Dulcet is a digital and print literary magazine featuring fiction, poetry, and visual artwork that takes readers on a journey and leaves them changed for the better Amplifying powerful and nuanced words of vulnerability and relatability, Dulcet stories dive deep into the center of things and untie the knots. Like life, not every story has a happy ending, but all will have a sense of resolve or a weighty revelation that promotes hope.
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By Sean Ewing
KRISTIN HELMS
ANNA BRUNNER
TYLER MARTINEZ
SOFIA MOSQUEDA
TEATREE TAYLOR
SYDNEY GERMAN
Welcome to Volume One, Issue No. 1 of Dulcet Literary Magazine.
Four months ago, Dulcet was a tiny fleck of an idea bouncing around my mind A beautiful literary magazine filled with prose, poetry, and
visual art purposely curated to take readers on a journey through the complications and tangles of life, and somehow come out the other side having loosened or untied the knots Powerful, nuanced, and relatable.
When I first put the call out for submissions, I hoped I would receive a few good pieces to create a modest first issue. But then 1,800 submissions later 9 short stories, 40 poems, 26 visual artworks accepted, and five new talented editors who understand the tone and vision I set out to accomplish. We are beyond excited to present you with Dulcet’s inaugural issue!
Within these pages, writers and artists have taken different approaches to our reflective “Moonglades” theme. Some have captured the physical moon or moonglades in images and poetry, others have explored sentiments on people, the past, or events and circumstances that somehow left them or their characters changed. All of it has been carefully selected to stir emotions, deeper thinking, and resonance.
I hope you enjoy reading these poems and short stories and viewing these art pieces as much as I have loved curating this over-arching narrative of thoughtful revelations and beautiful introspections. The title of our cover image by Kelly DuMar says it best: “A River of Stars.” So, without further ado, I invite you to dive in, get swept away in these reflections, and bask among all the stars
Pam Bickell is a collage/mixed media artist, with a focus on communicating with her soul through art She works with magazine images and paints paper for the lighter images. Her pieces often seem to come from the dream world, and she has been known to be nudged by the invisible world to make art for others It is her great joy to do so
Rob Billingsley’s inspirations come from family, friends, and episodes throughout life. Two of his poems entered into the 2023 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition were awarded Finalist and SemiFinalist As a journalist for a local newspaper, the Bull Run Observer, Manassas, Virginia, he covered town council meetings in Haymarket, Virginia, for several years. He wrote articles based on personal, cultural, and business interviews and several items about travels in England and Italy. His education in library and information sciences led to a career of research and practice in federal and local government He authored reports, articles, and contracts about advanced information technology
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including Oxygen II (Moonstone Press, 2022) She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has written a debut novel – Circe’s Daughters – a work of historical literary fiction And now, she is working on two new poetry collections – Oxygen I and Oxygen II – a series of short stories, and a memoir Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in numerous literary and scholarly journals and magazines.
Lydia Rae Bush is a poet writing on embodiment, trauma recovery, and social-emotional development Rae’s work has been seen in publications such as FULL MOOD MAG, Crab Apple Literary, and Poetry as Promised Magazine. When not writing, Lydia can be found singing and dancing, especially in bed when she is supposed to be going to sleep Socials: @LRBPoetry
Michael L. Butkovich is a graduate of The New York Institution of Professional Photography, completing his studies in 2001. Michael studied professional photography at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith in 2004 He also studied art at the Fort Smith Art Center and was a member of the Fort Smith Photography Club. He attended San Antonio College earning an associate’s degree in English in 2016. He then attended the University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas (UTSA) earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 2018. He received Honor’s twice and placed on the Dean’s List. In that same year of 2018, he was inducted into the Sigma Tau Delta, International English Honors Society
William Cass has had over 325 short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines such as december, Briar Cliff Review, and Zone 3 He won writing contests at terrain org and The Examined Life Journal. A nominee for both Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net anthologies, he has also received six Pushcart Prize nominations. His first short story collection, Something Like Hope & Other Stories, was published by Wising Up Press in 2020, and a second collection, Uncommon & Other Stories, was recently released by the same press He lives in San Diego, California
Martha Clarkson’s photography can be found at NYC4PA, Lightbox Photography Gallery, F-Stop Magazine, Black Box Gallery, Sunspot Magazine, LensCulture, Light, Space, and Time Gallery, Ours Photography magazine, Calyx, and Junto. www.marthaclarkson.com
Pam Clements’ poetry and nonfiction have appeared in several literary magazines, including Blueline, Kalliope, The Palo Alto Review, The Baltimore Review, and others. She has published one volume of poetry, Earth Science (Troy Book Makers), and is currently completing a memoir about the five years she spent teaching in Charleston, South Carolina
Caroline Cottom, PhD, is a personal essayist, memoirist, and poet whose poetry collection, Asylum, was published in 2022 Her poems have appeared in Silk Road, Mandala Journal, Santa Fe Literary Review, Motif IV: seeking its own level (anthology), Pennsylvania English, Main Street Rag, and others. She is the former director of the US Coalition that brought an end to nuclear explosions in Nevada, recounted in her memoir, Love Changes Things, Even in the World of Politics. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband Thom and cats Suki and Shanti
Daun Daemon has published poems and stories in numerous journals and anthologies, including Delmarva Review, Typehouse, Deep South Magazine, Into the Void, Amsterdam Quarterly, and others Her memoir in poetry, A Prayer for Forgiving My Parents (Kelsay Books), was published in 2023 Daemon teaches scientific communication at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh with her husband and three cats. Find more at daundaemon.com.
Susan Dambroff is a writer, performer, teacher, and avid doodler. She has published two poetry chapbooks: Conversations with Trees and A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, with Finishing Line Press. She was a finalist for the Gabriele Rico Prize for Nonfiction with Reed Literary Magazine Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies including Rattle, Kelp Journal, Indolent Books, Civil Liberties United, Stoneboat, Essential Truths, and Ghosts of the Holocaust. She performs in Spoken Duets, a poetic collaboration with Chris Kammler. They weave and wrangle with words as they give voice to the challenges of living in a body in these tumultuous and hair-raising times
Scott Davidson grew up in Montana, worked for the Montana Arts Council as a Poet in the Schools, and – after most of two decades in Seattle – lives with his wife in Missoula His poems have appeared in Southwest Review, Hotel Amerika, terrain org, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, and the Permanent Press anthology Crossing the River: Poets of the Western United States.
D.W. Davis (he/him) is a native of rural Illinois His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at Facebook.com/DanielDavis05, or @dan davis86 on Twitter.
Steve Denehan lives in Kildare, Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin He is the author of two chapbooks and five poetry collections Winner of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award and twice winner of Irish Times' New Irish Writing, his numerous publication credits include Poetry Ireland Review and Westerly.
Frank Diamond’s poem, “Labor Day,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize Award. His short stories have appeared in RavensPerch, the Examined Life Journal, Nzuri Journal of Coastline College, and the Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, among many other publications. He has had poetry published in many publications. He lives in Langhorne, PA.
S.D. Dillon lives in Michigan He has an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was managing editor of The Bend in 2004. His poetry has appeared recently in Tampa Review, Door = Jar, Wild Roof Journal, Panorama, and The Tomahawk Creek Review, and is forthcoming in Canary.
Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator from Boston. She’s the author of four poetry collections, including jinx and heavenly calling, published by Lily Poetry Review Books in March 2023 Her poems are published in Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Thrush and more Her images have been featured on the cover of About Place, Josephine Quarterly, Synkroniciti, Young Ravens Literary Review, Etymology, and published in many literary journals. Kelly teaches creative writing workshops and produces the Featured Open Mic for the Journal of Expressive Writing. Reach her at kellydumar com
Halina Duraj’s work has been published in journals including The Sun, The Harvard Review, and Ecotone. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego.
Jeri Lewis Edwards resides along the central coast of California and is a published poet in many literary journals, such as Poet Lore, Quiddity, Naugatuck River Review, The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, Green Ink, Wild Roof Journal, The Stillwater Review, among others She is also a mixed media visual artist and some of her work can be viewed on her Instagram: @Jeri2ravensstudio.
Andrew Elson is English but has lived in Poland for some time, where he owns and runs an English language school with his wife
Sean Ewing is a visual artist inspired by the natural world and the delicate interplay of light and shadow He endeavors to capture the quiet beauty of ephemeral moments, evoking a sense of serenity and introspection. His work often reflects the serene landscapes of dawn and sunset, creating a space for viewers to pause and explore their own reflections. Sean’s art invites contemplation and offers a peaceful retreat from the chaos of daily life As a poet, Sean Ewing aims to evoke deep emotions and reflections through vivid imagery and relatable themes His work is inspired by the complex interplay between nature, human experiences, and the enduring spirit that drives us to overcome challenges.
Melanie Faith is a writer, educator, photographer, and frequent doodler Her craft books for authors through Vine Leaves Press offer tips on flash fiction, poetry, teaching creative writing, writing a reference book, and photography. Her latest poetry collection, Does It Look Like Her? (February 2024), follows Alix, a forty-something artist, new educator, and mom, and the famous painting she sits for The poems explore what it means to pursue artistic passion, the personal meanings we overlay onto art and artists in a society not conducive to art-making, ambition at midlife, and the indirect route to so-called overnight success. Learn more about her writing, teaching, and creative work at: https://www melaniedfaith com
Fernando Esteban Flores is a native son of Texas, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, and has published three books of poetry: Ragged Borders, Red Accordion Blues, & BloodSongs available through Hijo del Sol Publishing. His poems have appeared in multiple journals, reviews, newspapers, online sites, and have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Fernando received an ELLA award and an Arts & Letters award from the San Antonio Public Library System for his outstanding contributions to the artistic and literary community of San Antonio and is currently the poetry editor of the CTN Journal of Pedagogy & Creativity (catchthenext.org).
Tricia Gates Brown's poetry has appeared in Portland Review, The Christian Century Magazine, and Mason Street Literary Review, among other publications; and she has a poetry collection forthcoming from Fernwood Press in early 2025. Her debut novel Wren won a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal By trade, she is an editor and co-writer, mainly working on projects for the National Park Service and Native tribes She also writes a column at Patheos, “About Religion, Doubt, and Why They Matter." For fun, she makes art.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler and served as El Dorado County’s inaugural Poet Laureate (2016-18). She’s included in California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Heyday Books), Villanelles (Everyman’s Library), and California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology Latest books are Windows of Time and Place: Poets of El Dorado County, and Walking the Bones
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. He has work upcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
Katie Hughbanks is a writer, photographer, and teacher whose photos have been featured in over 30 publications, including in Cool Beans Lit, Peatsmoke Journal, In Parentheses, L'Esprit Literary Review, New Feathers Anthology, Glassworks Magazine, Azahares, MAYDAY, and Black Fork Review. She is the author of two chapbooks (Blackbird Songs and It's Time) and teaches English and Creative Writing in Louisville, Kentucky.
Sherry Hughes Beasley is the author of six poetry books, the most recent being Yellow Bedroom and The White Flowers She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where she is also a graphic designer, a jeweler, and an animal rights activist. Her poems have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, Iris, and many other places.
Liz Jakimow is a poet and photographer who lives in the beautiful valley of Araluen in Australia, where she is inspired by the mountains and nature that surround her. After someone she loved passed away, Liz set herself the task of taking one photo everyday At the same time, she was also expressing a lot of her grief through poetry The photos and poems from this initial three-month grieving period came together in an exhibition and book titled, A journey with grief: exploring loss through photography and poetry.
Gurupreet K. Khalsa considers connections, space, time, cosmic flow, reality, illusion, and possibility. Her poems have appeared in The Poet, New York Quarterly, IHRAF Publishers, aurora journal, Delta Poetry Review, and other online and print publications. Multiple poems have received awards. Currently a resident of Mobile, Alabama after living many other places, she holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Design and when she’s not floating about in space is a part time instructor in graduate education programs
J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and is on Instagram @jikleinberg. An artist, poet, and freelance writer, her poems have been published in print and online journals and anthologies worldwide Chapbooks of her visual poems, How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; She needs the river (Poem Atlas) was published in 2024.
Susan Kolon is a Chicago-based writer. First published as a creative writing student at Michigan State University, she spent the next two decades wandering the marketing halls of corporate America, dispelling stories about children, catalogs and candy. Her work has appeared with corporeal lit mag and orange juice, a poetry journal Find her at https://kolonperformancestrategies com/an-anthology/
Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in Rue Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World, Sad Girls Club, New Generation Beats Anthology, Encephalon, In Parentheses, The Elevation Review, and Moot Point among others
Edward Lee is an artist and photographer from Ireland His paintings and photography have been exhibited and published widely, with many pieces in private collections His website can be found at https://lastimagesphotography.com. Twitter: @EdwardLeeArtist2 / Instagram: @edwardleeart
Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet com) is a writer, editor and teacher who lives in Santa Fe, NM Lee’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, Slipstream, The New Guard, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Writer’s Digest and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and four Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award His collection Buddha’s Cat was published by Whistle Lake Press in May 2024. His memoir Service Husband: A Caregiver’s Journey Through Disability, Suicide and Recovery is forthcoming from Mercury Heartlink in January 2025 and his collection Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in April 2025 Lee is the founder and host of the online Tuesday Poetry Practice community
Mirjana M. (they / them ) are a digital artist and writer from Belgrade, Serbia. Their work focuses on exploring the juxtaposition of various elements through mixed media of photography, double exposure, textures and light. Their work most often explores concepts of duality and has appeared in Gulf Stream Literary, The Good Life Review, waxing & waning, Vocivia, Broken Antler, Spellbinder, New Limestone Review magazine and other places. They authored 3 poetry collections. You can see more of their work at their blog olorielmoonshadow wordpress com or get in touch on Twitter (@selena oloriel) and Instagram (cyanide cherries).
Shannon Mahoney is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana. She is currently a freshman at Miami University where she studies creative writing and strategic communications Her work appears in the Sheepshead Review and Young Writers USA. Additionally, she has received an honorable mention for the Penrose Prize for Poetry.
Terri McCord is a South Carolina Arts Commission literary fellowship recipient and has earned awards from Hub City, Emrys, Yalobusha Review, and literary journals such as the Southeast Review, South Carolina Review, and the Vermont Studio Center Her poems have been nominated for a Best of the Net award and four Pushcarts Her work has recently been published or is forthcoming in Feral, Slippery Elm, Orchards Poetry Journal, Lucky Jefferson, Thimble, and Panoply.
Alyson Miller is a prose poet and scholar who teaches writing and literature at Deakin University, Australia.
Sheila E. Murphy’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Hanging Loose, Fortnightly Review, and numerous others. Her most recent books are Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), and Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2023). Murphy received the Gertrude Stein Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Her Wikipedia page can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila Murphy
Monica Nawrocki has lived in three provinces, had five concussions, owned a Ford Pinto, and married a woman long before it was cool. Writing was inevitable. To date, she has published four books, and her short fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies in North America and the UK. www monicanawrocki com
Larena Nellies-Ortiz (she/her), is a German and Mexican-American poet and photographer from Oakland, California Her photos and poetry have been featured in Burningword Literary Journal, Local Wolves Magazine, Stonecoast Review, 3Elements Review, Sun Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Change Seven Magazine, Eunoia Review, Bitter Melon Review and are forthcoming in Wordpeace, The Ilanot Review and Libre. You can find her on Instagram @lalifish.
Mary Osteen. Back in the early 1970’s, in a one-room public library on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, a librarian with dauntingly magnified alligator eyes rimmed in heavy black steel frames, guided the as-yet-to-write poet Mary Osteen to the spice-shelf sized collection of female poets including Dickinson, Sexton and Levertov – and she hasn’t stopped writing since At 67, now retired and living in the high Sierra Foothills, Mary spent decades ghostwriting for lawyers, an experience that she insists propelled her into the more meaningful work that would become her passion, teaching high school English Besides fishing and camping with her husband and cattle dog pup, Mary belongs to the local poetry group “Thursdays at Two” which, ironically, meets in the tiny town library
Pat Phillips West’s work appears in various journals including: The Inquisitive Eater New School Food, Haunted Waters Press, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere She has received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations.
Susan L. Pollet is a published author of books in multiple genres including two poetry books entitled Susiku And More, and Palpable Ponderings. Susan’s poetry has been published in multiple literary publications. She is also a visual artist whose works have appeared in multiple art shows and literary publications She studied at the New York Art Students League, has been a member since 2018, and resides in NYC.
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays His memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost, was released in 2024 by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing Zack’s ninth book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, was published by Regal House. His most recent play, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center and ran in London, Indonesia, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland Zack’s blog, Advice for Writers, has more than 280 posts www zackrogow com
Tara K. Ross is a writer, podcaster, and audiobook narrator based in Southern Ontario She is vicechair of the Eden Mills Writers' Festival and co-host of The Hope Prose Podcast Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tamarind, Wells Street Journal, and Kaleidoscope, among others. When she's not working as a Speech-Language Pathologist, Tara climbs the Ontario escarpment and works on her next novel within her cabin in the woods
Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb is the author of the chapbook Shapes That Stay (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Midwest Quarterly, About Place Journal, Camas: The Nature of the West, Medical Literary Messenger, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Slipstream Magazine, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. She holds an interdisciplinary MA and has served in various capacities as an educator, a researcher, and an editor.
Micky Shorr is a retired school social worker/psychotherapist, after a rewarding career working with children and their families. She has recently relocated back to Brooklyn, where she is enjoying getting to see firsthand her grandson becoming himself. Micky's poetry has been published in several literary journals, most recently in Trailer Park Quarterly, Wordpeace, The Scarred Tree and Redrose Thorns Her work has also appeared in the award winning anthology Slant of Life, in Walt Whitman 205 and is forthcoming in AWA anthology We’ve Got Something to Say.
Tim Staley was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1975 He chairs the Creative Writing Department at Organ Mountain High School in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania and works as a financial director for a large non-profit His haiku and related poetry have been published broadly, including in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Mayfly. He has received recognition in the following international contests/awards for his work in these forms: the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational, the San Francisco International Award for Senryu, the Robert Spiess Memorial Award, the Touchstone Award for Individual Haiku, the British Haiku Society Award for Haiku, and the Trailblazer Award.
Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and are available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Jasper's Folly Poetry Journal, Beatnik Cowboy, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024 (http://www.louisianaliterature.org/2024/04/11/new-release-announcement-alex-stolis/), RIP Winston Smith from Allen Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press
Ruth Ticktin encourages sharing stories through writing and teaching. She’s an author: Around & Around Poetry Chapbook (BottlecapPress 2024); Was Am Going, Recollections Poetry & Flash (NewBayBooks 2022); co-editor: Psalms (PoeticaPublishing 2020); co-author: What's Ahead? (Pro Lingua Learning 2013); contributor: MD Bards, Gathering 2023, 2024 (LocalGemPress); Straylight 10/23; PressPausePress 6. More https://rticktindc.wixsite.com/ruth.
A.J. Tradii is an award-winning copywriter and professor of communications and writing at Central Washington University. Their work has previously been published in Hevria, The Réapparition Journal, and The Beautiful Space
Patrick Trotti is the publisher of LEFTOVER Books, an independent press. He’s perpetually at work on another novel.
Marcus Tsai studies literature in Texas. He has been recognized by the Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Prize and The Common Language Project. In his free time, he likes rollerblading.
Patrick Vala-Haynes is a Sundance Screenwriting Fellow. His short story, THE HENCHMAN, won the 2017 Fiction Award at the Montana Book Festival. His work has been published in SAND, Split Rock Review, 9 Bridges, Sheepshead Review, Slate and elsewhere. He lives within running distance of the Oregon Coast Range
D. Walsh Gilbert is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland who lives in Farmington, Connecticut on a former sheep farm at the foot of Talcott Mountain, previous homelands of the Tunxis peoples She’s the author of six books of poetry, the most recent, Finches in Kilmainham (Grayson Books). She serves with Riverwood Poetry Series and is co-editor of Connecticut River Review.
Kelly White Arnold is a mom, writer, teacher, and yogi. Her work recently appeared or is forthcoming in Petigru Review, Hellbender, Last Leaves and Pinesong When she's not scribbling in notebooks or wrangling teenagers, she's planning her next tattoo and daydreaming about traveling the world. On Instagram and X @KArnoldTeaches.
Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas His monologue show, Twelve from Texas, was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre His poetry collection, Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away, is published by Kelsay Books.
Stephen Wunderli is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life and The Denver Gazette He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace award, and the Bridport Prize in literature.
Tara Zafft has a BA from UC San Diego and Ph D in Russian literature from the University of Bath, UK. She has poems published in the anthology, Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, The Ephemeral Literary Review, Aether Avenue Press, Dumbo Press, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.
By Patrick Vala-Haynes
This he plots: to open his eyes one morning, throw off his quilt and shake the night from his jeans. Take his place at the table and grunt at his mother. She’ll pour milk for him, fry his eggs the way he likes, spread butter on his toast
And he’ll leave without telling, shut the door while she scrapes the dishes and hums show tunes, scuff off the porch and kick the last step back into place one more time, as if he doesn’t know how to use a hammer What does the future care about a loose board
About putting one foot before the other, or the worry a mother spends on dinner, spearing the lamb chops with garlic, scrubbing the dwarf potatoes she’s grown, the ones that look like stunted pricks how she blushes when he says that, but can’t stop laughing, fanning her throat with the towel.
The rain drums on the sill, November’s wind smears the yard from here to there.
Hell, she shouldn’t have to carry the firewood this winter She can, but she shouldn’t have to: pitch on her hands, bark in the pockets of her apron It’s been just the two of them since he was eight, a little man and his mother finding their way, learning how to patch the roof, prime the well.
Who would they be if he’d had a father to turn him out? Does it matter? Comfort keeps him near the woodstove, warming his hands before he ventures out to feed the horse. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in the spring when he’s not fighting so hard just to breathe
Imagining her without him, imagining himself without her, the rhythms of their days then he’ll go. Going he can imagine, but leaving he’ll put off. He feeds wood into the stove, pokes at the coals as if the flames need prodding to do their job, as if a fire doesn’t know what or how to burn
By Marcus Tsai
The month after, inside your room, the room reforming around me like a hug. I watch
the mahogany dresser as if it will open its many drawers for me How can I say
I want to leave through the empty doorway of a person
then close it so no light shines underneath? Instead I am walking further inside. Instead
I am opening this dresser and praying there’s something left:
tennis court sun captured in the face of a diamond necklace or our restaurant chatter
sewn into the hem of a shirt An old ski trip crystalized on mitten fuzz. Smile lines distorted
inside a pair of reading glasses. Mom, I cannot wear these forever. Each day
passes and my fingers are a little bit further from the ground. Tell me how to grow
into this absence made for a taller me. Hold my hand and we can place
each outfit inside this dresser as if it will be worn again
I will give it my high school tennis shoes, each outgrown jacket, pairs and pairs of socks
now cluttered with holes Maybe this will be enough to reverse time and turn the dresser into a tree again. Right here: a brilliant canopy, heavy roots,
no need for tree rings. And you, stepping out from behind the trunk, your green sweater, your thick glasses, your voice pulling me through the years:
“Hi sweetie! How was school today? What did you learn?” And me, suddenly fifteen again, suddenly stepping into the kitchen, the long bus ride home creased into my athletic shorts:
“It was good. And nothing.”
By Martha Clarkson
By Scott Davidson
Sometimes there's too much air to breathe. Sometimes it won’t ever stop. Walking to the car in my hometown – bent over, arms to our sides – it’s possible my daughter was
rethinking stories about growing up here, stopped by wind pedaling home, starting sled runs on the roof using drifts blown against the house. It wasn’t until I
moved away I could see how wind shapes character Some become dogged, some resigned, some never more than spiteful. The excuse around town, for those who have
stayed is wind is the reason they’re always mad. We took skateboards to the end of the block, tucked bedsheets into our jeans. They were sails when we lifted them up.
Which I told my daughter to balance things out. Later I stood in a ditch out of sight of the car. When the wind blew up at me, funneled and focused, I had to dig in my heels to stand
By J.I. Kleinberg
By Susan Kolon
Looks like my neighbor just moved out. You know when the truck is out front and one last cabinet needs emptying?
Front curb heaped with a scattershot of frantic: the game Twister!, cardboard corners worn by the jam of fingertips.
A red mini-bong, smoky glass intact. Post-it note: MOVE CAR! Hard Rock Casino presents Jason Mraz ticket
untorn unredeemed. Bent business card for a splashy boat charter in Panama. Picture frame fastened in purple glitter,
inscribed To The Most Beautiful Mom, empty. Photos strewn like wildflowers In one, a woman behind a boy with arms draped
over his shoulders. My guess? An earlier version of my neighbor, face tight as a fist, smothered in a straightjacket of shy.
Prescription label, Bayview Animal Clinic for Bailey, Canine – administer four times a day. A party favor from the Mardi Gras bash
I would’ve liked to attend, masked mischief to hide from the daily grind. I know escape it’s my go-to to get by. Still miss
not being the Easter bunny. Pregnancy stick – one solid insolent line entwined in the fat curve of a plastic orange peel, a symbol of fertility. Scanning for toys, I invent…another try? A sterile denial tumbles me. Pay Now Medical Balance
Due $23,297. A crease of dark and light dispersed into filaments left behind, separated. I wonder: the dog, Bailey – are they okay?
By Stephen Wunderli
y father dragged me by the straps of my knapsack across the Dirty Devil River. The water was up to his waist. His boots, tied together with socks stuffed inside, hung around his neck along with mine, a ritual necklace we wore each year at this crossing from sand and brush to the junipers and the foothills where brown grass tufts in the wind shadows and grows thin on the rises. That’s where the mule deer are. That’s where the solace of September light lays across game tracks and charcoal markers from the year before. Sandstone boulders record the number of deer seen and what direction they were moving, hashed in black by my father like a prisoner counting days. We push through the blackbrush that lines the river and step barefoot on the gravel incline. It is a week before hunting season and we are here to spot. Junipers milk the gravel for water. Mule deer step softly among the brush, timid creatures born to be hunted. My father knows they are there. We put on our wool socks. I’m eleven years old I can almost walk the strong current of the Dirty Devil without being swept away Almost In the spring it carves new banks in the sand, widening its course before settling into the middle depth My father tells me there is quicksand on the banks I know this He tells me every year. He also tells me that bystanders are the real cause of fire.
Conifers have grown thick in the last fifty years here. The Indians used to burn off the land and the new growth would attract mule deer. It is all managed now and deer are harder to find. No one comes to burn off the dry pinyon and deadfall. It is now an apocalyptic fire waiting to happen, waiting for a lightning storm in the middle of summer to set the whole range ablaze with heat so intense it will crack open stones.
“Do you remember Benji?” We were putting on our boots and of course I remembered; it had only been a year since the Navajo pitcher left our team midseason.
“Where did he go?”
“He is back on the reservation. I heard his sister went missing. I wondered if you should know or not, but you are old enough.”
Athelia was two years older than Benji Her real name was Walking Deer but kids made fun of her so she took the name of a librarian who visited the reservation and brought her books She let the old woman braid her hair, which is an honor Her eyes were dark and when she hummed softly those eyes gripped my sentinel heart. She watched me and Benji field grounders every day after school. She never sat but walked back and forth, sometimes playing her hands in the wind as if she were shaping it. “You shouldn’t stare at my sister,” Benji said. “It will open your soul to evil spirits.”
“Really?”
Benji laughed. “White people believe everything.”
“We could have done more for her,” my father said. His boots were laced up and he
was standing above me. A sudden lightness moved through me and fled. “They don’t do much for Indian children when they disappear We should’ve done something more for her ”
We moved up the steep into the ledges My legs were cold from being wet, and my mind was numb Athelia brushed against me once on her way to walk with Benji after school and that scent came back, a faint odor of the lilac water she rinsed her hair with fanned toward me by her loose braid. My father walked ahead, long deliberate strides. Why didn’t he do something? I looked back over my shoulder at the river cutting mercilessly through the sand. We didn’t see any game tracks, only a few horseshoe imprints. Someone else was scouting up the tight canyon ahead, so we edged back down the boulders and made our way across the scree until we could enter the adjacent canyon. Dense shadows curtained the entrance. My father has been coming to these mountains since he was a boy. He is in his midfifties and hikes like a much younger man. I am his only son and he has told me many times that he was reluctant to have a child but loves me more than I will understand. His words stop as if cut off by the smoke of a campfire and he would rather just stare at the flames.
“I would have done something.”
“That’s just big talk ” My father stepped into the dark canyon ahead of me and I dream that we find Athelia and take her home, tend to her wounds from a fall And I stare at her eyes then tell everyone to call her Walking Deer because she has no evil in her It’s all I thought about for two days as we moved across the ledges and kneel motionless for hours behind dead junipers stuck in the ground like antlers shaken loose by bucks. My father glassed over the landscape, following the sinks and shadows where the mule deer pull at grass and raise their heads to chew, looking, always looking for anything suspicious. It must be some kind of anxious life to keep your nose in the air, sniffing for creatures that will kill you. A mountain lion. A black bear. A man and his son who will reconcile their lives by the flesh they take.
We slept light, horsehair blankets and forearms for pillows. A small fire sent smoke and embers into the night sky that became entangled with the light of the stars. We ate deer jerky and drank from the streams where the water is running, not settled. Few words are spoken on these trips. No deer are taken. My father spends hours looking out at the landscape that would gnaw humans to the bone if left alone for a season He will come back without me He will kill a deer and gut it himself The entrails he’ll leave for the coyotes and rodents and turkey vultures the color of wet clay with blood-red hoods that scavenge the carrion He’ll throw the carcass over his shoulders and hike out of the mountains like earth’s first man. I know; we have done this every year since I was eight; pulling me through the scrub in a ritual of endurance. I cried the first night and he paid no attention.
My father spotted a small herd of deer at the edge of the laccolith where a dried-up delta spills from a shallow canyon. Storms have washed the gravel and sand out where the sun can give birth to the grass, fed by the trickle of water from snow melt. The deer fanned out but
stayed close enough to smell each other. The grass, green halfway up, brown on the tips and white before it is sheathed by the frost-laden soil He stared for a long time He knows that in this spot, the wind will blow the snow off the slight rise of the delta and the deer will return to grass uncovered It is as if he is counting blades He pulled a charcoal nib from his pocket, a nugget from the fire the night before. He chalked seven lines on a flat sandstone rock tilted up like a headstone. In the afternoon of the second day, a Sunday, we returned to the river and crossed to the truck. That’s when he talks again. School tomorrow. Wonder what mom is doing. Two weeks in Gunnison. The sun, tilted on its autumn axis, strikes the road ahead of us sideways, sparking the grit without warming it. My father stopped the car in the middle of the road and reversed back. He opened his car door and looked at something in the road. Rattlesnake. Flattened. He stares for a long time at the diamond pattern and how the very tips of the scales are translucent which made it reflect the light and catch his eye “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s only poison on one end.” This is a joke my father has said many times when we’ve come across rattlers among the boulders out to warm themselves in the afternoon.
“Just have to know which end ”
My father only laughs when it is somehow required for my sake
The next year I was twelve and wore my own boot necklace The water was just above my waist and I didn’t hold onto my father’s hand. I felt the loose rocks under my feet. The cold hurt. The sharp gravel hurt. This is something we don’t talk about. It had been a year of him working weeks at a time away from home driving tractors that move the earth, scraping the skin back, pushing the scab of flora to the side and carving roads with herringbone patterns laid in from the huge tires. His hands are calloused and he can strike a match on the palm. I’d spent a season at school, another summer without Benji. My baseball glove aged in the sun because I left it on the back porch, it is cracked and looks like the back of my father’s neck. “Your great aunt Rube died,” he said, striding ahead of me. I was old enough to keep up with his pace and hear him more clearly. “You should know that.”
“I don’t remember her much.”
“Ruby. Your mom’s aunt from Tremonton. Her husband died before you were born. She waited all these years to go after him Just waited ”
That was his lament for the season There’s plenty of dead bodies, known and unknown to stare at; bring them into focus, sharpen your vision the way you do looking into the faraway crags with the sun beating in from the east. He chose carefully. Deliberate lessons of lives that could have been more. “We should have taken a road trip to see her one last time. Your mother would have wanted that. She never said, but she wanted it.”
We moved farther north. I was keeping up and he was pushing on. We passed by the hash marks of last year and I thought of Athelia, gone. Benji left without a goodbye. Rube could be buried anywhere in the high desert. We stopped at dusk and dug a fire trench the
length of a man with the heels of our boots. It was unusually cold that year. We would lay our bodies on either side of the long fire as it died down On cold nights my father builds more of a pyre, stacks stones among the twisted branches of juniper; tightly packed to burn slower, heating the stones that radiate through the night and lay a smoldering altar tomb the next morning. Sparks burned our blankets. In the early light they looked like bullet holes.
We glassed the delta but saw nothing. We hiked in a wide half-circle around the laccolith to get north where the sun was warmer. We stayed low knowing the cold would bring the deer down, slowly, one or two at a time while the others breathed frost through their nostrils, waiting. “Why didn’t you do anything for Rube?”
“There’s not always something you can do.”
We crossed into a draw and flushed out a chukar, big as a screech owl with speckled feathers and zebra-striped wings. It fluttered out so close to us it felt like it was pulling a string from my chest. We crouched down. The wind was coming toward us from the draw and I knew all deer heads would be up from the sound. We held still for a long time. Finally my father drew his monocular and glassed up the draw. He glimpsed a set of antlers moving in the brush Waited He signaled to me with his hand, two fingers for a buck, a fist for each doe Four in all We sat for an hour just watching I focused in on a doe, the big brown eyes flashing up and looking into the distance, then bending her head back down, she pulled up grass. “It’s a tight spot they’re in,” my father whispered. “They know it will be an early snow and that means moving even lower.” We backed away slowly. “They’ll be easy enough to find.” He made four hash marks on a gray boulder.
I remembered great aunt Rube on the hike back to camp. Her house smelled like bacon grease and window cleaner. It was like the air never left, it just hung around her picking up odor. I was four or five, I don’t remember for sure. It was the only time I saw her. Back of her house she had a small pony. She said she always wanted kids, lots of them. But when they didn’t arrive she bought a pony hoping that would help, like putting a surprise under the tree and wishing for a child to show up. Instead, her husband died, slid off the road after drinking with the boys after setting two miles of fence in the snow because somebody said it couldn’t be done. The pony stayed. Great Aunt Rube waited. When we were standing in her gravel nearing the time to leave, Rube turned to my mother “You can take the pony for the boy I have no need of it now ” I heard her say this and knew better than to beg I stood silent as an altar boy “Oh Aunt Ruby, we have no place for a pony ” My heart ached again at the thought of it. I should have promised to take care of it. “I always wanted that pony.”
“No, you didn’t. It died a year later.”
“I wouldn’t have let it die.”
“Rube died too. Could you do anything about that?”
Gray clouds brought dusk in early, I got a fire started quickly, the way my father showed me. The dry grass, the twigs small as pencils in a lean-to, twisted juniper branches cross-
hatched on top and supported by a castle of stones. The last log was as tall as a man, and thick as a leg It was the feeder log that would slowly be pushed in through the night, burning from the end like a candle The flames commenced just as rain began to come down, a mist that fogged the hollows We wrapped ourselves in cheap painter’s plastic because it was lightweight, and leaned against boulders to sleep upright, only our feet getting wet. It was an autumn rain, thin and wanting to be more, but the low clouds kept it from falling a great distance, so it was only a skein of moisture settling on everything and making the fire smoke. I dug my heels into the gravel to keep myself from slipping out of my duck squat.
“Where is it you think Athelia and Rube are? And the Pony?”
“Dead is all.”
“Everything is useful, somehow. You said.”
“Death isn’t always useful.”
“Nothing left then?”
“Not as far as I can tell, except maybe regrets. Those always stay.”
“I wish Benji was still here.”
“See, regrets That’s all wishes are ”
I pulled the plastic over my head to keep the smoke out of my eyes Droplets formed on the outside and fractured the light from the fire It was like watching Christmas lights through a windshield with snowflakes melting on the glass. It didn’t mean anything, it was just nice to look at. Not everything has to mean something. “Did you want to have another son?”
“Like instead of you? No.”
“I mean like two of us?” Each droplet in front of me held a bit of light from the fire, hundreds of them, all the same, but each a little different. My mother believes in a God of wonder. I thought about that as I watched the shards of fire in raindrops.
“Two boys…I figured one was enough. Less to give, you know?”
“I don’t mind sharing.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
After an hour the rain let up. The stars and the moon were shrouded by the terrestrial grayness. No light reached us. It felt like we were miles apart and only fixed to the earth by the fire, two different points anchored by the only thing visible in the dark My father fed the candle log further into the coals and flames jumped
At dawn we shook the plastic and rolled it up neatly and pushed it into our damp knapsacks. We hung the horsehair blankets over the boulders to dry and walked stiffly away from the draw where we’d seen the last deer. My father wanted to get on top of the book cliffs and look down at where we’d been, down at where we could go. I followed his footsteps, placing my boot where he did, on stubborn grass and dog-sized rocks for traction. “There’s a lot of dying goes on out here,” he said, bent over and trudging forward on the incline. “Some dead move on like ghost clouds over the ridges and are forgotten. Others stay put and we kill
them over and over. There’s that priest you don’t know from my childhood, thank God. I kill him every season Maybe one year I’ll kill him for good ”
We scaled the square rocks and wedged ourselves into the crags finding handholds and footholds, moving up the shadowed face while the sun steamed the flats that drained out from the cliffs behind us for miles. I never knew the priest. That was the first and only time I ever heard of him. The remembrance of him just came out of my father like his lungs couldn’t hold it inside anymore. My young mind had no way of reasoning with what I had heard. I could only wait for the redemption to come over him in a single act of his own choosing.
We stepped onto a ledge the size of a flatbed truck. Below us was a box canyon seventy feet down, narrow with a soft belly where the grass grew taller. We could see the laccolith, the dome squeezed between book cliffs by eons of pressure until it almost exploded, but didn’t. The pressure subsided but the bulge remained, round and frozen in its futility to erupt. I was standing still, feeling the scent of the canyon brush by me in a ritual of longing for the seasons to change.
My father was glassing into the dark canyon, letting his eye adjust to the lack of light. The motion of his head followed the contours of the canyon floor He was on one knee, his elbow rested on the cocked leg It took several minutes, but finally his head was bent forward, looking right below us He teetered on the edge of the square cliff and glassed straight down He held up his left hand. Buck. Four point. He rose, silently slid the glass into the inside pocket of his barn jacket and stepped back. He raised his hand to his mouth, motioning for me to be still, to be quiet, to not move. He stepped softly backwards, scanning the cliff for something, I didn’t know what. Then he spotted it, a boulder the size of a small suitcase. He wrapped his arms around it, hoisted it onto his thighs, stood and brought it waist high. It must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. I stepped to the edge. I could see the buck feeding right below us, the antlers barely visible among the blackbrush, moving back and forth as it fed. My father strained until he was beside me, the toes of his boots over the edge. With a primal exhale, coarse and straight from somewhere deep in his chest, he heaved the boulder.
Rube never looked up, seemed her eyes were always on the ground in front of her. Benji always seemed to be looking at the horizon. Athelia was always staring at the clouds, the way the currents reshaped them The stone, older than humankind, fell effortless, tumbling in its dance with gravity The sound it made was the sound of the beginning of earth
The deer made no sound Its rump rose violently and fell lifeless The antlers shattered Two nearby does leapt into the air and bolted out of the canyon. My father was breathing hard from the effort. We looked at each other. I could see in his eyes some finality, some kind of resolution that I could not understand. I was a boy. He was a man. I could not yet know what he required for redemption.
“Let’s go see what we done.”
We scrambled down the steps. He was moving quickly and I couldn’t keep up. He
bounded from foothold to foothold then disappeared into the crag that split the wall. I could hear the scrapes of him falling before I turned to step into the shadow and feel about for the first handhold His voice was forced from him No words, just agony escaping I climbed down facing the wall, careful to set each hand and foot hold, looking down between my boots, looking for him. One move at a time, breathing, not wanting to fall on top of him. Finally I could see the top of his head. He had lost his cap and his hair was mussed like a child’s.
“My leg is broke.”
I swung my foot outside the corner of the crag and found a crack to grip, then a foothold. I got myself below him and wedged in. His boot was stuck fast. His shinbone stabbed out through his pant leg, jagged like a busted juniper branch. Blood was flowing out the hole and down his boot. He reached out instinctively to touch the bone. I stopped him. “Don’t. We’ll fix it after we get you down. Can you push up with your other leg?” He tried to get his other foot under him, I guided his boot to a foothold. “You have to push, push until you are standing up.” He screamed and pushed knowing that if he sat any longer he would pass out and I would never be able to get him free His left leg shook and slowly he pushed his taut body up the crack, the bone protruding below his knee, moving, grinding against its other half A gush of thick blood pulsed out of the wound His eyes closed His face pale and drawn. I put my forearm behind his knee and used it as a lever against the rock face to free the foot. It turned, no resistance with the bone broken, and came loose. My father screamed in rage at the pain, fighting back against the hurt to somehow defeat it.
We still had twenty feet of sloping wall to retreat. I backed against the wall and my father braced himself with his arms in the crack and slowly lowered himself onto my back. We scaled down the rock that way, finding toe holds, gripping the face with aching fingers until I could kneel on my hands and knees in the scree that fell away from the cliff. I slid backwards, my father on top of me, thirty feet of steep penance, knees bloodied by sharp rocks. When we reached the gradual incline I rolled my father onto his back. He was unconscious. I pulled off my flannel jacket and laid it over him, then tore off my shirt and ripped it in half. When I wrapped the rags around the wound, my father woke in agony again. “Pull it tight.” He screamed I put my jacket on and easing my shoulder onto his chest and wrapping his arm around me, I rolled him onto my back I struggled to my knees, then my feet, and started down through the junipers and grass we had so easily strode up that morning I gripped his arms and hunched forward from his weight.
“Don’t tell anyone about that buck.”
“That’s not something to worry about now.”
“I had to do it, you know that.”
“No, I don’t.” My legs were wobbling from the weight, my feet unstable on the uneven ground.
“I had too. It’s not something you’ll ever understand, I hope.”
“I guess so ”
“I had to kill him ”
“I guess so ”
“No!” He shouted. “I had to! I couldn’t let anybody do to you what he did to me!”
“It’s OK, We’re almost there.”
My father was sobbing. “I was so young. I couldn’t stop him!”
“It’s over. You killed him.”
He wept softly into the back of my neck, breathing in painful gasps. When we reached the dirty devil, the night had come without me noticing. I paused on the bank. The water was still, moonglades splayed across the surface, hiding the darkness beneath, the nature of things laid out to a boy for the first time. I breathed in the depth of it and shuddered the heat out of my body, the cold coming onto the two of us bent into one body, father and son, trying to keep warm. I plunged into water, accepting the ache and churning forward toward the other side.
The next year lightning struck the side of the book cliffs and sparks ignited a fire in the grass It had been a dry fall and the low flames spread quickly, dotting three hundred acres with thousands of bonfires burning hot from the sap released in the heat The earth smoldered. The deer fled North, most of them. Some choked to death in the smoke and their stiff bodies were left where they fell. My father pulled the truck and trailer up alongside the river to have a look. I unloaded the horses and we saddled up. We crossed the river and circled to the South, upwind to watch the apocalypse of smoke drift away from us. The brownish gray cut an edge into the blue, separating the dark from the light. The horses breathed heavily up the inclines, struggling up the scree and onto a ridge that zagged across the landscape to a highpoint among the Henrys. We paused and let the horses get their breath. They snorted and we loosed the reigns and let them pull up grass.
“It’s somethin’ seeing half the world on fire,” I said.
“Like Heaven and Hell. Better to be on this side of it.”
By Dr. Alyson Miller
On a night she combs her hair. Waits for the doorbell, for the call to pick up. She might find the good cotton nightie. It will depend on the weather or the moon phase, on the words last thrown to the wind. The old couch with its scrags and stains, the seat that always dips, is made a chez lounge, a marble-topped bar, a delayed flight in business. A child runs a stick along the corrugated fence, a kind of jazz that erupts in screams and laughter, a banging door A cat runs from the garden, hunkered; the neighbour empties bottles into the recycling, shouts at the dog for quiet There is a dirty glass in the sink, a blue speckled bowl; it is not yet 9pm From somewhere, smoke – not a cigarette but incense or a house fire or leaves in the chimenea. It smells like autumn and panic, the turning of colours, the stretches of night. It smells like settling, like strange voices outside of audible. The noise of crickets has overrun the birds, but will die soon, in the cold; she turns up the television, whispers blessings to the lintel, to the corners, to the hearth.
By Sean Ewing
By Terri McCord
at this instant the sun, a protagonist overturning fine sand billions of cells my calloused feet dig deep, imprint
I look for love here, the bare-branched tree, the breadcrust-colored rocks, a lap-lap of oars from no visible boat, a chatter of dogs passing by and I kneel down to this broken shell to see what life might have survived
By Pamela Clements
In a dream I was listening to a poem I had written partly about you who were sitting in front of me your nape and shoulders rising above the pew. The poem had placed fourth in some contest, a test of speed in writing The speaker Read it badly, haltingly; but still you knew, from references to warm evening air stirring across a deck beside the Hudson, eagles and herons rising in the dusk, and you saw it was a better poem than it sounded in the reading. When I stretched my leg before me, you caught and held my calf, silently thumbing nylon, eyes forward. When I leaned toward your ear to whisper something late in a dull program, somehow at last, after lo, so many years your warm hand held my hand
for Jillian Romano
By Kelly White Arnold
Feel it all, Jill says, and I know she means more than the pull of my hamstrings or the lengthening of the muscles in my inner thigh or even the pressure of my yoga mat beneath me. Feel it all. I stretch my hands into the dust of my being, reaching memories heavy like stones in my gut: the dust of my mother’s scattered ashes, the knot of a marriage untied to free myself, the babies my body refused to grow. Feel it all. I stack my griefs one atop another, a cairn in memory of who I was, make space for other moments trickling in slow: riding in the car with my sisters, windows down, radio blaring; the glint of silver band on his ring finger; tang of summer salt on skin and the pleasant heat of not-quite-sunburned shoulders.
Feel it all. Warm coffee on a chilly front porch morning. Campfire light. The sleepy murmur of rock-running water in the mountains. I inhale, deeper than I have in months. Feel it all. And then, the deluge. The grasp of every single hand that has ever reached for mine pours forth. The warmth of every embrace that has ever held me, that still holds me. They have always been here. I feel them all.
Lee
All Around, Joy By Edward
By Sean Ewing
I did not know, in those reckless days, when love was a bright fever, a thrill beneath the skin, that it would come to this the slow grind of days, the ordinary ache of keeping promises made in a whisper. You kissed me then, with the sun on our faces, and I did not see the shadow of what was to come.
Love is no poem, no wild verse, but a ledger balanced in long, sleepless nights, in the quiet tally of sacrifices given without thanks, the daily bread of forgetting yourself for another.
I did not know that love meant sweeping the floors of our life, gathering the crumbs of every contention, holding them in my palm like secrets, too small to notice, too sharp to forget We plant gardens of good intentions, but the weeds come, uninvited, and it is love, the hard love, that bends our backs to pull them.
I did not know, but now I do that to love is to wade into the dust, to wear the drudgery like a second skin, to find in the grind of days, the shimmer of something holy, a quiet miracle born from the dirt, born from the sweat and the tears we never meant to shed.
And still, beneath the toil, a tender bloom, growing in the cracks of our rough hands.
By Fernando Esteban Flores
Fue un asunto de sangre & sal
A matter of blood & salt
Shots of mescal
The dark willowy diva melting
The microphone with Voluptuous boleros
Singing no son de papel Los sentimientos & a poem went off Like an IED
A blast of unprompted Inspiration sizzling
On the page with blots Of hissing syllables
My fingertips scorched To the touch
I was only writing The best for last
Packing what I needed For the rest of the way
Sentiments shoved & stuffed Into a cardboard box
Of artless scribblings
More than
Etchings on paper
As if someone’s waiting
Down the fabled line
By Larena Nellies-Ortiz
By Pam Bickell
By Susan Dambroff
From under a blanket of faded roses a drifting memory ––my beloved social studies teacher dies again and my mother hands me a glass of brandy
we sit on the edge of her bed on her purple woven quilt without roses where another day she tries to teach me knit/purl knit/purl and with all my mistakes we roll the stitches out with laughter loop by loop
Now her hands have become mine as I stroke the tan silk of my dog’s ears
and under the august skirt of my backyard elm I pull open the morning through lace curtains and see her ––offering me brandy on the bed by her window under a spring spray of dogwood
Her fingers on the glass have become mine around a teacup painted with pears and out my window wild roses climb into the last seam of summer
By Monica Nawrocki
ad’s gonna have to live with us,” Martha whispered into her husband’s chest. She’d given up trying to entice the sandman towards the creaky bed she and Jeremiah had shared for fourteen years.
“I know. Get some sleep now, Hon. You’ve got to rest.”
She’d barely managed to get to bed at all since her father had suffered a stroke four days earlier. Not a was-it-or-wasn’t-it stroke, but a clock-stopping event that forever divided their lives into Before and After
It was January, so Jeremiah had been able to stay with their ten-year-old son, Buck, while Martha flew back and forth over the gravel roads in their rattling ’78 station wagon, between the Intensive Care Unit where her father struggled for a foothold on life, and their weathered farmhouse where her son struggled to regain his equilibrium.
Buck was non-verbal. Pre-verbal, Martha always said. She believed that Buck would learn to speak eventually. Just as he had learned to walk, feed himself, dress himself, and eventually, to feed the chickens, bring in the firewood, and a myriad of other hard-won accomplishments that most parents took for granted. She also harbored a suspicion that Buck could read a bit. He always demanded she point to each word as she read and when he looked at his books alone, it wasn’t just the pictures he studied. Jer said he was pretending to read, and most days, Martha agreed.
Buck had learned all these things late, very slowly, and largely because of Martha’s infinite patience.
The disruption to Buck’s regular routine in the days following the stroke caused a regression that had Buck screaming and crying and attempting to hit his head on the tired kitchen linoleum In the last few days, Martha held him for hours, rocking him gently and singing close to his ears, the same songs she’d been singing to him his whole life. Jer stood watching; Buck was getting big and could hurt her. When the distraught boy finally started to settle, Martha would nod at Jer and he would gather some of his son’s favorite books and lay them within arm’s reach.
Martha rolled carefully away from Jeremiah’s chest which rose and fell in a steady rhythm. She stretched the kink out of her neck and stared at the dark patch on the ceiling she knew to be an ugly water stain in full light. But at night, with just the moonlight, she liked to stare it into interesting shapes. Flowers or butterflies. Tonight, she saw a black hole.
She breathed deeply, tried to empty her mind. She couldn’t keep up the pace of the last
few days without any sleep. Her dad had been moved from ICU to the ward early this evening and once he was settled, she’d come home to find that Jeremiah had a late supper waiting for her and Buck was in the bathtub humming his four favorite notes; Aᵐ , F, C, Eᵐ His happy tune She managed to go in softly and greet him without disturbing him She ate in exhausted silence, grateful for her two quiet fellows.
Now, she pulled the covers off and slipped out of bed. Across the hall, she spied on Buck who lay amidst his tempest of blankets in extremely worn pajamas. Getting him to accept new pajamas had just gone from a top priority to about number twenty. She sighed as she watched her son, so serene in sleep. Moving Buck out of his bedroom was out of the question. Which meant Dad would have to bunk in the family room until they could make the office back into a bedroom.
When it had become evident that one child would be all they could manage, the third bedroom in the salt box had been converted to the farm office. Martha ran the bookkeeping end of the operation; the rest they shared, although Jeremiah was the expert. He’d grown up on this farm In fact, Buck’s bedroom had been Jer’s She ran her hand over the yellowing locomotive wallpaper Buck refused to let her change and returned to her own room She slipped back into bed and inched her cold toes as close to Jeremiah as she could without disturbing him.
Two weeks later Martha and Jeremiah lingered at the breakfast table drinking coffee. They watched their son eat his pancakes meticulously, cutting each flapjack into precise one-inch morsels, separating edge pieces from perfect squares and drowning the lot in syrup. He kept a wet facecloth beside his plate in case he got syrup on his fingers. His present-day peaceful breakfast routine was the result of hours of struggle, each step in his pancake system created through trial and error, through angry demands made without the extravagant advantage of words.
Martha raised her eyebrows at Jeremiah, and he nodded. She set down her mug – the last one from a set of six her best friend, Jillian, gave her for Christmas just two years ago. “Hey Buck,” she said softly
Buck’s eyes landed on her briefly and continued around the kitchen
“Buck, do you remember our talk about Grandpa Dennis? Do you remember how you and I made a nice bed for him? Well, today is the day we bring Grandpa home. You and Dad will do chores and when it’s lunchtime, Grandpa will be here, too. That will be nice, won’t it?
I’m really happy that Grandpa will be living with us, aren’t you, Dad?”
“Yup. I’m excited about it, too. So, I’ll do chores with Buck and then we’ll all have lunch. You, me, Buck, and Grandpa Dennis. Great!”
Buck chewed carefully. He liked pancakes. Pancakes were green for go. They were special occasion breakfast Regular breakfast was oatmeal which he also liked but not the way he liked pancakes He liked Grandpa Grandpa was almost always green for go He was nervous about Grandpa coming here to live because no one told him the departure Arrival was today but no one told him departure. That was a bit topsy-turvy. So, he was nervous about that. Also, he was nervous about a three-people house becoming a four-people house. Would there be enough food? Or warmth? He could feel his funny breathing starting. Topsy-turvy. He whipped his finger into the air and touched infinity. There. Okay. He had it. Infinity under control.
“Slowly, Buck,” said Martha softly. She watched her son trace frantic horizontal figure eights in the air above his juice glass. His eyes glanced off her forehead. His finger slowed and his breathing deepened. After thirty seconds, he returned to his pancakes.
“You’re doing an excellent job of staying on track, Buck I have one more thing to tell you about Grandpa The stroke took away Grandpa’s words, so I hope you can help him with talking without them since you know how already You don’t have to help if you don’t want to. This would be a favor, like when you and Dad go do firewood for Mrs. Adair. It’s not your job, just a nice helping thing. Okay?”
He continued to eat his pancakes calmly and Martha exhaled.
Okay.
At 12:00 exactly, Buck sat down at the kitchen table, hands washed. There were four plates and the extra chair would be for Grandpa from today until departure. He’d heard the car bring Grandpa and Mom at 11:08. Fifty-two minutes should have been plenty of time to get ready, but they were not at the table. His dad was in the kitchen and there was food on the table so Buck picked up his fork, but no one answered
Mom came in at 12:02 and said there was a change of plans Buck traced infinity while Mom said words about Grandpa being too tired for lunch Buck picked up his fork again, but Mom didn’t answer. It was lunchtime. There were more words about Grandpa needing lots of help – even for eating. Finally, Dad gave Buck his lunch. 12:04. He relaxed. Just a little topsyturvy. He ate his lunch and ignored his parents’ conversation.
A few evenings later, Dennis appeared for his first meal at the table. Jeremiah helped him negotiate the short distance from the family room to the kitchen Martha had adjusted to making two meals – one that her dad could manage and the scheduled meal Buck was doing unexpectedly well with all the changes to their lives, but changing his meal menu might push him too far.
“Well, Buck, isn’t this nice?” Martha said as she put the last steaming bowl on the table and sat down.
Buck didn’t look at her, just picked up his fork and stared straight ahead.
“Yes, go ahead, Love,” she said. “Bon appetite everyone.”
As they ate, she and Jeremiah talked about the next day’s schedule. They’d hashed out the details in private; this replay was so Dennis and Buck would be prepared for the town trip.
Dennis’ physical therapy had begun a day after he was moved from ICU to the ward. Martha had been trained in the exercises to be done twice a day at home and they would make the trek into town twice a week to see the therapist. It was early, the therapist had said, but Dennis seemed on track to regain most of his strength and function in the right arm and leg His speech, however, didn’t seem to be progressing
“Mom and Grandpa are going to town while Buck and Dad will do chores and have a special lunch for two. Grandpa and Mom will be back after lunch,” Martha recapped. Buck frowned and tapped his watch without taking his eyes off his plate.
“Between 1:00 and 2:30. That’s as precise as I can be, so I need you to be flexible, okay, Buck?”
Buck’s frown dissolved slowly as he finished his last bit of dinner, picked up his full glass of milk and drained it in one go. He pushed back his chair and tapped the table lightly.
“Yes, you’re excused,” said Martha. She watched him place his glass and cutlery carefully on his plate and carry them to the counter. He put his dishes beside the sink and returned to push in his chair. When it was perpendicular to the table edge, he went into the living room and turned on the television. She heard the opening theme music of that new show he liked so much. 60 Minutes.
She turned to her dad “How’re you doing Dad?”
He nodded He really was improving, she noted, as he moved the fork from the plate to his mouth and stopped, holding it in mid-air and completing the transaction by moving his head forward. His dexterity would be fine. But he still wouldn’t even attempt to vocalize.
Over the next several weeks, Dennis grew stronger and steadier, but no louder. Buck watched him, in his way; suddenly becoming perfectly still when Dennis entered a room, appearing to stare at something only he could see.
Martha observed this with interest. What did her son make of the silent adult? Would he feel safe to attempt communication with Dennis? Would her son finally find connection with
someone other than his parents? Perhaps a new kind of bond was possible here. This vague idea kept her from pressing her father to do his speech exercises She worried about what would happen if Dennis were to abandon Buck on his silent shores and return to the world of words without him
Jeremiah, on the other hand, saw Dennis’ total lack of progress with speech as regression. It bothered him that his once vital father-in-law was content to shuffle around in silence. Unlike his wife, Jeremiah could see no upside in this. So, on his next town trip, he headed to the barber shop for an unnecessary trim and a much-needed confab with Art and the boys. Jake, Elmer, and Ralph spent most of their time – or so it seemed to Jeremiah –yacking with Art in his shop. Or reading the paper. Or playing checkers. They’d each turned over operations of their farms to a son or son-in-law in the past few years and were now controlling things from the swivel chairs of the last bastion of male congregation in town. And they had become Jeremiah’s think tank – a brain trust for all matters agricultural but he now turned to them with his first ever non-farming problem. He told them about his silenced father-in-law, and they jumped into the quandary with gusto, despite not knowing Dennis. Having recently relinquished control of the family farm in the next county to Martha’s older brother, Jamie, Dennis’ life – apart from the stroke – was familiar ground The barbershop quartet was old school, and their collective fear of uselessness galvanized them into rallying to the rescue of a fellow farmer put out to pasture. They were unanimously agreed that Jeremiah must take steps to reverse Dennis’ slouch toward oblivion. Once the word typewriter emerged from the brainstorm, they turned their attention to whose idea it had been while Dennis headed to the Second Chance Thrift Shop to see what they had.
“Well, there you go, then,” said Jeremiah, patting the typewriter like it was a dog. “I’ll just leave ‘er right here and you can have at it whenever you want.” He had shoved aside the array of whatnots that usually occupied this dark corner of the kitchen counter.
He turned to Dennis, who leaned on his walker and stared at him. Jeremiah couldn’t tell if the glint in the old man’s eye was anticipation or anger.
“Well, alright, then. I’m back to work.” He patted the machine again and headed to the boot room
Martha had little to say about it when Jeremiah pressed her that night “But what do you think?” he asked again “You’re not telling me what you think ” He hopped into bed in his boxers and watched his wife rifle through her drawer for a flannel nighty.
“I think it’s a fine idea, Jer. I’m not getting ‘fired up,’ as you put it because I’m not sure we should be pushing Dad. He’s obviously scared, or something, and I don’t want to put pressure on him. But it’s good that he has the option.” After a moment or two, she continued. “We don’t really know how bad his language center was hit – he wouldn’t cooperate with those tests. Maybe he can’t even spell anymore. Or read, or make sense of words at all. Or
recall them. We’ve no idea. I don’t want to freak him out, is all.”
Jeremiah was quiet “Geez, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea Shoulda’ talked to you, huh?”
“No, Jer It’s fine Honestly It’s an option I just think it’s important that we don’t push him. Okay?”
“Okay.” He watched her. She was thinking hard about something while she brushed her hair. “What?” he asked finally.
“Well, if he does use it, let’s not make a big deal about it okay? That would embarrass him. Let’s just ignore it. Maybe he needs to practice before he shows us anything.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jeremiah said, flipping back the covers for Martha. “I hope it works.”
Martha slid in beside him, saying nothing.
For another six weeks Martha and Jeremiah tried to ignore the typewriter – each for their own reasons. Then, on a bright March morning Martha saw Jer walk by the typewriter as he did most mornings, pretending not to look. Then, he stopped and backed up. He turned and looked at his wife with huge eyes
Martha could see Buck and Dennis coming down the hall together, as had become their routine She frowned at Jer, poured him a cup of coffee and set it on the table, luring him away from the typewriter.
Not until after oatmeal (with 24 blueberries for Buck– an outstanding day) when Dennis had shuffled into the living room to turn on the TV and Buck left for chores, did Martha finally read the two words on the dusty piece of paper that Jer had rolled into the machine a month and a half earlier.
collect eggs
When she talked to Jeremiah about it later that day, she got swept up in his enthusiasm. Dennis was not only communicating, he was getting himself going, looking for his place in the new family configuration, seeking usefulness!
“But collecting eggs is Buck’s job,” Martha worried Jer chewed the inside of his mouth, then snapped his fingers “You know how Buck likes to be in charge? Well, we’ll promote him to supervisor and ask him to train your dad Heck, if he’s up to it, you could turn the candling over to Dennis, too.” They’d tried to teach Buck to check for flaws in the eggs but he was really, really good at it. The first time they left him to handle on his own, not a single egg survived inspection.
Once Dennis and Buck had fallen into a smooth routine of sharing egg duties, a second message appeared on the typewriter page. Again, it was waiting for them when they got up in
the morning and this wish was far easier to grant.
Two days later, with spring rain pounding the roof so hard the drip bucket was called into action, the next missive awaited their arrival in the kitchen.
Again, Buck was convinced to take on the new recruit in his supervisory role. Dennis seemed pleased with the ruse and accepted the boy’s constant corrections with good humor. Dennis, despite having fed chickens for more than 60 years, required two days of work with his mentor to achieve the proper wrist action for spreading feed on the ground. Buck watched Dennis’ first solo feeding with such intensity, that he forgot the rule about nose-picking and ended up with a bleeder. This set them back a few days, as the sight of blood was not something Buck handled well But eventually, Dennis fed the chickens and Buck got extra time to look at his books
Everyone settled into the new routines and the typewriter acquired a layer of dust The ground dried up and Jeremiah fired up the tractor he’d been tinkering with for weeks and shot out of the machine shop like a 12-year-old leaving school on June 30th. His charge from the farm yard to the fields raised more dust to settle on the typewriter as well as the rest of the house and Martha started her annual spring cleaning with the usual array of dust-curses and muttering. She almost missed the next directive from Dennis until she swished a cloth across the plastic keys.
She stared at the words. The message couldn’t have been there long; the weather necessary to prompt such a request had only arrived last week.
She and Jeremiah pretended they hadn’t seen it for another eight days It was spring and neither of them had much time to devote to making the detailed plan that would be necessary for this one And less time to deal with the aftermath if it didn’t go well
They started by broaching the subject with Buck privately. Although bath time had always been the best time to talk to Buck, he’d started closing the bathroom door since Dennis moved in. He still marched around the house naked before and after his bath, but for whatever reason, they were no longer invited into the inner sanctum that was bath time.
Second best chance for ‘good reception’ was after dinner. When Dennis went out to the chicken coop to put the girls to bed, Martha sat on the couch and watched her son absorb his
new favorite book about the very first steam engine trains. He was tracing his finger across the page about Stephenson’s Blucher locomotive She was already sick of this book
“Hey, Bucker,” Martha said “Can I talk to you?” She watched his face and when there was no reaction, she continued. “So, Dad and I were thinking about how much you liked going fishing last year. Remember how we marked your calendar for when we could start again in the spring?” She was just remembering this as she spoke. It was probably this week or next where her little drawing of a fish on a line sat waiting for him to find it.
“Well, Dad and I thought it might be fun if you took Grandpa fishing. What do you think of that?”
Buck looked at the wall behind Martha and got very still. She thought she saw him rock forward slightly. Not that this helped; rocking could indicate anticipation or agitation.
That was Monday. On Thursday, she watched her father and son wobble out of the farm yard toward the creek and it took everything in her to wait half an hour before following.
For the first time in years, Martha did not make a mental to-do list as she headed down the overgrown path, past the peeling fence, and headed for the trail through the aspen stand Instead, her head was filled with the emergency response procedures she would need when she found her son injured and her unsteady, silent father standing by helplessly What had she been thinking? Her pace quickened with her heart rate. She didn’t think Buck would go into the water but what if he fell in? The bank was steep at the high spot. What if he tumbled in and the shock of the freezing spring run-off triggered a seizure? He hadn’t had one for almost two years, but still . . .
She realized she was nearly running and made herself pay attention. The path was still winter-messy and tripping over a tangle of fallen branches would not help whatever situation she was about to encounter. It was possible that the “situation” might be her bursting out of the trees and scaring the shit out of them. She slowed her pace once more and made herself breathe.
And then she was out of the woods and could see them sitting side by side on the bank, just this side of the high spot – away from the reeds but close enough to the water to pull a catch in easily
Their backs were to her, so she stood and watched the scene undetected Two narrow, plaid-covered torsos, one slightly longer than the other Two messy heads of hair, remarkably alike, now that she looked. And two rods pointing to the opposite bank. The water had a slow but steady current as it curved here, moving around some ancient obstacle and flowing west to a river and eventually a lake. The only motion, aside from the water, was the rhythmic cast and reel of two lines that had already synched into a single motion. The only sound was her own breathing and a few robins. She was afraid to move – forward or back. It was so still she was sure they’d hear her although she was a good 35 yards behind them.
Her son was sitting motionless – a sign that he was concentrating on something – willing the fish to his wormy hook, no doubt He finished reeling in his line at the same time as Dennis; they both checked their hooks Buck carefully pulled his rod back over his right shoulder and cast Then Dennis, sitting to Buck’s left, transferred the rod to his left hand and made his awkward cast. Martha’s eyes widened slightly. When had he started using his left hand?
As she watched them reel, check, and cast, she noticed again the stillness of her son’s body. He was paying attention to more than the casting.
Buck stopped reeling and touched Dennis on the right knee, then pointed upstream. A family of wood ducks rounded the bend and moved slowly toward them, staying close to shore and investigating the marshy edges.
Dennis and Buck watched the ducks for several minutes, lines left to float to the surface in the gentle current. Buck leaned forward slightly and stayed frozen in that position for several minutes, while Dennis began reeling in his line. He stopped when Buck tapped his leg again and pointed to the smallest of the ducks. The ducks had emerged from the reeds, the two larger in the lead, walking and pecking through the muck and when the runt attempted to follow, he wobbled, staggered to the right, and plopped down in the mud All three humans were rapt as the little duck struggled to get himself back on his feet The rest of the duck family stopped, and one of the adults circled back to supervise as the little one fought his way forward. Once he was free, the entourage continued on their way.
Martha wiped a tear from her cheek and watched her father turn to stare at Buck. He tapped the boy’s right leg once and nodded, but Buck didn’t seem to notice; he was reeling in his line for another cast.
Martha sat down on the barely-greening grass and took a good look around. It really was beautiful down here. Because of the gentle rise behind her, she couldn’t hear anything from the farmyard. Even the robins rested and the silence wasn’t an absence at all, but a richness of its own. She watched the bookends of her life – her father and her son. Perhaps they experienced silence this way all the time – maybe even in the spaces between her endless words.
Dennis tapped Buck with one finger and pointed to his mouth Buck reeled in his line and set the rod on the ground beside him, then leaned past it and opened the picnic hamper He took a paper napkin out and wiped his hands, then used another to reach in and pick up half a tuna sandwich. Martha watched, mystified, as he held the morsel up to his grandfather’s mouth, sitting motionless while Dennis chewed and swallowed. Over the course of several minutes, the ritual continued until Dennis had finished the half sandwich. He made a gesture Martha couldn’t quite see, and Buck reached back into the basket for an apple. He hesitated, then put it in front of his grandfather’s face. When Dennis leaned toward it, Buck dropped it and began to rock.
Martha stood up.
Dennis laid his hand on Buck’s shoulder, then picked up the apple and tossed it behind them as best he could with his left hand He patted Buck’s knee ever so gently, and they both went back to casting
The food mystery was cleared up almost immediately when Buck reeled in his line to find an empty hook. Without looking at him, he handed the rod to Dennis. The man put his contaminated hands into the worm can and baited the hook. They both resumed casting.
Martha stifled a giggle as she got up and headed back to the house. Her heart expanded like bread dough on a warm window sill. Dad and Buck were getting it figured out. They all were. She hurried back along the path humming happily to herself.
Spring settled into summer almost overnight and everyone was busy. Too busy to write, apparently, until several weeks later. Comparatively speaking, the note they found in the typewriter that bright morning was practically a manifesto: more pancakes more fishing but no topsy-turvy apples
By Pat Phillips West
I prepare my mother’s recipe for White Bean and Tuscan Kale Soup. The penciled footnote makes me smile If you ’ re upset and cook, vegetables will be bitter and bite the tongue
Her handwriting more alive than the apple tree blooming outside the window, more permanent than my own body, once part of hers. I keep opening the pantry door and walking into the past, into the image of her kneading bread she made in the quiet mornings, doing nothing else in those moments, but passing energy from her body and hands to the dough
The soup simmers until the wide-open kitchen is infused with a plump earthy aroma. When the timer dings, I slice the crusty bread fresh from the bakery, bring it along with butter to the table. Ladle the thick soup into a green earthenware bowl, finish with a drizzle of olive oil, squeeze of lemon, and gratings of pecorino. Each bite
satisfying to the soul
By Melanie Faith
Sure. I guess there were many things I wanted to pass along. Making kites from wax paper. Checkers. Chess. Sketching proportions. Riding a bike. Dying Easter eggs with plant dye. Gran taught us:
beets make pretty purple. Grape juice for blue. Turmeric and vinegar to make yellow.
Cabbage or spinach for a mint green.
Balancing a checkbook Taking photos I guess roller-skating Ice-skating when the weather’s right.
Making mud pies. Guitar scales. Reading. Cooking pancakes that are even on both sides. Making a campfire. Long division.
Planting vegetables. Weeding.
Keeping a tidy room. Sewing a hem that’s nearly impossible for anybody to pry apart. Writing their names.
By D. Walsh Gilbert
A woodland path dissolves at twilight. This is the most solitary time to walk along it to follow what’s been beaten down by creatures and mystery. Unmarked trails fade into blue-gray dusk and evening’s blur. They’re only recognized by memory by having been there once before The haunting of vague histories will return
The stillness and the silence overwhelm. It’s the time for foraging by nose, a sniff of sweet pepper bush, hypnosis lured by huckleberry consciousness now lost.
This is the act of witness a poet seeks, her footprints retreating somewhere unknown. The chance to heed without interruption, to attend and pursue, to hunt and to attain.
The descending dark improves fragile vision
The silhouettes of gloaming trees begin to become ancestor, myth, pools of hidden ink, the downy, muddled uncertainty of dream
By Sheila E. Murphy
Tristesse, his wife said of the new year’s piece I sent just after Rob disappeared from life. I lost light for a while, yet the thought of him still centered my faith in an essential goodness, beneath the sprawl of life. Rob once said to me, “I wish I were more interesting.” He was a quiet, lovely man who, when asked about a vacation with his wife, responded, “The earth moved,” and everyone within hearing distance laughed a nervous laugh, but I think I understood his sense that all the world could lift beyond the hard discipline of economics he had mastered. There was a less public dimension of him as an acquired taste complete unto himself. His interior and surrounding affection inspired, even lured me into another logic pure as the moonlight I imagined when the earth moved.
By Kelly DuMar
for your cat, Yoshi, 1992-Dec. 3, 2003
By Sherry Hughes Beasley
His pupils had grown huge and black, caves he could not crawl out of, and you lifted him into your arms and carried his orange striped body outside. We could see the pain in his face, the confusion, the fear, and after it was over I cleaned out my boot box, the one where he dozed one afternoon in a bar of sunshine. Your shovel in the flower bed made the sound of earth moving and falling.
It was freezing and late.
I stood on the patio sobbing and held the flashlight
After years, I anoint you, holy oil righting wrongs so all I see is the gold
my touch turns you into. In that colonial, alchemical city, as we rest beside a fountain, weary of gilt cathedrals and jacarandas’ purple flares on late-Lent sky. Your gorgeous head on my lap
striking as a mass of bougainvillea. Heart-stirred into the next day. Ferry boat and serenade old man and beat-up guitar;
you and I are an attractant, caught like ghosts at a séance, laughing, testing our miracles before ascending the heights
of that ancient island, stripped to bare limbs and copper skin, until we can see for miles, but not what stands before us.
By Tricia Gates Brown
By Christen Lee
Last night, I dreamed that I was moving backward through time. Rose from my bed, retracing every step. Closed my fingers over a wave goodbye, spoke unintelligibly, shifting from understanding to question. Opened a finished book and read from end to beginning.
Watched my children draw nearer and nearer to my side until they clung to me. My babies.
Tears rolling up soft cheeks toward gentle eyes, shrinking smaller and smaller inside my arms “Please stay,” I wanted to say, but the words impossible. Bodies plumping, infantile. My belly suddenly swelled and heavy.
I leaned back into a lighter frame, face beaming with expectancy. My hands in yours, I promised you a lifetime together, a love forever.
Then we walked back the aisle to the shores of La Jolla Cove. Sea lions calling above the ocean swells, sunset splendor rising to meet the first kiss Magic in the making
At 26, I drove cross country. Felt the earth shake, grow wider beneath my feet. I never slept at 25, finding my way in and out of hospital rooms, hanging IV drips, dispensing pills at 2 am. 22 and making it alone, I found a place to call my own. Checked my mother’s sorrow at the door and called this letting go.
I strolled my college campus, settling on the cold stone bench at Mirror Lake, books in tow, mind ripe with possibility The flutter of first love beat in my chest, scrawling poems on notebook scraps. Those days that felt like forever.
On stage, I recited my graduation speech, “Farewell my friends, the future is ours.” And the past with its original heartbreak, rejection, the chill of loneliness.
At grade school camp, we danced songs around a bonfire. Scavenged the after dark, searching for stars and their signs. Meanwhile, cicadas sung their broken chorus and I, terrified of the vastness, the fullness of space, had never felt so far from home.
Then I fell into my mother’s arms. Her baby. How she held the world at bay until I, finally safe, became tiny. Imperceptible. A speck inside my mother’s heart. A dream within a dream.
By Halina Duraj
ast night, driving to the grocery store in San Diego, I hit a pothole and heard a clattering sound. At the next red light, a maroon van pulled up alongside me. The driver stopped, rolled down his window and gestured for me to roll down mine. I thought he was going to tell me I lost a hubcap my car launches one every couple of months. Instead, the man pointed at the school across the street and said fuego.
Gray-white smoke billowed from the roof. I’d seen it a few days earlier, too, but then there had been bright lights and people in hard hats up on the roof they didn’t seem bothered by the smoke, so I didn’t worry. I assumed it was construction work maybe boiling tar to repair the roof, as my father had always done in big aluminum buckets on the kitchen stove. The house stank for days afterward, even if you opened all the windows. I didn’t see people up on the roof now, but there were bright lights and long strings of triangular orange flags, the kind that hang across pools, denoting lanes With my window down, I smelled tar
The light turned green and then yellow No one had pulled up behind us The man said something else in Spanish, too fast for me to understand I can pick out some words, but I can’t speak. The man asked, “Ingles?” I nodded. He pointed at the school again. “Nine-oneone?”
The light turned red. The man was looking at me, perplexed. I knew he was trying to figure out why I wasn’t pulling out my phone.
I didn’t know how to tell him it probably wasn’t a fire because I’d seen it before. It was complicated to explain even in English the light would change at any moment and I had no idea how to say it in Spanish. And what if I was wrong what if it was a fire? Better safe than sorry, people say. And that’s right. What was the cost in calling even if it wasn’t a fire? But also: I had never in my life called 9-1-1. I was a little scared of it. I didn’t know why.
While I was thinking all this, the man pulled out his phone and dialed. I heard him say: Hablas espanol? Sí, sí, incendio en la escuela. No se. No se. The light turned green. The man looked at me again, still holding the phone A car honked behind me I drove on
But I kept seeing the man’s face, his concern as he’d pointed at the school, the deep furrow between his brows, the way his eyes had changed by the time he had to pull out his own phone.
As a pointless gesture of amends, I dialed 9-1-1 from the grocery store parking lot ten minutes later. It was like making any other call. The dispatcher’s voice was pleasant, friendly. When I said “fire,” she put me through to the fire department dispatcher. Her tone was more brisk, a no-bullshit vibe. I told her the cross streets and that I thought the school was called Dana Middle School but I wasn’t sure. “Ma’am, we can’t go by what you think, we need the name,” she said.
“I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do.” Actually, I’d thought the cross streets would be pretty helpful
“Oh, here, it’s coming up,” she said “OK, Dana Middle School Tell me the cross streets again?”
“Naragansett and Catalina. And I’m not sure it’s a fire. It could be steam. Like maybe it’s construction.”
“There’s another call coming in for that address,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll contact the school’s on-call person.” I wondered why she didn’t send trucks anyway, just in case. But she sounded nicer now, and I didn’t want to make her mad again. I wanted to ask if she spoke Spanish, if all emergency dispatchers did now.
On my way home, I passed the school again same billowing gray-white whatever-it-was but no fire trucks. The rooftop lights were on, though, and a woman stood under the orange flags on the roof, with her hands on her hips. She had a long braid and a hard hat and she seemed very sure of herself so close to the edge. I looked for my hubcap along the curbs but didn’t see it.
When I got home, I remembered the clattering sound and checked my hubcaps I had, in fact, lost one
I told my husband about the maroon van while we put away the groceries He said, “I wonder why he didn’t just call 9-1-1 himself first. Oh.”
“Yeah,” I said. I opened the fridge and put in the half-and-half. For a moment, neither of us said anything.
Then he said, “He probably gave a fake name. It’s probably fine. He didn’t have to stick around after the call.”
I felt grateful for his kindness, hoped he was right. And I wondered over and over why I’d been so hesitant. It wasn’t just not knowing how to tell the man in Spanish what I’d seen a few days earlier. There was something hidden in my reluctance to dial. But thinking about it was like pushing through a doorway hung with gauze, layer after layer obscuring a room. I’d think and think swat at gauze then retreat. Later, annoyed at what my mind was hiding from me, I’d try again. It was as if the reason both did and didn’t want to be found. When I finally did remember, I laughed It was so obvious
One night in junior high, I hunched over my math homework at my desk on the other side of the wall from my parents’ bedroom My father shouted and my mother pleaded nie lam, nie lam! which means don’t break it in Polish, as in don’t-break-these-bones, don’t break me. The shouting was worse than other nights, but how much worse was the question, the real math. I lifted the phone’s receiver from its cradle on my desk and rested my index finger on the nine. How would I know it was worth the risk of what he’d do to me, to her, after the cops left? Even if he went to jail, it would only be for a night. That’s what had happened when my father struck the next-door neighbor with a baseball bat a property line
dispute. The neighbor’s wife had called the cops. My father was home by the time I left for school in the morning He had a court date and a lawyer, but he never went back to jail
It had to be death, I decided If it seems like he’s going to kill her, it’s worth it If not, then it’s not I tried everything I could think of so I wouldn’t have to call I faked a coughing fit maybe the thought of me choking would distract him. I tried yelling, as loudly as I dared, something neutral: “I’m studying for a math test!” The next shout through the wall came at me: “This is not your business. Shut up or I come in there next.”
This isn’t your business.
Better safe than sorry.
Of course I didn’t call. My mother didn’t die, still hasn’t, though my father finally did. I wish I’d learned Spanish. Most of my life I resisted it my father wanted me to learn. He thought it would be useful. He saw immigrants such as himself World War II refugees, Eastern European, white as dwindling, giving way to the new generation of hard workers flowing up from Mexico, Central America. California would soon be a majority Hispanic state, he believed, and I had a responsibility to learn the language, just as he’d once had to learn English He was right about this the prevalence of Spanish in California It’s still hard for me to admit he could be right about anything when he was wrong about so much
After I remembered that night in junior high, I told my husband He folded me into his arms and said nothing.
Today I crossed that same intersection no smoke, no orange flags, no people on the roof. I saw my hubcap in the gutter and pulled over. I picked it up, placed it against the wheel, and pounded it on with my fist. Hard. Then I got back in the car and continued driving, listening to the “You Can Learn Spanish” CDs that I picked up at the library this morning.
“¿Cómo está?” a deep-voiced stranger asked.
“¿Cómo está?” I echoed.
“¿Estoy bien, y tú?”
“I hope you are,” I said. I really do. Then I kept listening, waiting to hear and learn how to say I’m sorry.
Ignore the wind
By Shannon Mahoney
thrashing the tree branches Ignore seventy-two potholes on the way to work
Grab your scarf then abandon it with your patience as summer teases us with snippets of July. Get up in the middle of the night for water.
Watch the deer in your own backyard stare back without fear of what might happen next; whose impeccable vaulting pattern surpasses what is easy and becomes a miracle of propulsion. March is said to be “in like a lion, out like a lamb,” but I return to the deer, their easy grace and heights
Those who with us bear colder days, and show face when the streets fall silent Who shadow spring with baby fawn bashfulness, and prove to us that, yes, all that is harsh is lovely too.
By Andrew Elson
By Mary Osteen
I saw a turkey fly up, up and up she went loudly, a brown and gold-winged tank with enough feather flapping I thought might lose my cap so I held it tight, leaning back to see her staring down from a mid way branch of our tallest Ponderosa Pine, and knew her feat was just for me.
I called out to her “Mama Turkey,” like I always do, she turkey-chirped right back as she always does with me, and my toes curled a bit in my boots like they too were smiling.
By Alex Stolis
By Joshua St. Claire
keeping the moon as long as I can stratocumulus sky
grandmother’s lavender virga from a distant cloud bends the sky
cirrus uncinus a brown pelican flings up the sea
an arc of cirrocumulus fading to nothing Pierrot a thistleseed outracing cloudshadow Sunday drive cloud panorama at last we reach the end of time
so bright
I can barely look summer clouds
leafsong the tumble of rain and light through shifting clouds
altostratus afternoon trefoil blossoms when you least expect it
By Susan Pollet
By Zack Rogow
Not many befriended me during those years when love was only a birthday-candle wish and I rarely slowed down for friendship. Not many except Maxine.
Maxine never moved from her rent-controlled studio steps from Central Park but she revolved the furniture every week The ceiling she painted twilight blue, splashed with golden stars a Renaissance chapel.
Sometimes she’d spin her old 45s all day long Still of the Night, Silhouettes, Chapel of Love her Pontormo brown eyes big as records, the lonely easel stood up in the corner.
When Maxine turned your way, days of rain ended. She regretted the lost beauty secrets of her teen age but still looked great in a leather miniskirt in her 40s, her lush, brunette tresses wider than her waist Eating never seemed to apply to her, a Jewish mother’s nightmare.
Her boyfriend kept popping the question. Said he’d never marry anyone else. It was just one of those things she never got around to, like mining the wide seams of her talent. But if she asked, “Did I show you this?” then her drawing in the magazine fantastic. Stars had been her dates and friends before they’d moved on and she regretted them, too, though once in a while a lead guitarist would just be leaving her apartment. If you asked, Maxine would merely smile.
Most days Maxine just sipped her cigarettes, the smoke trilling toward the constellations on her ceiling.
Why did Maxine even bother with this fuzzy-headed bohemian when I had no idea what to make of myself? She gave me so much kind attention and I gave her I confess my adoration.
By Frank Diamond
Pete Tillinghast needs to be here. Needs to say goodbye as midnight approaches. Needs to say it when nobody’s around. No self-consciousness about whether he looks sad enough or looks too sad. No, none of that. No watching eyes. No temptation to pretend to feel something that he doesn’t; or not feel something that he does.
The taste of salted asphalt and coming snow rides the February wind that skims across the Lenape High School parking lot Pete clutches his jacket his varsity jacket near his throat He shivers This will be a short farewell Pete alone with the guys Or with memories of the guys Or with ghosts?
Pete’s not sure about an afterlife; never really thought about it much until this year which forced him to think about a lot of stuff he’d never thought about. But if souls go on then maybe they reach us through dreams, or memory, or prayer, or meditation. They’re not in cemeteries, and they’re certainly not in memorials, like this one here. That sort of bullshit comforts the living. Pete understood that reality since back when he was 8 years old and watched Grandpa’s casket being lowered into the ground, while some aunts and uncles blubbered and wiped their eyes.
Now, on this night, Pete whispers “goodbye” to his teammates.
Suddenly, as if in response something springs from out of the nearby hedges.
“What the…?”
It’s a fox, darting away, across the lot, past the school, and into the surrounding woods, disappearing just like that
It’s OK You’re all right
Pete takes deep breaths, calms himself, lets the adrenaline subside Nothing but a fox That’s all A sly fox It could have been worse It could have been a skunk and then where would Pete be? But just a fox streaking for cover. Pete wishes he could be so light-footed.
About 45 minutes earlier, he’d slipped out the kitchen door, but Mom probably heard him leave. If she hadn’t heard him stumble on the steps, she’d certainly heard the car start, and Pete pulling out of the driveway onto the street and around the packed U-Haul parked in front of the house. Knowing Mom, she probably figured out that Pete is here.
“Nothing gets by me,” she once told Pete, and she never needed to say it again, although she often did. They call her Nurse Notice at the medical center because she’d collar a doctor in the hallway and say, “I notice that the patient in room.…” And whatever Mom pointed out always needed attention. Or so Mom says.
Now, Pete exhales a spear of breath that shoots toward the memorial then dissipates about a foot from his face.
Grounded lights bathe the bronze sculpture of a young man with a basketball driving toward a layup The pedestal enshrines the names of seven of Pete’s teammates who’d died on that horrible day over a year ago DeShawn Baldwin tops the list Pete’s best friend Late, great, best friend In a few minutes, after midnight, it would have been DeShawn’s 19th birthday. He’d probably be celebrating with guys on his college team, for DeShawn had been talking to recruiters on the sly since sophomore year. Recruiters who’d offered sweet basketball scholarships, packages that included food vouchers, and bitchin’ leased cars so he’d always be on time for practices and games, and “help” with classwork if DeShawn needed it. But DeShawn was book smart way more so than Pete and liked learning, so he wouldn’t have taken them up on that perk but still, as DeShawn would say: “It’s nice to feel the love!”
At first, they wanted to build this memorial right by the school’s front doors, but some Lenape Township zoning code wouldn’t allow that, so they built it toward the side, right near the gym entrance, which seemed more fitting anyhow.
The structure keeps watch outside the arena in which teens produced sparkling moments of athleticism in an intoxicating amalgamation of ballet and boxing and track, with an inflated spherical object with a circumference of exactly 29 and a half inches thrown into the mix
DeShawn Baldwin ruled that basketball court.
No recruiter had ever approached Pete Tillinghast, which didn’t surprise him. The odds of any high school basketball player anywhere getting a free ride to college: 18 to 1; 105 to 1 if you’re talking about a Division 1 university team.
Of course, now, it doesn’t matter. There’s the ankle. Pete still limps. It might take a long time before he can even play in pickup games. If it wasn’t for the ankle and the tragedy the two didn’t really have anything to do with each other, except that they did but if it wasn’t for them, Pete, who just turned 19 himself, would have ended his basketball playing days on a high note: sixth man on the Lenape Wolves, a team that wins state, or would have.
“Which makes you the best sixth man in Pennsylvania, Vanilla Ice,” DeShawn said. Pete, one of three white kids on the team, liked being called Vanilla Ice. As nicknames go, it could have been worse
The tag fit, too Pete’s skin in summer would burn in an hour if Pete let it, but he’d learned early the benefits of sunblock, the application of which Mom didn’t have to nag him about.
Pete’s Nordic looks often drew stares, and though he didn’t have a girlfriend now, he certainly could have.
The intensity of Pete’s aquamarine eyes sometimes made people double-clutch in midsentence, and his gaze always seemed to just miss its mark as if he stood atop a ski slope, mapping the path he’d take.
A growth spurt between sophomore and junior years brought him to 6 foot 4. A spike in appetite and time in the weightroom saved him from being spindly and inconsequential Pete’s still lanky, but steel-cord strong a force on the floor Or was
He’d always been quick, and family videos show him progressing through the years usually holding a basketball. There’s one of Dad teaching him to dribble at 3 years old, which Pete did to the applause of onlooking relatives.
In the Lenape High School games, in the midst of thrown elbows and squeaking sneakers and grunts and trash-talk and fist-fights without fists, his teammates just called him “Ice,” the speed of competition forcing them to drop “Vanilla.” Pete liked that, too.
Nobody’s called him that since that day.
That day, that day, that nightmare of a day.
He overslept. And Pete Tillinghast never oversleeps. He never overslept before that morning, and he’s never overslept since. Now, he’s lucky if he can sleep at all. Pills the shrink prescribed give him maybe four hours a night. He thrashes in his sleep, needs to wear a mouthguard so that he doesn’t bite the shit out of his lips.
Mom had set the alarm for him, but when he awoke the lights blinked the hour when the brownout hit He didn’t shower No time Pete bounded down the stairs just as Mom came home from late shift
“Shouldn’t you….”
“Drive me!”
Mom pivoted and they both bustled into the car.
The Wolves were heading across state to Pittsburgh to play some team in the semi-finals that wins, it seems, every other year because the kids live in a neighborhood where God and basketball get equal billing.
“Floor it, Mom! Hurry!”
He tags DeShawn.
“Ice, where you at?”
“Tell Coach don’t leave. I’m on my way.”
“Hi, Mrs. Tillinghast!” DeShawn calls.
“Hello, DeShawn! And go Wolves!”
“We need our sixth man!”
Mom says: “Hrumph! This one Can you believe this?”
“Just drive, Mom,” Pete says. “I already hung up.”
And Mom books it, screeching into the school lot like the lead car of a SWAT team. Pete grabs his kit and starts to make a mad dash. The last dash. About 20 feet in he steps wrong in a pothole; muscle and bone in his ankle snap. Pete screams, falls. Sharp pain radiates from the already swelling ankle up his leg reaching as high as the knee. Pete would learn in years to come that trying to describe pain is like trying to describe love. You must assume that the
other person just knows.
Pete almost loses consciousness He hears howling from somewhere and realized only later that it had been him He kept trying to get up even though everybody Mom, Dad, DeShawn, teammates, the other parents, Coach Baker kept insisting he stay down No Staying on the ground made him claustrophobic, and even more desperate.
Later, Mom told him that he’d also kept insisting that he go to the game, even as the ambulance arrived and he hopped on the good leg, supported by DeShawn and another kid, over to the vehicle where they sorted him onto the gurney.
At Mom’s hospital, they right away injected something that numbed not only the injured area, but the entire right side of Pete’s body, even up to his mouth so that he slurred his words. Then they told Pete to count backward from 10. He might have made it to seven.
While under, they twisted cartilage back into place, cemented bone together, and stitched the area where the injury broke through the skin. Then they worked in the pins and plates, securing them with bolts.
While every trace of Pete’s consciousness vanished in the death-like slumber of anesthesia, his teammates sped across Pennsylvania still determined to win the semis despite the absence of their sixth man
And that’s when it happened
His teammates’ obituaries would later use “suddenly” in the headline. And it certainly was sudden.
The facts were simple. The driver of the 18-wheeler had fallen asleep. That’s all. He crashed through the median on the Pennsylvania Turnpike into oncoming traffic; into the lead van carrying DeShawn, the other starters, and a couple of subs.
No survivors.
Young lives extinguished just like that; gone by the time Pete awoke blinking his blurred hospital room into focus. A retinue surrounded him: Mom, Dad, Dad’s latest girlfriend, Pete’s older brother and sister-in-law, Uncle Joe, Cousin Jim.
“You’re in the hospital, hon,” Mom said.
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to be fine, just fine,” Dad asserted, and his girlfriend chimed agreement “Fine?”
“How are you feeling, dear?” Mom asked
Pete pondered for a second.
“Everything’s fuzzy; like in and out,” Pete said which, for some reason, elicited a sprinkling of giggles, though he wasn’t trying to be funny and what he said wasn’t amusing.
“You’re snowed, Pete,” Dad explained.
Pete looked at the IV, and then the hanging clear bag that delivered measured drips. One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Three-Mississippi.
Then he noticed the little white cone with the black button near his hand and Mom tells him: “For morphine Press it when the pain starts coming back ”
“OK Did we win?” Pete asked
The gathered visitors sort of wilted, as if his gaze were a camera gone out of focus
“We’ll talk later,” his father said.
“I want to know now.”
A voice boomed from the doorway.
“Mister Peter Tillinghast.” They parted to let the doctor come forward to explain the extent of his injury and detail what had to be done to put Pete’s right ankle back together.
As the doctor spoke, Pete noticed that people left in response to some silent request so that by the time the consultation ended, only Mom and Dad remained.
“Son….” Dad began, and he never called Pete “son.”
“Yes, father?” Pete responded sarcastically. Banged up and all, he still resented Dad for the divorce.
Mom’s sob aborted this exchange, and she cried out: “There was this horrible, horrible accident, Peter!”
Then Mom explained, or tried to explain, as best as somebody who completely loses it can explain anything During her halting, sputtering, sloshing, coming-up-for-air recitation, Dad rubbed her back, a gesture that Pete would always remember afterward. Pete hadn’t seen his parents touch each other since they separated.
When Mom finished, dissolving in sobs, Pete asked: “Yeah, but where’s DeShawn and the other guys?”
Mom cried out: “He doesn’t understand!”
Dad stepped up, grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Son, we just told you there was an accident. A terrible accident.”
“Oh,” Pete said, closing his eyes and going to sleep.
That was over a year ago. The shrink told Mom that Pete should perhaps do his lessons at home and then gradually ease back into school. Before COVID-19, that might have seemed an unusual plan of action. Now, everybody knew how to teach and learn virtually. Or at least go through the motions
The memorial service at the school had been mobbed, and Pete went to four of the seven funerals, until he couldn’t get out of bed for a week and the shrink said “enough ”
The last burial he’d attended had been DeShawn’s. The media kept their distance, the tower vans and gaggle of reporters milled way over at the other side of the cemetery, nearly out of view.
As the minister read over the coffin, Pete kept glancing at Mr. Baldwin who looked older, shrunken. DeShawn and his dad had forged a father/son camaraderie after DeShawn’s mother died.
DeShawn honored Mr. Baldwin, talked about him to Pete often, and never once in disparagement, which must be some sort of record for a teenager
And Mr Baldwin looked like somebody easily mythologized Powerfully built, he loaded trucks for a shipping company, working around people half his age because any peers had long before dropped off because of bad backs, knees, or shoulders. Driven away by the strenuousness of the job. But Mr. Baldwin kept on.
His face could have been carved from rock. Stoic. Strong. But with a smile that developed slowly and kept widening; a protective light that chased dark moods away. So, that’s where DeShawn’s smile comes from, Pete realized when he first met the father.
Mr. Baldwin had been quite the athlete himself, and the trophy case in the Lenape High School lobby featured talismans of championship basketball and football teams that he’d starred on, as well as individual honors for wrestling and track, records that have yet to be broken by any Lenape student since.
Pete had pieced together Mr. Baldwin’s trajectory after he graduated from Lenape, because the arc of his life had not pointed toward manual labor.
Something happened that set young Mr Baldwin off course, and he dropped out of college, tried to become a professional musician, but gave it up when he married Somewhere in there he became a boxer, and his crooked nose and scarred features mapped the detour that had led to that dead-end.
“Pete, you were my DeShawn’s best friend,” Mr. Baldwin had said when he’d visited Pete in the hospital, as if the father had already begun gathering the facts of his dead son’s biography. Then this big, strong, immovable object collapsed onto a chair and wept into his hands sounding as if something had gone down the wrong pipe.
“I am so sorry, Mr. Baldwin,” was all Pete could say.
“I know.”
When Mr. Baldwin stopped, he didn’t look at Pete as he stood and walked unsteadily out of the room, throwing a goodbye wave over his shoulder. Pete wondered if he’d always be somebody Mr. Baldwin would avoid.
Two days later when they discharged Pete, Mom delivered a request from DeShawn’s family as they headed home
“Yes, I’ll do it,” Pete said Mom asked: “Honey, are you sure?”
“I am going to do it.”
The Baldwins wanted Pete to say a few words at the funeral. Public speaking terrified Pete, but this was DeShawn.
“Maybe explain how you two became friends?” Mom suggested.
“I guess,” Pete stuttered.
Pete couldn’t diagram friendship. How do any two people become friends? Respect
counts and that came in 8th grade when Pete and DeShawn played on different teams for the grammar school championship DeShawn’s squad won, of course, and he’d scored the most points, of course But Pete made an impression with his assists because as the teams shook hands after the whistle (“good game” “good game” “good game”), DeShawn unclenched and then pointed at Pete: “Dropping dimes the whole time!”
“Thanks,” Pete mumbled.
The next year they’re teammates at Lenape. They cracked each other up and liked the same music, movies, and TV shows. Also, they shared the same philosophy. An ancient philosophy.
They discovered this when walking out of the gym one night. Coach Baker liked to quote famous lines, and the players had to find out who said them by the next team gathering. Occasionally, a kid would know right off and shout the answer, earning a break from doing suicides the next practice. This night, Coach Baker quoted: “What we do in life echoes in eternity.”
One of the players shouted: “Maximus from the movie Gladiator. My dad watches it all the time ”
“Correct!” Coach Baker said
Not completely correct, DeShawn told Pete as they made their way to their parents’ cars
“Actually, Maximus was quoting...”
Pete interrupted, “Marcus Aurelius!”
“My man!” DeShawn said, as they bumped fists.
Turns out that they read everything they could about the Roman emperor specifically, and stoic philosophy in general.
“My middle name is Marcus, Ice,” DeShawn said. “Dad picked it. I ask him why once and he tells me because he knows I’m stoic from the first time he sees me.”
Pete said, “My Mom. Teaches a course called stoic nursing at the hospital.”
“We’re probably the only high school students in the state talking about Marcus Aurelius,” DeShawn said.
“Does that make us nerds?”
“Nah, man Makes us warriors!”
They didn’t hide their interest in stoicism, but they didn’t preach it either Mostly, their friends and teammates upon whom this datapoint even registered, just smiled, and shrugged as they would about the quirks of anybody they liked.
In the days leading up to DeShawn’s funeral, plans were made and modified and then modified again until it came to pass that Pete would still give a eulogy, but at the burial site instead of in the church.
And that day came.
A cold, bright day. So cold that the dead grass crunched underfoot as mourners made
their way from the caravan to the gravesite. And so bright that shadows of trees and tombstones looked as if they’d froze
Between the priest’s blessing and before the flowers were dropped upon the casket, Pete hobbled on crutches over to the edge of the grave, turned, and faced the assembled
A sudden gust made the paper jump about until he clenched top and bottom to try and keep it still like some town crier in an old movie, but his hands shook, nonetheless. Squinting the words into focus, Pete began. Later, someone would tell him because he asked that his voice seemed shrill and he almost shouted, though there was no need.
“DeShawn Baldwin! Star! And not just because of what he could do on a basketball court or baseball field. DeShawn was is one of those who bring light to us. His smile was the sun. Anybody who ever met DeShawn, went away feeling better about themselves. That’s real star power. And DeShawn, and DeShawn….”
Pete couldn’t read the next part because of tears. Why hadn’t he considered that? He wiped his eyes, as his speech flapped some more. He took a deep breath … and then fainted.
By the time they’d gotten him to the hospital, they realized that he didn’t really need to go to the emergency room; that Pete probably collapsed from anxiety and grief
“People do that all the time at funerals,” the nurse in the ambulance explained “Weddings, too.”
After about an hour in the ER, a nurse practitioner took his vitals, declared him fit, and they left. Dad got his Uber, Pete and Mom got theirs.
Pete decided then, on that ride home, that he needed to get away from Lenape Township forever, get away from memory, get away from ghosts.
Dad would say: “You need to do what you need to do, Pete.”
Mom would warn: “You take yourself everywhere you go.”
A week after DeShawn’s burial, the semi-final game that the team had been racing too when the truck smashed across the barrier would be played. The Wolves would roster a squad comprising the five subs in the other van who hadn’t been killed that day and a bench with JV players. The Knestburgh Knights would do the same: create a team with five substitutes (not counting their sixth man) and JV players
“The Scrub Bowl,” Pete called it
He stayed home, watching on the Lenape High School cable channel that displayed all the earmarks of rickety equipment operated by an amalgamation of teacher and student volunteers. Often, two kids from the media lab would do play-by-play, but not this time. Somebody decided that that would besmirch the ceremonial aspects of the contest. And no cheerleaders, either.
This was more than just a game.
Before it began players and coaches from both teams, as well as the refs, gathered at
mid-court, took a knee, bowed their heads. They joined hands, appeared to be praying. Then fans filtered solemnly down onto the court as well, keeping a respectful distance from the group of players who became a circle within a circle
“Look at that,” Mom said She shook her head, but no tears Pete, laying on the couch with a blanket and three pillows, figured that she must have made a decision that in order to get her child through mourning, she would have to at least fake that she no longer grieved so intensely.
Then the game began.
Over the years, Dad would call it the “Woodstock Game,” something Pete had to Google. Dad meant that if everybody in Grandpa’s generation who swore they’d attended that outdoor rock concert had actually been there, the headcount would have been half the population of the United States.
The Petersen Events Center at the University of Pittsburgh seats 12,508, something else Pete Googled. At least 10 times that amount eventually claimed to have been there to witness something special, and that wasn’t a reference to the before-game consecration.
Apparently, nobody had bothered to tell the scrubs that winning or losing didn’t really matter in light of the tragedy The game would be as close to an immortal event as high school students could fashion
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth through regulation and then the first overtime. At some point Pete got a text from a friend: “It’s on ESPN!” and Pete flicked over. But that would not be the only channel to cover it. By the end of the second overtime, more of the national media descended. And because it was a slower sports news day than even slownews-Saturday-afternoons can be filled with overseas soccer, and a smattering of golf and bowling more and more networks picked it up.
By the end of the fourth overtime, it had gone global. The kids made plays that dazzled and amazed. Three of the unknowns in that contest would go on to star in the NBA, including a Wolves freshman DeShawn had once pointed out to Pete, pronouncing: “Dude’s got game, for real.” Three of the overtimes finished on shots that tied it up in the final second.
And that’s how it ended. On the last play. Finally finally! the Knights put it away in the eighth overtime a state record for playoffs with a Hail Mary shot made at halfcourt with one second left on the clock The Wolves had been ahead by two points The Knights emerged victorious: 115 to 114
“Dagger! Dagger! Dagger!” an announcer on one of the networks shouted.
Or as a “locutor” on one of the Spanish stations yelled: “La daga! La daga! La daga!”
Afterward, the Knights dedicated the victory trophy to the Wolves.
Pete couldn’t sleep for a week, not until the shrink prescribed a heavy narcotic, which he only needed to take for a month or so.
Now, with Pete standing before the lighted memorial as midnight approaches, the wind
kicks up, rattling the leaves in the corner of the school building. No moon. No stars. No, not on this night Just black cloud cover holding off snow that could breach at any moment
Pete places his varsity letter at the foot of the memorial, laying it among the wreaths and other tributes that the maintenance crew periodically gathered They store what can be stored in some sub-subbasement in the school’s labyrinthian underbelly where unused machines rust in the dark.
The memorial includes Lenape High School’s insignia and the inscription. “In loving memory…” Then the poem “To An Athlete Dying Young,” which almost didn’t make it because it offended someone somewhere somehow. “Moment of Silence Memorial” the school board had christened the structure.
Suddenly, lights flash across Pete as if they’d been thrown by a prison tower. He turns to see another car pulling into the lot and parking next to his. Pete knows it’s Mr. Baldwin.
Why is he here now?
Pete wanted solace and solitude. He never even considered that his midnight rendezvous might have to be shared. Mr. Baldwin begins walking over. He slices the air in greeting. Pete raises his hand as if back in class, then faces the memorial again When Mr Baldwin’s footsteps close in, Pete turns
“Hi, Mr Baldwin ”
Mr. Baldwin gestures, redirecting Pete’s gaze to the memorial. They stand in silence for a moment.
“Cemetery’s closed now, of course,” Mr. Baldwin finally says. “I’ll be going there today, too. To see DeShawn. His mother.”
Pete clears his throat. He can’t think of anything to say.
“You can call me Jamar, you know.”
Pete buries his hands in his pockets, scuffs the ground.
“No, sir. I don’t think that I can do that.”
Pete never called Mr. Baldwin anything but Mr. Baldwin or “your Dad” when DeShawn lived.
“That’s all right,” Mr. Baldwin says.
More silence, then: “You’re moving away ”
“Yes, I am, Mr Baldwin ”
“How are you going to live?”
Pete’s father gave him a chunk of cash to last a year and also names to call in Philadelphia who had helped Pete find a place to live. Pete wants to write a novel, even though up until now, he would just spend an hour or so staring at a blank screen.
“Join a writer’s workshop,” his old English teacher had suggested. So that’s the plan. Pete had already paid the deposit and the first and last month’s rent on the apartment that he’d be moving into tomorrow which becomes today in a few minutes.
Dad had said: “Everybody should have a gap year.”
Mom vowed to visit often
“There’s a threat,” Dad had said, and Pete didn’t know whether to laugh, because since his parents split up, he couldn’t quite differentiate between a friendly jibe and a cloaked insult.
“Going to college?” Mr. Baldwin asked.
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Don’t know?”
“I probably will, Mr. Baldwin.”
In the sky, two distant lights scurry through the night. Planes, not exactly going in different directions but not exactly in sync either. One could be traveling north/south, the other east/west, Pete thinks. Who could tell?
He glances over at Mr. Baldwin. The pounded granite face of the old boxer had set into such a sorrowful mask that Pete starts to reach over to pat the man’s shoulder. Mr. Baldwin does a quick take and glowers at the hand. Pete buries it again in his pocket.
And that’s how Pete knows He just knows
He can almost hear the contradictory feelings battling inside Mr Baldwin One wanting to tell Pete: “It’s not your fault that you’re alive and my son isn’t ” The other saying: “I wish it was you who died in that crash and not my DeShawn.” These thoughts must be fevering for dominance in Mr. Baldwin, just as two thoughts battle inside Pete. One says: “You know, Mr. Baldwin, I wish it were me who died that day.” The other exclaims: “I live! I am alive! Thank you, God! I am alive!”
Mr. Baldwin now declares: “It’s snowing.”
Pete doesn’t see anything and wonders if he’d heard right. But then an arrogant flake plops on the end of his nose, and Pete brushes it off. Then other flakes hit him, and now it’s coming down hard.
“It’s good you’re leaving, Pete. You need to get away from this misery. I have to stay.”
Years later, somebody in Pete’s life would exclaim: “But you’re one of the most normal people I know!”
This happens right after he confesses that he battles depression and anxiety and needs to take medication Pete might, to a select few, elaborate a bit, and discuss the Lenape High School tragedy and what part he played in it Or didn’t play in it
His wife whoever she may be will know that there’s more to the story. His children whoever they may be will just accept that their daddy limps, for the doctor is wrong: It will never go away. He will teach philosophy at a university. And write.
Mr. Baldwin slaps him on the shoulder.
“Well, it’s officially DeShawn’s birthday. I’m getting before the roads ice over, Pete. Think of DeShawn every now and then, will you?”
“Yes sir.”
And after Mr Baldwin leaves, they begin to gather around the memorial Yes, they Them They first appear as a glow that becomes separate throbs of light that self-assemble Within seconds, they are there: Bently, Cuttino, Jameel, Curtis, Miles, and Bradly And there’s DeShawn.
In their uniforms looking back at Pete with curiosity. Trying to figure Pete out as Pete tries to figure them out.
Where are you? they seem to ask.
Pete shakes uncontrollably by the time he scrapes the windshield and jumps into his car. He puts his hands on the vents out of which will soon swoosh hot air. Then Pete Tillinghast drives out of the Lenape High School parking lot for the last time. He glances in the rearview, but snow hides the memorial and whoever or whatever might be lurking around it.
“Nothing’s lurking there!” he scolds himself. “It was a hallucination! Pull it together!”
He continues navigating through the treacherous night.
By Micky Shorr
1. I left my life in the valley. That chipmunk hiding in the downspout. Even the greedy woodchuck.
First back-to-Brooklyn community garden didn’t heal my longing for dirt. Dead end street broken sidewalk, rusty construction vehicles.
Devoid of trees, dusty soil hungry for worms Vehicles rumble on overhead highway Homeless people beyond the gate Feral cats inside
The lure of family brought me back to the city. Pandemic confined me to this concrete landscape. Now urban gardens rub sleep from their eyes. It’s April again; the earth and I reminiscing.
2. I miss the sweet silence. Here every day my ears are assaulted. Buses grind. Subways rattle. Ambulance howls.
In my country world the sounds were soothing. Early morning, later afternoon my garden buzzed and fluttered Back porch at midnight it rustled
In that quietest time my deepest self whispered Her wisdom. I’ve worried did I lose that forever.
3. I’ve just traded it for closeness. Warm hand in mine, baby soft, when we crossed the street. Long private walks, philosophy mingled with Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Boisterous spirit turning reserved, dignified. Coming on 13, still not one of the mean boys We snuggle on the couch with an online word game. He’s teaching me Minecraft for the “granny competition.” Hands on.
By Susan Pollet
The full moon I carry as old things pass away, the moment of impact
(A
By Gurupreet K. Khalsa
awakened from stupor, disintegration, diffracted consciousness in habit and illusion, self-pinned
to an identity staked behind the Wall of Gath when I push hard in one direction
but find myself elsewhere, mistaking light through stained glass windows as redemption, words churning
like a mass of alligators.
To comprehend paradise, make a move, lifting, diamond-like, everything.
Dreams grow: providence and a promised land Heck, the will of God, Thelema, is because I say so, deed as fruit and seed; the full moon I carry and old things pass away, never standing still.
The lord created dance steps:
flap your arms, folks, tap your toes, happy clap, knee slap, grasp the aliveness,
step through the impasse; he has been there the whole time, my lover and friend
Wall of Gath: said to be the origin of the Goliath story
Thelema: In Classical Greek, divine will, inclination, desire, or pleasure
You led me across a threshold as you lay dying, the wings that spread when your soul left its body, then settled on my shoulder I wanted to die to be with you. Later, a lightning bolt and a hundred dreams led me to my true work, gathering people for peace. As deeply as I yearned to have you back, you gave me this gift of messages and messengers, thunderous signs
Mother and Daddy told me they got you for me: sweet baby born with a bruised head.
By Caroline Cottom, PhD
You were my charge, and Mother’s, too We didn’t, couldn’t, believe we’d lost you.
Do you remember the black phoebe’s chirps, the bird we salvaged in the San Clemente Canyon, how we longed to save its life but it died in our hands before we got home? Birds, cats, my daughter, insects even I see you in every vulnerable thing.
Cathy, the world is trembling; still, it is full of light.
By Tara Zafft
In this way, I have become more dog. More senses, shake, and nerve. Ada Limon
My daughter tells me that dogs have no sense of time. That when you leave the room for them it is forever.
I have become all dog
She packs her carry-on, calls the cab. Just a week this time, and the time has been… a shoeless sunset walk on sand, warm water tickling toes, singing Rihanna, imagining her best wedding dress and all the bridesmaids she’ll have long before there is even a man on the horizon, now turning orange you seem very calm, maman she says with the French she says when feeling close and I say, yes nowhere to go but here but I risk saying, I already miss you she says of course, we smile, water in our eyes.
By Tara K. Ross
The lake is discreet in this twilight haze, with variegated light glinting off an unwary sunfish. We need this time, this reprieve from movement, and it’s as if the North is merging with our exhaustion, the air itself having little left to give. Other than the whir of late-season dragonflies, a distant loon, the scent of fire, everything holds this guarded state of waiting.
“We should have done this more,” I say to the man in front of me, the one I’ve called my more adventurous half for eighteen years now.
“Yeah We said that, didn’t we?” Rob doesn’t look back, because he doesn’t need to The sky that crimson fade he could never quite legitimize through a lens is the same shade he called my lips after a day on the greens He said that once for no reason “We’ll be back, though.” He dips his paddle slow and low through the velvet depths.
I glance to the other side of the canoe, at a smoother, gentler version of myself in the water. “Maybe.” Fighting the stoop of time, I roll my shoulders back, inhaling with purpose. “Or maybe this isn’t meant for us.”
A similar inhale first fastened us to this lake two years ago. Escaping Rob’s Navigator into the later afternoon air of Algonquin District, our youngest, Everly, had claimed we found Santa’s workshop. Our eldest, Lacey, smiled for the first time in what felt like months.
We hadn’t been this far north in over five years, since Rob’s parents moved into longterm care and life got busy. I missed the cliff-lined drive, tucked away rivers, and sleepy hamlets, so I found a reason for us to get back here for Rob, in particular. The woods slowed him down. Money and amassing became shadowed by simpler, greener things finding a meadow hidden within the pines, a bakery balanced against a lake with warm butter tarts to sweeten first kisses the types of triumphs a university boy collected to impress his city girlfriend The type I missed sometimes
Marjorie’s Maple Delights, the same board and batten bakery that held our first kiss, had been my excuse for us to come back here and revisit what we once dreamed of for our lives. The bakery had cried for a paint job, but the red-lettered sign was new, perhaps that summer. It almost overshadowed a real estate sign of the same color fastened to the railing: For Sale. By Owner.
Every aspect of that isolated bakery its reflection on the lake, the lace tablecloths protected with glass panes, that aroma that reached me in Toronto is still so vivid. “Do you remember Marjorie’s?” I ask after a time.
He sniffs the air before answering. “It smelled like Christmas. Wasn’t that what Everly said?” The holidays had always been special for our family when work, school, and sports agreed to wait for more important things. That scent of freshly cut wood, browning butter,
and a dash of cinnamon replicated two weeks of restful sleep and delights baking in the oven. This place felt special Even back then
“How could I forget it?” Rob balances his paddle across his legs He stretches tall in his seat, hands resting on his lower back, much the same way he greeted this lake two years ago He had walked until his footsteps fell silent against soft grass and he stayed that way, transfixed by the curve of the bay and swaying pines. I stood next to him, admiring the untouched fringes, the calm, the depth of breath. Rob said it felt like home a home so sparse and free compared to our paper-mache-layered life in the city. We interlaced fingers, and it was impossible to disagree. But now his words come out crowded and tense. “I’ll remember everything about this place. This is us.”
“Sorry?”
“This place. This lake.” His voice is gruffer since the smoke entered the forecast. He coughs into his elbow, his asthma acting up. “We should’ve come out sooner.”
“Well, big boss man didn’t think so. And even if Monahan agreed to flex your ”
“No, tonight, I mean.” He swats at the first mosquitos of the evening. “Aren’t you getting attacked?”
“Not with you here ” One of the early hunters lands on the stretched base of his polo shirt, near where his shingles just healed I defend his love handle with a flick of my finger “Plus, I sprayed myself when I did Everly.”
He twists to see where I flicked him, the canoe shifting with his weight, ripples traveling toward the shore. “Weren’t they watching YouTube in the truck?”
Of course, he would comment about them on a screen, despite his own intimate obsession with his phone. But now is not the time to trudge up that argument again. “Lacy was. Evy wanted to watch the sunset.” I nudge his shoulder back and pinch off the squashed remains.
“Surprised she didn’t ask to come with us.”
“She did, but I told her we needed this time. You and me.”
He nods, as though he’s speaking more to the hazy light and scorched shore than me. His shoulders rise and fall, a sigh escaping him before he swats at the air again. “I should’ve pushed Monahan sooner for the home office ” With the similar untamed spirit of Lacy, he plunges his paddle into the lake with a satisfying splash
I lift my paddle to join him, but more to keep us straight “Would it have mattered?”
“Sure it would. We could’ve had three, four good years up here. Come up before Everly started middle school. Kept Lacy from that dickhead she’s going to go straight back to now.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.” I try again. “We moved, hoping to change, but did that really happen?”
“Excuse me?” He suspends his stroke, but I don’t and the boat veers toward the shore the same place we thought should have changed everything.
By the end of our first reunion with the North, we owned Marjorie’s slice of Cooper Lake For a season, we even considered making a go with the bakery, but nine months later, an excavator demolished those fragrant walls Countless machines replaced them with our modern farmhouse, including architectural beams harvested from the green giants who obstructed our view. A new virtual marketing job for me and the buttering up of Monahan for Rob cemented our lives in the North. It was supposed to be a new start, but here we are, still in a race. A different race, but in the end much the same, still wrapped within layer upon layer of material wealth and protection.
Even that first summer, I remember stepping onto our back deck to check the weather with Lacy. The sky was dim, this new sepia tone settling over the previously verdant landscape.
“Smells campy,” Lacy said, the scent of Christmas as far gone as Marjorie’s butter tarts.
“More like a trailer park after fireworks,” I added. The smell, combined with that orange haze, set off alarms louder than any chemical booms.
According to the news, it’d been a fluke week of weather unusually strong winds, an irregular dry stretch but we knew better Rob monitored the fires like they were a direct link to his stock prices, which, given his work in pulp and paper, was fair He reassured me that, with our new HEPA filters and the best environmental scientists finding long-term solutions, I could pack away my irrational forest-burning fears right next to BPAs and microwaves. But it wasn’t as simple as buying glass containers and turning the other way. Even the girls knew that.
Lacy wanted to swim to the island that same day. With hands on hips, she listened to my excuses about the air quality, house chores, and how Dad couldn’t spot her in the canoe because of his asthma acting up. She stomped away, and I distracted myself by finding the perfect spot to hang Marjorie’s salvaged sign.
Ten minutes later, Lacy returned, banging on the deck doors from the outside, bathing suit on, drenched with water, lungs heaving. Only after racing to the dock did I realize more than lake water streamed down Lacy’s face.
From within the brush, a flurry of movement draws my attention away from the past and toward the approaching shoreline Like that day on the dock, a similar spike of cold travels down my back. I see the quills and hush Rob as we glide closer.
Rob shakes his head, like his father used to do. “Well, would you look at that?” He said the same thing when Lacy came into the world, but now it holds a darker note I’ve become too used to. “At least two of the little ones. What would you call them?”
“Small miracles,” I offer. “But technically a prickle.”
“Evy tell you that?”
“Who else?”
He reaches for his back pocket but finds it empty “We should call her Tell her to walk over ”
“Why would we do that?”
“First time I’ve seen a porcupine family.”
“Doesn’t that make you wonder? Why we’re seeing them now?” I shift in my seat. Rob does the same until we’re both looking over our shoulders. Not at our dream home, but at the darkening plume of clouds rising from the forest at the opposite end of our lake.
We stay there, caught between new life and inevitable death, unsure of what to say, how to acknowledge what we will leave behind, and whether anything will remain.
Rob finally disrupts the hush, clearing his throat. “We should get back.”
“Not yet,” I say. “I want to go around the island first.”
“In this smoke?” His voice comes out louder than even he seems to expect, and the porcupines scatter into the brush. He spins at the sound of their escape, and the boat tips until the lake almost spills in. We reach for the sides of the canoe, centering our weight until the rocking subsides “We almost pulled an Evy ”
“Almost ” I return to that day the morning I refused to let Lacy swim because of the haze and my self-imposed must-dos Everly could’ve died She wasn’t wearing a life jacket, and when the canoe flipped and Lacy didn’t see her come up for air, she came for me. I sprinted that horrible long race to the dock, both of us assuming the worst.
“Can you please put a mask on?” I say to Rob, reaching into my bag for my own.
“I’ll be fine.” Rob plunges his paddle deeper, driving us closer to the evergreens at the center of Cooper Lake. He won’t be fine, but this lesson he needs to learn himself.
“Hun, why did we move up here?” I push the words out with the same gusto as Rob’s strokes.
“Seriously? We’re going back to this?” he says.
“Seriously.” I don’t want to fight with him, not today, but maybe we aren’t seeing the world through the same filter. I need to know.
“We wanted to get away from it all.” He provides his standard answer.
“What is the all, exactly?” I keep my voice neutral, like when I referee the girls
“The hamster wheel, the high density, the smog, the noise Want me to go on?”
“If you want ”
Rob increases his speed as we approach the back side of the island, his breath audibly shortening. “We wanted that feeling … we had … when we first came … up here.”
“To Marjorie’s?”
“Yes!” Water from his paddle sprays at my face.
“But then we bulldozed that.” The clear-cutting to fit our dream home and then a boathouse to protect our smog-making Jet Skis that made one hell of a lot of noise. “And
now we’re back on that wheel,” I say, vocal restraint failing.
He starts to speak perhaps to defend his work-life unbalance but a chain of coughs comes instead, making his mighty race falter
I offer his puffer but he declines it with a wave of his hand I wait for a break in his battle for air, then say with all the tenderness he deserves. “We could have kept Marjorie’s, remember? The entire business. We could have left the hamster race and everything else behind.”
“The rat race,” he says, now reaching back for the puffer. “Hamster wheel. Rat race.” He takes two quick puffs before resuming his stroke, but with minimal exertion now.
My throat burns as I pull the boat forward for both of us, needing us to crest the edge of the island before I say anything else. “And now we’re in a different kind of race.”
In front of us lies the reason for this last paddle. The sun drifts behind us, tucked below the living trees, and the lake spreads out all around, smooth and incapable of assisting. What remains of the forest rises to the east, the blooming ashen sky lit by an earth-bounded glow. Despite the news reports and drone photos and the mandatory evacuation in effect by midnight, the air in my lungs fails me at seeing the fires firsthand
Rob is still He holds his hand behind him, open and waiting I place the mask within his reach, but he shakes his head, the mask discarded, his hand still outstretched I try again, interlacing my fingers with his, eyes burning for a different reason now. We watch our portion of the world, the same bay and swaying pines that first fastened us here, lie in wait for its finale.
“I can’t believe we had to lose this to realize what we might’ve had,” Rob speaks to the low distant rumble within the forest.
I nod and Rob doesn’t see, but he doesn’t need to.
The paddle back to the dock is quiet except for the shared rhythm of our tempered strokes and a dancing star of just-visible light guiding us through the smoke. Our girls wait at the edge of the dock, feet dangling in the water, our road trip playlist blasting from Lacy’s phone. Lake Fever by The Tragically Hip.
“Everly was getting worried,” Lacy teases, but slides an arm around her sister’s shoulders in a protective cocoon
“Did you see us almost tip?” I fight for a lighthearted tone Everly jumps up. “No! That would’ve been epic.” She follows the boat as we steer it ashore. “Next time, I’m coming to make sure it happens.” Apparently, she remembers her near death experience as nothing more than the discovery of a great hiding spot.
“Girls, I don’t know if there’ll be a next time,” Rob says with a gentle tone I’ve missed hearing.
“Why not?”
“What about the canoe?” Everly asks.
“And Marjorie’s sign?” Lacy adds, holding out her hand to help me exit the boat
There’s no concern for the layers of material comfort they are leaving behind, nor the architectural beams or skylights that fail to reveal stars tonight A left-behind canoe and an obsolete sign are all they ask about. Perhaps some of us are learning.
Rob joins us on the dock, then casts a glance at our stuffed Navigator, the double trailer holding Jet Skis, and then back to a canoe cradled on the lake. “You can’t hide under a Jet Ski, can you?” He straightens, hands on his lower back, releasing a deep exhale in a moment of urgency that shouldn’t allow for reflection. But if not now, when?
“We could still change.” I squeeze his hand before disappearing into the house. A moment later, I reemerge, clutching Marjorie’s sign. I stop before my own feet reach the grass and watch Rob and the girls fasten down our canoe, instead of a trailer crowded with our past selves.
Maybe he’s right and we will be back. This lake, at the very least, will await that transformation.
By Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb
It is a stray, faded leaf drying sepia-gold on the courtyard walk, one of many once green dropped by sleepy elms in grass nearby, carried by deep autumn wind into my random path, a simple, fallen leaf destined to disintegrate under one thoughtless step, to be transformed into pieces, then dust, but isn’t everything like that in a way? The issue here is one of beauty, whether it matters that a thing so lovely should be granted one more minute to leave its mark, so like anything, a human being, for instance, fragile and fated to end up as nothing, even though beautiful, compassionate, or kind, designed to benefit, to give someone else pleasure or comfort or an unexpected reason to be in the moment a season’s memory, albeit, by nature, fleeting
By J.I. Kleinberg
waiting for her ship to come in
By Alex Stolis
By John Grey
With winter at its bitterest, you still crave the blustery shore, for here it was that memory first surfaced, that time has kept safe for nascent board riders, inveterate body surfers, even transient sand dwellers.
No knifing wind can undo the footprints, then and now, or hold back the solitary from embracing those they once knew The sky is in place The rocks, the dunes, likewise And an amber stripe cruises the broken surface of the sea. Even the lighthouse is looking out for you.
By D.W. Davis
Jorge gave the hoist motor another thump, it felt like the thing to do, then sat down on the edge of the lift, legs dangling. Behind him, an empty floor, populated by discarded scraps of office equipment, remnants of the previous occupants. Before him, the city expanse, skyscrapers and sunlight, glass reflecting glass reflecting sky, and beyond them, bashful, the ocean. If you went high enough, Jorge knew, the ocean could not hide. He would have liked to see it now, as Davidson barked at him from the radio in something vaguely resembling Spanish, cuatro y cinco minutos, Jorge, paciente, despite the fact Jorge had only ever spoken to him in English. Forty-five more minutes and Jorge smiled and took another hit from the joint he’d been saving for his lunch break, splitting it with Arturo as they complained about the things they had to complain about. Jorge blew the smoke out into the abyss, watched as it drifted upward and vanished against the clouds His feet were numb from the lack of blood flow or the general essence of being After a moment’s reflection, in which he considered his circumstances and the alternatives wherein he could have been in any moment other than this, the moment he had expected himself to be in, uneventful but expected, comfortable Jorge decided he enjoyed this sensation of weightlessness, the closest he had ever come to rising above himself, hollow and unencumbered. Smiling assuredly, he glanced down, wondered as he always did about the people below: little specks to him here, little specks to everyone else, the world, but everything to themselves. He thought how, from up here, he seemed no different to them. It didn’t matter your position respective to everyone else; it only mattered your position respective to time and place, and in that, Jorge knew, everyone was the same.
By A.J. Tradii
I'll visit my garden this pregnant morn though in truth it's more a wildflower patch a natural masterpiece where I may catch the scent of night-blooming jasmine borne or the morning glory's unraveling scorn of itself, naive that its splendor can match that of the loveliest rose, or perhaps a heartsick thistle, confused and forlorn. Oh, to keep them in eternal spring would be a grievous arrogant thing mine is not to prune and weed
A grasp of their own inner beauty's the feed to learn and like and get to know then upon the world their gifts bestow.
By Kelly DuMar
By Patrick Trotti
The train finally crawled to a stop at the station. It was almost ninety minutes late. Chris was the first to board. Something about the click-clack of his cane catapulted him to the front of the line, even in front of the impatient passengers He sat furthest to the back of the very last car, knowing it was the closest to the bathrooms and the cafe He was able to snag a fourseater, where two seats faced his two He plopped down and tossed his bag on the seat beside him. Nobody took the other pair of seats because it was the beginning of the trip. The train lurched out of the station only about a third full. He was looking at a full twenty-four hours on board. He had two meal vouchers in his wallet and a tin of dip to get him through the time between smoke stops.
“Tickets, please,” the conductor mumbled as he approached Chris, who was absently staring out the window at the scenery passing him by. “Sir, do you have your ticket?” This question snapped Chris from his trance.
Chris looked over the young kid. He can’t be any older than I was on that fateful weekend in D.C. all those years ago, he thought before unfolding the print ticket in his hand.
“Sorry. Here you go, son,” he said in a smoke-stained voice.
Chris used to work on a steam train back in the day, a lifetime ago, back when these things were actual hard work and physical exertion Everything was manual back then, too It’s part of the reason why he chose to take the train up to Union Station in the first place: he had the money saved up for a quick flight up from Florida, sure, but a bout of nostalgia guided him on board the Amtrak instead.
“You don’t need to hand me that,” the conductor chuckled to himself, as if he were dealing with an unruly child or slow-witted person.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, everything is digital now.”
“Apparently not if I’ve got this, young man,” Chris doubled down.
“Just show me the barcode on the bottom of the ticket so I can scan it, please.”
Chris knew all about the train system. Sure, he dealt with print tickets back when he was working, but that wasn’t important. What mattered was that he’d been working the rails for longer than this barcode scanner had been alive. The conductor’s whole attitude, the gruff nature of his speech and horrible body language – it was all so amateurish and sloppy.
“Whatever you say,” Chris said through his teeth, as he had a forced smile across his face
The conductor just shook his head from side to side and continued off down the line, clicking the buttons on his gizmo like some sort of mindlessly rote talking assembly line
worker, sauntering in the middle of the widened aisle, which was much more spacious than Chris remembered it being during his days Where was the customer service, the welcoming conversation, the panache? It was all paint-by-numbers now Chris was never so glad to be retired He’d have wished for a quicker-acting fatal disease if he had to endure even one day working as this young man did. He was now six months into a two-year window. He stared down the back of the young man as he made his way through the first car, largely silent – save for a few terse remarks – until finally he pushed yet another button, opened the door, and disappeared into the next car. He couldn’t even be bothered to physically open the door to the next car, as if everything about this man’s work day was point and click. Chris wondered who’d help him if they got into an emergency, but quickly realized he’d be at the mercy of his own willpower and that it would be every man for himself. He temporarily stewed in this thought, knowing full well that he was the only person he could trust.
Chris’s reason for boarding was the cherry blossoms all lit up and in bloom in Washington. But more than that, this trip was to go see a girl from half a lifetime ago and see the life he chose not to pursue. This weekend would be about, above all else, the road not taken
The last time he was up that way he spent the best weekend of his long life with a coworker shacked up in a city hotel The echoes of that encounter still reverberated to this very day. It was the single most consequential event of his life. He had no family to speak of and most of his buddies were now dead.
He let out a deep exhale and closed his eyes, but the breath slowly morphed into a cough so deep and ugly that it produced a mouthful of phlegm, which he spat out into his handkerchief just in time before he swallowed it whole and risked choking on it. The contents were a dark shade of green with a blotch of deep crimson red dashed in for good measure, as if to remind him that death would be a slow inevitability rather than a quick and sudden surprise.
He rode without anyone being in his direct view from his seat for the entirety of the state of Florida. By the time they roared out of Jacksonville, half the train was full. It wasn’t until they passed into Georgia that someone sat in his line of vision. A young man with two big suitcases came aboard and took the four-seater across the aisle from him When the conductor quietly scanned his ticket, scribbled the letters DC in black marker on his stub and attached it to the storage compartment above him, Chris realized he’d have to look at this kid for the next twenty hours.
“He’s a real gem, eh?” Chris mumbled to the young man after the conductor continued further down the aisle.
“Charming demeanor,” the young man chuckled.
“I see you’re also headed to Union Station. Looks like we’re in for a long night. The name is Chris, pleasure to meet you.”
“Yeah, headed up there for an internship. I’m Jimmy, glad to meet you. Do you mind if I listen to my podcast? I forgot my headphones Left ‘em back at the apartment Moving out was hectic enough without forgetting a bunch of stuff Or altogether leaving other things behind on purpose Yeah, I feel like I’m leaving a part of myself back there, to be honest Four years seemed like it just flew by,” the young man trailed off.
He was unusually talkative for a stranger, although he seemed to be nice enough. There was a gentleness behind the young man’s eyes that made Chris thankful that he chose to take the seat next to him. The old man failed to realize another reason for the kid’s friendly behavior: his own approachable demeanor. He liked to think of himself as a gruff and grizzled old man, but really, he was a big softie at heart.
“I don’t mind at all but thanks for asking. To be honest, my hearing ain’t what it used to be. Afraid nothing is these days. Just a part of growing old,” Chris said as he looked away and out the window at the Georgia backwoods passing them by. “So, it sounds like you’ve had quite the upheaval. I take it you’re a new grad?”
“How’d you know?”
“You mentioned an internship and four years flying by; just put it together It’s all about listening to the details Anyone can speak but not many know how to listen anymore ”
“Yes, well, I graduated a semester early so I don’t get to officially walk with the rest of my class this coming May but it’s just as well. I finished up back in January. Figured it was easier and quicker than spending another full semester on campus. Plus, I can get an early start to my summer internship.”
“What school?”
“SCAD.”
“Excuse me?”
“Savannah College of Art and Design.”
“Major?”
“Dual major, digital communication and multimedia with a writing minor.”
“Find me a man who knows how to communicate properly and I’ll show you a man who never goes misunderstood!” Chris nodded his head as if he agreed with the point he was making as he made it
“That’s as good a reason as any I’ll have to tell my folks that one ”
“Last question for now, I promise Where are you interning?”
“I’m going to work for a congressman on his staff for the summer. Hopefully it turns into something more long-term. I’m really hoping to get into speech writing. I like to write and they love to speak so it’s a match made in heaven, right?”
“Ain’t that the truth!” Chris chuckled.
“So you visiting family up in D.C. or what?”
Chris pondered this question for a moment. For such an innocuous query, it was awfully
hard to explain. He was going to see about the woman who terminated her – their –pregnancy after their weekend together It turned out she was already in the early stages of getting engaged While Chris did nothing knowingly wrong, the torridness of the affair after the fact came into full resolution Finding her after all these years was a long shot at best, sure, but he still carried the letters with the return addresses with him to this day. He’d kept them after all these years because he simply couldn’t let that part of his life, however fleeting, go.
“A little business, a little pleasure is the reason for my trip,” Chris said.
“Well, good luck to you and let me know if you need a hand with anything,” Jimmy said with a smile. Chris nodded but the kid’s offer seemed purely symbolic.
It was early spring and unusually warm outside. The cabin was cold, though, as the recycled air was being pumped through the car right above their seats.
Chris dozed off with a mouthful of dip in. It was this tobacco that ended up waking him up a few stops later when he nearly choked on the wad as the train hit a rough patch. These operators today didn’t know the first thing about executing a smooth ride How hard could it be given all the technology at their disposal? He spit out the ball of chew right into the seat next to him and tried his best to contain his coughing fit It got so bad that the young man got up and grabbed some napkins and a cup of water from the cafe car behind them.
“I do apologize. I’m awfully embarrassed. It’s not like me to go hacking up a lung in public like this.”
“Oh please, no need for sorries. Just make sure you didn’t swallow any of that junk,” Jimmy said as he handed him the cup. “You know that stuff’ll kill ya.”
“Son, I’m afraid that’s the least of my worries,” Chris said in between sips as he hung his head solemnly. “In fact, this trip is more of a bucket list item.”
“Oh stop. You’re not that old.”
“It’s more complicated than just that,” he said with the most glum look on his face.
The kid caught this not-so-subtle exaggeration of his emotions.
“How long have you got?”
“Well it’s now a matter of months – not years – according to the doctors But what do they know? I was given two years and that was six months ago But I’m sure if I’m late with my payments he’ll give me some additional time to live,” he let out a yelp of a laugh
Jimmy laughed nervously. This man reminded him of his grandfather on his mother’s side. Most of his family was on the West Coast and he hadn’t been in touch with any of them in a while. This was the closest he’d gotten to a family interaction since he moved away to go to school. He even spent all four years of holidays and breaks on campus just to avoid them.
A woman a row in front turned and dramatically scoffed at them before putting her mask back over her eyes and going back to sleep. Chris rolled his eyes and Jimmy concurred.
“Say, why don’t we go sit in the cafe car and grab some coffee? My treat,” Jimmy said in a hushed tone
Chris took his time getting up Jimmy offered his arm but the old man shook it off, already embarrassed that he’d been given enough charity and special treatment for one day They shuffled into the next car and took a seat at one of the many empty tables. Jimmy got up and ordered two cups of coffee and came back with his hands full.
“Wasn’t sure how you took yours so I grabbed a little of everything,” Jimmy said.
“I take it black anyway.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chris asked.
“No offense, I just meant that you seem like a throwback, really old school, you know. In a way, it’s a compliment.”
“I know, it’s just a nice way of saying I’m a relic.”
“No no, it’s an honest assessment of a dignified older man. One who doesn't have any artificial enhancements to cloud his taste.”
“Keep finding something in nothing like that and you’ll do just great up there on Capitol Hill, kid,” Chris smiled
“So, do you mind if I ask what’s wrong with you?”
“Colon cancer. Inoperable at this point. Been resistant to treatment, too. Damned pesky tumors multiplied and spread to the stomach.”
“Should you really be drinking that sludge then?”
“At this point it’s all about comfort. If not, I’d only be sucking on ice chips all day and that ain’t no way to live. No sir, I’m not going out like that, at least not until the very end and only if forced to,” Chris said defiantly.
They remained seated and sipped from their hot coffees in silence. The hum of the train provided enough background noise to fill up what would’ve otherwise been considered awkward silence. They made for an odd pairing. Passengers passed by them on their way to the bar and cash register just assumed they were grandfather and grandson on a family trip together. One was on his way to start his new life and the other was going to see about the life he’d chosen not to pursue
The old man quietly relished the company He didn’t get out much anymore except to get to and from all his medical appointments or to run some errands Being so close to someone so youthful and accessible was a welcome distraction from his troubles.
Small towns continued to tick by, speeding past the train windows in a flurry. The overhead lights inside the train eventually turned off around midnight, and Chris and Jimmy each were able to catch some shut-eye for a few hours. They went back to the cafe car shortly after it opened later the next morning. The sun brightly shined through the train windows, forcing them to wake up abruptly rather than ease into the new day. The aroma of coffee and
breakfast sandwiches filled the car. Both men waited patiently for their meals. The worker served them and went back behind the counter to wait on the next guest
“Did you sleep well?” Jimmy asked
“Kid, nowadays that’s about the only thing I do well,” Chris responded
“That’s sad,” Jimmy said.
“That’s a fact.”
“How do you remain positive through it all?”
“I don’t. I remain a realist through and through. Big difference. If anything, this whole situation with my health has just reinforced my outlook.”
“But isn’t realism just a repackaged form of pessimism for those that aren’t ready to admit they’ve given up fully?”
“I’ll push back a bit and say this whole thing is merely semantics,” he said weakly before he amped up his response. “I haven’t given up, though! I’m living life. I’m here, ain’t I?
Taking trips and whatnot.”
The old man knew he’d most likely not find the woman and, at the moment, he was content with that reality He’d been prone to vast mood swings ever since his diagnosis Old age and failing health were a powerful combination, it turned out
“I’m talking about your mindset, not your actions How do you keep afloat when you know that your time is limited?”
“That’s some heady stuff, kid. But I’m afraid it’s over my paygrade. I just can’t keep dwelling on it. No, I decided once I got the diagnosis that I wouldn’t let this final chapter define my entire existence. Now, let me ask you some questions. Who are you going to work for up there?”
“A local congressman from near where I went to school. He’s a good guy.”
“No such thing up there. That place sucks the goodness and honesty out of everyone eventually.”
“He’s talking about big ideas. Real macro thinking. Painting in broad strokes about his vision for things. Hopefully I can help him drill down and get the details out there,” Jimmy said.
“So I take it you’re a real lefty, huh?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Big ideas are usually reserved for the progressives ”
“Regardless, I don’t take sides professionally. I’m nothing more than a hired gun, so to speak,” Jimmy said.
“Don’t you have a core set of beliefs?”
“Of course, but that’s personal.”
“Kid, everything is personal in my experience. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll end up falling for anything.”
“It’s not that simple. I just want to keep my personal thoughts out of my work. I don’t have to be lock step with what I’m working on It helps, but it’s not vital I can write any message succinctly, even if I don’t believe it Better to keep the emotion out of it ”
“I see what you’re saying, but always remember to keep a bit of the emotion in your writing because that’s what makes you unique. Your ability to follow directions and your hard work will get you noticed, but your personal style will make you indispensable,” Chris said. He caught himself sounding preachy. He sounded like a father figure imparting some sage-wisdom on his boy. It was moments like this that the old man wished he had a family of his own, anyone really, to hand down some of his thoughts learned over the course of his life. Instead, he was now relegated to soaking up snippets of wholesome instances shared with a stranger. This realization, while far from new since his diagnosis, led the old man back to his seat with a silent dejected air about him.
They rode in silence for the rest of the way. Their trip was lonely despite having a car full of people surrounding them. The old man was dejected and the kid was nervous and both of them were in their own heads overthinking everything.
The train eventually rumbled into the Capitol area with the grumbled groan of the Amtrak announcement over the intercom They were the first ones off the train Jimmy helped the old man carry his bag into the station Chris would’ve protested, but the kid was hell-bent on doing something nice for him.
“Well, I guess this is it, huh?” Chris said.
“You don’t have to say it like that.”
“No, I didn’t mean in general. I meant that our travels now diverge.”
“I suppose so,” Jimmy said. “Say, can you do me one more favor? Watch my bags for a moment. I just have to run to the bathroom. Thanks.”
Chris nodded and leaned up against the wall, surrounded by more bags than he could possibly carry now. He secretly wished he, himself, could run somewhere – anywhere – or at least be able to. He stood across from the bathrooms, not twenty feet from the entrance. He idly watched the line of passengers coming and going through the station.
A loud scream rang out, snapping him from his trance. It was coming from the men’s room He hobbled into the bathroom, leaving the bags unoccupied momentarily
“What’s going on in here?” he yelled out as he slowly came around the corner
When the entire room finally came into his vision, he found the kid near the far wall, up against the hand-dryers with his hands up in the air. A man was facing him with a knife. The point of the weapon gleaned under the translucent lights overhead.
“Mind your business, pal.”
“Kid, you alright?”
He nodded feverishly, hands still frozen in midair. Chris took a step toward the stranger. The guy was now flanked on both sides. He pivoted so he could have an eye on each of them
as he barked out his demands.
“Both of you gimme your wallets Now!”
Jimmy nervously went to reach into his pocket but fumbled He dropped his wallet on the dirty floor and went to pick it up but the stranger stopped him
“Kick it over slowly.”
Jimmy did as he was told. They both watched as the stranger went to bend over and scoop it up. Before he did this, Chris reached into his pocket.
“You don’t want to wait to see what I pull outta here, buster.”
“What? You're a crazy old man!” said the stranger.
“You’ve got one last second to scram before I give you one last shot – then it’ll be too late,” Chris said in his most serious voice.
He clutched his old flip phone in his pocket and aimed it at the stranger. It was just bulky enough for him to use it to bluff with.
“You wouldn’t,” the stranger scoffed.
“Is this where I say something pithy like ‘try me’?”
“Just give me the money and we’re done ”
“Can’t do it ”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“What’s the difference?” Chris asked.
Jimmy found it incomprehensible that the old man could be negotiating with an armed lunatic. Maybe the old man had some sort of death wish after all.
“About one jab of my knife is the difference,” the stranger said. His voice trembled. He was now the one on the defensive.
“Can’t get us both before we get to you, though,” Chris said, flashing a mischievous grin.
“Woah woah, I ain’t about to take one for the team!” Jimmy pleaded with the old man.
“Relax, kid. You ain’t the one he wants anymore,” Chris said, realizing that the focus of the stranger’s attention had shifted ever since he walked in.
“So, I’m supposed to let you get stabbed for my sake? Over a few bucks?”
“Out of the two of us, who’s the better pin cushion?” Chris asked rhetorically.
The stranger shook his head and went for Jimmy’s wallet, which was still on the ground
As he reached for it, Jimmy kicked it away, which caused the stranger to look down and then back up at Jimmy This gave the old man just enough time without a pair of eyes on him for him to jump into action. He wound up and kicked the stranger in the knee. It was the old man’s final big move, his last stand. The man fell onto his side and dropped the knife. Jimmy picked it up and shooed off the stranger, who hurried out of the bathroom before anyone else came in.
In the commotion, Chris had dropped his cane and nearly lost his balance completely.
“Here, I believe this is yours,” Chris handed him his wallet.
Jimmy still was holding the knife flimsily in his right hand.
“Toss the knife It doesn’t suit you,” he continued
Jimmy helped steady the old man As they walked out of the bathroom, shoulder to shoulder, Jimmy looked at the old man, who was now visibly shaken His forehead was shiny with a coat of perspiration and he was breathing heavily. The two took a seat on top of Jimmy’s luggage.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Just thought it was the right thing to do,” Chris said.
“All that was over a few bucks?”
“How does the saying go? ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Truer words have never been spoken. Always remember to never pick a fight with someone who ain’t afraid of losing,” the old man said.
“You gonna be alright?”
“I’ll be fine. That’s part of the problem, I suppose.”
They both sat there for a few minutes. One man caught his breath while the other tried to decode those final few words There was nothing left to say He’d said enough already The old man had bigger things to worry about now and the kid had a brand new chapter in his life to begin
Suddenly the old man recognized that it wasn’t important if he ever found the woman. This wasn’t about a reunion, but the fact that he’d allowed himself to even look in the first place, that he considered himself worthy of such things. Perhaps that was the real discovery in all this. And if he did find her, he was fixing to apologize for everything. But if not, he’d continue the journey towards forgiving himself.
By Larena Nellies-Ortiz
The light always shines from the same source.
The vine must change directions to grow.
Someone keeps turning the earth.
By Wayne Lee
By Katie Hughbanks
1.
By S.D. Dillon
A sapsucker hollows the limb overhead.
2.
The blue-gray crest of a belted kingfisher blows back in winds near your shore
3. Crows on dead branches; yellow goalposts against an opaque sky.
4.
The purple martin skids & skips a disk of shale with a forked tail nod of the head & the bill nicks the surface to wash down skeeters
5
Barn swallows spiral & circle where you once docked.
6.
The eyes of the tufted titmouse bead forth like buttons on a stuffed bear.
7. Seagulls skirr into the sunset.
A red-tailed hawk, chased by a smaller bird, escapes your view
9.
The cedar waxwing peered into the window as if to watch its reflection: a narcissus flower mysterious & silent as wind.
By Lydia Rae Bush
Weirdly good at breaking down, been doing it since I was seventeen, been needing to since I was three, been needing to take my time doing it, been needing to honor other people's process, been proving over and over again how many turning points a life can have, been learning more and more how big each one still is, been seeing time enough that they will never stop coming, been learning that if each right angle keeps me turning in a circle, necessarily, the original track must not have been so bad.
By Liz Jakimow
By Beth Brown Preston
Gather out of star-dust: memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights in our rented place on West 131st Street laughing and talking the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then, the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues. Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs, clippings from Ebony and Jet Folks dancing the original Charleston, the fine old step, the swing and the sway
Gather out of moon-dust:
There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms. Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow. Lessons on how to become a "real poet," while Claude McKay joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint. Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes. Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust: a time for the "new negro." For Pullman porters to unionize and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to exercise her wings of gossamer silk and satin
Music warbled from an ebony flute while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews
Was Christ Black? Do angels really play trombones for God in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten? Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed? As I gazed from the window at the skies of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night. To hear "Go Down Moses" sung in church on a Sunday morn. Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones. Daddy Grace.
By Rob Billingsley
Looking out the window of a northbound train at the racing scene,
I thought, how like our days was the fencepost haze, Friends and loved ones, like mountains rising, then fall in the distance.
A storm came up, with gathering clouds, started to rain, Darkened sky, lightning strikes on the fields nearby, Disappointment, the fading view wrenched through with unintended sighs.
On the window’s plane, my reflection appeared reversed, In that looking glass – a world near, far, approaching and passed, I merged with it all: what gazed out stared back in surprise.
Are we not the landmarks of each other’s passing lives,
Do we not become our friends, our loves, their sum, With only our fading, flashing reflections allowed to remain.
…
“We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.” Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
Winter Night Window
By Kelly DuMar
By William Cass
Friendship Manor was a skilled nursing facility for seniors located just south of San Diego in an older neighborhood that had seen better days. It had been built in the late 60s and was comprised of three single-story wings wrapped around a seldom-used courtyard. The murmur of traffic on the 805 Freeway several hundred yards away was just audible in the reception area adjacent to the intersection of Euclid Avenue and East 9th Street A taco shop and a sparsely occupied office building sat to its left, a strip mall stretched across the street, and the surrounding neighborhood consisted of small stucco homes constructed during the same midcentury era. Most of those were owned by residents of Mexican descent along with a sprinkling of Filipinos, Asians, Caucasians, and African Americans. Low chain link fences enclosed many of the yards, a good portion of which were made up of crushed rock. Statues of the Virgin Mary, bird baths, and rundown cars were prevalent housefront features.
Jack Bingham was one of the few Caucasian patients at Friendship Manor and had a courtyard-facing room at the very end of the far wing. The bed next to his was presently empty, its blue vinyl mattress leaning on box springs beside a sliding glass door. A television secured high on the wall across from the foot of Jack’s bed was never turned off and permanently played a channel of old reruns at low volume. Jack lay flat on his back propped up on pillows with the bed’s head inclined and its guard rails raised. A washcloth tucked into the loose collar of his hospital gown caught spittle that dribbled from the left corner of his mouth White stubble on his face matched that on his head, and his eyes, milky from cataracts and dementia, blinked often in some combination of confusion and consternation His daughter, Sarah, lived in L.A., and busy with her own family and job, was only able to visit sporadically. A card she’d brought the previous weekend to celebrate Jack’s 80th birthday perched crooked on his night table with an accompanying cupcake he hadn’t touched; the candle was still in it, but in spite of her encouragement and prodding, Sarah had ended up having to blow it out for him.
Just before five that Monday afternoon, Jack’s ex-wife, Evelyn, made her regular entry through the facility’s front doors, signed in, exchanged glum nods with the receptionist, and carried her insulated lunch bag down the hall to Jack’s room. Along the way, she did her best to ignore the vacant stares of patients outside doorways sitting in wheelchairs or leaning on walkers, as well as the moans emanating from rooms and the faint scent of urine masked with disinfectant.
Jack grunted when she pulled a chair to his bedside and opened the bag She arranged items from it on the lap table she adjusted close to his chest: miniature Tupperware containers
of cottage cheese, diced hard-boiled egg, cherry Jello, watermelon cubes, and a can of vanillaflavored Ensure into which she inserted a straw before holding it to his lips Jack gave it a short slurp, then regarded her with his strained, cloudy eyes and said, “Did you take Bella out?”
“Bella’s dead, Jack.” Evelyn tried to keep her voice as even as possible. “You and I buried her with her chewy bone in our backyard a long time ago.”
“She’s dead?”
Evelyn gave a short nod. “Thirty-five years.”
Jack returned his troubled gaze to the television. After she’d uncapped the containers and offered him a small spoonful of cottage cheese, he asked, “Where’s Sarah?”
“She was here a couple days ago. For your birthday.” Evelyn coaxed the spoon’s edge against his closed lips. “Here, open up.”
He did, chewed slowly, swallowed with effort, then said, “Sarah was here?”
“Saturday for your birthday.” With her fingertip, she gently tipped his chin towards the night table. “See your card and cupcake?”
“What are those for?”
“Your 80th birthday ”
Evelyn sighed as she watched him frown, then turn back towards the television She thought about her weekly phone conversation the evening before with their daughter. Sarah had said Jack barely recognized or acknowledged her during the visit. Her voice caught as she told Evelyn that the charge nurse had stopped her on her way out to explain that his decline was accelerating and it might be time to initiate a palliative care consult. For months, Jack had refused any and all meals that the facility provided and said he’d only eat “Evelyn’s cold plates.” In a desperate attempt to provide him with minimal nourishment, Sarah had cajoled her mother into preparing a facsimile of that meal – the items he could still manage to swallow – and make the daily half-hour drive to feed it to him: a man she’d divorced bitterly twenty years earlier after finally enduring enough of his frequent infidelities.
Evelyn tried a bit of Jello next, tapping the spoon against Jack’s lips until he finally accepted a morsel. She wiped away some of his drool while he chewed, watched him grimace as he swallowed, then tried again with a cube of watermelon She was startled by a frantic cry from the room across the hall Dim gunfire spurted sporadically from the western playing on the television A pair of hummingbirds hovered in the descending light outside the slider, their wings beating rapidly in a blur of motion. Jack hacked up a wad of yellowish phlegm onto his washcloth. Evelyn squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.
Mitsuru sat on a webbed folding chair on his narrow backyard patio. Even though it was only
a little past five, the marine layer had already begun to disperse, giving way to gathering dark clouds He pulled his cardigan closer against the chill and sipped at a cup of Sencha green tea that had grown tepid He looked beyond his back fence where he’d first seen Ernesto a dozen years earlier as he painted the back wall of the office building next to Friendship Manor It was a long wall requiring significant initial prep that had taken over a week to complete. Ernesto was a short, compact man with the remains of a repaired harelip who always wore the same paint-spattered white coveralls. Without fail, he began work at first light and never finished until well into the evening. Mitsuru would regard him each morning before leaving for his tailoring and alterations shop and again later while washing his dinner dishes at the kitchen sink.
After his third evening observing Ernesto at work, Mitsuru stretched cellophane over a paper plate of the leftover yakisoba he’d just eaten, reheated it in the microwave, took a bottle of water out of the fridge, and carried both to the back fence along with a plastic fork and napkin. Ernesto stood directly across from him facing the wall and patching a crack with a putty knife.
“Excuse me,” Mitsuru said
Ernesto turned his way, the putty knife suspended like a baton The red stitch of his harelip and his gentle eyes stood out in the twilight
“You work very hard,” Mitsuru told him. He extended the plate and bottle. “It’s late, past suppertime. I brought you this.”
Less than a yard separated them. Ernesto looked from Mitsuru’s face to the items in his hands and back. He said, “That’s very kind.”
“Here.”
Ernesto pocketed the putty knife and took the meal. They stood looking at each other for a long moment before Ernesto smiled and said, “Thank you.”
Mitsuru felt something in him stir at the warmth in that smile, something that suggested this stranger across from him was a person who could be a friend. He waited another handful of seconds before turning and walking back to his house. He flipped off the kitchen ceiling light, but before going through to the hallway, he saw Ernesto still standing where he’d been, holding the plate, napkin, and fork in one hand with the water bottle in the other, smiling quietly at the back of the house
They repeated the same choreography for the next three evenings until, after thanking Mitsuru for his meal on the last of those, Ernesto asked, “What’s your name?”
“Mitsuru.”
“I’m Ernesto.”
They nodded slowly at each other. A dog barked in a yard nearby, and the sound of scratchy Mariachi music played on a radio several houses away. Mitsuru watched Ernesto slip the water bottle he’d given him into his coveralls pocket and reach out a hand, his warm smile
never leaving his lips. They shook. Mitsuru gave a final nod before returning to his house. When he got home from work the next afternoon, he found the wall’s painting complete and Ernesto nowhere to be seen; Mitsuru wasn’t sure if he’d relocated to a different portion of the building or had moved on somewhere else entirely
Mitsuru never saw Ernesto again until twelve years later during the defense attorney’s closing argument for a criminal court case on which he’d been chosen as a juror. The case involved a young man who had been charged with driving his car while under the influence of marijuana. He’d been pulled over after rolling through a stop sign after midnight in an area popular with nightclubs and bars. After he was stopped, the officer smelled a strong odor of burnt marijuana inside the car and observed the defendant brushing off flakes of what appeared to be grinded weed from the bottom of his shirt. When asked if he’d been smoking cannabis recently, the defendant admitted that he had “about an hour ago.” He subsequently failed every field sobriety test. Additionally, his red, glazed eyes had been dilated to seven millimeters, his pulse was extremely elevated, and his speech and responses were consistently slow and delayed.
A toxicologist also testified that results from the defendant’s blood draw were more than double the THC levels for moderate cannabis ingestion, which in her professional judgment clearly indicated the inability to safely operate a motor vehicle The young man’s defense attorney maintained that his difficulties during the field sobriety tests were due to anxiousness caused by the arresting officer’s intimidating manner and that the toxicologist’s testimony was irrelevant because there was as yet no acceptable measure for THC impairment like there was for alcohol.
The attorney was emphasizing this last point at the lectern when Mitsuru saw Ernesto silently let himself in through the courtroom’s closed doors. He’d lost some hair and gained a bit of weight over the ensuing years, but the distinctive scar above his lip was clearly visible, and he was dressed in what seemed to be the same paint-spattered white coveralls. He sat immediately behind the defendant, reached over the railing, and squeezed his shoulder. The young man turned and they exchanged quick, hopeful smiles. Their unmistakable resemblance was so striking that Ernesto felt his breath catch. Ernesto’s eyes traveled from the defense attorney to the jury box where they slowly scanned each juror When they came to Mitsuru’s, they stopped and held in recognition until Mitsuru looked down at his feet He hardly heard the attorney’s final words or the judge’s instructions before the jury was sent to begin deliberations.
When those began that Monday afternoon, it was already almost four, so the jurors only had time to elect a foreperson and start to review evidence from the notes they’d all been taking. Mitsuru said nothing, and although that discussion lasted less than a half-hour before they were excused for the day, other jurors’ comments made it clear that the overriding sentiment was that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
But having seen Ernesto enter the courtroom and the silent exchanges that occurred between father, son, and himself, Mitsuru wasn’t sure he could vote that way Recalling their previous encounters over the fence at which he now stared made that seem even less certain, especially when he remembered Ernesto’s smile there in the gloaming that was almost identical to the one he’d given his son a couple hours before. In spite of the dropping temperature, Mitsuru felt a bloom of sweat spread up from his shoulder blades to his ears.
Daniel had enlisted in the Navy after three semesters of community college. When he finished basic training, he was assigned to a squadron at North Island Naval Air Station across the bay bridge from San Diego where he trained as a helicopter mechanic. He met Aisha, an E-1 who worked as an electronics technician, during his second week there after she sat down across from him in the crowded mess hall. She’d been living on base for almost a year and offered to show him around. They went bowling that night, began dating regularly afterwards, and eight months later, were combining their Basic Allowance for Housing to live together in a little rental bungalow they found a few blocks from Friendship Manor Following separate six-month deployments, Daniel proposed to Aisha by slipping a ring she lifted out of a nearly empty bag of Scrabble tiles when it was her last turn to draw replacements as they were finishing a game; she upset the board squealing with delight. Afterwards, they quickly arranged for a New Year’s Eve wedding at the base chapel; Aisha’s sister sent her the mauve, strapless wedding dress she’d worn herself which, happily, fit perfectly.
In addition to their shared biracial backgrounds, Daniel was drawn to Aisha by her calm, even demeanor, as well as an earnest solidity that reminded him of the older women in his Midwestern family. He was far more timid, hesitant, and reserved by nature, so he wasn’t completely sure what it was about him that attracted her. Their life together centered around simple pleasures and routines: fixing basic meals, taking long walks through the neighborhood, playing board games, watching television. Neither of them cared much about drinking or partying like so many of the other young recruits they knew That was why Daniel was surprised when Aisha told him some girlfriends on base were taking her to Las Vegas for a long weekend for her bachelorette party; he was completely uninterested in any sort of bachelor outing for himself.
While she was gone, Daniel reorganized the garage, as well as several closets and shelves. He planted some herbs in an old washtub he’d found in the garage rafters. He cooked, watched TV, and took walks alone. He went to bed early and waited for sleep to come. From his spot on the couch, his heart gave a little leap of joy and relief late that Monday afternoon when he finally heard Aisha clatter through the front door with her rolling suitcase.
She entered the living room, dropped the suitcase’s handle, grinned, and said, “Hey, you ”
Daniel hurried over and wrapped her in a hug that lifted her off her feet He heard her bark a laugh at the same moment his palm slipped across the gauze covering the length of her collarbone. He set her down, stepped back, separated the top of her jacket, and said, “What’s that?”
Her head tilted, a glint in her eye. She said, “Surprise.”
“Are you all right?”
“Never better.” Her lips curled into a mischievous smile.
He felt his eyebrows knit. “So, what’s the bandage all about?”
Her eyes danced between his and the clear tape she began to slowly peel away from the gauze. Eventually, the top and sides came free, and she dropped the flap so it dangled against her blouse. A blue-black image of a snake winding itself around a branch stretched from one edge of Aisha’s collarbone to the other; the skin of it was slightly swollen with a red-inflamed edge. The snake’s eyes bore a similar dancing-like quality to Aisha’s but looked angry rather than delighted like hers A purple, forked tongue darted from the snake’s mouth
Daniel’s own eyes had widened and his mouth hung agape He heard himself say, “You got a tattoo ”
“Do you like it?”
His heart fell as abruptly as it had quickened. He swallowed. “I don’t really know what to say.” He hoped the look he gave her wasn’t as imploring as it felt. “It will be there for everyone to see with your wedding dress. Like a beacon.”
“That’s the idea, yes.”
“Under almost anything you wear… forever.” He watched her smile stiffen. “I mean, what possessed you?”
She shrugged. “I’ve always found them beautiful. Tattoos. Always imagined having one.” She touched the top of the snake. “Now I do.”
Daniel fought not to shake his head. Unbidden, he thought: Who is this woman? He was only vaguely aware of the soft tumble of thunder rolling in from the eastern foothills. He thought: What else don’t I know about her?
Angelo and Sofia had recently retired after selling the little Filipino restaurant they’d run together on East Plaza Boulevard for forty years. There had been a period of time when their son, Gabriel, was young that they’d hoped he might take over the business someday. But that notion quickly passed during Gabriel’s early school years when his academic successes began to accumulate and it became clear he was destined for bigger things. He’d gone off to UC
Berkeley on scholarship, married his boyfriend, Mike, shortly after they graduated, and moved to the East Bay with the baby girl they adopted from China three years later They both worked for a start-up company pioneering driverless delivery vehicles
Angelo and Sofia lived roughly halfway between the restaurant and Friendship Manor on a quiet cul-de-sac. Angelo was proud of the roses he kept carefully pruned along the front fence among a variety of drought-tolerant succulents. After Gabriel married and began his family, Angelo started transforming the cramped backyard into a space he hoped they would enjoy on their infrequent visits, the next of which was long-awaited and set to begin that night. He laid artificial turf, built a picnic table he placed under the single pepper tree for the occasional shade it provided, hung a birdhouse from a low branch, bought a plastic pool for their granddaughter to use if the weather was warm enough, and tended to the vegetable and flower garden in a back corner. The visit had been on their calendar for quite a while, and Angelo had timed his planting so that sunflowers would be in bloom, as well as strawberries and bibb lettuce ready to pick when they arrived. Sofia had carefully put together a gift-bag for their granddaughter that included coloring books, crayons, puzzles, bottles of bubbles, and wax paper-wrapped Ube Pastillas, the traditional homemade Filipino candy that Gabriel had loved as a small boy
Angelo knelt on the turf assembling the pool late on that Monday afternoon while Sofia prepared lumpia for dinner; neither of them felt confident driving in the dark anymore, so Gabriel and his family planned to Uber the short distance from the airport after their plane landed later that evening. Angelo worked to finish the pool assembly with the good smells of Sofia’s cooking coming through the screen door from the kitchen and allowed himself to luxuriate over the possibilities of the approaching visit: trips to the zoo and beach, walks to the playground where they used to take Gabriel at their granddaughter’s age, a big birthday celebration they were all invited to at a cousin’s house. He tasted the hint of rain before he heard the first rumble of thunder. When he glanced up, the clouds had become bruisecolored.
From inside the house, Angelo heard Sofia’s muffled voice answer their ringing phone. Several moments later, she appeared in the open back doorway, her hands clenching the ties of her apron She looked at him with her mouth in a thin, tight line
“What is it?” he asked
“They aren’t coming ”
“What?”
“They’re all sick with the flu. Mike can’t even get out of bed.”
Angelo lowered himself onto his haunches. His shoulders slumped, and his mouth mirrored hers. Very lightly, it began to rain.
“Come inside,” Sofia said.
Angelo regarded the screwdriver in his hand and the pool parts scattered around him. He
nodded and heard the screen door clap shut behind her. He forced himself to gather tools and parts and slide them under the picnic table The rain fell harder, even though a streak of sun remained low in the sky over the shipyards to the west
Linda and Grace shared an office just off the reception area at the front of Friendship Manor. Linda was the facility’s program director and Grace its social worker. Their desks faced opposite walls; Linda’s held a photo of her husband, Denny, and their three young children, while Grace, who lived alone, had a snapshot of her cat tacked to a corkboard over hers. They were both in their late-thirties, had been colleagues for nearly a decade, and occasionally got together socially outside of work.
Grace heard Linda mutter, “Shucks.”
When she swiveled around, Grace found Linda staring at her cell phone’s screen. She asked, “Something wrong?”
Linda shrugged and looked outside into the rain “Adam isn’t coming in His car broke down on the side of the freeway on his way here ”
Adam was the new part-time rec therapist who worked evenings and coordinated afterdinner activities bingo, cards, sing-alongs for patients who could be persuaded into participating. He worked from 5:30 – 8:00 and had been on staff for two months. Grace had noticed that Linda began wearing more make-up and dressing a bit more suggestively shortly after he started; she also seemed to find unnecessary reasons to interact with him. Grace wondered why he’d called Linda’s cell rather than the facility’s line.
“Lousy weather for a breakdown,” she said.
Linda mumbled, “Yeah.”
“You know, for a new hire, you seem to be showing a lot of interest in him.”
Linda shrugged again, her eyes remaining on the window. Grace watched a flush spread across her cheeks, and felt something fall inside. She asked, “How’s Denny?”
“Oh.” A beat passed. “You know…fine.”
A low shaft of sunlight made its way through the dissipating rain and lit tiny lines at the corners of Linda’s lips
Grace said, “The kids?”
“Same.” Linda suddenly spun in her chair, stood, and lifted her work bag from the floor. “Better go post a notice canceling Monday night bridge. See you tomorrow.”
Grace nodded, but Linda didn’t look her way. After she’d hurried out of the office, Grace regarded the photo on Linda’s desk; she’d always dreamed of having a husband and children of her own, but that seemed less and less likely with each passing day. She gathered her own belongings, left the office, and pushed through Friendship Manor’s front doors. The
rain had halted entirely, the setting sun widening like a diffused cloak, and a partial rainbow had appeared in the western sky Grace stopped at the edge of the drop-off circle to admire it
Evelyn pushed through the doors with her lunch bag, paused beside Grace, and they gazed up together at the streaked arches of color
“Beautiful,” the older woman whispered.
“It is,” Grace agreed.
The crisp, late afternoon air had a clean, washed feel to it. From under the eaves of his patio, Mitsuru looked at the rainbow as well. Daniel and Aisha had wandered out onto their front step to do the same; Aisha reached over and took his hand, and he squeezed back. Angelo called Sofia to the screen door where they watched it unfold above their backyard, and when she began to cry, he put his arm around her.
A siren wound off across town. Droplets trembled, then loosened from leaves and overhangs. Gradually, the light fell, and the sun sank below the clutter of telephone wires, buildings, and treetops. Almost grudgingly, it seemed, the rainbow finally faded until all that was left was a vast charcoal sky with the many souls below it doing their best to navigate this dance called life
By Michael L. Butkovich
By Steve Denehan
Santa Luzia is a small village in Portugal pitched as quaint and picturesque and not a tourist trap it became obvious quickly that the people had no English none at all, and besides, olá (hello) obrigado (thank you) and adeus (goodbye) I had no Portuguese the streets were tight and cobbled at sunset old men and women would emerge carrying old wooden chairs to sit outside their homes smoking and talking quieting, only when I walked past
I found a spot beyond the harbour away from everything from everyone I made my way to it most evenings to taste the warm sea air to look at the reflected sky quiver to feel less alone
By Christopher Woods
By Taylor Graham
In misty moonglade, Great Horned Owl called from the near distance first I’ve heard since you passed. Dawn’s hazy dim lightened into morning gray as star-thistle tarnished silver. Queen Anne’s lace and tarweed past their bloom. Dog and I are on the same trail we walked the day before you left us.
So many changes A morning’s meditation, finding my lone self without you but in spirit. How our long past shadows me, bound to every footstep as we move on.
We’re in midst of woods-dark, canopies of live-oak bending over trail. The down-slope side’s a deep green mystery, yellowing leaf-lanterns casting no light. The trail bends east, climbing. Low sun glimmers ahead through overcast, brightens just enough to throw shadows. Mine is dim, imprecise, lagging behind but still with me – sharpening as we walk, sun rising straight in my eyes.
By Ruth Ticktin
In the valley showing me gardens around her home
Mother walks carefully and identifies in awe:
See, crowns of flowering pink dogwood on the hillside petals from the yellow lilies below slowly falling watch the road that is piney complex hemlock we are surrounded by faculties of mountain laurel
On the island climbing a hill behind her home
My mother-in-law urges me to soak in the view:
Look, white sprouts purple plants at our feet ahead vibrating sea, tan sand, green shrubs reach on red wildflowers and yellow standing up blue skies shining all the ways down to our water
Both women accept my help in the kitchen and garden believe in the basics and blessings of home and land allocate mesmerizing time as labor’s rewards make chores integral to life caring and loving
Accept and believe in their faith seems isolating Create and assign time for their own, sounds selfish
Rural farm mother or island market mama speaking in archaic pronouns or lilting dialects women find meaning in life despite bedlam managing to swallow angst anew again
By Susan L. Pollet
The sky and sea in unearthly gradations of blues and grays
The light so special the painters made sure to spend time there
Ancient walls and street doors with melted iron knockers inviting a return to a paradise where Picasso worked his magic
Hard to be blue there as the friendly people in this southern town smiled and beckoned in their multi-ethnic ways with food, art, craft and markets
Basketfuls of beauty shining in sunlight tempered by a gentle age-old soothing breeze
By Sean Ewing
after Joe Bainard
By Tim Staley
I remember in my brother’s headlock me saying I can’t breathe and him saying if you couldn’t breathe you couldn’t say you couldn’t breathe
I remember my dad’s health food store: gummy Coca-Cola bottles, gummy loafers root beer flavored gummy worms
gummy glasses a poser chocolate called carob and Orangina, a sparkling orange juice in lightbulb-shaped bottles.
I remember my brother returning from his earlobe reduction surgery gauze bandages around his head and me being whisked to the Donahue’s because dad hadn’t given permission for this elective surgery and there was to be a fight.
I remember laying on my Siberian husky Nikki and him biting my eyebrow and dad from the blood running down my face fainting behind the sofa.
I remember dad fainting for no reason and me being whisked to this downtown arcade in a run-down two-story with an Atari in every dimly lit room and unfamiliar children sprawled on hardwood floors, wired controllers in their hands.
I remember an elder telling bible stories under a tree at church and this girl telling me how her boyfriend kissed her how he ran his fingers through her hair and she modeled the move with her own hand in her own hair
I remember going to a church camp with Phil Huey and his Baptist people and when we got to Gulf Shores the ocean was closed, and a Black woman from the camp told me she was married to a white dude and how for that the South treats her rude.
I remember stealing “gold” from the bottom right desk drawer in the church office at Vacation Bible School Just common feldspar spray painted gold but still you could trade it for cupcakes bracelets chocolate milk.
I remember a landscaping step breaking my arm at Space Camp Level 2. When I came back from the ER this blond astronaut-to-be was on my bunk, kicked up feet, reading my Far Side as if I were dead
I remember one Easter telling my mom I wish I’d never been born and our relationship resetting the next morning.
I remember kissing Patricia, Diet Coke on her breath little pearls of salt in the fuzzy trough of her upper lip.
I remember shoplifting a blue Sheaffer pen from the drugstore to give dad for his birthday and a septic stick from the drugstore to give him for Christmas and how my stomach felt each time he said thank you.
I remember 5th grade parents had to sign graded assignments so in the sewer I stuffed my Ds and Fs so my parents would only see my successes.
I remember the little room of greasy fingerprints on mirrors under the stage at Chuck E. Cheese.
I remember my brothers hanging me on a doorknob by my tighty-whities my legs too short to touch the ground a perpetual gravity wedgie.
I remember reading, age 13, the Hite Report Nationwide Study of Sexuality on my brother’s shelf in New Orleans with female masturbation vignettes set in tubs of running water.
I remember asking God to move a little piece of white fluff from one side of my pillow to the other and He did!
I remember Fun in the Son Church Camp in Myrtle Beach where I accepted Jesus into my heart, and I wonder is He still in there? Like a wood frog on the shore of Lake Superior with frozen lungs, breathing through skin.
By Jeri Lewis Edwards
An unusually cold or gray day - even
rainy Sundays are best. A language specific to us on our walks in the woods, just me and my dogs.
8 am, the forest brims with a deluge of want.
Strange sounds emanate from misshapen trees, limbs become broken fingers, leaves, immaculate tongues, chipped bark, lost teeth. Birds and other animals are hunkered down, just me and my dogs
The dogs run in circles, zigging in front, zagging behind, whisking straight up the track and in reverse, quickly taking on a feral appearance, happily matted with shards of paper birch, pine needles, indescribably orange fungi that hang like ornaments off flanks and ribs.
Down and up and around the twists we go, aiming towards anything, spending all day out there when we can, sometimes dripping in mud and sand, sometimes returning to the vehicle with only a pencil
stub of light in the winter sky, looking to begin all of this again tomorrow
It’s the taller one, only six years old, her white fur pulverized by rain, muck, sweat. She holds her gaze on me, dense like the understory, layers of devotion.
She lingers longer now, pushes herself to keep up.
How do I dispel my craving for what isn’t?
Again and again the agony that cancer is taking her Taking. Her.
Nothing is next except the night comes.
Bedded down we become a family of deer, our red blanket, a pocked depression, a sweet artifice suspended.
Even when she’s gone, I know
I’ll lean over to where her warm body completed the space, and whisper, it was good, wasn’t it?
By Larena Nellies-Ortiz
By Daun Daemon
itty, kitty.” Kate held out the paper plate with one hand and beckoned with the other.
The fluffy orange tom sat motionless well beyond Kate’s reach, near the hollies on the ridge over the busy Raleigh boulevard. He looked like a tattered stuffed animal, loved until his plush was matted and soiled Perhaps he had been thrown out like an unwanted toy, something that her cat-saving best friend, Marcella, had told her people did when they tired of pets
“C’mon, Clockwork.”
Clockwork curled his tail tight around his toes, against the chilly November wind.
Marcella had said, You can’t force a feral to accept you, Kate. They make you earn their trust.
Kate set down the plate, knowing that when she walked toward the gas station down the hill Clockwork would slink to the food, then gobble it up while watching her move away.
She called him Clockwork because he appeared at precisely 5:45 every day when she fed him after work. If she came early, she had to wait for him to emerge from the holly bushes. If she was late, she missed him. He would walk to the hill’s crest and sit for exactly five minutes, said Marvin, the man who allowed her to park at his gas station, and then the cat dissolved into the bushes. Clockwork. Such a tight schedule.
The other cats Kate fed lived in a derelict warehouse beyond the railroad tracks behind the gas station Clockwork likely splintered off from that colony, possibly trying to draw away some of the females She wouldn’t have known about him if Marvin hadn’t asked her why she didn’t feed that ginger cat The first day she saw Clockwork, he was skinny and starving but aloof At first, he wouldn’t go near the plate until she was out of sight The wellfed cats in the colony seemed eager for their food, milling about anxiously at several yards’ distance while Kate dumped the contents of cans and bags on the ground. As soon as she crossed the tracks, the cats 23 at last count swarmed the food.
She started tending the colony in September when Marcella was on her second round of chemotherapy for metastatic ovarian cancer. Kate, whose only pet had been a headstrong beagle that died 20 years ago, grudgingly agreed to the feedings until Marcella recovered. Which didn’t happen.
Marcella had begged Kate to feed the cats every day. Every single day. What could Kate say? Sorry, when you die, they’ll have to starve? She didn’t understand why Marcella asked her and not one of the other feral feeders. Others in the network called Kate, offering to help, but she declined. Caring for the cats was a gift, the fulfillment of a dying wish.
Feeding the colony would be part of her job, a task she had to complete before the workday’s end, with Saturdays and Sundays as overtime Get up, eat breakfast, get dressed,
go to her desk job at the university, work, eat lunch alone, work, leave, feed cats, go home. She hoped every day’s sameness would bring comfort
For six years, Marcella had a cat of her own, a handsome mackerel tabby named Spartacus. Marcella’s only family some cousins and an aunt lived in Oregon and didn’t want to fly Spartacus there from North Carolina. Like Kate, Marcella had been an only child of parents who had married very late and then quickly produced one baby. Kate and Marcella had known each other since college, remaining best friends as boyfriends and, in Marcella’s case, very briefly, a husband had wandered through their lives.
Now Kate was responsible for Spartacus. Like many men she had known, the cat wanted more than she offered. Kate lived in her parents’ house, in a neighborhood of World War II era cottages one street over from a busy intersection. She didn’t let Spartacus outside for fear he would be hit by a car or traumatized by drunken college students from the university. In Marcella’s neighborhood next to a city nature park, Spartacus had known the taste of bird blood and chipmunk guts
Every day, Kate battled him at the door After turning the key in the lock, Kate would place her foot at the door and push it open slowly. “Back, back, back!” She used her sternest voice and waggled her foot in Spartacus’ face. He protested with grunts and hisses.
Kate expected that, in time, Spartacus would accept his fate and stop trying to escape.
Kate had introduced herself to Marvin the first day she fed the cats. He was courteous and helpful, explaining how Marcella often left cat food in his storage shed and filled her water bottles at the station. He offered the same to Kate, but she declined, telling him that keeping everything in her car’s trunk would be easier. Mostly, she didn’t want to muster the energy for conversation. She usually waved at him, fed the cats, and left.
Today, her car was running low on gas Like most people whizzing by on the boulevard, Kate usually pulled into one of the brightly lit mega-stations Marvin’s station was small yet tidy, with a two-bay garage It was a relic, Kate thought, of an era when people knew their gas station attendants by name.
Marvin himself seemed a relic. She figured he was at least 70, yet often saw him on a dolly under cars, changing oil or checking leaks. This evening, he was reading a newspaper at his desk, twinkling Christmas lights in the big glass window acting as a merry frame.
Kate lifted the gas nozzle.
“Kate, hold on there!” Marvin jogged out. “I’ll do that.”
“Thanks, Marvin. Really, I can do this myself.” But Kate stepped back and let Marvin pump
“How are the cats?”
“They seem fine None missing No newcomers ” Kate fidgeted with her wallet “Good.”
Marvin finished pumping in silence. Kate handed him a couple of twenties and followed him into the station. She looked around the small room while he worked the cash register. A beautifully matted and framed photograph on the wall behind him showed a younger Marvin with a petite brunette and a handsome teenage boy.
“Your family?” Kate asked, nodding at the photo.
“Yep, about 20 years ago.”
He handed her the change she was due. “Your wife is lovely. Your son looks just like her, especially those big eyes.”
“Well, Billy is the spit image of Claudine. She died a few years after that picture was taken. Melanoma.”
“Oh ” Kate cringed at the mention of cancer “Does your son live nearby?”
“Billy moved out to Colorado after college Got married, had a couple of little girls ”
Marvin handed her the receipt and leaned on the counter “You still have Marcella’s pet cat?”
“Yeah. Spartacus. He’s a pain. I’m not used to sharing my space, especially with a nervous cat that throws up his gourmet cat glop.” Kate stopped herself. Why was she talking to Marvin as if he were a friend? “He’s probably expecting his food. Guess I’d better go!”
She turned away and hurried to her car. She could sense Marvin watching, and she felt ashamed for being so short with him.
I learned long ago not to name them, Marcella told Kate. You’ll become too attached, then find one dead on the boulevard. You won’t have lost a cat. You’ll have lost a friend, someone you always count on showing up for you
Kate hadn’t believed Marcella wasn’t attached to the cats, though she knew Marcella referred to them only by their markings: “tuxedo cat” or “petite calico ” So when she Kate found “brown tiger with mittens” crushed on the busy road, she had scraped up the bloody, furry mess herself because calling the city would raise suspicion, which Marcella had also warned her against.
Never call city government, Marcella commanded three days before she died. She clutched at Kate’s hand on the stiff hospital sheet. Don’t give anyone a reason to exterminate the colony. Those assholes downtown are always looking for some reason to feel they’ve rid the
world of pestilence or nuisance, some reason to feel powerful and in control They know nothing about compassion
Kate did She didn’t tell Marcella about “brown tiger ” Or that “skinny white cat” was now missing an eye She told her the colony was healthy
A couple of days later, she even told Marcella about Clockwork, though she hadn’t named him yet. That happened very naturally two weeks later, the name just popping out of Kate’s mouth at the office when she described the feral to a coworker. When she told Marcella about the cat, she called him “fluffy orange boy.”
“He showed up yesterday,” Kate said while she cradled Marcella’s unmoving hand in hers.
She reached over and stroked her friend’s sunken cheek.
“Last night, I got out of my car at the gas station, and Marvin told me that a ginger cat had appeared up the hill. A ‘ginger cat’? Can you believe someone like Marvin came up with that? So I looked. ‘Fluffy orange boy’ is matted and dirty. I don’t know where he came from.”
She paused.
“I guess I’ll feed him too I don’t suppose he’ll ever join the colony So that’s two food deliveries to make He’s just one cat and within walking distance from the colony Should I feed him where I found him or try to coax him farther down the tracks?”
She knew Marcella wouldn’t answer, but she waited anyway. The clock on Marcella’s bedside table marked another minute gone by. Then another.
“Maybe I’ll try to trap him, clean him up. I think I can find the trap in your garage. Maybe I’ll take him home and introduce him to Spartacus. Maybe they’ll become best buddies. Maybe … ”
The sound of her own enthusiasm quieted her. She watched the minutes go by.
Kate was right about Spartacus. By spring, he had given up his determination to escape. When she unlocked the front door, he disappeared into the unlit house.
Spartacus spent his hours sleeping, not the enviable sleep of oblivious cats, but a sleep of the doomed, eyes half opened and dull When he roused, he did so sluggishly, and he was losing weight Kate tempted him with canned tuna, deli turkey, even sardines, which she despised. He rejected every offering. He would munch a bit of kibble, lick his right paw a few times, swipe at his muzzle before slinking under the sofa.
She tried to lure him out with toys “guaranteed to give cats hours of fun,” but they succeeded only in humiliating him. If she found him sitting in the open, she flicked feathers on rods at him, tossed brightly colored mice his way. He would slink under the sofa. She bounced jingly balls and trailed twine through the room. Under the sofa.
Occasionally, he allowed her to reach down and scratch his neck. Sometimes she pulled him onto her lap and rubbed the top of his head After a few strokes, he jumped off and slid under the sofa
In February, a purr slid loose while he was on her lap At last, he was going to let her love him! She cooed baby talk nonsense at him. He looked up at her and stopped, the paw that had started to knead her blue jeans slackened.
I’m not Marcella, she thought. He knows I will never be Marcella.
“It’s OK, Spartacus. I can take care of you.” But her voice wasn’t convincing, and the cat moved forward on her legs.
Kate held him down, willing him to understand. “Please.”
Spartacus flattened his ears and growled, a threatening gurgle deep in his throat. Why wouldn’t he forget Marcella?
“I miss her too, you stupid cat,” she yelled at him, shoving him off her lap and sending him flying to the carpet. He landed chin first and rolled at a painful angle into the coffee table. He scrambled under the sofa.
Kate threw herself to the carpet and screamed at the now furiously hissing cat “You think I don’t miss her too? You’re not the only one who wants her back! I hate you, you stupid cat!”
She reached under the sofa and yanked his tail, but he dug his claws into the carpet, yowling and spitting and finally raking her flesh.
Kate let go but didn’t yelp or pull her hand away. She froze, horrified at herself, and stared at the equally horrified cat. His eyes were black holes of animal suffering.
Never force a cat to do anything it doesn’t want to do. Kindness and patience will draw the cat to you. People who get off on trying to break an animal’s will make me sick.
“Spartacus,” Kate whispered.
He growled, licked nervously, and turned away.
For the next month, she saw him only in the window at the end of the day. He came out to eat and use the litter box either when she wasn’t home or when she slept. He was due to visit the veterinarian in a few weeks, and Kate decided that she would ask the doctor to find Spartacus a new home Perhaps someone else could make him happy Perhaps someone else could be more like Marcella
More than flowers had burst forth this April. At the warehouse, Kate saw kittens frolicking everywhere, kittens that vanished the moment the adults caught her scent.
Kate wasn’t prepared to deal with kittens, mostly because Marcella had trapped the adults, had them spayed or neutered, and released them. When she got sick, Marcella had
only enough energy to feed the cats, and several new ones showed up, fertile and frisky. Kate wasn’t sure what to do about the kittens, so she bought more food, lugged around more jugs of water, and spent more time feeding the colony every night
None of them moved down the tracks to keep company with Clockwork, who now allowed Kate to approach within just a few feet. If she came too close, he turned his head to the side. If she persisted, he dissolved into the bushes.
One unseasonably warm evening, Marvin called to her as she got out of her car. “The ginger cat still by himself?”
“Yes, unfortunately.” She unloaded a large bag of cheap kibble from the trunk.
“I tried to make friends with him once, early on. He didn’t take to me. Some cats’ll trust a woman but not a man.”
Kate nodded.
“I reckon he’s the kind that won’t let nobody get close.” Marvin smiled. “Too bad. He’s a good-looking cat.”
“Yeah, he’s a handsome guy. Maybe one day we’ll see some orange kittens in the colony, then we’ll know what he really does when we aren’t looking ”
She lugged the bag of food and jugs of water across the railroad tracks to the warehouse, fed and watered the colony, and headed home to Spartacus
Spartacus wasn’t in the window. Kate sat in the car and stared at a rip in the window’s screen. A droplet of sweat rolled from her hairline to her temple. She wiped it with her fingertips.
Last night had been so warm that she had opened a few windows to let in the perfume of Carolina jessamine and the sounds of night birds.
This morning she had been running late for work and had forgotten to shut the front window, the window now with a cat-sized hole in its screen.
“Spartacus,” she whispered.
Her stomach clenched, but Kate felt oddly calm, relieved. She wouldn’t have to feel like a prison warden in her own house anymore She wouldn’t have to leave out food and scoop the litter box for a phantom She wouldn’t have to face the veterinarian and endure the look of disappointment the woman was sure to give her, as if to say, How could you give away your dead friend’s beloved pet? But this was an honest accident. People lost pets all the time, and others felt sorry for them.
She didn’t know what to do next, so she sat in her car and looked at her house. The cloud of yellow jessamine shimmered in the early evening, the cotton candy pink azaleas at the foundation were in peak bloom, the Japanese maple arched gracefully next to the sidewalk. She took it all in her charming cottage, her neatly landscaped yard, her tidy life.
It was all she needed. She didn’t need a cat. Any cats at all.
Eventually, in the fading light, she went inside, ran water into Spartacus’s bowl and dumped kibble onto a dish She set these on her front porch and shut the door
Before going to bed, she closed the front window and latched it because the weather forecast called for cooler days and a prolonged period of rain.
For three days, the dishes remained untouched on her front porch. On the fourth morning, Kate dumped the contents down the garbage disposal and threw away the dishes. She had no need for plastic bowls decorated with orange fish.
She was also done with the feral colony and Clockwork. She hadn’t been back to the warehouse or the gas station in a week. Instead, she had called the gas station in the middle of that first sleepless night and left Marvin a message: “Please feed Clockwork and the other cats if you can. I can’t continue.”
Now she stood at her front window on a Saturday afternoon, watching rain wash pollen down the street into sickly yellow rivers and wondering when it would end The rain had started the day she threw away the dishes, and it hadn’t stopped since The air was chilly, the days were gray and wet, and the red tulips in a planter out back had closed tightly in on themselves. This was spring in North Carolina, what should be a glorious time of warm sunshine and a vibrant new green world. With this weather, she thought as she watched a drenched neighbor walking his sodden collie, you’d think she had moved to Oregon.
Oregon. The Willamette Valley. Though Marcella had moved away more than twenty years ago to attend college here, she had always spoken so dreamily of the place. Rain, yes. Grayness, yes. But, oh, Kate, when the clouds roll away over the Cascades and you first glimpse the snow on Mt. Hood in late spring, the sight will fill your soul with the deepest comfort. That sturdy mountain capped by such startling whiteness has been there the entire time, just above the clouds. You only had to believe in it to get through the mucky days of winter. I’ll show you someday. We’ll visit in the summer when all the flowers bloom and the wineries are open. We’ll
Her cell phone startled her She checked the living room clock 5:03 Only Marcella had ever called her on a Saturday evening, so she let it go to voicemail She finally listened to the message an hour later:
“This is Dee Hines, a nurse at WakeMed, calling on behalf of Marvin Drum He was admitted yesterday after collapsing at his gas station. The doctors say from exhaustion and dehydration. He’s doing fine but is too tired to talk on the phone. He asked that I tell you to see about the cats. He said something about people trapping them, but I didn’t completely understand. I hope this makes sense. If you want to talk to Mr. Drum, call the hospital’s main
number and ask for room 3423 Have a good evening ”
The nurse didn’t hang up right away, and Kate could hear the vague sounds of hospital activity She was beginning to feel the old queasiness coming on when the nurse’s words finally sank in
The cats! Who would trap the cats?
The city, Kate The city will trap them in an instant if they have a reason You won’t be able to get them back.
She grabbed her car keys and threw on a rain slicker. She had to go to the gas station, but she’d be damned if she would go back to that hospital again. She could call Marvin later.
She ran through the downpour, slipping in the mud. “Cats! Cats!” she yelled. How could she call them without names? But she kept on until she was hoarse, until she knew the cats weren’t hiding from her, weren’t just mad because she had neglected them, until she knew they were gone “Cats Please ”
How did they do it? How did the city so quickly capture more than 40 wild cats and kittens?
Clockwork.
Kate stumbled down the railroad tracks to the holly bushes in the now pounding rain.
“Clockwork! Kitty, kitty, kitty…Clockwork!” Soaked by a downpour that surely even Oregonians would hate, she felt like the only person who ever knew a grief this wet and constant.
Then she saw the trap set just outside Clockwork’s bushes, baited with what had been a can of tuna. The jerks forgot to cover it with a tarp, and the food had washed completely away. Perhaps Clockwork had even eaten the flakes of fish off the ground, but he hadn’t gone into the trap.
“Idiots!” she shouted. “You wonderful idiots!”
She grabbed the trap with both hands, slid to the edge of the bank and hurled the thing to the boulevard below It bounced down the hill, losing its door along the way, and landed on end just outside the white line at the lane’s edge
A sound, small but clear, cut through the rain Again
It’s always a good sign when one talks to you It means you ’ ve won him over
Thank you, Marcella, Kate thought.
When she saw Clockwork, she knew she would eventually take him home. He was a slick stick of orange cat fur, and he wanted to be fed. Kate looked at her watch: 5:45 on the dot. She slogged to the car, pulled out the bag of kibble she hadn’t yet thrown away, and took it up the hill. She sat on the ground, not caring about the mud, and watched Clockwork. He
was less than five feet away from her now, but wary. He ate with gusto, eyeing her the entire time When he was done, he stretched leisurely, first his front half and then his back, meowed in her direction one more time, and melted into the bushes
Kate remembered something else Marcella had told her, something she had always thought funny but that now seemed like a beacon.
When one gives you a quick rubbing against your leg, a run-by grooving, you ’ ve made a friend. That doesn’t happen much, but when it does you can eventually get that cat and find it a home.
Kate smiled. She couldn’t wait for that day.
As she left the gas station, Kate decided that Marcella would want her to track down the cats, which meant asking Marvin what happened, which really meant that she should go to the hospital. On the way there, and to distract herself, she fantasized about finding the colony. The cats and kittens would be safe in a compound, sleeping nuzzled against each other in a big happy mound of fur. The place would be clean, and the cats would have soft bedding. They would be warm and dry, and a kind-hearted shelter worker would talk to them and find them all loving homes
That’s why shelters existed, and that was how they worked They didn’t just automatically gas the animals anymore, did they?
Did they?
For once, Marcella’s voice was silent.
Soaked and muddy, Kate stood in the hospital’s lobby, closed her eyes, and willed her heart to slow down. Nothing here had changed, of course it still looked and smelled like a hospital. The hardest part would be stepping off the elevator onto a too-bright hall and entering a room where someone she cared about lay hurting.
She took a slow breath, opened her eyes, and headed for the elevator. For Marcella. No, for Marvin.
“Kate!” Marvin seemed overjoyed to see her “Come sit down ” He pointed to a chair by the bed
“How are you feeling, Marvin?” Kate reached for his hand but stopped herself The reflex still hadn’t gone away.
“Oh, I’m dandy. I just need to rest up. A man my age shouldn’t drag himself under cars, so the doctors say.”
Kate smiled. “Thanks for having the nurse call me. I … I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make your life harder.”
“No, Kate, I’m the one that’s sorry. I tried and tried to tell those people from Operation
Barnyard that somebody was tending the cats, but they wouldn’t listen. The warehouse is going up for sale, and the owners called that rescue group Said that if they didn’t get the cats in the next couple days, they’d call the city I guess you got to give them credit for letting the kind people have first shot at it ”
Operation Barnyard? Kate thought. What had Marcella said about that group? They do good work, usually They take the cats to farms to be barn cats My beef with them is that they don’t neuter the cats first and they don’t follow up to make sure the cats get food to supplement the mouse diet. But I suppose sleeping in a big barn on hay beats the risks of city life.
“Kate?” Marvin reached for her hand. “Kate, you all right?”
She was weeping now, freely and fully. She could barely see Marvin through the tears, could barely feel herself throw her arms around him and hug him.
Marvin cleared his throat. “Well now.”
Kate pulled away but left her hand on Marvin’s right shoulder. “What about the gas station? Will you close it down?
“Oh no. My cousin in Charlotte is going to come over for a while and stay with me, manage the station He’ll hire somebody to do the real work, though He doesn’t like to get his fingernails dirty ”
“I’m glad you have someone to help,” Kate said, pulling her hand away “I should go home and get cleaned up.”
“Oh, Kate,” Marvin said as she turned to leave. “How about that ginger cat? They get him too?”
“No, Marvin, they didn’t.” Kate felt the exuberance anew. “They didn’t outsmart Clockwork. He was there, as usual, at 5:45.”
“So you’ll have to feed him still?”
“For a while, at least, until I can get him to trust me. Then maybe I can take him home.” Kate stopped at the door and turned back to smile at Marvin. “I’ll call you tomorrow and check on you.”
Well, Marcella, looks like you left me more than an obligation, Kate thought She sat in her car in the hospital parking lot and watched the day grow dark The rain had lightened to a soft spring shower, and people walked about without umbrellas
You left me a friend.
She realized now why Marcella hadn’t asked anyone else to tend the cats or called Operation Barnyard. Marcella knew that Kate had no great love for animals. For all those years they were friends, she hadn’t pushed Kate to help her with the cats. But she knew she was dying and would never return to the warehouse. She had faith Kate would.
Sometimes a cat will disappear, just vanish. I trust it has moved on to someplace safer or
has died without suffering The loss is real, and I’ll miss that cat until it sinks in that I have so many others to tend to The ones right in front of you, Kate, they’re the ones that matter
Kate drove home, windshield wipers on intermittent, headlights burning She decided to call Operation Barnyard on Monday and ask where they took the colony so she could make a sneaky drive-by. She’d tell the rescue folks not to trap Clockwork, and she would apologize for wrecking their trap. She could give them Marcella’s, once she had dug it out of storage and used it to fetch Clockwork. She might never see those other cats again, but she had to believe they would be safe.
She pulled into her driveway.
The headlights of her car shone directly on him. He was wet and dirty; his face was crosshatched with battle wounds. He sat perfectly erect and still on her porch, his black and silver tail curled tightly around his paws. Though she couldn’t hear him, could only see his mouth open and shut weakly, she was certain Spartacus was calling her home.
By Sean Ewing
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