Clever Fox Literary Magazine - Issue 001

CLEVER FOX L I T E R A RY M AG A Z I N E

1I SS U E

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Letter from the

editors

The Fox Valley is a magical place with magical people. It’s where we fell in love with all things creative. The bookstorein-a-house, teeming with classics and dollar-store-cheap finds; the cafe nestled against the river, foggy from the bustle of java addicts indulging in live music; alleys full of art and culture pulsating in the August heat—all of these places and experiences setting into motion what would be Clever Fox Literary Magazine.

At this point, to say it’s been a tough year is almost a cliché. But, in the hard times, the arts kept many spirits alive. The writing, artwork, music, it all bubbled to the surface to remind us of resilience, empathy, nostalgia, and growth. We at Clever Fox are beyond grateful to be able to share the beauty of these bubblings through some truly fantastic creative work.

What makes this publication so special is the community we’re striving to foster. In a literary, and moreover, creative world where rules and guidelines are hard and fast, Clever Fox wants to pull up a seat for you at the table. Our mission with Clever Fox is to provide an outlet of creativity to not only those within the Fox Valley area, but to their friends and family across the country—potentially across the world— and connect through art expression.

Whether you’re a high schooler writing until four in the morning or an accountant penning stanzas in the break room, YOU have a place in the Clever Fox pack. With the turmoil we have all collectively faced in the past year, the ability to continue to create and appreciate art is a beautiful one.

We hope this issue inspires and encourages the creative soul in you, and we thank you for your support of our fledgling lit mag. Without our pack, we wouldn’t be here publishing our first issue within a few months of launching. Thank you for your support, and we hope you continue to return to us.

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-Nikki & Elaina CFLM Editors

Table of contents P OETRY New Acquaintance | Joel Jupp The Interview | Art Dulan Your Hair | Rebecca Bretaña Streams of Living Water | Karen Klotz Hip Hop in Three Voices: I-III | Christopher D. Sims Passion | J.J. Celli Event Horizon | Johnny Masiulewicz Candyland | Sarah Bellum Mental I See It | Ricardo Bouyett North by Northwest | Zachary Michael Jack

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FICTION The Second War | Dan Woessner Moonglow | Troy Kelleher Little Bird | Wendy Walker

14-15 16-19 20-21

FL ASH FICTION Dan’lions for Memorial Day | J.L. Callison

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ART & PHOTOGRAPHY Whispering Rain | Stephanie Alexis Snyder Pandemic | Stephanie Alexis Snyder Exi(s)tinction | Stephanie Alexis Snyder

PHOTO CREDITS

COVER 8-9 22-23 25

Poetry New Acquaintance

by Joel Jupp O passerby, glance upward. You wander alone no more, as I wave from an elevated porch and invite you via flesh and bone to be my acquaintance at a distance.

Pandemic be damned, only one hope remains before the final scorch, as generations grind and moan, for deaths trespass every fence.

In these moments, we live as stone, rockfall from mountain, or scree from church, we roll and roll, no longer known, like active verbs without a tense.

Joel Jupp

Dr. Joel Jupp teaches philosophy at Aurora University, as well as writing courses at Judson University. He is the Executive Editor at PaperBlazer, where he edits for writers in over 35 countries. His original music, including his newest album “Breathe,” can be heard on Spotify and Apple Music.

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The Interview

by Art Dulan Do you kiss when you meet? Do you always kiss? Is it from habit or emotion that you kiss? Can you say that one or the other is primary?

What about earlier in the relationship? What do you think is the reason?

When did you first realize it? How did you feel? How do you feel now?

Do you know what the other feels when this happens? Do you ask or does it surface? How do you feel afterward? Do you sense a finality? Are you satisfied with that? What do you do about it?

Do you break up? How long does that last? Is it better then?

Is there talk of plans? Does the other seem serious? Are you serious then? Do you think it will ever end? Do friends advise you? Willingly or do you ask? Is their advice appropriate? Do you follow it? How does the other respond? Is this positive for you? And what about the other?

Does it create dialogue? Is it better then? Do you have what you need? How does that feel? And what about the other? Does it seem it will last? Are you both happy then? And do you kiss?

ARt Dulan

Art Dulan’s short story, “Conway’s Women,” was published as Editor’s Choice in Aura Literary, U. of Alabama, Birmingham; Art was also a winner out of 600 hundred nationwide entries in a ten-minute play contest with The Last Journey of George at Chicago Dramatists. Art has three other poems, two short stories and a novel underway.

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Your Hair

by Rebecca Bretaña When you were born, little reddish hairs poked through your scalp like daffodils pushing through warm dirt. As an infant, I traced your blond cowlicks with the tip of my finger as you drank from my breast. The golden spirals were hypnotic, and sleep would overwhelm us both. Now your hair is dark. It’s a kitchen sink trap — gum, maple syrup, grains of rice. Remember when you twisted your finger into your dishwater locks, and I had to cut your hair?

Remember how you cried? When you grow up, your hair will matter more. You’ll try to take care of it, and I’ll help you. I’ll braid it and then teach you to braid it yourself like my mother did for me. And when you decide to get a bad haircut, I’ll try to talk you out of it, but I’ll let you do it anyway. It’s your hair, after all.

Rebecca Bretaña

Rebecca Bretaña is a copywriter from the suburbs of Chicago. She lives in a neurodiverse household comprised of one husband, two kids, two dogs, one angry fish, and too many houseplants.

Streams of living Water

by Karen Klotz As I sit beside a flowing stream And watch the ripples and the calm My mind goes to places yet unseen For which my soul does joyfully long I once could splash and happily play But now I sit and dream away The stream is clear not clouded with dirt My heart unclogged with pain and hurt May my stream of living water always be clear So I can pass it along to those I hold dear Life’s journey is soothed by His word The greatest sound I have ever heard

Karen Klotz

From Karen: “I was introduced to poetry while in high school, being inspired by the poetry of Gwen Frostic. Each summer, my family and I would vacation in Crystal Lake, Michigan, where I fell in love with nature and poetry. After graduation from high school, my dad, who was a professor at Ripon College, took us on a sixmonth sabbatical throughout Europe and the UK. The scenes are still a blueprint in my mind. I graduated from Whittier College in CA with a degree in biology; afterwards I married and had two boys. While in my 30’s, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. After a divorce, I remarried Hart, who had two girls. So now I have four adult children and four grandchildren.

Although my body has significantly succumbed to MS, my mind is active and the joy of writing poetry has once again filled my sedentary days.”

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Hip hop in three voices

by Christopher D. Sims I. Some men, rappers Be calling we women Names uncalled for in this thing called hip-hop. They don’t stop, won’t stop until a real revolution, a woman’s revolution shows up at the doors of every record label, every rap magazine, every recording studio and says No! Does hip-hop hate women, Black women, Women of Color?

It has turned our brothers into beasts. Beasts who hunger for praise, for bright lights, for spiritless glory while the story Of the woman goes down in a gaslit flame as we continue To be called out of our names.

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II.

III.

I got rhymes to say. Say, I got rhymes on my mind, my mind is on rhymes.

My textbook don’t take a look at how hip-hop culture has changed things

Rhymes, rhymes and vision. Vision people should listen to, listen, to me drop rhymes

Has taught young people the truth! Rappers

about poverty, the poor, the racists, the sexists, the crooked politicians, the pimps, the failing school district, the polluted air But I am not sure anyone cares, really cares. Do you care, care about polluted air, failing schools, pimps, crooked politicians?

I got rhymes to say. Say, I got rhymes and vision Just need someone to pay attention, to listen, to learn, to get up, to act!

I rap!

up in the recording booth like KRS-One wasn’t rapping for fun!

Rap taught me about racism, about my history, told me that “my history ain’t no mystery!”

The textbook The teacher gave me failed me, so hip-hop songs became my college On me, they dropped A lot of knowledge!

Where are the lessons about hip-hop, about rappers in my school’s books?!

Rappers are scholars!

Christopher D. Sims

Christopher Donshale Sims, also known as UniverSouLove, is a Black liberation theorist who uses the written and spoken word as a means to inform, educate, impact and empower. He was born on the west side of Rockford, IL. Christopher discovered his poetic abilities with the help of early 80s rap music. He is the author of I Was Born And Raised In The Rock, which was released in the summer of 2020.

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Pandemic (2020)

by Stephanie Alexis Snyder Medium: Digital Photography

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Pandemic embodies the feeling of loss that families are experiencing when they lose a loved one to COVID-19. Loneliness lingers within them. These are the things we will carry with us as climate change introduces new viruses. | Pandemic is a digital photograph shot in Des Moines, IA (2020) using a Sony a7iii camera.

Passion

by J.J. Celli Its hard to ignore the Irony Between Passion and Poetry The holding together what seems to belong Apart

J.j. Celli

J.J. Celli has a BS degree, a BA degree and a MA in Forensic Psychology, however their poetry has little to do with their professional endeavors. In J.J.’s own words, “I feel like my work can be described as streams of consciousness, centered around the human experience. Poetry is a way to analyze the elements and experiences of life that are undefined by race, gender, profession, religion, sexuality, identification, geographical or socio-economic status....it’s those experiences we feel with our heart, and I hope to do just that.” J.J. can be found on Instagram (@j.j.celli) or at https://jjcelli.com.

Event horizon

by Johnny Masiulewicz along the event horizon of gnosis pure, singularity, nacreous clouds opalesce the shimmer of the unknown fingers pressed hard ‘gainst the eyelids in the children’s ritual; the pure event horizon shimmers in that space ‘tween hands and head

Johnny Masiulewicz

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Johnny Masiulewicz is author of the poetry collection Professional Cemetery (Puddin’ Head Press) and creator of the award winning Happy Tapir zine series.

His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, anthologies and sites including Curbside Review, Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Nerve Cowboy and The Alembic. A native Chicagoan, he now lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida.

CONTENT WARNING: The following piece contains graphic descriptions that some may find disturbing. TW: Blood

candyland

by Sarah Bellum Mental Monsters settle in the bottom of basements under beds in closets in places children keep seeing iridescent eyes staring at the paleness of their throat.

Shimmering in the half-moon hoping the clouds will give way to light illuminating their demons.

It took being an adult to know monsters don’t need darkness to hide that I need midnight to embrace my skin tell me I can’t sleep for sleep paralysis to press me into my mattress like settling sediment.

She feels like morphine drip slid into an artery pulsing around the promise that this time she’ll do it right.

Sometimes I hold my breath

because the beasts that live in me smell fear smell cortisol scented like Candyland.

The game where I keep falling off the cardboard I never was one to win.

I’ve stayed in too many instances where they’ve cut my throat watched me bleed out smile barracuda mouths at how my pulse sounds out the syllables of me dying in time with their game.

Sarah Bellum Mental

Sarah Bellum Mental is a Write About Now virtual poet and originally from Chicago, Illinois. Now living in Houston, she continues being a part of spoken word poetry. She performs poetry live to try to give a home for those voices who don’t have a voice. She looks to amplify her voice for those too scared to speak of what they’ve been through, to provide light in the darkness of living life at times.

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I see it

by Ricardo Bouyett

CONTENT WARNING: The following piece contains graphic descriptions that some may find disturbing. TW: Blood

Here’s how I see it that moment, that release of tension of the last few years: You stand across from me in my driveway, you hold out your hand and ask me to go for a walk again around my neighborhood. When I reach for it I am pulled across a river of gravel to the streetlamp where I begged you to tell me you didn’t love me, when your eyes broke the sweat you were too scared to admit and you held me like a traitor.

I run back but I’m caught in a field held hostage by an eclipse, where you’re standing in the middle of indifference, your back turned to me with five daggers stuck to it like a pair of unlucky dice. I run to pull them out of you begging the blood to stop pouring.

You turn back around just to choke me as you push us through the ground and we land back in my driveway where you tell me you’re happier when I don’t exist despite how much I want you to say you miss me.

I see it in the years that have left us, in the choices we’ve made and not made and in the love I’m surrounded by that doesn’t depend on how much blood I can clean up before the sun comes back up.

Ricardo Bouyett

Ricardo Bouyett is an independent filmmaker, photographer, and writer creating work around the Chicagoland area. Since 2012, he’s been creating fine art photography projects, short films, and poetry collections that explore his recovery from sexual trauma. Ricardo’s work also breaks down traditional concepts of manhood and rebuilds them through the queer Latinx lens.

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north by northwest

by Zachary Michael Jack I tell Teej, who’s riding shotgun, that life has lost its direction, that I feel like I’m making a cameo in my own personal movie, only when I get on the bus in the first scene, I’m not the double-chinned director everyone’s expecting. Overhead, crop-dusters circle in a cloudless Midwestern sky, ominous grasshoppers, their sorties signifying so much predation, plague. Teej falls silent, ruminating over how the screen of evergreens in the rear-view could run my film. When the professor-critic on the radio makes the usual distinction on high and low brow, how low fails to view Hitchcock in light of the larger gravity of Hamlet, say, Teej sneezes. Hitch wasn’t always serious, I object, then confess: I feel like the family dog, willing to go anywhere, do anything, my dumb tongue lolling out. Life’s Family Dog, he adds, no doubt thinking of Fate’s stepchild, Elvis’s twin, or the name of the dog on Our Gang, the one with the patch over its eye.

Zachary Michael Jack

Zachary Michael Jack is the author of many books on the power of place, including most recently The Haunt of Home: A Journey Through America’s Heartland.

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Fiction

juice. They were making their fourth round of the day through the building lined with cots. The star-shaped fort was nothing but buildings filled with cots these days.

The second War

In front of Nellie was Private James Amerson with his blue, bloated face and swollen throat. Three days from good health to this. She grabbed his wrist, the equivalent of sticking one’s hand in a fire to confirm it was warm.

by Dan Woessner Private James Amerson was dead.

He had arrived at Fort McHenry three days earlier relatively healthy compared to some of the other sad cases arriving since Armistice Day. He’d been gassed like so many of the others, but not enough to do permanent damage, and so they held him for observation and to receive the training offered at the facility, the training being part of the initiative that the politicians called the second war. Everyone knew the first war, the one in Europe that Nellie thought was stupidly called the Great War. Nellie had her thoughts on a great many things, one being that war wasn’t something that should be called Great. Terrible was closer to the mark from the accounts she got from the men in the beds and the even more convincing stories their mangled bodies told. War wasn’t great. It was hell.

The second war, staged at Fort McHenry, was meant to resurrect all the wounded men returning from Europe, and not just physically. Fort McHenry was a place offering training in all sorts of trades. These men, once able, could return to their homes with more than just nightmares of the trenches, they’d have a skill, could earn a living, and regain some of the pride lost along with limbs or eyes or tangles of intestines. Nellie was proud of the work she and her fellow nurses were doing to help these men recover, but the second war’s goal struck a special chord with her. People, she knew, were more than blood, bone and flesh. They needed more, and this effort was about as good as she could have imagined.

Then the flu arrived.

“How is he?” Robin asked. Robin was next to another cot filled by another former soldier, wiping the man’s forehead and trying to coax him to drink a little orange

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“He’s gone,” Nellie said. “Just the ordinary flu, right?”

“Yeah, right,” Robin replied, and even from across the aisle, Nellie could make out the dark bags under her colleague’s eyes. They stood out from the white of her uniform and the paleness of her cheeks. Nellie would like to show Private Amerson to that nitwit Dr. Blake so he could see what was really going on. Just the day before Dr. Blake, the esteemed Health Commissioner of Baltimore, had assured the citizens that this new outbreak was just like the ordinary flu. How could a man of such importance lie so blatantly? The regular flu didn’t cut healthy men down in their prime like this. Three days, she thought again. She’d bet anything Private Amerson’s lungs were filled with liquid. It was over when it got into the lungs.

“Please talk to me,” another soldier sobbed from a few beds down. Nellie and Robin met eyes, and Nellie nodded, stepping away from Amerson to someone she hoped she could help.

“What can I do for you, soldier?” Robin looked at the chart hanging at the foot of the bed and found his name, Lieutenant Wyatt Jones from Rockford, Illinois.

“I’m bleeding,” he said, lifting his left thigh, all that remained of his leg. Red spotted the bandages where his knee should have been. “I finally looked. I couldn’t for so long, and now I look and there’s blood. Cripes, is that bad?”

“Nothing some new bandages won’t help,” she said.

Changing bandages was a relief to helplessly treating those with the flu. For all of man’s cleverness in making guns and tanks and gas, God proved again that he was the best at killing. A flu, stop that, if you think you’re so clever. She retrieved a roll of bandages and pulled a pair of scissors from her smock to cut through the old ones.

“How’s it look?”

“Oh, nothing I haven’t seen before,” she said. “It looks to be healing just fine. A little blood is to be expected.”

He kept his eyes closed as she continued to work. He was handsome, tall, lean, with thinning blonde hair and a square chin.

“Can you tell me something?”

“What, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, just something, I’m going nuts here.”

“Well, do you know you’re somewhere famous?”

“Fort McHenry?”

“Yep, do the words, ‘Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,’ sound familiar?”

“The Star-Spangled Banner?”

“You got it. This is the very fort the British tried to take to get to Baltimore and a bunch of brave boys like you kicked them back into the sea.”

He nodded and swallowed, his Adam’s apple trembled.

Tears were at the corners of his eyes.

“I handled the bullets and bombs all right, but I keep seeing men dying here, and I am scared to death that it’s comin’ for me next. We can’t fight this, can we?”

She finished wrapping the bandage and tried to smile.

The same worries haunted her thoughts. Ms. Williams, the head nurse, just said that the patients were dropping like flies, and that scared Nellie to the bone. Ms. Williams was a hero, a leader of the nurses who could stare down even the cockiest young male doctor. Her words carried weight.

“Maybe not,” Nellie conceded, “but we are going to keep trying.”

“Could we get you sick?” he asked.

“Yes,” she refused to lie to the patients, and she also knew it was likely that it had been one of the nurses, aides or doctors who had brought the disease to Fort

McHenry from Baltimore in the first place. She kept away from everyone when not working now, fearing she was caring the virus on her clothes or her skins or on her breath. She’d heard the doctors talking about wearing masks even at home. She couldn’t imagine that, but she’d do it if it helped stop this damn thing.

“You should leave us all be,” he said. “Just board up the doors and burn the buildings down. Keep it here.”

She realized that he didn’t know the flu was everywhere already.

“Let me ask you something, Lieutenant. When the Germans started firing at you, did you turn and run away?”

“No, ma’am, I’m no coward.”

“Well Lieutenant, neither am I,” she patted the remains of his leg gently and then wiped his warm forehead with a damp cloth. She hoped his temperature was from the amputation and not the onset of the flu. It was impossible to tell.

Three days, that’s all.

Just the ordinary flu. What an idiot! Someday, the nitwits would run this world right to its doom.

Dan Woessner

Dan Woessner has published work for Sauk Valley Media and numerous other publications for Shaw Media in Northern Illinois over the last twenty years.

He has been honored with awards from the Illinois Press Association, Illinois Associated Press, and the Associated Press Sports Editors. His short story “Get a Life” was published in June of 2020 by The Write Launch. He also had a short story entitled “The Ride Home” published in Horror Magazine (Breaking Rules Publishing) in October 2020. He was a finalist for New Millennium Writing’s Monthly Muse contest on Music and an honorable mention in the Phidian Writing Contest. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Northern Illinois University and currently writes proposals for a professional services firm.

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CONTENT WARNING: The following piece contains graphic descriptions that some may find disturbing.

TW: Corpse

Moonglow

by Troy Kelleher He lays my phone at the center of the table, like it belongs to all of us. Each time it lights up, they squeal and grab each other and say things like: Can you BELIEVE this bitch?

A woman in a smock pours more coffee and smiles.

Nice kids, she thinks. Kids on a snow day. When you’re 16, older people are always looking at you, smiling.

Like they really like you. Of course, they aren’t actually thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves squeezing into a younger body just like yours. They’re using your body like a costume, like something they can rent and wear for a while, bring to a party or two, spill some wine on, and then chuck in the dumpster. When she finishes pouring, the waitress gets this faraway look in her eyes. She’s forgotten we exist because she doesn’t need us to.

Incoming call: Kayla. The phone lights up and buzzes. Chris makes this gorilla sound, like Ooh-oohah-ah-ahhh! There are four of us at the table: me, Chris, Jen and Mariah. Chris, whose giant shoulder is pressing into me, is sort of the spiritual center of the group. He’s large and has a square head and loads of energy. There are boys at school who, you suspect, have a sort of complexity, a sensitivity somewhere deep inside—boys who, you get the feeling, have something going on beneath that thick layer of stupid nervous bullshit. It’s like, if you could just get a pickaxe and chip away at all the residue that’s built-up over years of TV and testosterone and living in a town where ‘gay’ is still synonymous with ‘stupid,’ you would find something inside, a little creature, kind of wet, kind of sad, but warm, and maybe— maybe—you could hold that warm sad thing in your hands and call it your boyfriend for a little while.

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Chris, my boyfriend, doesn’t have anything beneath that thick layer of stupid teenage bullshit. I know; I’ve checked. I’ve studied him in bedrooms, in fields, beneath bleachers. I’ve searched him thoroughly. Once, I asked how he felt about his sister, who drowned in a quarry three years ago. His response: “I mean, it was sad,

obviously.”

Chris is good at math, and he’s good at pressing a heavy metal ball called a shot put against his neck and grunting and spinning in a circle and launching it across a field. He is, I’m told, the best in the state at that. On his birthday last year, I bought him a new shot put. (I thought about buying him a book; but, when I told Kayla about my plan, she laughed so hard she had to use her inhaler.)

The shot put turned out to be the wrong size. “It’s the thought that counts,” he said, patting me on the head. His dog was on the floor next to us, looking neglected.

The problem with Chris, or the good thing about Chris, is that he lacks whatever mechanism is required to produce sarcasm. When he pats me on the head or pulls out a stock phrase like “It’s the thought that counts,” there’s no double meaning, nothing to read into. With Chris, you get what you get. And that’s why he’s my boyfriend. He’s straightforward. Maybe kind of dumb, in a way that can’t be measured. At least, when he’s with you, you’re never worried about what he’s thinking.

“I think you really need to show her this is not okay,” says Mariah, who always announces her thoughts with “I think.” Mariah’s parents host most of the parties our parents go to.

“You really need to...”

“Here’s how I would...”

“What if you just told her...”

The snow is still piling up against the window. The way the café sits, on the top of this hill at the center of Millport, you get this crazy snow drift that covers the windows on the east side. We always get a booth there during storms. It feels like you’re in an igloo in a remote wilderness.

We’re in our teens. This means our primary drivers consist of urges to escape, urges to enter adulthood, urges to fuck, urges to find our ‘identity.’ This is what our English teacher told us last week. He was explaining the problem of using ‘children’ as the protagonists of literary works. Children, he said, have experiences that may seem unique and complex at the time, but, in hindsight, are neither, and are therefore uninteresting, in a literary sense. In other words, the things I’m feeling now, like my conflict over dating a boy I do not love but do understand, my anxiety over college, my irrational concern over what these two other girls at the table think of me, and my strong, almost undeniable—almost cellular-level—urge to find the Safety Guard who patrols

the hallways and grab his gun and shoot Mr. Richardson in the nuts, is no more than a soft adolescent cliché. A teenager, once again, getting all worked up and ruining her makeup for nothing.

I have 17 missed calls from Kayla. I should have just answered her on the first ring. I shouldn’t have let Chris take my phone and show it to everyone and turn Kayla’s obsessive redialing into a public event. It’s true: Kayla’s behavior does look like harassment. But what I can never explain to anyone at this table is that I like it when she does this sort of thing.

Or maybe ‘like’ isn’t the right word. There isn’t a right word, with Kayla.

I take my phone to the restroom. Everyone at the table yells, Don’t let her DO this to you. I flip the deadbolt. It’s quiet in here. Actually, it’s loud; the fan is berserk. But it drowns out everything else, so you feel like you’re in an escape pod, sailing through space. I wait for Kayla to call back. When she does, I answer on the first ring.

Back at the table, everyone is leaning in, whispering.

They all look at me and go quiet. I’ll admit, it does feel good to be a public problem for a little while. I know I’m not supposed to want attention—well, I’m supposed to want it, badly, desperately, cellularly, but I’m also supposed to feel ashamed of my wanting and resist it at all costs; this is the basic social mechanism at the core of being 16 and a woman—but it actually feels kind of good to be a problem that others are trying to solve, without me. I wonder if Kayla feels this way. I don’t think she does, but maybe.

“I’m going home. I have a headache,” I say. The second part is true; my head always hurts when it snows or rains or Chris gets upset.

“She’s going to see Kayla,” Chris says, shaking his head. I hesitate, then take my coat.

Chris moves fast. He grabs my sleeve. I start to pull back, but I hear a rip. “Chri-iiiis,” says one of the girls at the table. They always use this tone with him, like they’re talking to an adorable infant. He doesn’t seem to mind.

Now Chris is standing between me and the door.

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It always amazes me how much of him there is. Big, rational Chris, whose father has this giant hand that he walks around offering to people at parties. He’s wearing the face that means I’m being hysterical; it’s like he’s looking at someone who just snapped out of a seizure.

I saw this look a month ago, when I told him I wanted nothing to change between us—just for us to stop being ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend.’ It’s the kind of look that, in hindsight, makes me want to hurt him. But, at the moment he does it, it makes me doubt everything about myself.

Which is just what he wants, I think.

I touch Chris’ big face that so clearly displays its wants and demands, which are the same thing. I wish I could put this face in my purse, carry it around, take it out and read it like a paperback, whenever I need something easy. I turn and leave through the back exit. No one seems to know about this one. *** Now there’s the issue of getting to Kayla’s house.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling brave, I make these decisions that feel so elementally powerful, in the moment. There’s this adrenal satisfaction, like I’ve just shed my teenage skin and emerged as a strong, complicated protagonist. But then I realize there’s some major logistical problem that fucks everything up: in this case, the problem being: no car, not much daylight, several miles of country road between me and Kayla.

Also, tennis shoes.

I could trek back to my house first—it’s basically on the way—but that would mean answering questions, feeding small, soft lies to the people who, according to Mr. Richardson, have felt exactly what I’m feeling now and know that it doesn’t matter, that the ‘dynamic’ between these ‘characters,’ between Chris and Kayla and myself and everyone at school, is a play that’s run ten million times. I wish I could make something, a piece of art, something eloquently bleeding and screaming in the front yard, that would make a compelling counterargument.

The snow along the shoulder of the road is covered by a skin of ice. Each time I step, I have to consciously lift my foot to knee-level, kick it out in front of me, and push through. I’m not light enough to walk on the surface, but not heavy enough to easily break through.

Just walking demands all my attention.

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When I get to Kayla’s, I haven’t been thinking about her or Chris or anything other than walking, and I’m surprised when I look up to see her standing on her porch, like I didn’t expect to see her there.

“Did you walk?” she says, after watching me walk all the way up the street. “I could have given you a ride. You should’ve said something.”

This, we both know, is absurd. Kayla doesn’t drive.

Even if she did, the car by the garage, her grandmother’s, wouldn’t make it down the driveway.

Kayla is the only person I know who doesn’t live in a neighborhood. She lives in one of those houses you see way back on country roads, an outpost in the frozen soybean fields. We met at gym class. I was walking around the eighth lane of the track while everyone else was playing a game in the field—yes, I was being the typical moody teen; eat your heart out, Mr. Richardson— when Kayla appeared beside me and asked if my boyfriend ever hit me. Kayla is the only student I know who has problems that extend beyond the social dynamics of this town. She has an older boyfriend who cheats on her at OSU; a mother who disappeared 20 years ago, leaving her with her grandmother in a house out in the soybeans; also, a series of bodily malfunctions that, among a long and ambiguous list of seemingly disconnected symptoms, sometimes makes her bleed so much it looks like she’s dying, and sometimes makes her call me in the middle of the night and tell me that, if I don’t stay on the line, something bad will happen before morning. *** The house looks like a place where a Baby Boomer family lived a long, wholesome life and then abandoned in a hurry, like they were fleeing a nuclear meltdown. We pass a dark room where I can hear the wet clicks and whirs of the machine hooked up to her grandmother. I don’t know what the machine does, exactly. We never talk about it. When I’m there, Kayla operates as though her grandmother and the dark room that contains her don’t exist.

In the kitchen, Kayla pours wine. We lean against the counters, sipping and talking about the storm. I try to strike the exact pose of my mother at a party, the way she brings her right arm across her torso, beneath her breasts, and balances her left arm on it, making an L. This

makes her look smaller but also contemplative. It also keeps her drink close to her lips.

“I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here,” Kayla says. I imagine her grabbing me by the collar and dragging me along the berm of the highway.

She sets her glass on the counter. There’s lipstick on the rim.

And there it is. That’s what’s so different about her tonight. She’s wearing makeup and a dress and earrings, like she’s going to a cocktail party. She looks adult. She looks like what I imagine her mother looks like.

The snow stops. The air inside the house is dense.

It’s cool but humid, something you could preserve in a jar.

We quickly run out of things to say.

“Can I show you something?” She whispers, bending slightly so she’s eye-level with me. I don’t know why she’s wearing heels. *** The body is covered by a sheet. This is the first time I’ve been in this room. It’s nearly empty. I had imagined the bedroom of an elderly woman would be filled with strange mementos, black-and-white photos of men in uniform, boxes with things made of pearl and metal imbued with meaning. But this is nothing. This is an alien’s idea of a human’s bedroom. There’s a painting on the wall of two cherubs sitting on a stone bridge, playing harps. Beneath the painting is a stack of paperbacks, junk novels, the kind that would make Mr. Richardson wince. Everything else is medical.

Kayla stands there, looking at me. She wants to see me see this.

Her grandmother died the night before, when it started to snow. The machines beside her kept running, dutifully pumping oxygen through a tube and monitoring the body for any signs of life, which, if it had found any, it would have displayed on the screen as lines and numbers. I don’t know what Kayla wants. I try to say something, but it all comes out as cliché: “Oh, my God,” “I’m so sorry,” “Are you okay?” Maybe Kayla doesn’t want to be alone; maybe that’s why I’m here. But I don’t think that’s all of it. I think she wants to watch me in the room with the bare walls, the mass-market paperbacks, the dumb machines still running, and the absence at the center.

It’s dark when I leave. It’s not yet sunrise, but the sky has lightened from pure black to a spectrum of blue. The late moon hangs over the tree line, and the snow absorbs its glow and projects it back, like it’s trying to explain something on its own terms.

Troy Kelleher

Troy Kelleher lives in Des Moines, Iowa, where he works as a copywriter for a marketing agency. When he isn’t writing, he enjoys running marathons, exploring new places, and losing himself in a good book. He attended North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and is currently a student of The Writers Studio.

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CONTENT WARNING: The following piece contains content that some readers may find upsetting. TW: Infant Loss

Little Bird

by Wendy Walker I found out I was pregnant exactly five years to the day after Robert and I started trying. April Fool’s Day, my least favorite holiday. The only prank I pulled that first year was on myself, hoping to God the IUD would hurt less getting yanked out than it did getting shoved in. I swore at the pretty doctor once or twice, but she looked about thirteen months pregnant at the time, so she understood the pain we go through for motherhood.

I lied to myself every following year that this would be the one, hoodwinked myself into using the ovulation kits, the pregnancy tests, the hormones.

I thought I’d pulled the biggest prank of all when I finally saw those two little lines. Nobody I told believed me the first time around because of the holiday. What a stupid day to announce I’d kicked infertility in its slack jawed, gap-toothed mouth. My mother cried. Robert’s eyes were wide with relief --- that we’d finally managed it or that I wouldn’t be nagging him for biologically contrived intercourse anymore, I couldn’t tell.

I went into the first ultrasound appointment feeling alone, and I left with a mental image of the tiny blip inside of me. A pea-sized ball of cells. So little, and so much.

They told me she would probably die the same day they told me I was carrying a girl. Genetic abnormality.

Some body parts not forming correctly, including the heart. These things happen, Mrs. Wilson. Abortion, still birth, or neonatal death, Mrs. Wilson? Order off the menu, Mrs. Wilson.

I named her Claire.

We didn’t prepare a nursery. I cancelled the baby

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shower. Robert stopped touching my belly, stopped pressing his cheek to my navel to murmur to her. When we did have sex, he preferred to be behind to avoid having one more dying thing between us.

I went into labor exactly 40 weeks after April 1st.

Claire took five years to come, but she was conscientious of her time now knowing how limited it was. Five hours on the dot between my water breaking and the nurse placing her on my breast.

I’d expected a twisted crone from the ultrasound pictures and grim-faced technicians, but Claire’s abnormally bent arms made her look like a naked baby robin who had been jerked from her nest, her mouth opening and closing like a beak. My little bird.

She was pallid, but she cried. You’d never know how little oxygen she was getting based on the volume of her wailing. They didn’t bother with anything besides a painkiller; Claire didn’t have a life they could save, but I got to stare at her without the tubes and masks I had declined.

I held her, stroked her gray cheeks, kissed her damp hair, smelled her baby scent.

It’s funny how easily and automatically you love something you know you can’t keep. But she was a good girl like her mother; she stayed an hour.

We didn’t hold a funeral, but we spread her ashes at the roots of an oak sapling in our backyard. Robert put a bench out there for me to be by her when the weather was nice --- mostly so my distance from him would be on his terms instead of mine. I brought books with me, reading in the afternoons, patting the trunk goodbye whenever I marked my page for next time.

The next April Fool’s Day, three months after she was born, I heard the chirping. A tightly woven nest hanging in the branches. There was only one baby, brand new.

Naked, blind, and hungry amongst the bright blue shell fragments.

A baby robin. A little bird.

I could only smile.

Wendy Walker

Wendy Walker is a Yorkville, IL native with a Master’s degree in educational psychology and a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and neuroscience. She is currently pursuing a second graduate degree to become a Nationally Certified School Psychologist before going on for her doctorate. She lives with her husband and two dogs, and she enjoys creative hobbies such as drawing, painting, sculpting, and writing in her free time. “Little Bird” is her first published work.

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Exi(s)tinction (2020)

by Stephanie Alexis Snyder Medium: Digital Photography

As a child, I feared the bees. What I didn’t realize is that they fear me. If we continue down this destructive path, they will soon be extinct--but that won’t be the end of their story. Soon, we may know first-hand how it feels to be on the verge of extinction. | Exi(s)tinction is a digital photograph shot in Minneapolis, MN (2020) using a Sony a7iii camera.

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Flash Fiction

In Memory Of Samantha Bannon April 16, 1989 July 6, 2016 Lt NC US Navy Silver Star Purple Heart Afghanistan Loving Wife and Mother

Dan’lions for memorial Day

by J.L. Callison Josh Bannon knelt before the stark white marker that was all he had left to remember his wife, Samantha— all he had left, other than the little three-year-old boy picking grass leaves next to the grave.

He had promised himself he would not cry, but big tears meandered down cheeks already wet from previous tears. The dozen yellow roses, her favorite, seemed so little, so paltry a testament of his love.

“Daddy, I picked some grass for Mommy. Do you think she will like it?”

Josh glanced up at the small heap of plucked grass on top of the stone. “I’m sure she will, Jackson. She loved you very much.”

“I wish they had dan’lions here, Daddy. I want to give Mommy some dan’lions.”

“We should have brought some of those from the table at home. I’m sorry, I didn’t think of them.”

“No, Daddy. Those are for you. Can we go home and pick some for Mommy?”

“I’m sorry, buddy. That’s too far away. Maybe next Memorial Day we will remember to bring her some.”

Josh straightened and brushed at the grass stain on his knees before tugging down the leg of his curled-up shorts. “I think it’s time to go, now.”

Josh bent and kissed the top of the stone before running his fingers over the engraving. So little to describe one who meant so much.

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Carefully strapping his son into his car seat, Josh had to pause and wipe tears once again. Jackson, much too young to have any real memories of his mother, had been happy to give his mother some grass. He really knew no different.

Thoughts wandering, Josh pulled away from the cemetery. Only half a dozen others had been seen, though quite a number of military were buried there.

Were they forgotten? Did no one care? His dark thoughts were broken by an excited child’s voice.

“Dan’lions, Daddy! Dan’lions! Can we pick some for Mommy?”

Without thinking, Josh wheeled the car into a short drive and hurried around to unbuckle his son. He grabbed Jackson’s hand to keep him from running too far ahead or into the road, and together they picked a dozen long-stemmed “dan’lions” from the ditch before going back to the car and returning to the cemetery.

Jackson solemnly lay his “dan’lions” atop the grass on his mother’s headstone. He kissed the stone as he had seen his daddy do. “I brought you some dan’lions, Mommy. I hope you like them.”

J.L. Callison

J.L. Callison was an early and voracious reader. In the third grade, he read over three hundred books, including A-H of the World Book Encyclopedia. A college English teacher told him never to try to write, that he did not have what it took. For nearly forty years, he believed her, but when he became disabled and bored looking at four walls, he wrote a novel, Stranded at Romson’s Lodge (Morgan James, 2016), a story that had been on his mind for many years. Stranded was followed by My Donkey and the Master, Rotund Roland, and Mouse in the House: For the Love of Peanut Butter (Illustrated by Donna J. Setterlund).

Photo credits The cover of Issue 001 is by the masterful Stephanie Alexis Snyder. Learn a little more about the photograph, “Whispering Rain,” as well as more about Stephanie herself.

COVER: Whispering Rain (2018)

Medium: Digital Photography Sometimes, as raindrops fall from the sky, the flower petals listen. The little drops whisper stories of clean air, rolling waves without debris, blue skies, chirping birds, smoke-less vehicles, oil-less oceans, a reef so great and glorious. “When?” The flowers whisper back. The little drops evaporate. Whispering Rain speaks to what earth fears as it struggles to hold onto its beauty. | Whispering Rain is a digital photograph shot in Chicago, IL (2018) using a Nikon D5200 camera.

Stephanie Alexis Snyder

Stephanie Alexis Snyder is a photographer from the Midwest. Her passion for photography began in 2009 at the back of a yearbook storage closet in Oswego, Illinois. The visual subjects in her work are urban landscapes and earth’s natural environments. Her photography tells the story of a world that does not view the human race as the center of the universe. The heroes, the villains, the innocent bystanders, and those who don’t fit into any of the above: They all have a place in this world and her work.

Clever Fox Literary Magazine utilizes free stock photography courtesy of Pexels and Unsplash to add a visual element to our publication. We thank and would like to recognize those works below, and of course, encourage you to enjoy and support the artists behind these works. As our publication grows, we look forward to including more artwork and photography submissions from talented artists all over the world!

• Pages 2-3: Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash • Page 4: Photo by Jill Burrow on Pexels • Page 5: Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Pexels • Page 5: Photo by Jess Vide on Pexels • Pages 6-7: Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash • Page 10: Photo by I.Am_Nah on Unsplash • Page 11: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash • Page 12: Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash • Page 13: Photo by Lou Levit on Unsplash • Page 16: Photo by: Martin Adams on Unsplash • Page 19: Photo by Karl JK Hedin on Unsplash • Page 20: Photo by A Perry on Unsplash

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