Issue 4 - 45TH PARALLEL

45th Parallel ISSUE 4

Spring 2019 Cover art: “Tangle” by Carolyn Supinka.

45thparallelmag.com This publication received support from the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State Unversity. It was made by students in the OSU MFA program for creative writing.

Copyright © 2019 45th Parallel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Masthead Editorial Staff Karah Kemmerly..............................Editor-in-Chief Tatiana Dolgushina.............................Poetry Editor Olivia Postelli.......................................Fiction Editor Brigid Ronan.................................Nonfiction Editor Carolyn Supinka.....................Art & Comics Editor Erich Brumback.......................................Web Editor Colleen Johnson...........Social Media Coordinator Karen Holmberg..............................Faculty Advisor

Readers Nicole Horowitz Sari Baum Brooke Landberg Cody Rose Bowie Anthony Cassandra Verhaegen Brown Chaze Copeland Kate Marisa Yerace Dawson Cynthia Marbut Laurel Dixon Drew McCutchen Tazianna Elysee Emalydia Natalia A. Pagán Serrano Flenory Matt Fuller Eloise Schultz Juliette Givhan Daniel Nick Snider Gonzalez Katherine Hale Ruth Sylvester Isaiah Holbrook

Editor’s Note When the first editors of 45th Parallel came up with the journal’s name, they intended to draw attention to two things: the latitudinal line nearest to Oregon State Unversity, which also happens to be the geographical halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and the sense of in-betweenness that line embodies. The name 45th Parallel represented a convergence of genres, ideas, and literary styles.

The name feels well suited to the writers and artists featured in this is sue. They are very much engaged with in-betweenness: the malleable distance between parents and children, the mysterious valley between the past and present, the blurry border between girlhood and woman hood, the heartbreaking shift from life to death, and the gulf between our personas and our authentic selves. The speakers and characters con tained in these works ask difficult questions about their connections to the world, to others, and to themselves. Within liminal spaces, they find answers. Perhaps not direct answers, but hints that point them a little closer to the truth.

Before you dive in, I want to acknowledge the people who made pro ducing this journal possible. Thank you to the original editorial team of 2015-2016 for bringing 45th Parallel into existence. Thank you to the folks on the masthead for making Issue 4 so compelling. Thank you to the good people at the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University for their continued support. Thank you to the wonder ful contributors who

shared daring, thought-provoking work with us.

And thank you, stranger with this book in your hands, for the curiosity and trust that inspired you to open it. I hope you enjoy reading the jour nal as much as we enjoyed making it.

Karah Kemmerly

Table of Contents Poetry Self-Portrait at République, L.A. Diane Martini Richard..............................................................................................

8 Ears (With the Final Word of Each Line From a Poem By Rob Carney) Ron Riekki................................................................................................. ....................18 Ars Elegica John A. Nieves.............................................................................................. ..............20 Any Fool Can Jeanne-Marie Osterman.........................................................................................

22 States of Emergency Brad Johnson............................................................................................ ...................26 Good Day for the Obituaries Les Bernstein.......................................................................................... ....................48 Postcard from Croatia Lynn Boulger............................................................................................. .................52 Finding Out About the Deaths of Some of My, Well, Ron Riekki............................................................................................... .....................54 Grief Lynn Boulger............................................................................................. .................56 Fatherhood Brett

Thompson........................................................................................ .................69 Sea Horse by Erasure Trevor Eakes............................................................................................... ................70 Flight of the Miner’s Wife Alaina Pepin................................................................................................ ................80 Portrait of My Father In Too-Short Shorts Kelly Lorraine Andrews..........................................................................................81

6 Infidelity with Wild Turkey and Held Breath Katelyn Joy Wilkinson.......................................................................................... ..83 turtle shell Robin Gow.................................................................................................. ................94 Prose Bless Me, For I Have Sinned. This is My First Confession.

Antonia Angress .......................................................................................................1 0 Friendr Ian MacAllen.......................................................................................... .....................28 Evaluation Rich Furman ......................................................................................................... ....46 Chain Letter: An Artifact Mark Crimmins ......................................................................................................4 9 Mom Jeans Kasey Renee Shaw................................................................................................ ...57 Live and Love and Distance Katharine

Kistler............................................................................................... ........71 Feral Colony Kat Saunders.......................................................................................... ...................85 Art big grass like billion dollar industries for unneeded lawns like homogenous thoughts Nelson Lowhim............................................................................................. .............24 Yet Another Example of the Symbiotic Relationship Between Boredom and Purpose Dean Liao................................................................................................... ................42 Women’s Work: Candle, Carrots and Parsnips, Flogger Madeleine Barnes.............................................................................................. .........76

Contributors............................................................................................... .......................96

7

Self-Portrait at République, L.A. Diane Martini Richard 1. “Can I start you off with champagne?” from a French vine, old and thirsty, roots that pushed through poor soil where other no other fruit could grow.

2. The waitstaff pulsate in conceited motion, neither backward nor forward, and red roses overplay their part. I have an elevated heart rate.

3. Here, everybody gets labeled as somebody.

Tonight, I will be the Nervous Female.

Champagne is not the right word, and this is not a clear story.

4. Outside, it’s overcast. I order Four Roses bourbon.

Jaunty, knowledgeable and opaque—mostly men drink bourbon. I wrap my hands around its confidence.

5. Younger Me sits in a Paris bistro, her eyes sparkling like Dom Pérignon. She orders chilled oysters using any words and laughing. The weather is effortless.

6. In L.A., it starts to rain with real lightning. The couple in the back corner Instagram their short ribs.

I wonder if they know what real love is?

7. My friend orders Sole Meunière, a subtle dish famous

8 Martini

Richard

for its browned butter. It should sizzle when poured across the fish. This is a matter of perception.

8. Data points interrupt: a) Lightning may be seen and not heard depending on the distance; b) Track records measure the history of a past performance.

9. In the closing scene, I am running.

Martini Richard

9

Bless Me, For I Have Sinned.

This is My First Confession.

Antonia Angress 1. I’ve lost count of all the times in my life I wished I believed in God. 2. When I was younger I used to pray, silently, before bed. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If from my sleep I should not wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. I don’t remember where I learned that. Possibly Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which I loved and read over and over again.

The other prayer I recited was in Spanish: Án gel de la guardia, de mi dulce compañía, no me desampares ni de noche ni de día.

That one my next-door neighbors taught me.

3. I can recite the Hebrew Hanukkah prayer, but I don’t know what it means. Incantatory gibberish.

4. I wished I believed in God when I was fifteen and I feared the ourob oros of my thoughts would unravel me. I wished I could pray myself out of my unquiet mind.

5. Mostly I was afraid of dying in my sleep and ending up in Hell. I feared my parents would also end up in Hell. None of us were baptized.

6. The idea of being wrong about God terrified me. To this day I’m still unable to adequately describe the existential terror of not knowing whom or what to believe. The stakes seemed so high: worship the right God in the right way or suffer for all eternity.

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7. Jews, like atheists, don’t believe in the afterlife.

8. One of the Catholic writers whose blog I read writes candidly

about her struggles with post-partum depression and bulimia.

Every time she goes through pregnancy and labor she spirals into a pit of self-loathing and despair. She has five kids and is open to more life. She writes about loving her body, loving what God has made it capable of, and hating it too.

9. Jesus Christ—Jesucristo in Spanish, all one word—introduced me to the concept of generative, generous suffering. I don’t remember how old I was the first time my neighbors took me to Mass. The crucifix trans fixed me. It looked like something out of a horror movie. I understood that suffering was beautiful. Or, I understood that it was possible to suf fer beautifully.

10. When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out, a boy I had a crush on asked me how I felt about my ancestors being responsible for Christ’s death. I blanched; he laughed at my expression and made a joke about Jews and money. I no longer recall its exact wording, but the joke involved him rubbing his thumb across his index and middle fingers. I did not occur to me to tell my parents or teachers about this incident.

11. I attended Mass sporadically throughout my childhood and adoles cence while accompanying my neighbors or friends from school. My parents didn’t mind. I think they viewed it as an educational experi ence—they were big on being open-minded and getting out of your comfort zone—and since I never repeated any of what I heard at Mass at home, they had no reason to believe that I took what I was learning seriously. I never expressed to them a desire for spiritual formation. When I was at Mass I loved the music and the art, but I always felt slightly uneasy. You don’t belong here. This isn’t yours. Every time I step into a church, I feel it still: a sense of awe and transgression and voyeurism, that I am at best a guest, at worst an interloper. Doubt gnawed at me. I didn’t fully under stand why, but for a long time I feared that it was because I was not, deep down, a good person.

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12. I wished I believed in God when I was twenty-one and I told my boy friend I wanted to die. I wished prayer could unmoor me from my mind.

13. Another Catholic blogger writes about offering up her suffering

for the good of the souls of others. She instructs their children to do the same. Offer it up offer it up offer it up.

14. I love my mind. I love what I can make it do. But I hate it too.

15. Saint Faustina writes: My sacrifice is nothing in itself, but when I join it to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ it becomes all-powerful.

16. I believe in selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and benzodiaze pines. I believe in Venlafaxine and Fluoxetine and Alprazolam. I believe my mind is crooked but medicine can fix it, or at least straighten out some of the hairpin bends.

17. I was eight when my grandmother died. My mother inherited her substantial art collection, which she had shipped to Costa Rica from London, where my grandmother had lived for the previous two decades.

The artwork looked absurd in the rustic wood-and-cinderblock house my parents rented from a dairy farmer. The most striking piece was a 14th-century wooden Madonna, which had been in my family since my mother was a child. My parents displayed the Madonna in a corner of our living room. She was about four feet tall, armless, and termite-eat en.

When I passed her on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I tried not to look at her.

18. I wished I believed in God when I was twenty-six and my friend over dosed on street Vicodin. I wished I knew that I would see him again. I wished I could promise his girlfriend that she would see him again.

19. Had I promised that, she might’ve hated me and I wouldn’t have blamed her.

20. Recently, my husband and I visited my parents in California, where

12 Angress they moved when they left Costa Rica. The wooden Madonna still stands in the corner of their living room. The artwork, displayed salon style, looks slightly less out of place in their Bay Area cottage, though it is obvious that it would be more at home in an elegant London flat.

21. My husband was once my boyfriend, my college sweetheart. It was to him that I confessed my wish to die. He called my parents from the hospital. Later my mother told me, “You’re lucky to have him.” She didn’t say, “He is a blessing,” but ever since then, that’s how I’ve thought of him.

22. As my husband admired the wooden Madonna, my mother com mented that it would be ours someday. “Though you’ll have to fight your brother for it,” she joked.

23. Judaism is matrilineal. By Jewish law, you are a Jew only if your moth er was a Jew. 24. “She scared the shit out of me when I was a kid,” I said.

25. My mother is a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and 26. “Really?” my mother said. “I found her comforting. I would get up in the middle of the night and touch her face.”

27. The Madonna’s face is the only part of her that is not termite-eaten. The wood is smooth.

28. My mother told me that when my grandmother lived in London, she used to go to Latin Mass. “She loved the sermons, even though of course she didn’t understand them,” my mother said.

“And she loved the mu sic.”

29. When I was fifteen I accompanied a friend to the baptism of her new born cousin. The baby cried briefly when the water splashed her head.

Angress 13 Then she quieted, cooing in her godmother’s arms.

30. Indelible in my memory is the case of a ten-year-old girl known in the Costa Rican press only as Rosa—my middle name, incidentally— who became pregnant after an assault and was refused an abortion. A nonprofit activist group flew her to Panama

for the procedure, where upon she, her parents, and the doctor who performed the abortion were excommunicated from the Church.

31. The closest thing Judaism has to baptism is circumcision. My parents, both Jewish as far back as their families can remember, decided not to circumcise my brother. My mother calls the practice barbaric.

32. One of the Catholic bloggers celebrates her children’s baptismal an niversaries in addition to their birthdays. The child gets to eat dinner off a You Are Special Today plate. During dessert, the other siblings sprinkle the honoree with holy water. It’s a nice ritual.

33. As the story goes, my extended family was aghast, since circumcision is the lowest fence you need to clear to keep your Jew card.

34. Recently, a college friend of mine in her third year of medical school described circumcising newborns at the hospital where she assists. “It’s like a baby dick guillotine,” my friend said. “You pull the foreskin over the glans, freeing it as you go, maneuver just the foreskin into the guil lotine, and then clamp it down really tight. All the while, you’re feeding the baby sugar water on a pacifier while his arms and legs are strapped down so he doesn’t wiggle, and he’s deafening you with his screams.” My friend paused. “It’s basically baby torture. I would never circumcise my kid.” I came away from that conversation thinking: Good call, Mom and Dad. I also thought: The Catholics have the right idea. Just splash the kid with holy water and call it a day.

35. One of the Catholic bloggers plans destination First Communions for her children. She has nine of them. The eldest is sixteen, the young est not yet a year old. It amazes me that she has been either pregnant

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or breastfeeding for the past seventeen years of her life. Her kids take their First Communions in Paris and Rome and Belfast and Lourdes. In her Instagram photos, the children look radiant in their

little three-piece suits and white dresses. Faces all ablaze with faith. The most important moment of their lives so far, their mother writes. She captions the posts with angel emojis.

36. My husband’s parents prayed with him every night before bed.

They recited the Our Father and Hail Mary together and then they listed all their relatives and asked God to watch over them.

37. One of the Catholic bloggers wrote a post about how she recites the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel and sprinkles her children with holy water and blessed salt before they leave the house for school in the morning. Spiritual warfare, she calls it.

38. I wonder sometimes if there are people who pray for me. How would I know? Would my ears burn?

39. At my wedding reception, my aunt sidled up to me and whispered, “Your new in-laws are going around telling people they’ll see them at the baptism.” Drunk on champagne and love, I laughed and laughed and laughed.

40. My husband and I have decided that if we have a son we will not cir cumcise him, Jew card be damned. We want our children to have some semblance of a spiritual education but neither of us can agree on a reli gion. At the dinner table we toss ideas back and forth. Secular Judaism? Buddhism? Unitarianism?

41. I can’t remember the last time I went to synagogue, but I remember the last time I went to Mass.

42. We excised all mentions of God from the wedding ceremony, though we left the traditional Hebrew prayers in, figuring no one would un derstand them. My father, whose Hebrew is passable, read those parts.

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There was no rabbi. My mother-in-law, a retired federal judge, officiated and signed the paperwork.

43. By Jewish law, our children will be Jewish.

44. My husband also lost his faith around the same time I lost mine. Sometimes I picture us both as teenagers—me in Costa Rica, him in Louisiana—lying in bed at night asking ourselves the same questions. He refused to be confirmed. It was a big deal, he recalls. His father was despondent. I had nothing—no one—to rebel against. I was already at sea.

45. We exchanged our vows under the same chuppah my parents were married under—now it hangs on the wall in our apartment—and we circled each other seven times, and we both smashed a wine glass to shouts of mazel tov. It felt important to me to be Jewish, just for that one day. But not too Jewish.

Jew-ish.

46. My other grandmother—my father’s mother—was born in Vienna. She spent her girlhood imprisoned in Auschwitz. I spent my girlhood on a dairy farm in Costa Rica, wishing I could watch Nickelodeon and rollerblade down the all-American streets of suburban California like my cousins.

47. My husband swears his aunts shot him concerned looks as he recited his vows. This might have been because his vows included, “I promise to do my very best to not leave my dirty socks lying around.” In return, I promised not to procrastinate for too long before folding my clean laun dry.

48. These were the same aunts who disregarded my husband’s grand father’s wishes to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in his old hunting grounds in rural northern Louisiana, his favorite place in the world. By the time my husband’s grandfather died, he’d been divorced and remarried and had long since left the Church. The aunts insisted on a traditional Catholic funeral Mass and burial, fearing for his place

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in heaven.

49. I first read my paternal grandmother’s memoir when I was thirteen. There was a lot I could not wrap my mind around. That there were branches of my family tree that simply ended, lopped off by the Angel of History. That for years while my grandmother

was in the camps, she’d ceased menstruating. That my father is named for my great-uncle, my grandmother’s older brother, who perished in the gas chambers.

50. “Instead of God,” my grandmother wrote, “I believe in ghosts.”

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Ars Elegica John A. Nieves I. Under a stand of hedged juniper, I would coax the pincers of large black ants to catch the tips of my fingers, then lift them a few inches off the ground and hum to them, hum them lullabies and set them free. I once got a whole hand’s worth simultaneously. On a still II. February night, years back, I woke to my partner singing nonsense up into the popcorn ceiling while sound asleep. Nothing I did could stop the almost gurgled melody. I left for the couch, used the TV to drown her out. Even III. now, I walk out into the road to move turtles. Even now, I mutter-smile while slicing onions, tell jokes to smashed garlic and diced peppers. Dance peeling II. ginger. Her hair was in her mouth when I went back upstairs, like her own body had stifled her song. I tried to wake her, to tell her. But nothing.

The crickets were so much louder in the muffled blue-black. Once,

I. I brought the ants sugar cubes and watched as they slowly pulled them apart. I thought it might make us friends. Instead it brought

20 Nieve

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other, smaller ants. The two groups fought each other viciously until they were carrying bodies of the opposing types away with their hard-won crystals while my mother screamed dinner from the door.

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Any Fool Can Jeanne-Marie Osterman

sit by her father’s bed and talk about the old days watch shallow breaths count blue boomerangs on a faded gown worn by the many who’ve passed this way but it takes a tender-hearted lover of self to get out of her chair to catch a nap grab a plate of food and when I walk to the cafeteria carrying my clipboard with Medicaid application and notes for Washington State Human Services I’m mistaken for a social worker by a man in a wheelchair whose wife is dying down the hall.

He is crying and wants me to tell him what to do. I explain I’m just the daughter of someone else who is dying. I want to tell him I’m a fool tell him I’m tired and what

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little I have left is for my father not your wife.

I don’t say it. We look at each other me with my clipboard appearing calm and officious in the matter of everyone’s death.

Osterman

23

big grass like billion dollar industries for unneeded lawns like homogenous thoughts Nelson Lowhim This photo collage/joiner is part of a move toward breaking free from the constrictions of a camera (the paralyzed cyclops, as David Hockney called it).

Lowhi m

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States of Emergency Brad Johnson The second time an Amber Alert shocks my spine into my shoulders and vibrates my phone across the counter, I switch the setting to mute. If everything’s an emergency, there’s no emergency.

I tell Vito I like how Prop 65 mandates restaurants and strip malls affix warnings on their walls listing possible on-site chemicals known to cause cancer. He says the warnings are everywhere, affixed on every building. They’re so ubiquitous they mean nothing.

Besides, he says, what good is a label informing you that consuming 700,000 gallons of parking structure cement might make you sick? You need the state to tell you that?

Rather than dying silently, fire alarms in my house are wired together, and all go off when the batteries in one fades, which only happens after three a.m.

Their wails ambush my sleep, and I run to the staircase where my daughter stands in her pajamas, her hair a mess of question marks.

She holds the kitchen chair as I unscrew each alarm, leaving the plastic casings hanging

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from the ceiling cords like a clone’s disembodied head, and I tuck my daughter back in bed, knowing she’ll be older in the morning, aged with the knowledge fire alarms don’t always mean fire.

Sometimes they mean the siren broke, and sleep’s easier if you just unplug the warnings.

Johnson 27

Friendr Ian MacAllen The first orientation video promises that the Friendr app can pro vide a fulfilling experience for both the client and the associate.

I was not looking for a fulfilling experience. I just needed the money.

The second orientation video warns against specific behaviors for associates: no touching, no sexual contact, and absolutely no circum venting the app when arranging a Friend Encounter. The video consists of colorful animations reducing these rules into childish cartoons nar rated by a helpful dog. The dog warns of the dangers of making friends outside of the app. He implies people are scary, and the app is a safer alternative.

The third orientation video offers helpful suggestions, like adopt ing an alternative name to use with clients. I chose the name Leonard. I think Len and Lenny are nice nicknames, although the Friendr app warns against encouraging clients to refer to associates by anything oth er than their formal professional name so as to deter any undo familiar ities. We are, the final video reminds us, professional friends. None of the orientation videos provide advice on suppressing your human emo tions. *** Begin by downloading the Friendr app to your device. Create a user account. Pick a user account name that is easy to remember. After logging in, fill in the appropriate profile information by answering a se ries of questions about yourself.

The first of these questions are biographical—age, location, aller gies. Then the app constructs a profile to match associate friends with clients who are friendless. The app always refers to clients as “friend less” rather than “lonely” or “a person without friends” to avoid negative

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connotations. The later profile questions are more complicated than the biographical ones. They ask about personality and

interests. As I filled out my profile, the questions about my current occupa tion were the most challenging. The software has a limited menu to se lect from. There is no option for “professional friend.” I tried selecting “freelancer,” since technically all Friendr associates are freelance em ployees without any claim to benefits or labor protections. These points are reiterated by the friendly-looking cartoon dog both in the orienta tion videos and on their website.

Litigation is pending. The occupation menu, though, has no option for “accepts money for platonic friendships.” I backtracked through the menus looking for an appropriate profession to indicate my experience levels since each of my three career tracks has since been automated. I checked off “lawyer.” After uploading a photo, the Friendr profile is complete. Associates are matched to a compatible client and arrangements for an Encounter are set within the app. Associates are reminded they should never meet a client without arranging the meeting through the app, both to ensure proper billing and for the associate’s own safety. *** Life had grown pretty grim since the layoffs. A decade ago, I had been on track at a big-law job. I had survived both recessions and grown complacent. The firm had landed a number of high-profile tech firms, and we felt certain these clients would carry us into the next century with billable hours. We had a heavy focus on insurance liability of au tomated machines, a seemingly endless market for lawsuits against the surge of automated vehicles, doctors, accountants, financial advisors, retail clerks, and machines in nearly every other industry. We weren’t wrong. Plenty of lawsuits ensued. We became the go-to firm for the emerging automated technology companies. The thing to know about technology companies is that they know a lot about technology. It only took a few months of our six-figure billings for those nerds to focus on cutting their legal fees through automation. We never expected the bots to come for our jobs, but two years after our first successful defense of a maiming robotic doctor, I was laid off.

My next move took me to the public defender’s office. The auto mation revolution hadn’t created a shortage of criminals, and plenty

MacAllen 29 of them required publicly funded legal advice. Then the city inevita bly outsourced those jobs to computers, and I reverted to my old

high school job delivering pizzas for Tony. Tony’s Pizzeria on Graham Avenue was a neighborhood staple, but a few months after I started, he replaced me with a pizza delivery drone. I collected unemployment, but I knew things were going badly when my caseworker was replaced with an al gorithm. The following week I signed up to become an associate friend on Friendr. *** I didn’t receive any Encounter requests the first day. Although Friendr promised no limit to how much I could earn, as a freelancer, I also wasn’t guaranteed any income. I worried tweaking my account to appear more desirable was a dishonest misrepresentation of the poten tial friendship I could offer, but I needed the money. I read up on key words and optimization techniques to improve my chances of matching with a client until, finally, Bert pinged me.

I looked over Bert’s profile. He seemed mostly normal with a strong passion for seltzer water. Feigning interest in someone’s hobbies can be tedious for associates, the Friendr tutorials had warned. But I was des perate. I accepted his Encounter request and set about studying up on seltzer water. *** The doorman at Bert’s building looked at me as though annoyed I was interrupting his day. Lucky him, to have a job, I thought. Bots still couldn’t replace the warm and cozy feeling of a real, live human opening and closing the door. The doorman called up to Bert’s apartment and pointed me toward the elevator bank.

Bert stood in the doorway waiting for me when the elevator opened. “Hi, Leonard!” he said, waving at me with far too much enthusiasm for me to feel comfortable.

“You must be Bert?”

“Of course! You look exactly like your profile photos. I’m sure we’re going to be great friends. Come on in, but please, take your shoes off,” he said, waving me into his apartment with an unnerving excitement. I hadn’t expected such a high-energy client, but I knew I had to recipro cate. I wanted Bert to like me, and not just because I wanted him to rate

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my friendship a five-star experience.

“Great place you have here,” I said. His apartment overlooked the park.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Bert asked as he led me into the main living room.

“I’d love a seltzer,” I said, remembering my training video: “Act like a gracious guest when a client is hosting. Keep Friend Encounters posi tive.”

Bert held two glasses of seltzer. He was standing uncomfortably close to me. He offered me one and then sipped the other. I waited for him to say something.

“This is good seltzer,” I said eventually.

“I make it myself. Do you want to see?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the mantra: “Say yes.”

Bert eagerly showed off his collection of vintage soda bottles.

He had them arranged in his kitchen by style. To me they were all just glass jars in various shades of blue and green.

“I’ve always been fascinated with carbonated beverages,” Bert ex plained as he picked up a greenish-tinted one. He shot another glass of soda. “The cartridges I special order.”

As he moved through the various eras of his soda collection, Bert revealed the origin of his wealth. He had invented the Sel-Zero, the ze ro-calorie seltzer water machine. I didn’t want to point out that based on my research, all seltzer water was zero calorie. There was nothing terribly revolutionary about his product, but the real magic of his suc cess came with selling pre-packaged water for the machine to carbonate. Customers would place the sealed packs of water in the machine, and the machine would squeeze out fresh, portable carbonated water.

“This bottle is the very first seltzer bottle I ever owned. It belonged to my grandparents. They were from Connecticut and often hosted cocktail parties.” He held up a delicate bottle with a cross-stitched pat tern etched in the glass and a silver spigot on top.

“That is kind of amazing,” I said, even believing it myself, just a little bit. *** I was on my way home from the Encounter when a Friendr no-

MacAllen 31 tification popped up: “Rate your Encounter!” the app demanded with options for one through five stars. I didn’t have much friend experience to go by, but my Encounter with Bert had transpired without serious threat to my health or safety. I rated him five stars.

A few seconds later the app pinged me back; Bert had also rated

me five stars. Those five stars were all I needed to send my profile to the top of the search results. By late that evening my inbox had been filled with Encounter requests. My friendship career had finally taken off. *** By the end of the week I had booked a dozen more Encounters. There was Patrick, the kind old man who lived alone on the Upper East Side and mostly wanted someone other than his cat to talk to. There were Tina and Jim who wanted a third wheel for dinner-and-movie dates because they were obviously headed toward divorce. I attended a concert with Otto, visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Simon, practiced yoga with Henry, joined Michelle for her work happy hour, spent a day with Stanley on Long Island. Most of my Encounters ended with five-star ratings. The people loved me, in a strictly platonic way.

The one four-star rating blemishing my profile was, I suspect, left

by Tina and Jim, who were too busy making each other unhappy to notice the joy I had brought them.

I entered a regular routine. In the mornings, I scheduled some kind of physical activity: yoga, running, tennis, or something similar with the more athletically inclined clients, followed by lunch.

The client always paid for incidentals. In the afternoons, I visited with low-impact clients like Patrick, who filled me in on his cat’s activities. In the evenings, I took up with the night owls. Weekends were especially busy, but at least during these busier hours, Friendr charged a premium. The Swell pric ing intended to provide an extra incentive for associates willing to fill our client’s friend needs. *** Clients adored me and I worked hard to please them. They reward ed me with five-star ratings, and higher rankings translated to premium fees. My own lifestyle lent itself to fulfilling their whims. I had no girl friend or boyfriend for years, no children or dependents, and didn’t even have a dog or cat to worry about. I was fully devoted to earning Friend

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fees.

Clients lavished me with gifts—not just meals and tickets to shows, but real, tangible items like new clothing and the latest gadgets and giz mos. My clients were the winners of the automation economy, their wealth securely in place before the end

of labor. Most lived the life of leisure from accumulated capital now managed by artificially intelligent portfolio managers.

Automation had been hard to accept for the rest of us. True to the technocrats’ brightest dreams, abject poverty had been eliminated. No body had to go hungry. The farm bots produced more than enough food and construction robots built enough housing. But also gone was the ability to ascend beyond subsistence. At last my first deposit from Frien dr arrived. The nominal fees amounted to the most money I had earned since before the automation age. *** Kevin wanted help meeting women. I preferred avoiding these En counters because a negative outcome was far more likely than a positive one, but I was feeling greedy. Kevin had sent an Encounter request late Friday afternoon and the Swell pricing had a three times multiplier— not unusual for a Friday night when Friends were in demand—and I thought for sure it would be enough to snag the BFF badge. The Friendr badges were a next level of quality control and could help Friends earn even higher fees.

I met Kevin outside his apartment. “My buddy tells me this place is a total meat market,” Kevin said. I wanted to ask Kevin why his buddy hadn’t joined him here instead of me, but I was already spending the money I would earn from the Encounter. I needed to stroke Kevin’s ego. I could tell from outside the bar it was the sort of place that played non stop Battle Bots on giant screens—a terrible venue to try and meet wom en.

Kevin and I sat at the bar with beers. Between Battle Bot matches, he rambled on about the terrible relationship he had recently ended. All the problems had been the fault of his partner.

As a friend for hire, I had sat through many worse stories, but Kevin wasn’t helping himself with the women at the bar. I hesitated to tell him potential partners didn’t want to hear about his ex-girlfriend.

MacAllen 33 “Maybe lead in more positively, about yourself,” I suggested, though he didn’t take the hint. Another beer, and another attempt at flirting, and I had to be more direct: “Don’t jump right in about Barbara. Women don’t want to hear about her.”

I could tell our Friend Encounter wasn’t going well when he

turned to the bots battling on the screen. He was caught up in a ferocious match when Alice spotted me from across the bar. She smiled. I smiled back, her bright red hair catching my eye, but then remembered why I was in the bar. I wasn’t here to flirt with beautiful redheads; I needed results for Kevin. It didn’t matter, though, because Alice crossed the room to where we were sitting.

“I’m Alice, and this is my friend Abigail,” she said. Abigail extend ed a gangly arm offering her hand.

“Leonard. A pleasure to meet you both.” I shook both their hands before remembering Kevin. “And, uh, this is my friend, Kevin.” I slapped Kevin on the shoulder to get his attention away from the bots. “Kevin, this is Alice and Abigail.”

I’m not sure if it was my pep talk or if Abigail had somehow en chanted Kevin enough for him to behave, but he didn’t talk about Bar bara once. The four of us had another round of drinks before Kevin sug gested, all on his own, that we have dinner. He managed to get through the meal without seeming like the sad sack I had met that afternoon. When we left the restaurant, Alice and I naturally lingered as Kev in and Abigail meandered up the street, continuing their flirtation. “We had a great time tonight,” Alice said with a giddy smile. I could hear Kevin asking Abigail to have another night out.

“So what would you think about having a drink sometime?” I said to Alice.

“I doubt that would be appropriate,” she said, the smile gone.

“You seemed to be having a good time, I thought maybe—” “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I thought you understood,” she said, her tone now businesslike.

Just then a cab pulled up and Abigail called over: “Alice, this is us!” “Maybe I’ll see you again?”

Alice smiled, touched my hand briefly, and then climbed into the cab. I wondered what I had done wrong.

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“Can you believe it, Len? She and I are going out again next Tues day. You really pulled through for me, buddy,” Kevin said.

“That sounds great,” I said with positive enthusiasm as I watched the cab drive away. *** Bert booked a full afternoon with me. I had seen him a few times, but our Encounters had tapered off in recent weeks. I felt I

owed him a few hours since his five-star rating had launched my Friend career. When I arrived at his apartment, the first thing I noticed was that it ap peared emptier than usual. The couch and television screen were gone. The only thing in the room was his collection of seltzer bottles. “What’s the matter, Bert?” I asked. He was visibly sad.

“I’ve got to sell the collection.”

“The seltzer bottles? But why?”

“I’m bankrupt.”

“But I thought you had sold millions of Sel-Zero water machines.” “Pre-sold. Turns out the Sel-Zero water packets don’t need an ex pensive machine to squeeze out carbonated water.

Customers have just been squeezing seltzer water from the packets by hand.” He held up a Sel-Zero bag for me to hold, clipped off the tube on the end, and poured a glass of seltzer. “You see the problem? No ma chine.”

“Can’t you just sell the bags of seltzer?”

“Sure, but my business partner invented the bag. He doesn’t need me to sell them—so I’ve run out of money.”

“I’m sure you’ll find another way,” I said, remembering Friendr’s recommendation to always remain supportive of clients.

“Listen, I wanted to say goodbye. You’ve been such a good friend to me. I’ll be honest with you—I’m spending the last of my liquid assets on this appointment.”

“I’m honored, really, that you would spend the last of your money on me. You know, you were my first Friendr client? I’ll always remember that about you.”

“I was thinking maybe we could be friends—outside of the app.”

“Unfortunately, Bert, Friendr’s terms of service prohibit fraterniz ing outside of the app’s arranged Encounters. It is to protect both of us.

MacAllen 35 It’s so that we can both forget about the arrangement, financially, be tween you and me.”

“The problem is—I can’t really afford to pay for friendship any more on account of owing so much money.”

“I know. I’m pretty torn up about this, too.”

“Maybe we could just go out for an imitation coffee sometime.

We wouldn’t even have to talk. We could just sit at the same Melville Cafe and drink our imitation coffee and not talk to each other.”

“I supposed that wouldn’t technically violate the terms of service, if we didn’t speak. I’m just not sure if that is how friendship is supposed to work.”

“Just pick a place and a time, and I’ll be there.”

I hugged Bert goodbye. Since we were never going to see each other again and there was nothing sexual about a hug, I figured we could bend the rules this once. Goodbye, friend, I wanted to say, but he wasn’t. He was just a client. *** My Friendr score continued to increase. My efforts with Kevin had earned me the BFF Badge, and suddenly I was a favorite among single men looking for help finding a lover. I had no special bag of tricks. I felt certain they would find me out as a fraud soon enough, but the Swell fees were higher, and I accepted the challenge.

When we were successful, the men believed I had been their lucky charm and would leave glowing reviews of my services. If we failed, the men blamed the women, or they blamed the weather, or the bar, or sometimes they really just wanted someone to watch Bot Ball or Robot Hockey with. They never blamed me, and usually we would try again until they found a woman or man desperate enough to love them back. *** Kevin booked another appointment. “Abigail keeps asking about you so I told her we could go to dinner,” he said in the message. The Swell multiplier was four, so I figured for that kind of money I would have to say yes.

I met Kevin at his apartment. I was impressed he knew how to cook, but he had filled his spare time with classes at the French Institute. “Listen, I need you to play along and tell her we met taking a cooking

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class. I don’t want her to know about—you know, that I used Friendr.” “Everyone uses Friendr. There’s no shame in it.”

“Will you just play along? I’ll throw in an extra hundred bucks,” Kevin said.

“Sure. Okay. What were we learning to cook?”

“What?”

“We met at cooking class. What were we learning to cook? I mean, I know how to make spaghetti and baked potatoes.”

“You aren’t cooking anything. It’s just a story—we were at

class.” Abigail was already on her way up to his apartment, so I agreed, think ing it a shoddy story.

Kevin, for his part, was a gracious host. He mixed cocktails for us with the adroit skill of a seasoned bartender. He admitted later to having enrolled in several mixology courses.

“I think it’s charming that Kevin takes personal improvement so seriously. He’s constantly running off to a new class,” Abigail said while sipping the drink. “And Leonard, what about you? Tell us. Are you learn ing anything new?”

“Not lately, not since that cooking class I took with Kevin,” I said, attempting to sound authentic.

“What is it you do, then?”

“I was a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? Like an actual career? I didn’t know we had those any more.”

“Not for a while, actually,” I admitted. “I’m between careers now.” “No shame in retiring. I thought after I sold my app that I would want to save the world with some philanthropy work, or maybe get into venture capital. But you know, I’ll be honest: retirement is far more plea surable. Maybe that’s why I find Kevin’s commitment to self-improve ment so charming.”

I smiled and played along, and afterward Kevin gave me another five stars and nominated me for a Friendr Bro Badge. *** I saw Alice at a bar in Queens. I would recognize that red hair any where. I had booked three straight weeks of Encounters without a single night off. I had been spending so much time in bars helping men meet

MacAllen 37 people, I thought for sure I’d prefer spending time alone in my apart ment. Twenty minutes after sitting alone, I realized I was lonely. I headed down to my local spot, a dive bar that gentrifying waves had overlooked. And then I saw her sitting at the counter.

“Alice, hey, how are you?” I said.

She looked up at me, stared at my face, and I could tell she didn’t recognize me. “Sorry? My name isn’t Alice.”

“We met a few months ago—you were with your friend Abigail.” “Sorry, I just don’t remember—you know, I have a lot of friends.” “I was going by Leonard the night we met, but you can call me Dave.”

She sighed. “Dave, you seem like a lovely person. But to be

hon est—you don’t want to get involved with me. I know you think you do, but you don’t. You met Alice. She’s also a lovely person.

She makes every one feel great. Well, everyone except me. But that’s just the thing—Alice is really good at making people feel good because for her, that’s her job, it’s what she does. But for me—I hate people. I think that Leonard might know what I’m talking about.”

“You’re a friend, then? Professionally, I mean.”

“No. I’m Harriet. Tonight, I’m just Harriet. Tonight, I don’t have to talk to people if I don’t want to. Tonight, Harriet wants to drink alone at a bar. Tonight, Harriet just wants to sit quietly by herself.”

“I see.”

“You can find Alice on Friendr, username AliceNChains.

Catchy, right? Find me on there. I’ll give you an industry discount.”

“Don’t you want something more real than that?”

She chuckled. “Nothing’s real anymore.” *** I was surprised to find Bert had made an appointment. He wanted to take me to Game Seven of the Battle Bots World Series, and so even though there was no Swell bonus, I agreed. I could have earned triple rates helping bros trawl the singles bars, but I had never been to a Battle Bots game in person.

We met outside of the old Yankee Stadium and Bert wrapped his arms around me in a giant bear hug. “It’s so good to see you, buddy,” he said.

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“I’m surprised, but admittedly happy to see you too. What hap pened? Last time we talked you were selling off all your worldly posses sions.”

“Don’t I know it. But I’m back, baby! I have a new round of financ ing, this time for a seltzer-flavoring machine. We add packets of flavor essence to the water. I’ve got so many people excited for it. One of the investors had tickets to this game and offered them to me. I knew I had to bring my best friend.”

“Oh, thanks, Bert, that means so much to me.”

“I used to come here with my father when the Yankees were a base ball team. You remember them?”

“It was a real tragedy when they turned the stadium into a Battle Bot arena, but I’ll be honest, I love watching a team of robots rip each other apart.”

We swiped into the stadium. The seats were magnificent, just

be hind the visiting team’s goal. Sadly, the Bloomberg Bots lost in the final minutes of the game and the Suris became the new Battle Bot World Champions, but watching the match with Bert, eating a hot dog and drinking a beer, it almost felt like we were friends. *** Kevin booked me for his wedding. “Dude, you need to wear a tux, but I can rent one for you if you need,” he said in the message. The Swell surcharge was a ten times multiplier, so obviously I said yes. Kevin had rented out Ellis Island for the event. He had invited three hundred of his closest friends, and we all had to ride the little tipsy ferryboats to the island.

“What’s the matter, you don’t have your sea legs yet?” Kevin joked with me. What he hadn’t told me was that I was to be the seventh grooms man in his wedding party. At least he didn’t expect me to make a speech.

The ferry docked and we met up with the bride for photos along the water. Among the bridesmaids, I saw Alice, her bright red hair dis cordant next to the pale blue bridesmaid dresses.

Between pictures, I found a moment to speak to her. “Funny seeing you here.”

“You’re friends with the groom?” she asked. “Friends,” she empha sized a second time.

MacAllen 39 “And Abigail is Alice’s friend?”

“Premium Swell charge today.” She smiled at the thought. I nodded. “So are we allowed to mingle?”

“Alice is here through tomorrow’s farewell brunch. Abigail even got me a hotel room down the hall from the wedding suite with the rest of the bridal party.”

“How thoughtful.”

“You do seem nice enough. Leonard, right?”

“Today, yes.”

“Listen, Leonard, I don’t want you to think—it’s just that Harriet can be a real bitch. I mean, nobody is paying her to be nice and that means the teeth come out.”

She touched my hand ever so slightly, and then the photographer was calling us back for another line up.

Later, after the ceremony, after the speeches, when the bride and groom were drunk, Alice and I danced to a slow song. I felt her body breathing next to mine and for a brief moment that was

all I really want ed, another human to stand beside and feel the beating of her heart against mine. But the song ended, and the lights came on, and I went home. *** I returned the tuxedo to the rental store. The computer spat out a receipt and I wondered if Kevin would ever tell his wife the truth about how he and I met, that I still didn’t know how to cook anything worth a damn. I assumed that since Alice had attended the wedding, Abigail hadn’t bothered telling him about their relationship. They had both crafted their own perfect world. They could afford to do that. They could probably keep paying Alice and I to show up at those important mo ments for the rest of their lives—the birth of their children, birthdays, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and maybe even their funerals. I had heard plenty of stories of Friendr associates booking final Encoun ters.

I had cleared my schedule for a few days thinking I needed a break after the wedding. It was then I decided to log onto Friendr not as an as sociate but as a client. I just wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes who didn’t need me to be someone else. I just needed a friend.

40 MacAllen 41

Yet Another Example of the Seemingly Symbiotic Relationship Between Boredom and Purpose Dean Liao In post-industrial society, the relationship between labor and leisure is torrid. All play and no work makes jack a broke boy; all work and no play makes jack a supplicant. Subsumed by mixed

messages, we stum ble around blindly, clutching tightly to our narrative of choice, inventing ourselves as we go along.

Production is both death and existence. We are merely the currency for transaction. A closer look and what do you see?

Just another false profit.

Liao

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44 Liao

Liao 45

Evaluation Rich Furman “Your body is going to need to remember how to move. Your quad riceps are going to forget, in a sense, how to work.”

The large, open physical therapy room has two other therapists working with their patients. They encourage each of them to move their limbs an inch or two more. Come on. You can do it. Push. I listen to the grunts and moans—a man perhaps

twenty years older than I and a small fig of a woman perhaps thirty years older. The black vinyl therapy table feels tacky and unnatural as I move my body into positions and poses upon request.

“You’re going to have pretty extensive carpentry performed on you, and your body is going to forget how to function.”

This is our pre-surgical physical therapy intake, and Dr. Matt ma nipulates my limbs in ways they have not moved since my days of kink or Hatha yoga. He announces numbers with authority and satisfaction: I seem to be passing. 132 degrees with one knee, 131 with the other. My legs straightened to a wink shy of zero degrees. He tests the strength of my quads and hamstrings.

“You’re really strong. How are you keeping up with strength train ing?” Dr. Matt asks.

It’s been a couple of years since I have thought of myself as strong. My knees have been making me unsteady at random, unpredictable times, as if any unexpected bump or small disturbance might send me to the ground.

I tell him about the body-weight squats I do every other day, ne glecting to share that as my body descends the last few inches toward my floor, I worry about blacking out from the pain. I’m not worried about doing more damage to my deformed hinges—they are coming out any

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how—and I read that leg strength and range of motion are associated with positive outcomes.

“I would have thought that would hurt a great deal,” Dr. Matt half suggests, half asks.

“It’s manageable.”

He grins, slightly cockeyed, kind but disbelieving. We talk about exercises I will need to do after the surgeon cuts open my leg, carves out the troubled tissue, and saws smooth the bones that are now splintered and failed. Dr. Matt has me perform each exercise several times, move ments that two years ago I would have scoffed at, discounted as being for the weak. I used to say that walking was exercise for unfit people. But now, I am starting to realize that in a few weeks, any remaining smirk will be wiped right off my face.

Furman 47

A Good Day for the Obituaries Les Bernstein released from the dense knot of stable identity relieved of unfinished earthly busyness and provided a long view of shifting perspectives 5 people well over 90 3 in their sleep 2 surrounded by family unanchored their moorings slipped to a cushioned distance and according to the daily news peacefully passed to parts unknown

Bernste in

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Chain Letter: An Artifact

Mark Crimmins Go ahead—throw this letter away and forget about it! That’s what Ethel Searle of Gallup, New Mexico did. Then she went out and did her gro cery shopping and got bitten by a tarantula that crawled out of a box of bananas. Or maybe it’s Blunt Wilson of Yelm, Washington you want to be like. He crashed his truck into a tree just outside of Tumwater when he ripped this letter up and threw the pieces out his cabin window. Try to forget about Samantha Davis, who was buried by a mudslide in Hemet, California after she decided not to open this letter. Take it to school and make fun of it to your friends—that way you can be like Jimmie Bates of Battle Mountain, Nevada, who crashed his bike into a ditch full of radio active waste on his way home from school after being such a big hero to his chums! But I know that some people are a bit more concerned about their health than the fools who made the mistake of ignoring this letter, and it’s to these people that I now address myself. You don’t need to know who I am—that’s not important.

What’s important is understanding that Saint James the Obscure needs this letter to make its way around the world before he can extend the life expectancy of the human race. But sending on this letter will also bring immediate benefits to the people who do so.

Take Cecilia Whistle of Linden, Kansas. She received this letter on 17 March 1975. She made seventeen copies of it and sent them to her relatives. Six weeks later she went to Las Vegas and won twenty thousand dollars on the blackjack tables. Now she opens her mail with a diamond-studded letter opener and she’s quit her job at Burger King to write a book about how Saint James the Obscure has changed her life. Cecilia Whistle is smarter than The New York Times. I sent this letter to the editors, explaining that it was fitter than all the other news to print and asking them to display it on a full-page spread. And how did Amer

ns Crimmi 49 ica’s national newspaper respond? It sent me a letter informing me of its advertising rates. I guess those New Yorkers aren’t as sharp as they want the rest of us to think. If you ask Saint James the Obscure for money to publish his good tidings, he gets real pissed off. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which newspaper had massive financial problems right after it made the mistake of treating Saint James the Obscure in a mercenary way. When someone’s trying

to help you, the last thing you want to do is ask them for cash.

When you’re lying in the middle of the freeway with a bulldozer on top of your head and the paramedics come to free you with the jaws of life, do you ask them for a hundred bucks so you can go out for cocktails after you get out of brain surgery? When six guys are mug ging you in a Memphis alley and a stranger risks his life to rescue you, do you ask him for the watch his wife gave him as a twenty-fifth anniver sary present? No. You do what little Bobbie Starks of Austin, Texas did when he opened this letter before his parents came home from work. You realize that this is the turning point of your life and mail the letter to seventeen addresses in your Mom’s little black book by the telephone table in the hall so the grace of Saint James the Obscure can descend on them like a Scarlatti cantata. Little Bobbie Starks never told anybody he did the right thing. Within a month, his parents were sitting at the dinner table talking about their good luck. The Lincoln Town Car they won in the drawing at the fairgrounds. The lifelong supply of coffee that mysteriously appeared from Colombia. The $51,000 bank error Austin Savings and Loan made in their favor. And whatever happened to Bob bie Starks? Now he lives in his parents’ backyard in his very own little house built out of 50,000 Lego bricks he won as a prize for an essay on toys. And the nice thing about this is that the Starks family doesn’t have to feel guilty because of their good fortune. Seventeen of their friends have also received sudden and mysterious windfalls. But perhaps you want to hear my own story before you make a decision that will change your life forever. I received this letter in the mail five years ago and im mediately sent it to all my friends. I only had three friends, so I picked the other fourteen people out of the phone book. Within three weeks I was cured of my arthritis. A month later, I received a money order in the mail for 34,000 francs, a present from the Swiss government. My wife and I always wanted to have children, but we gave up on it when she turned sixty. Then I sent this letter out and Saint James the Obscure got

50

Crimmin s

to work. Now we have three children and all of them have appeared in baby commercials from which we receive lucrative residuals. I’m trying to learn how to drive a Ferrari Dino that a total stranger left me in his will. Other wonderful things have been happening to me—too numer ous to mention here. The important thing is that you mail this letter to seventeen people immediately. Then all you have to do is sit

back and wait for your reward. All you need is the cost of the stamps and the intel ligence to realize that Saint James the Obscure has chosen you to be the recipient of his benevolence!

Act now! Head over to the post office and prepare to prosper!

Crimmins 51

Postcard from Croatia Lynn Boulger Bullet holes are visible in the cathedral doors

in Šibenik. Do we leave that out?

Do we leave out the taxi driver telling us he fought in the war while we were in the back wondering if atrocities were committed, and what atrocities? Was he one of the soldiers who held women hostage inside hotel rooms for years?

No, that was the Serbs, he says, not us. It’s beautiful here.

The water is clear. We swam off Porporela at twilight, the water of the Adriatic purple and cold. We’ve been to Hvar, Dubrovnik, Split, and now we’re in the capital, which is charming. At dusk, the gas man of Zagreb goes around the old city on his Vespa, lighting the lanterns.

He holds a 10-foot-long rod and expertly switches a lever at the base of each lamp, which opens the gas line.

The pilot stays lit and the five mantles catch when the gas starts flowing.

52 Boulge

r

He leaves a trail of light where he has been.

History slips off into shadow.

Boulger 53

Finding Out About the Deaths of Some of My, Well, Ron Riekki I call them ancestors but my brother calls them relatives, saying that he does not feel indigenous, and I tell him I don’t care about his feelings, when I should have told him to feel the presence of those who have come before us, and I think of the last Anishinaabe pow wow I was blessed with, me, an outsider, watching, afraid to enter, because I’m not Anishinaabe, but I am Sámi, Karelian, native, but Arctic native, reindeer native, snow native, ice native, guovttá native—a Sámi word meaning two people alone and I am two people alone— and the loons nearby were quiet, and I went out on the lake, alone, and I looked up at the stars, and I know that the stars are our ancestors turned into reindeer, bright reindeer,

54

Riekki

and I tell my brother this, but he is lost to his accounting, to his numbers, when I want to tell him about how many of us

have been assimilated, have lost just about everything for so little just drum-less death

Riekki 55

Grief Lynn Boulger

Remove the apple tree and the field does not disappear.

Subtract the rock, the slashed blueberry bush— the field remains.

Melt the snow, empty the vernal pools under sheets of lacy ice— the field is there.

The sheep cocooned in their smell of wet wool and warm manure, lanolin, animal, their slow dignity, flecks of hay in their coats. They slowly walk into the barn, and the field remains.

Night comes down low, summer stars or winter snowfall, fireflies, fallen leaves. Darkness all around. The field remains.

Boulge r

56

Mom Jeans Kasey Renee Shaw Tom, my boyfriend of three months, leaned against the wall of his bathroom and watched me pee on a pregnancy test. We split the cost for a box that advertised two-for-the-price-of-one for 100% certainty—$20 for certainty, couldn’t beat that price. Yellow curry was abandoned to bubble on the stove. Tom’s roommate had left a minute ago to run to the store; we dashed to the

bathroom to make use of the little privacy that we had.

“These things can be wrong. Just remember that. I read it all the time online. False positives.” I avoided, to the point of delusion, the very real possibility that I was pregnant. I justified my denial in any way that I could: I took my birth control pill (only missing a day or two), Tom and I used condoms (most of the time), and I was pretty sure I had a tilted uterus, which made it harder to conceive (never formally diagnosed but my mom had one, and I assumed it was the case for me too).

“Right,” Tom countered. “But haven’t you been nauseous lately? Morning sickness is a symptom of pregnancy.” He paused, scrunching his eyebrows. “It is, right?”

I stood up from the toilet seat and buttoned my jeans, dismissing him with a wave of my hand. “My sister just got over a stomach bug. I’ve been up late studying, too, and haven’t slept, like, at all.” I gently placed the pregnancy test stick on the sink.

Tom bit his thumbnail. I chewed on my bottom lip. Our eyes didn’t leave that spot.

Within two minutes, a solid, pink line appeared. “Bullshit,” I said, reaching for the other test. My hand was shaking. Tom’s face paled. “False positives, okay?” I reminded him. “Don’t worry or you’ll start freaking me out.”

Only thirty seconds passed before the subsequent confirmation:

Shaw

57

I was pregnant. The reality flooded my brain, my denial breaking like a dam. I barely made enough at my waitressing gig to cover rent. My diet consisted of whatever alcohol I could buy with a fake I.D. and black sludgy coffee to supplement my schedule of studying, partying, and of ten getting only four hours of sleep. I didn’t know my body could get pregnant, but I knew I couldn’t afford it.

The smell of our burning dinner permeated in the house.

“Leave it,” Tom told me, turning off the stove. He took me into his room. I laid down and put my hands on top of my stomach.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Oh my God. This can’t be happening.” He knelt next to me and opened his mouth to speak. I didn’t let him. Nothing he could say would be the right thing and my nerves kept my tongue wagging. “What are we going to do?

What can we do?”

His mattress was on the floor, nestled next to a window. The cool glass pressed against my toes. “You have an exam tomorrow.

I have to go back to my place. We can deal with this tomorrow.”

Anxiety bubbled from the base of my stomach to the top of my throat—a tea kettle whis tling in another room, about to spill over. I swallowed. “I’m going to walk home so you can go study.”

Tom held both of my hands. “Do you think I’m going to leave you alone right now?” *** My mom got pregnant with her first child, my oldest brother, when she was 21 and my dad was 20. I have no idea what the terms of their rela tionship were when she got pregnant—casual dating, a hook up, a long term relationship. Neither had finished college yet. Both, after learning the news, decided to take some time off—or, more appropriately, were forced to.

My grandmother, hyper-religious and hoping to avoid Hellfire, planned a wedding for them in three months. Getting them hitched be fore my brother was born, somehow, was less of a sin. A divine loophole.

I’ve seen photographs of the wedding. Friends brought homemade dishes like they were going to a potluck: chili with ground beef and black beans, grilled chicken seasoned with only salt and pepper. My mother wore a friend’s wedding dress. My dad’s groomsmen wore blue jeans. The bride wasn’t showing yet, but I can’t imagine a scenario where the

Shaw 58 guests weren’t suspicious of a speedy wedding. For my family, the idea of a shotgun wedding was a much better option than the alternative: my parents raise their child out of wedlock.

They divorced nine years after they exchanged vows.

I imagined Tom in a tuxedo, me in a hand-me-down white gown. Our friends would bring veggie burgers and sutlach. His groomsmen would wear dress pants. Then, when our baby was born six months after our wedding, no one would say a word. *** Morgan watched television in the living room of our apartment. No one knew I was pregnant, and I figured if anybody had to, it would be my twin sister. No doubt she would question my early-morning retching in the bathroom, my eventual absence from classes, my disappearance from outings with friends. I perched myself next to her and set my back pack on my lap. “I have to show you something,” I told her. She turned her head toward me, slow enough that I could appreciate

the profile that we shared: my dad’s pointy chin and ruler-straight nose, my mom’s long eyelashes and small lips. My hand offered her the pregnancy test. She stared at it, then shook her head.

“I really hope you’re joking, but if not, you know you can’t have a child right now.”

Her reaction stunned me, though it shouldn’t have. She had my mom’s compassion, but my dad’s direct, no-nonsense rationale. “What?” I snatched the test from her gaze and stowed it back into my bookbag. “Real great, Morgan. No ‘Are you okay?’ or ‘What’s your plan?’”

She shook her head, an adult talking to a petulant toddler. I shrank beside her. “You know you can’t have a kid. It would ruin your life. Of course I’ll support whatever you choose, but be reasonable.”

I slung my bookbag over my shoulder. “You can be a real bitch sometimes, you know that?” Stomping into my room, I cried into my pillow. She was right, but I desperately wanted her to be wrong. I day dreamed that she would tip-toe into my room and hold me in her arms like when we were children sleeping on the same full-sized mattress. I used to have panic attacks when I was that young. I was terrified the world might end. Maybe it was because of the Discovery Channel shows that talked about Heat Death or the times my Christian grandmother

Shaw 59 brought me to her church and the pastor talked about Revelations.

Nev ertheless, Morgan wasn’t nervous like I was. She was never scared. She would embrace me and tell me that the world would end in light and we would feel nothing at all.

But she never came. *** At my first Planned Parenthood appointment, I sat across from a nurse with inoffensive pink lipstick and a gentle voice. She substantiated everything: I was pregnant, just about five weeks. I dabbed at my eyes with a tissue. Tom waited in the next room. I could hear the faint squeaksqueaksqueak of his chair as his leg bounced up and down.

“You have options,” the employee reminded me. “Have you consid ered any of them?”

Flipping idly through the pamphlets she gave me, words like safe and choice jumped out at me. The models all looked intelligent, brazen, and confident. They had young faces and

dressed casually. A crisis ho tline was printed on nearly every page along with details of different psy chologists. In the corner of the room, the anatomy of a vagina was drawn on a poster with a model diaphragm next to it. One question remained stagnant in the air.

Could I be a mother? *** Standing in front of my bedroom mirror, I lifted my shirt, probably like my own mother did when she first found out. I pushed out my ab domen, tried out what I might look like in the coming months. My belly poked over my yoga pants. I twisted from side to side and arched my back. It was hard to imagine that something was in there.

“Hello,” I sang out. “Hi. Can you hear me in there? ” I gave my stom ach two or three taps with the knuckle of my index finger.

“You probably don’t have ears yet, huh? It’s me. Your mom.” I was trying the word out on my tongue; I didn’t feel like a mother but, in different ways, I was play ing the role. I complained of my aching back and tender feet. I avoided alcohol and fanned away Tom’s cigarette smoke. We came to the quick conclusion that I couldn’t go through with the pregnancy, but, despite myself, the thought of motherhood was as lovely as it was terrifying.

Shaw 60 Tiny baby shoes. Holding little hands. Late nights with no sleep.

Kissing chubby cheeks. Missing out on last-minute vacations with unattached friends. Unconditional love. Undisclosed resentment.

As I stared in the mirror, I told myself that I was playing a very dan gerous game. I couldn’t have myself falling in love with Him. Or Her. Or It. Pulling down my shirt, I decided to never do that again. *** I insisted that Tom not skip another class and asked my sister to take me to where the Planned Parenthood in my college town referred me: the Planned Parenthood East Columbus Surgical Center. I deter mined to opt out of using my insurance card; I was still on my dad’s health insurance and feared he would figure out what was going on. My parents, I decided, could never know.

“I’m really glad you’re doing this,” Morgan said to me as we stepped out of the car. I turned my head from her so she didn’t notice the tears in my eyes. My cheeks burned. I crossed my arms and held my jacket tighter to my body.

I hated Morgan for saying that.

Tom let me stay over every night and woke up early to send me to class with coffee and lunch. Where my sister refused, he indulged me in my constant interrogation: “Do you think we could do it? Raise a baby?” “It’d be hard, but it’s your choice,” he’d reply, gazing at his shoes.

“I want to know what you think,” I pressed.

He would stay motionless for a long time, contemplating the least aggressive and influential reaction. He was just as frightened as me. “I don’t want to tell you what to do and have you hate me forever.” It was as much of an answer as anything else. I hated Tom for how kind he was.

And the embryo inside of me, I hated It, too—a thief that stole my body’s nutrients, that made me exhausted and sick to my stomach. It invaded my insides and fashioned a home using my flesh and bone. A parasite lurching and twitching in my womb, starving for my discomfort, compelling me toward motherly instinct and affection. It wreaked havoc on my my brain and my body, my father’s pragmatism and my mother’s softness, and took advantage of my love and my abhorrence.

I walked into the clinic and signed in. Right when I sat down, a

Shaw 61 Woman entered. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. Where I kept my head down and folded my arms around my chest, she walked in with her lips painted a merlot red, her chin held high. She clutched a toddler in her arms, and her mother, it appeared, followed closely behind. When she passed me, she gave me a soft smile with those red lips.

“I’m here for my ultrasound,” she told the secretary. “And to sched ule my surgery.” *** My grandmother never liked my dad and she always made that clear to my sister and me. She refused to sit at our softball games with him. When my mother emailed him, their preferred method of contact, my grandmother would hover over the emails and suggest possible re plies. I took her out to dinner once, a place where the authentic Mexican food confused and revolted her. She drank heartily from her margarita, no salt. “Your father didn’t want to marry your mother, you know. He didn’t know why they couldn’t just live together and raise your broth

er. I said to him: ‘You got my daughter pregnant. You’re marrying her.’” She was pleased with herself. The waitress checked on us and my grand mother let her know that she thought the queso was inedible. I wanted to slap her, to scream at her. I was sure my grandmother only thought she was doing right by my mother. But did she know she took away my dad’s choice? Did she know she took away my mom’s? Would she listen to me if I told her? *** “Would you like to see?”

“Yes, I think so.”

The ultrasound technician greased my stomach with cold goo.

She turned her head to the monitor, her forehead creasing until she found what she was looking for.

My baby looked like a puppy-alien hybrid. Its fingers curled un derneath its unformed chin, greyish dots-for-eyes padded the sides of its blobby head. An extraterrestrial crescent moon inhabiting my womb, and this was our first meeting. My heart was a tidepool: she swelled, she sunk.

“Would you like to keep the picture?”

This was our first meeting and our last. I wanted to touch the mon

Shaw 62 itor, to trace the curious curves and greyscale cells. A picture would be the only tangible item to remember that this happened.

“Look,” I’d tell my own children, “you had a brother once.” Or perhaps I’d say “Be care ful, be so careful.” Or if Tom and I unraveled, I could show it to the next great love of my life. They would see what I went through. Evidence of my pain. Proof. A landmark.

“Yes, I think so.” *** The copy of the ultrasound was in my pocket when I scheduled my final appointment. I didn’t tell Morgan as we drove home. Tom was waiting for me when I got back to my apartment. I gave him the photo and flopped onto my bed, regarding him through my eyelashes.

“Oh, wow.” He said, pinching it in between his index finger and thumb. “I can’t believe this. This is...so real, isn’t it?”

“Does it make you feel any different?”

“What do you mean?”

“About any of this? About what we decided to do?”

His face turned into a stone; he was scared to death of

influenc ing my decision and my emotions but more scared of being a father. He didn’t think I knew that last part, but I did. I looked through his phone while he was sleeping—I couldn’t sleep then, couldn’t ever sleep despite constant exhaustion— and read a text message with a friend about how emotional I had been, how scared he was that I would back out of the procedure, how he didn’t think he could be a father. I glared at the dark outline of his sleeping form, how his chest rose and fell, and wanted to smash his phone into tiny glass pieces. I resented him for what I saw he said in his private conversations, what I imagined he could have said; I resented him for a lot, and I resented him right then. I wished he just told me that he wanted me to have the abortion. I wished he could have brought himself to say “abortion.” I wished he would tell me that he didn’t want to be with me, to be a part of a family with me and get bald while my hips grew round and sported mom jeans, to be stuck with me in his life for at least eighteen years, just like my parents were and are permanently linked. The longer I sat in this quiet with him, the more time he wore that stupid blank expression on his face, the more hate began to bubble in my stomach, the more I wanted to scream at him.

Shaw 63 Coward. Coward. Coward.

He gave me back the photo. The rigid glacier in the pit of my stom ach melted. The realization flooded upward, upward, upward, until I felt red-hot guilt and mourning touch the tips of my ears and submerge my brain.

Maybe, I thought, I am the coward. *** “Are you nervous?”

I gave the Woman, the same one from my ultrasound appointment, a polite smile and shrugged. We both wore robes and had IVs attached to our arms. “A little,” I admitted. I tried to avoid looking at the needle in my arm by maintaining eye contact with her. She was pretty, with a heart-shaped face and glossy brown hair. Earlier she was on the floor in the waiting room, scooting a tiny red fire truck around with her son. He couldn’t have been older than five. Her mother talked quietly on in a phone in Spanish, thumbing idly through a magazine. I tried my best not to stare at her, making out the lazy blue-black of the sky through the tinted windows, the sunrise peeking out from the cover of winter’s fog. I don’t think anybody could see inside unless they got close,

pressed their face against the glass, and even then, who knew.

But my eyes always re turned to her there with her son, her voice imitating an engine and her son giggling in response.

“Did you get the full anesthetic?”

“Yeah. Did you?”

She nodded. “There’s no way in Hell I’d do this without being knocked the fucked out.” We laughed and the air became lighter.

“How old are you? I’m sorry if that’s personal. I’m just curious.”

“Twenty.”

“That’s how old I was when I got pregnant with my first one, the lit tle guy always following me around in the waiting room. He’s great, but I couldn’t do it again. My boyfriend wanted me to. Said he wants to marry me. Do this thing right. I don’t think Davy—that’s my son, Davy—I don’t think he understands what’s going on.” She tapped her long fingernails on the arm rest. I thought about my mother and wondered if terminat ing her first pregnancy was on her radar, just once, or perhaps it crossed her mind when she was pregnant the last time, when her marriage with

Shaw 64 my father was failing. I could see her in the ultrasound room—a couple kids, a miscarriage, and a failing marriage later—the moment they told her that they were mistaken, and one baby was actually two. Recounting the story, my mom said she cried because she was so happy. Now, I ques tioned if that was true.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I’m sorry.”

She laughed as if I said the funniest thing she had heard in awhile. “What could you possibly be sorry for?” *** The Woman was called back into the operation room. Fifteen min utes passed. There was no music playing in this room like there was in the lobby. Monitors beeped. Nurses spoke in soft voices. I tapped my toe and scrolled through my phone. I tried to text Tom, but I didn’t have service. I glared at the lights until purple circles dotted my vision.

I was truly, for the first time, alone with what I was about to do. No school work, no Tom, no job, no distractions. Behind a white wall the Woman was getting an abortion, and behind that same wall, in a matter of minutes, I would be getting one too. No more throwing up. No more cramps. No more sleepless nights. No more baby. I was severely sad and incredibly relieved

simultaneously. I didn’t feel entitled to either emo tion.

How could I be upset if I was willingly getting an abortion?

How could I be relieved if losing my child made me intensely mis erable? *** The Woman re-entered and sat down next to me. They put anoth er IV in her. She had heavy-lidded eyes and a honeyed smile. “Don’t be nervous,” she said. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

I studied her form, how relaxed she seemed to be—a woman re turning from a day at the beach. Leaning toward her, I touched her arm. “Thank you.” She grasped my hand in hers, rubbing circles with her thumb on my skin. For that small blip in time, I was at peace. And then it was my turn. *** “So where do you go to school?” The doctor was an older woman with a straight, gray bob and deep laugh lines. She guided my legs on

Shaw 65 stirrups with a gentle, rehearsed hand.

“Ohio University.” The nurse poked my veins with the sedative and it ran cool through my body. “When will this start working, by the way?” “Soon enough. Scoot your butt closer to me.” She sat in a chair. I could only see the top of her head. “What do you study at Ohio State?” “Oh, sorry, it was actually Ohio University.” My feet came into con tact with straps that held them into place. I wiggled my toes, testing my freedom. “Nursing, but I think I’m changing my major to English.” “Wonderful. I always loved to read. Gonna be a little cold here.” Her fingers examined me, foreign and strange, and my knees became magnets that compelled themselves together. “Keep them open for me, okay?”

The nurse crouched by me. “It’ll start working fast. Try counting down from ten.”

A mechanical whirr overshadowed the noise of the air-condition er. “Some patients look at the clouds on the ceiling and say they’re mov ing when it kicks in.”

My chin pointed upwards. “Ten, nine, eight…”

If the clouds started to swirl, I didn’t see them. *** By the time I woke up and stumbled back to Tom, the operation didn’t exist in my memory. The Woman, my companion through this shared experience, was nowhere to be found. Men

filled the waiting room and snapped their heads toward the door I was escorted through. Tom sat straight up and cracked his neck when he saw it was me. He ushered me into my coat.

A woman in a yellow jacket stopped Tom and I just before we walked outside. “Go out the back. There’s an exit that way.” She pushed her sunglasses up her face, her bangs fanning from behind them. “You won’t have to look at them.”

“Who?” I muttered. “Look at who?”

A group of protestors held signs with mutilated fetuses and accu sations of murder on signs. Little girls with braided pigtails picked at the grass and kicked at the dirt. The older ladies—and two gentleman— showed off their posters to the building and the streets, to passing cars that honked their horns in approval and drivers who flashed them a

Shaw 66 middle finger. They were noiseless, yelling nothing. There was no con versation between any of them.

I leaned on Tom’s arm, doing my best to ignore the protestors.

I didn’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing me cry, proof of my grief and my relief, or the satisfaction of an angry outburst that started to rise hot in my chest. The ground beneath me was impermeable; my brain was in a fog from the drugs. I could’ve lay there, right in the snowy grass, and fallen asleep. To distract myself, I started a chant in my head: left foot, right foot, don’t look.

Left foot, right foot, don’t look.

“Thank you.” His voice cracked. He raised a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. “Thanks so much.” I could only nod to the lady in yellow. A badge on her jacket read “volunteer.” She gave me a pat on the back and donned her sunglasses.

Tom’s car was in front of two women: both in long jean skirts with grey, knitted caps over their heads. They held their signs—the smooshed heart of a fetus and a Bible verse, one I never cared to look up—directly in front of the part of the fence that separated them from Tom’s car. They were straight-standing Medusas, their faces blank and their cheeks red dened from the cold. “Just get in,” Tom pleaded, opening my car door for me. “Ignore them.”

My posture swayed. I propped my elbow on the trunk of the car. The heat consumed my whole body. My chant changed: how dare they, how dare they, how dare they.

“It’s too late!” I shouted at one of them. “It’s too fucking

late!” Tom grasped my upper arm. “Stop, Kasey.”

For good measure, I spit on the ground toward the fence. “You’re wasting your goddamn time. Go actually help someone!” It was no use—they just stared like I wasn’t there at all. *** “I know you were upset, but yelling wasn’t going to help anything,” Tom said.

I watched the sky and puffy white clouds trail the car as we rode down the highway back home, back to normalcy.

“If anything, that’s what they want. They want a reaction.” I closed my eyes.

“My main concern is that you’re okay, you know that.”

Shaw 67 I didn’t like how the clouds seemed to follow me. *** The weekend after I had my abortion, Tom threw a party at his house. I glided from friend group to friend group, nursing a bottle of wine that stained my teeth purple. Everyone looked at me with sad eyes.

“How are you?” they asked, and I pretended I didn’t know what they were talking about. “Ah, fine, just fine.” Tom told more people than I was okay with. It made me angry that he didn’t ask if he could divulge my secret, didn’t consider that I never wanted the sympathy, never want ed to be the Girl Who Got An Abortion.

I was bleeding from the operation. The doctor and Google let me know that was to be expected, but the pad I wore chafed against me, gave me subtle reminders of my barren womb. It hurt.

I tried to lie down in Tom’s bed, the lights out, the bass of his stere os creeping underneath the space of his bedroom door. I couldn’t ignore it. The room rotated. I pulled out my phone and called my mom. Her boyfriend answered.

“May I please talk to my mom?” I asked, in a voice that sounded like a little girl’s.

She answered. I told her everything. I listened to the sound of my mom crying and the starkest difference, in the weight of her words, be tween us both.

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68

Fatherhood Brett Thompson My two year old daughter never lets me finish a page of her florid, outrageous picture books. So I must keep my thumb affixed in the corner and lift it once the words are done, the signal between us that we both understand, yes dear, you may race ahead, you already so daring and willful, go on little stubborn one, little callus across my toe, little splinter for my palm, how I love you, more than a paper cut, than bitters at the back of the tongue, more than a vodka burn and the driving rain and all the puddles in Asia. Dear, it’s like spring, out walking on unstable ice, honeycombed and fractured, sun in my eyes, and I am slipping under myself again, the weight

that comes from sinking, that feeling of sinking, it’s that feeling more than anything else.

Thompson 69

Sea Horse by Erasure Trevor Eakes The. Sea Horse is Creature true. Fish In upright Like all it breathes Through Body, That. Together Suit of armor.

The strangest things, Sea Horse, is that father has Babies.

Father has. Pouch. A kangaroo.

Puts her eggs in And then leaving Father to hatch.

When Eggs. Hatch, 208 baby (S)ea Of the father’s Body.

Most Along the shore. Most tropical seas.

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Life and Love and Distance Katharine Kistler I turn to my boyfriend, who’s asleep in the blue light of pre-morn ing streaming through the blinds. He grew out a mustache over the sum mer, looking like a Marine-sized Groucho Marx. I lay my hand along his chin and cheek and run my thumb over the thick, coarse ends.

Swinging my legs over the side of his bed, I hop onto plush carpet floor. In the bathroom I pull on leggings and running shoes, wipe the dream-evident drool off my cheek. There’s the impression of pillow on my right arm and the redness from his weight on my left. I admire the marks the night made on me for a moment, then head back to bed to say a brief goodbye. I lean down and kiss under the bristly hair, greeted with a mumbled groan I’ve come to know means “I love you.”

I am not a fan of his mustache. I think it ages him, but his fellow Marine friends all have one, and I’m not one to ask someone to change their appearance if it’s not hurting me. So I deal with the facial hair, as long as it remains confined to his upper lip, and I tell myself he’ll shave before I know it. Underneath it, he is still the recent graduate I tricked into a date. All clear-skinned and nervous, he bounced his legs under the table as we pretend-planned a life in New York City over Chicago-style pizza.

On our second date, we planned how we’d talk long-distance.

We took a picture together. I stared at it that night as I tried to memorize his number, wondering if he’d be excited when I called.

He was younger than I am now and had the rounded cheeks not yet fallen off from ado lescence. I know things about me have changed but, like this, he keeps them a secret, relishing in what was and what will one day

once again be. Pushing through the heavy door to his building’s stairwell, I de scend the steps slowly, stretching along the way.

This place of his is tem

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porary, a home for single soldiers waiting on orders. Lucky for me, it’s in the city where we met and where I still live. For three years, we’ve connected at intervals. He’s been stationed in Georgia for that long, close enough for me to feel him in the air, but too far to touch.

The part of relationships when people bond over holding hands and sleeping side-by-side, we spent cheek-to-cheek with the phone, learning every intonation of one another’s speech and forgetting what the animated versions of each other looked like between visits. On our one-year anniversary, we’d only spent a total of one month together.

Now, at the point where some of my friends were marrying their long-term partners, we were just holding hands, experiencing the crev ices of each other’s bodies, seeing markings and moles that made every limb unique. We’d fallen into the routine of having a piece of technology between us, so being away from it felt like being let out of a cage, like touching the ocean for the first time.

I’ve been staying with him for a week. We’ve got between three and four left before he goes to Japan for nine months. As far as the east coast felt while our relationship was new and I was an undergrad with little money or time to spend on a visit, now I feel the weight of our looming distance in my chest like the weight of a plane’s wheel. While it’s the longest we’ve been together uninterrupted, it’s the first time I don’t know what day he’ll have to leave.

When I step outside, the Texas summer humidity envelops me and I breathe deeply to adjust my lungs to the heavy air. It takes me a cou ple of blocks to reach stasis with my steps, running through the urban neighborhood in which his interim apartment sits. I feel myself won dering if we should move down here in a few years when I’m done with school and he’s got a less kinetic job. I find myself thinking a lot about how we will live once he’s home, wherever that proverbial home turns out to be.

I jog through the empty courtyard, the fountain not yet on for the day, no booths for the morning summer market set up.

Change like this I can handle. When you know something will arrive each day without fail. Like getting dressed in the morning.

The week’s featured booths are posted online alongside the

weather and the names of the lunchtime performers.

Kistler 72 There aren’t many other runners on the orange dirt path along the river. The few people I pass give an expressionless tilt of the head or opening and closing of a balled-up runner’s fist.

When he surprised me at my door, my mother Cheshire-grinning, happy to be in on the secret, I wanted to spend as little time as possible packing a bag. When I woke up the next morning, I realized I’d forgotten my headphones. So, I’m greeted each dawn by the sound of my foot steps. Hitting the ground with a satisfying crunch that sends a signal from the sole of my foot to the tip-top of my head. Each time my foot lands on the manmade path, I’m encouraged to jump and catch the next gratifying step.

Today, I feel a stitch in my side and slow down, clutching around my ribcage and standing with my feet shoulder length apart. I shuffle to the railing that keeps runners from sprinting straight into the river, leaning on the cool metal at the hip, the pain of my bone on railing not matching the pain of cramping in my side.

The water is slow, no show boats or tourists on it quite yet. A few ducks paddle to me from the other side, expecting bread or tortilla or another piece of doggy-bagged food from the surrounding restaurants.

I start to run again before I can disappoint them, heading back up the path toward the street closest to him.

This is one of the last times for a long time that our distance will be coverable by foot. When I can take a break and not miss a flight or a date. I can take my time to see him. I feel fulfilled from our conversation last night. I yearn for his touch the way other couples do, knowing it is only a few ordinary minutes away. So, I stop at the brick-wall coffee shop amidst the small business owners trickling into the farmer’s mar ket grounds. The sun hasn’t broken the clouds, but I can sense it will be a hot day and I’d like to give back any surprise I can, however little.

My card is sweaty from being stuffed in my bra and I wince hand ing it to the barista. The apartment has few appliances, so I’ve made my self a regular here. She gives me a forgiving look and turns to give the coffee order to her sleepy-looking coworkers as my payment processes. The air conditioning begins to dry the sweat on my temples. I wipe it away before picking up our two

drinks and walking the last three blocks home.

Kistler 73 I take the elevator while coming back. Inside, alone, truly alone, for the first time today, I sniff at the steam escaping the rectangular hole of his coffee’s lid. I always tell myself I’ll never drink dark roast, but the bitter smell fills my lungs with him and tempts me to try it. Instead I sip from the milky tan liquid of my cup.

Again, as is our tradition, I let my mind wander to the prospect of this as a permanent spot for us. The fifth floor button worn down from the excitement to see him after work, dog hair sprinkling the hallway, a mat in front of the door. We spend every weekend morning drinking this coffee, swimming in the humid air. I don’t worry about the day when he wakes up before me and kisses my sleeping mouth goodbye, because he’s the heavy sleeper, and I’m the early riser. I know tomorrow and the next day and the next, I’ll see him in person, never inside a screen or in another time zone.

But right now, all that steady thinking is futile. The change will come and it will feel permanent. Like a haircut that won’t grow out fast enough or a slow-healing scar. It will take a few days to adjust to life un accompanied. It will take time to figure out when I can call, and more to figure out what times he can answer. The door to the elevator opens and I step into the hallway. I take another whiff of his coffee’s perfume, tell my nose to savor it; in just a few weeks, I won’t be smelling dark roast for a long while.

Soon we will go back to how it’s always been, at least a thousand miles between us. By the time he comes back we’ll have both gotten old er. He’ll probably be thinner, I’ll have a college degree. We may need to move in with my parents here, or his in Arizona, while we both search for jobs, first and new. This route I’ve been running, the coffee, the farm er’s market booths. These are all temporary, and they’re out of my con trol. All I can count on lies inside of him, where it will be even when he’s on the other side of the Atlantic.

I reach our door and slowly turn the key we’ve been sharing.

The door has proven loud and I don’t want to wake him. I step into the bed room and see he is still here, fast asleep.

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Women’s Work: Candle, Parsnips and Carrots, Flogger Madeleine Barnes Women’s Work is a project that aims to explore the associations between women’s domestic embroidery, agency, labor, and the policing of female sexuality in early modern England. By creating embroideries that de pict sex toys from this time period, I hope to gain insight into women’s sex lives and needlework practices while engaging with existing texts, conversations, and research around these subjects. I aim to conjure up a sense of playfulness that would speak to the ways that embroidery might have allowed women to subvert society’s expectations in unprecedent ed ways. The moral and aesthetic aspects of embroidery were thought to stave off idleness—an idleness that would give way to unacceptable sexual behavior. An art form encoded and denigrated as feminine, nee dlework was aligned with virtue and gave women the opportunity to “prove” their worth and defend their chastity. It served as a way to en sure that women were using their free time wisely and in ways that kept them out of the public sphere, an arena reserved for men.

These three particular embroideries, “Candle,” “Parsnips and Carrots,” and “Flogger” all depict images that might not be recognized as sexually significant at first. My hope is that these pieces will help people learn more about women’s sexuality and its many interesting expressions and manifestations, as well as the anxiety that surrounded women’s free time in the early modern period.

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Flight of the Miner’s Wife Alaina Pepin I remember my mother’s yellow dress as I drive across a flooded road in the middle of North Dakota, where the telephone poles and cattle sink to their knees in mud. Little birds smack against my windshield and I just close my eyes.

I was six and her skin still smelled like Crisco and curdled milk, even at the bottom of the mine. But now it’s been

days since I saw Michigan in the rearview, and in the silence of a broken radio, the only person left to explain the difference between flight and falling is me. When they found her splayed against the iron ore, spine and arms all cracked, I hid beneath a rusted bridge where I believed no god could find me. The sun sets and the plains bleed and weave their colors like her patchwork quilt that’s tucked beneath the passenger seat. I pull over in Emmons County at a mine shaft boarded by planks of jack pine to read about black gas and ceilings that collapsed. About unanswered prayers and the lungs of an underground miner. Canaries dead on the crumbled floor.

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