Apeiron Review | Issue 18

winter 2020

issue 18

Review Staff editor Meredith Davis production editor Meredith Davis layout design Katie Falk

front cover photo by Jim Ross back cover photo by Richard Wu

Editorial This issue was, like many things throughout 2020 and the beginning of 2021 for me, a source of the unknown. Unknown joy & unknown hardship, not to mention an unknown publication date. So many pieces of my life changed throughout the year. The previous issue was published hours before I gave birth to my daughter and second child, in the midst of the pandemic, while dealing with Covid related job loss and overall uncertainty about, well, everything. I then began this current issue with renewed vigor, reading submissions and working with authors while nursing my newborn in bed in the glow of a laptop screen. It was great in so many ways. Additionally, I threw myself into pursuit of a classic books podcast with my brother who, freshly retired from the army, was also looking for permanent work in a world seemingly devoid of the promise of permanence. Eventually, the days changed as they do with babies and preschoolers, both now running about the house, jobs returned, and I find myself having been carried along by the tide of it all neither owning a rutter or realizing I needed one. That is why this issue will be the last for a time – until I rutter up this ship and set it on a course. I do know interest in the magazine is high, so high I can’t keep up. So, for that I am grateful, and because of that I know there is a course to be found. I am humbled by the feedback and joy the work I choose to publish brings to readers. It’s your work though, so that is where all credit is due. Read and enjoy and look for us again.

-M

Table of Contents Photography

Creative Nonfiction

Fine Place to Leave a Bike....................Front

The Old Greeting Card ..............................26

The Fallen Angels .......................................21

The Last Minstrel Show ............................30

Jim Ross

Richard Wu

Please Sit ................................................Back Richard Wu

Fiction Fire Ants ....................................................10 Judy Xie

Relations ....................................................19 Gary Percesepe

Your Ambitious Day for Fishing .............22 Gabe Kaminsky

Dance Music .............................................34 Chris Neilan

Faustus Hood ............................................40 Roland Leach

The Healing ...............................................42 Jemàl Nath

The Last Honest Man ..............................49 Jacke Wilson

The Suicide Man .......................................52 Thomas Mizell

Sunayna Pal Jim Ross

Poetry Morning Rituals ...........................................7

The Future in Repose ................................38

Listen Up ......................................................8

Quartet for Nina and Sam ........................39

Deadheading ................................................9

Radioactive Isotopes .................................48

Cuttlefish ....................................................15

Hallows Eve ................................................50

Rats .............................................................16

Message: Undeliverable ............................51

Interstices ..................................................17

The Stipple Ceiling ....................................59

Visiting Your Father ..................................18

Evening Rituals ..........................................60

Bibek Adhikari Beth Ruscio

Maria McLeod Roland Leach Roland Leach Roland Leach

Kris Robinson

Apologia for Missing Church Sundays ...23 Katelyn Roth

In Love, Night .............................................24 Beth Ruscio

This Kindness Written in Rain ................25 Beth Ruscio

Between School Days ...............................28 Gareth Culshaw

Rip ...............................................................33 Alan Semrow

Aspiration, n.2 ...........................................36 Connor McDonald

Men Have Come with Arms .....................37 George Perrault

Cecil Morris

Denise Alden Robert Hilles Chad Lutz

Betsy Littrell

Melia Lenkner

Bibek Adhikari

Morning Rituals Bibek Adhikari Four of us sit silently, almost comfortably around a varnished table, sipping tea— an unknown herbal kind, the one mom bought from the nearby Ayurvedic shop— sipping slowly, cupping our hands around the ceramic cups, gauzing the warmth inside. I dream of parijat flowers, pastel white falling throughout this morning.

Perhaps I am wrong about the fall.

I dream of heartbroken flowers, falling from different heights—the same Patricia saw some forty years ago. In this melancholy house, I am one of those flowers, falling off the teapot into the cup.

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Listen up Beth Ruscio The sky is a canvas primed, pulled taut

Beneath cankered bark we are green,

and all the rivers named.

Shade gathers round us

drought dormant, but eager as saplings to feed

like a dirndl skirt cinched up,

on a thundered morning.

The square is full of noise.

thinned woods, half kindling

Breathe. Dive beyond the dominion of roots

half pine needles, fallen.

where other worlds are nursed, where what could sustain us

Out in the field dry whispers rise

struggles, reaching.

to precipitation.

Listen.

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Deadheading Maria McLeod We did not deadhead the rhododendrons last summer, and now, this spring, their dusty blackened flowers crown the new green leaves, obscuring the flush of fuchsia to emerge from hidden buds, a disappointing pairing, when we could have, with a little time and effort, made the return of their flowers so much more lovely and unencumbered.

We didn’t know then what we know now of the body — how easily we falter like leaves on the forest floor I confused for lace not realizing such delicacy was due to decomposition.

It’s a path unwittingly taken toward departure, a slow, cellular sluffing, a loss not realized until someone calls it up onscreen and points to what’s gone awry. This is how death becomes you before you’re ready to give in to it like dried flowers dropped into bath water you wear its tired beauty as you sink into the porcelain, petals clinging to your hair.

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Fire Ants Judy Xie Tyler ate fire ants. He didn’t eat them out of hunger, and he didn’t eat them often. But when he did, he made sure no one knew. On any given blade of grass, he would find the ants slowly crawling their way up and over and around. He would uproot them. Take the blade, with the ants circling and circling, and he would shove it in his mouth. If anyone asked him how they tasted, he wouldn’t be able to say exactly. Maybe something like a lemon - sour in the back of his throat, coupled with a slight burn. He’d gotten used to it, after all. But now, when he chewed, he mostly tasted grass. And grass wasn’t too bad, because it was dry and it tasted just how it smelled. Everyone liked to say that Tyler was strange. Too strange. Like he was faded around the edges. When he was younger, he was notorious for being able to eat anything. From worms to mixed garbage to rotten fruits. It was a simple process really. Someone would make some concoction, maybe milk and gravy with some peas, and the leftover lunch meat. He ate it. Meaning: enter, chew, swallow, gulp. It really wasn’t too bad. Tyler learned to take things inside of him. Some things he learned- To just take them. Endure them. Pretend it wasn’t that bad. It could have always been worse.

Everybody knew Tyler was a good kid. He loved his Mom. And without fail, everyday at 7:00 am, he would take out the trash. She never asked him to. He would move across the lawn with the recycling bin pinned against his hip, shading his eyes from the early sun. He would assess the mess: soda cans littered everywhere, half-eaten pizza, soiled paper plates. The ants would come out then, a black- red tidal wave at the ready. They would take the plates, cover them with their rounded bodies always moving. Tyler would pick up these plates. He would try to shake them off. His fingers pinching the edges and his wrists angled just so. At best, the ants overcame him. They would move up his fingers frantically as they tried to take more and more of him. They never made it to his knuckles. He would release the plate, dump them all into the trash bag.

From the backyard he could see into the garage, where his father was still asleep on a greasy, pull out couch. His Mom said that he was never coming back. And yet, there he was. At first, they were careful, so careful, that Tyler could pretend he wasn’t there. At first, it was quiet footsteps in the middle of the night. Footfalls so soft, they could’ve been the ants creeping in the attic. But soon, they grew careless.

He’d be there in the morning pouring his coffee, always stuffed with sugar. He did love his sweets. Had a tooth so rotten, Tyler wondered why it didn’t fall off. It was the kind of cavity that grew from the center and kept going, and one day, he wouldn’t be able to eat anymore. It was a thought- something that Tyler could hold on to. Before the split, every morning would be the same. Tyler with his trash. His father at the table. Coffee in one hand, his mouth full of rotten teeth, a smug, knowing kind of smile set on his face. A face that had charmed well with age, but still potted with so many holes. Tyler wondered if all the dirt and the dust in their house could turn his face black. And all those potholes would be seen by 10

everyone. They wouldn’t have to get as close to him as he did. Wouldn’t fall for his blue eyes- everyone said they sparkled. And maybe that was why he was here. His eyes. And the way they crinkled with laughter lines. A nice guy. A good guy. A family man, who played catch in the backyard. The type of dad who never missed a birthday, who came home in a suit and tie. Some days, he would even bring home a rose for Mom even when it wasn’t their anniversary. He’d knock on the door, as if he was a mysterious stranger, rose in hand. Said it was so that he could re-meet her over and over again. Because he never wanted to stop knowing her, and she would stare up at him with wonder filling her shining eyes, blushing madly. Her hands clasped together. She never noticed the little red ants climbing up the thorns circling around and around. She never noticed that he never smiled with his teeth, always closed lipped, some sunken in dimple. So maybe that was why he was here, sitting across from Tyler. Mom threw him out. She promised. He was never coming back. But they were growing more and more public, and sure, he still kept his apartment that was 10 minutes away. But he was never there. But she promised.

Freshman year, Tyler cried in Mrs. Krause’s fourth period chem class during a lecture on acid base titration. It was a quiet cry. The tears ran down his face, mostly silent, and everyone pretended not to see. He remembered, the first time, how sour those ants tasted.

“When you’re titrating strong acids with weak bases you add more, so it forms a buffer.” Because eventually, you’ll reach an equivalence point.”

He never thought he would reach that point. When he was seven, he remembered sitting amongst the ant holes sprouting from his yard. Those exploding volcanoes. He didn’t care about how they nibbled at his ankles, thought maybe it was better that way. Thought how those ants, bright and angry, would shine brighter- than he ever would. He fell asleep like that. With the ants smeared and stained in the inside of his cheek, he couldn’t help but hope that maybe if he ate enough, he would be colored with something new. His skin, red and fresh-slapped. His father said that he looked better that way.

Nobody was surprised when his father let him throw a party. He was the cool dad. The kind of man that had a “no drinking policy with a wink,” so he would leave beer kegs where Tyler and his friends could find them. And after four hours of Metro with the beers untouched, it was time for snacks. Tyler would bring in the silverware meant just for this occasion, the bowls were always clear as if to say they were a family with nothing to hide. He’d come in balancing them in his hands filled with Doritos and chips.

Adam, Kevin, Tom, and Jill would howl in excitement, drumming their fingers against the table.

“Hey, we didn’t even have to chip in!” Tom gwaffed.

With Adam screaming, “Makes me even chipper!” Tom and Adam fist bumped.

Everything was better this way, with his parents gone, and the house just to themselves. And for a while, 11

the ants left too. Mom had gone over to Adam’s house for some wine drinking and his father left to visit some bar for a good game of poker or something like that. He wasn’t really sure, but he was glad because the boys (and Jill) were over and they could eat on the living room floor and his friends were sprawled across the couch gorging themselves like pigs.

“Dude, where’s the guac?” Jill asked, eyeing the bowl through the curtain of her blue hair.

“Fucking princess” “You know it” And so he’d pull out the guac and the sour cream from the fridge, packed and ready-made by his Mom. He’d slide into the living room floor on both knees, the bowl of guac cradled to his chest. Pretended, he was a rockstar at his encore the bowl raised over his head in delivery.

“Your loyal servant”

“Oh, shut up” and Jill would take the bowl and hold it to her chest. “All mine” While Kevin stared at her, his eyes glossing over as if guac was suddenly the most fascinating thing in the world.

“Hey, buddy, eyes up here!” hollered Adam. He’d smirk while tapping his chest and then smacking himself with both hands twice at his temples.

“Hey, fuck off.” Beet red, Kevin grabbed one of the beer bottles, and before Tyler could groan, “Let’s play spin the bottle!”

And of course, they howled in agreement, (neglecting the fact that there was only one girl). And of course, it was Kevin, who wanted to play.

The bottle glinted under the flashing screen with you died still splattered across the television- a bloody font meant to appeal to the supposed carnal nature of teen boys (and Jill). It spun round and round, and the boys waited with bated breaths for it to slow down (while Jill, arms folded, waited in exasperation).

With the bottle reaching its last wobble, “And… it’s Kevin!”

“With the lamp!”

12

The boys rolled over laughing their hands clutching their stomach, while Kevin unfolded his legs bravely and went up to the lamp. He grabbed it by its neck and in a single movement had it tipped towards the ground. His body arched in a dramatic flourish, and with the lightbulb jiggling at the sudden action, he planted a sloppy loud kiss to the shade of the lamp. Everyone hollered. They banged their fists against the ground- stamping their approval. And for the rest of the night the bottle would spin and spin, always landing on some inanimate object or boy- never once touching Jill. The night went on with more cheek kisses and dramatic make out sessions with the sofa, the TV, and the curtains. Along with wistful glances towards Jill from Kevin, who was growing more desperate at the closing notes of a dying game.

Yet, the bottle landed over and over again on anything or anyone who wasn’t her and Kevin sat, eyes filled with sadness and longing.

Tom nudged Tyler in the shoulder and whispered in his ear, “He’s so fuckin whipped” and Tyler could feel his eyes crinkling, couldn’t help the laughter building up inside of him. And for the first time in a long while, he felt the need for something to come out. He supressed his laughter with a stifled snort and swiped his fingers in the guac. And in one swift movement turned to face Tom. His fingers dancing in front of Tom’s eyes. His eyebrows wiggling in the partly dimmed room.

“You wouldn’t.”

He would have. But before he could, Tom tackled him to the ground. Tilted his head towards him and pinned his arms to the floor. And Tyler traced his eyes, the soft slope of his mouth, a bed of plum trees.

He focused on the red splotches crawling up his neck; he’s ridiculous. With one hand raised over his head, the guac at the ready. He’s gonna give me a facial. Tyler grinned, staring up at him. Tom pushed back his sticky hair lifted his eyes to him, lazy and careless, undeniably him. He bent closer, and suddenly the weight became something familiar. Something heavy. And Tyler couldn’t shake the sinking dread that settled over him. His eyes, startled, big-eyed, blinking blankly at the ceiling. He could see the ants returning. They came in through the cracks. Then the floorboards, a visiting sea of smashed berries, squirming. He felt them now. The way they came in through his sleeves. Into his pant legs.

Itch. They stung and burned relentlessly. Itch. The fire ant venom, a cocktail of at least 46 proteins, had reached his sides. Itch. They made their way across his face over his nose. Itch. A thousand pinches at his temples. Itch. They began to fill his ears.

In biology, Tyler learned that infected ants were pumped swollen, disguising themselves as ripe. They could hardly control it. The parasites would come in and then that would be it. Tyler was already infected. He knew this. He could feel it in the way his father called him useless, with his arms wrapped around him. He held him to his chest. Watched as the endless stream of ants clambered up their legs, their arms.

Sometimes when Tyler looked in the mirror, he couldn’t find his reflection, and when that happened, he’d have to rely on touch. He’d feel for his left hip with his right fingers, they were all there, all five of them, and he’d drag them across the bumps on his skin. After making sure that his left hip was there and his right fingers were touching them, he’d lose one of his earlobes or his whole nose. He was constantly looking for parts of himself. He felt them disappearing. Almost as if they didn’t belong to him.

They probably didn’t. The ants probably took most of him. He tried not to think about it.

But he did think about how later that night, when all his friends left, he would be alone with the ants again. How one day, Jill will decide to dye her hair red and Kevin would find some other blue haired girl to love. And Tom will cut his chin trying to shave, while Adam will try stand-up, get booed off the stage.

He thought about how they would all be moving forward once things got started. And how he was stuck.

And how he couldn’t really explain to his Mom, him kneeling, sick and shirtless by his father. Couldn’t tell her why, when he whipped around, mouth-sticky. The ants dripping out.

14

Cuttlefish Roland Leach We were born by the ocean, knew its shifting

face by wind and moon. Tracks through dunes, the yellow

flowers of sour fig in season, blue-bottles washed ashore like plastic toys, the white chalk

holsters of cuttlefish. A perfect day

was hot, still, with a heaving swell. We were transgressive in summer, heroic and brash.

The blue sky allowed us to conceive

of anti-gods, thinking our parents’ gods too pale, too quiet. Never reckless enough

for our liking. We knew the shifting wind,

fickle moon. We learnt the warm seasons, and they were too brief. When winter came,

we were halves of self, strewn along the beach

like cuttlefish, whose beauty only seen beneath water.

15

Rats Roland Leach

I took the axe from the back-shed and stood over the rat on the lawn.

We had tried killing the rats with poison, complained about the noise in the roof and now the cat had brought him to me: Traumatised, his claws fixed into the grass, eyes staring out. No more than a large mouse, someone’s pet. I waited axe in hand for longer than was manly. My father would have ended it by now. As kids kittens had disappeared with a knock on the head, even our dog who swallowed plastic.

We had tried killing the rats with poison but killing is hard face to face.

I went inside hoping it would go away, thinking how language invents words that make right to kill: Pests, vermin, infestations.

How it was no longer right to kill a whale.

Endangered, whale-song. It is hard to love a rat.

Hard to kill a rat. I carry him out to the back lane in a pool-net, finding him a place in the high grass where the crows might not get him.

16

Interstices Roland Leach

My mother liked words, she would say, ‘In the interstices between the beginning and the end, between my husband leaving for war, and returning cigarette-thin, between taking me to live in the bush in an army tent, and the first child, between waking with an eye out for dugites and cooking dinner in a wood stove, in between, in the interstices, I dreamed of the sea.’

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Visiting Your Father Kris Robinson You recognize the stagnant scent of puberty as pimply boys pass the sacrament In ill-fitted suits, awkward in their faith as they are their age—Christ’s flesh, stale Tufts of WonderBread, torn like the pieces you toss to ducks on a lazy afternoon—oily-hair adolescents Pass tiny cups of tepid water—the Savior’s blood brings greater thirst, an insatiable appetite fed By boredom, reverence observed in the shared absence of silence: mothers tousle their toddler’s hair, restless Teenagers squirm & their fathers’ thoughts drift from Christ’s sacrifice to football fields, to prophets Of the pigskin, twiddling thumbs speculate the first quarter stats—you uncross your legs, lean back& Open Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods; with a shared reverence, you turn the pages as your father Leans over to whisper, “The ribs should be finished in time for the second half.”

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Relations Gary Percesepe We were survivors of a dead mother and no account father. A stink was on us. We accepted the fact.

We had one true friend, Old Bill. He had known our mother, but only when she was hiding out from our father, if you follow. Old Bill always told us the same story about Mom fainting when we was born. He’d cross his knobby knees and spit in the spittoon, and say, Now boys, it wasn’t just when you was born that your Mama fainted. She fainted from the slightest thing that stirred her. We didn’t really want to hear about that, again, so we always turned up the Farm Report on the radio. Pork bellies swung from the rafters. But Old Bill would be rolling like a hog truck on a gravel road going straight downhill. He was not a man to dip his donut, is what he said. Said he was a stallion of misbehavior. We wanted to shoot out his stoplight, but he was family, you see. This man to be reckoned with, our manly mentor. Old Bill had lived on nothing but crayfish for seven years, it was rumored. Boys, Old Bill said, Your mother would say to me, what say we unzip Old Trigger there, and let him out of the barn. And he went on in this general vein.

Fallen Angels Richard Wu

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21

Your Ambitious Day for Fishing Gabe Kaminsky

You were fishing because why wouldn’t you be. It was summer after all. The current was languid and hypnotizing, uniformly heat injected, and it felt like the river had existed for all the millions or what not years of the planet. It was solid and there in front of you. You could grab it. The trees, sure, the gigantic evergreen trees. They didn’t rock or shake or sway or bristle in the breeze.

They didn’t even breathe. You thought they could see you though. They had eyes really.

And the buttery sun radiating on your palms and in your eyes, down on your forehead, grilling against your flabby skin, and on the callouses on your feet, and in between your gummy toes. Its warmth while intense was wholly intrinsic because you knew this was what you came for. This was what you ordered up.

I could’ve told you where the fish were, where they all were, and which parts of the river they favored—which nooks and crannies they laid in to eat the plasticky guppies—and you could’ve caught them all. But that would’ve been no fun and you know it.

You sit there and your mind is neither at war nor at peace. It just is. You are hunched forward and your hand is nestled on your chin like The Thinker sculpture, and you look at the trivialness of the water, how it doesn’t move or do anything at all, how its frozen in summer, and you wonder if you could sit here forever. I didn’t blame you then and I don’t now.

22

Apologia for Missing Church Sundays Katelyn Roth

In thick, lazy mornings, in bedroom black where dogs snore softly on their sides and weigh down sheets with their warm bodies, I press my face to your hot arm and breathe in the way you smell only in your sleep; feeling your slow, untroubled breath, I worship: sings my soul, with shout of acclamation, how great thou art.

I scarce can take it in, humble adoration. How great thou art.

Sabbath Sundays, cooking or reading or washing my hair; you watching football, starting something in the crockpot; my body still sings the old hymns thoughtlessly, how great thou art without realizing, sings my soul without permission, great thou art.

23

In Love, Night Beth Ruscio

My parents show folk taking comfort

Tomorrow she will have to hold the receiver up to his ear.

in the progress they as dreamers might make

~

liked to sleep in.

Playing the play Endgame. And on and on they will go

~

all the way cross country by red-eye

There they are about to meet backstage where it’s most night.

chasing midnight in a darkened star-filled sky cabin, a flying room

See their silhouettes lean in, their faces lit by blue gels.

of souls, made candescent on cue.

Dad signs his glossy eight by ten: Can you use me?

The amber gobos will gild their newly old faces,

His sure hand on her nape Mom shifting

expectant, holding their own sleepless and stung

her hips slightly yes, wanting, but not so fast

with first light.

Darken the room don’t we

time’s a two way proposition.

for a candled cake and for wishes close our eyes?

24

This Kindness Written In Rain Beth Ruscio for Brigit Pegeen Kelly In a humid trance, toward an open-air stage, I trudge, a gangrenous mountain sky like a heavy breather behind me in line. Under a cantilevered eave stands Brigit, majestic as the cypress, her gray-green eyes, the weather’s mirror.

Last night, she keened a low song a lost boy sings a wall of notes so honeyed, a strain so round to the ear that I added a gasp at the swell.

Formal, in earth-colored habit, she’s a chalk turtleneck, shoes a shade of clay.

I’m a polka-dot mini-dress in an Amish church.

I resist feeling puny, flip, transient.

If only I had the gift for simple things.

If I had tall impossibles in store.

If I gave up small-time, would sacred follow?

Devotion to doubt’s a drag. Hell?

It’s so close you can walk there would be something I’d write. Overhead, a deeper grumble full of heckle and chuff, and breaking over us like a fresh start, in comes a storm that cuts in line, grabs the mic, pours.

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The Old Greeting Card Sunayna Pal Dad left us on 11-11-11. He was fond of being unique and stylish. I can see how he must have negotiated with God for that date. Although stylish, he was a reserved man. I sometimes wonder what must have happened to him to be this way.

We didn’t have the best relationship. Sometimes, it breaks my heart to see my hubby play with my son and to think that I never got that and never will. Things weren’t always so, I think I got busy with college in my teenage years, and he didn’t take any effort. We had become so weird around each other that one day I was coming from my office and he was out for a walk. We crossed roads but didn’t look each other in the eye.

In 2010, he complained of constant headaches for some time. On investigation, the doctor confirmed a malignant tumor in the brain. I was planning to study further, so I decided to leave my work to stay at home and be there for him and concentrate on my studies. During this time, I saw a softer and also a weaker side of him. It was scary and weird, but we slowly learned how to deal with each other. A part of me forgave him for nothing he had done.

After he was gone and after the emptiness became bearable, I cleaned his cupboards. It was a warm evening, and I thought I had finished everything. Then, I saw the black suitcase. It was his most valued thing in the house as it had all his important documents.

Almost every morning, as the sunlight filtered through the trees, the suitcase would open, and he would be closed to the world. He would sit with his tea on one side and the suitcase on the other. I had learned not to disturb him during this time.

During his illness, I must have opened it a few times to take out a checkbook or fixed deposit papers, but I never looked around. I was afraid that even in his illness, he would understand what I was doing and scold me. I remember, as a child, I wasn’t even allowed to touch it.

I think I subconsciously kept it for the last. I picked it up and sat on the edge of my dad’s bed. It opened with a slight creak which I had never heard before. I located the important paper file and kept them aside. I went ahead to see what else was there in the suitcase. I touched the vinyl pocket but drew my hand back. I looked at my dad’s empty bed, took a sigh and went ahead. I found some old visiting cards.

Some manuals of machines I didn’t even know we possessed.

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Behind them, I found a pink envelope. The paper was turning yellow, without thinking, I opened the flap and found a greeting card. I pulled the card out to notice the simple and cheap card paper. I opened it and saw the names Sunu and Kaku scribbled on the bottom. I then realized that it was a birthday card given to him by my sister and me when we were young. There was no date mentioned but I could say that it was old. I looked at it and tried to remember when or which year but couldn’t even recall giving it to him.

What was so special about this card? I checked if there were more. This was the only card we had given him, probably. I noticed the scribbled writing. I must be 7 or 8 years old. Why had he kept this card? I had no idea that he was a sentimental person. Why did he never express himself? I felt tears form in my eyes as I looked at the words “Dearest dad” written on them. All this while, he never mentioned it. Was it by accident? Why did he keep it with his important papers? Was it really important to him? Of course!

I was important. A memory flashed in front of my eyes. I was receiving a certificate, and I found his face in the audience, beaming with pride. I saw my mother smiling too but there was something special on the face of my dad. I can still see that face. How could I have forgotten it? Why was I remembering it now? What good is it now?

I sighed and kept the card back in the suitcase. It belonged in the black bag - It is where it should be, with his important documents.

Between School Days Gareth Culshaw There were sixteen of us seventeen if you count the sun.

We ran with homework in our hair. The voices in our heads grew when it left the gutter throat.

Nettles stung my shins and I wondered if radios feel this way between stations.

The field slowed us down with clumps of grass.

Our pockets, full of pencils and pens, jackdaw clacked, the further we went on.

Though we had no idea where we were going we ran until Monday, and the first day back at school.

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The Last Minstrel Show Jim Ross I wore blackface. In 1960, three years before the March on Washington, four years before the Civil Rights Act became law, I was a 13-year-old eighth grader at a Catholic elementary school putting on its annual minstrel show.

We didn’t use conventional blackface—shoe polish or burnt cork. Instead, nuns segmented their old seamed black stockings, poked eye, mouth and nose holes in them, and had us slide them over our heads. The intent, to amuse, was to make us look as black as midnight. And knowing old nun stockings covered our faces made us feel perversely funny. We looked like low-budget bank robbers.

Nearly all the students had white skin. The handful endowed with their own God-given black skin were given a waiver when it came to nun stockings and allowed to be black in their own, natural way. Calvin even got to sing a solo.

We kicked off with, “I’ll be down to get you in a taxi honey, better be ready ‘bout half past eight”—the “Darktown Strutters Ball,” a 1917 jazz-foxtrot tune made famous by The Six Brown Brothers.

Our class clowns, Mick and Artie, then came stage front to perform an Amos-n-Andy type routine. They scripted it, and the nuns said, “Okay, say that” and “No, you can’t say that.” In rehearsals Mick tripped exiting the bleachers and we laughed, so the nuns said, “Keep that in.”

We followed with “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, with a hundred and ten cornets close at hand,” the signature song from The Music Man. Harkening back to halcyon days in River City, Iowa, this one conjured up a true white man’s minstrel, played by white men wearing their God-given skin tone.

Calvin then brought the audience to tears. The nuns had chosen him to sing the archetypal ballad of Eire, “Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,” probably out of a twisted sense of irony, which came across most strongly in the line, “come ye back . . . when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.”

In closing, the stocking-faced ensemble sang, “Me and my shadow, strolling down the avenue,” credited to Billy Rose, Dave Dreyer, and Al Jolson. This tune belongs in the minstrel songbook alongside Jolsen’s “Mammy.”

I doubt any white classmates found the minstrel show racist. Not then. Three years later, in 1963, my stocking-faced brother was performing in the minstrel along with his stockingless black classmates.

30

During the opening show, a black classmate’s father marched on stage, let loose a blood-curdling cry, cuffed his son, and dragged him off, leaving the minstrel in disarray and his mystified family disoriented and humiliated. By the next morning, the town’s entire black community knew about what came down at the last minstrel show.

Before the incident, had anyone told the nuns the minstrel was racist, they would’ve been thrown headlong into a blackboard. Though most students weren’t directly abused, we all were unwitting witnesses and had to rationalize away what we saw. The most pernicious and vulgar form of abuse consisted of targeting certain students who the nuns abusively called lazy, useless, stupid, unworthy, moral failures who would never amount to anything. Today they’d be called learning disabled. Blackface minstrel shows, heaving kids into blackboards, emotionally torturing those who were differently abled— the many forms of violence and the profound vulgarity of it all fed implacably off each other.

Seared into the memories of my eighth-grade classmates was the day Mick’s comedic timing was off and he angered a nun. A deal was struck that for Mick to stay enrolled both his parents had to leave work and come to school pronto. The father was required to beat Mick in front of the class. I still see him removing his belt, rearing back, and flogging Mick, over and over, as if performing a scene from a passion play. Mick choked back tears, his father and mother cried, each of us watching cried bitterly. But teacher (left) and principal (right) stood by unmoved. After school, some of us wailed walking home.

Mick’s mother lost her job.

I found Mick 40 years later and asked him about the whipping. A Buddhist by then, he said his father beat him at the slightest provocation “and I vowed I would never treat my children that way.”

I recently told my adult son and daughter about wearing blackface.

“Didn’t people know it was wrong?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? How could people not? ” My daughter said, “You sang us to sleep with those minstrel songs when we were kids.”

“Every time, I remembered where I learned them, too.”

My son interrupted, “But you wore whiteface years later.”

31

I retold how, as a 26-year-old grad student at Howard University, I was invited by a friend to a Halloween party sponsored by the black women’s Order of the Eastern Star. Warned it was a costume party, I wore a white sleeved leotard and tights and smeared white greasepaint on my hands, face, neck, and hair.

As we reached the venue, the seated Worthy Matron looked up and gave me a toothy smile: “I can see you’re trying to win the prize.”

Asked what I was disguised as, I said, “A white man.”

A gentleman in a scarlet tuxedo exclaimed, “You look just like a Caucasian.”

We danced all night, the DJ dubbed me “moon dancer,” and I won best male costume. Best female costume went to a black woman dressed as a harem dancer. At the DJ’s direction, she and I paraded around the room, arm in arm. As cameras flashed, the well-lubricated audience chanted, “Black and white, black and white.”

My son asked, “So what’s the difference? Did your wearing whiteface balance things out??”

I said, “Everyone knew why I wore whiteface. They knew it was a comment on the perversity of minstrel shows and wearing blackface. The joke was on me. Instead of feeling like another slap, everyone was in on the joke.”

32

Rip Alan Semrow

You can rip my chest open and I’ll rip my life agenda apart you can rip my chest open and I’ll hand over my heart I’m young and I can make these decisions.

33

Dance Music Chris Neilan You find your heart is a balloon, blown up and let down and blown up again, so you make tapes. Mix tapes, cobbled together from mix albums—Dave Pearce and Euphoria and Ministry of Sound: The Annual. The plastic hinges chip as you carry them in your rucksack to the parties, with the cans and syphoned liquors you’ve managed to finagle. Ultra Nate, Armand Van Heldon, ATB. In commuter town living rooms crowds of children listen to those tapes, when you’re able to commandeer the tape deck, paying no hint of the attention you wish them to pay, to these tapes, these pieces of your inexplicable balloon heart. A boy from your year is asleep on the sofa, the room pungent with eau de toilette and lager, young bodies. Cliques both strengthened and dissolved, boundaries shifted by the new presence of Booze. Some have been kissing. As you try to rouse the sleeping boy he vomits into your lap. Your tape is not playing. A girl you know says you’re nice, and her friend agrees, and the first of these girls drifts into your personal orbit. She lies on the floor of the sitting room alternately allowing you and a bowl-cutted boy called Matt to kiss her, and spectacularly she allows your hand up her top, into her bra.

The room is dark by this point, and it’s very late—people bedded haphazardly on the floor and sofas, chatting, laughing, laughing at you. Your tape has been played, a bit: Jungle Brothers, Paul Johnson. You remember deciphering the rhythms in your bedroom, walking around town—the thump thump thump thump drop.

The house is quiet now, and a-fog with scent—the acid stench of puke, fag stink, spilled lager, stickysweet Hooch, some peaty whiff you don’t yet know to identify as hash, and something else—something in the air, of hard kids, violence, the violence of contact, desire, bodies, kissing, grinding, groping, laughing, humiliating, and with it all the home smells everyone knows, of carpet cleaner and pot pourri.

You turned fifteen this month—most are still fourteen. Do you wake up next to the girl? No, but under your own coat, freezing cold. It is October, and morning now, and you’re sicker than you’ve ever been.

The hostess’s mother has appeared and is making, inappropriately, black coffees.

34

Your tape plays. You stumble the half-mile home. Maybe you listen to your tape when you get home too, in the light of your bedroom, the ceiling spinning and spinning. You make more tapes, more and more, often try to put them on, and they’re seldom listened to. Sometimes, sometimes, they stay on for four or five songs, and one person might nod their head, white-boy overbite. Maybe it stays on long enough for you to forget it’s on, to stop watching out for people who might turn it off and put their music on, long enough to just enjoy, for a while, the ambience that your tape has helped create, the interactions that are happening, the jokes, the joshes, flirts, moments, scored by you. Don’t comment on it, don’t seek approval—that will conjure belittling. Keep it quiet. Let the tape be changed when it’s changed.

Don’t rush to reclaim it as if it’s a precious jewel. You’ve stopped thinking about it. You forgot it was even playing. Let the time pass. It’s no big thing. Life is no big thing. Music is no big thing. Hearts are no big thing. That first kiss? Drunk, on a living room floor? No big thing.

35

Aspiration, n.2

Connor McDonald

Afternoon in the wet to resolve a message about papers needed for financial aid. The papers were submitted two weeks ago, and the automated message a mistake, which has now been corrected on three separate occasions. I learned today that financial aid will continue to be necessary; after receiving good grades from Legal Research and Writing, my GPA will remain high enough to maintain scholarships. bygone chances cherry blossoms falling with the rain The returned assignment also contained a mistake: the use of “canister” and “cannister” within the same sentence – a single hair that ruins the meal – causing me to clench my fists near my ears; the deep red imprints of fingertips seeming excessive, an act from the ego aspiring to some sense of perfection.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines aspiration as the process of drawing breath. Again, I find confirmation in Kafka: afire with fever and left gasping for air from tuberculosis; he requested Max Brod consign his manuscripts to the same fate. It must be characteristic of the type that gravitates toward law . . . to be drawn in by the mistakes of our aspiration(s). smoldering the curled wings of mothlight

36

Men Have Come with Arms

George Perrault

into the church of music the church of dance into the church of reason and the church of the smallest happiness the church of the numberless one men have come with arms into the church of the mesa the church of these fields whispering with corn and the chant of prayerful rain they have entered with arms but still we rise and sing with the obdurate joy of a canyon carved by a river when river was the name of god

37

The Future in Repose

Cecil Morris

At 3 he lies on the floor, his face pressed to carpet, his eyes on the wooden train his hand drives over and over, an arc of imagination consuming him, his attention held, his too busy limbs stilled, the forth and back and forth of birch block, the turning of black wheels, the silver hubs, unrolling some story only he sees.

Folding laundry across from him, I watch my son and see how he has left my world, embarked already on his own journey on invented rails that curve through future valleys, that cleave distant mountain passes.

I pat his shirts flat, smooth his narrow pants, picture myself as graffiti-covered boxcar: rusting but still rolling, not quite forgotten freight drawn by his small engine.

38

Quartet for Nina and Sam Denise Alden Erasure Poems from Motel Chronicles by Sam Shepard, 9/28/80 I. “Dahhling.”

Ice cool Scotch, blond wig: throw it on the floor, Egyptian queen.

Skin shining blue neck, elbows, knees, feet.

Deadly landslide piano, voice snaking through eyes and hands.

A candle at night, her voice coming through concrete.

II. Nina Simone was cool, eyelids painted blue.

Brecht always a deadly shot.

She killed me, froze me outside paradise.

III. Nina whole underneath her eyelashes, the mirror resting on the floor.

Her song vengeance, shot in those days with ghostly chords working over a candle, singing.

IV. Always painted blue, then red, she used to finish with “Jenny the Pirate,” direct deadly shot.

Outside, her voice right through to home.

39

Faustus Hood Roland Leach

He was only five months into the marriage when he realized this was not how he imagined it would be.

He was in love with Sisely and believed this love was returned equally, yet something had slowly changed, day by day, in those one hundred and fifty days. His wife was slowly transforming into a different person. Quite literally. Just the other morning he had looked across the pillow at her and her face seemed to have changed. Her nose that had a tiny bump near the bridge was straight, the three freckles on her cheek had darkened and looked larger. He quickly reached across the pillow to look at her closely, making Sisely jump but she had already metamorphosized back into the woman he had married.

There were many things that were the same. They still were having sex, still had things to talk about, liked being at home – just the two of them. But Gregory felt that an encroaching tide would soon draw back and expose some other Sisely that he hadn’t noticed before.

The best thing about her face was her eyes; almond eyes whose lids darkened on the corners like the paintings of women favoured by the Renaissance artists. He still remembered the first time he met her on the beach. She was just standing on the edge of water when he came out of the ocean, and she had stared at him and said You looked like you were having fun.

He noticed her eyes.

And that was one thing that had changed. She had always looked into his eyes. He thought it was a game at first and had stared back, thinking he had to outstare her. But she never seemed to look into his eyes anymore. It was like she was looking just to the left of him as if he had a parrot on his shoulder that she was addressing. He may have been imagining it, but there was something sad in her face now, as though life no longer offered anything new. Perhaps this is what happened in marriage.

He was disappointed.

If he had noted some great sadness in her face, had she noticed his disappointment? Were they now a sadly disappointed couple? What had living in the same house together, bound by certificates of forever, done to them?

Perhaps they needed children. They had never broached the subject, they had other careers to fulfil their lives.

40

They were successful enough to soon have an architecturally designed home in a beach suburb and they could afford most things that others aspired. There would be holidays and dinner parties and if there were children they would go to elite private schools where they could meet other elite children.

They were meant to be happy and perhaps they could be – it might be a phase, the shock of the gnu, a joke Sisely once made. But no matter what they may manage to resurrect there would never be that moment when he came out of the water and she had stared straight at him as if they were alone, stranded on an island at the edge of the world, saying you look like you were having fun.

It was not long after that Gregory woke one morning and heard Sisely in the kitchen. She was making breakfast and he thought, so it will be like this from now on, and was not deeply disappointed. When she came to say it was time to get up, he couldn’t recognize the woman at the door, and she stared slightly to the left, refusing to admit that he also was unrecognisable.

41

The Healing Jemàl Nath

“How’d you go?”

“Great.”

“Cop any grief?”

“Nah. I had so much to off-load they wouldn’t have noticed.”

“Good.”

“Snaffled a laptop that should have a four meg DDR3 module, and, this.” He placed an old radio on the table.

“It’s kind of cool,” she said.

“Isn’t it? It’s a Healing Golden Voice!”

42

“I like it.”

“Probably 60s or 70s. Teak case I think.” He plugged in the unusually long cord and switched it on. A low hum emanated from the speaker, but in front of that hum, prominently, the music played: It’s good to be alive To be alive To be alive “Wow. Sounds like we’re back in the 70s,’ she said, gesticulating disco moves. “Shall we stay there?”

“I don’t think so, Darling. Music aside, the 70s were awful.”

“We weren’t even born then.”

“Racism, nepotism, homophobia, gross social inequality – shocking time for women,” he said.

“Oh, nothing at all like the present then.”

“Nope.”

“I suppose I should be more grateful that I live in a time where the smartest guy I know rifles through e-waste for a dollar, and I spend all day online applying for jobs that I’m not even sure exist, unless I get an autoreply from a bot.”

He was about to respond to her sarcasm when something outside drew his attention. “Check out the 70s soiree over at Rosa’s.”

She twitched the curtains. “Very convincing outfits. Rosa looks years...” She glanced over her shoulder at the radio.

“I’m going outside,” he said. “Umm, leave the Healing on.”

She heard him walk out the door, and come straight back in. “That was quick.”

“Darling, I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “I had no way of contacting you, and I just got caught up in it—”

“You were in and out in a second.”

43

“Hey?”

“A second ... not even.”

He composed himself, and stared hard at the radio. “I was gone for at least an hour.”

She shook her head.

“I was. There’s no way you’ll believe me so you’ll just have to go.”

“Outside?”

“Hang on.” He disappeared up the hall and sang out, “Do we still have that old jar of one, two, and five cent pieces we found behind the oven when we moved in?”

“It’ll be in the box labelled—”

“Got it!” He rushed back into the kitchen. “Put these in your pocket. Now walk out the door.”

Too tired to argue, she walked out the door, came straight back in, and sat down at the table.

“What happened?”

“I was just in 1979.”

“And?”

“It’s the same, but different. Where did all the huge trees go over the last forty years?”

“Strange, I know. What else?”

“I got offered a job!”

“Seriously?”

“A lady down the street was watering her garden. She saw me pass by and bailed me up. We had a chat about everything. Apparently, her husband teaches at Campbelltown High, and he desperately needs a laboratory assistant. She’s been running the ads for the school and so far, no takers. She told me to pop by the school tomorrow after three and help him set up for the next morning.”

44

“This is crazy. You walked out the door and came back in, immediately.”

“That’s what you did too.”

“I’m so stoked with adrenaline I have to go again,” he said.

She handed him the change.

“Thanks. Don’t wait up.”

“Ha!” She heard him go out the door and walk right back in.

“Behold.”

“A newspaper. Gone long?” she asked.

“Long enough for me to catch a bus into town, and get this.”

“Star Wars, Luke Skywalker.”

“There’s more. I too was offered a job by a nice lady.”

“Shut up.”

“She and her husband run a shop called ‘Toyworld’ in Rundle Mall. He’s not been well, so she needs some help. She was impressed by my knowledge of all the amazing vintage toys she had – obviously I didn’t use the word ‘vintage’– and she offered me a job on the spot.”

“Hon, I can’t believe this. Well done.”

“I didn’t do anything. You know this Kenner action figure’s worth a fortune now.”

“Define ‘now’?”

He recoiled. “We haven’t actually worked out what’s going on here have we?”

She shook her head, and picked up the newspaper.

45

“I’m gonna try something.” He turned off the Healing, and peeked out the window. “Jeeesus, I knew it.”

She held up the newspaper. “It’s still here.”

“Consider it a relic from 1979, because we’re back. Look.”

She pressed her face against the window. “Great.”

“Try not to be too happy about not being stuck in the past.”

“I won’t.” She grabbed the real estate section of the newspaper.

“Well, before I question the weirdness of it all, I should put young Luke here up online. We need the—”

“Hon, sorry ... did the toyshop lady say how much she’d pay you?”

He took a moment. “I remember thinking it wasn’t as low as I thought it would be.”

“Me too. That was my response exactly. Now see this. This is the solid brick flat around the corner, you know, the one that sold last year, with the separate loo.”

She handed him the page. “In 1979 it’s two years old, and up for sale.”

“I see it. Holy shhh, that’s not the price?”

“That’s the price.”

“It’s gotta be a typo.”

She shook her head. “We wouldn’t have to rent anymore,” she said, trying to sound calm.

He lowered the newspaper. “What are you suggesting?”

“We’ve just been handed more opportunity in one day than we’ve ever had, ever.”

“Wait, wait, wait a minute. We have to think this through.”

“Don’t panic. I’m just saying, this could resolve a lot of problems for us.”

46

He paused, took a deep breath, raised the newspaper, and read the real estate blurb for the flat.

“Darling?”

“Yeh, Hon?”

“Could you please turn on the Healing?”

47

Radioactive Isotopes Robert Hilles

The imagination is binary and contains slippage. Is more of an ascent than descent. Radioactive Isotopes in a garden. It is safe to say that radiation is outside human control. It can’t be contained and once it all goes wrong the amount of time to dissipate it is beyond any livable scale. The universe is so vast it appears to be standing still but it is not. Our years are spent inside closed heads where time ticks in seconds.

Radioactive Isotopes prove there is no God nor is all that is produced pluggable into a moral matrix.

There is no such weighting. Before the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl there was always going to be that disaster because isotopes are not bound by hope or wishes or even by the laws of thermal dynamics.

That is but a mathematical wish waiting to be corrected or at best deciphered and once deciphered it is no longer a wish but the way through the wrong door. It can be spread out then and drifts far out into the future.

You enter an airplane and fly over the abandoned city of Pripyat and you see a stopped Ferris wheel and rows of apartment buildings and the swallowing green. In another few decades the city and Chernobyl will be mostly hidden by a vibrant forest and from above like now it will look as though no one ever lived there. Only the remaining stacks will contradict that notion. If you look closely enough you will see the downward slope of history. And in a hundred years who will tell the story? And in a thousand who?

48

The Last Honest Man Jacke Wilson Later that night, after I found myself with some unexpected time on my hands, I went to eat a meal at the only authentic restaurant in town. To my surprise, the Last Honest Man was there, standing near the entrance in a coat too big for his body. “It’s you!” I cried. “What an honor! Can I buy you something to eat?” When I raised my hand to clap him on the shoulder, he narrowed his eyes and flinched as if he were afraid I might strike him. It took some doing, but I finally managed to persuade him to join me at a small table away from the windows, where he dabbed at his soup like someone emerging from a long illness as I--even though I was not particularly hungry--devoured a piece of schnitzel so large it was served on two plates. The Last Honest Man stared at me unblinking as I informed him of my lifelong desire to clean things up. “I plan to start local,” I said. “Not just this wretched country that can’t do anything right, and not just this corrupt den of vipers we call a city. And I’m not even talking about my neighborhood of morons and fools. No, no, I’m focusing on the changes that happen within. I’m starting with myself, my good man! Only through such efforts can we have any hope of fixing this godforsaken world!” My companion set his spoon on his napkin and formally acknowledged the truth in my remarks, though I couldn’t help but note the sadness in his eyes. “You’ll see, you’ll see!” I said merrily, paying for his meal and walking him to the door. On the sidewalk we were greeted by a vicious mob waving a sea of torches high above their heads. “Get out of our way!” their leader roared at me. “We’re here to burn this place down--and HIM with it!” “You don’t understand!” I screamed. “He’s the Last Honest Man! Without him there is no hope!” The leader of the mob stared at me, breathing calmly as the light from the flames danced across his face. “But he doesn’t belong here,” he said. “You’re right, my god, what was I thinking!?” I cried, cramming my hand in my pocket and reaching for the matches.

49

Hallows Eve Chad Lutz I am a box of crayons.

My little brother is a dinosaur.

My older brother, Jason, is a spider.

My dad is probably a Native American.

My mom is Minnie Mouse.

We’re probably handing out the best treats in the city.

Water bottles stuffed with candy.

The sixteen-piece.

The doubles.

Dark chocolate.

Nougat.

It’s snowing.

We’re wearing long sleeves because our costumes don’t conceal us enough.

No one can tell I’m the kid Freddy Krueger with my Starter jacket on.

We can see our breath on the air.

We’re probably watching Nightmare Before Christmas.

We’re probably listening to Spooky Sounds.

My dad helped me build a casket we use for decoration.

I was eleven. He was fifty-three.

We don’t talk because I’ve tried to kill myself.

I lean on him for support.

Not because I love him but because I need him.

The way a snail needs moss.

The way loved gets tossed.

The way some people hand out apples on Halloween.

50

Message: Undeliverable Betsy Litrell She wanted that house so badly that she licked the door on the way out after she viewed it: she thought her tongue would seal the deal. She wanted it not just for its stainless steel appliances, double sinks or extra bedroom, not for the closet cozy enough for a midday nap. Not because most of her furniture would fit just right and she wouldn’t have to paint the walls.

It wasn’t the space but it was the space — this place could deliver joy. So when she heard another family got the house instead, she knew it was an omen. Maybe just for the week, maybe for a thousand years. She crawled back to her house and couldn’t decide which house she planned to burn.

51

The Suicide Man Tom Mizell Michael didn’t trust the mid-day rain. It was good cover, sure. Folks kept their heads down, tried to keep the water off their faces, never stopped to take long looks at the other passerby. But he thought the sun was always preferable. Customers were like to sympathize with the rain, let themselves get washed in the gloom of it. If a feeling was real, it was at its realest in the sunshine.

All the same, he liked to keep a schedule. He popped the hood of his jacket over his head, weaved through the foot traffic, and tried to keep his feet dry. It was his third job on the West side in as many weeks. All men, not that he minded.

It was a gray part of town. Folks shuffled between half-empty shops and half-empty food joints, catching up with each other in convenience store parking lots. It was a dying place, like so many places were now. It was the like the bomb had already dropped, but no one had bothered to notice.

Numbers clung to doors with duct tape. Michael scanned for 1324 but the rain made it difficult to tell between the buildings. They’d been cookie-cutter houses once, back before anyone living could remember. Now each had been carved into at least three or four dwellings that could only be distinguished by how many bicycles with missing wheels were chained to the front steps.

It took three rings before a scratchy voice answered Michael on the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Courier,” Michael answered, the agreed upon lie.

“Come on up,” said the voice, followed by the mechanical buzz of the door.

Carpet had turned yellow from years of stains on the creaking staircase. Michael did carry a courier bag, one of those insulated totes for food delivery. He often thought that this was being a bit too cautious, no one had ever really noticed him on the job. All the same, he took some comfort playing the role.

Sometimes he would fancy himself a real courier, fantasize about scraping tips together from pizza deliveries.

Michael’s customer was waiting in the doorway on the second floor. He looked maybe fifty, with thinning hair and smoker’s teeth.

52

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “it felt silly to make you knock. Uh. Come in, I guess.”

They made their way to a cluttered seating area. Discarded take-out containers littered the floor space, so the host sat cross-legged on the couch. Michael found himself in a metal folding chair that had taken the place of a traditional recliner.

“So. Um. Do I just- Uh.” The customer reached for a thick, brown wallet. A few loose business cards spilled onto the couch as he pulled out a stack of hundreds. Michael counted the bills. A thousand, even.

Flat rate. He tucked the cash in his back pocket.

Michael’s customer wouldn’t meet his eyes. He was looking off to the middle distance, locked on something no one else could see. The man’s hand trembled as he absently scratched his scalp. Michael wasn’t surprised. Most folks were shells by the time they called him.

“You’re sure about this?” Michael asked, though he already knew the answer.

The man nodded slowly. “Please. I can’t do this anymore, I can’t- I don’t have the strength. Please. Help me.”

Michael opened his bag and removed the pistol, silencer already attached. He pressed it to the man’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

It only took a few minutes to clean up, do a little staging. After all, he was a professional.

# It was lonely to be the Suicide Man, but it paid rent. A real hit could cost upward of twenty grand, but Michael was just a trigger man so he kept it at a flat thousand. There wasn’t much difficulty to it, no prowling, no ambush. All he did was help people.

Michael offered his services to anyone desperate enough to find his unassuming little webpage. He was often surprised by the steady flow of jobs. Word of mouth wasn’t exactly an option so any boom in business just meant individual cases of desperation. Sign of the times, he figured.

The first hit had been free. Michael didn’t remember why he’d been out, but he’d come home late. When he struggled with the door a bit, he had chalked it up to the alcohol, but a few heavy pushes revealed the chair that had been half-heartedly hooked under the doorknob.

Inside, his roommate, Daniel, was huddled on the floor, breathing in shudders. Michael met Daniel’s 53

red, red eyes before noticing the gun that lay next to him on the floor.

“Please,” Daniel had rasped. “Please, I can’t.”

Michael went to the floor, sat with his shaking friend. When Michael went to put his arm around him, Daniel had shaken him off. It was as if Daniel was somewhere else, somewhere terrifying, and he could only reach back to Michael’s world long enough to repeat, “I can’t. Please.”

Over and over, he had repeated his plea. Eventually, Michael understood. He took the pistol in his left hand. It was light, small. The kind of gun usually found in handbags and pawn shops.

Daniel’s breathing steadied when he saw his friend take up the gun. His eyes closed as Michael held it to his forehead.

“Please. Please, I can’t.” #

Harsh sunlight reflected off of white walls and French doors. Michael rarely visited the burbs, and never for a job before.

The doorbell lasted an uncomfortably long time, bellowing out a full recorded tune like it was signaling Sunday mass. The PA crackled to life, but no one spoke.

“Courier,” Michael finally offered.

For a while, there was no response. Only the static from the little speaker let him know he was not alone.

A pair of ceramic gnomes held reclined positions on the white wooden porch. Michael offered them a shrug, as if to say “What can you do?”

At last a voice, higher than Michael had expected, came over the PA. “It’s unlocked. I’m upstairs.”

The massive white door was real wood, heavy to open. Inside, the house was like a sitcom set. An open floor plan revealed carefully matched, pristinely clean furniture decorated with fake flowers in a cheery pastel color scheme. One wall was dotted with picture frames. Michael thought it was curious. There were no people in the pictures, only sunsets. Each had been taken from a different exotic beach or mountaintop.

54

The stairs were covered in white carpet, bordered by a dark stained wood. They formed a crisp spiral in the dead center of the home. Michael ascended with his hands at his sides, not trusting the ornate railing to hold his weight.

The stairs ended in a spacious landing that peeled off into different doorways. Noise spilled out from one, voices on a television. Michael went to turn the doorknob to that room, but thought better and knocked gently with the back of his hand.

He recognized the blank expression that haunted all of his employers, but he hadn’t expected her to be so young. She held the door with fingers that barely poked out from the long sleeves of her pink sweater.

It took some time for her to work up enough breath to speak, and even then it was only an “Okay,” as she led him into the room.

The girl’s bedroom was pristine as the rest of the house. Intricately painted figurines stood watch on real wooden bookshelves. A set of colored pens was laid out ruler straight, parallel with a yellow legal pad on a glass-top desk. The notable exception to the catalog-like order of the place was the bed, or rather the bedding. Sheets were tangled up with the comforter, a fitted corner had sprung loose, and a little pillow stain had formed from a pool of spittle.

“How old are you?” Michael asked.

She didn’t answer him. Rather she slid an envelope out from under her pillow and held it out to him.

The wad of bills inside was thicker than Michael was accustomed to receiving. Instead of the usual fresh-from-the-bank hundreds, his fee had been offered in a mix of crumpled tens and twenties. He pushed the pile of sheets aside so he could sit on the bed and count. The girl looked nervously, not quite at Michael, but at the spot on the floor nearest his feet.

The money was all there. One thousand. Michael pocketed the envelope. He reached for his bag, but stopped short.

“How old are you?” he repeated.

The girl’s eyes snapped into focus and she met his gaze first with confusion, and then despair.

“No no no, please. Please. I gave you the money. It’s all there.”

Michael didn’t know what to say. The girl sat at the other end of the bed and started to cry. Michael could see that her legs were shaking. They sat like that for what felt like hours, her sobbing and him staring the bag he held in his lap.

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Finally he turned to her. “What’s your name?”

She laughed through her tears, and it seemed to calm her a bit. “Does it matter?”

Michael shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Rachel.”

“How old are you, Rachel?”

“Sixteen,” she answered with defeat.

Michael stood, shouldering his bag. He took a look back at Rachel.

“You’ll get over it,” he said. “Whatever it is.”

“There is no it!” she snapped. Michael stopped in the doorway. He retreated a step into the room. Rachel was hesitant, she hadn’t hoped he would actually listen. Michael gave her a nod to make her case.

“There’s nothing to get over. Nothing happened, I-” she stopped herself short. “I”m just like this. It just hurts. I just… want it to stop.”

She matched his gaze for a minute, her brown eyes pleading with his blue. Michael paced the room, his hand mindlessly wandering over the zipper of his gun bag.

“I don’t,” he said finally, “kill kids.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“Close enough.”

Rachel slumped back on the bed.

“Is it not real,” she asked,”because I’m young?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you won’t help?”

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Michael ran a frustrated hand through his hair. He couldn’t remember what he was like at sixteen. Or eighteen, for that matter. He figured he was probably like he was now, but thinner. Did he have someone then who cared about him, who would’ve been hurt? Maybe, he thought, but didn’t everyone?

Michael ran a finger lightly along a wooden shelf. His hand hovered briefly over a trophy from a grade school spelling bee. The wobbly reflection of the room glittered in the fake bronze.

He took a look back at his waiting customer. She had the hollow look, the far-away eyes, all the tell-tale signs. Her pain was the same as all the other’s had been. But, for whatever reason, he just couldn’t help her.

Michael looked her up and down. He slowly shook his head.

“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll just… do it myself.”

Michael wasn’t sure why, but he exclaimed, “You can’t!”

“I can’t?”

“I- I won’t let you,” he stammered. Then he added, “I’ll call the police.”

Rachel looked at him incredulously. She almost laughed.

“You’re not going to call the police. You’re the Suicide Man.”

At that, Michael could almost hear the little shattering in his brain. He was the Suicide Man. A killer.

He was no help to anybody. Just a murderer like any other. Halfway down the stairs, he remembered the crumpled payment in his pocket and returned to the room. Michael thrust the envelope toward her.

“Take it,” he said. “Take the money back.”

“I don’t need it,” she protested.

“Just take it.”

It took quite some effort for Rachel to stand, more to walk to him. She couldn’t meet his eyes, but he couldn’t meet hers so neither of them noticed the other’s shame.

“Okay,” she muttered, and took the envelope back.

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The Suicide Man made a dash for the stairs, never looking back. #

Michael was used to the neighborhood. Kids on bikes criss-crossed through Summer streets, until the inevitable Midwestern rain sent them scurrying back inside on a Summer day. He clutched his courier bag anxiously.

The white wooden door swung open with a long creak.

“Rachel?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry for the wait,” he said.

“It’s no problem,” she replied.

Neither met the other’s eye, as Michael handed her the take out order from the insulated bag.

Without words, they agreed to pretend they were not the people who had met before. She went back inside, and hoped, as she ate her lunch, that she would never be that person again.

Michael closed his zippered bag, and disappeared into the mid-day rain.

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The Stipple Ceiling Melia Lenkner A forest, monochrome, white and textured, as colorless as it is lush -- here and there, a swan-necked reptile will peek from behind dense foliage. Hanging vines camouflage another, a great, spined tail his only tell. Here, a smattering of wildflowers. There, a waterfall, erupting from the grass of a hilltop and spilling down, down, to where it crashes against the stones of a riverbed -- a riverbed that feeds into the sea. Somewhere between dragon and dinosaur, salamander and serpent, with stippled scales in white and shadowed grey, a creature pieced together from Animal Planet and Loch Ness legend floats through an ocean, sending forth a wave of bubbles with each sweep of her broad, flat flippers.

My mother painted this ceiling while she was pregnant with me, and I like to think she used a sponge to layer on the paint, giving birth to the creatures I would later discover on late nights when the hallway light brought contrast to the shadows and the creatures crept into place. Lights out, sweetheart, and the books went away, and I’d lay on my back and stare into the white paint. Better than a mural -- I went on expeditions and discovered the creatures in the ceiling, worked my metaphorical grip around craggy abstractions to brave the landscape, filled internal journals with species previously undocumented.

I no longer sleep in their natural habitat, and I have to wonder if they’re still there, lurking in the popcorn ceiling, waiting to be spotted. Sometimes, I wonder too, if my absence has driven them to extinction.

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Evening Rituals Bibek Adhikari Inside the cramped living room, planting ourselves in shaky wicker chairs, with dinner on our knees— rice, chickpea stew, roasted okra, faintly smelling of paraffin from the Primus stove— we savor our share on steel plates, the ones that come with separate compartments for different dishes, eyes glued to the technicolor screen— that dreadful 21-inch box, a gift from my parent’s wedding, a flamboyant luxury in the olden days, now a relic, speakers crackling, almost dying— we eat off our knees, forgetting the everyday problems of our everyday lives with a famous Indian sitcom, Tarak Mehta Ka Oolta Chasma, sharing intermittent laughter in-between.

I stuff a heaping spoonful of rice and curry into my mouth, snort at a smutty double entendre, drink water, splutter and cough—my dad pats on my arm, I laugh clumsily, content to be with an everyday family with a living room, a TV, and bills to pay.

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Contributors Fiction Jemàl Nath is a writer of emerging profile with essays published in journals and magazines such as, Anastamos; Food, Culture & Society; Journal of Sociology; Australian Humanities Review; and Health Sociology Review.

Gary Percesepe is the author of Itch, a story collection, and Falling, a poetry collection. He is Associate Editor

at New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review), where has worked closely with Executive Editor Frederick Barthelme for many years, and before that, was an assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review. His work has

appeared in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, Westchester Review, Brevity, PANK, The

Millions, and other places. He resides in White Plains, New York, and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx.

Roland Leach’s fourth collection of poetry, Obliquity, was recently published by Ginninderra Press. He is

proprietor of Sunline Press, which has published twenty three collections of poetry by Australian poets. His flash fiction piece ‘Angle’ appeared in Apeiron Review and was chosen for the Best Short Fictions 2015 (Queens Ferry Press)

Chris Neilan is a writer, filmmaker, PhD student and lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan

University in the UK. Neilan won 2nd prize for short fiction in the 2017 Bridport Prize, and was shortlisted for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2016.

Gabe Kaminsky is a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh studying English. His work has appeared in Exile and Prologue Magazine. He has a story forthcoming in the Scarlet Leaf Review. He is from from the Greater Philadelphia area.

Tom Mizell is a writer and actor originally from Dallas, Texas. His first short story was published in Ripples in Space in 2018. He now lives in Chicago, where he works teaching children’s robotics classes.

JACKE WILSON is the unlikely host of The History of Literature Podcast. He lives like a dog in Bethesda, Maryland.

Judy Xie’s writing has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, both Rider and

Ringling University, and the Festival of Books. She attends Mountain Lakes High School in New Jersey and has been published in PolyphonyHs, The Colombia Journal, Into the Void, and Noble / Gas Qrtly, among others.

However, she is most known for consisting of at least 50% ice cream.

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Photography Jim Ross resumed creative pursuits in 2015 after leaving a long career in public health research. He’s since

published nonfiction, poetry, and photography in over 100 journals and anthologies in North America, Europe,

Australia, and Asia. Publications include Columbia Journal, Friends Journal, Ilanot Review, Lunch Ticket, Kestrel, MAKE, The Atlantic, and The Manchester Review. In the past year, he wrote and acted in his first play; and, a

nonfiction piece led to a role in a high-profile documentary limited series. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents to five—split their time between MD and WV.

Richard Wu is a Eugene McDermott Scholar from the University of Texas at Dallas. In his spare time, Richard enjoys creating artwork, as well as writing stories and composing music.

Creative Nonfiction Jim Ross resumed creative pursuits in 2015 after leaving a long career in public health research. He’s since

published nonfiction, poetry, and photography in over 100 journals and anthologies in North America, Europe,

Australia, and Asia. Publications include Columbia Journal, Friends Journal, Ilanot Review, Lunch Ticket, Kestrel, MAKE, The Atlantic, and The Manchester Review. In the past year, he wrote and acted in his first play; and, a

nonfiction piece led to a role in a high-profile documentary limited series. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents to five—split their time between MD and WV.

Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Sunayna Pal moved to the US after her marriage. She is part of an anthology that is about to break the Guinness world of records. Know more on sunaynapal.com

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Poetry Bibek Adhikaria is a contributor to The Kathmandu Post, a leading national daily of Nepal. His works (both

poetry and prose) can be viewed at https://kathmandupost.com/author/bibek-adhikari. His poems have also been published in some print and online publications, including República Daily, Annapurna Express, and Lokantar.

Denise Alden lives and writes in the Twin Cities, and some of her work can be found online at Pif Magazine and

Metafore Magazine, and in print at The Aurorean.

Gareth Culshaw lives in Wales. He had his first collection published, The Miner, by FutureCycle in 2018. He

is currently doing an MFA in Creative Writing at Manchester Met. He has been nominated for Best of the Net. Gcwculshaw@moonfruit.com

Roland Leach’s fourth collection of poetry, Obliquity, was recently published by Ginninderra Press. His poetry

has been published throughout Australia, US and UK. His short stories have also appeared overseas and ‘Angle’

was included in Best American Short Fiction 2015. He is a past winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize (the richest poetry prize for a single poem in Australia), and the recipient of an Australia Council Grant to write poetry in the

Galapagos Islands. He was the Poetry Editor at University of Western Australia for Westerly for several years. He is the proprietor of Sunline Press.

Melia Lenkner is an emerging writer from rural Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in the literary

magazine Pulp. When she isn’t writing for The Siren or reading submissions for BatCat Press, she spends her time bonding with her two dogs.

Betsy Littrell is a whimsical soccer mom to four boys, working on her MFA in creative writing at San Diego State University. Her recent publications include The Write Launch, The Road Not Taken, Prometheus Dreaming and

Adanna among others. In addition, she volunteers with Poetic Youth, teaching poetry to underserved elementary students.

Chad W. Lutz is a speedy human born in Akron, Ohio, in 1986, and raised in the neighboring suburb of Stow.

Alumna of Kent State University’s English program, Chad earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College

and currently serves as an assistant editor for Pretty Owl Poetry. Their writing has been featured in KYSO Flash, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Gold Man Review, and Haunted Waters Press, was awarded the 2017 prize in

literary fiction by Bacopa Review, the 2019 award for fiction by Haunted Waters Press, and was a nominee for the 2017 Pushcart in poetry.

Connor McDonald writes from Oregon while completing a law degree. His poetry has appeared most recently

in Wales Haiku Journal, Under the Bashō, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. His nonfiction has also appeared in the Dante Society of America’s Dante Notes and in Beatdom.

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Maria McLeod writes poetry, fiction, monologues, and plays—three of which have been performed on stage.

Honors include three Pushcart Prize nominations and the Indiana Review Poetry Prize. She’s been published

nationally and internationally in literary journals such as The Interpreter’s House, Puerto Del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pearl, Crab Orchard Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly and others. Originally from the

Detroit area, she resides in Bellingham, Washington, where she is an associate professor of journalism at Western Washington University.

Cecil Morris, retired after 37 years teaching high school English, now tries writing himself what he spent so

many years teaching others to understand and enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in The Ekphrastic Review, Ekphrasis, Poem, Dime Show Review, Gravel, The American Scholar, and other literary magazines.

George Perreault’s most recent book, Bodark County, is a collection of poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado in West Texas.

Kris Robinson’s poetry has appeared in Voices of Sacramento and Calaveras Station Art & Literary Journal.

He is also a two time recipient of the Bazzanella Literary Award for poetry. Kris currently resides in downtown Sacramento with his ornery calico, Mingus.

Katelyn Roth graduated from Pittsburg State University with a Master’s in poetry. Her work has previously

appeared online at Silver Birch Press and at Heartland: Poems of Love, Resistance, and Solidarity. Currently, she lives, works, and writes in Kansas City, MO.

Beth Ruscio, daughter of actors, is part of a working class family of artists, actors, teachers and writers working in California. She is the current winner (2019) of the Brick Road Poetry Prize, and her debut collection SPEAKING

PARTS will be published in 2020. Her poetry has been Pushcart Prize nominated and has won finalist honors for several prizes and awards, including The Wilder Prize, The Sunken Garden Prize, The Tupelo Quarterly Prize,

The Ruth Stone Poetry Award, The Two Sylvias Prize, and Beyond Baroque’s Best Poem Prize. A featured poet for the June 2019 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press, other recent work has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Cultural Weekly, Tulane Review, Spillway, Malpais Review, High Shelf, and in the anthologies Dark Ink: Poetry Inspired by Horror; Beyond the Lyric Moment; 1001 Nights; Conducting a Life: Maria Irene Fornes and in the

upcoming anthology Fifty Years of Beyond Baroque. Beth is also an accomplished film, television and theatre actress, and a longtime mentor at Otis College of Art and Design.

Alan Semrow’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been featured in over 30 publications. Apart from writing fiction and nonfiction, he is a monthly contributor at Chosen Magazine and a singer-songwriter. Previously, he was the Fiction Editor for Black Heart Magazine and a Guest Fiction Editor for the Summer Issue of Five Quarterly.

Semrow’s debut short story collection, Briefs, was published in 2016. Ripe is his second book. Semrow lives in Minneapolis.

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Additional Photo Credits

p.6 MusicFox Fx p.13 Maria Teneva p.19 Beth Macdonald p.27 Nikita Tikhomirov p.29 Jordan Whitt p.32 Ludovic Migneault p.35 A P O L L O p.41 Martin Castro p.47 Hamza Dildar p.59 Denis Agati p.61 Ronan Furuta All photos available on Unsplash.com 66