Bennington College – The End of the World Journal – June 2024

the end of the world

JUNE 2024 BENNINGTON COLLEGE

The End of the World

POEMS, STORIES, AND ESSAYS by the 58th Graduating Class of The Bennington Writing Seminars

JUNE 2024

Managing Editor

Erin Hemme Froslie

Nonfiction Editors

Julia Juster

Priscilla Posada

Poetry Editor

A.M. Voiculet

Cover Images

Sara Sobota

Journal Design and Cover

Ayla Graney

© Copyrights retained by all respective contributors.

Acknowledgements

The class of June 2024 is grateful to all who have encouraged us to tell our authentic stories: our teachers, our families, our friends, and, of course, each other.

We also are thankful for the writers we’ve read and the administrators of the College and Writing Seminars.

Rebound

Amrei Blaesing

31 October 1998

As the sun traveled slowly across the faces of the other skydivers, our jump plane entered a gentle turn over the Gulf of Mexico, three miles from shore. Our weekend begun, we waited to skydive as recreation. Belted to the cabin floor of an airplane without seats, the thighs of a woman I didn’t know were pressed to my sides from behind while I sat, bored, my own legs straddling the back of blond man I barely knew in front of me. Between my knees he moved in a kind of trance, visualizing the skydive he’d choreographed with friends on the ground.

The crammed airplane smelled of grease and sweat and unwashed clothes, while engines groaned loudly in and out of sync. Below us, the white ribbon of beach and emerald water out my window promised release, but I wasn’t thinking of a skydive or friends to share it with. I’d worked hard all week as a soldier, being something I wasn’t. I didn’t have it in me to pretend any further. I wanted nothing more than the pitcher of beer I’d be handed across the bar as soon as we landed, payment for entertaining the crowd of revelers at the FloraBama Lounge. My concern wasn’t whether my parachute

would work, or if my reserve would if the other failed. I wasn’t worried about landing too far out in the ocean to swim ashore. Under age, I only worried whether the bartender would refuse me the pitcher of beer I’d have earned when I’d stand before her with no I.D. in hand.

I leaned back toward the woman behind me, my parachute rig a kind of seat back, and pressed my eyes closed. I felt no anticipation, no excitement. I tried not to take too much more of her space. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I tried to vanish my thoughts about my military commander who found me too immature, a different kind of insubordination that led him to try for months to kick me out of the Army, out of flight school, out of the only dream I’d had my whole life: to become a military pilot.

This afternoon though, he’d tried a new tack. He sent me to spend two hours lying to an Army psychologist who questioned whether I had a drinking problem. My drinking wasn’t a problem, but blackouts were making things harder. I’d sat before this professional who wanted to help me in a special ward of an Army hospital. He didn’t need my lies. He only sought some explanation for why I could no longer show up to the flight line on time for work, for why I’d become so inconsistent, for why I didn’t seem to care. I didn’t have any answers I could share. I knew he could end my career. I fed him lies until he agreed my only problem was insomnia, and asked me to call if it didn’t improve. I wouldn’t. Instead, I drove three hours to another military town, so I could sit in an airplane crammed with civilians while the drone of engines lulled me to sleep.

When I woke, bumped by the man in front of me, I tried to focus on the sound of the engines as a way of meditation. I breathed in through my nose, and out through my mouth

the way I was taught to calm my nerves as a child. In, four seconds. Over a hill of my rising chest, then fully, slowly, out. In again. Slowly over. Then out. And on and on until I was shaken abruptly from behind after the pilot yelled, “TWO MINUTES!”

The airplane cabin came to life. I looked around a moment, then turned over onto my knees. Like everyone else, I tightened the parachute harness around my legs and chest. I closed my eyes again, to let my body feel whether the sides were even, then slid my fingers under the edge of each buckle to check for the lip of metal that’d tell me each strap was routed correctly. I reached behind my back to the base of my parachute. The handle attached to it was tucked away just far enough to not come loose prematurely in freefall. I undid flaps I couldn’t see on my back, checked that the curved metal pins were secure, then tucked the flaps back in. I couldn’t remember if I was sober when I’d last packed this parachute which didn’t bother me. Just curious about what to expect. I pulled my goggles up from my neck, donned my helmet, then looked at the people around me. All were in motion. The red light beside the open door near the tail had gone out. The green light came on.

I saw Foster’s grin as he sat against the back wall of the cabin. His grin was all dimples, cheeks and chin. His purple tiedyed jump suit flapped as people shuffled past him, cascading out the door, out of sight. He’d been waiting for this all week, too, fresh back from a photoshoot in Miami or New York. As I climbed out the door, wind slammed my side. I held loosely to the door frame with one hand. Foster pressed his free palm to mine, interlocked our fingers, with a tight grip that softened as he looked into my eyes. I felt his grin in my chest. He pulled me close to him with an inhale. The sunset glinted in his goggles,

and he shouted, “Ready?”

I nodded and I leaned with him into the open air, his breath in sync with mine.

“Set!”

He pulled me back into the doorway.

We paused and held one another's gaze.

He nudged me outward again, and exhaled the word, “Go.”

I let go of everything except him.

We fell, backward, into the wind, face to face.

We shared a column of air like two swimmers who’ve dived headfirst with no pool beneath us. The world was two miles away. We accelerated toward it and gained control of our movements. The air felt mushy, then grew dense with speed, while Foster and I remained chest to chest. We had the control you have when you hold your hand out the window of a moving car. Every child who’s had the chance has done this. The wind can move your hand up or down, out or in with the flex of your fingers. Flatten your hand and you feel it push against your palm. Cup the fingers and you cut through it. We moved our legs and arms, hips and chests, the angles of our shoulders or shins. The faster we fell, the more precisely and quickly we could maneuver in three dimensions. All movement became normal and relaxed. We breathed. We stopped accelerating toward anything except each other, stabilized as we freefell onehundred-fifty miles per hour.

For as long as we fell, we had nothing to run into except each other. Foster released one hand to wave a peace sign between us while his tongue hung out in the wind like a smiling hound. Every part of our bodies moved in unison. This was the closest I’d come to the present moment all week. We moved with the grace of two partners performing a waltz, easing apart, then

together again. The sun began a slow revolution around us. I eased slightly away and he did a half cartwheel then flew up to me like a sixty-nine in space. We both flipped over, synchronized. I now stood on the air, my arms held above my shoulders. Foster, again upside-down, closed the space between us. I extended one foot and he gently grabbed it. We cartwheeled together, gently maintaining our tenuous connection.

The ocean didn’t exist to either of us, even though Foster had nearly drowned there after a jump a year ago. He’d trod water for hours in the darkness sure he’d die before rescue would find him. He released me and I flipped upside-down again. We took turns orbiting one another. This is how I prefer to remember him, as my smiling dance partner, the two of us as far away from anyone else as we could be, moving as one. This was where I loved him. The sunset became a deep gold, the wispy clouds over the horizon pinked.

Other jumpers had begun to deploy their parachutes, but we just changed the path of our descent from straight down into a more angled dive as if riding a steep hill toward the beach. The small electronic altimeter in my helmet began to beep. Five thousand feet. Forty-five seconds had passed. I glance up toward the shore. We fell past opening parachutes, yet we had time for a couple more turns about each other. Foster waves his hands by his sides, turns to fly away from me as we pass through thirty-five-hundred feet. When safely separated, he deployed his parachute.

I flipped onto my back to watch his parachute unravel, stretch, then smoothly open. It worked. He’s safe. No longer a genderless dance partner, I turned over again to focus on the beach. Three thousand feet, I look to the side, and everything seems to stop, as if I was fixed to the horizon. It was a beautiful

sight, the distant line that separates a bright sky above from a shadowy earth below.

On the beach a flag waved above a high-rise construction project beside the bar I was aiming for. The flag told me the direction of the wind. With this, I visualized my path between buildings, cranes, pitched roofs and balconies. At two thousand feet, I shifted my eyes to straight below, wholly at the ground. I was no longer over the water. I saw the first slight ground rush, as if the world was coming up at me faster than I fell. My stomach recoiled upward. The last of the open parachutes of my fellow jumpers were now well above me, affixed to the sky. I freefell through fifteen-hundred feet and the world stopped rushing at me. Instead, it spread outward like an opening crater, a target for my impact. My breath staccatoed slightly as I inhaled a deep breath. For a second longer, I watched the beach resolve to bumps and dunes. This was the rush I sought on skydives. Not the freefall but the proximity to death. I loved these sensations, loved how they felt, loved that I couldn’t back away from them like I did everything else. Loved that I could feel anything at all from inside my numbness. I was nineteen, an Army officer and helicopter pilot, uncomfortable in almost every way. But all this would end soon. I was only seconds from a beer.

I deployed my parachute at twelve-hundred feet, but it didn’t come out of the container on my back. And the ground was too close. There’d been a problem with the pin releasing my parachute for months. I swatted at the rig with the back of my hand, groped for the cord, until it came free. I passed through eight hundred feet as the chute began to snivel open, taking too much time. The buildings grew in deadly size. Steel rebars pointed straight at me like skewers from the unfinished parking garage. I stared at them, still falling too fast. My mind panicked

but my body relaxed. I was going to die.

The parachute snapped fully open, hard. It sent a painful jolt through my spine that clenched my jaw. The harness dug deep into my hips. I had just enough altitude to weave between the parking garage and the second story balcony of the bar. A group of bargoers reached their beers up to snag my passing feet, but I lifted my feet clear to the open air over a patio, with just enough height to clear sand dune fencing before I touched the white sand. The fine grains buzzed under my bare feet and between my toes as I skidded to a halt, safe.

Down before anyone else, I was the appetizer for the crowd which now gawked skyward for the real show.

I scanned the sky too, for Foster. He flew his parachute through tight spiraling turns. Normally he was the last to land, but I had coaxed him into falling a little closer to the ground with me. I could hear the flapping of his jump suit, the shooshing sound of his parachute, as he continued tight turns then extended his flight up the beach. He disappeared from view behind the parking garage. The crowd turned from him to the other jumpers still much higher in the sky. I quickly counted the parachutes to make sure no one had a malfunction, before turning back to wait for Foster. His parachute was designed for someone weighing a hundred and seven pounds. He weighed closer to two hundred, which meant he’d dive over the ground like a jet coming to land. When he burst into view once more, his parachute was stretched out beside him, rather than above as he carved a sharp turn, then swung back under it, gaining speed. His chute sounded like an airliner as he buzzed the crowd, flying fifty miles per hour over their outstretched arms.

I reached my arm out to his for a passing high five that sent a shock through my whole arm as if snapped. He touched his

heels to the sand and sent a rooster tail of sand high into the air behind him, barely slowing. He made tiny adjustments with his fingertips while he flew, his feet still parting the surface of the sand. Six months ago, a friend of ours did the same thing and crashed into a sand dune so hard he shattered his legs, back and neck. I was told he’d walk with crutches soon. This was the leading cause of skydiver deaths. Not accidents, not malfunctions of equipment, but complacent, experienced jumpers piledriving themselves into the ground during momentary stunts that they’d committed to, but slightly miscalculated. After falling fourteen-thousand feet, they come up one foot short to become a dust cloud of broken bones attached to a perfectly good parachute. I’d do this too, a few times and live, but my body bears the residuals of years of trauma.

Foster was a master of this pursuit however. He managed to keep sliding for a hundred feet, like he was waterskiing across the sand, until he slowed enough to lower his feet and run at a full sprint, digging his heels in with each step until he skidded to a stop.

The Intruder

Farah Habib

Intruders come in all shapes and sizes; they aren’t always strangers.

The five-bedroom ranch with a 10-foot ceiling in an up-andcoming suburb near his job in Austin was Amir’s idea. Sabrina had gone along with it because she dreamt of the day her baby would have a playroom, the cul-de-sac a peaceful corner of the world for him to one day pedal his tricycle. She imagined wheeling her Bilal down to the neighborhood pool in a little red wagon, his chubby cheeks and dimpled smile barely visible from under a sun hat; but only when the lifeguard is on duty, Amir cautioned when she mentioned it to him.

The house was being built from the ground up. It was scheduled to be completed later that month; a springtime move was much better than the brutal Texas heat they would otherwise have to endure. Sabrina could have granite or quartz countertops; Amir didn’t care. It was the security system and locks that mattered to him. The news Amir read online confirmed his fears. Texas harbored intruders. Burglaries were a common occurrence. Hardly anyone was immune. “There’s something about the heat here that makes people go berserk,”

he explained to his family who had followed him from Pakistan to America, then settled across the midwest and northeast. “This is Texas where everything is in abundance, even the crime.”

Amir’s job as software designer at Austin’s leading technology firm specializing in home safety equipment gave him access to the latest gizmos. He planned a customized system: outdoor cameras with capacity to trigger red and blue lights in the presence of an intruder; color night vision, heat and motion detection from the weatherproof bullet cameras; detailed recordings made available via an HD video, from which he could watch the goings on of the house, inside and outside, live on his phone from anywhere in the world, or on TV from the comfort of his bedroom. It was a little beyond his means, but he was thankful for the employee discount and his own technical know-how for a DIY job. The locations for the cameras had already been identified—each of the bedrooms, especially the nursery, the kitchen and living room. Eyes always alert and watching.

Bilal was nearing his fifth month and ahead of her expected return to work that summer, Sabrina posted a want ad at the local Indian grocer. “We need a nanny,” she’d announced to Amir. “I’ll feel better knowing he is at home when I’m away from him.”

They had finally moved into the new place, Amir’s American dream materialized. All around him Pakistani physicians and engineers just like him were living in luxury homes, mini mansions really; it was proof of their having made it among a sea of immigrants clamoring to be counted among those with enough fortitude and foresight to amass the resources needed to make their way to the top. He had wanted the same. What would be the point, otherwise, of coming to America,

enduring insignificant, mind-numbing jobs—as a farmworker, a bathroom cleaner, a grocery cart hauler—for the sake of that college education that promised to gut out an unfathomable distance between him and his former life as a lackey? What would be the point of suffering through months, maybe even years, of that strange feeling in the pit of his stomach? His college days had been unbearable. Having arrived in the United States at 18, he was one of a handful of brown people, possibly the only Pakistani, in rural Minnesota where the cold gnawed at his loneliness. He’d learned to survive by becoming self-reliant, which he understood to mean financial independence through which he could make it on his own just as his father had done back in the 1950s when he’d left his family in India for the shores of Pakistan eager to make it in a new country founded on the promise of freedom and opportunity for Muslims. When the barrenness cut deep, he’d complained to the college nurse. She’d given him a cold bottle of water and sent him off with the assurance that things would get better: “It’s like going swimming in a pool. It doesn’t feel good when you first get in.”

She had been right. But now that the banana boxes he had painstakingly collected by frequenting the grocery stores in the area had been flattened and recycled, their contents spread out in the new place, Amir turned his attention to other matters like his savings account. He was aghast with disbelief at the zeros that had disappeared. Panic. Sabrina had to return to her accounting job.

He wondered now if he’d done the right thing by insisting on the second income. The thought of an outsider in his private space gave rise once again to that sad feeling in his belly. He’d yelled “Bilal can go to daycare just like everyone else’s kid.”

When she considered nixing the idea of working at all, he’d relented. Then spent the afternoon binging on cheap Totino's frozen pizzas. They were on sale at Walmart. He'd brought home a dozen. The personal size pies in the square packaging piled high like a Jenga tower in the brown paper bag; at the bottom was a special lock for the front door, a back-up, the third of its kind.

When no one inquired about the job for two weeks, Amir was relieved. Fate. On the way home from work one day, he drove by a home daycare in a small house at the edge of an older neighborhood that he cut through to save time. A backup plan in case a nanny wouldn’t materialize, he told Sabrina. Then exactly four days before she was to start her job, Sabrina’s phone began to ring.

After dinner that evening, while Amir watched reruns of Married with Children, she slipped into the armchair across from him. She’d heard from two people, a young Indian wife of a technical assistant at Dell Computers down the road and an older woman from Oman who lived with her three grown sons within driving distance from their neighborhood; she sounded sweet on the phone, and the best part—a personal connection. She knew a few people in the network of Pakistanis they were familiar with in Austin.

Amir had a million questions: How was her English? Is she a thief? Will she bring other strangers into the house? What if she burns down the house? Can she even handle the job? What if she loses it? What if she hits Bilal? And the most essential one, how much was she asking? But mostly he took note of the glow on his wife’s face, the shine in her big almond eyes. He knew his wife only ever looked excited when she was sure of what she wanted. He saw that she had flipped open the notebook she was holding to a dog-eared

page looking pleased like a child proud of a find at the beach.

The Omani woman’s children all worked, but menial jobs as a handyman, a gas station attendant and a security guard, all of them now living in Texas. No husband. She spoke English but with an accent for she had only been in the United States about a dozen years. Sabrina also liked that she was a Muslim.

“I liked her better than the young woman because she has children. I loved the way she spoke about them too. She wasn’t just proud of them. She seemed to love them for who they are.”

Amir didn’t shift his gaze from the screen. Sabrina was used to competing with the tube. She finished off her tea and moved her pencil down the page of her notebook. “Her name is Amina, you know like Prophet Mohammad’s mother. But she prefers we call her Sister Amina.”

“You want to hire this woman because she likes her loser sons and has the same name as the Prophet’s mother. Don’t do something stupid you will regret later, Sabrina.”

Sabrina looked up from her notebook and caught her reflection in the decorative mirror she had only recently hung on the living room wall. She was fair complected but now her cheeks shone red. She didn’t realize she was making a tap, tap, tap sound with her pencil on the notebook until Amir directed his gaze her way with that familiar arch between his eyebrows.

“I don’t know yet if I want to hire her, but yes, I want to give her a chance, and she’ll be here for a trial run tomorrow.” And then with an admonishing tone. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about people in that way.”

Amir picked up the remote and flipped the channel to a cricket match. He wasn’t used to this new side of Sabrina. When he’d phoned his mother back in Pakistan a few years ago to tell her he was ready for marriage, she’d pinged him a

bunch of images and profiles of prospects. Sabrina’s was the one he’d paused at a little longer. Her straight black hair and wide forehead reminded him of the heroines from the Pakistani dramas who he thought looked like the perfect image of a wife—docile, pretty and eager to please. Sabrina had, for the most part, lived up to that image. She usually gave into him if he pushed hard enough, like the time he insisted they take the cheaper option to drive the twelve hours to visit his brother in Missouri instead of a short three-hour flight; she’d simply disappeared into the kitchen to put together a grocery list of items she’d need to make sandwiches for the road. He was only ever used to seeing her retreat into herself, go off to read a book or try a new recipe in the kitchen when he didn’t want to accept invitations to friends’ birthday parties or movie nights with them; he thought Sabrina understood his annoyance at having to go out, frivolous outings, waste of gas and time. Not to mention the crazies who might chance upon their empty house and consider it an invitation to break in.

“What I can’t get you to see is that it’s a terrible idea to have someone we don’t know in the house.” Amir’s tone was firm. He had turned off the television. Bilal was sleeping in the room next door. The gurgle of his breathing from the baby monitor on the coffee table was the only sound that broke the heavy stillness in the air.

“I have a mother’s instinct about this woman,” Sabrina was now saying. “She sounds kind and I believe the one-on-one attention Bilal will get from her is not something a daycare can provide.” She kept her eyes on Amir and longed for the day a nod of understanding or a knowing glance—gestures between a couple in sync—would one day fill the void between them. But when Amir met her eyes, it was a sideways glance accompanied

with a smug smile. Their four years together had taught her to read the signs of disapproval on his face. Sabrina swallowed her words; her reluctance at having to disrupt her baby’s sleep early in the morning to take him to a daycare remained unsaid; so did her desperate need to avoid having to hand her baby off into the arms of an attendant for whom he would be a number, one of about half a dozen infants in a room full of cribs and playpens awaiting their turn to be changed and fed. Her Bilal deserved better. But she could not impress this upon her husband, whom she believed was choosing to ignore the fact that her income was only going to be a way to build their savings.

Sister Amina arrived the next day exactly on time. She wore a hijab and jilbab, which didn’t surprise Sabrina a bit although Amir avoided eye contact the whole time even though he slipped in and out of Bilal’s room or wherever he found the two women conversing in the house. Her long grey gown was exactly how Sabrina had imagined an older woman from the Middle East to be wearing. She’d met a few Arabic speaking ladies during Eid prayers at the local mosque and liked how they hugged and planted a kiss on each cheek as a greeting. Sister Amina did the same when she arrived. Her cascading laughter made Sabrina smile; she couldn’t help notice the squint in the older lady’s eyes. Hers was a calming presence.

The trial run was a success. Sister Amina had helped to feed and change the baby. She looked friendly even to Bilal who took to her almost immediately when she held out her hands to him. She gently stroked his back while he sat in her lap and clumsily twisted his caterpillar rattle, his tiny fingers and fists a set of tools he was just discovering. And when Sabrina asked her to talk about her experience with babies, she asked for permission to bathe Bilal before his afternoon naps. “It helps calm them down

so they can sleep better,” she had explained. “And if you do not mind, dear child, I will want to keep a schedule so that the baby sleeps, eats and goes to toilet on time.” Here she giggled before adding “The one taking care of the baby also prefers that. No routine means no happy baby or caregiver, khallaas.” Sabrina smiled both at the advice because she had heard it from her own mother before and because she noticed that Sister Amina had a habit of ending her sentences with that Arabic word—Khallaas as in “I will come Monday through Friday, Khallaas; “I’d like to make Bilal’s pureed lentils and rice myself. The Gerber baby jars are no good, Khallaas.”

“You can tell she knows what she is doing; she must have been a thoughtful mother to her own children,” Sabrina declared to Amir later that evening.

“Let’s see if the $1,500 a month she’s charging will be worth it,” is all Amir had said from his spot on the couch before going through a detailed plan of which entrance Sister Amina was to enter and what time she needed to come in the mornings so that they wouldn’t have to share any codes with her or even provide her with a spare key. “In fact, I don’t even want her to know how to open and lock the main door. There really should be no need for her to leave the house when she’s with Bilal.”

Sister Amina’s references checked out, a contract was signed, the schedule finalized, and Sabrina started her job with a feeling that she was leaving her Bilal with the next best thing to her own presence in the house. Routine set in. Sabrina arrived home each evening, Bilal bathed, napped and waiting for her in his playpen. Even Amir seemed to be fine with the arrangement. He didn’t frown when Sabrina mentioned the nanny at night, and quietly put away his folded laundry that Sister Amina left at the entrance to their bedroom.

Things started falling apart after a cancelled project at Amir’s work. Or it might have been summer doldrums, maybe even the Texas heat that gave Amir headaches. Either way he began popping up at home in the afternoons from time to time. Sometimes he even worked from there. Needless to say, he began to notice things: a gallon of milk left on the kitchen counter. The drip, drip, drip of the kitchen faucet. Bilal crawling around without a diaper. Then came the day he arrived home to his son’s wailing. Sister Amina nowhere in sight. He ran to the nursery.

Love Language AN EXCERPT

Erin Hemme Froslie

The Italians named tomatoes pomodori: golden apples. The French used to call them pommes d’amour: apples of love. In my family, they are one of the ways we say “I care about you” without having to directly admit it.

The first year of our marriage, when my husband and I lived in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, my maternal grandparents made an unannounced visit to my workplace, a small newspaper office in a nondescript strip mall. I heard my grandfather’s contagious laugh before I saw the two of them standing at the receptionist’s desk. I could feel myself blush with embarrassment at this impromptu stop. After all, I was a young professional trying to impress the more experienced reporters around me and I was certain my grandfather with his big silver belt buckle and my grandmother in her polyester pants would not help my cause. I had been at my job for less than a month, and my grandparents were giddy with the gift they had stashed in the back of the Oldsmobile they had driven 250 miles from home. It was late August. They were in the Twin Cities area for their annual trek to the Minnesota State Fair and since they were more-or-less in the neighborhood, they wanted to drop off

some tomatoes. My grandfather set down a five-gallon pail filled with their most recent harvest. The tomatoes were piled so high they tumbled from the top when I tried to lift it.

I stumbled through a thank you. I gave my grandparents quick hugs and told them I couldn’t talk too long or my boss would get upset. As I watched them pull out of the parking lot, I stood there wondering what I was going to do with a halfbushel of tomatoes. To solve the problem. I invited my new coworkers, a group of six, to help themselves. They descended on the produce with enthusiasm, the tomatoes an unexpected gift.

Years later I reach out to Jack, a gardener who is known by other gardeners in our community as “The Tomato Man.” For more than 20 years, he has grown heirloom tomatoes from seed. He used to limit the number of varieties that he grew in his garden to sixty. Then three years ago he and another tomato aficionado founded the Tomato Seed Savers Club. This past April he planted 100 new-to-him varieties, all the seedlings stretching toward the grow lights in his home basement. I heard about his club and tomato seed efforts from a Facebook post. In September—when most tomatoes are ripe and ready to be harvested for both seeds and fruit—he invites me to visit the community garden plot where the club grows its tomatoes.

I am curious about this connection between harvest and future plantings. These are rituals that are familiar and comfortable to me, one way I can reclaim my own agricultural roots. I no longer keep track of corn and soybean commodities, but I can play in soil.

When I moved to Fargo-Moorhead in the late 1990s, the Tomato Man’s plot would’ve been near the southern border of the city. Now, it’s more centrally located in the sprawling metro

region. To get there, I drive past a grocery store, apartment buildings, and a Starbucks. I then drive into what I have often referred to as Church Lane, a street that takes me past a Baptist church, an Episcopal cathedral (designed to look like a grain elevator), a Lutheran congregation and a non-denominational church that recently took over a building formerly belonging to an Assemblies of God congregation. I have sometimes wondered while driving this busy road if heaven will be like this—people in cars delivered to the theological parking lot of their choice while the rest of the traffic speeds by.

When I arrive at the community garden plot, I see volunteers already busy bending over plants. Wide-brimmed hats shade their faces and most are wearing gardening aprons where they stash tools like knives and vine clippers. The harvest is in full swing. There are pumpkins and melons and peppers and eggplants and, of course, tomatoes. The garden plot is large by city standards, small by farm standards: 190 feet by 190 feet or about two-thirds the size of a football field. Over half of the garden is devoted to heirloom tomatoes. This season, the Tomato Seed Savers Club carefully planted 600 seedlings.

Heirloom tomatoes often have a shorter shelf life than their hybrid cousins that are stacked in pyramids at our local grocery store. In general, heirlooms are also less productive, making them poor choices for commercial success. They are, however, more varied in size, color and shape than hybrids—and often tastier. The seed savers club in Fargo has grown nearly 250 varieties in the past three years. These seeds are carefully labeled and stored in Jack’s basement. I’m told that most seeds will keep well for up to six years. That said, some of the volunteer gardeners have had luck growing tomato plants from seeds that are twenty years old or older.

I’ve never lived in tomato country, places where these lovely plants grow continuously and unwieldy from long, hot summers that never really collapse into winter. Where I live now, in the Red River Valley that separates Minnesota and North Dakota, the soil supports wheat and corn and sugar beets and sunflowers and potatoes and is home to rich, fertile soil. But while the soil is welcoming, the growing season is not. Tomatoes thrive in heat and that is a short-lived resource on the northern plains. On average, we have 140 frost-free days and, like the people who live here, tomato plants must soak in every ray of sunlight possible between mid-May and the end of September. Tomato season is measured in weeks, not months. But when it hits, it’s a flurry of flavor and preservation. Bowls of cherry tomatoes. Stacks of slicers. Bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches. Tomatoand-butter-on-white-bread sandwiches. Canned tomato juice. Canned spaghetti sauce. Salsa.

This fleeting, but abundant season is one reason I become intrigued by the Tomato Seed Savers Club. This is a gathering of mostly retirees who devote two hours every week to planting, pruning, and preserving heirloom tomato varieties that grow well in northern climates like ours. In other words, this group of volunteers nurtures the plants in hopes of harvesting not only the fruit, but the seeds. They believe that the promise of spring grows from the abundance of autumn, that hope is reason enough to dig in the dirt and tend to these plants.

Every summer I, too, stick tomato plants in dirt. I am, as one of my friends describes it, a planter not a gardener. My garden is tiny in comparison to what I grew up with and the community plot where seed savers grow tomatoes. One year, I push a few green bean seeds and a pepper plant into the soil.

The next year I try peas and zucchini. What is never a question is whether I’ll have tomatoes. The question, really, is how many. Still, my friend is right. I’ve gotten smarter, or perhaps lazier, over the years, seeking bushy determinate varieties of tomatoes that know their boundaries and don’t require staking or cages to hold their lanky skeletons upright. I seek smaller varieties that can be protected from the deer that wander through our yard. This summer I promised to only raise cherry tomatoes that could be housed in planters on my deck. A trip to a local greenhouse and I came home with four plants—only one that I planted in a pot. I pushed the other three into the two small gardening beds in my backyard. Before June, before I could wrap my garden in bird netting to protect the young plants from critters, deer pulled up two of the three seedlings. I refused to replant.

I have no patience for plants that need to be babied. I am exactly the kind of gardener that Randy, one of the seed savers, scoffs at.

“Most Americans get impatient,” he says as he prepares seeds for drying. “They throw something in dirt and expect it to grow. They won’t put the work in. They don’t know you need to be on your hands and knees.” I know he is right. Planting is a physical expression of faith and falling on your hands and knees seems to be exactly the thing a gardener should do to coax miracles from the soil. Merely planting seeds misses the point. Gardening is an exercise of prayer, a belief that there’s something bigger and longer lasting than yourself. Randy tells me that a garden is loyal. It’s not nasty or rude, he says. It gives back. I’ve not had that much luck with a garden but maybe it’s because I’ve missed the part about falling on my hands and knees, that part that makes me think about prayer.

I expect that my lackadaisical attitude towards gardening is spoiled by growing up on a farm. When my parents purchased the homestead—a mere quarter mile away from where my father grew up and my paternal grandparents still lived—my father raised cattle for a few years and then opted for the trendy, up-and-coming hog operation. When a farrowing house went up on the west side of the farm, the former cattle lot on the east end turned into a garden where my mother planted asparagus and rhubarb and green beans and peas and onions and tomatoes. Years of cattle manure provided an organic fertilizer that still supports rows of vegetables even forty years later. In my memory, we really did just sprinkle seeds in rows and push seedlings into the dirt and watch them grow.

Tomatoes, however, needed some additional tending. We wrapped strips of newspaper around the main stem to protect the young plants from cutworms. We took rusted Hi-C cans with the tops and bottoms removed and placed them over the spindly seedlings to protect them from wind. That care paid off in the late summer when we harvested the bounty and began what felt like the real work. In the heat of August, my mother started boiling water over the stove so that we could blanch tomatoes and remove the skins. I stood over this boiling pot, steam gathering on my forehead, and waited for the skins to split. Once this happened, I carefully removed them with a slotted spoon and transported them into a cake pan.

I can still feel the prickly burns on my fingertips as I slipped the skins from the fruit. I can still hear the slurps as cooled, juicy tomatoes were packed tightly into quart Mason jars. I can hear the ping of the canning lids sealing to the mouth of the jar. I feel the stickiness of the kitchen floor on my bare feet.

It’s mid-September and the cherry tomato I planted a week

before Memorial Day is looking spent. What was once green, thick and thriving in the large planter on my deck is now dry and brittle. While the leaves have nearly dissolved to dust, the branches still bravely hold three dozen or so tomatoes the size of gumballs. This is partially due to neglect on my part; I intentionally stop watering once September arrives. It’s also because this is a determinate plant; it produces a lot of fruit in a short time period. These late fall days are its last hurrah. With a gentle tug, I pick a handful of ripe fruit and I toss them into my mouth. Nobody else in my family eats these and they are too small to chop into salsa. Some of the tomatoes are still green, unlikely to ripen before our night-time temperatures drop below freezing. I could cover the plant, but as sad as I am to see the gardening season come to an end, I am ready to stop being a caretaker.

These are the details I’ll share with my parents during our weekly Sunday night phone calls. Tomatoes are something we have in common, something we can easily talk about. It’s one of the topics that crosses the miles from their southern Minnesota farm and my northern city existence. It’s a topic that bridges my childhood and my adult life. My mother will tell me how the tomatoes my father planted in a raised bed near his workshop shed are growing faster than the ones she planted in the traditional garden. My father will tell me about the bacon he purchased from his favorite butcher, the bacon that will perfectly pair with the tomatoes he grew for bacon-lettuceand-tomato sandwiches, a meal they will eat three times a week during tomato season. My parents don’t always understand the life I lead. They don’t have jobs that start at eight in the morning and end at five. They wonder why I spend so much time on a computer and why I can’t drive four hours on a Monday to pick

apples because the harvest is ready right now. I don’t have dirt under my fingernails, but this I can do. I can share with them how this summer was so dry that I had to water my tomatoes every three days. I can’t see them over the phone, but I can hear their nods. It’s been dry there too, they say. This is a language that we all understand.

Excerpts From the Mustang Manuscript

Julia Juster

The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood.

―John Berger, Why Look at Animals?

On Valentine's Day, Milo strings a horse shaped piñata from the ceiling light in our living room and I walk by twice before noticing it sways there. The light is off and the horse is dark, but I am not unobservant. I look past because there is nothing to see. Part of me accepts a horse swinging in my periphery, or wants to. Milo makes up a real reason for me to go back down the hall and, when I look for the space heater, I find the horse hanging. He dangles from a yellow jump rope and I am so happy to see him in my house. Milo hands me the stick. You need, he says, to kill a horse.

The piñata is three shades of brown in tissue layered spots. Somewhere there is a piñata factory. Send me there to see the assembly line of hollow wonders. A conveyor belt of cardboard joys built to be stuffed and smashed. I want to shake the hand of whoever made this horse look so horse. I approach it as I’ve learned to, palm slow and open flat. This horse is not shedding

glitter or strawberry scented. He’s the brownest brown I’ve always reached for. God’s favorite color, I heard an auctioneer say last week about three brown horses in a row. Must be why he made so many of them. The piñata has a black mane of thinnest paper fighting to fall to the right. I know it isn’t breathing. I see his tail swish long. His ears point like they should and his muzzle curves soft and it was most important, Milo says, that the horse looked real. He's right. I don’t quite believe this empty horse has no spine.

The stick is small and the rules are no spinning, no blindfold. The point is not to be cruel, but to see what I’m doing. The present is the taboo. Take it, smash it, and the worst that will happen is candy spilled on the floor. No animals are harmed in the making of this thought experiment.

I don’t want to kill a horse, and that’s my problem. I am years into the business of trying to understand exactly why the horse is so unkillable, which is how the American West wound up with so many of them. More than 73,000 horses and burros are free roaming right now across ten states. There’s a debate as to whether they’re feral or wild, invasive or native, but whatever I call them, these animals are still trying to eat and drink on land that can’t sustain them and can’t recover while trying. The protections in place perpetuate the issue, not only for the horses, but for every other bug and bird and seed of the delicate, droughtworn ecosystems under their hooves. Biodiversity plummets, making the land even more vulnerable to climate change, and the emblematic mustang is at odds with the very landscape it represents. As the population and the crisis grows, so does the budget. In addition to the horses still on the range, 60,000 more have already been removed. They are placed in long term

holding facilities where they will stand for the remainder of their twenty year life span. Barring extreme medical conditions, killing them is a federal offense. Exportation is also illegal, and fewer than five percent are adopted domestically. This year, that program will cost over $150 million taxpayer dollars, and the total expenditures creep towards one billion. The only animal with more federal protection in the United States is the bald eagle.

This is a niche kind of issue if I confine it to one particular place or people, just a few states or just one kind of animal. But tell me, who hasn’t made decisions so well meaning they’ll never work? Tell me it’s not in all of our natures to save something to death.

I bring my elbows up to hold the stick over my shoulder. I see the horse sway in anticipation. He cannot run. I hit him on his back, and he doesn’t break. I don’t even dent him. This is not the force I hoped I’d have, swift and sure. I pictured myself fearless, or purposeful, or unable to tell the difference. Instead, the animal swings away from me then comes back, away and back again. I am not hitting the horse like I believe there is a prize instead. I want to break it open, I want to want to, but I lose the point I’m trying to make as soon as I go from thinking to holding a weapon. This is a love story.

I close the distance between each strike, landing the stick quick at the horse’s hip, then his neck, and now the light is wobbling. We rent this old corner of a California house, and didn’t know one screw has been missing from the light this whole time. I need to finish my gift before I pull a hole through the floor of our neighbor’s living room. What happened? She would say down

to us, holding her daughter back from dangling her feet through our ceiling. Happy Valentine’s Day, I would say, I tried to kill the horse in my head. I’d go to toss candy up from below, an offering and apology, but everything would still be inside. The horse in question still fine.

I turn the bat into a spear and stab the horse’s side. His broken open body bends around a few more hits until little treats tumble out. Each one is a delight meant for me: tamarind candy, peppermint tea, dark chocolate cherries, and a wrapped wedge of cheese. Tonight for dinner Milo and I will eat the horse’s insides. I gather the candy in one pile and sweep pieces of tail into another. I fold the horse’s four legs in half for recycling. I pick up the rest of his creased frame and pet his nose. I never hit the head. Now I rip it from his shoulders. I finger comb the mane back to the right side and sit the horse’s head on my reading chair. We’re keeping him, I say, then slice some bread and peel open a tin of sardines. Their heads are cut off too, their bodies packed in spiced oil. Milo and I put the meat of them on the bread with our dripping fingers. I cannot feel the spines when I eat them, one and then another.

Disquiet

Fabienne François Keck

Darlene Macky took a huge breath in and out.

Long ago, she had managed to convince herself that excrement had ceased to bother her, that she liked throwing sullied sheets down the laundry chute, and that nothing but the scent of wet urine mixed with baby powder and Keri lotion moistened the dryness of her eyes. If she thought hard enough about cool stones under a hot summer sun or about a warm electric blanket enveloping her aching bones, she could meet Mr. Henderson’s watery eyes with cheerfulness and Mrs. Johanssen’s temper tantrums with patience. Nothing she could do, however, could teach her to deal gracefully with legs.

It was not so much that she denied the fact that smoothly shaven legs became coarse with hair under a stiff hospital bed sheet or that once active legs turned flaccid during a week’s inactivity. To the hairy leg, she could provide a travel sample of shaving cream and a disposable razor; to the inactive leg, she could apply the sports medicine knowledge gained from her personal trainer. On the other hand, she was disquieted by flesh that stopped at mid-thigh, by flesh ridden by blue lacerations. Indeed, she knew that it was silly to be so easily affected by varicose veins, and yet it was true that the sight of discolored swelling made her stomach twitch ever so slightly, that leg braces evoked within her the lachrymal stirrings of her heart.

“Of course, they don’t speak to me,” she had told her husband, her face flushing angrily in response to his sick joke.

But at night, Darlene rode on a sea of legs: on legs pockmarked yellow, on golden marble humming legs, on fishscaled mermaid legs, on frozen pink calves scoured by worms, on the bark textures of palm tree-legs, on pudgy knees licking fire, on meaty thighs with green fangs gnawing at the white of her hospital uniform. She would wake up to find herself curled into a fetal position, clutching her tightly-muscled calves. She would find herself pulling back the blankets to uncover the familiar strength of her husband’s two legs, changed only by the dryness of age and the gradual lightening of dark hairs. Other times, she would pace up and down the kitchen floor.

After work, it was such a relief to scratch her itchy legs. Darlene knew that she shouldn’t, and yet here she was, running her sharp fingernails over the itch on her left calf. Yes, she would stop and reach for skin cream, but for now she raked her skin raw.

Laundry Day

AN EXCERPT

Elisabetta LaCava

In those days it was still possible to buy emigration certificates to Palestine. I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave.

“I am too old, my son,” he answered. “Too old to start a new life. Too old to start from scratch in some distant land ...”

―Elie Wiesel, Night

Look at Anna—her veiny hands clasping, her jaw clenching. Under the tile roof of her home, she sweeps the wiggling remains of a red snake into her large trashcan. It’s the third one she’s killed this month.

“I should have left when they did,” she mumbles, wiping the sweat off her forehead. It’s September 2020, and the Venezuelan borders have been closed since March.

Anna wears the wisdom of someone who knows good sense yet is annoyed to know it. Three years ago, her neighbors repatriated to Spain. When they left, Anna contemplated leaving. The neighbor’s empty house is one of many peppering the streets of Cumboto Norte, houses belonging to old friends who left too.

It’s unpleasant to think of snakes replacing them. Like the devil himself has supplanted their migratory lives and now intends to encroach upon Anna in the sanctity of her kitchen.

The bedroom’s air conditioner is turned off. Anna picks up the full container of water from under the drain line to replace it with an empty one.

“Did you boil the water?” Carlo asks as he walks into the kitchen.

“Seriously?”

“Just asking. I can do it.”

“No, I’m doing it. You go outside and put more gas in the generator. I think it’s almost out.”

Carlo protests. He wants to have his coffee first, but Anna reminds him she has yet to boil the water and can’t do it if the power goes out.

“And while you’re out there, see if there’s any water flowing into the tank.”

The shiny cream tile that covers the kitchen walls from floor to ceiling is damp. The weather app said it would be 78% humidity today, but it feels stifling to Anna. She turns the portable burner on and pours the water she just collected into a large pot. With the propane shortage, she hasn’t been able to use the real stove in months.

“I’m making water,” she says to no one in particular. Anna is 77 years old and moves swiftly. She has lived in this house for 40 of those years and knows it well. Even after the

remodel, the walls are the same and the same slight unevenness of the floor is noticeable under her worn tennis shoes. She goes to the bathrooms to collect dirty towels. It’s laundry day and the housekeeper decided not to show up. No matter, Anna wouldn’t entrust her with this chore anyway. White linen goes first. She has enough water to wash one load. It’s just the two of them now, Carlo and Anna. One load goes a long way. When she picks up Carlo’s towel, she whimpers a little. Not a real cry, or anything like tears, simply a tiny moan of discontent. Carlo’s skin tends to shed profusely on Anna’s whites, makes this whole washing process more necessary. And Anna is unwavering about her ways with white—the towels, the sheets, everything white. How else would she know things were clean? She can’t do that with color, feel confident.

Anna loads the machine and grabs the bleach from the shelf above. But the jug has no weight. There had been at least half of the bleach container left the last time she used it. She shakes the jug to get the few drops into the 1990s model washer.

It’s OK. Anna was made for this; she is prepared. She is the only one who is truly prepared. She grabs the keys from her tattered apron’s pocket, the heavy ring always with her. She walks out of the kitchen to a door that sits under the concrete staircase, unlocks it, and flips the light switch. That small expectation is still there somehow. The one that tells her the light will come on every time she wishes. It’s an old habit. This belief that brings madness every time the power goes out. Every time the generator has to be turned on. Every single day of her life now. A tiny fraction of a great resentment builds with each power outage.

The single lightbulb hanging from the low, angled ceiling fires. This space is narrow, windowless, and still with stagnant air. It is the room Anna has been stocking for decades. There is a large freezer in the back and shelves upon shelves filled with all kinds of necessities. With her legs slightly bent and her head low, Anna scuttles by a row of soap bars and toothpaste. Her kids used to tease her for being a hoarder, for dwelling in the war. They would follow her into the storage space, pick-up her supplies, and then plead to use them.

“This is how you stay alive,” Anna would tell them. As if from this storage room they would learn about the fist of hunger from her childhood, about the ends of her fingers, numb and cold, ripping through the worn-out tips of her gloves, about the dirt lodged there, the wet from the snow, and about her own mother, how she had stored and saved, how she had taught Anna how to store and save, how to survive, how to eat less and how to eat slow, back when Germany was a pale, hungry child like her, wearing an apron where she stashed food that she found or that she stole, hungry, holding on to things, to rations and shelter, storing, moving and feeding, still paying retribution 75 years later, still paying in hunger and devastation, as if she herself had done the advancing, the starving, the murdering.

“You learn to stock up when you can,” Anna told her kids when they were still young and still believed in her. Exactly as her mother had professed as she amassed these same provisions even after the war ended and they all somehow survived, even as her father returned from his time as a prisoner of war when he worked as a cook for the Americans and gained weight—the only father they’d known who returned alive and fat from the war. “To not be able to brush your teeth Anna. Remember how that was?”

Anna remembered. That was true war experience. That’s why she started stocking up as soon as they moved to Venezuela. The country was oil-wealthy back in 1977, the resources abundant. But Anna didn’t trust. And now she is glad she didn’t, proud of herself.

In the back of the storage room, past two rows of salt, toothpaste, laundry detergent, olive oil, canned tomatoes, and hundreds of other non-perishable items stacked one on top of the other, Anna finds a liter-sized jug of bleach. Three empty spots stand vacant next to it.

She grabs the bottle hesitantly. It’s the last one and, this, she never does—take the last of anything. And she is confident she had more than one left. She walks back to the door, reaches for the clipboard on the wall, and there, on the first page of her inventory, cloro is listed alphabetically after aceite, arroz, azúcar, and chocolate. Anna erases three checkmarks with the back of her pencil and promptly locks up the room.

“Did you take the bleach?” she asks Carlo when he walks into the kitchen. He’s holding a metal gas can, his legs so skinny under oversized jogging shorts.

“No.”

“How did you do it? Oh, I remember … you must have done it the other day when I asked you to go get the salt.”

“You know, Anna. I bought most of those items. They are not all yours.”

“So, you did take it.” Anna, satisfied, exhales a German curse word at Carlo. Then she fills the coffee pot with the freshly

boiled water.

“So what if I did?”

“Where? Where did you take my bleach?”

“I’ll get you some more, stop. It’s just bleach.”

Anna knows too well that’s not how it works. It has taken years to stock up on stuff. And it’s getting harder to keep up. The stores never have what you need. You buy what’s there that day and store it. Place it in the order of purchase and use the oldest one first.

Look at Anna—she dips her hand into her purse, feels around for the heavy metal ring. Her hand clutches. This is not the first time Carlo has lied to her. But she holds the keys and has the good sense she wished she didn’t. And one thing is certain. Next time, Anna will get her own damn salt.

Full manuscript published in Stone Canoe, 2022, Number 16

Canción

My son flew out west yesterday, into the sunset’s bloodshot eye, back to the desert where dust hides its venoms and salves. Life holds itself in dry stumps, and at night: that bowl of sky, punctured by stars. He loves the creosote smell after rain, the saguaro that flowers at night, once a year. Scorpion shoe, hidden wound—he is half javelina, a tough-hided creature patrolling the canyon with his wide-shouldered squadron, hiding the most tender parts of himself: just what we meant not to teach him. Here in his boyhood home, rain smears the skylight, too warm to freeze. Attic dripping with absence, a room thick with loss and relief. We sent him away to keep him alive and so far, it has. Face-down in his pillow, I pretend to breathe in his mountains, his sky, the smell of wet dog in his bed. We know we walk backwards by water, blindfolded, unclenching, unpeeling ourselves off of him: only child, phantom limb.

Laura Last

The morning after I quit the band

the conductor smiles and punches the last ride on my ten-trip. What would his face feel like in my hands? In the old days, I liked a good uniform fantasy: UPS, FedEx—I even cruised cops in cars next to me, driving drunk, with no bites. At my worst I was white, still looking sweet and suburban, so I never got caught, made it home to pass out on the futon.

Outside the train window, clouds sulk at the river; the local pulls south past the waste treatment plant this side of the Palisades. Today takes another card off the table and I’m old enough now to ask, Was that the last time?

By Spuyten Deyvil, a haphazard sorority of Barnard girls bob in their boats, a bunch of beginners at dawn.

I turn strangers into versions of me, and then they curl up in my body for free.

Last

By the Dead Sea and topless under white skies

I was so thin by the time we arrived–I’d left Crazy Richard the summer before when he said I’m so angry, you’re lucky you’re alive.

My flat stomach clenched, I tried to survive with no self to anchor my pliable core. I was thin by the time we arrived.

In the cast party photo, I spiral: deprived of a trellis, just part of the ancient décor. I’m so angry, you’re lucky you’re alive.

We Young Artists sang, and I sensed then denied the feelings of failure I knew to abhor. At least I was thin by the time we arrived.

When I fucked the conductor – flaquita! he cried–I used what I had to try and ignore I’m so angry, you’re lucky you’re alive.

By the Dead Sea and topless, under white skies I pretend to be whole, and not to need more than to be young and thin. Anger shoved deep inside, it was years before I could feel lucky, or alive.

Laura Last

Nothing in between

It’s not the finger pointing at the moon; it’s the moon.

This moon put ten thousand fingers in my mouth.

This moon, like the flesh of fresh melon

I suck for seven bright nights. Its scalpel light severs my body: whipsmart, blundering.

This moon said stop pointing and swallow.

The Great Happiness Sea AN EXCERPT

Priscilla Posada

It was a hot, sticky summer when the ash from the wildfires in the north and west gave the sun a reddish tinge. It made me ashamed to gush at the beauty of a world in decline. During the day, I would sometimes venture out with my neighbor Dania— she lived on the third floor—for an ill-advised walk. If we stayed out too long, we would feel it in our chest afterwards. Other times Dania and I hung out in my apartment on the second floor. Others in hers, which to me was bohemian and to her was falling apart. A corner in the ceiling of Dania’s kitchen was leaking and growing mold. When referring to it, she called it the “bohemian hole” looking at me with a wry smile, daring me to not laugh.

One of those days, the peach-colored sunshine streaming through the windows made me feel like I was in an independent film. Everything felt romantic. “These moments we’re sharing,” I told Dania. “I’ll remember them forever.” Back then, Dania and I kept our front doors unlocked. It was a women-only building. The third woman was Dora. She was 94 and lived on the ground floor—apartment #1. We never saw her. The only signs of life were the smell of cigarette smoke that hit you

upon entering the building, weekly visits from her niece, and the occasional low murmur of Spanish-language television.

Sometimes Dania and I would talk out in the hallway. Often we got excited and our voices rose until I said we were shouting like Italian woman in a working-class building. Dania was a pink-collar worker. She worked as a barista in an espresso bar and as a sales associate at a fancy running shop. I’d been working remotely for a nonprofit that ostensibly sought to help the unhoused while merely providing middle-class jobs to those who already had homes.

Oh did I hate that job! At first I felt like I was getting away with something because my work certainly didn’t take 40 hours a week. I could cook during the day or clean the apartment. Only after six years did I start to get the creeping realization that while the job was easy, it was spiritually draining to do something I felt was stupid for a large part of my day.

It all changed very quickly and unceremoniously. On a random Tuesday, I got a call from a lawyer. Ingrid, an eccentric friend of my mom’s, had passed away. Ingrid was childless and unbeknownst to us had owned a decrepit building in the East Village. She bequeathed it to me. While I couldn’t afford to make it livable for myself, the property was worth millions just as it was. I promptly sold it, ironically became more frugal, and feel secure that the money will last until I take my last breath.

“Let’s hang our laundry to dry out here,” I said to Dania in the hallway. “It would look so fucking cool.” Sometimes, Dania and I would go up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise… All this to say, I was happy and had no yearning to be anywhere else. Then August arrived, my birthday month. I had foolishly promised to house sit for Pina, my old anthropology professor. “Look Priscilla, I’m going to Rome. If I had anyone else, I

wouldn’t bother you, but as things are, my house—” “Your boat,” I interjected. “My home will sink if there’s no one there to empty the water when it floods.” “Goddamn it, Pina,” I said, though I hated saying someone’s name in conversation and was merely mirroring her because it felt good to mimic an idol. “Why don’t you move somewhere easier?”

Pina lived on a houseboat docked on Newtown Creek, New York City’s largest superfund site. I had met her fifteen years ago in an undergraduate class on “Sea, Self, and Society.” Things I liked about her: she was hilarious and a nuanced, independent thinker. Things I did not: Pina had never married or had kids, and I felt responsible for her. I already had a single mother as a mother. “Why two single mothers?” I asked the universe one day and got nothing back.

Though I didn’t swim and had no survival skills whatsoever, I knew the drill. Don’t get electrocuted, and if the boat floods, bale out the water with a bucket. Staying there was a drag: swarms of mosquitoes in the summer and fucking freezing in the winter. Pina’s neighbors sucked: though living a short walking distance from cute boutiques and trendy bars, they behaved like they were off the grid. Many didn’t talk to “outsiders” and took me—a semi-insider—as a conversation hostage whenever I was there. This was utopia? I would rather pay rent and have a shower. Pina didn’t get it. She sent me listings each time a boat in her “community” came up for sale. Pina said she would buy one for me. That I could live there and save money on rent and write all day. I hadn’t told Pina I was already independently wealthy. The wealth arrived so late in life that I found it hard to integrate into my identity.

Well, the day to housesit arrived. I packed a small bag of clothes, leaving all my electronics, including my iPhone,

behind—I wanted to see if it would help me focus on writing— and took the B48 for an hour. I had described the houseboat to Dania and told her to drop by whenever. The bus delivered me two long deserted blocks from Pina’s boat. I made my way through a stone path and used my spare key to open the door.

To my surprise, Pina was still inside. She was sipping tea and staring at the wall. The air smelled like black tea mixed with roses. There was another scent as well, that of a sweating human body that hadn’t been washed in a while. I paused and tried to see Pina as a stranger would. She was wearing a bright girlish yellow sundress. It hit her mid thigh, exposing her cellulite melting into the wooden chair. She looked at me and started singing a song whose words I couldn’t hear. I could tell she was singing out of rhythm. She had done so much work on her face that it looked both taut—around the forehead and cheeks—and bursting forth—the lips.

The plastic look of the skin on her face was made all the more shocking when my eyes dropped down to her neck and decolletage. Heavy wrinkles crossed each other as if she had spent her life sunning in Mallorca or doing hard labor outdoors. She had heavy greenish blue sparkling eyeliner on her lower lids weighing down her eyes. Her eyebrows were penciled into brown arches and matched her straggly, dyed brown hair. Upon her head was a ratty straw hat with a bow in the back. I promised myself I would not attempt to hold back the passing of time when my turn arrived, or rather seeing as I was 35, to start resisting the impulse now.

After a while Pina flashed the most American smile at me. Big toothed, and artificially whitened, dentures. My eyes darted to the obvious blush upon her cheeks, the cracked and peeling red on her lips, the goopy mascara. “Pina, no,” I said, innocently

as a child staring at someone with a disfigured face. I covered my eyes with my hands. I felt their warmth and peeked out at her again expecting a different vision. “I’ve had work done,” she said matter of factly. “I needed to reflect on the outside how I feel on the inside.” “No, Pina, no,” I repeated. I felt faint and staggered to recline on the futon where Pina, already deep into her sixties, slept. “Is this reality or a nightmare?” I asked. “This is reality,” she softly replied. “And I have to go catch my plane.” She gave me a strong hug, changed out of the ugly yellow dress into sweats, and left.

Later, I felt the impulse to sit on the wooden chair Pina had been sitting on just hours before. I looked at what she must have been staring at. It was a framed photo of herself in her thirties. She was a goddess. Her hair was shiny and full. She beamed at the camera. She was wearing a high-waisted bikini. She must have been laughing at the moment the camera caught her. Forever savoring life. Around her eyes were the twinkling lines of a life spent smiling. I sat staring at that hypnotizing image as the sun fell out of the sky.

In addition to the futon and the wooden chair, the little dilapidated boat had the formica table and another aging chair, this one velvety. The “kitchen” featured a portable gas stove and a mini-fridge. There was a porthole facing the water in the back. I walked over and looked outside. The water was a sad blue color, a swirling indictment of ConEd, Amtrak, Shell Oil. “Promise of Paradise.” That’s literally what Pina called her home. The words were etched on the side of the boat.

The next morning, I walked a few blocks to a health food store where I loaded up on muesli for breakfast, vanilla-flavored macadamia nut milk, blueberries, fish, cans of chickpeas, a gallon of water, and spinach—things that either could be eaten

raw or would cook quickly before the stove ran out of gas. Once I settled in to write, surrounded by all of Pina’s collected tchotchkes—wooden masks from Brazil, metalwear from the Middle East, a beautiful branch of deep red coral encrusted with shells and algae—I actually did feel the promise of paradise.

I admitted to myself that the “old girl” was on to something. I called Pina the “old girl” in my head because once a six-yearold I babysat had called me that and I was only 27 at the time. In my regular life—and this was after the inheritance—it felt like I was constantly protecting my time to write from an onslaught of parties—friends, family, chores, endless scrolling through the news, and swiping left or right on dating apps. Without all of my usual distractions, writing ceased to be torture. It was exhausting, but here, gently rocked by the boat, the words poured out.

I began to read my work aloud, making edits whenever something sounded awkward. I also brought my favorite books to read and reread: Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion and Hervé Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent. The French understood longing, which was my default state. Days went by like this and then it all changed on the evening of August 8, the most auspicious day and the one I was supposed to be born on. Had I not arrived two days early my birthday would have been 8/8/88, the most beautiful in the world. On that most lovely of days, I had been writing, reading, and drinking small amounts of unmarked amaro from a small fancy glass for an untracked amount of hours. This is all to say, I was tipsy and feeling content.

“Fuck it.” I thought. I slipped out of my clothes, rubbed myself down in an addictive smelling natural insect repellant and stepped out to the back of the boat where there was a small deck. There was a nearly full moon, and I wanted all the

beams to reach my bones. I sat down on the wooden boards and dangled my legs off the edge. I wondered if a splash of water on my feet would later give me cancer.

Staring at the water, I noticed ripples as if a large creature were swimming underneath. Had some large unfortunate manatee made its way here? I imagined myself heading next door to the neighbor’s, naked, and asking what could be done to rescue this creature. But then I saw a young man surface. He had shoulder-length, honey-colored hair, knotted and covered in algae or slime or algae that had turned into slime. He had small, pretty brown eyes. “Were the eyes bohemian?” I could imagine Dania asking, barely suppressing her laughter. All alone on this boat I had taken to having imaginary conversations with Dania and my therapist, Iris. The stranger smiled at me baring a row of small, sharp white teeth. Was he sexy or not? My mind raced to determine. He was likely one of the European tourists who rented boats out here. Or, one of the local burners. I wondered if I’d sleep with him just for fun.

Back to those teeth. They were the first of his many charms. But how to explain charms like these to friends. Only a few would understand how a row of sharp teeth could be sexy in the same way as a strong, broken nose. That morning, I had been trying to turn notes from my journal into a novel. Did I just need material and this, if anything, seemed like material? Most likely, socialized as a girl, and later as a woman, I felt the pressure to be nice even if I was a single woman in a dark corner of Bushwick and this was a man who must have been crazy if he was swimming in these toxic waters.

He waved to me. I waved back. He nodded towards my small deck, and I patted the space next to me and said, “Yeah.” He swam forward. “Wait, there’s no ladder,” I said. “Come

around the front and I’ll let you in.” Instead he moved toward me. “There’s no ladder,” I repeated. But just then, he reached for the ledge and pulled himself up with astonishing strength. He had a six-pack, which I hadn’t seen since my twenties and inches below his navel, the unmistakable tail of a merman. “Holy fuck,” I whispered, mesmerized by the tiny pearly bluegreen scales. He looked nothing like a manatee. Maybe the sailors who had confused the two had been drunk.

The young merman lay back on the deck and rested his head on interlaced (not webbed—I had checked) fingers. He exuded a scent that I wanted to wear as perfume—it was salty, it was ancient with notes of amber. And also sewage. I was repulsed yet wanted to get closer. He spoke. It was a sleepy voice, hypnotizing, foamy, with a lisp. The kind of voice someone would drown for. He had a Portuguese accent. He launched into his story as if he knew that if he stopped I would just ask all the questions he was already addressing.

We stayed entranced in conversation for a long time. Mainly I wanted to know why he was swimming in Newtown Creek. He said he had initially been drawn by the music of nearby clubs. He liked the vibrations they sent into the water. But he did so at great personal risk. While immortal, swimming in toxic waters was ravaging, and not in a good way. Nor did his friends approve of his fondness for humans. We had, after all, fucked everything up.

Noah, that was his name, suggested going for a swim. I replied that I was a bad swimmer. He said it would be fine. We both jumped into the warm, gross water. I doggy-paddled, I floated. I thought about my life at that moment. Somewhere nearby someone sent illegal fireworks crashing into the sky. Noah tried kissing me and I turned my face. “I should be going

now,” I said and made to swim toward land, now covered with insect bites. “Actually come over,” I added. A part of myself was overpowering the others. Noah lifted me back on the deck with the ease one lifts a kitten off the ground and then lifted his own body over. I walked back inside the little houseboat and he followed by dragging his body. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Trust me, you look just as pitiful in the water,” he laughed back.

Inside the boat, we lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Noah tried holding my hand. I untangled myself. “I don’t want to lead you on,” I said. He burst out laughing and said: “That’s our gambit.” We talked some more until I felt I had known him for a very long time. “I kind of feel bad for Pina,” he said. “She’s stayed in this dump ever since I met her hoping for something to change.”

Maria

Jules V. Santin

I can’t remember her name. I couldn’t even pronounce it back then because it was in Greek and no matter how many times I asked her to repeat it, it kept coming out of my mouth like a black smudge. She laughed and told me to call her Maria. She was holding the reins of the horse I was on, leading me through the dirt alleys that ran down the backside of the island homes. It was windy, and D- had told me that I should go outside. He said that now that I lived on the island I should spend at least three hours a day away from him, doing something else. "You must start your life here," he said, and he introduced me to Maria, who was recently divorced with two small kids, and whose father had told D-, needed a friend, too.

She had long brown hair that looked salty and that got tangled in the wind. She was strong, with muscular legs and thick shoulders that were tan from working outside. I never knew where her kids were. I never even knew the combination of them, girls or boys. Maria was just another woman, lost with no story, with empty hours to fill, which was somehow easier when we did it side by side.

We made our way through the back alleys, zigzagging towards the ocean. At one point she told me we needed to turn around. “He will want to swim in the waves,” she said, patting the horse’s head.

I told her I didn’t know that horses could swim and she said, “Yes, especially if they were born on the island. They aren’t afraid of the water because they have grown up hearing it.”

One night she invited me to a music class that was held on the other side of the island. It was about forty minutes away, in another village, on a peninsula that was thrust out further into the sea so that it was even colder.

There were about another half dozen women there, on a wild grass field, not far from the ocean, of all ages, who spoke varying degrees of English. When they asked me what brought me to the island I didn’t know what to say, but Maria said, "love," and the other women nodded.

There was a woman who grew up in Oregon, whose grandparents had died and left her a small cottage. Another woman had grown up in New York but then met her husband and now she worked for the Greek tax department. A woman whose family had been living on the island for as long as anyone could remember and who’d only ever been to Athens once, for her aunt’s funeral.

I couldn’t decide if I was supposed to be there or not. I couldn’t decide if I fit in, with this circle of women who seemed so welcoming even though I had nothing to give.

Lately I hadn’t been able to cry. After D- told me I needed to be out of the house for a certain number of hours, I didn’t know where to go so I wandered around the Venetian castle built into the coast that had long been divvied up into family homes, numb, with a headache and a sunburn at the base of my neck. But in front of these women, I crumbled, first into myself and then into a howl. Afterward, I pretended that nothing was wrong.

The woman who had lived on the island all her life started unloading different drums of varying sizes and spacing them

out on the grass. Maria shook out a pile of music toys on the floor. There were mismatched maracas and triangles and drumsticks. The other women seemed to gravitate towards spots that weren’t so much assigned as they were familiar.

Maria handed me a maraca and said, “Follow me,” as she strapped a large drum with a harness onto her back.

No one discussed what song we should play. There was no sheet music. Maria simply hit her drumsticks together and shouted, “One, two, three,” in a kind of war cry before we broke out into a rhythm. I was one step behind, echoing the music instead of making it. I watched Maria, her thick body, so capable in its sound, calling.

I found out after I left the island that a horse that is reluctant to cross water might be more willing if another horse wades in first.

Go

Sara Sobota

Hands on handlebars, kick the kickstand, step right, left, right, step on pedal, swing leg over bike, push. Pump, pump, pump, pump, my feet on the pedals, all my weight bearing down on them, one, two, three, four, moving. I’m standing on the bike and cycling my legs as fast as they can go. Around the bend, out Chapin Circle to Pine Needle Drive, barely turning my head either way as I cross the intersection. Pump, pump, pump, pump until the rate of my body and heart catches up with the pace of my breath. I’d started panting heavily, trying to slow down my breath with Lamaze-type exhales, ever since I’d gotten off the phone with Shannon Hawk.

The family counselor at Wellness Resource Center is my only connection to Alex for his first two weeks in rehab. He’s three states away and I haven’t spoken to him since he got on a plane 18 days ago. They told me not to accompany him. He was drunk that morning.

The involuntary output of stress that’s driven me to my bike this afternoon began just in the past few days. It starts with a racing heart, then quickly shifts to short, panicky breaths and a burst of adrenaline that I can only counter with running or riding. During the call with Shannon, I’d stayed focused, using that adrenaline to take notes on the advice and information she was giving me. Somehow I can hold it together when I’m

gathering information, and I don’t let myself hurry through the conversation; her guidance is an IV to my dehydrated spirit, utterly bare of ideas and hope. While I’m on the phone I can force my brain to pace itself, to think through each of her answers before I move to my next question: When can I talk to him? Can I talk to any of his doctors? How long will he be there? What does his room look like, and does he have roommates? Can I send him a letter or a package? Will he get it?

I’d thought whoever met Alex at the airport that day would take him straight to Wellness when he got off the plane in Fort Lauderdale, but they took him first to Sunrise Detox Center, where he went through a 5-day withdrawal period. Regardless of their DOC—drug of choice, one of the terms I’d learned in my ongoing crash course of recovery speak—everyone “using” at the time of intake to Wellness first goes to Sunrise. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, meth—it doesn’t matter; all addicts are stirred into the common human soup of misery that is the first step of recovery. I was terrified for him when I found out. If I’d known the details of detox, I don’t know if I would have put my 19-year-old son on that plane.

As I ride, my mind is empty for the first several minutes. I’m taking in the breeze, the green leaves on the branches of magnolia, oak and pine trees, the tread of my bike tires on the road, the warmth of the South Carolina early November sun on my back. I just go. I’m breathing, in and out, in and out. I imagine no one can see me, moving through the streets of our neighborhood. I take a different path each day, trying to get lost in this place where I’ve lived for 25 years, and though it’s impossible, the variety of taking familiar streets in new directions is enough of a scramble to satisfy my need for a novel perspective.

Details of the morning Alex left come to me. He was wearing a favorite shirt of Chris’, since Alex had gained weight and his own clothes didn’t fit him anymore. Chris had been looking for that shirt the past week.

“You know, that’s Dad’s shirt,” I said to him as we drove to the airport.

“He has plenty of others.” Alex didn’t look up from his phone.

At that point I was glad Chris had opted not to accompany us, and I didn’t tell him about the shirt until a week later—I didn’t see any reason for the two of them to have one last screaming match. But I did note the irony: along with our time, money, and wits, Alex had taken the shirt off his dad’s back. When we parked at the airport, Alex dug around in the compartment between the front seats of my car.

“Do you have any headphones?”

“No.” I was getting angrier by the minute. There was no bottom to his need. “And if I do, they’re mine.”

Alex shrugged and opened the door.

Once he had his luggage ready, I reached out to hug him. He wore sunglasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes. His whiskers scratched my cheek. He’d told us he wanted to grow a beard, but I suspected he just hadn’t felt like shaving. His shirt—Chris’ shirt—smelled like B.O.

“I love you.”

Alex shrugged me off and started walking away. Tears filled my eyes as I watched his back. But when I got back in the car, all I felt was anger.

My legs are pedaling, getting warm but not burning yet. My breath is steady at this pace of activity, and I can almost convince myself it’s the exercise, not the panic, causing my

elevated heart rate. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, occasionally swiping at the tears that leak out of my eyes, the one physical symptom that exertion won’t mimic. I try to focus on the environment around me and what I can feel with my five senses, as my therapist recommended. Sun. Wind. Handlebars. Road. Sleeves. Cloud. Flowers. Squirrel. I wave to one neighbor as a car passes, then another, thinking normal behavior might bring normal thoughts.

I find myself wondering if Alex can go back to college in January. STOP, I tell myself.

Everything has to change. That’s what I heard Shannon say. Alex’s experience in rehab is not a one-month endeavor. He has to completely rebuild his approach to life, and in order for it to stick, I have to do the same. No long-term thinking or planning. I tell myself these things out loud—I don’t think anyone can hear me—in order to make them real and to avoid thinking about her one sentence that sliced right down my center. Apparently, the place where an addict becomes addicted is the place where they’re most likely to revert to old habits, places, and ways of thinking. Our home is the place Alex is most likely to relapse. Alex can never live at home again.

My mind and heart beat furiously against those words. I’ve never visited these places called Wellness and Sunrise, never met these people. Maybe the whole thing’s a scam. Maybe Alex is already back on the booze. Maybe they’re drugging him. Maybe I’ll never see him again. Chris and I made the decision to send Alex to Wellness in a matter of days, based solely on the work of a placement specialist my therapist recommended, because we’d believed his life was in danger. The reviews on the website of the institution mirrored those of every rehab facility I’d researched: a fully equal amount of horror stories

and life-saving testimonials from former residents and their family members.

From Evan Y:

All I can say is stay away. There are worse places out there, but your money will not be well spent here. Their whole ideology is based on deception and guilt…. a place like this should be better trained to deal with their patients who by and large are still wildly screwed up from drug use. A lot of the staff seem...questionably qualified.

From Carisa P:

I went here ten days ago and had to fight like hell to get out. I was lied to about pretty much everything dealing with this facility. This place is poorly run, utilizes you tube videos as its main method of teaching recovery, totally understaffed, nursing is not knowledgeable in even the basics…they will only allow you to speak to your family sporadically, and even then it has to be on speaker phone where if you say the wrong thing they hang up.

From Cindy W:

Pretty bad do not go money all they want big time dont waste ur time or your life bad news they do not care ur a number.

My sister Cindy had told me about “the Florida shuffle,” a corrupt business practice among south Florida rehab places that’s been confirmed by multiple area newspapers. Rehabilitation is a profitable industry in the area, I was horrified to learn. Facilities market their programs with palm trees, beaches, and crystalline swimming pools on their websites, emphasizing the peaceful environment and using words like “freedom,” “dignity,” and “respect.” They accept drug abusers from all over the country who have health insurance and collect up to $40,000 per patient. We fit that statistic perfectly. They offer little therapy and no drug testing, releasing the patient

after a standard period of 30 days. The addict relapses and ends up at another facility. Another $40K. The game goes on until the patient dies of overdose.

Shannon’s voice battled in my head with the voices I recalled from the Internet. For the life of me, I hadn’t been able to figure out how to get credible information on the dozens of places I’d reviewed online. Now, every protective instinct I have is shredded. My heart, like my throat, is raw. The sun is starting to touch the tops of the trees on the horizon of my neighborhood, sunset about 30 minutes away, but I can’t stop riding yet.

I’d told very few people about Alex’s situation, but I had to share the news with my department chair at Coastal Carolina University because I’d missed work and teaching a few days in the middle of this crisis. At a social event a few months earlier, a colleague had told me she’d recently entered recovery and was attending AA, so I asked her if we could meet one morning for tea. As we sat in her office sipping from our cups, I told her Alex’s story. I could feel relief seeping out of my pores as I laid the problem verbally in front of me.

“So now he’s in Florida. I’ve never even seen the place, and I can’t talk to him, and he’s with drug addicts and people much older than him,” I said. “I know he needs rehab, but I just wonder if it needs to be this severe. He’s not that bad.”

Claire laughed out loud, nearly spilling her tea. I sat up straight, a hot flash of anger jolting me.

“I’m sorry,” she giggled. “But everyone says that. It’s classic drunk language. It means you’re in denial.” I’d been mad at her for days after that.

I can’t imagine an end to this impasse. No matter where my thoughts turn—Alex as a sweet young boy; the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner table with one person missing; scenes in

the house when he came home drunk; the room he’s sitting in right now—my mind pushes the images away. Keep it blank, my heart urges.

Still pedaling, I throw my head back and call to the clouds. “How did we get here?” I level my head, watching the street, but my mind continues the conversation: He’s in a place with drug addicts! He doesn’t belong there. Tears roll down my face, even as I pump and breathe, with the truth that beats up against a wall in my brain that I can’t seem to dismantle: Alex is a drug addict too. He already is hurt. This is where we live now.

Kate Sweeney

The San Fernando Valley

The neighbor’s second wife calls the helicopters circling our house ghetto birds. I stop talking to her. The same day, I learn the soft triangle at the back of a horse's lower leg is actually a miniature heart. A protective blood-cushion I've pushed my thumb into thousands of times to release a hoof for cleaning. I donate books to the local library, leave little strips of paper with the names of my favorite porn stars inside. What if desire is just muscle memory? My daughter has been peeing on the ground of the shower at the public pool. She does this with her friends, says she likes the way the tiles look when they run yellow, her fresh young legs hot and burning after a long day of sun.

Later, she tells me she also pees in the pool, loves the feel of warm water surrounding her. Like a womb, I say, and I want to tell her I did this too. Without a shred of shame, she parades across the deck, goggles flashing, urine kicking up from her heels.

To the Man Watching Porn at the Fort Lauderdale Airport

MJ Tuttle

“I like your look,” you say, cradling your laptop, maneuvering past the jutting armrests to sit next to me.

“Thanks.” I put a limp bundle of shoestring fries into my mouth.

The armrests, you explain, are to keep people from sleeping.

“I like to imagine they are real arms,” you say, showing me how to crawl under them.

Your OD green sliding underneath them makes me imagine all the worse places you’ve slept. I know you would tell me if I asked, but I don’t.

“One arm at the chest, at the hips, over the ankles,” you say, slapping the leather on top. “Locked and loaded!”

I nod and say something about fishing, because I think that’s what people do here. There’s a man eternally fishing on the television down the hall. The same twenty-minute loop. Twenty-two fish per loop. One hundred and seventy-six fish till my flight to Raleigh.

“Fishing!” you say like you’ve got one on the line.

You show me your computer, pictures of your cousins holding a mahi-mahi somewhere offshore. It was your birthday, you say. Dirty, poor, unsmiling men with round faces, heavy

hands, like you. Not like the television man, with his big sunglasses and corny Joe Biden smile. Your birthday mahi was gaped and fluorescent, colors I’d only seen together on running shoes. Its expression between Fuck and Where am I?

Behind the photos, an open browser window shows a GIF of a hentai woman with an eyepatch being plugged repeatedly with a giant purple dick. Cum in seconds, the ad dares. Or warns? It weirds me out how much she looks like me—or we have the same haircut. I notice the chain of tabs that surround the fish one. Only the first few letters are visible but I get the idea: Stepd, Blowj, Sexy Cu.

You return your computer to your lap as the grates fall over the Steak ’n Shake, The Duty Free Shop, Tropical News. They crash into the tile, the metal tinkling.

“No more hamburgers tonight,” you say, taking off your boots.

“Guess not.”

We talk a bit longer—stoner thoughts from you mostly— then I say, “I’m going to go walk around.”

“It was really nice talking to you,” you say.

“You too,” I say, and find another bench.

At three in the morning, I wake up to a man riding an orange floor buffer. I’m annoyed, then mesmerized by the track of gloss he leaves behind. It takes me a minute to realize where I am. My backpack is under my head, and my shoelaces are tied to my other bag the way you instructed. I untie myself and walk up the empty corridor toward you. I stop to watch the man on the television catch another fish that swims through the air. This one is all Fuck. I use the bathroom—pee, wash my face, brush my teeth with my finger—all trying to hold my breath. It reeks of Lysol. I return to one of your stoner thoughts and think you

were right. Nothing here feels real. You are down the empty hall, awake, the buffer passing you now, the laptop’s blue light on your face. We are the only two people staying overnight in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. You do not see me. You are concentrating on something else. I confess, I am glad you are still here.

A.M. Voiculet

Aporia

The horns grow the way breasts do, budding swollen dusk stains. Flat-chested, I asked the doctor if it’s a bug-bite, a mosquito bite, from staying out too late, a flea bite from bringing all those strays home. For letting them sleep in my bed. A bite, a burn right where my heart is.

The doctor looked at grandma, as if to say:

“Didn’t you tell her?”

About how things bloom. About the sourness of green apricots, already living and worming inside me. How the horns are little seashells under my hair, hot stones in the rain. The horns are rough tree bark and they splinter in my scalp. They smell of earth. They tear.

Lucifer should know but he isn’t a mother. He says, “Meet Eva. Call her first-mother. Sleep with your head on her breast. See how warm she is.” The searing cold when I ripped my tongue off on a frozen metal pole for applause. I don’t want warmth. I don’t want the heat of shame. To be a weaker, dumber Lilith. A little lover, a doe-eyed angel.

Eva won’t feed me the apple from her mouth. Can I touch it with my fingers? I want what lurks in the interior, the woman. I want to taste it with my burned tongue. Will it heal? Must I mend? I won’t beg. Maybe just a little. Eva, you wouldn’t know the horns hurt like a tightening throat, like gums bursting with bigger teeth.

I want to gnaw. Give me a chew-toy for my mind. The horns are bloody, slick with viscous yellow. I scratch, I bend, I degenerate. Drag my forehead against the wall for ease. I stomp my feet, pull my toes to stand – a foal learning to live with its new

smell. Tell me why I don’t smell of spring. Eva, tell me you have teeth. Let me feel how sharp they are.

I know you want to watch me grow.

A.M. Voiculet

Bouvardia, double

Tells me she’s a dancer and I ask what it takes. “I wasn’t aware of much before I moved out here, but I don’t think I took the shape of those who broke me.”

Cheeks all flushed. Her voice has a note of vocation—

Candy hearts and too much amaretto. We’ve lost and folded and we’re patched up crime scenes. Skinny shine of fading stars and the dollar-store pearls around your neck. You’ve stolen skin and touches and all the light of dawn.

Sophia, the ballerina, her body a whole bruise, says, “This is the song I’ll dance to on stage.” She raises her arms above casting darkly over me—all birth-marks and freckles. She bends bones to the soft violin, the crystalline murmur of the lake. Wild flowers tremble in the breeze, what I wouldn’t give.

A.M. Voiculet

Pink is a color for stupid girls

King Aphrodite, my mother leaves me with a haircut called a bowl cut. She says, “Don’t forget to be rude, to stare them right back in the eye. Close your hands into fists and dig those fingernails deep into your palms. Always lie; don’t show anyone your heart. Best pretend it’s something else.”

She leaves me with playground prophecies. Other parents tell her, “What a sweet boy you’ve got.”

All I want is to smell like strawberries.

My hair grows longer in just a month. It grows in spite, out of spite for scissors. Grows past my ankles and grips onto the walls like moss until they’re a blush of pastel, warm and furry to the touch. I dream of hair the color of cherry jam thinly spread on warm bread.

It wraps around my shoulders, grows through the cracks in the furniture, eats through all the khakis and the dark-blue turtlenecks. It blooms fragile bulbs and grows fruit. Sunlight pours out of it. My hair is a playful, silky skirt.

70 A.M. v OICULET

It covers my skin. I sleep in it like wings. And inside, my heart isn’t a silvery music box, a painting, a smear of lipstick on bedsheets. Nothing pretty.

We live silently in the hot stomach of this great monster, tulip-scented and glossy, my heart and I, throbbing—

Issam Zineh

Ars Poetica

Write a poem about lust without using the word lust. Luxuriate in the prayer. Give birth in an open field, then go back to work. Search for your own body among all the talk of other bodies. Draw up the resonant smell from memory. Be the biggest presence in your own life, your own biggest ghost in your own cemetery of numbers. Feed your guests sandwiches of sugar & meat from your best horse. Tear down the road signs to confuse the advancing troops. Feel the fullness of your bladder.

Biographies & Recommendations

Amrei Blaesing is a trans-woman and former Louisiana Army National Guard helicopter pilot. Following her yearlong deployment to Iraq, she flew rescues and searched for bodies in her former home of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She briefly created visual effects for feature films, then studied violin making in Cremona, Italy. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Whip Smart by Melissa Febos

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Farah Habib is based in Massachusetts where she teaches literature and writing at a community college. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer whose essays, short stories and poetry render that liminal space between eastern and western cultures where she spends most of her time. Her work has appeared in a Hole-in-the-Head Review, Hippocampus Magazine and is forthcoming in Kwelli Journal.

Kingdom: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto

Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat

Erin Hemme Froslie teaches journalism at a liberal arts college in Moorhead, Minnesota, which is across the river from Fargo, North Dakota. She also runs her own writing and editing business, Whistle Editorial.

Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Julia Juster lives and writes in Oakland, California. She is the managing editor at Arrowsmith Journal and working on a manuscript about mustangs and myths.

Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Meadow by James Galvin

Fabienne François Keck is a fiction writer and graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. A polyglot, voracious reader and world traveler, she is based in the Boston area. Her work is forthcoming in The Southampton Review.

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

Elisabetta La Cava is a double immigrant born in Italy and raised in Venezuela who became a Texan some years ago. Her work has been seen in Another Chicago Magazine, Stone Canoe, The Pointed Circle, Texas Poetry Calendar, and more. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she runs three small preschools.

We the Animals by Justin Torres Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Laura Last lives with her husband and two cats in the lower Hudson Valley. Her poems have appeared in the Laurel Review and in the recently-released anthology of prose poems, Fantastic Imaginary Creatures.

Incarnadine by Mary Szybist

Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright

Priscilla Posada is a writer and literary translator living in New York City. Her work can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail among other places. Her Spanish to English translations of Pablo Katchadjian’s novels What to Do and Thanks have been published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux Crazy for Vincent by Hervé Guibert

Jules V. Santin is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author who focuses on creative nonfiction. She lives in Southern California with her husband and son, “Mr. Fitz.” Her work is featured or forthcoming in, Anti-Heroin Chic, Riggwelter, and in numerous anthologies.

The Apocryphal Gospels

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Sara Sobota is a writer, educator, and journalist whose roles include senior lecturer of English and publications editor for the Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts at Coastal Carolina University. She is also nonfiction editor at The Pettigru Review. Sara is working on a book-length memoir about forms of multi-generational recovery.

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

Kate Sweeney is a poet who lives on Weckquaesgeek land. She is a Best of the Net finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and has a chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us.

A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

MJ Tuttle is a trans writer and filmmaker originally from North Carolina. Feature films she has written and directed have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Rooftop Films, International Film Festival of India, and all over the world. She is an adjunct faculty member at The New School and Adelphi University. She was a finalist for the 2023 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest and an editor’s selection for CRAFT Literary’s 2023 Flash Prose Prize. She lives in New Mexico and New York.

A.M. Voiculet is a Canadian-Romanian poet. She has a background in Psychology and Classics from McGill University. Through the medium of storytelling in verse, she brings to life the intersection of the modern-archaic and girlhood she experienced while living in Romania. When not at work in the laboratory, she is hidden away—reading and painting.

Blue Bamboo by Dazai Osamu

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Kawabata Yasunari

Issam Zineh is author of Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), finalist for the Trio Award, Medal Provocateur, Housatonic Book Award, and Balcones Prize for Poetry. He lives on Paskestikweya land. www.issamzineh.com.

Time and Materials by Robert Hass

These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara

Amrei Blaesing

Farah Habib

Erin Hemme Froslie

Julia Juster

Fabienne François Keck

Elisabetta LaCava

Laura Last

Priscilla Posada

Jules v. Santin

Sara Sobota

Kate Sweeney

MJ Tuttle

A.M. voiculet

Issam Zineh