down with each syllable on her large bottom lip caked with a bright pink lipstick.

I felt a large hand on the back of my braided pony tail yank me outside. The same large hand yanked me up by the back of my jeans and I landed squarely on the hood of a black Chevy truck—my bottom just missing a rather large longhorn hood ornament. The heat from the sun on the black truck made me feel like hell was awfully close.

“Listen here, Murph. And listen good.” Bullet Bob, less than a foot from my face, his eyes glaring at me, gave me very little choice.

“Let there be no mistake how serious I am when I say this: Never forget, never forget, you—yes, you—are no better than anyone else. People may be different. They may not have what you have. They may not be as pretty, may not be as smart. But never ever forget—you are no different than they are. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be treated like the Lord "58

would treat us all—with love and respect. You got that cowgirl? You got that? I am serious here. You go in there and treat Miss Bea like she was last year’s Miss Texas and be nice, ya hear?”

I quickly got used to a different way of life. Folks eating egg tacos and drinking a Lone Star seemed natural at ten in the morning. Frog’s served as the local diner and the local bar, and kids were welcome if you were with family. I was with the Father of the town, and he played that priest card often and well. He held a lot of official meetings at Frog’s, and a lot of unofficial meetings, too. He could play a round of poker and do marriage counseling all in the same fifteen minutes. He knew he was sure to find whatever local he needed, counsel a wavering parishioner, and everyone knew where to find the priest. Remember, this was circa 1972, before cell phones and emails.

Six hours later, and at least six beers later—maybe more—my Uncle Bob thought it would be a good idea if I learned how to drive the Ford and Pepper back to the rectory. It sounded like a good idea to me. One of the benefits of being tall at an early age was that I looked older than I really was. I looked at least 14. Anxious to grow up, and feeling sassy in my red boots, I sat tall, my foot easily reaching the pedal and my hands at ten and two. I sauntered down County Road 420 with the bull shifting his weight to and fro behind me in Darth Vader’s cattle trailer. When I pulled right to get on the big highway— Highway 36—I felt his weight shift a bit. Uncle Bob decided we needed to stop for cigarettes. One can never run out of Larks. I pulled into the one gas station in town, and he decided we would get gas too. Fortunately, the gas tank was on the driver’s side. I slowly pulled the Ford to a stop and let out a sigh of relief. Uncle Bob staggered into the store, and I pumped the gas, having learned this on previous Uncle Bob adventures.

I waited and waited in the truck. Bullet Bob appeared to be listening to a last minute confession with the store employee. He was still laughing when he jumped into the truck and handed me a Dr. Pepper and a handful of penny candy. While lighting his Lark, he said, “Murph, you look like a pro there driving. Now let’s take this bad-ass bull home. I’ll take him to Joe’s tomorrow.”

I pulled out of the gas station as if I drove a truck with a trailer every day of the week. Unfortunately, I cut left to get on the two-lane highway a bit too soon, and the trailer took the last gas pump with it. At first I didn’t know what happened; was the bull moving, or did I hit something? Then I saw this geyser of fluid, and the bull shifted too and fro, all in a matter of seconds. I screamed, and the priest shouted, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, oh my gawd, oh shit!” I stopped dead on the highway. The bull fell forward with another large mooo. Bullet Bob was yelling and laughing all at the same time, “Well, don’t stop now, Murph, keep on going! Pull ahead to the Dairy Queen!”

About two hundred yards later, I sat and watched kids eating their dipped cones inside the Dairy Queen with their moms and dads. In the rearview mirror, I watched the dark "59

shadow of my uncle as he weaved a jog back to the gas station while the pump spewed and filled the pot holes of the parking lot with clear danger. I could see the fire truck and sheriff cars approaching, their lights bright and fast. I just knew I was going to jail, and I would be there until I was too old to drive again. I wondered if they would ever give me a Dr. Pepper in jail, or would every meal consist of gruel like in the movie Oliver? I wanted to be with the family in the Dairy Queen.

Time passed slowly. The family gobbled chocolate dipped cones as they laughed and talked with each other.

My knees jiggled, and sweat was pouring down into my red boots. My eyes were fixed in the rearview mirror, watching the chaos and the police talking to Bullet Bob. I wondered what they would let me wear in jail. About thirty minutes later, Uncle Bob jumped back in the truck, nodding his head forward. “Okay, Murph, keep on driving straight and turn left at the bingo sign, and head for home. God is with us. Always remember that.”

"60

The Mad Years

!

!

Randy Osborne

One afternoon, as she had done many times before, my grandmother Madeline looked up from her sewing, stared at me for a long moment and said, softly, “God will give you blood to drink.”

John F. Kennedy presided over a happy nation that year: 1961. Patsy Cline crooned “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces.” Alan Shepard took the first astronaut rocket trip. The U.S. had two hundred military advisers in South Vietnam.

After the divorce, my mother took a job as a secretary and sent six-year-old me to live at Mad’s house on the other side of our northern Illinois town. Mad and her husband had spaced their five children so far apart in their decades-long marriage that two still lived under their roof. So I grew up with my uncle Peter and my aunt Kathleen, my mother’s siblings, as practically my own.

But everyone understood my privileged status. Mad scooped me plenty of vegetables from the watered-down soup, and seldom scolded “The Little McKay.” On Peter, she exercised her wrath mightily. “I’m gonna give it to you fast, I’m going to give it to you hard!” she yelled, standing over him and ratcheting her arm back and forth like the lever that turns the train wheel on Gunsmoke, my father’s favorite TV western. The Dexedrine made her jumpy.

Mad’s blood-to-drink quote echoes Maule’s gallows curse against Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, after Pyncheon wrongly convicts Maule of witchcraft in order to take his property. Later, at a party in the mansion, Pyncheon dies face down at his table, blood gushing from his mouth.

Mad loved Hawthorne and Poe and the Bible, except for the New Testament. She liked detective magazines, too, with their pulpy pages and lurid murder photos. Also Fate, a monthly journal that featured “true stories of the strange and unknown”—spirits, UFOs, all things paranormal.

I learned to read on police magazines, Fate, and something called The Watchtower, delivered by bland, well-dressed people. Mad shooed them away easily, like I’d seen other people treat the stray cats that she unfailingly welcomed.

Cats held a link to the supernatural, and Mad took in every scruffy example that showed up. She said the neighborhood boys would torture them if she didn’t. At any given time, thirty-five to forty felines lived in the basement, depending on how many of the animals had bred, and how many babies the rest of them devoured. One morning, Peter tromped upstairs with three kitten heads rolling in a dustpan.

Her husband, Carl—C.V., as we knew him—would not have approved of the filth or expense. But the year I came to live with them, C.V. left Mad for a woman he met at the pow"61

er plant. He took the good car with him, and we saw him around town with “that slut, Cuddles,” as Mad called her.

Terrified of ghosts and prowling killers, with no adult male in the house, all four of us slept in the attic, piled on shoved-together mattresses. If anyone had to go to the bathroom, we didn’t, since nobody would brave the stairs and the dark. We used what Mad called the “slop jar,” which she took from its corner and emptied every morning.

When the meter man rang Mad’s bell, we fell quiet in mid-sentence, perfectly inert.

If we let him wade into the basement sea of cats, the eye-watering, nostril-scalding stench would repel him quickly. Gas-masked health inspectors would file through later. Our house, CONDEMNED. They might notice the penny in the fuse box, too—a hazard, probably some other kind of violation. Never do this, warned the manuals. Circuits will overload. Not the best solution, but money was tight.

At last the meter man gave up and looped a rectangle of paper over the knob, like the Do Not Disturb hanger in hotels. Mad would pencil-in the tiny clocks on the tag, and leave it out for retrieval. I pictured the meter man back at headquarters. “Nobody comes to the door, Carl. Think you should check on them?”

C.V. tried for a divorce and Mad fought back, which you could do in those days. He gave up the legal skirmish and sent Mad no money. We collected pop bottles for pennies; dinner was hot dogs with beans. After C.V. died of emphysema in 1966 with slut, Cuddles, at his bedside, we learned that he had married her anyway. He had signed over his pension, too. In court again, this time to prove the bond she earlier had won the battle to preserve, Mad couldn’t do it. The county clerk in Virginia had misplaced the ancient records. Cuddles, of course, saved hers.

For as long as C.V. lived—and, I suspect, beyond—Mad clung to hope that he would walk through the parlor again, as if he had gone out for a haircut. As a souvenir of him, we had only that old car, an ironically misnamed Mercury Comet.

She hated driving. Years before, she had lost her teeth in a blowout crash with C.V. at the wheel. Sometimes to scare us, she opened her mouth and let the top dentures drop, wetly.

But on certain afternoons, she herded us into the Comet and piloted across town to the house C.V. shared with that slut, Cuddles.

“Stay on the sidewalk,” she ordered. “See what you can see.” We saw an open window, lacy curtain flapping in the breeze…I understand now that Mad wanted C.V., not us, to see something: his abandoned children on parade in front of the bungalow where he cuddled with that slut.

On scrape-the-frost mornings, so that she could take Peter and Kathleen to school, Mad coaxed the Comet into service by sheer will, as I cringed in the backseat. She was the gentlest person in my life, and never “gave it fast and hard to Peter,” or me, or anybody else.

Except once.

"62

On the morning in question, Peter stayed in bed with the flu.

The traffic light turned green. Mad yanked the shifter and stomped the gas pedal.

The engine roared. We didn’t move. “Damn.”

Mad swore a lot after C.V. left, always “damn” or “God damn,” never the newfangled obscenities such as “shit” or “fuck,” which to this day I regard as inferior curses, lacking weight.

Horns honked behind us. Mad grabbed the shifter again—mounted, like the turn signal, on the steering column—and laid her foot down hard. Nothing.

“Damn!”

At least the car began to feel warmer; our heater had quit working a winter ago. Mad tugged on the shifter with both hands. At the same time, she pounded the accelerator furiously, like someone playing an enormous pinball machine and losing. The car shook with RPMs, a rocket ready for launch.

It didn’t launch.

Even with fingers in both ears I could hear Mad bellow as she thumped away at the gas pedal. I smelled smoke. We would burst into flames.

She tried once more—“God damn!”—and we lurched past the light as it turned red, then chugged up the snow-banked hill toward Jefferson Jr. High School.

“Brilliant maneuver,” Kathleen said, from the passenger seat.

“Shut your trap, Blunderbuss,” Mad said. “I’m warning you.” Blunderbuss. It was a term of non-endearment Mad typically brought out only in extreme situations.

Kathleen surely knew this, yet she kept on. “Have you considered driving professionally? This might be the smoothest ride ever.”

“God damn it, Rattlehead. Shut up.”

Rattlehead ranked among Mad’s lower-grade castigations, and thus to naïve ears may have forecasted a retreat, but I believed it improbable that she had reversed the usual order and had begun to de-escalate already.

“Do you hear me?” Mad shouted. “Take your mouth in your hand and goo-rip it!”

Now we had entered dire territory. Grip-the-mouth was late stage, and even worse when Mad stretched out the word grip, making two syllables. Goo-rip.

At last Mad pulled to Jefferson Jr. High’s curb. I silently begged Kathleen for silence.

Don’t say anything. Get out, get out now.

“Driving instructor,” Kathleen said. “Honestly, you could get a job as—”

Mad’s arm flashed like a snake’s tongue, a whip crack in the cold-again air of the car.

Time stopped. Kathleen’s cheek reddened, glowed.

She jumped out, clutching her books. She kicked shut the door. Up the slanted, icy walkway she clomped, head down, refusing to glance back.

And then she slipped.

"63

Kathleen’s books flew skyward as if blown by a geyser. She went down like a hammered spike, and bounced. Twice.

Mad rested her head on her forearms, wheezing. Her body heaved, convulsing like I had seen her do on nights when she thought I slept. This was laughter instead.

“Oh McKay”—Mad almost couldn’t speak—“didn’t she get what she had coming to her? Didn’t she?” People never got what was coming to them.

Kathleen picked her books out of the snow and shook them off. She limped toward the building, a defeated soldier. We watched her disappear inside.

Mad straightened herself in the seat and shifted into gear, somehow effortlessly.

With the slap, Mad had surprised herself as much as anyone. A pensive quiet held until we reached the bottom of the hill. There—as if to celebrate with a daredevil act her quashing of Kathleen’s defiance—Mad slid us past the red light and into the busy intersection.

“Oh Jesus, McKay! Oh Jesus!”

Mad did not tap the brake lightly. Nor did she turn the Comet’s wheels to match the skid’s path. The Rules of the Road meant nothing in such predicaments.

She jammed the brake pedal to the floor, and instantly the car began to whirl.

“Oh Jesus, McKay!”

Colors whizzed past the windows, as if through the lens of a movie camera tossed from the top of the Empire State Building. We rotated, tumbling toward impact. Horns blared, not behind us this time but all around. Near, then far, then near again as we spun.

“Oh McKay, oh Jesus!”

I felt dizzy, almost joyful, freed of everything but the glide and roll and the end, which seemed very near. Oh Jesus. Nothing bad could happen to us now, because the worst would happen any second, and everything before would dissolve into oblivion: a permanent outage.

Mad would get what was coming to her for clouting Kathleen. I would get what was coming to me for making the men run away. Maybe C.V. would be in the other car with that slut Cuddles, and they would get what was coming to them, too. Cuddles, that witch. Blood to drink.

Then, with a small, sideways jolt, we stopped.

The Comet faced the direction we’d come from, idling in the correct lane. Cars veered around us. The slush hissed under their tires.

Mad shifted into first gear, dexterously again, and we proceeded up the hill as if we had only been misdirected for a short while, as if this had been the plan all along. She found us another way home.

! ! !

"64

Bones to Pick

!

!

Kathleen Brewin Lewis

The old couple picks at the day as if it were a roasted chicken.

They dine on the breast at breakfast, devour the liver, heart and gizzard at lunch, are down to the dark meat for dinner.

Then the real nibbling and gnawing begins.

They pull the last shreds of meat from the rib bones, pry the tiny morsels from the wings.

One of them wrests the wishbone from the greasy carcass and holds it aloft.

She wants to paint it gold and hang it on a ribbon, but he calls for the question, there and then.

What’s your wish? he demands, Pick a side and pull.

And so, with a crack of the cartilage, it is decided: Which one of them will turn in for the evening, which one will sit up alone in the dark. 

"65

! ! ! !

"66

The Failed Sketches

!

!

Anton Frost

I draw you in pencil by listening to your movements beneath fabric.

!

By peeling open pomegranates and leaving them lying in different

! phases of moon, !

I drain your segments over each other in watercolor.

!

It's not long before you are a gathering of toppled crescents,

!

a sphere breaking into sensations, a door that is not open, not closed.

!

I sketch you with pebbles for cells, umlauts for a voice,

!

an uppercase “G” for each ear.

Days pass for your eyes.

!

Days pass like letters of the alphabet. !

Animals die in all your spans.

An hour is a strand of hair,

! a week is a warmth off the side of your neck. !

I add color with the pomegranate’s wetness.

You strike different poses

! !

"67

by telling me how you wish you could live, by telling me how you are actually living.

!

I give you my tenth, hundredth, and thousandth drafts and feel no closer to finishing than the first:

!

“a fawn in colored pencil on an island of grass,

!

the word EARTHLING

!

floating over its head in block letters.”

!

In distress I scribble a leafless tree, black with rain and a bright sky.

!

It resembles my nervous system.

It looks like a blaze of something you know,

! something I have yet to realize. !

You look at my piles of sketches, touching corners of pages gently.

!

“You do not need to be here for all this,” I say. !

I am not sure if I am talking to you or to myself.

!

Next I draw your open mouth, taking up a whole page.

Inside it I dictate what you say:

!

“The sphere is the form, The circle is the shape.

The curve is the notion:

! !

"68

The vanishing line that started here had my name.”

This could go on forever.

You keep becoming different things—

!

water spilling over the lip of a cup, a pocket knife flipping open in midair like a flower.

!

A window being opened by a woman with a cloud of suds on each wrist

!

transforms into an oblong patch of continent from an old world map,

!

the shape that land takes when it is too distant to make out clearly,

! when it is more imagined than real. !

I give up by gazing at you.

I snap a pencil in two, handing you the lead portion.

!

The eraser stays with me. !

After we agree to meet later, you touch my shoulder as you leave.

!

It is such a relief that we already exist. ! !

"69

! ! ! ! !

"70

Contributors

!

Hank Backer is currently pursuing his Ph.D in creative writing at Georgia State University, where he's edited for both Five Points and New South. He's been published in The Rectangle and Sixty Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies.

!

Evan Guilford-Blake writes plays and fiction for adults and children. Nineteen of his plays and a novel, Noir(ish), are published. His work has appeared in numerous print and online journals. He and his wife (and inspiration), Roxanna, live in the Atlanta area. www.guilford-blake.com/evan

!

Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in Southern California and is the author of three novels. He was born in the Carter Administration. www.robindunn.com

Natalia Castells-Esquivel is a native of Pachuca, Mexico, currently living with four (currently alive) plants in Atlanta. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in places like Thought Catalog, Loose Change, Santo y Seña, and Revista Contraseña. She works as a copywriter at PM Publicidad. Also, she makes really good scrambled eggs.

!

Anton Frost's poetry has appeared widely in print and online. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.

!

Amy Herschleb is a poet and served as the Managing Editor of FANZINE. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University.

Christine Hoffmann teaches writing and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her scholarly and creative work is published in Make Magazine, Eclectica, College Literature, The CEA Critic and, somewhat randomly, Slayage: the Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. She blogs about literature, language and teaching on TECHStyle, Georgia Tech’s digital pedagogy blog.

! ! ! !

"71

Kathleen Brewin Lewis is an Atlanta writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yemassee, Southern Humanities Review, STILL: The Journal, James Dickey Review, Heron Tree, and The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. V: Georgia, in addition to Loose Change. A graduate of Wake Forest University, she has an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and senior editor of Flycatcher.

!

Christopher Martin is the author of Marcescence: Poems from Gahneesah (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), co-authored with David King; Everything Turns Away: Poems from Acworth and the Allatoonas (La Vita Poetica Press, forthcoming); and A Conference of Birds (New Native Press, 2012). Editor of Flycatcher, contributing editor at New Southerner, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he lives with his wife and two children in northwest Georgia. “Phos Hilaron” was his first published piece of creative nonfiction, and Loose Change was among the first publishers of his poetry. www.christopher-martin.net.

!

Randy Osborne teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at Emory University. He’s the director and co-founder in 2010 of Carapace, a monthly event of true personal storytelling, and staff writer at BioWorld Today, a newsletter that covers the biotechnology industry. Represented by the Brandt & Hochman Agency in New York, he is finishing a collection of personal essays. www.randyosborne.com

!

Hank Pugh’s work has been published in 322 Review, Serving House Journal, Green Briar Review, and Loose Change magazine. He is a graduate of St. Johns College and currently works as a self-employed attorney in Annapolis, Maryland. His favorite things are opera, fly fishing, and Southwest Montana.

!

Kristian Rodriguez was born and raised in Lawrenceville, Georgia. His writing has also appeared in the Stone Canoe Journal of Central New York. He is currently developing original music in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.kristianrodriguez.com

!

Tricia Stearns is a writer, photographer, and the director of the Peachtree City Farmers Market and Peachtree City Community Garden, a 4+-acre site with 146 8’x20’ plots. She graduated in 2010 from the MAPW program at Kennesaw State, is a columnist for Fayette Daily News, and has appeared in various publications.

!

Paige Sullivan was born and raised in Monroe, Georgia, and recently graduated from Agnes Scott College with a double major in creative writing and psychology. She is a new MFA student in Georgia State University's creative writing program and happily resides in the Oakhurst district of Decatur, Georgia.

!

"72

Jessica Temple earned her BA from the University of Alabama and her MA from Mississippi State. She is a Ph.D student at Georgia State University, works for the poetry radio show Melodically Challenged, and reads for New South. Her chapbook, Seamless and Other Legends, is available from Finishing Line Press.

!

Jan Thompson is living with a view of Catalina and San Clemente islands these days. She shares the place with a blue-tick coon hound, a chihuahua-Pomeranian mix and twelve egglaying hens. Lots of hyphenated things. She spends her days gardening and writing. At night she watch movies and gazes at the stars.

!

Rachel Trignano’s work has been featured in WABE's City Cafe Storyteller series, the HydeATL PUSH Series, Saul Williams’ Chorus: A Literary Mixtape (September 2012, MTV Books), Write Club Atlanta, the City of Atlanta’s OCA’s Elevate: Art Above Underground and Loose Change magazine. She also performs flamenco, bakes rustic fruit pies and did not write this bio.

!

Johnathan Welsh is a figure painter from Atlanta, GA. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kennesaw State University in 2011 and has been showing in local galleries ever since.

His work primarily deals with the figure and its relationship with themes ranging from his family, the South, religion and socioeconomic issues.

!

Cheryl Wollner is a creative writing major at Agnes Scott College. She writes fiction, nonfiction and drama and hopes to pursue a career writing cartoons.

"73

Acknowledgements

!

Heartfelt thanks to all of our editors, staff and volunteers, present and past, for making this Best Of edition—and Loose Change itself—a reality. Special thanks to: Nicole Knox, Alex Gallo-Brown, Jennifer Lobsenz, Steven Ricard, Sherri Caudell, Paige Sullivan, Jody Bufkin, Cody Reyes, Rachel Trignano, Cristina Martin, Amy Herschleb, Kristi DeMeester, Chantal James, Stephanie Dowda, Maggie Ginestra, Helen Hale, Ingrid Sibley, Chris Appleton, Staci Janik, Jesse Swords, Chris Richards, Scott Daughtridge, Damon Sgrignoli and Marissa McNamara.

!

Thanks to the guest editors of our 2013 writing contest series for lending their time and talents: Erica Wright, Jamie Iredell, Randy Osborne, Abigail Greenbaum and Jesse Lichtenstein.

!

Many thanks to our 2013 Power2Give contributors and the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs (whose generous donations funded this anthology), and to everyone who has ever spared some change for Loose Change.

!

To our friends in the Atlanta arts and literature community: Carapace, Vouched Books, Lostintheletters, The Letters Festival, The Decatur Book Festival, WRITE CLUB, “True Story!” Reading Series, 421 Atlanta, Burnaway.org, FANZINE, Kill Your Darlings, HydeATL, Atlanta Zine Library, Vida Voce, the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, The Wren’s Nest, Flycatcher Literary Journal, Poetry Atlanta, Java Monkey Speaks, Coconut Poetry, Atlanta Writers Club, Shocking Real-Life Writing Academy, Purge ATL, Solar Anus, Naked City, CommonCreativ, and many others—thank you for joining us in supporting Atlanta’s writers.

!

Finally, our sincerest gratitude goes to our contributors—and every writer who trusts us with their words—and to our readers and listeners. You are, quite literally, the reason Loose Change exists. Thank you.

"74

Cover Art Š Johnathan Welsh Printed in Georgia, U.S.A. www.loosechangemagazine.org