Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine — Fall 2015

Chanter Literary Magazine

Fall 2017

(noun): one who sings, or, the part of the bagpipe that plays a melody

Fall 2015 Macalester College Literary Magazine St. Paul, MN chanter@macalester.edu

Chanter would like to thank the following: All the amazing writers and artists who submitted their work Matt Burgess Jan Beebe The Mac Weekly The wonderful developers of InDesign at Adobe Marshall left us for a wedding

Cover art: Look at yourself (collage), Maja Søndergaard Bendtsen

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Editor-in-Chief: Karintha Lowe Literary Editor: Xander Gershberg Associate Literary Editor: Zeena Fuleihan Art Editor: Bram Wang Associate Art Editor: Coco Banks Submission Manager: Marshall King Associate Submission Manager: Ariana Lewis-Stevens

Staff:

Nathan Are Emily Crnkovich Declan Cummings Libby Eggert Clare Foley Julia Fritz-Endres Elizabeth Isaac-Herzog Ellie Janda Matthew Later Elizabeth Loetscher Willie McDonagh Noah Mondschein Miriam Moore-Keish Austin Parsons Theodore Twidwell Crystal Yam

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Writing

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Patience Poems 6

Regardless 7 Zeena Fuleihan

My Land Lord and I hit it off

Chris Herrmann

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Willie McDonagh

Scenes from a Marriage 10 Meggie Royer A Lawn Should be Green and Cut Short 11 Declan Cummings Old Times 12 Matthew Later

Holland Tunnel 16 Hank Hietala

Mare 17 Max Guttman

Voyeur warrior chant 18 Svitlana Iukhymovych [no title] 28 Liza Michaeli Mesmerize Me 29 Zeena Fuleihan

Postcards 30 Katie Tsuji

Last Rites 31 Meggie Royer

Thoughts on the Prairie 32 Dan Abramowitz Love Poem 33 Karintha Lowe You Should Know 34 Adrianna Jereb Now Is Not The Time 38 Nathan Are

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Art

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Lotus Necklace 19 Juliette Myers Begging to Enter 20 Svitlana Iukhymovych

Nightlights 21 Josh Koh

Untitled 22 Abigail Methvin Sunset 23 Liam Downs-Tepper non functional 24 Maja Søndergaard Bendtsen Mermaid Postcard 25 Juliette Myers Untitled 26 Abigail Methvin nawab’s 50-50 27 Simon Koda

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Patience Poems Chris Herrmann Kombu one piece of ribbon steamed with a wooden spoon and bloomed patience and dried kelp half aged hardened, and set.

Floral Living learning from chestnuts to breathe easy pause all acts in action to sit still little sun, it’s ok to look now chestnuts say it’s ok to breathe easy.

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Regardless Zeena Fuleihan I am leaving coals with laundry blackened burnings still blushing while these clothes will never grace a skeleton.

There are flecks of heat trapped in mesh woven fibers, no amount of soap will staunch the smoke.

I am leaving your ashes with fabric soft-worn collars still aching for a neck but my shoulders, they crave a breeze.

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My Land Lord and I hit it off Willie McDonagh There’s a squirrelly young guy who comes by early in the morning on the weekends and fixes my pipes. It’s been years and days since my pipes have broken, and it is because of him that I have some of the best plumbing around, but the fact remains that vigilant maintenance by the homeowner is absolutely essential. I must agree.

He says I’m his only tenant left, but I’m inclined to doubt this. The fact is I have seen other people around the lobby and some of them live in condos near me and I’ve even been inside some of them and have seen their rugs and dish sets and I know the young man doesn’t own the building because he doesn’t live here and he lives across the street where he looks at me funny all night long and throws his tools at my window but he has bad aim and I have strong windows.

My coworkers sit in silent rapture while I inform them of the latest developments during the morning meetings. Well, of course they are interested. In fact, just this morning they pursued me about what effect my guy thought the winter weather would be having on the new copper pipes he installed. I gave them my coy smile as if to say, “I guess we’ll see, now won’t we?” and they relaxed a little because my guy knows his stuff. I left to a chorus of approving fingers wags and a contented throwing-up-of hands. “Why, I need know no more!”

It never seemed pertinent in those conversations to mention his plot for me. I haven’t got it figured out myself, either. I’m well-sure by this point that he is unpredictable, but just as most of the wildest, craziest friends are, he assures me. Last week he dropped by while I was still at church and fixed a trouble spot he had been talking about for the longest time. I wrote out his check and he packed up his things, but then he lingered for a while. He made a few attempts at kicking my legs out from under me, but I think my bemused look discouraged him from further action. “Next time then, yeah boss?” “Not this week, guy.”

On his most recent visit, he set his stereo down and turned on his messedup disaster music before starting to paint the walls red. Sitting up in bed, I asked him what about the pipes and he said he had checked them out earlier that morning and all was well (“Just slipped right through the 8

window, boss!). Too tired to analyze the situation or make sense of the shattered glass on my bedsheets, I let up my interrogation. Now, looking at his feet, he explained, “I could try to be big in the eyes of the world / What matters to me is what I could be to just one guy.” I heard his slash mark and realized that he was stealing lines from Brian Wilson. “You goddamned thief! You can’t take wholesale like that! What sort of explanation is that, anyway? For your behavior?” “Was it the slash?” he asked and that’s when I lashed and tossed the tea tray across the sitting room. He ducked and picked me up by my back, then tossed me out the broken window.

Just a two-story dive, I had the time to think about him before stopping on the dirt. A priest out for a jog saw me on the sidewalk, where he says that I whispered, “Guess some guys just aren’t cut out for a big friendship” and unstuck my arms from the pavement to throw them up in the air.

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Scenes from a Marriage Meggie Royer Grandmother dug him out of the lake next to the wood, his fingers curled around reeds, pockets threaded with silt.

A small frog tucked into his cufflinks, their silver long tarnished into copper, its belly bloated with sound.

We sat him at the dinner table; she wanted to place an orange in his mouth like they do with pigs, or an apple, something round and sweet.

I had to remind her he was here as a guest, not a meal or a savior.

Everything ends.

A widow’s heart, the skyline, some grave you dug yourself out of just to get to the horizon.

She wanted to keep him, to let the story follow its course this time, one more life inside her bed.

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A Lawn Should be Green and Cut Short Declan Cummings I sit, gazing out over suburbia’s backyards.

A woman, sweating, mows her lawn, walking back and forth, back and forth, cutting squares, spiraling inward, toward a center.

A tree stands crooked, leaning toward me, over me, out of sight, looping back, extending behind me, burrowing through the ground, only to emerge again in front of me.

Ridges fissure the bark, dark shadows, like ants lined end-to-end, resting between the raised wood.

The woman has finished mowing and stands in the center of her lawn.

One week from today she will return and two weeks from today she will return and she will walk, back and forth, cutting her squares, and once again, find herself standing in the center of her lawn.

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Old Times Matthew Later

It is in the newspaper under A’s arm that he learned of B’s new address. Page 11, a man who slashed ambulance tires, but, behind the arrest, B’s unmistakable outline enters a building. It’s an apartment complex in the area where A goes on walks anyway, why, isn’t that the building, A thinks, that I sometimes circle two, three times, until someone asks if I’ve lost my keys, and then I leave, always? So A goes on a long walk in the opposite direction, laps around a more or less circular lake and exits the paved walkway for grass being watered by automatic sprinklers to avoid someone approaching with a flashlight, their figure unavailable, the light uncomfortably like the end of a tunnel.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” A resolves.

Tomorrow A buys flowers and lifts an old postcard off his dresser.

A departs in the direction of B’s supposed building and laps its perimeter until a young person, whom A follows inside, unlocks the main entrance with a key woven into one of many bracelets shaping their arm, each with its own key attached in a way befitting the bracelet’s material. A stands on bent knees to examine his reflection in the bronze plate room number, wonders, “Doesn’t he come as soon as the doorbell rings and am I recognizable?” The door glides away and there stands C. “Can I help you?” “I’m here to see B.” C, though skeptic, leads the way. B is seated across from a mirror, or, in the mirror, across it, and it is on this other plane that A and B’s eyes meet.

“Hello…” B begins.

“Do you remember?”

“And you are…?”

A reminds B of a Summer in the Upper Midwest, nearly weightless flakes of shaved sunlight debouching under gaps between leaves, falling left, then right, then left again in increasingly wider, gentler arcs, a little lower each time until reaching warm dirt at the base of a green mountain where A sees B perched between two old silos, his fingers slipping off the second and the crumbling mortar like rain meeting dry, trampled leaves.

“Go on…” A runs under, catching B when a stone rocks loose behind B’s toe against silo one, then they kiss, and find a spot in the Sun where they take turns keeping eyes closed or open. This is their introduction. B catches A a fish in a net. A collects berries to feed to B. Etc., etc…

“Oh, what a joke!”

B gives their weight to a confused C, who says, after B kisses his 12

cheek, “This is no joke-- tell me more about the woods, as they were then, at that exact moment…” Prepubescent voices chanting the names of lakes, Agnes, Apple, Bluebird, Little Rice, an outpost in a clearing on a ranch with only a men’s restroom and a busted water fountain, we drank out of a creek, the water tasted like copper. B and C’s hands tighten into each other, two ends of the same knotted twine.

Like a heavy perfume coming from who knows which partygoer, all three men at once feel the living room’s elegant weight, of which they are casually unaware in equal measure, gilded molding, smoke colored Chinese hanging scrolls of charcoal painted, flower-like mountains, deep red walls and a soft, warm rug blood rushes to be up against, if one is barefoot, which all people present happen to be. “We spent the next half a year together.”

“That’s an interesting story,” says B. “And a very old one too.”

“So you do remember?”

“Of course. Yes, of course, I,” B laughs like a unilingual foreigner playing along with the group dynamic. “Oh, look, it’s raining.” B’s neck arches backwards and rotates left, his fingers wrap around it and massage.

“It’s a funny story because I have the same one.”

“C came last week and told me the same thing. I couldn’t believe it, after so many years.” B is still facing the window.

“Who told you?” C demands.

No one told me, of course no one told me, A responds, what is this? A canyon slides out from A’s inside jacket pocket, while passing the postcard it rotates parallel with the floor and the Badlands, twenty years ago, directly eye level with B, disappear briefly from B’s view. It is passed into his hands and sure enough this is the never-sent postcard he bought on their road trip together, out to the West Coast from whence they flew back East, then Trans-Atlantic, coated in renditions of B’s signature stacked on top each other. C says he has an identical copy in a safety deposit box, B contradicts, he was the one who kept the card, and lost it long ago. But A has proof, he insists: “I’m the only one who’s right.”

Thunder, a cello behind the wall, the rustling of A’s bouquet when he presents it to B.

“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” says B, even as he receives the flowers and inspects the cheery card tied to stems soon deposited in a waterless vase. “We’re already engaged.” C is looking, not at A or B, in the mirror or otherwise, but just looking. Somewhere, something...

“Please just hear me out,” “Well, all right... We have nowhere else to be.” C is still looking, silent.

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“And besides, it might be fun.”

B and C agree, they too, will share one memory, let’s see what we can remember, one says.

“I’m going to tell both of you something I’ve never told either of you.” B’s memory: the couple flies to Lille, France, where they shack up in a small apartment once belonging to B’s cousin, a place whose long hallways always conduct clean, salty air in spite of few windows and a distance from the Sea or Ocean, an apartment haunted by the twilight of torpid bulbs and little sunlight. B waits tables while A (or C) sells postage stamps door-to-door, freelance, and once a month together the couple visits a restaurant where they eat portions determined by apistats well familiar with the lowermost threshold of too-full-to-outrun-a -bill, which is toed but never crossed. One such night B makes love with C (or A), during which time B feels as though his body’s bottom half is eating its upper analog with slow, dumb bites, and after the climax, on the periphery of candlelight with his arm under A(or C)’s neck, B watches a herd of wild horses kicking and grazing on his lover’s stomach as the two come to rest.

A and C, at the mention of tiny horses, perk up and trade cross glances.

“I remember the horses, too, but I didn’t believe they were real.

And you would have thought I was insane if I asked about it.”

“I didn’t see the horses, no, my eyes were already closed, but I remember their heavy strides and nostrils, yes, little warm geysers. I thought I was sweating and cramping with a bad cold until I heard neighing, and even then...”

So which is more likely?

“My story,” says C, who never opened his eyes. “The cold is an obvious explanation for the horses.”

“But you saw them too!” urges A, directly toward B.

“But if you noticed my discomfort,” C, getting heated, “then why not, on the brink of dreams, my sickness might become something else?”

“And how can I be sure that one or both of you, in this moment, only remembers what I suggest?” The trio relax, they slump a little. “I should’ve thought of that sooner.”

What about you, C, A and B both wonder out loud, but C says it’s the same problem, the power of suggestion on memory is too strong, particularly when one is in want of something. Everyone nods solemnly.

But can we fill in the blanks, maybe, C suggests, if you begin another, B?

“Well, I could talk about the Russian-speaking lady we met selling--” “Carpets!”

“Who had a daughter--” 14

“An optometrist..”

“And they asked us to--”

“Drive them across town from one of their apartments to the next–”

“--because they were trading wardrobes.”

“This is useless too…”

“It’s funny though, the way you tell your stories.”

“Like what?”

“Like that, stories,” says C, who explains he remembers the events of those months as simultaneous, scrapbook like, hastily assembled with no eye for continuity. “Am I the only one?”

“We could talk about it for hours and never know who matches what, which memories are the same, which different, when they happened…”

“But it’s best, maybe, to assume they’re all the same.”

“Does anyone want a drink?”

Next, C will go to the bank in search of a lost item, the postcard stowed in a deposit box. But first, let it be known that after, when B is exhausted, A and C will go on a walk together around that lake in the opposite direction, talk things through, C will ask A to never speak to them again and A will walk home and make the following entry in his journal:

In a way, I am relieved.

But first C makes his way out the building through the rain’s last hour, past wet streetlights and storefronts, knowing the bank is not open but still on his way for some reason, call it an excuse even if it’s not that exactly. He slips on pavement and with cherry-scored palms pushes his body up onto its feet again where his skyward gaze aligns with a townhouse window framing a fat child’s shadowy expression. C turns the other way then back again, as if in a game of peek-a-boo, to find the child no longer in the window, then he turns around once more in the direction of the bank as the two remembered images, one of the window frame with child and one without, compete for how the facade will be etched in C’s memory after he walks away, the child, empty, the child or empty, which one came first again? The two frames run parallel in C’s brain until one glows brighter and the other fades to black.

A crumples the newspaper and drops it in the trash.

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Holland Tunnel Hank Hietala Viruses surging through an artery saturated with neon, sickness pumping in a frantic flow, parasites packed in the jaws of a serpent, tempting these two-eyed vampires.

Or is it a sewer drainage pipe, leaking battalions of rats on the cement, a stream of scuttling scoundrels, carried by the current of the River of Hades, they remain apart.

It could be ants bustling through a Chinese finger trap, ravens screeching within a brick-enclosed viaduct, a sea of sinners slinking across a hellish cavern.

I’ve never seen a picture of traffic spilling through the Holland Tunnel.

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Mare Max Guttman This field swallows difference. Child has not known the grass of cloud. Child breathes deep flowers, strokes soft petals, tiptoes do not wake them. Mother picks flowers, mother’s touch, mother takes flower, not just a cuddle. honey hon fun fawn fondle feel my love feel me cover mouths, they will stop, mother stop mother what no what. Knew never, thought never, now is never. Mother Mary mother mine took my flower, please tell me that wasn’t real it will never grow back.

Pink, yellow lilies once was how I grew, but she planted red thorns, run pack up get up eyelids leaden. laundry follows, all of it, make it on time, before the others. Early is on time. Pull down look please stay here pull down open open stay alert don’t get pulled down pull down.

Up with the door the stare don’t look at me please please don’t look at me.

New what? old new is still but old old is new what kind of auto-upgrade is this? Give it back a light box it holds escape from this jailmind. the path is burned, need years to grow back see you then.

In bed, who? mindblock meds no, none of this could be. But the one too good and true. This one’s real.

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Voyeur warrior chant Svitlana Iukhymovych The photo apparatus is apart, lens out, light bent away, body separate, shutter detached from the opening trigger.

Dust puffs now, ribs flare with the cleansing breath.

Danger catches and holds attention, I stare at a lid of a boiling hot brew, tipping, and fear its gentle touch.

Sudden openings and closings may be enough to spill, and silence the hissing stove.

An overflow, to imprint, develop, cleanse, fix, and dry.

I’ve seen at you clutching your heart in your fist like it’s the last roll of outdated Kodak film.

No speck of light can alter what’s already there.

Say the dark is necessary, the dark is necessary, the dark will return an image.

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Lotus Necklace Juliette Myers Title

Name 19

Begging to Enter Svitlana Iukhymovych Title

Name 20

Nightlights Josh Koh Title

Name 21

Untitled Abigail Methvin Title

Name 22

Sunset (Veli Losinj, Croatia) Liam Downs-Tepper Title

Name 23

non functional Maja Søndergaard Bendtsen Title

Name 24

Mermaid Postcard Juliette Myers Title

Name 25

Untitled Abigail Methvin Title

Name 26

nawab’s 50-50 Simon Koda Title

Name 27

Liza Michaeli […]

Empathy, that face, that energy, that grueling and mephitic yet absolutely necessary conversation that bothers you, and cradles you, and gives you one small reason to get up; that voice that keeps you turning and blood that keeps you breathing; and force and snub and touch that keeps your head above the water and heart out of the fire and eyes between the clouds and reminds you, over and over again, until you can’t help but surrender: “This is water, this is water.”

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Mesmerize Me Zeena Fuleihan What is under 36,000 feet curled beneath a liquid quilt sewn apart by pressurized remains decomposing out of sight like broken tree roots Take me to the ocean floor I want to see electric teeth and bodies the geometric shapes I never drew in my textbooks Surround me in deafening black fold wet molecules into the crevices behind my eardrums, submerge me I want my skeleton to shift, the sediment of my bones will form one more bottom-feeding mirage.

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Postcards Katie Tsuji I put on earrings to swim in the ocean. Salt and sleep have turned

my eyes yellow.

They do not weep in this dry climate.

Upon unpacking, I found your grocery list nestled among my sweaters.

We have long since eaten the blackberries, the marmalade.

I pass days licking petals of baby’s breath while tongues of paint

peel from the garage door.

Since night, I have loved to walk the alleys watching ash of

cigarettes flake through the air.

Tell me te quiero, just once.

In hotel slippers I wade through sand as the streetlamps drip kisses

of light.

I applied pink lipstick for the waiter who has your voice, and

picked at my carrots all evening.

If you were older, and I a pretty girl, we’d drive to your farm in the afternoon.

We’d pick the peaches along Manning Avenue. You could show me

my smile.

It just takes practice, sugar.

The owner of this raincoat cannot touch me with his nails.

He has no right to the knots of my spine, nor the padding of fat

under my chin.

In a locked car I might take his hand.

Once, you combed burrs from my hair while the stereo hummed lullabies.

Here, mothers salt clams for dinner. The teenagers do not dance.

All day I have been trying to petal together a torn silk flower spread

in rows across the carpet.

Over weeks a tangerine peel rotted in the trash bin, and the smell of California winter sunk through the apartment.

Baby, to give you up would mean I ever had you.

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Last Rites Meggie Royer My mother on a train filled with bodies. My mother sitting between all her previous lovers, dress uncurling like cinnamon peel from a spool.

My mother as goddess among men.

One with cigarette still lit, ash blooming across the sunken bowl of his left cheek.

My mother has mascara for this.

Afternoon sky swimming past the windows, its bloodlines, its cirrus clouds.

The driver announces the station.

Like paper dolls, she pulls them in a thread from the seats and down the aisle, heads bobbing as abacus.

To their ends they arrive– their burials in pools, backyards, their ashes in our sink.

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Thoughts on the Prairie Dan Abramowitz The Sioux used to live here.

The Ojibwe too. And beasts with incurved horns would grunt and gnaw on these planes.

In Slayton the Ojibwe have gone.

The roads cut through the Sideoats, and the Canada Wild Rye. The Sioux have left Luverne. But the Bison run in herds on the prairie.

They are not dead yet.

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Love Poem Karintha Lowe The tractor lies forgotten, submerged in a browning river.

He feels the dust collecting at his rusting brow, and the water thick as ink, pressing against his flaking thigh.

No one notices how the sun chips his steel back or the way the wind whips his face with the grace of a trout’s tail— Only the river knows him, feels his calves dig into the muddy depths of her body and his breath, the mechanic humming, beating a path through her heart.

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You Should Know Adrianna Jereb Most people ignore the homeless.

We had to stop at Wal-Mart; you never had any good food at your house. You drove with the windows open as we passed by the Arby’s, the dollar store, and a guy with a cardboard sign waiting by the stop sign.

Me, you, and Hailey wandered in and you got the cart, waving to the old greeter-woman with the plastic flowers stuck in her thin bun, and taking a smiley-face sticker from the roll.

At the deli section, you picked out a sandwich in a triangle box, egg salad with two halves of the sandwich stacked side-by-side, and a bottled water. Hailey and I followed to the next section.

At the checkout, you paid for the sandwich and water separate from our joint food. I pushed the cart out and we unloaded into the backseat, except your bag you handed me to keep up front. At the stop sign, you pulled over and jumped out, taking the plastic bag and five dollars to the homeless man. Hailey and I sat watching, our bare legs against the hot black seats.

My mom thought you wore too much makeup.

You put on eyeliner sitting cross-legged in front of a mirror propped against the wall. One of your brothers – probably Nathan, the youngest and the only remaining blonde – peeped his head in the door just to shout, “SOFIA!” and you ran to slam the door, only for it bounce back open.

“The landlord won’t pay for any repairs, so we’re not fixing anything,” you said, explaining the two-inch gap between the crooked door and frame. It was your explanation for mattresses on the floor, the single bathroom, and no paint on the walls.

You had four little brothers, until you suddenly had five. But Owen was your half-brother anyways. Sometimes people mistook you for Owen’s mom; you had all those curves you were always trying to sweat off, and with your trendy clothes and makeup, you could have passed for twenty-five. We were fifteen and I was jealous.

The beginning of senior year, around when Owen was born, you moved to your grandma’s house by the hospital. Your dad and the boys moved in with his girlfriend in Black River Falls and your mom moved to 34

Mauston, leaving you in the middle. After that you were never back in the house on Juniper Street, but sometimes you drove past, noticing the lawn was bigger without the scattering of bikes and skateboards lining the front sidewalk.

How you wouldn’t go out with Ben.

When your dog got that Parvovirus and had to be put down, his mom, a vet, waived some of the fees.

I heard Ben brought you flowers once, because you were feeling down. But you wouldn’t go to homecoming with him.

“Why not?” I asked. “Everybody says he’s super nice.”

You shrugged, said, “Because I don’t want to.”

“Wait, you don’t want to go, or you don’t want to go with him?

Because you don’t have to go with someone, you can just go with me and Becca.”

Another infuriating shrug. You didn’t go. Ben showed everyone it was fine by going with his friends and dancing the whole night.

Surprise.

We were in Hailey’s basement, you expecting to come over and hang out, probably eat macaroni from a box and play Grand Theft Auto or Just Dance on Hailey’s Xbox. I held a giant Tupperware full of twenty pink cupcakes from a Pillsbury mix, with pink frosting from a can.

We were huddled in the basement with the lights off, our tilted heads listening to the clunking and the voices trickling down to us –

“Your cats are so fat!” you said coming in Hailey’s house.

“They are not! They’re growing!” Hailey replied.

“No. They’re fat.”

It was ritual between you and Hailey to contest the obesity of her cats, especially after your cat – God, that thing was ugly – died and you got more attached to Hailey’s. You joked all the time about being crazy cat ladies someday, even though you both had boyfriends.

The lights flashed on in the stairwell and Hailey prodded you down the stairs. You thought she was trying to spook you. There are too many slasher movies about being the first to enter the basement, and you’d seen them all.

There was no jumping out from behind couches; we shouted a jumble of “Surprise!” and “Happy Birthday!” having never officially decided what our yell would be.

You shrieked and doubled over, like you’d been punched in the 35

gut, the way one hand went to your stomach and the other to your neck.

You held yourself there, breaking into hysterical giggles, trying to smile through the shock we’d delivered so well.

The rest of the evening was arguing over how much everyone had to put in for delivery pizza, except we insisted you couldn’t pay. We wouldn’t eat more than one bitty cupcake apiece, so I forced the container on you.

“I’m not going to eat all these. And my grandma has diabetes,” you stated.

“Yeah, well they’re for your birthday,” I insisted.

It took six months to get that container back, even with “JEREB” written in Sharpie letters on the lid, because you moved out of your grandma’s house and started crashing couches around Tomah. I offered that you could stay at my house, but you never did, probably because the location, thirty minutes from school and your job, was inconvenient. And anyways, when I said it, repeatedly, I never really expected you to accept.

Remember the time we went to Noah’s Ark?

It was around my birthday. You said we should do something, but I think you just wanted to go swimming. Your parents drove and dropped us off at the entrance, and I watched you hand over seventy dollars for two chartreuse wristbands. I couldn’t believe you had so much money, all cash, right there in your wallet. But then, you had your job bussing tables at Greenwood’s, where they paid you more because cash was tax-exempt.

We got in around two o’clock and wandered, trying out the slides and the wave pool. There was that bridge over the bottom of log ride, the Splash Zone, with warning signs all over it. We hung onto the fence when the water waved up, but an old woman wearing a swimming cap fell backwards, pushed to the cement.

“I think I hurt my wrist,” she said.

You helped her up and as she walked off you theorized about how the park should do more to protect people, and also, what was that woman doing here by herself?

When the park closed, we walked out, our wristbands glowing in the dusk. Your parents’ cell phone contract was up and you couldn’t call them. I stood there, not wanting to ask if we should do something. They showed up after we’d waited half an hour, with new sunglasses from the Five Dollars or Less! Store and Mexican food in Styrofoam containers.

“It’s so good, authentic Mexican,” your mom said, and she gave us the extras ¬– white tortillas with finely ground beef and cilantro. I can’t remember which side of your family is part Mexican.

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Your dad drove back, speeding on the interstate, and you slipped him fifteen dollars for gas.

Spanish class and the English alphabet.

Señor installed a seating chart to keep everyone in line and J followed H every semester. I studied vocabulary every week and still got back tests that, though the same letter grade, were always a few points lower than yours. Do you remember our projects? There was our Spanish music video; we condensed the plot of an entire stalker drama into three minutes. Sarah was in that, and Miranda. You hardly put up with Miranda because she was a suck-up, always bouncing off her seat to give the answer.

Did you know you introduced me to the Goo Goo Dolls?

And tattoos when you turn eighteen, and Grumpy Cat, and that movie, Stand By Me.

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Now Is Not The Time Nathan Are I find, these days, more moments where my fingers are wrapped around smooth ceramic, scalding from a coffee or cider that’s breathing itself in sneaky hot vapors into the air.

And outside it’s getting crisp.

The sun is pinching in on the days’ end, squeezing us with darkness in two directions.

So come close because now is no time to be wandering alone. Even your scarf and hot mug are not enough to keep you warm for long.

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Chanter Literary Magazine

Fall 2017