Fall 2019

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Cover Art

Pia Contreras Lie, July 2019 Charcoal on paper with digital modification.


BLACKBIRD FALL 2019 | VOLUME 12 | ISSUE 1


Editors in Chief Abbey Green Rachel Horowitz-Benoit Martha Langford Maya London-Southern Marius Sheppard Skaerved Maddy Stutt Prose Board Emma Auer Charley Burlock Zoe Harris Sophie Hodges Martha Langford Gordon Lewis Cole Merrell Olivia Pintair Maddy Stutt Poetry Board Rebecca Amen Abbey Green Rachel Horowitz-Benoit Kate Likhite Maya London-Southern Nathan Newbold Liz Sheedy Visual Arts Board Eiko Fulton Kevin Hongzhou Katherine Morris Hana Matsudaira


Letter from the Editors Each year we create Blackbird not just as a platform for Middlebury’s creative minds, but as a way to connect them. We mean this figuratively, in some ways; when we take in the work of our peers, turn it over in our hands, and read it aloud in our own voices, we feel an abstract link to each other. But this connection is also quite literal: we intentionally curated the entire order of this magazine so that there might be a physical movement between the content on each page. We are so grateful that this student body chooses to forge these connections. Despite busy schedules, Middlebury students take the time to create art. The works we have chosen are all thanks to artists making that active decision to create. They deal with identity, beauty, politics; they ask questions and risk answers. We hope that by bringing these works together, we have created something new and wonderful. We believe that to move writing and art from an online document or notebook page to a bound book like this is increasingly important. With all of the information we now have immediate access to, so much art can be ignored or diluted. Let this collection of poems, prose, and art be something you can hold and return to, something tangible and lasting. Thank you for giving yourselves to us. The Editors Rachel ‘21, Abbey ‘20.5, Martha ‘20, Marius ‘20.5, Maddy ‘21


Submission Guidelines Blackbird is always accepting prose, poetry, and visual art submissions to be considered for publication in upcoming issues. We set no limit on the number of submissions per student, and we encourage all forms, genres, and medias. Submissions should be sent to blackbird@middlebury.edu with the submission attached. Multiple pieces may be submitted in the same email. All visual art should be submitted sized for print at a minimum resolution of 300 DPI. All prose and poetry should be submitted in a Word document. If you have submitted a longer written piece, please mark one or more excerpts (under 10 pages each) that you would like us to consider for publication. We do not typically publish anonymous or untitled pieces unless there is a reason to maintain anonymity.


Contents Fiction

Emma Crockford, Cartland......................................................................................................................................30 Gordon Lewis, Don’t Make a Beggar of Me.............................................................................................................36 Isaac Ducker, Snowed In............................................................................................................................................45 Mel Payne, Queens......................................................................................................................................................64 Cole Merrell, saint joseph of the pines......................................................................................................................68

Nonfiction

Will O’Neal, Instructions for a Life of Greater Mindfulness...................................................................................10 Olivia Pintair, Winter in Iceland...............................................................................................................................16 Martha Langford, On Working.................................................................................................................................15

Poetry

Emma Crockford, Mud Season...................................................................................................................................8 Abbey Green, Daydream...........................................................................................................................................13 I Would Like to Tell You............................................................................................................................. 29 Hannah M. Deering, i’m learning my lessons rather slowly...................................................................................14 Nathan Newbold, Soup..............................................................................................................................................22 Colleen Gair, New Shirt.............................................................................................................................................24 Mirror Test.................................................................................................................................................. 42 Heritage....................................................................................................................................................... 58 Alex Vanezis, Silence..................................................................................................................................................26 David Williams, Black Bonded Leather Notebook 6”x8”........................................................................................28 Pluto............................................................................................................................................................ 63 Will O’Neal, Untitled............................................................................................................................................. 33 Arthur Martins, October 10.................................................................................................................................. 35 America....................................................................................................................................................... 54 Wiese........................................................................................................................................................... 62 Liz Sheedy, Bacio................................................................................................................................................... 38 Tim DeLorenzo, Proof of Purchase....................................................................................................................... 41 Erin Hansbrough. Blue Ridge Meloncholy........................................................................................................... 53

Visual Art

Hunt Cramer, Desert Colors................................................................................................................................... 9 Nate Albers, Untitled............................................................................................................................................. 12 Katherine Morris, The Cormorant....................................................................................................................... 15 Milk Parlour............................................................................................................................................... 34 Paige Ballard, Pandemonium................................................................................................................................ 20 Summer Rain.............................................................................................................................................. 27 Whispers..................................................................................................................................................... 59 Jack Friedman, Birdword...................................................................................................................................... 23 The Experience........................................................................................................................................... 60 Abbey Green, Hippocampal Neurons .................................................................................................................. 32 Burn Out..................................................................................................................................................... 49 Pia Contreras, Pecas.............................................................................................................................................. 44 Rip............................................................................................................................................................... 52 Fiona Mustain, Girl at Taman Sari ...................................................................................................................... 56 Under Taman Sari...................................................................................................................................... 57 Eiko Fulton, Bed Sheets......................................................................................................................................... 40 Paperweight................................................................................................................................................ 67 Marius Sheppard Skaerved, Bonfire..................................................................................................................... 74


Mud Season Emma Crockford

This late spring snow arrived last night, a blue bath in the middle of mud season. How wonderful it is to find you in the dark, your hair cold from the shower, Your shirt heavy at your wrists. I almost tell you about the schools of yellow fin fish at the base of the canal, the men who gut them on the flat rocks of jetty. How early they arrive, how late the last man leaves, calling for his daughters hiding in the rocks.

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Hunt Cramer Desert Colors, January 2019 Smartphone Photography 9


Instructions for a Life of Greater Mindfulness Will O’Neal

Take a bubble bath. Let the bubbles pop around you, and think about the things you’re grateful for. Close your eyes, and slide beneath the water… Lie down face-first in some grass. Put your fingers in the dirt, up to the first knuckle, and leave them there. Feel the cool dampness and inhale deeply. (You’re communing with the most intricate ecosystem we walk over every day.) If anyone asks what you’re doing, invite them to join you. Who do you think of when you touch yourself? Write down their name. Masturbate, intentionally, while looking at their name. When you’re on the edge of orgasm, stop. Tear up the paper. Send them a text, or a DM, or an email, and tell them you’re thinking of them. Walk down the nearest road and follow the double yellow line. Let it guide you. Sing a song to yourself, something jazzy, and, once you are one with the line, close your eyes. Remember that on the road of life, we must persist despite the honking and cursing of others. Poop in a bathroom stall next to someone you admire. Be present. Listen to the sounds of their bowel movements, whatever texture or volume they may be. Don’t try to silence your own. When it’s all done and flushed, wash your hands and look them in the eyes. Clean the dishes in my apartment. (They’re to the left of the sink.) As the soap and water run over your hands, picture what God would look like if He were a toad. Come back any time. Go to a memorial service. Stand in the back of the room and let the emotions of the room roll over you. Cry, if you feel it coming, or laugh. Don’t hold back. When it’s over, go to the casket. If it’s closed, open it. Give the deceased a thank you kiss. Collect the favorite clothes of a close friend and bring them to an open space. Listen to the sound of crickets and blue jays as you cover them in gasoline. Light a match and throw it onto the pile. Scream as you watch the clothes burn, then roll up in a fetal position. Never tell your friend what you’ve done. Create a 501(c)(3) for a cause you care about and then embezzle all of the donations. Don’t think about the moral implications—the money is yours now. Go to the nearest bank and withdraw it all as cash. (Make sure you’ve got a big enough suite case.) Now go to the car dealership and buy the newest model of the nicest car. Drive this car to San Francisco and purchase some nice real estate (but not so nice as to raise suspicions). Go to the bar down the street that Saturday and meet Cameron. (You will hit it off instantly.) Date Cameron for eight months, and then get married. Invite your parents—you haven’t seen them since you left. Write loving vows for Cameron and memorize them so you don’t have to read them off a piece of notebook paper. When the FBI agents dramatically interrupt the wedding, tell them they’ve made a mistake and explain to Cameron that it’s all a big, silly misunderstanding. Once they’ve realized their mistake (you smooth talker, you!), restart the wedding and recite those beautiful vows you’ve written. In two 10


years, get divorced and move back in with your parents. Arrange the books on your childhood bookshelf by color. Then arrange them alphabetically. Then arrange them backwards alphabetically. Then arrange them by size. Then arrange them by publication date. Then arrange them by ISBN. Then arrange them according to the Dewey decimal system. Then drive to the pizza place and tell the owner you love him. God, how you love him.

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Nate Albers Untitled, November 2019 Digital Collage, November 2019 12


Daydream Abbey Green

On days like these it seems that even the weather has given up on things, the wind half-heartedly blowing leaves still stuck to trees, trampolines only mildly chilling children’s feet. Here, I think we could pass evenings, years, letting Netflix specials run on smudged computer screens and keeping the house at 64 degrees. Chicken noodle soup would stay frozen in the freezer, and we would carve away at frostbitten ice cream containers, almost finishing cartons before buying new ones. In the morning you could tell me how you tried to open the driver side door of another green Subaru before seeing the crack in the windshield, the cat hair on the car seats. And I would daydream while turning over strangers’ faces in the morning newspaper, trying to hold the hands of the clock above the kitchen sink. When you leave, I would go upstairs to wring out the night still dripping from our bedsheets, letting them stick again to the depressed form of our bodies before casting the comforter over, murmuring lullabies and last rites.

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i’m learning my lessons rather slowly Hannah M. Deering

hold me like i’ll feel it, & maybe i will but why snatch a baby bird from their mother’s nest? just to snap their neck? take me by the hand, but don’t take anything else leave my dirty dishes in the sink to rot tell me we’ll wash them when we wake tomorrow morning because every hour i’m awake, i’m counting counting down til the hour that i’ll wake again, all to say: it’s already thursday? have i brushed my teeth? pull me by the necktie down your twisted staircase let me be your playmate wrap me in linen before you send me off for my viking funeral in the middle of the lake don’t go grabbing handfuls of sand from its shores you will feel no greater grief than grasping for grains, not knowing which will fall through and which will stay stuck to your finger pads resistance is futile; there will always be sand.

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Katherine Morris The Cormorant, June 2019 Digital Photography 15


Winter in Iceland Olivia Pintair

Sometimes the sun rises slowly. This, I learned while tucked inside a cabin in the cold of January white Icelandic hills far up north asking can you tell if I am alive? can you tell that I am alive? Usually, when your child has to go on medical leave from boarding school because they have anorexia, you do not take them on a trip to Iceland before beginning their recovery process. Mine did, though. The day after I was brought home from school was my birthday and my parents had wrapped three plane tickets in thin, wispy tissue paper, edges folded gently like clean sheets. My mother made a cake with blackberries on it. She stained her shirt but did not care. “For you,� she said, for you, and I wanted to climb inside those words and wear them like a warm coat. Sometimes when I’m standing at the sink washing cold hands in cold water I forget that my mother will still want to hold me even if I am warm. Iceland is barren. Its body is volcanic, new, still yawning out of the earth. Sheep graze its moss-covered lava fields and treeless mountains bulge like bones through its skin. It is blue and gray and green and white, rippling with wind and rain. In the winter, sunrise and sunset are mere hours apart and both are beautiful. The skies ask you to look up. The roads ask you to drive along them singing songs that beat loudly in your chest. The mountains ask you to climb them. The darkness asks you to fall asleep and float away and wake up, realizing the wonder of awakeness. There, I learned that places can become maps of people. On the first day of the trip, I tried to climb a mountain. We pulled over at the side of the road to watch a waterfall that fell from a crevice in the stone, and barren and tree-less, the mountain felt particularly approachable. Walking away from our car, I began the ascent with little regard for my parents, knowing vaguely that if they needed me, they could see me and thus I did not really need to tell them where I was going. After all, I was not disappearing into any deep, directionless forest. I was right there in the open. It was like walking on the moon, the desert. My form shrunk as I walked away, but I did not disappear.

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Can you see me here as I shrink into the distance? It happens slowly, I know, but look you can still see my red coat my hair strung out behind me like waving arms or a kite. See? I’m right here you can pull me back you can call me home. hello? I can’t hear your voice over the wind

When I think of that mountain, I think about what it might have been like to actually get to the top. What it might have been like to ignore the wrenching guilt that turned my body around at the sight of my parents—tiny specs chasing after me, beckoning frantically for me to come down. I have imagined what I would have seen from the summit—perhaps a glittering, golden city or a field of flowers blooming in the winter. Perhaps a wild Icelandic horse would have greeted me there, touching its nose to my palm, knowingly. Knowing something. It is not difficult to imagine scenes of majesty awaiting if I had reached the top. Even though I know I would only have seen more mountains. And more valleys. And more heavy clouds. I have learned that our bodies are maps of the world just as the world is a map of our bodies. Blood runs like rivers rivers run through veins there is a kind of reciprocity. You can read backwards and hear the same story. Through the body of this planet who we are both killing and trying to save, our own voices sound I don’t know if I am ready to die, and I am. 17


As I walked down that mountain, my brain clouded over in defeat. But yet, another part of my heart seemed to be singing softly, guiding me down, sounding like prayer, as if in thanks. I did not know what to make of that feeling. I watched it in wonder. My hand rests on a collarbone My feet ascend a peak And descend. And somewhere, a key is turning. Go home. Let the mountains fall back into their earth one day when they are tired of standing. Let the child be held one day when they are tired of standing. It is okay to return.

Over the days we spent in Iceland, my parents and I grew accustomed to the brevity of daylight. In the northern dark of January, the sun withdrew from the sky in the early afternoon, only having risen a few hours before it set. When we got back to the tiny cabin we were staying at, it was dusk and I had to squint to make it up the icy porch steps without tripping. Inside the cabin, pine paneling covered the walls and fairy lights bloomed along the windowsills. A painting of sheep grazing in a lava field hung in the kitchen. A lime green tea kettle sat on the stove. Long nights leave room for witnessing darkness, and on that trip, I became thankful for them. My parents and I would sit together at 4 pm surrounded outside by total darkness, reading, sipping tea, lighting candles, watching the tiny flames dance. On one night, we discovered that there was a hot tub on the back porch that filled with geothermal water from beneath the earth. One by one, we switched off the lights in the cabin and crept outside barefoot in the snow. Into the dark, into the wind, into the cold, closing our eyes, we ran to baptize ourselves in the heat that came from the earth. I submerged my ears in the water so I could listen to its voice. The sounds of rushing wind and faint splashing echoed in my ears as I floated that night, swimming in what came to feel distinctly like a womb. The world felt warm and cold and wide and tiny. And I—my body, maybe, my thoughts, something, maybe nothing—was there. I looked out at the curving, star-speckled wall of sky and wondered if it was the inside of my mother’s stomach—a membrane that would one day break open and passage me through to somewhere else. Today, I wondered whether death is a womb as well whether anyone can fit the vastness of who they become here into such a small space again. Perhaps though, the space is not so small. 18


It is dark here most of the time. And so there is no reason now to suppose that this is a house anymore. The floorboards that creak could be piano keys or a forest floor or the back of a bony hand or a smooth, groaning patch of sky speckled with very far-away stars. As we walked over the moss, over the snow, over the warm floor of the cabin, I watched my father’s eyes dark brown eyes softly kissing everything he saw. He is gentle, steady, introverted, compassionate. Once on the trip we visited the house of Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic poet who lived during the 1100s and 1200s. The ruins of the ancient house were hardly recognizable, but the small bathing pool next to the piles of mossy stone was full, clear, intact, circular. My father also has a deep pool within him. Its still waters hold rippling wisdom. On our final morning in Iceland, as we sat in the dimness of the cabin, as I shivered with fear of the coming months, fear of trying to heal a broken part of myself, and doubt that I could do it, my father knelt before his pool, dipping his steady hands into its water and washing me in the most heartbreakingly powerful love. “You are chained to one place,’’ he said, “and you have the power to free yourself. There is a whole universe here for you.”

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Paige Ballard Pandemoniun, June 2014 Digital Photography 20


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soup

Nathan Newbold when the leaves die I want you to leave tin soup mugs on the season-inhaling wood porch railing and use a bay window to blow kisses in your socks at the birds ellipsing to dip their beaks into the pumpkin-colored funeral feast.

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Jack Friedman Birdword, September 2019 Digital Drawing 23


new shirt Colleen Gair

I walked into your room and announced that I needed to borrow a shirt. The one I was wearing was no longer applicable to who I was. At some time between nine and ten this morning, pale blue button down with brown pinstripes was me, but now in the late afternoon, it was not. You told me no, I could not borrow a shirt I had too many pieces of your clothing in my possession and besides I must hold myself accountable for who I was this morning, I grabbed a shirt from your drawer anyway, you had two of that shirt, and I already had one, you took it back and stood on the bed, with your arm raised announcing I could not have it and so I took off my sneakers, you paused and gave me your “what” combination of smile, laugh, amphetamine and I gave you my “I’m being polite” where my intonation goes up on the last syllable and I jumped on your bed, clawing to get the shirt for I had already removed mine in anticipation of the new me and we jumped from the different pieces of furniture acting like the children we never were, until you grabbed me and kissed me and whispered that I wouldn’t get the shirt I kissed you back and said I would I laughed and said I always exploit my sexuality to get things from you and you said you knew and you did too and 24


then we exploited each other, but we know that’s not what we really do. you are the boy I write poetry about, but you are not the boy who loves me. you whispered I could have the shirt as your left eye drooped your fatigue, magnified by your square glasses but we both fell asleep on the bare mattress with all your laundry pushed on one side and my new shirt (me) thrown to the other side of the room.

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Silence

Alex Vanezis there is the silence of a mother tending to her sleeping child. it is a tender lack of noise. there is the silence of a meadow in winter. the lilac of a snow-covered crocus biding its time. the still furled beak of its bud waiting in its frosty womb. in summer, without a sound, the splendour of the fecund earth vibrates. in the wind, the mass of cornstalks undulates like waves of molten gold. there is also the quiet of first waking. a silence thick with the rush of senses. the smell of stale breath. a hazy daze. a solitary, self-contained tranquillity. then there’s the silence of a smile, enveloping like the yellow of sunrise, or even ceramic—heatless, light and delicate. or the slouch of a walnut lintel drooping with the weight of home. there is the silence of goodbyes. the mouth heavy with the lack of language. almost like the silence of underwater, of the submarine alone. there is the silence of awkwardness. the prickling edges that grit and stick like salt. the long, long… too long pause. there is the silence in between gasps of laughter. the swell of expectation, ephemeral and splendid like the transient cresting of a single whitecap. the release of breath, a spilled lilt, gently emphatic like the whistle of boiling fennel tea. and the silence of watching the bustle of life in muted miniature from the window of a tall building. or a wedding through a pane of glass: bride gowned in diaphanous gauze, black suits of silky mysticism. there is the silence after, alone with the one you love, they say they love you. it is the purest of silences. for what is there to say? that you know the landscape of their iris? the ridges of emerald and algae. that their laugh stays with you like the pulse of a slow song? that they pull at your stray thoughts like currents in a sea? what’s a kiss but itself? what’s a sonnet to the squeeze of a wrist? harmony to the heat of close breath? language to the brush of soft lips? to be deaf in the feel of another— what is fuller, more thundering with life?

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Paige Ballard Summer Rain, March 2013 Digital Photography 27


Black Bonded Leather Notebook 6” x 8”: The Bug Collection David Williams Jun–

Oct–

[Dragonfly] Crown that clasped sand-spun hair. Drawn behind ears.

Hastily, I filled this book with summer bugs.

[Field Cricket] Lulled to sleep — in pulses. We met in dreams. [Fireflies] Lit up in gold like evening eyes. And pages more: butterfly mosaics of fireworks and sea glass, glowing like the low coals of Hallelujah!

These days, only a few moths visit my porchlight – a pathetic sawdust consolation bound to pages that remember deeper hues.

But even they have paled over the months. Now all I see:

Tokens of you in scotch tape shackles.

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I would like to tell you Abbey Green

When it is raining inside my room you are here with me. Bending my body into yours, curling your feet until they crack, complaining about the smell of shea-buttered hair. I see your face in every shower drain— at night, your name still sleeps on my tongue and my dreams are becoming more and more real. But I cannot seem to stay in them, cannot seem to get the smell of your skin off my fingers. I have been up for hours, thinking of May’s sunburnt thighs, how the red soaked up all of the rose water. What am I to do with the skin that bleeds when you’re not here? When all of the fruit rots on the windowsill, and I can’t keep my toes painted Carolina blue? I feel better when the water has come to my jawline. When the edges of the world are blurred and the valleys of my face glisten with salt and love.

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Cartland

Emma Crockford I get the job the month before highschool graduation. Almost no one comes in those first weeks. I wear jeans and sweatshirts, try to warm myself up by standing as close to the frialator as I can. I sit on the cold metal of the countertop, make myself ice cream sundaes, try to scrub out the stains that stick to the floor. Cartland sits directly off the highway, wedged in between a fast food stop and an out-ofbusiness pet store. It was once, and ostensibly still is, a family amusement park. Displaced by easier routes years ago, the sides of the road here are littered with the leftovers of the tourism industry. Not nearly busy enough to sustain the businesses that catered to vacationers in the sixties and seventies, my stretch of highway is home only to drive-thrus, empty lots, liquor stores, Benny’s, Walmart, and Cartland. The window in the back of the kitchen looks over a drainage ditch, a grated rain pipe. On the slowest days I watch for the otter the other girls swear lives in the small stream of water. The mini golf course is directly over the septic tank, which failed in May, and reeks of sewage. Ed, the mechanic, shows up everyday to lose a battle with the septic system. He enters the kitchen from the basement, shaking his head. “If you think this place is a mess up here you should see it down there,” he says, his boots tracking dirt through the kitchen. The batting cages have been out of order for two years straight. The nets still hang, tangled, over the asphalt. The pitching machines themselves were sold years ago. The Go-Karts, the titular attraction, sag under the weight of even the smallest driver. Once, in June, two wheels came off a cart a customer was racing. I heard her screaming from the kitchen. She didn’t even get a refund. Just her choice of a free sundae. She got peanut butter fudge. She wanted brownie. We had run out. I grill frozen food and make Sundaes all summer. On a whim, my boss decides to start serving barbeque meals. I serve barbeque. We lose money. It’s hot and sticky inside the kitchen. I stick my head in the big freezer out back. I wash dishes with cold water and let my hands turn red, numb, raw. I mop the floor in the almost dark and play the radio. I scrub the counters with bleach wash. Get the place as clean as it will get. On my third day, James, the thirty-year-old son of the owner, complains when I don’t have his lunch at 12:15. One burger. Mustard. French fries. Pickle. Onion rings. His food, he insists in a low whine, should always be waiting when he arrives. He tells me he will forget it this time. I’m new. He picks apart the fries I put on his plate, tears them into little mushy strips. Sucks them from his fingertips. Okay, I say. Thank you. He nods. Next time, he says, he’s sure I will do better. In June, his mother, the owner Nancy, calls me at home. Do not make James lunch anymore, she hisses. He is stealing from the business. Do not tell him where the register money goes at the end of the night. Hide it somewhere new each close. Okay, I say. Have a goodnight. Nancy is difficult, I think. Hard to please, irrational. Drunk, the other girls tell me. She is just drunk. I don’t believe them. I watch her watch the place sometimes, how the parking lot seeps right into the highway, how the weeds have made a home of the mini golf course. I understand how angry she is. I watch her watch her son. Nancy isn’t anything to worry about, the girls assure me. Jim, her husband, is. I believe them. Jim is skinny and pale and looks twenty years older than his fifty-five. I sometimes think Nancy just drops him off here for the day just so she knows where he is. He smokes behind the 30


kitchen. I try not to move suddenly around Jim, afraid I might scare him. Afraid he might show his teeth. Some part of me I don’t recognize refuses to meet his eyes. He calls me a nice little girl. A good little girl. A pretty little girl. Says it when I need small bills for the register, when I am getting in my car, when I give him the grocery list. He tells me to say thank you. I take the change for the twenty. Try to show him with my face that I hate him. Say thank you. On a Friday in July, I look outside and see he is painting the plasticine seal statue in the mini-golf course. Jim wears thick layers even in the sun - big boots and a dark canvas jacket. He paints the ball balanced on the nose of the seal red and white, painstakingly gentle with the brush. He is careful not to mix the black of the nose with the red of the ball. He paints long whiskers on the side of its face. The horse, the dolphin, the windmill are all worn and chipping. He spends three days on the seal and never touches the others. He moves like it hurts. Ed, the mechanic, is the only person who smiles. He is always in the kitchen because everything is always breaking. He is almost seventy. Pretty old to be a mechanic, he says almost everyday. This place is a mess, he tells me, like it’s a secret. Like I don’t already know. I nod. We go on break together some nights. I reheat macaroni and cheese for myself, the smoked ribs left over from our unsuccessful barbeque stint for Ed. One night, we eat at the picnic tables, where we aren’t supposed to. We look for the otter that Ed insists lives in the tiny river. He sees it all the time, he promises. I sit and watch the dirt bank over the wooden railing. The water is shallow and stagnant. In the silence, Ed clicks his tongue like he’s calling a cat.Wait for it, he tells me. Just wait. I rest my chin on the railing. He smiles, leans back, stacks his empty plastic plate on top of mine. His face is round, and red from work. He tells me he is dying while he fixes the soft-serve ice cream machine. This is his last summer, he says. He won’t make it to New Year’s. In August, I mention this to one of the girls. She laughs at me. Shakes her head, finishes checking a customer out. Ed, she says, has been dying for twenty years.

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Abbey Green Hippocampal Neurons, June 2019 Smartphone Photogaphy 32


Untitled Will O’Neal

My dad the scientist has explained to me more than once that wind is an effect of high and low pressure systems interacting in the atmosphere. I don’t believe anything I can’t see with my eyes. I don’t believe anything blows the yellow leaves in the air but the wind. And yet when I sit on the toilet blowing dust bunnies across the floor, I am God.

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Katherine Morris The Milk Parlor, September 2019 Smartphone Photography 34


October 10 Arthur Martins

dear child hold me close again let the impetuous black raven go let the window open for another day but don’t run and trip and cry and hide don’t let the mirrors suck you gone don’t even let the white safe whip open just open up and see my combination Inside; dear small one step away again now leave the corner and step onto light leave the nails for the boards above us whatever it is that hurts will do so still but hurting does last as much as it passes and the very best we can do is always forgive not them only but all in ourselves and out to just believe; dear pimenta i cannot reach out yet i cannot tie down your hand to cradles nor can i make your skin out of ice cream again there is little i could do to ever stop that flush to stop the harsh breaking of saline deserts still to stop the me inside you to part and leave and try to tell myself all would be alright and written up when the screams would let us not believe; but still then we walked along the road there are many words to say to one another and only few will ever reach light but you are not an another— not anymore. not ever. dear child, hold me close again and i will tend to your wounds as if they were mine.

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Don’t Make a Beggar of Me Gordon Lewis

It all felt so cliché, yet there I was, at a crossroads in some sleepy town in Kansas at some ungodly hour. The orange light from the lamp post was just the right color, enough to bother my eyes but not enough to actually light up the surrounding area. Does it usually take this long? I was becoming anxious. Where was he? I’m a moron, how could I believe what that crazy lady told me? Looking up into the night sky, I let out a huff. The stars are easier to see here than back home, so much so it almost made me reconsider what I was doing. I had run through the meeting over a hundred times in my head, trying to think of everything he’d say to me. I had to be ready for anything. I leaned against the post. Geez, he sure gives people enough time to mull over their decisions. Patience was not a virtue I possessed, something that could bite me in the ass during this negotiation. Better to experience these emotions now than during crunch time. My hair swayed in the slight breeze as the warm summer wind picked up. I shivered as a sudden cold rippled down my spine. What could’ve conjured this ominous wind? Instinctively, I turned around and faced the crossroads. Across the intersection I could barely make out a figure; it was as if the wind had pushed the clouds to hide the moon’s light. I didn’t need to see anything to know it was him. “I’m here to make a deal.” My voice faltered. “Oh, so that’s what you were doing. Here I thought you were just enjoying a bit of stargazing”, the figure retorted. His voice cut through the warm air with such malice. It was sinister and sharp, sending chills through my whole body. He stepped into the dim light and I was surprised. He wore a black trench coat and a white button-down shirt, with matching black slacks and shoes. He looked like an ordinary man – someone you’d pass by in the street without registering that you’d seen him. He pulled his red right hand out of his coat pocket and produced a piece of paper. “Out with it, boy, I’m in a bit of a rush.” he growled, not yet having broken eye contact with me. I stepped closer to him. “I want to be able to talk anybody into anything”, I began. “It is important for my job that I am able to negotiate successfully and make deals. I need the money to pay for my wife’s cancer treatments.” My hands were trembling. “You’re an odd fellow,” he replied. “Most people just ask for fame or money, but you ask for the means to work in order to get the money? Why not just ask for your wife’s health instead?” “What does it matter to you?” I shot back. He shrugged. “You’re right, a soul is a soul, after all.” He walked over to me, the few feet between us feeling like miles. Am I really doing this? My head pounded and my hands continued to shake. He stopped in front of me, holding out the worn piece of paper. “Just sign this, and we can call this a done deal.” He tapped his foot impatiently. I reached into my pocket for my pen, but he stopped me before I could pull it out. “Not that kind of signature, buddy. This one needs something a little more personal.” He held out his red right hand again, this time brandishing a small knife. I gulped. Taking the knife from his grip, I felt the edge of the blade. Pretty dull. I looked up at him. “Sorry, pal. This pain’s a helluva lot better than what you’re gonna feel later.” For such a powerful, menacing being, he really had a mouth on him. I pressed my thumb onto the paper, soaking the page with blood. A sinister smile spread across his face. “It’s been a pleasure,” as the page vanished with a snap of his fingers. “But I really must be 36


going now. I’ll be back to collect soon.” “So, it’s done? That’s it?” I stood in disbelief. I felt no different than I had minutes ago. “Of course it’s done,” he sounded annoyed. “You should be able to talk any rich business executive into a lucrative deal.” He continued to walk away into the darkness. I let out a sigh and smiled. “Before you go, I just have one more thing to ask.” There was no crack in my voice now. He turned around, visibly annoyed. “Usually, your kind doesn’t keep asking so many questions. What is it?” As he spoke those words, I saw his eyes open wide, as if he was truly seeing me for the first time. It was the face of someone who had just realized he had made a grand mistake. I beckoned him back towards me, and watched him stand there in horror as I began to speak. “Let’s make another deal.”

37


Bacio

Liz Sheedy I first met the Angel of Death tuning a vihuela outside my big top. It was raining, as the forecast had promised, so management closed the carnival gates. Despite the weather, my visitor sat on a Californian olive crate and seemed not to notice me for a time, since he’d snapped one of his vihuela’s six course strings. The very picture of this stranger could have dampered Beelzebub like una corda; rainsoak adhered his bones to crepe black wear, his hood drooped like a spoiled plum. He was wanting in mittens, in something woolen and warm. I, standing in my socks, resolved to invite him inside. Only then did Death look up, a skeleton endemic to anatomy classrooms, and pluck cotton candy out of his eyeholes. Before long, my visitor fanned an ivory hand (for he told me later that he had arthritis), and, unsure what next to say, I guided him into my tent. The big top is comprised of stage and seating, but I fashioned a modest home behind these. Stimpy, a tomcat, waddled over and headbutted my shin. Are you allergic? I was always sure to ask this of any guest, but the Angel did not hear me; he was drawn instead to something hanging on the coat rack. Sheepish, he lifted up my bathrobe. Because his cloaks trailed wet across the floor, I permitted that he change. He was pleased by this. Gracious, even, when I let him keep it. Death sat down by the kitchen, joining Stimpy, who had already curled up on the island. I returned to my turquoise stove and watered the hen shaped tea kettle. Before I had heard Death strumming his too-tight vihuela, I had been stirring a pot of slow-cooker hot chocolate. An open Nutella jar waited on a cutting board adjacent the crepe fryer. This appliance was of Death’s especial interest. Would you like one? He nodded so eagerly, his skull spun counterclockwise on his vertebra. Why not cocoa, I coaxed. Why not tea? He warmed up to these also, and started tapping “Lullaby of Birdland” on the counter. Those digits were long and gracile for an arthritic— a pianist’s fingers. After producing a cookie tin full of gingerbread men (as a ginger myself, I thought it imperative to bake with the root spice), I wondered aloud, you must be fond of jazz. Death paused, caught by surprise. Let me play my gramophone. I have Count Basie somewhere in here. Having settled a disc of vinyl, uneven with overuse, onto the plateau, I lowered the needle so that it might twill music into the canvas space, crackling, skipping on occasion, never to fall short of the sound I called perfect. Now, where was I? Death had bitten the head off a gingerbread man and churned the soft body in his cocoa mug. Chocolate and hazelnut textured themselves into an air kneaded by a dreamful Stimpy. While crepes began to fructify in the fryer, Death told me his story. I had pulled a stool to the other side of the island so I could better gauge his mannerisms. He had this habit of detaching one arm and waving it around the way a rhetor would wield a pointer. In harmony with rain and big band swing, Death began with his sojourn in Italy—he spoke nonstop about those face-size lemons 38


in Sorrento, how he’d tumbled down Mount Vesuvius and trapped himself in the Florentine Duomo. Throughout his telling, he had accrued some tourists who had been thrown from automobiles, had drunk too much wine, or had been involved in circumstances kept light in the discourse). Death knew little about pasta until he’d met the ghost of a saucier. Death had flown here by economy class, but because he didn’t know how the luggage carousel worked, he left his souvenirs at the airport. The poor Angel missed his Dante apron and copy of Ars Moriendi. I told my guest in return about my solo concerts, the war between clowns and mimes, and Stimpy, who did not care to be criticized for his laziness. The rain outside persisted, the gramophone lulled through a fourth Basie record. Stimpy had jellied himself into my lap like a giant donut. Although my guest had just started a cup of chamomile, something seemed to weigh his spell of silence. Is there something wrong? I tried. As I wiped clean the pie bird which I had used yesterday in a Winesap apple pie, the Angel replied that he had grown tired of his work. Much of his time was spent escorting souls unworthy of his service. People hated him (except the Stoics, but Socrates was boring company). Even Slayer, the thrash metal band, had named a nefarious song after him. Blamed for calamities, Death grew afraid not only of his clients, but also of himself, and, in all his years, no one had ever treated him to tea or cocoa or little gingerbread men, no one had ever given him crepes or a robe with which he might keep warm. It was lonely, he said, to be an angel without a harp. Hence his investment in a vihuela. All he needed were lessons. I’m no great teacher, I claimed. But he assured me that I had taught him more in our first five minutes outside than in any other instance he could remember. My hospitality, said Death, assuaged his hope as well as his arthritis. Knowing that my guest must journey on once the rain ceased, I lent him an umbrella and napkinned a couple cookies and the half-full jar of Nutella. As a secret surprise, I stuffed in a ticket to my next show. Lessons were to start Saturday afternoons, half past one, sharp. The Angel tossed his old cloaks into a waste bin and took my hand a moment before departing. Do you want me to come with you? I asked, though I am not sure what compelled me. My friend shook his head, as if to answer, not today. As Death twirled the bloom of his umbrella through the grey drizzle, I spoke to him once more, for I had forgotten something most important: What shall I call you? The Angel turned on his bony heels, scratched his skull. The Nutella in his pocket was unlidded—he’d already been eating the butter with his fingers. Just then, I intuited that I would smell hazelnut whenever my new friend would stop by. Scooping a generous sample of Nutella with his thumb, the Angel gave me an all-toothed smile. I knew the perfect name. Bacio, I said. Bacio.

39


Eiko Fulton, Bed Sheets, November 2019 India Ink 40


Proof of Purchase Tim DeLorenzo

Ok, I’ll say it… I ran out of Nespresso pods. I couldn’t admit that I need help from caffeine to get through my day, But I need Nespresso pods with Fancy names to fix myself Up a nice warm cup of coffee. I like Viv’alto Lungo and L’inizio Lungo. Dessert coffee favorite? Affogato. Pick up more pods from the store? I forgoto. And now I have nothing To make coffee with and I’m really tired, you guys, But I still had the strength to Get up and go To the Nespresso store and ask “How often will I need to buy the little cups For the Nespresso machine?” The salesman looked at me And told me that Topology is the study Of what happens when you Deform, twist, and stretch objects. Tearing, however, is not allowed. I thought it was nice That tearing wasn’t Allowed, so I said “I love coffee!” The salesman looked at me, again, And told me that any continuous function defined over a convex set onto itself has a fixed point . “Does it heat the water with induction?” I asked. He said “No, conduction.” He looked at me one last time. “Transform a function onto itself,” He said. “or stir a cup of coffee as hard as you can, but there will always be one fixed point, whose location in the cup will not change. And you can stir and stir and stir all you want but you will not change.”

41


the mirror test Colleen Gair

Anytime his mother left the house, Simon tottered over to the sliding mirror in the foyer at first I thought, he wanted to play with the apparatus slide it back and forth to find the treasure trove of a closet behind but instead he pressed his face against the mirror, huffed and then exhaled over it, watching the heat melt on the icy mirror and then titled his head backward and watched the ice blonde hair of his flutter in motion he took a step back, moved his left arm, up and down, giggles spilling from his incarnadine lips a smile splashing across his paper white skin as he whispered “jag är Seeee-moan” and in one movement, slid to the ground never breaking eye contact with himself I knelt next to him and pointed to my reflection and his and he laughed, poking my reflection in the face saying “cole-eenuh” and we moved our arms and legs and faces while our twins made the same movements when his mother came home and found us touching the mirror, she did not laugh like we did she did not see the reflections of us nor her own reflection as she cleaved us from the mirror with her hands full of paper towels and cleaner as she told me the mirror was off limits I said, but he recognizes himself now she said, the mirror to him is just another shiny thing to her it wasn’t a feat of self-awareness demonstrating inklings of consciousness, I had to think that she had never lost herself 42


that she had never taken off her heeled boots and hurled them at an oak door when she heard the sounds of snoring on the inside because she was forgotten again she must have never thrown her body against a door that wouldn’t open and eventually given up and run outside screaming into the cloudless night, until passing another person, she remembered herself then she would know the marvel of recognizing herself in the mirror and not wash off the remnants of that recognition so quickly

43


Pia Contreras Pecas, November 2019 Digital Media 44


Snowed In Isaac Ducker

The avalanche forecasters said the storm would be big, maybe the biggest they had seen in ten years. It had started as a steady rain in California, soaking the sands of the Mojav, and soon the clouds began to bunch into a pregnant gloom over the mountains of southwestern Colorado. The snow started to fall on New Year’s Eve. At first it was light, and the children stood outside the schoolhouse catching flakes on their tongues. By nightfall, the whole town was quiet, and the streetlights cast an orange glow on the drifts and piles. Chuck Dougall stepped outside of his office, marched into the middle of main-street, and looked towards the mountains around the town. He could see the snowfields at their base, but past that, not much. The clouds weren’t fluffy. They didn’t look like mashed potatoes or cotton balls or mist; to Chuck, they looked like a solid white wall. The announcement had come in over his radio an hour ago: both passes were closed. Eureka was snowed in for the first time that winter. Chuck walked back inside, stomped his boots on the doormat, hung up his coat, removed his cowboy hat, shifted the badge on his chest, and ambled to the coffee machine. He made coffee slowly, careful to fill the filter to the top and clean up the dribbles of water he spilled. He sat down to let it brew and began to twist the silver ring on his left hand. Every once in a while, the radio on his desk would crackle to life. Bombing commenced on south side of Sultan Mountain, snow removal team needed at mile 54 tunnel. Over. Mostly, though, the station was quiet, except for a slight buzzing in the air and an occasional hiss of steam from a pipe in one of the cells. Chuck’s life was, in a word, quiet. It was so quiet that he would sometimes make noises with his hands to fill the empty space. He twisted his ring, three times around, tapped it on the desk, and twisted again. He would do this at the breakfast table, too, after coming home from the station, sitting in front of his over-easy eggs, grilled potatoes, and two pieces of bacon that he now cooked for himself. He would sit there, fumbling through the local cross-word, his boots planted on the cheap linoleum floor, until Chase sort of shuffled, stumbled out. “Morning. You want breakfast? Eggs?” “Uh, nah,” he would say, or some curt variation, but always in the negative, before pushing his hair out of his eyes and shoving his unfinished homework into his backpack from the other side of the table. “Love you, later,” and then the door would slam before Chuck could respond. He let out a deep sigh and walked back to the coffee maker to fill his cup. He hadn’t been able to see Chase that day, or Chase had not wanted to see him. After eating his breakfast, Chuck went to bed while Chase was still asleep. When he got up that evening to make food before his shift, Chase had left a note: ‘w/ friends for New Years party. will b safe. cu tomorrow.’ Underneath it he had drawn a lopsided heart. Notes were their primary form of communication these days. ‘Xtra shift. Leftovers in fridge’ ‘Going to Gabe’s after school. Will get to bed early’ ‘Day off tomorrow, any free time?’ 45


Motorola had been around for about five years, but no cell-phone company was willing to pay to build towers in the San Juan mountains for a town of 300 people, especially when the next biggest town, the closest place with a movie theater and a hospital, was 60 miles away. So, they wrote each other notes. They used to have a land-line hooked up to the house, but with only Chuck’s income from the station, money had been tight. Chuck had wanted to keep the phone, for safety reasons. Chase had wanted hot water. “Why do we need a phone for safety? You’re the first to hear about the bad shit when it happens, anyways.” He filled up his cup with coffee but he didn’t sit down. He shifted his weight front to back in his damp Stetsons. He ran his hands through his comb-over and glanced to the fridge to his right. Trapped under a magnet was a photo of him and Chase, dressed in orange hunting hats and camo, posing behind the body of a deer. They had been able to see their breath that Sunday morning, ten years ago, and the paved main street had felt scattered and gray and empty, the store fronts all shuttered, because everyone else had been in Church. Neither of them said anything on the drive into the back country, and the rivets of Chuck’s Sheriff truck rattled on the packed rock and snow. They had walked for about ten minutes into the wall of evergreens before Chase breathed a deep sigh. “She woulda wanted us to go to church,” he said, trudging behind his Dad in the snow. “She would have wanted us to live our lives how we want to live them, Chase,” he replied over his shoulder. “How do you know?” “I know because I know. I knew her longer than you did, Chasey, knew her better than anybody. Believe me when I say I know what she would have wanted.” A blue bird called in the distance. Its cessation sucked the air from the valley and made the sunlight appear both flat and hollow all at once. “Hm. You think.” “Don’t give me that crap, Chase. What’s that supposed to mean?” They crunched through the snow for five more steps without Chase saying anything, until Chuck turned around. “You hear me? I said don’t give me that. Don’t say something like that unless you’re gunna explain it.” Chase was much shorter then, only 8 years old, so he had to look up to meet his eyes. “You know she wanted to die?” “Chase…” “What? Try an’ explain. All you ever said was that we were snowed in. That’s all you ever said.” Chuck detached from his gaze and looked out past the fronds of the evergreen trees into the field of snow. He could see wet, brown branches poking through the slushy surface. Crocuses had started to sprout at the base of the south-facing trees. Soon, it would be summer, and they would drive over the passes under the harsh, south-western sunlight. They would look into the shimmering blue of distance around the peaks and they would have a hard time imagining the snow piled six feet high next to the roads, a hard time imagining the passes closed, the shelves of the grocery store almost empty, the lights of the squad car reflecting red on the drifts and piles. Things were beginning to melt. Soon, New Year’s Eve would feel far away. It would feel far away 46


and it would stay put. Chuck squinted, and perhaps there were tears in the corners of his eyes, or perhaps the sun was just too bright. He felt that if he said or explained anything to Chase everything would become real, as if his words would freeze his decision into reality and Chase would feel the cold for the rest of his life. To protect him was all he ever wanted, so he turned around and kept trudging. Chuck stepped back to his desk and released another sigh as he settled into the faux black leather of the chair. He looked up at the ceiling, looked down, pulled open the top drawer, fumbled out the packet of nicotine gum, popped out a few pieces and pushed them into his mouth. He chewed and looked up at the ceiling again, tapping the back of his muddy boots against the ground. Once the rush stopped seeping into his mouth, instead of throwing the gum out into the trash can near his feet, he got up and walked into the station’s bathroom. He thought that he had to pee, but he caught sight of himself in front of the mirror. He saw so much of Chase in his face, especially as he got older. They had the same hawkish nose and almond eyes, the same earlobes that were wanting a bit more lobe, the same way of looking up from under their brows and smiling. They had always shared that look. Sometimes Chuck would do it to himself so that he could remember doing it to other people, and, on some level beyond Chuck’s knowledge, he did it so that he could also remember Chase doing it, so that he could remember Chase smiling. He wondered, as he looked at himself, what Chase would do with that smile, where he would take it and where it would take him. In moments like these, when he would look at himself in the mirror or see his reflection as he got out of his truck and closed the door, he realized that even though they looked so alike, he barely knew his son at all. He flinched away from the mirror, walked back to his chair and sat down. His hand moved towards the bottom drawer of the desk. It slid open. Chuck looked down and stared at the bottle of bourbon for a while before the hand grabbed it, moved it up, twisted off the lid, pored. Chuck drank the coffee in measured gulps, looking again at the photo on the refrigerator. He only drank on really snowy nights when the passes were closed and he knew he wouldn’t be driving far. For Chuck this was not a rationalization, but a fact born in habit. He had drunk a cup that night ten years ago, and every time since he had drunk one too. He drank not because it felt good but because it felt bad, because it reminded him of what he hadn’t done. Every night Eureka was snowed in, he would drink a couple mugs of hard coffee and go for a drive. Some winters, most winters, Eureka was snowed in more often than not. Chucked refilled the mug until he recognized the same sick warmth in his gut. He stood up, grabbed his coat and hat off of the hanger, locked the door, and stomped through the flakes to the truck. The snow was falling steadily and the plows couldn’t keep up with the accumulation. Chuck drove his usual route, on autopilot. Something about the crush of the tires through the piles of snow, the glow of windows, and the muffled silence made him imagine walking out to the end of a pier in fog. He drove past the grey, ominous structure of the county court-house, onto Reese street, past their first house, where Chase had his first birthday party, where he had painstakingly placed candy corns on the spines of the dinosaur cake she had made, where they played with 47


plastic swords on Christmas morning in front of the roaring wood stove. On the next street he passed the red-brick schoolhouse. Through the falling flakes he could almost see Chase standing there, before he had grown out his hair, before he had grown. He could see tears streaming down his face, holding his tattered science fair poster-board some boys had stomped into the slush. Turning, he drove past the alley where they had first met, walking past each other over and over again in the snow until she had the courage to say hello. He breathed in deep and tapped his ring on the steering wheel as he made the next turn. Through the snow he thought he could see another squad car stopped in the road. He looked around for the street sign and realized that he had driven onto the street they had lived on ten years ago. A man rushed into the house through the snow, but he wasn’t sure if he was seeing it happen or remembering what had happened to him. He started to ease the car forward, watching the whir of the light-bar illuminating the specks snow, inching closer and closer until he realized the lights were not blue and red but yellow. The body of a snow plow emerged from the flicker. As he passed through the glare, another car pulled onto the road in front of him and began to swerve. He hesitated for a second and flashed his lights. The car pulled over to the side of the road and Chuck tucked his truck in behind. He thought for a second that it belonged to Cheryl, Chases’s friend’s mom, but he couldn’t tell because the entire back was caked in snow. He came up to the window and rapped on the glass. A pale hand cranked it down. He bent down and smelled the booze before he could see who the driver was through the gloom. “Looks like we’re snowed in again, huh, Dad?” Chase laughed a hiccupping, dark laugh. Chuck took a breath, stood up and turned his head to look out on the row of houses receding into the ashen flakes. He saw the man rushing into his old house again and then he was inside of it, looking around the living room, at her crumpled body under that lime-green fuzzy blanket on the couch. Chase was crouching by her head, nudging her, asking her “Mommy, Mommy, why so sleepy Mommy?” Through the falling flakes, he could see her five hours earlier, under that same fuzzy blanket, smiling up at him, saying that it was probably nothing, that they should wait out the storm to drive to the hospital. Chase turned around and his eyes hollowed out. “Mommy said she called you at the station. Is everything ok? You’re gonna take her to the hospital, right? She’s so sleepy.” He knelt down beside her, nudging her awake, grasping at her pale, bruised skin, rubbing her bald scalp. “I don’t know Chasey, I don’t know. I’m gonna try ‘nd keep her awake here. I can’t drive, we’re snowed in.” “Your breath smells bad.” “I know Chasey, I know, but the passes are closed, I promise. That’s why I can’t drive, I promise.” He bent his head down to rub his nose against hers but as their skin was about to touch Chuck was back in the snow and the cold, under the flicker, looking at the wall of clouds. His feet trudged back to the squad car. His hand opened the door. His ring tapped three times on the steering wheel. His right hand slid it off, placed it in the glovebox, and closed the lid.

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Abbey Green Burn Out, September 2019 Smartphone Photography 49


On Working Martha Langford

I devoted my last undergraduate summer to being home, the only summer I’ve let Mississippi own. I deleted Instagram and Snapchat but kept Twitter and books, and books and books. Jackson interstate skylines had no interest in competing with square frames of Lake Como, Yosemite, your granddaddy’s Cape house. I don’t know what any of that boredom feels like, but I sit comfortably with the four women ordering blue plate lunches from the institutional bar next door to our train-depot-turned-temp-office. The two women I idolize, my bosses, recount years hungover, pregaming, and plummeting in that bar. One sober and pregnant, the other sober and empty-nested, both benefactors of humor, compassion, and ugly hard work. I spent the summer understanding that they move too fast for Mississippi. They rained down stories of racing through guilt and rage via the narrow confines of what white womanhood demands of white women in this place, babies and entertaining and entertaining babies. One thanks God she has boys, because at least their whiteness and maleness and goddamn filthy richness can convince them of their independence, which they will believe they have earned. To deal with the girls who believe themselves the only victim of the history that elevates them, not without a fight. The other wants a cigarette, not to bear the process of creation, but she will raise this eightmonths-along hopefully-red-headed Mississippi daughter to read Kiese Laymon and to Rage Against the Machine and to not drive fucked up just because Mississippi has made you impatient, and that speed and Speed are not the only ways to progress. She will know that the race towards victimhood looks different when we are not born at the batting plate but on third base. I wonder what the white girls in Mississippi will look like tomorrow, or if the hair, clothes, and workouts will not change before they get uncomfortable. I hope they will read. I hope they will eat. I hope they will not step aside for a drunk boyfriend or for a husband. I hope they will step aside for black women doing infinitely more work, enduring the effects of refusing to accept the call to work. I hope they will they will vote for what they have read, what they want to eat, what they give up or gain in stepping aside. I hope they will consider what work is already in process, what we have refused to breach. I hope we will do the work. My mother is beginning. In the same professional position that she has occupied for decades, she is shifting. A month after I first left for college, she read everything James Baldwin and Audre Lorde had ever written. She took down the art museum’s permanent collection called The Mississippi Story, because she knew it wasn’t that, Mississippi’s story. She admitted that this one story looks like infinite galleries updated constantly, that we must maintain a pulse check on history. Last month, a male British hire told her to step aside to make room for his financial intelligence, and she cried, drank three sugar free margaritas, went to sleep, and told him she will step aside when he is willing to do the work that is finally happening under her leadership. But she is also drinking. 50


I had never seen her drunk before I left for college, and a year later she lied to my face about her sobriety on the way to dinner in New York after a meeting that required vulnerability at new heights. At dinner she kept lying until I started crying and she whisper-screamed “do you know how hard I’ve worked for this,” as if I didn’t read a poem written about her love and my birth every night before I went to sleep that year. When some of us finally step up to work for anything but our own cowardice and we reconsider our conviction that self-preservation will trickle down and, by a white male God’s toil, therefore morph into change, we see how much hope Fear kept from us and for how long. We are behind schedule, so we must work harder, faster, but we also will release harder, faster, with a leg up in alcoholism. Urgency turns work into the act of feeling. I am relinquishing myself to guilt and resolve and watching those be molded by hope into weapons like loving to hear myself listen. Like when, for the first time in my life, my mother let herself be fragile and break, because so what if being broken at home, with her daughter, is the cost of making sure the work of reparation gets done in Mississippi.

51


Pia Contreras Rip, October 2019 Repurposed bedsheets ripped, dyed, and sewn together. 52


Blue Ridge Melancholy Erin Hansbrough

We pretend to know what strife is, watch the peregrines soar over the blue ridge and feel like we’ve lived a thousand lives. We’re too wise for our years and too tired, even though our time won’t be up for decades. This place is hollow, haunted and it drains us, drags us down to the depths of the mines and whispers I’m waiting at the end of the journey. There’s no escaping the weary in our bones. The trails and creeks have sown freedom into our souls but our bodies are tied up by human strings and industrial things we can’t shed off. It’s not enough to run to the woods anymore, like we did when we were feral cats or maybe kids, for the rain washed away everything we remember and there’s nothing left to do. We wonder who we are now, and where we are going, if we’ll ever get away. That’s why we climb the mountain in the mist, step over moss and fallen logs, feel the thousand tiny moths batter our faces. We wait for the hawks to drop from above the cliffs, since they know more about life and leaving than we ever will. We walk down the mountain when the sun sets but we never walk out of this town.

53


America

Arthur Martins it might as well have been a joke but we did not learn better anywhere and the uncle is the bearer of her truth to see that dangling serpent amidst the sea which gave home to all of us times ago would forever be condemned and trapped a lady strong as her will and full of life fertile too with some she would have been just happy but with men she was confined to be a woman the rocky sierras act as mothers for the poor and their tears tear up rivers cleansing us but they cut her at the neck as the grande rushed past to inundate her rain with black only to be whiter let all the in-betweens lost in sand sink in ore and the only lands free were never her true children now before him she had burnt for over five and some sold from one shore to chains onto the other she lived into the burrows where her entrails were made pastel the destined swords bent her so that she had no chance to flee the sails noosed her skin and hung her open at marketplaces auctioning her heart as if it were their history to slash and burn when some brave jorge leaped at seventy-six she knew that freedom was not her thundered truth and felt from inside her womb the parting of hero twins the eve one was birthed he seized the head and fucked her tail for as a man he mustered greed pleasured only as she fell so she cried that day for hundreds of years and she cried still systemic domestic eventual lasting America stripped of her name her rocks her origin her baptism her usurper now bears her name as proud prize of his genocide without name without language but his own she is his whore his brutish supremacy erases daily the marks upon her skin her lands of winds now barren for machines but dare you not remove her us all even from her sein gringo hers is all the land both above and beyond and mine is her treasure hers are the people she protects even the you that vilifies and tortures she will not be beast to bear the pain of the acts you commit against her 54


hers is the name no one should mutter as she could not have been invented hers is the name of our shared histories and not those of your oppression only beware of her rising for she strikes with fire those who omit themselves and never again feed her the lie your rotten estuary mouth independently proclaims; oh say can you see gringo your America is a lie.

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Fiona Mustain Girl at Taman Sari, August 2019 Digital Photography 56


Fiona Mustain Under Taman Sari, August 2019 Digital Photography 57


Heritage — A Sestina Colleen Gair

I drink from the big bottle now like my daddy not the little nip nonsense that waited for me in my stocking each Christmas morning when I’d take a sip and do what little kids do: open my mouth and talk without using my tongue pretending I can’t taste anything anymore. I lie and say I don’t think of him anymore because I can’t call a vacancy in head “daddy” a word sitting lethargically at the back of my tongue thinking it’ll be used again because it has waited so long, but this nameless lump has nothing else to do but slide down my throat and crawl back up in the morning I wore black for my seven years of mourning, hollowed myself out so I can’t weigh myself anymore, but I hold my liquor like a good Colleen should do with Jameson and hatred in her veins like her daddy he tried all the whiskey, she colored while she waited amongst other Colleens who said it right, the name off the tongue I snuck little tastes of tastes that paralyzed a five-year-old tongue triple distilled, smooth & mellow, whiskey in the morning Mum told me I was so cute, learning all the labels as I waited but after a month I didn’t want to be here anymore I knew I spoke the wrong way, my accent disappointed daddy who left me in line at the airport and I didn’t know what to do I don’t like Jameson on the rocks but I’ve learned to make do because of the heat as it drips to my esophagus from my tongue and if I drink it at night, I know that I won’t dream of daddy until the whiskey wears off at some time in the morning but when it’s daylight, I don’t think of him anymore, or at least I don’t say anything because my tongue is weighted Eventually the dreams come back because they’ve waited countless nights and impotent mornings and they’re ready to do something, but my own dreams can’t scare me anymore when I drink from the big bottle when I ignite a fire on my tongue, without regard for how I’ll feel in the morning, I’ve already become the scariest thing I can imagine: daddy. I’ve waited for my name and “our” country’s to flick off my tongue but I do hate my name so maybe I’ll rewrite myself in the morning Or maybe it’s not worth fighting anymore, I’ve got the big bottle now, daddy. 58


Paige Ballard Whispers, March 2014 Digital Photography 59


Jack Friedman The Experience, February 2019 Digital Drawing

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61


Wiese

Arthur Martins lies upon soft grass and thirteen roses that smile blue the scent of your heart dressed in some vermouth wool the pacing of your eyes and the sighing of your lips the fact that time holds me slower whenever you are near the feeling when your clouds on my nape breath prunes your quartered vest that whisper me snowflakes in june your rare earth that meets my sky halfway into your grove that single time your flight took off but you remained whole and justly put in mine arms filled with joy and second turns are but the favorite things i will hold against mine bare skin as your absence undresses me.

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Pluto

David Williams How long were those nights you abandoned me to the four am rain, before the light came to melt the hardened blue shadows on your bedroom wall? Your knee held me ten inches at bay from sunrise; the stone in my side that would not move, but instead I contorted around, weary and aware of my sacrifice. I imagined you awoke the next morning, snug and unaffected, myself still unable to buy my ticket out of the unending night. The clock spins faster under the weight of sleep. Bare feet burnt by cold tile, you stood downstairs, back to the stove, and kept the coffee warm between your clasped hands, while I lay up. Lagging hours behind, I counted the minutes as they rolled down the window, and waited for you to carry dawn back across this impossible threshold and warm the world outside the covers.

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Queens Mel Payne

“Grime, there’s grime everywhere!” Bianca shook her head, “Is that all you can think of when you write about New York? It’s so cliché.” “Don’t discount clichés, they’re the mother of all beings.” Antoine smirked and raised his glass to his mouth, his pinky and ring finger lifted slightly from the glass, the way he saw Connery do it once in a movie. He set it back down on the linen tablecloth, “And besides, even if it is a cliché, it’s one that everyone buys into. Everyone wants to believe that New York is this mystically pungent place and that if ‘you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” He did the air quotes and everything. Bianca jokingly rolled her eyes, “And what do you really believe?” “What does it matter what I really believe? I live in LA.” The cosmopolitan restaurant clattered and buzzed all around them, important people doing important things. Antoine felt satisfaction wash over him like a wave, a wave that crashed every time he visited New York. He felt he belonged in restaurants like this, clubs and parties like this. The feeling was warmer than the dark wine that ran down his throat, he could hardly get it down. “So you admit that you’re a sellout?” Bianca pushed on. Antoine looked around. This was what he wanted to capture, the restaurant crackled with electricity, he wanted to bottle it up and carry it back with him. He waved the insult away with that flippant mannerism that all the LA folks do nowadays, “I admit that I’m trying to be one.” Antoine could tell that Bianca was trying not to smile as she looked down at her risotto. He knew that he would never stop being in love with her, even as all the years passed and the differences grew. He felt for her in a way he had never felt for another being, and it was comforting to know that she would always be there. Even now, during their annual bi-coastal visits with each other—the kindling of a not quite fizzled fire—It was almost like she was tinted in rose. “You should move back to New York. Your family misses you; they talk about you all the time.” Bianca’s warm brown eyes, always seemingly on the verge of tears, looked around the busy restaurant, “Remember how great it all used to be? How we used to scam Jose for free beef patties and Plátanos?” She laughed, “I’ll never forget that time we got so drunk and crashed that cookout in Jackson Heights! Anytime I pass by Elmhurst I get so scared that I’ll run into someone. See, you can’t write about that in LA.” Before Antoine could respond, the waitress came back to top them off. She smiled down at him—she had a cute little blonde haircut and clearly wanted him. Antoine pretended to check his phone until she left. “Ah Bee, that’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. There’s an opening in the studio, Financial Analyst of all things! It’s down to me and this asshole, Rob, in Sales.” Antoine shuddered with disgust but then brightened, “The pay is glorious, 150 a year! Can you imagine me with 150 a year?” Antoine looked expectantly at Bianca. “What are you talking about, since when have you wanted to work in finance?” Bianca asked. “Since when does anyone ever want to work in finance?” How did she not understand? Bianca shrugged, “It just seemed to me that the screenwriting gig was going really well. Didn’t they green light one of your scripts?” 64


“Yeah, but who knows how long it’ll be ‘til it sees the light of day.” Antoine said, “You don’t understand Bianca, these things take years and years and then might not even make it. I have to be practical for right now.” “But—” “Listen Bianca, it’s done. I’m growing up. Can’t you just be happy for me?” Antoine slouched back in his chair and downed the rest of his Merlot. Happy for him? Bianca stared at Antoine, beguiled at his words. “Happy for you?” Bianca repeated, more to herself than to him. “I’ve worked my ass off to get here. Remember how we used to hop turnstiles because we couldn’t afford metro cards? I have to be more than that. I don’t want my kids to have to suffer the same way that we did.” “We grew up in Queens not Calcutta.” She stabbed her shrimp with a fork. “Exactly! We were expected to rise up and make something of ourselves. Do you know how much debt I’m in from school? I can’t be a martyr just to write something that won’t mean anything to anyone but me. This is what’s expected of me. This job is like an eraser—no, it’s a clean slate. How often do we get something like that?” Bianca clenched her fork until her fingers turned white. Fat, overripe tears slid down her cheeks. “I didn’t realize how much you needed a clean slate.” “Bianca, It’s not like that—” “Just, shut up!” Bianca exclaimed. The tables next to them looked over, Antoine knew what they were thinking, of course these people were being loud. “I’m sick of this bullshit. You’re not the first person to leave Queens, and I’m sure you won’t be the last. Stop talking to me like you’re writing your tragic memoir and just be real.” Bianca took a gulp of her wine. “I love you, Antoine. But who are you? Who is this person, what is this?” Bianca threw up her hands and looked around at the restaurant, “Why are we always going to the fucking Upper East Side?” “This place was featured in the Times!” “And it fucking sucks!” Bianca shook her head, “I’m not interested in pretending to be something I’m not and sucking up to these people. I love living in Queens!” “I thought you moved to Brooklyn?” “Whatever! You’re being weak and cliché. You’re so wrapped up in you, you don’t even notice the real things happening around you. You haven’t even asked a single thing about me; do you even know anything about me?” “Of course I know you, you’re—” “I’m what? You’re one true love? Who you had to leave behind in order to make something of yourself? I’m not some manic pixie dream girl, I’m a human fucking being.” They both fell silent. It was like her words had altered the chemistry they were both made up of. “This isn’t a movie or a book, this is real life. You can’t just say you’re one thing and suddenly become another. You’re a writer and you write. You can’t be a writer and not write.” Bianca said. Antoine gritted his teeth, “Why do you see everything in black and white? You never get it, Bianca. I can’t just be a writer and I can’t stay in Queens my whole life.” Bianca squinted at him, like she was seeing him for the very first time, “Then you really are pathetic.” She grabbed her purse from the chair and rummaged through it. “Stay in New York, 65


or honestly go back to LA.” She took out a $50 bill and laid it on the table, “Just don’t call me for a while.” She got up from the table and walked out of the door. Antoine, and half of the restaurant patrons, watched her leave. The blonde waitress who witnessed the whole scene, hurried to Antoine’s table, “Sir is everything okay?” Antoine stared at his empty wine glass, stunned and lacking of any words at all. He nodded after a beat, “It’s okay. We’re meant to be.”

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Eiko Fulton Paperweight, November 2019 Charcoal and India ink 67


saint joseph of the pines Cole Merrell

El año pasado un hombre de Honduras vino para acá con su familia, had no idea where he was, buscando un hotel estaba, and he came in here with his windows rolled up, didn’t know, verdad? so they put sixteen shots through the windshield como si fuera algo casual, windows bleeding, and his baby girl’s still screaming in the back, didn’t get hit, so they walk over and Balazo! her body falls out and there’s these trocitos de su cabeza all over the ground como sandía aplastada. And that old woman, ahí por la entrada? they made her clean it up. Enterró el pequeno cuerpo in its pink little blood-spattered dress. Por ahí hay de estar, la niñita, por aquella cruz en la calle. The driver stops talking and moves his foot to the break. Gamaliel rolls the chibolón back and forth in his hand, closing his eyes, feeling the wind. He’s ten years old and carries himself like everybody else in the world is only nine. About a meter away, on the dirt, there’s a circle of rocks, twigs, and splintery plywood with seven colorful glass balls inside, sparkling jupiters and ringless saturns and small shiny comets of orange and purple and red. Marbles, Gama thinks, wishing his mouth could get around the word as easily as his mind. Every Saturday morning for six months now, he and his mother have been attending English classes at la iglesia mormona in town. Sometimes the missionaries play Marbles with him afterward. Chibolónes? the chellitos say, as Gama nods approvingly. Marbles, he repeats back. Mamá says that if he learns English he’ll be able to get a job en El Norte. In a couple years, he’ll know enough; he’ll send money back home and she can finally get her heart fixed. On the other side of the circle, Beto and Sante tap their toes impatiently. Gama might be the chibolónes champion of the barrio, but he sure is slow to shoot. He’s still testing out different angles, holding his arm out and squinting like a TV sniper, when they see Lucas jogging toward them from across the park. Just a year ago his arms were skinny like theirs, but tumors of teenage muscle have recently begun to spread across his bony frame. He’s thirteen, too old to for marbles, and spends most of his time running errands for the bichos, who reward him in odd dollars and sometimes joints. Ay, ¿que hondas? he says, pulling a towel from his pocket to dab the sweat from his face. Gama (the oldest) shrugs indifferently, as Beto and Sante look on uncomfortably, as if worried their mothers will see them. Lucas holds up a five-dollar bill and asks if they want to help. ¿Con qué? Gama asks suspiciously. Lucas says that it’s nothing too serious, just some keeping watch. Beto and Sante look to Gama, who eyes the five-dollar bill and pictures his mother and wonders what Jesus would do. The bichos sit where the street dead ends, on either side of the entrada to the right, laughing together no jodás hombre, verga as they trace the approaching car with their eyes. Little white toyota, piece of shit, one headlight, slowing to a stop as it approaches. Squinting carefully, they make sure that the windows are rolled down. Sí, sí, yo lo hago. One of them stands, shoving a pistol down the front of his sagging jeans. He’s shirtless, built like a greyhound, with crude MS tattoos on his chest and neck. Showing his teeth like a smile, almost, he swaggers toward the left side of the car, and squats down next to the driver, a stout-looking, leathery man with a blue-collar mustache. They stare at each other, for a moment, as the radio quietly statics out a cumbia. Ven a bailar la cum68


bia, báilala con sabor… The boy slowly reaches through the open window and brushes across the driver’s chest with his arm, gently turning off the music. Silence. He snickers. Puta, hombre, tranquilo, ¡riáte un poco! Eyes on the rosario on the rearview mirror, the driver’s hand twitches instinctually toward his forehead chest right shoulder left shoulder, but he catches himself. En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo, he meditates. Better not to move. Earlier in the evening, Óscar had caught him walking out the door and wrapped around his leg in protest, like a child-shaped boot. ¿Para dónde vas, Pápa? Marcela turned off the sink, looking on warily from the now-quiet kitchen. He’d smiled bravely for the both of them, ruffling his son’s curls. Voy a hacer visitas con las hermanas. Voy con Dios, gordito, así que no te preocupes. Swallowing, Marcela held her soapy hands to her hips in an attempt to appear more angry than fearful, but it was no use. The worry stuck wet on her eyes. Plying Óscar from his leg with a ten-cent laugh, he’d waved his way out the door, looking anywhere else but at her. Ya vuelvo, ya vuelvo. Pulling his hand back out of the car, the greyhound looks to the backseat, where two first-timers sit in sweat-dampened habits, swallowing their throats dry. Monjas. The one on the right has a crumpled face like an old candy wrapper. The one on the left holds a guitar in her lap. Much nicer to look at, he thinks, examining the tense shape of her mouth, her pursing, trembling lips. She’s young, still some babyfat in the cachetes. Can’t be older than nineteen, maybe twenty. Looking her in the eyes now, they dilate even wider than before. No words, no noise apart from thick gulping and the quiet pio pio of some half-molted chickens that have wandered out of the colonia and now walk in abrupt, dumb scribbles around the car. Finally, licking his teeth, the boy stands up, nodding to his friend by the entrada, who bellies out of a too-tight polo and waves them through with an M-16. Gama feels like vomiting when they hand him the gun. He shouldn’t be here. Behind him, Beto and Sante are whimpering softly and look dangerously close to tears, so he shoots them an eye that says Shut up Don’t move Pendejos Pendejos Pendejos. The sun is mostly set and nothing is dark or light. Their orders are simple enough; they’re to follow Lucas and a couple of the younger bichos around as they collect protection money from some stores and churches. If anyone runs outside, they’re to shoot, but nobody ever does. Everyone knows the rules, everyone follows them. Gama breathes deeply, thinking about how relieved Mamá will be when he brings home his cut of the five dollars. He turns around again, this time with a softer face, and whispers gently to his friends. No se preocupen. Va a salir bien. Lucas approaches and places a hand on Gama’s shoulder. Vámonos ya. Vaya pues. Windows still rolled down, the car turns onto the narrow street, graffitied houses all shoulder-to-shoulder with metal bars over the windows. Colonia San Jose Del Pino. An iridescent blue fluid flows out of a stray house pipe and smells like bleach and queso duro as it seeps across the street. Concrete, barbed wire, chain link, plywood, and sheet metal wall off homes and shop windows and the big dirt field in the middle with sticks in the ground for soccer goals. The makeshift park, like the street, is empty, save for a few of the boys. They track the toyota with the sides of their eyes. Los vigilantes the driver mutters, shaking his head. Clinging to her guitar like a stuffed bear, the monja on the left looks up at the grey sky, 69


which hangs over everything, top-of-the-box. No holes for light or ventilation; everything drips with the grainy haze of burning trash and bad weed. She rubs her eyes, then looks up at the sky again. Getting dark out, makes sense there’s nobody on the street. A nervous shiver. She looks hopefully to Hermana Flores, but her companion’s creased forehead is bowed, cracked lips moving softly. Tapping the guitar, she thinks of praying, too. Did Monseñor Romero pray for protection the night they pulled the trigger? Blasfemia. If Mamá were here, she’d say not to think like that. Ten fe, Clarita. Jesús está contigo. Up until three months ago she had always been Clara; Clarita, Chiquita, Cariña, Hija. Lots of names. But always Clara, underneath and above it all. Clear. Light. Bright. And Mamá would say it like that, like an adjective. Clara. Clear girl, light girl, bright girl. Last navidad she was still at home, laughing with Papá as he struggled to wrap tamales in banana leaves. By the end they were dancing bachata in the living room, covered in flour. He had a laugh like honeyed mangoes and she misses it every day. Nobody calls her Clara in the convent; for three months, now, she’s been Hermana Leyva. At six, she used to run around the house in a bedsheet habit, smile-yelling Soy monja, soy monja! And here she is. Still playing dress-up. A little girl in the back of a toyota, praying not to die tonight instead of for the people they’ve come to visit, sick, hungry people who live every day in this neighborhood of gnashing teeth. She’s always feeling so many of the wrong things, things like boredom during mass, doubt, an emptiness shaped like her mother, exhaustion, blush-colored butterflies when she thinks of Diego, the need to wear a t-shirt, random pangs of gut-level loneliness, inadequacy, an inappropriate love for coca-cola, dizzying amounts of what-mighthave-been, the fear of being martyred, and a thick smear of guilt over all of it. Feliz Navidad. Earlier this afternoon, she’d read the end of Romans 8 to a woman with a hacking cough and white fog over her pupils. Antes, somos más que vencedores and all the rest. Here, though, air like chlorine on her tongue, she thinks of the previous verse, where Pablo quotes the psalmist. Por causa de ti somos muertos todo el tiempo; Somos contados como ovejas de matadero. Turning her head to watch the boys in the park through the back of the window, her chest begins to feel heavy and light and thinner than india paper. The toyota slows to a stop. Lucas counts the bills in his hand under the phlegm-colored light of a nearby window. Veinte, Cuarenta, Sesenta, Ochenta, Cien, Ciento Veinte, Ciento Cuarenta, Ciento Sesenta. He smiles to himself, going back to count one more time as Beto and Sante nervously look over their shoulders. ¿Ya estuvo entonces? Gama asks, hoping to go home. Shoving the cash into the shallow pocket of his too-tight jeans, Lucas speaks with a growling edge, showing off what puberty has done for his voice. He asks Gama why he’s so anxious to get home, folding his arms like he’s about to beat his ass. The boys don’t move. But then Lucas laughs with his teeth, clapping his hands together. Son bromas, ¡tranquilo! ¿No creen que somos amigos? Making eyes that look like they’re up to something, he looks to one of the older bichos, who’s thin, hungry-looking, covered in tattoos from the dick up. Lifting a slender, patterned arm, he points to a house down the street with a white car parked out front. For a moment, he and Lucas turn away, giggling to each other. Even though Gama can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, he can feel the outlines of their words, the wet lick of their l’s, the dry hiss of their s’s, and he knows that the devil is in them, somewhere. Lucas turns back toward them and says that there’s just one more house to go, grinning the wild grin of a cipitio or benjamite.

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They’re parked in front of a dull green house with a dented sheetmetal gate that’s been loudly spraypainted in bright yellow, like writing in piss. MARA SALVATRUCHA PUTA 13 13 13. All three step out of the car. Clara shifts her weight between her feet as Hermana Flores continues to rezar and the driver softly raps against the gate with his knuckle. Nervous eyes peek through the window. After a moment, the gate swings open with an aluminum shudder and they hurry to enter, closing it shut behind them. Inside, a raccoon-eyed child throws his arms around the monjas, smiling with a gaunt cheek to their knees. ¡Gracias por venir, hermanas, gracias por venir! Yo sabía que iban a venir, ¡se lo dije a mi abuela, se lo dije! He skips inside with a grin, pulling Hermana Flores behind him, excitedly squeezing at the slack, veiny topography of her hand. The driver reverently motions for Hermana Leyva to enter ahead of him. Outside the house, the bichos crouch in the dirt and stare through the bars in the gate. Bien chula la niña, ¿verdad? Esa cinturita… Sí, sí, peligrosa la putita. When they’d started toward the house, Beto and Sante had sprinted in the other direction, which the bichos seemed to have laughed off. Que suerte, Gama thinks as his mouth continues to fill with sour spit like battery acid, forcing him to swallow constantly or risk hurling something clear and milky all over the ground. He wonders if some of that tortilla from yesterday morning is still in his stomach and, if it isn’t, what else there even is to throw up. In his hand, the gun hangs heavy, as if attached to his shoulder by a string instead of an arm. Inside the house, someone begins to strum something peaceful and flickering that Gama thinks he might have heard once at misa. Looking over the shoulders of the boys, he sees Alejandro through the window and gags audibly. Besides Ale and his abuelita, who’s lying sick in bed, there’s also José Colindres and two hermanas from the church. Señor Colindres had grown up here in the colonia and still visits every week or so, even after making it out. A few months back, when Gama’s mother came down with chikungunya, he’d showed up at their door with a bagful of elotes, some dried beans, and a watermelon. Said that he was praying for them, and then he was off. Beaming her way through the puerta, Clara feels suddenly transfigured. The room is low and stagnant. To one side, there’s an old, palsied woman lying on a bare mattress, drymouthing gracias and different names for the Lord. On the other, a small kitchen table with schoolbooks balancing the legs, where someone has set out three pieces of stale pan dulce on a faded mickey mouse plate. Surrounding the mesita are two pink plastic child-sized chairs and an upside-down five-gallon bucket. With a tremored raise of the arm, the old woman gestures for the visitors to sit as the boy leaves the room. After a moment, he rushes back in and excitedly presents a matchbox car to Hermana Flores, who oohs generously and asks if he’ll show her how fast it can go. She seems younger, magnified, sanctified, even, in this cluttered, empty room that smells of bedsores. Holy. Hermana Leyva begins to strum her guitar softly. She’d almost forgotten the date. Noche de paz, noche de amor, Todo duerme alrededor… 71


On the mattress, the woman closes her eyes, mouthing along to an old december memory shaped like these words. Not entirely sure of the lyrics, Alejandro begins to whisper-sing, attempting to divine each next word by reading her lips. Noticing this, the driver nudges the boy and joins in loudly, exaggerating the movements of his mouth. At todo duerme, he checks his watch. Still plenty of time to make tonight special. He can pick up some panes con pollo on the way home, Marcela would like that. Or maybe something to put under the tree. Entre los astros que esparcen su luz viene anunciando al niño Jesús Remembering the next two lines, (they’re easier because they repeat) Alejandro grins proudly and begins to add consonants to his vowels. His energy is infectious, and the others begin to laugh as they sing. Porque donde están dos o tres reunidos en mi nombre… Brilla la estrella de pa-az Warm sunny agate tears begin to paint Hermana Leyva’s cheeks like invisible ink. Would it be so strange if Moses appeared, if Elijah were here, if a whole host of brown-eyed seraphim burst through the door or walls or ceiling singing santo, santo, santo? Awash in this rent-veil feeling that gushes like water or fire through the room, the girl looks toward the door with an expectant smile. And then she hears a banging at the gate. It’s beautifully quiet; nobody screams. Gama’s back is turned (he can’t bring himself to look at the kicked-open gate that now hangs tenuously on only its upper hinge) and all he hears is the faint sound of normal speech in a tone like Hola, ¿que tal tu día? Suddenly, a father’s voice speaks more loudly than the others and there’s the clattering sound of a chair or table smacking into a wall. Warm, rashy urine runs down Gama’s leg, soaking his underwear through and dripping into a muddy puddle on the dusty ground. What Jesus would do is whither the boys like fig trees and turn everyone else into angels, but Gama can’t do either of those things, can’t even keep from pissing himself. Watery snot drips coldly from his nose and he wonders what he’ll say to his mother. A hand with long nails pushes José Colindres’ face into the concrete floor. Pinned down by two of the boys, his eyes are pointed directly at Hermana Leyva, though he can only see from the waist down. The old woman and old nun are both unconscious on the mattress and Alejandro’s in the corner, bleeding from his head and saying no no no no no. Backed up against the wall next to the door, Clara is completely alone, legs pressed tightly together at the knees, arms stretched wide as if to protect some invisible person that isn’t there. One of the boys approaches her on all fours like a dog, licking his lips and panting. He’s putting on a show. Slowly, he stands, almost a foot taller than the heaving girl, and gently strokes her cheek with a tattooed thumb. Then, he moves to kiss her, leading with his tongue. José sees the legs of a child stutter-stepping through the door, wearing faded jeans that are dark in the crotch. He can’t quite see the kid’s face, but there’s a gun wiggling in his hand. 72


The boys on his back snicker, asking the child if he’s come for a turn, telling him that maybe he’ll get a shot once they’ve had theirs. ¿Gama? Alejandro whispers in confused reverence, as if experiencing a theophany. Then, a sound so loud it’s silent and a white ringing in the air like seeing spots. The body of the tattooed boy drops to the ground, complete minus the head, which lies in chunks and rinds across the floor and drizzle-sticks to the walls like red dew on grey lilies. In the confusion, José feels the hand lift from his head and quickly jumps to his feet, gutpunching the first boy he sees as another shot blows out his eardrums and splatters blood across his face. He looks at the familiar child in the wet jeans, who screams and only looks with one eye as he empties the pistol into the bodies on the ground. Once the explosive cracks give way to empty clicking, Gama throws the gun to the floor and heaves out incoherent apologies as he runs to José, who scoops him up in a tight embrace and strokes his sweat-matted curls. Clara falls to the ground, too exhausted to stand, scraping her tongue raw with her teeth and spitting the greyhound’s taste from her mouth, choking. After what feels like seconds and hours, she gets up to her knees, breathing, somehow. Alive. She looks at the gun on the floor, and then at the barefooted child crying in José’s arms, and then at her own little body, shaking in fear. Santo, santo, santo.

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Marius Sheppard Skaerved Bonfire, January 2019 Digital Photography 74


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