Volume 1 Spring 2025
Blue Fire
Blue Fire
vol. 1 | 2025
Georgia Southwestern State University
Copyright © 2025 by Georgia Southwestern State University
Department of English and Modern Languages
Georgia Southwestern State University
800 GSW State University Drive
Americus, GA 31709
Webpage: gsw.edu/bluefire
Email: bluefire@gsw.edu
Instagram: @gsw.bluefire
Cover Art: “Blue Life” by Clarissa Cervantes
Editorial Staff
Faculty Advisor
Alaina Kaus
Editors
Sam Gainous
Amari Rudison
Alex Morton
Cover Design
Sam Gainous
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our gratitude to the Department of English and Modern Languages as well as to the College of Arts and Sciences for generous financial support.
We also thank Blue Argo and Penny Dearmin for providing feedback on selected submissions, Lauren DiPaula for suggesting editing resources, Genie Bryan for helping to proofread, and those at Smartpress for answering our many questions. Thanks also to Dearmin and Jennifer Ryer for your continual support and wisdom throughout the making of this publication.
Finally, we are indebted to everyone who submitted work this semester. Your belief in the power of storytelling and artistic expression makes Blue Fire possible. Thank you.
Contents
Letter from the Editors
Creative Nonfiction DADDY Katherine LeJeune
Lipstick Feminist Genie Bryan
Quilts Sam Gainous
Through Her River Maven Coston
Fiction A
thought poorly timed Zachary Rock Monnier
The Nanny Suzanne Kamata
William D. Baker
The Vapor and the Dusk
Andrew Bellacomo
Poetry
For Millennia Without Nighttime
Robert Hughey
Spirit, Return to Me
(I Call My Spirit Back to Me)
Robert Hughey
Butterfly
Michael Willingham
juke box memories
Joseph A Farina
stay just a little bit longer Joseph A Farina
in their time
Joseph A Farina
Tiphanie Butler
Tyeshia Walker
This Is the Moment Then J.M. Summers
The Lost Soul
Jimmy Encinia
The Remnant of Love
Jimmy Encinia
Schadenfreude
Donovan Bettis
DREAMING
Brian Mallett
right person, wrong time Emily Fea
Trapped Within Emily Fea
Song Lyrics Bars Across My Window
Colonel Jon David Marsh
Visual Art Sunflowers
Esther Sprott
Yellow Coneflowers
Esther Sprott
Where is my mind?
Jackson Dunagan
Jackson Dunagan
Lee Tupper
Emily Crenshaw
Cervantes
Letter from the Editors
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Blue Fire. Featuring works of creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, and visual art by those within and beyond the GSW community, this issue celebrates literary and visual artists at home and those stretching across the globe.
The pieces included in the following pages make us pause and linger. They represent what we believe to be bold, unexpected, and vibrant. We are grateful to our contributors who trusted us with their work and to you, our readers, for being part of this journey.
We hope this collection moves you, resonates with you, and perhaps ignites a spark of inspiration within you.
Warmly,
Sam Gainous
Amari Rudison
Alex Morton
Creative Nonfiction
DADDY
Katherine LeJeune
Chapter 1: Daddy’s the Worst
My dad is the worst. He can’t even take care of himself. My mom tried to leave my dad alone with me and my twin brother as babies for three days. On the first day he forgot to buckle me in my stroller so I fell out and broke my arm. He is also just dumb. My baby cousin was recently born and he tried to burp her and she started laughing like there was no tomorrow. He also can’t handle any money. Whenever we get bills, he just tells my mom to do it. He won’t trust my mom when she is driving. She has been driving for almost as long as he has. My dad is so weak. Bro uses five-pound weights and still grunts when he does curls. His younger sister uses ten-pound weights. One time I held the weights in my hand with my arms spread out for one minute and beat his record. My uncle Patrick is so much better. One time my uncle punted a football like three times further than my dad. My dad picks his toe and fingernails. One time he picked his toe so much it started bleeding so now every time he does it we call it the blood sock. Once my mom went on a business trip and guess who was packing lunches. I was! Sometimes we will be running late for school, and he’ll say “I forgot my keys” and then he’ll go back into the house for like five minutes, then finally come to the car when we’re standing outside in the cold waiting for him. Yes, I love him, but he could do better.
Chapter 2: Daddy’s So Cringe
My dad is possibly the cringiest person in the entire world. He
can’t even make a funny joke. I can’t tell you how many times he told a joke and nobody laughed. Some of his jokes are just terrible movie references. Like he says something about a specific scene from a movie and nobody gets it so he explains it and we still don’t get it. My dad is just so emotional. One time, we were watching a Mark Rober video about a crow doing cool things and he cried because the crow gave a chicken nugget to a picture of its owner. Like it’s not that serious. My dad loves chess so he assembles a chess tournament every year and he cried during a speech he said. He didn’t even mention me for baking like two hundred muffins for all the contestants. My dad said he would work out every night like two months ago and he hasn’t done it since but when he did do it he acted all tough but he always made these cringe grunting noises when he did it. My uncle can lift like two hundred pounds. He actually is tough.
Chapter 3: Daddy Can’t Cook
My dad can’t cook anything. He literally can’t cook food, but he also can’t cook at video games. He sucks at retro bowl and my ten-year-old brother is better than him even though my dad is like ten times older than him. Getting to the literal part, my dad doesn’t even know how to put pre-made fries in the air fryer. He himself only eats cereal and has like ten bowls a day. My dad loves coffee but sometimes he can’t even make it. For example, a little while ago he forgot to put his cup under the coffee maker and stained his rug at his office. He can make a good mac and cheese sometimes but also a few times he overcooked the pasta to where the pasta was falling apart. One time he was trying to warm up a Wendy’s breakfast muffin but forgot to take off the tin foil wrapping so he almost blew up his office building. He puts Pop Tarts and Toaster Strudels in the microwave. Sometimes, he burns Eggo waffles. Which I didn’t even know was possible when you put the toaster on a set temperature. Only once did he cook something which was French toast and that was like thirteen years ago and somehow he has gotten worse. When I was talking to him about this he said “I have baked cookies before” and he
did but he used pre-made cookie dough and he also didn’t make it into balls. He used the already cut squares. During a chess tournament against grownups, I got the same score as him. So he can’t cook at that either.
Chapter 4: Daddy Can’t Do Anything
My dad really can’t do anything. He can’t even punt a football to the right place. Like I’ll be standing in the middle of the yard and he’ll kick it way over to the driveway. My dad also can’t plan anything. For example, I planned our big summer trip this year seven months in advance. He can’t even plan a playdate. He always tells my mom if I’m at work then other kids can come over, and that’s his idea of a playdate. He can’t follow directions. So like we will be trying to get home and my mom tells him to turn left and he just doesn’t do it. He can’t even follow directions to a kids’ craft kit. We will be trying to make something and he’ll completely mess it up then just try to laugh it off but he ruined it. My dad can’t take care of himself AT All! My mom has to do everything for him. She cleans his clothes, his dishes, and she has to clean his mind of all the childish things he is always saying. He can’t even make the bed. He can’t drink any water. He only drinks coffee and Coke. He doesn’t even drink water at supper or breakfast. He also can’t remember anything. He will say, I’ll be there in ten minutes, and I’ll wait twenty minutes and I’ll ask him when he’ll be there and he’ll say, oh I forgot. He also keeps no promises. Like I got a science kit for Christmas and he said that he will do some experiments every weekend and it’s been three months and guess how many times he’s done it, twice. Three weeks ago he said he will get me a bookshelf that week and he hasn’t got it for me. He can’t go shopping either. Last time he went alone he bought moldy tomatoes that we couldn’t eat. Every day, he comes home from work complaining about what happened that day but he calls it the best thing ever. Like do you like it or not.
Chapter 5: Daddy’s So Old
My dad is so old that he only watches the news. When I’m trying to watch a movie he always says put on Smerconish or something. Even though he is like 85 he still acts like a baby. When we ask him what he wants for a gift he just asks for underwear, socks, razors, and deodorant. He has so many grey hairs that it looks like he put tinsel in his head. His hearing is so bad that he has to wear earplugs to basketball games at the rec center. He has a receding hairline that makes his forehead huge, and his hair is so thin that you can see flaky scalp under it. He’s so old that he likes unfrosted Pop Tarts. The best part is the frosting. He also likes the strawberry one the most and not Oreo. I like Oreo the best. Even though he doesn’t like frosting on his Pop Tart he still puts All the frosting on his toaster strudel which makes no sense. He’s so old he likes reading. He was even born in the 1980’s. My dad would rather watch Morning Joe than watch Sing 2. When we play football my dad usually tells us he’s too old to run around so we just stand there and pass the ball.
Chapter 6: Daddy’s So Childish
My dad is so childish. He picks his nose even though he told me not to when I was younger. He also watches kids’ shows. He likes Beast Games even though he complains it’s a bad show for kids. He whines so much. He always tells my mom “don’t bully me” even though she didn’t do anything. All she did was tell him to go to bed. Which brings me to my next point. He is under my mom’s control. She tells him to do all the things we have to do. But, he doesn’t have to eat his veggies at dinner, which I think is totally not fair. He acts even younger than we are. He looks like he’s eighty but he acts like he is two. He whines, makes potty jokes, and plays retro bowl all day. He even has chores. He has to do the laundry, fold the clothes, and sometimes do the dishes. He complains too much for how old he is. He throws a fit every time he doesn’t get his way. Sometimes he gets jealous when we get toys at Christmas.
Chapter 7: Daddy’s So Weird
My dad is probably the weirdest person you will ever meet. My dad ALWAYS walks on his toes. He is literally always lying because that adds like three inches to his height. One time, my mom told my dad to squat and he couldn’t keep his heels on the ground. That explains why he walks like that. My dad reads too much. He reads for like an hour every day. Now don’t get me wrong, I like to read. I actually read thirty minutes every day. But sometimes when I ask to play outside he’ll say, “After I read,” and then it gets so dark we can’t play when he could just read later. I am writing this book all by myself so it’s kind of hard to fit in thirty minutes of reading and writing a day because I get home at five every day. But my dad still tells me to read. My dad has a cyst on his head and he won’t remove it. Finally after like thirty years of having it he’s finally getting it taken off. He always makes up a story that my mom hit him on the head, and that’s what caused it. But half the time it’s a broomstick and the other half it’s a frying pan. He says that she hit him so hard he forgot. My dad has way too much coffee. He drinks like seven cups a day. Coffee is supposed to make you energetic. But my dad drinks it to fall asleep. I think he’s had so much he’s immune to the side-effects. My dad has so much cereal. Sometimes he has cereal for supper! For Christmas, we got him some Old Spice Christmas additions. He said this year that’s all he wants. He has so much Old Spice he’s basically tried all the scents (there’s like one hundred of them) and he tells us every morning which one he uses like it’s a big deal.
Chapter 8: Mommy
My mom is the best person in the world. She keeps our family together. Without her, I would probably be dead. She takes care of me and my brother as if my dad were one year old. When I was born, my dad only left work one day to take care of me. My mom cooks, cleans, and takes care of all our money (in other words, we would have to take care of ourselves if mom were not here). My mom even takes care of my dad. She makes him
food, does his laundry, and schedules his doctor appointments. My mom makes the most delicious foods. My favorite is sesame chicken. She also buys the best Christmas gifts. She bought me everything I wanted and my dad waited until there were three days left till Christmas. Mommy also buys all the good snacks. She buys us these big boxes of Cheez-its, Lays, and Takis. She buys me and my brother clothes every single month. She also does all the yard work (except for mowing). Like just now she was shoveling snow off our porch while daddy said it’s just water that will melt, even though yesterday the cat almost died because it was afraid to walk on the snow and wouldn’t come from under the porch. Daddy says he loves the cat more than mommy but mommy always feeds it. Mommy has to think of EVERYTHING.
Lipstick Feminist
Genie Bryan
I love makeup. I am unapologetic about this. I was informed by a serious feminist in graduate school that I couldn’t be a good feminist if I wore makeup. We all know the type. If you went to graduate school, she was sitting on the other side of the seminar table from you. She was the one who refused to read Moby Dick because some scholar published an article that suggested Melville hit his wife. I read the novel. I got an “A” in the seminar, and I still wear makeup. And lipstick. Lots of lipstick. My handbag currently contains fifteen shades of lipstick. I never know what my mood will be. Russet is my color when I am feeling at my most Elder Goth—a change from my youthful Goth days when I could go darker. Velvet Sorcery is a slightly subtler shade for days when I am fairly certain I should try to appear a bit more professional. Lolita, the remaining tubes from a discontinued line, reflects my often-hidden Goth true self but a little less dramatically than Russet. Chocolate Mousse was my wedding lipstick. It was me the day I got married in black and green. Besides, my husband liked it. Maybe we’re both a little Goth? I grieved the loss of Black Lily—lost to the company’s decision to no longer be a cruelty free brand. Cathedral, from the discontinued line, is a still hoarded favorite. Pink Chocolate was a longtime favorite; I bought multiple tubes of this one before the brand left behind its morals about animal testing. The first tube was bought for me by my cosmetics loving mother on one of our bonding trips to the makeup counter at Parisian’s, a long-gone department store.
She used to tell me when I was an angsty teenager/college/ grad student, “Put on some lipstick; you’ll feel better.” It was often good advice. Some things did feel better with Pink Chocolate on my thin lips. That was a standby color for years until it wasn’t. Just red enough for drama but with enough of a brown undertone for my skin color. She taught me this about color when I was disconsolate about not being able to wear true reds like my best friend. Mom was right about a lot of things. And she chose that color for me.
It’s strange now how lipstick has become a symbol of our relationship and her love for me. Once, after completing my PhD comprehensive exams, I arrived home completely wrung out by the experience. She took one look at me and said, “Oh, honey, you need some color.” And we were off. Off for an afternoon of lipstick shopping, lunch, and the kind of talk I only had with her. She bought Amber Glass for me that trip. That tube is long gone now, but I carried it in my bag for years. It reminded me that I was profoundly loved by the most amazing mother a girl could have had. She knew me in a way no one else ever will—we were friends.
She raised me to be strong, independent, and intelligent. She always told me to get every minute of education I could get my hands on. She wanted to be an academic or a doctor; the era and her upbringing left her behind just as all the other feminists were emerging on college campuses. In 1959, her family told her she could get married, be a nurse, or be a secretary. She chose to be a nurse because that allowed her to go away to college. She lived through my experiences, reading along with me while I was in grad school. So there we were, buying Amber Glass, as I told her about my answers on my exams in between color trials. Lunch talk had me telling her all about my explanation of Melville’s dark answer to transcendentalism, “Melville thrust a harpoon through the optimism of transcendentalism” (Yep, I wrote that on my exam; Mom found it hilarious.).
So don’t tell me I can’t be a feminist while wearing foundation and eyeliner and eye shadow and blush and mascara and, yes,
lipstick. My mother was a southern feminist before she even heard the word. And she gave me the choice to believe in my own strength as a woman.
Sometimes I can’t face the mirror long enough these days to apply those beautiful colors to my crooked lips. Nevertheless, the memories of her are still so clear from watching her do her beautiful face as a youngling to taking me lipstick shopping as an adult. But all the colors are still there, in my bag and collected in containers on my dresser, when I want them.
And I’m sure she’s still thinking, “Oh, hell, Genie. Just put it on. You’ll feel better.”
She was right. And she was a great feminist. Lipstick and all.
Quilts
Sam Gainous
There is a quilt in the backroom of a small house that sits on 1st Street.
It is mine.
My grandmother sewed all her life, or at least all my life. She crocheted afghans, made clothes for all four of her daughters, including their bridesmaids’ dresses for their weddings, sewed little shirts and overalls and dresses for all six of her grandchildren, and hemmed pants for my dad and her sons-inlaw. Anything with a needle and thread. But her most glorious work was her quilts.
Nana had six grandchildren, and so she made each of us a quilt to be given to us on our wedding day. She made it to all of their weddings, but she will not be at mine. And so, my quilt sits in limbo in the back room of what was once Nana and Papa’s house but is now just Papa’s.
I spent most of the first five years of my life in this tiny little house that belongs to my grandparents. Nana tried to teach me the things she knew and while my skills are nothing compared to what she could do, I know more than my aunts or my cousins. Maybe that is what makes me long for this quilt. I have plenty of quilts from her, one of them rests on my bed at home, but this one—it was made for me. From her chair, she showed me how to hem a pair of pants if they were just too long, how to tack a quilt with the tiny little bows of white thread, how to cross stitch with a hoop in my lap, and how to painstakingly piece together a quilt top. Nana made this one for me. She sewed every stitch sitting in
her chair, by hand, and it is the last thing I will ever get from her. I worry that someone will try to take it before I can even see it. Nana liked to keep the designs a secret from all of us. I worry that it will disappear and be claimed before I can get it. My mother’s three oldest sisters are ruthless about this sort of thing. They were arguing about what jewelry they were going to get before my grandmother’s grave was even dug. A few quilts have disappeared from the backroom along with a few other things, courtesy of my aunt who lives in Florida taking them after she left from Nana’s funeral.
My mother is not one to argue. She is like my grandmother in that way. She is the peacemaker, just as Nana once was. She wants me to have my grandfather’s wedding ring. She says my first diamond should be from the family and that all of the sisters and her niece have one, so I need one. I do not think I will get the diamond. I only want my quilt.
I do not know what my quilt looks like. It could be in the design of a maple leaf, or the engagement ring design that I was never a fan of, or maybe a fan design, spreading across the length of the blanket. I imagined it would be blue, or maybe green, but something light and airy. It’ll be queen sized, not too thick because we do live in South Georgia. Or maybe it’ll be something completely different.
My quilt is in limbo, in purgatory. I will not be married soon so I know not when I will receive it. For now, I only have my memories of my Nana and the small sewing projects that have been in my life since I breathed the first time. My quilt is stuck between the land of gifting and the land of taking. I will not be given the quilt as I had seen Nana do before; there will be nothing more given from Nana. I will simply have to take it.
I am jealous of my cousins and aunts and my mom. They got her for so long, but I only got her for sixteen years. She was at their weddings and she saw their children be born; she was at their high school and college graduations. She got to see them grow up. I’m almost angry. It’s hardly fair that they got to see her as this woman who could drive and do things and go places;
they knew her when she was healthy and young. I only knew her while she was sick. I don’t remember her not taking medicine for her heart, or without white hair, or without the cane and later the walker.
I feel guilty of the anger I feel. I should be grateful I got her at all, but it seems that since she has passed, it has all gone to hell. I can’t help but want to scream. Papa’s mind is going, and he’s getting restless and ornery as all old men do. One of my aunts wants to put him in a home, but I would rather go to jail for her murder than allow them to put my grandpa away.
Papa hasn’t been the same since Nana left the world of the living. He told someone, just a few days after, that all he wanted was to live long enough to take care of her. That’s all he wanted, and that’s what he got. They were married for sixty-eight years, and I can’t understand how he didn’t fall apart while the rest of us were. And now he is messing up his medication and is arguing with all of us and he calls me Janis or Donna and I’m okay with that because some days he looks at me and I’m not sure he even knows my name, but he always calls me “baby.” I can’t remember what Nana used to call me. I don’t even really remember her voice. Her voice in my head has been taken over by everyone else yelling.
The family started arguing and haven’t stopped for six years. They all want the jewels and the house and the pictures and everything in between. I am tired of the arguing. I just want there to be a peace again. I really just want Nana again. I want to have her here. I want to show her all the things she has missed. I just want Nana back.
Nana passed in December of 2018, just a few weeks before Christmas. She was at home, and it was quick and I am grateful. I am grateful she went when she did because I remember her telling my dad that she couldn’t take losing another son. I am grateful she did not have to go through the loss of my uncle the following August. I am grateful she was at home in her bed, under her flowered blanket because it wasn’t cold enough yet for her to break out one of her quilts. I am grateful I had just spent
the last Saturday with her, putting up her Christmas tree, topped with a red handmade angel. My mother was not crying when my father and I got to the small house on 1st Street. I was, but I am the dramatic one, as my mom says. I couldn’t go into the small house. A lot of people were there and I get anxious in big crowds so I sat outside, avoiding the stifling heat that would have made the small house feel like the hell I thought I was in.
I didn’t want to go in because I don’t think I could have looked at Papa. I did go in eventually, only for about five minutes. Papa was sitting in his chair and Nana’s chair was horribly empty. She was still in the house. The funeral home was yet to come. I couldn’t see her; I didn’t want to see her. Then I was escaping out the back door with tears in my eyes and the desire to scream at anyone and everyone clawing at my throat. I sat in a swing that I had sat in many times, with Nana. I looked at her flower bed that looked awful because it was winter so there was no need to keep it up at that moment in time. It was almost peaceful. The last moments of peace before the planning started and the subsequent arguing that comes in planning a funeral and apparently never stops. I sat outside in a wooden swing. And that is where I mourned. I mourned for the loss of my grandmother and the gift of her quilt.
The visitation was on a Thursday night—the night of our town’s Christmas parade. It was the first band event I had ever missed. We were in the church where I grew up, and not for the first time, I absolutely hated being there. She was placed right at the altar, her light blue casket clashing with the awful green carpet, but surrounded by hundreds of flowers, so carefully arranged into her last garden to tend. I couldn’t look at her. I wanted my memories to be of her alive, not lying in a casket.
I was so angry that night, and every time I look back to it, I can only see the line of people out the door and remember how much my feet hurt because I wasn’t allowed to kick off my heels, everything else a haze of grief except one crystal clear memory. Her sister’s granddaughter was there, sobbing openly into her grandmother’s arms, making a fuss about how much she missed
“Aunt Betty.” I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to push her away from where she was standing over Nana. I wanted to tell her that it was not right for her to be acting like this because I had to be composed and didn’t want to cry. It wasn’t her grandmother, she wasn’t in the receiving line of family, she only saw her once a year. This lady lying in the coffin was my Nana, mine. No one else had a right to be openly sobbing except my family. I was hers; this girl was nothing. I should have been the one crying into my mom’s arms, but I wasn’t. I just shared a look with my mom and ignored it.
Nana’s funeral was lovely. There were so many flowers from everyone. I hardly remember a word said. We had it filmed so that my uncle who was bedridden could watch it. Perhaps one day I will watch it. I was tucked between my dad and my other uncle wearing a black dress and ugly black heeled boots that I haven’t worn since.
One thing that brings me comfort is my mom. She is my Nana’s youngest child, just like I am Nana’s youngest grandchild. She looks like Nana. Her hands are Nana’s hands, and sometimes I’ll look at them and for just a minute I can pretend that they are attached to the woman I am thinking of.
I want to tell Nana about everything. I want to show her my high school diploma. I want to show her my new haircut. I want to talk to her again. I want to watch her sew again. I want to see her open the little jar of silk roses that sat in the window by her sewing machine again. I want her to be more than a picture in a frame at my wedding. I want her to be in the pictures. I want her to hold my first daughter that will have her middle name just as my mom and I do. I just want her.
I am selfish. I know she lived a happy long life, but it wasn’t long enough. Just another year, another two, another ten. But she was sick, and I don’t think I could keep her here longer knowing she was suffering. But I am a selfish girl who just wants her grandmother back, but I will make do with what I have. I have the hazy memories, and the photos, and most of all I will have her quilt.
Through Her River
Maven Coston
I can recall the drives over to downtown Albany, Georgia. I never lived too far from downtown, but far enough to stretch about a fifteen-minute drive. Most of the drive consisted of a highway that led us out of the suburbs in which I lived, and all you could see were trees and cars that you’d occasionally pass on the linear road. I had to have been thirteen. I was going through the normal stages of teen angst at the time. I hated my city more than ever. I hated school, and overall, anything and everything that caused minor annoyance to me.
Without a second glance, one could believe my fury was unjustifiable—but I had my reasons. These included the hot summers that would melt me from heat every year, the bigoted and common right-leaning democratic views that left a bitter taste in my mouth, and as far as people, they tended to be pretty violent and unruly. This is not to say that it is not like this elsewhere, like in northern cities, but I found it made more sense to have such problems in bigger places, instead of some place relatively small. I have a soul that yearns for the bright city lights and downtown nightlife, aspiring for experiences much bigger and better than those Georgia provides for me.
I stayed in most of my days for these reasons, and rarely did I wish to leave my sacred living quarters, which had everything I needed. My video games, books, tv, mini fridge, microwave. One would’ve thought I was living in my own apartment. Georgia’s earthly environment surrounded me since I was young, engulfing me with an embrace of southern appeal wherever I
went, despite my strong will to run away and never look back. It beckoned me to stay with much success. That success lay within the flora and fauna of the area. One day, in particular, was a day of contentment for me. It was a day when I reconciled with my mother-land, and I began to appreciate the little things she offered me.
I was in the downtown area—near our city aquarium, near the restaurants that smelled only of things a normal person could not afford, and near tall buildings that loomed over you, as though they were too tall to stand on their own two feet. But it was summer, and downtown was not what I was here for. I was here for the sound of running water below the bridge and down a lengthy hill. I felt a longing to stay cool and thought no better than to indulge in my natural craving for atmospheric relief. I trotted downward to the sound of the babbling brook, feeling the temperature drop significantly with every forthcoming step. The steepness of the hill, if one were not careful, could cause an adult to revert to a toddler as their weight is pulled forward before them. Resistance was needed in this situation, in the sense that I was one hundred pounds of nothing when faced with the pull of gravity and blow of the humid wind coming my way.
The sign read “The Flint River” as I arrived upon some creaking wooden steps, held together by rusty nails and thick rusted poles. I stood for a minute, taking in the cooler breeze I felt down there. Trees covered the sky above, providing a canopy of adequate shade for comfort, and the smell around you, strong, of salt water and fish—you could almost taste it. I sat down, taking off my pearl-colored sandals that hurt my feet on the walk downward, and I dipped my feet in the water. The water felt like a light massage and tickle between the toes, and I’d occasionally wiggle them whenever a pebble or two got caught in between. I looked around, finally taking in my environment in totality. I saw frogs perched upon the dock further down on which I sat, peering over in what I assumed was anticipation on where to jump. They did eventually, spraying me with the riverfront mist that wet my face and hair mildly. I looked beneath me and
saw small fish and leafy plants further in the river and down the stream. The stream was consistent and fluid, fast paced yet gentle, and shallow at the end where I was. I started to stand in the water and walked down the side, as any further forward, I would have been in the deep water and swept away with little chance of going against the current. I kneeled down closer to get a better view of the tiny world below me that I was trespassing, and I saw rocks, lonely jewelry, and spurs of movement.
I would come to know that this moment would mean the world in its entirety to me. I saw what it was like to be Zeus to a world of Olympians. I bathed in the presence of my mother nature, Georgia. This was not something I could get from city streets and subway stations. No, this was an experience that would help me understand where I come from. This ground fed me for thirteen years, this water flowed here for thirteen years, this placed existed here for thirteen years just waiting for me to discover it—to give her another chance to stay. To be happy. To be content. This small city life had its charm in its peaceful hours, its secret covens you’d discover only by asking around or looking closely at shop signs. There was no getting bored, there was no getting tired, and if you had nothing, you had this land. In the time I loved nothing, I had this river. In the time of childhood grief, I had nature. In the time I hated everything the most, I had Georgia.
It was not something I was meant to understand then. Only now do I feel a connection to where I belong. I could have been born anywhere, yet this experience is not something that could be mimicked elsewhere. I was meant to live here joyfully. Happily, even. I was meant to learn a lesson of being able to appreciate what I had, the small things. The times with my friends when the mall was the only thing to do, the times when church was the only thing open on Sundays—and the time when I crossed that high school graduation stage and knew every face in the small crowd. In that crowd, I saw a vast sea of people who would branch into a river of their own opportunities. They would branch off to new lives through a river. I appreciate this life, in
Southwest Georgia, through her river.
Fiction
A good thought poorly timed
Zachary Rock Monnier
Why do the most important ideas come at the most useless moments?
Ori pondered this question as he plummeted to the quickly approaching and very unwelcoming flagstones beneath him. They had looked quite small and positively idyllic a few moments ago, when he was much higher up in the air. As time both sped up and came to a standstill for Ori, he began to critically examine the contents of his mind. Mostly because this was preferable to thinking about how those inner thoughts would soon be spilt all over the cobbles.
Why hadn’t he pressed his employer for more details about the job? A wiser and likely longer living rogue would have wanted to know about the little things. Like traps, poisoned tea cakes, and soldiers with 8-foot-long pikes. Ori, blinded by the large sum of money proffered as a reward for a job well done, now saw the answer to this question was worth his entire bodyweight in gold. The way things had gone—discovering each of those little things as they came—had made for a truly miserable exercise. Sure, he was quite nimble and managed to keep all of his appendages intact when the trap went off. Unfortunately, the acrobatics caused him to be stuck in a small guest suite of the castle which seemed to have been built for visitors who are meant to sleep there on a permanent basis. With no way out and the hours wearing on, some tea cakes on a small table began to look quite appetizing to him. Amazing how boredom and hunger can dull the rational mind to such a degree. Granted, the antidote
his wiser partner had packed for him allowed him to rally. Which makes it a shame, really, that the sound of his cursing and coughing as he fumbled for the vial alerted the guards of his presence. And yes, yes, alright the soldiers did not seem to be eager to chase after him much once he left the immediate range of their pikes.
It’s just . . . the reason behind that last stroke of luck was because Ori had defenestrated himself out of a window and very, very few guards get paid enough to follow along an act like that. Which brings us back to the present predicament.
With a dejected sigh, Ori stopped thinking about the past to focus on more pressing matters. Like gravity.
The Nanny
Suzanne Kamata
Keiko was in her favorite rattan chair watching TV when the helper arrived.
“Hello, Nishi-san,” the young woman said. She had purple streaks in her hair and a pierced septum, but she was kind— maybe second or third generation Japanese.
Keiko gave her a nod and a grunt. She couldn’t remember names anymore.
“Ready for your tea?”
“Unh.” Keiko heard the rustle of shopping bags, and knew that the helper had brought groceries, probably from Little Tokyo Marketplace down the street. She hoped the young woman had remembered to get Yakult. And manju. These days, she had a craving for sweets.
The woman said something else, but Keiko was distracted by a news flash on the TV. The sound was muted, but she saw the images. Someone had died, suddenly and tragically. Someone beautiful and relatively young. A woman, daughter of a famous singer. Keiko gasped. She had known that woman as a little girl. She tried to say as much, but her words came out garbled and strange.
The helper rushed over and put a hand on her shoulder, her forehead creased in alarm. “Are you okay? Should I call someone?”
Keiko shook her head, but tears filmed her eyes. “The king,” she managed to blurt out, pointing to the TV in the corner. “Love me. Tender. Little girl.”
But the broadcast had already shifted to another topic.
“I think this is upsetting you,” the helper said. She reached for the remote control. “Here, let’s change it to something else.” She clicked to a nature program: animals in the desert. Sand. Frilled lizards. They watched together in silence. After a moment, the helper went off to the kitchen to make her a cup of tea.
Keiko kept quiet, concentrating. Yes, the names eluded her, but she could still remember reading the notice in the newspaper all those many years ago when she was young and ambitious, and then going to the office for an interview.
“Can you keep secrets, young lady?” the man behind the desk had asked.
Keiko had nodded.
The interviewer, who had worked for the king and his bighaired wife, the chilly lady with the heavy eyeliner, had told her that they liked Japanese workers because they were polite and discreet. Plus, Keiko had experience taking care of her younger brothers and sisters. She had gotten the job.
She had packed her little suitcase and gotten on an airplane for the first time in her life. She had flown almost all the way across the country, marveling at the changes in landscape as she peered from the window—desert, canyons, green fields. From the airport in Memphis, she was whisked to the white mansion in a stretch limousine. She remembered the young women gathered at the gate in their pedal pushers and sunglasses, waiting for a glimpse of the king.
The king’s daughter was a wild thing, a thin pale girl, with straight staticky blonde hair, who’d never heard the word “no” in her life. That’s how it seemed, anyway. Keiko’s job was to follow her around and grant her every wish, to wrestle her into clothes, and mop up the floor after she’d splashed bath water all over. At first, she hadn’t liked the girl very much. She was so selfish, so spoiled. Keiko thought it might be better to get a job working in an office, typing letters, making coffee for a boss who smoked cigars. But one day the girl fell and scraped her knees right in front of her mother. Blood dripped down her shins and
she began to cry, but instead of running to that beautiful icy woman whose hair was stiff with spray, she’d rushed into Keiko’s arms. From then, Keiko had understood that the child had been deprived of affection. This understanding had softened her, and she had grown to love the child.
The king loved the child, too, but he was overindulgent. He took the girl out at night, when she should have been sleeping, driving her around the property in a golf cart. He let her eat deep fried candy bars and drink Coca Cola. He adored his daughter, but he had a temper. He had a gun, and if he saw something on TV that he didn’t like, he might shoot the screen. Keiko was afraid of him, and she did her best to stay out of his way.
The mother, the cold woman with the big hair, had an interest in Japan. She flounced around in kimono and asked Keiko questions about Japanese food and customs, not realizing that the nanny had been born and raised in Little Tokyo. Sure, she knew a lot about Japanese culture, but she had never been to Japan.
Later, after the king and the girl’s mother divorced, the little girl split her time between the two of them. Keiko went wherever the girl went—to the sultry Southern town with its moss-draped trees and heady magnolia blossoms, or to the house in Los Angeles, where the mother sometimes appeared with her karate teacher who was also her lover.
When the king died, while sitting on his toilet, a wave of grief washed over the little girl and never ebbed away. Some of the people who had surrounded the man sold their stories to tabloids, or spilled secrets on TV. Keiko, however, was not looking for money or fame. She had promised to be discreet. Even after the little girl grew up and she was no longer her nanny, she kept quiet.
The sad little girl grew into a young woman. She fell in love with a musician and got married. Keiko was invited to that wedding. She didn’t go to the next one, however—the wedding to the Black prince with the gloves and chimpanzee, or the next, to the famous actor. Nor did she attend the fourth one in Kyoto.
Keiko had wondered if the venue of that one was anything like the rooftop garden at the New Otani Hotel, where her own husband had proposed. The hotel was called something else now, and the man that she married was no longer alive. He was now interred in the Evergreen Cemetery not too far from a Japanese photographer who’d taken photos of the camp at Manzanar.
Once, when she was living an ordinary life with the husband and a daughter of her own, she found herself at a mahjong table with a woman who had appeared as an extra in several Hollywood movies. “I stood right next to—” and here she had mentioned a very famous Chinese American movie star whose name Keiko couldn’t recall. “My face was on the silver screen,” the woman had bragged, “for everyone to see.”
This would have been an opportune time for Keiko to tell this woman and the other women at the table about her brush with fame, about strutting among the peacocks on the king’s estate, and carrying his daughter, the princess, piggyback up the stairs, but she didn’t. Being silent was a form of love. She hadn’t even told her husband and daughter about what it was like to live in the service of the king’s little blonde-haired girl.
But now, she wanted to say something.
The helper appeared with a cup of steaming green tea on a tray. She set it on the table beside Keiko, along with a cellophanewrapped manju on a plate. Keiko waited patiently while she unwrapped the sweet, and put it back on the plate.
“Feeling better?” the young woman asked.
“Prin-cess,” Keiko managed. “Sad.”
“Oh, you must be thinking about that Japanese princess.” The helper nodded sagely. “The one who got kicked out of the royal family for marrying her college boyfriend. She’s in New York now, isn’t she?”
Keiko sighed. She took a sip of tea and nibbled on her manju, enjoying the flavor and texture of the bean paste.
A few minutes later, the door opened and her daughter, now middle-aged, burst into the room with the force of a hurricane. She was wearing a navy suit and her black hair was cut short, her
ears hung with gold hoops.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, swooping down to kiss her cheek. “How are you feeling?” Then, she turned to the helper. “How’s she doing today?”
The young woman with the purple-streaked hair frowned. “She seems a bit stressed out about something. She mentioned a princess? Maybe she’s delusional?”
Keiko’s daughter laughed. “Who knows what she’s thinking?” She crouched down next to her mother and peered into her face.
“I’ve got some free time this weekend. What do you want to do, Mom? I could take you shopping for a new nightgown, or maybe we could just go down to James Irvine Park and enjoy the garden? Go visit Dad’s grave?”
Keiko wanted to go to the funeral for the little blonde girl who had grown up and died, but she knew that wasn’t really possible. She had lost touch with the family, and the ceremony would probably be closed to the public. It might not even be in Los Angeles, but at that estate in Tennessee. She wasn’t up to traveling that far.
She looked her daughter in the eye, and finally, a name came to her. “Lisa,” she said.
“Yes?” Her daughter grasped her hand. “What, Mom?”
“Risa Mari.”
Her daughter squeezed her hand. Keiko squeezed back.
Indemnity
William D. Baker
Joshua’s mother has been gone a week, and it has been two days since talking to his father. The cheap townhouse rental is an oven. The refrigerator and cabinets that are sparse on the best of days are now absent of anything worth eating. It is mid-summer in Central Indiana and stifling hot, brutal hot, savage hot. Hot that breaks the air conditioner, and the landlord doesn’t fix it. Now Joshua must get on his junk bike and ride to the other end of town to find his father, because he doesn’t answer the phone. Something needs to happen before Child Protective Services discovers he is alone. The CPS lady already told his mother that she was “on her last nerve.”
Kimberly, his mother, keeps Joshua in a double on the north end of Jefferson, Indiana; streets of run down, slap together, reclaimed Army barracks from the 1950s that are now in the hands of small-town slumlords. There is not one single thing in the townhouse that is not broken, worn out, useless, or perilously close to being so.
His father, Roger, lives on the opposite end of town in a transient trailer park named Yellow Rock. Joshua asked once why it is called Yellow Rock since there are no yellow rocks or discernable colors anywhere in the park; everything, including the inhabitants, has the same coloring of desperation. The trailer is an ancient wreck of patched skirting, moldy paneling, and leaking windows.
Joshua drinks all the water he can hold and rings his father’s phone again. Maybe he is asleep after working all night. Maybe
he is out looking for his mother. Maybe he is somewhere drunk. Joshua wheels the bicycle through the front door. The outside temperature is almost unbearable, and he shucks his t-shirt, wrapping it around both sides of the bare handlebars to protect his hands as the dull chrome will be scorching within minutes. He has sun-bleached hair and skin as dark as Caucasian allows. In her drunken amusement, his mother calls him white darkie or even the N-word. His father would fight if he knew, but telling him will start an incident, and then it will no longer be about Joshua.
He sees the pink kid sunglasses on the dirt in front of the townhouse, bent and tossed there by a neighborhood child. He straightens the glasses and wears them.
Sweat pours as soon as he starts pedaling. Shorts and socks are soaked by the time he rides through Jefferson town square. No kids play outdoors. There is sparse auto traffic, and the few people outside stare at the crazy preteen boy in pink sunglasses peddling a junk bicycle at breakneck speed on the hottest day in town history. Sweat runs under his hair, stinging his eyes, but he can’t stop.
The road to Yellow Rock Trailer Park turns to gravel around the curve next to the highway department and past the mounds of rock salt staged for distant winter. Heaps of gravel and dirt and decaying mulch piles emit a low-hanging stench that goes hand in hand with the sodden heat. The sun blazes a white atrocity, and the horizon shimmers and wavers in its desolate summer dance. His heart hammers, and he is forced to breathe through his mouth, which means tasting road dust. The bicycle stirs up gravel that stings his legs. A fine gray film coats his skin like glue, and rivers of sweat turn to rivers of mud. The sunglasses become coated in the dust and thrown aside.
He passes the first trailer, abandoned with its door hanging open and windows broken. Past the empty lots overgrown with weeds, trash grass, and old septic piping sticking up at irregular intervals with bent and rusted trailer ties hidden in the growth. He ran through the empty lots last summer, tripped over one of
the hidden ties, and broke a wrist. His mother threw a fit, and his father spent time in jail. She said it was because of the wrist, but Joshua knew it was because the old man brought a bottle into the emergency room and fought with security.
Joshua stops in front of his father’s trailer. The door hangs open, and he can hear shuffling; he quickens in expectation when the hat emerges. The brown fedora he was lucky enough to find at Goodwill, lift two dollars from his mother’s purse, and buy it for his father. The old man made a big deal over it, calling it his Goodwill fedora, and Joshua didn’t know which pleased him more, the big deal or that his mother was never the wiser.
The fedora tilts, and it isn’t his father. It is Mendelssohn, the trailer park owner, a reprehensible person with a classical name. A sheep’s face looks up with sunken, watery black eyes as he slams the door behind him. He is a sloppy, filthy thing, in a stained white wife-beater shirt and soiled plaid used car salesman slacks with misshapen loafers. He sports a chewing cigar in the corner of his mouth. A thin line of brown mess drips off his chin and onto the filthy shirt. Mendelssohn is a symphony repulsive.
The wide man waddles down the stacked cinder blocks that serve as a front step. He removes the cigar, wipes his chin, then cleans his hands on the pants. “He ain’t here.” His voice is the bleat of a dying animal. “And when you see him, tell him he owes me money.” He turns away from Joshua and steps around the broken sidewalk. He stops, takes the cigar from his mouth, blocks one nostril, and blows, then walks on as the filth bakes on the side of the trailer.
Joshua drinks from the outside hose and soaks his face and body. He rides the bike into town through the suffocating, desolate summer to his Aunt Jen’s house, where he stays until graduating college.
Joshua has seen neither parent since his twelfth summer;
however, he is not surprised when his father, Roger, calls him at the office. Maybe he is a little surprised that his father is resourceful enough to find out where he works. Anna, Joshua’s wife and mother of his children, is upset. Joshua is not; he always expected the old man to show up one day, if he lived.
Joshua stands in the dingy entrance to the House of Jefferson Restaurant, a worn old establishment in a worn old Indiana town. He looks through the starred, pellet-shot glass panes of the front door and sees the old man through the kaleidoscope of damaged glass. He is fragmented and distorted but unmistakable, hunched over a coffee cup, holding a menu in one hand, and looking every minute of his late fifties. Long black and silver hair is slicked straight back. He has heavy reading glasses with a thick tortoiseshell frame and a worn hawk face that is parched leather. He is gaunt and shaky and wrinkled and dog-eared, looking like what he is, a used-up drunk. Nicotine-stained fingers tremble as he holds the laminated menu; too many years of cheap drink, too many hours of manual labor, too many generic cigarettes. He is clothed in exhausted work clothes with a threadbare jacket tossed on the seat beside him, but he looks sober. He has a big black book resting at his elbow.
Joshua stands over his father at the opposite side of the table, and both men look at one another for several seconds. A small smile turns at the corner of the father’s mouth, and Joshua sits.
Raylene, the permanent waitress, appears. “Hi Joshua, honey. Coffee?” she drawls in her Kentucky accent.
“How are you, Ray?” Joshua asks.
Raylene pours the coffee and says, “Oh, you know, honey, rolling with the flow. I still miss your Aunt Jen coming in here. What’s it been, three, four years?”
“How are Don and the boys?” Joshua asks.
“Hard to keep track of, like always,” she says.
“Hi, Raylene,” Roger says.
Raylene surveys him for a brief second. “More coffee, mister?” Roger nods, and she pours and leaves.
“That was cold. I’ve known her all my life,” his father says.
“What do you expect? This is a small town.” Joshua sips the steaming coffee.
“You look good,” his father says. The small smile curves the corners of his mouth again.
Joshua looks away and says, “You don’t look as bad as I thought.”
Roger chuckles. “That’s something, I guess.”
“Might as well get to it,” Joshua says. “What’s the occasion?”
Roger shrugs and adds nothing. He pushes the empty cup to the edge of the table for Raylene.
“Burned-out drunk? No work? Homeless? Sick?” Joshua asks.
Roger makes an X in the air. “None of the above.”
Joshua looks away.
“Serious,” Roger says, “I got a job. Place to live. Good health. Sober, a dozen years now.”
“Uh-huh,” Joshua says.
Roger pulls the collar of his shirt forward. “See, sober. Got the pins to prove it.”
Raylene appears, filling the cups. They are silent and study the thick black liquid for a moment until Joshua breaks the silence.
“Twelve steps,” he says.
“Huh?”
“You’re doing the steps,” Joshua says, “and this is the apology thing. You need to make your apologies.”
“Amends,” Roger says.
“Right,” Joshua says. “Tell you what, go back to your sponsor and say you did it and I told you where to go. Cross that step off your list.”
“That’s an odd statement coming from you,” Roger says and changes the subject. “Have you heard anything from her?”
Joshua looks at him. “In fact, I have.”
“Yeah?” His father leans forward.
“Let’s see,” Joshua says. “She said, ‘I’m going with whatever this guy’s name is for cigarettes and beer. Call your S.O.B. father
if you need anything.’ I waited two days and called my S.O.B. father, who said, ‘I’ll go find her.’ I never heard from either again and was raised by my aunt.”
Roger looks out the window a long moment, then drains the cup. “Some things never change; I had to park way over by the old hardware. It’s some kind of outdoor store now.”
“What are you doing these days?” Joshua asks.
Roger brightens. “I been living in Indy since I was sober. Work a night janitor thing. Daytimes I help at the mission.”
“Family? More kids?” Joshua almost chokes on the questions.
Roger shakes his head. “No, son. I have an off-and-on lady friend. My own little apartment. I try to give back where I can.”
Joshua notices the title of the book next to his father’s arm. The worn gold gilt lettering on the spine says Thompson Chain Reference Bible, and he gestures to it. “There’s something I never thought I would see.”
Roger looks at the book. “It goes where I go.”
“Good, if that’s what works for you, but please don’t be tempted to preach to me,” Joshua says.
“You might not believe it, but that mission and this book have been a lifeline,” Roger says. “You know, you seem kind of negative. I’m surprised, considering what you are.”
“Is that so? What do you know about me?” Joshua says.
“Enough. You’re a doctor, like a psychiatrist. A big shot at the County Mental Health. I keep tabs,” Roger says. “Not so much these last few years. I mean, not since your blessed Aunt . . . ” He stops and looks out the window.
Joshua looks at him. “Please don’t talk about her, and I’m a psychologist,” he says. “You’ve been sober all these years, minutes away, and kept tabs. So I ask again, Why now?”
Roger stares at him for a long moment. “You know why. Because you can handle it now. You know what I am. With me around all these years, you might a been in county lock, drunk, or worse. Besides, having me around was the last thing your aunt needed.”
“That’s so noble of you,” Joshua says.
Roger nods and stares at his coffee cup for a long moment. “I thought of you every day.”
“Don’t,” Joshua says.
“Every blessed, sorry day,” Roger says.
“Unbelievable.”
“Yeah,” Roger says. They toy with their cups.
“Did you even look for her?” Joshua asks.
“I did,” his father says. “Not at first, after I got sober a few years. By then, most people was moved on. She has cousins still around if you can find them, but none knew anything or would tell me. I run into people from time to time. She’s in Texas, California, Georgia. Take your pick. Did you look?”
“I didn’t look for either of you. I always thought that if you wanted me, you would come around.”
Roger nods and stares at his hands on the table. They are silent.
“You parked by the outfitters?” Joshua asks.
“Yeah.”
“Is that your coat?” Joshua indicates the worn jacket.
Roger looks at it. “Yeah.”
Joshua finds his wallet and places two hundred-dollar bills on the table. “It is going to be cold this week. Go into that outfitter and get a coat and gloves.”
Roger studies the bills and pushes them back. “Can’t do that.”
“It is cold. Get yourself a coat,” Joshua says.
“You don’t understand. I can’t wear some designer coat into the mission,” Roger says.
Joshua thinks. “OK then, go out to Walmart on 31 and get a coat.”
Roger studies the bills a moment longer and pushes one of them back across the table. “Coat don’t cost that at Walmart. I’ll bring you the change.”
“Keep it. Get groceries or whatever.”
“I’ll bring it the next time I see you, and that’s a promise.” The old man looks out the window a long moment. He says, “I could come down here once in a while for coffee.”
“Why?” Joshua asks and sees a vague watering of his father’s eyes.
“Seeing you again, that and the Lord himself, it’s what kept me going all these years,” Roger says.
“God damn you, Roger,” Joshua says.
“I don’t think he does.” Roger puts his hand on the book and looks at his son. “That may be hard to believe, but that’s what it says.”
Joshua stands and tosses bills on the table for the check. He takes a business card from his wallet and writes a number on it, then leaves it with the money. “Give it some time, then call me. The card has my personal number.” He leaves the House of Jefferson.
Joshua sits in the midnight blue Lexus across from the diner. He doesn’t know much about astronomy, but he notices the stars and planets beginning to sparkle and shine on the purple, black velvet of the darkening sky. They are varying pinpoints of stark white, bold and numerous, dominating the expanse until the dense clouds of an approaching snowstorm cover them over. He watches the door of the House of Jefferson, and Roger emerges with his jacket pulled close to block the Indiana winter. He shuffles down the sidewalk with the Bible under one arm, toward his fall-apart pickup truck.
Joshua sees his father pass in front of Jimmy’s Place with its fogged windows, chipped paint, and sputtering neon Stroh’s sign. Roger never hesitates, walking around patrons as they hustle into the bar. He pauses at Red Rose Liquors and talks to Kenny Hoffman, standing in front of the store with a brown bag under his arm. His father shivers, puffs out steam, and lights a cigarette. Hoffman is joined by other town drinkers; they all talk. His father tosses the cigarette in the snow and moves on to his truck.
Joshua questions: Can he walk past the town watering hole, past the town liquor store, and past the town drunks? He has. Will he buy the coat? Will I hear from him again? He can’t decide.
Does he know I’m here? He doesn’t think so, but with people like this, you can never be sure of anything.
A spatter of new snow covers the windshield, and he activates the wipers. He sees the increasing dusk usher the uncertain night with its amending potential. Anna will be getting the children bathed and ready to settle down for the evening. Joshua will be home soon and be able to spend time with them.
The rusty pickup truck passes. Joshua watches it turn on Jefferson Street and sees the Christian fish decal on the tailgate; it is the same decal he has on the Lexus. He notices the gun rack in the rear truck window dangling a beat-up brown hat.
The Vapor and the Dusk
Andrew Bellacomo
On nights when the moon was full and the sky was clear, he took long walks silent and alone. His eyes strained at first in the dim, metallic light, but they strengthened and grew accustomed to it with time. He always walked in secret. He stole out without telling anyone. The nights were quiet and that quiet haunted him all the time now. He sought it and he did not know why.
He walked along the road in the dark. The road was a ribbon of silver. No cars. A soft wind. When he walked along the road at night he was as alert as a hunted animal. His heart beat fast, his senses were heightened. At every sound, the hair stood on the back of his neck.
He always walked in the direction of the water. He walked down in elevation as if something in his animal body felt that was the only way to go. He walked toward the creek that was a tributary of the Oconee River. He walked past an old sharecropper cabin, windows boarded up with corrugated tin. Dark moss gathering around the base of its stone chimney, rain lilies planted long ago, still blooming in the area around the cabin, petals yellow white in the moonlight. The closest things to ghosts he had ever seen.
At the creek bank he stood for a long while, staring against the slick surface of the water. It was so quiet in the still of the night. His feet sunk into the soft waterlogged sand. He crouched down and saw a deer skull half-buried at the water’s edge, its polished teeth forming a startling grin, nostril and eye socket tight packed with sand. He looked at it a long time. It was
fascinating somehow. He didn’t know why.
When he looked back over the water his eyes caught a form that had not been there before. Its pale body standing out against the dark masses of vegetation on the far bank, a panther was crouched lapping water from the creek. It made no sound at all. The second he caught sight of it, its eyes met his and they sat staring at each other for a long time. Neither, it seemed, could look away. A current of primal fear and wonder ran between them. Its eyes were two liquid pools of black. Perfectly circular. Alert in ways he had never thought to consider.
In an instant, it was gone. In one fluid movement it sprang back into the thicket from which it must have emerged, though, to Russell, it felt like something that had materialized out of the still, dark air.
When he told his father the next day about the panther, he didn’t believe him.
“We hadn’t had panthers in this part of the country in a hundred years,” he told him. “You sure it wasn’t a bobcat?”
“What happened to them? Did people kill them?”
“Yeah people killed ‘em. And built on their land, killed what they ate.”
“What do they eat?”
“Anything they can catch I reckon.”
“What, like deer?”
“Yeah.”
His father took a long draw from his cigarette and threw it on the ground and crushed the butt under his boot.
“You better get on back in there and study.”
“It wasn’t no bobcat I saw.”
“Ok then. Now go on.”
“You believe me though?”
“I believe you really think you saw a panther.”
“But you don’t believe I saw a panther?”
Russell’s father looked at him for a long second. Searing blue stare.
“No. I don’t. I don’t because there’s no panthers out here.
Not no more. Every now and then somebody walks out of the woods swearing up and down they saw something that ain’t there, or that ain’t there no more. Panthers, wolves, hell, a damn yeti, whatever. But they didn’t see none of it. You know what they saw? They saw their own imagination. A little imagination ain’t a bad thing when you’re a kid but it can be dangerous if you get carried away with it once you get older like you are now. Sixteen’s a man. The best thing you can do is what’s in front of you. If you look in front of you there’s always some work to be done and that’s what you ought to focus on. Now go on inside and quit chasing after ghosts and do your homework.”
Russell, though, couldn’t stop thinking about the panther. How sure he was that it was a panther he saw. At school he drew sketches of it in the margins of one of his notebooks. Waited impatiently all day under the harsh fluorescent lights in the classroom for night to come again. He dreamed of ways to escape the hard lines of school hallways and lockers, the bells every fifty five minutes, the worksheets set down before him. He sat next to windows in classrooms whenever he could and stared out into the bright and the green and the blue. At one of the windows a fly was buzzing desperately and tapping itself against the glass in rapid, random intervals trying desperately to escape and Russell thought he knew something of that same magnetic pull. During lunch hour he snuck outside, paced along the perimeter fence, climbed the Bradford pear tree that stood near the road and watched the cars pass from his secret place hidden among the leaves and branches.
In the afternoon he went to the library and found a book called “North American Mammals” and found pictures of “Puma concolor” and he remembered so clearly the image of the panther poised elegantly on the riverbank. It still, the water still, its reflection a near perfect duplicate. And he found a picture of its range, an illustration of the North American continent. Where the panther lived was shaded blood red. A tiny pocket of Florida, and a huge part of the country out west of the Rockies. Nothing in Georgia.
The next day he stopped and talked to Mr. Jim Scarborough at the Pure station about a mile and a half down the road from his house. Mr. Jim was old and knew a little bit about everything it seemed.
“What do you know about there being panthers here?”
“What now?”
“Panthers. Cougars, you know? Mountain lions.”
“Panthers? What about ‘em?”
“Did they used to live here?”
“Yeah. Oh yeah, my granddaddy shot one once. Down near the Ogeechee river. They was already not too many of them then though. When the first settlers came through here, they were a real problem. They’d get in and kill people’s livestock and you know out west they’ll kill a person every now and then. You know you got to be careful out there just walking around.”
“I think I might’a seen one the other night.”
“Seen one? You sure it wasn’t a bobcat?”
“It didn’t have any spots or stripes or nothing like that and it was bigger than a bobcat.”
“Well you know they say they ain’t supposed to be none of ‘em left down here but I have heard of a lot stranger things in my time.”
That night he walked down to the creek again. The moon was obscured by clouds and it was a lot darker.
He opened the metal cattle gate very carefully, muffling the chains in his hands so as not to wake the dogs.
He had a knife on his person, a knife his father gave him with a leather sheath. His father won the knife in the sixth grade in a shooting competition.
When he passed the old sharecroppers’ cabin he stopped a while. It felt very eerie there in the dark and a shiver ran down his spine. He liked the thrill of it in some strange way, and the stillness and seclusion. He tried to imagine the people who used to live there. Where they stood in the yard, the trees cleared away in that time before the second growth forest closed in. He wondered if they saw panthers, if they still lived here then, or
wolves. And he thought about how in that moment there wasn’t much separating him from that older time, how he could almost bring it back in his mind, make it real again. He liked that.
At the creek, he sat on the bank with the knife in his hands until the first blush of dawn light rose up over the tree line.
But he never saw the panther again.
#
He woke up to his father’s voice, stern and anxious.
“Son. Son, I need you to get up now. Have you seen Lucy? We can’t find her.”
Lucy was the family dog, a stout pit bull mix that had wandered up seven years ago as a stray puppy.
“The gate was open this morning. Did you go out last night?”
“Yeah, but I could’ve sworn I fastened the chain back.”
“Why in the hell would you’ve gone out there last night? You were supposed to be asleep. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Get up now and help us find her.”
They never found Lucy. They left food out for her for two weeks but she never showed.
Over time the memory of that first night by the creek and the panther dimmed in Russell’s mind and he doubted himself more and more as the years passed. But he dreamed about it sometimes, that same image of the panther crouched low by the water, it’s double in the reflection on the surface. The white sheen of the moonlight and the shadows out of which all form emerged. On the days after the dreams the memory was sharpened again, but he never knew whether it was a true memory or more a product of his imagination.
#
When Russell was 76 years old he bought a car. A 1955 Chevy Bel Air, the car he always wanted in high school but never got.
Over the phone the man selling the car told Russell his address: 1742 Watts Bridge Road, the road where Russell grew up. Details came back to him as the man described how to get to his house.
“You know that bend in the road right out past Flat Rock? You remember that one? Well you go past that and over the creek and not too far down, maybe a half mile you’ll turn off onto the first dirt road you see. Yeah, on the right.”
When his son dropped him off at the man’s house they looked over the car and the man invited Russell inside and Russell asked if he had any iced tea and the man did and he gave him some. They talked like all old men everywhere must talk who come from the same place. They make connections about who they know, they ask about how people are doing with whom they’ve long lost contact, they reminisce about the way things were and curse the paths society is taking. The man, it turns out, had moved back into the house about fifteen years ago. His parents had gotten divorced when he was ten years old and his father kept the house. His father was a hard and violent man and he almost never came to see him there. But he had inherited the house, and more importantly to him, the land.
Russell thanked the man and told him he would let him know how the Chevy held up and the two promised to stay in touch.
On his way out, as he walked through the kitchen, a form in the next room caught his eye. A tan, fur pelt was draped over the back of the sofa. It was large and ran almost all the way down the sofa’s length.
“Pardon, I know this is out of the blue, but what kind of pelt is that you got on the back of your sofa there?”
The man smiled, seemed proud to tell what it was.
“You’ll never believe this but that is an honest-to-God panther pelt. My daddy shot it right here along this river in nineteen fifty-four, or it might’ve been fifty-five.”
“You’d never believe just how much I do believe you. You mind if I go over there and get a closer look at it?”
The pelt was soft and supple, and the fur looked just as it must have the day the heart stopped in that animal. It made fine, intricate patterns as it changed shape in his hands. He had the thought that if he stared straight into that fur long enough, he could see the panther breathing.
As Russell drove back down Watts Bridge Road, he came to the bridge over the creek. The water was low and a wide stretch of raw sand bank was exposed on either side of it. He pulled off on the side of the road just shy of the bridge and walked down to the water. It was early fall and each breath of wind tore leaves gently away from their branches. The leaves spiraled down and lit soundlessly on the water’s surface. They drifted away on an invisible current.
His feet sank into the soft, wet sand. He laid each foot carefully as he walked. He was completely quiet, strikingly graceful and precise in his movements for his age. He crouched low at the edge of the water, his reflection a perfect double against the still black below.
Russell looked deep into the shadows on the far bank but the brush was still and quiet, and he knew this wasn’t a dream.
Poetry
For Millennia Without Nighttime
Robert Hughey
For thousands of years now, Over-blazes the Masculine Sun. That His warrior spirit be, Misinterpreted, Away from paternal guardian, Toward genocidal atrocities.
Hail, Goddess Night!
Our world without you has lost The embrace of the maternal, The compassion that fills humanity With cooperation over competition, Prayers over curses.
Rise, Rise, Divine Feminine! To triumph, to free us from Violent patriarchal domination.
Heal, Heal, Divine Masculine! To bring our world back together And save us from extinction.
Balance, Divinity, That this world of endless daytime might Rest under the embrace of Night once more.
Spirit, Return to Me (I Call My Spirit Back to Me)
Robert Hughey
I know you’re out there, Lost in shame and guilt
Of my past’s darkened share. I call my spirit back to me. All the parts I’ve left behind, Return, my sacred essence.
Return, I’ve changed my mind.
Spirit, return to me. I’ve always loved you. Where else would I be?
Spirit, my divinity, Return to me, And we’ll finally be free.
I lost you when I felt the shackles
Of the shame, the guilt
Of my past mistakes, And the horrors fate has dealt.
I call my spirit back to me.
Return, pieces of my soul.
Return, I step into my sacred role.
Spirit, return to me.
Spirit, my divinity, Return to me,
And we’ll be free.
I won’t lose you this time. Together, we will ascend. Listen to the power of this rhyme.
Spirit, please return to me. I’ve always loved you, desperately, Where else would I be?
Spirit, my divinity, Return to me.
And I’ll finally be free.
Butterfly Michael Willingham
Flutter upon the sunset sky. Wing to wing, the life is no lie. It goes on and on with no end. Even if you and I are put on mend.
Blue, yellow, green, black, They bat upon the airs to infinity. Do not harm its path. It could bring ill affinity.
In a way, we all flutter. Don’t clip my wings.
My flight becomes nothing more than a shudder. Painless, painful, the sweet bells will ring.
To the lifeful, to the lifeless, Nothing was ever meaningless.
Joseph A Farina
every emotion of our lives the name of every girl that we would like playing on 3 minute 45 rpm vinyl records in juke boxes everywhere the soundtrack that defined our lives then and our shared memories today juke box memories
it was all about the cars the clothes, the pop songs reflecting our innocence and broken hearts the wonder and pain of being sixteen holding hands, walking home with your one true love and crying in your room
stay just a little bit longer
Joseph A Farina
so eager to grow up oblivious of the cost it’s only when you get there that you know what you have lost and you search for ways to get it back even though you know you can’t resurrect wonder years spent so very fast hold on to childhood for as long as you can keep close bellezze rhymes told and retold until the day that you must grow out of your then and join us in now.
in their time
Joseph A Farina
let lovers be lovers standing together hands entwined their warmth a furnace of fire unhindered by force or time in winter whiteness their fragrances a wine to bind them in their glow together without hurry no decisions of tomorrow the future is what it will be
eyes only for each other walking silent under rain without hurry sharing laughter and umbrellas, counting puddles and each other’s poor attempt at staying dry
exquisite in their summer a season to always keep whether pain or joy to follow their mornings and their coffee shared with kisses and recitals written missives of their love
for they were only lovers each day was still their own when no one hurt and no one cried
UNSPOKEN SCARS
Tiphanie Butler
I forgot what it was like to be in pain. Every harsh word being said in vain. Water seeping from one’s eyes, That feeling of the pain eating you alive.
Someone tossed it aside and compressed it, Forgetting what the feeling of stress is. Being happy can be hard, Forgetting all my emotional scars.
Those invisible wounds still open to this day, Getting deep with every word they say.
I forgot why I suffer in silence, To avoid physical violence.
I tend to forget these things a lot, Always overlooking what I have. I wish I could forget those words. Why can’t they just be unheard?
I forgot to let the wounds be. Now that I have remembered, it is hurting me. For now, I will forget it all again, And leave this unspoken.
Self-Embodiment of Perfection
Tyeshia Walker
My body is stiff, it won’t move
My body stays true
Life touches and I feel myself change
My body stays true
I know what I need, my plan is clear and concise
I imagine my world as clear as day and I know how to avoid relentless strife
The whispers of encouragement course through my soul and I feel myself morph
The reflection I see stays static; I fill with remorse
My body stays true
Even when touched my body stays stuck
My body stays true
Rhythm rocks my soul and I feel the beat, my heart pounds at every sound of hope
With every note, I feel my soul rise
My expression feels forced and I realize it’s my body that I despise
Even when cheerful my face remains mono
Every action feels fake and my self-expression is hollow
It brings no reaction and I feel my soul shrivel, but despite the hatred
My body stays true
I transform every day but every day it gets harder to remain in
the same body that doesn’t show the change
My body stays true
I want to crawl out and show my real form
But how can I, when I can’t even live up to my own embodiment of a norm
Standards I cannot touch and expressions I cannot achieve
Every day it gets harder to remain in this dream
When reality occurs and I’m faced with the hand of fate my soul will no longer remain
But my body will once again remain unchanged
My body stays true
My cries reach the surface and the pain of imperfection leaks about
My body stays true
The cuts are visible and the bones glimmer my body has changed rapidly from what I remember
The air has grown dimmer and perfection becomes illusive
Every imperfection seeps in and it is all so intrusive
When faced with failure my soul once again begins to morph
The pain and grief chip away
My body stays true
Though this time when I look in the mirror my soul and body merge into one expression and I feel renewed
My body says it’s true
Here We Are Again
J.M. Summers
Here we are again. The blackberries have ripened, the swallows begun to contemplate the possibilities of foreign shores. And we? We have forgotten ourselves, consumed by the immolating heat of summer, caught unawares by the approach of the season new, darker nights. What then remains?
Perhaps just this: the sobering air of an Autumn in which the butterfly’s courtship will cede to the murmuration of starlings across the narrowing vista of our dreams.
Careful Steps
J.M. Summers
Does he notice the drenching rain of Autumn, the heat of summer?
The same heavy coat clothes both, the umbrella stuffed into the backpack unfurled, set as his grey eyes are on the path ahead, back bowed not by the burden, but with the weight of each careful step, knowing ways others do not, paths that will not cross. What destination does he seek? The song surely will be heard more clearly there, the nuthatch, robin, variegated air of morning.
This Is the Moment Then
J.M. Summers
This is the moment then.
A hush that only the broken song of the blackbird will dare to interrupt, the insistent sparrow, robin. See there, the mountaintop, the dew that will melt before the hubbub of the new day, stilled, as we are, by its uncompromising beauty, the unexpected meeting that we keep, you and I, both of us venturing forth early this morning.
The one to listen, the other too, for the echo, fading, of an unspoken amen.
The Lost Soul
Jimmy Encinia
As the sea begins to settle, A little boat floats along the serene waters. The night settles, as the boat has no direction. They ask, “Where will that boat go?”
As it drifts out of sight, the boat still has yet To have a set destination. There is a light on there, but barely visible, A light that once illuminated the storms.
That little boat had a name to it, “Dreamer.”
A boat that once had a captain, now has been Lost onto sea, wandering the dangers of the waters. That boat once had someone to guide it.
The Remnant of Love
Jimmy Encinia
Even after all the wars people in the world had, There were people who wanted one thing. That feeling of love from another, One that would stay by their side until death.
Walking through the green battlefield, you notice Many fought for similarities. A locket with a picture of a loved one. “Who could be this person in the photo?”
Looking through more of the greenery, One notices a body with a note next to it:
“To whom this may reach, I wish war was no more, My spouse and my children wait for me To come back from this hell.
If you bring this locket back to my family, They will be at peace, knowing I am not Lost, rather I am somewhere peaceful now.”
Tears fall down from the sky as the Green battlefield becomes an active mudslide. With the tears from these fallen soldiers, The sense of guilt begins to flow through.
A war full of hatred between governments, That brings people with similarities to fight One another for political reasonings. “Only those who live, tell the tale,” they say.
The battlefield soon brightens up, The light soon warms the battlefield and Begins to bloom once again. A place where all fought, With love in their hearts.
Schadenfreude
Donovan Bettis
Death is the only thing that shall prevail. Everything soon enough shall fail. Stuck in an existence to crumble, As the foundations are reduced to rubble, As a mortal existence remains beyond frail!
Trapped between the bowels of heaven and hell, The cycle continues, said domains not real enough to tell. Soon enough we shall relapse,
As our bodies begin to collapse, Just like how all the others before us fell! No form of remembrance shall remain, Just a consequence of eternal pain, No obscene dark path to escape,
So, our world remains ours to rape,
As we have all to lose and none to gain! Too afraid to live and to die, We seek truth but continue on with a lie, Masquerade as though we have worth, Born of this forsaken earth.
So of course, it would be better to die!
Condemned with such cosmic insignificance, But you must have some form of “vigilance,” Until all you can do is grieve, Regardless of what faith you believe.
So of course, we fall into nonexistence! It was written where we belong,
On a stage to play erelong. You can say I speak in spite, And of course, you are right, But no one can ever prove me wrong!
DREAMING
Brian Mallett
Day is done, and now in darkness as I lay my weary head to rest to think of things, when words and wisdom went their selfish way without my best, or what tomorrow brings, or how the tides may turn and put me to the test . . . . . . one cannot know.
Fog that falls on furrows carved within my wandering, wondering mind, covers me in quiet, sealing all the worried voices, storing them behind, and sending me through shadows toward some secret buried mystery to find . . . . . . one cannot see.
Calm collides with consciousness and softly cries a hymn that calls my name.
I strain to hear the spirit chanting or the colors dancing in their game, beyond the stealthy meaning lurking, memory and moment just the same . . . . . . one cannot tell.
Then time escapes its trap and wakes to watch the story fade with little trace, sprinkling light on patchwork patterns bright with
indiscriminating grace, and hope for nights again to feel the mist divine upon my earnest face . . . . . . one can dream.
right person, wrong time
Emily Fea
perhaps we loved at the wrong time, when the world wasn’t ready for us. maybe we were just a moment in the past, a love meant to fade, never to last.
the echoes of your laughter will still linger like whispers of something that could’ve been. your voice remains my favorite melody, will always remember the touch of your skin.
simply the right person, the wrong time, and maybe we found each other in another life. maybe it was the wrong person, right time, and you were never meant to be mine.
perhaps we’re the stars, beautiful but too far apart, shining briefly in the same sky, only to fade as time passed by.
if we had made it work, if circumstances had been kind, but maybe that’s the beauty of it— a love we’ll never truly find.
and if our paths are never to cross again, i wouldn’t hold a grudge within my heart. i would keep the memories within my head, hoping you’d take part.
as time goes, i’ll reminisce ours like photographs tucked away— smiling faces in moments we can never replay.
whether you were the right person, or whether it was the right time, or even if neither were true, i’ll carry a piece of you to remember you by.
and maybe that’s enough to say, we loved, even if it wasn’t meant to stay. it hurts to miss you, but my heart is still warm, knowing the happiness you’ve found in someone else’s arms.
Trapped Within
Emily Fea
The weight grew heavy, too much to bear, She wished for nothingness, to vanish, to pare. Storms raged loud, their chaos unkind, What she craved was stillness, a peace to find.
One day, she locked the window tight, Shutting out thunder, rain, and light. The walls shook less, the rain ran dry, No lightning to flash her secrets awry.
For the storms were relentless, tore her apart, Left wreckage unseen, shards in her heart. Tornadoes spun wild, with fury and roar, Scattering fragments, she built once more.
Some storms lingered for days, for years, Each one stepped in her unspoken fears. So, she locked the window—closed it fast, And thought she’d escaped the storms at last.
The room grew hers, a quiet domain, No thunder to startle, no cold, biting pain. She patched the cracks, swept wreckage away, For once in her life, order seemed to stay.
Yet the sun did not rise, no morning light, No golden beams to dissolve into the night. The baby-blue sky, the drifting cloud, The breezes once tender—all disallowed.
She tried to open the window, to feel, The warmth of the world, its vibrant appeal. But the glass stayed firm, no matter her plea, Her sanctuary had become a prison key.
And still, at night, the storms would call, Their echoes faint through the silent hall. Thunder murmured, waves softly crashed, The life she has lost, the memories stashed.
Alone she sat, the days turned to haze, Time blurred edges, night stretched into a maze. She missed the sunlight, the sky, the flowers, The breath of storms, their relentless power.
She yearned for what once terrified her soul, The storms that had torn but made her whole. And she knew, with a sharp, bitter spin, She hadn’t locked the storms out— She’d locked them in.
Song Lyrics
Bars Across My Window
Colonel Jon David Marsh
words in italics are spoken reverently singing should start slowly and increase in fervor by the fourth stanza
Wake up boys. Get dressed. Huh?
What’s wrong, Daddy?
Just get your church clothes on. Daddy . . . where’s Mama?
Things changed around the home place, The day my Mama left.
I saw the hurt on Daddy’s face . . . And tears that he had wept.
Now, me and Little Tommy were too young to understand. Wasn’t ‘cause she didn’t love us any more, She was called away to walk up there, in the promised land. Now she’s holdin’ hands with Jesus, over on that other shore.
That’s the day my Daddy stopped believin’. He spent the whole day in his rockin’ chair. His friends all thought that he was deeply grievin’. But with her gone, he simply didn’t care.
The rock he’d leaned on left him, so he sat around and cried, Leavin’ me and Little Tommy on our own. Then Daddy took to whiskey . . . and Little Tommy died. I ran away though I was hardly grown.
Chorus: Now there’s bars across my window with a steel door to my cell,
And they ain’t never gonna let me go.
I’m doin’ life in prison in a five by thirteen hell, Where crazy is the only place to go.
Now, I can’t say I know just where the road I took went wrong. It was a dark and twisted trail I took.
Well now, you might think my life sounds like some cliché country song, Or a sad and stark and poorly written book.
I can see outside my window if I stand upon my bed. ‘Cross the yard a ladder’s leanin’ ‘gainst a tree. The gun-boss had a belly laugh, then looked at me and said, Oh, yeah, he’d put that ladder there to torment me.
When Mama died our family fell apart. Her love was what protected us from harm.
When Little Tommy died it hurt so bad it froze my heart. I wish that I was back with Mama on that farm.
Chorus: Now there’s bars across my window with a steel door to my cell,
And they ain’t never gonna let me go.
I’m doin’ life in prison in a five by thirteen hell, Where crazy is the only place to go.
Visual Art
Sunflowers
Esther Sprott
Yellow Coneflowers
Esther Sprott
Where is my mind?
Jackson Dunagan
Eternal Separation
Jackson Dunagan
Catch and Release (one of two)
Lee Tupper
Catch and Release (two of two)
Lee Tupper
Stop and Smell the Flowers
Emily Crenshaw
Blue Life
Clarissa Cervantes
Contributors
William D. Baker’s fiction has most recently appeared in Rosette Maleficarum, Active Muse, LEON Literary Review, Red Rose Thorns, Revolver Literary Magazine, Word City Lit, Literary Heist, confetti, and Tenth Muse. Additionally, he has over a dozen more fiction publications dating to 2013. He maintains an author website with publication links at http://www.sylbun. com and can be contacted at williamdbakerauthor@gmail.com.
Andrew Bellacomo is a student from Albany, Georgia, majoring in English at Georgia Southwestern State University. His interests include filmmaking, history, outdoor recreation and reading. In his work as a writer, his focus is on exploring the confluence of people and place, how characters are shaped by the landscapes they inhabit.
Donovan Bettis enjoys his free time with his games. He knows that he is not made for this world and expresses it through negativity. Regardless, he still seeks to enjoy his time here.
Genie Bryan came to Georgia in 2005 to teach at Middle Georgia College, moving to GSW in 2007. She earned her PhD at the University of Louisiana and, because graduate school was such fun, wishes she could go back to school and earn two more PhDs. She lives in Americus, Georgia, where she teaches in the English Department and serves two spoiled cats (Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia).
Tiphanie Butler is a freshman English major with a deep passion for creativity. She uses poetry as a way to cope with stress and finds joy in making jewelry and exploring various art forms. Although she is still undecided on a minor, she is eager to find one that complements her creative interests. Tiphanie is actively involved in Alpha Psi Lambda.
Clarissa Cervantes is a researcher photographer. Clarissa’s photo gallery includes images from all over the world, where she finds inspiration to share her photographs with others through her creative lens, inviting the viewer to question the present, look closer, explore more the array of emotions, and follow the sunlight towards a brighter future.
Maven Coston is a current student and aspiring author here at GSW. They enjoy reading different genres of literature and selfcare as well as participating in different arts. Their favorite genres to write in include fantasy, romance, and psychological horrors. Their writing style is one adapted from raw thoughts plastered onto a page without any planning required. Furthermore, they have been writing original works since the age of ten and have never looked back since.
Emily Crenshaw is a GSW alum, current student, and an artist. Her artistic concentration is in digital art, multimedia art, and painting. She is working toward a Bachelor of Arts in Communication & Emerging Media with Certificates in Media Studies and Entrepreneurship. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a minor in Sociology and a Certificate in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies from GSW.
Jackson Dunagan is a contemporary mixed media artist based in Rochelle, Georgia, who is working on a Bachelor of Arts from Georgia Southwestern State University. He explores themes of escapism, existentialism, nature, and humanism through innovative and technology-assisted methods. His work is deeply
influenced by curiosity and the variety of experiences that shape his perspective, often drawing inspiration from the Southern landscape.
Jimmy Encinia is a Romance poet and storywriter. He is a Junior middle-grades education major at GSW.
Joseph A Farina is a retired lawyer in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. An award winning Pushcart nominee and internationally published poet, his works appear in many poetry magazines, notably Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine and The Windsor Review, and in the anthologies Sweet Lemons: Writings with a Sicilian Accent, Canadian Italians at Table, Witness, and Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century. He has had two books of poetry published—The Cancer Chronicles and The Ghosts of Water Street as well as an E-book Sunsets in Black and White. His latest book is The beach, the street and everything in between.
Emily Fea is a freshman at Georgia Southwestern State University, currently pursuing an English degree. She has always been passionate about storytelling in all its forms, from poetry to fiction. Her work explores deep, thought-provoking themes. She enjoys writing poetry that captures raw emotions and complex ideas, as well as fantasy, where she can build immersive worlds.
Sam Gainous is a current English major at GSW. She hopes to further her education by obtaining a Master’s of Library Science and hopes to have a career in curating and distributing rare and old books. Outside of the literary world, she loves to travel with her two best friends and hopes she gets to go to museums with them for the rest of her life. She also would like anyone that has a cat to say ‘pspsps’ to them for her. TPWK.
Robert Hughey is an author and college English instructor from Americus, GA. He teaches for Georgia Southwestern State
University and South Georgia Technical College. Robert finished his MFA in Creative Writing in early 2025 and plans to continue writing for the rest of his life. May it be long and interesting.
Suzanne Kamata is an American permanent resident of Japan. She is the author of several books in a variety of genres including the short fiction collection, River of Dolls and Other Stories (Penguin Random House SEA, 2025), the novel Cinnamon Beach (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2024), and Waiting (Kelsay Books, 2023), a story in poems. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and is an associate professor of Global Education at Naruto University of Education.
Katherine LeJeune is a fourth-grade student at Furlow Charter School in Americus, GA.
Brian Mallett is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Southwestern State University, College of Business and Computing. He has published papers in management and innovation, and is author of the book, How Faint the Whisper – A Parable, Kindle Books.
Colonel Jon David Marsh: With a career including stints as burger flipper, air traffic controller, journalist, special inspector, student, instructor, artist, author and nomad, Kentucky Colonel Marsh celebrates nearly eight decades on this rock, and continues to chase life as woodsmith/wordsmith with his wife, Lissa, and cat, Miss Sadie, in a century old cottage just west of campus.
Zachary Rock* Monnier is a non-traditional student in GSW’s General Interdisciplinary Studies program. A transplant from Pennsylvania, Zac enjoys gardening, overly complicated board games, and moto-camping. He is an active member of Calvary Episcopal Church and is helping revive a 21+ members-only pool behind Sumter Historic Trust’s HQ.
*yes, really, I wish he were joking
Esther Sprott is a visual artist specializing in watercolor and photography, as well as a rancher and co-owner of Blue Sky Ag, a cattle company. A graduate of Georgia Southwestern State University’s business school, she blends her artistic vision with her deep connection to the land, drawing inspiration from nature and rural life. You can follow her work on Instagram: @ esthersprott.
J.M. Summers was born and still lives in South Wales. Previous publication credits include Another Country from Gomer Press and various magazines/anthologies. The former editor of a number of small press magazines, he is currently working on his first collection.
Lee Tupper is a first-year student at Georgia Southwestern State University! They are currently majoring in psychology. They are passionate about multiple forms of art such as visual art and music! Growing up they were always fascinated with drawing and used it as an outlet for their creativity. When reaching high school, they started the art pathway and received a cord for completing it.
Tyeshia Walker is a computer science major and business management minor from Abbeville, GA. She writes short stories and poetry in her free time as well as writing for the GSW Sou’Wester newspaper. Her poem titled “Self-Embodiment of Perfection” is her first published poem about the struggle of body image, dissociation, insecurity, and finding yourself through imagery.
Michael Willingham is a junior majoring in marketing with an overflowing intrigue in writing. Once despising the art of writing, he discovered it was to express himself and some of his beliefs in poem and sonnet. With an experience in creative writing and a heart to express, he writes creative pieces ranging
from sonnet to poem to full-fledged narratives in the wake of expressing his heart and his frequent flowing imagination.
