Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal — VOLUME THREE

F E A R S O M E C R iI T T E R S

Volume

3

a millennial arts journal

F E A R S O M E C R I T T E R S VOLUME 3

2020 Editor-in-Chief Korbin Jones

Editor of Fiction Nino Cipri

Editor of Nonfiction Merkin Karr

Editor of Poetry Kelley Lewis

Editor of Visual Art Lucia Iglesias

Content Assistants

Marisa Lucas, Kim Sternberg, Angel Etima Ette-Umoh Copyright 2020 Fearsome Critters All rights reserved

TABLE OF CONTENTS Fiction

Alex Atkinson Bolts 124 Amita Basu Sanctuary 92 Latifa Chafik Red Lips 140 Gina Elbert Goodbye, Getrude 30 Ren Ellis Recycled 83 Life 86 Tara Fritz Coming Out of the Water 51 Desmond Everest Fuller Sawtooth 130 Yaki Margulies If the Shoe Fits 138 Kacie Prologo Sandy 20 Cathy Watness Liar, Liar 68 Kylie Westerlind BIGGEST LITTLE 102

Nonfiction

Brittany J. Barron Runaways 87 A Photograph, Taken at Christmas 90 D.S. Davis Eating Away at Me 141 Ifeoluwa Falola Our Heroes Must Wear Capes 80 Ana Hein City of Locks 26 Brenna Lakeson She 144 Chad Lutz Worst Comes to Best in San Francisco 47 Cameron Miller 32 Reasons Flaxseed is Going To Steal Your Girl 77 Civilized Company 102 Sudarsan Rauta Ecstasy 17 Yuliia Vereta The best writing tip 136 Megan Wildhood I Wasn’t Lying About the Fire 60

Poetry

Victor About Early Spring/Late Winter 41 Leah Baker Bull 9

Brittany J. Barron Let Me Stay 16

I Meditated with a Stranger in Asheville, North Carolina 107 M. Christine Benner Dixon On the balance 23 Scott Branson so much feeding happens off one carcass 19 Kendall Brunson Hunger in the Convent 84 Elizabeth Chamberlain boil rice, braise greens, fry chicken 103 Jason B. Crawford i am black like all things black 9 Caitlin Curtis Suicide Traffic 27 Tempo 41 Sean William Dever the sickness doesn’t grow 41 diabetic as supernova 45 Marina Fec Wolf 79 Hunt 128 Rich Glinnen Ten Year (Old) Reunion 112 Laura Hoffman Detonate & Disassociate 27 Consensual Virgin 85 Rosanna Jimenez Like a Real Woman 66 Frances Koziar The Man with the Shirt 57 Andrea Laws Fortune of a Medical Forecast 121 Albert Lee 日暮里 [Nippori] 22 田畑 [Tabata] 23 John Leonard Alone With St. Joseph 18 Giovanni Mangiante People 9 Papier-mâché man 18 No hope whatsoever 44 Siobhan Manrique Radial Cracks 101 Vanessa Marie Bryan Wanted Space 59

I Woke Up to a Photo of Your Dick 84

I Saw Your Engagement Photos on Facebook 89 Midnight Conversation in a Parked Subaru 91 Something Blue 107 Emma Ogilvie Bodies 65 Jenny Qi A Kind of Flattery 44

we will die beautifully in the way of stars 58 Sometimes I remember 65 Seat 23A 85 Psalm 89

Andrea Reisenauer existential 41 Table Talk 121 The song that goes like this 129 Why my Hogwarts letter never arrived 133 E. Samples Rerun & Blues 134 Matt Schroeder You will Never go Without 50 Benny Sisson DADDY DAUGHTER DANCE 23 John Stewart Spin Cycle 44 Disha Trivedi Hunger 78 But where are you 101 Sarah Valeika Lithuania: My Grandmother’s Reflections, 2019 90 Tina Vorreyer Questions from “A Happy Little Accident” 65 The Meeting 117

Scripts

Derek Anderson LOOP 10 A. J. Bermudez Orphea 73

Visual Art

Paula Camacho Cradle 122 Temple 123 Katelyn Cartwright Dripping in Stars - 3 88 Dripping in Stars - 2 91 Linh Dao Gaze - 2 78 Gaze - 3 79 Gaze - 1 82 Amanda Leemis Emotion Noir - Bellatrix 108 Emotion Noir - Tommy 108 Emotion Noir - Philip 109 Emotion Noir - Scream 109 Anna Martin rathe 8 redivivus 16 fresh from the spine 17 aeipathy 19 cagastric 21

Ni Petrov Man_City: Series - 1 28 Man_City: Series - 2 29 Man_City: Series - 3 30 Mercury Marvin Sunderland Mess of Jimis 137 Jesus the Cat and the Carrots 139 Emma Sywyj Man Painting in China 57 Amelia Wysocki Oma the Barbarian Fae - 3 142 Oma the Barbarian Fae - 2 143 Oma the Barbarian Fae - 1 145 Jiawei Zhao Movie Clip #1 at the Governor Theater 49 Academic institutions are temporal to us?

58 What is a Chinatown 59 We are thrown down here 64 Dragon (nine framed photographs) 67

Hybrid Works

Emily Barker r/deepthoughts 24 RiRi gets it 24 Road works 24 Dysentery 24 Graves 25 M. Christine Benner Dixon Other Species 76 Sarah Firth Your Reason 42 Jeff Hersch A Warning to the Mind - 1 40 A Warning to the Mind - 2 43 America Online 46 Sam Moore “Just don’t kill me” 110 Valley Girls 113 Two Slow Dancers 118 Kathy Nguyen Always Waiting 1

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”— Ida B. Wells

Always Waiting

Relistening to nhạc Việt Nam1 always brings me back to a time when my parents, particularly my mother, culturally maintained my siblings and me by regulating what types of music we could listen to. Nhạc Việt Nam occupied a large space in the house with the gentle yet purposeful slow vibrations of chordophones or the breezy wooden flute sounds serving as overtures in an otherwise quietly guarded house. The textures of those sounds, sometimes dramatic, sometimes providing a sense of hopefulness, sometimes creating a metrical combination of dichotomous words. But when listening to the music’s flow, it always fluctuated between connotations and ambiance, inevitably creating tensions and instability in our family when only one type of music and sounds that defined our parents’ life. Whether in an open space or behind closed doors, it was not difficult to observe the looks of resignation and years of suppressed historical fatigue on our parents’ stilled faces as they carefully listened to each nốt nhạc.2 With ears comfortable to the sounds of the hums of quê hương3, or quê nhà4, nhạc Việt Nam evoked a past that reverberated well into their present. These very sounds, as beautiful and tragically poignant as they are, sometimes suffocated me at night in my own familiar home.

Though Vietnamese with some Chinese heritage on our father’s side, we didn’t speak in Mandarin. Our tongues immediately assimilated to the Southern Vietnamese accent since birth, ears recognizing the steady lilts of our parents’ tongue; the only language that they fluently and contentedly communicated in, recognized, and understood. Vietnamese is a beautiful, poetic language, entangled with such metaphors and colloquialisms; my mother’s tone is brassy, a sonic contrast from my father’s soft, calm intonations; their Vietnamese remained smooth, steady in articulation while my own grasp of Vietnamese remains languid,

insecure, and intermittently shaky depending on who I’m conversing with.

And yet we were allowed to listen to Cantonese and Mandarin pop songs because we were fans of the wuxia genre5, particularly fight scenes that included the martial arts legends: the Shaw Brothers’ Venom Mob from the 1970s and 1980s. Brutal and gruesome duels to the death, yet brilliantly fluid choregraphed scenes appeared on an otherwise plain tubed television screen, projecting abstract, fantastical, and sometimes illogical with both archaic worldviews, but it was the juxtaposition between violence and beautiful melodies and singing that somehow defied the logic of violence. The evenly paced rhythms that hum evocatively, that echo off screen became the ultimate reason I often prefer Chinese love ballads, even if I never understood the context or story behind the song; a language that we never spoke and were unable to decrypt became aural preferences. The joy is/was in the catchy hooks and ostinatos. The inability to understand the context and subtext can’t hurt you.

Ignorance is painless until the sensation becomes palpable whenever it erupts, destabilizing that musical rhapsody that we heard but couldn’t comprehend.

Raised in a country where the second language in the house becomes the dominant language outside of the secure spaces of a home becomes a warring conflict as tongues clashed, as my Americanized Vietnamese tongue materialized, causing divergences and collisions, breaking the solid rhythms of the language we used as a form of familial verbal communication, with English steadily dominating the nouns and verbs that I often used in Vietnamese. The day I used the vague English version of you rather than anh to address my older brother was perhaps the singular moment where my mother knew that language carries an inescapable in-betweenness that’s difficult to reconcile. My parents were always speaking in fluid Vietnamese, allowing our tongues to become more in tune and in sync with their dialetitcal patterns. Yet, English loomed over them like a dominant power, pervasive and quite omnipotent, relying on our tongues’ capability to becoming their interpreters and translators, further constructing another barrier

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Kathy Nguyen

Tình đẹp là tình bơ vơ Beautiful love is lonely Chờ người đến bao giờ...?

How long can a person wait?

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Vietnamese music.

Music note.

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Homeland.

Home.

Hong Kong martial arts film and television series.

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between us/them. Language placed a distance between us and our siblings; multiple occurrences frequently happened where my parents awkwardly stood or sat down in-between an authority figure while we spoke for them. No one wants to be spoken for when multiple voices want to be heard. There were instances wherein I saw myself as an unreliable narrator/translator when these memories resurfaced, but I could be identified as a Vietnamese American with English words forming as it became difficult to balance two languages. Tongues hardened when words become scrambled, riddled in contradicting conjugations and translations became more difficult with each passing day.

Any form of American music, regardless of genre or the safe teen bops by the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, or Britney Spears, who all once, during a fleeting cultural era of dominating TRL countdowns, were forbidden in the off-white walls that have been blemished by time, unpainted due to exhausted working schedules and often collapsing from overworking with a minimum hourly pay.

Back when television networks didn’t conform to propagating reality shows, competing for dominance and ratings and falsely equating how competition shows were a shortcut to achieving the American. VH1, a channel that used to focus solely on music, was one of my favorite channels to turn to, watching old and new music videos. Pop-Up Video remains a favorite childhood show for me, where I sat down on a worn brown couch to watch the encyclopedic pop-up bubbles with brief background information, almost analogous to an interactive PowerPoint presentation, overloading my curious mind with pop culture factoids. My parents complained that those were times wasted, but it was a time when I thought I got to temporarily experience a form of American childhood, watching popular programs, regardless of how minute that time was. While I did get to experience partial sounds that defined the 90s, it was difficult not to compare how Western music became timeless discographies while some aged out­­— some aging very badly—­­­­while the present musicscape capitalizes on nostalgia to move forward. I don’t know much about music, selectively watching the same music video replays my sisters often watched and listening to the catchy tunes of whatever was on constant airplay.

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Restrictions came with cultural maintenance. Days were spent secretly listening to the top airplay singles on the radio; sometimes the parents just had to accept that they couldn’t control the radio. There was a time when my brother hid his first Tupac CD that he somehow covertly purchased when he didn’t even have his license yet. My sister had a small collection of cassette tapes that hazardously piled on a cheap pink shelf nailed onto the wall, ranging from the Spice Girls to Britney Spears to the Titanic soundtrack I remembered purchasing for her as a birthday gift after weeks of saving my allowance, and other artists who dominated the 90s musicscape.

Our auditory systems were heightened, thrilled by lyrics and the catchy basic beats of sounds forbidden in the secure, comforting confinements of our house became a different listening experience as familiar and recognized phrases became sources of comfort as opposed to the poetic imagery framed in nhạc Việt Nam. If you didn’t understand, you simply weren’t fluent enough, which outsiders will question your level of Asianness, or in our case, how authentic our Vietnamese identities were.

Having never purchased any form of Western music for myself during my childhood, I do remember fondly listening to Savage Garden, an Australian duo, perhaps best known for their ballad, “Truly Madly Deeply,” during the height of the 90s love songs’ playlist. As I relistened to my favorite track of theirs after experiencing an unfathomable yearning to listen to past filled with regulated, forbidden childhood sounds. “To the Moon and Back,” a surprisingly dark song from a duo that often recorded very saccharine love ballads, evidence of alienation and pain were reflected in the lyrics: “She can’t remember a time when she felt needed / If love was red then she was color-blind / All her friends, they’ve been tried for treason / And crimes that were never defined.” Colorblind. Treason. Undefined crimes. Themes that tragically remain as common refrains in this very socio-political climate and discourse. Just hearing the words, undefined crimes, conjures several images of marginalized communities in the United States being criminalized for their skin color. Even if I’m listening to the lyrics out of context, questions continue to arise: who gets tried for treason for undefined crimes? Why is colorblind unrecognized and undefined when crimes are based on color?

Darren Hayes, the duo’s vocalist, continues to sing “She’s saying, love is like a barren place / And reaching out for human faith is / Is like a journey I just don’t have a map for.” Raised from parents who became hardened by life due to their survival, and perhaps not a clearly defined sense of directions, intensified by circumstances and factors, I never understood but resented them for as I inevitably inherited their own detachment and cynicism marred by their exile and geographical distance where time doesn’t move for them. Their concept of time was never becoming synchronized with the passage of time winded by others, but they constantly forced themselves to move forward without allotted time for themselves to heal and to process, resituating themselves in a new world that xenophobically dehumanizes people of color, immigrants, and refugees, creating harmful separations and distances by constructing borders and fences between us/them, keeping them/us out as they wait to live like humans and not as people whose freedom of movement have been violently restricted. My parents were always moving, tirelessly, never stopping, to survive. My mother remains moving, never at a standstill, moving from there until waiting for an elsewhere. “Thì cũng phải tiếp tục sống,”6 my mother sometimes gently says, her tone drawing on a softer inflection than her normal loud voice. She repeated this statement every few years as if reminding herself about the reality of this society.

Perhaps for my mother, sounds of movements are a reflection of her survival and her needs for us to survive, but at the same time she continues to look back as she moves forward. Stepping back, moving forward, going ahead, regressing in steps; they all seem like variable moving flows that are often rife with cacophonous missteps. Her loudness marks her survival while her quiet tenors sometimes reveal her trauma.

But cultural beats could always be heard and discerned; it was difficult not to notice the defining differences between Vietnamese music and Western music and the stories behind them. Vietnamese music was a sound of stillness, unmoving, sometimes unprogressive, and repetitive. Hooks remained the same, refrains sounded familiar, but for Ba and Má 7, Vietnamese 6 7

music was historical sounds and artifacts of their existence and life prior to becoming refugees. As they waited to listen, to return to the times they were familiar with as they continued waiting to live like accepted and recognized citizen. Continuing to sometimes cautiously listen to American music, as children, my siblings and I also awaited a time about having a conversation with Ba and Má about our hyphenated identity with displaced, faraway roots that have yet to be recovered.

Though sounds remained alive through YouTube and nostalgic airplays, cassettes were a relic of the past that became expendable and discarded for something more favorably advanced. That included the continually changing preference in music as we comparatively decide which songs have become outdated artifacts of an era we were once a part of, but those, too, became a distant memory, waiting to rematerialize after multiple passages of time.

I think for most children with parents who are refugees, music becomes a difficult negotiation and segue between two cultures, two languages, and two conflicting sounds where points of commonalities between notes and tones become difficult to thread. Playlists become a source for cultural and generational clashes.

Linguistic indoctrination is a living norm in the United States where fluency determines opportunities.

Vietnamese was the language to be spoken at home, but in a world built with exclusive walls, English was the indoctrinated language that protected us and legitimized us as natural born citizens. The distant American Dream, which metamorphosized into recurrent nightmares for my parents, became closer. I recognize that the American Dream is a frequent theme when writing and speaking about refugees and im/migrants. In his interview with The Nation, Viet Thanh Nguyen tells Jon Wiener that the American Dream is “the immigrant idea,” noting that there is a difference between immigrants and refugees.

Immigrants may “fit” into the American landscape because, as Nguyen asserts, America is a “nation of immigrants.” There may be spaces for them; however,

We still have to continue living.

Father, Mother.

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there are no geographical spaces for refugees. Stories of refugees do not fit the American mold.

What is the American Dream for refugees? For my parents, both who escaped Việt Nam due to the communist takeover in 1975, a conversation which remains a contesting point within the Vietnamese community, there was no dream but a desire to survive, with a daughter who was born a few years before the war ended and too young to retain any of the historical and political atrocities. Without a doubt, this conversation prompts a sensitive series of questions and ideas about war, history and identity, and will become a part of an inter-generational inheritance where we have to reconcile our renegotiations of our family’s ideologies and involvement of the Việt Nam War. Sometimes intrusive and opening up my mother’s unhealed wounds, I once asked my mother about her American Dream. In an unsteady voice, she once replied, “Má nằm mơ thấy Chị Hai, Anh Ba.”8 They never made it and they would never know what the American Dream was; their deaths often left my mother awake at night, experiencing nightmares more than falling into a dream realm. As a person born and made in America—something Viet Thanh Nguyen often ruminates about in his writing—I could never clearly articulate what the American Dream is to myself and to my parents; there’s really no living proof of anyone who achieved it without being vilified for taking over American-made jobs or being a victim of racism and xenophobic rhetoric. Alive or dead, I think that some of us don’t even know what the American Dream is or what it entails and what it means to live in a country where dreams are fenced and bordered, driving people away. All of which involve waiting and then being forcibly removed. I would think the American Dream is an illusion, shattered, to unveil a nightmare filled with hostility and violence. The cost of achieving the American Dream is a simultaneous action and inaction: to always wait, whether waiting for legal documents, waiting to be reunited with family, or waiting to be treated as humans.

Speaking in English became a partial mode for survival for us, and yet at home, some of us are being surveilled at home to oblige our parents and their

precarious allegiance to their birth country, honoring our cultural traditions became overwhelming with a spirit and autonomy diminished by forced burden, while simultaneously confining ourselves to whatever. The weight became unbearable as monosyllables sparred with multi-syllable rhymes.

Even with the company of coworkers and the accompaniment of silvery rusted machines’ droning, my parents combatted loneliness and their irritation by American music that were unable to identify with, by listening to nhạc Việt Nam or cải lương9; lyrical words that told their stories that are muted and foreign to American outsiders, but voluble within the confinements of our house and my parents’ friends’ houses, and in local phở restaurants where both nhạc vàng and nhạc trẻ10—a genre that my parents weren’t particularly fond of, citing generational differences in musical preferences— were always playing, welcoming Vietnamese customers in a way that provided a significant source of comfort for my parents. In our family, Vietnamese music was the ultimate bias, undying and never truly aging out, remaining in its familiar sounds of diasporic yearning.

Like an unchanging melody that couldn’t possibly be surpassed from initial recordings or altered in its original compositions, Vietnamese music for Ba was a living constant. It was an immutable form that continued to sound off, reigniting memories of a revised history and a neglected historical peril of the plight of war refugees and survivors. Perhaps to maintain and preserve the Vietnamese language in the house, nhạc vàng Việt Nam11, Vietnamese diasporic music, became a constant sound to re-member, refamiliarize, and retain. For my parents, who are refugees, to be displaced into a foreign country while simultaneously being labeled as foreigners invading spaces and benefits that should be entitled to naturalborn American citizens and not someone who fled or migrated due to circumstance. Familiar Vietnamese songs unwaveringly flowed from the bedroom to the living room. Constant, lingering sounds of the diaspora that were inescapable. Multiple classic sound/tracks that I can remember the words to, singing in an unpleasantly tone-deaf rhythm that made my parents cover their ears,

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I see your sister and brother in my dreams.

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Reformed theatre.

Young music.

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Vietnamese yellow music.

Vietnamese singer.

blandly informing me that I had no future of becoming the next ca sĩ Việt Nam.12 I knew my strengths and was equally aware of my weaknesses: I could never make it as a Vietnamese singer. Besides the realization of never becoming a singer, the tragically yet fondly harmonizing stories prewar were focal conversational topics between my parents, especially my father, whose life was, at times, encompassed by Vietnamese music.

Nights when it’s quiet and I’m attempting to write, sometimes in memory of my father and his stories that he used to repeatedly re-tell, I listen to nhạc thu âm trước 197513, for both nostalgia and to remember my own conflicting feelings about Vietnamese music, as I wait for ineffable reasons. Old cassette tapes and CDs that were re-recorded and re-released to maintain the crackling sounds of Vietnamese yellow music that once belonged to my father remain in a box; a few times when I return to my mother’s house, I listen to them, but on nights where yowling cats and voices that ricochet due to thin walls accompany me on quiet nights, I selectively listen to the Vietnamese singers my parents, mostly my father, listened to, inheriting his musical preference. It’s difficult to singularly describe nhạc Việt Nam; it’s very encompassing, compiled with a range of ballad, romance, tragic love songs, war songs, and other synonymous compositions.

I think most Vietnamese parents have specific musical preferences, desiring to relisten to singers that will remain as immortal historical figures of pre-1975

nhạc Việt Nam: Thanh Thúy, Mai Lệ Huyền, Thanh Tuyền, Phương Dung, Hoàng Oanh, Hương Lan, Thiên Trang, Duy Khánh, Trần Thiện Thanh, Chế Linh, Hùng Cường, Trung Chỉnh. This isn’t half of the list of singers who defined nhạc vàng, but these are some of the many singers

I grew up listening to or watched on the many VHS tapes and DVD collections my parents purchased from Asia Entertainment, Thúy Nga, and Vân Sơn Vietnamese musical variety shows. Aside from my parents’ stories, these entertainment companies often retold and replicated images and the plight of refugees and the lives 13

Music recorded before 1975.

of both Vietnamese soldiers and civilians during the war, which became essential sources of understanding the Vietnamese diaspora and the Việt Nam War. Stories about people that American schools never included, excluding them further into the invisible margins of obscurity.

Times when a sizeable 5-disc CD changer micro system, where music never stops playing as the machine shuffles through multiple CDs, decorated our living room, I remember constantly listening to Như Quỳnh’s first CD, Chuyện Hoa Sim14, produced by Asia Entertainment and released in 1995. Như Quỳnh would be categorized as part of the 1.5 Vietnamese generation, who was born in the 1970s, during the Việt Nam War, but too young to remember it. My parents were indifferent to Như Quỳnh, specifically my father because he maintained that first-generation voices remain a part of the Vietnamese musicscape and they were untouchable and irreplaceable.

When Duy Khánh passed away in 2003, my father once claimed, “Duy Khánh chết rồi không ai hát như vậy được nữa,”15 which became his appeal once other Vietnamese diasporic singers started passing away. But my mother did have a soft preference for her thanh thoát, singing in a slow yet somber tone as she narrates a familiar story about the war and diaspora. When I was still following her career through several obscure websites with hyperlinks that have long died as the Internet expands in rapid development, Chuyện Hoa Sim was reportedly the best-selling CD in 1995, and it wasn’t difficult to determine the reason. People living in the diaspora and waiting in a constant state of limbo consume nostalgia, holding onto those memories of war and survival while remembering the dead. Fighting in a war meant leaving people behind. Hopelessness of fighting an ongoing, even non-winnable war, compounded by memories of both the living and dead, becomes a daily struggle. For some of the living, this becomes survivor’s guilt. As painful as these memories are, survivors will maintain and preserve them, always remembering them. Several renditions have been recorded since Như Quỳnh’s version, but her 14

Story of Rose Myrtle.

Once Duy Khánh dies, no one can sing like him.

16 Elegant and crytal-clear voice.

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version remains the most popular and memorable. In the điệp khúc17, Như Quỳnh narrates:

Ôi lấy chồng chiến binh

Lấy chồng thời chiến chinh, mấy người đi trở lại

Sợ khi mình đi mãi, sợ khi mình không về Thì thương người vợ bé bỏng chiều quê Nhưng không chết người trai khói lửa Mà chết người em nhỏ hậu phương Mà chết người em gái tôi thương

Oh marrying a warrior

Marrying during wartime, how many people will return

Afraid that I will leave forever, afraid that I will never return

I love my wife

But the warrior isn’t dead

But the little sister is dead

But my dear sister I love is dead

The song is based on a poem, “Màu Tím Hoa Sim,”18 written by Hữu Loan, who was inspired by the events during the Indochina War. Several nhạc Việt Nam narrate stories about the fear of not returning home from war and the ones being left behind, usually women, having to wait for men to return home. When listening to this song in the present, I’m reminded of Hanif Abdurraqib’s analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s song, “Alright,” where the song “promises nothing.” The history behind the song, “Chuyện Hoa Sim” doesn’t change all that much when considering its solemn and tragic tone, it’s still very much a song about the brutalities and realities of war; war almost always promises nothing, but the story’s context doesn’t change, the story’s context does: war impacts 17 18

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Chorus.

Purple Flower Rose Myrtle.

women yet their voices are hardly ever heard and their stories are relegated to the invisible margins of footnotes.

Vietnamese Women did serve in the war, but history pays very little attention to their contributions. Women who did not serve in the war are relegated to becoming waiting figures. The glorification and selective remembering of war becomes a gendered perspective. Men and women were/are both victims and survivors of war, but unlike men, no one waits for women to return.

Ha Jin’s novel, Waiting, centers on three characters: Lin Kong, an army doctor; Manna Wu, a nurse and Lin’s girlfriend; and Shuyu, Lin’s wife. Each waiting for decisions to be made: a long wait of promises of matrimony, a stalling waiting period of an impending divorce, and waiting for life’s fulfilment. Lin does proceed with the divorcing, leaving Shuyu after 18 years to marry Manna, but in the end of the novel, Manna’s heart fails after giving birth to their twins, and Lin asks Shuyu to forgive and reconcile with him after Manna dies since she doesn’t have much time to live. Shuyu agrees, and another waiting period continues the cycle as the women wait for a man to decide his life’s trajectory.

Life isn’t always structured in this pattern of fragmented promises and fractured relationships; like refrains, they’re common, but vary depending on context and the circumstances. But perhaps like the characters in Waiting, we’re always in a queue, remaining to connect to a line only to be disconnected, lingering on the margins, and simply waiting. But who waits longer in the infinite queue? And in life?

Waiting, both a ubiquitous term and action, is a universal theme in nhạc Việt Nam, too. War waits for no one; it’s almost as if the prerequisite of war is to leave people behind, making them wait for someone’s return.

After years of reflectively relistening to nhạc Việt Nam as an older adult, though nostalgia accompanied by beautifully composed music that’s atmospheric, it’s difficult to deny that I’ve developed volatile ears when it came to Vietnamese music, a shared sentiment shared by some of my siblings I grew up with. Như Quỳnh’s song, “Chờ Người19,” composed by Khánh Băng, which is sung in almost a cold, fatalistic tone, captures a 19

Waiting for Someone.

woman, standing there, observing, waiting for someone to return. As much as Vietnamese war chronicles and reveals several unknown perspectives about wartime and war life in Việt Nam, most famous and remembered Vietnamese composers were/are men, writing about the fate of women. Waiting for someone to return isn’t at all reciprocal or equitable. Echoing in common refrains, women are either waiting forever for soldiers, or in general, men, to return, get married off while the soldier or former love sings in a depressing tempo, or they get killed off while their waiting period ends abruptly.

Women’s partial lives are dedicated as lyrics. Their deaths and waiting figures remain in memory, but I don’t think anyone else will continue waiting for them.

Like Shuyu in the novel, Waiting, Vietnamese women are written as passive romantic loyalists, never leaving, always waiting. Unable to keep up with my mother’s many stories, I often forget whether she’s waited for anyone in her life when she was still living in Việt Nam; there’s always that reemerging impulse to know if and how long she’s waited for someone, or if that person she waited for was my father. The question becomes muted whenever I stare at my mother.

Vietnamese women in nhạc Việt Nam become waiting subjects in each line and note. It’s a stagnancy and lull in the music, but they have yet to redefine their sound since the same songs are being re-recorded. Perhaps this is the industry’s inertia, unwilling to accommodate or redefine sounds and songs, restricting to tell other stories beyond the familiar. Many times do I hear my parents’ friends using “it’s just a part of our culture” to justify and perpetuate the exclusions and oppressions of other perspectives that do not align with traditional Confucian perspectives. Even life in America does not exempt Vietnamese American women from becoming waiting subjects. There have been a few times where my status as a leftover woman who is aging out of the marriage system became a focal point of discussion. Multiple Vietnamese women have asked my mother when I will get married or if I am in a long-term relationship that will secure a future marriage or whether I was merely waiting for someone to select me like in The Bachelor. My response

has always been a firm no since marriage isn’t a priority, something my parents surprisingly agreed with as they became an outlier of several dominating and overbearing Vietnamese parents. But this scenario reminds me of the Vietnamese songs I listen to, neither diverse nor welcoming. In 2010, Như Quỳnh released a song, “Duyên Phận,”20 composed by Thái Thịnh, which is really about how Vietnamese women are predestined to be married off. Như Quỳnh concludes the song by asking, “Đời người con gái không muốn yêu ai được không?”21 The song unpacks the traditional fate of women, but what does maintaining traditions and culture mean or look like in modern life? I’m sure there’s an answer, but one that is shrouded with contradictions and regrets. Ba and Má knew I wasn’t waiting for someone, but for something.

Songs never have a timestamp on them, but perhaps in Vietnamese music, those that have repeatedly been resung and re-recorded inflect a sentiment of postwar grief, a grief that’s indescribable to me, yet I’m wondering if I’ve inherited that generational grief. I can see how that grief never dissipates. When I listen to certain songs, I contemplate the many unresolved feelings, lingering resentments, or attachments from the past that my parents carried over into the present, projecting some of these feelings onto us. Maybe those resentments and conflicting feelings become a part of diasporic family’s inheritance. It’s not material, but very tangible and difficult to let go.

Some nights exist when the last string riffs cease into a noiseless, motionless coda; I observe my mother at a short distant, not wanting to be in touching proximity yet close enough for my eyes to stare at her. On those nights her body is still as her face, wrinkled from time and scarred by decades of trauma, remaining thoughtful yet restless, as if remembering some nights when the familiar desperate sounds of nhạc Việt Nam transitions painfully from a gentle ritardando to an eventual fading diminuendo remind her of those who once survived to live. And on those nights, we both grieve, sometimes for the same person, but for my mother, she’s remained in a 20 21

Fate.

Can a girl not fall in love in her life?

7

quiet, tragically uninterrupted grieving state since 1975, witnessing multiple deaths and having to bury them away from her motherland as she weeps for how dead our immediate family remains longitudinally displaced and forgotten. Our souls momentarily disappear as I continuously cry into the night, remembering my father.

We both wonder who’s the next one waiting as soundless shadows fade into the night, only to return and repeat.

rathe Anna Martin

8

Bull

Leah Baker Who shall come at me like a murderous bull And, raging, raze me split spleen and trample the juicy beast that is my heart?

Who shall quench that warrior call within me for war, claw my fists and clasp my throat ?

People

Giovanni Mangiante People are good mornings that become empty coffee cups.

People are insects trapped in wet concrete.

People are sinister figures that follow you at night.

People are shadows at both sides of the guillotine.

People are vodka tonics and flies swimming in cold soup.

People are crowded wardrobes overflowing with nonessentials.

i am black like all things black Jason B. Crawford

i am black like all things black wanted for everything but the flesh noise to anything arrhythmic an ankle of gold shackled to an ankle of gold the skin rubbing to flake off ash letting something of the name be free but ain’t all skin dead once left homeland ain’t all tongues a north star until dimmed a boy with a taste for the river but yet in fear of any body of water that he can’t spit out

People are coats and coat racks, shirts, blouses, pants, shoes, underwear, bottles of rum, empty perfume bottles, an earring under the bed, a missing hairpin.

People are the roses that died in the summer.

9

LOOP

Derek Anderson INT. HOME; GWEN’S BEDROOM - DAY CLOSE ON a pair of eyes, sleeping. They crack open.

GWEN (20s) wakes in bed. Checks her phone. An energetic young woman, she’s got her whole life ahead of her.

INT. HOME; BATHROOM - DAY Gwen sings to herself in the shower. Brushes her teeth in the mirror. Cleans her ears with a Q-tip.

ISAIAH

Yeah, me too. You know... Maybe, in lieu of a raise,

you could pay half my rent every month.

Gwen thinks he’s joking . . . then lights up, elated. He smiles back, genuine. They kiss.

An ELDERLY MAN in a RED SHIRT shuffles past, spilling popcorn across their laps. Gwen laughs in disbelief. They brush their knees off as previews begin.

The MPAA approval bathes the theater green. Gwen glances over at Isaiah, and smiles.

INT. MOVIE THEATER LOBBY - DAY

No one sees the MASKED GUNMAN enter, until he OPENS FIRE with two handguns, killing half a dozen people.

Busy weekend. Gwen and boyfriend ISAIAH (20s, dorky, playful) wait in line at the concession stand.

SCREAMING. Frantic movement. Gwen and Isaiah dive under their seats, petrified. Isaiah motions to the exits—

GWEN

Ok get me a cherry ICEE and popcorn with two

butter squirts. Just two.

GWEN

Wait, just wait!

ISAIAH

Or you could tell ‘em what you want when we get

up there.

GWEN

Then what’s the point of dating you at all?

Honestly.

ISAIAH

We can’t stay here.

Gwen sees the Elderly Man in the red shirt start to stand.

He gets SHOT AND KILLED. Isaiah grips Gwen’s hand.

In a panic, Isaiah JUMPS UP. They RACE down the stairs.

BANG! BANG BANG BANG! Isaiah is STRUCK in the chest, and slumps!

They reach the counter. She nudges him forward. Isaiah laughs and orders for them both.

Gwen doesn’t stop. She TRIPS over him, keeps running—

INT. MOVIE THEATER - DAY

INT. EMERGENCY EXIT CORRIDOR - CONTINUOUS

They munch popcorn, waiting for the movie to start.

—BURSTS from the emergency exit and races TOWARD THE CAMERA, SCREAMING, SCREAMING.

GWEN

All I want is a teeny raise. I’m so tired of living

with my parents.

INT. MOVIE THEATER LOBBY - DAY

10

Gwen’s on a gurney in the lobby, shivering. EMTs wheel bodies out of the theater. Isaiah’s corpse rolls by.

INT. FATHER’S CAR (MOVING) - NIGHT Shaking uncontrollably, Gwen stares ahead as her FATHER (50s) drives home. A tough, stoic man, he grinds his teeth.

FATHER

I’ll turn on the heat.

GWEN

No, I’m not . . . It’s fine.

She continues shaking. Father shakes his head.

FATHER

It’s okay. Nobody can hurt you now.

He pats a HANDGUN on his belt, its barrel engraved with black flames.

INT. HOME; LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Gwen’s Father, MOTHER (50s) and SISTER (30s) rally around her as she sobs, curled up on the couch.

Gwen nods, exhausted. Her sister keeps smoking. She puts down her phone and stares at the stars.

CLOSE ON Gwen, as her eyelids grow heavy.

The shot SLOWLY TURNS like a winding clock, in a full circle, as Gwen’s eyes droop, droop, droop . . . and finally close.

MATCH CUT TO: INT. HOME; GWEN’S BEDROOM - DAY CLOSE ON a pair of eyes, sleeping. They snap open. Gwen wakes in bed. She stares up at us.

INT. HOME; BATHROOM - DAY Gwen showers, but doesn’t sing. Cleans her ears with a Q-tip. Brushes her teeth. Stares at her reflection.

DING. The doorbell.

INT. HOME; LIVING ROOM - DAY

A CLANG in the kitchen; Gwen JUMPS, STARTLED—! It’s just her Sister, retrieving plates.

Gwen opens the door. It’s ISAIAH, unharmed. She simply grins.

SISTER

Sorry, I thought she should eat . .

INT. RESTAURANT - DAY

EXT. HOME; PORCH - NIGHT

Gwen sits alone, at a busy restaurant. She glances at Isaiah, in line outside the bathroom.

Dead of night. Gwen smokes on the back porch with her Sister.

He takes something from his pocket. She perks up. It’s a tiny ring box. Isaiah glances up—

On her phone, she scrolls through various news sites, reading headlines: “Everything we know about the shooter.”

—but Gwen looks away just in time. She smiles, elated.

GWEN

(shows her sister)

Look. Like he’s a celebrity.

SISTER

You should try and sleep.

MOMENTS LATER, Isaiah’s back, they’re eating together.

Isaiah notices Gwen smiling uncontrollably.

ISAIAH What?

11

GWEN

Hm? Nothing.

Gwen glances a few tables down, at a WOMAN in her 30s wearing a RED SHIRT. Her smile diminishes.

ISAIAH

You saw, didn’t you?

GWEN

Saw what?

He grins. But Gwen doesn’t grin back. She drinks her water, a nauseous unease swelling in her.

GWEN

Do you wanna go somewhere else?

ISAIAH

We are currently eating.

Gwen drags Isaiah around the half-wall, staying low. The exit is in sight, but a Gunman FIRES from behind the counter.

GWEN

Okay, when I say run, we’re gonna— Gwen glances back. Isaiah is pale, clutching his chest.

Blood pouring from his ribs. Gwen desperately applies pressure.

GWEN

No, not again, please!

Isaiah’s dead. RAT-TAT-TAT, machine guns MOW DOWN the gunmen. POLICE burst through the restaurant entrance.

INT. FATHER’S CAR (MOVING) - NIGHT

Gwen stares at the front door, uneasy.

Wrapped in a police blanket, Gwen rides home with her Father.

ISAIAH

Hey. What’re you so worried about?

FATHER

It’s okay. Nobody—

A long moment passes. Nothing happens.

GWEN

—can hurt you now.

GWEN

Just a bad feeling. Sorry. So, what is this that

you’re hiding from me?

Isaiah smiles slyly. Sips his straw. Over his shoulder we see TWO MASKED GUNMAN march through the doors and OPEN FIRE. SCREAMING, a mad rush to the exit, several killed in seconds. Isaiah and Gwen crouch behind a half-wall, panicked.

The red shirt Woman whips out her own gun, FIRES, but is SHOT AND KILLED. The Gunman adds her weapon to his arsenal.

12

Father nods and pats the handgun on his belt, barrel engraved with black flames. It gives her chills.

GWEN

Dad, did anything happen yesterday?

FATHER

Like what?

EXT. HOME; PORCH - NIGHT It’s late. Mom and Dad whisper in the kitchen, watching Gwen, on the porch with her sister. Gwen is deep in thought.

GWEN

It didn’t have to happen.

SISTER

Please, don’t talk like that. There was nothing you

could do.

INT. HOME; BATHROOM - DAY Gwen sings to herself in the shower. Brushes her teeth in the mirror. Cleans her ears with a Q-tip.

INT. GWEN’S CAR (MOVING) - DAY

GWEN

Hm. I don’t wanna go to sleep. Will you stay up

with me?

Gwen drives alone, singing to the radio.

INT. HOME; GWEN’S BEDROOM - NIGHT

She parks in a busy lot. Walks toward a building alone.

HOLD. It’s an elementary school.

Gwen and her Sister stay up late, watching Netflix in bed.

INT. HOME; KITCHEN - NIGHT Exhausted, they make peanut butter jelly sandwiches together.

EXT. PARKING LOT - DAY

INT. CLASSROOM - DAY Gwen drops a stack of papers on her desk. Weary, she sits and puts her head down.

INT. HOME; LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

ISAIAH (O.S.)

Hoo! Hoo! Somebody was a night owl.

Sun rising. Sister is asleep on the couch. Gwen stares ahead, bleary, mind churning. Nervous.

She perks up. Isaiah’s perched on her desk, smiling in a blue t-shirt. Gwen kisses him.

GWEN

Hey. Keep me awake.

ISAIAH

You should see my class, they’re so adorable, their

blue museum shirts make them look like a little

school of fish. Where’s your shirt?

SISTER Why? GWEN

‘Cause I think I know what happens.

Her Sister drifts off. There’s nothing Gwen can do.

CLOSE ON Gwen, her eyelids heavy. The shot TURNS, WINDING UP, as her eyes eventually flutter shut— MATCH CUT TO: INT. HOME - GWEN’S BEDROOM - DAY

GWEN

Aw man, I knew I forgot something.

ISAIAH

Ah, well. I hope we’re back in time tonight. We got plans.

GWEN

Plans? What plans?

ISAIAH

Romantic dinner cruise. Maybe.

CLOSE ON a pair of eyes, sleeping. They snap open. Gwen wakes in bed. She grabs her phone.

13

GWEN

Oh, yeah? I hope you practiced what you’re gonna say.

ISAIAH

Well, I’m the one who usually does the talking. I

should be fine.

Gwen smiles at him, in love. CLOSE ON Isaiah, he smiles back. CLOSE ON GWEN, whose smile slowly, disturbingly falls away.

ISAIAH

Whoa, whoa, calm down, what—?

GWEN

Lock the door!

Isaiah locks the door. Gwen struggles with the windows, can’t get them open.

ISAIAH

Gwen, you’re scaring the kids.

JARRING SOUNDS creep into the soundtrack. Isaiah speaks—but we can’t hear him.

GWEN

I can’t do this again.

Gwen’s eyes turn to the clock.

An announcement comes over the PA:

It ticks extremely slow, every moment an eternity.

PA VOICE (V.O.)

Teachers please be advised that Mr. Greene is in

the building.

Gwen’s eyes turn back to Isaiah, who’s confused. She looks at him in terror.

GWEN

We have to do something.

BUZZ—the schoolbell rings, SHATTERING the sounds and it all goes SILENT. Gwen looks over Isaiah’s shoulder.

Through the classroom door, a YOUNG BOY (5) enters, wearing a RED SHIRT. Our stomachs turn as he takes a seat.

We keep watching the door, as other students enter, every one of them in RED SHIRTS. ISAIAH

What’s wrong?

Reality finally SNAPS and time CATCHES UP. Gwen stands.

GWEN

Open the windows. Lock the door!

14

Gwen and Isaiah’s eyes widen.

ISAIAH

That’s code for— BANG BANG BANG in the hallway. Kids SCREAM and hide under the desks. We hear the HOWL of a distant teacher as she’s SHOT. RATTLE on the handle of their classroom door. Isaiah races to bar it. Gwen tries to KICK open the window.

GWEN

Huddle together, kids!

BANG! BANG!—bullets blast through the door, creating BLOODY HOLES in Isaiah’s chest. He slumps to the floor.

Children SCREAM. Gwen runs toward them as—BANG— the handle falls off the door. It swings open.

IN A BLACK SPACE, removed from setting, a solitary GUN enters the frame.

IN THE CLASSROOM The GUNMAN—a teenager—walks toward Gwen.

Gwen LUNGES at the gun, which fires—BANG!—striking her in the shoulder. She collapses.

IN A BLACK SPACE the gun shoots again—BANG!—at her leg.

Gwen moans, clutching her wounds. She crawls toward the kids. The Gunman steps on her back.

IN A BLACK SPACE, the gun stares down at her. Then, it drifts toward the children.

CLOSE ON Gwen in silence, her horror indescribable.

IN A BLACK SPACE, we see a young boy in a red shirt, standing motionless, staring at us. The frame DOLLIES past him, down a line, all the children in red shirts, shoulder to shoulder.

INT. HOME - GWEN’S BEDROOM - NIGHT 4:00 AM. Gwen’s in bed with her laptop, trying to stay awake, rubbing her eyes, desperate.

EXT. HOME - PORCH - NIGHT Gwen smokes with her Sister, listening to cicadas.

INT. HOME - LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Gwen wears headphones, music blaring. Her Sister’s long since fallen asleep. Gwen watches the sun come up.

EXT. DARK STREETS - EARLY MORNING We FOLLOW GWEN from behind, as she leaves the house, jogging.

Gwen runs away from the camera, all we see is the back of her head. She runs, runs, runs.

All of them staring at us.

EXT. BRIDGE - DAY

At the end of the line, the shot slows, and lands on the gun.

Exhausted, Gwen stops on a bridge over water. She unlocks her phone, sees a picture of Isaiah. He smiles up at her.

CLOSE ON CLOSE ON

CLOSE ON

CLOSE ON

Gwen’s eyes, noticing something. the handgun, ENGRAVED WITH BLACK FLAMES. Gwen, who SCREAMS soundlessly into the camera. the trigger, PULLED.

WIDE SHOT: A classroom full of empty desks. HOLD. INT. FATHER’S CAR - NIGHT Gwen rides home with her Father. A long silence.

FATHER

It’s okay. Nobody can hurt you now.

Gwen stares at her Father. Furious.

Gwen sits on the bridge, exhausted. She slaps her cheeks.

Her eyes start to close. She SLAPS herself, furious. Tears on her cheeks as she fights to stay awake.

But there’s nothing she can do.

CLOSE ON Gwen’s eyelids, as they flutter. The shot TURNS like the winding of a clock— —all the way around, slowly— —as her eyes flutter— —flutter— —flutter— —and close.

The film BEGINS AGAIN, and continues indefinitely, on a loop. There is no end.

15

Let Me Stay

Brittany J. Barron In my dreams, I follow Sissy.

We could be anywhere.

There’s white air. There’s soft snow beneath our feet.

Tree branches bend, laced with ice, and in the distance tender fledglings cry.

We stop at the end of a river.

Sissy drops cold pebbles into the water.

Small ripples appear, disappear.

Daylight fades. I see her face by the flight of the stars.

The green in her eyes is deepening.

Pieces of snow fall on our cheeks.

Only with her do I allow this thought to breathe— I want heaven only if I can go there with Sissy.

redivivus Anna Martin

16

Ecstasy

Sudarsan Rauta It is still morning and the November sun in leisure is warming up the damp earth that is soaking my feet underneath. The naked grass bathed afresh in dew is bursting forth unashamed. I let my bare toes kiss and be kissed by the green lashes, my limbs quivering in ecstasy.

I close my eyes and breathe. Such delicacy.

Should death descend on me at this precise moment, I for sure, will take him into my embrace and never let go.

But a chirrup stirs me up. I blush. I turn to see. A Bulbul, perched on a crooked rock, fidgeting, the eyes glistening—is she in bliss or is jealous of me? I can’t say.

Or is she in awe? She does not stop for an answer, can’t be bothered, I suppose, flutters away into oblivion, leaving the air in a thrum.

Out move my hands and run through my hair, ruffling off the moisture. I shake myself and hum a tune.

I hum my way back into the world where I come from, the world of chatter.

fresh from the spine Anna Martin

17

Papier-mâché man

Alone With St. Joseph

Papier-mâché man

Every night the sun attends its own funeral.

Papier-mâché man— screaming at midnight on a public telephone, clawing inside his pocket for a coin that isn’t there, looking out of the booth wondering how much youth he has left.

Days slowly die, like the sparrow egg you found underneath our favorite oak tree. Its pale shell— an afterthought of heat lightning.

Sinking his teeth deep, deep— into the hedonistic fantasy of the man he isn’t, but wishes to be.

Every time I think about failure, I picture the crib in my toolshed; the opportunities we could have given it.

Giovanni Mangiante

Papier-mâché man— my eyes, my nose, my mouth.

Papier-mâché man— my hair, my pain, my smile.

Papier-mâché man— easily made, easily broken.

18

John Leonard

You buried it in the dirt and said to me; The earth will make a perfect mother.

(Silence and a weakly nurtured glance)

Every time you think about me, you picture sweat dripping into the ocean, and you wonder why I still visit that tiny grave for no apparent reason.

so much feeding happens off one carcass Scott Branson

I threw the magazine on the floor and felt the heat of summer this room remained locked, with the page open to where she had been reading I barely knew her, but the conservationist in me wanted to keep fingers on newsprint the little plant he gave me reached too far and fell out of the pot I dumped out the soil and tried to repack it so the green shoots would stand again setting it with three other plants in sparse dirt, the botanist in me wanted to know is it a metaphor a long tooth they left rattled on the dashboard and filled the idling silence I turned sharply and it slipped to the floor, perhaps crushed under passenger feet bone dust filtered through air, the paleontologist in me wanted to reconstruct the creature

aeipathy Anna Martin 19

Sandy

Kacie Prologo Seemed like half the town came out to see David Burwell dead. Davey’s niece Sandy drove herself all the way over the Wabash County line just to help see him off. Took damn near four hours from where she’d been holed up Fort Wayne near Route 30, just her and a little lopsided bed under a neon motel sign on a two-year stint busting scrap car parts between Battle Creek and Indianapolis.

Wasn’t good money. Still, better than the tips she’d pulled in during those blank years shuffling stale coffee and cold pie to the long-haul drunks at the Steel Trolley Diner six nights a week after she’d quit high school.

“Hey there, honey,” they’d say, the men reaching for the hem of Sandy’s rayon uniform, the women rolling their tired rheumy eyes, “tell yer’ uncle we said hello.”

Wasn’t so much as a single space left in the driveway by the time we’d finally made it past Korosy’s Deli at the heart of town. Sandy’s own Datsun was curbed the next block over where a whole slew of late comers, their necks and armpits sweating through the polyester nap of their Sunday best, had circled back from Davey’s looking for places to park. The other half must’ve figured they’d just send a sympathy card.

“Last year we sent my niece off with a nice big dose of Propofol just like that fella, Michael what’s-hisname,” Doris Keenerman said. “Poor girl got herself stuck underneath the thresher. Doc said she wouldn’t’ve lived another three weeks if she lived a day.”

Doris, her forearm braced against the weight of her son, Herald, tottered down the sidewalk with a serving platter of molasses cookies tucked against her armpit, probably the same molasses cookies she’d brought to every pre-funeral potluck since Dalton Davies’s uncle, Phillip, up and caught himself a dose of typhus back in ‘46 after getting tick-bit in the South St. woods. Back then, farms and fields separated family from futility.

Food had to be wrestled from the ground by shear force or goddamn miracle. Phillip, a long scrap of sinew wrapped over farm mule bones, spent the best of his boyhood summers clearing brush back from the fields where his poppa grew soybeans and stunted ears of flint corn. Sickness slumbered in the kid for damn near three 20

months before it laid him up with rash and fever. By then, his daddy must’ve figured it be too cruel to let him live.

“Best to cull them when you can,” Doris said of her own daughter who’d come home from the Sugarback foundry with the kind of redness under her skin that meant she wouldn’t live to see forty-five. “Cuts down on the heartbreak.”

In the end, it took three of Phillip’s uncles, hardtack men who’d been scraping their peace since before the first smoke of the railroad rolled through their fields on the way up to Michigan, to put the boy under. Phillip’s aunties fed and watered the men after the fact. His oldest cousin, Jimmy, who’d jumped in to help finish digging the grave while Phillip’s momma stood kneading biscuit dough at the kitchen window, sat in the wooden chair worn with the shape of the dead boy’s ass.

When the town grew too big and too close, its boarders leeching out part and parcel of generational farmland, families like Dalton’s spread out into the new neighborhoods, taking their scrubland traditions with them.

“Miss Burwell,” Alba Dunkin, looking every inch a pillar of matronly strength in her long mourning dress and Jackie-O pill box hat, said, “the pastor’s due at any moment.”

Alba spoke in the high grating tones reserved for family of the terminally ill, as if death had already come for Davey, and now the only way to reach him from across the Veil was to shout at Sandy by proxy—guilt by association. It’d been Alba who’d seeded the first whispers about Davey’s declining health. “It’s not as if the community couldn’t find the strength to support Mr. Burwell in his time of need,” she’d said, her congregation of housewives swaying in time with the overhead air conditioning at the First Friends Church, “but why let a good man suffer, even if he isn’t a true man of God?” Uncle Davey shivered under the pillow even as beads of sweat ran back through his temples. Sandy bent her elbows as a cramp ran up her arm following the long tract of puckered scar between her forearm and wrist. Sandy took a swan dive out of Davey’s barn the year before her momma moved them up to East Patterson City. Broke her arm in three places. Three clean breaks. Everything else, muscle, tendon, the small and well-mannered bones of her wrist, had shattered against the stone walkway. Doctors

cagastric Anna Martin over in Crestview told her it would never work quite right after that. Even with surgery, the best Sandy could hope for was a dull throb, like the pull of an abscessed tooth, when she stretched her arm out straight.

“What a bunch of horse shit,” Davey had said. “Ya’ll watch, she’ll be up an’ clompin’ around in no time” He’d been right, of course. Took a few weeks, but Sandy wound up using her cast to jam Jimmy Doherty’s nose down into his bottom lip, smashing cartilage and breaking the hard ridge of bone between the battlement of his eyes. Not that long after, Sandy’s momma, Stella, packed up enough of their clothes to fill the back seat of her sedan and took off from Davey’s house. How it must’ve hurt Davey’s heart to watch his little girl go. Must’ve hurt even worse to have her come back.

“Hold tight," Sandy said. “Almost there.”

Watching Davey die, in and of itself, wasn’t worrisome, though it took a might touch longer than was really comfortable. Davey struggled against the constant pressure of the bed pillow, gasping and thrashing under the gasket of plastic sealed polyester. Sandy looked down at the deflated space where Uncle Davey’s chest used to

be, all the tan and tone worn out of it by his time spent laid up in this makeshift sickroom. Truth be told, there wasn’t much left of Sandy’s favorite uncle but a stage four lymphoma mummy, a skeleton wrapped in fly paper.

In a few short months, cancer had whittled down most of Davey’s farm-won muscle and the follow up chemo decimated the thick sprawl of his hair. Every doctor promised Davey he’d never make it up the farmhouse stairs again, so Myra’s husband—who’d been squirrelling old timber since his time at The Pattern Works—helped tuck him away downstairs in a small, out of the way walk-in closet turned sick room for the last month or two.

When Davey managed to draw half a breath—a wrenching offal sound that ended in a cough—he spat fat wads of phlegm across the bed. Threads of blood wound their way through the yellow goo, staining the skin over his teeth the same pink as Sandy’s lipstick.

Sandy strained her arms. “Used to be we grew six different kinds chilies not three feet from the stoop. I’d sit out on the patio and eat right off a’ the plant. Heat and salt, Davey said, only things worth tasting in the world.”

21

On the nightstand next to the bed, a paper plate heaped full of potato salad—homemade from the spuds Iris Laree, who’d taught at the grammar school, pulled from her own garden—seeped mayonnaise onto an open Bible. Laughter broke out from the dining room, a general grumble that was sexless in its mass and formless in its volume. Even as the morning wore thin, more folks turned up with trays and bowls, their bottoms sopping with condensation from overworked refrigerators, snugged against their bodies.

“Bunch of goddamn vultures,” Sandy said. “All of em’ put together ‘ed be about as useful as a fart in a windstorm.”

Alba’s cheeks reddened. “This is God’s mercy, Ms. Burwell.”

A pack of bored cousins, their t-shirts tucked in tight over the swell of their bellies, kicked over one of the bags on their way to garage to scrounge around for Uncle Davey’s Black Label whiskey. Sandy curled her lip against the sound, raising the pink-painted edges of her mouth just high enough to show the glistening whites of her teeth.

“Mercy for who?” Sandy asked.

Alba shook her head and put a hand on Sandy’s shoulder, the clamp of her thumb and middle finger

catching under her armpit. Above them, a sampler, hand stitched with the Lord’s Prayer, shone its new thread against Davey’s smoke yellowed walls. Davey had never bothered himself with church much. “Ain’t a man got enough to worry about when he’s livin’?” Davey would ask when the ladies of the First Friends of Christ came calling to his back stoop. “Ain’t we got enough problems?” The sampler hadn’t been there the month before.

“I promise,” Alba said, “It would be so much worse for him without this.”

Sandy frowned. “Will you please just give us a few more minutes?”

Alba nodded. The silver cross at her throat caught the light from the table side lamp, flashing an angry staccato as Alba stomped back to her flock in the dining room.

Sandy, the only niece that Davey’s sister, Alice, ever graced the world with, rolled her eyes and encouraged her uncle to die a little faster. “She ain’t nothing but two pounds of shit stuffed into a one-pound bag,” Sandy said to her uncle.

She held the pillow there for a while longer, long after Davey stopped moving as a matter of fact. When sandy walked out of the living room, people turned their heads to watch her leave.

Of course, people always do.

日暮里 [Nippori] Albert Lee

All the salarymen wear white button-downs, navy or grey slacks, and dark brown loafers matching their dark brown belts. They don’t wear ties because summer is outside and they don’t need an extra reminder of their inevitable disposability. As a racist white person probably once said, “All these Asian men look the same.” If you ride a train during rush hour, you would very much agree with Becky. Suit stores in Japan carry 48 browns, 100 grays, and maybe a charcoal if they’re feeling spicy. As I walk on and off and on and off the train, I run to and from and to and from too many shades of fading. Sometimes, one of the shades completely sinks to black. The universe nods. When it looks up, we see a little boy folding color into the world, one crane at a time because hope is the better currency for this generation.

The journey of a hundred hues begins with a single shade. As he gets off the train, I close my eyes and pray that he, this soft boy, will live long enough to become a gentle man. Or at the very least, I pray his Elmo-red shirt, Cookie-Monsterblue shorts, Big-Bird-yellow hat, and rainbow randoseru can stay. When I open my eyes, he is gone and the beginnings still do not justify the ends. I’m supposed to get off the train but I don’t because I’m still here, somewhere, longing for a color lonelier than light.

22

DADDY DAUGHTER DANCE

On the balance

daddy/daughter/dance/step one/two/step/feet/step/ cheeks/step/too/tall/step daddy/on my/back/step stop/daughter/on the/right side/step/onto/foot/front/step the/daughter/is a/step the/daughter is/step/means/fake/step/daddy/lost his foot/ing/daddy/is also/daughter step/stop/daddy/stop/step/whose daughter/daddy/and the boy with gun/the boy/is a/gun/daughter/owes step/daddy/the gun/stop/step/feet two/real/feet/the daughter has/real/feet daddy has/fake/hands/fake/step daddy/fake enough/two/tell/he’s not/ your daddy/that’s/not/a/daughter/ don’t/step/on/the/step/daughter step/don’t/call him/daughter/don’t call it/dance///////////////////

No one’s keeping track, you know, of the number of times you’ve lied today, of the assholes who’d rather save themselves thirty seconds than save your life, of the long days of the red maple’s reddening each year, of the sparrows. No one’s eye is on you— that’s an adolescent nightmare/fantasy theologized by the obdurately insecure.

Even your own tally is haphazard since you daydream, distracted by the pleasure of a good sandwich with fresh tomatoes.

Benny Sisson

M. Christine Benner Dixon

田畑 [Tabata] Albert Lee

I ask my host brother, Ryou, what he wants to be when he grows up. He tells me he wants to be an American. He tells me he wants the privilege of thinking in the future tense. He tells me he wants to choose happiness, not just once, at a dilapidated college party that only lasts for three drunken hours, but again. Again, in his living room, re-reading chapters of Hunter x Hunter. Again, at work, doing something other than changing PowerPoint font sizes. Again, in the garden, planting plumerias amidst the heaviness. Ryou wants to be an American because he wants breathing to be involuntary. He knows becoming an American won’t guarantee him happiness. But he also knows staying Japanese won’t guarantee him anything. Existing in Japan is making him sick and I cannot ask him to forgive it because how dare I ask an ethnically monogamous, Japanese man to forgive a world I couldn’t have possibly survived in. How could I possibly forgive a world that determined, when I was born, that I am to work eighty hour weeks for fifty years in order to collect a pension that may or may not exist? It is not fair that he is a boy and, in this country, boys grow up to be emotionally illiterate wallets. Actually, they don’t grow up to be, they shrink down to will.

23

r/deepthoughts Emily Barker

I gap-yahed in Ecuador Thinking I might find myself In amongst the indigenous Ayahuasca ceremonies And sanctuaries for blind parrots There was this one moment Gazing out over the steaming trees That looked to a t like Lonely Planet had promised But then my friend said, ‘Let’s get a candid,’ And when I tried to bring it back it was never there Anyhow I lost a bunch of weight that trip When I came home everybody said They’d never seen me so skinny and brown My old prom dress fit again And I couldn’t remember ever being happier

Road works Emily Barker

Road works ahead? I Sure hope it does lead somewhere Please God lead somewhere

RiRi gets it Emily Barker

Dysentery Emily Barker

Step one: Use posi-

YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY

-tive affirmation

24

A drunk girl came up to me in a club last week and told me, yet again, that I look exactly, no, exACtly— Sarah! Come over here! Doesn’t she look exACtly like our Hannah? Sarah came over. Sarah agreed, gushingly. Oh my Gooooooood. That’s scary. As always, I was thinking about all the strangers in my life, who, over the years, have been kind enough to tell me exACtly how bland and easily confusable my face is. On occasion, it’s an attempted compliment or chat-up. But I’ve gone home with precisely none of the guys who’ve compared me to minor celebrities on already-outdated reality shows. This girl took the traditional route, swaying to Facebook and flicking through to what she apparently deemed the most flattering, (whether for me or Hannah was unclear), selfie. I tried to shrug humbly. ‘Wow, thanks. She’s pretty.’ Rihanna came on and the girl said that oh my God she loved this song and was off, singing.

Want you to MAKE. ME. FEEL—

Graves

Emily Barker Saturday 19:41

Mate so I know it’s been a bit but I just had a nap and had this mad dream haha had to tell you it was like our first date, but in a graveyard, and we kept turning corners and finding cute little stalls and every time you’d buy me like a chocolate heart or a rose or some stupid shit and people kept getting pissed off that we were so happy (which made it really funny ygm). So then it gets dark, we’re holding hands over this tombstone and this dread fills me like I know something’s bad, so I look down and here’s no coffin, just an open hole. And I crouch to see if there’s claw marks, if something got out, but there’s nothing—I look up to tell you and you’re gone. Then I run around all these empty graves and some are baby-sized, one’s big enough for a house, others look like they might fit gig ticket stubs or petty arguments, and I think I’m fucking sad about all these things that aren’t there and I can’t bury but I don’t know I don’t cry even now I’m awake weird right Sunday 00:37

How you been you up to much

25

City of Locks Ana Hein

I wandered by the Seine, alone. It was night, but the street lamps had a yellow vibrance that cast a veneer of warmth over the city. The little booths that decorated the sides of the cobblestone avenues were shut tight, their wares ensconced behind green wood. Patrons of bars and cafes sat at tables, enjoying their meal and each other; the occasional peal of laughter echoed from inside. The cherubic faces carved into the buildings above looked down on all of us in silent judgment from their heavenly perches.

I walked across one of the bridges, lost in the lyrics of Lorde’s Melodrama. As I looked down at the river, I noticed something glinting on the bottom of the elegantly curved iron railing: locks. There weren’t many of them, maybe fewer than a dozen in total. They were tiny. You wouldn’t see them if you weren’t looking down. Some had initials or names carved into them; some had sharpie scribbles that were indecipherable to everyone except the person who’d written them. Some had combinations, others were simple grey padlocks. They were all firmly situated in their chosen spot. They seemed permanent, immovable.

They were a statement: We are holding on. Forever.

It all starts once upon a time when a man and a woman fell in love, as they so often do. They lived in a quiet village in the countryside of Serbia. The man was daring and brave, always out to prove his worth. The woman was delicate and ethereal, a creative soul who found beauty in every place she looked.

Every night, they would sneak out of their homes and meet at their special place, the Most Ljubavi bridge, where they did what lovers do.

But then one day, the man was called to fight in the War. The morning he was set to depart, they met one last time on their bridge. “I am yours, completely,” she told her love. “I love you more than anything in this world. I will be here waiting for you, darling. I will never desert you.”

They kissed one last time and then he was gone.

He met someone at the front, a friendly nurse who stitched him back up after he’d been shot; or else a villager he saved from a stray shell; or else a girl who was simply cute and there.

26

He did not return to the village.

The woman never heard word from her lover. She wandered around the town, a ghost trapped in flesh.

She no longer laughed or smiled, barely ate or talked to anyone else. They say that on the day the man married his new love, the woman died. When the local doctor cut her open to inspect why such a young, lovely girl had died so suddenly, he saw something incredible. Her heart that just a few days ago thrummed in perfect rhythm, had somehow turned to glass. And just as suddenly as it had transmuted, it shattered.

The local girls, fearful of winding up like the poor woman, started to put locks with the names of their own loves on the couple’s bridge. Once the locks were in place, they kissed the keys for luck and tossed them into the water below, sealing their fate. They hoped the locks would keep their boys theirs, maintain their love forever and ever.

But what if their boys were bad men? What if they beat them, or spit curses at them, or lost themselves at the bottom of a bottle?

They didn’t think of a way to solve that one.

My name is not written on a lock, but in a notebook. It’s a normal black Moleskin, if I’m remembering it correctly.

I think it has a tassel built in as a bookmark. Last time I saw it, it sat on the windowsill bookshelf of the man who sexually assaulted me.

When he was done, he got up, sat down at his desk, pulled it out, and wrote down my name on two different pages under two different lists. One for kisses, one for sex.

“So I don’t forget anyone,” he told me as he puffed on an electric cigarette and turned his head to look out the window.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him as I walked around Paris. He tried desperately to exude the intellectual, eccentrically charming attitude of a beatnik poet. He would’ve thrived in this city. I could so easily picture him lounging outside at a table in his black overcoat, casually sipping on a glass of whiskey. Or he could be standing above me in one of the open, balconied windows, smoking a cigarette while looking over the river, contemplating something deep and significant. Or he could be sitting on a bench in the park, reading a battered copy of

Hemmingway. Or he could be taking pictures of the side roads with his vintage camera. Or he could be hooking a lock into place on a bridge before kissing a girl.

They call Paris the City of Love, so it’s only natural its bridges are bursting with Love Locks. One bridge in particular, the Pont de Arts, was famous for the number of lovers it attracted. Its chain railing was completely stuffed with the tokens of affection. Locks on locks on locks.

In 2014, part of that bridge collapsed under the weight of that love. It had over 10,000 locks on it at the time. Eventually, one portion couldn’t handle it anymore and buckled over onto the walkway. It would have been more dramatic if it fell into the river, but life doesn’t always give us the symbolism we desire.

Soon after, the French authorities removed the remaining locks. Collectively, they weighed more than 45 tons. Needless to say, you are no longer allowed to lock up your love.

Once, a boy hid words in the pockets of a girl. He thought he was being romantic and kind and generous, a classic hero in a fairytale, but he was really crushing her under the weight of a story she didn’t know she how to tell, a

story she didn’t know was hers at all. It wasn’t until the boy left­—they always leave at the end of these sorts of tales, don’t they?—that the girl realized what he had done. She finally understood why her lungs were clogged with metaphors and images of moon-lined skin and springtime cherry trees, why her insides were burning and constricting—there was no room for air any more.

The space was all taken up by his gift.

She tried to talk, to sing, to cry—anything to expel what she harbored inside. Words poured out of her, but they were never the right ones. She couldn’t express the story properly. If she could just get it out, tell someone in the right way so that they held her close and smoothed back her hair, she knew she would make it through.

“Are you okay? You haven’t been acting like yourself.

Are you still interested in that boy?” the girl’s friends asked her. She told them she was fine, thanks for checking, she was just a bit tired.

She wanted to clamp a lock around his lips so he would know how it felt to hold so much inside of him and not be able to feel release. She wanted him to collapse under that same weight he had given her. She wanted to finally be free of the words. She wanted to let this feeling go.

So she picked up a pen and tried to tell the story again.

Suicide Traffic

Detonate & Disassociate

Plunging off the busy overpass of a California freeway on a Friday afternoon is an effective way to shift some negative energy.

the car alarm became Ave Maria after its maddening twenty-three minutes of song on the night I fell from our heaven at your apathetic altitude Mother Mary materialized as your car door crescendo blasted my temples like shrapnel from a bomb

Caitlin Curtis

Your misery will stretch for miles, like rings that pulsate off a stone that didn’t skip as it races to rest underwater.

Laura Hoffman

27

Man_City: Series - 1 Ni Petrov 28

Man_City: Series - 2 Ni Petrov 29

Man_City: Series - 3 Ni Petrov 30

Goodbye, Gertrude Gina Elbert

Dr. MacKenzie may as well have said that death was contagious. His forty students didn’t move, didn’t even act like they’d heard his instructions a second ago. Some held their breaths to avoid inhaling the formaldehyde.

Others stared straight ahead so they could pretend there was nothing wrong. The rest tried to stop picturing what—or who—lay on top of the metal tables, shrouded with starchy cotton sheets. They just waited, afraid that one wrong move could somehow turn ten cadavers into fifty, fresh for dissection.

The air was just so close. It would’ve helped if the ventilator did its job, but of course nothing worked properly in the new building. The university board was too busy hiding behind its civic duties to the fuelstrapped Queen to care about spending the last few pounds needed to make its medical facilities truly tolerable. It was the economy, they said, the inflation and Prime Minister Heath’s power cuts siphoning money away from the school’s funds. It was an obvious excuse, but the men in charge had made it abundantly clear that MacKenzie was to have no opinion on the matter. As far as they were concerned, he was lucky to even have a class to instruct.

Almost four decades had passed since MacKenzie’s own college days. He was no longer the student who had burst out laughing during the awkward silence on his first day in an attempt to shut out the ringing in his ears. The sound still tugged at his eardrums, but by now he’d accepted that it would never quite go away. There was little he could do except distract himself however he could. The clock ticked behind him and he decided it was time to see which of his students would move first.

He coughed.

“The sheet,” murmured a messy-haired boy in the far corner, as if just now realizing where he was. The roll listed him as David Campbell. “He said we have to take off the sheet.”

Heads bobbed in reluctant agreement as the sound of David’s voice nudged the rest of class into action. Fighting the urge to ask permission of their cadavers, the students stepped up to the ten covered examination tables lined

up across the room. Someone’s trainer sole screeched across the linoleum floor.

The second young man in David’s group blushed.

“Sorry,” Richard King said to the neighbors who shot him peeved looks. “New shoes, you know.”

David hadn’t noticed the disturbance. He was rubbing his fingers back and forth along the edge of the coversheet by the cadaver’s head, waiting for someone to take it up at the other end. MacKenzie knew this trick: if David moved his fingers quickly enough, the burn from the friction would keep his mind from wandering to uncomfortable places. It was a small enough gesture that only someone who knew it would notice. In MacKenzie’s experience, it wasn’t something you did on your first day: it was for when you knew what to expect from the cadaver lying under the sheet. He wondered where David had seen a dead body before.

Each group needed two people to uncover the cadaver, if only so no one would have to do it alone. David was ready, but nobody volunteered to help. Would MacKenzie have to go over and prod someone? He smirked as he saw the boy with the squeaky shoes, Richard, sneak a look at the other two students in his group to see if one of them would do it instead.

It wouldn’t be Shruti Singh. Her hands had flown up to her head and she was playing with her hair, manically undoing and re-doing her ponytail. Her dark locks kept getting caught on her rubbery gloves and she winced every time they were pulled out of position. She restarted with every few motions, cutting Richard off before he could speak with a pursed-lip sorry-but-I’m-busy look.

That left only Margaret Grant. MacKenzie had to glance at the roll to find her name, but it wasn’t hard with only two women in the room. She was bouncing up and down on her heels, readying herself with some sort of internal pep talk. She locked eyes with Richard and before he could open his mouth, she pushed past him and grabbed the end of the sheet. Richard conceded the position with an affronted, “Well, then,” but it was clear that he was hiding his relief.

Margaret’s lips were drawn in a thin, determined line despite the slight shaking of her hands. “Are you ready?”

David nodded. “Let’s go.”

As if on cue, she and David swept up the sheet in time with the others in the room. Like ten giant white lungs, 31

the sheets inflated in the first shock of post-mortem exposure, suspended in the space between inhale and exhale. They hovered over the bodies, releasing a strong puff of chemical smell, and collapsed with a cough-like rumble. The students slid to the side so they could meet and fold their rectangles of cloth.

Forty students standing over ten corpses hesitated.

MacKenzie could see their Adams’ apples bobbing up and down as they swallowed over the knots in their throats.

They’d made the first step. When MacKenzie spoke, the forced calm of his Scottish brogue sounded indecent, even to him. “Gentlemen­­—and ladies, of course—please cut away the bags enclosing your cadavers.”

In David’s group, no one could find the scissors.

Richard shoved his hands in his pockets, ostensibly to search for what he had never put there. Shruti spotted them first, at the end of the table opposite David. She hesitated, thinking maybe she could pretend to keep looking, before remembering Margaret’s enthusiasm.

She passed them to Margaret, who immediately inserted their sharp edges into the plastic, running them down from head to toe like a child hastily unzipping her coat in the heat. The plastic floated down in the light breeze from the ventilator, catching on the cadaver’s toe. No one moved to fix it.

From his podium at the front of the room, MacKenzie boomed, “What’s the first step of proper medicine?”

A few replies were tossed half-heartedly in his direction like pebbles into the sea.

“What? I couldn’t hear that.”

“To make observations and form a preliminary impression . . .”

MacKenzie sighed, but did his best to remain upbeat.

“I knew you lot had learned something in orientation last week.” He hauled himself from the podium and began making his way across the room so that he could introduce his students to their new patients.

David, Richard, Margaret, and Shruti faced their cadaver. They had been assigned a female with hairless skin the color of a rotting peach. She was smaller than the average human being, as if death had shrunk her down to a more manageable size. Her body was trim; her small round stomach was tucked up above narrow hips and impossibly thin legs. Except for her face and hands, she was entirely naked.

32

Margaret reached for the end of the wrappings that concealed the body’s face and hands, but David blurted out a warning before she could remove them. “No, we’re not supposed to do that yet. She’ll dry out.”

“Oh. Right.” Margaret clasped her hands behind her back instead.

“What do we do now?” Richard asked. He tried his best not to look at the collapsed breasts that pointed insistently in his direction.

“Wait for MacKenzie,” Shruti said. There were still several minutes to go before he reached them in their remote corner. Margaret was devouring the body with her eyes, but Shruti could barely look at it. She let her gaze wander out the window instead, to a baby in a pram being pushed by a smartly dressed mother across the street.

“Gentlemen. Ladies.”

Shruti jumped. MacKenzie waved his hand in what he hoped was an apologetic gesture before squinting down at the dead woman on the table. It occurred to him that she was about his age. “Hello,” he greeted her, before shifting his attention to Margaret and Shruti. “I thought you might be most comfortable with a female. How are you ladies holding up?”

Shruti nervously shook her head, but Margaret raised her eyebrows. “We’re doctors, sir. We have to be comfortable no matter what.”

“Quite accurate, my dear. Now, what can you tell me about the specimen?”

“She’s dead,” Richard interrupted optimistically.

MacKenzie almost laughed for the first time that day.

“What else?"

“She . . . she’s really rather quite small,” Margaret offered.

David spoke. “Like someone’s grandmother, sir.”

“Like an Agnes or a Gertrude, something Victorian like that,” Shruti finished enthusiastically.

MacKenzie bit his lip. The university had given strict instructions: an overdose of commiseration leads to the inability of the physician to form an objective opinion. But at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to agree. Despite the exalted opinions of his superiors, he still privately believed that a physician with too little empathy wouldn’t have the patient’s best interests in mind. He picked up

a scalpel and twirled it around his large fingers absentmindedly.

“Gertrude, eh? Let’s open her up.”

The first thing to do was investigate the spinal cord.

Shruti watched as Richard, a weekend rugby player, attempted to flip Gertrude over on his own. He hooked a hand under her left side and pulled, but she only rocked slightly onto her other hip. He furrowed his brow, took both hands, put them under her knees and back, and tried it that way. Athlete though he was, he could barely get her off the table and stumbled when he did, smearing embalming fluid across his scrubs and knocking the coversheet to the ground. He cursed as he slipped on the cloth and banged his knee.

Unable to stand it any longer, David grabbed Gertrude’s thighs, forcing Richard to accept his help.

Shruti cringed at the thud that the body made when it finally rolled over on the table. MacKenzie replaced the coversheet over Gertrude’s lower half and, satisfied that things wouldn’t get any worse, left to speak to another group.

Richard wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist.

“Lucky she’s so small, or that would’ve been tough.”

The four students stared at the tray of metal tools sitting before them. An arsenal of sharpened scalpels, forceps, scissors, and saws winked back at them in the fluorescent light. Shruti could barely look at them.

“Well, come on, they don’t bite,” Richard said, gesturing at Margaret.

“Why me?”

“You were so keen before. Anyway, David and I flipped her over.” He turned to his partner and clapped him on the back. “Right, mate?”

David cocked his head. “Well—” “I undid her bag,” Margaret said. “I think Shruti should have a go. She hasn’t had a chance yet.”

Shruti’s gaze shot up. It took a second for the encouraging smile that played on Margaret’s lips to register—Margaret actually thought she was doing her a favor. “Um, thanks?”

“I’ll read from the coursebook for you,” Margaret added. “So you know what to do.”

Shruti sighed. “Alright.”

Margaret flipped to the correct page and waited as Shruti gingerly picked through the tray to find the right size scalpel. Sitting up straight on a stool with her ankles crossed, Margaret glanced from the book to Gertrude to the boys standing before her. She exhaled sharply. “So. Where is everyone from?”

Shruti’s fingers hovered over a sharp-looking short saw. “What?”

“I thought we could get to know each other.”

Shruti made a face and bent back over the tray.

Richard said, “Perth.”

“Like Australia?”

“No, like Peru. Yes, Australia, Grant.”

“Well, sorry,” Margaret rolled her eyes. “I didn’t hear the accent.”

“I was born here. We moved out to Perth for my dad’s job when I was a kid but he made me come back to study.”

“Is he a diplomat or something?”

“Surgeon. My grandfather was, too.”

“I guess you’re in the right profession then,” Margaret replied politely. Richard shrugged and she shifted her body so she was facing David, who was on her right.

“What about you?”

“I live with my mum out near Reading, small village called Little Eckley,” he contributed. “It’s just her and me now.”

“Got any siblings?” Richard asked. He had always wanted a brother.

“Not really.” The quizzical looks shot his way forced David to clarify. “He died when I was little.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Margaret said. She fidgeted uncomfortably in her chair.

David shrugged. “S’alright.”

Sensing an impending awkward silence, Margaret executed a sharp verbal U-turn. “I’m from up by Cambridge, myself. It’s really quite lovely.” She gestured good-naturedly at Shruti with her chin. “Shruti, what about you?”

Shruti still hadn’t selected her weapon of choice. Now that Margaret’s eyes were on her, she picked up a biggish scalpel and faked a discerning look. “Um, London,” she mumbled. Margaret knew this already; they had discussed it when Shruti’d moved in with her ten days ago. As the only two girls in the school, they’d been placed together as flatmates. “Out by Ealing.”

33

“That’s the wrong one,” Margaret replied. Shruti was affronted that Margaret would correct her on her own hometown, but Margaret continued, “Try the size ten.

It’ll be easier to handle.”

“Oh.” Shruti switched scalpels. She hated being told what to do, but she had to admit she wouldn’t have known. She stared at the tray for another moment and walked up to where the top of Gertrude’s spine met the base of her head.

“Wonder where old Gertie was from, eh?” Richard asked.

Shruti pictured Gertrude in some cottage in Surrey, drinking tea in the dark with her cat in order to conserve electricity. They didn’t know what age she was, but Shruti thought with her smallness that she must have been about seventy. Gertrude would’ve thought the oil crisis part of the anti-German war effort and not OPEC’s embargo in the Middle East. She’d have been frightened, but she’d have rung her daughter anyway to assure her she’d fight the Nazis off with a frying pan before she let them blow her to pieces . . . to pieces . . .

“How’s it going there?” Richard asked, getting up and walking over to Shruti. “You get it yet?”

“No,” Shruti murmured. Richard opened his mouth to complain, but she continued, “I was just thinking that Gertrude probably knit tea cozies and liked to do jigsaws.”

Richard shook his head. “No, not jigsaws.” He squinted and started fumbling with his fingertips in front of his face. “The pieces would’ve been too fiddly. People’s grans can’t see that well.”

“We don’t know she’s a gran,” Margaret pointed out.

“Oh, come on, she must have been.”

“Act—ahem—actually,” David said, his voice cracking so that he had to start over, “My brother used to do them.

If she did one with fewer pieces, it really wouldn’t be very hard.”

Richard wasn’t totally convinced. “If you say so.” He focused his attention on Shruti instead. “I’ll do it if you want.” He extended his hand for the scalpel.

It was tempting, but Shruti remembered how he’d acted earlier. “It’s supposed to be me. Really, I can do this.”

He shrugged. “Just slice into her. She won’t feel a thing.” He snatched the coursebook from Margaret, who looked like she wanted to protest but crossed her arms and rolled her eyes instead. She turned to face Shruti, 34

who still resented being volunteered and so refused to back her up. Richard prompted, “Alright then.”

Shruti gripped the scalpel. Gertrude’s back stretched out in front of her, all the way down to the gentle rise of her buttocks beneath the sheet. There was a dash of blue ink at the top of her spine where MacKenzie had left a guiding mark when preparing the bodies the night before.

Shruti was torn between wanting to run out and find her sister so they could go dancing early tonight and knowing that the only way to get to there from here was to start the dissection. It had been her own idea to come to medical school, after all. There were so many people she wanted to help. Her stomach bubbled as she turned back to Gertrude’s covered face and pictured the tranquil expression now facing the table. Shruti leaned down.

“Sorry,” she whispered into Gertrude’s ear.

The scalpel pierced the blue mark, went in too far, and got stuck. Was anyone watching her? It wouldn’t move in any direction. With a sharp jerk, she got it out, and tried again. This time, it slid, but it cut something it wasn’t supposed to. Shruti squeaked in terror.

When she peeked over her shoulder to see if anyone had heard, she saw that Margaret, Richard, and David had gotten bored waiting for her to make her move. They were talking amongst themselves about the upcoming first round of exams. David glanced in her direction and Shruti quickly looked down, feeling awkward. She made up her mind to try a second time, but the scalpel got caught again. This was hopeless.

“Do you need some help?”

David stood in front of her, his face all scrunched together in secondhand embarrassment. Shruti sighed, letting the scalpel go limp in her hand. She was very aware of a wisp of hair that stuck to her forehead with sweat despite the laboratory’s chill. “I just didn’t realize it would be this hard.”

“I’d be surprised if anyone did,” David replied. He spoke as if he had gone through all of this before, but Shruti couldn’t think of a situation where that could be true. “I can have a go, if you like.”

David held out his hands. His fingers shook the slightest bit. “Are you sure?” Shruti asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” David said. He smiled weakly. “Just let me do it before I can change my mind.”

Against her better judgment, Shruti handed him the scalpel, if only because he seemed to need it more than she did.

David took a short, sharp breath and inserted the knife just beneath where Shruti had made her first jagged cut. At least she had gotten that much right. The scalpel slipped and he muttered to himself, “Don’t be silly, David.” It took him a second to get going but once he did, the scalpel glided down Gertrude’s back like a knife through butter. The further David got, the more his tongue protruded from between his lips in concentration.

He sank into a world where no one but he and Gertrude existed.

Shruti felt a twinge of jealousy as she watched him work. At the same time, though, she couldn’t help but think that Gertrude was better off without her.

No matter how hard Richard pulled on the strip of cloth masking Gertrude’s face two weeks later, he couldn’t get it to unwind any faster: there were just too many layers.

He whispered to himself so that he wouldn’t have to think about what he was on the verge of exposing. “And so, the mummy emerges . . .”

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Shruti.”

“Are you pretending you’re some kind of archaeologist?”

Richard turned to her with a look of doe-eyed innocence. Behind him, the bottom half of Gertrude’s face peeked out from under the last layer of wrappings.

Her mouth was small and there was a scar under her lower lip. “Have a little fun? Me? You’re joking,” said Richard.

Shruti let out an exasperated breath and next to her, David drummed with his fingers on the table near Gertrude’s left knee. Margaret rolled her eyes at them.

“Oh, just get on with it. You’re acting like toddlers.”

“Okay, mum, I’ll behave,” Richard conceded. He stuck his tongue out at Shruti and liberated the linen with one last tug. It whipped out and away from Gertrude’s bald head, revealing her perfectly preserved face in full. Her eyes were closed—thank God—and her eyebrows slightly elevated, the individual hairs so distinct that it was as if the embalmers had painstakingly implanted each one

for verisimilitude. If he hadn’t known any better, Richard would’ve expected her to wake up any second.

“Right, well, where do we start?” Richard asked.

Margaret, who was acting as guide again, replied, “If I’m not mistaken, then the mandible.”

“Which is . . .”

“The jawbone, Richard.”

“I knew that.”

“I’m sure you did.”

David passed Richard the scalpel so he could start cutting around Gertrude’s cheek. Annoyed at Margaret, Richard grumbled something at him to the tune of, “She thinks she’s so much better than us, doesn’t she?”

“She just wants to get the work done,” David said, picking up the wrappings that Richard had dropped by Gertrude’s shoulder. He twisted them around his hands as he added, “I’m sure she means well.”

Richard disagreed, but he didn’t want to argue.

Instead, he bent down to remove Gertrude’s cheek skin with the scalpel. He hacked away at layers of fat and fascia, digging out the dull white bone from underneath and ignoring the cramping in his fingers. Once enough of it was gone and Margaret wasn’t looking, he grabbed the bone saw from the rack of larger instruments lining the wall. It wasn’t really the best thing for job, but it was loud and powerful and sharp. He plugged it into one of the outlets suspended from the ceiling and pressed down the button so he could delight in its empty growl.

The electric cord hit Shruti against the side of her head. “Watch it!” she grumbled.

“Relax, it’s fine,” Richard said. He knew enough about what he was doing. His fingers felt around the bones in Gertrude’s face. “There it is.” He inserted the saw.

Margaret’s eyes widened as she looked wildly from the coursebook to him and back again.

“Richard!”

He couldn’t hear her over the angry grinding of the saw.

“Richard!”

“What?”

He started on the other side.

“You’ll break it!”

The saw screeched as it hit the open air. With a nonchalant wave of the hand, Richard banished a small cloud of dust from the cadaver’s face and put down the 35

tool. Over by the outlet, Shruti yanked out the plug before he could start up again. Richard cut the last strings of muscle holding the jaw together and thrust his hands under Gertrude’s jaw just as the mandible dropped into his upturned palms. He turned toward Margaret, holding out the jaw like a sacrificial offering. He grinned. “I’ve got it.”

Margaret slammed the coursebook shut. “Can you please be a little more considerate?”

“Yeah, treat the lady here with a bit of respect,” Shruti added.

Richard protested. “Aren’t we a little past—” “We’re working for a grade, Richard,” Margaret interrupted just as Shruti parted her lips to complain.

“You’re not the only one here.”

Shruti abruptly shut her mouth, frowned, and grabbed the spray bottle from underneath the table.

She misted Gertrude’s face with an acute desperation, distracting Margaret so that the argument died off.

Unable to retort, Richard clutched the jaw in his hand and stalked back to the seat next to David. He felt bad for upsetting Shruti—she was a nice person, really—but it would have been awkward to apologize.

Behind him, Richard heard Margaret admonishing Shruti because Gertrude’s face glistened like she’d been caught in a rainstorm. “Okay, okay, don’t drown her,” she said, prying the bottle out of Shruti’s hand.

“Isn’t she dead already?” Richard whispered to himself.

On the stool next to him, David had wrapped his hands so tightly in the bandages that his skin was turning deathly white. Richard nodded in the direction of David’s clenched fists. “You okay there, mate?”

“I’m not your mate.”

Richard started. He’d never heard David speak like this before. “I’m . . . sorry?”

David didn’t answer. He twisted in his seat and scanned the room, as if he suddenly needed to ask MacKenzie a very urgent question. The doctor was at his desk, just putting down the phone after a call. There was no telling what had been said because MacKenzie had spoken under the cover of Richard’s racket. His face had fallen, though, and he looked disappointed. Richard watched as MacKenzie made eye contact with David for 36

a brief second before running his hands through his thinning hair and heaving a sigh.

“A moment,” he mouthed, half-heartedly putting his finger up to indicate they needed to wait.

David nodded, turned back to Richard, and pursed his lips. Neither of them spoke.

Richard started playing with the jaw in his hands. It wasn’t that big a deal; it wasn’t like he and David were close. They didn’t have much in common besides being the only two boys in their group. David was, after all, a much better student, which Richard gave no bones about admitting. Richard had always known it, known before the first time he stepped in the lab that everyone else would be better than him.

If it had been up to Richard, he wouldn’t be here in the first place. He wouldn’t even be in England, for that matter. He’d only done the application to please his father. Sure, he’d made an honest effort once he got here, but at this point Modern London Medical College was all he had. Once the South Perth Lions had turned him down during the rugby recruitment season, what was the point of fighting it? The worst part was that Richard’s father hadn’t even waited for the Force rejection before accepting MLMC on his behalf. Richard had been so sure he could wave that letter triumphantly in his face but . . .

He tossed the jawbone lightly from one hand to the other. It was hard, brittle, and spiked with Gertrude’s few remaining teeth. Richard traced his finger over the tops of her molars, sliding up and down over the ridges and across the wide plateaus in between. Even Gertrude, in a way, was better off than he was. She had picked what she’d wanted to do with her body and she’d done it. Everyone else in the room belonged, too. Why couldn’t he? No one even spoke his language, it seemed: Richard would bring up the previous night’s match, be it rugby or even football (and who doesn’t watch football?) and they’d stare at him blankly as if he were the abnormal one.

The jaw grew heavier in Richard’s hands. He stopped tossing it. If he dropped out of university, his father would be angry. If he stayed, he would get bored. Shruti would dog him about the cadaver. David would forever float at the peripheries of his vision, refusing to come into focus, and Margaret would walk all over him. But he was strong; wasn’t he supposed to be strong? Wasn’t he even able to

almost lift the body on his own? Richard’s grip on the jaw tightened.

“Ouch!”

The ragged edge from where he had sawed too hastily had cut through his gloves and into his hand. A dot of blood sprang up by his lifeline and spilt out over his palm, sticking the latex to his skin. Richard’s face flushed and his grip tightened around the offending edge, but the bone was too thick, so he shifted to the thinnest part, where the teeth were. His muscles tensed with the pressure that coursed down to his fingertips. Blood spurted out faster from inside his hand. No one heard as a tooth broke off with a subtle crack.

Margaret cradled Gertrude’s heart—a human heart—in her hands like a baby bird. It was slightly heavier than she’d expected. Face-up, it fit comfortably in the nest of her palms, which were damp with excess fluid. Its veined, brownish tissue seemed to glow in the fluorescence from the overhead light. Margaret traced her finger over its surface, delighting in how the rubbery muscle resisted her when she tried to push on any single spot. Beyond her, Gertrude lay on the examination table, her ribcage cracked open and inverted so that it resembled a pair of unfurled wings.

She could feel everyone watching her, waiting for her to pass the heart to David, but she wasn’t ready to just yet.

He was always right behind her in everything—they were neck and neck for the top spot in the class, his written exams better than hers and her practicals outstripping his—so he could wait one more minute. He reminded her of her brothers, except he didn’t tease her about not attending Westminster (which wasn’t even her fault) or Oxford (she had tried her hardest) until she could hear his voice in her head every time she stepped into a classroom.

Margaret turned the heart over and over in her hands.

There had to be something she’d missed. They hadn’t found Gertrude’s cause of death yet and, even though it wasn’t required, she felt like she had to know. Gertrude wasn’t allowed to have secrets.

Shruti nudged Margaret with her elbow. “Let’s give someone else a go, eh?”

“But I—”

“You’ll get it back,” Shruti persisted. She jerked her head toward David but Margaret had already turned back to the heart.

Margaret sighed. “Alright.” She held the heart out to Shruti and told herself this wasn’t the same as giving up.

Shruti’s face contorted as she tried to find a way to refuse going next and Margaret sighed. Nothing had changed in the two months since the day they’d moved in together: they were never going to understand each other.

The first thing Shruti had done when she’d arrived was put a Bowie record on Margaret’s turntable. She’d justified her pick of Hunky Dory by saying, “I know it’s a couple of years old, but it’s my favorite. There’s also Aladdin Sane. My parents don’t let me listen to that one, but they’re not here, so we’ll do it after.” As she stowed her clothes in the communal wardrobe, she skipped and danced in a wiggly way. Margaret couldn’t afford to waste time so close to the start of the semester, so she’d closed the door to her bedroom so she could study. But the music made her wonder what it was like not to care quite so much, so she’d smoked a cigarette in the open window instead and hoped Shruti wouldn’t come in to talk to her.

She didn’t. With exception of an odd, failing attempt at friendship, they’d barely spoken since.

David offered to go next. “Do we know what killed her?” he asked, turning the heart over and over in her hands.

“No, not yet,” Margaret replied. She tried to sound nonchalant, but really she was watching closely. She didn’t want him to find anything she hadn’t. The answer had to be in the heart. They hadn’t found a lot of what they were meant to, nerves and blood vessels, things hiding behind layers of fat or just in the wrong place entirely. But this, she was sure she could solve this piece of the puzzle.

She needed it to go right.

David pulled at the different openings into the heart, widening them a little with his probing fingers.

The muscle seemed elastic enough; it sprang back into place when he removed them. Margaret knew he’d be careful but she wasn’t sure she trusted him all the same.

She sometimes caught him looking at her as if he were picturing her dead.

After several minutes of this, Richard, absolute child that he was, couldn’t wait anymore. He dropped 37

the scalpel he’d been playing with into the instruments bin with a clatter and grabbed the heart straight out of David’s hands. “My turn!”

“Careful!” shouted Margaret. Her own heartbeat quickened.

“David wasn’t done!” Shruti huffed as David opened his mouth to speak.

Richard stuck his tongue out at David, who rolled his eyes. “Too slow, Campbell.”

Hearing the commotion, MacKenzie drifted over from a neighboring group. He was like a barge, weighed down by every additional lesson he had to teach. “Is everything okay over here, Mr. King?”

Richard reddened. “Yes, sir.”

“Handle your specimens with care, Mr. King. Don’t want to break anything else, do we?”

Richard nervously tightened his grip on the heart, squeezing it with his fingers. “N-no, sir.”

Margaret bit back a smile. “Shut it,” Richard snapped once MacKenzie had left.

“Your turn’s over,” Shruti said to Richard. “Give it to me.”

Richard made as if to give her the heart, but then started fumbling with it. “Oh, here —here—oh no, where is it?” He let it drop.

Shruti and David gasped and Margaret’s body tensed so she could dive for the ground. She couldn’t let it get hurt. It would get all dirty and someone might step on it and— Richard caught the heart after a split second. The others let out a collective breath.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Shruti snatched the heart from him and passed it to Margaret without examining it herself.

Richard looked at Margaret, whose mouth was still open in shock. “Problem, Grant?”

He was all insolence and no tact. Margaret’s brothers had done this to her all the time but she had never been able to come up with a good retort. Her mind went blank for a second before she said, “I bet Gertrude’s the only woman who’s ever given you her heart and that’s only because she’s dead.”

“Ohhhh!” Shruti and David exploded with laughter.

Richard flushed. “I’ll have you know . . .” he trailed off.

Shruti high-fived her. “Ladies got to stick together!”

38

Margaret smiled at her triumph and laughed along with the rest. Even Richard chuckled after a moment, conceding, “You’ve got me there.”

Margaret rubbed the heart in her hands absentmindedly with one finger before raising it up to the light so it cast a shadow over her face. Everything about it was perfect, from its graceful curves to its once noble purpose. She would wait a moment before cutting into it, so that she wouldn’t have to ruin it right away. Maybe for once it was enough as it was.

But Margaret could feel Shruti’s eyes scrutinizing her momentary reluctance. Her hesitation meant nothing, even if Shruti read more into it. It wasn’t like Gertrude’s heart had started beating again, right there in her hands.

There was work to do. Laying the heart down on the table in a bit of free space by the cadaver’s hand, Margaret picked up a scalpel and sliced it open.

On the last day of class, even David was inclined to agree with everyone when they said they were relieved to go home. “I think it’s time we all go get a pint.” He bent down so he could pull the folded sheet, now covered in brownish stains from dried-up blood and the bottom of Richard’s shoes, from underneath Gertrude’s metal table.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, lad,” MacKenzie said, appearing behind David.

David still stooped. “But I thought—” “I know what I said. The others will go onto use for the pro-sections. But this old girl—” MacKenzie slapped the plastic box that contained Gertrude’s excised organs with a loud thump that made the others in the room turn to look at him. “—Gertrude, you called her? We can’t salvage her. They’re picking her up in the morning before the undertakers’ strike starts.”

“Are you . . .” David banged his head against the table trying to stand up again. “Ouch.” He took a breath. “Are you sure?”

MacKenzie nodded. David noticed the bags under his eyes were darker than usual. He wondered if his own eyes looked the same or if it just felt that way. “All that’s in store for her now is cremation. A trip to the old furnace.”

“I should think it’s not as gruesome as all that,” Margaret said.

“Will there be a service?” Shruti asked.

“Not my department,” grunted MacKenzie. As he took his leave from the group, they just barely heard him add, “They made that very clear over the phone the other day . . .”

“We going, then?” Richard asked. While the others were talking, he’d shed his gloves, emptied the tools out of his pockets, and dumped it all in a pile on the table.

Like the others, David was relieved that the hard work was over. They wouldn’t have to come into this room anymore and breathe the stink that was more formaldehyde than air. But as much as he wanted to go, he couldn’t move his feet toward the door. The others turned to follow their classmates out the door and leave, but he hesitated. “I . . .”

“Do you need a minute?” Shruti asked, spinning back around. Her tone was gentle and sympathetic. He knew she meant well, but he hated it. He didn’t want to be the weak one.

“Erm . . .” He ran his hand through his hair. Who was he kidding? “Yeah.”

“We’ll wait for you outside,” Shruti said. She shrugged.

“Margaret probably wants a smoke anyway.”

“You can say that again!” Margaret shouted from the door. The three of them filed out, the last of the students to quit the laboratory.

MacKenzie, rattling around behind his desk, didn’t realize that there was one last live human being in the room. Humming a little tune, he picked through the keys on his ring until he came to the one that opened the bottom drawer of his desk. David watched as he stooped down and disappeared behind the desk, clinked something that sounded like glass (what exactly was in that drawer?), and came up with a half-empty bottle of whiskey. His eyes only on the bottle, MacKenzie twisted off the top and downed its contents without coming up for air.

It made sense, David decided. MacKenzie, burping and shaking his head, packed the empty bottle into his briefcase and pulled out an unopened one from his drawer for later. Once he’d snatched up his coat and hat, he went to the door. His back to the room, MacKenzie hesitated with his finger on the light switch. He murmured something to himself—maybe it was to the cadavers?—and plunged David into darkness. The door closed softly behind him.

David turned round to face Gertrude again. Her head, having been bisected several weeks ago, was held together with a hasty bandage and her missing jaw made it look like she was in shock over the state of her skull.

David could imagine her saying, What liberties you’ve taken, young man! But no, she’d wanted it this way. That’s why she was here in the laboratory.

Still, maybe she hadn’t expected a group of students quite like David’s to come along. Who could prepare for a Shruti or a Richard? David stared down at her as he traced his finger along the cold, almost sharp edge of the table. He felt himself remembering, so he pressed his fingertip into the corner at the end by Gertrude’s head, but the memories wouldn’t stop. He surrendered and let them come, wrapping himself as tightly in his thoughts as the cadavers were in their shrouds.

Twelve years ago, he had stood over his older brother Dean in the police morgue, a room that to him had been just a cold and smelly place with the letter M on the door.

He didn’t know what his brother was doing there at first, only that it was a silly place to fall asleep when everyone was worried and looking for him. Their mother was even talking to Captain Morris in his office. David had been left unsupervised by Constable Ted, who was supposed to be watching him but had fallen asleep instead. David hadn’t liked Ted because he had tweaked his nose and it took a great deal of rubbing to get the feel of the man’s finger off.

David had run away at the first opportunity and found the morgue left unlocked by the medical examiner, who he’d glimpsed go into the loo.

Sitting atop the examiner’s stool with his legs swinging in the air, David saw that Dean was all bruised and scratched and there were dark red splotches on the sheet covering him. His clothes were in a pile in the corner. Five minutes passed before David realized Dean wasn’t just lost anymore. He was dead and it was David’s fault.

Dean had gotten a new bike for his sixteenth birthday, a shiny royal blue thing. David had found it two days earlier, hiding in the basement behind some boxes, and had attempted to ride it. He made it a turn or two around the cellar before his foot missed the pedal to brake and he ran straight into the wall. He was fine, but some piece had fallen off the bike. He’d thrown it into a random box and hoped no one would notice.

39

Right after Dean got the bike, he rode it to his friend Victor’s so they could complete their thousand-piece Trafalgar Square jigsaw puzzle. No one wondered where he was until several hours later, when Victor called and asked what was taking Dean so long to arrive. The police found him during the night in a ditch off a sharp curve in the road. He’d hit his head on a rock. Their theory, as the police captain had explained to David’s mother, was that his brakes had stopped working and he’d missed the turn somehow. Perhaps he was trying to avoid a car on the road.

The funeral was held on one of the most beautiful days of the year. David sat on the church steps with his aunt, away from the service. He let his mother believe that it was to protect him from too much sadness, but really he had asked to do it so he wouldn’t have to look at what he’d done to Dean.

Now he, Margaret, Richard, and Shruti had done the same to Gertrude. They were going to leave her too.

David looked down at her: her broken pieces, her shocked expression. Her freakishly defined eyebrows and her mercifully closed eyes. He groped in the back of his mind for the echoes of the vicar’s sermon from the church steps twelve years ago: what was it he had said? David hadn’t been to church since.

“Our Father . . .” he began, but it sounded stupid the second he started. He let himself trail off. He glanced out the window beyond Gertrude and caught a glimpse of a glowing orange spot in the darkness. Margaret’s cigarette. She threw it down on the ground, extinguished it with her heel, then she and two other shadows started back toward the college. They were coming to get him.

“Um . . .” David looked around frantically, trying to find something fitting. Spotting the box of organs, he thought he could at least put them back in their original vessel, but he broke a nail trying to pry it open.

The top had stuck. If he had more time, he’d get it open.

He grabbed up the sheet and threw it so it spread over Gertrude, floating down so gently and slowly he was sure the others would knock at the door before he finished.

The blanket settled over the box and Gertrude’s body, but not her head.

David took up the top edge, ready to pull it up over her face. “I—I’d put you back together if I could.”

40

Footsteps echoed outside the laboratory door. David dropped the sheet over Gertrude just as Shruti called his name.

“Coming!” David shouted. He stepped away from the cadaver, turning his back on it and walking over to the sink. He splashed some water on his face, the cold making his skin tingle, and wiped it with the edge of his shirt.

Then he walked out the door and left to join the others so they could finally go out for that pint.

A Warning to the Mind - 1 Jeff Hersch

Early Spring/Late Winter

existential

A lone yellow flower Under the gray sky With orange/reddish tips Contrasting with the beige wall Against which it stands Bending to the cool Wind of early spring A petal detaches itself Falling on the cold pavement Before drifting away Carried by the wind

i wrote my name on

the wall of a bathroom stall

traced six letters

in graphite

the sickness doesn’t grow

Tempo

it bubbles to my throat, hurls me onto the floor—mannequined there for hours, days until I’m forced to shower and shave or the lights will go out again be without the heater that spurts scalding water and steam at my neck at night, scarring my sweat-stained skin—who could be proud of me— naked and sprawled on vomit-crusted beer-bottle stainglassed carpet – this basement hallway is littered with more holes than my stomach-lining— when the sunlight screams through these windows you’d love the colors I swear you’d still love the colors

My heart used to pump too fast. I once read that a heart only holds so many beats, like a record, it only has so much space for songs, which is why hummingbirds live for three years; their music plays so fast you can hardly hear it.

My doctor gave me pills and now my heart is quiet.

So slow it’s like it’s beating in reverse.

Victor About

Sean William Dever

Andrea Reisenauer

the next day it was erased

only spider-line

scratches remain

until one day

they too will fade or be replaced by a

brazen black-Sharpie phallus

Caitlin Curtis

41

Your Reason Sarah Firth

If you stare at something long enough, it changes. Doesn’t matter what it is, the longer you stare the more you see, even if your eyes never move, even if the thing being stared at never moves.

Nothing stays the same, not to the eye of the beholder, and really, isn’t that what counts?

A ceiling doesn’t actually change in the span of the few hours you might stare at it, but it’ll feel like it does.

It’ll look like it does, so basically, it does.

What is the world—what is life—if not what it looks like to you?

The ceiling looks like a blank canvas when you look up from the soft prison cell of your bed. It’s off-white and flat and the cold light of a grey winter day falls across it uniformly. It’s a ceiling, and not even an interesting one at that. Just a ceiling when you give up trying to feel like a human and flop down onto your mattress because it’s more comfortable than the floor and your family will judge you if they find you on the ground. You’re meant to have moved past that.

You’re meant to have moved past all of this. You’re meant to be able to handle the days you can’t feel anything, the days you’d be glad to step in front of a train or ‘accidentally’ fall off your balcony. You’re meant not to consider thoughts like this as anything but cause for concern.

Right now they’re comforting. This nothingness doesn’t have to be forever. There is always a way out.

You’re not going to do it. You know you’re not. But having the option feels like the one bit of control you have left, so you cling to it. Cling as you stare up at the ceiling and feel time pass you by, sticky and slow.

Cling as you watch the ceiling change. Your eyes don’t move from the spot directly above your head. Maybe you blink, maybe you don’t. Your eyes are rooted to the same spot because to move them would take energy and that’s one thing you definitely do not have to spare today. So you stare at the ceiling and watch shapes appear and disappear, watch the tricks your brain plays on your eyes if you keep them trained on the same spot for long enough.

What is your life, if not what it feels like to you?

42

Today it feels like a punishment. Today it feels like a gaping hole, an inky black void into which all hope, all meaning, all feeling disappear until all that’s left is a husk, a meat sack with eyes, a vessel which exists only to remind you of the depths of your uselessness.

So, then, life isn’t even pain. Life is wishing you could feel pain. Life is numb; life is all your nerves clipped; life is watching yourself bleed out and not even being capable of accessing the will to give a shit about it.

Life goes on while you’re lying here, you know. The world doesn’t stop just because you’ve got some faulty chemistry in your brain. It’s not going to wait for you.

And it’s not going to put on its kid gloves. Life’s gloves have spikes. Life’s gloves won’t stop just because you’re down on the ground with blood in your mouth. They’ll hold you down and keep you there just because it’s easier.

If you want to get up you’re going to have to fucking hit back.

But not today. Today you’re going to lie there and take what life gives you. Stare at the ceiling. Watch the shapes.

You can hear footsteps padding down the hall. They get closer until they’re right there and the door creaks as it opens. His little head appears in the doorway, eyes wide and innocent. “Mama? Are you still sleeping?”

You want him to go away. Your head hurts just at the sound of his voice. “No, baby. I’m awake.”

He runs over to the side of your bed, face bright with inexplicable excitement. It’s all for you, all because he’s happy to see you, and you realize there’d be no coming back from turning him away. Your eyes are wet and he reaches out to touch the track on your cheek.

“What's wrong?”

You smile because he’s beautiful and you can’t believe anything so perfect could have come from you. He’s made of you. You did at least one thing right. “I’m a little sad today, baby.”

“What would make you happy?” he asks. His eyes are green like your mom’s, but he looks like you.

“You.” He takes your hand and pulls you up, and you let him because it’s true. Right now the world consists of an endless chasm of darkness and him. You choose him over the void, and maybe tomorrow the void will get a little smaller.

But there will be a tomorrow. There will. Because of him.

He’s your reason today. And people will tell you that’s unhealthy. People will tell you to live for yourself, to live because you owe yourself the chance to experience life’s beauty. Today that’s a meaningless suggestion given by someone who knows nothing. Today your reason is him and no one can take that away from you.

He holds your hand and walks you down the hall to the living room. You sit together on the couch, him in your lap with his little head rested back against your chest. You cling to him, smell his hair, stroke your thumb over the temple you grew inside you.

The picture on the television is constantly changing.

The images mean nothing to you; you can’t make sense of them, but you stare at them long enough that you start to see hints of colour again. You hear his breath, feel his chest rising and falling.

You cling to your reason. You cling to your reason because you have to believe that tomorrow there will be more reasons.

There might not be. Maybe not tomorrow . . . but someday. Hopefully someday soon.

You’ve made it this far, right?

A Warning to the Mind - 2 Jeff Hersch 43

No hope whatsoever Giovanni Mangiante

This underwhelming life of mine escapes through my fingers, and I can hear it in the well rounded, complete, laughter of the children playing outside.

I spend the night terrified of what’s not there, and the child I once was is now hanging from his neck somewhere at the back of my head.

A Kind of Flattery Jenny Qi

Have you lost weight? You look good!

They meant it kindly.

Just stress, I laugh lightly. So sick with uncertainty I swallow, taste bile.

On NPR, an interview with a woman nostalgic for addiction: How beautiful you look!

They admired her wide eyes, high cheeks, hollowed waist and holy grail thigh gap.

She was homeless then, and addicted to heroin.

Oh . . . you’ve gained weight. when she finally got clean.

I was my thinnest at my mother’s bedside.

Melting away was the last thing we would do together.

Spin Cycle John Stewart

I sort of died My car flipped several times My life didn’t flash before my eyes I dreamt I was underwear in a wash Scoured for an eternity Or so I thought because it stopped There was blood all over me But when they pulled me out I felt like new When I got home I was starving I ate a slice of bread plain for some reason And it was the best thing I’ve ever tasted

44

diabetic as supernova Sean William Dever for Shane Patrick Boyle

cast from the sky

star born from the onset of homegrown illness

in Houston, Texas

ventured to Mesa, Arkansas

duty

but there’s no rest

life

with kaleidoscope eyes

insulin

for right now

you never told her test-strips

she didn’t wake again

that things would work themselves out

each day

for those who bleed like us

for three weeks you

kissed the palm

with tainted blood and corroding bodies

catching the tailwind

of her soul

while Eli Lilly

a field of grain

and Sanofi

with tainted blood and corroding bodies and with our hands pulled from the soil

who picked up a second job we watch the costs soar

brothers and sisters but there’s no rest

each day we rise

to

or the countless others those with

for those who

a wildfire burning in and unite

collapse the damnation forced upon us

country eager wipe the blood from their money will not dry

$50.00 short

stripping them to bare the burning

swear it’s for us

like the souls of the countless

demolish the thrones of Big Pharma

for those

whose body submitted to high blood

impure red seeing through their pincushion-fingertips bleed like us

you

the literal corrosion of the

and of Jesimya David Sherer-Radcliff

$15.00 to $320.00 a vial

and with them

a wildfire

we stay

Diabetic Ketoacidosis

after aging off of his parent’s insurance Novo Nordisk

before

and you died in a hospital bed a week after your mother

and what of Alec Raeshawn Smith

cover medical costs

blood

each day

attacking the muscles and tissues of major organs

sugar a month

of her hand

but there’s no rest

and with our hands buried in the soil

$50.00 short of meeting your goal

insulin

begged for company

to still make out the shape of her

burning in a field of grain

of the blood

with

stained your cheeks

as the remaining vial of insulin

carefully drew enough

you had

a wildfire burning in a field of grain

and the sugar-tinged tears

clung the memories

body

your body cried for

that you started a GoFundMe to raise money for supplies

and needles

who bleed like us

catching the final moments of your mother’s

but there’s no rest

tainted blood and corroding bodies

a child’s

with tainted blood and corroding

but as you waited by her bedside

and you told her not to worry

enough left

to care for your dying mother

for those who bleed like us

you went and couldn’t take a job

bodies

you left your apartment

on tailored suits and ties

to from a

but

our

as we implode and stain the sky 45

America Online Jeff Hersch 46

Worst Comes to Best in San Francisco Chad Lutz

A half hour has passed since I first started sending text messages out like beacons from a sinking ship to just about everyone I know in the Bay Area. The reason: because the guy I was staying with decided to vacate his apartment three days earlier than originally planned and I needed a place to crash.

“Just go homeless,” a friend of mine joked. “Everybody’s doing it.” But this friend of mine makes over $100,000 a year in a supervisory role with a manufacturer partnered with Tesla, has a Land Rover, a motorcycle, and spends most of his free time living out of his SUV and hanging around music festivals.

“That’s not funny,” I texted the same friend back, unable to understand where he was coming from. Three months earlier I’d gotten in a footrace with a homeless person that called me a bitch because I was running for fun.

“Ever go three days without food?” he asked, catching up to me. “You’re a pussy.”

A part of me realizes my pride is why I remember this moment so vividly, but also because it was stirring.

Because I’m ten hours from having no place to go in one of America’s biggest cities with my only real lifelines (parents) over 2,700 miles away.

I’m on my way back to Oakland from San Francisco, a place where eight in every thousand persons is homeless.

This may not sound like much at first, but when you consider there are over 800,000 people that reside on the Peninsula, the thought should give a person pause.

And it’s not just San Francisco, it’s the entire Bay. In January 2018, East Bay Express gave an estimate of roughly 2,760 homeless persons living in Oakland.

In Berkeley, the count was an estimated 975 homeless persons. Waiting lists for beds in homeless shelters are rising, too.

I was over in the City for a job interview. I had a good feeling about the interview from the moment I sent in the application. I’d talked to the owner through a string of emails and had him laughing. Within an hour, I was scheduled to meet. Things looked good. Things felt good.

And I needed it.

The interview was with a bike tour company offering $22/hr to basically babysit sightseers in a place I know like the back of my hand. Facing an already purchased and pending return trip home to the Midwest, if I couldn’t find a job by the following Tuesday, it was bye-bye birdie.

Back to the homeland. And with it already being Friday, the clock was ticking.

So, I put on my best business casual wear, practically sprinted to the nearest bus stop, and boarded the NL for the City without hesitation. But when the meter on the bus told me I was down to my final $5 on my Clipper card, that’s when the situation started feeling bleak.

Transbay fares are $4.50, one way.

At the time, I had a measly $10.25 to my name.

As the bus rolled down Grand Ave, I watched one of the many tent camps in Oakland pass by. Blankets propped up with chairs and tattered Coleman, Hilary, and Field & Stream tents streaked with grime and crud. Shopping carts stuffed to their gills with pop cans and children’s dolls and toothbrushes, clothing.

In May 2017, Operation Dignity, a Bay Area outreach program, estimated there to be about 200 homeless encampments in Oakland alone, just like the one off Grand Ave. near San Pablo Ave. Some with as many as 75 to 100 people living in the confined areas, many without toilets or running water. The same as I was watching from the NL on my way to, hopefully, find a damn job.

I got to the City with plenty of time to spare before the interview. My plan was to find my way to the pier where the bike tour company was located and then practice what I wanted to say to the manager. I was also going to use the time to continue to ask friends for a place to stay.

“Can’t do it,” one of them said, “I just moved into a new place and it’d look bad to have a guy crash on the couch.”

“Just a week or two?” I asked, but they couldn’t do it.

Another friend told me they couldn’t do it because were about to move and didn’t want a random person living with them while they showed the apartment.

Most of the people I texted just told me, “Sorry, can’t help you,” and as much as it sucked to hear, I understood.

I’d basically be living rent free and taking up what little space Bay Area denizens already have. And at an average of $1,102 per square foot, you either pay or take the highway.

47

So, I walked.

I walked through China Town looking up at the TransAmerica Pyramid and wondered if it was going to be the last time I’d ever see it’s odd triangular shape inperson. Or, at least, for a while.

As I walked, I passed a man in a big brown parka sleeping on the street with a dog lying at his feet and a dollar flapping gently in his paper cup. Then, I got it. The final text message.

“You can stay with me, but only until your flight leaves.”

And that was it. The deal sealed. There would be no way I could make enough in five days to pay for the first and last months’ rent on an apartment, plus utilities, let alone all the other necessities life warrants.

I never ended up going to the interview with the bike tour company. I stopped along the sidewalk and breathed heavy, felt like punching a hole in the building next to me, and wondered what kind of place this was?

It’s a place where a four-bedroom house costs an average of $2.2 million, and a measly one-bedroom home racks up an $880,000 bill.

Once I got my breath back, I called the manager with about forty-five minutes to spare and told him thanks for the consideration but yadda yadda yadda best of luck blah blah blah and hung up. I felt sick to my stomach and decided sitting down might do me some good, so I gathered myself and started walking toward Embarcadero, realizing I was now a tourist, no longer a job prospector.

I’d simply run out of time (and money).

I came out to the Bay Area three weeks ago with $300 in the bank to find a job. The trip was originally only supposed to last a week, but ended up extending because I kept finding job opportunities, but only one of them came up solid. The bike tour company. The other two required at least a two-hour commute by BART costing $5 each way, every day, on top of being a commissioned position in sales. That’s all I could find, outside of the bike tour position. I sent out more than 50 applications in those three weeks.

Upset and defeated, I posted up on one of the swiveling metal chairs along Pier 14, breeze blowing in from the north, sun warm and bright in the sky, and started thinking about what I was going to do now that 48

my options were exhausted, when a man with no teeth and cracked skin came up to me asking what that noise was.

“What noise?” I asked, unconsciously drumming my fingers on the metallic seat.

The man pointed at my hands with a smile and laughed. There are six rings on my fingers. I wear them every day.

“Oh, of course,” I told him, feeling like a dope, blushing like a beet. It didn’t take more than a fraction of a second for me to feel this shame, but the man didn’t seem to care.

He cleared his throat, adopted a stately air, and held out a periodical, some rag he was selling on the beat.

“I’ll take whatever you can give me,” he said cordially, but not without a hint of shame.

We stayed like that for a moment. Him, standing, waiting for my response; me, still seated, wondering if I actually had anything left to give.

A pelican flew overhead and cried out in a language neither I nor the man with the cracked skin knew, but we both looked up as if we did, and when our eyes met again I could see the man was on the verge of crying, tip-toeing a line I pray I never understand.

“Yeah, of course,” I finally say, at first listless and dreamy, but eventually stronger and assertive, as if this moment was completely natural and I’d been privy to it my entire life.

I unzipped the bag I was carrying, dug around in the front pocket, rummaged through pencils and old bowling scorecards, a couple of oranges, an iPod, headphones, and then, finally, at the bottom of all this clutter, I found the loose change I was looking for and had accumulated over the previous three weeks.

All accounted for, $0.97 changed hands. Mine, jeweled with sterling silver; his, liver spotted and blistered.

“Those are some nice rings,” he said, accepting the money and clinking the coins together with his right palm as he counted. “God bless.” And with what I supposed was the satisfaction of getting something when he really didn’t expect getting anything at all, the man flashed his empty gums in a chap-lipped smile, bowed slightly, turned toward the far end of the pier, and started walking, whistling as he went.

Traffic blasted through the intersections along the Embarcadero as I watched the man go. Watched his body

shrink from life-size to doll-size to micro-machine.

Trains clanged. Seagulls screamed.

I was zipping my bag when I looked down and saw one of the oranges in the front pocket and stopped. There they were: Cuties. Two of them. One, two. One for me and one for me; a backup plan in case I couldn’t afford dinner.

It made me think about what $0.97 would get you in a place where a meal for two wears a median price tag of $80. So, with the sun shining and Ferraris roaring down the street, I grabbed one of the oranges, rose to my feet, and flagged the man down.

Movie Clip #1 at the Governor Theater Jiawei Zhao

49

You will Never go Without Matt Schroeder

if you keep me like a small dog your parents brought home & hid on the balcony they couldn’t, wouldn’t tell you then of what happens come years down the road when the ticker gets plain tuckered out

all legs in the air I will tame the wilderness in me & do my best to circle back when let off my leash you will never go without if you keep me like the cat named cat you & your sister had when you were young but keep me better do not let me go quietly into a rough morning without stories & something deeper I am learning to purr & to run to the door when you return I am learning all the loving a stray like me was always afraid of

50

you will never go without if you keep me like I keep you

buried deep in my heart

like an invasive species

that grows & grows &

does not give any ground

let’s promise never to stop & if someone somewhere tries to cull our love we will testify to their ability to fertilize & let the earth do the rest

Coming Out of the Water Tara Fritz

Daniel hasn’t always hated the lake. At one time he found it nice—not incredible or anything, but nice. On hot, clear days, the water turns shades of crystalline teal like rippled glass. The surrounding forest is cool and dark, alive with small wonders—birds’ nests perched high on tree limbs, mud-colored fish in creeks. When the sun sets, the hill at the far side of the lake turns red and gold until just the silhouette of the hemlock trees remains, the backdrop of his childhood summers.

This is the first time they’re staying at the lake house for a full month since Daniel was ten, and that was three years ago—before his father at the helm, the tipping of the boat, the water that closed around Daniel like a cold fist.

He wakes late that first morning of a long month’s worth of mornings to his sister’s sharp knock on his halfopen bedroom door. The old boxy alarm clock on the bedside table says it’s a little after ten. When he sits up, Libby snaps, “Mom told me to come bring you down to the lake.”

The words are enough to shock him into wakefulness.

“I don’t want to go to the lake.” He tries to keep his voice even, but his hands are clenched in the sheets.

The annoyance on Libby’s face softens a little. “I know.” She already has her bathing suit on, the strings of the top disappearing into the neck of her t-shirt. “But Mom and Dad said you have to.”

He could cry. That’s what he did when he was eleven, when the memory of nearly drowning was so fresh that just the sight of the water made it hard to breathe. When he was twelve, he shut himself in his bedroom and read the same book over and over. He looks up at Libby and knows he’s too old to get away with any of that now.

“Take your time or whatever,” she says when he doesn’t answer. “I promised Mom I’d bring her another cup of coffee.” Her dark hair, tied up in a long ponytail, swings from side to side as she ducks from the door frame.

He takes his time getting ready, brushing his teeth with methodical detail, applying sunscreen even though he doubts he’ll be outside for long. Then he pulls on shorts and an old t-shirt and takes a thick book from his suitcase.

Libby pokes her head around the door again, travel mug in one hand and iPod in the other. “What are you doing? Let’s go.”

He traipses after her down the sloping path to the water’s edge, emerging from the green light of the forest into the clearing of grass by the dock. “Oh, good!

You brought your brother,” their mom shouts across the distance, and she nudges the woman next to her, one of their neighbors. “Sharon, look how big Danny’s got. I swear he grew half a foot this year.”

She’s exaggerating, but Sharon Moran smiles indulgently anyway. They’re sitting in a half-circle of camp chairs that look out over the water. To the left is the dock stretching out into the distance, its boards worn to gray.

“Here’s your coffee, Mom.” Libby plunks the mug into the cup holder at their mother’s elbow.

“You did get big,” Mrs. Moran says to Daniel. Her teeth are blindingly white. “Of course, we didn’t see much of you these past few summers, did we?”

Daniel tries for a smile in return, but it comes out more like a grimace. His mom reaches over and pats his hand. “Dad and the kids went for a boat ride,” she informs him. “I told them you probably wouldn’t want to go, but maybe tomorrow.”

His chest seizes with panic. “I don’t want to go tomorrow. Or ever.”

“Oh, Daniel.” She reaches for his hand again, but he shies away from her touch, earning him a scowl. “A little boat ride won’t hurt you.”

There’s a retort on the edge of his tongue, but he tucks it away before his mouth can get him in trouble. Instead, he drags a chair far from the water’s edge and sits down to read. In a rare show of solidarity, Libby flops down in the grass beside him, peeling off her shirt to work on her tan.

The morning passes slowly. The adults talk in low murmurs until there’s a shout from the path, and the Doyles from down the street appear, lugging a small cooler between them—“For mimosas!” calls Mrs. Doyle, her lipstick a bright red smudge even at a distance, and his mom and Mrs. Moran squeal in delight.

The speedboat returns to the dock just as Mr. Doyle pops the cork off the champagne. Daniel’s dad leaps from the boat and helps secure it before he lifts the Doyles’ young daughter, Emily, from the boat, and then helps Josh 51

Moran clamber onto the dock. Josh is Daniel’s age, but looks like a stranger to him now, giddy and windswept, body taller and broader. All of them are wearing life jackets—something they never did three years ago.

“See, kiddo?” his dad calls when he catches Daniel watching. He grins and rakes a hand through his thinning hair. “Emily’s only four, and she enjoyed it plenty.”

Daniel darts his gaze back to his book again, heart pounding. It takes him three tries before he understands the words on the page in front of him.

“You have to know what they’re all doing here.” Logan Thompson rolls his eyes.

Logan and his family arrived that afternoon. His younger brother Will sits beside him, looking elated to be sitting with the older kids. The warm day had shifted into a night verging on chilly, so the parents built a bonfire in the pit that sits between the water’s edge and the cover of the forest, then went inside the Doyles’ place to drink Manhattans and play cards.

Logan looks around the circle with his lips curled into a smirk. “Come on. None of you know?”

“Shut the hell up.” Josh Moran rips a handful of grass from the ground and throws it at him. “Of course I know.

Mom and Dad had to give me some reason why they were taking me out of soccer camp early.”

Daniel stares blankly at them. Logan and Josh used to be like brothers to him. They spent entire summers together, running barefoot down the road, throwing each other in the water, playing freeze tag in the humid dusk of the forest. Now they seem as foreign to him as the few scraggly hairs on Logan’s upper lip.

“Well, our parents didn’t tell us anything,” says Libby, and Daniel is grateful she spoke up. “Stop lording it over our heads and spill already.”

Logan puts on a wicked smile. “They’re trying to catch the hermit.”

“The what?”

“You know,” says Josh, “a hermit. An old dude with a long beard who lives in the woods and never talks to anyone.”

“And?” Libby blinks at him. “What about him?”

“Josh, you suck at telling stories,” says Logan. Even in the low light, Daniel sees Josh’s face flush.

52

Logan leans over into Libby’s space. He’s fourteen now, just a year shy of her. “I can’t believe you guys’ve never heard about the Hemlock hermit—that’s what they call him. He’s been around forever, but your parents probably never told you in case you got scared.”

Daniel can’t hold his tongue any longer. “Why would we be scared of some guy who lives in the woods?”

Logan turns a glare on him. “Because, Danny,” he snaps, and Daniel hears the unspoken words behind those few syllables—Who are you to talk about what we should be afraid of? “This isn’t just any hermit. He’s been breaking into the cabins around here for years. Mostly the little rentals by the ranger station, but sometimes one of ours.

He comes in and steals all your food, and if he doesn’t like what you left him, he leaves messages written in blood on your walls.”

“Shut up!” Libby smacks his arm. “He does not.”

“He does too.” Josh nudges Logan and they share a conspiratorial grin. “One day last summer we came back from town and there it was on our wall: Buy more Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

For a moment the words hang, teetering on a fragile thread, in the still air. Then Logan and Josh burst into laughter. Daniel manages a smile. Will, only ten years old, looks caught between amusement and real fear, but Libby rolls her eyes.

“I’m going to bed,” she says, standing and stretching.

“Daniel, tell your friends to come up with better stories.”

She starts up the path to the road. Daniel can’t help but notice the way Logan and Josh watch her, hermit story momentarily forgotten, until the swing of her ponytail is lost to the shadows and the night.

Daniel forgets about the story, too, until he’s lying in bed that night, afraid to sleep. Every time he closes his eyes, the water reaches for him. He stares at the ceiling to keep the waves at bay and twists his fingers beneath the sheets, waiting for dawn or for exhaustion to pull him under, whatever comes first.

The house is still. Through the open window, he hears leaves rustling in the breeze, the steady chirrup of a few crickets. Not even the sound of the lake reaches up here, and the dark is all-consuming except for the faint orange glow of the light above the garage that leaks around the edge of his curtains.

Maybe that’s why he hears it, lying there, attentive—a different sound in the woods. A breaking stick, the crunch of leaves. Just a deer, Daniel thinks, but then he remembers the glow of the fire on Logan’s face as he told them about the hermit.

He flings back the covers and pushes aside the curtains. All he can see is the gravel driveway, awash in faint light, everything else cast into deep shadow by the trees at the edge of the woods. The noise comes again, and out of the corner of his eye he spots a movement.

It’s not a deer, but a man. Daniel’s breath comes shallow, afraid that the hermit will sense his wakefulness in the small hours of night. It’s hard to tell anything specific about him, but Daniel can see he doesn’t have a long beard, like Josh said. He steps tentatively, clutching a bulging sack over his shoulder. In his free hand, he holds something boxy but misshapen. When he creeps around the garage, the light illuminates him for one long second, and Daniel sees the shape in his hand for what it is: two books, paperbacks, covers bent and curled from use.

He blinks, and the man steps out of sight, disappearing into the darkness. Daniel crawls back under the covers and, to his surprise, falls fast into sleep.

Daniel wakes to a drizzle pattering on the roof and the sound of voices on the front porch. Thunder cracks distantly across the sky as he slides out of bed and tiptoes down the hallway, past his sister’s closed door and his parents’ open one.

The sound of the rain is louder downstairs. Through the screen door he can see his parents standing barefoot together on the front porch. Someone is speaking, a voice he doesn’t recognize. Daniel can’t help but drift to the door to see. He thinks he’s being quiet, but the shuffle of his feet gives him away.

His mother throws a glance over her shoulder. There’s something wary in her eyes before she covers it with a smile and says, “Oh, you’re awake.”

Daniel looks past her to find a park ranger standing on the front steps, still talking to his father, who’s nodding as he listens. He tries to catch a word of what they’re saying, but before he can, his mother slips inside the door and gives his arm a gentle squeeze.

“It’s early, honey,” she says, blocking his view as she shuts the front door behind her. She’s still in her bathrobe

and looks like she desperately wants to return to her morning coffee. “Why don’t you go back to bed?” Despite his curiosity, he lets her shepherd him back upstairs and under the covers again.

But Daniel doesn’t believe in coincidences. The rain persists through the afternoon, and everyone gathers at the Morans’ to play pinochle and drink margaritas.

Josh and Logan, already a little stir-crazy, have built a pillow fort in the cavernous living room. They tell Daniel and Libby the password, and once the four of them are assembled inside, they launch immediately into their own stories of the park ranger on their porches early in the morning, delivering warnings to their parents.

Daniel only joins in to say he saw the park ranger, too, but doesn’t say who he saw the night before, escaping into the woods.

“The hermit strikes again!” says Josh, waving his fingers over the beam of the flashlight wedged between them. Libby and Logan laugh, but Daniel only feels a growing unease. When they start making plans for an all-night stakeout on Logan’s back porch to catch the hermit in the act, Daniel excuses himself and ducks from the fort.

Outside, the rain has stopped at last. A heavy fog rises from the water, so the cabin floats like an island shrouded from the outside world. He doesn’t know why he didn’t tell them about seeing the hermit. He holds the secret close to his chest, as if sharing would tarnish it, somehow, and make it no longer his own.

It’s a moment before he notices that Logan’s brother Will has tagged along, from the porch aimlessly into the woods, because the others refused to tell him the password to the fort until he got older. Daniel feels kind of bad for him—he’s only ten, and Daniel still remembers what it was like to be ten—so he lets him run along at his heels, sulking, until he finds a weird-looking mushroom or overturns a rock to watch the bugs scurry from beneath it. Daniel, without really realizing it, is searching for snapped branches or trampled ferns or footprints in the soft undergrowth. He doesn’t look up until Will breaks the silence.

“Why don’t you wanna be in the fort?” he asks, like it’s the most important thing in the world.

They scramble over a mound of rocks, piled as if dumped there by some thoughtful giant, while Daniel 53

thinks of an answer. He can’t articulate why, only that he’s afraid of the distance he perceives between him and them. “It’s just not my thing,” he settles on.

The rain lingers for a week, the temperature dipping, low gray clouds bumping against each other in the sky.

The lake turns the color of cold iron that makes Daniel shiver just to look at it. Each morning, he pulls on his raincoat and boots, venturing into the woods, sheltered by low-hanging hemlock branches and a blanket of fog to keep up his solitary search. One day, he thinks he’s found some footprints before he realizes they’re just his own.

No matter how far he wanders from the cabin, there is no sign of the hermit anywhere, as if Daniel dreamed him.

He’s jealous of this ability to disappear so fully, to fade from existence without anyone noticing.

He leaves a stack of his most love-worn books out on the back porch in hopes of luring the hermit back. They sit on the stairs, day after day, pages curling in the damp.

The other boys do their stakeout and see nothing, and give up shortly after that.

The Doyles’ place is the next to be broken into. The ranger suggested they all put their cars in the garages and close shutters over the windows at night, to make it seem like they left. If they heard anything suspicious, they were to alert the ranger right away. But Mr. Doyle snores, and Mrs. Doyle is a heavy sleeper. Even little Emily slept the whole night through.

Only food is gone: a loaf of bread, a bag of chips, and half the fruit and vegetables in the crisper. They might not have noticed except for the forced locks and the muddy footprints on the kitchen tile.

This is what Daniel gathers as he listens to Mrs. Doyle tell the story for the third time the next morning at the lakeside. She looks haunted, huddled over her second cup of coffee, face pale without her usual red lipstick.

Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Moran, sitting on either side of her, somehow manage to look sympathetic with every retelling.

Daniel can only think of that morning, when he went out to the back porch to see if the books were still there and found them gone.

“Why don’t you go play with your friends?” asks his mother, coming up behind his chair and brushing a bit of hair from his eyes. There’s boredom edging into her voice, 54

but also envy, like she too wishes she could be out there in the lake without a care in the world.

Daniel watches Josh jump on Logan, pushing his head below the water. After a moment, Logan emerges, spluttering, and jumps on Josh in turn. Will, floating there in a lifejacket, kicks away from them. Libby laughs from where she’s sitting in the shallows, splashing herself with water and reacting appropriately to every smooth pretty stone Emily Doyle brings over for inspection. The boys do it again for her, showing off.

“I don’t want to,” Daniel says, shutting his book on the last page.

“Oh, sweetie.” His mother seems too tired to be upbeat. “You’ll have to get over it someday.”

Daniel says nothing. The sun peeks out from behind a cloud, making the water shine like diamonds, blinding him until he looks away, blinking spots from his eyes.

“Danny, come on!” Josh has noticed that Daniel is done with his book. The boys have made an effort to be nicer lately, which he thinks is because their parents told them to, which only makes it worse.

Daniel shakes his head and tries for an apologetic smile. He misses the sound of footsteps, muffled in the grass, coming up behind him. “C’mon, kiddo.” A shadow falls over him, and his dad is there, hauling him off the chair by his armpits. Daniel is too stunned to do anything but drop his book and stumble along with him.

“Time to man up and face your fears.” His dad’s laugh is playful, but his grip is strong.

Daniel’s mind catches up with him, and he starts to struggle, but his dad lifts him higher until his toes just barely brush the grass.

“Dad, please—” He can hear the high note of fear in his voice. Part of him is embarrassed, but mostly he’s so terrified he can’t breathe. They’re getting closer to the water. His chest is heaving and his feet kick wildly, mind going blank with fear.

“Danny, it’s just water,” says his dad, a note of desperation in his voice. They’re nearing the end of the dock. “Come on. Don’t you want to have fun with your friends?” And in the midst of his panic, Daniel hears all the words he’s not saying—Don’t you want to be normal?

Don’t you want to make this easy for me?

Then he’s thrown into the water.

He opens his mouth to scream—too late—and swallows water instead, sinking fast. Panic is like a stone in his pocket, weighing him down. He knew how to swim once, but his body has forgotten how. Surrounded by the murky blackness, he’s too paralyzed to move, limbs going heavy with terror or exhaustion or maybe acceptance.

Some part of him, he thinks, has always been here— caught, drowning, beneath the waves, just like before, flung from the boat as his father took a sharp turn, beer in hand, laugh carried on the wind. He revisits this place in his nightmares, in his waking moments, in his father’s forced smile and his mother’s veiled worry, like the lake is always calling him back—calling him home.

There’s a hand, then, under his arm, pulling and pulling, and another hand shoving at his back. Together, Josh and Logan lift him from the water, and hands from above pull him up to the dock. Daniel collapses on the worn boards and coughs until he’s nearly sick, eyes screwed shut, still suspended, somewhere, in that dark water.

“Daniel—” It’s his mother, leaning over him, brushing wet hair from his face, but he jerks away from her touch.

When he opens his eyes at last, everyone is watching him, startled and fearful. His mother is crouched on the dock beside him, letting out little gasping half-sobs. His father looms over her shoulder, his face a blank mask.

Logan and Josh stand on the other side of him, dripping water, looking more serious than he’s seen them since that day three years ago. Will is still in the water, watching with wide eyes; in the shallows, Libby has risen to standing, face stricken. Only Emily seems unconcerned, crouching at the shoreline and watching as a handful of watery mud filters through her fingers. Daniel notices all this in the span of a single ragged breath.

Then his mother turns a glare on his father. “What the hell is wrong with you, Keith?”

“It’s been three years, Deb!” He looks around at the faces watching him, wary, and deflates a little when he turns to Daniel, looking lost, like he’s the child.

He reaches for him, but Daniel scrambles into standing so fast he catches a splinter in the soft pad of his foot. His mother presses her hand gently to his shoulder.

“Why don’t you go sit down for a bit?” she asks.

He ducks away from her, too. “Don’t touch me,” he snaps. His throat feels scraped raw. He wants to be far

from this place, from the memories that reach up and choke him, from the piece of his ten-year-old self he left below the water.

Daniel walks barefoot through the woods until the frantic beating of his heart slows. He doesn’t know where to go, just that he needs to move, remind his limbs what it means to be alive. No one comes after him. He thinks about the hermit, alone like he is in the dappled light of the forest. His hunger to find the man only grows the farther he walks, searching for footprints, an empty chip bag, the remnants of a solitary camp. If he found the hermit, he wonders, would he let Daniel stay? Would he see the same need—to be away from everyone, to isolate himself from the world—reflected in Daniel’s eyes?

He doesn’t emerge from the trees at the far edge of their neighborhood until the world is enveloped by soft blue dusk. Still shoeless, he sticks to the edge of the forest where the layer of pine needles are a carpet to silence the sound of his feet. He can hear the sounds of dinner from the other houses—laughter and chatter, the clink of cutlery against dishes. Daniel wants to penetrate each tender bubble, insert himself into whatever he’s missing.

As he rounds the Thompson’s place, the back door explodes open, and Logan and Josh sprint from the back porch to the trees, muffling laughter in the palms of their hands. Daniel finds them huddled behind Mr. Thompson’s shed. Logan is holding a glass bottle that’s filled with some clear liquid.

Josh’s eyes widen when he sees Daniel over Logan’s shoulder. Logan turns, following his gaze, and the smile slides from his face like water.

“Hey,” Josh says. “Where’ve you been?”

“Walking,” he replies. “What’s that?”

Logan holds up the bottle, and Daniel squints, but in the low light he can’t read the label. “It’s alcohol,” Logan says slowly, like he’s explaining to a child. “I found it in the back of my dad’s liquor cabinet. They’re going over to the Doyles’ tonight, so they won’t miss it. Want to help us drink it?”

Something in him recoils. These boys are strangers to him. They’re no longer the ones who drew tattoos on his arm in permanent marker, who climbed trees to chase the squirrels, who built sandcastles on the public beach.

It’s like they grew up and left him behind to drown.

55

Daniel knows they’re throwing him a line, one last chance to save whatever friendship used to be between them, but—“No thanks.”

Josh shrugs. Logan rolls his eyes and says, “Whatever.

More for us.”

He sees their dislike for him fall over their faces like shutters. We tried to include him, they’ll tell their parents, and tell themselves, too.

“Yeah. Whatever.” Daniel turns away, but then he thinks to add, “Don’t call me Danny anymore.”

He pushes past them. After a moment, he hears their voices, quiet and on the edge of laughter again, but he doesn’t envy them at all.

When he makes it to his own cabin, Libby is the one who emerges onto the back porch. She catches his arm.

“Where’ve you been?” she asks. “Mom and Dad are going out of their minds.”

“Walking,” he says, shrugging off her touch.

“Okay, well—” She hesitates before adding, “Logan stole some vodka from his parents’ cabinet. He says they won’t miss it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Her eyes narrow, as if she can’t believe he knows this but is walking in the opposite direction. “We’re all going into the woods to drink it. Are you coming?”

“I don’t think so.” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as harsh as it does.

Libby draws away from him, looking almost hurt for a moment, before she shrugs and a mask of indifference falls over her face. “Okay, fine. See you.”

Daniel watches her go, receding from the glow cast by the garage light. Her hair is drawn into a tight ponytail again, swinging back and forth, almost hypnotizing.

There’s an inch of skin, pale in the darkness, where her t-shirt has ridden up from the waist of her shorts.

Before he can stop himself, he blurts out, “They’re both half in love with you—you know that, right?”

Her feet skid to a stop on the gravel. She looks back at him with her mouth curled like she can’t believe how stupid he’s being. “So?” Daniel doesn’t have an answer for her. Before he can muster a response, she’s gone, vanishing into the shadows. Instead of going inside, Daniel’s feet take him the rest of the way to the water’s edge.

56

The lake is a mirror reflecting the indigo of the sky.

The sun has set behind the ridge on the far side of the lake, turning the hemlocks into a senseless blur of shadows.

The bank feels empty, even though the chairs are still there, and the picnic table and the fire pit, and the dock stretching out into the depths.

He forces himself to walk until the waves lap against his bare toes, and he stares out across the water, so still as to be innocent, harmless. He yearns for it—not for the water, but freedom from this terror. Maybe if he holds vigil here at the edge, the part of him still trapped beneath the waves will emerge to rejoin him.

The first stars are pinpricks in the sky when he hears the rustling at the edge of the woods. Daniel turns, eyes struggling in the dim light. All he can hear are the waves lapping against the rocks. Then there’s the rustle again, the unmistakable sound of footsteps on fallen leaves.

Daniel takes a hesitant step forward, then another, curiosity pulling him along like a fishing line.

And there, in the shadows by the fire pit, is a man.

He knows he should be afraid, but all he feels is relief.

The man has a sack flung over his shoulder, a short beard, and he wears a worn patched jacket and muddied hiking boots. He must have been waiting, watching, to see which houses were dark and quiet, but has been scared out of the woods by Logan and Josh and Libby.

The hermit is aware of him now. They both stand frozen, neither willing to make the first move. Daniel could scream, or run for his parents to alert the park ranger.

But he knows that he won’t. He meets the hermit’s eyes across the wide expanse of grass. A spark of understanding, of recognition, passes between them.

Daniel gives the hermit a nod, as if to give him permission. “Go,” he says, so quiet he thinks maybe the hermit doesn’t hear.

But the hermit holds his gaze only long enough to give him a slow nod in return. Then he makes his way silently through the underbrush and beneath the trees again, until he disappears over the crest of the nearest hill. Daniel imagines the hermit on a trajectory back to his lonely camp in the woods, and wonders if he misses the voices and presence and complications of other people, or if he’s content in his solitary society of one.

Daniel is alone now with nothing but the sounds of the night. He wishes he were brave enough to follow him, but the fight is gone from him now, the anger burned away and replaced by something like resignation.

Instead, he carries that moment of understanding, the

knowledge that there is someone like him in the world back up the hill with him, through the trees and up the street and into his darkened house. He leaves the lake far behind him.

The Man with the Shirt Frances Koziar

To him it was nothing, a trophy of an ordinary day, he showed us in our soup kitchen—that haven of our kind—showed us a dress shirt he had pulled new out of a dumpster flame retardant he boasted with a smile, but it was cut through the collar. All the stores do that, my friend told me, and I looked at the man with the shirt, smiling as he flaunted how little we are cared for, a beacon of unintentional defiance—that shirt disfigured with the same ignorance that slices necessities from our lives and care from our neighbours—a child who had found a treasure amidst the refuse of a beach, the boy forgotten too like the trash.

Man Painting in China Emma Sywyj 57

We will die beautifully in the way of stars Jenny Qi

But now, we are just beginning, pale light whispering out of you so tenderly my words are paralyzed. Before you, I’d never heard anyone say he likes the freckle on my left cheekbone, the shameful flaw I tried to bleach out and left my skin burning.

Academic institution are temporal to us?

Jiawei Zhao

58

What is a Chinatown Jiawei Zhao

Bryan Wanted Space Vanessa Peterson

Silver ring under mahogany dresser— reminder of skin on skin meetings with red-violet curls.

Come home.

59

I Wasn’t Lying About the Fire Megan Wildhood

If I am with my head down at a bus stop waiting for a sleek, purple hybrid coach, I am in Seattle and I am going home, to work, to therapy or to the gym. Maybe seeing a friend. I had learned about ten years into my stay in this city to double up on plans, even on nights I knew I’d be too tired, because there would never be a scheduling conflict; at least one would be canceled, never with more than a few hours’ notice. “Let’s hang out” never means that in Seattle. It means “I want you to think I’m a nice person and I don’t know how to say no but I don’t have any intention of following through even if we set a specific date to meet up.”

If I am leaving the house—an actual house with multiple bedrooms and a staircase for the first time in a week since my arrival, anxiously scanning for mountains, I’m in Columbus, Ohio. My life, childhood included, is covered in mountains so thoroughly that I didn’t know I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I couldn’t see them. I’d also evidently lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough to pine for water—bodies of it, on the ground, gleaming in sun and, more often lack of sun, not pustules of it hanging all over the air all the time. I grew up in the desert half a mile from the Sun known as Colorado, anti-humid land where you start evaporating the moment you go outdoors. I’d like to evaporate now instead of surrender my Washington driver’s license for one in a state with some of the worst employment laws in the nation and where the humidity’s like being in a dishwasher. They can handle snow here, even if they got the foot and half currently falling on Seattle, paralyzing it, driving people to rush the grocery stores for essential oils, mixed-drink makings, Rainier-cherry chocolate and compost bags. Seeing snow plows in neighborhoods and cars staying on the roads—in their own lanes!, even while the snow is still falling!—takes me back to Littleton, where I first learned to hate snow with a passion evidently not fiery enough to keep the blizzards away. In Seattle, they only come once every decade or so, which was one of the handful of reasons I “randomly” picked that city when I felt the irresistible urge to get the hell out of my home state. The others: I’d been there before (my dad took me on a college tour down the West Coast since I was adamant 60

about not staying in state for college) and I needed to leave Colorado since that’s where all my problems were, of course. This superb foundation is why I am so confused that I’m literally losing sleep missing Seattle.

I power-walk everywhere because I am paranoid about not getting enough exercise. If I’m doing so through charactered neighborhoods where more than one person has painted their house purple and you can find ice cream made of mushrooms, fudge and mocha and independent bookstores still making it even as rents pierce the stratosphere, I am in Seattle. I spend a lot of time wishing for a glimpse of the stratosphere. Surely, I thought as I was packing up in Colorado at age 20 to head for the West Coast, if you really couldn’t see natural light for nine months out of the year, no one would live there.

False. It really does rain all the time, except when tourists come for those five days in the summer—though, don’t be fooled, a lot of Seattle’s famous “rain” is really just the air getting thick and complainy. Though, don’t be fooled; you’ll still get layered upon layered in wet, especially because umbrellas are the fastest giveaway that you’re a tourist here. You’re expected to sprout gills if you plan to stay. You’ll get used to it, the native Seattleites said. I’ll learn to accept the fading memory of warmth and light and life and love from the sky?

I need about an hour of reading a day. If I am woundup tight because my friend who is loaning me her car was right, that you really can’t get around Columbus on public transit, it is because I couldn’t get to the gym consistently the first week I was here until her car was out of the shop and because a lack of reading feels in my mind’s body, that is to say my brain, like a lack of exercise in my body, that is to say my subconscious mind. What that feeling’s name is is extremities-tingling pain. I anticipated a bumpy adjustment—moving any distance is one of the top five most stressful things a person can go through (the others are death of a loved one, divorce, job loss, and major illness). Moving across the country is traumatic.

Moving across the country because of a marriage ending is whatever the level above trauma is. There isn’t a good word for it in any of the languages that I know, but that doesn’t render the feeling I’ve been feeling since about nine days before boarding my plane unreal.

If I am weeping and then unable to weep and then weeping and weeping and weeping, it is because I am

parting physical company with my beloved therapist. No more regular treks through the grounds, green and full of flowers year round, to the old transition house run by nuns from 1906 to 1973 that his office is in. The days, two a week for over two years, of him lighting flakes of dried sage, cedar and lavender and wafting the smoke over himself and then me as a practice of wishing beauty, blessing and the banishment of negative energy for us, are over. The bodywork—helping me breakthrough the nontalking that sometimes descended over me in sessions by standing in front of me, holding out his hand and getting me to push back with mine as he resisted until somehow my resistance to speaking failed—is not possible anymore. Imagined handshakes and hugs simply don’t cut through deep touch deprivation.

If I am doing things not in my nature—like dropping in on an old professor, now mentor, friend, papa, without making plans like both of us prefer and without really enough time for the kind of chat that has buoyed me through much darkness of soul and mind over the last nine and a half years—it is because I am a bit crazed with the fear of actually saying goodbye. Papa, surprised but not annoyed, welcomed me on the day before I was supposed to leave for the other side of the country. We talked for the entire time between when I showed up and when I needed to be leaving the appointment I’d made at the optical to have new glasses made for me that day in order to get to my therapist on time. My therapist had just gotten sicker than he’d ever been, slashing our remaining sessions that I’d been counting on to make it through the goodbye process in half, but I needed to say goodbye to Papa, too. It wasn’t even really goodbye—we’d write and talk on the phone, he reassured me, a promise I told myself I could believe because he’s not from Seattle and thus is more likely to mean what he says—but I couldn’t manage to say the words. I was only able to say the words “I can’t say the words.”

“Henri Nouwen,” he began by quoting one of his seminary professors in the ‘70s at Yale, “had to say goodbye to someone very dear to him once. He struggled to get through the farewells. After he’d said all he could bear to say, the loved one said something Nouwen later wrote was one of the most healing things he’s ever received: ‘From now on, all the ground between us is holy ground.’

So, dearest, from now on, all the ground between us is

holy ground.” I have shed a tear for each of those 2,008 miles and then some each time I repeat this story.

If I at one point sounded fine with this decision, excited even, it is because I had not done it yet. I didn’t know. My longest friend had been wishing for me to come to Ohio for four and a half years. She and I met in Colorado in 2005 after she moved there from Columbus and helped me pass a class at CU Boulder I was retaking after getting the first F of my life because I could not accept that I was not going to save the world and was “ just” a writer. When she initially told me she’d found me a place to stay and would pay my moving expenses, which turned out to be airfare and FedExing the 26 of boxes of all my earthly possessions across the country, plus my rent plus give me some toward living expenses, which are just a little over half what they are in the city I’m missing something heavy and sharp and cold and shaking and unshakable, until I had a season of rest and then looked for a job, I noted it as too good to be true.

A season of rest? Plus, a community my friend had spent the last eight years since moving back to Ohio fully vetting? Yes, she said. Rest, a thing I couldn’t achieve no matter how hard I worked, and community, a thing I couldn’t achieve no matter how hard I worked. I didn’t believe my friend was lying—she’s lost everything for the sake of the truth before. It was the “for me” part I couldn’t get my head around. Also, I couldn’t leave my therapist.

Also, I wasn’t physically afraid of my husband, so putting a country between him and me seemed like just the thing I would do if I were as dramatic and attention-seeking and irrational as he thought I was. Also, I wouldn’t, despite having done nearly exactly this when I was twenty, and in the middle of something important then, too (college), actually quit my job with nothing lined up and move out of state. I wouldn’t actually leave my husband, especially with no other guy lined up as he’d asked the first time I told him I was leaving. I wouldn’t actually manage to start all the way over again, never mind that I’d done it before, except that time with more than what I arrived in Seattle at age 20 had: more time to make something of my life and more excuses for being so behind. Less brokenness, though.

If I suddenly want to not leave after years of loneliness and struggling to find another church after the pastor at the one I got married in told me he had a crush on me and 61

it was my fault and increasing lack of ability to afford to live here on my own, it’s because I am in Seattle and was very human about this decision and didn’t know what I had till I was about to stop having it. “It” is probably not Pike Place Market or the lenticular cloud hat Mount Rainier sometimes wears on those soul-breakingly clear days I submit you will only find in Washington State or the green all the time or the abundant blackberries on the side of every road or the Burke Gilman bike trail’s blind turns or the way downtown makes the random windstorms whistle or the bus lines that don’t get you to Alki Beach on the weekends when you first arrive in the city and know nothing or the long dark on both sides of the day for more than half the year or the statue of Vladimir Lenin in Fremont or the parade of naked bikers every solstice or the church I met Jeffrey Eugenides in or the library I met Amy Tan in or the auditorium I met Jonathan Franzen in or the best employment laws in the nation or the comfortingly liberal politics. “It” is that I knew it all.

I’m not talking just familiarity. I’m talking intimacy.

Intimacy of knowing not just where you are at every given morsel of time, but why approximately 87 percent of the intersections intimidate even LA drivers (Seattle was designed by two people who didn’t like each other), why we don’t salt the roads during a snowstorm (because the melt will wash into Puget Sound and freak the salmon out) and why moving from one place in America to this place in America is a deep culture shock (the Seattle freeze, which lasts all year, snow or no). This is the intimacy of commitment: I stayed somewhere long enough as a grown up, albeit unintentionally and all the while sprinkling my talk with far-flung dreams of establishing residency in other countries—that I not only knew the placeness of that place, but that I built that knowledge by myself—before and after the time I had relationships there. I learned how to get around the downtown Seattle of 2006 by the sounds the wheels Metro buses made on the different streets. I came to be able to tell which neighborhood I was in by the intensity of the burntness in the smell of coffee in the air. Blindfold me and plop me down in the middle of anywhere between Everett and Tacoma and watch: I will know where I am— at least for the next few years—the place they call Seattle now is not the Seattle I moved to in 2006, the Seattle I 62

loved until 2012 when I lost the community I’d had since I was but months in the area, or the one I dragged myself through without knowing how damn much I’d miss it from then until January of 2019.

If I’m suddenly eating much more unhealthily, it’s not just because the depression my friends thought staying in Seattle and with my husband was deepening has not yet lifted. It’s not because eating right is too expensive—three organic produce items here costs as much as one organic lemon in Seattle. It’s because I’m in Columbus and I’m just not used to managing so many social opportunities. There is a support group or church small group or recovery group or divorce-care group or Bible study or movie night or girl’s night or—reversal of reversals—someone texting you last-minute to hang out every night of the week including Sundays. In loving memory of Seattle, though, I tamp down on my excitement at new friendship prospects and may always do so—or for however long it takes to break a 12.5-year habit. I’m also not used to having to throw food away—as in, in an actual garbage can, not a compost bin. Or Styrofoam at restaurants or plastic bags in grocery stores, either.

If I’m eating out more, I am in Seattle for another month and I finally get how blessed Seattle residents are in terms of authentic variety and options/tolerance for people with food issues.

If I start reporting that the weather wasn’t so bad, I have just left my going away party that the good people at the crisis center I will be leaving tomorrow put on for me at Seattle’s best Jamaican food place.

If I get wistful for the first time about the beauty of the islands of Puget Sound even though I’ve been on a ferry dozens of times since that first mesmerizing ride visiting Seattle as a 17-year-old with my father on a road trip to visit colleges, I am days away from leaving Seattle.

I have gotten in touch for the first time ever with what I’m persuaded is my love of this city.

If I’m excited about how close Chicago and New York City and Washington, D.C. are, it’s because I am leaving Seattle without having straightened out my priorities.

I keep forgetting that my little sister’s now a two-hour drive away, but she, like my husband, probably doesn’t know or care where I am. My therapist says that this move isn’t a mistake either way: I’ll either find what I’m looking for in Columbus or I can come back, this time with an

appreciation for the place I’ve been struggling so long in.

But I don’t want to work so hard just to find out I don’t like things. I don’t have time for that. I want to work hard toward something. I want to be building something. I seem to be perpetually stuck in expending atomic-bomb levels of energy figuring out how to do a thing—social work, eliminating belongings to make it easier to move states—that I don’t end up wanting to do and the feeling I get from wasting so much time and energy on stuff I can’t use is that of being in a shrinking room painted with poison.

We’re continuing our work on Skype, but my therapist also said he hopes I come back. “You’re very unique.

You’re an interesting person. I enjoy working with you in person.” At the time he told me, I was certain I would not come back. How is it that I still don’t know myself?

If my dreams are suddenly about doing that halfhour walk up the hill of Stone Way from my first job in the legal field to my beloved therapist’s office, it is because those were days when, though separated from my husband, struggling to find a community, discouraged vocationally having just dropped out of seminary, I hadn’t thought about that time as my last couple years in the city I chose to begin my adult life in. If my dreams are suddenly about Elliott Bay Books or the cute, resistingfancification Seattle of 2006 or the smell of the creosote on the bike trail I took to the worst of my soul-hardening jobs, as a fond thing or the park in downtown clotted with more and more of the city’s economic refugees that overlooks the viaduct they are at the time of this writing finally tearing down (it’s been condemned for years as too damaged to survive the next earthquake) and then Puget Sound and then Alki Beach and then the gentle ridges of Bremerton and Bainbridge, it is not because I was content with what I had—is that even a good idea if what you have is hurting you?—but because I thought I would have an infinite number of somedays to enjoy them even as I researched relocating to Denmark or New Zealand or Australia. I didn’t know, I didn’t remember, the stupid pain of separating from somewhere that never made me happy.

If I dream with more regularity about the doors of every studio by myself, duplex with two good-forthat-season roommates, house owned by former parent figures, house with eight other women, apartment I

intended to share with my life partner, apartment I shared with a good friend upon separation from that life partner, house I shared with a pretty terrible roommate and one great one who was replaced by one who seemed great but got brainwashed by the terrible one, and apartment I did share with my almost former life partner and struggling to close those doors, it’s maybe because the world is burning and the people I love are not okay— my little brother has just texted, one week after I left Seattle, that my last grandparent has died 12 days before my trip to Colorado to say goodbye to her. I hate trying to close doors on—I mean in—dreams.

If my dreams are of a quirky Seattle that fit me well, it is because they are dreams. That Seattle got overrun by rich, white techies and corporations who evade taxes by claiming they’re providing jobs and neglect to mention that they are also supplying the bodies for those jobs— at one point 1,000 a month were moving to Seattle. If I persist in clinging to the unreality of dreams, I am still shaking with the shock at the feeling of longing to be back in Seattle, the city I’d been telling my therapist for weeks and my husband for a few years I didn’t like anymore but am now this very moment a day and eleven hours away from it driving nonstop on the fastest route.

And if I tell you that our you-and-me house is on fire, it is because I feel the thousand knifey fingers of smoke down in my alveoli and not because I am okay leaving my city. If I tell you I’m leaving, it is not just because you squabbled over spending $40 extra dollars on transportation to a marriage workshop that cost $900, demonstrating a clear disregard for its exquisitely tailored teachings. It is not just because, instead of pulling over or asking if we could sort things out when we got home, you felt fine jerking the car over into the next lane nearly ripping the front bumper off of the car behind us and then swerving your merge into the back bumper of another car. Or because the car thing was an escalation from your previous property-damaging bursts of random anger, few and far between, but not isolated incidents void of pattern. It is not because I blinded my eyes to your efforts following your request for six months to prove you wanted this relationship after I said I was leaving the night you swerved the car; it is because there were no efforts following your request for six months to prove you wanted this relationship after I said I was 63

leaving. You said, “You got another guy lined up?” and then “This is devastating! There are not second chances with you!” as if we had not broken up five times before our wedding, which you threatened to postpone until we were healthy, with no plan to get that way; as if we had not separated twice, one of which you initiated abruptly on Valentine’s Day and didn’t tell me where you were for three days and only then informed me of your plans by CC’ing me on an email to a couple on the elders team at the church that betrayed us and both of which lasted at least 11 months; as if you had not told me you felt no love for me on our wedding day and the only reason you were with me was because of Jesus and, the day you found out about my suicide attempt, that you’d been thinking about divorce for a while.

We are thrown down here Jiawei Zhao 64

If planning holidays without my input, which you did because you did not pursue my input, feel salvific rather than like routine relationship gestures, if offering a foot rub feels heroic and like enough to conquer the agony canyon between us, then this is why our house is on fire.

If I risked and ultimately did end up sacrificing saying goodbye to my grandmother, someone I have loved my whole life, for saying goodbye to a city I learned too late I didn’t want to say goodbye to at all, it was because the house really was on fire, I told you the house was on fire and that I was alone, I was alone, I was alone, I had no more water, and you, the one who promised from now on to join your life with mine for the rest of it, did nothing.

Questions from “A Happy Little Accident” Tina Vorreyer

What happens to the body whose womb fills prior to the complete download of it’s hard drive?

Will there be an error message allowing the user to fix their mistake before irrevocable chaos occurs or will we only know of the inevitable damage after the fact like that of a pre-ejaculated flash drive?

Bodies

Emma Ogilvie Our poetry was slick with sweat And it slid off the right side Of his bed.

So I reached down a careful hand And guided it back to me Over and Over we slipped it Over Our bodies.

Sometimes I remember Jenny Qi

a poem you sent me, a distinctive turn of phrase—I saw it in a book today; how easy to remember you outside my door, insisting we still attend the reading, both shivering from different kinds of fever; thrill of thinking finally somebody knows me; remember the first poem you showed me, how my hands fluttered so you held the page still; remember sleepless reading your words over and over, letting black ink melt me kaleidoscopic.

The metal underneath his skin Heard my breathing, And his heart.

Our words lay curled like rattlesnakes “I’m sorry.”

Sweat and tears, but never blood.

We were careful of our bodies.

65

Like a Real Woman Rosanna Jimenez

Finally have the body you prayed you’d grow And you spend your time figuring out how to hide it or Find a most tasteful method to proselytize your form, just so Ladylike— Intricate shiny tubular mechanics of a lipstick Whose ownership you thought was reserved for Real women A ritual in mirrors and storefront reflections Emboldening and conforming Somehow you knew womanhood would be this way— Your sex is short-lived power powder Sand in wide-set hourglasses Then it’s gone, abducted, from the inside Penetrate ejaculate take take Run You always want to when it’s over, even when its good Knowing you can’t stand being Around a man freshly finished Useless The lights flash on even when they stay off and you know You got what you wanted and so did he Once out in the world away from the pathetic limp Deflated room You feel your force from Pilfering and splitting Walk home in your heels Such a lady Those struts yours Clack clack all yours Swollen lips still slick All yours The breeze, just then Blowing your hair just so, just there All yours You pass others and they notice Can’t help but see your power All yours in this short moment Gone just as quick as it came For as long as you came Your walk longer than expected Strange eyes on your behind Wrap your arms around your middle 66

Make small walk faster Unlock the door and lock behind quickly Shed Turn lights on wash your vessel Lather and lotion Play your music at your volume Dance for yourself safe unseen Sing loud the sometimes-wrong words deranged in your wild tongue Look In the mirrors see her and smile Flirt with her shy response to your gaze There she is Here And here spin and wiggle There again, behind your shoulder Yours

Dragon (nine framed photographs) Jiawei Zhao 67

Liar, Liar

Cathy Watness Secret Her name was a secret. Traded in whispers by housewives over coffee. A breath between secretaries and bosses in passing. A last word of wisdom given to newly to-be brides by mothers and grandmothers.

Opheliad. Hissed as if in a serpent’s tongue. Opheliad.

Snarled by the scorned. Opheliad. A prayer for the betrayed. Opheliad. A reckoning for the reckless. Opheliad.

Phoebe Gonzalez lives in Harrisburg, Illinois. She is thirty-two-years-old. She is engaged to Harold “Harry” Barnum, age twenty-eight. Phoebe suspects that Harry is cheating on her. Today she is meeting her friend Ashanti King for coffee.

Ashanti is texting and sipping her praline almond latte. Phoebe takes a gulp of her bitter dark roast that she discreetly cut with vodka. Ashanti turns off her phone.

“Sorry, girl. Our babysitter canceled, so Sasha had to find a new one and was bitching up a storm.” Ashanti smiles. Ashanti’s predatory, bone-white smile has always reminded Phoebe of a shark’s, equal parts dangerous and alluring.

Phoebe and Ashanti were roommates in college.

They were lovers for four years if you call bitching about shitty professors over undercooked Ramen on weekdays, and scissoring noisily on weekends, dating. They went their separate ways after graduation. Ashanti moved to Manhattan to become a model and met Sasha whom she married and had a son via anonymous sperm donor.

Phoebe stayed in Chicago and became a receptionist at a bank. She met Harry at a golf outing hosted by the company. Harry is an architect.

Three years ago, Phoebe and Harry moved in together.

Three years ago, Ashanti, Sasha, and their newborn son Malcolm moved back to Harrisburg. Being a model didn’t work out, so Ashanti started her own chain of online beauty products, Princess and Witch; for the virginal teases and the sexy seductresses. A year ago, Ashanti and Phoebe ran into each other at Walmart. Ashanti was buying baby diapers. Phoebe was buying tampons. They exchanged numbers and began meeting up for coffee regularly. Six 68

months ago, Harry proposed to Phoebe. She said yes. It has been four months since she has suspected Harry of being unfaithful to her.

“I think Harry is having an affair,” Phoebe says.

Ashanti looks surprised. The other patrons continue to sip their coffees and look at their respective mobile devices.

“Has Harry done something to make you feel like he’s screwing someone else?”

“No.” “Do you fight a lot?”

“No more than what’s usual.”

“Is the sex good?”

“It’s fine.”

“Does he call or text people other than you a lot?”

“No.” “Do you usually know where he’s at?”

“Yes. I can’t explain it. Everything’s fine. I just feel something.”

“Pre-wedding jitters?”

Phoebe shakes her head. It’s not that.

She remembers the precise second, she felt it. It was on a Sunday. Harry had just finished brushing his teeth.

He was passing her in the hallway. He had smiled and kissed her cheek. That’s when she had felt the something.

It was like an itch that wouldn’t stop, but it was under rather than on her skin. She had felt it in her bones, in her blood, in her stomach, vaginal, and intestinal fluids.

It wasn’t suspicion. It wasn’t knowledge. It just was. That was four months ago. It is still there.

Ashanti’s fingers, tipped with long purple nails, flow over the praline almond latte like it’s a flute. Her expression is not doubtful nor is it certain. The small, crow-toe crinkle near both her eyes and the slight thinning of her lips express hesitance and something unknowable. She puts the cup down and digs through her large golden purse until she grabs a blue pen and a small notebook with yellow roses on it. She opens it up and starts scribbling something.

“Me and Sash went to this little tea shop when we first moved back here. The woman there knows about something that can maybe help you,” Ashanti says.

She rips the piece of paper out of the notebook and quickly gives it to Phoebe. Phoebe looks at the paper in her hands. On it is a name and address.

Thirty minutes later, Phoebe walks through the front door of the Second-Hand Faith Teapot. She is immediately immersed in a plethora of warm scents. It is as if the air itself is intoxicated. She feels like she is drowning in a dizzy haze of floral and herbal essence. She closes her eyes to steady herself against the waves of odorous overload.

When she opens them, she sees the woman behind the old-fashioned wooden counter. Her skin is dark and her stature reveals a proud, curvy hedonist’s body. Curls tumble past her shoulders like black licorice. Her face is beautiful. Eyes the shape and color of blueberries and a disconcerting Cheshire smile that inspires an uneasy and delighted shiver to dance up and down Phoebe’s spine.

“Are you Autumn?” She asks.

“That’s me, honey. What can I do you for?”

“I’d like to purchase some Blue Moonflower Tea for a tea party,” Phoebe recites what Ashanti said to ask for.

Autumn’s eyes flash. “You sure about that, honey?”

“Yes.” Autumn goes into a room behind the counter. She comes back with a blue tin and two pieces of paper. One of the pieces of paper has a name and address on it. Phoebe mouths the name silently. Opheliad.

Murdered By An Army of Little Girls Houses where bad things happened usually get titles.

Assam is different. Its current inhabitant may have been the first to speak its name aloud, but its name has always been Assam. Assam was built in 1845. The three-story, black and white structure has seen its share of ordinary and odd occupants. Its most hated was a man in the 1950s named Lloyd Aquinas.

Lloyd Aquinas was a good-looking man with handsome hazel eyes and curly butter blonde hair. He was also a pedophile. Between the years 1953 and 1959, he murdered five little girls.

The first was Jessica Little. She liked to wear red dresses and red ribbons in her long brown hair. She was six-years-old when she was riding her bike down the street. Lloyd invited her into Assam for tea. He strangled her. It took three minutes for her lungs to stop fighting for air. It took another three minutes for her slowing heart to stop beating. It took twelve hours for him to bury

her body and bicycle in his dirt floor basement. The year was 1953.

Teresa and Helen Ito were next. Their mother and grandparents had been forced into a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Their father, Daniel “Danny” Ito, had volunteered to be a bombardier during the war.

Teresa and Helen were twins. They were nine-years-old when Lloyd drugged them at a playground and shoved their lifeless and languid bodies into the back of his trunk. It was the hottest day of the year in 1955. Lloyd lived an hour away from the playground. Their hearts stopped beating seconds of each other about forty-six minutes later.

Next was Margaret “Peggy” Henry. Peggy was seven.

Her curly orange hair was always in pigtails. Peggy was looking for her three-month-old puppy, Bogart. She asked Lloyd if he had seen Bogart. He told her that no, he hadn’t seen Bogart, over a cup of tea laced with arsenic.

Two weeks later, the Henrys found Bogart alive and well.

Peggy was never found. The year was 1957.

Lloyd’s last victim was officially Robert “Bobby” Kevlax. Unbeknownst to Lloyd, Bobby would have grown up to be Robin “Bobbi” Kevlax. Lloyd kidnapped Bobbi near the baseball diamond in the park. It was raining that day.

Of the five girls Lloyd abducted and murdered, Bobbi’s death was the most violent. Guilt-ridden impotence had prevented Lloyd from raping his first four victims before he murdered them. It did not prevent him from raping Bobbi Kevlax. Afterward, he viciously slashed open her throat and cut her body up with a box cutter. By the time he dumped her body in a hole in his dirt floor basement, Bobbi Kevlax was unrecognizable, reduced to nothing more than a body mutilated by bloody ribbons like the ones Jessica Little was so fond of. The date was August 30, 1959.

In a span of seven years, Lloyd Aquinas had abducted, murdered, and raped five young girls. Precisely one month after Bobbi Kevlax’s death, Lloyd was murdered in his own house.

For seven years, Assam had been forced to witness the pleas of little girls as their lives were senselessly cut short.

Assam had been forcibly turned into a twisted parody of a pregnant mother’s womb, a mass grave for five girls whose flesh and blood forever tied them to Assam’s earthy cervix. Whether it was the product of Assam’s 69

rage, the girl’s desire for vengeance, or a bond between the two that brought Lloyd Aquinas’s doom is impossible to know. Here are the facts.

At 3:50 am on Sunday, September 30, 1959, Lloyd Aquinas was in bed, reading and masturbating to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita when he heard a clattering noise downstairs. Between the times of 3:51 am and 3:52 am, the clatter became multiple clatters that morphed into the pounding of multiple small feet and bodies up the stairs to the second floor. At 3:53 am, the door to Lloyd’s bedroom slammed open. Between 3:53 am and 3:54 am, dozens of little girls with all manner of sharp kitchen things swarmed into Lloyd Aquinas’ room. The mosaic of blood, ebony, gold, and chocolate heads with torn lace dresses and ragged hair ribbons kept filling the room as one by one, each avenging soldier plunged her make-shift bayonet into the cowering monstrosity on the bed caught with its withered weapon out.

It was exactly 4:00 am on Sunday, September 30, 1959, when Lloyd Aquinas’ lungs gave up the fight for air, and his heart ceased its skewed beat.

The sweet and repugnant smell of dead and rotting leaves teases the late September air. Phoebe and Harry walk down the sidewalk in the rapidly cooling dusk, linked in holy palmers’ kiss twined with pink and light copper fingers in a lover’s knot. The black spire towers of the desolate Victorian house rise like spikes of black smoke in the dying sun’s rays.

“You sure this is the house Shanti and Sash are interested in? It looks like a major fixer-upper,” Harry says.

Phoebe looks up into her fiancée’s vibrant gray eyes.

Despite the gloomy color, Phoebe has never thought of Harry’s eyes as dull. They always sparkle like diamonds, but for the last four months, Phoebe hasn’t been able to read their depths.

“This is the place. Ashanti said that the door would be unlocked, and to go on in. She wants you to take a look at the basement. It has a dirt floor, and she wants to know what you think of it.”

They walk down a long corridor. The walls are the teal of crushed robin eggs. They come to a black door that Harry opens. Harry and Phoebe recoil at the death stench ascending up the stairs.

70

“Jesus Christ, it smells like a bunch of dead rats,” Harry exclaims. “Sure you want to go down there?”

“Yeah.”

Harry takes a silver military flashlight out of his pocket and switches it on. Phoebe’s sweaty hand grips the tin of Blue Moonflower tea tighter. Harry and Phoebe are still holding hands as they descend the stairs. They stop when their feet touch the dirt floor of the basement.

A long table with seven places and chairs stands in the middle of the floor. There are two chairs on each of the long sides and a chair at each of the ends. The chairs are mahogany with tall backs like jail cells, save for the chair at the head of the table. It is a stately, tattered thing.

Dust sparkles on the upholstery back and arms. Obsidian calligraphy patterns almost slither in the glare of Harry’s flashlight. The table itself is covered by a white lace cloth.

Red, pink, and orange doiliey decorations hang around the border like bleeding hearts. Yellowed wax candles stand like sentries waiting for an attack on their queen. A cracked, pale pink and faded white teapot adorned with spiderwebs sits over a sea green glass gaslight. A single teacup waits on a saucer in front of each seat.

“Look, Pheebs. We can have a cup of tea while we wait for Ashanti and Sash,” Harry jokes.

Phoebe is not paying attention. She places the tin of Blue Moonflower tea on the table. She reaches down inside her jeans and removes the steak knife held tight by a black garter strangling her upper thigh. Phoebe winces as the knife gets caught and cuts shallowly across her thigh.

“Pheebs?” Harry says when he sees the knife in his fiancée’s hand.

“I’m sorry, but I have to know,” Phoebe says as she grabs Harry’s hand, strikes the blade across the palm like a viper’s bite, and slams it down onto the dirt floor. The knife with both of their blood slips out of Phoebe’s hand and lands in the dirt.

The door to the basement slams shut. A menacing hiss thrums through the air. Something predatory stalks through the dark. It takes hold of a silver butterfly hair piece, slices open a pale palm and mixes the spilled blood.

The Tea Party The Ritual. The Summoning. It must be done just so.

Descend with the lover to be questioned down to the deepest depths of the only house with a name. Spill blood from the lover to be questioned onto the earth. Opheliad will hear your call. Do not question her. Do not fear her.

Opheliad will then spill her blood onto the spilled blood of the lover to be questioned. Those whose blood has been spilled are now bound. Brew Blue Moonflower tea.

Opheliad will pour the tea for each soul at the table. Drink only when Opheliad does. Do not request more tea. Do not touch the teapot. After tea, ask the questions you wish for the lover in question to answer. Only truth will set free.

Lies will result in a spoiled appetite.

Phoebe and Harry’s eyes adjust as the sickly candles blaze with sudden force before tapering off. The gaslight flickers. Shadows dance through the dark and slowly take shape.

“What the hell is going on? Phoebe?” Phoebe has never heard Harry say her name like that before. Like he is afraid of her. Like she is a stranger.

The shadow figures are six in total. A little girl in a red dress with a red ribbon in her dark brown hair. Her lips are ocean blue. Twins with night hair and eyes the shape and color of almonds. A redhead with pigtails. A child with pale golden hair and cuts like ribbons all over a pale face. Each takes their place around the table. The twins sit on the right side. The ginger and brunette sit on the left. The fair-haired child sits at the end of the table. Another figure lounges on the black bergère. The figure turns its head. Blood red hair spills down a bony back framing a chalky pale face. Sharp cheekbones and an aristocratic nose glint as if they are made of the finest blades in the flickering light. Bright green cat eyes shine with sardonic humor. The figure’s body is willow thin, deceptive. Milky flesh stretched over metallic and ivory bones. The figure wears a white Victorian dress tight and translucent enough to see the corset stained brown beneath. It supports an hourglass physique equally alluring and repulsive. By existence and design, natural and unnatural. Both and none.

Opheliad. Opheliad, the secret. Opheliad, the avenger.

Opheliad, the prayer. Opheliad, the reckoning. Only truth will set free.

Pale mahogany lips curl up revealing thick needle teeth. A plum tongue swipes demurely at a corner of Opheliad’s mouth. Harry makes a panicked, pitiful sound and tries to back away. He cannot.

Opheliad beckons Phoebe and Harry to the table.

Phoebe and Harry heed her call. Both are too frightened to refuse. They shakily take their places across from each other at the table; Phoebe sits at Opheliad’s right hand. Harry sits at Opheliad’s left hand. Metallic fingers wink with mischief. Harry flinches as Opheliad gestures with that dangerous limb to Phoebe and the tin of Blue Moonflower tea. Phoebe takes it in her hands and opens the lid. She looks at Opheliad, eyes lowered in submission.

Opheliad uncurls her right pointer and gently lifts Phoebe’s head up. Opheliad looks at the child with the ribbon cuts marring her face. Opheliad smiles with motherly gentleness. The child smiles back and takes out a silver tea ball on a golden chain from her pocket, scoots away from the table, and walks over and hands it to Phoebe. The child returns to her seat. Phoebe opens up the tea ball. She pinches enough tea to fill the ball and snaps it shut. Opheliad lifts the tea pot’s lid. Phoebe dangles the ball into it until she hears it plop down to the bottom like a prison ball and chain.

“What the fuck?” Harry manages to get out, recoiling as Opheliad snaps her head toward him with a small metallic shriek. She holds up one black-tipped white finger to her lips and shushes him. Harry snaps his mouth shut.

Deeming the tea ready for consumption, Opheliad makes her way around the table, pouring each guest a cup of tea. Her long legs encased in black thigh high boots creak as she pours the tea, careful and meticulous not to spill a single drop. After she pours Harry tea, he picks up the teacup. A small, icy cold hand clamps around his wrist, the shock of which causes Harry to tremble, tea splashing in tiny waves. The little girl in the red dress steadily drags his hand down until the teacup is back on its saucer. Harry cowers under Opheliad’s narrowed glare.

Trailing one sharp digit across the back of Harry’s neck in a teasing threat, she lounges once again in the bergère.

She picks up her teacup and sips from it, humming in 71

appreciation. The children do the same. Phoebe and Harry follow suit. They only drink when Opheliad drinks.

Only when the teacups are empty and Opheliad makes no move to pour another cup does Phoebe dare to speak.

“Harry. I am going to ask you two questions. All you have to do is answer them honestly. They can both be answered with either a yes or a no. You don’t have to say anything else. Nod if you understand.”

Harry nods. Opheliad watches with a smirk. Phoebe breathes.

“Do you love me?”

Harry doesn’t hesitate.

“Yes.” No one moves.

“Have you ever cheated on me?”

Again, Harry’s response is quick and precise, the question barely having any time to brew before he spits out his answer.

“No.” In less than a blink of an eye, Opheliad is on him like a spider on a fly. Phoebe’s breath hitches. The itch beneath her skin is now a raging rash with relief in sight as Opheliad drags Harry kicking and screaming to where their blood was spilled and mixed. She straddles him.

Fingers cruelly curl around his shoulders, painfully penetrating to the bone as the blue button-down shirt is ripped off him in pieces. She snarls a single word.

“Liar.”

Harry bucks and whines as metallic and black tipped fingers shred the dark gray undershirt.

“Oh, God! Pheebs, I swear, I didn’t cheat on you.” Harry cries out, pleading.

“I didn’t cheat on you.”

“Liar.”

“It was just texting.”

“Liar.”

“It was nothing.”

“Liar.”

“She meant nothing.”

“Liar.”

“It meant nothing! Phoebe!”

“Liar! Liar!” Opheliad roars, plunging her sharp metal fingers deep down into Harry’s chest, rib cage cracking, flesh ripping, fingers clamping around an unfaithful heart.

72

Opheliad brings the organ toward her mouth.

Harry has stopped making noise. She opens her mouth, sinks her teeth into the pulsing thing, and moans in satisfaction. She chews and swallows, liar continuously hissed between each and every bloody mouthful. When she has licked every last drop of blood from each finger, she pries Harry’s mouth open and kisses it, teeth clamping down on a lying tongue, tugging at it like taffy until it finally splits and separates with a wet squelch. She slurps it down like a crow would a worm.

Phoebe says nothing. She stands up and slowly makes her way to the staircase. She can’t move another inch. She looks at Opheliad, at her blood-stained lips, at the blood dripping down her long chin. Harry’s blood. Cheater’s blood. Liar’s blood. Opheliad stands up, fingers curled around a bloodied steak knife and silver butterfly hair piece. She walks over to Phoebe. She places the knife and hairpin in Phoebe’s palm and curls Phoebe’s fingers around it. Those whose blood has been spilled are now bound.

Phoebe reaches into her pants and attaches both items to her upper thigh with the black garter. Opheliad walks to the table and sits down, gesturing for Phoebe to do the same. Phoebe sits at Opheliad’s right hand.

Opheliad pours another cup of tea.

Orphea

INT. APARTMENT - BATHROOM - DAY

A. J. Bermudez PART ONE [B&W. Simple, elegant, never entirely static shots, like moving photographs in succession. Messy, exquisite sound.]

Spectacularly drunk, Orphea staggers into the master bath, braces herself against a clawfoot BATHTUB. She twists the faucet. Water sputters and rushes out.

INT. LIQUOR STORE - DAY

Orphea sits on the edge of the tub and continues to drink as the water overflows, drizzling over the edges of the tub onto the tile floor.

Dressed in a dark, epicene suit, ORPHEA (30)—a heroine of ambiguous ethnicity—stands at the counter of a nondescript liquor store.

Still fully clothed, Orphea grips the edges of the tub and lowers herself into the water.

She pays for four cases of CHAMPAGNE.

She lies back, fully submerged, not breathing.

INT./EXT. TRUCK - DAY

PART TWO

CLOSE ON the cases of champagne, rattling in the bed of a moving TRUCK.

[Full, LSD-grade color. Lengthy, dynamic shots. Pure silence.]

INT. APARTMENT BUILDING - DAY

EXT. DESERT - DAY

Orphea diligently hauls all four cases of champagne up a narrow, geometrically implausible stairwell.

INT. APARTMENT - DAY

In stark contrast to her aurally lush but visually monochromatic apartment, Orphea awakes to a riot of hyper-saturated color—and absolute silence—in an inflated KIDDIE POOL.

CLOSE ON a RECORD PLAYER. The needle descends and something elegiac, in the vein of Billie Holiday’s “SOLITUDE,” begins to play.

She is surrounded by a vivid, sweeping desert, bizarrely strewn with miscellaneous BEACH PARTY ACCOUTREMENTS.

Flanked by sculpture-like pyramids of unopened WEDDING GIFTS, Orphea sits on the sole item of furniture (a LOVE SEAT) and begins to consume the champagne like she’s trying to break a record.

A jet black BEACH BALL bounces across the sand like an omen.

Against one bare white wall, projected footage—a WEDDING VIDEO—plays on loop. Orphea dances with EURYDICE (25), a visually stunning bride, the image of youth and hopefulness.

This is love.

Orphea stands, dripping with water. She steps out of the pool and makes her way toward the only other landmark: a trio of cathode-ray TELEVISION SETS. Alongside this TV sculpture, looking like the curator of a rejected Nam June Paik exhibit, stands HADES (35). He is lavishly dressed, at once playful and serious, with the mien of a wry, Afro-Caribbean god.

He places a finger to his lips, signifying the realm’s only rule: absolute silence.

73

Hades tilts his head. Orphea follows as he guides her past a dystopian MILE-MARKER reading “Styx and Stones,” toward a haze of color and light on the horizon.

There, like a post-apocalyptic fever dream partway between hell and Coachella: an extravagant PARTY. Amid a wasteland of sand, a sea of PEOPLE dance with abandon, each unsettlingly with their EARS TAPED SHUT. From beneath the bandages, rivulets of DRIED BLOOD crease the lobes and jawlines of the dancers.

Orphea’s gaze drifts toward the far end of the proceedings, where EURYDICE (25), still clad in an airy wedding gown, sits listlessly kicking her feet atop an enormous, unused SPEAKER. Leaving Hades—whose expression registers something between amusement and grief—Orphea presses through the crowd, toward her wife . . .

En route, she observes a series of TATTOOS—one on the back of each dancer’s neck—signifying the manner of each individual’s death: a gun, fire, pills, a clock, et al.

In a shift of perspective, we FOCUS ON the tattoo on Eurydice’s neck: a winding SERPENT. Having clawed her way through the crowd, Orphea finally reaches Eurydice. She greets her beloved with an impassioned kiss, but Eurydice pulls away and puts a finger to her lips, mirroring Hades’s earlier gesture.

Orphea grips her wife’s hand and, with an air of nearimmortal resolve, the couple begins to wend their way back through the madness.

As they move through the thick crowd, Orphea fends off dancers like underbrush. The chaotic swarm begins to close in . . .

Maddened by the silence, Orphea’s panic and fury escalate. Eurydice attempts to calm her, but it’s too late . . .

74

Orphea unleashes a violent, deafening ROAR. In the still, silent wake of this forbidden sound, Orphea opens her eyes.

She is alone. Eurydice—along with all the other figments of hell—have vanished.

Stricken with horror and renewed grief, Orphea collapses in the sand.

PART THREE [B&W. The same audio/visual aesthetics as Part One.] INT. APARTMENT - BATHROOM - DAY Immersed in complete darkness, Orphea hears the phantom of a voice . . .

She springs up from the tub, splashing water over the side. . . . But the voice isn’t Eurydice’s. It’s simply the record, which has begun to skip, butchering the original song.

Orphea lies back against the edge of the tub. With her toe, she shuts off the faucet, which has been running continuously. The floor of the bathroom is a slick, undulating sheen of water.

EURYDICE (O.S.)

There’s water in the kitchen— Orphea jolts upright in the clawfoot tub.

Eurydice emerges into focus, propped in the doorway, wearing a robe and a smirk.

EURYDICE (CONT’D)

What are you doing? (chiding, adoring)

The champagne was meant to be shared.

ORPHEA

You’re alive . . .

Eurydice moves to the bathtub.

She kneels, cradles Orphea’s face with concerned adoration.

EURYDICE

You were dreaming in Latin. (affectionate)

You poet.

She curls her fingers in Orphea’s hair, trails her fingers down the curve of her neck to the collarbone...

EURYDICE (CONT’D)

Come back to bed.

(in Latin, playfully)

Amor vincit omnia.

Eurydice places a soft kiss on her wife’s lips, then turns and stands. She traipses through the doorway with exaggerated, honeymoon mirth.

Alone, Orphea stares at the empty doorway. She clumsily grips the sides of the tub, then pushes herself upward.

ORPHEA

(dark, emotionally drained)

Amor vincit omnia.

As Orphea rises from the tub, we focus on the back of her neck. There, a new TATTOO has emerged: a single WATER DROPLET. From the other room, the sound of Eurydice resetting the needle on the record player.

The original song reprises, at full volume.

CUT TO BLACK. END 75

Other Species M. Christine Benner Dixon 76

32 Reasons Flaxseed is Going To Steal Your Girl Cameron Miller

1. Flaxseed is like a nice guy who smiles at you from across the produce section at Kroger: It’s gonna make you poop a little.

2. Milled flaxseed looks like dust, and thus has survived a run-in with Thanos. Consequently, it mixes well into most pastas.

3. A little flaxseed is good for your colon. A lot of flaxseed will hit you with a truck. Repeatedly.

4. Flaxseed will sleep with your girl while you are out of town.

5. Flaxseed has ties to the Yakuza.

6. Due to budget cuts, flaxseed was hired to replace you at your job.

7. Flaxseed hates Bob Ross.

8. Flaxseed made Chuck Norris cry.

9. Flaxseed sets avocado prices. No one gave him permission. He just does.

10. On top of being a terrible person, flaxseed doubles as the poison your girl will try to kill you with when she finally works up the nerve to break up with you.

11. Oh, yeah, flaxseed is going to make your girl leave you. Watch out for the lasagna.

12. Flaxseed puts flaxseed in your takeout without asking.

13. Flaxseed has anger issues.

14. And trust issues.

15. Flaxseed divides by zero.

16. Flaxseed will set you up for murder.

17. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This was mostly in an attempt to escape flaxseed.

It did not work.

18. Flaxseed can and will catch the gingerbread man, and when he does, he will eat his limbs first.

19. Flaxseed encourages anti-vaxxers.

20. When your girl moves out, flaxseed will answer your Craigslist post for a new roommate. He will move in without asking and will never have rent money on time.

21. Flaxseed watches Fox News.

22. Flaxseed forgot to feed his Tamagotchi.

23. You can’t fix flaxseed with Flex Tape.

24. Flaxseed sodomized your Furby.

25. Flaxseed wants you to paint him like one of your French girls.

26. When you hit rock bottom, flaxseed gave you a gun and wished you luck on the other side.

27. Flaxseed kicked John Wick’s dog.

28. Flaxseed never DD’s.

29. Flaxseed stole your wallet.

30. Flaxseed assumes you moved back into your Mom’s basement because you wanted to.

31. Flaxseed expects you to take care of him when he’s older.

32. But mostly? Flaxseed assumes he’s a good person.

77

Hunger

Disha Trivedi

Gaze - 2 Linh Dao

78

To the empty point inside of me, a man said all women are born with a hole inside that they’re waiting to have filled.

This whole, locked where kidneys meet adrenaline, meaty in a pan, is rare: best served with words as rough as unwashed abalone shells and Lover Man plucked from Billie Holiday; with yet another plastic spoon of news (blond hair speaks of grabbing pussies which is to say the whole), with maybe sex which is to say may be sexism; with sailboats in a bathtub plugged with sinking fingers to the point of adrenaline and hunger.

Wolf

Marina Fec I am a meal, always.

My hands have been bloodied and I am reminded every time you lick my palms; you were never going to forgive me.

I unsnared your leg one-hundred times dressed the wounds with arnica and chrysanthemum: small favors after one burning betrayal.

And then I ran away, hid in the emptiest places I could find: black woods that hated the sight of me, alligator swamps, the hot humid dark.

Ruthless places that made me feel safe.

But you sniffed me out like a dog and called me back like you do.

I didn’t have to think about what I wanted after you flashed those teeth of yours.

Gaze - 3 Linh Dao

79

Our Heroes Must Wear Capes Ifeoluwa Falola

“. . . Nothing ever prepares you for when you kill a man for the first time; at that moment, you may not understand the gravity of what you have done because really you are just trying to live, but later at night . . .”

I grew up in Lagos within the busy streets of Ogba and at a time when the digital age was just growing into stride in Nigeria. We mostly played outside with children from down the street, and televisions and phones were a luxury of some sort. If there was anything that growing up in Lagos showed me, it was that good deeds were a rarity. The first act of selflessness towards me that I can recall happened when I was five. Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” ushered in the presence of the ice-cream vendor into the neighbourhood, and I hurried out of the house hoping to be first to buy one. There was usually a line and the ice-cream finished within minutes. I caught up with the man down the street and waited for my turn, I was last in the queue. When it was my turn, I realised I had left my money at home. I pleaded my plight with the sincerest face I could muster, and he smiled and said I need not worry. He gave me one of the last two ice-cream cones with a smile on his face and filled my cone to the brim. I waited the next day so I could pay him for his kindness, but the only things that remained the same when the icecream truck rolled in the next day were Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” and the ice-cream.

These days, selflessness and integrity have become needles in haystacks. My father told me that during his youth, strangers could walk up to your house just to watch Nigeria play football. Stores allowed certain people to cart away with goods because they trusted them and knew they would come back to pay for the goods. A time when integrity was not so hard to find that we had to seek it in the words of failed statesmen and dishonest politicians. Nigeria has developed a habit of not rewarding its heroes appropriately until when forced to.

Remember Stella Adadevoh? The woman that gave her life to save millions of Nigerians by stopping Patrick Sawyer from spreading Ebola through Lagos and consequently Nigeria? Remember Dora Akinluyi? A lady that dedicated her life to forcing nationwide crackdowns on the sale of 80

expired products and counterfeit drugs. What about the soldiers that lay their lives down just to keep a nation at war safe? Shouldn’t their sacrifice be recognised?

Serving your country as a member of the armed forces is one of the most selfless things a man can do, and as we know war is never fun. If you live in the SouthWestern part of Nigeria like I do, it does not seem like the country is at war, and these headlines of bombings and causalities in Northern Nigeria just feel like numbers in an arithmetic equation you could not be bothered about. A while ago, beyond the hills that once sheltered the residents of Iseyin, Oyo State during times of the Oyo Empire War, I sat with Ibrahim (not real name), a soldier in the Nigerian armed forces. I was in the town completing my mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) three-week camp training when I noticed Ibrahim, a soldier that always had a smile spread across his cheek at all times. This was a rarity for me; Nigerian soldiers were renowned for being stone-faced and quick to inflict grave amounts of pain when necessary, an aftereffect of Nigeria’s time under military rule. I offered to buy him a drink in exchange for the tales of his service in the Nigerian Army; he declined the drink but besought me with his story nonetheless.

“War demands sacrifice of the people. It gives only suffering in return.” — Frederic Clemson Howe

Being born in Northern Nigeria, schooling in Eastern Nigeria and living in South-Western Nigeria provided Ibrahim all the diversity he needed as a Nigerian. He could speak Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo fluently and it was hard to tell which tribe he belonged to—a rare case in a country pre-disposed to tribal bias. Ibrahim grew up hearing stories of war from his father who was a soldier that fought during the Biafra War. “When you grow up in that kind of house, and especially that type of environment, sometimes that life is all you ever see and all you ever want to be.” His eyes were searching, perhaps for succour, and he chose his words carefully. I think this was a thing with members of the military; they never wanted to be caught wanting or have their words misconstrued, or maybe it was the military training that stiffened their throats and hardened their words .

There are two ways to join the Nigerian Army, through the Nigerian Defence Academy and the Depot.

The Nigerian Defence Academy is a military university and it was established in January 1964. The admission requirements were similar to what you would need to get into a Nigerian university, and the training spanned five years. The Depot was different, though; all that was required was a Secondary School Leavers Certificate—a certificate that was given to you to indicate that you finished secondary school, but the catch was that you could not advance past the rank of Army Warrant Officer without a university degree. “I joined through the Depot, I spent six months there; the training was intense and as expected, people died.” He says this casually, as if it were a ritual that I must have heard of. He was not entirely wrong. It was drummed into my ears growing up that joining the military would have you sign your death warrant; you were as good as dead, and many have been known to die during the training process. Ibrahim was in the special forces within the Nigerian Army and he was sent out to Bama like many others to fight Boko Haram insurgents. Bama is the second biggest town in Northern Borno State, and it accounted for over two hundred and fifty thousand residents according to the 2006 census.

Bama was a major trading post on the road to Cameroon and it suffered one of its earliest attacks from insurgents in the summer of 2013.

“Fighting at Bama was my first time in a real war and fighting there was difficult. We were blocking borders that carried people through to Cameroon and we were always under fire. It was sort of like a hot zone. I could barely sleep because you never knew when the next attack would be.” Ibrahim’s words made it feel like the military spent most of their time being on the defensive, and he was right. Insurgents seized control of Bama in September 2014, but the Nigerian army regained it in March 2015.

Since the Nigerian military regained control of Bama, some of the internally displaced people have returned home; many others remain in IDP camps, having lost all of their possession to the terrorist attacks. Since the initial attack in 2013, there has been an incessant back and forth at Bama between Boko Haram insurgents and the military, with the most recent attack occurring six months ago.

“Do you know what it feels like to not know if you’ll see the light of day tomorrow? To set out and know that this may be the last time you breathe air?” — Unknown

Ibrahim’s greatest fear was feeling like he was never coming back home and that the skies at Bama would be the last beauty his eyes would behold. He has attended multiple funerals of his fellow servicemen, and sometimes he thought about how it could have been him within the confined walls of the coffin. When I ask if he feels the military was sufficiently armed, he gave a quick nod and smiled a reminiscent smile before he said, “We were, but these guys had a better armory and we struggled to feed so many times. We were not taken care of properly and the money we are paid doesn’t compensate for what we go through.” In a November 2018 attack on Metele, Borno State, several soldiers deserted their base after being overrun by Boko Haram forces. Soldiers who spoke anonymously to the local press mentioned how many soldiers were brutally murdered and they lamented their lack of sophisticated weapons. “The situation has gone so bad that it has gotten to a stage that soldiers would be rushing to pack up their camps and flee upon hearing the news that Boko Haram fighters are advancing,” a soldier said following the incident. Although the army reiterates that Boko Haram is not better armed than them, there have been soldiers that have disputed this claim. Following the desertion at Metele that claimed hundreds of soldier lives, deserters were subsequently court-martialed.

“Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.”

— Francis Bacon

On the first time he killed a man and if the experience changed him, Ibrahim started in plain English, but he switched to pidgin English when the weight of loss bore on him. “Nothing ever prepares you for when you kill a man for the first time; at that moment, you may not understand the gravity of what you have done because really you are just trying to live, but later at night, reality sets in and then it haunts you, but you realise it’s them or you and you make yourself okay with it. It used to haunt me a lot when I first came back, but I remind myself that 81

these people killed my friends also. I am getting better now.”

Within the Nigerian army, many soldiers suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). An Independent UK report on the overwhelming number of suicidal military members in the UK and the neglect they face was quoted to have said, “At the turn of the 21st century, both the military and governments in the UK have come to recognise the issue of military-related suicide, but despite the increase in mental health awareness and support campaigns for both serving soldiers and veterans over the past two decades, concerns over deaths continue.”

Nigeria is a country still warming up to the realities of mental health awareness and treatment. Many within the army do not know what PTSD is, and even if they

Gaze - 1 Linh Dao 82

do, they are afraid to speak up because they fear they may be unfairly adjudged to be mad. This is the reality of Ibrahim—whose memories of war sometimes haunt him—and many others. When I ask why he always had a smile that stretched his lips thin, he said, “I have seen the extreme parts of life and I am just grateful that I am here to see a new day.” Ibrahim is married to a fellow soldier, but they do not have kids yet. He hopes when he has kids that they will see a better and safer Nigeria. I reminded him that my offer to buy him a drink still stood and then I thanked him for his service to his country. I felt him steel himself, and his lips trembled a bit before forming into a familiar smile. He stopped a single teardrop from crawling its way down his left cheek and he did not say a word after, and neither did I.

Recycled Ren Ellis

Macpherson Road was a long straight line of cement with a stretch of untamed grass on each side. The grass borders were a dull, blonde tan under the blue winter sky.

They stretched an acre wide between the road and lines of trees. The early hour shielded law-abiding eyes from the clash of black and white striped uniforms and orange vests the inmates wore. In the shadowy early morning light, each piece of garbage Harvey pierced with his trash picker looked the same, because they were the same, the very same articles of trash he picked up every Tuesday.

At first, Harvey thought the last year of prison had made him paranoid, and it had, but it didn’t make him wrong. He had a theory that every Tuesday before the inmates journeyed out to pick up litter along the road, the white van in which they’d placed last week’s load would pull onto the shoulder, take out the bags of trash and scatter their contents across the grass for the inmates to collect again, like parents sprinkling the same plastic Easter eggs across the lawn year after year, assuming the kids are too dumb to notice.

But Harvey noticed.

To prove his theory, he memorized his findings. The faded, crushed can of Sprite with its sharp angles, its stillrounded ends, and its right-side twisted tab. The plastic Kroger bag with a rip through the K. The Starbucks cup from fall announcing the return of pumpkin spice. He found these items again. And again. And again.

He wondered at first, who would do this? Weren’t the inmates already being punished for their various crimes

without being made to do the same job every week? But then, why should it matter to Harvey why they did it, whoever “they” were? It gave him a way to pass the time, leave the confines of the prison, and take in the outside world. Maybe that was the answer. It gave the inmates something to do. It made them feel good, like their work was worthwhile. The alternative was to let them sit, stuck, restless in thought, itching to move, trapped between the same four expressionless walls.

Some of the inmates, the white-collar criminals like Harvey, talked about what they would do when they got out and they were free. Had he been free before prison?

Harvey didn’t think life had been so different then.

He’d embezzled funds out of boredom. He didn’t need the money. He made a decent living, if one could call it living to go through each day with recycled greetings.

Recycled actions. Recycled thoughts. The changes minor.

Insignificant.

Every Tuesday during trash pickup Harvey hunted for the same scrap of paper: a page out of a magazine, crumpled and torn, but he’d memorized the story months ago. It was titled “Trash to Treasure.” It featured a local entrepreneur, an old hippie woman with an online store selling items made from recycled parts: bottle cap bracelets, light-bulbs-turned-terrariums, boxes made from floppy disks and CDs, and scraps of fabric sewn into quilts. Her wrinkled hands put the pieces together on sunny days in her garden. She called herself an artist.

When asked if she preferred work to retirement, the hippie was quoted as saying, “Work? This isn’t work. I’m freer than I’ve ever been.”

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I Woke Up to a Photo of Your Dick Vanessa Peterson

No caption. Just a cocked head,

Hunger in a Convent

eyebrow raised invitation.

Tousled hair, smug smile on face—glimpses of your post-shower routine.

How do they do it?

Commit to a life without touch,

without the possibility of you?

Kendall Brunson

Do their fingers caress the inside walls of pumpkins

and the length of gourds in wonder?

Or do they build a dam,

plugging away the need to feel another’s pressure?

In the mountains,

tucked between river and range, I need you.

You are not here.

At night, in my dank room,

I reach for it. To connect. To us.

I picture that night in the chilly garage,

not yet knowing each other’s body.

I reach harder.

Your hand slides underneath my purple sweater.

My reach quickens

as I undo the second of your jeans’ buttons.

But I hear them outside my door,

prayer beads knocking together sustain a chilling chant.

And my eyes are opened to

the continuous pulsing.

In the morning, I stare at the hunched nuns

carving away the tight peels of apples.

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You smirked that first night, too, after pub food and a parking lot hookup.

Grease-free hand on chiseled hip, every inch of your tanned skin displayed in the full-length mirror.

Fingers like matches, setting fire to my skin with each graze.

In the photo, your girlfriend’s panties drape your nightstand in the background.

I always hit the mirror, lace looping over its corners.

Read 7:32 am.

Consensual Virgin Laura Hoffman

sour-green sixteen with a rabid parolee sounds in the absence of angels: throat choke motorcycle my ear pressed to the cold shoulder of a tarry road counting the loss of my cherry coke’s fizz and now passenger side moony-eyes

welcome lips, but still

I am a dead thing reaching through him for the sun carefully he renews the accord not knowing

that he is the first

to ever ask before

Seat 23A Jenny Qi

Here I am a speck between times and places, light as Icarus reaching the sun, so close I can bite into its rays, remember what warmth is.

I think the sun tastes how orange feels, the closest approximation of heaven.

I could melt the glass like a sheet of ice, reach through.

With my fingertips, I’ll erase mountains, smooth wrinkles from an ancient face.

When I open my eyes, I am falling but still flying.

I will be somewhere else yesterday, and in this other yesterday, you are living, breathing as the living do.

Under the sun of a different mountain, your hand is still as warm as I remember.

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Life

Ren Ellis No one knew how long Doc had lived in the Women’s Correctional Facility. Even Old Beth, then serving her sixtieth year of a life sentence for killing her pimp, couldn’t tell me how long Doc had been there.

“She was here before I got here. Before anyone I ever knew was here. Doc is part of this place, like the walls, the floors, and every damn lock.”

I didn’t see how that could be. Maybe Doc was a Lifer like Beth, but Beth was pushing eighty years old, every year of her life having carved a hill or valley on the deserts of her dark skin. Doc didn’t look a day over forty.

Doc never said much. I assumed from her name she’d practiced medicine in the outside world. We all came to her for our aches and scrapes. Sometimes we came just to have someone listen. Either way, she always made us feel better.

As her cell mate, I saw more of Doc than others did, but it took years for me to learn her story. Doc was a million-piece jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

She wrote in a small leather book every night. She would pick it up for a single moment, make a quick mark with her pen, and close it again. One day she handed it to me, saying not a word. Deep creases ran like twin rivers along the book’s spine. Inside, I found only pages upon pages of tallies.

“32,400,” Doc said. “There are 32,400.”

Each day she added a new tally to the book, as she had for the last 89 years.

Asking questions of Doc didn’t yield answers.

Answers spilled from her lips only when she chose, in unpredictable sequence. I lunged to catch each, grasping tightly so none slipped through my fingers.

“You should have thought of the child, they said. But I did. I did.”

“He wouldn’t sign over his parental rights.”

“She never had a choice, in any of it. I gave her a choice.”

“He played for an Ivy League. Was cleared before the season began.”

“She was thirteen years old.”

“He ran for Congress later. He won.”

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Later, on the outside, I found urban legends about Doc online, theories that claimed she stole a year for every life they said she took. I think she gained a year for every life that she saved.

She never asked to know my story, but like so many before me, I came to her for healing. My hands folded over my womb as I told her of the joy that became loss that became grief that became blame that became crime. I had been so lost in sorrow, I hadn’t fought the verdict. I believed myself guilty, too. I didn’t fight the prosecutor’s words.

“A woman’s body responds to her desire. It gives clear signs of what she does and doesn’t want. She deliberately terminated the life inside her by way of miscarriage.”

I knew I had wanted a child. Wanted with every cell in my body. But I still felt I had done something wrong. If I’d had a husband to help me lower my stress, or take the right vitamins, or work while I stayed at home in bed, or drive me to the hospital faster than the ambulance could come, would that have made a difference?

“I wanted it so badly.”

“I believe you,” Doc said.

Her belief couldn’t erase what happened, but it helped confirm the truth buried under so much shame.

Doc marked another day in the book, counting toward her ninety-ninth year behind bars. Still she waits for the day she’ll be free. When all of us will be free.

Runaways

Brittany J. Barron Browsing Facebook, I see a black-and-white picture: two girlfriends stand hip to hip and lean against a bar—above them, little lights dangle like silver thorns. They laugh at a shared joke, smile, look toward the future: late-night stars, beer bottles, party hats. I attend grad school with these girls, and whenever I see a picture like this one, I think of my childhood frenemy, Amy. This picture could easily have been us, if we had remained friends. In these moments, I think about third grade: the year my sister’s autoimmune disease slowly feeds upon her body, the year when I still call my father “Dad,” the year before my and Amy’s friendship ends.

One afternoon, Amy and I stay after school to help decorate for the annual fall festival. While we stack the hay bales and hang orange streamers, our moms gossip in the back of the gym, out of sight.

Amy is as restless as the red leaves that scratch the pavement when the wind blows. She suggests that we leave. No one cares. Other parents fill the gym, but they drift around looking busy and ignore us.

“We should tell one of our moms.” I try to delay her.

Amy rolls her eyes. “Our moms trust us. They left us here, didn’t they?”

“Yeah. To decorate. Where will we go anyway?”

“Let’s go to the park.” Amy prances to the gym’s exit, ready to leave. She leaves me with the same two options.

Follow her, or be left behind.

I catch up with her outside. Once we cross the football field, we follow a small, wooded trail to the park, which consists of a few swings, a slide, and monkey bars.

Amy and I have known each other since the first day of Kindergarten. We call each other best friends, but Amy instigates competitions between us. Who is the teacher’s pet? Who do the boys like best? Who is skinnier? Who is the fairest of them all?

Amy keeps her brunette locks draped down her back; wears expensive, name-brand clothes; and pouts with her red-delicious apple lips. I tie my Cinderella-blonde hair in a ponytail and cast my wide, forest-green eyes to the ground.

You’ll never be pretty.

I believe her.

At the park, Amy runs toward the swing set and claims one of them. I sit in the swing beside her. With every back and forth motion, we ascend higher into the clouds.

I think about the other day, when I overheard my mom on the phone with a friend, sharing how Amy’s father flirted with her to no avail, but he found other moms who loved his attention. I think about her sister, Alison, who calls Amy names. Fat. Ugly. Stupid. The same words Amy uses to hurt me. She plays me like a puppet, but she too dances like a puppet on a string. Neither one of us knows how to live without a puppeteer.

I like our world at the park. No name calling or competitions. We could be two butterflies in flight.

“Let’s stay.”

Amy slows her swing. “We need to leave. We’ve been gone too long.”

She decides our fates.

I trail behind her. My feet scrape along the dirtcovered path. With every step back, I forget how it feels to squeeze and hold onto the swing.

When we walk back through the gym doors, we cause minor chaos. Our moms had been searching the school for us and hoping we would return any minute. Over the intercom, the principal announces our return.

Separately, our moms corner us. I blame everything on Amy. “She forced me,” I lie.

My mom is not convinced. She put her hands on my shoulders and looks me in the eyes. “If Amy jumped, would you jump?”

“No.” This is the answer that will make her feel better.

My mom had asked me the question before, and my young mind always took her literally. I knew, deep down, Amy could act that recklessly. I imagined a bridge, with a rushing river beneath it. Amy would climb onto the railing, reach out her hand, and ask me, What are you waiting for?

Because I wanted her to mean it when she promised me friends forever, I would grab onto her hand, stand beside her, and I wouldn’t let her go until we hit the water.

With Amy, I took risks. Now, I watch my friends’ lives unfold as I scroll through my Facebook feed from 87

the comfort of home. Even though I don’t miss Amy the mean girl, I miss the Amy who I ran away with that fall day. I don’t know who she is anymore or where to find her, but if I saw Amy today, I imagine that I would walk up to her and wrap her in a hug. Then, she would take my

Dripping in Stars - 3 Katelyn Cartwright

88

hand, and we’d find a bridge to jump off of. Nothing too dangerous, but dangerous enough to feel a heady rush.

We’d gasp for air and then laugh at ourselves when we reached the water’s surface.

I Saw Your Engagement Photos on Facebook

Psalm

You’re standing in an envy-colored pasture, her hand resting on your stomach, the diamond as the focal point—it was the one I lost mid-hair-yanking-orgasm while we fucked on New Year’s Day. I had imagined it made its home with dust mites under your dresser.

after Francesca Bell

Five months later, you got down on one knee and gifted it to your girlfriend. You were sexting me the week before—snapshots of your chiseled chest hiding under hair,

let me sit up, but first let me crumple, beat my fists in the earth until my knuckles darken in the creases and hurt.

callused hand grasping your erectness, brawny legs enveloped in cotton sheets.

Let me stay undisciplined, rake my nails deep and leave you scars to match mine.

Vanessa Peterson

I wonder when you vow to be faithful if the texts with full-body nudes will cease or if I’m exempt from the forsaking-all-others clause.

How will you explain it to her, Bryan, when she asks over anniversary lobster tails and chardonnay how you came to choose that ring?

Jenny Qi

When you toss me into gravel like a ragged mistress, rip skin from my knees and palms,

I hope your marks in my flesh remain unfaded, every bruise and burn and hollow a hoarded memory.

I want to abandon my pride and chase you when you leave me, and when you pierce my too-tender chest, let my heart break open and spill its warmth.

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A Photograph, Taken at Christmas Brittany J. Barron

I shuffle through my maternal grandmother’s picture collection and hope to find inspiration for my graduate thesis, until one picture makes me stop, my fingers hovering on the page’s corner. Two of my uncles, my parents, and my younger self stare back at me. A Christmas picture. Almost two decades ago. I remember neither the moment nor the photographer. It is and is not my family.

A family together on a fraying blue couch: behind them, a blanket, where angels peek out—they surround God with their haloes outlined in rose gold.

At opposite ends of the couch, two middle-aged men sit in the middle of a conversation: one holds a fork in his hand with a holly-printed paper plate in his lap and faces the other whose hands rest on his knee and chin, lost in thought. They’re probably talking about sports, a football player whose game has improved this year.

A man, a woman, and a child sink in the middle.

The child wears an elementary-school arts and crafts project: a white sweatshirt with a hand-painted reindeer in the center and her name, Brittany, printed in red letters at the bottom. Black leggings finish the outfit.

She smiles and waves at the photographer, so eager to please. Her smile seems to say, Ask me to smile, and I’ll obey.

She sits in the woman’s lap, sliding down, as if waiting to be released. Brittany’s blonde hair splays against the woman’s chest. Her hair is the blondest it will ever be, as light as sea glass.

A thin veil of makeup coats the woman’s face. She smiles, maybe she is laughing. Her eyes are closed. She looks as if she could be sleeping, or free falling.

The man is an island unto himself, a King sitting on his throne, his crown replaced by a baseball cap. He holds a plastic cup—his cup runneth over—and wraps his other arm around his burgeoning belly. He wears a Planet Hollywood t-shirt, and his smile seems to say, Look at my wife and daughter. They will not leave me. My wife loves with blind devotion. My little girl smiles and waves—she wears reindeer sweatshirts, speaks when she is spoken to, chooses her words with care.

90

One day, his daughter may see his eyes in her own.

She may pray, Erase him from my eyes.

Look at this photograph, and your eyes can’t help but be drawn to the angels. Do the angels bless this family or curse them?

I leave the photograph where I find it and shut the photo album. When my grandmother asks if I found what I was looking for, I tell her, No. I didn’t find anything.

Lithuania: My Grandmother’s Reflections, 2019 Sarah Valeika

here our bodies, slipping through Vilnius as inconspicuously as labas from our lips labas languishing with fear, the dregs of in-born fear of speaking our own language in the land of the oppressor. the Motherland stands beside us and in its shadow we do not cower but stand, our legs shaken, blood sugar low and feeling faint but they mustn’t see us trembling mustn’t see us (fear, we cannot help but fear) and labas we say to the man on the street corner whose eyes remind of the officer who took Papa away. our labas hushed, we offer it nonetheless exhaustedly audible, if only to ourselves.

Dripping in Stars - 2 Katelyn Cartwright

Midnight Conversation in a Parked Subaru Vanessa Peterson

Calloused hand on inner thigh, layer of black jean can’t stop

fire’s magnetism.

91

Sanctuary Amita Basu

8:20 am. The bus pulled into the bus-station at Benaras.

For economy, Shilpi had taken a non-AC bus. In early February, the early mornings were still cold. And winter’s smog still lingered: augmented by year-round business-as-usual. Goods-trucks belching black dieselsmoke. Municipal workers disposing of rubbish by setting afire dead leaves, juice-boxes, and car-tires all heaped together. The rubbish-bonfires were useful: they drew shivering beggars, security-guards, stray dogs, and miscellaneous outdoor creatures. Even with her asthma spray, it’d been a challenging three-hour journey from Lucknow. With relief, Shilpi stepped out of the bus.

New. And into the chaos of Benaras. India’s holiest city is its most chaotic. Well-dressed and open-faced, Shilpi drew a swarm of autorickshaw-drivers competing to drive her where she willed.

“The ghats?” said Shilpi.

“Which ghat?” they chorussed.

“Dasashvamedha ghat.” The ghat of the ten warhorses. There, at the most famous of Benaras’s numerous ghats, she’d start her weekend. Start making sense of this latest misadventure. Really look at herself and ask herself: What am I doing wrong?

“Dasashvamedha, Rs. 250,” they chorussed. “This way, madam!”—“No madam, come with me.”—“No, I asked her.” The autorickshaw-drivers fought each other for her fare.

In principle, Shilpi knew that this bickering was for show. Crowding her, fighting among themselves: it was to confuse her. So that, dazed, she’d be ushered into a bad bargain. But in practice—her head buzzing, she regretting the trouble she was causing these poor people—it was hard to remember.

“Rs. 250!” said Shilpi. “You must be joking! How far are the ghats from here?”

“2-4 kilometers,” they chorussed. “But it’s early morning, and you’re a single passenger . . .”

“So what? Autos don’t run on share here? In Lucknow—” “No, no. In Benaras there’re no share autos. You have to reserve it. This way!”

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Rucksack in lap, Shilpi sat clutching the fragile frame of the crazy vehicle. Traffic was bad enough in Delhi, but there it was mainly traffic-jams. In these smaller cities, traffic was crazy. It directed itself, undisturbed by trafficlights and traffic-police. “Directed” is a euphemism.

Every car, bus, motorbike, and manual-rickshaw knew where it was going, and all it knew was that it must get there. Rules of the road? What’re those? Here there were no traffic-jams at traffic-lights. Here there were only snags everywhere. Motorbike heading north from every crossroads sees two square feet of room ahead. Motorbike forges ahead. Never mind that there’re vehicles headed to that same 2 square feet from south, west, east, and northeast, too. Never mind that the biker himself will be stuck, once he’s claimed his 2 square feet of progress, amidst everyone going every which way.

Selfishness. But an impersonal, blind selfishness. A nation of infants, tugging at the nipple, deafening with their screams themselves. No sympathy for others: true.

But no sympathy for oneself two minutes later. Bike: wedged on 2 square feet between vehicles going every which way. What next?

God knows. Honk. Honk, for god’s help, raucously nonstop. And justify: This is just life. Traffic-snags.

Reckless driving. Road-accidents.

As her driver honked and sped and swerved through the streets, other rickshaws kept slowing to board passengers. ‘So: autos do go on share here, too,’ Shilpi thought. ‘This driver’s cheating me.’

Anger rose, quickly quenched by empathy. Anger that, once again, another person was cheating her. Quenched by taking the other person’s view. ‘He saw that I was new here; he did what anyone would do. Take advantage.

It was my fault. I should’ve walked on, out of the chaos around the bus-stop, and found an auto down the road. I should’ve haggled. Why didn’t I haggle? Why did I believe them when they said autos here don’t run on share?’

Why did she believe them?

New. Continually renewed, Shilpi’s faith in people renewed her soul. They cheated her, and lied to her, and aggressively demanded of her what they imagined the world had promised them. And still she had faith.

Shilpi had come to Benaras seeking sanctuary from her own habits. Was her faith in people costing her her own wellbeing?

She was not religious. She’d come here seeking, not god, but a better way to live. A holy city in India is a severance from life’s habits. Here, at a distance, severed for the weekend from herself—it was her habits Shilpi had come to examine.

Ripe me off once: shame on you. Rip me off twice: shame on me.

The auto-rickshaw deposited her at Dasashvamedha Ghat. Shilpi offered him a Rs. 500 note; he hadn’t change; then she offered him Rs. 200, turning out her wallet to show that’s all she had. The driver swung his head into a nod of largesse, excusing her the balance of the Rs. 250 they’d agreed. He drove off. Shilpi, unreasonably grateful—as if he’d done her a favour by cheating her, from lack of change, magnanimously a mite less than forecast—stepped onto the ghat.

Punctuated by landings, eighty concrete steps led down from the street to the water. Shilpi descended, past the motley of buildings crowding the ghat. Looking up from the bottom step, the city seemed to be falling into the river. Into the Ganges, which here was particularly holy— for some reason. Shilpi frowned, trying to remember fragments of her grandmother’s stories. Nominally a Hindu, Shilpi wasn’t familiar with the myth. She’d have to find a guide to show her this crazy, magic, filthy, holy city.

She turned to the water. Bare-torsoed and barelegged, white loincloth intervening, a Brahmin ascended the steps. Brass water-pot in hand: he’d just finished morning worship. There—in the water, facing the sun, pouring into the river libations of river-water—stood another. Sympathetically, Shilpi shivered. But, then, she reflected: they’re too engrossed to feel the cold. Their faith was alien to her, but their chill she felt in her bones.

Walking down the ghats, a solitary European tourist passed her. Shorts and joggers, rucksack strapped across chest, sunhat shading face. He made with Shilpi a moment’s eye-contact. His eyes bright and seeking.

This ancient city, drawing from around the world new blood. Seeking what?

Shilpi turned away. From across the country and the world, people come here. Seeking what? What had she come to seek?

Here in the plains, the Ganges was wide-waisted and slothful; the bank opposite, also girded with ghats, was 300 meters away. Looking downstream, the river widened further; there the facing ghats were 800 meters apart, and from midriver rose a silt island. Shilpi narrowed her eyes. Are those camels on the island? Camels gaily caparisoned. Perhaps to give tourists camel-rides; tourists rowed across the river in canoes. Tourists handed from autorickshaw-driver to boat-rower to camel-driver: the chain of exploitation, in the name of god, efficient.

On the steps sat a half-dozen massive cows: masticating, eyes wide shut. Would they be here during the aarti? With humans jostling each other for elbowroom, would these cows be allowed to stay? Yes. Cows were still sacred: even at the acme of the crush, they’d be tolerated. A vegetable-vendor setting up his stall shooed away a cow approaching for a snack. Lackadaisically, the cow moved on to an unattended stall.

The gorge rose up Shilpi’s throat. Years ago, when she’d first understood what “bad touch” was, she’d complained to her headmistress that a teacher had abused her.

They’d laughed her away. But strangers—who wormed themselves, with tales of woe, into her friendship—had continued to abuse her. The people around them knew.

Who these men were, what was the motive behind the tales of woe with which they approached every naïve young woman. Everyone knew. Nobody did anything.

They tolerated the man, and they tolerated Shilpi’s complaints, and they tolerated her still better when she stopped complaining.

Go steal food from that stall. Next door to mine. There I won’t object. There, cow, I’ll tolerate you. For you are holy, cow. For this is the land of live and let live.

Anchored to the ghat on the water gently bobbed two dozen wooden canoes: furnished with benches, and painted red, blue, or yellow. These must be the boats that rowed out during the famous evening aarti: to give tourists, from the water, a better view of the aarti than could be had from the steps, which would then be all a-jostle. Perhaps the same boats also took tourists around, during the day, to tour the ghats.

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Pamphlet in hand, salesman’s smile on face, an undergrown boy approached Shilpi from the boats.

Averting her eyes Shilpi set off down the ghat. She didn’t want a boat-ride: not now. She’d walk down the ghats.

You could walk from one to the other, end to end, cross the river—there, far off in the morning smog, slept the bridge she’d read about—and walk back down the other side, through the other half of the ghats.

Late winter: good for walking. The sun fought the smog, and won, to shine on Shilpi a new day’s joy. It was only two months every year that in the plains the sun felt a blessing. The other ten it was a plague: to avoid at all costs, to refugee from in cavernous interiors or ACblasts. As she walked, she warmed up. Divested herself of her denim jacket, and threw it around her shoulders.

That was hotter than tying it around her waist. But, tied around her shoulders, the jacket hid her breasts.

Shilpi was in the costume of millions of young urban Indians: jeans and loose teeshirt. Still she was self-conscious of her breasts. Perhaps if she had a betterfitting bra. Had she always been self-conscious about them? Did they feel awkward physically?

At 23, Shilpi could not remember a time before people made her uncomfortable about her breasts. People staring, and singing at them scraps of lewd songs, and pretending that it was the jostling crowd that’d brought their elbows in contact with her breasts. How long does the world have to stare at a part of you before it starts to feel uncomfortable? Physically.

Shilpi knotted her jacket-sleeves around her neck, and arranged the cuffs before her breasts. She longed for a world where her breasts would find sanctuary. From men’s eyes. Where finding a better-fitting bra would be her only breast problem.

Was it her breasts that’d drawn all those men?

Was that all they’d wanted—they who’d talked so sweet, opened their hearts to her, begged her only for understanding, promised to love her always? A promise she’d never asked for. She’d been sympathetic, but also bored. Her days were spent reading. The lives and ideas of great people. And these men—yes, it was sad that they’d suffered, but were their sufferings all they wanted to talk about? Perhaps once they unburden themselves, then we can have interesting conversations. So, she’d consented to act, for now, as a sanctuary. To receive men’s tales of 94

woe. And so they’d talked, and made her their promise.

A promise that was meant to put her at ease for what followed.

Shilpi walked faster. Boatmen, and tour-guides, and waiters at restaurants overlooking the ghats—idling, called at her to offer their services. She waved and smiled.

No, thanks.

So polite a refusal! They were startled. They could not but believe that this No didn’t mean No. They turned their heads to study her. “How much?” she heard someone offer for her. She swallowed the urge to swivel and smash his eyes in with the steel water-flask strapped outside her rucksack.

A female travelling alone. Travelling by daylight, dressed as a tourist, dressed like everyone else. Of course they looked at her and saw interesting possibilities.

It was to reason away her anger that Shilpi thus reasoned with herself. ‘It’s only the usual. Don’t be upset.’

But, again, already Shilpi was in the other person’s shoes.

India’s a land of hypocrites. We can’t stop breeding, but we’re prudes about sex. These men are just sex-starved.

I acknowledged their existence; therefore, they think I’m interested.

But here I am in Benaras, on holiday—and to avoid strangers’ eyes I’m walking head-down.

Rousing herself, Shilpi glanced around.

She’d read about the filth at Benaras. City of legend: legendary filth. Garlands of marigold floating downriver.

Mounds of marigold, coconut, jasmine, and the other paraphernalia of Hindu worship. At the temples, the floors were littered and the drains choked with milk, incense-sticks, and tiny printed pamphlets.

The temple she wouldn’t visit. Beautiful structures, they’d once been. Now thronging with purohits relieving the unwary of thousands of rupees. Still thronging with millions full of a hope so intense it was almost despair.

No! She’d walk down the ghats. Think.

Shilpi had always drawn men. They’d told her she was beautiful. She’d believed them. Not from vanity. She believed people. Vrinda, her closest female friend since they were five, had remarked: “They like you because you treat them like people.”

“How am I supposed to treat them?”

“See! Even when you ask that, you’re not righteous.

You’re sincerely puzzled. That’s the problem. How’re you

supposed to treat them? Like men, Shilpi. In India, men and women don’t treat one another as people. They’re men and women. Then along comes you. Men aren’t used to a woman being kind. And friendly, and unreserved about her life and dreams. Men see a friendly woman, and they don’t understand. They see a loose woman.”

“You’re saying I’m responsible for what’s happened,” Shilpi had said, reflectively. Oddly, it was a relief to hear someone else accuse her. It was the conclusion she’d reached herself. She must be responsible. Once or twice, one could blame chance: the men who came my way were bad apples. But bad apples had kept coming. “That’s what I—” “No!” Vrinda had scolded. “You’re not responsible. Not that way. You didn’t intend to be anything more than friendly. Did you?”

Slowly Shilpi had shaken her head. Full of faith in people, taking strangers at their word, shivering in sympathy with men whose tales of woe bored her intellect but didn’t exhaust her sympathy—the price of her irresistible vulnerability was that Shilpi never believed herself. Whatever her intentions—people’s unintended reactions made her wonder: ‘Is this what I actually wanted?’

“What you are responsible for,” Vrinda had concluded, “Is yourself.”

Shilpi glanced up. There: at the promontory, jutting into the waterline—the land sunken, the soil black—there stood the cremation-ghat. How many bodies do they burn there a day? The river must be filthy with their ash.

Stepping to the water’s edge, Shilpi peered. No: the water looks clean. She remembered, then, reading that the Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan—the Clean India Initiative— had begun by cleaning up Benaras.

To be responsible for oneself: what does that mean?

Does it mean being hard and selfish? True: every man Shilpi had been kind to had exploited her. “Borrowed” money, got her to tutor him for exams, made sexual advances when she was sleeping or drugged or when she, for once, had needed their shoulder. Awful as that’d been, Shilpi couldn’t imagine living as someone else.

Someone hard. Someone who, just like those men, looked at people not as people. Not even as men and women. As opportunities.

Even when our troubles are bad, we cannot imagine changing: we prefer familiar misery to the dislocation of personal growth. Then—if we’re lucky—our troubles get worse, we snap, and next thing we know we’ve changed.

Already we’ve changed, from self-preservation, agonising skipped. We’ve changed, and glancing back we can’t believe how stubborn we were.

And so it goes. When we fail to sympathise with ourselves a year ago, two minutes later—what hope is there for sympathy between humans?

Each ghat was labelled with paint on a concrete signpost. Each ghat looked unique. The arrangement of the steps, the boats tethered before them, the buildings falling down to them. The buildings ranged from cutprice guesthouses to posh hotels with waiters costumed in turbans strolling in manicured tiered gardens.

There were silk wholesalers: factory outlets, selling the famous Benaras silk wedding-saris half of India saved for. And there were private dwellings, their backs to the ghats, opening into the labyrinth of streets. How many centuries had those homes stood there? Studying one high-ceilinged, narrow shack, Shilpi wondered what it was like to live there. To fall asleep with the ceaseless city din ricocheting off your walls, to awaken every morning to the noise of cormorants and aarti. To peer, at dawn, at the ghat-steps: dhobis spreading, already, dyed fabrics out to dry.

Shilpi stopped herself short of falling into the water.

She looked around. She was at the cremation-ghat.

Manikarnika.

“Good morning!”

Shilpi turned to see a young man wearing a multicoloured polyester Nike sports-teeshirt, black jeans, Nike joggers—and a smile.

“This is your first visit?” he said. “Careful”—as Shilpi narrowly avoided colliding with two men. Torsos bare, loins girded in once-white lungis, they were sweeping ashes into the river.

“Uh—yes,” Shilpi confessed.

Here, no buildings flanked the ghat. Here, no steps led from street to water. Here, the land was level: soft soil, ash-black. Twenty feet from the river blazed three funeral-pyres in various stages of conflagration. Logs piled high. Clean orange flames burning through dirty black smoke. Smoke wind-blown over wide river.

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“This is main cremation ghat of Benaras,” said the young man. “One more ghat is there, other side—other side of Dasashvamedha ghat. That one has an electric crematorium, also.”

“Oh, yeah! I saw a big brick funnel smoking when I looked that side. I wondered if it was a brickmaking factory. I got down at Dasashvamedha and just started walking this way. Is Dasashvamedha in the centre of the ghats?”

“Kind of centre. Depends where you count from. These days, people are building ghats along whole river. They make fake history, build some hotels . . . good income.”

Ungrammatical, his English was fluent. He spoke with the quaint intonation of someone who’s learned English in adulthood. Shilpi never forgot that it was by luck that she’d grown up fluent in English: by luck that English had become the language of her thought. Shilpi admired people who’d taught themselves English.

Lost in admiration, and in the fresh species of chaos on this ghat, Shilpi had forgotten to shield her nose from the smoke-waves blowing her way. Now coughing, she fumbled for the cotton scarf with which women across north India shield themselves from sun, and dust, and eyes. The young man beckoned her out of the way. They stood under the single graybrown building looming over this ghat.

He was compact: 5”5’. Sallow-skinned, clean-shaven with a flat face and small, bright black eyes. Must be northeastern. Forearms well-toned, and his teeshirt hinting at a well-developed chest. Shilpi loved looking at strong people: admiring their discipline and longing to be, herself, strong every way. But she’d learned not to look. ‘I really admire your body. I wish I could find time to work out. . .’ This is what she’d say. But experience had taught her. What men would hear was: “I admire your body. Fuck me.”

Restraining her urge to introduce herself and shake hands, Shilpi asked, looking away, “How many bodies are burned here a day?”

“Every day, 100-120. The burning continues full day, but at night it stops. Night is unholy to burn.”

“It’s odd! So much smoke, but it doesn’t smell bad.

There’s no putridity, or smell of roasting flesh.”

“That’s because of the wood. For burning use sandalwood, and mango wood, which give good fragrance 96

when it burns. Also ordinary wood is mixed, to reduce the cost—sandal and mango cost is higher. Come, I show you.”

He led her away from the pyres, behind the graybrown temple. There stood stacks of wood: cut into logs, successive layers of the stack at right angles. Giant Jenga towers separated by narrow footpaths leading from the warehouse to the ghat.

“These are sandalwood. You can smell.”

Shilpi stooped to sniff. “Oh! Nice. Yeah, this must be expensive, as you said. My grandmother had a tiny log of sandalwood, to make paste, for pujas . . . That itself was expensive.”

“Yes, but this is lower grade. Still expensive.”

“How much does it cost to get a body cremated here?”

“Minimum Rs. 5,000. Depends on amount of sandalwood. Total wood needed is 150 kilograms.”

“150 kilograms of wood per head! That’s so wasteful!

In south India, smuggling sandalwood is organised crime. I used to work at a forestry research centre before I came here for my M.Sc in life sciences.” Shilpi checked herself. Nobody was interested in learning about another person: unless they thought that person was interested in sex. Why couldn’t she remember?

“You’re studying here?” asked the young man. “By the way, myself Kachmach.”

“Kachmach!” Shilpi laughed and, disarmed, extended her hand. “Is that a nickname?”

“It’s a name I give myself.”

“Sorry I laughed—it sounds like someone noisily chewing chicken-bones. It’s a nice name!” she assured him. On topics trivial and grave, she was always speaking her mind. Alienating friends who thought she was snide.

Vrinda was one of her few female friends: Vrinda selfassured and outspoken. “I’m Shilpi. I’m studying in Lucknow.” They walked back towards the pyres. “Are you from the northeast?”

“I am born here,” said Kachmach. “My father has sweets-shop. I am doing tour-guide for fifteen years.

Started during schooldays. I have learned English, and also many foreign languages. Spanish, Italian, German tourists come here a lot. I speak, not full, but basic information I can give in these—all languages.”

“You picked up these languages yourself!” said Shilpi.

Catching herself again mid-admiration, she pretended

her eye had been caught by the scene. She pointed to the shacks standing alone above Manikarnika ghat. “Who lives there?”

“The sweepers.” Kachmach pointed to the men sweeping—bare-torsoed, barehanded, barefooted— ashes into the river. “They are sweeper caste. That slums is their home.”

Shilpi was enraged. “Aren’t they municipal workers?

Why aren’t they given proper accommodation? Without them this whole business would come to a standstill.” 150 kilograms of wood per head! She wondered what margins the warehouses charged. Cremating a relative at Benaras: India’s equivalent of getting married in the Bahamas.

High margins on weddings and funerals. “Even here, where people come to die, there’s casteism.”

“This is the job they’re born to do,” said Kachmach, mildly.

Rage ebbing as rapidly as it’d risen, Shilpi remembered: she was a tourist. Being a tourist, glancing at something, getting enraged—that’s easy.

Raised by liberal parents, attending international schools, Shilpi was out of touch with India’s still-thriving caste system. But already she knew: if she learned about it, she’d understand it. Sympathise with it. Perhaps, millennia ago, it made sense? The possibility sent a chill up her spine.

Shilpi remembered the men, also half-nude, she’d watched rising from morning worship in the river. Those were Brahmins: well-paunched, well-respected. Their job: go around muttering verses in a dead language.

That’s the role they fulfilled, sprawled at the top of India’s intricate caste hierarchy. Nominally, Shilpi was herself a Brahmin.

“See, they are preparing body.” Kachmach pointed to a corpse, draped in white, being borne on a wood stretcher down to the river. “They will dip body in water, to purify.

Then body must dry 30 minutes to catch fire.”

“So that’s another body, drying over there? Why’s that one wrapped in red?”

“White for men, red for women.”

“What? All you’re doing is burning the bodies. Even when you’re dead, why does sex still matter!” At the far end of the ghat, two men were tying something up in ropes. “What’s happening there?”

“Oh,” said Kachmach, hesitating. “That body they put straight into water. No burning. Six types of bodies are not allowed to be burning at ghat. Children less than twelve years—” “Why not?”

“Tradition,” declared Kachmach.

“But why? Even for tradition, there must sometime have been a logic. And now we’ve forgotten that logic and we’re stupidly following the empty ritual.” Kachmach looked defensive. “I’m including myself—I’m not religious, but I have stupid habits of my own.”

But it wasn’t Hinduism Kachmach was defensive about: it was his own abilities as a tour-guide to answer whatever question flew his way. He rallied. “Children not allowed, reason is that, before puberty, human are already pure. Water of Ganga and fire on Ganga ghat is for purification, but children are already pure.”

Shilpi looked doubtful, but beginning to be convinced.

Kachmach forged on: “Also cannot burn person who died from snakebite” – “Why not?”

Kachmach reflected. He’d guided tourists from Germany and Tamil Nadu, but this one was giving him a run for his money. To be fair, she hadn’t actually engaged him as her tour-guide. She’d been wandering, looking lost, and he’d put himself near her and they’d fallen into a conversation. That was much the best way to recruit clients: and Kachmach had perfected the accidental pickup.

“Snakebite person not allowed because that person is considered still half-alive, and cannot burn half-alive person.” He did remember hearing something of that sort.

“Also cannot burn pregnant woman”—he anticipated her Why Not—“because pregnancy also purifies a woman, so she not need purification of fire. Also cannot burn . . .”

As Kachmach finished his inventory of the six types of bodies that can’t be cremated at Manikarnika, Shilpi watched the white-wrapped body drop into the river.

Was Kachmach making it up? Shilpi felt doubtful that a pregnant woman was considered too holy to be burned in the holy city. The snakebite story—that sounded crazy enough to be true.

Weighted with stones, the body dropped into the river. Shilpi’s eyes wandered to the silt-island midriver.

Smog from the morning’s open fires—cooking fires, 97

rubbish-burning fires—had drifted out from the city. She narrowed her eyes at a dubious figure, smog-shrouded.

“Is that a—naked man standing on that island?”

“Yes, that is Ahori,” said Kachmach, making no attempt genteelly to shepherd Shilpi away from the sight into his own protective custody. “They are worshipper of Shiva. You know Shiva?”

“The god of destruction. But he has a blue throat, because he swallowed some poison to save someone.”

“Yes, he save the world. Ahori walk around naked, never cut hair, and eat human flesh.”

“What!”

“He stands there to fish for flesh. From unburned bodies thrown in river.”

“How can you eat a human? There would be so much toxicity, from bioaccumulation up the food-chain. Not to mention parasites!” She watched the figure kneel and stare into the water. “Is this practice legal?”

“Not legal. But police say nothing.”

“I guess it’s a kind of recycling,” Shilpi admitted.

Again India’s motto: Live and let live. I know what you’re doing, but I shan’t stop you. You’re not my responsibility.

Where nobody’s responsible, even for themselves— what happens to the human who shivers feeling other people’s chills?

“This way,” said Kachmach, indicating the graybrown building, “is temple. We walk around then enter.”

She followed him to the rear of the wood-warehouses.

They paused before the courtyard of another gray-brown building. “This is hospice. Here, widows come to die.

Many widows from West Bengal, specially, their families take their property and they escape here. Benaras city has almost two hundred homes and hospices for widows.”

“Yes. I’ve watched a documentary on this! How widows from all over India are abandoned and come to Benaras. By Deepa Mehta. Deepa Mehta had also made a fiction-film on this. Water. That was set during the British Raj . . .” The fiction-film had starred a fairskinned “heroine,” a Britisher in fact, and India’s hottest “hero.”

Over the fiction-film—set in a romanticised past, the widows’ compulsory white sari artfully draped, the heroine’s institutionalised suffering merely a rite-ofpassage to happily ever after—everyone had drooled. The documentary her friends had refused to watch. “That’s so boring, yaar,” they’d complained. “So, poor people are 98

suffering. Ugly people. What can we do?” Aloud, Shilpi continued: “The widows come here to seek sanctuary, but here, too, they’re exploited. Oh!” Shilpi stood facing an old woman. Shrivelled but alert, sitting on the hospice steps, crouching for warmth.

“If you want, can make donation,” suggested Kachmach, standing respectfully off.

“Oh!” Shilpi fumbled for the nylon bag in which, while travelling, she stored the bulk of her cash. “How much should I give?” She was always giving to beggars: hot food, not cash, but here there were no food-vendors in sight.

“Whatever, by god’s grace, you can spare, Ma,” croaked the old woman, in Hindi.

“Here.” Shilpi put Rs. 200 into the woman’s outstretched hands. Joints gnarled, palms leathery. The fine lines of her palm were worn out; in the skin, callused thick and smooth, the major lines had become stark grooves.

Holding Shilpi’s head, the woman muttered a prayer over her. The prayer was the old woman’s IOU for Shilpi’s Rs. 200. Shilpi didn’t understand a word, but she didn’t feel the anger she’d felt when it was holy men who’d ripped them off. She’d accompanied a friend to a Hanuman temple and been shorn, by an efficient chain of purohits, of Rs. 1500 in the course of a fifteen minutes’ whirlwind tour.

This was only an old woman. She had nothing to sell.

Kachmach led Shilpi on, saying something over his shoulder to the old woman. No doubt they were friends.

Perhaps he charged her a commission on her charitable receipts.

“Now we see temple.” They climbed into the tiny, open-walled temple standing above Manikarnika ghat.

Obediently Shilpi rang the giant brass bell in the roof of the atrium. “This is temple of fire.” In the main chamber of the tiny temple, in a wide, shallow brass bowl on a low marble pedestal burned a bonfire. By it stood a stack of logs, which two saffron-robed men were shredding into strips. The temple’s back steps led down into the woodwarehouses.

“This is holy fire. From here, people take start fire for funeral-pyre. This fire is burning for 3,500 years.”

“Really? Like the fire of the vestal virgins in Rome.”

“Yes, 3,500 years. Temple is owned by Dom caste”— pointing to the lithe, dark-skinned men in saffron robes squatting around the temple—“They keep the fire. Same people also do cremation work.” Looking out, Shilpi saw the saffron-robed men supervising the placing, constructing, and alighting of the pyres.

Three pyres now stood burning by the river. A fourth stood ready to light. On higher ground, at street-level but cordoned off from street and ghat, Shilpi saw two enclosures: one containing pyres ready to burn, and one crowded with mourners in white. “Why are those pyres cordoned off?”

“Those are special pyres for celebrities. For those you have to pay 5 lakhs to reserve.”

“Oh.” Shilpi didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Women wrapped in red, men in white. Pregnant women: banned. Those bodies let’s throw into the water for the cannibals to fish out. The cannibals: men of god, outcasts, lurking on that island which contains only camels and tourists, lurking on no-man’s land. Pay a few lakhs money, and two of the world’s last trees, to send off your relative in style. Old women, deserted by their families, ripping off tourists with their misery and their mutterings of gibberish.

Her friends were right: other people’s troubles were boring. Ugly people. Ugly strangers. Close off your heart and just worry abour yourself.

Forge ahead. Then, stranded, honk for god’s help.

Shilpi laughed. “I’ve been walking all morning. I need to sit down.”

“We sit there,” said Kachmach, pointing to the rear of the temple. She followed him into a barn, straw-strewn, where assorted street-dogs and beggars lounged—also a cow, who’d climbed up there god-knows how, and sat masticating, eyes wide shut. Shilpi baulked. But it was broad daylight, and this barn still overlooked the ghat.

They picked their way between straw-heaps to the farther end, and sat down on cleanish gunny-bags spread over the straw as chair-cushions.

Dangling her legs over the temple’s edge, Shilpi laughed. “Nice arrangement! From here you can see the whole river.” Fifteen feet below her, on Manikarnika’s soft ash-black earth, milled tourists. Intrepid Europeans, scaling the ash-heaps unguided. Quick-limbed, bright-

eyed with hope. What were they seeking? To this city of chaos and of god, what had they come seeking?

“What brought you here? Your father has a sweetshop here, you said. Was he born here?”

“No, we are from Assam.” Kachmach paused, lowering his face, fumbling in his pockets. Nodding with interest, Shilpi waited to hear more. “He and my mother had secret love-marriage, and escape from village to Guwahati-city.

They were from different castes, so her parents not allow.

My brother born, I born . . . Then they find us, and they kill her. Her own family kill her. All these years, they search to kill her. Then my father bring brother and me to Benaras.”

He paused again, and produced a joint. He held it out to Shilpi, smiling. “Visit to holy city not complete without Shankarji ka prasad.”

Shilpi smiled. The gift of the god Shankar: euphemism for marijuana. She declined.

“Yet, you’ve made yourself from scratch. You had to leave school—” “No, my father very insist that my brother and me finish school. I finish school, I help my father in shop. He make shop from scratch. Slowly-slowly, he build. We help him. Then, I learn this business also . . . Here, in holy city, you can be anyone. Caste not matter, background not matter.”

She watched a man, bare-torsoed, descend from the temple towards the fourth pyre, bearing aloft a claypot containing embers from the holy fire. From Hindu friends’ funerals, she remembered the ritual. That must be oldest son of the deceased. Red-wrapped: the deceased was a woman. His mother? Aided by the saffron-robed attendant, he lit the pyre. Reluctantly the wood caught fire. Alone, he stood watching.

“You can be anyone?” mused Shilpi. “Perhaps you can.

You can tell yourself that it all depends on you. That, if you’ve failed, it’s your fault. But, when you’re dead, they will burn you, or won’t burn you, based on who you were when you were born.” Her eyes flitted to the special pyres, cordoned off on higher ground. “Based on how much money you were able to rip off people.”

“Yes,” said Kachmach, carefully blowing his smoke away from Shilpi. “But here we can relax. Here, dogs and beggars, and cows and people, can relax and enjoy the view.”

99

“And the ahoris can eat human flesh,” rejoined Shilpi.

The smog had lifted: clearly now she saw, kneeling amid the camels gaily-caparisoned, awaiting passengers—the lone cannibal, fishing something out of the water. “And you said it’s not legal, but nobody stops them. The cows on the ghat, shitting everywhere . . . I guess people won’t lift a finger to help you, or stop you, even though they know what’s happening. But they will tolerate you.”

“You have to help yourself,” said Kachmach. “Here you can’t trust anyone . . .”

Shilpi waited for him to finish: ‘Here you can’t trust anyone except me. I’ll be here for you.’ This was how it always began. And this would be the way for a tour-guide to secure a customer for the whole weekend. This woman you can give alms to, this hotel you can stay at, this man will just look after you and won’t bother you.

But Kachmach said nothing further. You can’t trust anyone: and that was all.

No. Again, Shilpi made up her mind. Would she believe the next man who came to her, seeking sanctuary?

Singing to her his tale of woes? Asking her for money, sex, love? Yes. She wanted to believe: for her own sake. Would she get hurt again? Perhaps. She could bear it. She must bear it. For the alternative was unthinkable. To become like them. To look at people as opportunities. If you can’t beat them, join them?

“You’re responsible for yourself,” said Kachmach, echoing Vrinda’s speech to Shilpi years ago.

No! It wasn’t worth living without faith.

Shilpi waited. Would Kachmach continue his tale of woe? He’d not begun it voluntarily. But, then, they never did. They got her to probe for it. And she probed.

She was curious about people. Raised in a home with love, without fear, fearlessly she’d reached out to solitary human creatures. They happened to be men. For women took care of themselves: women took care never to be alone. Women rang home thrice a day. Wherever they went, women made friends determinedly. Friends to bitch to, friends to bitch about. In a society fragmenting abruptly into nuclear families, young people spending years away from home—young men, too, had suffered.

Shilpi had lent an ear. To tales of woe involving love, and failure, and callous family. She would’ve lent an ear to 100

anything. This is what they’d chose to tell her. And, then, they had chosen to mistake her normal human sympathy for looseness.

Yes: they’d made a choice. In a land where relations exist, not between people but between men and women, between Brahmin and outcast—in that land, the individual still does not become exempt from living, as a human, among humans.

Still Shilpi waited. Still Kachmach was silent.

Smoking meditatively.

A self-made man. To him, his troubles were merely incidental. Casteism had killed his mother: so he’d given himself a new name. It was his achievements that he had proudly volunteered. His language skills. The length of his career. He had made himself a human: interesting, not for what he’d suffered, but for what he’d done. He’d not even asked her for money. He’d just joined her, and walked with her, sharing his knowledge.

New. Always new, Shilpi’s faith in people had bruised her flesh. But always her flesh healed. But again her faith shone, in her eyes, out at the world. Black, bright, beautiful.

“You know what? On second thoughts, I will take a puff or two.”

Shilpi reached for the joint. He reached out to her.

Their eyes met.

But where are you

Radial Cracks

really from this place blue-eyed California colored like every daytime dream and boy born ahead of schedule colored like spoilt cream colored like mist flagging redwood branches like so many anxious commuting skeins lost on bridges once called golden but which have no gold promised in the veins that skeined to Asia and reeled home people with skin called yellow instead of golden russet amber me / what you ask is not where am I from but what am I / I am this place that seeded dreams amidst the blue eyed skies to lift away the curt reply that I would like to give your question / where are you really from that you could be so presuming because I never want to go there.

She’s pushing the idea on me like she’s hawking used cars, bragging about what parts she’s changed about herself and how many miles she’s gone without sitting on the floor.

Disha Trivedi

Siobhan Manrique

She says we’re going somewhere better, in a lie so dense it bruises, says she’ll steal me away from black highways, in Western states shaped like wombs; she’ll hide me from the night until the sun paints the world anew, yesterday’s mistakes overlaid with gray, today’s hunger outlining everything twice, the rearview all thumbprints and radial cracks.

But I watch from beside her; with bloodshot eyes I witness her disassembling, like a dream of falling, before dust can settle, chewing medicine until it’s poison again, just to try to get away from her own fluorescent fever while she and I breathe with the same moribund cadence, tunneling into the setting sun.

Too scared to look in, we keep opening and closing doors; we keep giving each other keys, like permission to hurt.

101

Civilized Company Cameron Miller

Transcript of Camera D 4 OCTOBER 2018, Tape B (5-8am) Reviewed in compliance for Report 221-B Logged 7 OCTOBER 2018 5:00 am: Start of Tape B. 7:14 am: Resident from apartment C enters landing, moves to apartment door B and knocks. No one answers.

Resident begins walking in a circle outside of apartment door B, texting on their phone.

7:17 am: One of the residents of apartment B answers the door, half-dressed. Resident from apartment C pushes into apartment B, pointing their finger at the other resident’s face. The two disappear out of frame.

7:19 am: Resident of apartment B, now accompanied by a roommate, pushes the resident of apartment C back onto the landing. The three argue. The door to apartment B is slammed in the apartment C resident’s face. Resident from apartment C returns to their room.

7:22 am: Door to apartment B opens. No one seen inframe.

7:23 am: The first resident from apartment B attempts to hold the second resident back. Breaking free, the second resident approaches the door to apartment C and knocks. The door opens and the second resident disappears. Visibly upset, the first resident from apartment B returns to their room, slamming the door behind them.

7:28 am: Door to apartment B opens. The first resident from apartment B begins pushing a couch onto the landing and towards the stairs.

7:31 am: Door to apartment C opens. The second resident from apartment B and the resident from apartment C both enter the landing. Both watch as the first resident from apartment B pushes the couch off the top of the 102

landing and down the stairs. The second resident from apartment B runs downstairs after it, leaving the frame.

The resident from apartment C approaches the resident from apartment B and points their finger at them a second time, this time pushing their finger into the side of the other resident’s mouth. The resident from apartment B pushes the other resident back. The two continue to argue.

7:33 am: The second resident from apartment B walks back up the stairs. Standing next to the first resident from apartment B, they pull out their phone and shake it at the resident from apartment C. Leaning in to see what is on the phone screen, the resident from apartment C flips off the other residents before returning to their apartment and closing the door. The first resident from apartment B tries to run after them, but the second resident holds them back. After a minute or so, the two of them return to their own apartment.

7:55 am: Door to apartment B opens. The second resident from apartment B steps out with a coat and backpack and walks onto the landing, closing the door behind them. Putting on headphones, the resident walks over and kicks the door to apartment C. The resident walks down the stairs, out of frame.

7:56 am: Door to apartment C opens. The resident from apartment C steps out of her door and looks around.

Shaking their head, they return to their apartment and close the door.

8:00 am: End of Tape B. NOTE #1: Proof of original complaint (“they pissed on the sofa they were holding for me”) not found. Original complaint discarded.

NOTE #2: Incident copied and logged in both apartments’ resident files for consideration of lease renewal. Marge, I think one of these two has to go at lease’s end. This is getting just a tad out of control, don’t you think? <<<>>>

boil rice, braise greens, fry chicken Elizabeth Chamberlain

eat, but taste only the inside of your mouth which fills six times an hour with the familiar malt of self-loathing which is not self-pity, you think for the nth time, but you still don’t know how to speak one without the other released from the privacy of the depths of grief you discover old drives anew, trying to read your being inside someone else’s mind, above all else needing someone to be inside someone else “I’ve never had dinner this late,” she laughs pitch and volume both a little too high but you have, and later, and sometimes never and so you stand in the square of one tile of your kitchen and you think about how you’d fail a quiz if anyone ever asked you how many dishes are in your cabinet or how much you care what they think so you scrub up, and you do it again: boil rice, braise greens, fry chicken

103

BIGGEST LITTLE Kylie Westerlind

Eldorado Casino New year brings you to the usual spot on a Saturday night.

Brew Brothers filled up with leftovers from the Sands and workers fresh out from their Tesla and Amazon factories in Fernley. Warming up with vodka sodas, you’re there in your tee-shirt dress and thigh-high suedes waiting for everyone you dragged out here to show up for good company. God forbid any man actually comes up and talks to you; you’re only here to piss off Frankie. Not that the market is open, but a free drink is compliment to the wallet and that thirtieth birthday you checked off two months ago, don’t forget. And hassled by the bouncer still: the usual quiz on your address and birthday. You should be flattered, others tell you, for looking so young, but you’re not flattered. It is not flattering to be told you don’t belong.

John, Selena, Seth, and Cassie Jo decide to show up and apologize—sorry, sorry, side work dumped on them at the restaurant, and managers going off on app sales and servers ringing up kids’ chocolate milks for themselves, then the traffic downtown for the eve’s crawl, no parking on Center or Virginia, detour to the Puff-n-Stuff, and so on, business as usual. Mostly everyone’s here now and spiraling fast, those goddamn fishbowl frozen daiquiris, and all’s gone to bitching about fry-fills and running out of the draft Sam Adam’s seasonal and the jerks who leave pocket change on a fifty-dollar tab, those who cry vegetarian and a comped meal after doubling up on pig tavern burgers. You and the crew laugh and try to throw in the annoyances of the night, but the laughter always dies out. It’s the same customers, the same stories.

John and Selena get that messy drunk, which is fun until they start with the close faces and that hand on the inside of the elbow, what with John’s girlfriend at home— and didn’t they have a newborn? A boy or girl, who knew, but that’s how it goes. Seth buys a round for everyone, and Cassie Jo déjà vu’s out of the bathroom but she steals Selena away from John and everything feels okay again.

And there you go, lightened up with drink, cheeks tropic red under the neon and finally they’ve turned off that country shit you love and are on to the club tracks that get even louder after midnight. Seth throws back an 104

ounce of amber and takes you out there for the countdown in this biggest little, as he likes to call it.

Here we are, in this biggest little.

After twelve, new year, and who could you have kissed? Frankie buzzing up your bag with I’m sorry, baby, and Will you come home?

Silver Legacy It’s after one now, and down in the pit you’re throwing away what feels like everything. Roll of twenties tipped out from a thousand in sales you made at the restaurant earlier. The house hitting twenty-one is a magic trick you saw coming. You consider moving everyone along to roulette or those themed celebrity slots, but Seth is making a fool of himself on insurance and Cassie Jo hangs back, sipping on the gin and tonic Seth ordered, and is it her hand on his shoulder? The guy next to you snicks the felt table with his nail and leans on your chair, curls of smoke leaving his mouth. You wanted to piss off Frankie, and so now what? You’re here, and he won’t stop calling you. You won’t answer. And this isn’t the first time.

John and Selena wasted, and carried through their close and sexual dancing at the bar, now joining the others at the blackjack table. John wants a go at the shoe, but everyone knows that’s just setting chips on a table so the dealer can stack them in red, green, and white towers on her side. Selena hugs you and strokes your hair and provides a nice escape from the guy smoking next to you.

You take up your chips after going bust on the last round, and Seth turns from the table, reaching his arm out, the black ink of bristlecone pine trunked at his elbow, and it’s like fresh air, you taking his hand.

It’s always Seth.

He won’t change, he says.

You’ve known this, and still.

Virginia Street The taxi driver lets it slide that you cram into the car and sit on Seth’s lap. Cassie Jo sits between John and Selena, and everyone shivers but all feel warm, biting. Cassie Jo can’t let her night go, she’s all on and on about the cooks letting her times blow and that it must be something personal, but Seth calls her out on this bullshit, and you laugh with them and Seth is in story-mode about Cassie Jo stealing bites of fries by the ice machine like she always

does and the constant slips outside into nipping wind for cigarette breaks with the bus boys near the dumpster, but mostly it’s the lingering by the bar while Seth scoops ice cream into the milkshake machine—no drinks for you CJ, he always says right as she comes up the two steps.

Fuck you, Seth, she says now, hiding behind her hand, elbow smudging the window.

And Selena’s laugh shoots over the taxi driver’s head.

Oh, fuck you! Fuck you!

But everyone is smiling. Even Cassie Jo. Even Seth.

And you.

Peppermill Selena melts into a chair in the terrace lounge and John stays close, and there’s a hand on the arm again. You put your name down for a table at Café Milano’s, and Seth taps away at a game of video poker, the bartender floating down a glass of vodka soda, the glass sweating already.

Seth hands it back to you without looking and just like that the fresh air is gone. Cassie Jo sits next to him but swivels in her chair, looking at him, looking at you.

Give me your drink, she says.

Booth John departs after a cup of coffee and a helping of a garden omelet that he shared with Selena, and she begs him for a ride. No one can do anything but wince; their sudden distance from each other as they walk away saying so much about what they want to do, will do. Cassie Jo only could do so much it seemed. She picks at a beignet with her fork and goes for her water glass but it’s empty, and Seth hands her his own.

How’s Frankie? Cassie Jo gulps the water.

He needed a night in, you tell them.

Needs the shit kicked out of him, Seth says, taking his glass back.

Cassie Jo elbows Seth, and you hate that he laughs.

And Cassie Jo asks, who was it this time?

So everyone knows, you say. You feel on display, there across from them, and Cassie Jo’s hands go under the table.

Yeah, everyone knows. Seth leans to the side to edge out his wallet, throwing his card out at the checkbook.

Did you see who it was? Cassie Jo puts the card in its placeholder.

Didn’t know her. The keno screen above you reveals another number.

Does it matter, CJ? Seth is the only one to ever call her this.

Technically, we aren’t together, you say.

I fucking hate this guy, Seth says.

How can you stay with him? Cassie Jo says this without looking at you. The glare of the café lights reveal the tiny contact discs circling her irises.

And now it hits that you’ve never liked Cassie Jo. Technically, we aren’t together. At the moment.

You’ll go back, though. Cassie Jo takes up Seth’s glass again. Is what you’re saying.

He’s not the only bad guy in this.

He wants you when he needs you, Seth says.

He won’t change, you’re right, you say. You shrug on your parka.

Seth reaches out but his glass is empty.

Tuscany Tower Cassie Jo gives up. She dumps herself into a cab after she cheered Seth for New Year’s and not you. Lunch shift, she told him when he asked when he’d see her at the restaurant.

And you’re inside, cigarette smoke folding into your clothes and finally the people are dwindling. Sunrise and the windows glow orange like smoke lighting the world but it still feels like night all the time.

I hate that I’m always asking you about him, he says.

Where you’re at.

You take off your parka again, warmth buzzing you, and you’re not sure if it’s from being alone with Seth or the casino heat.

So you are broken up?

I don’t know, you say. You honestly don’t.

I’m getting a room, he says, looking at you long enough that he doesn’t have to say more, or anything at all.

This isn’t the first time. You run your fingers over the faux fur of your parka hood. I need to be alone, you tell him.

105

Café Milano You go back to the café and sit at the counter for coffee.

Older men swivel in the chairs next to you, fingers itching for cigarettes at sunrise and newspapers fresh enough their ink is still wet. The busser slides a mug down the line and the waitress asks regular or decaf. Above you the keno screen splices with replays of the ball drop. Servers pass by with platters of fruit fantasies, scrambled eggs, prime rib, mimosas. The café is quiet but full of morning murmurs and kitchen hisses. The casinos never sleep.

And Seth comes through, calling you. Then, his room number.

Sure, you think, you’re here to piss off Frankie. But you’re here, too, for yourself.

Here, Seth says, in this biggest little.

Seth, you say. It’s nearly morning.

The line crackles. It’s an icy one out there, he says. At least sleep on the couch, then, until the roads are melted.

Let me finish my cup of coffee. Your confidence is annoying, you say.

I can hear you smiling, he says. I can just hear it.

Suite The room is all dimmed lights and drawn curtains. Your phone is on silent but its screen lights up the ceiling.

Turn it over, Seth says. He’s on his side, hands together by his face.

You do but glance at the notifications first. The usual messages, a voicemail or two. And yes, you feel guilty.

Is this how it’s going to play out, you say.

Seth flips to his other side, away from you.

Is this it?

What? He shifts again. What’s wrong with you now?

Nothing’s wrong with me, you say quietly, feeling a little stung, but also he’s right. You’ll sleep the day away and it will be dinner shift, again. Waking up, checking out, returning the messages and phone calls and then lunch at the sports bar with him, shaking your head at the news and wishing you could do more than that, but it’s easier to fall back into watching the fallout between friends from last night play at the restaurant, the gossip distracting you from buzzed patrons trying to hit on you as you spill ranch cups on the apron you just washed.

Then, days later, something like this: downtown, following the neon, close enough to feel something, but to 106

make it last, that’s always getting further away. Wanting something because you need it. And will it make you happy? Probably.

Seth on his way out, his breathing quieter, his legs restless, kicking away the dark, and you’re left there.

You come out from the tangle of sheets and step to the curtains, pulling back the pleated canvas. Light is coming up over the Virginia Hills, the modest peak of Rattlesnake Mountain. Down below the tower you see the fake glacial blue of pool water, the heated chemical wisps coming out from the hot tubs. In a few hours it will be crammed with people trying to get away from themselves, and you’re just the same way, really. So easily you trick yourself into thinking this is the way it goes. Today, it could be different. It will be different. This can last, and it’s all here in the biggest little.

I Meditated with a Stranger in Asheville, North Carolina Brittany J. Barron

because it was a group exercise, because it was a blue city, and I was at a research conference with my peers, but I didn’t know them— not really— I didn’t want to be alone.

We sat on little pillows.

I crossed my legs and bit my lips.

Look into your partner’s eyes for five minutes.

That stranger— I don’t remember his face or his name.

I remember his eyes.

Eyes of Black Mountain meadows I could burrow into.

The longer he looks at me, the more he will see.

He could’ve been an angel, and what could I do but think about myself,

Something Blue Vanessa Peterson Round & round & round silver circle creeps, lurking in shadows of doubt, gorging on feasts of I don’ts, belly bulging full, only dos remain.

4 carat Tiffany slithers onto ring finger, slowly wrapping, constricting the fight left in you until finger turns something borrowed blue.

about that morning’s arrival.

I didn’t recognize the early irises— I didn’t know they could be so small.

I met an angel— I could only hide.

107

Emotion Noir - Bellatrix Amanda Leemis

108

Emotion Noir - Tommy Amanda Leemis

Emotion Noir - Philip Amanda Leemis

Emotion Noir - Scream Amanda Leemis

109

“Just don’t kill me”

Sam Moore

I I’ve always wondered what it would be like if you hit me.

How it would feel, your hand up against me, a sudden strike that leaves me blushing and rosy red. It comes up a lot in fiction; novels and sitcoms feel populated with sad girls who like the idea of being hit during sex. I always joke that “sad white girl” is my brand, gender be damned, I’m just a little surprised to see that reaching as far as the bedroom. Reaching as far as you, and all the things that you could do with your hands.

I know that even if you hit me, it wouldn’t be the worst feeling in the world. Like the Grizzly Bear version of “It Felt Like a Kiss,” less like an implicit acceptance of violence, more like a reaching out for a dark desire. He hit me, but he didn’t hurt me. (Gerry Goffin; Carole King) There’s something interesting about the fact that the song was written by a husband and wife. Apparently about a babysitter who was beaten by her boyfriend; she insisted that his actions came from a place of love.

That, in the end, it felt like a kiss. That their version of the song is so upbeat makes the whole thing sound strangely acceptable. There’s a sadness in the Grizzly Bear version that brings it somewhere between melancholy and lust, not just one or the other.

I don’t think it would feel like a kiss if you hit me in bed; it would hurt more than your lips on my body ever could.

But I still think I’d feel safe; that even if you hit me, hurt me, left me a little bruised and worse for wear, you’d still be able to put me back together again. Without needing the kings horses or his men.

II Your body fits with mine. There’s chemistry, attraction, the draw that lures one body to another, existing on and beneath the level of the skin. The sort of thing that comes from wayward eye-contact, a glancing touch. Something that doesn’t feel like much, but that has the potential and the power to open up so much more. Like you’d be able to 110

push my body to its limits, and then bring it back, still whole.

Just don’t kill me, I said as you took of your leather belt, smiling.

(Maggie Nelson) There are limits, of course, to what the body can endure.

It’s why Maggie asks not to be killed, but the idea of what can be found on the road to those limits has a certain, admittedly morbid appeal. It’s why the person taking off their belt smiles; because of what they’re about to do to Maggie, and what they might find together on the way to those limits. The body in extremis appears through Nelson’s Argonauts, in terms of both physical and emotional changes; the idea that the body can be transformed, through hormones, pregnancy, the enactment of desire. Nelson might not be interested in what she calls the metaphorics of [her] anus, but the body is so rarely just a body. It’s a map, a document of lived experiences, of desires and dangers, cuts and bruises, lipstick marks, signs of loves that have been and gone. I like the idea of marks that show that I’m yours.

If you leave a bruise along my cheek, it’ll fade with time, but there will have been a moment where every part of my body was yours, where I gave myself to you like an offering. And you took what I offered, every single part, and made it into something special from the way your lips left lipstick marks along my chest, the faint marks and bruises that decorate my body as a thing that’s yours.

III “Where d’you wanna leave lipstick marks on me?”

“Everywhere duh.”

“Yeah? Cover every inch of my body in marks? Brand me as yours?”

“You are mine.”

IV Do you think I want to hurt you?

I could feel tears coming out of my eyes, but they didn’t feel hot like real tears. They felt cool like little streams from a lake.

I don’t know, I said. I’m just telling you that you can.

(Sally Rooney) The idea of being hurt by a loved one appears in both of Sally Rooney’s novels, but the why of it comes through most clearly in this conversation between two people who are something more than friends. They’re having an affair, they’re having good sex and good conversations, but she feels like not all is well. She’s worried about losing herself to him, being subsumed by him, becoming The Other Woman. She wants him to know that he can hurt her. If he wants, he can. The question of why he might want to exists between the lines, between these desires and uncertainties.

It becomes a mark of ownership. He did this to me because I asked him to, I wanted him to, and he wanted to, too.

V I would never call it colonising. More like an expedition that’s been welcomed, almost like a dare: see how deep you can reach into the heart of this place. See if you can spot the traces left behind by other travellers. Leave a mark on my body like an X on a treasure map, marking the spot that’s begging to be claimed.

In the right hands, the body is a map, a living document that’s written on in fingernails and lipstick. It keeps secrets hidden until the right hand touches it; the right touch at the right time can open it up like it never has been before.

You can do what you want with my body; find its secrets however you desire, with force or with a delicate touch.

Leave marks from your dark, femme fatale lipstick, or the fading crimson memory of your hand across my face.

Make my body an extension of yours; use it as if it were your own, never leave it alone. Be careful with the power you’ve been given. And just don’t kill me.

You can do whatever you want with me. (Sally Rooney) There are two different ways to read this, and they change the agency of the speaker. Turn her from subject to object.

You can do whatever you want with me. Like going out with me, going to a movie, kissing me, turning me on in public. Things we’re both involved in, pushing and pulling like Marina and Ulay, wondering how far it can take us, wondering if the arrow will fly.

You can do whatever you want with me. Do what you want with me like I’m an object. Far from abjection, embracing objectification and use. Submitting, giving myself away, until I say the word that brings us both back onto even footing.

It isn’t about just being used and thrown around like I don’t matter. The power belongs to the person who gives themselves up, as if they’re saying I have the strength to give myself away. You have their power in your hands, the question, in the end, is how you wield it.

111

Ten Year (Old) Reunion Rich Glinnen

My high school religion teacher smacks His bald head with both hands When he misses a spare, doesn’t strike, or Commits any other bowling blunder Like he’s spanking the ball itself “Jesus,” I whisper, watching the corporal punishment Circle back after all this time to his horseshoe do, As if years of thudding discouraged growth; He limps back, fondles his rosin beanbag, Searches for a grip My errors are vented through my right leg, Stomping the floor like a cigarette-depraved Cheswick; To the right and left seedy men in ripped jeans and beer t-shirts Bark cunt, kick ball returns, smack gums, or charge quietly as they drink, Then disrobe hurriedly from their drunken master tatters Behind the wheel of a car traveling triple digits And throttle their wives awake from oiled-boy dreams We combust on our weekly night of recreation, Burst from the bowling alley around midnight A squad of lopsided toad-drunks tumbling towards trunks, Relieved it’s over, Relieved to feel the night breeze ice our sweat-dried skin; And to dread work the following day, the following week, Until we anticipate bowling once again when work Is realized as slow death (usually around Thursday); Back where we’re in control of our head smacking, We label ourselves cunts, And can stomp to our hearts’ content.

112

Valley Girls

the right guy.” Lauren laughed, and told me, “My mum always says the same thing.”

I The train to Wales is delayed by half an hour before it even leaves the station. The voice on the PA system announces that delays from other services mean that there are delays to our service as well. A domino effect of poor public transport; if one train is delayed, all the others on the same route will be, too, a ripple moving slower and slower out from the center. Now the trip will take around three hours, with a change at Cardiff onto a local service towards the valleys, and all the charm and ugliness that comes with it.

The presence of Paul’s family in Taipei might be one of the things that makes it seem like an otherworld. A place where time hasn’t entirely moved on from how it was when he left it behind. Family can do that, sometimes, cause you to drift backwards into an old version of yourself, obeying certain rules while you stay under a certain roof.

The journey gets quieter as it goes on. The stretches between stations get longer, the city disappears only to reappear hours later with all the signs and announcements in two languages instead of one. Nobody I know speaks Welsh, but it still features everywhere; maybe as a reminder of heritage, of roots, of the fact that it’s a different country here, something that’s easy to forget when it’s one of three, all sharing the same small island.

Paul goes to confront something that happened before birth. Home, Taipei, exists outside of normal time, as if he travels back to his childhood self while on the plane.

The Valleys feel stranger than the rest of the country. This kind of quiet, almost-left-behind, is difficult to find. It isn’t about industry or globalization, or capital-n ideas of Nation. Instead, it’s in the landscape. In the valleys and the hills, the parks and public monuments. Its space and silence are easy to get lost in.

“Yeah.”

Sam Moore

On the plane, after a cup of black coffee, Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or “otherworld.” (Tao Lin) An otherworld feels uncanny, familiar and alien all at once. Like small towns hidden away in the Valleys like a secret. It feels out-of-joint, in time and space, like certain things never passed through here. Lauren told me once that when she goes out into town with her girlfriend, or meeting after work, they get sideways glances from old guys in pubs. She told me that they never feel afraid, just self-conscious, aware of the way that eyes fall on them when they hold hands walking down the street.

Once when her girlfriend stepped out for a smoke, a guy walked over and said, “Well, maybe someday you’ll meet

If a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to disable a setting implemented before birth […] it would be here. (Tao Lin)

The girls meet me at the station and lead the way back to the house where they’ve living with Hannah’s dad.

“It’s a little awkward,” Lauren laughs.

“I can imagine.”

Hannah tells me that her dad doesn’t know that she smokes. I tell her mine doesn’t know I do either. I tell her that I never smoke at home, so whether or not anyone there knows doesn’t really matter.

She says, “I feel like such a teenager, sneaking fags when Dad’s out of the house.”

In Taipei, when Paul and his girlfriend visit his parents, they always end up sneaking away to take drugs; doing LSD when nobody’s in the house, and then going out to McDonald’s after. He’s still young under their roof, still juvenile, still keeping secrets from his parents.

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II The first time anyone told me to read Tao Lin, I was high.

It was funny, in a fitting way, like telling someone to read Infinite Jest while they’re staring at the TV. Three of us— Lauren, another guy, and me—were sprawled across two sofas in the living room of the house that Lauren lived in back in England, before she moved to Wales to live with Hannah and her Dad. I was attracted to the guy in the way that you’re attracted to friends of friends who are smarter than you. I wanted to know what made him tick.

He was taller than me, had broad shoulders, and wore white t-shirts that always looked a little tight. This might have been deliberate, an attempt at peacocking. If that’s what it was, it worked.

“You’d really like Tao Lin,” he told me as we traded observations about authors and essays. He talked about his dissertation, which I still hadn’t read. “He’s sort of like a cross between Wallace and Ellis,” which it turned out means that Tao Lin writes about drugs, but does so with sincerity instead of cynicism. We passed a joint back and forth as he talked about Taipei and psychedelic drugs.

The former interested me more than the latter. I took two Tao Lin books from his room; Taipei and Shoplifting From American Apparel. I read them both within a month, sober whenever I opened them up. I gave them both back to him, told him that he was right, that I liked them.

“I knew you would,” he said, in a way that sounded triumphant, like he wanted to know what made me tick, too.

“What else do you have for me?” I asked, badly flirting automatically in spite of the fact that the guy standing across from me was straight.

“This,” he said, handing me a printed document, stapled together at the top-right corner. “Now you can’t make excuses for not reading it.”

We walked back into the living room, each sitting on a different one of the two sofas, and Lauren looked at me as if something might have happened between him and 114

me given how long we were in his room, looking at his bookshelves.

“Books,” I told her, and she laughed.

“Of course,” she said, rolling up a joint.

They regularly reminded each other that the LSD would soon start weakening, as it continued intensifying to a degree that Paul could sense the presence of a metaphysical distance, from where, if crossed, he would not be able to return. (Tao Lin) For Paul, the drugs open doors of perception, but not in the sense of Heaven and Hell. Instead, they leave him hyper-aware of Time and Space, and whatever Twilight Zone might lie beyond that. He sees metaphysical distances; space opens up to him, lines in the sand that live in the land of metaphor turn in to reality. He can see them, afraid of what happens if he crosses over, of not being able to find his way back. That’s part of what he does in Taipei, tries to find his way back to something, unsure of what it is, or even if he’ll be able to get there again.

I sit outside with Hannah and we pass a joint back and forth I imagine Paul’s inner monologue, or even the pages of Taipei being read aloud by Rod Serling. Paul is moving, on planes to Taiwan, or on LSD in McDonald’s, towards a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. (Rod Serling) There’s something of the Twilight Zone in small Welsh towns, in places that have been left behind. They exist in-between then and now, here and there, suspended like a broken clock that ticks back and forth between two specific seconds eternally. To travel there is to travel back in time.

III Late one night I stand outside the back of the house with Hannah. There’s a balcony leading to a garden; the house is deceptive in size, like its hiding something. I stand closer to the door that leads back inside the house.

in the quiet, listening to its rhythms, falling in time with it like I had with the beat of someone else’s heart.

“So, if Dad comes down he sees you smoking first,” she tells me, rolling up two cigarettes, one for each of us.

It doesn’t feel like we got bigger, but instead, that the world got smaller. A journey from Cardiff to the Valleys feels like something else entirely, like the changes in the landscapes from cities to countries, from buildings to hills, is more than just physical, more than just looking at different things out the window of a local stopping service train that always announces the stations in two languages.

“Okay,” I say.

There’s music playing faintly inside; Lights, Skin and Earth, a strange blend of synthpop and mythology, drawing on ennui, uncertainty, and the desire to be more than you are. I tell her that I like the album.

“I knew you would,” she says.

I tell her a story about Alex, who held my heart in her hands like a precious gem, until it lost its luster, and we drifted too far apart for her to see what made it shine to begin with. She imagined a quiet life for us; beckoning skies and wide open spaces.

“Texas,” I tell her. “We talked about Texas.”

“You? In Texas?” She asks, blowing smoke, watching it mix with her breath in the cold night air.

“Is it so difficult to imagine?”

When Alex was in Texas there was a funeral. She told me about it, about how wearing black was unbearable under the sun. About the complicated hatred that she had for her dad; absent from her life for decades, his second wife and children in the car with her driving back from the service. The place where she laid her family to rest.

Back inside I hear a declaration that we could be giants.

(Lights)

Hannah offers me another cigarette. I say yes.

IV The next afternoon I sit outside, listening to the sound of the roads, getting high with Lauren. She rolls us one joint each. The silence between us is comfortable and close, intimate in a way that neither of us are used to; wanting no more than we have with each other: a friendship that feels easy, almost ageless.

We met at a club with a group of undergraduate queers.

Everyone but us was hooking up, getting off. We stood by the bar buying rounds of drink, finding a way to put to the words the feeling of being the same and different compared to everyone else that we came here with, not enough like them to be fully accepted, less than them, less worthy of certain words and feelings, like our shared history isn’t shared at all.

She tells me she’s not sure how much longer she’ll be able to live here without going crazy, that there are only so many lazy weekends a person can take.

I’d spent a lot of time imagining what it might be like to live out there. She wanted a farm, and I wanted her to be happy.

“I miss the city,” she tells me.

I tell Hannah that when I picture my hypothetical Texan future, it looks a little like this: long nights, cigarettes and joints outside under starry skies. Finding my place

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

115

I don’t need to ask her why. We listen to the cars pass by; the garden stares at roads that go to places I’ve never been to. Sometimes, on the balcony at night, I follow the lights of the cars with my eyes, like they’re falling stars, going somewhere sacred, ushered on by the divine, a sign worth following to the end of the earth.

distance that she needs to travel unimportant. She looks away from the road and her gaze meets mine.

She tells me that they’ll go travelling next summer, far away from here before setting somewhere vast and sprawling, somewhere that might be big enough to contain the two of them.

I look at the faint fiery glow on the end of the joint in my hand. The sounds of the quiet life reach me somewhere deep; the traffic fading in and out, the wind and the birds, things Wordsworth saw worth in. It isn’t about quiet lives or loud ones, about cities or towns. It’s about the people, or the person. The one who makes a place—a small town in Wales, a farm in Texas, a dive bar in the Midwest, a cheap flat in London—feel like home. That makes a place, no matter how big or small, feel less lonely. They leave a mark there, like a lipstick stain, or the smell of cigarettes, a reminder that this is where you want to be, where you’ll stay for as long as you can.

I go outside to grab a bottle of wine. I don’t like it when he sees me high. Her voice sounds far away from here but still manages to reach me. I don’t bump into him inside.

I tell Lauren about Alex and Texas and the idea of a quiet life, whatever that means.

“I think I could do it,” I say.

“I don’t,” she says, smiling full of sympathy, the same that I smile at her when she talks about her need to travel, to be far away from here, from the places that she could never bring herself to call home.

Taipei seemed gothic and lunar, in the movies of that night, with the spare activity and structural density of a full colonized moon that had been abandoned and was being recolonized.

(Tao Lin) She tells me that the valleys feel empty, devoid of the things that bring her comfort and safety. Except, of course, Hannah. She seems to be saying that home is wherever Hannah is. That this town, like the sparsely populated moon of Taipei, with its density and emptiness, was somehow filled up by the presence of a single person; light bleeding into corners that were normally out of reach. She keeps looking at the traffic, shifting lazily between drinking and smoking, handing me the bottle now and then. Her eyes seem somewhere far away from here, from the road across from us, from this house with its deceptive size, far away from the valleys and the people that she sees every day. Like she’s looking to the future, the place unknown, her company certain, the 116

She laughs, “I’m so high.” Hidden in the valleys with her virtues and her vices, with the love of her life, and the price that she’s more than willing to pay for it.

The Meeting Tina Vorreyer

In a room

of silence, I can hear

the white noise of my brain.

The shuffle of fabric, The hunger of another, The life-giving breath in us all.

Disconcerting can it

be â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but relief you will feel.

117

Two Slow Dancers Sam Moore

I We were coming back from a party together, a formal that was much too fancy for either of us. Of the half dozen or so people that we went with, you and I were the last to leave. First-in-last-out, the way it had a tendency to go whenever we went out drinking; the reason why one of us would always stay with the other, because we always said that nobody else could keep up with us.

We walked away from the building, one of many like it scattered across a campus that was scattered across the town. A newer building, one less full of history and titles and famous names. But parties in the old buildings tend to be two or three times more expensive than the ones that they host at the newer ones. It was the early hours of the morning, dark, but that probably wouldn’t last much longer. In the summer, new dawns have a tendency to sneak up on you, the same way that the nights do in winter; it changes the way the passage of time feels, makes it strange and elastic, stretching out at certain points. We stood up against a low brick wall, sharing a cigarette— one from a pack I bought before the party, knowing that an open bar would get me to the point where I’d transform into a social smoker, just like the open bar turned you into the kind of person who stole my fags.

You asked if I wanted to get a taxi home, since it looked like it might start raining any second. I said no, more than happy to walk back, talking and smoking. It had been a long night, but I still had half of the pack left. Slightly tipsy, hands uncoordinated, I fumbled with the cheap pink lighter that I bought on the walk between the train station and your Airbnb. “Of course you got the pink one,” you told me as I lit up another cigarette. You smiled at me before taking the cigarette and taking a drag.

The party ended with a silent disco, the first I’d ever been to. The headphones had three channels to choose from, each playing different songs. We kept the same channels on, danced to the same songs, every now and then taking a step closer to one another. We didn’t talk, not really, 118

we just listened to our bodies, wondering if they were playing the same songs as one another.

II By the time we arrived at your Airbnb, with my small suitcase and the clothes I wore on the train all over the floor, the rain that threatened us on the walk home finally put in an appearance. It wasn’t very heavy, and the breeze was bracing in a way that seemed to keep us both awake, so you opened up the doors to the balcony. We stepped outside and shared another cigarette.

It rained on us lightly from your balcony; the lights were on below us, keeping the city awake. I asked why you smoked and you didn’t have much of an answer; you just took my cigarette and smiled like there was a secret being kept between us. In a way there was. You asked me the same question, handing me the fag. After you finished saying “Why do you smoke?” I exhaled, as if that could be an answer to the question: I smoke because I smoke. An addict’s answer, I suppose. I know I haven’t really smoked since that night, just once or twice when I’m stressed or can’t sleep at night. There’s something about it that calms me down, that helps me regulate my breathing and my brainwaves through routines and rituals. When we finish the cigarette, we go back inside and you make drinks.

They were strong, more vodka than mixer, and the taste lingered in my throat as I forced it down. I gasped, cursed, laughed, in that order. And then you topped me up. You told me you wanted the party to keep going, even though there were only two of us. You sipped at your drink while putting together a playlist: old country songs, a cover of “Jolene,” about half of Rumours. Not the kind of songs that keep a party going.

We gossiped about the people that we saw at the party; relationships that seemed like they were on the way out; the old friend of yours who left with someone I vaguely knew; the strangers who looked like they were breaking up at one end of the bar. When we watched them, we talked about the things we thought they might have said.

Over “Jolene” and drinks that were too strong, we talked about it again, how

I could never love again, He’s the only one for me, Jolene. (Dolly Parton) I always thought that “Jolene” was as much about the singer’s feelings for the title temptress as it was about that lover they could lose to her. The lover, the only one for me, never seemed fully formed, more like an idea or a memory than a person. We never know how he looks, but we know that Jolene’s beauty is beyond compare. The idea that my happiness depends on you made it sound like the singer’s options were either to stay with the lover who might leave her or to try and be with Jolene. I wondered if she also talked about Jolene in her sleep. (Dolly Parton) We listened to the song and you told me about the way that every repetition of Jolene sounds more loaded with sadness than the one that came before it; even though the song doesn’t sound sad, it’s made sad by the singer. You said that you thought the cover we listened to was better than the Dolly Parton original. You said it was sadder in a way that you understood, but didn’t tell me more than that. Another secret, but not one that we shared.

Things slowed down when “Dreams” started playing.

The rain had picked up outside and we’d both finished the too-strong drinks you made. You were singing under your breath, more like lip-syncing than anything else.

It seemed effortless, almost like you were operating on instinct, falling into the familiar rhythms of a song you’d heard so many times before that it existed somewhere deep inside of you, repeating in a quiet, ghostly way—a stuck record playing in a room you couldn’t unlock to turn it off.

“Dance with me?” you asked from the other side of the room. I had my hands on the countertops, in the kitchen part of the hybrid living/cooking space that formed the biggest of the three rooms of the flat you were renting for your month-long stay. You sounded distant, the way things do after a few too many drinks, after reaching the point where you’re looking down on what happens rather than experiencing it. I heard your footsteps as you moved closer. “Dance with me?” you asked again, placing one of your hands over one of mine. You were hot to the touch.

But listen carefully to the sound Of your loneliness Like a heartbeat drives you mad In the stillness of remembering what you had And what you lost. (Stevie Nicks) We danced and you were leading, making up for my two left feet. “Don’t dance so quickly,” you told me as I stumbled a little, steadying myself by holding onto you.

I could hear you singing quietly. I focused more on you than on the song. Letting your voice and the rhythms of your breathing and your movement turn into some kind of guide. I let myself fall into the same rhythms as you.

When the rain washes you clean you’ll know. (Stevie Nicks) I thought there was the sound of thunder outside, and I laughed at the timing of it, wondering what else in the song was true, if Stevie’s theory about thunder only happening when it’s raining had just been proven right.

The song seemed lonely in the same way as “Jolene,” a resignation instead of a fight. Both songs seemed to say that sometimes you just have to give up, even on the things you love. Maybe they’re not yours anymore, or they’re not the same as they were when you loved them, or they loved you. Sometimes you just want your freedom.

“Dreams,” playing as it rained outside, sounded like it was about that freedom and the cost of it; as if freedom were the loss of a dream rather than the dream itself. A new lover wouldn’t know you like the old one, wouldn’t say It’s only me who wants to wrap around your dreams.

(Stevie Nicks) When the song ended, you kissed me. Or I kissed you, or it happened in one of those rare moments where two people want the exact same thing in the exact same moment, and who makes the first move is irrelevant, only the act itself matters.

“We shouldn’t,” you said, quietly, breathing the words into my ear. You looked down on me a little, a couple of inches taller, even more so with the heels you still hadn’t taken off. You didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. There was something in your voice that sounded familiar, an echo of how I’d sounded with other people in the past. Another 119

secret, one you couldn’t tell for fear of shattering the moment that we shared. You took a few steps away from me, still holding my hands. YouTube autoplay meant that there was still music in the background, but the songs didn’t matter. “We shouldn’t,” you said again, breaking eye-contact with me, either hiding what was in your eyes from me, or trying to avoid confronting what was in mine. There was a history in gap between us, more to navigate than just the few steps it would take to be close to you again. We’d shared so many stories about when we let the wrong people in, or the guys who forced their way through, whose hands I could sometimes still feel moving down my back.

I asked why we shouldn’t, and you just said, “We shouldn’t,” before falling into silence again. The rain began to ease off, and the music was just white noise; we were in the room, and far away from it all at once, somewhere else, on either side of the gap that had opened up between us. You took a step forward, and then I took a step forward. The room seemed to come back into focus. The song sounded familiar, something sad and nostalgic, wishing things could be easy, like they were before. Whenever before was. That was another one of those moments where we seemed to want the same thing in the same moment: for things to be easier than they were.

III You led me by the hand into your bedroom and took off your heels, shrinking so you were a little closer to my height. I still looked up when I kissed you. The music from the other room could still be heard faintly from here, with the bedroom door left open. Still holding my hands, you fell backwards onto the bed, lifting up your dress. We were fumbling, uncertain how far this would go, how far we wanted it to go. Breathless, you asked, “What do you want?” and I heard myself saying, “You can do anything you want to me,” at once a declaration of submission and an admission I wasn’t sure what to do, wasn’t sure what you wanted. You moved your hands down my back, as if you were trying to banish the hands that had come before yours.

The song outside seemed to get louder, or we were sobering up and everything around us was a little clearer. You 120

said, hushed, like you were scared of breaking something between us, “This is so good.” You said something about me doing well, and we laughed at how it sounded, but you smiled in a way that made me think that the space between us didn’t have to be quite so vast. But still, sad songs were playing in the other room.

We’re two slow dancers, last ones out Two slow dancers, last ones out. (Mitski) We stopped before anything else could happen. But we both felt good about the things we’d done. We talked about doing more, but neither of us had protection. I laughed at that, at the fact that the simple things that always get overlooked or ignored when people talk about hooking up ended up being the thing that stopped us. If it wasn’t real life, it wouldn’t have been an object; after all, nobody needs to reach for a condom on TV; everybody seems to think it breaks the spell. If there were a spell that had been cast between us, I don’t think that’s what broke it. I think it was the rain, the sad songs from the other room, the distance between and the way our histories couldn’t quite coexist.

It’s funny how they’re all the same It’s funny how you always remember And we’ve both done it all a hundred times before It’s funny how I still forgot. (Mitski) We left your bedroom while the song played, both of us still fully clothed, looking unkempt, interrupted. We danced to the end of the song, falling back into familiar steps and rhythms. Part of me wondered if it was a way for us to try and physically close, joined together, in spite of the all the things we couldn’t do. The song was sad, a reminder of the things that had been lost to time, or sadness, or silence. All of those things from long ago, our histories, stretching back to long before we met, seemed to be given a new lease on life by “Two Slow Dancers.”

And the ground has been slowly pulling us back down. (Mitski) When we danced, it was like we were trying to stop the ground from pulling us back down, hoping that the slow, somewhat uncertain movements of our feet would be

enough to stop the past, and the ground, from getting too strong a hold on us. Thinking, hoping that we could stay the same, the same as we were in the past before the ground pulled us back down. We were just two slow dancers, dancing to sad songs and the sound of the rain outside. We were still awake when the sun was coming

up, maybe of everyone at the party, the first ones up for the light of the next day. But even then, we were the last ones out. The last ones out of the past.

Table Talk

Fortune of a Medical Forecast

Dad didn't allow certain topics at the dinner table: boogers, puke, poop.

You will recover a valuable item that has been lost.

Andrea Reisenauer

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s un-ladylike. Disgusting. Rude.

My sister and I would wait until late at night to giggle over some sound our bodies made, a playful eruption of human nature as raw and pure as the anxiety I felt every morning before school.

There are things we don't talk about at the table: divorce, death, diarrhea.

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no appropriate place to cut open and chew that nameless flavor we all taste: a churning-confused burn that feels so much like indigestion.

Andrea Laws

my sanity, that is what is lost it faded with each click waking up to a thirst that sprouted a new week coffee forgotten in traffic building blocks clocking in clocking out to a a dim existent place longing for its expiration date hoping for a better time be lost forever donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t taint my soul to an early grave sanity; you are lost for a reason

121

Cradle Paula Camacho

122

Temple Paula Camacho

123

Bolts

Alex Atkinson He reached into the box on the passenger seat and grabbed a bolt. Not huge, felt like 3/8. He tossed it out of the window, onto the road. He had developed a kind of knuckleball drop. No spin. The bolt floated down to the asphalt, as much as it could considering he was driving a truck, where it would hopefully . . .

“Fuck.” It took a bad bounce into the gutter. Well, it might not be a total loss. This was a neighborhood, after all; and while the bolt had come to rest almost perfectly in the space between two houses, people had parties. They parked on the road for all kinds of reasons.

Maybe it would find its way into the back tire of a Water Department truck.

He selected a woodscrew and tried to throw a curveball. Gutter again. Goddamn it. It was hard to get in the groove first thing in the morning. He tossed some more screws, and bolts, sipped his energy drink, and threw out some rusty nails for good measure. Some of them landed where he wanted, some of them didn’t.

He tried not to be too hard on himself. It was a numbers game, after all.

He started to feel paranoid and went somewhere else.

He had two more hours before work.

2 An arm snaked out the window and dropped a bolt.

Emira was too far away to do anything about it. She hurried over and picked it up. Added it to the collection in her palm. “Goddamn it . . .” That made four, how many more?

It was a total fluke that she was onto him. Emira Harvey always, always, always jogged with her headphones on. If she took them off, she had to stop. Every time. She didn’t know why. It was probably a breathing thing. She had never been much of an athlete. She had only taken them off this morning because she’d been feeling . . . What?

Wistful? Nostalgic? However it was that the sky had made her feel in those moments before the sunrise, stars still wheeling overhead like a map key in a video game—and everything in the world might still be horrible—but she had realized then how small she really was, and how short would be her life; so, she ought to suck some joy out of it, whatever comes. A feeling which had disappeared 124

almost as soon as she had felt it. Too airy, too complex; it drowned in all the muck. A feeling like that, which had made her push her headphones back— Breathe Breathe Breathe —and stop to enjoy the view.

Tnikt. She had no idea what the sound had meant then, and she hadn’t even really been that curious, but it made her turn around, and she had noticed the truck.

Emira listened for it now. A Dodge Ram. Newish, but not new. Big engine, building steam. You could hear for miles at this time of the morning, when there were not that many people outside—and she thought she did. Two streets over, moving east. It had taken Pine Needle. That meant, by now, it should be winding around to . . . “Black Forest.”

Emira sprinted in the direction of Black Forest Road and made it there just in time to see the Ram cross in front of her again, this time moving west. He’s really doing it. Even after she’d seen him drop one, had she really been sure? It was crazy. East to west, north to south. He has a plan.

He’s seeding the whole neighborhood with these things.

It wasn’t crazy. It was insane.

Who was this kid? What was his problem? She made it to the end of Black Forest, and looked around. No Ram— but he was close. At this time of the morning you could smell for miles, as well. She thought she could smell the fucker. Oily exhaust and adolescent musk. Did your girlfriend dump you, you little shitass? Is that what this is about? Some privileged little prick, probably an abuser, trying to take revenge on the girl that got away—or more aptly: escaped—willing to pop every tire in the neighborhood in the bargain. The kind of guy who would gleefully strip all the skin off of your body but would ugly-cry if he ever got called out for it, or if you ever got the best of him at anything.

She looked down each road as she passed—Cobb then Cuttysark, Blue Heron, Palmetto Bluff—ears cocked, listening, cursing every asshole who started their car or stepped out onto their porch to cough. The sound was tricky. The rush and roar of the Ram’s engine seemed to come from everywhere at once, echoing off of house and lawn, tree and shadow. Now close, now far away.

The effect was made worse by an early morning rain.

Not quite ready to join the clouds, but animated by what was sure to be a hellishly hot day, it hung around her in

ribbons, obscuring light and sound, place and purpose, like the sticky fingers of a spider’s trap.

Which road? Which way?

“There!” Not in her ears, but on the floor. The ground.

The road. The fucker. Emira rushed over and scooped up another bolt. Only this time it was a rusty screw with a hexagonal head. “I’ll follow your fucking breadcrumbs then.” There and there and there she found them. Bolts and screws and nails and tacks. She took Boxwood down to Oxford. Oxford over to Betz Creek Road. When she turned onto Deerwood, she had a thought: What am I gonna do when I catch him? A good question. Timely. All this charging around like Captain America was great— and great exercise; she wouldn’t check her app until she got home, but when she did, she’d be astonished—but seriously, what was the plan? Did she even have one?

Emira realized that she did not.

She pictured herself: Emira Harvey, not an athlete, sweaty and gross and above all awkward, stepping out into the road, defiant, skin prickling against oncoming rush of the Ram’s somehow muscular frontend; arms raised, and waving for it to stop, so she could . . . What?

Ask to speak to the fucking manager? She almost laughed out loud, but that was when she spotted the Ram again about a quarter mile away, moving around the lake.

And she thought she could cut him off.

There was a path which ran beside a drainage ditch nearby. Emira dug for it and tore down it. Ordinarily, she would never have taken it. There almost had to be snakes. Especially at this time of year. That in mind, she leapt everything in her path—big and small, plain and vague—surprisingly able to do so. Emira soared over tall grass and fallen branches, alligators, mountain lions, you name it. Set it in her way right then, she would have jumped it. Easily.

I’ve got you! I’ve got you! I’ve— The Ram crossed in front of her again; but she hadn’t lost. The path emptied into a cul-de-sac, a little road.

400 meters, at most. She could make it. She could make it. Emira lifted her phone, sweaty fingers fumbling for its attention. She could make it. She could make it. She could do this one thing. The only thing she could do. She would try. By the time she got to the stop sign, she had gotten her camera to open somehow, and she sighted the

Ram’s backend. Zoomed. Zoomed. Waited for what felt like a fourteen-hour fuck for the thing to focus . . .

“Come on. Come on. Comeoncomeoncomeon!”

And read on the screen: Test Drive “What.” It was less a question than it was a sound which escaped her throat. She looked up from her screen to confirm it. Yep. Test Drive. That’s what it said. No tag, not even Tag Applied For. Just Test Drive. Sure. Why not? Of course.

When she told the story, Emira liked to tell people she didn’t think. That if she had thought, she probably wouldn’t have done what she did. She told them her body just moved. It wasn’t true. Emira Harvey thought so much.

She thought of everything. And all of it. And how fucked it all was. And she threw a bolt. She tracked its arch, marveling at the seeming accuracy of her throw, at how fast it seemed to fly. It almost looked like, if the bolt could have caught up with the moving truck, which, of course, was impossible because— The bolt punched through the Ram’s back window, and the brake lights fired right away.

Here it comes. The horror in the maze. I’ve got its attention.

Now what? She had no sword. No shield. No superpowers or divine favor to lean on. She didn’t even have that long to think. The door flew open and a man leapt out. Not a bull or a boy, but a man. A man who ought to have known better.

And he was holding a gun.

“OH YOU’RE GONNA SHOOT ME NOW?!” Here was another spot in her story where Emira often chimed in to let her audience know how little consideration she had given this. A lie, but easier than describing how it had really felt seeing that pistol. There to protect this man’s precious privileges. Unquestioned. Unassailable. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Fucking People Over. Reserving the right to lift his arm, and end her life. Cosmos Mariner, destination unknown. And why? Because she had called him on his bullshit. Flipped the rock and showed him to the sun. He hurried around to the back of his truck to inspect the damage, feet spluttering in his concern— because it was REAL now, REAL because something was happening to HIM. She got a lot of advice down the years about what she should have done next. None of it helpful. All of it unsolicited. She should have run. She should have hid.

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She should have begged this skin-peeling fuckhead for her life. She should have called the police. Good advice, surely. Sounded reasonable—but she would have taken none of it right then. She would have done exactly what she did. Emira transferred another bolt into her throwing hand—only this one was a screw with a hexagonal head— and pegged it at the back of the man’s head.

“Ow, fuck!” Such a gratifying sound. The meaty thunk as the strike she’d thrown hit him just behind his left ear; the tinkle as the screw returned to the pavement; his unmanly screech. He turned, and looked at her. Saw her for the first time. Too caught up in his own problems, he hadn’t even turned to see who shouted at him. Now he did. His fingers went to the back of his head, and they came away bloody. He showed them to her, palm out, pathetic, wounded, indignant, Christ on the cross. All the things. IT’S HAPPENING TO ME NOW! TO ME! AND OH MY GOD IT REALLY HURTS! “What the hell, lady?”

“This,” Emira said—and pegged him again. The nail bounced harmlessly off his clothes. “And this.” A screw. It went wild and clattered off the Ram’s bumper. “And this.”

Some kind of staple. “And this. And this . . .”

He looked confused, and Emira had a moment of doubt. Had the truck that she’d been chasing around all morning been silver or white? She wasn’t sure now. The sun had come up since she had first seen it. She took in the man standing in front of her. Could this be him? The bull in the maze—or Ram if you like that better—the monster at the end of her story?

Or was that her?

Clean boots. Pressed khakis. Blue button-down that looked like it ought to have a name tag over the heart— although he looked like he worked inside. Looked like— “You work in the office . . .”

Recognition bloomed in his eyes, but tried to hide it. Cover it with a mask of civility. Concern—perhaps for her? Are you okay, miss? “What?”

“Do you sell tires, by chance?”

Horror, there and then gone. “Huh?” “Do you sell them wholesale or do you run your own shop?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to figure out if you work for a distributer, and this is a bonus thing, or if you were trying to save your failing business . . .” It almost had to be one of those 126

two options, Emira thought then. Later, she would come up with all kinds of theories—everything from a terrorist attack to the guy just being crazy—but in the moment it seemed to her that it came down to just those two. And either way, fuck him.

“I don’t know what you mean.” But he did. He did.

“You do sell tires, though, right?”

How do you know you had the right guy? How many people would ask her some variation of that question, lifetime? Could she retire off the proceeds if she had charged them all a nickel? Maybe not. But she would have done okay. Truth was, she wasn’t sure until that moment, when after searching her eyes for what felt like too long and finding in them no willingness to be gaslit, the mask slopped off the man’s face and revealed the bug beneath.

“Shut up, you stupid cunt.”

Finally, Emira thought. Pleased to meet you, my skinpeeling friend.

“You stay away from me,” the man said. He lifted his hand, the one not holding the gun, and showed her the blood. “Say another word or throw anything else, I’ll call the police.” And he would, too. Emira saw it in his eyes.

He would dare any try, accept any risk to hurt her. To hurt anyone who crossed him, or stood in his way, or ever got the best of him at anything. “You don’t wanna fuck with me, lady. You really don’t.”

No, she didn’t. But it seemed to Emira then that the man standing in front of her was the avatar of everything wrong with the world. A world in which we have to fight for every inch of ground, for every breath, for every drop of poisoned water. A world in which we are squeezed, where we expect to be fucked over by everyone, at every turn, always. A world in which we only get as much justice as we can afford; where lying and cheating and scamming are considered virtues and getting sick is a bankrupting offense. A world Emira didn’t want to live in anymore. A world she had to live in because of men like him and she wanted break all his teeth.

“YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD, ASSHOLE!” Emira threw another bolt. It missed and bounced off the Ram’s rear view mirror.

“Stop that!”

She kept on. Emira pelted him with everything she had. Everything he had given her. His morning’s work, her ammunition. If this had been a movie, she often told

people, this would be the part where the director would have cued the Hero Music. Only in this case, the audience would have been laughing their asses off—because they would have seen that she would never move the needle. Not with this guy. Not ever. Not if she dropped an anvil on his head. And her missiles were too small to even see. The audience might have been forgiven for thinking she was casting spells, standing in the street, bellowing incantations like: “EVERYBODY’S GOT THEIR OWN SHIT” and “YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO’S GOT PROBLEMS” and “THIS AIN’T THE WAY, BRO!” While all the time he swam toward her, getting closer and closer, head tilted cautiously to one side but otherwise absorbing everything she threw with no apparent bother. Gun still in his hand, still reserving his rights.

She made it down to her final fastener—a bolt, by chance, but not huge like the one she’d thrown through the Ram’s back windshield—and she promised herself she would make it count. Emira wound up and threw— foot flying up behind her like a relief pitcher—putting all her weight behind it. She aimed for the skin-peeling fuckhead’s right eye. The bolt flew—perfectly on its mark—hooked at the last possible second, missed the shithead’s face by about ten inches, and exploded the Ram’s driver’s side window.

Here we go. That’ll do it. He’s gonna lift his arm and end my life. Everything that I am, everything I could be, gone in a crash. Cosmos Mariner, destination unknown­—over two panes of glass and a handful of bolts.

She hoped it would be quick. Hoped he would be merciful. Hoped he would shoot her in the head or in the heart. Whatever was fastest, whatever hurt least. She shut her eyes and waited for the shot that didn’t come.

“What the fuck? What the fuck? What the—” He kept repeating it, so Emira opened her eyes. And then she did laugh, because the man—fully grown, and apparently employed, skin-peeling fuckhead that he was—was jumping up and down like a little monkey. Hands on the sides of his head, the pistol in one of them apparently forgotten.

Emira had to take a knee, and double over.

“Shut up! Stupid bitch! Stop!” Punchy. Out of breath.

Frightened?

Emira showed him her favorite finger, but she was never sure he saw it. Because with no ado at all and

further no delay, the man bounced back into the cab of his truck and slammed the door, showering the asphalt with glass. “Fuck you,” he cried through the slot where his window should have been, and peeled away—so tough . . . “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck—” Emira was too stunned by his sudden retreat to retort right away. She wondered again what his story was, why he was doing this, and she hated herself a little bit for doing so. He would have never wondered about her and wouldn’t have given a shit if he knew everything there was to know—but she couldn’t help it. Why did he run like that when she broke the window? Was the truck a rental? Did it belong to his boss? His mom? What? Why was that the line? When Emira finally did find her voice, what she said was utter nonsense. She blamed her blood sugar—too much exercise and not eating. Just before he turned and was out of earshot, she called: “A BOLT GOES BOTH WAYS!” Her final spell, her last words on the subject—what the fuck did they even mean? She always left this out of her retellings.

Emira looked around, suddenly self-conscious. About what she’d said, about what she’d done right there in the middle of the street in her own neighborhood where sound tended to carry at this time of the day. She didn’t want to talk to anyone and she certainly didn’t want to talk to the police, but she had one more thing left to do before she could call it a job.

She would have to hurry. Emira Harvey picked up what she could of her morning’s work, and his, and kicked the rest into a storm drain.

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Hunt

Marina Fec I took a walk through the snow and the wind was like sandpaper on my cheek a harsh but familiar welcome into winter.

I stood in what used to be grass looked for patches disturbed by footprints like the inverted hearts I would find with my father in the cold, dark mornings when the air was so brittle you could break it with the snap of a twig.

This is a dark morning; 6am is usually a ghost to me slipping away before I see it but this morning Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve stepped out into its cold to look for things I can remember: droplets of blood that hit the snow and spread through the arms of each flake like tributaries

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or veins, a trail of them, leading to the warm body snow melted beneath it, my father asking if I would like to hold the heart in my hands, cupped like a small bird and clutched to my chest.

I felt the fluttering high in my throat I wanted to sing melancholic church hymns wanted to preserve what I could with a sermon or prayer, instead we took the iron-rich muscle home and we ate it.

The first snow always makes me think of that winter when I took a walk wind hitting my cheek like sandpaper, when I tasted blood sat at the table, and asked for more.

The song that goes like this Andrea Reisenauer A Broadway Cento

Cuddle up a little closer, lovey mine, and hold me tight because the hills are alive with the music of the night and all that jazz. Soon it’s gonna rain a moonlight lullaby, fate, a memory made of stone in the sweetest sounds of being alive together.

Only you can meet me inside the heather on the hill where anything goes in the heights of high flying adored. Close the door. Light my candle. I’m Dulcinea, Johanna, doin’ what comes natur’lly.

Think of me for the next ten minutes, defying gravity, and they say it’s wonderful.

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Sawtooth

Desmond Everest Fuller The steering wheel of Dad’s pickup was nearly as wide as my shoulders. The metal hoop shivered in the rubber grip as I shifted for third, my leg stretching to find the floor against the spring of the clutch. The truck moaned somewhere beneath the hood. I glanced over at Cody to see if he noticed the gears grinding, and saw he’d gotten blood on the seat.

“It’s no good,” he had said around a split lip. His dad would break his stupid arm, at least. His voice had trembled like her was about to cry, and I waited for him to flick a fist or rush me. He could have run, but he stood in my yard where I’d let go of his shirt-collar, his face beetred and bitter enough to taste. I said to get in the truck. I didn’t know why; at thirteen, it seemed like a thing to say after winning a fight.

He held his dirty sleeve up to his nose where I landed the good punch. A brown spot pooled in the flannel cuff and a few drops beaded on the seat. My heartbeat shook my bones and my head was empty as coming up from a dream.

Dad had told me to never touch his keys, then looped them on a coat hook inside the backdoor like magpie bait.

I would sit in the cab that smelled of Folgers, Camels, and Rainier and listen to Mariners games, waiting for him to get home from the bar. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking anything. I coasted, adrift in the wake of violence, glancing over at Cody, his cheek pressed against the window.

My gaze kept drifting across the dashboard to the notch in Cody’s throat. A single freckle floating in the dip of skin. It reminded me of Mom and how the light was different when she was alive, the way she used to lean into the sunshine, coaxing out her summer constellations blooming across her shoulders and raising amber in her cheeks. I stared until the passenger mirror nearly clipped a fence post as the road down into the river canyon.

Cody gripped the grab-handle. “You drive like shit.”

I said, “Yeah, well you fight like shit says that asskicking you took back there.”

He hunched his shoulders. “Wasn’t an ass-kicking.”

I snickered, and it tasted like dirty pennies in my mouth.

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He grimaced. “It wasn’t.”

We were quiet then in the warmth trapped under glass.

I glanced at Cody’s shirt collar and the orphaned threads where I broke his buttons yanking him away from the back door of my house. He nearly broke the lock, prying the jam with a rusted chisel Dad had forgotten on the porch. I heard a squeal like tangled metal come from me, or maybe him, felt my fist land. Then we were driving. My knuckles blushed pink and stung where they had connected with his teeth.

The truck lurched as I stomped the brakes coming into the hairpin down the side of the canyon taking us beneath the trees, under their green light where the air smelled of water and moss. The road wound down to the river, deep and still. When I asked Cody why he tried to break into my house, he shrugged.

“Lookin’ for tools; been strippin’ copper outta little motors. Need a new jacket, too. I thought everyone’s in school.”

“It’s August, nimrod.”

Cody would have been in my grade, but I hadn’t seen him at school after he was got caught stealing a blowtorch from shop class. He turned and scowled at the rocks and mud where the road bit into the valley wall. His jawline was delicate and fell up into a thick tangle of auburn. I ran my tongue over my teeth and a mouth dry as chalk.

Cody asked, “Is Mrs. McCutchon still principal?”

“Yeah.”

“I hate that bitch.”

I turned the radio dial. The announcer in the static reported that the Mariners were up on the Dodgers by two in the fifth. I knew Dad was watching the game at the Sawtooth with the other lumberjacks. The Sawtooth was a dive cut from rough timbers and soaked in the neon of electric beer signs glowing in the corners like luminescent cobwebs. A wooden plaque above the bar featured a stump with an ax and said, “Don’t worry, I hugged it first.” I could still be home before Dad, maybe bury the broken chisel, scrub blood from the seats.

I squinted in a wash of light reflected off the river through a break in the trees. “Wish we’d get our own ballteam. You ever catch a Seattle game?”

“Never been to Washington.”

“Me either.”

Our talk was hollow and didn’t mean anything. I tried to keep my eye on the road, but we were flying along the river’s edge and my chest vibrated with how I couldn’t stop looking across the seat. The quickening light played on his freckled cheeks, and I tasted maple syrup. I imagined a diner: I’d order us flapjacks and we’d stay there ‘til we learned to like our coffee black and the world forgot about us and I’d retrieve the shape of what needed saying from the brier of fear all around us.

But then, all I could say was, “I guess I should take you home?”

He shrugged down in the seat. “What, n’ get beat on twice today? Hell, you know.”

We both knew, and our silence was heavy with our knowing.

When my dad’s hands flew, they were silent fliers that struck like rough boards. I’d felt them once or twice before Mom died, and then after, in the scattered, floundering nights that fell on him when Mom’s jasmine bloomed and his head filled with fever honey and bottom-shelf bourbon.

I figured Cody had it worse, was told his dad to be a mean drunk. Dad had pointed out the Foss place to me once on our way to unload trash at the transfer station.

It was truly a shack. Shadowed, even on a sunny day, wedged between two hemlocks. Low sagging wires poached light from the nearest power-lines, and the yard was strewn with a menagerie of rust: hollow skulls of cars, half-buried barrels filled with old rain, dry refrigerators leaning open. Foss was a scrapper; his pick-up stood out anywhere, wobbly with junk. After Cody’s suspension, his dad kept him scrapping, and food was rumored scarce in that house.

A heron shadowed over the river and rippled down into the shallows. On the radio, the Dodgers had tied it up with two runs off a bunt. I imagined Dad’s forehead creasing, this side of throwing a beer pitcher at the wall, this side of weeping beneath slipping wages, Mom’s missing shape and the wash of the TV calling loss, loss, loss.

A beige Studebaker appeared, floating in front of us, a leisurely ten miles under the speed limit.

“Pass em’,” Cody muttered.

I looked over, and for the first time he didn’t avert his gaze. His eyes were full of me, and I had never known the

feeling of wanting to stay like that, open, full of blue and me looking out from him.

I shifted down into third. My gut shivered with excitement, and I smirked. “Bad spot to pass.”

“They’re crawlin’ along. Get around them.”

I bit my lip. “Can’t see too far ahead.”

Cody grinned, snickering. “Chicken.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that.”

“Yeah?”

“Shit, yeah.”

Light fell in strips through the pines, cutting green and gold over the road. We floated for entirely too long while I floundered between gears, nearly kissing the Studebaker’s back fender. Finally, I felt the truck lock into fourth, then fifth, and the engine bellowed beneath us as we pulled abreast of and began to overtake them.

I nearly didn’t see the logger, his bed folded and empty behind him. Horns bleated and our voices cried out in small unison. The logger’s horn smeared alongside us as I pulled the wheel hard over my knee. Metal screamed in my ear, sparks jumping through the open window.

Behind us the Studebaker had almost jack-knifed across the lane; my driver-side mirror, ripped clean off, lay on the asphalt, and disappeared as the road curved away behind us.

My heart was in my ears, thudding beneath a buzzing like a vacuum. Cody’s voice. Warmth. I gripped. And there was Cody’s hand in mine, sending white lightning up my arm. I pulled away, turned to Cody staring at me.

Before I could think, or he could speak, I cuffed him hard up the back of his head. How soft the mess of hair felt in my fingers.

He exhaled sharply. “You crazy son-bitch.”

It felt as though we were flying, ourselves and the body of the truck flew around us, all suspended. I wanted to kiss my palm, brush my lips against the memory of his calluses, his young hands labored to course burlap. In a flickering, like of a candle or a film reel, I imagined him with his back to me, his bare shoulder-blade dotted in a colony of freckles. And I knew him to be beautiful in a way that no one had ever been beautiful before.

The radio cut out for a while, and there was silence above the humming of the tires on the road. When the signal came back, the Mariners were up at the top of the sixth. I wanted to speak words that could convey the mess 131

of light in my head. But I didn’t then, and didn’t for many years speak of it to anyone, not till long after I’d left our county, and the small mills all up and down the highway shut down and stood like bones of prehistoric beasts.

Years later, I took a weekend out from the city just to drive around inside a ghost. At the last mill where Dad worked, someone had parked a camper under the tinroofed bay where fresh logs were once stored. The tiny camper windows were covered with dirty sheets, latticed with moss. I went by our old house no one ever wanted to buy and the truck where Dad left it. I peered through the dust-grimed windshield and made out the old bloodstain like a brown thumbprint on the seat.

Cody rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyone ever tell you you don’t have to hit a guy so hard?”

I needed to dunk my head in the cold river current and flush all the hot blood from my face. I needed the rush of mountain run-off to fill my ears with its glacial indifference.

I could barely hear my own voice. “You, just now.

Should I get used to it?”

He shook his head. “Something off about you.”

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I thought about that and wondered what would happen if suddenly, like blinking, I reached for his hand and our fingers dovetailed back into a dream of warmth.

Maybe in that dream there could be something off about both of us. We could shed the tight-grain hardness we wore in this place where we would break without it. We could keep driving, his palm beneath mine on the seat without time.

We rolled to the first stop sign of the first crossroads coming out the bottom of the canyon where the river drifts toward town. The truck idled in the warm air, and above the low chug of the engine we could hear frogs singing.

There was the click of the latch and the door slammed in the golding light that was leaving. The browned stain on the seat where Cody’s dried blood stared back at me. I thought about how I’d grit my teeth through the belting I’d take when Dad saw the truck like this. I heard Cody’s footsteps receding fast in the dust, and wondered about the way home.

Why my Hogwarts letter never arrived Andrea Reisenauer

A twirl of backyard unicorn tails would've made me sneeze like a steleus curse. A snail ate through my magic beans.

I grazed my knees jumping off playgrounds with a broom and Grandmother toad led me to the bathroom.

Wish-speckled skies granted me inflatus sties and my fingers sprouted slivers from wardrobes. Mice chewed through the hem of my best blue gown, all the mountains were silent and the rabbits brown, my plastic wand snapped as I sat down on the bus and the fairies on my lawn were fungus.

Now the world is a tower, prince charming waits below,

but my hair barely grows past my shoulders.

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Rerun & Blues E. Samples

Under the red string light canopy of bedroom conversation; Purchases of diet coke, smokes, cheap fast food and feigned hesitation; We rest on a pallet with our forbidden music mix.

Circling blocks of humid summer hours your concentrated smile cracks open, dilutes like a can of condensed tomato soup with its familiar taste like the sound of ice clinking, like slitting a car window and lighting up.

Around and round your restless spirit, with its routine skips and static pops, rattles my glass.

This town parades; Insists on a warmed-over fireworks sky.

Hand inside hand Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m drawn through the shortcut.

I climb over hair ties, VHS tapes, past polaroids and carpet stains down the backroad where locals only stoke lighter fluid flames casting dimly lit stones. /i spent decades working on a poem written in daffodils/ After lengthy spells of demons we write it out together in rock, in sand over pavement, in freshly poured asphalt, in black sharpie on a cardboard box; We simmer it with milk and stifled screams.

Beat our fists against two way glass like disoriented astronauts in a deep dive, counting oxygen against moths trapped in a lantern dome, palm prints against the frosted globe.

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/i breathe and a pattern appears/ (i am the pale thing in the dark words swarm over my head like a ghost cloud of gnats i can’t be burned onto CDs or second-hand pet names i’m not written in tobacco leaves i record in the mirror thinking one day i will stare and conjure a reflection of now) I ignore your messages but I’m not smoke rising from a flame.

On my way out the screen door double-slams.

My voice sings along like a soda can ashtray, like scraping together loose change under an arched neon light.

In the parking lot web of radio exhaust, spinning beats of whiskey and fever, you tap the pack and lean toward me conspiratorially, one old haunt to another.

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The best writing tip Yuliia Vereta

Every time staring at the blank page on the screen, I think of it. I think of the best writing tip I’ve ever received. It came from my best friend. Or as my ex-husband would say, “temporary best friend,” as he was certain that women make friends with those they work or study with and forget them the next day after they quit or graduate.

That is true sometimes, I suppose, but definitely not in that case when your best friend is a 42-year-old bald father of four, former soldier, holder of a degree in religious studies, once widowed and once divorced, who still has courage to laugh his lungs out over absurd jokes and trying his best to gush onto paper with fiction about Jerusalem villages, Nepali beliefs, Roman architecture, and Jesus wandering among them, having found the power to save all of us.

If there is anyone in the world worth listening to, it’s definitely him. One of those who is mostly silent, not because there is nothing to say, but seldom those who hear while listening. He is the one I view as the person who made me stay on the road, inspiring me at the times when I needed most.

We were working together for almost a year at that time when I already became desperate as a writer going through the crisis. Being so far from home, me from my developing country and him from the starred-striped one, every day after lunch we went outside for a smoke and a talk over a can of Coke or a red-bean ice-cream cone.

In between the conversations on why our supervisor doesn’t want to accept the fact that Australia is a separate continent and why such a big country does not have pigeons, we shared ideas on the latest writing competitions and recent publishing opportunities as well as discussing all of those inspirational articles from best-selling writers on why and how you should write.

Probably everyone who at least once sat in front of the typewriter or a computer attempting to make confused thoughts in a crowned sentence and failed was tempted to start reading those. Some articles advise you to stop waiting, as it makes you a waiter and not a writer, while others tell you to sit and wait for your muse to come if you 136

have to, and to start doing something else if it does not come for a long time. All of those never worked for me.

The best writing tip I’ve ever got came from him. That same one who was beaten by life, who was chewed up and spat out and who was still capable of creating beautiful things—the one who was saved by writing.

The best writing tip I’ve ever gotten among the rest went out to one word only: Write. Despite being judged, mocked, unread, unpublished, criticized, rejected— Write. No matter if for it you are losing your job, home, marriage, friendship, money, time, youth, country, if you feel like writing—Write. If you do not feel like writing but you have something in your mind, soul, heart, or guts that is burning you from inside and is attempting to make itself free, you just do not know yet how—Write.

Even if you feel like your common sense and the whole time of the universe is slipping between your fingers when you bleed onto paper—Write. Write and never stop.

Do not stop if it stops you from everything else. Do not stop until it stops in you.

Mess of Jimis Mercury Marvin Sunderland 137

If the Shoe Fits Yaki Margulies

Somehow, despite their best efforts, Erin was pregnant.

She and her husband, Corey, had always told people they didn’t want children. They couldn’t imagine sacrificing their potential and ambition for these smaller replacements, their energy siphoned off like gasoline, small sticky hands touching every surface in their once elegant home.

The couple’s favorite activities included shopping and vacationing. They felt they owed it to themselves to splurge in life. If not in this life, then when? Children would significantly dampen this credo.

“But doesn’t part of the full-life-experience involve raising children?” their friends asked. “Seeing them grow, succeed, coming back to visit you in your old age?”

“Please. We know children don’t visit their elderly parents nearly enough,” Erin said. “They’ll just leave us in a home.”

“I haven’t seen my own parents in two years,” Corey said. “That’s no payoff.”

But now they were pregnant. In considering her options, Erin suddenly found herself pinned at a crossroads, afraid. In her typical manner, she put off making a decision until it was too late and the decision was made for her. Corey was less than satisfied, but inertly resigned to the outcome as well. He read the introduction to a parenting book and put a childproof lock on the liquor cabinet. They bought a chic crib.

In no time at all, the couple were plunging towards the hospital, and towards the alarm of birth. The delivery was brief, and the baby came out quickly. The infant was a pair of modish, high-heeled shoes—blue patent-leather pumps. The couple looked at their newborn footwear with a discreet sigh of relief, amidst the intense confusion of the medical staff. The mother gratefully put them in a box and left the hospital.

However when she got home and tried the shoes on, she found that they didn’t fit.

The pumps lived between the old broom and the extra gardening gloves in the closet by the backdoor, the one seldom used. Erin began a dieting and exercise regiment 138

to lose the scant baby weight. She wanted to look great by swimsuit season.

There was more shopping. “Adopted siblings” for her blue shoes, Erin liked to joke, handing her Amex card to the person at the counter. There was a spa weekend in Palm Springs, a skiing trip to Aspen, a Paris excursion for their wedding anniversary. The shoes remained at home.

At a restaurant in Paris, the couple noticed a family of five—three little red-faced kids screaming at the French food on their plates. “Couldn’t have been cheap bringing three kids to Europe,” Corey said. “And they can’t even enjoy it,” Erin said. They nodded and fell back into silence, finishing their veal ragout and Moules marinières.

Back home, Erin bought a vintage sewing machine and looked up fashion articles and dress patterns online.

“I’m thinking of designing my own clothes,” she told Corey. “I can sew them myself and maybe sell the best ones if people think they’re good.”

“You don’t know how to sew.”

“I can learn. I’ve been practicing.”

“You don’t stick with things long enough, though. I don’t see it happening.”

“I can stick with things,” she said sullenly. “I see it happening.”

“Okay then,” he said without argument, reading from his tablet.

She didn’t like how certain he always was. Erin didn’t stick with sewing for long, but that wasn’t the point.

She could persevere when necessary. She left the sewing machine out on her desk, surrounded by design sketches, for an extra month or two, to give the appearance of a work in progress. Eventually she packed it all away in the back closet.

One day as she returned home from a Pilates class, eternally fearful of middle-aged weight-gain­—though she looked quite slim in her stretchy athletic wear, her silver-blonde hair now cut tastefully short—she spotted a neighbor’s boy cleaning out his family’s gutters in the crisp, wintry air, his handsome face earnest and taught with concentration.

She studied him for a moment before going inside, shaking off the cold.

“This is good,” Corey commented, eating some sautéed asparagus at dinner, breaking the regular silence.

“I found the recipe online,” Erin said, noticing how loudly he chewed.

“I had quite a workload at the firm today,” he said after a while. Erin was looking on her phone at an online user poll about handling one’s estate. “I’m sorry,” Corey stopped. “Am I boring you?”

“No, sorry,” she said, eventually lifting her eyes from the screen. She put the phone in her lap. “I think we should write into our will that our personal finances be donated to a few worthy charities,” she said.

“Okay,” he responded dimly.

The following week, they invited their attorney to the house. He sat at their dining room table, fingers clacking on his keyboard like a soft rain.

“Wait,” Erin turned to her husband. “What about . . . our child?”

“What?” her husband asked, his face blank.

“Should we leave something to the shoes? Or at least make sure they’re well looked after?” Corey stared at her across the table. Then he stood up and pulled the shoes from the back closet, wiping off dust.

His flaccid face suddenly turned dark and bitter as he ripped the pumps into pieces, pulling at the fabric with his teeth and nails, until all the little scraps fell to the floor. Then he returned to his seat at the table, slightly winded.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

The attorney left. Husband and wife remained at the table, staring at each other across unconquerable space.

Eventually, she tenderly placed her hand on his, the moment punctuated by a familiar silence.

Jesus the Cat and the Carrots Mercury Marvin Sunderland 139

Red Lips

Latifa Chafik Her lips were thin, non-existent when she smiled. She always wore a bright red lipstick paired with the widest smile. Her smile was special, one of those smiles you only encounter once or twice in your life. A smile that consumed you whole. Her teeth were crooked, but that only made her more interesting to look at. Her wrinklefilled hand lifted a cigarette to her lips; once it was placed between them, her left hand would reach up with a match, her head would tilt a bit to the right, and her right hand would wrap around the tip to great a shield to protect the flame from the light breeze coming through the cracked window.

“Red makes your teeth look whiter.” She exclaimed as she blew the smoke with her face lifted towards the ceiling. Her statement wasn’t true, her teeth were tinted yellow from all those years spent smoking and drinking coffee. “Black, no sugar. And I want it hot . . . very hot.”

That’s how she always drank her coffee. Her voice was always calm and low, but her tone—something in her tone would hypnotize you and you’d have to do whatever she asked for.

She always drank her morning coffee at the dining table with everyone else who lived in the house, except for the weekends. She would take her coffee to her room, sit in front of the vanity, and put on her make up. A brush in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I looked forward to the weekends. I’d just gotten there, observing her routine. The white silk robe, the grey hair in a French

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twist, the way she would turn around and wink at me and smile. My favorite part, however, was the finishing touch: the way she puts the lipstick on and then taps it a bit. I wanted to be her so badly. When she leaves the room, I go back and press my lips against the stain her lips left on her cup to try and transfer some of the pigment onto mine. When she wasn’t looking, I’d wear her robe and heels, put on her lipstick, and walk around, imitating her. I walked like her, sat like her, talked like her, and practiced in front of the mirror for hours to make my facial expressions look like hers.

That day was gloomy; it was so sad the sky cried.

I was nine years old. I woke up that day and found the black dress hung on my door. I never thought I’d ever see her like that. Her face was pale, he wrinkles deeper. Her hands that once warmed me up now felt freezing cold.

She looked and felt like a wax doll. This can’t possibly be her. They changed her. She wasn’t smiling at me and she didn’t wink at me. She wasn’t wearing her red lipstick and she always wore her red lipstick. I ran out of the funeral house and went to the only place I knew I’d feel safe.

My grandfather found me the next morning, sleeping in her closet. Her smell was the only thing that calmed me down, the memory of her warm hands cupping my cheeks was the only thing that put me to sleep. The look he gave me spoke louder then words. He understood my anger, felt my pain. The woman who raised me, my role model, was now gone, and there were no signs of her coming back.

Eating Away at Me D.S. Davis

If you get a DUI in Jersey, the state makes you take a class about the dangers of driving under the influence if you want to get your license back. The class length depends on your number of DUIs. During the thirty-minute dinner break, you have three options: bring a bagged dinner, go to the Dairy Queen, or go to the Chinese restaurant. Or, I guess, not eat at all.

The bro who admitted to driving high yet still believes he shouldn’t have been given a DUI ordered General Tso’s chicken. The old guy who went to get Chinese with him ordered sweet and sour chicken. He is on his second DUI, with his first being twenty-five years ago but was charged as a first-time offender thanks to a crafty lawyer.

Upon completion of the course, you can either get your license back or be ordered to go get an assessment where a drugs and alcohol therapist will spend a couple hours deciding if you have signs of a substance abuse problem. There are certain guarantees that will get you sent for the assessment. If you were twice the legal limit of .08% blood alcohol concentration, if you refused to take the breathalyzer, if you were caught driving while under the influence of an illegal substance, if you’re under twenty-one, or if you have two or more lifetime offense.

So, regardless of how you are legally charged, you will be sent for an assessment if you have more than one or more DUIs on your record.

General Tso’s Chicken Bro and Sweet and Sour Chicken Guy are both going to be sent for assessments,

which they think is “total bullshit.” They blame the cops.

I won’t need an assessment because my lawyer was able to get my results thrown out due to a technicality. The arresting officer forgot to put my surname on the results.

The devil’s in the details, as they say.

To avoid getting more pissed off by the fact they have to make more meetings and appointments, the two talk about their food. They seem to have formed a real friendship over the past twelve hours together. The General Tso’s Chicken Bro says, “Eating a dog would freak me out; that’s like eating a person. But a cat? They’re fucking assholes. I could eat a cat no problem.” Sweet and Sour Chicken Guy comments how he’s glad that their chicken seems to be chicken and not cat, an old racist “ joke.”

All of us just met two old bikers from AA who were staring at me their whole talk. Like they knew I could feel guilt eating away at me. With their optional flyer for meeting locations stuck in my pocket, I turn my focus on anything else, like General Tso’s Chicken Bro and Sweet and Sour Chicken Guy’s conversation. Now, I have two cats and a dog, but that same reason is why I’d have no problem eating a person.

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Oma the Barbarian Fae - 3 Amelia Wysocki

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Oma the Barbarian Fae - 2 Amelia Wysocki

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She

Brenna Lakeson “Why don’t you smile?” he says.

I’ve practiced many responses.

“I’d rather not.”

“I am smiling.”

“I’m ok with the way my face is right now.”

But I’m tired today, so I sigh from deep within my ribs as though the air I expel will heal me from all the times my body wasn’t up to a man’s standards, and say, “Please don’t tell me to smile.” I’m angry that I still feel the need to say please.

Smiling is the last thing I want to do when I remember all the things I carry in this body. She holds the memories of unwanted advances, some benign—yells on the street, comments in the store, requests for my phone number at the gym—but others threatening—touching, unsolicited.

It’s the heaviness of these impressions made on my skin, a memory foam mattress full of pressure points, that cause my heart and footsteps quicken whenever I encounter a man.

The first time I remember feeling the air around me change in the presence of a man, I stood at a gas station at 16. From two pumps over, I heard his singsong voice mocking the beeps my car made with the keys still in its ignition. I ignored him, but minutes later he drove up next to me. He yelled at me from the driver’s seat of his pick-up and I responded with a giddy laugh that made me feel sick.

I used to see him every Tuesday. He would check to see if he had incoming mail and then sit quietly at the back of the lobby. A few times I saw him rummaging around in his pants; scratching an itch, I assumed, or adjusting his body parts—when experiencing homelessness, there aren’t many private places to do such a thing. Until one morning when I looked up from our front desk to witness him, pants unzipped, pulled down to his knees, erect as he stared at me from across the room. Pleasuring himself as his dilated pupils surveyed my body, leaving her untouched yet violated. Months later, after he was released from prison—where he was held for a drug violation rather than indecent exposure—I ran into him in the alley behind my workplace holding a 2x4 with 144

rusty nails sticking out of it. That was the longest I’ve ever held my breath.

As a child of purity culture, I was told that incidents like this would ruin me. Each year, my church youth group separated the boys and the girls for a talk about sex. The boys were taught not to watch porn, but the girls were taught to save all of their sexual desires for marriage because that was the only way to remain holy and desirable. For decades, I tried my best to follow these rules. So, imagine my confusion when once my body began to endure the throes of puberty, men began to notice her. It didn’t matter if she was wearing cut off sweatpants or a prom dress.

It must be something about the way I held my body that would lead a strange man to masturbate to her. The unmarred white cloth of my virginity could be stained by actions over which I had no control. If I dressed conservatively enough and remained meek and quiet, I would be able to avoid all unwanted sexual advances.

Ripe and green after my first year of college, I met a man at my summer job with charm and confidence so captivating, it seemed nothing damaging could ever come from it. Three months into our relationship, he disappeared for weeks, never able to give me a sensible explanation. A year later, he instructed me that I was not to wear leggings in public because other men might look at me. Not to wear make-up because he liked me better without it. Not to spend time alone with any male friend.

Anything I did on my own was suspect. He turned me against my own parents by pointing out their failings.

He wedged himself so deeply into my personality that, after five years, I didn’t know where I ended and where he began.

Forming my own identity apart from our symbiosis was nearly impossible. When I entered graduate school and started conceiving my own ways of being, his hunger for control only intensified. I told him I had doubts about my ability to continue tolerating his fury and asked for time to weigh my options. Later that weekend, drunk, confused, and dizzy, I laid down on a couch next to another man I trusted only for him to take off my clothes and tell me he was only entering me a little bit.

For months, I labeled myself a cheater. Tainted not only by the sin of copulation but also the sin of infidelity, I was sure I was no longer worthy of love. It wasn’t until

after what felt like a lifetime of flashbacks that I realized my body had not welcomed what happened to her. A fingernail bent backward, she was put in a position for which she was not built.

My body was left hollow, carved out by the scratching of all the men who passed through her, leaving cave drawings of an earlier time in their wake. When spring arrived, the first blooms brought me to tears, and I was unable to hold the dissonance that trees could continue creating new life while I limped along, sprained and swollen. In the wild wake of my implosion, I set out to find grounding again. Unmoored, I spent a summer coming home to myself and learning to love the wrinkle to the left of my mouth.

I went for lengthy walks each evening, listening to the same song on repeat as I mourned. I visited New York City and released a long breath in the shadows of its resurrected buildings. I dated a woman and found comfort in a body like mine. In a hotel bar, I slid a British man my phone number on a napkin and later laid in his hotel room with his dress shirt on. I traveled to the beach alone and woke early for the sunrise to reflect its pinkness on my skin.

As I recovered, I met a man who saw the splinters embedded in my body and was willing to help me with the tweezers. He offered understanding as he discovered new wounds each time he looked at her from a new angle.

He was patient in learning that she grows soft when I am sad. He found a strangely shaped rock in a field in Arkansas and gave me half. He kept the other half on his dresser. When we argue, his exasperation comes not from his insatiable need for me to please him, but rather from his own disappointment that he cannot make me happy at every turn.

I became a plant, newly turning my head toward the sun. Given both the space to breathe and the comfort of being genuinely loved, I learned to admire the curves of my thighs, my emerging crows feet, and the way my hair looks when it air dries. When my body grew larger as I trained for a marathon, I told her that she was strong and good. When I would forget to care for her, she gently reminded me. Yesterday, as I saw my bus round the corner, I braced my body against the cold November rain and whispered to her with a smile, “You’re okay. It’s almost here.”

Oma the Barbarian Fae - 1 Amelia Wysocki

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CONTRIBUTORS Victor About (1993) is a French office worker currently residing in Tokyo, Japan. Before moving to Japan, he lived in New York and Chicago where he studied psychology. He has been writing poetry for about six years. This is his first publication.

Derek Anderson (1987) is a writer based in NYC, with one short story published in The Chaffey Review.

He was a script consultant for the HBO adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 and the Golden-Globe nominated film 99 Homes. His TV pilot Second Coming was produced as a staged reading for SAG. Alex Atkinson (1982) is a writing major at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, GA with work appearing or forthcoming in Crack the Spine’s The Year anthology and the Running Wild Anthology of Stories.

Leah Baker (1985) is an English teacher at a public high school. She has had pieces featured most recently in Pointed Circle, Voice Catcher, and For Women Who Roar. A feminist, gardener, yogi, sound healer, and world traveler, she can be found at www.OpalMoonAttunement.com.

Emily Barker (1994) is a British/Dutch writer and dog enthusiast. She recently graduated from the University of Birmingham’s English & Creative Writing program where she explored the relationship between poetry and popular culture, with particular focus on memes and their place in literature.

Brittany J. Barron (1992) graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing at Georgia College where she served as co-Assistant Poetry Editor of Arts & Letters. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Still, The Examined Life Journal, and Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk.

Amita Basu (1987) is working on a collection of short stories about women’s lives in India and a medical/legal mystery novel about art. Her writing is at amitabasu.com. Her interview and guest blog series for early-career artists and scientists at https://artistsandscientists.wordpress.com/ M. Christine Benner Dixon (1982) lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in Vastarien, HeartWood Literary Magazine, pacificREVIEW, Paperbark Literary Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and American Literary Realism.

A.J. Bermudez (1987) is a writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. She is the artistic director of The American Playbook, co-host of the podcast Two-Person Book Club, and was recently named one of the ISA’s Top 25 Writers to Watch in 2019.

Scott Branson (1981) is a non-binary/trans anarchist poet based in Asheville, North Carolina where they write, translate, teach, and organize. Their poetry has appeared in Matter and Crab Fat Magazine.

Kendall Brunson (1987) is a writer and filmmaker currently living in Jacksonville, Florida. Her short films have played at various film festivals including The Loft Cinema and Final Girls Berlin Film Fest. She earned her MFA from UCR Palm Desert in 2016.

Paula Camacho (1996) is a nationally-exhibiting artist based in Orlando, Florida. She is interested in exploring the phenomenon of consciousness by connecting with nature at a very intimate level.

Paula received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Central Florida in 2019.

Katelyn Cartwright (1994) is a queer identifying photographer based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

She uses gelatin film and a fully functioning darkroom as her main means of creating. Her body of work includes portraiture, social commentary pieces, and death practices in southern areas.

Latifa Chafik (2000) is an aspiring writer who mainly writes personal essays, poems, and short stories. This is her first publication.

Elizabeth Chamberlain (1990) is a writing and rhetoric professor at Arkansas State University. She teaches about and researches internet writing and culture. Her poetry has been published in Cicada and The Waggle.

Jason B. Crawford (1988) is a Black, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Lansing, Mississippi. He is the Editor-in-Charge for The Knight’s Library Magazine. His chapbook collection “Summertime Fine” was a Short List selection for Nightingale & Gale.

Caitlin Curtis (1983) has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Her fiction and poetry tend to explore an array of different modern-day blunders, from social anxiety to animal ethics. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review and “Fullerton Chapbook: Local Colors.”

Linh Dao (1991) has interests in artificial intelligence and nature, propelling them to write codes to create digital paintings that explore the transitory of human lives. Their collaborations with machine learning algorithms exam the notions of time, ownership, and legacy.

D.S. Davis (1991) is a writer of middle-grade and young adult novels. He is currently an MFA student studying Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College. He has been published in Avant Literary Magazine.

Sean William Dever (1993) is an Atlanta-based poet, educator, and editor with a MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He is the author of the chapbook “I’ve Been Cancelling Appointments with My Psychiatrist for Two Years Now,” published by Swimming with Elephants Publications.

Gina Elbert (1996) is a New York-based writer and recent graduate from the Pratt Institute School of Information, where she earned a Master’s of Library and Information Science. She hopes to become a children’s librarian.

Ren Ellis (1992) is a writer with an addiction to tea, dresses, and fantastical places. When residing in the real world, she lives in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women in 2018.

Ifeoluwa Falola (1996) is a Nigerian storyteller focused on telling African realities. He lives in a melting pot of inhibited ambitions and purposeful nothingness that some people refer to as Lagos, Nigeria.

Marina Fec (1997) is a student at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been published in Pretty Owl Poetry and Meniscus. She has won Pitt’s Writer’s Cafe Contest two years in a row, and has performed readings all around the city. When she’s not writing poetry, she’s climbing fake rocks.

Sarah Firth (1989) focuses on themes of mental health, sexuality, friendship, and the complexities between the three. Personal achievements include birthing two humans and surviving the battlefield of raising them long enough to discover her queerness and rediscover her love of writing.

Tara Fritz (1995) is a third-year graduate student studying fiction in George Mason University’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her works have previously appeared in The Vehicle, The Mochila Review, Brainchild Magazine, and Adelaide Literary Magazine. She can be found on Twitter @taradoeswriting.

Desmond Fuller (1988) grew up in rural Washington and Oregon. His writing has been published in The Timberline Review, The Gravity Of The Thing, Deep Overstock, The Gorge Literary Journal, and Rasasvada.net. He studies writing at Literary Arts and The Attic Institute.

Ana Hein (1999) is a student at Emerson College studying creative writing, comedy writing and performance, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her work has been featured in Concrete and Gauge, among others, and has won multiple Editor’s Choice Awards from Teen Ink Magazine.

Jeff Hersch (1990) provides analog collages for the modern being. Like his thoughts, these pieces represent everyday observations and conclusions about the vast world that erratically suffocates us, with little time for a quick escape or chance to relax. Learn more at www.infinite-stimulus.com.

Laura Hoffman (1989) is a United States Marine Corps Veteran currently enrolled in The University of Tampa’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her most recent work is forthcoming or appears in 2River, Miracle Monocle, and Hyperlimenous, among others. She won the 2018 Wainright Award for Poetry.

Rosanna Jimenez (1989) is a tech writer and researcher covering work place technology trends. When not writing about tech, she’s working on her poetry. She live in Boston with her boyfriend and her chihuahua, Edith.

Frances Koziar (1992) has publications in more than 20 literary magazines and is seeking an agent for a diverse NA/YA fantasy novel. She is a retired (disabled) academic, a social justice advocate, and a writer lacking 4-5 kinds of privilege. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Brenna Lakeson (1990) is a queer feminist pastor and social activist living in Atlanta, Georgia. Born and raised in North Carolina, she has an MDiv from Candler School of Theology at Emory University with particular interests in feminist theology, Hebrew Bible, and apocalyptic literature.

Andrea Laws (1986) graduated from the University of Kansas with two Bachelor of Arts degrees: one in English with a focus on creative writing, and one in Film Studies with a focus on film theory and criticism. She works in the field of scholarly publishing at the University Press of Kansas.

Albert Lee (1998) is a senior at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Amanda Leemis (1991) is a Brooklyn based artist born in Germantown, Tennessee. After graduating from Indiana University in 2013, she became a professional model and traveled the world. She found inspiration throughout her travels and began painting her view of the entertainment industry.

John Leonard (1991) is an English teacher and assistant editor of Twyckenham Notes, a poetry journal based out of South Bend, Indiana. His previous works have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Roanoke Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among others. You can find him on Twitter @jotyleon.

Chad Lutz (1986) is a speedy human born in Akron, Ohio. Alumna of Kent State University’s English program, Chad earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College. Chad’s first novel, For the Time Being, iwas published in March 2020 through J. New Books.

Giovanni Mangiante (1996) is a bi-lingual writer from Lima, Peru. He has work published in The Anti-Languorous Project, Dream Noir, Punk Noir Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, and has upcoming poems in Down in the Dirt. In writing, he found a way to cope with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Siobhan Manrique (1993) is an English teacher in Arizona. She earned her M.Ed. in Secondary Education at Arizona State University. Her poetry has been published in Tunnels and the 2018 Arizona’s Emerging Poets anthology by Z Publishing.

Vanessa Marie (1993) received her MFA in Poetry from Arcadia University. She resides in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Her work can be found in Unlost Journal, Boston Accent Lit, Occulum, Leopardskin & Limes, and Raq Queen Periodical. You can follow her on Twitter @saayxwahttt.

Yaki Margulies (1990) is a writer, comedian, actor, and musician from Seattle, Washington currently living in Los Angeles, California. His writing has appeared in Word Riot, Flash Fiction Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, The Jewish Journal, Cleaver Magazine, and various other literary publications.

Anna Martin (1993) is a visual artist and writer. A native to Baltimore, Maryland and based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, her work has been previously exhibited in various galleries and museums, such as the Rosenberg Gallery, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Cameron Miller (1997) is a writer and a college student attending Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio with previous publications in Sheepshead Review and Underground Journal.

Sam Moore (1994) is a writer, artist, and editor. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently by the LA Review of Books and in the Pilot Press anthology Modern Queer Poets. They are one of the founding editors of Powder, a queer zine of art and literature.

Kathy Nguyen (1987) is a PhD Candidate in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University. An emerging writer, she focuses on diasporic sounds and narratives, with works appearing in ejcjs, Ekphrasis, Kartika Review, FIVE:2:ONE, and diaCRITICS, among others.

Emma Ogilvie (1999) is studying English at the University of Virginia and draws inspiration from her daughter, Hazel, and husband, Garrett. Color and music fill their home and work their way into much of her poetry.

Ni Petrov (1986) is a Russian visual artist based out of Saint Petersburg.

Kacie Prologo (1989) is a student in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program.

They spend most of their time translating the kind of familial mythology that runs rampant in their hometown of Alliance, Ohio into both fiction and nonfiction.

Jenny Qi (1991) is a writer and scientist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She is currently a SF Writers Grotto Fellow; her first poetry collection, Focal Point, was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize and the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.

Sudarsan Rauta (1978) is an English teacher from Hyderabad, India. When his 6-year-old son is not asking him his ever unanswerable questions, he escapes into making poetry and stories exploring the world within and without.

Andrea Reisenauer (1992) is a ‘92 permanent student enjoying another round of higher education.

She’s an emerging poet whose past work has found its way into Wisconsin Poet’s Calendar, The Sheepshead Review, and Black Heart Magazine. In her free time, she likes to eat, travel, and eat while traveling.

Rich Glinnen (1989) is a Best of the Net nominee who enjoys bowling and eating gruyere with his cats at his home in Bayside, New York. His work can be read in Kenneth Warren’s Lakewood House Organ, at foliateoak.com, petrichormag.com, underwoodpress.com/ruescribe, Tumblr, and Instagram.

E. Samples (1982) was born in West Virginia and raised in Kentucky. She currently lives in Southern Indiana right next to the dirty Ohio River. Her poetry has appeared in Vamp Cat Magazine and fws: a journal of literature & art. She is on twitter @emilysamples.

Matt Schroeder (1992) is a poet and educator currently existing in the great humidity that is southern China. His poetry can be found in Thin Air Magazine, The Rush, Dovecote Magazine, Poetry Lab Shanghai, and The Decadent Review. When he is not writing, he enjoys making friends with the other strays.

Benny Sisson (1996) is a trans poet. She is the program’s assistant for the NYC literary organization Village of Crickets. Her poems are forthcoming with Lunch Ticket, Rinky Dink Press, and elsewhere. She is a library assistant, adjunct instructor, and MFA candidate at Adelphi University.

John Stewart (1985) is an aspiring poet living in Reno, Nevada. He teaches English, prefers his whiskey with a splash of virgin vodka, and enjoys wetting a line as often as he can.

Mercury Marvin Sunderland (1999) is a Hellenist transgender autistic gay man who uses he/him pronouns. He’s from Seattle. He currently attends The Evergreen State College, and his dream is to become the most banned author in human history. He can be found as @Romangodmercury online.

Emma Sywyj (1986) has exhibited fine art photography internationally in the New York, USA; Los Angeles, USA; Art Basel Miami and San Francisco, USA; Athens, Greece; and Budapest, Hungary.

They have also exhibited nationally in the UK and London several times.

Disha Trivedi (1997) divides her time between Scotland, New Zealand, and Northern California. She graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in biology and a minor in history of science. Her work has been published in The Big Windows Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, and The Women’s Issue.

Sarah Valeika (2000) is a poet, thinker, performer, worrier, and student (often all at the same time).

Her work focuses on issues of mental health and illness, as well as expanding theatrical and literary work to include individuals outside the neurotypical spectrum.

Yuliia Vereta (1993) is a young writer from Ukraine traveling the world and getting inspiration from other cultures to write short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, and whatever else can comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted.

Tina Vorreyer (1993) is a graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and has been published in four anthologies by Z Publishing (2017-2019), Black Works, and Not Very Quiet. They are the Poet’s Choice’s September Poetic Musings Contest Winner.

Cathy Watness (1994) currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana and has always been very passionate about writing. Her debut poetry chapbook, “A Movement in War and Peace,” was recently published

by Clare Songbirds Publishing House. Follow her on Twitter @CathyWatness.

Kylie Westerlind (1992) was born and raised in Reno, Nevada. She recently received an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula. Her fiction has previously appeared in Carve Magazine, and the story “Fur” was nominated for the PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Megan Wildhood (1986) is a creative writer, scuba diver, and social-services worker known for her large, idiosyncratic earring collection. Her poetry chapbook, “Long Division,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

Amelia Wysocki (1982) has spent most of her life behind a computer screen, learning how to create beautiful things, which always seem to contain a bit of edge and darkness. Her love of science fiction, fantasy, and ridiculously strong women have a heavy impact on most of her work, as well.

Jiawei Zhao (1988) is a Chinese-born visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Jiawei has recently participated in residencies at MASS MoCA and ChaShaMa North. His work was exhibited at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and Society of Photographic Education in Winter 2019.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Courtney Valentine

SELECTED WORKS Top Contributor in Fiction Desmond Fuller for Sawtooth

Top Contributor in Nonfiction Ana Hein for City of Locks

Top Contributor in Poetry

Jenny Qi for We will die beautifully in the way of stars

Top Contributor in Scripts A.J. Bermudez for Orphea

Top Contributor in Visual Art Paula Camacho for Cradle

Top Contributor in Hybrid Work Kathy Nguyen for Always Waiting

Winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist [selected by Jess Rizkallah] Jason B. Crawford for i am black like all things black

fearsome critter: any creature from early lumberjack folklore said to inhabit the wildernesses of North America.