Issue 2 - 45TH PARALLEL

ISSUE 2

SPRING 2017

ISSUE 2

SPRING 2017

Editor-in-Chief

Managing Editor

Nonfiction Editor

Comics Editor

Fiction Editor

Poetry Editor

Web Editor

Social Media Manager

Zoë Bossiere

Dakota Clement

Karie Fugett

Julia Malye

Sarah Kosch

Robin Cedar

Joe Donovan

Robin Cedar

Readers

Chessie Alberti

Colleen Boardman

Mohana Das

Sheila Dong

Joe Donovan

Paisley Green

Taylor Grieshober

Jessie Heine

Kristy Hae Su Joe

Kay Keegan

Addison Koneval

Ryan Lackey

Randy Magnuson

Sam Mitchell

TJ Neathery

Linnea Nelson

Jenna Noska

Kayla Pearce

Ben Sandman

Jess Silbaugh-Cowdin

Ben Swimm

Holly Taylor

Natalie Villacorta

Andrew Zingg

Cover & Insert Art by Micah Mermilliod

“Color Theory #1 (Communication)“ 2017

“Color Theory #4 (Connection)” 2017

“Color Theory #5 (Observation)” 2017

www.45thparallelmag.com

Copyright © 2017 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.

This year, at the AWP conference in Washington D.C., I did a good amount of promotional work, spreading the reach of our fledgling magazine to other editors of other magazines, hoping to establish a few lasting connections. On this expedition, I encountered more than one writer who would nod in recognition when I introduced myself as our Editor-in-Chief. “Oh, you’re with 45 th Parallel?” they’d ask, shaking my hand. “Haven’t I heard that name somewhere before?” To my surprise, this happened again and again.

What a testament to the strength of our first issue that we’re already on the radar of so many writers looking to submit their work! I can recall the uncertainty of only two years ago, when we had no issue, no money, and only our own determination to guide us. As the magazine’s second ever Editor-in-Chief, I felt a tremendous pressure not only to curate a second issue as strong as the first, but also to keep the magazine alive in its most vulnerable early stages. I’m relieved and pleased to say that 45 th Parallel’s second year was a huge success, an emphatic reassurance that Oregon State’s literary magazine is here and here to stay.

Because of our rotating staff as a two-year MFA program, 45 th Parallel is by necessity a magazine whose aesthetic is always in flux. Each year, our editors write a short description of what they’d like to see published in the next issue. Though this year our call for submissions didn’t specifically ask for themed work, we received (inevitably, I think) an overwhelming number of political submissions across genres, many of which made it into these pages. I’ve heard it said a lot recently that to write is a political act. We at 45 th Parallel believe publishing is also political, and we are always committed to publishing work from a diverse range of perspectives. In this issue, you’ll find our writers grappling with issues of identity, race, religion, sex and sexuality, and feminism in uncertain times. We are proud to represent these voices, and it is our hope that these works will surprise you, teach you, and leave you inspired.

I’m so proud of all we have achieved in only two short years. I want to thank our readers for their critical eyes and thoughtful perspectives, our editors for their dedication and verve. Thank you especially to our Faculty Advisor, Justin St. Germain, for his continued advocacy and support of 45 th Parallel’s vision.

It is a real joy to have been a part of 45 th Parallel’s early years, and a comfort to know the future of the magazine will be left to capable hands. I sincerely hope you enjoy our second issue of 45 th Parallel magazine, and stay tuned for the many more to come.

With affection,

Zoë Bossiere, Editor-in-Chief

Katherine LaRue

Right Atrium

You called for me so I went across the red bridge. Girls gripped the railing, dresses caught by the wind. Girls took pictures on their phones. Maybe their lips were red. Between the white streams of traffic animals were crushed, unidentifiable. Underneath the boats unzipped the river in the dark.

Nosebleed after nosebleed, we sat in your expensive bed, garnets distilling in the neat cube of my palm. If my thumbs were cold you blew on them, epic-eyed. You draped your jacket over me and it said there there.

I came over, but I shouldn’t have brought my body. You left it more or less a pendulum. Twine tied around a stone very badly, filled with your mean vowels. Every anatomy is eventually faulty. A dumb pile of rope and boulders.

Crystal J. Zanders

Everyday Racism

Ms. Alma, my grandfather’s mother-in-law, at 95 is the oldest black person I’ve ever known. She didn’t have much formal education, so when she was my age, she kept the kids and the house for a rich white family.

When I was in the 8th grade, they decided to build a park next to our school. They took a survey to see whether we would prefer a skate park or basketball courts. The basketball courts won, but they built a skate park anyway. They didn’t want to attract the wrong element. I knew that we, the black kids, were the wrong element.

My white ex-husband told me that black people treated him differently when they found out he was married to a black woman. He became “honorarily black.” I think it only went one way.

My grandfather was walking down the street when a white recruiter shouted, “I bet a nigger can’t pass this test.” He stopped, took the test, and signed at the bottom “so it could be graded.” The recruiter welcomed him to the U.S. Army, where he served 20 years. He did three tours in Vietnam.

I told my mom that I hated high school because I felt like I had to work so much harder than everybody else to get the same thing. Years later she told me that I had.

When I taught alternative school, at the beginning of every year I had to explain that “Profanity is not allowed” included the “n-word.” Every year someone would say, “Why can’t we say nigger? We’re all black.”

My friend and I tried to see a play in Mississippi. Most of the seats were pre-sold, but the lady told us that if we waited, we might be able to get seats. We waited over an hour, but the same lady gave the last two seats to the older white women who came in after us.

In college, I went to talk to the head of the Honors Program. Because I had an African American scholarship, I wasn’t forced to participate like most of the other students. He tried to talk me out of it, as if I didn’t belong there. I wanted to belong there; I wanted to be an honors student. There were over a hundred students in that class. I was the only black student.

In Mississippi, a white kid has to set something on fire to be sent to alternative school. A black kid can get too many tardies.

I went car shopping with my brother. At the second dealership, a white man asked to run my credit before he would show me a car in my price range. I asked him why, and he said he wanted to know if I could pay for the car. I left.

When I look up my former students, several are incarcerated at Parchman Prison. Most of them committed crimes as juveniles. It is expensive to imprison a juvenile, so their cases are postponed until weeks before their 18th birthdays.

I quit my grad school babysitting job when they asked me to clean the bookshelf. I was already washing the dishes and vacuuming and straightening the playroom on my oncea-week visits. That bookshelf hadn’t been cleaned by anyone since I got there. I felt like Ms. Alma, keeping kids and cleaning house for a rich white family.

I read that black preschoolers are expelled at higher rates than white preschoolers. Do they hate our babies, too?

My mom made me go back to the dealership and talk to his boss. I told the man my story and he apologized profusely. He told me that if I still wanted to see a car, he’d be happy to make me a deal on anything on the lot. I told him that I was going to buy a car with the folks who treated me right the first time. The next time I went car shopping, five years later and a thousand miles away, it happened again.

The state of Mississippi’s convict leasing program was designed to reenslave as many black men as possible. When it became a political liability, the state forced the convicts to build a plantation where the prisoners would work. Parchman Prison used to be Parchman Farms which used to be Parchman Plantation.

Jory Mickelson

Cloud

Hum of uncountable, shadowed wings, as though the lake’s reflection

has taken to air. When I hold you I am shadowed, as from a dark

leafed tree, an orchard clouded by fruit, burnished and graspable, easily peeled. It may be enough to see the citrine segments lit within—

the air about my head, like branches crowned in water and light—enough to know and to know and to know your fingers barely around my wrist.

Kimberly Grabowski

I Wanted the Gun in my Mouth

In high school, we investigated how big my mouth was—cups of yogurt, water bottles, my fist. I couldn’t swallow pills when I was little, so I formed a habit of forcing them down my throat with my fingers. Doesn’t hurt. A girl who looks virginal but is really a sex kitten is every man’s dream. Maybe rhythm is the key, sometimes I play a techno song in my head. I start to remember I have a body when the song isn’t playing. Think of my mouth as a womb-space. I’m on a kick, womb-denial. I want to use my mouth because I thought it was never birth-worthy. I ate a jar-full of marshmallow fluff, I think I wanted someone to tell me to stop. That game, “chubby bunny,” kids died from asphyxiation. My girl pretended not to want to kiss me. I had to use my tongue to pry her mouth open passionately. I’m pretending. I want my teeth to cut the insides of my lips. That’s mouthwateringly-good, that blood. And doesn’t it feel nice to gasp like that, delicious like deciding not to drown. Then going back down. I bought lip gloss that burned my skin. It was called Venom. Wasn’t that ravishing, the way it hurt? My eyes were screwed shut, and nothing about me was waterproof. He says you’re so pretty without makeup, and then what did I tell you about wearing makeup. It appears I have a gag reflex, after all. Maybe he has the virgin/ whore thing going on, maybe Madonna and Mary Magdalene. Don’t laugh at me, I thought my finger was on the trigger. We’re supposed to be honest with each other, tell exactly what we want. That’s why his hands push. I’m sore, I can’t move the muscles around my mouth. I’m too tired to say what I want. I wanted the gun in my mouth. Better that than someone pointing it at me and yelling “bang bang.”

River Robert Fromberg

“I told Mr. Sloan that he had nothing to worry about and so he shouldn’t worry.”

—John Dean, testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, June 25, 1973

1.

Sitting in the window seat, looking through the picture window that dominates the small room, what is mostly visible to the boy are needles and branches of evergreen trees. But if he strains just a bit, he can see, through the needles and branches, a sliver of the yellow house across the street. A serious yellow, a dangerous yellow.

He wonders why, at school, the topic of favorite color comes up so frequently, even more frequently than “what is your middle name?” And he wonders why the question seems so freighted with meaning. He answers “blue” because he believes that answer is least likely to lead to any but a neutral reaction. That has proven to be the case. No one has looked askance, and no one has said, “Really? Mine, too.” At first, he believed that the lack of reaction meant the topic had been dropped, and that he was free to proceed as though it had never arisen. However, once someone had glanced at a piece of his coloring in progress that relied on oranges and browns and said, “I thought blue was your favorite color.” From that time on, he colored mostly in blue.

Yellow is his favorite color, the yellow of the house across the street. He accepts as an article of faith that yellow would not be an acceptable answer to “what is your favorite color?” He also recognizes that “yellow” is not the correct word for the color in his mind, that to even name the color would belittle it. The word “favorite,” too, is only a rough approximation of his feeling toward this color.

His mother is standing in the front yard, talking with a neighbor, a woman the boy only vaguely remembers seeing previously

“They left a month ago,” the neighbor says. “They left in the middle of the night.” The neighbor’s enunciation becomes more studied. “The man,” she says, “was being pursued.”

“Oh?” the boy’s mother says.

“You just hide behind your trees,” the neighbor says. “You don’t know what’s happening right across the street from you.”

She pauses, as though relieved to have had this opportunity to say something that needed saying for a long time.

The boy knows that the accusation is just and appreciates its clarity. He tucks it away.

At first, when people asked his middle name, he did not reply. However, that only made the questioners ask again and once even drew a crowd who circled him, demanding an answer. The next time he was asked this question, he answered immediately, and the questioner, looking deflated, walked away.

In the winter, the picture window frosts on the inside. When the boy sits on the window seat, he etches lines in the frost, even though he knows that when the frost melts, smudges will remain that will draw attention. The frost reaches only the lower third of the window, and he can still see the evergreen branches, a sliver of the yellow house, and, if he looks to the very top of the window, the winter sky, which seems to hold incredible weight.

Every other summer, a truck goes once up and once down the long street in front of their house, laying down glittering tar. Another truck goes once up and once down the street depositing gravel on top of the tar. For weeks after, as the family car drives on the street, the boy hears the gravel ricocheting off the car’s undercarriage. The fact that his family and their neighbors have the task of tamping down the gravel over a several-week period makes him feel that he is part of a tiny, forgotten community.

The boy thinks that if this were the last picture he ever colored, if he were to die that day, he would work slowly and not worry whether he finished.

At the house across the street, did the father tell the mother and children in the evening that they would be leaving later that night, giving them time to pack? Or did he wake them and tell them they had to leave immediately? Evaluating these option, the boy believes that the terror of each would be different in kind but not degree.

Their car would fill rapidly with their possessions. How did they decide what to take and what to leave? Were the children allowed to choose things to take? He imagines that those things would be limited to things they could hold in their lap as they rode in the car’s back seat.

He does not know how many children are in the family. He has never seen the father or

mother. However, he has a strong sense that the father wears short-sleeved white dress shirts and black-framed glasses.

Did the man expect his pursuers to arrive the next morning? Or did he expect them that night? Did the family have to keep their voices lowered when packing? Did they have to close the house and car doors silently? Were they worried that the sound of the car starting would draw attention to them?

When the pursuers arrived at the house and found the family gone, would their reaction be rage? How must it feel to the man to know that someone felt such rage toward him?

He imagines that one child, a girl, would be holding some form of stuffed animal whose fur was a dirty grey but that had around its neck a ribbon the same yellow as the house. This child would feel the rage directed toward her father as palpably as though it were directed toward herself.

James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King, Junior, but has not been caught. According to the radio, James Earl Ray is in the region of the country where the boy lives. That night, the boy waits for James Earl Ray to climb in his window. The window in his room is square and small, perhaps too small for a man to fit through. It is also high, not too high for James Earl Ray to reach, but perhaps just high enough that James Earl Ray would decide to choose another house through whose window to climb. The window lets in very little light, and its height is such that the boy cannot look through it to see the back yard or other houses. Considering the matter logically, the boy thinks, the placement of the window should give him comfort. Yet the boy knows that the placement of the window will make the inevitable arrival of James Earl Ray, wriggling and emerging through the small opening, even more terrifying.

The needles that gather under the evergreen trees are a wonderfully bouncy cushion. They are only sharp if you touch them at the wrong angle.

He has an intimate understanding of each interior door, how to subtly lift, push, pull, and guide each door to open or close without a sound. Because a sound could draw attention.

Every other summer, led by his father, the family stains the redwood siding of their house. The boy loves the weight of the brush and the watery consistency of the stain. He cannot make a mistake. He can slather on the stain any way he wants. He can see no difference in the appearance of the redwood siding, yet his father assures him that this is a good thing that they are doing. The project does not take long. After it is over, the air is still.

2.

Driving along a river. Three parallel lines: road, train tracks, river. A grey day. Early fall.

The road and train tracks are raised. Glancing away from his driving, he looks down at the smattering of houses on the stretch of land that is separated from the river by the road and train tracks.

There are no trees. No fences. Viewed from above, the houses are exposed. They are naked.

From many, the content appears to have spilled out—chairs, couches, toys that can be ridden or sat in, pets, tables, cars, trucks, boats. No, “spilled out” is not right. Rather, it is as though, in this neighborhood by the river, a house is not considered the sole container of one’s life. A house is like another chest of drawers or set of shelves. Possessions can be inside the house or outside the house. Life can move fluidly from inside the house to outside the house.

However, he sees no people.

Inside the neighborhood, the drive along the long street is like a tracking shot in an arthouse movie.

He sees two cushioned rocking chairs on a lawn, side by side. Leaves and inscrutable debris have collected beneath the chairs. The debris and the seats of the chairs are almost touching. He imagines the years that have passed, the arc of rocking diminishing each year. Now, the chairs would be able to rock a few inches at best. Within several years, the chairs will disappear entirely.

A white house seems longer than the others, but also shorter, so short it is hard to imagine the inhabitants being able to stand up straight. A girl who lived there later became part of the ensemble of a popular television show and continued to pop up in various roles, although her career has quieted as she has come to occupy middle age.

The street signs are a different color than they once were.

The yellow house has brown trim. The house appears soft. The brown trim appears soft. Were he to touch either, it would be the consistency of cake frosting.

Across the street, the trees are gone. There is no sign of their ever having existed.

The redwood is gone. Instead, there is a deliriously ugly light-blue siding, a light blue the color of signs on small-town drug stores. A light blue that even the owners, upon seeing it covering their house, would stare at a moment, shake their heads, perhaps grin, and shrug.

The picture window has a shadowy curtain inside.

On the lawn next to the house is a large white boat on a trailer. Next to the boat, taller than the house, is a bus the size and type that a moderately successful rock band would use on tour. It is a soupy, swirling brown. Its driver’s side front bumper is coated with layers of duct tape.

Directly in front of the house is a Triumph sports car, in its potency somehow larger than the bus, boat, and house.

He pictures a rock band returning from tour in the dead of night, spilling out of the bus, the band members stumbling giddily toward the house, except for one or two, who hop into the Triumph and zoom down the road along the river toward the all-night convenience mart for essentials.

The vehicles overwhelm the house. Driving past, he can only think about a cartoon he once saw of a muscle-bound man walking a tiny dog. He tries to hold his laugh within pursed lips.

Turning back onto the river road, a thin strip of black, patching a crack in the road, extends ahead, wobbling and disappearing beneath him as he drives. He would be happy to spend the rest of his life studying its movement.

Cheyenne Black

Ten is Too Girl

ten is too girl to know what he looks like naked his finger on the detonator a field of burrs in sand she vomits bubbles of heat pop on her skin prick tick-tock /wait/ wait until the phone rings and she hopes its her mother

scuffed Mary Jane’s with School House Rock punctuation in her head

the blue dog, the one they call a bitch digs under desert scrub for shade—drinks limeade not water because ten is too girl to want water when there’s limeade

she’s hesitant to merge with what’s next? like the first in line after the ambulance

saturday morning I’m trying to wake up make some fucking coffee bring me a beer a bitch

two months in the summer and every other christmas—one foot hovering over the date the wait

trampled under the rodeo bull wicked girl wrong girl too girl bitch we lost her in sight of the Hollywood sign she was wearing /something/ something too little

chin-dripping gulps of limeade ten is too girl to smell like cowboy

Rachael Peckham

Lift

You’ve heard it said that to understand the basic science of flight, just stick your arm out the window of a moving car. The rush of air you feel above and below your hand is the same force of pressure that gives a wing lift, making you think of all the times, growing up on a pig farm in Michigan, you piled in the back of your dad’s farm truck with your siblings. How even the dogs loved to hop aboard and lean out the side, flying headlong into the wind. How effortless and good it feels to sail through open air—less a freedom than a return to the lost memory of being cradled and carried, our first means of movement in the world, aloft in the safest clutch.

But this is not always the case. Sometimes the relinquishing is a reckless one. Years ago, on a distant beach, you and your college roommate catch a lift from some off-duty lieutenants on a spontaneous invitation to surf an hour’s drive up the coast. Even drunk, you request to sit up front, but the cab is already too crowded, and somebody grabs hold of you under the arms, fingers pressing into the padding of your bikini—I got you—and hoists you up onto the bed. The driver guns it and you’re all thrown backward on your butts, laughing obscenities. The one who so courteously lifted you onto the truck pats the space next to him, Here, lie down, and you oblige, letting him curl around you in feigned protection, eliciting a pointed look from your roommate that says you have a boyfriend. Never mind that she’s the one who signed you both up for this joyride, when she knows damned well how you hate piling onto friends’ laps for even a short ride to a party.

You’re shivering, the lieutenant says, hugging you so tightly you’ll wear his cologne on your skin. Normally, you’d place some breathing room between your pelvises, if not push him away altogether, but the truck rounds each curve so fast, his hips keep knocking into your backside with a little too much momentum, like he’s leaning into the turn without any counter-balance. Like he’s colluding with the driver to make it a fun ride. And all the while, you can’t stop the vision of a tight bend up ahead, the driver miscalculating the turn, braking too hard and too late. Will you fishtail? Cross the center lane and plow into the guardrail? Roll over? No matter what, it proves catastrophic for everyone in back, either pitched out or crushed, and at this thought, your fear shifts into sharp anger, not at the driver or your roommate but at yourself for always going along, for what your mother calls the disease to please. And you pull your anger around yourself like a tent, refusing to put so much as a toe in the surf once you’re safely parked on the beach.

Your roommate gets the message, her buzz killed along with yours, and demands that you both sit up front on the way back, or you’re catching the bus. For once, you’re glad for her direct and overbearing tone—the one you’ll never quite harness nor joke about again because your friendship won’t survive graduation. You’ll slowly drift apart, attending each other’s weddings as guests, not bridesmaids, and without so much as a Christmas card to tether you to each other now. And you’ll feel both sadness and relief

at having walked away, for once, only to realize much later that flight has nothing to do with going with the flow, or riding the current or any other cliché. No, it has to do with tension—with enough difference in pressure. It’s the force of resistance that keeps us aloft.

Gathering Evidence Bonnie Arning

I once read how upon learning of her caretaker’s miscarriage, Rita, the chimp, used her fingers to sign: cry-please-person-hug.

Even then, I wondered if all nature’s creatures were designed to respond in this way. On the night of her miscarriage, my wife

set the spent fetus atop a folded towel. She paced as if establishing perimeter—a nervous boundary that marked the edge of where

their country ended and ours could begin. Can I touch it? I asked, unsure if she would allow. Though curious, the fist-sized sack of blood

did not resemble a baby. It looked as though if poked, the membrane might rupture, burst and flood out like a punctured skin of wine. The only

evidence of its once curled form— a single wad of tendons and lumpy head-like bulge. I couldn’t fathom what relationship was meant to form

between myself and that dark tissue until hours after nightfall, when she scooped soil from the base of a tree and tucked her slick bundle into the

dirt. As I covered the mound with brush, I was reminded of Bonobos,

about how at night, the primates gather earth and sticks to construct raised beds, how their care is expressed through subtleties—the primatial parents who carefully kneel to blanket their child in leaves.

Bonnie Arning

—for my grandmother and I thought of you, and your white plume of hair and the white plume of smoke puffing off the head of a state-wide fire—

it was smoke from the fire that killed you, your lungs already pumice each vein a wire wound through stone. How it slowed

your heart—your fist-sized slug, wheezing in the foyer. I have learned

the noise your heart makes is the sound of each valve closing. How violent. What shut.

A whole body battering in time; allthewhile inside us a billion slamming doors, or

the same door opening and shutting in bloody perpetuity.

Who knew? Our refusal to remain open is what keeps us alive.

The heart is such a grinder. Wound until it wouldn’t.

Your heart unfolded like a magician’s fist to release a smoke white dove

blood entering and then—

And all the papers read: Yesterday, during a thunderstorm, a white Buffalo was born

The coroner takes your body

and flings apart the chest: lungs hard and gray, heart, white as ash.

Mark Hodge

Grandpa and the Duke

Grandpa’s Grave

Every spring, around the anniversary of our Grandpa’s death (none of us remember the exact date), my cousins and I visit his grave. We wear cowboy hats and boots to convince ourselves we are honoring him. In our outfits we look more like a parody than a memorial, more likely to break into an acapella version of “Home on the Range” than bust a bronco or run down an outlaw, but we are pretty sure Grandpa would appreciate the gesture, yet, equally sure he wouldn’t really care one way or the other.

We stand around the grave and try to carry on a conversation in his cowboy speak: “Devil-of-it-is,” “cotton-pickin’,” “mmkay,” “like I told...,” and other things that our Grandpa must have decided he liked the sound of saying before they became his habit. Sometimes we spit, like we have a big chaw in our mouths, then worry that we might have just spit on Grandpa’s grave. Grandpa probably wouldn’t mind that, or our soft hands and dirtless fingernails, or the little tear gathering in my cousin’s eye.

Harry Carey and John Wayne

John Wayne and Ollie Carey both cried after that scene at the end of The Searchers, when he put his hand to his elbow, just as Harry Carey had done so many times in his own films.

Carey had been Wayne’s favorite Western actor when he was growing up. He respected the realism that Carey brought to the genre, and he learned to imitate many of his mannerisms in his own films. Later, Carey would become a kind of surrogate father to the Duke.

Things We Didn’t Know About Each Other

I never knew if my Grandpa’s name was Freeman or Jack. I’m pretty sure one was his first name and one was his middle name. That was the kind of thing that our family didn’t really know about each other. We always just called him Boots.

“End of a way of life...too bad...it’s a good way.” —Hondo Lane

John Wayne’s Feet

Part of the reason for John Wayne’s distinctive, sauntering walk was the fact that he had relatively small feet compared to his large frame.

Grandpa’s Thumb

When he was younger, Grandpa cut off half his thumb with a circular saw. It’s hard for me to imagine him losing concentration and doing such a thing, but it is easy for me to imagine him calmly picking it up and walking to a doctor’s office so they could sew it back on, which he did. But it was too late, so he had a kind of half-thumb, rounded off on the end with no fingernail, the rest of his life. Grandpa was always practical, so he found ways to put the thumb to good use: killing wasps, pushing in loose nails, testing knife blades, whatever the situation might call for. I asked him one time if he still had any feeling in the thumb. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “mmhmm.” Whenever Grandpa talked he always gestured with his thumb, and when he pointed to something he always pointed with his thumb; so the thumb became a commentary on the point he was making, or the object he was indicating. I can’t ever really think of Grandpa without thinking of his thumb.

John Wayne and Acting

John Wayne would never admit that he had ever wanted to become an actor. He liked to tell stories of how he had just stumbled into it, and how he would have preferred to be a prop man if the pay had been as good.

Grandpa’s Clothes

Grandpa always wore denim coveralls, a sweaty cowboy hat, and old, tan boots; unless he was going to a wedding or something like that, then he would wear a western shirt with silver buttons, gray pants, a clean cowboy hat, and black boots. Even in our small town he had grown into an anachronism, but I never thought to ask when he had settled on exactly those clothes. As a kid, I just assumed he had always worn them, even though I had seen pictures of him as a kid during the depression wearing different, though related, clothes (in the pictures the other people are dressed similarly to Grandpa, but I’m also pretty sure they were family).

John Wayne’s Horse

In The Big Trail when John Wayne rides a horse he looks like Shaquille O’Neill riding a donkey. He got better at riding a horse later in his career...or maybe his directors just got him a bigger horse.

Grandpa’s Horse

Grandpa used to have an old horse named Smokey. He said we could ride her if we could

get on her. Grandma would let us have some sugar cubes or carrots so we could lure her over to the barbed-wire fence and climb on. We used to ride her bareback, two at a time, until she got old and cranky and started bucking us off. I never saw Grandpa ride Smokey, though he did say hello to her every morning.

At the Grave

“There was one time, Grandpa said, ‘you boys can play anywhere you want, just don’t go in the Northeast field, where that bull is.’”

“Devil-of-it-is, we didn’t know which field was the ‘Northeast field.’”

“But we were too embarrassed to admit that to Grandpa.”

“So, of course, we ended up in the Northeast field, and sure enough there’s that bull.”

“And he was between us and the damned gate.”

“I remember we looked at each other like “oh shit,” and yelled, “run!” at the exact same time.”

“Probably the fastest we ever run.”

“We went right through a cotton-pickin’ sticker bush...”

“Why didn’t you go around?”

“I remember looking over, as we were in the bush, and seeing the bull running right beside us.”

“He was smart enough to go around.”

“And then we dove under, jumped over, or maybe went right through the barbed-wire fence...”

“Yep, it’s like we told Aunt Sue at the time, we couldn’t even remember, because we were so scared...”

“Then we had to walk back to Grandpa, with cuts and stickers all over our legs, and tell him what-the-devil happened.”

“Was he mad?”

“Ah hell, he wasn’t really mad. He thought we probably learned our lesson.”

“Only thing he said was, ‘is the bull okay?’”

Oliver Hardy

John Wayne looked up to Oliver Hardy.

Things We Didn’t Know About Each Other

My Grandpa didn’t know if his birthday was June 21st or June 22nd . His birth certificate said one and his mom said the other. I didn’t even know his birthday was in the summer until someone told me that as a funny anecdote at his funeral. It wasn’t the kind of thing we knew about each other, though he might have been aware that my birthday was in the spring, because we had cake at his house every year around that time.

“Why’d You Have to Marry That Whore?”

That’s what John Ford said to John Wayne after refusing to attend his second wedding. According to people who probably knew, Chata actually was a prostitute in Mexico, but

I still don’t think Ford was being very generous (it didn’t seem to change how Wayne felt about him though). Duke didn’t really like her hairy legs, but by all accounts he did love Chata. It was also a little stressful for him that she was an alcoholic with a bad temper, and she invited her equally alcoholic mother with an equally bad temper, up from Mexico to live in the spare room, but he drank a lot, too, so he couldn’t really begrudge them that. In the end, the marriage didn’t work out.

Bad Habits

Grandpa didn’t have any bad habits. If he thought something was a bad habit he just quit doing it.

Ain’t

John Wayne always had to remind himself to say “ain’t.”

At the Grave

“Do you guys remember the time that cotton-pickin’ cow kicked Grandma in the nose?”

“Yeah, Grandpa punched that old heifer right in the face.”

“Knocked him flat on his ass.”

“Her ass—a heifer is a girl cow.”

“Mmkay.”

“I swear that cow was out for a few seconds.”

“I’m surprised Grandpa didn’t kill the damned thing.”

“He was practical like that.”

Ward Bond’s Ass

Ward Bond had a humongous ass.

Grandpa’s Discipline

I don’t believe Grandpa ever thought anything he didn’t want to think.

The Mexican Revolution

After the war, John Ford started spending long hours in his room, wrapped in a sheet, drinking heavily, listening to the same recording of songs of the Mexican Revolution over and over.

Louis L’amour

Grandpa had a shelf full of Louis L’amour books. He always liked Western books and

movies, but he never read or watched anything about the war.

Walter Brennan’s Teeth

Walter Brennan used to ask directors if they wanted him to do his scenes “with teeth” or “without.” My Grandpa always did “with teeth.” Until the end. It was strange seeing him like that.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

We used to play upstairs at Grandpa’s house. There was a room up there that seemed to be designed just for us. It was full of old cots, big pieces of foam, Lazy Susan cabinets, two bars with a built-in table between them, and no other furniture. We made baseball fields, forts, zoos, farms, restaurants, and anything else that came to mind, while the adults sat downstairs, in the living room, talking about mortgages, or whatever adults talked about then.

One time, I went downstairs to get a drink, and maybe steal a cookie, and I noticed that all the lights were off in the living room. The adults were sitting quietly, watching the flicker of the TV. I had only known the adults to watch baseball on that TV, and never with the lights off, so I was curious. I snuck in and sat down in time to see “Directed by John Ford” and hear the chorus “Cavalry! Cavalry!” fading into that Technicolor red mist behind the 7th Cavalry flag. The only movie I had ever seen in Technicolor was The Wizard of Oz (every Thanksgiving), so the bright red of the mist and the deep blues of the uniforms gave it all a surreal, dreamy feel to me. I was mesmerized, and forgot to go back upstairs for my turn at bat.

It was the first time that I remember really loving something that the adults also loved. My Aunt Sue had taken us to see Bambi, Peter Pan and Star Wars, and she humored us in the car afterwards as we rattled on about how great those movies were, but she only enjoyed them because we were so excited. But during She Wore a Yellow Ribbon I felt like, for the first time, I was seeing the same thing that the adults were seeing. It was as if they hadn’t noticed, but I had been magically transported into their world, or, rather, that we had all been transported into John Ford’s world.

My aunts talked in hushed tones about watching the same movie with their grandfather at a theater, and how he had been indignant throughout, saying “that ain’t what it was like.” My dad said that he preferred The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but this one was up there, too. Grandpa just sat there, silently.

It was the first time I had seen John Wayne. He resembled Grandpa, in build and features, expressions and demeanor. I knew John Wayne wasn’t Grandpa, and that he wasn’t playing a character that was supposed to be Grandpa, but they became tangled in my mind. When John Wayne gave advice to the younger cavalrymen it felt like Grandpa was giving advice to me. When he talked to Joanne Dru, I thought that must have been how Grandpa was with my aunts when they were first dating boys. And when John Wayne talked to his dead wife at her grave it felt like a presentiment of my Grandma’s death.

I never thought to ask Grandpa what he thought of John Wayne—that somehow seemed a little too personal.

John Wayne and Acting

There are two related criticisms of John Wayne. The first is that he never really acted, that he was just himself in every movie. The second is that he wasn’t really John Wayne, that he was a fake, that he grew up in Los Angeles, and was never really a cowboy.

Victor McLaglen’s Hands

According to Ingrid D. Rowland, Michelangelo and the sculptor of Aule Meteli both exaggerated the size of their figures’ hands “because they carry such a weight of significance.” The same could be said for Victor McLaglen’s hands on film. To watch him spit in his hands and rub them together, wipe his nose, grab a man’s shirt, punch a man in the face, light a cigarette, or hold his hands in front of his face in frustration or consternation, is to feel the physicality of the film world he lives in. Every time his hands are shown on screen it is a cinematographic event, an important part of the mise en scene. His mangled, oversized hands juxtaposed with his battered, smiling face tells us we are in a world of brutality and honor, Hemingway’s world, but with whiskey instead of wine. Where someone like Anthony Quinn seems to be an artist convincing himself to play lovable brutes, McLaglen seems to simply be playing a slightly larger version of himself, and all the authenticity can be seen in how he holds his hands. I sometimes think I would like to have Victor McLaglen’s hands, but I’m not sure I would have enough commitment to the beauty of cinema to go through the act of punching so many men in order to sculpt my hands into such monuments.

My Hand

You can squeeze my hand. I won’t think you’re a sissy.

John Wayne and Acting

“I sat there, trying to be John Wayne.”—John Wayne, on when he found out he had cancer.

Ancient Greeks, Cowboys and Modern Medicine

It is hard to live by the Ancient Greek code of a completed life now. Our society, with modern medicine, conspires against a graceful exit. Modern death may be just about fitting if you have lived as a Woody Allen, with your anxiety on your sleeve, but what if you lived as a John Wayne, with your self-control and honor. There is no simple progression from not being able to get on your horse to dying. When we see that you cannot mount your horse, we lay you in a bed for weeks, months, or even years, and pump you full of medicine so we can watch the façade of pride slowly die, while your body continues its operations, however incompetently, without you. The cowboy’s hope of dying in his sleep is no longer about dying of natural causes instead of being gunned down, it is about dying before your loved ones, and their doctors, know you are sick.

Galloper

You can almost feel John Ford grin, when he has John Wayne (as Brittles) tell Ben Johnson (as Tyree) that he is “well-mounted;” it is almost as if Ford is saying, “watch this,” before Johnson has his big scene where he runs from the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. I had never seen anyone ride a horse like that. I had only seen people I knew clip-clop along on a fat old horse, in a pasture or on Main Street. Johnson embodies Ford’s idea of the importance of competence, that a man gained respect through being able to do something well, to the benefit of the group. Johnson had that in spades, in his characters and his acting/stunt work. Ben Johnson could have been a painting of the perfect horseman. His torso, arms, and legs all composed on the graceful animal, bursting with kinetic energy, yet tranquil—it was beautiful. I found out much later that many of Ford’s scenes were based on Frederic Remington’s paintings, but Johnson’s riding allows the filmed version to easily surpass the source material. It was after watching Johnson ride that I was really hooked on Westerns, for the rest of my childhood I would wake up every Saturday morning to watch them with my dad.

At the Grave

“You remember that cotton-pickin’ old cur-dog that was out at Grandpa’s place?”

“Had a devil-of-a scar right on his forehead.”

“Grandpa’d never call it ‘his,’ but it always followed him around.”

“And he wouldn’t ever let us feed him...”

“It was like he told Aunt Sue, he didn’t want that dog being dependent.”

“Yep, said he could catch his own rabbits and squirrels...”

“And if we got close to that old dog, Grandpa’d say, ‘That dog don’t take much to pettin’.’”

“Yep.”

“Devil-of-it-is, that made me want to pet the damned thing.”

“You were always stubborn.”

“So, one time I asked Grandpa if he minded if I pet that dog.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said, ‘I told you before not to, but you go on and do what you wanna do.’”

“What’d you do?”

“I tried to pet him.”

“What’d the dog do?”

“Bit the ever-lovin’ shit outta my hand.”

“What’d Grandpa do?”

“Laughed his ass off.”

“I can see that.”

“Grandma got all kinds of mad, and said, ‘Boots, why’d you let that boy pet that dog, when you knew he’d bite him.’”

“And Grandpa?”

“Well, he got kind of serious, and he said, ‘Man learns from gettin’ bit,’ and that was that.”

Two Vultures

“You get those goddamn birds up in that tree right now or one of their heads is gonna be sticking out of your mouth and other head out of your asshole.”—John Wayne to Jack Elam, when he tried to raise the price of the trained vultures, that he had won in a poker game, when they were due to appear in a scene of The Comancheros.

Things We Didn’t Know About Each Other

I sat at my Grandpa’s bedside for an hour with my dad before I realized that he had already died. Maybe that was something else that we didn’t always know about each other.

Explanations

Please allow me to not quite explain myself. I don’t want you to say you love me. They won’t understand, and you are too far gone to clarify—not that you would have if you were still here.

Grandpa’s Wagon

Grandpa had an old wagon that he kept out in front of his house. It was the wagon that his family rode in when they moved up from Texas when he was a kid. We used to play cowboys and Indians in it. Every Fourth of July he would hook Smokey up to the wagon and drive us in the parade. We rode with the horses, at the back, behind the marching bands, four-wheelers, and Shriners in their clown cars. You could always tell the parade was almost over when you saw the horses. They had to be last because they shit all over Main Street.

Necromancer Kathryn Merwin

Lasses Birgitta was an alleged Swedish witch. She was the first woman executed for sorcery in Sweden. Here on the island of windmills & winter, earth disappears slowly. Vanishing waves through another polar night, avalanche of stars, cool shell of the moon. Lips to keyhole, she breathes into the sepulcher, glass & skin glowing with oil & light. She exhales to make ghosts, turns the doorknob: o ne, two, three. Black anemones dagger starlight through crumbling rock: she bathes her hands in honey, her lips in sulphur. She presses her ear to dirt. She calls a name into earth: someone calls back. She whispers into rabbit-holes, paints her skin with their fear. Midnight, frost-girl dancing in the forest, wild, unforgiving.

Amanda Stovicek

Drawing Death

The sun shining on the roof of your mouth. The body in the swamp with a bullet hole found in the morning. The body found under the blackgum tree. The body making necklaces out of cattails and algae. The crows sweating feathers into the water. The sweep of clouds like a wisp of baby’s hair. The space on the steel table empty even when filled. The nocturnal silence of blackgum and cypress uncovering more bodies. The bodies clasped together like necklaces. The bones of their hands, a puddle of pearls. No one touches you like that. No one touches you.

Corey Farrenkopf

You in Another Body

“Describe me. The other me you said you saw,” Hamilton says. Whenever I see photographs of him, a profile picture or polaroid hung on his mother’s refrigerator, it’s a different man. The same man in all, but not the one before me, in real life. The one who puts his arm around my waist, who kisses my neck the way I like.

“Well, you have thin lips,” I say. “You’re really tan. Probably a few inches shorter. Beer gut. Balding. There’s this mole beneath your ear.”

His hand wanders up his neck, searching for the growth. He finds nothing on his unblemished skin and smiles. He waves the waitress over and asks for another beer. I turn down a second seltzer, mine still half full. She walks across the brick patio, heels clicking, and disappears into the cafe. Hamilton leans a muscular arm over the metal railing and tosses a crust of bread to a pair of pigeons.

“Doesn’t sound like me, does it,” he says, without looking away from the birds.

“No, I wouldn’t say so.” I sip from my straw. No, Hamilton is tall. You can count hours at the gym on his biceps. Blonde hair. Clean in every way his counterpart is filthy.

I wanted to ask his mother, that one time he invited me over, who the guy on the refrigerator was. I thought it was some complicated joke. I saw the same man in images of college keg parties and intramural soccer matches, out of breath, slumping by the sidelines. He appeared in every Instagram image and upload Hamilton posted on social media. Some joke.

Hamilton was the kind of person who desired documentation of every occurrence with a photograph. Proof he was alive, that his life wasn’t all television and nine to five. Over four-thousand pictures on Facebook: eating dinner, surfing lessons, a cousin’s baby shower. I’ve scrolled through, trying to find Hamilton’s grinning face—the face before me now—something to let me know he’s there somewhere.

The first time I noticed his doppleganger was in a photo we took inside the Met. It was our third date. My art history professor snagged us discounted tickets. I asked a German woman to take a shot of us next to an upright sarcophagus. The flash flickered before my eyes. Then the German woman said something I couldn’t comprehend as she returned my phone. She might have been holding back a laugh or wishing us a nice day. At first glance, I thought someone had stepped into the shot, that some paunchy Italian man had gotten lost in the exhibit. But when Hamilton saw the image, he smiled, claiming she captured his good side, no tick of humor on his face. I didn’t ask what he meant, afraid of the answer. Now I avoid sharing the frame with him, not knowing who I’ll meet on the screen.

Our paninis arrive, steam wicking off melted cheese, the scent of parmesan and basil floating about. He takes a bite then passes me his smartphone, screen unlocked. It’s opened to his camera. Only the white metal mesh of the table is visible through the lens.

“Take a picture,” he says.

“Shouldn’t I wait until we’re done eating?” I reply, dread souring the bread in my mouth.

He gulps down another bite. “Nah. I want to see what I really look like.” He laughs. My hands shake, lifting the plastic shatter-proof case. Hamilton is still blonde haired, blue eyed, polo commercial ready as my finger hovers over the shutter release. His smile broadens, minute wrinkles crease around his eyes. I press the button.

“Now let me see,” he says, extending a hand.

I hold it back, dropping it level with my hip beneath the table. I block the screen with my palm, eliminating the sun’s glare. I squint. It’s the tan disheveled man, panini in one hand, the other grazing over his thinning scalp. He wears the same collared gray sweater as Hamilton, the same aviators tucked into the neckline.

“Come on, I want to see this other man,” he says, hand reaching across the table. He knocks what’s left of my seltzer over, spilling ice cubes onto the latticed table top. I feel cool water dampen my sock.

“Let me take another,” I say, raising the camera again.

He snatches it from my hand, fingertips tapping the screen to bring up the shot. He flips through previous images and smiles.

“Why? This one looks fine. Could be my new profile pic,” Hamilton says, placing the phone face up on the table. I can see it’s frozen on the image of the tanned man, his bulging gut resting on the edge of the table. Hamilton raises his hand and waves the waitress over, ordering me another drink and napkins for my wet sock.

“It’s a real keeper,” he says, tucking the phone inside his jeans.

“I guess so,” I reply. He doesn’t ask me if I saw the other man on the screen, doesn’t ask if our perceptions have realigned, doesn’t ask who I believe the other guy to be. A slipped dimension. The foreshadowing of a future self. A ghost hiding beneath his fitted t-shirt. Instead he asks if I want a lime for my seltzer.

“No, I think I’m fine without.”

Fuel John Paul Davis

Do cars crave the neat alcohol sting of gasoline spluttering into their tiny round mouths does the A express simmer with pleasure uncoiling its tongue lathering it over the crackling third rail is it wagging its long steel body delighting in the spiciness of voltage does my laptop enjoy suckling its thin wire eager as a puppy before a full bowl its mouth is open all day long do I tantalise it moving my fingers over its many teeth does my bicycle lean against the wall daydreaming of my pumping legs does my press on the pedals have a flavor when I was a child Mom gave me small green stars phosphorescences I could sticker to my bedroom ceiling so I borrowed a star chart from the library & fastened the night to the dark above my bed all day they gulped & gulped in all available light then after sundown sweated it back out of their burning little bodies they were so ravenous they’d swallow any photon but did they prefer certain varietals maybe what bounced from the sun through the window to my cat then a poster or perhaps from the lightbulb to the spine of a book then upward say the light absorbed a small taste of whatever it touched then did they gulp down particle after glowing particle like someone eating strawberries hoping for a truly sweet & rich one pausing a little after to glory in the gift of such luxury when a ray or two reflected off my skin, was I their ambrosia do they know why when I lay my tongue against you soft & firm as you crumple & buck above me do I jones for the sour salt anointing no energy is transferred yet afterward I boil I smolder until sunrise I lie next to you photoluminous.

The List of Broken Things

Wheel on an elephant cart, one petal of the cat’s bell peeled back to extract the metal seed that made noise, a doll’s head, the first cup and also the second, pencil gripped too hard with effort, pencil gripped too hard with anger, a doll’s head, a doll’s head, one nuclear family, the plants growing along the border of the garden, a window where we moved to when we fled, the drought finally, the clouds again and again and the temperature falling,

thermometer that scattered metal fish across the floor, but not the fever, the smallest bone in the foot, a connection made across the buried lines of the sea then: static, that pulpy thing buried in the body, your voice when you spoke in Latin, chair legs dragged through too many climates, ice that continued to crack, first the metal shell of the bullet then the skin above the clavicle, the seal over the door, the seal of the envelope, falling down, the world around me.

Sasha West

Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists

Valentine’s Day: I cut hearts out of maps, needle them onto twine, and hang them across our rooms.

I kissed the terrorist goodbye so he could take our daughter into his car, wrapped in black coats, off to daycare.

Reader, I married him. Statistics say: if someone’s hands end my life, they will be his. He is

my God’s little body. All the danger of the world sleeps in his muscles.

Still, I place gently my hand on his head, I marvel at his skin, I bring him inside my house, my body, I bear his child.

It is love that keeps the darkness down, love that in the sea cradles. I place my life

here, in my life, with the dangerous stairs, our bathtub and ladder,

him. All could kill me—my daily life in pieces. I say yes and wed his beautiful risk.

Bobby Hannah Gilham

The physical suspicion that something was not going well and that perhaps it never had gone well.

– Julio Cortázar, from Hopscotch , 1966

Eve had read all about the funhouses, and leaving their rotting corpses inside the hotel. She was equally enamored by and in horror of:

All things

Bobby

The freckled face on the back of her milk carton

Her dreams about Jonathan and his…

Her mother’s locked cabinet

The hole beneath her ribs where she kept an EpiPen and a few scraps of paper

This was not a metaphorical hole; rather it had been put there

Oh darling, don’t fret, you’ll get wrinkles.

She’d been reading a lot; perhaps that was the problem. Reading about vampires and homes that held secrets and lovers and extendable walls. She was reading about the Master and his Margarita, about the devil and photography and about Geryon and Herakles, about Little Red Riding Hood and pretending to understand she understood Maria. She was devised as someone literary, by someone who purported to be literary. As if that meant something.

She wanted you to stop and think. Not about her, of course, but about it.

There was a collection of short stories, something she’d been compiling, pulling from library books and stealing from her mother’s extensive collection. She carried the stuffed notebook around, asking others to contribute to it, interviewing her friends at school, her teachers, the talking dog who lived down on Wilshire. She wanted to know: What are you afraid of?

They all had different answers. Needles. Shotguns. Dogs, cops, my mother. My lover. God. The Devil. Incorrectly-modified pronouns. Losing someone, something. An eternal life after life. Falling in love. Dying alone. Dying too soon. Coming back as a toilet brush. Coming back at all. Getting stabbed in the eye. Being tortured. Living through a horror movie. Having to rewatch The Shining. Getting left. Leaving the wrong person. Leaving the right person.

It was all very interesting, she supposed, but no one had an answer to suffice her burning desire. Her small and rapidly developing mind was attempting to reckon with all the things she’d always known but could never properly convey.

What is fear? Am I afraid? Where does everyone else keep their fear, if not in this little cavity behind his or her ribs?

She’d been in a haunted house once as a child. She’d also been in exactly three therapists’ offices. And fifteen drug stores. Two theme parks. One carnival. With Bobby. Today. Right now, in fact.

She was awfully fond of Bobby. And Bobby was not afraid of anything. And that worked out just fine.

She’d always wanted the company and Bobby had a nice way of existing, but not entirely. He didn’t speak much, he didn’t ask for much, and he never snorted. Not like Mr. Frenzen did, whom she hated. Even though Dr. Gonzalez told her she must be mistaken about Mr. Frenzen. He was a dear friend, after all.

But she was not mistaken, and she was not going to think about it anymore.

“When you at last begin to seize those things / which don’t exist, / how much longer will the night need to be?”

And anyway, Eve eventually had a wish to crumple little Bobby up and store him in that compartment behind her ribs, in her chest, where she also kept a few fortune cookie papers and a sliver of an old photograph. To keep him company.

She’d had the hole since she was a toddler, and she didn’t remember a time before. Her mother did, and she’d weep, and weep. But there is no use explaining something to someone who doesn’t know any different because they have nowhere to go but down down down.

So picture this: Bobby and Eve are walking. Maybe they’re holding sweaty palm to sweaty palm, passing the cotton candy stands and arcade games, all sleepy in the frame. Eve will remember how painfully aware she was of the heat and the new, earthy way she smelled on warm days that summer.

Eve thinks about the word earthy and how, to her, an earthy smell was one of corpses, not of earth.

Well, are they so different, honey really?

While walking, Eve suddenly and horribly imagines the day when Bobby might die. She sees his clean white collared shirt beneath a small suit, wonders absently about the conversations that might go into the planning of a child’s wake.

“Well, does lasagna seem too, I don’t know, festive?”

And Eve pictures how his sweet face might look in the casket, his thin lips hiding a jagged upper jaw line. He really does have terrible teeth, Eve thinks now, giggling to herself while Bobby shoots at disappearing bullseyes. He wants to win her a stuffed bear and she wants to pull his teeth out, start fresh.

She thinks she might be able to do it better. Oh, she would ask first of course! It’d only be if he wanted her to. Come now. A few inches taller than Bobby, Eve has to shrug her shoulder to hold his hand. Realizing this, Eve suddenly knows that they are incompatible, she and Bobby, and that somehow this matters to her plan. She’d only seen a few sex scenes from movies, nothing too racy, but she knows that if they don’t fit together, they are not meant to be. Eve so badly wants to fit with somebody. To crawl under their skin and never leave. She just wants someone to wear, to live so fully in their self that the two might become inseparable, that they might share the same thoughts, the same dreams, that they might speak in short brain waves, ordering the same dish at a restaurant and finding humor and sickness and love in all the same places. In all the right places.

Eve wants so badly to know someone. Inside out. And she wants Bobby. Mismatching parts or not. Never to control Bobby, though; she just wanted in.

She wants to wander down the corridors of his arteries, lit by red paper lanterns and a half-burned string of Christmas lights in an apartment uptown where Bobby will never actually live. She wants to slide drunkenly down the walls, her tights full of runs,

hair a chaotic mess and mind free for once. Bump like cars into partygoers, creeping slowly towards a door at the end of the hallway, light thumping, burning, some psychedelic, dissonant song is playing, and it’s all there for her, like a scene she would never allow to play out. The music is climaxing, her fingers are burning and behind the door, fun mirrors, only a whole mess of red.

Smile.

Smile.

That’s all Eve really wants. To find her connection.

But Eve does feel a great many things, not least of which is fascination.

She pulls away from Bobby’s hand, reaching into her notebook stuffed with fear. She’s stolen pages from library books, her mother’s collection, her neighbor’s journal, the recipe book from her aunt.

What are you afraid of?

She smoothes a sheet and reads to him just outside the funhouse on the pier, near the lazy waves and prickling sunlight. It really is a beautiful day.

“I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason all together in some struggle with the grim phantasm FEAR,” she reads.

Bobby is not stupid, but he is twelve, and there’s that.

“What else is in that notebook?” he asks. Eve wonders if she makes him nervous. Perhaps his mother always taught him to ask questions when he is uncomfortable. To get to know people.

Bobby really was an awfully polite little boy. Eve really, truly, did not want him to change. Not a day. She wanted him to stay like this forever. Sweet and earnest and soft. Eve felt it to be the tragedy [were she old enough to fully understand that word] of the opposite sex. To become slowly transformed, to grow aggressive and brash and brazen. Eve knew the tragedy of women, and unlike her mother and those women in her family before, she was not afraid of it. Although, perhaps she should be.

Bobby’s funeral was held on a Sunday at the Presbyterian church on Wayward with a wake that followed at the Whitaker’s house down the street. They served lasagna. Eve was not invited.

The casket was closed, but Lillian Whitaker had insisted her little Bobby wear the altered suit. She could hardly finish that thought though because last summer they were celebrating new love, new life, hugging family and drinking and she and Bobby had shared a dance to Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” There were tea lights in all the birch trees. And that all was a thousand years ago, now, a different dimension, a different era, a kaleidoscope. Like dinosaurs and asteroids and astrophysicists and the discovery of penicillin; to Bobby’s mother, there was no time, no space. Only Bobby. And no Bobby. His father Robert greeted the guests and his mother Lillian sat in the bedroom and tried to focus on inflating her lungs, slowly. In. Out. In. Hold. Out.

Eve imagined the woman sitting there, sobbing, breathing into a bag, going through her son’s notebooks and toy boxes and making an infinite scene. Webbed fingers crawling through toy train sets, wrapping in and around bedposts, cocooning there forever.

But Eve was not an adult, and so she did not understand, yet.

Bobby’s mother merely sat in silence, breathing in. And out. And in. Hold. Out. The coroner was able to do quite a lot; there was even talk of considering an open casket. But Lillian would have none-of-it-Robert.

But he did have a fairly easy job, really, as many of the organs were never found, and those that were, Mr. Whitaker had asked be donated. A little girl named Suze would get a brand new liver because of Eve and she would grow to do wonderful and terrible

things. I’m sorry, not because of Eve. Because of Bobby. Because Bobby died. Eve had nothing to do with it, surely. This is coming out all wrong.

Which, in turn, means that Bobby was alive (somewhat) when they found him for the organs to be salvageable, as you may have deduced.

Eve doesn’t like to pander, so there will be none of that.

But for the morbidly curious, the coroner was able to remove twenty or so crumpled up sheets of paper, of library book papers, actually, from inside his ribs. From stories about the long nights, about the houses falling, the clocks ticking, the hearts beating, the knives reeling, eyes flashing, about the jungle, the carnival, the funhouse.

That was the construct of which they found him in. Stuffed politely with beautiful words, stained in, well you know.

“Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator –though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed,” one cop read aloud from the papers. The words, her words!

And Eve couldn’t help but wonder if she’d misunderstood the whole thing, just a bit. But she did so wish Bobby could’ve seen it, anyway. Well, really seen it. All of it. The little girl stumbling into the funhouse minutes after them, searching, huffing, lost lost lost. The steps getting closer, further, mirrors warping closer, further, Bobby’s sweet and shallowing breath.

Oh you really should have been there!

The little girl’s name was Martha Carson and she would overdose fifteen years later on (insert your medication of choice) while her toddler Rachel slept in the next room. Just before she gave it all up, Martha so badly wanted to write down the strange smells recurring from that day as a child near the ocean. Inside the funhouse.

Earthy, almost. Like paper and pipes and late nights in the library and lost nights in a stranger’s bed and the smell of birth and of removed organs lurking somewhere behind a funhouse, maybe near the garbage cans, festering somewhere behind a set of ribs, somewhere stuffed with little snippets of love letters and grave misunderstandings.

Bobby tried to explain it to the paramedic, too. The smells-sounds-sights.

The horror!

But the oxygen mask was sucking in all his words and he died before they got to the hospital.

And really, I wasn’t there, so I probably shouldn’t say another word.

Krys Malcolm Belc

The Broad Street Line

You always hold my hand at night, in the beginning. You’re afraid of campus, of the thick woods, the heavy black. It’s quiet; the nerds are asleep. You talk a lot, talk all the time; I learn everything about you, unbelievably fast, and keep my secrets. It’s impossible to explain how dark my childhood room was, how lonely. Months later I sleep with you in the twin bed you slept in before you left home, even though your parents think I’m on the floor. The Long Island Railroad roars by every so often. It’s New York City; people come and go and come again, all night. This is the normal you came from.

When you graduate and move to Philadelphia, you live on the fourth floor of an apartment building. Apartment 4D. At night with the windows open we hear loud echoes, voices bouncing off the buildings: rugby players from the University of Pennsylvania singing and chanting in a wild rumpus; couples screaming outside bars. One night, a pop. You fucking shot me, we hear. You shot me with a cap gun, what the fuck? The trolley comes by every few minutes, rattling like coins shaken in a piggy bank.

You have a job that’s the stuff of nightmares. All day you perform experiments on people with schizophrenia. We call them studies, you say. But I’m not convinced. Electrodes are involved, to measure responses, reflexes. Sometimes you sit with them for ten hours, alone. It’s not Law & Order, you say. These people are not violent. The patients come day after day; there are so many in this city. You videotape them being startled by a loud tone. You test their sense of smell; I don’t get why. It’s good to learn more about this disease – I understand that – but I also think about tiny electrodes on their eyelids, the men with flat faces, loud beeping noises, a panic button behind your chair. You’re not afraid.

But you won’t take the Broad Street Line. I ask you to meet me for dinner in South Philly. We’re driving, right? You ask nervously. I’ve known you a year and think I know your fears: quiet, dark places. Your parents finding out I don’t sleep on your floor. Having to say a word you’ve never read for the first time out loud. Especially if it has a lot of vowels. You grew up in Warsaw before the wall fell. You became a New Yorker. The Broad Street line is, like all things in Philadelphia when you are from New York, a miniature version of the thing. It runs for a few miles, straight up and down underneath a single street. There’s nothing to fear there.

You could get hammered, you say. A guy was. You saw it on the news. I ask where you saw the news – you have no TV – but you don’t remember. That’s not important, you say, annoyed that I question everything. It happened. Hammered in broad daylight. No one called anyone.

I look it up. I’m someone who looks things up. The victim was a hospital worker, a tech, who fell asleep on the train. The man who hammered him had a five-year-old standing next to him, his son. A hammer in a duffel bag. Screamed something about God. These are the ones you tell stories about: the ones who think they’re God, think God is talking to them, think they have something to teach you about God and the universe and all the things in the world we should fear.

Sometimes after work you come to see me on the dark campus where I still live, but you take a regular train, a commuter train where they still issue paper tickets. Trains with quiet cars. Trains you can sleep on. When we go to sleep in my dorm room, it is completely silent. A fearful thing, now. I’m afraid. I’m afraid that the world is not made for people like us. I’m afraid of you locking yourself in small rooms with strange people all day, people who think they can feel sounds, people who think they are God, people who won’t startle no matter how loud the tones are. I’m afraid I’ll never lie in your childhood bed again, never hear the LIRR scream by again. We go to sleep: quiet, afraid.

Krys Malcolm Belc

Your Father, the Cab Driver

Has perfected the art of speaking much and saying little.

He reads widely; listens to NPR. He can talk to anyone about non-controversial subjects for hours. The weather. Nature. International vacations. Car repair. Traffic. Baking bread. Local high schools and colleges. He would never say so to your face but he is proud of you: Stuyvesant, Swarthmore, Penn; he drives around waiting for other parents who will know all that these places mean to a cab driver’s daughter.

For Christmas and birthdays, you send him sad, soulful woman singers on CD. Norah Jones. Adele. Regina Spektor. He sends you a long text message from his cab one night; it can only be described as poetry. He describes driving through Manhattan with his windows down, in the middle of the night, listening to Begin to Hope.

He spends evenings idling in the taxi line at JFK among his Polish buddies, some of whom barely speak the language he long ago mastered beyond mastery. They talk about their kids. Bridges and tunnels. Soccer. The evils of the Taxi and Limousine Commission. But his art, the art of waiting and of talking, is dying.

In 2005, in an interview for the New York Times, he says: “With cellphones, nobody wants to talk to the driver anymore. Even on a five-minute trip, they always think of some long-lost aunt they can call.” When I ride in his cab, I cannot play on my cellphone; I want to make a good impression. Having perfected the art of speaking much and saying little, your father actively chooses not to employ these skills with me.

He asks what I study; when I tell him African American History, he says, Really? Why? That sounds depressing. He asks about my family: where they live, the names of all my siblings. He judges them for being too big and too wealthy without saying so. I memorize his taxi number so I know who I’m hiding from. You tell me I’m being ridiculous – Do you know how many cabs there are in this city? But I say one can never be too careful about these things.

Later, after a years-long series of awkward cab rides and awkward dinners, he expresses confusion at your choice to marry me. All this about being gay, and you go and choose someone who is barely a woman to begin with? When you tell me this later, I can see it: I picture him drumming his steering wheel, not waiting for your answer. Opening his windows and pressing play.

F. Daniel Rzcinek

Leafmold

Time to get to work: giant haystacks, the first freeze of November, longing like a broken hammock, jackpot of loneliness. The jackpines redacted. The deer hit by traffic falls dead outside your front door, bloodying the morning paper. Logic of herons. The half-full gas can on the garage’s stained floor. The drums begin like this. Nephew of an albatross, orphan of a frigate. Take a long break and then coast on silence. After the island. I promised to cook dinner and forgot. The over-examined life is all I am left with. Churn the farm, my dream commanded. The rest was lost. A psychic broadcast from the deck of the Shirley Irene as it makes the crossing from Kelleys Island to the coast of Ohio. The shallow end of the bathtub. Trees creep up to the gunwales and the mouth drops, spilling cars. Six freshly shot buffleheads add choral static to the mainland’s drone. No shut-offs. At the junction of water and electric, the heels of shoppers go clicking by. This is not a form of song yet it suggests it. We go for full integration and the resulting enchilada known as whole. Laughter of swans in the fog. Fog like a bow bent at the sky. Sky like a chant: silver blue silver, silver blue blue.

The Insurrection at Fort Bob Ross

Happy little trees fell one by one with an unhappy sound, and the sky ran many-colored toward the approximate horizon. We could hear catcalls in Russian sifting through the gaps in the wall—“I might not know art, but I know what I like”, “Absence of intent is not method”—that sort of thing.

Like most movements, it didn’t begin as a movement. It began as an itch, a feeling of being unaccommodated, a question: What is reality hiding behind her skirts? Nothing, the Russians insisted, mixing their burnt sienna from seal blood and motor oil. We disagreed. Mystery, I suppose, is what we were after. Something impossible to believe in. We had all trusted in representation at one time. We were even a family of sorts. But at a certain point the world as it is stopped being enough. The visible lines cutting our trail couldn’t be the whole piroshki; even the master would have agreed, we were sure of it. The opposition, of course, tugged the other end of the same banner. Both sides heard his voice in their ears, the lilt and calm of it, and claimed it as their own.

The war dragged into the fall. On the 29 th of October we launched our last counterattack, projecting onto the encroaching marine layer his final, unaired episode. The disavowed reel in which the master abandoned his lakes and trees and peaks for negative space, his careful dabbings for fat brush strokes and sweeping lines. His afro undulated against the fog like the very halo of god, and even the Russians fell silent.

With the bold, incomprehensible canvas flowering before him, he spoke of his parents’ divorce, his alcoholism and pyromania. He revealed how he had watched a fire he’d set sweep through a forest of lodgepole pines to shimmer against an alpine lake, its red tendrils a premonition of the brush he would later take up in absolution. He calmly—in that unequivocal purr—apologized to the recruits he’d belittled as a drill sergeant. This was his reckoning and his redemption. Paint would flow in place of blood, and oil would subsume fire.

As the segment ticked to its end, and the master faded from view for the last time, a hush of peace settled over the coast and dulled to spoon-sharpness the wooden pikes of the fort. It was a glorious calm that lasted the length of a sigh, before the firing resumed with renewed vengeance.

Our cured pelts were little protection. Conceptualists and performance artists fell like skittle pins. By early morning, the gift shop had been overrun. The vanishing point wavered behind drifting clouds of smoke like a highway laid down and forgotten in the desert. Holed up in the granary, we swelled with the righteousness only the doomed know, watching the sun rise across rippling hills and majestically crashing surf. What relief we felt then at our loss. What bliss defeat was as, far out, a humpback whale breached the cerulean blue.

Commute

He squinted his eyes, tried to imagine he was back in Europe, where people rode bikes and took trains because that’s what they did, and not just because they’d lost their license to a DUI. He let the brown yards and cyclone fences blur into canals and villages, imagined the swaying, tatted guy across the aisle was something indigenous. When he leaned forward to throw up, James moved his foot out of the way as if sidestepping a broken cobblestone.

He rode especially carefully. He’d meant to get a helmet; he’d planned to run out the night before but the damn game had gone on forever. Fourteen goddamn innings. One o’clock in the morning, and there he was in his worn-out chair watching the dugouts empty, the bullpen drain out. Now with each bump and pothole he saw the contents of his head spilling, the soup of his precious brain splattered onto Sunrise Avenue. His thoughts would be tracked across town, somebody’s shoe slurping up his memory of the girl on the boat, making out in the deck chairs.

“Welcome back!” everyone had cheered when he got home, as if it was they who’d been in the better place—huffing in dust and exhaust while the sun sintered in a glob of dull yellow behind its curtain of haze.

He squeezed between two cars nudging closer to thwart him. The drivers eyed him with distaste, offended by his exertions. Who the hell did he think he was?

There was a spot on his neck he regarded as a kind of scar where the girl from the boat had held her mouth tight against him. The sun drilled into it with constant radiation, his shirt collar abraded it—his surroundings, wherever he went, seemed to conspire in trying to excise this one remaining souvenir.

“You are golden, one of a kind,” she’d said, or something along those lines. Her English was halting, and he knew only the most basic phrases in Danish. Her arms were tan below her short sleeves from riding her bike day-in day-out across the gently undulating Danish plains.

He’d hoped to sustain her memory through his own two-wheeled mnemonics, but it was a different world here. There was no allowance for alternative travel. The bike lanes were a dangerous afterthought, and any conveyance other than a car (or, better yet, a truck) was seen as a kind of subversion.

Denmark dissipated slowly like a fantasy before him as he rode, cooking off like sweat. No one could be born and live their life out in such an unreal place. It was impossible. Midway across a sagging storm drain, it ceased to exist. Just like that, a balloon popping. He wondered what would become of the girl, suddenly without a home. The same as happened with everyone, he supposed, once they were out of view. She’d be bottled up and set on a shelf just out of reach, her faint tappings against the glass no louder than the ticking of moths against a streetlight.

Shaun Anderson

Write the Scene

I was six. He was nine. It’s been seventeen years.

“I don’t actually know how old I was,” I tell my therapist.

Six years old. I had to be six. It’s the only age that makes sense. It was the age of the colorful dinosaur quilt and the lion and tiger pajamas that my mother sewed for me. It was before my eighth birthday. Before my baptism. He came to the birthday dinner when I turned eight. He laughed at me when I cried after spilling the free ice cream sundae. Melting vanilla staining cheap restaurant carpet. I had to be six, because I knew better when I turned eight.

Write the scene. I was six. He was nine. My older brother was asleep on the top bunk of our bunkbed. I was supposed to be asleep in the bottom bunk. Dylan was supposed to be asleep on the floor.

Did he choose to hang himself so his feet wouldn’t have to touch the floor? It all happened on the floor. But he wasn’t hanging over the floor where it happened. There was no reason for him to avoid the floor in those last moments. He was wearing his prom tux when his sister opened his bedroom door to find him swinging from the ceiling. I imagine him dangling from the fan, gliding around his room. Nineteen years old.

I was nineteen when I told my mother. Three thousand miles away, serving an LDS mission in California. We could only write home once a week, and I used my one email that week to tell her. I told her in an email. I didn’t get to hold her. She didn’t have to see me cry. I didn’t have to write the scene, didn’t have to remember who took off my pajamas. I just wrote the word, “molested.”

Now I have to write the scene. I have to know. My older brother was asleep on the top bunk. Dylan was on the floor. I was on the bottom bunk, and then I wasn’t on the bottom bunk. I was on the floor with Dylan

“I don’t know how to forgive him,” I tell my therapist, sixteen years later. “My job isn’t to convince you to forgive him,” she replies, crossing her arms against her red sweater.

“But I need to forgive him.” I can’t meet her eyes. “Why?”

“That’s what good people do.” I recount the endless stories of forgiveness that I’ve

heard through my years of Sunday school.

“I’m not here to help you place labels on yourself like ‘good’ and ‘bad.’” She sounds stern now. “You’re just a person.”

Write the scene. He was nine. I was six. We had a cousin sleepover. My brother was asleep on the top bunk. Dylan was supposed to be asleep on the floor. I was supposed to be on the bottom bunk. Why did I get on the floor?

“This is our secret,” he said. “We’ll get in trouble if you tell anyone.”

He was dead before I told anyone. I didn’t feel anything when he died. I was walking to gym class during my junior year of high school. My name was called over the intercom, and I was called to the front office. My dad was there with tears in his eyes. He got right to the point.

“Your cousin Dylan committed suicide this morning.”

I just nodded and said something like “How sad.” Then I hugged my dad and went to gym class. We ran the mile that day. I had forgotten Dylan was dead by the time I got home from school.

I need to write the scene. Need to know. I forgot about that night until twelve years later. He died, and I didn’t feel anything. He never got that close to me (he got inside of me), and he always chose to hang out with my older brother (my older brother was asleep on the top bunk. Dylan was on the floor).

Write the scene. Six. Nine. Pretty sure we did that. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was six. He was nine. Did either of us know what we were doing?

“I forgave him on my mission,” I tell my therapist. “But when I didn’t come home from my mission straight, I started blaming him again.”

“You know that this isn’t the reason that you’re gay, right?” she asks. I didn’t know that when I realized I was gay. Eighteen years old. Alone in my apartment. Waiting for my roommate to come home from work. Remembering the feel of his flesh against my sin, two of us mashed together in the backseat of a friend’s car as we drove home from Bear Lake. Why couldn’t I love a girl like I was supposed to? What the hell was wrong with me?

I was six. He was nine. How did he know where to put anything? Is it a basic human instinct? Would that particular instinct kick in at nine? Could he have learned it from someone else? I just did what he told me to do. He told me to do a lot. More than anyone who is six should do.

Write the scene. I was six. He was nine. My brother was asleep on the top bunk. He had to be. We tried to be silent on the floor. He couldn’t have known. He was asleep on the top bunk. Dylan and I were alone on the floor, and my brother couldn’t have known. We were so quiet.

Dylan never talked to me about it. It was our secret. I forgot that night. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I was eighteen when I remembered. Dylan would have been twenty-one, but he was nineteen, gliding around his bedroom, his neck tied to the ceiling fan.

“It breaks my heart that you’ve spent so long carrying this alone,” my mission president told me, sitting on the other side of his gigantic oak desk. I hadn’t carried it. I had buried it, then dug it up to explain my homosexuality. Did

Dylan take my pajamas off, or did I? He definitely suggested it. I was six. He was nine. How did he know what to do? I need to know. Did I take my pajamas off? Why did I climb out of bed? Why didn’t I climb back into my bed?

“You were six,” my mission president said. “You’re putting your twenty-two-yearold mind into your six-year-old body. That’s not fair.”

Was I six? Was it before I was baptized? Did I change that fact so that I could pretend it was all washed away in some baptismal water? It didn’t get washed away. But I had to be six. He couldn’t have been much older than nine.

I worried that I might have contracted an STD. He had to learn from somewhere. I still haven’t gotten tested.

I’m scared to know. I have to know. I have to write the scene.

I was six (I can’t do this). He was nine (he couldn’t have hit puberty yet). My brother was asleep on the top bunk (definitely asleep, we were quiet). Dylan was supposed to be asleep on the floor, and I was supposed to be asleep on the bottom bunk.

“Hey Shaun,” he whispered from the floor. “Are you awake?”

(Why didn’t I pretend to snore?)

“Yeah,” I whispered back.

“Come down here for a second,” he whispered. “But be extra quiet.”

“NO!” I shout, and wake my older brother.

“Okay,” I said, rolling out from the colorful dinosaur quilt my mother spent hours stitching together.

Did he take my pajamas off, or did I? My carpet was long and shaggy. Dark brown. This was the first time I’d ever felt the carpet with my bare back. It was rougher than I expected.

I still don’t know. I’m trying to write the scene, but I still don’t know. “What exactly did you do with your cousin?” my mission president asked, sitting opposite me across his expansive desk.

Did he need to verify that this was a genuine case? What qualifies as genuine?

“Anal… and oral,” I replied, not meeting his eyes.

“But you were six,” he said, raising his eyebrows, almost like he didn’t believe me. Did he take my pajamas off, or did I?

“You were six,” my mission president says. “You didn’t know any better. Besides, it was all washed away from you when you were baptized.”

“You’re placing your twenty-two-year-old brain into your six-year-old-body. That’s not fair,” my therapist says.

I’m pretty sure I took my own pajamas off. I left those lion and tiger pajamas my mother had sewn for me on the floor. He told me to. I did.

I was six. He was nine.

Gail Langstroth

Ultraviolence

from Rawiya – She Who Tells a Story an exhibition of women photographers from Iran and the Arab world

This is not: woman clothed with the sun.

This is: I know end. I know explode.

Stripped to moon steel pounds incessant staccato. I know mercury/dead.

I stand fallen freeze glow after what left has left after night after night terror

rips shredded from dream from stench from cup from wall whether I want to or not—

I see with my mouth: my shut/white barb-eyed star.

Misanthropy LLC

The idea didn’t come to me so much as overwhelm me. Although there was a creative element to it, a eureka-moment quality. But, and if you read on you’ll know I seldom do this, I have to give the credit to people. Not any one person. People. As in, other people. In the Sartre sense. As in, hell. It was people in all their oppressive pettiness and boundless arrogance, with their ridiculous fleshy frames and their bone bowls of brainy custard atop them. The multifarious ways they disgust and offend. Their sour smells and sourer thoughts. All that people are, their universal bullshit and essential shittiness, that gave me the idea for Misanthropy, L.L.C. Great ideas, like stout saplings, need rot and decay to grow.

It’s been four years since I’ve founded Misanthropy, and we’ve flourished. We’ve successfully screwed-over, stymied, derailed or otherwise shit all over countless lives, and, as a result of this tactical immiserating, brought smiles to many formerly frowning faces, and brought grief and grimaces to more than a few formerly self-satisfied smirks. We are dream-makers and breakers. The company has granted some wishes by dashing others, but is has also given me purpose, given me an outlet for the well of hate and rage and frustration that had been continually stewing in me for three decades. And it’s allowed me to help people—to help them by hurting others. Not that we physically harm anyone. That’s crude. Breaking bones is simple. It’s the low-hanging fruit in the payback game. Breaking minds, triggering trauma, scarring souls—turning hope into dread and joy into sorrow; well, that’s an art. Which is what we are—artists. We hurt our marks emotionally, psychologically, intellectually. It’s my special sort of genius: the ability to ruin someone’s day or year. The ability to shit up someone’s birthday or wedding night or first day at a new job. The ability to dismantle someone. That’s why we’re hired.

I remember making drafts of our first brochure, employing the rhetorical tools of a bitter pitchman: Do you have a coworker who continually shuts you down in meetings? A boss who harasses you? A nosey neighbor? An ex who keeps calling? Is there a creep that continually leers at you on the subway? Are you tired of it but too afraid to confront it or them? That’s why we’re here. A hired, helping hand to dish out payback. No act of revenge is too small or too big or too vile. It wasn’t just a job. It isn’t. It’s a calling. One I had to answer.

You could say that Misanthropy is in my bones. A sort of acrid inheritance that I’ve finally figured out how to put to use. My father was an amateur misanthropist. Before his company fired him, he embezzled over forty thousand dollars and used it to replace the roof on our house, the furnace, and fund a family vacation—miserable in its own beachy way, the requisite sunburns and sand-irritated eyes, though I recall my father’s drunken grin when he reeled in his first marlin, one of his rare smiles that, due to my sister’s retching of a bologna sandwich over the side of the boat, is an image forever wedded to the stench of vomited cold cuts, which, combined with the sea air, embodies for me,

the Florida Keys. My uncle, too, was a first-rate misanthropist. When he lost his first job at a shipping company—lost isn’t the word, it was taken, despite, in his efforts to keep it, his threats to blackmail his philandering manager—he poured sugar in the gas tanks of all the trucks. The company was insured but it stalled their operations for weeks and they eventually went under. He had to go to two different grocery stores to load up on sugar. We found loose grains in the car, white dust in the cup holders and between the seats, for years after that, as if the car belonged to some grubby candy man who left sweetness in his wake rather than the usual stray hairs, grease and dander. I don’t say this to incriminate my two role models. They’re both dead. I only want to show you the kind of heritage we bring to the job. Our pedigree.

I carried on the tradition as a child. A neighbor, a little red-headed runt next door, once stole several of my action figures. I said nothing. Feigned friendship. Bided my time. Three months later, while this little ginger troll was stumbling over a soccer ball, I broke into his house through the dog door and smashed his toys to pieces. It was a massacre. I kept up my misanthropic training in my teen years with minor poisonings—laxatives in milkshakes a perennial favorite of mine, my high school signature move—pranks, threats, blackmail and other sundry retaliations. Suffice it to say, when you hire Misanthropy, you’re hiring experience.

All of these, every desultory attack and malicious act, was grist for the misanthropic mill. They served me in good stead when, as an adult, fresh out of college and new to the dull, deadening world of office work, I first used my gifts for others. A coworker, let’s call her Jane, was being harassed by our boss. He would call her over to ask her a simple question: Can I borrow some paper clips? How’s your new keyboard working out? But would have porn playing conspicuously on his computer. Usually hardcore butt stuff. Sometimes weird, grainy clips of German bestiality porn from the 70s. I never saw it myself, but Jane did. However, she needed the work and was afraid of reporting him. He’d been there forever, was friends with the founder. He was like a boil that is too much work to lance so you just live with the hideous thing, but it keeps throbbing no matter how much you cover it up. Yet there I was: the eager dermatologist. Jane had a problem and I was her solution. As a favor to her, at first, but afterwards I realized it was a calling. He stopped harassing her. In fact, when I was through with him—I may have been a little overzealous, it being my first time working on someone else’s behalf (I took pictures of his dirty search history and sent them to his wife, smeared dog feces under his desk, keyed his car, dosed him with laxatives, and so on)—he was a changed man. A timid, understanding boss. Sure, perhaps a broken man. But he was far better, more useful, less toxic, as someone cowed, than his former whole and wholly awful self.

I struck out on my own after that. First, taking on jobs through word of mouth, helping friends of friends get revenge. I salted the earth of asshole gardeners. I trailed close behind asshole hikers, talking loudly on my phone, listening to bad music, pissing in plain sight when they stopped to take pictures or have a snack. The tip of my dick is in many a sweeping landscape photo. I heckled at performances of pretentious actors and egged entitled cyclists. It was wonderful. I must have ruined three dozen days—a conservative estimate. Word spread. I hired a hacker and a strong man—certain marks got violent and while I handled myself well I thought, blinding one belligerent with pepper spray and kicking another in the groin, I needed some muscle—and a splendidly spiteful, malevolent assistant.

This is the team you hire when you contract with Misanthropy. This is the team that gets you results. That ensures absolute anonymity and discretion. Our latest brochure ends: So stop bottling up your hate. Stop choking down your fury. Let us take those dark dreams and make them a hateful reality.

My last job was a job like any other, which is to say, in my line of work, absolutely

unique. No job is the same. Yes, the same motivations animate and inform each job. But part of our genius is making sure they manifest in new, malignant ways each time.

Melanie was a job. Our client, her husband, felt emasculated by her and wanted to take her down a peg. I’m no feminist frankly, or egalitarian, not really buying into rights or justice or ethics or any of that crap that people concoct to make it seem that they matter and that we can make sense of this senseless world, but her husband did seem an especially stupid and despicable creature—he actually picked his nose during our initial interview, picked it and ate his findings, licking the flakes of hardened snot and stubby strands of nose hair off his fingers—but a job is a job. At Misanthropy, we don’t take sides. After doing some reconnaissance on Melanie, I came up with a plan. She seemed vain. She was beautiful, so the vanity goes without saying (to be clear: of all the people to hate, I don’t hate the beautiful. I pity them. They have the most to lose). Beautiful but fighting a losing battle, like the rest of us, against time, the sun, wind, gravity, hormone depletion and so on. Fighting marvelously, I might add. Or, more apt, losing marvelously. She did yoga and Pilates. She took spin classes, kettle bell classes and kickboxing classes. She belly-danced. She ran. I watched her and imagined hearing wind whistling through her arteries—they were that clean. She had a resting heart rate south of fifty beats a minute, on a stressful day. And all of these activities she did with both grace and an appealing air of contempt. As if she was fully conscious of any critique anyone might have of her and had considered it from all sides and found it flawed. Everyone around her seemed to be just that. Flawed. Unsound. I found this contempt intoxicating. But, ever the professional, I soldiered on and hatched a plan to destroy her, no matter how impressive or attractive her self-possession and disdain.

Two ill-wills clashed. I was dogged. She was unflappable. I started simply enough. I got a trial membership at her gym and indirectly ruined her mornings: I always seemed to be using the machine or weight or mat that she wanted; I ran on the treadmill next to her forcing awkward and inane conversations; I ate big bowls of coleslaw and raw kale topped with sauerkraut the night before a yoga class and took a position in front of her the next day, expelling pure brassica-fueled methane into her nose first thing in the morning. She, however, proceeded with her day, her life, unaffected and apace. I got dirtier. I stole her gym bag—my strong man had taught me how to pick locks—and waited to see her frustration as she left. There was none. Not even a hint of it. She looked even more regal, strolling out of the gym and into the dry winter air, skin goose-pimpled and sweaty. I thought at least she’d get a cold but no such luck. Her confidence extended to her immune system. An indomitable creature. Pure will.

My sabotage grew more aggressive. I punched a hole in her oil pan and watched her walk to the bus thinking a brush with public transportation might take some of the sheen off her, but she seemed to enjoy the change. She found it a lark. I broke into her house and put dye in her conditioner bottle. Her hair went from a lustrous, tawny brown to a bright and damaged magenta. Inexplicably, it suited her. I had a friend hack her email account and send lewd messages to her colleagues. She spun it as a joke and they praised her off-beat sense of humor.

Finally, growing desperate enough to risk overexposure, I began to sit next to her at lunch. She ate at the same café most days, getting a small salad and an espresso after. She read the paper and smiled to herself. I thought: here’s her special place. Her calming ritual, her center. I thought: this is how I’ll fuck her up. I sat next to her and talked on my phone. I bleated nonsense into it. Bullshit trivia. Disgusting made-up tidbits about my bowel movements, detailing the consistency, smell and color of my stool. I got into it. I was an effusive spokesman of the disgusting and inappropriate. A fount of repulsive data. After the fifth lunch, she confronted me.

“You can do better,” she said, disappointment in her voice.

“Excuse me?” I picked my nose, my teeth, and smacked my lips loudly.

“You can do better than this. I know you can.”

“I don’t get what you mean, ma’am.” I picked a generous hunk of wax out of my ear.

She smiled, shrugged—I knew I was in trouble because her clavicles had grown erotic, enticing arrow lines pointing down and in, drawing me to her. The suggestiveness of bones! She put down a tip and left. It felt like the tip was left for me. I watched her walk away, following her with my eyes until she disappeared into the noon-day crowd of shuffling idiots on their lunch break. For the first time, I felt like one of them. Part of the dumb and pathetic masses. A nobody. A nothing.

That’s when I began to notice my life being interrupted, derailed. She turned the tables. One morning, my tires were flat. One night I did laundry and it came out bleached. Someone had tampered with my detergent. I began to get loads of catalogs in the mail for the most ridiculous things: back pads, industrial magnets, tentacle porn, clay cock rings. I could barely lug my recycling bin to the curb (a minor nuisance to most, this excessive wave of junk mail, but for me, a man apart and proudly so, each brochure felt like an incursion from a persistent enemy at the gates of my privacy). One morning, after my usual sequence of masturbating, shitting, showering, shaving and getting dressed, I found her in my kitchen drinking coffee.

“This is terrible coffee. Tastes like wet paper.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“That porn you were watching sounded rough.” Evidently, she had overheard my routine and been in my apartment a while.

“Want some eggs? Toast?”

I didn’t answer. For once, I had no answer.

“I make a mean scramble.” She got up and pulled down my pan and pulled out the eggs and butter. She knew where everything was. She cracked six eggs and let the shells fall on the floor. Cut off a slice of butter and dropped the rest of the stick on the floor. Filled a cup of coffee, after spilling milk and coffee on the counter and floor, and handed it to me.

“This is a very practical kitchen. A practical kitchen in the practical apartment of a man in an impractical profession.”

“And what do you think my profession is, exactly?”

“He speaks! You weren’t this quiet in the café. Maybe profession isn’t the right word. Because you’re really more of an amateur. As you can see from my being here.” She stirred the eggs. They looked fluffy, though some were sticking to the pan in a yellow crust along the edge.

“I’m a consultant.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a mercenary. An asshole who is paid to be an asshole by other assholes who are too chicken-shit to be one themselves. Like my husband.” The toast popped up. She took a slice and piled some eggs on it. “Do you like hot sauce? I noticed you had some habanero-mango stuff in the fridge.”

“No. It was a gift.”

She opened the hot sauce and poured it all over the breakfast and laid it in front of me. I dug in. I didn’t know what else to do. The sauce burned my nose but the eggs were good.

“It isn’t fun, is it? Having someone systematically fuck-up your life?”

“Did you speak with your husband?”

“No, I try not to talk with that oaf if I can avoid it.”

“So how…”

“I followed you to your office. I found the number and spoke to your secretary. It was simple. Too simple. I can’t believe an angry victim hasn’t stormed in there yet and

shot up the place.” She finished a piece of toast and threw the scrap of crust on the floor. It was pumpernickel. It looked like a log of dark and dried goose shit on my white kitchen floor.

“We take precautions.” I felt a need to defend our business model.

“Sure. They might work too, when you are punking some unsuspecting housewife by slashing the tires of her soccer-mom mini-van. But I think you’ve met your match.” She smiled.

“So where does that leave us?”

“Why don’t you give me the low-down on your operations and we can go from there?”

So from there, we went. To a lunch, a dinner, another dinner—me giving her the history of Misanthropy, its genesis, my motivations, our successes and failures, our potential future, and her listening to it all, interested and sharp, asking incisive questions, pointing out weaknesses and opportunities I had missed. It was an education. I was flummoxed. Here was a person. A person I’d been paid to hate yet couldn’t. She was something new. Something else.

Misanthropy never felt so good. After she pretended to have a change of heart for her cloddish husband, she became my partner. We did everything together. From plotting to execution, we lived for Misanthropy and, in turn, for each other. Our schemes became more cutting and elaborate but still efficient. She had a knack for figuring out a person’s real weakness. The crack in the veneer, the rotting pillar holding them up that, at first glance, seemed so solid. She was a genius. And I reveled in learning from her, in going from founder and well-spring to willing sidekick. My strongman stood straighter under her command. He grew bolder too. My hacker found her creative mind refreshing. Only my assistant found her wanting. She said she had dead eyes. But I’d never seen anything livelier. Her body, her entire being, seemed to hum with possibilities.

We started leaving vague calling cards for our marks. Not enough to incriminate us. Just enough to say: Misanthropy was here. After the first few jobs, my heart softened. All the hate I’d harbored seemed to dissolve. Like an old callous sloughing off.

We felt so great after dismantling an arrogant high school football coach—his team had collected the funds—that we kissed. On the bleachers of the high school field like teenagers. Or like teenagers in movies since I had gotten through high school without kissing or being kissed by anyone other than my toothless grandmother. Kissing became groping. Groping became fucking in the dugout next to the field. I felt young and old at the same time, full of wild energy yet serene too, deeply content. My life was forming. She was the gravity that pulled the random matter together.

Yes, her husband was still in the picture. But, as she assured me, also very much not. He was rich and that mattered, which I couldn’t begrudge her. Money matters. I knew this, so expanded my operations on the side. I took on twice as many jobs. And yes, the quality suffered. I got sloppy. But I also got rich. I showed my earnings to her and proposed with a pile of hundreds. She already had a ring. I needed to give her something new. We fucked on a pile of bills—a month’s worth of misanthropic enterprises. I remember a twenty-dollar bill clinging to her left ass cheek as she went to the bathroom to wash me out of her. A strip of green and greasy papier-mâché.

We talked about the wedding, about her divorce. We talked about our misanthropic future. My customers noticed a newfound tenderness affecting my work. I lost a few customers. Money was refunded. Our ratings slipped.

But I had Melanie. We decided to spend a weekend together near the water. I booked two nights at an aggressively quaint inn. It was her proposal. A contemptible place conducive to brainstorming and fucking. Except she couldn’t make it at the last minute. Something came up with her husband. So I spent one sad, solitary night at the

inn, hating her husband and his hold over her, hating my own growing dependency on her, yet loving her all the more. I fled the faux-beach cottage interior of the room for the actual beach outside but felt just as trapped and alone. I listened to the hungry gulls. Watched the sandpipers sprint along the shore, just out of reach of the rising tide. I shook the lingering somberness while driving back, back home, back to her.

I found nothing. Not her and thus, no home. My money, gone. My files too. All of the cases, the evidence that could sink Misanthropy and me. And, worst of all, all traces of Melanie had been erased. Her shampoo, her clothes, her jewelry, her tweezers, her books, her sleeping pills, her favorite condiments in my fridge—gone. My phone rang as I contemplated the devastation that is absence.

“Hey there.” It was her. I tried to clear my throat but it was too dry. My tongue felt three times too big. It was choking me.

“Don’t talk. Just listen. It’s over. Everything. I have enough evidence to put you away for decades. I have your list of clients. I have your case notes. I have you. I own you. Misanthropy is done. Your whole chicken-shit, bitter experiment is done. Do you understand?”

I mumbled a response.

“I said, do you understand?”

“What about us?”

She paused for a moment—a moment, a year, a lifetime—before laughing. A deep and satisfied laugh. I’d never heard that laugh before. “Us? You were a mark. And you’re done. Your precious misanthropy is done. You don’t even know how done you are.”

She hung up. I heard sirens approaching. The hand holding my phone felt like someone else’s. The apartment I was in. The life I was left with. It couldn’t be mine. I heard pounding on the door and someone’s name being called, a name that might have once belonged to me. I thought about Melanie and tried to hate her. Tried to tap into the old hate that had saved me so many times. Hate like a furnace, a forge. But I couldn’t. The fire had been extinguished. There was nothing but this husk. A perfect dismantling.

I began to think about getting her back. A million possible schemes came to mind and dissolved into the pointless, vain and impotent gestures they were as fast as I could consider them. A million devious, useless plans. It was gone. I’d lost it. No, she’d taken it. My Misanthropy.

I fucking love her.

Jackie Huertaz

Public Notice

BE QUIET WHILE COURT IS IN SESSION.

* Notice the military font of the “Do Not” lists that are taped behind the mesh colored brown pews in the courtroom. Notice the way the antiquated benches succeed the judge’s lifted mega desk. Every few minutes more people trickle in wearing mixed-matched business attire from Sears. Notice how they nervously gaze around the room before locating a place to sit. When you arrived you paused and gazed too, never allowing your eyes to become completely absorbed in another’s. A courtroom far removed from any episode of Law and Order. The layout of the courtroom feels like an outdated religion and is awkwardly quiet like the Q&A panels at a literary reading. It’s 7:50am, and the court requested your presence at 8:00. You’re early.

NO DRINKING.

* Don’t think about the sixty dollars you spent on Screwdrivers and shots of Crown Royal at the Pump House the night before. Don’t think about the other twenty dollars you pumped into a jukebox to listen to “Mustang Sally,” your favorite Wilson Pickett song. Try not to think about the money you wasted at a bar with a friend you don’t care about. The sign in the courtroom says “No Drinking” but all you can think about is having a drink. You want to be seduced by a vodka tonic and swim into the arms of a Sequoia Red IPA. You pick at your cuticles until they bleed because you’re missing work and can’t afford to miss work. Forty-five minutes later, and the judge still hasn’t called your name.

NO EATING. NO FOOD IN COURTROOM.

* Despite your anxiety, you still want to eat. Your stomach moans, so you fidget with your purse to mask the rumbling sound. When you requested a restraining order against your brother, you started to eat unhealthy shit to cope with the stress. You processed your brother’s recent homelessness with trips to late night dollar menus. The ten pounds you recently lost, gained back in two weeks. Avoid thinking about your brother hungry and homeless. Avoid thinking about how he visits your sister’s restaurant because he has nowhere else to eat. Try to avoid thinking of him. Think of you. Think about how he stalked and harassed you. Think of the names he called you. Repeat bitch, slut, whore, and cunt in your head. Get mad at him. Try to hate him for making you miss work to be here. Another twenty minutes passes, the courtroom clock above Judge Eucido’s mega

desk reads 9:05am.

NO WEARING SUNGLASSES, OR HATS IN THE COURTROOM.

* In the courthouse, you cannot hide behind your black wayfarers or your Fresno State University baseball cap. Everyone anxiously waiting to be called in front of Judge Eucido is exposed and vulnerable. No eye contact is made. Silence. The shuffling of papers fills the quiet moments between testimonies. When your brother’s behavior started to change, so did his wardrobe. He swapped jeans for baggy army pants. Converse for combat boots. He’d wrap a black bandana underneath his Volcom hat and doll his entire ensemble with a clip-on tie. He’d accent this daily outfit with an aged, beat-up briefcase he purchased at a garage sale. I imagine he thought with the briefcase he was someone important or it gave people the impression he was doing something important. You feared that he would show up to court today with his hat and briefcase, but to your relief he never showed.

TURN OFF ALL CELLPHONES AND ALL PAGERS.

* The bailiff is hypervigilant at all times. No facial expression surfaces behind his beady brown eyes. Even though signs riddle the courtroom walls with “Turn Off Cellphones” people still pull out their Androids and iPhones, completely oblivious to the rules that now surround them. The bailiff jumps at the opportunity to harshly scold someone out of his arena for using their phone. When your brother was arrested the second time he called every member of your family from jail but you. But no one answered. No one wanted to pay the fifty-dollar fee the correctional facility charges to accept outside calls. No one had the extra fifty dollars to even accept the call. You recently read in a Vice article that within six months of release twenty-percent of inmates are rearrested for a new crime. After three years, sixty-eight percent, and by the end of five years, a staggering seventy-seven percent.

ABSOLUTELY NO TALKING OR COMMUNICATING TO INMATES IN CUSTO

DY. (THIS IS A VIOLATION OF CALIF PENAL CODE SECTION 4570).

** An inmate in an orange jumpsuit is sitting in the pews adjacent to the judge. A clunky silver chain binds his hands and feet together. No one in the courtroom seems to notice or care about this thirty-something man. The inmate and your brother embody the same chiseled GQ cheekbones and lean physique. Approximately twenty-percent of inmates housed in jails have a serious mental illness. Your mom tells you that schizophrenia runs on your father’s side of the family. Your brother started to change when your parents separated and your father attempted suicide. You wondered what that was like for a fifteen-year-old boy to witness. To watch your father’s stomach purge the poison, to watch the doctors wrap bandages over faulty slits on your father’s wrists.

ANY VIOLATION(S) COULD RESULT IN EVICTION FROM THE COURTROOM AND/OR ARREST, AND CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.

** You’re sitting in the courtroom and waiting. Waiting. And more waiting. You had to miss work this morning, and you’re thinking about those missing hours on your paycheck. There’s a chance you can still work a partial day. You want to rise from the pew

and scream at the almost divorced couple for taking up the majority of your morning with their dog custody battle, but if you do, the beady-eyed bailiff with a Burt Reynolds stache will arrest you. It’s now 9:45, and you’re not nervous anymore. You just want this to be over with. You’ve rehearsed in your head all morning what you are going to tell the judge. My brother’s behavior is unpredictable. I’m not sure what he is capable of anymore. His anger towards me is escalating because I refuse to give him rides and money. He does not want to help himself.

Judge Eucido finally calls your name.

ONLY THE IMMEDIATE PARTIES ARE TO APPROACH WHEN THE CASE IS CALLED.

*** You didn’t know what to wear to court this morning. You don’t own black slacks or tweed skirts, nylons or a pantsuit. So, you opted for black leggings and a navy long-sleeve top with grey ankle boots. Your hair is pulled back in a loose bun, and for some reason you decided to leave your handbag at home, and sport a tote bag from this year’s AWP conference. The tote is a symbol⎯a beacon that represents your other life beyond this place⎯that reveals to courthouse people that you don’t belong here. When Judge Eucido calls your name and asks you to come forward, you suddenly feel hyperconscious of the way you look. You pull down your top, trying to conceal some of your weight. All eyes are on you and your ridiculous tote that does not match your outfit. He shifts through the documents, statements, and police reports you submitted in addition to the order.

Silence on silence.

Ms. Huertaz I’m granting the order for three years. Please take a seat and wait for the paperwork.

You walk back to the pew in a strange stupor and wait again for your name to be called.

You don’t feel vindicated when you leave the courthouse that day. You are not greeted with cheers or hugs or a fist pump gyrated into the air. No. There is no victory today because this is about your brother. This is about a court order that specifically states he can no longer be a part of your life for the next three years. The restraining order represents the lengths you had to go to keep your brother at bay⎯to keep him away from your mother’s house. This is about your brother who can’t keep a job and steals, but never said no to picking you up drunk as fuck from the bar when you couldn’t get a cab. This is about your brother, who is court mandated to stay 500 feet away from you. Who, for your thirty-second birthday, bought you a typewriter⎯the only member of your family to ever encourage your writing. This is about your brother, who started using drugs and now has nowhere to live. This is about your brother, who might be schizophrenic, and now there’s nothing you can do to help him.

Blazoning Leaves Rebecca Givens Rolland

Springtime: still snowing, almanac aside. Girl’s in transit from previous seasons, arms nestled in gold blankets as she runs. Greensleeves (singing, shock-breathed): photographed, she’s galloping miles, swiping whatever transport, over blank sea, rubblescarred land. Inhabiting myths, she turns nightingale, tower, takes the place of Helen, Cassandra, scorned. Three thousand books beg her: turn back, shelve indecent plans. But who knows if she’ll hit safety, no matter how much billowing wind she breathes? (Mumbling here’s bliss) she keeps her pace up: plume-charmed air: clamps one shadow, then another, underneath her, till even her jacket’s tail end disappears.

Over the next few days, St. Pierre was rocked by earth tremors, showered in ash, and enveloped in a thick cloud of choking sulfurous gas.

1“How volcanoes work: the eruption of Mt. Pelee, Martinique.” July 1, 2010.

Mom’s Still Afraid Nicholas Brown

of my wife at her table

theyre too damn smart

why put yourself in danger

youve been here a long time never she says home is only a place we leave home isnt a place we get

of white women

standing in her home on her throat the worlds of her voice nakedly on display

she snaps

youre just not you afraid of our darkness

they might find out yet that it sunk deeper curdled under the skin you and I both know

I was never here

cant make me believe anymore of hope I say believe

most dont want us dead or gone look at me she says how can you say that you call this a life

Reflections

As a girl, I was fascinated by my own reflection. Gazing at myself in the mirror was a way to understand what other people saw when they looked at me. I saw long black hair that matched my dark colored eyes. Brown skin that made me stand out in a room. Round eyes that became narrow when I smiled. Swollen lips that spoke two languages. I saw myself for what I was, but I never could have imagined what others would see. That is to say, as a girl, I would look innocently at myself in mirrors.

The sky tends to lie about whether it will be a good day. The darker days are heavy, but I find that I am most comfortable with the solitude that they bring. I recall sitting in a 1950s diner enjoying the calm before the storm. I was alone in a booth, waiting for my cousin to return from a phone call with his father. There was only one waitress working. The diner was always empty around the time we went. I looked out the window, noticing the sky becoming grayer. I could see my cousin pacing back and forth with the phone. He came back to the table flustered.

“Your dad is such a dumbass,” he said. “He still doesn’t understand this country.”

After searching his face, I turned my head back towards the window because the sound of the rain was easier to understand.

I looked back down at the whip cream melting in my caramel coffee. I thought about how much my uncle must have changed since immigrating to the United States so many years before. I thought about the sentiments in photographs my father has shown me. How happy the two brothers looked after escaping a deadly civil war. My father came to the United States because his brother said it’d be good for him, so it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that my uncle believes he’s better than my father. He has assimilated to the dominant culture while my father refuses to do so. I don’t blame my cousin for believing all that his father says about mine, but I do blame myself for the silence it invokes in me.

I looked back at my cousin and gulped all of what I should’ve said away with my coffee, regretfully changing the subject.

I can remember a brighter day, but still I could not enjoy it. I was walking to the park with

my best friend. I carried all our stuff in a big tote bag. I never used to mind it. My friend was fairer in complexion than me, so it was important that I remember the sun screen for her. The weather was inviting and warm, yet my friend felt vulnerable under the rays of the sun. She needed my help to protect her skin. I reached into my bag. The streets were busy. A car slowed down, its driver causing traffic just to call, “Hola, Gringa.”

I found the lotion, but when I passed it to her, she was angry.

“I mean, that could’ve been your dad in a construction truck hollering at me!” she said. These words didn’t register as hurtful in her mind. She shrugged the comment off almost as fast as she blurted it.

“My dad’s better than that!”

I said it too late, but I felt desperate to say something, anything.

I’ve learned that some days will break your spirits. Some days will hold you hostage. Like a needle they can leave you numb—no—like a needle they can pierce your skin.

When he said it, I felt removed from myself. I started over-analyzing. Questioning whether I had ever been seen that way.

He doesn’t understand this country.

And suddenly I wasn’t sure if I did, either.

When I began watching the coverage for the 2016 presidential election, I had to keep reminding myself that this time, more Hispanics would vote. That the Hispanic vote would be bigger and more influential than ever before. That everything was going to be okay. Outside it was dark, and I felt a tremendous fear in my throat. I kept telling myself that my people would vote; my people would protect one another.

On November 8, 2016, the Hispanic vote was bigger and more influential—this led to more support for their President-elect.

My uncle was one among the many.

My father was twenty when he came to the United States in 1980, afraid to be drafted in the civil war at home. He heard wonderful stories from his brother of his experiences in California.

My father was constantly getting himself in trouble. He felt safer behind bars, but he lost touch with his family when he did this. They got tired of bailing him out of jail. When he was finally out for good, he needed a new solution.

So he hopped on a bus filled with other men, all hoping to find their way to California.

I used to rush to the school bus on report card day, excited to go home and brag to my brother. Most of my classmates would walk around the halls just to talk about their grades. I never really cared to do this, so I always just sat on the bus and waited until we departed from school. Once, a kid asked me why I always hid on report card day. This question surprised me. I hesitated in answering.

“I’m not hiding,” I said.

I remember thinking, why does it matter? I handed him my report card and his face dropped.

“I thought you were dumb,” he said.

All I could do was stare blankly at his face.

“I didn’t mean that, I just meant you look—”

“I look what?”

Every day, I wake up aware of my appearance. I’ve come to see the world in colors, and I know that mine is not many people’s favorite. Sometimes I wonder whether someone is staring at me because they like the jacket I’m wearing or because they don’t like the skin I’m wearing. I am never sure if my fate is being determined by a stranger because they think I am something or someone my reflection is telling them. But I am sure that I determine my own fate because of what I believe people see.

Now, I face myself in mirrors looking for what other people might see. My hair is still black, my eyes are still round and dark. My skin is still brown. My swollen mouth still speaks two languages. The reflection I loved as a girl has somehow become the same one that people associate with criminals in this country. My face is plastered all over the media. They don’t want me here. Though I was born in Maryland, to them, I am not American. In mirrors, I see the reflection of a target in a country whose government supports hatred.

I see, through my reflection, that I am afraid.

Nostalgia to me feels like bones breaking beneath the weight of lost emotions, found and

felt again.

As a boy, my father would steal his little sister’s pink bike to ride all throughout the dirt roads of San Miguel. He wasn’t necessarily looking for anything, but he peddled until he felt he was far away from home. He was running from his father’s grave. He had a vague memory of the time his father stumbled home drunk, but he never forgot the room where he’d fallen and never woke again.

On his bike rides he would lift his small body off the bike seat to shout in vivaciousness. These were the innocent times that led to his delinquency. These were the times that, in the end, made him tired of falling victim to the same streets. My father was sitting stone cold in a hot jail cell when he felt that he needed to run far away, as he did when he was a boy.

My father is a hard man for reasons of his own. He never says he loves us and he never tells us what he feels, but still we always understand him.

In El Salvador, people glorify the American way of life. There was a storm of emotions in the pueblo when my father and his brother returned for a wedding. People admired them like conquistadors that had just returned from a voyage. The brothers were uninterested in sharing stories; they were happy to be home

Everyone in the pueblo was invited to the wedding because everyone knew each other. After a couple of drinks, my father had forgotten that he ever left. It wasn’t until an unfamiliar face walked in that he realized how long he’d been away. She was slim with long black hair and dark eyes to match. Her smile was infectious. My father asked a friend who that was. The friend laughed and said, “You’ve been gone for a while haven’t you? That’s Ana.”

My father’s heart sank. She was the chubby girl he made fun of. She was the girl he forgot about. She was his childhood friend. She would be my mother.

In elementary school, every second grade class learned about the Native Americans. My teacher decided that if we performed a play about Pocahontas, then we would remember facts more easily. She said the class didn’t have to do auditions for the part of Pocahontas because she thought I would be a great fit. I went home, excited about what my teacher said, but when I shared the news with my mother, she wore a ghost-like smile and her eyes wandered elsewhere.

My mother is a strong person. If she has something to say, you will hear it, and more. We were shopping in Wal-Mart one day, such a normal day. We were ready to check out. The lady ringing us up didn’t even look at my mother. She didn’t even say hello. My mother noticed that the cashier was throwing our groceries in the bags, so when the eggs were next my mother asked nicely if she could take them in her hands. This was the only time the cashier looked at my mother. She threw the eggs in a plastic bag, where we heard

them crack.

“Oops,” the cashier said.

My mom took a shoebox she was going to purchase from the cart and threw it in the same manner back at the cashier. Then she took my hand as we walked away and told me, “The people of this country want to see you angry. They want to see you like me. But you are better than me. You are better than them. Always be better.”

When I was twelve years old, my mother smacked me across the face after I told her to stop speaking Spanish to me. Her handprint has never left my cheek.

She didn’t say a word, and neither did I. I remember feeling torn. I loved my family, but I was beginning to hate my skin.

Why was I so different? Why did it matter?

Our high school counselor wasn’t expecting me to come in so early in the year to talk about my future. She spent most of the meeting telling me that there would be another time to think about this and that I was way ahead of myself. I went in once a week to see if “the time” had come. Annoyed, she would tell me to sit down.

“Where do you even want to go to college?” she asked.

I listed my top three choices. She pulled up several charts, revealing that I qualified. I was happy, but she wasn’t convinced.

“Maybe you should try community college first,” she said. “It’s more plausible.”

I thanked her for her concerns, but I knew what I wanted to do.

My mother’s hands shake when she gets nervous. Sometimes they become numb and it makes it hard for her to use them. Her passport almost fell out of her hands as she disembarked the plane. She never looked back, though. She couldn’t.

She was afraid to tell her mother she was leaving; a new world awaited her and she didn’t want to say no. When my father returned to the States, they began exchanging letters. In one of those letters he sent her a plane ticket. He told her he loved her and that he would be waiting for her.

When she left El Salvador, she had no idea if she would return.

One day after school, the birds were chirping. The breeze was soothing and the sun was

kind. A friend of mine joined me on a walk, and we talked about the future. I told her I was excited to go somewhere else. I remember feeling so close to freedom—to finding a place where no one knew me. A fresh start where I could be whoever I wanted to be.

I would soon be leaving my home and my family. At the time, I couldn’t tell if I was leaving for a new world as my mother had done, or if I was running away like my father.

When I visit El Salvador, my parents tell me to not speak Spanish too loudly because people might take advantage of the fact that I am American. They say El Salvador is under complete gang control. The slightest hint that I am American could put my life in danger.

Now I find it’s not much different here.

That day when I was twelve, I asked my mom to stop speaking Spanish to me because my peers in elementary school told me, “In America we speak English.”

I used to wish that I could hide. There were times in my life that I used silence as a form of invisibility. I would overhear my father complain about being mistreated at work. I would overhear my mother tell stories about children making fun of both her accent and her job as a custodian at a middle school. Sometimes I wish I could tell them that I, too, experience moments like these. Yet, I don’t quite think it’s the same.

They came to the United States for what the country claims to be—the land of the free. Both my parents laugh about this today. They joke that the slogan doesn’t include the fine print: “For those who are white, rich, and cowardly.”

I am starting to finally understand this joke. My parents tell me that if I can’t learn to laugh about my pain, then all I become is the loser. While I think this is empowering, it also frightens me. Frightens me, to think that my family’s only option is to become desensitized to this hate, this pain all through our lives. As my parents would say, the more you care, the more you lose.

Rick Krizman

A Field Guide to Billionaires

The billionaires meet every Saturday night, nine on the dot, at an undisclosed location— no millionaires allowed—where they eat lobster, drink gold-flecked martinis, and talk about what do they do with their billions of dollars. I got a billion things at the Dollar Store, one billionaire says, while another billionaire wants to buy a small country, or maybe an island, because countries are getting too pricey. One billionaire walks around with a thousand million-dollar-bills in his fanny pack. Another billionaire decides to pay everybody’s college tuition, which turns out to be a bad idea when everybody moves home afterwards. There is one billionaire who cashes it all into pennies, the amount of which can only be expressed by scientific notation, then lays out a copper beach in Santa Monica Bay where all the other billionaires come on sunny Sunday afternoons where they take off their clothes and lay on the coins until their skin is pink and their backs are ringed with penny-sized dimples.

The very best billionaires are the ones you don’t know, living in a part of Malibu or Xanadu or Timbuktu that isn’t on the map, practicing their billionaire ways where nobody can see, fucking a thousand millionaire wives, carving giant redwoods into toothpicks, digging for oil in your backyard where you think it’s just a guy from the city checking the sewer line. We have to dig a big hole here, he says, but don’t worry, you can pay for it in monthly installments at the preferred interest rate. Then he shows you the oil leak, and sends big tanker trucks down the alley to haul it away so it doesn’t spill all over your aspidistras, sorry about the smell, but business is business. The secret billionaires carve chunks of the Arctic ice shelf into neat little cubes for their Negronis, the saltiness perfectly balanced against the bitter Campari. When a secret billionaire wants a steak, he flies to Colorado to inspect the herd. He shows the best steer to his butcher, who cuts and shaves and skins and hangs and dries the whole deal, carving out New Yorks and ribeyes and tri-tips, and tougher cuts that will be slow smoked or braised in the billionaire’s kitchen by Thomas Keller. The organs and intestines go to French restaurants which give them fancy names and sell them to millionaires for big bucks. Then a tanner makes a nice leather coat for the billionaire, and custom-stitched leather seats for his Maserati, a belt, cowboy boots, man-bag. The hooves and horns are ground into billionaire toothpaste. The teeth are made into piano keys. The bones are assembled as a play structure for the billionaire’s son when he’s home from Exeter Prep during the first two weeks of August. It’s not always easy to be a billionaire, any billionaire will tell you. There are a billion things you have to account for. You have to decide what’s for breakfast, just like millionaires do. Nobody can take a shit for you. Actually that’s only two things, but still. Worst is, you have to sleep with one eye open so some millionaire doesn’t sneak in and take it all and be a billionaire instead of you, because believe it or not, there’s only so many billions and money does not grow on trees. When a billionaire suffers, everybody

suffers. We cry for the billionaires, knowing that people will cry for us when we become billionaires. We know the pain of a billionaire is just like the pain of everybody else, only maybe a billion times worse because there’s so much more to lose.

The Gods Have a Bullet

that whistles your initials as it estimates the circumference of the circle they themselves jewel-set between your eyes. The gods chatter, gather their hems outside the nursery window. They’re waiting for the ghost inside you to be born. The gods

have plans for the room your body will be once they evict you. They measure from your patella to your ankle, from your left wrist to your right wrist, from the curve of ear your mother lullabied to the curve of lip your first lover at first kissed, later bloodied.

To the gods, the sweet meat inside of your skull is only meat, and only sweet enough to tempt the vulture’s beak and tongue. Once emptied, the overturned bowl of your skull will balance itself beneath the earth, which is patience, which is a god’s work,

which is knowing the worth of the body is blossom, rot and bruise, not the person inside it who grows hungry enough to believe she is a soul. The gods have a bullet and a beautiful temper and a love as blank as every musk-scented secret growing thick between thigh and mind. The gods have built a bomb that protects the dwelling and shatters the dweller. It’s called your body. It ticks, ticks. The gods don’t mind. The gods are worshippers of waiting, dreaming of the roots that will unlock the ribs caging your one and precious, ordinary heart.

The First Time After Surgery

He wanted to see the scar. Of course there was a night before: satay and sake, cigarettes and Moscato. Enough clichés to move my hand

to the light switch, my lips to explain why I needed the dark. And then kiss the dark parts of him. In the next day’s light

he thumbed down the waist of my jeans, then the length of the scar over what had been my body split. A window. Outside it,

the pear tree bragged about the flowers in its hands. He said it was beautiful. It did not change me, or anything.

CONTRIBUTORS

Shaun Anderson is an undergraduate student at Utah State University studying English. He has been published in Nightlight Magazine and received first place in creative nonfiction in the Utah State University writing competition, Scribendi.

Bonnie Arning is a poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Prairie Schooner, The Colorado Review and others. Her first collection, Escape Velocity, was selected for the Mountain West Poetry Series in 2017. She lives and teaches in Corvallis, Oregon.

Krys Malcolm Belc is a trans writer and former proud Philadelphia public school teacher who recently relocated his family to snowy Marquette, Michigan. His work has recently been featured in Reservoir and The Monarch Review.

Cheyenne Black is the managing editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review, and an MFA candidate at Arizona State University where she also teaches. When not attending graduate school, she lives in Washington state with her husband and children.

Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press) and Maleficae (GenPop Books). A Barthelme Prize winner, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and The Best Small Fictions. She serves as Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.

Nicholas Brown is a first-generation Mexican American. His work is forthcoming in After the Pause and Third Point Press. He works as a technical and proposal writer. He loves his mother.

John Paul Davis is a poet, musician and programmer. His first book, Crown Prince Of Rabbits, was published by Great Weather for Media in 2016. You can find out more about him at www.johnpauldavis.org and crownprinceofrabbits.com.

Jeff Ewing’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, ZYZZYVA, Willow Springs, Arroyo, Southwest Review, Saint Ann’s Review, and Cimarron Review, among others. He lives in Northern California with his wife and daughter.

Corey Farrenkopf works as a special education teacher and landscaper. Presently, he resides on Cape Cod with his partner, Gabrielle. His work has appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Gravel, Wraparound South, Literary Orphans Journal, and elsewhere. To read, more visit CoreyFarrenkopf.com.

Robert Fromberg has published fiction in Indiana Review, Bellingham Review, Tennessee Quarterly, and many other magazines, and he taught fiction writing part-time for 17 years at Northwestern University. A short book of his, Blue Skies, was issued by Floating Island Publications. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and has written about healthcare for more than 30 years.

Hannah Gilham is currently a first year graduate student studying fiction at New York University and a Rona Jaffe Fellow. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver, and writes a weekly literary blog called SaidSomethings.

CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Hodge lives in a small town in Oklahoma. He stays home with four kids.

Jackie Huertaz is in her last year in the MFA nonfiction program at Fresno State University. She currently holds an English degree from the same institution. She is the service learning coordinator and assistant nonfiction editor for the Normal School magazine and is also a nonfiction editor for CWAA (Chicano and Chicana Writers Association) and San Joaquin Valley Review. She is from California’s Central Valley, more specifically Visalia, California. She writes about the working class, Mexican American identity and language, family, loss, music and drinking.

Kent Kosack is a writer and MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Gravel, Noctua Review, IthacaLit and elsewhere.

Rick Krizman’s fiction has appeared in The Wising Up Press, Sediment, Star 82 Review, Medusa’s Laugh Press, The Big Smoke and elsewhere. He is the father of two grown daughters and lives with his wife and other animals in Santa Monica, CA.

Gail Langstroth is a eurythmist and poet. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, and works with the Mad Women in the Attic writing workshops. Her poems have appeared in Citron Review, Clementine, Passager, Rust + Moth, and Yemassee. www.wordmoves.com

Katherine LaRue lives in Portland, Oregon. She is at work on a book of poetry called getting better machine.

Micah Mermilliod currently resides in Mobile, AL and received a BFA in photography from the University of South Alabama. His work often combines aspects of photography and printmaking to create dream-like montages reminiscent of sci-fi fantasies. The evolution of humanity as it integrates with technology is often a central theme in much of his work.

Kathryn Merwin is a native of Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Booth, So to Speak, and Sugar House Review, among others. She has been awarded the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize for Poetry, the Blue Earth Review Annual Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently pursuing her MFA through Western Washington University.

Jory Mickelson’s work as appeared in Antiphon (UK), FAULTINE, The Florida Review, CutBank Literary Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, Superstition Review, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review and other journals. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry.

Joel Orloff is a cartoonist and illustrator. Right now, he is working on adapting Kafka’s novel The Castle into a comic. His drawings can be seen at skaweeerureeweeert.tumblr. com He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rachael Peckham’s prose poems and essays have appeared in Brevity, Dos Passos Review, Gulf Coast, Inkwell, Edge, South Loop Review, SENTENCE, and elsewhere. She was the 2016 winner of the Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize, the 2016 winner of the Orison Anthology Nonfiction Award, and the 2016 winner of the Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature in Literary Nonfiction. She is an associate professor of English at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she lives with her husband and son, both poets and essayists in their own right.

F. Daniel Rzicznek’s collections and chapbooks of poetry include Nag Champa in the Rain, Vine River Hermitage, Divination Machine, Neck of the World, and Cloud Tablets. Rzicznek teaches writing at Bowling Green State University.

Emely Rodriguez studies English and mass communications at Towson University. She is the poetry editor for Grub Street, Towson’s literary journal. She works first-hand with writers both on and off campus, learning from each person to strengthen her skills. Emely is a proud Latina who advocates in her writing for her people and for herself. Throughout her life, she has experienced micro-aggressions and heartbreak, but she has learned to use her writing to cope. She began writing in fourth grade, after a guest poet visited her classroom to help her class create a poetry book. Ever since that moment, she has explored language in both English and Spanish literature. Emely loves poetry and typically focuses on that genre but has also become fond of prose poems .

Rebecca Givens Rolland has published one full-length collection, The Wreck of Birds, and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, and other journals. She currently lives in Boston.

Amanda Stovicek is a writer and teaching artist from Northeast Ohio. She is preoccupied with star formation and writing that resists. Her work has appeared in Us For President, Rubbertop Review, Jenny Magazine, and is forthcoming in The New Old Stock.

Kimberly Grabowski Strayer’s poems have appeared in Superstition Review, Midwestern Gothic, Pretty Owl Poetry, VECTOR Press, and others. Her chapbook, Afterward, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Poetry at The University of Pittsburgh.

Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. She is on the creative writing faculty at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.

Crystal J. Zanders is a writer, teacher, and pug-owner who spent the majority of her life in small southern towns. She currently resides in the Wild West where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Mexico and the poetry editor at Blue Mesa Review.

Bonnie Arning | Shaun Anderson | Krys Malcolm Belc | Cheyenne Black

Emma Bolden | Nicholas Brown | John Paul Davis | Jeff Ewing

Corey Farrenkopf | Robert Fromberg | Hannah Gilham | Mark Hodge

Jackie Huertaz | Kent Kosack | Gail Langstroth | Katherine LaRue

Micah Mermilliod | Kathryn Merwin | Jory Mickelson | Joel Orloff

Rachael Peckham | F. Daniel Rzicznek | Emely Rodriguez

Rebecca Givens Rolland | Amanda Stovicek | Kimberly Grabowski Strayer Sasha West | Crystal J. Zanders