Belmont Story Review Volume 8: Kinship

VOLUME VIII | FALL 2023

A national magazine of literary arts, faith, and culture

| KINSHIP |

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[ TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S ] E D I TO R I A L S TA F F

EDITOR

Sara Wigal CO-MANAGING EDITORS

Sophie Slusher Tiffany Alexander SUBMISSIONS COORDINATOR

PR COORDINATOR

Kailee Lingelbach

Kendal Cliburn

ART DIRECTOR SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR

Josie Montrose Ruthie Helfer

SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATORS

El Wilson

Sunny Urben

Chris Kang

Lauren Neely

POETRY DIRECTOR

Margot Pierson

POETRY EDITORS

Josie Montrose Julia Ziepfel Olivia Peppiatt Mikayla McGrory

FORMER EDITOR

Richard Sowienski Email: belmontstoryreview@gmail.com © 2023 Copyright Belmont University

COPY EDITORS

Journey Mathewson Jessie Lang Phoebe Bloomfield Cayla Rusielewicz

FOREWORD

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POETRY

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This is Not a Joe Burrow Poem

by Casey Harloe

FICTION 8

God Send

by Barbara Lawhorn

POETRY 29

Rest Eternal, Grant Me

by Laura King

FICTION 30 A Hundred Dozen

by Megan Draper POETRY 43 50p

by Sean Madden FICTION

44

Girl, Leaving

by Jeffrey Haskey-Valerius

FICTION 52

Krokodilopolis

by Jill Marshall

POETRY 69

Ocean City in October

by Christine Pennylegion

FICTION

70

Make Believe

by Elizabeth Vondrak

POETRY 87

Musings from the Wet Season

by Melissa Ridley Elmes

FICTION 88

My Mother’s Fatal Rhythm

by Cindy Mu

CONTRIBUTORS

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[ FOREWORD]

“F

amily is family,” so the saying goes, and yet there are so many ways to define family now. Is your family who you are born to, your blood kin? The colloquialism asserts that for better or for worse, you’ve got this family, and not another, by the nature of your birth. But we know that family can also be your adopted relatives, those with a legal, if not, blood tie. And, can you choose your family even out of those people with no formal bond to you at all? All these definitions of family function today because we’ve broadened how we see family conceptually. Ties of love, blood, and legality thrive or wither as much as we put in the work to grow these relationships.

I used to think of the idea of kinship as only a DNA-bonded family, but the actual definition when you look it up is so much broader.

Surprisingly, one definition of kinship includes romantic partners, and other examples of the word include co-traumatic war survivors, and even shared nationality. Why don’t we just say relationship, if our modern definitions of family or kinship have widened so inclusively? I don’t have this etymological answer for you, but I wonder if it has something to do with the romanticized notion of what it means to be family or kin. Any relationship could be positive or negative, but family? Kinship? These imply to a native English speaker a knowingness of personality and habit that go beyond the bounds of what it means to be acquainted with someone. There is closeness in kinship, there is trust and a willingness to put up with the bad and praise the good. And that is what every piece in this new volume of Belmont Story Review has come to share with its readers this year.

In recent years, stories that share the themes of “found family” have risen to popularity, and this notion is one I frequently observe in the writing of my students here at Belmont University. “Found family” is antithetical to the old school way of defining familial relationships.

The idea that you can grow into, or even grow out of a family, isn’t representative of traditional ideas about familial structures based on a shared gene pool or the admission of law. Including other forms of family has important impacts on many people and certainly on the students that pass through the halls of our campus—family can be found at any age, in

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any place. The effort to sustain this kinship i s t he s trengthening b ond.

For some, finding a home with strangers who become chosen relatives can renew their hope in humanity, helping them find relationships where they are accepted and loved.

In this volume 8 of Belmont Story Review, you will find stories that show growing kinships, such as God Send by Barbara Lawhorn, which depicts a daughter witnessing the found family between her mother and a nun.

In A Hundred Dozen by Megan Draper we see salvation in the biological kinship of a family in a dystopian survival story. In the poem This is Not a Joe Burrow Poem by Casey Harloe we observe crescendoing romance.

We read the unusual growth of interspecies kinship in Krokodilopolis

by Jill Marshall, and about how blood ties and memory make an intergenerational connection in the flash fiction My Mother’s Fatal Rhythm by Cindy Mu. Kinship impacted by mental state is illustrated in the poem Rest Eternal, Grant Me by Laura King, whose poem explores the lack of social bonds’ impact on where we can see possible kinship. 50p by Sean Madden presents how kinship may be wrought by memory.

Our editors also selected pieces that showed kinship’s dissolution in various forms, such as Girl, Leaving a story by Jeffrey Haskey-Valerius which shows familial abuse and the subsequent rejection of a parentchild bond. In the story Make Believe by Elizabeth Vondrak we read about how families change and transform with loss, and with the threat of death. This theme is explored again in a way when we read the fears of a parent hoping to protect children from suffering and threat outside of the family in Ocean City in October a poem by Christine Pennylegion. In the final poem, Musings from the Wet Season by Melissa Ridley Elmes a storm’s disruption is used to illustrate the unwanted intergenerational kinship found in the shackles of family expectation and tradition.

Each semester, a kinship of shared mission and work connects every student who joins the staff of this literary journal, and we invite you, our reader, to join the family.

Happy reading,

Sara Wigal Editor

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[ POETRY]

This is Not a Joe Burrow Poem By: Casey Harloe

I love you the way people love Joe Burrow without ever following football previously, like a touchdown like a full stadium cheering or maybe a hot dog with extra ketchup, with a pride that is inherent, quiet, the kind for the city you were born in, almost automatic it seems, I love you and I’d shout that from a rooftop bar if you wanted me, if you didn’t believe that’s how much and might sing Al Green on karaoke sober and aware and embarrass myself or just stare at you, feel lucky, I love you like I love that house on the corner of Castle Hill, how sometimes I imagine us in it with kitchen utensils and Christmas lights, pine needles and Bublé from a Bluetooth speaker, with a lawn to maintain to mow in a bikini top when it’s August and hot and sweaty and miserable but god I love you in any month, in ways I don’t know, like the name of those orange flowers by every suburban mailbox that grow out of nowhere and are just there and no one questions, simply and wildly beautiful, and in ways I haven’t found yet, how I still end up lost on winding roads in my hometown that I didn’t know existed my whole life until I began driving down them with you,

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soft radio and air against the window, I love you anywhere, I don’t care, sitting under Applebee’s lights, over brew pub pretzels and beer cheese and baseball playing silently on the small flat screen, in mouthfuls and when I’m not paying attention, without trying, I could choke to death and still be smiling, I love you so crazy has it been a minute already

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[ FICTION]

God Send

C

Barbara Lawhorn

atholic Mass was incomprehensible to me, but I understood the church’s ceiling was

like a ship’s hull, turned upside down. It made me think of my father’s canoe, flipped and set on sawhorses, painted a glossy racer green. My mom had painted Sweet Alice in swooping cursive and it looked like that white script might go flying off the hull. My mom was the sweet Alice he named the canoe after, and it sat unused although my mom was adrift. We were in

Photography: cottonbro studio, Pexels.com

the wake of his death—an accident on a construction site in Denver, Colorado, a swinging crane—and death had directed us back to her childhood home smack dab in the middle of the midwestern heartland and the Catholic parish she had grown up in. Church was new to me, but my mom had calmly explained as I sat next

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to her in the small U-Haul truck chugging through Kansas on our way from Colorado to Illinois that weekly Mass was going to be a condition of living with my grandparents, and so was going to Catholic school. It was late summer of 1987 and I was eleven years old, going into fifth grade. How odd to be nearing fifty now and feeling, in some ways, as young and uncertain as I did then.

Saint Patrick’s Church had the thick, dusty silence of a library and stained glass that caught light and threw it and made me want to be saintly. I desperately wanted to be an altar boy, but girls weren’t allowed yet.

I liked learning when to sit and kneel and stand. It felt like story time at the library when the readings and gospel were given, and I liked the repetition woven into the Mass, the structure built like construction scaffolding, and listening to the priest’s homilies. The priest, Father Marcus, reminded me of Abraham Lincoln, who I had been a little in love with since the second grade when I did a book report on him. Father Marcus was tall with a long and bony face which made me think of my horse calendar. Something about his face and his thick, dark, pomaded hair made me think he could do with being fed apples, carrots, and sugar cubes while I spoke to him in a honeyed voice and placed kind hands upon him.

There was a lonesome quality about him that made me think he needed affection. He had hands as big as pie plates, which he motioned with as I imagined Lincoln once did, and a baritone voice that was richly resonant and as dense as a flourless chocolate cake. His homilies were layered, and I liked that. He’d have separate strands, but in the end they all came together, braided in a conclusion that closed like a door clicking shut in a way that life rarely ever offered closure. His elderly mother sat in the front pew dressed like a wizened Jackie Onassis, I imagined. Her hair, beneath a pillbox hat, was a Ronald McDonald shade of orange, and her lips were painted to match. She lived with him in the rectory until she died.

My own mother wore bell-bottom jeans, tapestry shirts that were older than me, and dangling hippie earrings that sometimes sounded like bells chiming. Her hair was braided and the tip was like a thick paintbrush skimming the small of her back. She would put concealer on the dark circles beneath her eyes and a liquid rouge the pink of sunsets on her cheekbones, and I loved watching her put mascara on with the tiny wand. She’d gloss her lips with Vaseline, and regard herself only briefly.

She was forever telling me I was more than the vessel of my body, and it was important to tend with care for our bodies but not confuse them

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with who we actually are. At eleven, I was my body most completely and at home in it too.

My mother was an artist. Her parents struggled with this, but I was so proud to walk with her, hand in hand, into Saint Patrick’s. Her parents were dear people who I came to love, but this was before we found a way to forge a family. This was when we felt like uninvited guests, my mom and me against the world, alone in a lifeboat. Although my grandparents had six bedrooms, my mother and I lived in one together.

We arrived in Mason, Illinois, three days before school began. My grandparents had arranged for my enrolment at Saint Patrick’s school. It was a brick building, completely nondescript, and in a strange state of transition. My mother had been taught by nuns in habits, strict and straight as the rulers they were known to rap knuckles with, but my teacher was a nun who wore cream-colored slacks and was sitting on her desk, strumming her guitar and singing John Denver’s “Grandma’s Feather Bed.” Her blonde hair was plaited in a French braid, and her camisole was evident beneath a sheer, beige blouse that was tied in a loopy bow around the neck. She looked more like a glamorous flight stewardess than a nun, but I had never met a nun before, so what did I know? Sister Maria and my mom seemed to be like some sort of magnetic science experiment, and energy crackled between them that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

“Beatrice,” Sister Maria called, placing her guitar in the open case at her feet, “look at the reading bathtub I just created this very morning. I understand you love to read. Climb in!”

I did, and my mother laughed. Oh, what I would do to hear that sound today. Did I, nestled in a claw-foot tub filled with throw pillows, hear it for the delicacy it was? I remember smiling at my mother because it was music I had not heard much since my father died. She tossed her head back, and her lovely neck was exposed, the wishbone of her clavicle, and it was like silk scarves being pulled by the hand of the wind, glittering rain while the sun was glimmering, icy grape soda with a bucket of buttered popcorn and a movie just starting on the big screen. We were living in a world of shadow and absence, and it seemed fitting to have to traverse a new landscape because inside I was lost. I now think about my mom, juggling her grief, solo parenting under the watchful and sometimes judgmental wingspan of her parents, in a place that had outdated and incorrect ideas about who she was.

“Bea, you look entirely at home,” my mom said, her hazel eyes suddenly brimming with tears. “This is a trip,” she said, turning to face Sister Maria.

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“I had fifth grade in this room too, only my teacher was nothing like you and a bathtub full of throw pillows would have been considered sinful.”

Sister Maria reached out and took my mother’s hand as though everyone did this without thought. “Isn’t life strange? Don’t you think it is really something how circumstances converge?”

“Life is certainly strange. And yes. It is something.”

Sister Maria turned my mom’s hand over, examining it. There was a smear of paint, crimson, like weeping stigmata, on the back of it. “Are you an artist?”

My mom nodded. It was a small, nearly imperceptible nod. She did not declare herself as I was used to.

“She’s a great artist,” I called, popping my head above the rim of the bathtub, watching these two women become friends. “She paints, and sculpts with wood and does lithography. Her work centers mostly on the female form and the divinity found there.” I had heard my mom say this once after two glasses of wine.

My mom pursed her lips and shrugged. “Maybe I was an artist. Now, I find myself widowed and living with my parents in the house I grew up in.

Now, I’m mostly Beatrice’s mom.” The tears spilled over her cheekbones and she closed her eyes like the Jesus on the crucifix above the doorway.

I regarded him, the wound at his side, his crown of thorns over his long, hippie hair, and his ribs so easy to count. My mom called Jesus a love artist and a great man who had been mythologized through stories. My grandma said he was the Son of God. Father Marcus said he was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I closed my eyes. I had not been taught to pray, but I tried on my own. Help my mom. Please. Help my mom. Please.

Maria bounced on the balls of her feet in her ballet flats, grabbed both of my mother’s hands, and made a high-pitched yelp. “I need your help.

Will you come in and teach art? We need someone to teach art. It’s totally part time, but in our staff meeting, we realized we have a need. Beatrice, stay there. You,” she said, nearly shouting and looking at my mother with such sweet intensity and enthusiasm my mom had no choice but to squeeze her hands in response though the tears were dripping from her chin, “come with me. What’s your name? I haven’t even asked your name!”

“Alice Elizabeth.”

“Alice Elizabeth. You are a godsend. Come with me. Beatrice, grab a book and settle in. You mom is an artist and will soon be an art teacher!

God is good.”

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The sun fell through the wall of windows. All of them were open and it was August in the Midwest, so the air was thick and I could smell my feet. I didn’t bother to grab a book because although once I had devoured books, since my dad died I couldn’t read. The words swam and the page overwhelmed and my brain was filled with ants. I understand now it was grief, a lack of focus, but I hadn’t told my mother. I saw the way she stood before a canvas, regarding it and not moving, and I did the same thing, only with an open book in my lap, trying to remember to turn the pages as a reader would. Now, I closed my eyes and felt like I was in a porcelain womb made for me, and my knees trembled. Had God answered my prayer, or was it simple synchronicity?

My mom had explained my father’s death as an accident—a convergence of events that seemed related, but weren’t actually, although they resulted in my father dying. It was instantaneous, she said, and he didn’t suffer. Jesus suffered, had chosen suffering. I put my hand on my heart and thought, Heal. I imagined myself on a cloud, my father beside me, telling me in the hushed voice and actual words he had once spoken to me in real life, to imagine myself weightless, each breath taking me closer to sleep, to the freedom and weightlessness of sleep, to the liberation and mystery of my dream life. When I awoke, my mother and Sister Maria were peering at me, both wearing small, gentle smiles like the Virgin Mary statue in the corner of the room, and the sun lit them up like haloed saints and their many hands reached for me in unison to pull me up.

On unsteady feet, still sleep muddled, my mother and I walked out to the parking lot with our arms linked like conjoined pretzels. I would soon learn to cross my arms like this in prayer in Sister Maria’s class, and honestly, sometimes now I place my hands on my own shoulders and hold myself fiercely. Back then, my mother and I matched steps naturally. I had been born of this woman. It strikes me now as a messy miracle, ripe with pleasure and pain. I could feel my mother was buzzing hard on what just happened.

“That was weird,” she admitted. “Are you okay with me teaching art at your school?”

I nodded wordlessly, glad she would be a touchstone. I was a kid starting a new school in a new place. My father died less than three months ago.

“I think I just made friends with a nun,” she whispered and bumped me with her hip.

“I’d never pick her out in a nun lineup,” I said, honestly.

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“She’s married to Jesus,” she whispered, her eyebrows raised, and then she said, “Don’t go getting any ideas. You get to decide what to believe, but I don’t want you running off to a convent and marrying Jesus. That’s what Maria did. Against her parents’ wishes, she eloped with Jesus.”

We locked eyes and we laughed and laughed, caught the current of joy for a moment and rocked on it. It seemed absurd, but later, in Mass, looking up at the large crucifix behind the altar, the soulful, downcast eyes of Jesus would seem to find me, and I would look at Sister Maria, so rapturously singing. Sometimes she would wipe tears away, unashamed of crying, her smile wide the whole time. She told my mother once that marrying Jesus really let her marry the whole world, let her grapple with loving all humanity.

My mom said she couldn’t imagine being married to anyone other than Mike. It jarred me to hear my Dad’s name. She didn’t want to kiss or be touched by anyone other than Mike. She said even when times were hard, he’d reach for her and pull her in, sex her silly so whatever had been hard didn’t seem so hard. Maria laughed. She said she wasn’t married to Jesus like that, but she’d had her fun and she didn’t miss it. Or when she did, she tried to offer it up, like a prayer or a gift, one that could expand her sense of being. She told my mom there were ways of being religious and sensual too, committed to paying attention to her senses, to seeing God in everything, abundance and absence included. They would have coffee together on weekends, and they’d forget I was there, perched with a book on my lap.

Forget I was always bearing witness.

My mom spilled affection. I think now about how maybe she sought touch in the safe ways—ruffling my hair, hugging me up, kissing my cheeks, and holding my hand. She’d cuddle me on the couch and read to me at night. She told me she had vowed to be physically demonstrative because her parents weren’t. I always basked in it. I always thought it was normal, but the kids at my school flocked to her. She was different from the other moms, not just in the way she dressed, but in the way she regarded each kid. Clifford Mason told me he was pretty sure she could see his soul. Jill Whitlock asked me if she could spend the night. “Is your mom always like she is in art class?”

My mom was except when she wasn’t, except when sadness folded her up and I found her crying with her pillow pressed to her face. I’d bring her honeyed tea, then rub her back. I’d sing Cat Stevens songs. I’d make a cradle out of my body when she couldn’t get out of bed, and whisper a litany

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of what the world still held for us, even if we must navigate it as a place without my father in it.

Sister Maria held her pain too. They held hands like sisters and hugged like family members who cherished each other. They kissed each other’s cheeks goodbye. They said “I love you” upon meeting and upon leaving one another. I thought nothing of this. I only wanted a friend like they were to each other—instantaneously known to each other, it seemed. At ease, even when they talked about hard stuff.

My grandparents seemed to regard us from a distant shore as though we were a bobbing canoe in the center of a lake, but I know now they had their own lives, as rich and complicated as mine. And it was through them I made my first deep friend.

Mrs. Swan was my grandmother’s friend. She found herself suddenly tending to a husband rendered speechless by a stroke and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, and, while her daughter was in rehab, caring for her grandson, Joshua. Joshua was my age, but because of the events of the previous year, he was redoing fourth grade, now at Saint Patrick’s rather than in public school. Mrs. Swan lived two blocks from my grandmother in a house that looked like part of the set of Gone with The Wind. The house had pillars, four of them, and a wraparound front porch. The shutters of each window were periwinkle blue. In the front yard there was a gazebo, and inside there was a rope swing with a wooden seat. Inside, the house had wall-to-wall carpeting and a huge television set in a wooden framework. There was a magnificent mahogany-colored leather couch and high-back chairs, and Mr. Swan sat on the couch with an oxygen tank going, and one leg of his khakis rolled up to show the stump below his knee where his leg had been amputated.

He had diabetes as the shit cherry atop the shit sundae, Mrs. Swan once confided in me.

The house was musty and dim, with the curtains forever drawn and the television blaring. On the coffee table there was a behemoth cut glass candy bowl full of ribbon candy. The candy was rapturously glorious to look at and sickeningly sweet. In order to taste one, we had to spend time watching cartoons with Mr. Swan. Mrs. Swan had told me that there was nothing wrong with his brain, and it was important to treat him like a person because he was a person. His body had failed him, but once he’d been a boy of my age, and once they had been young and had beautiful bodies they had greatly enjoyed, and now, they were just old.

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“It’ll happen to you. Don’t think it won’t,” she said, her nose nearly touching mine. She wore her white hair in a flapper pageboy, and her blue-gray eyes glimmered like mica. She smelled like talcum powder and Doritos, her one and only vice, she said, besides bourbon before bed. “Ah,” she said, “I think you see me too, Beatrice. Right into my never aging soul.

I think I can see yours as well. Mr. Swan’s name is Reginald, but he loves to be called Reggie. You can call him Reggie. My grandson desperately needs a friend. I am hopeful you can be that friend. Can you use a friend too?”

I nodded.

“Let me hear your voice, please. I’m curious about the music of your voice. We get our one voice and it is important to use it. People will try to make you quiet and small and sometimes we lose it ourselves or it is taken from us. We must resist and raise it as much as possible and fearlessly, which means feeling the fear and doing what turns your knees and voice wobbly.” Here she raised her own fist and shook it. Then, she opened her fist and like a conductor, or a magician, gestured my voice forward with the hithering of her fingers.

“Yes,” I said, enunciating loudly because my grandmother said her hearing was going, “I could use a friend.”

“Joshua,” Mrs. Swan yelled, “come here and meet Beatrice. She has a lovely voice. Clear as a church bell sounding on Sunday morning.”

Josh was my height with red hair. He wore thick glasses that magnified his green eyes. They were green, green like beach glass with the sun shining through. His skin was pale as milk and covered in freckles that I bet tasted like nutmeg and cinnamon. I asked him once and he let me lick his arm. He giggled when he saw my face fall in disappointment.

“They just taste like your skin,” I said and that giggle took off on four wheels. His laugh was as effervescent as a 7 Up that had been shook up .“You licked my freckles, freak. You thought they tasted like baking spices.

You’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met.” He shoved me and then got serious. “Seriously, the weirdest.” When he smiled it was like the sun breaking through clouds.

Josh loved the weird, the freaky, and the wild. I knew this meant I was maybe his favorite person ever. We walked to school together, to and from.

Really this meant I got to his grandma’s early and we watched cartoons and I told Reggie what was what in my world, and then we meandered to school. We took new routes, hoping to get lost, and we did get lost in conversation, but all sidewalks seemed to lead to Saint Patrick’s. I want to be-

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lieve I am not casting my mind back and remembering wrongly. Josh and I were suffering in our own intense ways, and yet, maybe through movement and miles, our walk a good thirty minutes at a fast clip, we volleyed questions to one another. Soon they went from our favorite color (mine, yellow; Joshua’s, aqua) to the most scared we’d ever been (mine, when the house burned down next to us and my father went out to watch and I thought he’d burn up; Josh’s, the first time he called the police when he was five.) to whether we’d eat a baby food jar of termites for fifty dollars (both of us, yes). Our lives were difficult, and yet I remember laughing so hard we both had to stop and bend over, tears streaming down our faces. What could we have said that made us laugh like that?

And I suppose if I know anything, it is if you find someone you can laugh with like that as an adult, well, don’t hold on too hard, but don’t let go either. Curl up with that person like a dog in sunlight. Lap it up like a kitten’s pink sandpaper tongue luxuriating in heavy cream. We took real pleasure in the weather too, the seasons, and we mapped the small world of Mason, Illinois, as though we were adventuring cartographers and explorers, kicking rocks and carrying sticks we ricocheted off brick walls and fences and tapped on sidewalks. And while we were labeled by others because I had a dead dad and his mom was an addict, together, this was just part of who we were.

You should know that Josh is dead now. The last time I saw him was when I went home for my mom’s funeral. He came to the wake, and we hadn’t seen each other since the summer after high school graduation, so a decade had passed. He was wasted in an ill-fitting suit, smelling of vodka and too much cheap cologne trying to cover it. He was working his way through his second divorce and living in the trailer park on the bottom lip of town, the saddest one. It hurt my heart to see him in such a state. He hugged me for a long time and said, “Beatrice, you know how this goes. And if you need a buddy, you know I got your back, okay?”

I tried to speak, but the words were lodged like a handful of gravel, and he pulled me in. You know, drunk or not, it takes a rare person who can hold a person upright when they want to collapse. Joshua never made me feel wrong, not once, and he still looked at me like all my parts were stained glass with sun coming through, and my dark was just there because it should be, like natural shadow. When he kissed my cheek, his own cheek was wet too. He invited me for dinner and I promised I’d go, but he didn’t have a phone, and it was a promise I didn’t intend to keep even as I made

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it. I think sometimes, being seen and known is hard because it means you can’t pretend you are someone other than who you are.

Once, during that summer after high school, things could have gone one way with us, but I knew choosing him meant choosing Mason, choosing what I already knew and what maybe I assumed. We’d love each other well despite our wounds, but maybe our wounds would cause us to harm each other too—really harm each other. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting Joshua and said so.

What I actually said was, “I can’t imagine you naked.” And he took his shirt off, and then his shorts and stood there in his underwear and socks.

He closed his eyes, took a shuddering breath, and shook his arms out like a swimmer preparing for a race. Then, he took off his glasses and shucked off his underwear and then his socks. He flung them with abandon and faced me. He held my eyes.

“I mean, I can’t imagine kissing you. I don’t think of you as a boy.”

He came toward me slowly and said, “I would very much like to kiss you, is that okay? And then you don’t have to imagine it. You can just know.” And he did, gently at first, and with his eyes open, and everything in me swam together like my mom’s oil paintings where I could see the paints swirled and also separated, and my eyes closed and goose bumps covered me, and I could feel him pressed against me, a man. When we came up for air, I whispered, “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to not be your friend.”

He stepped back and put his hand on his heart like he was going to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and I saw I had already hurt him, and he loved me anyway and he understood, but he was braver than I was and more curious. He was willing to see where it would go, who we’d become alone and together.

“Ah, Bea, we love each other best and in all the ways,” he said, “but maybe we just won’t be lovers in this way. Maybe we’ll be better than that.

Maybe we’ll be deep and true friends. Lovers come and go, I guess, but maybe friends stick around?” He wasn’t wearing his glasses and his freckles stood out like constellations on his naked face.

I put my hand on his cheek. He pressed against my open palm like a cat.

Don’t you think there are a million ways to make love? I didn’t know this then, but I was to learn. I didn’t know that someone could make love to you by taking you on a country drive, or out for lemon ice cream, or cook you something so spicy you break out in a whole body sweat and your lips swell up from the heat and all the kissing before and after. I didn’t know

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that a hand on a cheek and a beloved face pressing against it hard and hungry for that touch could be lovemaking. Or someone sitting next to you and letting you melt and unspool and just being with someone was making deep love—someone letting you rest and put the world down. I thought you had to take your clothes off. Look, I have to let all the time we were deep friends count for something, count for everything, actually. Count for more than so many have. I have to be honest too and say, I stepped to him, and I kissed him, again and again, because I knew I was leaving. I already knew. He thought our coupling was evidence of me staying, so maybe no matter how well you know a person, there’s never any way to know all of a person. When I left Mason, I really left, and the only intention I held in my heart was that I wouldn’t be back. He was my deep and true friend. He was my beloved, and maybe nobody else ever saw either of us like we saw one another, and maybe I wasn’t a deep and true friend worthy of his love—not in the end, not really.

I am trying to figure out what is conditioning, or programming, and what is choice—free will. And maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe we make choices based on things we understand and stuff under the surface we just can’t be aware of. Maybe life just happens. Maybe meaning and purpose are stories we tell ourselves; maybe we write our own gospels to convince ourselves of mattering. Joshua wrote his own ending. Blood alcohol level of .4, in his grandmother’s gray and rusting Buick on the one train track on the outskirts of Mason that didn’t have arms. They found pieces of that car blown two miles out in the neighboring field. I imagine Joshua telling me he was just nature, scattered to the fields, and to think of his death as a return to nature. We comfort ourselves in the ways we can.

I loved that car. It was Mrs. Swan’s baby. When it rained, she’d chauffeur us to Saint Patrick’s. She played a cassette tape of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and moved her arthritically knobbly fingers to the tunes. She was old in body, her skin like crepe paper, but she was so alive, like a downed power line zapping and popping. It was impossible not to fall in love with her. She’d found a way to be wildly herself and also within the confines of the mundane requirements of life, which is to say she still seemed to be a missile always seeking joy. Sometimes, that seems damn near impossible to me, but she made it seem easy.

The last time I was in that car with both Josh and Mrs. Swan, she drove us through fog thick as pea soup. She turned the music down so she could concentrate.

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“When I was a child, on days like today, I always hoped the fog would swallow the school up. I always felt this possibility in me as I walked with my brothers. And one day, it happened. One day, the school was nowhere to be found and we had no choice but to backtrack, holding hands, the fog a viscous membrane we had to push against. It took us all day to go the two miles back home, and once safe in our kitchen we clamored about how there was no school where the school should be and how the fog felt like liquid cement glue we had to struggle against. My mother said, ‘hogwash and bedknobs, what kind of leg pullers were we?’ She didn’t believe a word.

But you know, before my brother Henry died, he asked me, ‘Lottie, do you remember the day the school disappeared?’”

She looked at me in the rearview mirror, a truth teller, not a leg puller.

“There is magic all around us. Don’t kid yourselves. You two get it on your walks to school. What would we do with the day if the school disappeared in this fog? Where would we go?”

“I’d travel back in time,” I said, “to when you were young.” It popped out of my mouth without any kind of forethought and Mrs. Swan laughed so hard her eyes closed and she took her foot off the gas.

“Beatrice, you delight and flatter me.”

Joshua said, “If we had a time machine, I’d want to visit ancient Egypt.”

Mrs. Swan signaled her turn and the clicking sound was like a metronome in a car suddenly quiet. She parked. The school was there, but made something sinister draped as it was in a shawl of fog. I wanted to stay in the warm car with two of my favorite people, and Dave Brubeck the soundtrack to forever.

“Drat,” she spit, “I was really hoping the fog would do its work. No bother. Beatrice and Joshua, after school, don’t dally. I think I have something that will fit the bill for both of you in regards to time travel. Now scat, cats, and study hard. Reggie will be lost without me and waiting for his brekkie.”

The fog burned off and we ran home through a warm and overcast autumn day. When we opened the front door, Reggie sat, tube in his nose delivering the good stuff, but looking dapper in a tuxedo that hung on his bony frame. Mrs. Swan had slicked his sparse white hair and side parted it so it swept over his pink scalp. The whole place seemed to sway as though we were on a ship due to the candles all over the place and the flickering flames. Mrs. Swan entered from the kitchen dressed a lot like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. The dress was simple enough, a cream-colored linen with a plunging neckline that let us see her utilitarian old woman brassiere.

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They both smelled pungently of mothballs. What took my breath away were the snakes she wore, wrapped around her withering biceps, and a wreath of what looked and sounded like golden coins that came to a rearing cobra of gold in the middle of her forehead. She held a photo album, heavy and gilded too, and she sat next to Reggie. In my mind, I took a photo, for there was a moment when she looked at him and she was ageless and in love. I don’t know that I will face aging as she did, my own or anyone else’s, but Reggie looked at her, and maybe there are things beyond words, and maybe what they had couldn’t be put into words. My mom looked at my dad like that once and my dad looked at her. I was jealous then. I’m jealous now.

We spent the next hour, Joshua and I, as bookends to this couple, looking at Reggie and Loretta Swan in another life when cinema was new; Reggie played for the silent films, and they both attended the opening of The Lark Theater, now the most decrepit theater in town, playing two old films back-to-back for two dollars on weekends only, although the lobby was all fake red velvet and there was an incredible chandelier dripping light. Mrs. Swan brought us there with them, recreating the magic, the music, and how after the decadent night of newness and excitement, Reggie, in the side alley, had taken her chin between his thumb and forefinger and said, “Now Lottie, with your permission, I plan to kiss you now.” And she, emboldened by the night, full of the swashbuckling she had just seen and bubbling over with the cartwheeling piano playing of Reggie, and feeling like she held the secrets of the sphinx and was part goddess herself, pulled away and said, “Not if I kiss you first, Reginald” and she said it was her first kiss, and she took it just like Eve took the apple, and she wasn’t sorry no way and no how, and it sent electricity through her whole body and she worried all the metal she had on would get her electrocuted

by Reggie’s charge.

“It’d be three years before we married, but you know, that was just a legality, and a religious to-do for our families. For me, we just made sense.

We made sense and magic and life grew up around us and we sure did have ourselves a time walking through it together.”

Reggie moved his head, put it on her shoulder. She closed the book, leaned back against the couch, and they looked like weary, old folks. I could tell she was tired.

I got up and carefully took the photo album off her lap. I got the ottoman and put her feet up. “Mrs. Swan, would you like a cup of tea?”

She nodded.

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“Joshua, will you blow out the candles? I’ll make tea.”

Josh moved about the room, extinguishing the flames, and the room dimmed.

“Beatrice, before you go, can you take off the head piece and the arm bracelets?”

The headpiece was lighter than I thought. I held it with both hands and coveted it hard. I had to unclasp the snakes and pull them down the lengths of her arms. They had heft.

She looked up at me. “You know, it takes a special kind of person to wear such a getup.”

“I can only imagine. You looked like a movie star back then. You still do.”

“I’m an old woman, Bea, and while this was fun, I have no need for them. Those are for you.” She held up her hand. “Say, simply and with intention, ‘thank you’ when a gift and a compliment are offered.” She closed her eyes, and leaned her head back. “Sugar and milk, please.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Swan.”

“You are welcome, so welcome. Can you and Joshua wrestle Reggie out of his tuxedo? I don’t know what possessed me today. I am plumb tuckered out and overdid it. I’ll place the blame on the fog this morning.

It gave me notions.”

“What wonderful notions they were, Mrs. Swan.” And then because a candle flickered and lit her face just so, she struck me as needing protection, so I placed a hand on her head like my mother would do, a blessing of sorts, and then I kissed each temple. My mom said some places never get kissed, and the soft skin of the temple holds so many worries, it ought to be kissed often. Finally, I kissed the space between her eyebrows where our worries tend to perch. A trinity of kisses.

Mrs. Swan opened her eyes and said, “Why child, thank you. Thank you.”

B We were doing a play. We would perform it inside the church. Sister Maria asked me to be the voice of God. I would be behind the altar, with the microphone Father Marcus usually wore clipped to his vestments. It was the story of creation. Joshua, as a man of science, said it was all a load of malarkey. Oh, Joshua, who explained to me how babies were made, and loved dinosaurs and stars and planets and plants and explained atoms and root systems of trees and decomposition. Joshua, for whom I cried when I

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learned the Brontosaurus never really existed. I was driving to work when NPR told me and I found myself weeping in the parking lot, trying to pull myself together because he loved that nonexistent creature the best. Joshua who tasted soil and licked his finger to find the direction of the wind and who held up his bean sprouting in a wet paper towel inside the green house of a freezer bag. Joshua was the serpent and he said everything with a hissing lisp that cracked me up. I was glad I couldn’t see him, sheltered behind the altar. Sixth graders were Adam and Eve. I was God. Joshua, a fourth-grader, was the snake. A third grader was the nonverbal tree who handed over an apple, and the first and second graders sang a song. We practiced for two weeks, and it was going to be part of Catholic School Week, the week we had Mass every day instead of just on Friday and that culminated on Easter. We were Monday’s Mass.

That weekend, my mom had finished a painting. It was eleven months after my dad’s death, and it had been in the works since Christmas when Father Marcus had given a homily in which he explained that according to Jewish custom, Mary had most likely given birth alone in that barn. My mother had painted Mary as a fourteen-year-old girl, alone, in active laboring. Naked and alone, embodying the act of birth, with the thick hair of infant Jesus emerging from her vagina, along with holy blood and excrement. Her eyes were closed and her mouth opened in a howl. Father Marcus had placed the focus on Joseph outside the barn, listening to Mary labor and being unable to enter the barn—his torment. My mom groaned and whispered to me, “Imagine being Mary.”

Apparently, she had, richly. On Monday, she packed the canvas in my grandparents’ back seat and took me to school as Mass was the first thing and she wanted to show Sister Maria. I practiced my lines in my booming God voice, trying for deep and baritone. When we parked, my mom asked, “Why the TV announcer voice?”

“God isn’t a woman,” I said.

“How do you know? I mean, women are created in God’s image too, right? Try saying it in your voice, as you.”

I did. “In the beginning, I created the heavens and the earth,” I began and when I got to “And I said, ‘Let there be Light,” my mother grabbed my hand so hard the bones in my hand rubbed together. The volume of her voice and its intensity frightened me.

“You are the light. You have the light inside you. Read it with your voice, please? Sister Maria gave you this part for a reason. Your voice is lovely as is.

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Don’t mask it. Don’t you dare. You are my beloved daughter of whom I am proud and don’t make your voice anything other than what it actually is.”

She stared at me and I pulled my hand back.

“I’m sorry, Beatrice. I’m sorry. It’s just. It’s just that I think we are all sacred, and you don’t have to be anything other than Beatrice Michaela Lawson.”

I nodded like I knew what she meant, only I didn’t. I was already thinking about how I had to cross my arms over my chest and get Father Marcus’ blessing, his huge hand on my head, heavier than Mrs. Swan’s headpiece, which I actually had in my bookbag. I planned to put it on as I said my lines to call up the majesty it invoked and to be part snake like Josh. No one would see me. No one would know.

“Your father saw you being born. Most places didn’t let fathers in the birthing rooms, but your father demanded it and you know what he said?

‘It was the most wondrous thing he ever saw, the most brutal and the most beautiful too,’ and his face, well he was laughing and crying at the same time, he was so overwhelmed with awe. We both held you and I knew that love was everything, the only thing, and that’s my religion. Do you understand?”

I whispered, “Yes,” but I didn’t, not yet. And anyhow, Sister Maria rapped on my door. My mom said, “Break a leg, love,” and kissed my cheek about a million times.

Sister Maria was smiling at me, expectant. “Beatrice, you will be wonderful. You will be embodied in your voice. Although we won’t be able to see you, you will be with us completely.”

My mom was carefully pulling the canvas out of the back seat. Sister Maria’s breath hitched and she placed a hand over her heart. Now, I think the body is a book I want to read and know and respect and handle with care. Her face was telling a deep truth. She began to cry. She covered her face with both of her hands and her crying became weeping. I did not know where to look.

My mom wrestled her painting into the back seat, and closed the door softly, then moved around and gathered Sister Maria in her arms.

She carefully removed her hands from her face and gazed upon her.

I saw Father Marcus approaching. He did not know the context. He only saw my mother kissing her tears, one by one, saying, “Maria, your vulnerability is beauty. Maria, you are loved. Maria, you are loved by me.” He only saw two women embracing in such intimacy my own eyes were filling. I was on the outside of the moment, and peeled away

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when I saw Josh and Mrs. Swan entering the church. I broke into a jog to join them.

Inside the church, I crossed myself with fingers I had dabbled in holy water. I regarded the Virgin Mary, the folds of her dress and head covering falling like water. Her eyes were downcast, her head bent, her arms crossed as mine would be when I approached Father Marcus for blessing.

I joined my class and waited for Sister Maria. When she arrived, her eyes were still red, but she was calm and beatific. She walked me to my place behind the altar. As she moved to return to her pew, Father Marcus crooked his massive index finger from the curved vestibule. His face was stern.

Behind the altar, hidden from view, I clipped the microphone to my shirt, and kneeling, removed my book bag, unzipping it quietly. I carefully pulled out the rearing cobra headdress, replete with shimmering coins.

They sounded like birch leaves in the wind, a sound I had last heard with my father. When I had it in place, I lifted my head regally and saw Father Marcus looming over Sister Maria. I could hear him now too, seething.

“How dare you?” He spat, and spittle did fly.

Her eyes widened and she looked like a child to me, and this woman I loved, who just last week had recited the Beatitudes grandly and gloriously, stood as wordless as Reggie and shrank, receded, and was made small. I saw Father Marcus as an imposter, not a Father, not a conduit for God. A mere man, and in this moment, a cruel man.

“I saw you and Alice, as did the entire school. I saw you,” and there was an indictment there and in his pointing finger, “and I saw your sinfulness.”

I was never a mother, biologically, but as a teacher I have protected my students and loved them and have tried to nurture their minds and hearts and bodies, and I felt in me a stirring to protect Sister Maria with the only thing I had. I clicked on the small microphone. I do not remember getting to my feet, but I was standing as I boomed in my own voice, “Silence. Father Marcus. Silence.”

And silence fell upon him, his mouth perfectly round and his eyes large, and his accusatory pointer finger frozen.

“Blessed are the nuns who love. Who love the world so fully in a way the world doesn’t always understand. Blessed are the nuns who sing John Denver and make reading bathtubs and marry Jesus. Blessed are you, Sister Maria.”

The congregation looked at me, and I raised my arms like I had seen Father Marcus do so my palms were open to heaven. I scanned the faces, my knees suddenly watery and trembling. I saw Mrs. Swan.

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“Blessed are the wise who drive Buicks and listen to Dave Brubeck and love their husbands so much, even when they lose a leg and lose their words and their heart is failing. Blessed are the old who have lived many lives and still love their daughters who smoked crack and couldn’t mother, and so had to be both grandmother and mother and friend even though they are old and tired and are dying, they keep choosing to be really alive and keep finding magic and mystery. Blessed are you, Mrs. Swan.”

My father was laughing and crying and I was leaving the only safety and comfort I had ever known. I was so small. I was so tiny.

The world was so big.

Joshua’s eyes sought mine and asked me a question: What the hell are you doing? Maybe he read my face too, the fear, because he nodded, like a go on now, nod. A you got this nod.

My mother stood up. She was in the back of the church. She was going to come for me, but she had a long way to go. The church was a ship, turned upside down and filling with water, and I would surely drown.

“Blessed are the widows who miss the only man whose touch and face and voice and brain thoughts they hunger for. Blessed are the mothers who paint and create and feed and nourish and who are so depleted and no one asks them what they need or how they do it and every day they do it. They do it. They labor babies out of their vaginas and then they have to keep them alive. They have to give the mother love. Even when they think they can’t.”

I saw the Virgin Mary painting my mom made in my mind. Then Mary was my mother, and I saw my father, who I was so afraid I was forgetting, busting into that barn and taking her hand, and saying, “I am here. You are doing so great.” And I was the baby. I was the baby coming out amid that blood and excrement. My father was laughing and crying and I was leaving the only safety and comfort I had ever known. I was so small. I was so tiny.

The world was so big.

I saw my father dipping his hat into a mountain stream so I could drink from it. I saw him on a blanket and the pines in the wind bending and sounding like an ocean and him putting that hat over his eyes and saying, “Beatrice, this here is the life. I am the winner of life. There is nowhere and

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no one else I would rather be with.” I saw my dad with the goat skin jug he wore slung like a messenger bag. I saw my dad in an old photo carrying a case that had a typewriter in it. I saw my father, a pipe clenched in his teeth, his smile real and true, and I knew it was his true, real smile because his crooked canine, the twin of my own, was showing.

“Blessed are the kids who lose a parent, who have a dead father, or a mom in rehab, or whose parents are divorced. Blessed is my father who loved me. Blessed is my dad who is dead. Blessed is me who will never see my father again. Not ever. Blessed is my dad. Dad,” I howled into the microphone. “Dad.” And the church was filled with the sound of my grief breaking open and before I could fall to my knees, there was my mother, and Mrs. Swan and Joshua and Sister Maria. There they all were, casting their net of arms about me, their voices braiding to call out my name so that it was the sound of love, love bigger than the church, than the heavens, love so big it was the closest I can come to ever imagining God. Love, catching me and holding me in the net their many hands made.

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[ POETRY]

Rest Eternal, Grant Me By: Laura King

sleep and dreams my prayer, but night, I wake to white noise, swirling day’s debris.

Too acquainted with madness, I am in a safe room, when a moonlight sail raiments my face until the cell returns, motionless; thin mattress, white sheet, single pillow, clock mocks with only, instead of so long— seven stars, seven spirits, seven scrolls, seven seals.

Seven husbands, she died childless, no one remembers her.

The universe is melting, and other scary thoughts.

Catastrophe means overturn, the doctor warns of negative assumptions, I turn over and practice happy— seven kites on seven strings, tethered to seven fingers.

Look! Even in the doomed sky, I control them.

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[ FICTION]

T

A Hundred Dozen

he body still looks like a girl.

Were it not for the rigid angle of her elbows

and the mound of sand blown over her pelvis, the body might have been a child from the west

Megan Draper

country. Her murky blonde hair and pale skin match the others. She might have sat up, rubbed the golden grains from her eyelashes, and asked with a full-toothed smile, “Please, can I have a drink of water?

But it’s not a child from the West country.

Photography: Tomã¡å¡ MalãK, Pexels.com

Bodies do not sit or rub or ask.

“Why doesn’t she have shoes?” Card points to the bare and blistered toes.

If Sare were here, she would scold him for asking. Sare, though only a few years older than I am, likes to talk as if she were from Mom’s generation. She works in silence because someone

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long dead decided it was rotten luck to speak when looking at a body. I don’t know if she believes that or if she just believes enough in our mother.

I am not Sare. Proximity to a body shouldn’t deter conversation. A cook doesn’t stop stirring the pot in the presence of a corn husk. I answer Card, “Her family took her shoes.”

“Why?” “They might have had another child who needed them.”

“Why didn’t they take her?” he asks. He hovers over the closed eyes but doesn’t touch. This is only the third body he’s seen. They are still like blown sandglass to him—delicate and unique.

I kneel and sweep part of the sandy blanket away. Rust-colored pants whip loosely around the ankles. They’ve left the shirt, too. Most families can’t afford to leave so much. They must have more respect for their dead than most. Or they haven’t yet gotten used to leaving naked corpses behind.

I say, “They have a long way to go. It doesn’t make sense to carry the extra weight.”

“She doesn’t look very heavy.” Card kneels, bravely brushing his fingers over the body’s shoulder.

“Good. Then I don’t want to hear you complain.” I swing my pack off my back, untying the drawstring. I start by stripping off the pants, folding and tucking them into the pack. The fabric is coarse and thin but not the worst desert garb I’ve seen. Some fools from the east country don’t even wear pants long enough to tuck into their boots.

Card and I strip the body down to the undergarments. Per the burial tradition of the west country, a single coin rests on the navel. The dull, dark metal contrasts with the pale, static skin. I pocket it.

“What do you think her name was?” Card asks. He stands still as I button up the bag on his back.

“It doesn’t really matter,” I say.

“Maybe her mom was a tailor. Her clothes all fit really good.”

“Really well.”

“I bet she liked tiger lilies better than all flowers. And she liked to do hair, which is why hers is all braided.”

I pat my pocket to make sure the coin hasn’t escaped. “There’s no way to know any of that, Card.”

“Then maybe she had older siblings do her hair like Sare cuts ours. She was scared of the knife, though, like me, so she held super still. And when the haircut was finished she got to play with their pet lemur-fox.”

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“Lemur-foxes don’t live in the desert.”

“But they live in the West country! Uncle Dario saw one before,” he protests. “She had one.”

I shake my head.

Sand slips over my hard-soled boots, covering and uncovering the toes with every step. Our camp looks closer than it is, a soft blur waving in the heat. It starts moving toward us; our family must have finished loading the wagons and hitching the camel-rhinos.

I take a long drink of water from my sling and hand it to Card. The desert spreads across the horizon like precious butter sizzling in a pan. Sunlight colors everything gold. It must be the most beautiful place on earth.

Not that I’ve seen anywhere else to compare. I was born in the desert.

Its ferocity pumps through my veins. My people have made this place home for generations, migrating across the sands as traders and survivors. I’m not sure how many nomadic tribes there are. Aunt Mora once said that as long as there are more desert wolves than people, the desert won’t mind.

She also believes we shouldn’t talk around bodies.

When we go to the greatest oasis, there are usually four or five other family groups. Most of them have lived here as long as us, some even longer. I’m old enough now that the adults let me sit in while they share news and gossip. Most of the talk consists of which country has recently attacked, what refugees have said, and how bad the next sandstorms are supposed to be.

I’ve yet to enter the East and West countries. Sometimes, when we’re close to a border, I can see smoke clouds so large they make my eyes burn. Uncle Dario offered to take me with him last time he went into the city to trade.

“C’mon, boy. I can teach you how to talk to the merchants. There are riches in the cities that can’t be found here,” he’d said.

I’d refused. I imagine the East and West countries to be as ugly as our desert is beautiful. Refugees wouldn’t risk everything to escape from places worth visiting. They cross from both ways, always believing that something better can be earned on the other side. They don’t consider stopping in our desert. I hate them for it.

When we reach the camp, I’m glad to see we haven’t missed the evening meal. My family gathers in a lazy circle, sitting on bundles of supplies.

The twins try tossing bits of salted meat into each other’s mouths. Sare hands me a full water sling as she tousles Card’s hair.

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34

I know what the refugees call us.

Scavengers. Vulture-rats. Magpies. Thieves.

Looking at my aunts, uncles, and cousins, I try to see them through an outsider’s eyes. Aunt Harmony’s belt bears a baron’s seal from the west country, but her headscarf is from the east. My eldest cousin wears a silver necklace tarnished brown—a souvenir taken from a skeleton on a dare.

The weapon slung across my great uncle’s back saw both sides of the war before he took it from a guardsman’s grave.

There’s no shame in taking what someone else has left behind. Besides, the refugees are the ones escaping blindly into our desert. They come to us for supplies and advice when desperate enough. They’re the ones who scurry across the sand like worm-tailed rodents searching for another crevice to hide in.

When Sare wraps her arm around my shoulders, I feel a swell of pride in my gut.

“What did you find?” she asks.

“The girl was from the west,” Card answers. “She was going to be a warrior.”

The distance between Sare’s brows closes dangerously. “What?”

Card shrugs. “Or maybe she’d work with medicine like Aunt Harmony.”

“Ignore him,” I say. I show her everything.

“It’s different when one of us dies,” I answer when I’m sure my voice won’t betray me.

He sighs, a frustrated child. “How is it different?”

“It just is.” Dad died before Card was born. He was a toddler when Mom and baby Milly got a fever from a west country family who’d shared our fire.

I remember both times and Great Grandma before that. I remember the strangled silence as we left the bodies behind. We scavenged as much as we could, but it was a different kind of taking. Shame flushed my cheeks.

I understood for a terrible moment why the refugees look at us like we’re the dirty ones.

Card interrupts my thoughts. “Probably ’cause we know each other, right? We don’t have to guess.”

I succeed in blinking away the tears. “Sure.”

“What do you think that girl was like?”

Tension spirals down my spine. My shoulders curl toward my ears.

“Stop talking about her. She could have been any hundred dozen things. It doesn’t matter!”

In the wake of my outburst, the silence weighs like stones on my chest.

I usually leave the yelling to Sare. Before my pride quiets enough to allow an apology, Card’s small voice brims with wonder in the darkness.

“A hundred dozen,” he whispers.

B

B

“Are you awake?” Card hisses.

We lie cocooned in our bedrolls. Card and I have shared a tent since he was born. Sometimes, when the wind threatens sandstorms, all of us pile into the covered caravan. There isn’t enough room for us all to lie down inside, and I can never sleep. On those nights, I listen to my eldest cousin’s snores and hear Card giggle while Uncle Fare whispers stories of great hunts across the dunes.

I keep my back to my brother. The wall of the tent billows, a shadow moving against shadows. I’m pretty sure he’s going to ask me to go outside with him while he pees. He hasn’t outgrown fearing the dark. “What is it, Card?”

“When I die, will you take all my things and the coin from my belly?”

I flinch. The image of Card, eyes open and tempting the birds, fingers curled stiffly at his sides, crashes over me. Tears gather at the corners of my eyes. I’m glad he can’t see my face.

Several days later, when the sun hangs low in the sky, we catch up with the girl’s family. First, we find a small body that smells like sour urine.

Desert wolves discovered the body before we did, so there isn’t much. I pretend my stomach doesn’t heave at the sight. Grandpa flips the bloody coin from the body’s navel in the air as we walk, letting the twins shout bets on how it will land.

A few miles later, the bodies of the parents lie half-buried. Their arms are around each other, their mouths full of sand.

“Dehydration,” Aunt Harmony says. She looks away from the bodies when she speaks.

“Shame. We could have traded,” says Uncle Dario.

“They might still have food.” My great uncle points to the packs on their backs. That sets us all to work. I swarm around one of the packs with my aunts, turning away from the bodies holding each other. Card follows, eagerly peering over my shoulder.

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Aunt Harmony pulls out the first treasure: a pair of white working gloves.

“Water snake skin,” I observe.

She holds them out to me with a smile. I take the gloves and lie them in the sand. We find a baby blanket, a coin purse, another pair of gloves, a pickaxe, an empty canteen, and a change of women’s clothes. The clothes and gloves are evaluated and divided. The pickaxe is freshly sharpened and could make for a good trade when Uncle Dario ventures to the city. What did the refugees think they would do with a pickaxe in the desert?

Aunt Mora deems the pack itself too worn to take. She cuts off the woven cords and leaves the rest. The sun has disappeared behind the horizon, and someone has started a fire. A chill sweeps through me. My feet are glad we won’t be walking more, but I wish we’d moved further from the bodies.

“The desert wolves are probably still in the area. They know there’s food here,” Aunt Mora says.

I put my hand on Card’s shoulder. He tugs on my shirt. “What do they use those white gloves for?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve never seen gloves that color. They look special.”

“They don’t need them anymore,” I answer.

“Do we need them?”

I thump his back, pushing him toward the fire. The night cools my cheeks. “Let’s go eat.”

B My eyes open to the dark.

“I have to go pee,” Card whispers.

I roll over to face him. He’s only a black outline of curls and small shoulders. Exhaustion pulls at my eyelids. “Go by yourself,” I mutter.

“I don’t want to.”

“Take a torch.”

“Please.”

“No, Card.”

He groans like I’m the one being difficult. “I’ll pee in the tent. I’ll do it.”

I drag a hand over my face. “Fine. Fine, toss me my shoes.”

A second later, they thump beside me. I tug them on, grumbling about little brothers just loud enough that Card can hear. A soft fumbling sound tells me he’s putting on his boots. He tugs at the ties holding

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the tent flap closed, and the hazy light of the stars and moon falls over our bedrolls.

Coals glow in the dented sand where our fire has burned out. I take one of the oil-soaked torches from the caravan and dip it into the coals. Fire catches. Card holds my hand as we walk away from the camp. Normally, I wouldn’t let him hold onto me, but no one is around to see.

When we’ve walked far enough, he lets go and takes several steps away.

He turns around and drops his pants to the ground. I rub my eyes while he relieves himself. The flicker of the torch and the patter of his pee are the only sounds in the night.

I hear him pull up his pants. I expect him to take my hand again but I don’t hear him come closer. “Are you finished?”

“I see something,” he whispers.

I whirl, the torchlight bending to the movement. My eyes widen as I follow Card’s gaze.

The desert wolves’ eyes reflect the moonlight like water. The nearest one is close enough that I can see a pale scar along his front leg. I count four but there must be more nearby. Desert wolves always travel in packs.

Their fur is the golden color of the dunes. I’ve seen them many times in the day when their coat reflects the sunlight like rays darting across the landscape. In the dark, they are pale and unremarkable like they were shaped from the sand itself.

I push Card behind me. The scarred one bares its teeth. Card whimpers, burying his face in the small of my back.

I wave my torch and shout a wordless warning.

One of the wolves yips back as if to call my bluff.

Card is crying now. I can feel the shake of his frame. My arm waves the torch but it feels detached from my body. I scream louder.

The lead wolf takes a step back. Its muzzle is thin. Its shoulder blades protrude over the top of its head.

“Go! Leave us alone!” I bark. My heart pounds in my ears as loud as a screeching vulture-rat.

It growls. The other wolves echo the sound. I know a threat when I hear one.

A shift in its shadow. A lowering of the head.

My lips part.

Just before the lead wolf’s paws leave the ground, an arrow sprouts from its breast. A shrill whine simmers in the air. Voices shout behind me.

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I’m rooted in place as the other wolves’ ears flick and they hunch backward. I swear I see one of them glance mournfully at their dead pack member. Together they turn and sprint away.

I find myself gasping for air.

“Boys!” Uncle Fare grabs my shoulder. He pulls me against him with the hand not holding his bow. Card still hasn’t detached himself from my back.

“We’re not hurt,” I say breathlessly.

Uncle Fare affectionately pats my cheek. Normally, the gesture would be insulting but I don’t care. I feel young and vulnerable.

Uncle Fare pulls the wolf’s body over his back, gripping the front legs. Card doesn’t let go of my shirt as we follow him back to camp. Uncle Fare drops the wolf beside the pit where my great uncle is already rebuilding the fire.

Aunt Mora comes out of the caravan, a knife glinting in her hand. After making sure we’re uninjured, she kneels beside the wolf. I turn Card’s face away as she slices from the throat to the tail. A waft of bodily fluids reaches my nose. My eyes water.

“We can always use more pelts,” she says.

“Fresh meat will be a good change,” Uncle Fare agrees.

I guide Card back to our tent and leave them to finish taking what they can from the desert wolf.

Card slips into my bedroll with me. It’s been years since we’ve slept together like this. I don’t try to dissuade him. His bony elbow pokes my chest, and my arm wraps around him.

“You don’t have to be scared,” I say. As soon as the words have left my mouth, they sound stupid and hollow.

Card snuggles against me. Maybe he has enough faith in me to believe my words. He says, “I’m never going to pee alone.”

I laugh shortly. “That isn’t the lesson you should take from this.”

“Then what is?”

I wasn’t expecting the question, so I say the first thing that comes to mind, “Always carry a torch.”

“So your family can see you?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

We don’t talk, again, but it’s a long time before either of us falls asleep.

B I wake to the smell of meat cooking over the fire. We pull on our shoes and duck out of the tent. I don’t see Sare up yet. She’s going to yell at me

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for what happened with the wolves. I can already hear her lecturing about how reckless I was. Dread sinks in my gut.

“Do you think the wolves found the family?” Card asks. He takes off one of his boots and balances on one foot while he dumps sand out of it.

“Everyone was safe in their tents.” I grab his arm to help steady him.

His hair curls around his ears. Sare needs to cut it soon.

“Not our family. The family we took everything from yesterday.”

I cringe at his phrasing. Family. I refuse to label the bodies with a title so intimate and alive. Took. It isn’t taking if there isn’t an owner. “It doesn’t matter if they did. We’ll never see them again.”

“Because they’re dead?”

“Yes,” I say sharply. My shoulders rise toward my ears.

“They found the little girl before we did, so maybe they’ll come back for the mom and dad.”

I don’t answer, hoping it will put an end to his questioning. My mouth waters as I watch Aunt Harmony remove the cooked meat from the spit over the fire.

He continues, “They’re like us, aren’t they?”

“The people were from the west country. They’re not like us.”

“Not the people,” he says exasperatedly. “I mean the wolves.”

My stomach flips at the memory of the bodies I’ve seen torn apart by desert wolves. Bloodied sand always makes bile rise in my throat. Before I can answer, the twins emerge from their tent, bouncing toward Card and talking over each other.

“Dad says you saw the wolves!”

“Did you–” “What happened?”

“–fight them?

Card lets them drag him away, grinning. The twins are only a few years younger than him. He’s used to being a hero in their eyes.

Despite the sunlight breaking over the horizon, I shiver. Card’s question lingers like sand in my teeth. They’re like us, aren’t they?

I want to deny it. I don’t want anything to connect me with the beasts that tear apart carcasses, the monsters that will likely populate Card’s nightmares.

I think of Aunt Mora’s efficient slice through the wolf’s skin. She’ll have cut it in a way to preserve the largest sections of the pelt. The meat we don’t eat today will be dried over the fire. Whatever fat there was could

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be used in stews or as grease. She’ll have saved some sinew and tendons for stitching wounds. We’re stocked up on most tools, but she might’ve cleaned a few bones to carve into whistles for the twins. The largest teeth can be added to the leather cord Uncle Dario wears proudly around his neck. Wealthier merchants in the cities will buy intact skulls sometimes as exotic trophies.

Maybe the wolves would be proud of us for using their dead brother. Maybe they’d recognize that we’re also doing what needs to be done. It’s never been personal.

cious drops of water and dripping them down his torn throat. He awakens and we go home.

“A hundred dozen,” I croak.

Sare glares at me through her contorted expression. She doesn’t understand.

“A hundred dozen,” I repeat. We say nothing more as we strip Card and leave him naked in the sand.

The process feels so wholly human to me. Then, I remember the body of the girl the wolves found. They ate everything they could. No reverence for the dead. They did what they needed to do to survive.

Maybe the wolves would be proud of us for using their dead brother.

Maybe they’d recognize that we’re also doing what needs to be done. It’s never been personal.

B Two days later, I wake to Sare’s hand on my shoulder. Diffused sunlight fills the tent. She shakes me hard enough to jar my jaw. Her dark brows nearly touch. “Where’s Card?”

B When we find him, Card looks like a body.

The desert wolves were merciless. His clothing is torn so severely it will do only for bandages or oil-soaked rags for torches. There are too many pieces of him missing. So much protruding white and red. I bend over and vomit.

A burnt-out torch lies a few feet from Card.

Sare falls to her knees, the soft puff of sand resounding in the great desert silence. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. No words for even this motionless boy. What rotten luck does she have left to fear?

I slide a hand into his hair, fiercely aware of how his scalp clings to warmth. Tears skid down my cheeks. I envision myself collecting the pre-

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[ POETRY]

50p By: Sean Madden

In the kitchen, the skylight blinks.

A shadow, a memory.

An afternoon of numismatics.

The fifty pence, a decommissioned subdivision of the Irish pound, stands out.

Heptagonal, cupronickel; the year it bears feels less ancient than it is.

A curved edge binds reverse to obverse, woodcock to cláirseach—the connection being that each rings when plucked. I never told anyone about the carcass in the jacaranda, a bird so decayed as to be unidentifiable, its gray wings draped across a web of naked branches.

This is one side of the coin.

The other is my son, collector of coins, jumping off a swing at its apex.

He has flown higher but never so freely.

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[ FICTION]

M

omma’s floorboards were creaky old things. She could always tell the exact co-

ordinates of where I was in the house just from the softest little squeak. That’s why, when it came time to leave, I wasn’t fixing to carry all that extra weight with me.

My last supper was meatloaf and mashed potatoes, an old fave from before I started my diet.

While I adjusted myself on our smelly, misshapen sofa, Momma was parked like usual at her re-

Girl, Leaving Jeffrey Haskey-Valerius

Photo: Ali Karimiboroujeni, Pexels.com

cliner. She looked across from the TV tray, and as soon as she flashed me that malicious grin of hers, I knew something was up. I feared maybe she knew my plan, as though I hadn’t been as secretive as I thought.

“How many pounds you down now, Jo?” she said all singsong, her words smooth and mel-

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lifluous as she picked her teeth with that extra long pinky nail of hers.

She knew I hated to be called that: Jo. Hated the ambiguity. It could either be short for Joseph, my old name, or Josephine, my new one. When I came out last Christmas, I thought having a similar name as before would make it easier for her. Maybe that was my own fault. But she never called me Jo before, not once growing up, and now it was the only name out of her mouth.

I glanced up at the clock, Sylvester on the seven, Tweety Bird a hair past twelve—not too long now.

“Not sure,” I said, my fork scraping across the plate. “I think about ten, twelve pounds. Somewhere ’round there.” I was lying. I’d just reached thirty that morning, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I’d inherited her double chin and flabby arms, and now that I was losing them, she was all put out.

The weight loss felt nice—so did knowing she was jealous of me—but the only thing that mattered was the hardwood floors getting less noisy under my feet, more like whines and whimpers of an old arthritic dog instead of a cat in heat.

Momma eyed me real hard as I pushed potatoes ’round my plate. I could feel her stare from across the room even though I refused to look, a technique I learned long before I came out. Never spend too much time in her eyes, and life is generally safer.

“Why do you like to hurt me, baby?” She said it real softly, like she was cooing at a little baby or something.

I caved. I knew her tricks, but I caved anyway like a dumb idiot. Soon as I looked up, she gasped for dramatic effect and threw her fork to the floor, like she’d seen the devil or something—but not before smirking at me for a split second. Very purposeful, that woman. Strategic.

She sighed and talked to the Lord under her breath, crossing herself once, twice, thrice. When she was done, I waited to see if she’d bend down for the fork. Of course she didn’t. She’d have to move her tray. I smiled graciously as I moved mine to get her a fresh one, ignoring her little wink as I passed.

“You know these is your grandmama’s potatoes. Got that bacon fat and garlic butter just how you like,” she cooed just as I was opening the silverware drawer.

“Thank you, Momma.”

I ran my finger down the blade of a knife, not deep enough to bleed but good enough to pinch.

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“Fetch another Mella Yella while you’re in there, sugar.”

I slammed the drawer and yanked open the fridge. Pressed a cold can to one eye and then the other. I hadn’t slept in four nights. The crickets outside were too loud, I guess. Or maybe it was all my anxieties about leaving and such tumbling around in my head.

I still didn’t know what I’d be doing once I was gone. My best friend lived twenty miles up Route 65. She already agreed to drive me past state lines. I just had to walk through the thick heat of the August night first. She couldn’t pick me up after dark on account of our mothers being like hawks.

Morning was safer so she could do it before she went to work. She’d offered to pick me up bright and early, but I said no. Something about walking all that way through the dark, perilous night felt real symbolic to my journey.

And after that? As far as a brand spanking new diploma could get me.

“Here you are, ma’am.” I didn’t look at Momma or the Snoopy on her nightdress as I left the soda on her tray.

“Hush,” she whispered, turning up the TV. Momma loved her cop shows. She kept the sound on mute during commercials “because that is what civilized families do,” she told me once. Then as soon as the program was back, she’d turn up the volume loud enough for the coyotes to listen in.

“Alright now. I know you been reducing, and I’m real proud of you, sugar.” Commercials were back. “That said, I’m not too pleased with how you been acting as of late.”

I’d since put down my fork and given up the pretense of eating. Now I was plucking hair from my forearms, itching for something to do with my hands.

“How’ve I been acting, Momma?”

“See, that.” She pointed a finger at me, fire in the depths of her Coca-Cola eyes. “That right there. You been talking back. I swear, you ain’t touched these meals I slave over. You acting real ungrateful, child. Like you’re better than me.”

I had to think. I couldn’t have her angry. Not tonight. “That’s not true, I—” “That’s not true,” she mocked. “You’re lucky I ain’t thrown you out on your head, boy.”

There it was. Wasn’t often she alluded to a gender at all since I told her who I really was. When she did, it was purposeful, like when we’d been out shopping a couple times. We’d be in the women’s section of the Walmart,

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and she’d hold up a nice dress and say, “I wish I’d had myself a little girl, Jo, I really do. She’d look so cute in this little ditty.”

Then she’d look at me all wide-eyed, going, “Oh, I guess I do now, how about that?”

And she put the dress back on the rack, snickering.

I never said nothing then, and I certainly didn’t respond to her calling me boy now. How could I? The show came back eventually, but the volume stayed off. She stared at the TV so long I thought she was trying to read their lips. But finally she cleared her throat and said very hushed-like, “Eat your supper. Probably ice cold by now.”

I scooped up the meat I had cut into tiny pieces with my fork and shoved it down my throat. Drier than a fistful of pills but still a little warm. She was right about the potatoes, though. Even in the summer heat, they were cold enough for the bacon grease to separate. I scraped up every last bit to make her happy. I could have puked.

On TV, two officers were slapping handcuffs on a half-dead heroin junkie. When they shoved her in the back of their car, she banged her head.

Momma cackled.

“That’s what ya get, girl!”

I loathed everything about her. I could not wait to be on my own.

When the show ended, I grabbed our plates and smiled sweetly.

Washed up the dishes. Put a knife down my underpants, just in case. Then I swept the house, wiped the microwave, and scrubbed the toilet. It wasn’t the weekend so those chores weren’t necessary, but part of me didn’t feel right leaving her with a dirty house.

When I was all done, I kissed her on the head and told her good night and lingered a half second. She’d shampooed that morning.

She didn’t utter one word till I turned to leave.

“What else, baby?”

I paused, composed my face. I was hoping to get away with it on my last night.

I turned back around and got to my knees. Took off her slippers. As usual, her feet were cold but still sweaty somehow. I held one in my hands, rubbed the warmth back into it. I kissed it, avoiding the cracked toenails.

Thanked her for all she did. Did the same on the other side.

“That’s real nice. Now. Listen here, Josephine—” I dropped her foot right out of my hand. I thought I was imagining it or having a full-on meltdown, but what she said next confirmed she’d actually said it.

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“I know it’s been real hard as of late, what with your new . . .” She stopped to clear her throat, and I reminded myself to breathe. “I’m trying my best, is all. I’ve been asking the Lord how best to be a mother through this. And, well, I know I maybe haven’t been the easiest to get along with, so I just wanted you to know I’m working on it and that I apologize if I ever hurt your dang feelings.”

It was a long time before I stood up. She put on her weakest, most pitiful little smile when I did. I think maybe I gave her one right back.

“It’s all right, Momma,” I said. “Night.”

B I turned off my bedside lamp and lay there in the dark, the heat making my eyes heavy. I kept them peeled on the stars outside my window—the window that got screwed shut last time I tried to run.

Maybe I didn’t know if I was making the worst or best choice of my life, but I was certain about one thing: there was really no choice at all.

Momma knew my plan. I realized it as soon as she was done with her talk. It was her own way of atoning for how she’d been treating me, speaking to me. Her timing was too spooky for it not to be. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was whether it was a silent plea to stay or if she needed to get it off her chest before it was too late.

Either way, I wasn’t fixing to change my mind. Maybe I didn’t know if I was making the worst or best choice of my life, but I was certain about one thing: there was really no choice at all.

I was already packed to go: two water bottles for the walk, a wig I’d grabbed from a lady’s shop a month back, an extra pair of sweats, some underwear, and my nicest ensemble, which my best friend got me for my birthday. I’d never worn it, but it was a slimming black skirt and a top with the prettiest, yellowest sunflowers, plus some flats with sunflowers on the toes to match.

Momma slept upright in the recliner most nights. Laying down in bed made her reflux worse. A couple hours later, the TV got quiet—not all the way off, but quiet. She told me once she could never ever sleep in total silence.

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An hour after that, she started snoring. I waited a little while longer to make sure she was in a heavy sleep.

I won’t lie. Even though I knew I had to go, I did think about laying there for the rest of my life, stuck in all my fear of leaving. Something about that fear was comfortable. Normal. I’m not too sure I know why. I guess because for much of my life, I was afraid to speak. I remember being a kid and getting hit upside the head every time I made a stupid little joke or something like that. I remember being told to quit acting like a sissy or else no girl would ever want to marry me. Somewhere along the way I suppose I learned to shut up altogether. All that quiet leant itself to obedience, to staying still and never questioning Momma about a damn thing.

So, when I lay there, I thought maybe I would stay in that bed forever. I didn’t. I knew staying would kill me.

There were spots on the floor that were louder than others, so I stepped over those on my way to the door. I kept the knife squeezed in my sweaty hand the whole time. I wasn’t planning to hurt her or nothing, but I knew I needed it just in case she decided to try and stop me.

As I tiptoed my way around, I didn’t hear the floorboards at all, and I was giddy about how much weight I’d lost. But really, they were quiet only due to my heart beating so loud in my ears. Maybe that was why I didn’t hear the snoring stop, either.

The light clicked on. Turns out the weight loss didn’t matter one bit. I still woke her up.

“You’re really doing it, aren’t you?” she whispered.

All of a sudden, my sight was blurry. I had this long moment where I stood there like an idiot wondering if I should use the knife on her. I couldn’t let her stop me, let her keep me under her rule no more.

But she didn’t look like she was about to try or nothing. The thing was, I knew deep down she wouldn’t. So, in the end, I dropped the knife and wiped away my tears and mucus and junk with the back of my wrist.

“Yes, ma’am,” I hiccuped.

She stared at me wide-eyed, jowls rocking as she clicked her tongue over and over. The whole time, I wasn’t breathing. I could have passed out.

Snoopy mocked me from her nightdress with his big fat smile, like he was glad to see me go.

Then Momma turned off the lamp. The TV illuminated the room blue: her blank face, the knife, my shaking hand. The door I was itching to walk out of.

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“You’ll regret it, girl,” she said, and picked up the remote.

There was my chance. I could’ve let her have it, told her how she wasn’t fit to be a mother and how she ruined my life, but that I was about to make something of myself despite everything.

But the old silence won out again, the same one that kept me from telling her who I was for all those years. I was still afraid of her. As I walked out, the infomercial about some kitchen gadget started blaring.

I was about an hour down the road when I realized what she’d called me.

Girl.

But I still had no regrets.

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[ FICTION]

T

he River Nile carves through the rock to beget the Faiyum, the Lake Land, and the

Wadj-wer, the Great Green. The land was calm when Wayeté approached the lake with a meal for his favorite. He knew he shouldn’t have a favorite, but he couldn’t help it. Her eyes were so warm, her skin so glossy yet knotty, her temperament placid, though she could turn faster than the floods of the Nile. When she was content, she even made a purr-like growl, deep and guttural.

Krokodilopolis Jill Marshall

Photography: Jimmy Chan, Pexels.com

He had no love for those other purrers, the furry ones, cats. They were nothing special and did not deserve the praise they received. Not like his wards, and she most of all.

The reeds in the northwestern corner were still, but he knew she was hiding. She was playing her games. That was fine. She could play.

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Imagining her broad smile hidden by grasses just above the level of the muck drew a smile to his own face. He could see the others start to move.

They sensed a coming revolution in their world. He lowered the basket from its perch on his head and held it close. He reached in and grabbed the leg of a still-warm fowl. He had just broken its neck. The others could do with leftovers and scraps. Only the best, only the freshest for his favorite. He hefted the feathered thing toward the reeds. And then— The sight he anticipated each day—she sprang into action. The others never had a chance. She leapt out of her hiding spot, propelled by her mighty tail, jaws stretched wide, teeth jagged and sharp. Water flew every which way; droplets pinged the surface of the pond, creating music to accompany the drama of her. Her body—muscular and lithe, deep green like the reeds and a pale green on her vulnerable belly, like living in algae had just barely stained her purity. The light canvas of her underside was interrupted only by a round brown spot near the right side of her jaw. The muscles ran down the center of her body, taut and bunched. He was proud that he was the one who nourished those muscles, that magnificent body.

She captured the fowl at the height of her jump and returned to the earth with a splashing thud. One leg hung from her mouth, and as another, lesser beast approached, hoping to share the bounty, she bellowed with powerful jaws clamped on her dinner. Her dinner alone. Since the other crocs knew she would not share, they looked to Wayeté with his empty basket. But he had eyes only for her. He thought she gazed at him with gratitude and love. But even after all this time, it was hard to discern love in her. She should love him, as he did her, but he couldn’t know. And perhaps that’s why he loved her all the more.

B Wayeté is a shepherd of crocodiles. His father was a shepherd of crocodiles, and his father before him. Wayeté never thought he could do or might want to do anything else.

Years ago, his father started him in the family business when he was just a boy. He gave Wayeté two hatchlings to oversee. He caressed their knotty backs, fed them insects and bits of meat right from his fingers, sang hymns to Ra, the sun god, and prayed to Sobek, the crocodile god, to keep them safe. They grew until they were as long as young Wayeté was tall. They hurried and smiled when he approached. They loved him.

When his father told him it was time for the pair to rejoin the bask,

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Wayeté was distraught. “They are my pups! They cannot! I must care for them!” he cried.

“They are beasts, Wayeté. They serve a purpose. They are not yours.”

When he followed his father to the enclosed pond, pups writhing in a basket carried between them, he allowed tears to carve paths in the dust on his cheeks, like the river that sliced through the desert to fill the lake.

He was silent so his father would not hear. When they arrived at the pond, they placed the basket on the ground, and Wayeté quickly wiped his face with the back of his arm before his father turned.

Wayeté reached into the container to pull out one pup. She was small enough that he could hold her with two hands. He felt the vulnerability of her underside and the scaly strength of her back.

“Shh, shh,” he said as she writhed. “You will be happy here.” He placed her inside the enclosure at the edge of the pond. She was content and slid into the water. Wayeté eyed the full-grown crocs around her, ready to leap to her defense if they made a move. But they did not.

He turned back to the basket and reached for the second one. It was a little boy, full of fear and anger, more so than his sister. When Wayeté picked him up, he felt the muscles in the animal’s abdomen tense and bunch. He jerked side to side, and Wayeté imagined how this little creature would soon grasp and flip his prey, round and round under the water until it suffocated.

“Calm, boy, calm. Your sister is there. She is happy.” He tried to position the little mass of muscle and slimy scales so that he could see his sister.

But when Wayeté looked to the pool, he could not see the girl croc, only the adults eyeing his activity with curiosity, maybe malice. The boy must have seen the same, because he redoubled his squirming, and Wayeté felt his hands slipping.

“Hang onto it, boy,” his father snarled.

Wayeté lowered the little croc with great effort to the place where he had set the sister. The brother, writhing, made contact with the sandy ground, and jolted out of Wayeté’s hands. He turned, free, and clamped his teeth down on Wayeté’s still hovering, still guilty hand.

He cried out, snatched his hands out of the enclosure, and looked at the pup’s damage. There was nothing but blood, red and oozing, where his two smallest fingers had once been.

B

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Wayeté did not miss those digits so much these days. That’s what time will do. But every once in a while, he looked down at his hands and thought how much easier tasks would be if he had all ten fingers, as divine Ra had willed (Sobek has little concern for Ra’s plans). Now, for instance, as he gripped the edges of the heavy basket, he lifted with his back and legs and arms, the muscles of a worker, but he would like to have a firmer grip aided by the two missing fingers. He thought about his little boy croc, now long gone, and looked at the smooth, puckered skin where the absence felt like a presence, like they could touch and hold his little boy.

He hefted the basket, full of fish parts and chum, bird heads and legs, all the parts the priests and their visitors would not eat. The crocs would be happy.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure approach from the temple in the distance. He kept walking, but as the figure came closer, he saw that it was a she, and a beautiful one. He set the food down and wiped an arm across his forehead. He noticed he had wiped a bloody piece of chicken skin off himself and took a cleanish hand to the rest of his face to ensure he was presentable.

The young woman continued her march toward him. She waved. He turned to see if anyone else was there, and she laughed.

“No, I was waving at you. You are the shepherd, right?” she said in an accent that betrayed her high standing.

Wayeté nodded. Words never came easily to him, nor did general interactions with humans.

“My father said I could watch you feed the crocodiles.”

“You want to watch? Why?” Most people cared nothing of Wayeté’s beasts during their lives. Only in death.

She shrugged. “I’m curious. Can I help?” She indicated the heavy basket on the ground.

“No, no. Of course not. I carry it myself.” Wayeté cursed the harsh words, the uneducated sounds that came out of his mouth. He reached down to lift the food. “Come,” he said, throwing his head in the direction of the pond. The woman followed.

“My name is Kleo,” she said.

Wayeté said nothing in return.

“And you?” she nudged.

“Wayeté.”

“How old-fashioned.”

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Wayeté grunted in response. He did not know his name was oldfashioned.

They came to the bridge, elevated high above the pond so the creatures could not reach their captors. Wayeté walked up the ramp, straining under the weight of the fish and animal parts.

“I can help,” she insisted. “I am strong.”

Wayeté looked at her white dress, soft and flowing, slightly shimmery, probably silk. He observed her hands, equipped with all ten digits, and her uncovered toes—all ten—in leather sandals threaded, it seemed, with gold and turquoise beads. He moved back to her face, which up to this point he had dared not look at directly, and realized her eyes were the color of his favorite.

“Your eyes . . .”

“My eyes?”

He shook his head. “Nothing,” he mumbled. He hefted the basket again and continued up the ramp without her help. When they arrived at the middle of the bridge, he stopped and set the food down again.

“Now what?” she said.

“We feed them. See, they are coming.” He gazed at his beauties. He didn’t see his favorite, but she had already eaten her fill.

“They move like they are from another world.”

“Like the gods.”

“Perhaps . . .”

Wayeté took a broken clay jug and pushed it into the flesh and pulled out its fill.

“You throw it to them?”

“Yes.” He flung the chum, and the crocs sped up. The food splashed down, and the waters churned and roiled. She gasped and laughed.

“Can I?” She held out her hand for the scoop. Wayeté hesitated. He liked to be the one who fed them. He was their provider, their father. He wanted them to see who gave them life. But once, maybe once would be fine.

He gave her the jug, and she did just as he had. Again, she gasped and laughed as the beasts splashed and opened their jaws for treats.

Again and again, she scooped, threw, laughed. And he watched her, not them. The light in her eyes, the shine of her dark hair. She had a dark spot, a mole next to the right side of her mouth, close to her jaw, and inadvertently he reached his hand to touch it but caught himself before making contact.

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He noticed the basket was half empty. “That’s good,” he said. “Watch this.” As he dumped it over the rail, the crocs swarmed under them. She made a slight whistle through her teeth.

“Amazing what Ra creates,” she said.

They watched the beasts fight over the best pieces until the water was calm.

B In the early morning, before Ra begins his journey across the firmament, the crocs slow down. In the absence of the sun’s warmth, they grow sleepy and curl up in places around the Wadj-wer they claim as their own.

This was the time when Wayeté could get close. They knew him; they were cool. And his favorite, she missed him.

Ever since she was a pup, no bigger than his hand, she let him stroke her, from between her slit nostrils, up her snout, between her eyes—now the inner lids sliding across, outer lids growing heavy. He remembered how tiny she once was, how her teeth could barely nick him, even though she thought she was dangerous. He could always bring her back to being dangerless with his caresses.

His fingers moved down her back, caressing the bumps, the knots, the topography more interesting than any faraway land he could imagine. He heard her purr-growl, an otherworldly sound, a sound that likewise put him at ease. His hand moved all the way down her back to her powerful, fleshy tail, which she shifted instinctively before keeping it steady for him. He did it all again, crouching next to her; he lightly touched her nose. She snorted as he moved up her snout to her eyes. Her scales shifted under his caress.

The rumble of her purr, the earthiness of her pleasure. He stayed with her until the sun rose and the other creatures began to stir around them.

“Sleep well, my love,” he whispered as he stood to go. She sighed.

B When Wayeté was still a boy, about two years or so after he gave up his pups, the brother and sister, to join the bask, he continued to give the pair special treatment—their preferred foods, songs, and caresses. Now, someone had come to claim the girl croc.

“Wayeté, you cannot grow attached to these beasts,” his father said.

Again. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you.” One more time.

Always one more. It will not be enough.

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“But she is mine!”

“She is not yours! What am I saying? It is not yours. None of these beasts are yours or mine. They belong to Sobek, and Sobek’s priests will claim them when they wish. How many times?”

“You can’t take her from her brother!”

Wayeté’s father huffed, then laughed in one solitary bark. “They do not care for one another. They do not care for you. If they did, you would be whole.” His father grabbed Wayeté’s wrist and jerked his lesser hand up in front of his face. “They are beasts!”

An elite man had died. A moneylender or treasurer or someone with money and counting—things Wayeté had no knowledge of, not that he wanted it. They were building a tomb near the temple, where the rich man would live out his second life in the West, the land of the dead. Wayeté’s little girl croc would be sacrificed to Sobek and protect that rich man in the next life.

“But why do they want her? Why not someone else?” Wayeté was whining now. Voice nasally, tears soon to come. He couldn’t help it.

His father, before Wayeté finished whining, slapped his face with the back of his hand. The force threw young Wayeté to the ground.

“Get up.”

Wayeté heard the low growl in his father’s voice and scrambled to his feet.

“Look at me.”

He faced his father, lifted his eyes to the man who wasn’t so powerful in the world, but who towered over his son. Wayeté was not fast enough to get out of the way or intelligent enough to see the second blow coming. He fell to the ground again at the force of the grown man’s backhand.

“Go get her.”

Wayeté scrambled over to the pond, where the croc was lying in the sun, content and unaware of the horrors in the world. He grabbed the pole with a loop of rope at the end and slipped it around her jaws. She jerked her tail when he tightened the rope. Tears streamed down his dusty cheeks. His father put pressure on her back and tail. Then, they hefted her into a wooden box, and his father slammed the lid as Wayeté removed the pole from the rope around her jaws. Her angry hisses rose to worried whines inside the box.

The box had a small hole in the side, near her snout, and Wayeté’s father lifted a small metal bowl filled with incense known to put animals,

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even big ones, to sleep. He lit it and wafted the smoke into the hole. The whining slowed and stopped.

“Help me load it onto the cart.”

Wayeté did not want a third or fourth backhand to the jaw, so he did what he was told and did not say a word.

“Wayeté, you will thank me one day for teaching you.”

B The young woman with green eyes and the mole and all ten fingers and all ten toes came back day after day, always right at breakfast time. She was impeccably punctual.

After they fed the bask one day, her gasps and laughter punctuating the frenzy, Wayeté said, “Tomorrow, come earlier. I want to show you something.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

She smiled. How were her teeth so straight, so white like her dress?

How did her eyes shine, not like they reflected the sun, but like she had light within? He inadvertently raised his hand to touch the small, dark mole by her lip. She intercepted the gesture as a friendly movement of greeting and pressed her palm to his. He recoiled.

“Ah, your fingers. You are ashamed?”

Flustered, he crouched to gather the basket and scoop. The surface of the bridge was dirtied with croc food. He would come back later with a bucket of water.

“I’ll go. My father must wonder what keeps me.” She turned west, back to the temple. That place. A place of death, disguised as devotion. How they deluded themselves.

Was she different? She must be. She understood him. She saw the majesty of his wards. The light in her eyes mirrored the light in his favorite.

She came back, day after day, to the lake, the true holy place of Sobek.

Indeed, the next day, she came earlier. She approached just after Wayeté had wrung the neck of a fowl and was heading for his favorite.

“Wayeté! Greetings!”

He waved awkwardly as he balanced the basket with his deficient hand.

“What do you have?”

He lowered it so she could see. “One gets a special meal. Always.” Kleo looked at the two dead birds tangled in the basket.

“Fit for a king!” She laughed.

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“Or a queen.”

“Oh, it’s a she?”

Wayeté nodded and heaved the basket upon his head. The priest’s daughter walked two steps ahead. When they arrived at the bridge, Wayeté pointed to the cluster of reeds in the northwestern quadrant of the pool.

“There. She likes to hide.”

“She plays games, does she?”

“She is different.”

“Does she have a name?”

“I call her Tiyé.”

“She doesn’t even move the reeds.”

Wayeté grabbed one chicken leg and hurled the carcass toward the reeds. The other crocs started to slide in that direction, but they were not fast enough. Tiyé leapt, moisture sliding off her supple body, jaws open, teeth gleaming. She caught the fowl midair, and plopped back into the water with a warning growl.

When the water settled, Wayeté looked at Kleo, whose mouth hung open. She was pale, and beads of sweat clung to her hairline.

“Want to throw?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Wait. Let her finish the first.”

They watched Tiyé slide back to the reeds, which swayed as she ripped the fowl into pieces and swallowed it.

When the reeds settled, Kleo reached into the basket and grabbed a leg.

She wrinkled her nose as she pulled the carcass out. She lifted it high and aimed for the reeds.

“Now,” whispered Wayeté.

Kleo flung it with a strength and accuracy not fitting the daughter of a priest. Again, Tiyé leapt, waters streaming, jaw to the heavens, ready to eat the world.

Kleo barked out a laugh, followed it with a peal of giggles. She looked at Wayeté, but he averted his eyes because every time he looked so deeply at her, his hand came up to her face without his permission.

“I can see why she is your favorite.”

“I love her.”

“She is divine.”

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Sobek surfaces from the water of the East, but in those lonely hours, dark turning to light, not every human is as content as the crocs are. Sometimes when he sat with her at dawn, grief flooded him. He could not put it into words, and he was glad she didn’t ask him to. He sat near her, his chin to chest, shoulders shaking as the Faiyûm transformed.

“You are here, alive. You are the only one.

You are my friend.”

She was comfortable enough with him that she allowed his hands to reach out to her without warning or caution. He touched her snout, caressed it, and then his thoughts, wordless, went back to himself, and he put his face in his palms or tore at his hair or beat his chest with fists.

He calmed and remembered her and touched her again. Calloused hands down knotty back, feeling the bony scales that protected her from harm.

She stopped purring when his hands went back to himself, arms wrapped around his own body covered with skin and dust, swaying back and forth as he faced the sky and cried.

He brought his face to look at her again. He wiped his arm across his cheeks.

“You are here, alive. You are the only one. You are my friend.” He calmed and started his ritual caresses once again.

B One day, Kleo arrived even earlier, eager to feed Tiyé. The morning was pleasantly cool, and after they fed her and tossed the slop to the rest, Kleo sat with Wayeté on the bridge, their legs dangling below them. She was not in a hurry to get home, and he wondered who waited and worried for her.

They watched the crocs turn toward the sun, now just above the horizon but steadily climbing.

“This is when they are slow,” he said.

“Slow?”

“They are docile when it is cool. I can go close. Touch them.”

“Can we?” The green eyes disarmed him.

He nodded but did not move.

“Well?” She tugged at his elbow, and he flinched. “Sorry, sorry,” she said.

He lugged himself up. “Let’s go.” He was glad she instinctively grew

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quiet and eased her steps. She had seen enough of the crocs; she knew the gravity of what they were about to do. He led her down the ramp and around the western side of the enclosure where there was a door, always firmly latched. A few beasts looked their way when they heard the click of the door, but they knew Wayeté’s routine and it wasn’t feeding time, so they went about basking and slinking.

He walked softly toward the reeds where Tiyé stayed. There she was.

Tranquil. Majestic. Taut. He pushed Kleo behind him because he didn’t know how Tiyé would react to a stranger. He crouched next to her, near her head, and placed a palm on her cool snout. She huffed. It would be good.

She was safe.

He gestured to Kleo to come to his side, away from Tiyé’s most dangerous part. Kleo crouched and reached her hand out. At the movement, Tiyé’s thin inner eyelid slid across and uncovered her eyeball, and she swung her head around toward the pair. So quickly that neither human could do anything, she snapped a warning at Wayeté. But the snap at Kleo was no warning. Her jaws clamped down on Kleo’s outstretched arm, all the way up to her pretty shoulder. Kleo screamed and passed out. Wayeté too screamed, and the sound scared Tiyé so that she backed herself into the water, severed arm in her jaws, muscley bits and blood dangling from her conical teeth.

Wayeté stood, stunned. He watched Tiyé go, then remembered Kleo, slumped in the sand next to the reeds, blood gushing from the absence of arm. He picked her up and ran until he arrived at his father’s house. He burst through the door into the courtyard. His father was there, an old man now, barely able to see or walk. He was the only person who could help.

His father looked up, ready to complain about his loud and reckless son, but he stopped when he saw his son covered in blood, a beautiful woman its source.

“Son.” Wrinkled hand to mouth. “What have you done?” Eyes wide, red lines in the white. Wayeté laid Kleo on a table he used for sick and injured crocodiles. His father hobbled over to her and examined the wound. Wayeté shifted foot to foot, wiping blood and grime all over his hair and face.

“Run to the temple. Tell the priest to come. Run.” Wayeté did as he was told. He kicked up sand that choked him, but he kept going. When he arrived at the temple, he frantically rang a bell at the entrance until an attendant arrived. Before he finished explaining, the priest joined them. The man turned pale while he listened.

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The three ran back to Wayeté’s house. When they entered, his father was washing and dressing the wound. The priest wailed and rushed at Wayeté’s father, demanding answers. His father pierced Wayeté with eyes that said, “Get out.”

He wandered back to the enclosure, into the gate left ajar in his haste.

He closed it behind him and went to where he had been with Tiyé minutes before. She hid in the reeds.

“What did you do? Tiyé, what did you do?”

Later, Wayeté had moved back onto the bridge when he saw the temple attendant fetch a donkey and cart. He watched as he and the priest loaded the girl and took her to the temple. His father watched them go, then turned toward the bridge. He, shrunken with age, no power left in those hands to strike, towered over Wayeté, who sat as he had with Kleo an hour ago, legs dangling.

“Will she live?” Wayeté asked.

“If Sobek wills. It is not likely.” A long silence, as the truth settled. “They are beasts. They will always be beasts. Will you ever learn?”

Wayeté knew the answer. Not in the head-way of knowing, but in the belly-way.

After one day, the longest of his life—no sleep, no direction, walking the perimeter of the enclosure, pacing the arch of the bridge—he received the news. The lovely girl, his only friend—she died. She was gone.

Wayeté stood in the doorway as the priest told his father the killer crocodile would be entombed with the dead girl. Wayeté’s father pleaded for his son’s life and convinced the priest that no one could replace the crocodile shepherd. No one else knew the job or would put up with its filth.

The priest acquiesced but cursed Wayeté.

“His sons, and his sons’ sons, and his sons’ sons’ sons! Every generation, every son of Wayeté will be a slave of Sobek until the sun does not return from the West!”

B Wayeté had indeed learned what his father taught all those years. After Kleo’s death, he put it into practice. The sun, Ra may he reign, sets in the water of the west each evening, and that is where we all go—human, feline, heron, croc—to live once again.

Tears fell as he approached Tiyé with the snare in the morning chill.

She was unsuspecting, and she hissed and cried in the trap, in the box,

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in the cart. He took her to the temple and, with the help of the attendant, removed her heavy, muscular body, long as Wayeté was tall, and secured her—immobile, vulnerable—to the altar. He stuffed his ears with cotton to muffle her whine-growls but could do nothing about his eyes.

He washed himself and said prayers to Ra and Sobek so that he, a simple herder and now slave, would be purified in their presence. He waited for the priests. He boiled inwardly, but outwardly was patient despite their high-class tardiness.

He sang the rhythms of their chants, and at the correct moment, he wielded the knife and was steady as he slashed the vein in the animal’s wide, beautiful neck. He bit his cheek and drew his own blood to distract himself with pain, to rush out that other pain. He waited for life to exit, and he removed the body and took it to another room, where he gently placed her on a table and began the next phase.

It was not as painful. The life was gone, but he could admire the creature, caress her, love her in a way he could not while she was alive. His father had taught him how to remove the fluids and organs left in the body and pad the cavities with linen, and so he did. He treated the body with salt and oil and coated her with resin made from beeswax and pitch. He covered every small space, every indenture, every bony bump to preserve her. He looked at her face, head on, and felt her smiling. He smiled back.

After his work, she was smaller. Life takes up space, and she had so much. Wayeté then wrapped the body, as his father had taught him: slowly, slowly, with precision and care. He started at the tail, made his way up to the back feet, claws still sharp but curling into the digits whence they came. He wrapped the abdomen, sinews never to be used again to jump and soar. To the front legs, caressing the neck, the best spot, where the knots were hardest and shiniest—the most lived in. He paused to run his hand along the neck toward the head, between the eyes, down the snout.

He marveled at the slit nostrils and sharp teeth, which he touched one by one as he ran his fingers around her jaw. A creature of beauty, taken.

He finished enfolding her with linen, and he began again, enclosing her in a second layer, as his father taught him, and a third layer, and a fourth.

He said a prayer to Sobek, to keep and protect his daughter, Tiyé, magnificent in her glory.

Then, he took indigo paint and decorated the linen-wrapped corpse.

Blue circles where two shining gold eyes once were. Sharp triangles where deadly teeth should be. Line down the back to the tip of the tail, wavy and

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bumpy like the animal’s texture. Then, he was finished. He walked out of the preparation room, washed himself, and prayed once again. He went to the front of the temple, splashed water on his face, and rang a bell to alert the priests his work was done.

B Feeding time was not so enjoyable anymore. His favorite no longer waited in the reeds, hidden and smiling, ready to soar for her meal. A pretty girl with green eyes and birthmark near her mouth no longer approached from the temple. No one was Wayeté’s friend.

He dumped the food for the ordinary crocs over the bridge into the pond. They swarmed and fought until it was all gone, and they basked as the sun rose overhead. He could not bring himself to be amazed with them as he once was. He sat above them on the bridge but grew restless. He descended and went to the gate at the west side of the enclosure.

He approached the area near the reeds Tiyé once commanded. He wanted to feel close to her. He sat with knees pulled up to chest. He closed his eyes and pictured her in the darkness of his mind. He tried to will her into being once again.

Then, a squeak. And again, again. A wild, furious chorus. The sound was familiar, unmistakable. Babies. Hatchlings. Pups. He opened his eyes and moved toward Tiyé’s reeds. He parted them to find a few eggs peeking out of the sand, cracked and broken with writhing bodies emerging head first, each no longer than his hand. The fury of sound increased when he approached. Was he their mother?

He dug in the sand to uncover the nest so the hatchlings could free themselves. He picked up one that was not yet cracked, was whole and intact, and heard a frantic pip from within. He pierced the egg with his thumbnail, and the squeak grew louder. A tiny snout appeared and widened the hole he had created. He placed her back into the nest with her brothers and sisters so she could hear and add to their song. He watched her arrive, beautiful gold and black stripes down her embryo-slick back.

When she was free of the egg, that little one broke away from the scrum.

She came straight to him, her green eyes locked onto his face. She wailed and complained the whole, determined path toward him. Tail jerked back and forth, feet marched her along. Wayeté put his palm out flat in front of her, and she walked right onto him. He picked her up and held her in front of his face. She continued to squeak and squeal at him, as if he spoke crocodile.

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He looked at her from all angles. He moved a finger down her bumpy, luminescent golden-striped back, and she snapped her dangerless teeth at him. He laughed for the first time since the girl lost her arm and his favorite was taken from him. He held the pup upright to observe her pale belly and noticed an unusual dark spot on the underside of her jaw. Not too big, dark brown, almost perfectly round like a lentil. He touched it with the tip of his little finger.

He moved the creature to look at her eyes. They were a deep green, unusual for a hatchling. They were familiar eyes, warm despite their presence on the cold reptile.

“Kleo?” he said. “It’s you.”

He closed his eyes and whispered to Sobek, god of waters and all who inhabit them. The one who swims under the earth and rises to illuminate the world once again. The one who was created from himself, who emerges from the Faiyum, the Lake Land, and the Wadj-wer, the Great Green.

His setting is countless sinkings, his rising countless surfacings. He sets, he swims, he rises again.

Wayeté protected that special one as he left the enclosure. She deserved a feast, the first of many, and he would provide for her and keep her all her days.

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[ POETRY]

Ocean City in October By: Christine Pennylegion

We labour on deserted sands to build our seaside home.

Fat toddler hands pat walls and lumpy strongholds into being; we gather shells to decorate, fortify with sticks, fly seaweed banners bravely.

A moat takes shape to guard against the rising tide.

Overnight it laps closer and closer, moon-pulled, implacable, as we dream our sea salt dreams.

We do not hear the walls collapse.

We do not hear a thing.

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[ FICTION]

I

Make Believe

f Alice had allowed her mind to wander into the past, she may have thought how this was

the first Halloween her brother hadn’t made her costume. If Alice had allowed her mind to drift

Elizabeth Vondrak

into the future, she may have even thought how this Halloween could be Joey’s last. But Alice was nothing if not disciplined. Her mind would stay like a well-trained dog. Right here. Right now. In the driveway of her best friend’s house.

Photography: Karolina Grabowska, Pexels.com

On the pavement, she and Chrissy sat, legs crisscrossed, the pieces of their costumes scattered around them. Dried leaves scurried by, pushed by exhausted exhales of wind. The sky, smeared gray, hid an extinguishing sun.

“Careful not to glue your fingers together,” Alice said as she handed Chrissy the tube of Krazy Glue. “The last place you want to be on Hallow-

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een is the hospital. They’d probably use a saw to get your fingers apart.”

While it may have been Chrissy’s idea to be Princess Leia (almost every girl was Princess Leia that year), it’d been Alice’s to go to the Thrifty Rexall Drugstore soda fountain for day-old cinnamon rolls, the ones wound to the size of a pie plate, to use for their costumes. When Lucille, the waitress with blue hair that matched her smock and who smelled like a fog of Bengay and Aqua Net, asked what in heaven’s name they wanted those stale rolls for, Chrissy, who usually had a thousand things to say, stood mute. Alice looked directly into the bulldog face scowling down at them and replied, “I beg your pardon, ma’am. But it’s top secret.” Alice insisted the trick to managing adults was impeccable manners. You could always roll your eyes later.

Alice also insisted Halloween was the best day of the year, even better than her own birthday. Only on October 31 could boys who were picked last for teams at recess become Roger Staubach or Pete Rose and girls who were too timid to raise their hands in class change into the Wicked Witch of the West or Wonder Woman. And those rules about strangers, usually taught with the hidden intention of scaring the bejesus out of kids, were simply tossed aside. For one magical night, children were free to be anyone they wanted, to go out after dark, to knock on unknown houses, to even take candy from strangers, and all in the name of fun.

“I’m careful,” Chrissy said. Mimicking Alice, she drew stripes of glue on the sides of her plastic headband. The girls, slowly, minding their fingers, then stuck a stale roll to each stripe.

Indeed, the very last place Alice wanted to be on Halloween night was the hospital, and until three days before, when her brother had been allowed home, she’d been afraid the hospital was exactly where she was going to be. She’d been certain that somebody would get it in their stupid head to take Chrissy and her to the hospital so Joey could see them in their costumes. The hospital, with its stink like Barbie dolls soaking in bleach and its horror movie sound effects of gagging and groaning, was worse than seeing her brother look and act like an old man.

The threat of a Halloween hospital visit may have passed, but now Alice had to deal with a stranger in her home. Her once athletic twenty-year-old brother had been replaced by a bloated man with dotted skin and thinning hair, a man who could barely walk or breathe on his own. He was grouchy, prone to tantrums. Earlier that afternoon Joey had been sitting in the living room recliner, watching a rerun of The Partridge Family, while Alice sat on

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the kitchen floor, newspapers spread beneath her and a giant pumpkin.

Since Joey couldn’t carve the pumpkin this year, her father had promised to help her, but he’d phoned from the office, saying he wouldn’t be home until after supper. Having spent so much time at the hospital the past few weeks, he had a lot of work to catch up on. So, Alice took the big butcher knife, its blade as long as her forearm, and cut a circle into the top of the pumpkin. She thought how her mom wouldn’t have been too happy to see her using the big knife, but she was running errands. Mom, too, had a lot to catch up on.

Just as Alice was putting the votive candle inside the jack-o’-lantern, she heard her mother come through the front door. She went to the living room and took one of the grocery bags from Mom’s arms.

“There was a terrible accident on the Veterans Bridge,” Mom said. She reached for the knob on the TV set.

“Don’t,” Joey said, his voice like the thud of the door when the wind pulls it shut. “I’m watching this.” Canned laughter spilled from the TV’s speaker.

“I just want to see the news—” “Don’t!”

“You’re being ridiculous.” Mom turned the channel.

Joey threw his arm back and punched the wood-paneled wall with the base of his fist. The sound slammed into Alice’s spine, stiffening every muscle in her body. Family pictures rattled to the floor, the glass cracking into a web across Joey’s high school graduation portrait.

Alice and her mother stared at him. Joey stared at the TV. Another eruption of pre-recorded laughter. Alice didn’t know what was more shocking: the fact that Joey had given into violence or that he’d had the strength to do it.

The last time before Joey had gone into the hospital, despite his fever and labored breathing, he’d shouted at his parents, insisting he was not going back to that “torture chamber.” As the angry and pleading voices hurled through the air, Alice had scurried to her room, grabbed the rosary off the nightstand, crawled under the bed, and with one hand put a pillow over her head and with the other squeezed the beads so tightly one would’ve thought she was trying to force something tangible from them.

This time she quietly carried the sack of groceries to the kitchen, grabbed her school bag stuffed with the items for her Halloween costume, and ran across the street to Chrissy’s house.

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Since Joey had gotten sick that summer, Alice had been spending a lot of time at the Newmans’. Even though Chrissy was in the fourth grade and Alice was in the fifth, they were best friends. An only child and only grandchild, Chrissy had lots of stuff to play with—tons of Barbies and accessories, her own record player and albums, and, coolest of all, a horde of dress-up clothes. Alice loved to play dress-up, but before she decided what gown or high heels to wear, she would choose a name and from there create its character. She might be Jacqueline, the sophisticated businesswoman, or Melody, the hippie guitarist, or Victoria, the glamorous housewife with an indeterminable accent. Her own name was for old ladies and waitresses on TV. Chrissy, on the other hand, had a great name—just like the pretty character on Three’s Company—and just like the character, Chrissy had shiny straight blond hair, not the dull brown mop of cowlicks as Alice had.

She wanted to play, to dress up, to be someone else, to be a normal kid.

And why not? Her brother was going to be fine.

He was going to come home.

Alice didn’t know what to make of Chrissy’s dad, though. He barely spoke, just sat on the floor, leaning against the sofa, drinking cans of Diet Rite while watching golf on TV. As for Chrissy’s mom, she was talkative, like her daughter, but forever cleaning. She even cleaned the stuff she cleaned with, dusting the vacuum and washing off the Glass Plus and Pledge bottles. The house was as tidy and bare as the United Methodist church the neighbor boy down the street had gotten married in. Today, she’d banished the girls to the driveway to work on their Halloween costumes, even though it was the kind of day you might see a snowflake or two mingling with the falling leaves. There was no way they were going to get glue on her kitchen table.

In a way, Alice liked the orderliness of Chrissy’s house—the exact dinnertime and bedtime, the precise places for toothbrushes in the bathroom, the perfectly made beds, the neat little stacks of socks and underwear in the drawer. When her parents stayed late at the hospital and she spent the night at the Newmans’, Alice didn’t even mind going to bed nearly an hour earlier than she did at home. And Mrs. Newman, she was nice, like the day Alice came home from school with Chrissy, and Mrs. Newman had sat

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down on the couch with Alice and told her that Joey had taken a turn for the worse. He wouldn’t be coming home from the hospital for some time and Alice would be staying at the Newmans’ for at least a week. As Alice stared at her Magic Marker-stained hands in her lap, Mrs. Newman put her arm around the girl’s shoulders, and whispered, “You can cry if you want, honey. It’s okay.” Alice refused. If Joey was coming home eventually, then he was fine and there was nothing to cry about.

But what later irked Alice was when after she’d joined Chrissy and they’d decided to play The Price Is Right, where they got out boxes of detergent and cans of Campbell’s soup and dressed up, pretending to be Barker’s Beauties, Mrs. Newman told Chrissy they should just watch TV. From the TV room Alice could hear Mrs. Newman whispering to Chrissy in the kitchen: “I’m sure Alice doesn’t feel like playing.”

“But Mom,” Chrissy said, “The Price Is Right was her idea.”

“She’s only being kind because she knows you want to play.”

Alice wanted to shout, “You’re lying! You’re using me as an excuse to keep us from messing up your house! How do you know what I want?” Alice didn’t want to sit and watch stupid old reruns of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island. She wanted to play, to dress up, to be someone else, to be a normal kid. And why not? Her brother was going to be fine. He was going to come home.

After the cinnamon rolls were firmly glued to the headbands, the girls put them on, the rolls covering their ears. They smiled as they inspected each other’s work: they had perfect Princess Leia hair buns.

Now for their clothes. With the white sheets Alice had taken from the linen closet at home, they made dresses by cutting circles in the middle for their heads to slip through and used belts to gather the material around their waists. Underneath, they’d wear white turtlenecks and tights and last winter’s white snow boots, happily enduring pinched toes for the perfect costume.

Even though Halloween had always been her favorite holiday, this year she was more excited and had been planning longer than usual. When Joey hadn’t been able to help with her costume—like Alice, art was his favorite subject; he’d even been studying it at college before he’d had to quit—Alice had been more determined than ever to make the perfect outfit. She couldn’t wait for a whole night of dress up, a whole night of tons and tons of candy. And the best thing was that this year Alice and Chrissy were going

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to trick-or-treat alone. Alice had easily convinced her parents to let them go unchaperoned, and Mrs. Newman had said since it was okay with Alice’s parents, it was okay with her. Alice tried to convince herself that getting her way was a reward for being responsible and not a consolation prize for having a brother with cancer.

B The girls stood in the Newmans’ foyer, buns on the sides of their heads, sheets over their bodies, boots on their feet. Mrs. Newman snapped Polaroids. Mr. Newman told them to watch out for goblins. He didn’t even smile when he said it.

The first stop was Alice’s house. As the girls walked down the Newmans’ driveway, Alice felt a tiny sparkler light and then burn in her stomach.

“You know my brother is still pretty sick,” Alice told Chrissy as they crossed the street. “He doesn’t look too good. But, uh, don’t be afraid or anything.”

“Afraid? How could I ever be afraid of Joey?” Chrissy adored Joey, almost as much as Alice did. He’d taught both girls how to ride their bikes, how to swim and to ice-skate. He’d even carried Chrissy a mile home after she’d fallen and cut her chin on the frozen baseball field where they’d been skating.

The girls rang the doorbell and held out their plastic bags, yelling, “Trick or treat!”

Alice carried the Footlocker bag that Joey’s last pair of tennis shoes had come in. Chrissy had the Kinney’s bag from her new school shoes. Alice knew her family would act happy to see them, as if the incident in the living room had never happened.

Alice’s mom, dad, and brother answered the door, their tired faces working to curve their mouths into smiles. Joey stood between his parents leaning on his walker. He wore his dark green bathrobe and blue and white-striped pajamas, the oxygen tube hanging around his neck. His few strands of dark brown hair lay smoothly across his white scalp, reminding Alice of Mr. Finkel, the balding man who lived on the corner and who’d done nothing but sit on his front steps smoking cigarettes since his wife died. Chrissy was as silent as the jack-o’-lantern burning on the front step.

Joey breathed heavily and said, “You look great. May the force be with you.” He sounded like Darth Vader without trying.

As they walked down the sidewalk, Chrissy said, “If Joey’s so sick, how come he got so fat?”

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Alice tried to hide her annoyance. “He isn’t fat. He’s all swelled up from his medicine.”

“So it’s okay if he eats Halloween candy?”

“I guess. If my mom lets him.”

As they undertook the maze-like, snake-like journey from sidewalk to front porch from sidewalk to front porch, Alice put her brother and her family into the box she kept for things she didn’t want to think about. She closed the lid. For now, under the moon as yellow and round as a banana Necco Wafer, she wasn’t Alice but Princess Leia, the girl beautiful enough to win the attention of Han Solo but also tough enough to beat up stormtroopers.

The sidewalk was filled with other Princess Leias, but they wore those nerdy hard plastic masks, the ones with the white elastic that goes around your head and that get all spitty on the inside where you breathe through the tiny slit between the lips. Nobody else had such perfect hair buns. Two teenage boys in green rubber monster masks that covered their entire heads ran down the sidewalk growling and shouting “boo!” at everyone.

Little witches and ghosts and fairies cried and clung to their parents’ legs.

“What morons,” Alice said, using one of her favorite Joey words. She’d learned lots of interesting vocabulary by watching her brother work on his car or play football with his friends, but she’d also learned to be careful about repeating what she heard. Once, while watching TV with her mom, she’d called Gilligan a eunuch, a word she’d assumed was like moron. Her mother, without even asking where she had learned the word, told her firmly she mustn’t repeat anything her brother said.

“Yeah,” Chrissy said as they watched the teenaged monsters bound down the street. “Morons.”

Before eight o’clock and after walking several blocks and knocking on countless front doors, the girls had covered the route Alice had drawn on the map she’d created, complete with scale and key.

“Wow,” Chrissy said looking into her shopping bag that was nearly half full. “We finished early and still got lots of stuff.”

“You don’t want to go home, do you?”

“My toes really hurt—” “Come on. How often do we get to be out at night by ourselves?” Unlike Cinderella, Alice chose to ignore the night’s end tick-tocking toward her.

“We could set a record for candy.”

“But we already finished your route.”

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“Let’s go just a little farther.”

“I don’t think my mom would like that. You know she said we shouldn’t go past Hoover Street.”

“How will she ever know? If we’re fast, we can still get home on time.”

Like the adults, Chrissy trusted Alice, who almost never did things she wasn’t supposed to. She just had a way of stretching the rules and of not getting caught.

“Please,” Alice said. “Halloween comes only once a year. Think how long till next year.”

They pressed on down Twenty-Fifth Street, three blocks past Hoover Street, to where the sidewalk disappeared, almost to where the street ended at a bank that descended through rambles of trees and bushes to a creek below. Their bags, laden with chocolate and high-fructose corn syrup, stretched heavily from their hands. At the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Monroe Street, Alice was surprised to find Mrs. Swanson, a woman almost as small as Chrissy, answer the door. She played the organ at church and wore her long gray hair in braids wound around her head, like a character out of The Sound of Music. She was forever playing songs at the wrong time during Sunday Mass.

“My, my. What have we here?” She stared at the girls’ cinnamon buns on their heads. “Owen,” she called to her husband, “we have two lovely . . . pastries at the door.”

“We’re not pastries,” Chrissy said indignantly. “We’re Princess Leia.

Didn’t you watch Star Wars?”

The woman shook her head.

“You’re kidding! Everybody’s seen Star Wars.”

Alice gave Chrissy a soft elbow jab to her side. “Thank you, Mrs. Swanson,” Alice said as the woman put a small McIntosh apple in each of the girls’ bags. Chrissy looked at Alice as if she’d just bitten into the apple only to find a worm.

“I hear your brother is out of the hospital,” Mrs. Swanson said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Alice replied, returning her smile.

“Such a terrible pity. So young. You know we’re all pray—” “Thanks. We gotta get home.” Alice pulled Chrissy by the arm and down the steps. “Good night.”

When they were back in the street again, Chrissy took the piece of fruit from her bag and looked at it as if it were a lump of coal. “When I grow up, I’m gonna give out Hershey bars, and I mean the big ones.”

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The girls were standing at the corner, in the circle of dull yellow light that came from the streetlight above them. As Alice looked up the street to where they’d have to walk to get home, she didn’t see a soul: all the other Princess Leias and witches and ghosts had disappeared. The houses stood black, their porch lights extinguished. Trick-or-treating was over, whether Alice wanted it to be or not. The only other illumination came from the streetlight on the corner two blocks up. Even the moon, now shrouded in clouds, had been snuffed out. With no other voices and so much darkness around them, they noticed the moans and howls of the wind. Dried leaves stirred in the gutter and floated down from the trees that arched over the street. The nearly bare limbs cast shadows like gigantic cobwebs on the pavement.

“Come on,” Alice said. “We better hurry. We don’t want to get in trouble.”

Chrissy stood frozen, staring up the street into the dark and shadows.

“It reminds me of the forest in Snow White. You know, when the trees all tried to grab her.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re only going to scare yourself.” Alice wouldn’t admit that Chrissy was scaring her too. “There’s nothing there.”

They started up the street, walking as swiftly as their tight snow boots would allow, not speaking, their hearts jumping at each dog bark, their skin prickling with each bellow of wind. Alice kept her eyes fixed on the next streetlight. She imagined it like “home” in hide-and-seek. Once they got within its circle of light they’d be “safe,” and after that there would be one at every corner.

Alice began to sing softly to herself as the wind pulled at their sheet dresses.

“Down, down baby . . .”

There’s nothing to be afraid of. “down by the roller coaster . . .”

Only half a block more.

“Sweet, sweet baby, I’ll never letcha go . . .”

Is that a bat?

“Shimmy, shimmy cocoa puff, shimmy, shimmy wow . . .”

Almost there.

“Shimmy, shimmy cocoa puff, shimmy, shimmy—” Just as they were about to enter the light, they heard rustling and scurrying from the bushes to Alice’s right and then the charge of feet. Growling.

Roaring. It was the two teenage boys in the rubber monster masks. But this

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time they didn’t just run past. One grabbed the bottom of Alice’s candy bag and tried to wrench it from her hands. She held on for dear life, her body lurching forward and back like a game of crack the whip.

As the boy pulled harder and Alice squeezed tighter with both hands, she thought of the movie she’d watched in school, the one with the “red light” and “green light” people. These were definitely “red light” teenagers— stupid morons picking on kids. She could hear the voice of the man who had instructed the audience that if someone wants your money or stuff, you give it to them. Give it to them and run: Run, children, run! Chances are once they get what they want, they’ll leave you alone. If you try to fight, they might hurt or even kidnap you. The movie—the whole big projector reel of it—zipped through Alice’s mind, and then she let it go. Something told her these boys didn’t want to hurt or kidnap her. They wanted candy—her candy—and no way was anyone going to take it away from her.

Alice held on to the bag with every bit of strength her ten-year-old arms could muster. The boy spun her around and around, yellow light and gray pavement swirling beneath her. As he pulled at the bottom of the bag and Alice pulled at the top, the word Footlocker stretched like a piece of taffy.

“Leave her alone, you asshole!” the other boy yelled.

“Stop it, you moron!” Chrissy yelled.

Pulling, pulling, around and around.

“Stop it! Stop it!” they both yelled.

Alice didn’t say a word. She thought of Joey and his ability to sense when she needed help. Like that time at the lake when she’d swum out too far. All of a sudden, he knew to look for his sister, to pull her to the shallows. She squeezed her hands tighter and tighter. No stupid boy was going to steal what she’d looked forward to for so long. She’d worked hard on her costume and trick-or-treating map. She’d walked blocks and blocks in snow boots two sizes too small. The anger was rising from her pinched toes, charging from her roiling stomach, pushing at the back of her tight throat until she could contain it no longer, until it exploded from her mouth like a Roman candle: “Let go, you fucking eunuch!”

And then the bag ripped. Candy sprayed through the air like confetti shot out of a cannon. Alice fell forward on her knees, only the shredded top of the bag in her hands. The street seemed to teeter-totter up and down. A few feet before her lay the bottom of the bag still fat. She sprang forward and threw herself on it as if she were recovering a fumbled football, just as

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her brother had taught her. The thief lay back in the gutter. The other boy kept yelling at him. “What are you doing? We were only gonna scare ‘em!”

The McIntosh apple rolled down the street and into the storm drain.

The thief scrambled to his feet and ran back into the darkness he’d come from.

“You, asshole! Get back here!” the other boy called to him.

Alice and Chrissy quickly gathered up the candy, throwing Smarties, Kisses, Snickers, and Bazooka Joes into the bag. As they started to run up the street, the boy who’d stayed called to them, “Stop! Wait!” Just before they rounded the corner, Alice looked back. He stood in the light holding his mask and wallet in one hand and dollar bills in the other, his face clouded in shadows. “Please! Let me pay you!” he cried.

“It’s okay,” Alice said.

“I wanna make it up to you!”

“It’s okay.”

Alice grabbed Chrissy’s hand, and they hurried on, not looking back.

When they finally arrived on their block, the porch lights still burning on their own houses up ahead, Chrissy whispered, “I promise I’ll never tell anyone that you cussed.”

“Promise you’ll never tell anyone anything.”

B Alice entered her home through the backdoor and went into the kitchen. She could hear the TV playing from the living room.

“Is that you, sweet pea?” her father called.

“Yeah.” She quickly poured her candy into a large Tupperware bowl and hid the torn bag in the garbage, underneath the slimy guts from the jacko’-lantern. Staring at the bowl, she folded her hands to her chest, as if in prayer, to make them stop trembling. She took a deep breath, picked up the bowl, and carried it into the living room where her dad and brother were gathered around the TV. The oxygen tube was pulled behind Joey’s ears, the little nubs in his nose. His chest moved like a balloon inflating and deflating over and over.

“How’d you do?” he asked.

“Good.” Alice tried to make her voice light.

Just then her mother entered the room. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. She seemed to study Alice, who averted her eyes to her candy. “Everything okay, honey?”

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“Fine,” Alice said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“She’s probably just tired,” Dad said. “She’s been out walking a long time.”

“Yes,” Mom said. “She certainly has.”

Alice put the bowl in Joey’s lap and told him he could have as much as he liked. What she really wanted to do was crawl into his lap like she used to, to tell him about the horrible boy in the mask so he could chase him down and scare him as much as the boy had scared her. To tell him about the boy who’d been nice, like he would’ve been, though Joey never would’ve gone around frightening kids. But she said nothing.

Normally, she would’ve sat between her parents on the sofa and stared at the TV, doing all she could to avoid looking at the person who looked nothing like her brother. Instead, she sat down on the floor, between the oxygen tank and Joey’s recliner. She put her headband and buns in her lap and pried off her boots. She leaned against her brother’s leg, wrapping her arms around it, rubbing her toes, and resting her head on his knee. He reached down and stroked her hair. Her mother looked at her and smiled.

“Even the Snickers?” Joey asked.

“Have ‘em all.”

“Don’t eat all that sugar,” Mom warned him. “You know what the doctor said.”

“Jeez, Mom, allow me some pleasure.” He unwrapped a candy bar.

“I don’t think one would hurt,” Dad said, more to Mom than to Joey.

Everyone returned to staring at the TV. After the news they all went to bed. Dad helped Joey negotiate the stairs to the second floor. Mom turned out all the lights. As Alice lay beneath her bedcover, she thought of how part of her wanted to tell her parents about the boys with the masks and the fight for her candy—to unburden herself like in confession. But she knew she never would. God could handle hearing anything. She wasn’t so sure the same could be said for parents.

She then tried to think of something that would help her fall asleep.

Usually, she would imagine herself as Princess Leia firing a blaster at Darth Vader or kissing Han Solo, but now when she closed her eyes all she could see was that boy in the streetlight, holding his wallet. She tried to force him into the box of things she didn’t want to think about, but he wouldn’t budge. She could hear him too, his voice straining and pitiful.

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No matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut or covered her ears he wouldn’t go away— The door creaked open. The light from the hallway fanned across the doorway. Her mother entered.

“That was very nice of you to share your candy with your brother,” Mom said as she sat down on the edge of the bed.

Alice shrugged and swallowed the lump that had bloomed in her throat.

In the dim light her mother’s eyelids looked heavy, the lines around her mouth deep as if the shadows had pressed their fingernails into her skin.

“Mrs. Swanson called shortly before you got home.”

This could not be good. “She did?”

“I was surprised to hear you’d gone all the way to her house.”

“We finished early, so I thought a little farther wouldn’t hurt.”

“But it wasn’t a good idea, was it?”

Alice lay still.

“She told me about the boys who tried to steal your candy.”

“She saw? Why didn’t she do something?”

“She’s an old woman.” Her mother sighed. “Alice, I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sure it was very scary.” She didn’t sound sorry, but annoyed. After a moment she reached for Alice’s forehead and gently smoothed away the hair. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Alice nodded.

“You didn’t get hurt?”

Alice shook her head.

“But the thing is it never would’ve happened had you done as you were supposed to. Two little girls never should’ve gone so far from home and so late at night.”

Normally, Alice would’ve defended herself with the tenacity of a TV lawyer, but instead she said, “Does Dad know?”

“No.” “Are you going to tell him?”

“Alice,” Mom said in that peeved tone she used to indicate her daughter was missing or, more accurately, ignoring the point. She sighed and then looked as if she were going to say more, maybe even give her another lecture, but didn’t. Instead, she took Alice’s hand and held it in both of hers. Slowly, she brought it to her lips and kissed it, letting Alice’s flesh rest against her own for a moment. She then lowered Alice’s hand and held it in her lap.

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“I was thinking tomorrow you and I could go shopping,” Mom said. “Get you some new boots for winter. Would you like that?”

Alice nodded.

Her mother stared at her for a moment. Alice watched the water rising in her eyes. “I know this has been hard for you,” she said. “It’ll get better.

Eventually. I promise.”

Alice nodded again, her lips tightly drawn together.

“I’m sorry your dad and I haven’t been here much—” “It’s okay, Mom.” Her mother released Alice’s hand and swept her pointer fingers below her eyes.

“It’s okay. Really.”

She leaned over and kissed Alice’s forehead. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I know.”

Alice watched her mother rise slowly from the bed and move through the shadows toward the doorway. When she was almost to the light, Alice asked,“Is Joey gonna die?”

Mom stopped, her back to Alice. Everything in the room, even the air and time itself, seemed still—petrified—as if Alice and her mother were in a photograph. Slowly, Mom turned around, lips parted, and stared at her.

Or perhaps stared at the question hanging in the space between them, as hard and heavy and chilling as the biggest, most grotesque jack-o’-lantern.

Finally, she said, “I have to believe he’s going to be okay.” She smiled ever so slightly. “But the truth is I don’t know. No one does.” The smile was gone.

“How do you do that?” Alice asked.

“Do what?”

“Believe something but not really know for sure at the same time.”

Her mother sat down on the bed again. They were quiet for a moment.

“Well . . . it’s kind of like when you play dress-up,” she began slowly. “When you’re wearing Princess Leia’s clothes, there’s a part of you that really believes you are Princess Leia. You kind of have to, or it wouldn’t be any fun.”

“I guess.”

“At the same time, you also know that you’re not really Princess Leia, but that doesn’t stop you from playing the game. Right?”

Alice nodded.

“It’s kind of like that with Joey. I have to believe he’s going to be okay because . . . that’s what keeps me going. In the back of my mind there’s still

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the fear I could be wrong, but if I let that fear take over, then I don’t know what I’d do. It’s like if you only thought about the fact that you’re Alice and not Princess Leia, you wouldn’t be able to continue the game.”

Alice mulled over her mother’s words and then said, “You mean we’re just supposed to ignore the bad stuff.”

“No. The possibility of death, it’s . . . too real. But we can’t give up hope either. We need it. And Joey needs it.”

Alice still wasn’t sure how someone could do both, but she remained quiet.

Her mother smiled, though the tears returned. “For now, we’ll just have to do our own special version of make believe.”

“Too bad there aren’t any good costumes for it.”

“I guess we’ll have to settle with dressing as our boring old selves.”

“At least you get to wear makeup and cool jewelry.”

“All in good time, my dear.” Mom leaned over and hugged Alice tightly.

“Please don’t grow up any faster,” she whispered.

After the bedroom door had creaked shut, Alice rolled onto her stomach, her face sinking into the pillow. She thought about what her mother had said about believing one thing while also knowing another.

She imagined Joey. He was smiling, his figure slim and muscular, his hair thick and shiny. The lump in her throat returned and throbbed like a stubbed toe.

Soon she was helpless to stop the tears that spilled like secrets and the breath that came in muted gulps. But the image—her big brother, strong and handsome—she held with unbreakable force. She held it until the burning in her belly withered to ash, until her chest rose and fell in gentle waves, until she floated into sleep, the darkness as warm as a blanket, the silence as soothing as a lullaby.

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[ POETRY]

Musings from the Wet Season By: Melissa Ridley Elmes

Hurricane season runs from June through November every year. Counting out the alphabet, naming the winds. Stay away from that sliding door our mother would caution when a storm methodically called after an angry woman somewhere, sometime—someone’s great-aunt famed in family holiday anecdotes for bashing her ne’er-do-well husband over the head with a cast iron skillet, someone’s irate grandmother raging against a slight long forgotten, save her response to it, some historical or literary woman written into murderous fury by a man with an agenda— threw itself against the glass, demanding our attention like a drunken neighbor pounding on the door because he forgot his keys and where he lived. Should the door shatter, we could drown out there, or drown in here, in waters named for a woman, her unquiet despair.

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[ FICTION]

My Mother’s Fatal Rythm

T

o walk among the bloody silence of a home, to grind an ink stick against stone,

still as a cut flower—that is what I did most.

Cindy Mu

Quite often, I would peer through the ink-blue rooms and moonlit halls, through blank scrolls of parchment before making a split decision to drown my brush in soot ink.

Once when I was seven, you screamed, clutching your bare throat, when you caught me plucking horsetail hairs from the brush. I did not know Photography: cottonbro studio, Pexels.com

it was once your mother’s brush, and so I sat bewildered, the coarse hairs digging into my baby fat—fistfuls of your past ripped from the root.

I wonder if she had cried the way you did, wrinkles twisted and deep when you left for America. Sometimes, I forget that all parents were once careless children, soft with fat and igno-

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rance, twisting from the outstretched hand of their mothers. To leave a parent coughing in the dust, trudging behind their children trying to catch up in a cruel game of iron-tipped tenderness, is precisely the nature of youth.

How can a slash of ink come alive without bleeding from the paper?

Perhaps, then, that makes us all children. You and me both, Mother.

Years ago, you taught me to write my name. After I had mastered writing the characters for one, two, and three, you had written my name out for me, the characters curled and flat against the cream paper. They had huddled together like a shivering shoal of fish when I decided to lift the paper before it dried, but I digress. A word is supposed to have movement, a vessel of time and rhythm as its main ingredients. But how? How can a slash of ink come alive without bleeding from the paper?

One. It is a living record of the past, a wound in the flesh.

You once told me that a fickle brushstroke cannot be fixed. How tightly you gripped my hand against the brush, scratching the paper in silence as you hovered above me. I once read that immigrant parents are more likely to pour themselves into their children. In that case, what do we mean when we say children should be innocent? Perhaps it is a necessary sin to harden a child early on, to teach them pain to survive.

Two. To carry the burden of a parent’s sacrifice, to prepare a child for war: that is the rhythm of my name.

If we were lucky, the past would be forgotten, but the past lives on through blood: another code of neurons and skin, ancestors living vicariously through our eyes and mouths. I was six when I stood in the living room watching Grandpa grind the ink stick in slow circles against the black stone. He was your father, yes, but he had a ticking stillness you did not inherit. His scarred hands were steady as he pinched the brush between his fingers, showing me how to draw the hairs to a sharp point for better ink flow. I cannot remember when he turned on the old TV. The house suddenly filled with sounds of dying soldiers, the sharp bark of men as they pillaged a village like his own. He poured hot water into his bowl of rice, drowning the white kernels and blooming the sesame oil into pale amber beads. “It tasted better this way,” he had said, bringing the porcelain bowl

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to his lips. His rubber slippers tapped against the kitchen tiles as he drank himself full on water, a steady ticking in the silence, a rhythm of memory.

To be a parent is to be a monster—a stitched-together, wretched mess of a creature. So why is it that we love and forgive our parents?

Three. It is because they cannot help but be what their parents were, passing the baton like a family heirloom.

The saying goes that love conquers all, but perhaps what they really mean is that love cannot be undone—not even in the quiet violence of parenthood.

It is the fatal brushstroke that cannot be fixed, a moment of iron-tipped tenderness and forgiveness: that is the rhythm of your name.

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[ CONTRIBUTORS] FICTION

POETRY

Page 30 Megan Draper is a native Michigander studying Creative Writing and Spanish. When she’s not traveling abroad, she enjoys watching witty movies and reading bittersweet books. Her work has previously been published by Owl Hollow Press and is forthcoming in 300 Days of Sun. She’s an active part of the writing community and can be found at www. authormeganriann.com.

Page 6 Casey Harloe is a creative writing student at the University of Cincinnati.

Her work has appeared in DIALOGIST, BRENDA, and Poets.org, and is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives in Cincinnati.

Find her at @caseyharloe.

Page 44 Jeffrey Haskey-Valerius is a queer, Best of the Net-nominated poet and writer whose work has appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, Iron Horse, Northern New England Review, Rust + Moth, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. He lives in mid-Missouri with his husband and dog. He tweets @jeffrey-valerius and is online at jeffreyhaskey-valerius.com.

Page 8 Barbara Lawhorn is an Associate Professor at Western Illinois University.

She’s into community literacy work, walking her amazing dog, Banjo, running, eating pie, and finding the wild places, within herself and outside in the world. Her most recent poetry and fiction can be found at Sand Hill Literary Review, Poetry South, Dunes Review Literary Journal and White Wall Review. She has work forthcoming in Santa Clara Review, INKWELL, and Miracle Monocle. She lives joyfully in the Midwest with her favorite creative endeavors ever–sons, Mars and Jack.

Page 52 Jill Marshall is a writer and ancient historian. She was born in Nashville, studied history and religion at Vanderbilt and Emory Universities, and currently lives in Atlanta. “Krokodilopolis” is her first published short story.

Page 88 Cindy Mu is a Chinese-American writer based in Illinois. She is currently studying Creative Writing and Molecular Biology at the University of Illinois, splitting her time between navigating medicine, working in neuroscience, and writing short stories in coffee shops. Her work is published/forthcoming in Montage Arts Journal and BrainMatters.

Page 70 Elizabeth Vondrak holds an MA in Literature from Boston College and an MFA from Florida International University. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various publications including Touchstone Magazine, untethered, and Transitions Abroad. Originally from Iowa, she lives in Boston with her husband and three children. Please find me at elizabethvondrak.com.

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Page 29 Laura King holds a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Her work has appeared in Neologism Journal, The Opiate Magazine, Modern Haiku, Ponder Review, Evening Street Review, Wrath Bearing Tree, Hollins Critic, whimperbang, Slant, The Meadow, FRiGG, Visitant, El Portal, Dash, Phoenix and The Los Angeles Times. She lives in Sacramento, California, where she is a hospital chaplain.

Page 43 Sean Madden holds an MFA from the University of Kentucky. The Emerson Review nominated his poem, “Note for Inspector,” for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Other poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Copper Nickel, Slant, Waccamaw, Glassworks, The Nonconformist, Sport Literate, Small Print, The Los Angeles Review, and The John Updike Review. He lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills with his wife and sons and is currently at work on a novel and a story collection. Visit him at seanmadden.org.

Page 69 Christine Pennylegion has lived in and around Toronto, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Windsor. She holds a BA(Hons) in English from the University of Toronto, and an MAR from Trinity School for Ministry. Her poems have been published by Dunes Review, Humana Obscura, Understorey Magazine, and others. Read more at christinepennylegion.com.

Page 87 Melissa Ridley Elmes is a Virginia native currently living in Missouri in an apartment that delightfully approximates a hobbit hole. Her poetry has appeared in Black Fox, Poetry South, Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, Spectral Realms, In Parentheses, and various other print and web venues. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Star and Rhysling awards for speculative poetry, and her first collection of poems, Arthurian Things, was published by Dark Myth Publications in 2020 and nominated for the 2022 Elgin award.

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