Mount Hope Issue 9, Spring 2016 by Mount Hope Magazine

ISSUE 9 Spring 2016

Mount Hope is published bi-annually in Bristol, Rhode Island, by the Roger Williams University Department of English and Creative Writing. Individual subscription rates are: $20 annually or $35 for two years. Mount Hope ÂŠ 2016, All Rights Reserved. No portion of Mount Hope may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including all information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission of Mount Hope magazine or authors of individual creative works. Any resemblance of events, locations or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental. Mount Hope cannot be held responsible for any views expressed by its contributors. www.mounthopemagazine.com Individual Issue Price: $10.00

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MOUNT HOPE â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 9

EDITOR Edward J. Delaney

ASSISTANT EDITOR Abigail DeVeuve, Nonfiction

WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE Adam Braver

COPY EDITOR Connor Lahey

DESIGN EDITOR Lisa Daria Kennedy Massachusetts College of Art

INTERVIEWERS Edward J. Delaney Kevin Marchand

POETRY EDITOR Shelley Puhak Notre Dame of Maryland University

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Madeline Cirullo Sydney Clapp Adam D’Arcangelo Gabriella Femia Taylor Flaherty Craig Gosse Brianna Gunzy Katie Kaehlert Brittany Parziale Claudia Rightmire George Thompson

POETRY CONSULTANT Carrie Addington Northern Virginia Community College MANAGING EDITORS Katherine Gladsky, Poetry Margaret McLaughlin, Fiction

Bruno Avilez Soto is from the coastal town of Penco, Chile. He studied economy and business, and he dedicates himself to painting in his spare time. Avilez likes to imagine he will make a living off of his watercolors one day.

COVER ART

Bruno Avilez Soto nació en Penco, un pueblo costero de Chile. Estudió economía y negocios y se dedica a la pintura como pasatiempo. Le gusta pensar que cuando sea anciano se ganará la vida pintando acuarelas.

Bruno Avilez Soto, Onion. Watercolor, 12cm x 17cm. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

CONTENTS FICTION 5 Do Not Disturb

POETRY

15 Walking in Spring Amid a Symmetry of Birch Trees by Kelly McQuain 16 How an Owl Spins its Head Without Tearing Apart by Kelly McQuain 30 Acorn by Claire Kinnane 31 Broken Watch by Claire Kinnane 32 Three-Legged Dog by Claire Kinnane 33 Spirit in the Orchard by Claire Kinnane 61 The Good Year by Julie Swarstad Johnson 62 Minnie Gulch, July 1998 by Julie Swarstad Johnson 64 Liminal Space by Julie Swarstad Johnson 83 A Pair of Onions Poems by Steve Nickman & Sandy W. Editor’s Note by Katherine Gladsky, Managing Poetry Editor

by Kristin Ginger 65 Bird Boy by Patty Somlo 76 Tree Rat by Erin Smith

NONFICTION 28 Silent Cider Mill

by Ruth Towne 34 EMBLUJ by Deborah Thompson 73 Flood Myth (Or, Along the Perimeter) by Michael Sweeney

INTERVIEWS 17 Author Jim Shepard

Interview by Ted Delaney, Editor 20 Author Greg Jackson Interview by Kevin Marchand

PHOTOGRAPHY 37 Life on the Rake

by David Wells Commentary by Ronnie Forrest Interview conducted by Gabriella Femia

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FICTION

Do Not Disturb by Kristin Ginger

I haven’t told my aunt and uncle that I’m coming back to Iowa. The only news we’ve had of each other for the past ten years is through Christmas cards. We made it through another year, their letter always starts. In the picture on the front they wear color-coordinated outfits—green-and-red plaid vests, cranberry turtlenecks, Santa hats, once even a pair of antler headbands. Inside the card, on the left, there is a reprint of the last school photograph taken of my cousin Sarah. It is from 1993: she is fifteen, her braces are still on, and she is wearing blue eye shadow. Her smile is forced, her sandy blonde hair is in two buns above her ears, and when I look at it I can hear her saying, Jesus fucking Christ, I look like a homeschool freak. It’s the same picture they blew up and framed in silver for her funeral.

I almost didn’t go to Allerton the year Sarah and I were sixteen. I was MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

invited to a friend’s summer home in Wisconsin, but then I called Sarah to tell her. “Like hell you are,” she said. “What are you ditching me for?” “Just a girl from school. Kimmy.” “Kimmy? You’re ditching me for a Kimmy?” “I’m not—” “If you go to Wisconsin,” she said, “I’m telling your mom you got drunk and gave Ian Jefferson a blowjob.” “I hate you,” I told her. “I hate you, too.” I went to Iowa.

We spent the summer working at a car wash, sneaking into second movies at the local movie theater, and lingering at the pizza parlor until it closed. Then, just one week before I was supposed to return to Chicago, Sarah announced, “I have the perfect idea for how to end our summer.” Sarah’s last perfect idea had been breaking into the public pool at three in the morning. I raised my eyebrows. “A road trip,” she said, to my relief. When she informed Uncle Mark that we were leaving for Carbondale on Friday, he closed his eyes. “Don’t do this, Sarah,” he warned. “It’s not even a real road trip.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “We’ll spend the night at Aunt Helen’s.” Uncle Mark didn’t open his eyes. “Beth!” he yelled. My aunt appeared in the doorway, wiping her damp hands on a towel. “The girls want to take a road trip,” he said. I spoke up before Sarah could. “We won’t do anything stupid, Aunt Beth. Really, we won’t stop anywhere, or—” “We’ll drive straight there!” Sarah interjected. Aunt Beth sighed. “This asks for a lot of trust. And I’d have to call your mother, Lauren.” “She’ll be fine with it,” Sarah answered. “Like you would be, if you weren’t such a psychotic control freak.” “Do not speak like that to your mother—” Uncle Mark started to say, just as Aunt Beth began, “If you think that talking like that will get you anywhere—” “Whatever,” Sarah muttered. “This is useless. Come on, Lauren.” I followed her out of the family room, then out the front door. She ran down the porch steps and onto the sidewalk, bare feet slapping the 6

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hot cement, but slowed down as we left the block and headed toward town. We didn’t talk as we darted on tiptoes across the scorching black asphalt of the gas station’s parking lot and paid eighty-five cents each for Coke in sweating aluminum cans. We opened them and sucked out the fizz, running back across the parking lot, past the small strip of stores, past more houses, and more, and finally out into the soybean fields. We kept going, side by side, not talking. As time passed, our pace slowed, but Sarah didn’t stop, so I didn’t either. After what must have been three miles, my feet aching and sweat beading at my neck, I sat down on the shoulder of the gravel road, letting the heat settle over me. Sarah paused, then dropped down next to me. “You should thank me.” She pushed strands of sweaty dark-blonde hair off her forehead. “Thank you for what?” I asked. “You just made me walk into the middle of fucking nowhere.” “Shut up. I don’t mean this.” Sarah waved dismissively at the flat fields. “I mean, that you’ll always look like a saint next to me. I’ll always be the fuck up, the crazy one.” Not able to contradict her, and not knowing what to say, I just shook my head. Then—after looking up and down the road and seeing nothing and more nothing—I pulled off my t-shirt. My pale stomach, sprinkled with freckle constellations, stared back at me. It worked: Sarah broke into a smile. Then, with a short laugh, she MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

“

You should thank me…You’ll always look like a saint next to me. I’ll always be the fuck up, the crazy one.”

pulled off her own shirt. There were tan lines around her neck and arms from the car wash. She scooted to the parched grass between the gravel of the road and the martial lines of leafy green soybean plants behind us, stretched out, and draped the thin cotton t-shirt over her face. I lay down alongside her and closed my eyes. My eyelids glowed a soft jack-o-lantern orange from the brightness of the sun. “I’m glad I came here instead of Wisconsin,” I said after a few minutes. Sarah didn’t answer. “Really,” I continued, “It’s good to be back.” “Don’t say you’re happy you came until the summer is over,” she finally said, her voice sharp. “Tell me when you’re leaving. Then I’ll believe you.” I had no answer for that, so we lay there with the sun eating at our skin cells and multiplying our freckles. I imagined the light bleaching my hair until the already pale strands turned white. I heard an engine in the distance, but I didn’t move. “Lauren,” Sarah said, “Car.” I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me. I heard the crunch of gravel as she sat up and the soft sound of fabric being pulled back over skin. “Lauren.” She poked my stomach. I smiled. I imagined her rolling her eyes, certain of her face even though I couldn’t see it. The car came nearer, getting louder—maybe it was a truck—and I didn’t move, even though my heart was pounding. The sound of a blaring horn made me jerk, but I stayed where I was on the side of the road. A cloud of dust blew across my skin while the sound of a man catcalling and another whistling blew into my ears. The dirt from the road stuck to my sweaty skin, layering me with grime. The car was gone as suddenly as it came. As the sound of the engine faded into the distance, I heard Sarah chuckling. “Psycho.” Her bare toes prodded my hip. “Let’s go.” I sighed, sitting up. “Put on your shirt,” Sarah told me. “Everyone will think we’re hookers.” “Carbondale, Illinois.” I sighed as we started walking. “I hope Aunt Helen realizes how desperate we are to get out of here.” “She might,” Sarah said. “She’s not a parent.”

Even later, when I was able to name dozens of reasons I shouldn’t 8

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have, I still wished I was more like Sarah. When I went skinny dipping in college, it was because she would have. My entire twenty-first birthday was a tribute to her, and when I finally lost my virginity a year later, her ghost was in the room watching my boyfriend and me. When the personal essay on a graduate-school application asked me to write about someone I admired, I realized my role model was still a sixteen-year-old dead girl whose last big accomplishment, according to the adults of our family, was winning the elementary-school talent contest with a gymnastics routine.

When we returned to the house, I could tell we’d won by my aunt’s frown. “You stop for gas and pop, and that is it. That is it, you hear me?” We piled our things in the back of the fifteen-year-old Honda that hemorrhaged gas: tote bags bulging with unfolded clothes, a jug of water, three ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and two bags of licorice. Sarah put in a CD as I climbed into the backseat to crank down the windows. “This is perfect,” she yelled over the wind and Kurt Cobain singing, With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. “This is exactly where we’re supposed to be, Lauren.” I looked at her then, and I remember the way she smiled as she jerked her head to the music, how her hair was whipping everywhere, reaching out to sting my shoulder in its frenzy. She was wearing her father’s old aviator sunglasses because she’d broken hers, and she only had one hand on the steering wheel—the other was out the window, surfing on currents of air as we flew out of Allerton. The sun was high and our seatbelts were unbuckled, and we drove through acres and acres, the country spread out flat around us for miles. We didn’t talk again, didn’t try to shout over the wind and the singing, but after an hour or so Sarah looked over at me and smiled. I couldn’t see her eyes through the sunglasses as she kissed the palm of her right hand, pressed it against my cheek, and held it there, just for a moment, before sticking out her tongue at me and turning back to the road.

My mind replays that scene when I least expect it, when I’m swimming laps or when a sitcom actress tilts her head in a certain way. Other times I intentionally recall it, watching that last moment on repeat, rewinding and rewinding again to watch Sarah kissing her hand and pressing it to my cheek and then sticking out her tongue. I wish this was on a real tape so I could show it to the people I meet who will never understand what I try to MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

“

I should have realized before we left that Sarah never meant to reach Carbondale.”

tell them. Twelve years later, driving the opposite way down the same highway, I keep the air conditioning on and the windows closed. My rental car, a blue Saturn, is almost out of gas when I finally turn down the main street and turn off toward my aunt and uncle’s house. I don’t need a map. There are new buildings and different signs, but the roads curve in the same places and I almost want to close my eyes as I drive, to follow some mix of memory and magnetic tug. For a moment after I see the house I think I must be mistaken; the paint is too dark, a forest green, and why do they need a basketball hoop in the driveway? But then I see the three pine trees to the left, and the hearts cut out of the small white shutters, and I know this is the right place. After Sarah’s funeral, when we were back in this house eating hard-boiled eggs with whipped yolks and sandwiches cut into triangles, my aunt had broken into sobs. My uncle watched her for a moment, then grabbed the tuna sandwich from my hand. “Stop it!” he screamed at me. “Stop eating her food! You’re why we’re here—” his voice broke—“How can you eat when you’re the reason we’re here?” My Aunt Helen and my mother hurried over. “Mark!” my mother put her hand on her older brother’s shoulder. He shook it off. “You too,” he said, facing her. “Get out of this house and take your daughter with you.” She stared at him. 10

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“I said get out!” he yelled, and Aunt Beth sobbed harder. She took her hands from her face to look at me, her lipstick smudged from her palms, and whispered, “Lauren, honey. I’m sorry, but please go.” Her voice cut into my numbness. I walked out the door, and my mother followed. § I should have realized before we left that Sarah never meant to reach Carbondale. She didn’t like our Aunt Helen, there was nothing exciting about southern Illinois, and she had told me the exact same story as her parents— when she never told them the truth. As she turned off the highway and onto Exit 27 for Morris, it was eight at night. We had already gotten gas and parked on the shoulder of the road to pee in the woods; there was no reason for us to stop. I turned the music down. I had rolled my window up two hours ago, and I’d pulled a sweatshirt on over my wind-whipped arms, but my cousin was still just wearing her t-shirt. “Sarah?” I asked as she took the exit. “Come on,” she said. “You know it’ll be more fun this way.” We drove past two gas stations, a diner, and a grocery store. Sarah didn’t slow down until she saw a neon sign lit up with the word “Vacancy.” The C’mon Inn had a green roof and pots of fake mums on either side of the office door. After we got our room key using her fake ID—she’d gotten me one earlier that summer, too, as a late birthday present—Sarah chanted, “Room number eight, room number eight,” as if she would forget it during the walk up a flight of cement stairs and down a balcony with evennumbered red doors. We filled our ice bucket even though we didn’t have any use for the ice—we just sucked on it in between bags of potato chips and cheese curls. “This is kind of fun,” I admitted, mouth full of ice and Fritos, leaning back against the headboard. Sarah leaned back next to me. “If we were exciting, we would be here with boys,” she said. I didn’t answer. “I’m glad it’s you I’m here with, though,” she said. “There’s no one else I could do this with.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “There are lots of people who are happy to eat junk food until they vomit.” Sarah waved a hand lazily. “Not that,” she said. “This whole thing. I’m glad it’s with you.” We lay there for a minute, and then she said, “You never really gave Ian Jefferson a blowjob, did you?” I tensed. “It’s okay, Lauren. You don’t need to impress me.” MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

I didn’t say anything, thinking back to last January when Sarah had called me at two in the morning. “You’ll never guess, never guess,” she had said. “Sarah, it’s the middle of the night,” I groaned. “You woke my mom up. She’ll kill me if this isn’t an emergency.” “Tell her I got into a fight with my dad or something. Look, you know the third Star Wars movie?” “Sarah, are you high?” She laughed. “Yes. But you know the third Star Wars movie?” “Return of the Jedi.” “I just had sex during it.” “Sarah. I’m not an idiot. Call me in the morning.” The next morning, though, Sarah had told me the same thing. In a basement that I imagined just like any other Midwestern basement—paneled in dark wood, furnished with two sofas and a nicked coffee table, with a TV in the corner—Sarah had taken off her jeans and handed a condom to Eric, a boy from her math class. “It’s overrated,” she told me. “But I’m glad I got it done with.” A couple of months later, after seeing a movie with a group of friends that included a guy named Ian, I had called Sarah and told her I’d gotten drunk and given him a blowjob. “He’s nice,” I told her, “but I don’t think it’ll go further than that. We were just drunk.” That evening, lying on the slightly waxy motel bed coverlet with her, I couldn’t picture Sarah with a boy—any boy. I could imagine her kissing someone, swatting his head, tilting her chin flirtatiously—but nothing past that. When I tried, my memories of digging in a sandbox or playing hide-and-go-seek broke my concentration. I could fast-forward to us sitting together on a porch as grandmothers, sipping pink lemonade, but couldn’t fill the space between. After age eighteen, or maybe nineteen, we became faceless. I wasn’t surprised when Sarah produced a handle of vodka and a halfempty bottle of whiskey from her father’s liquor cabinet. I’d been expecting more, actually—pot, maybe prescription pills. And because it was Sarah, I drank more that night than I ever had before. In Sarah’s world, more was always better. “I love you,” I remember telling her as she refilled the squat motel glasses. “You’re a good drunk, Lauren,” she said, and we toasted. I don’t remember anything we said after that, though I’ve spent years trying to recapture at least one sentence, one word. I don’t remember taking off my socks or crawling under the covers or passing out. I don’t remember what woke me up, if it was just the pounding in my head or nausea that made me lurch to my feet in the middle of the night. 12

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“

I realized that nothing was an accident, not her insisting I come to Allerton this summer, not her telling me she knew I’d lied, not her lying to me in turn, nothing, not even the bags of chips or the bucket of ice.”

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I do remember finding Sarah in the blue-tiled bathroom. I can see her there, curled into herself on the slick floor of the shower stall, the Do not disturb door hanger for housekeeping clipped over the low neck of her damp white t-shirt and the blood trickling over her bare legs. I remember being confused. I remember thinking, wait, this will make sense in a minute, I just need to vomit first. And I did, into the toilet that stood just four feet away from her body. I remember resting there for a moment, head on my forearm, panting and swallowing to get rid of the acidic burn in my throat. And then turning back to my cousin, and saying, “Sarah?” and touching her ankle, that bare, slightly damp, chilled knob with skin stretched over it, and then following the trail of blood up to her forearms. And it was somehow not surprising when I found myself calling the police; it was logical, normal. Grounding. It was what I was supposed to do, and I was doing it when I was supposed to be doing it. This I was sure of, and that certainty kept everything at a distance until my aunt and uncle were there, until the EMT was talking about severed radial arteries, until I realized that nothing was an accident, not her insisting I come to Allerton this summer, not her telling me she knew I’d lied, not her lying to me in turn, nothing, not even the bags of chips or the bucket of ice. Everything had meaning. The smallest things, such as the still-open window on the left side of the Honda in the C’mon Inn’s parking lot, took on the 13

significance of a suicide note.

My mouth is dry as I climb the steps to my aunt and uncle’s front porch. I lift my hand to knock twice before my knuckles touch the painted wood, and even then they tap hesitantly, too lightly for anyone to hear. I take a deep breath, shake my head, and make myself rap harder. I step backward when the door opens. Her hand still on the knob, my Aunt Beth stands in front of me, staring at me for a second before her eyes shy away from mine. “Aunt Beth,” I say, and finally she looks at me again. I am an inch or two taller than her, and I can see where the center part of her hair has widened, leaving a small bald track. Her expression is wary. “Lauren.” “Who is it, Beth?” I hear my uncle’s voice call from inside the house. Neither of us moves nor responds. The door is still only partly open, and my aunt is still holding it tightly between us. “Beth?” My uncle’s footsteps are slow. He appears in the hallway behind her, stopping short when he sees me. And then, “Lauren?” “Hey, Uncle Mark,” I say. He has grown a mustache, a beard—beneath his thick eyebrows, my uncle’s face has become a series of tufts and crags. He blinks a few times as I wet my lips, trying to think of anything else I can say. And then, I don’t have to. “Well.” Uncle Mark nods. “You’re just in time for supper.” My Aunt Beth looks over her shoulder at him, then back at me. “There’s pot roast,” she tells me. “I made—I made a lot. I always make too much.” “I’m starving,” I tell her, even though it’s only four in the afternoon. “Let the girl in,” my uncle says, and my aunt looks at her hand as though surprised to see it still on the doorknob. She opens the door wider. “Come on in, Lauren,” she says.

Kristin Ginger earned her MFA at Boston University. She has traveled to India on a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and joined the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop as a Peter Taylor Fellow. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Ruminate and Word Riot, and a series of interviews she did with refugees were compiled for the book This Much I Can Tell You. 14

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POETRY

Walking in Spring Amid a Symmetry of Birch Trees by Kelly McQuain Inside the mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s illumined dark every ribboned thing unfurls: the thinker foretells the way days leave like pages moss scented, mushrooming fiddlehead ferns uncurling in the gloaming every sapling knowing time is only loaning you this world and love is a little blister of venom that stings and sings in the veins

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POETRY

How an Owl Spins Its Head Without Tearing Apart by Kelly McQuain The human neck is a delicate pulsing stem, pretty but poorly made. Torque or twist too much and carotid or vertebral arteries might rip— There’s no safe way to take the world entirely in, now in the pines as a branch dips and rises releasing to the air an unseen wingèd heft: a silhouette moving fast, like the idea of itself, flying above our clumsy, slow-turning heads. On a night that has already offered us an exchange of starlight for the erasure of a barn’s bright red, where an owl hoots now: surely he sees us, as skittish as field mice as he spins his neck. His arteries widening into impossible reservoirs —not narrowing—the further blood travels from his quick-beating heart. I wish that I were made such a way: unafraid, unmasked. Able to take in the world without tearing apart. Tonight, these woods are astir with words unsaid: How I’d risk my neck to swoop you up from this dark. Kelly McQuain’s writing has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Redivider, Kestrel, The Pinch, and Mead, as well as in numerous anthologies: Between: New Gay Poetry, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, The Queer South, and Skin & Ink. His chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, recently won Bloom Magazine’s poetry prize. McQuain has received multiple Pushcart nominations and has twice received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. www.KellyMcQuain.wordpress.com 16

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Interview: Jim Shepard The author Jim Shepard talks about the craft of writing with Mount Hope.

Jim Shepard is long-established as one of the most unique voices in American letters. As a short-story writer and novelist, he has ventured places others donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go, often into the deep folds of history: The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the 1964 Alaska earthquake, the Columbine High School massacre, the inner life of a French executioner, and most recently the Holocaust in his 2015 novel, The Book of Aron. Shepard is known as a meticulous historical researcher. A longtime professor of creative writing at Williams College, Shepard is also one of the most engaging people we know, both in print and in the flesh. Humor informs much of his work and discourse, which is why it was such a great pleasure to sit with him a bit in a recent visit to the Roger Williams University campus. Shepard is the author of seven novels and four short-story collections, and has been a recipient of The Story Prize and The Massachusetts Book Award, and has been a finalist for The National Book Award. MOUNT HOPE â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 9

TD: You seem primarily to gravitate toward the first person in much of your work. Is part of the appeal of that, with the characters you write, to occupy a particular consciousness rather than portray it?

TD: In other interviews, you’ve certainly noted that to write a Holocaust book enters a crowded field, even if Ron Charles of The Washington Post noted you have “produced a remarkable novel destined to join the shelf of essential Holocaust literature.” It seems to me that in many of your other notable historical works, you find the situation nobody much thought about: a French executioner, for example, in one of your well-known stories, “Sans Farine.”

JS: Yes. It’s also often my way of confronting head-on the hubris of what I’m attempting. I often think that the first step for me, when I’m imagining trying to bridge some of these empathetic leaps—many of which seem outrageous when I first consider them— is, well, to start with a voice. If you can’t imagine a voice, maybe you should give up trying to imagine the rest of that world. And conversely, I hope that maybe that voice will teach me more about that world. And by “imagine,” of course, I’m talking about a process of invention that follows and attempts to synthesize a lot of reading and research.

JS: I think that’s right. And I think that’s to a certain extent what I was trying to do in this case, as well: to write about the kind of person—the kind of kid—who nobody thought about, whose loss no one memorialized: the kind of kid no one would really miss. Not a hero like Janusz Korczak, and not a young person so thoroughly extraordinary—like Anne Frank—that her story would uplift as well as sadden, and so become part of lesson plans everywhere.

TD: Of course with rare exceptions, first person indicates survival: In The Book of Aron, that he can tell his story takes away an essential complication in a Holocaust book.

TD: Historical fiction has seemed to be in an extended Golden Age much different than the days of James Michener. What do you think appeals to readers about seeing the past through the lens of present day writers?

JS: Yes. Though oddly for me it does nothing much to diminish the ongoing feeling of impending doom.

JS: It may be that as we become more and more apprehensive about where we’re headed, where we’ve been becomes more and more illuminating. It’s both grimly satisfying and usefully energizing to realize that we have as an imperial state made the same mistakes as previous imperial states, for example.

TD: Did you find your way to first person deliberately, or did you find that seemed to yield your best results? JS: I toyed with the third person only very briefly before settling on the first.

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TD: What is the appeal to writers, or at least you, of writing historical works as opposed to contemporary society?

work of science—so I’m free to infer, as long as I’m inferring responsibly, as far as I can tell, and to make minor alterations: to conflate two trips, say, that seemed not so central to the main story, or two characters for the same reason.

JS: There’s also the clarifying usefulness of a little distance. Oscar Wilde’s way of putting that was: “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” It also probably feels to the reader a little less as though she’s being preached at.

TD: In terms of craft, you’ve said in other interviews you are not the kind of writer who could write in a coffee shop. How do you approach the “habit of writing?” What would you suggest to an emerging writer in terms of work habits and attitude toward the process?

TD: Research seems deeply important to you in the writing of historical fiction. How much do you feel committed to historical accuracy as opposed to affirmatively discarding fact to tell a better story?

JS: In terms of work habits, I’d suggest improving them: becoming more disciplined, since most writers I know, myself included, are an unstable mix of extraordinarily disciplined and not disciplined at all. Which is of course part of what attracted us to this life in the first place. In terms of attitude toward the process, I’d urge the emerging writer to not lose sight of her sense of play: her willingness to leave herself alone in the early stages of a work, when she has only the dimmest sense of what she’s up to, so that she might honor the fact that her intuition is likely a greater genius than she is.

JS: I think we come to literary fiction not only to teach us about our inner lives but also to learn about the world. So that we feel, reading War and Peace, as though we’re simultaneously educating ourselves about our emotions and coming to understand more about Napoleonic warfare. Because of my own desires as a reader, then, I feel a responsibility to the non-fictional aspects of my fictions—the history or the science—and try to make those aspects as accurate as I can. That said, I also recognize that especially in the case of history, historians disagree, and that there are all sorts of gaps, and that as our politicians continually teach us, facts are malleable things. And on top of that, of course, I recognize that I’m constructing an aesthetic object—not a history or a MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

Interview: Greg Jackson The author Greg Jackson talks about his upcoming book, Prodigals, with Mount Hopeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kevin Marchand

Greg Jackson grew up in Boston and coastal Maine. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Granta. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Virginia and has been a Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and a resident at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A winner of the Balch and Henfield prizes, he was a finalist for the 2014 National Magazine Award in Fiction. Prodigals is his first book.

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KM: What about the short story form appeals to you?

surprisingly long way. An entire career of great story collections, and you’re Lucia Berlin.

GJ: Well, they take a lot less time to write than novels. That’s near the top of the list … Stories, moreover, allow you to explore and experiment, to move between different projects, and to entertain an entire plot arc as you work. They license you to play with conceits that would grow tiresome at novel length and moments of being too small to sustain a bigger book. In this respect short stories may be closer and truer to life, more in touch with its scale and texture, than novels. It’s also the case that in the compression of the short story, you often find a degree of detailing and care that becomes, as you develop as a writer, more what you read for too. This is no doubt why so many short story writers are termed writers’ writers, a code word for talents of such rarefied gifts that remuneration and acclaim are destined to elude them.

Why do people prefer novels? Our attention spans are famously shrinking, but not our preferred book length, it seems. I really think it’s just that there is a period of discomfort at the beginning of every story when, as a reader, you must get your bearings and sort out the scenario; this is cognitively taxing, and people prefer to stay in the flow of a narrative they already understand. This same logic may well explain the triumph of TV over film. It would all be a nonissue if more novels were actually great. Instead, too often in my experience, a promising start to a novel is followed by a gradual disintegration of purpose and prose, until at last you have the sense of watching the author grit her teeth, close her eyes, and write joylessly to the end. Of course, my feelings on the matter are likely biased by jealousy and incompetence as a novelist.

KM: Could you see yourself writing a novel? Is there one in the works? GJ: I could, and it would not be entirely dishonest to say one is “in the works.” But while I relish the challenge of a big, complex book and look forward to returning to the form I loved first, I can’t help resenting the tyranny of the novel. You hear it said these days that we are living in a Golden Age of the short story. I don’t disagree, and yet people buy many more novels than they do story collections (presumably they read more, then), and the contracts for novels are proportionally bigger. Literary reputations are, with few exceptions, built on novelistic output. One great novel can get you a MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

KM: You did your MFA at the University of Virginia. What was your experience there like and what are your thoughts on MFA programs in general? GJ: If you can get a free ride and believe you want to write, an MFA is a great thing. That’s the long and the short of it. I had a good experience at University of Virginia, but I don’t think it matters much where you go so long as you aren’t accruing debt. An MFA isn’t really school. This is confusing. It’s funded time to write. The 21

degree won’t get you far on its own, and it’s very easy to wind up with an MFA and no career. At the same time it’s nearly certain that you won’t write anything good as an MFA student, so doing an MFA is signing up for cognitive dissonance of a particular sort: you have to pretend you’re rousing the unawakened soul when what you’re really doing is killing trees to fill a drawer.

begin to overlap.” I wonder what you think about this. GJ: I agree. I think we are constantly sacrificing the quality of our time together to other priorities and vitiated forms of togetherness. Technology is to blame. External pressures, real and perceived, are to blame. We live with the sense that there is always something that needs doing, something to check, refresh, update, or respond to, and with the perpetual fear that we are missing out or falling behind. We privilege not only quantity over quality, but the stimulation of newness and busyness over what we might ever call substance. As our tools—our means—get ever more efficient and enticing, we let the notion of any end to which they might deliver us grow fuzzier and fuzzier, until at last there is no end at all, only the process, the busyness itself. Adorno called this “the enthronement of means as ends,” the irrational place where purely rational (that is, instrumental) thinking winds up. We have become terribly good at managing simultaneous tasks of no importance and terribly diligent about devoting our time—our lives—to things that hold no meaning for us.

Hmm… That’s not the most uplifting answer. Maybe my own experience has just been that there’s something liberating in confronting the difficulty head-on and then committing to the difficulty. The end goal, after all, is independent of your hopes and expectations, and it can be freeing—honestly—to understand that you’re apprenticing yourself to something greater than, well… you. KM: One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Metanarrative Breakdown.” For me, it ties together many of the themes you hint at in the previous seven stories—disconnection and the role of narratives in our lives, to name a couple. One of the reasons Prodigals spoke to me deeply is it made all too clear the ease with which we fail to connect with the people around us. In a world that places ever more emphasis on speed, ambition, and advancement, it becomes harder and harder to slow down and let “the boundaries of ourselves and the world grow indistinct and

People who say I am taking a Cassandra’s view here—the outlook of a technophobe so nostalgic for an outmoded humanism that he can’t see all the things technology has given 22

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us—are, how to put this delicately, insane. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and one way the Kool-Aid works is quite literally to destroy the part of your brain that might miss the things that stand to be missed. It is unsurprising then that many people don’t see what the big deal is. But I have a strong sense that emotionally we feel the absence of things we may not consciously think we want. The truth is we’re not very good at knowing what we want (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “paradox of work”). We are biologically evolved to want things to be easy, low-energy, and rapidly gratifying, whereas we are culturally taught that our greatest rewards lie in difficulty, effort, and delayed gratification. Culture does not teach us this to punish us, of course, but because these virtues develop in us strength, skill, and self-knowledge—things we can take with us into the future and use to pursue our own avenues of meaning.

In the meantime, literature continues to perform its longstanding function, interrogating the hidden story of our emotional and psychic lives. As the pace of things continues to pick up and we lose more inclination and opportunity to stop and reflect ourselves, I hope literature might become even more vital in this regard. Of course, this hope counts on someone putting down her phone and picking up a book. And it is scary to stop and reflect these days, dangerous to consider the true state of your inner life, because a true accounting of your hope and love threatens to throw the light of folly on most of what you grant importance, prioritize, and do. KM: Following up on the last question, I was wondering about the second theme, the role of narrative in our lives. I think there is great wisdom when, in the same story, you write, “We rarely noticed the narratives we had let slip into place until events conspired to thwart them.” Do you think this the situation we are all in? What are the consequences of having these narratives “thwarted”? Would it be better to find a way to stop spinning these stories to ourselves or is that impossible?

There is naturally a “prisoner’s dilemma” at play here: the pointless busyness and hustle of so many of us is what creates the imperative behind this very busyness and hustle. You run the real risk these days, if you try to opt out, of failing to meet the world’s expectations and finding yourself socially and professionally outcast. It is probably too optimistic to hope that the mass-organizing potential of the internet—that is, the culprit—might offer a solution. But values change quickly, and even more so now that the internet is the vector of change. The role of culture—its main role, really—is to develop values that transcend and correct the impulses of our natures. Values that enable us to live together in modest harmony and find meaning in lives beyond the satisfaction of hungers and eschewal of pain. But cultural values are slow to adjust, and God knows there is a lot to adjust to these days. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

GJ: I do think this is the situation we’re all in. And to some extent it’s inevitable and appropriate that we weave and inhabit these narratives as we go about our days. The work of monks and poets, on the other hand, may be to resist such narratives, to step out of their current and contemplate them. To do this, of course, requires removing yourself partly from the life of the world, which is why monks and poets are lonely misfits. The wisdom granted in taking an outsider’s perspective comes at a price: the distance needed for the vantage is at once a distance from other people. 23

This is not to say that as a writer you transcend the compulsion to spin the narrative of your life. (Maybe very good monks do, I don’t know.) What does happen is that your sense of the absurd gets finer. Now, the absurd is an emotional metric: it measures the divergence between what seems real and true subjectively and what is called real and true in public. The more time you spend contemplating your subjective experience and refusing to sign off on secondhand ideas, the greater this divide grows, until at last the stories we tell in public, and the stories we conspire to tell as cultures, seem downright delusional.

the cognitive cost of figuring out a new story, but part too, I think, is coming face to face with the lie of identity. We are reminded once again that we don’t, and can’t, will ourselves from thin air. Why this seems important to me is that the lie of identity—the myth of self-creation— occupies the throne of our worst callousness. It discourages generosity and compassion, seducing us into believing, when we are strong, that we will always be strong, and where we are strong, that we made ourselves so. It encourages blindness and complacency, not only as we ignore the plight of others, but also as we lie to ourselves. We deceive ourselves regarding what we care about and what sort of world we want to live in because we take narrative continuity (that is, fiction) as baseline truth, when it is crisis (narrative breakdown) that underlies our most important and wakeful experience of living. (There is an interesting analogy to be made here to Agamben’s thesis in “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern”…)

Many of our most cherished narratives, for instance, seem to cluster around the notion that as individuals we are fixed and knowable quantities who take the form they do as a result of our intentions. This does not seem to me especially plausible, but then contingency, context, and chance are less flattering narrative agents. And we turn out to be fervently wedded to the idea that we each possess some important static thing called an identity. (If you think this is a human preoccupation, rather than a cultural one, the field of anthropology will come as a surprise.)

Crisis, in this view, is not only a bad thing. It awakens us to ourselves and to the world. “The vale of Soul-making,” Keats called it. And let’s be clear, we are all headed for crisis—medical, material, romantic, spiritual. The question is whether we can wake up a little before the emergency. That’s my question, at least. Whether we can cultivate lives of some wakefulness and attentiveness and make decisions from within this clarity. Even if we shouldn’t hope to keep from telling ourselves stories, we can always aspire to be on better terms with the mechanics of narrative construction and begin thereby to guard against our worst and most prideful follies.

As you note, the idea behind the story in question—the idea alluded to in the title, at least—is that it is often only when a narrative falters, when the story we are telling can no longer be made to agree with reality, that we understand we have been telling ourselves a story at all. The story we have been telling to this point almost certainly exaggerates our own agency, and when it breaks down we confront the true scope of chance and fortune in our lives. In having to begin a new story we feel an uncomfortable grinding of gears: part of it is abandoning expectations, part is 24

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KM: Are the seeds of your stories generally situations or characters? In my case, the situation usually comes to me first, and perhaps this is one reason that my characters end up flat… Is there a pattern to how your stories emerge or does it vary from story to story?

KM: What is your writing schedule like? Do you write every day, wait for inspiration to strike, or do something else entirely? GJ: I really don’t think there’s any such thing as inspiration. Some ideas may not have fully ripened and you may do better to focus on other projects until they do, but writing is one of the best ways of thinking, perhaps the very best, and you will always come to more ideas writing than waiting around for things to pop into your head.

GJ: If those are the two options—situation or character—I suppose I start with a situation. Of course situations tend to involve characters, so the initial setup often dictates a character or two. Once I have an idea, I usually put it on the back burner for a few months to see if I keep thinking about it (the best sign that there’s something there) and to see if I stumble on the right complicating event. If the best initial situations are compelling for reasons I don’t fully understand, the best complicating events also defy obvious symbolic or metaphoric meaning. Nonetheless, they somehow turn the initial situation on its head in just the right way. This is simply a matter of intuition and feel as perhaps the word “somehow” indicates.

I do write every day if I can. It’s a frustrating day that I can’t. I remember not so long ago thinking that it sounded like torture to write every day, but what professional writers don’t tell you, or never told me, is that the actual, moment-to-moment experience of writing gets much more pleasurable the more you do it. The initial adjustment is painful, but most of the pain of writing comes in confronting the distance between what you want your writing to be and what it is. As you improve, this distance narrows a bit, and feelings of freedom and control, of satisfaction and play become more pronounced and consistent.

The opening scenario and complicating event are typically all I need to start writing. But so much of a story and the fictional world that sits around and behind it are discovered in the writing that it would give a false impression to suggest that these starting points decide the story that emerges. They provide instead a scaffolding for the exploratory construction of writing. Eventually, as in all construction, the scaffolding is removed, and what stands on its own may reflect the shape of the scaffold or not. A meaningful revision process asks you to accept that you might be telling quite a different story from the one you thought you were. The reality inside a fictional story is, at day’s end, no less unyielding than the reality without. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

KM: How did it feel to have your stories published in prestigious magazines like Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta, and The New Yorker? What was the journey upward like? How long had you been writing before you began to see some success? GJ: It felt… great? I had been writing for a long time—half my life—before I published anything. The breakthrough you allude to came when I was 31. I don’t think I’d written anything any good until I was 29 or 30, so in a sense success followed my own development with merciful promptness. I certainly spent a 25

few years in an awful uncertainty, wondering whether I could trust my own judgment, or the world’s, and so it was validating and in a deep way reassuring to see work I thought was good get recognized by editors and publishers. I felt relatively not-crazy for about two weeks. Then, like old friends, the usual fears and doubts came back with more challenging and better informed complaints. KM: What advice would give to young writers today?

“

GJ: Pursue writing as a career for love of writing, not to flatter a self-image. Make it a regular practice, even if that means writing for short amounts of time and even if you write nothing very good. Be brave in confronting your failure, understanding that, while it is hard to write compelling fiction and takes a long time to get good, you will improve more quickly if you engage with rather than hide from your shortcomings. Don’t give up: this is almost certainly the main difference between writers who make it and those who don’t.

Pursue writing as a career for love of writing, not to flatter a selfimage.”

KM: Page 122: “How is it some people listen to the wind blowing through the vacancies of their hearts and hear a voice urging them on in flight, and some don’t hear it at all?” It was sentences like this one that made Prodigals such a treat for me. Although I know this is almost certainly an impossible question, I would love to know something about the origins of such a beautiful question. Is this— anxiety over the nature of ambition, the ability of some people to stave off meaninglessness— something you already have in mind when you begin a story? Or does is arise as you are working your way through a tale? Has the 26

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act of writing ever allowed you to glimpse an answer to such dilemmas?

coexist with the realism of materialist and secular life. I hold out hope for literature in this regard, but it would be self-satisfied and wrong to say it has resolved the dilemma in my life. I feel more spiritually alive writing perhaps, more in touch with what I would call “meaning in life,” but as the title character in my story “Tanner’s Sisters” remarks, too deep an engagement with spiritual and artistic life can make you unfit to live. Most of our lives does not take place in moments of transcendence, and the interests of the spirit run largely counter to the practical, material considerations on which modern society is built.

GJ: I’m glad to end with this question, feeling I’ve been a bit unsentimental above, when much of what matters to me about literature is precisely the depth at which it engages sentiment and its rejection of worldly life and material success as territories of sufficient meaning. As one of culture’s spiritual offices—with art, religion, and myth—literature concerns itself foremost with questions of meaning, purpose, and emotional life. In opening a channel between our typically insuperable privacies, the solitude of subjectivity, literature helps us investigate how we may recapitulate one another, how we differ, and why.

Am I better prepared for when my governing narratives break down? Am I emotionally or spiritually insulated from hardship, disappointment, and placeless longing? Hardly. I don’t feel I have to generate internal movement through flight, busyness, change, or noise, and I may need less in general from the world beyond my head (to steal a phrase from Matthew B. Crawford). But needing less in this way risks a terrible detachment. You don’t want to take it too far. We should need more from one another, ask more, give more.

As you anticipate, I can’t retrace the genealogy of the passage in question with any precision, except to say that it’s clearly an idea close to my heart, kindred to things I have written elsewhere, and likely the central question of a book titled Prodigals; it occupies the heart of the story in which it appears, “Amy’s Conversions,” which story occupies the heart, literally and thematically, of the book. I don’t know what else to say without repeating myself: we dissolve the possibility of being present with one another and ourselves in the acid of ambition, and we spend our lives mostly in pursuit of things that don’t matter to us, and can’t. If you don’t sense a vacancy in yourself and hear the urgings of other voices, other callings, you aren’t paying attention. Whether flight is the answer, though, or what the answer is, are much harder questions. It would be nice to say that storytelling offers some appropriate meeting point where the longings of the spirit can MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

NONFICTION

Silent Cider Mill by Ruth Towne I. Cider Mill Pond lived long ago. A vertical water mill once hammered the passing pool and ground waves with its runner stone. A slight vapor once rose as the paddle slapped the stream again and again, like a beaver marking the water with a defensive clap. Mark would perch in the bow. Ethan and I would fold ourselves on the fiberglass floor. My father, steadfast in the stern, would guide the canoe. The four of us would cast our translucent lines across Cider Mill Pond when it yet lived. Father and son would slide us toward the dam, where the fish sunned themselves in shallower waters. I would close my eyes, expecting at any minute the dam to lower its concrete lip and swallow us into Maple Swamp Brook. Once, we fished at night. We baited lines on the banks of Cider Mill Pond in the same place where in daylight we would launch our fiberglass rafts. That night, my brothers caught hornpout. I released an eel. Sometimes, I think about the way that snakish thing reflected forward and back on the line, curving the bright of the flashlight against its leather. I wonder if that eel still resides in Cider Mill Pond. We tamed our lot of forest, transformed trunks into bunkers, and battered beeches into wigwams. We searched for white birches but found few. Our father taught us to scavenge for berries we might recognize and avoid those we encountered as strangers. And any time we encountered ferns, we used our walking sticks to scatter them like flocks of roosting birds.

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II. The mill never moves; the pond slips past it in thin sheets of splashes that shine like black ice. Cider Mill House in disrepair now opens itself. It exhales the blight of books through the fissure in its roof. Now, yellow oak leaves give hue like the wrinkled pages of the bloating books they alight upon. In January, powder falls through the peak and completes the geometric pattern of the rug on the oak floor. In April, the mists melt the ice, lap the inside of the windowpanes, and puddle under each sill. In August, cloudbursts storm past columned crossbeams and weep down the walls. In November, the final frost films on the abandoned dining china so that it seems the cupboards are museum exhibits behind glass. Cider Mill House released its spirit through the cleft in its peak. Cider Mill Pond never speaks. Yet, it causes the wind and water and weary leaves around it to pause. Were it more than a shallow impoundment of warm-water fish, were it more than ten acres long and six feet deep, were it ripe with ice ready for harvest—perhaps if Cider Mill were not so humble, Cider Mill House would speak. But it will never shout or mumble or even whisper. So three-seeded mercury, maidenhair ferns, and Allegheny vines pause and advance on. So ruffed grouse, green-winged teals, and hooded mergansers pause and drift on. So grass pickerel, yellow bullhead, and rainbow brook trout tread on. The spirit of Cider Mill Pond has passed on.

Ruth Towne is an emerging author from Southern Maine. Recently, The Magnolia Review featured her nonfiction piece “Nine Months of Conflict Taught Me How To Say ‘No’” and Foliate Oak published three of her poems, “Perkins Cove Port, Ogunquit,” “The Red Paint Grave,” and “Nor’easter.” She spends her spare time helping high school and college students improve their writing, and she also enjoys hiking and running in New England with Gunner, her German shepherd. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

POETRY

Acorn by Claire Kinnane Poised on its side, it rests discreetly on the border between the playground and the woods. Just below the chain-link fence, motionless on a bed of wood chips. I lift her. Turn and turn; wood smooth like Mom’s guitar, top round like Grandpa’s cap. I keep it clenched in my palm through Handwriting and Math. Unfold my fingers to check on it when Ms. Matthews drops the chalk. On the bus ride home a cool wind blows in bursts through a half-cracked window. I hold my jewel up to the light, between my thumb and forefinger, allow the air to dry the sweat of my palm. The girl next to me is reading, the bullies are seats behind; the world is just safe enough to hold my secret prize in an open hand.

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POETRY

Broken Watch by Claire Kinnane Off by seven hours for five years, she tick-ticks, hiccupping cricket, in the dusty darkness of a bedside table. Numerals dressed in elegant font, her glass face unscratched, my demented beauty queen, who tells nothing right but never fails to tell. If I turn her in for fixing, the cold terror sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d feel, her hands twisted back and back so far in time or far ahead. It would break her copper heart to have been so wrong. So now and again I hold her limp body in my hand, lift her just under my nose and take a feigned, earnest glance at the unreal time.

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POETRY

Three-Legged Dog by Claire Kinnane You are happy to be pulled. You are happy. Nostrils flaring, beating like hearts, sun flat and bright on your sleek head like the hand of a priest. Your three legs curled as cozily as four on a folded violet quilt. Your owner wheels you to a stop in your shining red wagon. You glance at me; I know you smell anxiety rising like a fume. I smile just for you, so youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll know the fear has nothing to do with you and wonder if your nose detects subtler truths about me, if it can pull some fearless element from the bundled fever that is my human bone.

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POETRY

Spirit in the Orchard by Claire Kinnane A week after you died, I’m apple picking at an orchard deep in the country, the air pungent with cider from a slipshod kiosk, the smell of warm piecrust fills my living lungs. I take you with me as I walk from tree to tree, nearly tripping on fallen Jonathans, scanning for the deepest reds, learning with my fingers what is shadow, what is bruise. Your body freshly below, miles away has sunk beneath my grief. What floats is you. How you assume the weight of everything. You are a half pound of Honey Crisps, hanging from my wrist, you are the splintered apple picker – the long pole sprawling seven feet, balanced on my shoulder. You are the pull on my wrist, the pinch in my neck, you are where the immaculate skin ends and the dark soft bruise begins.

Claire Kinnane is a writer and teacher from Washington, DC. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from American University in 2010. She’s been published in Big Lucks, Timber, and a variety of local publications. She currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband and beagle. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

NONFICTION

EMBLUJ by Deborah Thompson

1. The elderly man works his crossword puzzles in no time flat. Sitting at the next table over with my large dark roast, I’m still working my Jumble while he finishes the local paper’s warm-up crossword and moves on to The New York Times. The coffee shop keeps a bin of communal newspapers, so we see each other’s work. He finishes every crossword, even the Sunday ones. He creates meaning while I look for order. I sit in the coffee shop every day grading papers. I’m slow, possibly the slowest grader in the whole entire world, and getting slower with age. The coffee shop gives just the right balance of background noise to keep the loneliness at bay. The Jumbles are my reward for grading X number of undergrad papers. On a bad day, X=1. Several of my high school classmates were geniuses; I struggled to keep up. One went on to become an aeronautical engineer with NASA. Another 34

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writes about technology for The New York Times and hosts a show on PBS. I became an English professor at a state school. There was a time when I longed, even agonized, to know how genius felt. Now I just want to get my papers graded. “‘Only the self exists’ theory” is the first crossword clue. The man has written SOLIPSISM. PEOMT stumps me. I want to turn the O into a Y and make EMPTY. Finally I unscramble it into TEMPO. 2. I haven’t seen the crossword man for months, but he appears again, opening the paper to the puzzles page. “You’re so fast with those crosswords,” I say. “No.” He shakes his head. “I used to be, but no more. I can’t think right. I’m slow. I just can’t…” He gestures, his hands trying to unscrew invisible knobs coming out of each ear as if the knobs should rotate some internal alignment, making the thoughts click back into their grooves. MOSYRT unscrambles to STORMY. I get this one quickly, thrilled with the confirmation that chaos can still click back to order. I see later that the old man can no longer get the five-letter word for intelligent. 3. A few months later he’s in again, accompanied by a young woman who looks like a caregiver. “I’ve missed you,” I say. He doesn’t recognize me. He looks like he’s aged years in these few months, shrunken into a garden gnome, staring at the coffee cup he holds with both hands. “Do you want the crossword puzzle?” I offer him the Entertainment section of the paper. “No more crosswords,” he says. He points to his head. “It’s all just noise.” After years of grading papers to the café’s ambient thrum, I’m beginning to find just noise in my own brain, just neurons crossing wires in screeching feedback loops or short-circuiting. I fear my own demise has begun. “Here’s where the truth gets wonky,” a student writes. “I VOID WARRANTIES,” a coffee shop patron’s T-shirt broadcasts. “That’s the roll of the unconscious,” writes another student with fortuitous misspelling, spinning the psyche into a bespoken wheel. “He wanted to do surgery on my ears, too,” I overhear, “but I said no, that’s too close to my brain.” Someone asks, “Do you think we’re MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

getting dumber as a society, or is that just something you think when you’re in your forties?” Students’ and patrons’ words collide and collude. I grant myself a preemptive Jumble reward. Unscrambling NAMEBO to BEMOAN, I feel a little better. My eyes wander over to the grid of blank crossword squares. What is a three-letter cage component? 4. I haven’t seen him for years. I still think about him when I do my Jumbles. Crosswords mostly stay undone. Occasionally I give them a halfhearted stab, and think of his balding head bent over the squares, his white hair so translucent I could almost see the wheels in his brain revolve. I’ve gotten better at the Jumbles. That happens when you do something every day for years: you retrain your brain. But for all other functions, my 51-year-old neurons are slowing down. Recall is especially sluggish: words and names jostle among all the background reverb. It’s getting crowded in there, all noise. Still, on a good day of the Jumble, I’m playing out of my head and the answers just appear. BLONOG to OBLONG. TPEHD to DEPTH. I’m flying. This is the sharpest I’ll ever be. What is a four-letter word for nevermore?

Deborah Thompson is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University, where she helped to develop the new master’s degree in Creative Nonfiction. She has published creative essays in venues such as The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, Upstreet, and Briar Cliff. 36

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Life on the Rake Images by David H. Wells Words by Ronnie Forrest

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Quahogging is a way of life in Rhode Island, and the pursuit of those delectable bivalves is a profession as close to nature as a career can be. In wetsuits, in dry suits, and most often in small boats and wielding the long rakes, the quahoggers of Narragansett Bay go down to the water in the first light of dawn and come home with their bags of mud-slick prizes. It’s hard work for hard-won harvests, but for many it’s freedom from something else. Award-winning photojournalist David H. Wells has documented the work of this unique and hardbitten work force, and we present his images here of some of those people. Accompanying these are the words of Ronnie Forrest, Rhode Island quahogger. On an autumn day, Forrest shared his perspectives on his own work with Mount Hope’s Gabriella Femia.

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When I was 12 or 15, one of the buddies I hung around with, his father was doing it and he had the little boat and we used to sneak over there and take the boat and go quahogging. We used to go to Rocky Point. I don’t know. We’d work all day and make a dollar or a dollar-fifty and we’d sell to the guys out here and we’d go to the Rocky Point Amusement Park and spend the day in there, go in the saltwater swimming pool and go on the rides. You go on everything for, I don’t know, fifty cents I think. Spend the whole day there. That was in 1959 maybe. Then I got a job. After that, I had a job.

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We use bullrakes. They call it bullrake. It’s a metal rake with an aluminum pole, anywhere from twenty feet of aluminum pole to fifty-five feet maybe, fifty-four, fifty-five feet, depending on how much water you’re in, you have to change it, adjust the pole the deeper what you go, the shallow water you go, less pole, less pole. There’s a technique to it too. It’s not easy. Not everybody can do it and it takes a while to learn. I’m sixty-six and I still learn something every day. If I don’t, it’s time to quit and do something else I guess but you always learn a little trick, a little secret or something the more you’re at it. Same with fixing cars. Any of these guys that say, “I know everything. I’ve done that before. I can do anything on a car,” until they have this new problem and they can’t do it so you learn something every day and if you’re not learning something every day, you’re not doing it right, I guess. There’s guys that won’t do with wooden sails and they have baskets on them, rakes on them.

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It’s much easier to work in the summer because it’s more comfortable. In the wintertime, you have to bundle up and the quahogs go a little deeper. They turn over. Like now, they’re starting to roll over. They turn over and then they dig themselves down deeper so they do go down in the bottom. They are deeper so it is a little harder in the wintertime than it is in the summertime, not only because of the cold, the way you got to dress with rubber gloves to keep your hands dry and heavy boots to keep your feet warm and fighting the ice. You got ice too. The bullrake pole gets iced up and your hands… they slice through your hands.

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A few years ago, I come close to dying out there. It was a management area in East Greenwich and I went out and it was all ice in the cove here so I busted out of the ice and went out by myself and went down there and worked all day. On the way back, the wind had changed out of the south and blew all the ice that was drifting out there all back into the cove and I got swept in ice and took me, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, five or six hours to get in, busting through the ice. No one was there to save me. I was freezing. I was shivering. I had a little propane heater in the cabin and on the way back that kept me from freezing, because I definitely would have froze. It was cold.

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When you go out there and you work, you start taking away the clothes off as you’re working. Even if it’s cold, you start sweating because it’s hard work pulling a rake. I mean you’re jumping up and down and I only weigh 140 pounds so I probably jump more than most guys so you do get warm and you take layer and layer and layer, then when you quit, now you’re damp. You’re wet and then you’re in the chill center and you got to be careful then. You got to get right at home or start putting your layers back on and try to keep warm because now you’re sweating and your body gets cold. You start shivering.

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Quahoggers are a different breed than everybody else, I’ll tell you. I know a lot of people that I’ve taken a lot of people myself, neighbors, friends, and stuff, taking them out there and, man, they want to do it. They says, “I’m going to get a license. I’m going to go quahogging. I’ll do this. I’ll do that,” and one of them will work the rake for a few minutes if they last that long they say, “Boy, you’re crazy. I don’t care if you get $300 an hour. I wouldn’t do this.” There’s a technique to it and it’s pretty hard. It keeps you in shape. Let’s put it that way: I’m sixty-six years old and I’m still in pretty good shape.

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I took a buddy of mine two years ago. He’s dead now but a few years ago, we went to the transplant [a re-seeding of managed quahog beds] down there. They had some Hostess Sno Balls. You know the Sno Balls there, Hostess cupcakes, like they’re chocolate cake with coconut stuff on them, pink coconut? They were sitting in the boat for, I don’t know, six months up in the compartment of the cabin. We were hungry and we’re coming home and he says, “Hey, can I grab one?” I says, “Sure, go ahead.” He took a bite and he says, “This don’t taste good.” I flipped it over. I says, “Louie, look at it. It’s all blue mold, man.” He was spitting it out and trying to wash it out. Then I took the other one and just inhaled it, ate it right down.

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It’s open year round. Like now, getting into the bad weather, I don’t go every day. Every day last week I worked, and the last month probably I worked almost every day, but not that it gets colder. I’m old, so I’m going to pick my days now. For working all summer, I can choose and pick my days. Like tomorrow. Tomorrow’s supposed to be real cold and we’re going to have a northeast wind again. Northeast wind isn’t favorable down there where we’re working. We’re in the open so a lot of people won’t go tomorrow, saying, “I don’t need them,” but the end of the week’s supposed to warm up. The wind is covered by the land over there and it’s usually pretty sheltered.

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I worked at a car dealership, auto mechanic for years and then in the ‘80s, I got back into quahogging again but I always did it part time on the weekends and stuff even though I had another job. I always used this for a fill-in job, side job, whatever. Then the ‘80s, I quit working on the cars and went quahogging full time again all through the ‘80s into the early ‘90s and then I opened an auto repair shop and I had that for 25 years but on the weekends, all days that I had off, I still went quahogging or fishing or something. You don’t want to waste no time. You’re going to work your life away.

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It’s tough. It’s like going to the gym and just working out three, four, five hours, whatever, straight. Usually everybody works straight through. Once in a while you sit down and have a little break, coffee or snack or something. I don’t but I see a lot of guys do. I used to smoke a half a pack of cigarettes out there, down every ten or fifteen minutes and having a cigarette. I quit ten years ago now and I can work twice as good as I did when I was twenty-five or thirty years old because I don’t smoke anymore. Not too many of them guys is left though. I think there’s only a couple of them. They’re thinning down out there too. There used to be hundreds. Now there’s... I don’t see many quahoggers at all now. I think everybody’s quitting and going to get jobs and I don’t know but there’s still enough quahogs for everybody that’s out there so everybody seems to do good.

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David H. Wells is a freelance photographer, workshop instructor and blogger based out of Providence, Rhode Island. Affiliated with Aurora Photo, he specializes in intercultural communication, the use of light and shadow to enhance visual narratives and photo-essays used for publication and exhibition. His work has been featured in LIFE magazine, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Geo Magazine, and The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. He has had exhibits at Brown University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Houston FotoFest, and the Visa pour l’Image Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan, France. He has won awards from Pictures of the Year, the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, American Photographer Magazine, Society of Newspaper Design, and SocialDocumentary.net. His photo-essay on the pesticide poisoning of California farm workers was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He teaches photography workshops around the globe and was featured in Photo District News as one of “The Best Workshop Instructors.” His photo essay on Third-World Globalization appeared in Mount Hope 6.

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POETRY

The Good Year by Julie Swarstad Johnson That was the year I found webs bridging roof and power line, branch and brick, filigree across every open space on my porch. And all those spiders, so delicate among the strands, wincing back, nervous, timorous at the slam the screen door makes. That year I rushed to a job I almost quit weekly while the sky grew wider and emptier every month: vast, shallow plane like the shore-end of the ocean, but pinned in place, every shiver restrained. At nineteen I had discovered, on a beach in Mexico, that black band on the horizon, at nightfall, when ocean and sky blur into the deepest intimation of emptiness opening unexpectedly, the possibility of no satisfaction. Ahead, in that flat year behind a desk, that year—instead of wildfire—green flushed the mountainsides, outrageous, weird blush applied too enthusiastically. And the color: hue of a dry country, in which the eye perceives something held back, some wavelength suppressed or greyed out, but what remains turns brilliant, translucent, lit from the inside, stained glass seen for the first time in darkness, coloring the night even when I look away.

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POETRY

Minnie Gulch, July 1998 by Julie Swarstad Johnson

After Ciaran Berry

Mountain flower pressed in a book. Our tires grinding above the cliff face, and in my mind, something lodged like a half-seen reflection, or a glass bird, or water rushing out of sight. It’s all so diaryish, so 24-exposure camera purchased for vacation, so still life of my family at the highest pass, the commemorative sign. What I believe in: the blueness still left in a mass of snow at the peak, a marmot’s cinnamon bulk in the sunlight, columbine plucked from the shade and folded onto itself in the guidebook. And what really happened: my growing desire—good American—to possess the narrow canyon, to glide on ore tram wires, a glass hummingbird on fishing line at the tourist shop in Ouray. Mementos of summer. Same shop, different colors tumbled. Stones for children to treasure up in faux velvet and ribbon drawstrings, manganese and pyrite to play at pulling

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from the ground. Wooden blocks shaped into an ore crusher with masking tape, yarn tram wire above the carpet river and a deathless valley. Minus the shadow, the stamp mill’s hulk, its misremembered, vast inside seen through still intact windowpanes, separating the world into what can be touched, what can be dreamed. Padlock and chain link, steep darkness behind a sign left out of my play gulch along with the fear of the edge, turn at the road’s narrowest, rutted passage, grind of the engine strong as the whir of pine needles filtering the wind. Fear has everything to do with my dream of diving and diving and diving into some radiant distance, some river flowing in the darkness miles beneath my feet. Shade-loving columbine layered into the book and never seen again. Spun color suspended near my window. Beauty I bought. The stream pushes downhill, picks up my child-heat, my damp, my seeping breath.

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POETRY

Liminal Space by Julie Swarstad Johnson Curve-billed thrashers sleep in the darkness outside the house tonight, every night. Such a discovery just before the world recedes to constellations of air pushed from my open mouth, dreams passing into the corners of every room, something unrecognizable without the right story. Some nights, the moon floats low over the alley. It lights up the corners where each room shelters, where it crouches over the strangely familiar countries encountered in the moments before waking. Then, the house becomes a building again, brick on brick, dream-selves paled to ghosts by the glow that settles into the cholla with the nest precarious in its arms. Our rooms flood with moonlight. Our rooms hold nothing, reflect everything back. Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of the chapbook Jumping the Pit. Her poetry and book reviews have appeared in Passages North, San Pedro River Review, Bayou Magazine, Harvard Review Online, Poet Lore, and others. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she works for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. 64

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FICTION

Bird Boy by Patty Somlo He would not leave without those filthy birds. His mother understood, because he’d scratched out a message in the dirt. She told him this would be impossible. He could not have his way. The boy did not speak. He was small for his age, looking more like six or seven, even after his eleventh birthday. His mother still cut his thick black hair straight across the forehead, about an inch above his eyebrows, then along the sides of his face, where it stopped at the start of his jawline. The boy’s nearly black eyes dominated his face. He appeared to study the world. No one knew what went on in his head, because he didn’t speak and only scratched out messages occasionally. His name was Ahmed. Three years ago, days before he turned eight, Ahmed’s father left the house to join the fighters. Teachers, lawyers and even several engineers, including Ahmed’s father, had taken up arms to unseat Syria’s longtime dictator. Sarya, Ahmed’s mother, watched out the window until her husband disappeared from sight, and then sat down on the floor and sobbed. Ahmed didn’t understand what had happened, where his father had gone, but he cried too. He missed his father already. The pigeons arrived six months later, in a wooden cage constructed by Ahmed’s Uncle Fariq. Sarya wanted to tell Fariq to take those filthy birds away but they delighted Ahmed. Fariq came by every day after that, carefully instructing Ahmed in what he must do to care for the pigeons. There were five. The feathers were iridescent, purple-blue, almost pink in places. Ahmed was entranced by the birds and had taken his responsibility to care for them so seriously; he didn’t notice his mother’s crying. Fariq had scolded her, saying, “Don’t tell the boy yet,” and she had tried as best she could, in the tiny apartment, not to let him witness her sorrow. It had been Fariq’s idea to get the boy involved with the birds, so he would have something to help take his mind off the loss of his father. Ahmed began communicating with the pigeons. He liked to mimic the sounds they made—quiet, repetitive, percussive. He even started walking around the bedroom, where he kept the cage on a small table next to the window, bobbing his head up and down, the way the birds did when they MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

walked. If he learned a new song at school, he would sing it to the birds and watch as they appeared to perk up and listen. “I must tell him,” Sarya said to Fariq, after a month had passed. “He needs to know that his father has been killed. Ahmed is Mansoor’s only son. He should have the chance to mourn his father.” Fariq urged Sarya to wait a little longer. “One more week,” Sarya said. “I will tell him in a week.” The boy did not cry. Sarya thought he hadn’t understood, so she tried to explain. “Your father was a brave fighter. He fought to liberate our country. There was a fierce battle and he was shot. They say he didn’t suffer. He died instantly. “He is a hero. He showed a great deal of courage. You should feel proud.” Ahmed looked at her. His large dark eyes were opened wide. Sarya waited for the tears to come but they didn’t. “Do you want to say anything, my son?” The boy shook his head. He didn’t speak a word after that. Instead of speaking, Ahmed began to write notes. His teacher sent a letter home to Sarya, expressing her concern and suggesting that Sarya have her son checked out. Sarya lacked the money to pay a doctor and also hoped Ahmed’s speech would return on its own. But after two months passed with no improvement, the teacher wrote again. “Ahmed refuses to speak,” she wrote. “We cannot have him in class, as it takes too much of my time away from the other students to try to communicate with him. You will have to teach him at home.” Sarya’s hope that Ahmed would start speaking again began to fade as the months passed. Before she knew it, nearly three years had gone by without Ahmed uttering a word. Just as Sarya never could have imagined Ahmed not speaking for three years, neither would she have believed the exciting protests that began nearly five years before would escalate into an armed conflict lasting so long. She had remained in the country even after friends and relatives had gone. Now Fariq was here, saying that she and Ahmed needed to go. “You cannot stay any longer,” Fariq said. “But where will we go?” “There is a camp to the north,” he explained. “We will stay there for a time. After that, we will decide.” Sarya watched Fariq as he slowly made his way across the living room. He relied on two crutches to walk, having been stricken with polio as a child. Sarya knew this was the only reason her brother-in-law Fariq was still alive. If he had been able to easily run and walk, he would have left with Mansoor to 66

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fight and probably be dead by now. “You have to talk to him,” Sarya said to Fariq, the day they planned to depart. “He refuses to leave without those pigeons. You’re the one who brought him those dirty birds.” Fariq sighed. Unlike his sister-in-law, he figured there might be some way to take the birds with them to the refugee camp, but the car was already full. He couldn’t find a spot for the cage. As Fariq attempted to convince Ahmed that the pigeons would be happy to go free, the boy began to shake his head back and forth. The longer Fariq spoke, the faster the boy’s head snapped from left to right. When the head shaking didn’t convince his uncle, Ahmed stood up and began marching around the room, loudly stomping his feet against the floor. “All right, all right,” Fariq said, just as Sarya walked in the bedroom. “What’s going on here?” Sarya asked. “Ahmed. Stop that.” Ahmed kept right on going, shaking his head back and forth as he marched. “It’s not going to work,” Fariq told Sarya. “We’ll find a place for them somehow.” In the dusty camp, Ahmed became known as the Bird Boy. He was the favorite of the other children. Their noses running, dried snot stuck to their upper lips, dust lightening their hair, the children gathered around Ahmed and his wooden cage. They especially loved watching him mimic those birds, and soon the other children began doing the same. Sarya didn’t know what went on in Ahmed’s head since he refused to speak. She began to wonder if something had damaged his mind. Several times when they were back home, she had considered taking Ahmed to the doctor. But with her husband gone, Sarya was barely scraping by. A doctor’s visit was a luxury she couldn’t afford. “The boy doesn’t talk,” one of the old women in the camp said to Sarya, several months after they arrived. “Was he born this way?” Sarya studied the old woman’s face, her skin dark from the sun, wrinkled and dry. Beneath the heavy folds of her eyelids, the elderly woman’s gray-green eyes appeared kind. “No,” Sarya answered. “He stopped speaking after his father died.” “And never another word after that?” “Not one,” Sarya said, shaking her head. Then Sarya added, “Except,” and stopped. “Except what?” the elderly woman asked. The old woman had rested a warm weathered palm on Sarya’s forearm. Her fingers were long and slender, the nails cracked and yellow. Sarya leaned in close. “I think he talks to his birds. The pigeons,” Sarya whispered. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

The old woman was an herbalist, Sarya learned. Sarya told her that she had no money to pay but the old woman insisted that wasn’t necessary. She simply needed Sarya to help her climb the hills surrounding the camp to collect herbs. At first, Ahmed spit out the bitter-tasting brew his mother ordered him to drink. When she threatened to take his pigeons away, Ahmed swallowed the sour, dark drink as quickly as he could without burning his throat. Ahmed let the pigeons out of the cage during the day, not having a clue as to where they’d go. At dusk, the pigeons flew back, alighting one by one on the cage’s top. The boy began to imagine that he too could fly. He even let himself believe that his father was still alive, living by the sea where he had once taken his son. Ahmed pretended that he had grown a pair of strong wings and pictured himself landing on the sand in front of the bungalow where he had convinced himself his father now stayed. When winter arrived and Ahmed and his mother were still in the camp, the boy lost himself more and more in his fantasies. Shivering in the tent as snow fell outside, Ahmed could feel his wings lifting and lowering, as he soared up into the sky. He wanted to keep his pigeons inside the tent, now that it was so cold outside, but his mother said he could not. The boy didn’t know what to do. A voice in his head told him to let the pigeons go free and find a warmer place to live. When he felt sure his mother wouldn’t hear, Ahmed whispered that he wanted to go with them. Somehow, Ahmed and Sarya made it through that winter. The pigeons did too. The days warmed and grew longer. Wild blooms colored the hills. One by one, the pigeons flew away from the camp. Ahmed watched as they lifted into the air. The sun was so bright, he soon lost track of the birds in the sky. Afterwards, a bright line of white crossed his vision, even when he stared at the dusty tan ground. That evening, Ahmed waited for the pigeons to return. The sun dropped low in the sky. Now he could look up without the sun blinding him. The birds weren’t anywhere in sight. “Ahmed, you must come in and eat,” his mother announced. It was late and the sky had grown dark. The boy refused to leave the cage. How would the birds know to return if he wasn’t around? No matter how much Sarya tried to convince the boy to abandon his station next to the cage, he refused. While Sarya had wanted to leave the pigeons behind when they left home for the camp, she began to worry now 68

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what would happen to her son if the birds did not come back. The boy spent the entire night outside, even though in the early hours of the morning, the air had cooled. He stayed awake as long as he could but sometime after midnight his eyelids dropped and he didn’t open them until dawn. As soon as he woke up, Ahmed remembered the empty cage of the night before and looked over at the simple wooden structure. It was empty, just as it had been the previous night. For the past half-year, Fariq had stood in line outside the camp office just after dawn, on the first Thursday of every month. More and more people were fleeing his country, settling in camps like this one. The United Nations compiled lists and circulated them to the different refugee camps, as a way to reunite families. Fariq had little hope of ever seeing any of his remaining family or friends. But getting into line once a month and waiting, slowly making his way to the front, and finally taking time to scan the lists of names, let him believe for that brief time that all hope was not lost. Fariq knew that his brother Mansoor was gone. Yet he couldn’t accept it. Some days when he thought about Mansoor, Fariq convinced himself his brother could still be alive, because he had never seen his body. Of course, if he had been on hand for the burial, he would have needed time to grieve and acceptance would only have come later. But acceptance would eventually have come. With only rumor to go on, Fariq clung to the hope that Mansoor was still alive. He didn’t mention this to Sarya. It would have been cruel to lead her on, especially if there wasn’t a chance her husband had survived. No, Fariq didn’t reveal to Sarya the real reason he stood in line. Instead, he said, “I just want to see if any of the fighters we knew made it out alive.” The morning after the pigeons flew off without returning that night, Fariq was back in line. As he waited, breathing in dust picked up by the wind from the dry paths that wound between the white tents set up in rows as far as the eye could see, Fariq imagined reading Mansoor’s name and how that would make him feel. So many days now, Fariq wondered how he would be able to go on. For Fariq, the absence of hope was the cruelest punishment of all. The woman who usually stepped out of the office to tack the lists to the board was late. Fariq worried that there would be no lists today. He started to wonder if he’d gotten the day wrong but then smiled when he saw others standing in line. Hope was such a fragile thing. Fariq thought he had jinxed everything, simply by fantasizing the moment when he would read his MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

brother’s name. To wish for such an unlikely thing might cause it not to happen. Just when Fariq thought he would have to return to his tent without experiencing those few moments of hopeful anticipation as his eyes moved from name to name, the woman stepped out of the office. She didn’t glance at the line of men and women, a few holding crying babies, as she walked to the board, turned her back to the crowd, and began tacking up the sheets of white paper in a horizontal row next to one another and then in a second line below. Fariq averted his eyes from the board, as mostly women stood there reading the lists. He let himself glance back every few minutes, to see if they were done and it was time to move forward. Fariq felt that reading the lists ought to be a private time. Often he would see women walking away, heads bent down, their shoulders shaking, and he knew that they were crying. The first time through, Fariq didn’t find the name he was looking for. His gaze had been caught by another name, that of a man who had once been a boy Fariq knew in school. In that moment, Fariq recalled the boy he had been, frail and shy, not someone who would end up a fighter. When Fariq began scanning the lists again, his gaze skipped right over Mansoor’s name. Reaching the end of the lists, he realized that his mind had been lost in thoughts of childhood when he should have been paying attention to what he was reading and decided to scan the names again. Before he did, he mumbled a quiet apology to the people he knew were waiting in line behind him, for the momentary privilege of hoping to find a missing husband or son or grandson alive. He read the name and then opened his eyes wider to read it again. Of course, he thought, there must be more than one Mansoor Mohammed Maalouf in this world. But he read the name a third time and then let the name settle for a moment in his mind, as he might have refused to swallow a piece of sweet candy, leaving it to linger on his tongue. He told himself not to feel a bit of happiness until he confirmed that this Mansoor Mohammed Maalouf was, in fact, his brother. Ahmed had wandered off. He strayed beyond the camp, up into the dry hills where his mother had accompanied the herbalist. He was looking for his pigeons and the place a boy might be able to fly. A short distance from camp, Ahmed wished he had brought some water. A little further on, his stomach started to growl. He wasn’t going to cry because a boy his age wouldn’t, but he wanted to. The camp looked tiny from where he stood gazing down on it. He flapped his arms up and down. He even tried leaping from rock to rock when he lifted his arms but the motions didn’t take him anywhere. Neither did he 70

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spot his beloved pigeons. Not a single bird of any type flew past, or landed near Ahmed. He sat down on a cleared space, exhausted from the climb and his attempts to fly, hungry, his mouth dry. He made the sounds his pigeons used to make, letting his head dip forward as he did. Then he tried to picture his father at the beach. As soon as that image came up in his mind, Ahmed showed his father how he imitated the pigeons. He heard his father say, “That’s good, son,” right before he fell asleep. Sarya fainted seconds after Fariq shared his news. He slapped each one of her cheeks and shouted her name, in an effort to bring her around. Her eyes blinked rapidly, and then she opened them and stared at Fariq, as if the sight of her husband’s brother refused to make an impression on her. “Let me get you some water,” Fariq said, making sure Sarya could sit up on her own before he moved across the tent. He came back with a plastic bottle of water and held it up to her lips. “Drink a little,” he said. Sarya now remembered what Fariq had said before she lost consciousness. “Is it really true?” “Yes, it is. They will move Mansoor here tomorrow.” An hour later, Sarya went looking for Ahmed. As she walked, she tried to imagine how her son would react to the news that his father was alive and would be joining them tomorrow. She made her way along the narrow lane, with tents on both sides, inquiring of the women and some old men, “Have you seen Ahmed?” No one in the camp said they had. The sun had set behind the hills and Ahmed had still not come back to the tent. Sarya worried that he might have decided to go in search of his pigeons and gotten hurt or lost. About this time, Ahmed woke up from his long, hot sleep. He looked around, at first not sure where he was. Then he remembered everything that happened before he fell asleep—the pigeons flying off and not returning, his going up the hill to look for them without any luck, and his futile attempts to fly. It was almost too dark for Ahmed to see his feet, as he headed down the hill back to the camp. A part of him wanted to stay out all night, but he was too hungry and thirsty to wait any longer to return to the tent. Night settled over the camp but the white triangles of the tents stood out in the darkness. Ahmed could smell the aromas of food being cooked both inside and in front of the tents as he hurried back to his own. Just before he reached his tent, Ahmed thought he heard a familiar sound. Coo coo, coo coo, coo coo. He walked faster now, starting to jog, until MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

he reached the wooden cage next to his tent, only to find his pigeons perched there, waiting. “Coo coo, coo coo, coo coo,” he said to his birds. The pigeons answered him back, as he opened the cage and lifted each one in. “Is that you, Ahmed?” Sarya asked from inside the tent. The tent flap opened and Sarya stepped outside. “Where have you been?” she asked, raising a hand, as if prepared to swat him. But instead of hitting her son, she wrapped her arms around his bony shoulders and pulled him close. “I have something to tell you,” she said. Sarya leaned over and whispered in Ahmed’s ear, “Your father is alive.” The boy stood there for a moment, trying to take in the meaning of those four words. Then he answered his mother the only way he knew how. “Coo coo, coo coo, coo coo.”

Patty Somlo has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, one for storySouth’s Million Writers Award, and had an essay selected as a Notable for Best American Essays 2014. Author of From Here to There and Other Stories, Somlo has three forthcoming books: a short story collection, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil); a memoir, Even WhenTrapped Behind Clouds (WiDo Publishing), and Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing). Find her at www. pattysomlo.com. On Twitter @PattySomlo. 72

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NONFICTION

Flood Myth (Or, Along the Perimeter) by Michael Sweeney It’s at least partly true that our need for spirituality expands in the presence of scientific ignorance and desperation. For instance, in the hopes of staving off flooding, the Bronze-Age inhabitants of the Swiss Alps were known to encircle their villages with the skulls of their own children. Devastating floods had become such a regular presence in the region that they precipitated not only a mythos of the Lake Gods, but also of the apparent fondness these deities held for adolescent heads. One can’t help but wonder how this practice began; how, when the villagers hauled their own children’s skulls out to the road’s end and saw the flooding end, they had to contemplate whether the sacrifice had been effective, or that it was just a coincidence. And how, when they inevitably came to accept the divine explanation, it might have felt for them to agree that, yes, this was a logical practice to continue. In my own life, I’ve been desperate enough that I can empathize with a call to superstition. In my adolescence, I became afflicted with an autoimmune condition where, about once a year, my immune system came to believe that some foreign agent had invaded a narrow space with my right knee. My body responded by pumping this space full of a thick white fluid, until the knee swelled to the size of a grapefruit. This was called a flare. Even when my knee wasn’t flaring, there would always be some fluid in it, each squishy step serving as a water gauge of just how short-circuited my immune system had become. The beginning of a flare didn’t hurt, but once the pressure built up and my skin started to stretch, the pain would become almost unbearable. Left untreated, it would probably have burst like a head in an old horror movie. Sometimes I’d wonder if just letting this happen would be better than draining it with huge needles and plying my body with a lifetime of steroids, chemotherapy, and deductible-shattering subcutaneous injections. I wonder if the Alpine villagers felt similarly, if they would sometimes fantasize that the flood would just get on with it already, drowning MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

the world in a singular, fluid swoop. The mental anticipation of the flares was often worse than the actual physical consequences. Without any concrete data, I developed my own ways of measuring the joint. Lying down or standing upright, leg raised, rotated or straight, measured at rest or after walking around a bit, the fluid would droop beyond my bones at different points and with varying results—sort of like how a car’s oil dipstick will read differently depending on whether the engine is cold or hot. I grew to choose my methodology selectively, in order to construct a favorable narrative and to avoid the increasingly undeniable fact that each day things were worse than the last. I imagine a similar denial might have ensued for the Alpine villagers, the anxiety from persistent rain foreshadowing the moment when the ground actually swelled and buckled and started to gurgle out from under their soggy footsteps. To the villagers, the rain cycles and the spring thaws must have been like echoes from the last flood, and persistent reminders that the next would come soon enough. They certainly weren’t the only civilization to contemplate the flood myth. The Hindu Shatatha Brahmana, the Greek Deucalion, the story of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible—these all have stories with similar themes, legends of submergence, purification, and the purging of sin and evil; it’s no small coincidence that these things are still called Acts of God. I’m lucky to have been raised without these mythologies, or to be taught of any omnipotent beings drifting through the ether, alternating between love and reproach like the flicker of a fluorescent bulb in a faulty ballast. I’m lucky, because in the worst moments of my illness, my parents would have otherwise had to explain why God had made me, only to toy with me. Instead, as I matured, randomness became my savior. Pure chance, plain old shit luck. I could deal with those odds better than I could a psychopathic deity tugging at my destiny. But at thirteen years old, as I lay in bed late one night and my leg jettisoned enough heat to melt the frozen pea bags faster than the freezer could re-form them, I found myself desperate. Medication had been insufficient, I couldn’t get to the doctor every day to have him drain the thing, and there seemed to be no end to how much fluid it could absorb without bursting at the seams. For weeks before that night I had eaten only brown rice, starving myself in the hopes of discovering some unknown allergen. I would exercise vigorously for days, reading of the healing power of endorphins; when that didn’t work, I’d immobilize the joint completely, with similarly paltry results. At one particularly low point, I actually presented my doctor with a homespun schematic for a rubber spigot that could be installed in my knee cap, presumably allowing me to drain the fluid at my leisure like the pressure relief valve on a steam pipe. But on that night, as the flare 74

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peaked, my own ignorance and hunger for answers left me with no option but to turn, like the villagers, to theology. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I had done something to deserve this; maybe it was all just penance for years of insolence in the face of a lord whose name I had previously taken in vain with indiscriminate ease. It’s only natural to presume that the bad things in our lives are as earned as are the windfalls. But was it really so hard to imagine that all of my classmates were right and I was wrong, that not only was I headed straight to hell for my nonbelief, but that I was actually being punished in this lifetime by a merciless and enraged God? Wasn’t it at least worth humoring the notion? I arrived for a moment at some analog of Pascal’s Wager, the idea that regardless of what you actually believe, it’s in your best interest to live as though God does exist—if only to hedge yourself against the slim possibility of His wrath. I closed my eyes and prayed for help, oblivious to the irony in the assumption that a deity who was omniscient enough to hear a prayer might be too dense to discern my selfish intentions—or to notice that I had literally kept my fingers crossed the whole time. When the sun rose, there were no surprises. My knee was even more inflamed than when I had fallen asleep, as this was just the natural progression of things. And although the flares have followed me into adulthood (although they are better managed now), in a way I am fortunate because I didn’t understand at the time that prayer isn’t something to be taken lightly. Because if the swelling had subsided, I’d be just like the Alpine villagers, reckoning with the duality that a heavenly intervention had been either present or absent. And what then, from my own world, what manner of figurative skulls, might I have been obliged to place along the perimeter of my village?

Michael Sweeney is an energy engineer, writer, and musician living in Queens, NY. He writes creative nonfiction and poetry. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

FICTION

Tree Rat by Erin Smith

The day my neighbor died, I found a squirrel in the dumpster. He’d been lured in, probably by Kentucky Fried Chicken scraps, stale Wonder Bread, or Progresso soup cans, and there simply had not been enough trash for him to escape—a rare occurrence in our large complex. The dumpster sat on the northernmost edge of the large parking lot out back, with asphalt on every side. Studded around the buildings were spindly sugar maples and browning green ash trees. But even the trees not lost in the recent emerald ash borer infestation weren’t big enough to shade the dumpster, so it sat directly in the sun. At noon the dark patches in the asphalt were sticky, the air filled with the whine of window AC units and the whir of box fans. If the wind came from just the right direction, the odor from the dumpster got in your nose and mouth and felt like chewing on an old coffee filter soaked in lake water. I was taking out my trash and paused on the back stoop, setting the empty twenty-four-pack of Bud Light and the trash bag on the ground, to 76

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light a cigarette. Across the parking lot, two women shouted and gesticulated wildly at one another, either in excitement or anger, I couldn’t tell which. My neighbor from the first floor, Kevin, came out the door behind me. He was wearing that ugly Hawaiian shirt again, the top three buttons open and a dirty hanky hung out of his cargo shorts. Was that the only outfit the guy owned? I kicked my trash out of his way. He lit a cigarette and we watched the screaming women. The women climbed into an early ’90s Oldsmobile and Kevin said, “Sorry about you and Jenny, man.” I wasn’t shocked he knew. He probably helped her carry out her bags, her correspondence course books, and her cat carrier. I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged away five years. “You gonna be okay?” “Yeah, well, it’ll be hard to make the rent. If you hear of anything…” “I’ll keep my ears open,” he said, grinding his cigarette out on the brick wall and tossing the butt into the overflowing Folgers coffee can, our ad-lib ashtray. “Neighborhood’s going to hell anyway.” The ground thumped as an SUV with tinted windows crept past. “Jesus,” he said, “Doesn’t anyone work around here?” This from a man in cargo pants on a weekday. I waved lightly at Kevin as he went back inside. The Oldsmobile backed out over a beer bottle, the pop and crunch echoing between the buildings. I cringed and looked around the base of the dumpster. Broken glass and nails shimmered in the sun. It was a flat-tire kind of parking lot. Cars melted into the asphalt for days, weeks, sometimes months, until tickets thickened on the windshield and then, sometime later, the car would be gone. The dumpster was surrounded by cars resigned to something: side-view mirrors duct taped together, bumpers scratched and dented or missing altogether, rusty wheel wells and deep gashes from forgotten collisions, but look at those rims! The SUV thumped through the parking lot again, this time slowing to a halt a few buildings away. As it stopped, the passenger window lowered, leaking melody, an announcement to any cop paying attention—a dare even—that something nefarious was about to happen. A young man scuttled out of the building, leaned into the car, and just as quickly scuttled back as the SUV pounded off toward the alley. He waved to me as he ran, a toothy grin on his face that was infectious. I waved back. I’d be smiling, too; five minutes for a full day’s wages, if spent right. But no one here seemed to spend it right. At least they weren’t putting it into their apartments, where box fans, dirtied on the back to nearly black, were propped crookedly against screens, looking and sounding like it might be their last summer. Or, if a tenant was lucky enough to have a window unit, MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

“

But it was too soon; the hole wasn’t big enough, either for his body to get out or his head to get back in. I stared at his little behind as it writhed.

it was usually propped up with soiled pillows. Maybe the money went into the rims of their cars. I put out my cigarette, picked up my trash, and went to the dumpster. I pitched in the cans and was swinging the trash bag when the little squirrel’s thrashing caught my eye. The squirrel was being as resourceful as his little rodent brain and teeth would allow him. He’d sought out a weak, rusty corner and he’d chewed for all he was worth. Then, when he thought the hole was big enough, he’d stuck his head through. But it was too soon; the hole wasn’t big enough, either for his body to get out or his head to get back in. I stared at his little behind as it writhed. My wino neighbor, Julie, emerged from the apartment across the parking lot wearing comically large sunglasses and an optimistic white skirt that rode high on her thick thighs. I could feel her hangover just by looking at her. She waved at me, flung her purse in the front seat of her beat-up Jeep, and came over. “Howdy, neighbor,” she said in the same tone of voice someone might say, “I have mono.” “Rough night?” “What are you looking at?” she asked as if I hadn’t said anything, leaning over the edge of the dumpster. “A squirrel.” She lifted her sunglasses to her forehead. “Tree rat,” she said with a hatred in her voice most reserve for neo-Nazis or ex-spouses, “Let him rot.” 78

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With that, she turned and jumped in her Jeep. It started on the third try and grumbled for a moment before she violently threw it into reverse, nearly hitting a Ford truck passing behind her, before speeding off toward the alley. I looked back at the struggling squirrel. A small bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and into my eye. I wiped at it with the back of my hand. It was going to be a hot day. A foot above the asphalt, the air was wavy and birds flew sluggishly from tree to tree. My neighbor from the third floor, Steve, jogged up wearing ill-fitting khaki pants that came a good two inches off the top of his white sneakers. A droopy sweat stain had formed down the front and back of his gray T-shirt. “Why do you torture yourself?” I asked. “The old ticker. Gotta…keep it…ticking,” he huffed as he came to a stop. Steve had been a regular jogger since his father dropped dead of a heart attack a decade ago. When Jenny said I had bad taste, I’d always point out Steve’s outfits. This was his everyday look. When he worked, he’d upgrade to a button-down shirt (short sleeve, even in the winter)—variations on a plaid theme in blues, reds, greens. He gave in-home piano lessons, watching the children’s little fingers dance clumsily across ivories in homes he’d never be able to afford. Steve moved in around the same time I did or a little before. While I kept my eye on the feet as they walked by on the sidewalk from my basement apartment, Steve kept an eye on the dumpster from his third-floor studio apartment. Still huffing, Steve propped his foot against the bottom step and attempted a calf stretch. A man in a dirty wife-beater and jean shorts came out of the next building and tossed something in the dumpster. Steve turned to see. “Trash bag,” I assured him, and he turned back to his stretch. Steve wasn’t the only one who watched the dumpster. There were plenty of neighbors interested in what others put in the trash—myself included—and even a few scroungers who came by from time to time to collect the not-quite-smoked cigarette butts from the canister by the door. Only the really desperate climbed inside. For the most part, my neighbors weren’t desperate—at least not for anything they’d find in the garbage. Steve said, “Yesterday, I heard someone dump a box of VHS tapes outside the dumpster,” I didn’t ask him what sound VHS tapes make but I had to trust him—he had a musician’s ear. “Before I could get out here, someone beat me.” “Who was it?” “Same guy who’s always swiping the cigarette butts,” he said with a MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

dismissive wave of his hand. But it didn’t matter who he was. He was there first; etiquette says you wait your turn. “Took him forever to go through them.” The scrounger had been thorough. Steve said he had tried not to look at the titles as the man placed them in his bag, preferring not to know the treasures lost to him. “I got a few good ones,” Steve said. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Well,” Steve said, arching his back and thrusting his hips forward in another stiff stretch, “better go clean up. I’ve got Kayla tonight.” Kayla was Steve’s daughter. He had her every other night and every other weekend since the divorce three years ago. I waved at him absently and knelt down at the corner of the dumpster, marveling how much we all knew about everyone’s business around here. I was surprised Steve hadn’t mentioned Jenny. The squirrel did not move. He stared at me with black, dull eyes. Was I imagining or projecting the terror I saw there? I went inside my apartment and grabbed a broom. From the back, I pushed gingerly at the squirrel’s behind, each poke drawing more thrashing and squeaking from the little animal. When I went to the front and extended the broom handle, the squirrel froze and clicked at me viciously. There was nothing I could do for the little guy. I left the dumpster and returned to my apartment. The day dragged on. My compact refrigerator was down to a half-eaten month-old container of Daisy sour cream and corn tortillas so hard I could use them for disc golf. I tore one in half and dipped it in the sour cream. On the couch, watching a rerun of The Simpsons, I thought of food, money, rent. Jenny. Out on the sidewalk, a little girl’s feet in sandals walked by, then came back the other way. I wiped the tortilla crumbs off my shirt and laid down for a nap. I woke at dusk. Soft diffuse light shined through my windows. I went to my refrigerator, hoping something to eat had appeared during my nap. Nothing had. Outside my kitchen window, I saw a woman’s shapely legs, feet in black pumps. Beside her, some sneakers and two pairs of big boots. The police. Time for a smoke. Out front, Steve’s daughter, Kayla, was playing on the grass with a neighbor girl. I looked at her feet. Sandals. I winced. How long had I slept while she’d waited? Steve’s ex-wife, Rosella, stood next to Kevin and the two policemen. “Have you seen Steve?” she asked. 80

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“

I took that as my cue to go back inside. I pulled the blinds shut against the coming night and stared at the muted TV.

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“Yeah. I saw him jogging earlier,” I doubted it the moment the words left my lips. Had that been today or yesterday? A week ago? Five years? Kevin came and bummed a cig. “Steve didn’t answer when the kid rang,” he said, “She’s been out here a while…” He lowered his voice and stole a glance at the girl, “Anyway, the manager is bringing a key.” Rosella’s arms were crossed over her chest and her funereal eyes betrayed an odd mixture of worry and anger that seemed to say, “I know what they’re going to find when they open that door” and “I thought this man stopped being my problem when we got a divorce.” When the manager arrived with the key, only he and the police went in. Rosella chewed on her fingernails and glanced at her daughter too much. The girl had stopped playing and was staring at the front door, straight through me. When the police came out, they shook their heads. “Oh, man,” Kevin mumbled. He went to Rosella. Just like Jenny would have. And Jenny wouldn’t have let a little girl pace in front of the building for more than an hour while she napped. Rosella let out a short sob and as the policeman talked to her, I took that as my cue to go back inside. I pulled the blinds shut against the coming night and stared at the muted TV. Sometime after midnight I went out for my last smoke of the evening. The parking lot was quiet, 81

almost abnormally so. I took a slow drag from my cigarette and listened to the hums and whirs and the clanking of dishes through open windows and I imagined I was in an electric jungle. A loud bang opened my eyes. A neighbor from another building tossed a heavy garbage bag in the dumpster, which I now noticed was lit up with an eerie glow. I rubbed the cig out on the building and pitched the butt into the canister, walked out to the dumpster and looked up at the building. Steve’s blinds were open and from my view by the dumpster I could see only bare walls and the glow of his overhead light. § Over the next few days, the neighbors and the scroungers had plenty to choose from as objects from Steve’s apartment appeared, a whole life laid out by the dumpster—much of the furniture being returned to where he’d found it. I watched as they examined the objects for worth and either dragged them away or tossed them back on the ground. I began smoking on the front stoop and life went on as usual. I thought of Jenny every day. Wondered if she’d call. Wondered why not call myself. A week later, I walked out to the dumpster, my kitchen trash in one hand and an empty case of beer in the other. After I threw them in, I remembered the squirrel. I knelt down where its head had been, now just a nearly picked clean skull, its body long since gone, dumped into the back of a truck and taken to some landfill or incinerator somewhere and, I thought, maybe he did find a way out.

Erin Smith is a writer, funeral director, and shiatsu therapist living in the Twin Cities. A transplant from the South, she’s seen her O’s lengthen in her fourteen years in Minnesota and has learned to love AWD. When she’s not writing, funeral directing, or studying Traditional Chinese Medicine, Erin can be found with her cat, Chloe, on her lap. Erin has written about food, boxing, religion, and gravity in Foodservice News, Anotherealm, and Mortuary Management Magazine. Find her at www.erinsmithwrites.com. 82

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A Pair of Onions

Through a strange coincidence, two equally beautiful poems, with striking similarities, were sent to us within a month of each other. The first “Onion” we discovered was written by Steve Nickman of Brookline, MA and the second, by Sandy W. of Hong Kong. We’re happy to be publishing two poems titled “Onion,” because when we found both of them, it was a pleasant surprise to see them side-by-side. One of our editors said that she will never look at an onion the same way again. Both poets must have been channeling the same train of thought, possibly pulling the idea from the atmosphere at the same time.Whatever happened, both writers chose to submit their pieces to Mount Hope creating this perfect pairing of onions. Enjoy, Katherine Gladsky

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A PAIR OF ONIONS

Onion by Steve Nickman Vidalia reclines on the cutting board, offers herself up, her one pretension the tawny clinging negligee. I disrobe her, admire as I have since boyhood spheres within spheres, the urge toward interior, the urge to undo enacted again. Burning, I hold Saturn’s crisp, silent luminous rings.

Steve Nickman lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and is a child psychiatrist interested in the experiences and dilemmas of adoptees and their families. Steve’s poetry has appeared in New Plains Review, Apeiron, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Rhino Magazine, Mid-American Review, and Antigonish Review. 84

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A PAIR OF ONIONS

Onion by Sandy W. This is not about how she makes me cry. It’s not even about the tender heart, tied to a secret, hidden beneath her white organza dress, unattainable despite my teary efforts. You see - this is about her coming to ripeness in my garden, a full moon rising to the high throne. Indubitably she is the queen’s picking, fattened virgin bulb, green stalks soon to flower. Overnight, poignantly and nervously, she drags her robe of white mist in slow waltz, my sweet deb. Come daybreak I will have to take her out of her loam-perfumed boudoir, and marry her off to the gentle yellow bell pepper. Sandy W. is a writer and poet currently residing in Hong Kong. Her poems have appeared in poetry journals such as The Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine, The Opiate, Sweet Tree Review, and Visual Verse. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 9

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