The Scop, Spring 2023, Volume 83

The Scop is a literary magazine run out of King’s College. It is entirely run and created by undergraduate students from a variety of majors. Its members believe in fostering creativity of all forms, including poetry, prose, and visual arts. The name comes from the term for an Old English bard or poet. This is the fourth year that The Scop has accepted submissions nationwide.

Letter from the Editor

This year, The Scop celebrates revolution. The spirit of change, past and present, thrums through each page, humming its quiet chant for progress in every carefully chosen letter, brushstroke, and click of the camera.

Change for The Scop itself came in the form of a new submission software. While learning the ins and outs of an unfamiliar system came with its challenges, it also brought its advantages. With the use of Duotrope, The Scop’s reach has expanded far beyond King’s College into the wider community, and we have even received works from several international submitters. We welcome this diverse array of perspectives and are proud to present them within this volume. Additionally, 2023 marks 50 years since the first class of women graduated from King’s College. To honor these trailblazing women, we have featured various poems written by female King’s College students published in ’70s volumes of The Scop and a profile of Linda Nestor, Scop-published poet and graduate of the class of 1976.

It is natural and obvious that the arts will reflect transformation in the world, and The Scop will continue to amplify this image so that it reaches the creative soul of each person who pens for or picks up the magazine. Here’s to making history!

Brandi Naprava Editor of The Scop

Cover and Divider Photo Credits

Front Cover

Kyle Mlodzienski

Back Cover

Gary Druhl

Prose Divider

Michele McGowan

Poetry Divider

Michele McGowan

Arts Divider

Ashlyn Golya

Women at King’s Divider

Kyle Mlodzienski

Staff Divider

Kyle Mlodzienski

Inside Covers

Julia Evans

Adolf Hitler

I reach Hania before first light and walk with Bundeswehr gloves—hands in the pockets—to appear more German. My stolen hobnailed boots aren’t nearly my size. My painful toes curl under.

I smell an appetizing whiff of something baking and wonder if local street vendors with trays of sesame bread are out already. I remember Hania—the largest town in western Crete and the capital of the island—as a dirty, bustling Allied base in May 1941. It was packed with Brits, Aussies, New Zealanders and Maoris, waiting for the enemy to invade. They came all right, not by the sea as expected, but by air. And not in bloody bombers. Hitler stunned us all. His circus-colored chutes bulked up the air along the northern coast and dropped from the sky like confetti.

Near the Jewish quarter, my body is on full alert. Balls to the wall, as you Yanks say. I turn up Kondylaki Street—you know the place—a steep alley more than a street, lined on both sides with closed shops cheek by jowl. Lamp-makers, shoe-makers, tailors, establishments selling cutlery, tools

and brooms, and fancy that, a button store, with jars filled with buttons and ribbons sorted by color. Great canvas cloths are strung across the alley to protect passersby from the scorching Cretan sun. Still better here than the Sahara—pitiless heat by day, icy cold at night, the wadis, the cloying flies, the blinding El-ghibli could go on for days.

In the windows, there are those placards in German and Greek—JEWISH BUSINESS: FORBIDDEN TO GERMANS. A surge of blood to my heart, then sudden panic. Any time now, Nazis will be out patrolling the streets. The high gate to the grounds of the synagogue is right on the street. A stone pediment rises above the gate and is etched with a Hebrew inscription: ‘Blessed are the just…’ I pass through the gate to a covered courtyard. Rubble fills the far corner. I turn toward a wooden porch that seems to be the entrance. A man with a high forehead walks toward me, showing not the slightest concern at my enemy costume.

“Shalom.”

Margot Demopoulos

“Shalom.”

He isn’t wearing a yellow star. Jews in Hania were never ordered to wear one. It led me to believe they would always be safe. Maybe too few for Hitler to worry about. I knew by his appearance he’s my contact. Bearded, handsome, old enough to be my father.

He introduces himself. “Iosif Sarfatis, the Hebrew teacher.”

“How did you know it’s me?”

“The messenger alerted me to expect you.” He reached an arm high above his head. “Tall tree, that’s what he said. Tallest you’ve ever seen.”

The synagogue consists of a large rectangular hall, surmounted by a timberframe pitched roof with thick beams. Columns support the roof. Dust in the air has a hint of crushed stone and cold ash. To the north and south are roofed courtyards, the spaces connected to the main hall by windows closed with grilles. The Torah Ark is on a raised platform reached by steep narrow steps. A Jewish National Fund collection box rests on the bottom step. It’s quiet inside but doesn’t feel peaceful. It’s as if something’s brewing, but I have no idea what. It might just be my nerves.

I pull off the cursed round helmet.

“The mehitzah took a direct hit during the invasion, knocked off the copper dome,” Iosif says. “The other synagogue— Kehal Shalom—was not as lucky. The inside burned out, part of a wall was left, and then it too collapsed.”

I was thinking how Mother would like Iosif. She believed with all her heart that a high forehead meant high intelligence and worried mine was lacking. When I was six, she shaved my hairline to make my forehead appear higher until Father made

her stop. You forget the lad was born in the caul, he’d say, so you know he’s got the luck. He’s right enough.

“My father was a Jew, but not a good Jew. He didn’t go to services.”

“Doesn’t make him a bad Jew,’ Iosif says.

“He’s gone now. TB. The doctors said it was the chlorine gas.”

Iosif closes his eyes.

“The Second Battle of Ypres. Most of his mates died of TB too.”

“And we call ourselves human,” he says.

I hope Father isn’t up there looking down, seeing me in this bugger uniform.

“Come.” Iosif heads toward the door. “I’ll take you home for a morning coffee.”

My instinct is to get what I need and leave before patrols hit the streets but that’s not what I do.

“I would be honored,” I say. It’s an insult in Crete to refuse an invitation.

Iosif leads the way.

“How are Jews treated here in Hania?”

A Nazi flag snaps on a pole above a school.

Iosif shrugs. “Better than Thessaloníki.”

“You have relatives there?”

“They took them to work in Poland.”

“In Cairo, we hear rumors. Outrageous stories. About how Huns treat the Jews. Who knows how much is true?”

“My cousin said when they take them away they keep the families together,” Iosif says. “That’s good at least.”

“Where did they take them?”

“We don’t know. That’s what we don’t know.”

“In Thessaloniki my cousin hid with a friend, got new papers and now he’s in Athens. Last we heard he says there’s sickness there.”

I put my Nazi helmet back on. The air is

taut with coming rain. Some rumors about the camps are too fantastic to believe. Even the brass doesn’t know what’s true. But if they haven’t bothered Jews in Hania by now, I figure they won’t at this point. Why would they? But I also remember what Commander Hart said. The Germans smell a landing coming in Europe. They sense defeat. You think they’re going to evacuate Crete without destroying what they can on their way out?

I strut like the arrogant enemy in the event a real one comes along. Iosif takes Kondylaki but we turn before we reach the port. Iosif drags his feet as if they’re weighted with rocks. How high above the ground one lifts one’s feet while walking is a measure of melancholy or fear. Our bodies reveal what we’re trying to hide. Don’t listen to a mate’s words, study his gait. I remember that from training.

The air is close, sounds still hushed. Too hushed. At first the quiet was a gift, like a stroke of luck, but as the sky brightens it becomes a nagging worry. Nazis feel more present in their absence.

“Awfully quiet. Where are the patrols?”

“I’m thinking the same,” Iosif says. “They must be at the other port, unloading supplies, laughing with each other. They’re all young boys, you know. They paint red crosses on top of their trucks so Allied planes won’t bomb them.”

The street is filling up with Jews, but no, I remember no one can tell who is Jewish by appearance in Crete. They look no different than anyone else. They weren’t dominated by Ladino-speaking elements. Here they speak Greek and, just like on the mainland, they’ve long been integrated into Greek life.

We climb a tight lane parallel to

Kondylaki. Iosif points up to the secondfloor balcony of a yellow house. He leads me up the narrow stone steps crowded with painted tins of herbs, tendrils of roses and blood-red geraniums, freshly watered from last night’s rain. Iosif unlocks the door and steps inside. I’m right behind.

A woman in black draws in laundry, hand over hand, from a clothesline outside the open kitchen window. She turns toward me, sees my Nazi uniform and drops the blouse she’s holding. Her shoulders collapse like wounded bird wings.

Iosif rushes forward. “He’s English.” He picks up the blouse, places it on the ironing board, and runs a hand down his wife’s back.

“My wife. Sara,” Iosif says.

Wish Iosif didn’t name names.

The other person in the room is a lovely girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, dressed in a white blouse, navy jumper with school insignia, knee socks and polished leather shoes. Her long brown hair falls to her waist. She tightens her lips. She studies me with wary eyes.

Iosif places his hand on his daughter’s cheek. “Today is the last day of school. Classes are cancelled to honor Venizelos. Rahel’s practicing her poem for the ceremony.”

Rahel’s strength, her light and beauty, is in her face. Large expressive features— majestic nose, eyes alive with affection for her father, a smile that works higher up the right cheek.

“I’ll make us coffee but you must forgive,” Sara says. “We reboil the grounds.”

At any moment German patrols will be out in the streets. I should get what I need and leave.

“Since his death in ’36, all the schools

commemorate Venizelos’ life. Teachers read his speeches. Students recite his favorite poems. Rahel chose Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, Sweet and Decorous It Is. She knows it in English and Greek. Venizelos said the poem is like a lethal cannon, decimating the complacency of those too thirsty for war.”

“Know it well. Had to memorize it myself as a schoolboy for Armistice Day. They have a fly-past at the air base. Wilfred Owen died a week before the Armistice. One week. His doctors tried keeping him in England but he insisted on going back to the front. My father named me after Owen.”

Rahel joins her mother in the kitchen. After placing a copper bríki containing some water and the coffee grounds on the stove, Sara picks up the iron and starts to press a white shirt. One side of the collar first. She flips it over and does the other side. It reminds me of Mother. There was a right way to iron a blouse or a shirt, she used to say, a particular order. Collar first, then the yoke, and who knows what else, but the sleeves always last. When I least expect it, flashes of memories from home flood back. I hoard them, these ordinary moments. What if I never see England again?

“Mána, it’s too hot to iron.” Rahel wipes away a film of sweat across her neck. Using both hands she lifts her long hair and fans the back of her neck.

“You’ll be on the stage, mátia mou. You need a clean pressed blouse.”

I get sweaty, more nervous. I look out the open window over the street. Where are the bloody Huns?

Iosif asks Rahel to recite a few lines for me. She stands up straight, shoulders back, and recites the last lines:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

To be in this home with smells of ironing and coffee and a schoolgirl reciting Owen— that’s the cure for war.

When Rahel stops, I start with the second stanza: Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time…

Sara looks up from her ironing, startled.

“His father was in that war too,” Iosif says.

Sara claps her mouth. She leads me down a hallway with two framed portraits of young men, boys really, in Greek army uniforms. She touches one face, “Yeshua” and then the other, “Abram.”

“They never came back from the Albanian front,” Iosif says. “Whether it was from the frozen snow or a bullet from one of Mussolini’s men, we don’t know.”

“We’re so proud when our soldiers go off to war,” Sara says. “But where are the trumpets and cymbals when they don’t come home?”

“Sara went to bed with fever and didn’t get up for weeks,” Iosif says. “She remembers the boys, hopping foot to foot, while dallying after school.”

Something keeps nagging at me. Something’s going to happen. The air

is pregnant with danger. Should I say something? But this family is safe here. Wouldn’t it lead to needless worry?

“When the fever passed, Sara told me something,” Iosif says. “That last night before the boys left for the front, she found Yeshua shivering in his bed, saying the word ‘cold’ over and over as if he knew that months later he would die in the snow on Mount Grammos. He woke up blowing on his fingers. He told Sara he always believed he’d die in the sea, not the snow. She knew he’d never come back.”

Jerries should be out in the streets. My instinct is to go and find where in bleeding hell they are. Sara serves coffee. She motions me to the table.

“It’s not coffee really. Mostly ground chickpeas.”

“Smells grand.” I sit down.

Sara returns to her ironing.

A new sound comes from outside, like tapping a knife against a glass. Sara slams down the iron on a triangular metal plate and crosses to the window without her slippers. Her feet are flat and wide.

“Mána, what is it?” Rahel runs to join her.

Sara peers down toward the street. “Fascist snake.”

I rush to the window. The narrow lane is crammed with old Venetian homes made of yellow limestone. A plank-thin Nazi stands in the street one house away. Something weighs down one shoulder. He looks back and forth and then walks off in the direction of the old bazaar.

“What was he holding?” I ask Sara.

“The bullhorn to wake up the vermin.”

I return to the table, Sara to the ironing board.

Sara dips her hand in a pitcher of water and flings fingers and thumb wide

to sprinkle the shirt. In the way she tries to hide her fright, Sara resembles Mother.

Whenever I asked Mother a question about the Great War, she lapsed into silence or explained away my questions as a commotion from God and the powers that be and who are we to know?

What comes to mind is the day Father talked to me about his war. I was thirteen. He had summoned me to help carry an armload of explosives to the garden. “We’re going to blow up that Scots pine,” he said.

“But, Father, there’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. I loved that tree.

“It’s over three hundred years old. It’s dangerous and it’s coming down.”

“Is this dynamite?” I asked.

“Better than dynamite,” Father said. “It’s gelignite. We called it ‘jelly’ in the war. Safer to handle than dynamite and it doesn’t sweat. We laid it along a Flemish canal near the town of Ypres the day we were gassed.”

Gassed? I had never heard that before. “Da, you never told me you were gassed.”

“The chlorine caught at the back of my throat and filled my mouth with an abominable iron taste.”

We sawed a V in the massive trunk, packed it with the explosives, and added a detonator and a fuse.

“We were ordered to soak our socks with piss and tie them round our faces,” Father said.

I held back from asking questions. I was stunned. And there would always be time later. I didn’t imagine my father would refuse to ever speak of the war again. Not with me. Not ever.

We stood back at some distance from the old pine, waiting for the fuse to burn

through. I had cut it too long. I used almost an entire box of matches to get it lit and kept apologizing.

“That’s how you’ll learn,” Father said. “Thank goodness you’ll never need demolition training to defeat an enemy combatant. Another world war is unimaginable.”

I listened hard.

“The Great War surpassed all others before it, for the number of countries involved, the millions of men engaged, and the volume of blood lost,” Father said. “Deaths from my war added up to about thirteen million. The number of dead from the Napoleonic Wars including the French Revolutionary Wars from 1790 to 1815 was only two million. Wholesale immolation of mankind.”

Then, with an earsplitting shock wave of an explosion that knocked me and my father flat on the ground, the tree I loved lifted twenty feet in the air in a tunnel of black smoke. It crashed across our own garden, as well as our neighbor’s, obliterating Mother’s prize roses. I didn’t know it would be my only chance to talk to Father about war. He never brought it up again. And whenever I asked, he refused.

Sara holds out the blouse to Rahel. “Here, put this on.”

Rahel ignores it. She picks up a round tin off a low shelf, pries off the lid and lifts out a handful of ribbons. “Éla, Mána. Fix my hair.”

The engines of lorries shatter the quiet with such outrage I can’t tell from which direction they’re coming. Muffled voices. Boots clicking the cobbles. Not marching, running. Thuds of sound. Whole brigades of sound.

Sara, holding a hairbrush, sits next to Rahel. “Always loading, unloading,” Sara says.

A blaring bullhorn. A crackly voice in German, then Greek. “Sie haben fünfzehn Minuten Zeit, um auf de Straße zu kommen. Bringen sie nur die wichtigsten persönlichen Gegenstände mit. Möbel, Kleidung, Geräte, Bettwäsche müssen alle unberührt bleiben. You have fifteen minutes to come down to the street. Bring only the most essential personal items. Furniture, clothing, appliances, linens must all be left untouched.”

Iosif and I rush to the window. A shuddering of door frames. Shattering glass. Eruptions of rapping and pounding up and down the street.

“We’re finished,” Iosif says.

“Not by a long chalk.” I say the words, but what do I know?

Sara settles her fingers around Rahel’s hair but her daughter pulls away. Rahel stomps across the wood floor.

“Rahel, change your blouse,” Sara says. Sharp blows downstairs. Not with the human fist, but with steel or leather, the butt of a rifle or truncheon.

Rahel circles the room. “They’ll scare Nona!”

From the window I see lorries blocking the entrance to the old market. I glance in the direction of the harbor. More lorries. That port entrance, the only other way to escape the quarter, is blocked too.

Sara embraces Rahel. “Agápi mou, my love, change your blouse.”

“Mána, what difference does it make?”

“After this nonsense is over, you have the program at school.”

Rahel does as she is told.

A few things are certain. This is a

roundup for a deportation or a mass execution. All that stands between this family and the enemy is this fucking Nazi uniform and fluent German, thanks to my German parents. The street’s filling up. Children still barefoot, shirts unbuttoned. Grannies in nightclothes yanked from a warm bed, white braids hanging down their backs. Nothing looks right. A fancy dress with red lace. A broken pot of pink geraniums. Like coming to after fainting. I’ve never seen this before, not with my own eyes, but it’s just what Mother predicted. She said every Jew in Europe needs a secret hiding place. It happened in Warsaw, Krakow, Vilna, Minsk, Riga—Polish Jews, French Jews, Slovak Jews, why Hitler declared Berlin Judenrein.

“Where’s the hiding place?” I ask Iosif. Sweat trickles inside my collar.

I glance across the street. Two Jerries are removing bookshelves and pitching them off a balcony. They’re flushing out hideouts.

One Nazi yells down, “Wenn Sie jemand, Sie wissen, was zu tun! If you find anyone, you know what to do!”

Iosif points to a water pipe high on the kitchen wall, says the sink is on castors and the backsplash covers the entrance. Rahel starts pushing the sink past the opening.

A voice outside. “Kinder!”

Children are wailing.

“Hans, komm! Hier sind Juden!”

I see him first. The top of a rounded helmet mounting the stairs. I motion the family towards the kitchen and placed a crosswise finger on my lips. Iosif grips Sara with one arm, Rahel with the other.

Remember how Hart trained us to think like the enemy? By God, act superior and no one will question you. Draw up to your

full height. Don’t whisper orders, snap them out like a loyal Wehrmacht soldier! Let arrogance and disgust show on your face. Arrogance disguises fear, he said. If you get in a tight spot, two words should do the trick awfully well. Adolf Hitler!

Hobnailed boots brush past the roses. I fling the door open on a young Nazi. Scant mustache. Trembling hands. Squarish boy with strong bones. His stunned blue eyes tell me he doesn’t want to be here either.

I bark, “Heil Hitler!” before the boy can blink. I bark at him to stop wasting time and find more Jews. Hurry up! “Beeilung!” I know by his salute how new this boy is to the German army. He lurches down the stairs.

I gesture for Iosif and Sara and Rahel to come forward.

“The hidden room?” Iosif asks.

“No!”

Iosif clutches his wife and daughter.

“No matter what, stay with me! Pretend I’m one of them!”

Sara stuffs a brass candlestick, a hairbrush, and a single shoe into a linen bundle. She takes them out, repacks them. She’s too pale, as if about to faint.

“Jetzt! Now!” I shout the order.

We all go down the stairs and to the street and join the thrumming crowd. We’re pushed toward the throat leading out of the quarter on the port side. Two Germans seize Nona, the downstairs neighbor. Rahel yells she’s ninety and blind but they don’t let her go.

“Bitte,” Rahel pleads.

More Greek Jews utter the same plea. “Bitte. Bitte.”

I bark at Rahel. ”Befehl ist Befehl! Orders are orders!”

I nod to the boy scouts holding Nona.

They release her to me and move on. Rahel takes Nona’s hand. These are not SS. I never see SS on Crete. These are pimply-faced boys blowing school whistles and following orders. This is a sloppy roundup. I do what I was trained to do. Act like the uniform I’m wearing is my own. I make certain no one questions me. I spit at the Jew behind me.

I push to get closer to the front of the throng. Iosif’s family with Nona follow close behind. A man in a green robe clutches an orange cat. Identical twin boys, hair still dripping from their bath, hold hands. A woman drops to her knees and gathers some stones. I pull her upright, shove her forward. Jews who watch glare.

Waving arms. Barking commands. Hissed orders. Rifle butts. Sara stops to re-tie the ribbon in Rahel’s hair. I turn my back to every German soldier we pass. I yell at Sara and Rahel, “Komm!” Whether it’s my height, my presumed rank, or the pure disgust distorting my features, I do not know. Not a single German questions me.

Burning air fills my lungs. A man in a nightshirt cradles a beautiful violin. A red-haired boy chews on a heel of bread. Some women grip bundles. Some nothing. Others bite their bony fists. With almost no words, they let themselves be led away.

I bark at more Jews to move. “Schnell, schnell! Fast! Fast!”

I’ve been on raids before, surrounded by armed Nazis, but this is different. The fate of Iosif and his family and others is in my hands. I lunge through the crowd inhaling a sense of power. Whoever said we live our most genuine lives under cover of secrecy was bloody right. I’m in disguise to others, but real and alive to myself. Outside the entrance to the quarter and along the port, spectators are lined up to

watch. “Who are they?” I ask Iosif.

“Orthodox Christians from the next quarter. Our friends.”

Some Christians embrace Jews being loaded into the lorries. Engines idle. Right in front of me, a young Nazi pulls down the hatch on Jews packed inside.

“Nein!” I yell. I wave Iosif and his family forward. I order them to move fast—“Schnell, schnell!”—before anyone can challenge me.

The boy soldier looks up at me and holds up the hatch. “Natülich,” he says, as if packing in more Jews is quite the natural thing to do.

I shove in everyone I can fit inside, including blind Nona, then close the hatch. I approach the driver. I order him out with my thumb. At his surprised expression— these were all seventeen-year-olds, the fuck they bloody know?—I say the first words that come to me: “Adolf Hitler!”

Colonel Hart was right. It works.

Lorries ahead pull away. I jump in the driver’s seat, release the hand brake and follow. From the side mirrors, I see more lorries arriving to queue up behind, more Jews pouring out from the quarter. I realize we’re the last lorry in this caravan.

I let the distance from the lorry ahead gradually increase. Once that lorry is out of sight, I turn off the road and don’t stop until we reach the cave where I once had taken refuge. I park the lorry, cover it with branches and tell the Jews about the cave. They all nod. Some probably know it better than I do.

“Past the opening on the left, there is a high chamber,” I say. “Keep going. At the back there is a narrow gap that takes you down a sharp drop and leads to a series of curved chambers that come round to

connect up with the left wall of the main chamber, exactly where you entered. Stay in one of the curved chambers. They’re smaller and lower and stay warmer with fire. It’s safe enough to build a fire because it’s so deep.”

Iosif grips my arm. “Efharistó, thank you.”

“Huns have been here three years and still don’t know this cave exists,” I say. “Stay

until dark. Until a runner comes. In the night it’ll be safe to leave.”

I leave to find a runner. It doesn’t take long. I tell the runner what happened, ask him to find some villagers right away to disassemble the lorry. And guides are needed to get the Jews safely over the White Mountains.

I give him a message for the wireless: Jews. Contact Cairo for pick up by sub.

Margot Demopoulos is the author of the novella On the Quay at Smyrna. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

Real or Not?

“Good morning, John.” The therapist smiled kindly through the computer screen. John unmuted himself with a keystroke.

“Good morning.”

“How are we?” she asked him. He questioned her choice of pronoun. Hadn’t she read his list of diagnoses?

“Fine.”

The smile morphed into that clinical expression of analytic concern he was used to by now. She was figuring which worksheets would straighten him out. Another patient success story to add to her profile on the therapy app.

“So, John,” she began in that sanitized voice they all used. “Since this is our first session, I think we should establish where you’re at with your mental health journey.” They nodded together, following the unofficial script. John felt that tick in his brain. Real? Not real? He blinked rapidly, refocusing. Shh. Shh. Doesn’t matter anyway. Doesn’t matter.

“John?”

Wasn’t it funny how therapists all had

Sarah Hammett

the same consumer friendly voice as Siri or Alexa? John blinked again. Real? Not real?

“You’ve been struggling with a severe anxiety disorder since your early teens. Is that correct?”

Even her face seemed generic, he realized. He had bought this laptop for the screen resolution. Necessary for work, beneficial for these sessions. In the crystal-clear screen he could make out a middle-age bob haircut. Blue eyes behind designer reading glasses.

“Yes,” he answered.

“You have a tendency to disassociate with your surroundings when stressed,” she continued. “You believe your mental health led to your most recent break-up?”

“It led to all my break-ups.” John rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The panic attacks are annoying. Having to reassure a grown man that he’s not going to die in the produce section.” John stretched his legs out underneath his desk and breathed in through his nose. All these tips and tricks to keep himself centered.

“I’ve been seeing death omens,” he

blurted. “That’s why I stay in my apartment, now. I can control what I see here, I can’t…” This wasn’t completely true, he thought. He still saw them everywhere. Whenever he watched the news, he saw shadows lurking in the background. Death was everywhere. Plastic covered hospital wards, rubblestrewn cities. Every night a new headline, a new disaster. It didn’t matter, they all said. It would all be over in less than a decade anyway, each new “unprecedented” weather incident proving that.

He twitched his neck and took another deep breath. “But, yes, that makes it hard to keep a relationship going.”

“Farrah was the most significant relationship and subsequent break-up,” the therapist said. “Wasn’t she?”

John squeezed his eyes shut. No, this wasn’t right. This wasn’t right. She wouldn’t know Farrah’s name already. Real? Not real? He opened his eyes. Outside his window he could hear helicopters buzz by his apartment. Too many helicopters for a Tuesday evening. Real? Not real?

“Farrah understood me,” he continued. “She’s the only breakup that mattered. She’s the only one I was in love with. The others, I thought their influence would be good for me.”

He thought about Farrah. Her brown hair brushing down her back, that bridge of freckles across her face. Sometimes, in fleeting moments, he had wished she would die. Not out of malice, or malintent. Not because he wished her gone from his life forever. But because he had never loved like that before. He had never been that invested in whether someone lived.

A loud explosion rattled the apartment. His glass of water shook dangerously, sending out a hollow sound into the thin

air. He grabbed it quickly and gripped the table for support. He felt the vibrations course through him, causing his teeth to chatter.

“John?” The therapist leaned forward; her brow furrowed. “Is everything okay on your end?”

He looked around the tiny room, searching for any damage or evidence that there had been an explosion. He found nothing.

“It’s fine.” John straightened himself up. “I live near a military base. There’s training, or testing, or something. This happens a lot.” John hesitated for a moment, struggling to remember if this was true or not.

He didn’t have time to notice the therapist’s knowing stare, or the rapid way they took notes. He didn’t even have time to notice the fact that the apartment was still shaking, ever so slightly. The floor and the wall were becoming 2D animations of themselves. He inhaled sharply through his teeth, and thought of the one thing that always seemed to calm him down. His love for Farrah found him writing down her allergens on yellow sticky notes, placing them on his cabinet doors so he could refer to them when cooking for her.

He checked her commute before he left for work each morning. His thumb hovered over every red line on the route that indicated a car accident. He read the vehicle descriptions and sighed in relief when they never matched hers.

She was patient with what she called his “mother hen tendencies.” She knew his history, how his mother had died before he was even seven. Sudden illness. Undetected heart condition. He watched her slump to the floor one afternoon while baking brownies for the school bake sale.

He was painfully aware of how important things vanished.

Whenever they had been at their happiest, a voice in the far recesses of his mind would whisper that it wished she would go ahead and die and end the constant anxiety. That voice still whispered to him sometimes. Though these days its pleas were more sinister.

“John? Can you hear me? Did we lose connection?”

John blinked hard, pulling himself back.

“Repeat the question?”

“How long ago did you break up with Farrah?”

“A year and a half ago.”

“When’s the last time you left your apartment, John?”

“A year and a half ago.”

“I’m assuming the two are related,” she said with a wry smile. John couldn’t help but chuckle to himself. His life was bizarre. He knew that.

“We broke up at the park. I used to like to go to the park. It’s hard to disassociate there. It’s too calm. Too vivid. Couldn’t be fake.” He ran a hand through his hair. “She broke up with me there. She knew I liked it there.” He stopped himself, pulling himself back.

There was something loud and metallic coming from outside now. He glanced at the clock. No, he told himself. There was no need for explosions at two p.m.

“We thought it would be an adventure at first,” John said. He closed his eyes.

“What was that, John?” the therapist asked in that antiseptic voice of hers.

“Being long-distance,” John clarified. “In January of 2020, my long term girlfriend

Farrah McGowerty moved to Dublin to work with a tech company. But it was only temporary. Six months, and I would join her. She was working with the company; they were prepared to hire me on.”

It was comforting, reciting his life like it was a Wikipedia article he had memorized. Fact checking, as Farrah called it. Whenever he texted her in the middle of an episode she would reply:

“Have you fact checked, yet?”

Lists helped him darken the line between reality and hallucination.

“Then COVID happened,” the therapist finished. John nodded, swallowing. Whatever was happening outside his window was getting louder, getting closer. But he continued to ignore it because it couldn’t be real.

“Ireland was in lockdown for a long time. Farrah couldn’t come here; I couldn’t go there. Not the way I am now.”

“What do you mean by the way you are now, John?”

John leaned back in his computer chair, studying the popcorn ceiling of this cheap apartment. What was he not telling himself? It was hard to keep all the narratives straight sometimes. The truth, the lies he told other people, the things he hallucinated, the things he deluded himself with. These threads wove in and out of each other, wrapping themselves around John’s consciousness until it began to wither.

“You know, there’s no reason to leave,” John told the woman on the computer screen. “Not now, not in 2022. Everything I need is delivered to me with the tap of a button. Endless movies and TV shows, a new one every day it seems like. Concerts are live streamed. Hanging out with my

friends is virtual. I hadn’t left in so long when Farrah finally made it back across the Atlantic. I went to a restaurant for her. I went to that park we loved. She came here only to cut ties with me. I couldn’t blame her. It was a long time. It was too long to be apart.”

“John, you’re not answering my question.”

He hadn’t let himself remember the way things had been between the two of them. He wouldn’t admit that she leaped at the chance to move across the Atlantic. How in their final weeks of living together he kept her up for hours ranting about coyotes howling outside their window. Coyotes that Farrah never seemed to hear.

John turned, cocking his head. His window was cracked slightly. Through it he could now smell smoke. He could hear the staticky voice of someone talking through a megaphone. A crowd of people talking over each other. Jeering? He couldn’t be sure.

But did he really? He closed his eyes. Real? Not real?

“John, I want you to tell me how you think you are now,” the therapist demanded.

His eyes were still closed, his ears still tuned into the chaos outside. A sudden realization rushed through him.

“You’re not my psychiatrist,” John said firmly, eyes popping open. “You’re not. This isn’t real.”

“John, I’m not Dr. Schander,” the therapist said slowly. “I’m your therapist.”

“No. No,” John was insistent now. “My therapist is Timothy Paulson. He’s been my therapist for six years. You’re not my therapist. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”

“John, you’re spiraling. I need you to

focus, I need you to come back.”

John squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head harder.

“No.”

“John. Timothy Paulson moved. You couldn’t find anyone else offering virtual sessions. You decided to use an app. Do you recall deciding to use the app?”

His brain had become a rush of images, flashes of a life he wasn’t sure was his or not. The noise from outside his apartment became louder, the crowd was roaring. He was certain, now, they were furious. They had been growing more restless all afternoon. They were turning against the man on the megaphone.

John inhaled and checked the facts as he knew them. She was right. Timothy Paulson moved. He went to the app. He ignored the ever-frantic rush of his heart. He felt detached from his body, floating above, observing the madness. Why was it so hard to breathe? Glass broke outside. The sirens were louder.

Farrah was gone. Paulson was gone. Now, he only had this lady and her pixelated face telling him what reality was.

“Farrah and I would play a game, when I got like this,” John managed in a ragged breath. “Real or not real. I can’t always tell, and watching the news makes it worse. I’ll have three panic attacks before they cover the local basketball team. It worked for a while. But, as 2020 went by, the game got harder. A mutant virus. Giant hornets. Race riots. Everything felt like plots from a bad apocalypse movie. I didn’t know what was real or not. I didn’t know if she was real or not. She only came to me through screens, now. Sometimes when we spoke, she wouldn’t remember our previous conversation. She told me I was

imagining them. I disagreed, and she said she couldn’t talk to me when I was like this. She said she couldn’t be my tether to the world anymore. She said she couldn’t hear the coyotes.” John covered his face with his hands. Why couldn’t she hear the coyotes?

John inhaled sharply. The smell of

smoke was undeniable now. The lights flickered. The therapist disappeared, replaced by ‘No Connection.’ The apartment went black. Outside, the noise reached a crescendo. John closed his eyes. Real? Not real?

Sarah Hammett is a lifelong storyteller and writer of tales. By day she is a special education teacher in Huntsville, Alabama.

Between Lilies and the Gates of Everything John

I bent down carefully and placed my nose a few inches from the petals of the lily I had been inspecting. It smelled sweet and reminded me of summer when my mother would spend hours in the garden, tending to her flower beds and inspecting everything that sprouted from the soil.

“They call that a royal lily,” the man standing behind me said.

I craned my neck to look at him, inspecting him up and down. He was horribly pale, with hair the color of ink that was combed back neatly.

“A beautiful flower. There’s a variation that grows in water called a water lily. I believe there’s some in the pond.” He extended his arm, an invitation to walk with him.

I stood, brushing off my dress and taking his arm. “Do you tend to the garden alone?”

“The garden tends to itself,” he said, gently touching low hanging leaves on trees as we walked.

“How does it tend to itself?” I asked.

“It just does.”

Grebeck

I decided not to press the man as we approached the pond, which was dotted with green pads and white lilies that bobbed softly with the water. I sat down on a wooden bench near the water’s edge, and the man sat down beside me.

“How do you feel?” he asked me.

I stared at the water, tilting my head. “I feel okay, I think.”

“You think?”

“My brain feels foggy, like I just woke up from a long nap.”

The man nodded, crossing his legs. “That’s normal.”

“How so?” I asked.

He waved his hand dismissively. We sat in silence then, our shoulders touching as we stared into the murky water of the pond. I found it strange how quiet the garden was despite the abundance of trees, shrubs, and flowers. My mother’s garden was always thriving at its peak—birds busy building nests, bunnies munching on low hanging shrubs, and squirrels digging fervently to hide away nuts. I had yet to see any living thing in

this garden. There were no birds chirping or squirrels scurrying across the brick pathways.

As if sensing my discomfort at the silence, a gentle breeze ruffled the leaves hanging above me. I suddenly noticed the sound of a meandering stream behind me, crisp water rolling over smooth stones. I didn’t remember hearing a stream before.

“There’s still much of the garden to see,” the man said. “Do you like apples?”

“I do.”

The man stood once again, offering his arm. He seemed taller when I took it, and his stride longer. Despite this, he kept his pace slow and his stride short enough to accommodate for the height difference.

He led me to a copse of trees, each one teeming with apples the color of polished rubies. They shined brilliantly against the sunlight, not a single imperfection visible on any of them.

“Which one would you like?”

I approached the thicket, pacing around each tree and inspecting each apple. They all looked the same, but I knew there was undoubtedly one that had to be better than the rest.

“That one.” I pointed to the apple that grew higher than the rest. It had received the most sunlight, so it had to be the best.

The man reached up, plucking the apple I desired from the tree. He seemed even taller than he had a few minutes ago. How was such a thing possible?

I bit into the apple, sweet nectar immediately dribbling down my chin and onto the front of my dress. As I expected, this apple was the best I had ever had. It was vibrant, deliciously crunchy, and teeming with flavor. I could only imagine the kind of pie my mother would make with

these kinds of apples.

“Can I take some of these apples home? I want my mother to make a pie with them.”

The man tilted his head, smiling. “We have to leave them so that there’s apples for whoever visits the garden after you.”

I finished my apple, wiping my now sticky fingers on the end of my dress. “You never told me your name.”

“People call me many things, but I can’t quite remember what my actual name is.”

“You don’t remember your own name?”

“I guess I don’t,” he replied. “Do you remember your name?”

I thought for a moment, reaching as far into my brain as I could, and returned with nothing. I shook my head.

“We’ll just have to figure out our names together then.” He smiled, offering his hand.

I took it, and we began walking once again. I assumed he would have offered his arm like before, but our height difference was so great now that I only reached his waist. The man’s hand was much larger than mine, and I feared for a moment his hand would crush mine, but he held it delicately.

He led me to the gates of the garden, a glistening set of steel bars that were closed. Through the gate I could see nothing. There was a dense fog that stretched up as far as the eye could see in every direction.

“What’s through there?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said.

“I guess that means it’s time to go?” I looked down at my feet.

“It does, young one.” He placed a hand on the top of my head, smoothing down my hair.

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“We all have to eventually, to make

room for the next person who wants to see the garden.”

I looked up at him. “We never figured out our names.”

He got down onto one knee, placing his mouth beside my ear. He whispered my name to me. Lily.

“I remember now,” I said quietly. “What about your name?”

“Pick one for me.”

“Azrael.”

“A beautiful name.” He smiled, standing. I took his hand one more time as he opened the gate. Together we disappeared into the fog.

John Grebeck is a junior in the physician assistant program with two minors in biology and neuroscience. He is secretary of the Campion Literary Society and a guest contributor to The Crown. John writes poetry and short stories with themes of overcoming struggle and discovering personal identity.

Hope So

After his basketball team’s victory in the district playoffs against the number one seed from their Catholic League, Tom told his parents that he was going to a teammate’s house to play video games.

Like all the school’s fans, his parents were buoyant over the upset win and didn’t even pester him about being home by curfew. All that anyone cared about was the school’s first trip to a district championship game the following Saturday, and that was especially true for his parents who were both alumni and members of the School Advisory Council. His dad had been an accomplished basketball player while a student there, on a team that reached the semi-finals but lost. Tom rarely got into a game himself from his spot at the end of the bench; although not unskilled as a player, he was timid, unassertive, and lacked self-confidence.

He rode to the party with the team’s sixth man, Glen, who he’d claimed to his parents as his video game partner. It was held at the big house of a senior whose parents were away traveling and whose

William Cass

older brother was cajoled into buying a keg and booze for the affair. Tom had never been to one of those school parties before, always begging off for one reason or another, although he’d heard plenty about them. But he’d agreed this time because Glen had told him Jen Archer would be there. Jen was a junior like them, and a new transfer student whose soft, brown hair, gentle manner, and doe-like eyes made something fall in Tom. The first time he’d seen her, he’d literally caught his breath. Afterward, he was moved further by the unassuming way she carried herself, as well as random glimpses of her character: how she always left crusts from her sandwiches at lunch for the birds, the unfashionable cardigan she often wore that he’d heard had been her grandmother’s, or when she’d helped the custodian to his feet after he’d tripped over his mop bucket. Tom’s silent obsession with her had only deepened over time, but he hadn’t yet summoned the courage to speak to her; he hoped that would change at the party.

The senior’s house was already packed

when Tom and Glen arrived, music and a din of voices spilling from the large living room onto a back patio where the keg, topped with a stack of red plastic cups, and the booze table were set up. Most of their teammates were there, basking in classmates’ clamoring admiration over the night’s victory. Almost immediately, cups of beer were thrust into each of their hands. Soon after, Glen got pulled into the throng of dancers and Tom edged his way through the crowd affecting nonchalance while searching for Jen. He paused here and there to accept the congratulations of well-wishers, many of whom demanded a celebratory toast. When Tom complied and raised his cup to his lips, he did his best to feign drinking, and was able to avoid all but a couple of sips. He fought grimacing against the harshness of those tiny swallows. He had never drunk alcohol before and hated the taste.

After milling about for twenty minutes without finding her, he secured a spot in a corner of the living room where he could keep an eye on the front door for Jen. He kept his cup of beer at his side while the crowd grew rowdier around him. He saw the team’s starting guards across the room playing beer pong and their star center holding a funneled tube over another student’s mouth after taking a turn under it himself while others poured a mix of bottles into it. He glimpsed three other teammates knocking back shots in unison at the booze table while the dancing became so chaotic that Tom had to peer around all the moving bodies to keep the front door in sight.

Perhaps another fifteen minutes passed before Glen appeared next to him sweating and grinning, his eyes glassy. Glen offered

his cup for a tap, then said, “Hey, sorry, bud. Someone told me that girl, what’s-hername, couldn’t come.”

“Jen.”

“Yeah.” Glen tipped back the remains of his drink. “Guess she’s sick or something.”

Tom’s heart fell like a stone as he managed a nod. Someone began flickering the lights, the music’s bass intensified, and the crush of bodies suddenly felt suffocating. “Listen,” he told Glen. “I’m not feeling so hot myself. Think I’ll go ahead and walk home.”

Someone grabbed Glen’s shoulder and yanked him towards the patio. “Be good,” he shouted behind him.

Tom waited another several moments, glancing around him to be sure no one was watching, then dumped his beer on a standing potted plant, set the empty cup on a windowsill, and left.

The following afternoon, he rode his bike to the supermarket for his mom to get a few things she needed for dinner. He was standing in the express check-out line when a voice behind him said, “Hey, you’re on the basketball team, right?”

Tom turned around and found Jen holding a bottle of juice and smiling shyly at him. He stiffened and nodded.

“Congratulations,” she said. “Great game last night.”

He heard himself mumble, “Thanks.”

The line inched forward. He swiveled and moved with it.

She said, “My name’s Jen.”

When he turned back, her hand was extended. He shook its light dryness and said, “Tom.” Then before he could stop himself, he blurted, “Hope you’re feeling better.”

She frowned and tucked a strand of

loose hair behind an ear.

“I mean, someone told me you weren’t feeling well,” he continued. “At Andrew’s party.”

“Oh, that.” A little color had risen along her neck behind her ears. “To be honest, I just made that up. I don’t actually like parties…all the drinking and craziness.” She dropped her eyes a little. “Just not my thing.”

He swallowed. “Mine either, really.”

A flush had spread over him as the line moved closer to the cash register. He dropped the items he clutched onto the belt, paid, and took his bag. When he hazarded a last glance Jen’s way, her small smile seemed wistful. She said, “Nice meeting you.”

“You, too. See you at school.”

“Yeah.” She gave her cardigan’s sleeve a small tug. “Hope so.”

Her eyebrows raised above her doe-like eyes. Tom swallowed again, then moved beyond the check-out line towards the exit, forcing himself not to look back.

~

Glen pushed up next to him at his locker the following day during morning break and elbowed his side.

Tom flinched. “What the hell?”

“Shh!” Glen whispered. He glanced quickly around him, then shoved his cell phone’s screen in front of Tom. “Look at this!”

Tom tilted the phone sideways and saw a classmate’s Instagram account on it. The screen was wide enough to display parts of three posts, each from Saturday night’s party. Tom swiped, then turned back towards Glen’s troubled face and shrugged.

“Look closer,” Glen told him. “Enlarge them.”

Tom did. The first showed a group of kids dancing, cups aloft, with the beer pong game going on beside them. The team’s center towered above other howling students in the second, the tubing and funnel he held suspended over another student’s mouth. In the third, he and Glen were just visible against the living room wall, their red cups dotting the frame with others like Christmas tree ornaments, the beer keg, and their three teammates’ empty shot glasses face down on the patio table behind them.

Tom handed the phone back to Glen and said, “So?”

“So, Father Denny got ahold of these somehow.” Father Denny was the school’s notorious Dean of Discipline. “Someone showed him or sent them to him, I don’t know.” Glen shook the phone at him. “And right now, he’s got half our team lined up sitting outside his office. I just walked by. Interviewing them one by one.”

Tom knit his eyebrows, shook his head. Glen whacked him on the arm with his phone. “You dufus, drinking alcohol is a suspend-able offense for anyone on an athletic team…on campus or off!” His anxious eyes flitted around him again. “But here’s the thing.” He tapped his phone a few times and showed Tom a flurry of group text messages all sent within the last hour among their basketball teammates, many in caps with exclamation points. “Those pictures prove nothing about any of our team drinking,” Glen went on. “Just a lot of red cups and booze at a party where we happened to be. So, no one is admitting anything. If pressed, we were all just drinking soda or water or something… got it?”

Tom’s eyes widened, a cold sweat

blooming up his spine. He nodded. As if on cue, a loudspeaker crackled above them in the hallway directing him and Glen to Father Denny’s office. Tom watched Glen’s shoulders slump. He jammed the phone in his pocket, squeezed Tom’s arm hard, and hissed, “Just stick to that story, okay? Or else we can all kiss that championship game goodbye.”

Other students stopped their conversations and turned suddenly statuelike, silently following their path as they walked down the long, central hallway to the front office.

The bell had just finished ringing for the start of the next class when they arrived there. A half-dozen of their teammates sat on chairs outside Father Denny’s office leaning forward with bent heads or slumped backs staring blankly straight ahead. No one made eye contact.

Father Denny waited in his open doorway, his lips in a tight line, his jaw set. He pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose, pointed at Glen, and said, “You next.”

Glen shuffled past him inside the office, the door easing shut behind them. Tom found his way to an empty chair at the end of the row next to their center, lowered himself onto it, and blew out a long breath.

The center whispered, “You saw the texts?”

Tom nodded.

“Pretty positive you’re the last two he’ll talk to.” He gritted his teeth. “Just stick to our damn story and we should walk.”

Tom closed his eyes, licked his lips, and tried to slow his breathing. He felt the center’s big hand clap his knee. Except for the tap of the secretary’s fingers on her keyboard behind the front counter and the faint murmur of voices beyond the closed door, the quiet felt stifling. Tom opened

his eyes again and was vaguely aware of a patch of freckled sunlight flickering on the faded linoleum in front of him.

Less than five minutes had passed when Glen emerged from the open doorway with Father Denny behind him. Glen looked at Tom, his eyes grim but steady, and made one tiny nod. Father Denny pointed a long finger at Tom. He rose, smoothing his pants legs, turned sideways to let Glen take his seat, and passed by Father Denny into the office. The door clicked softly behind him.

The priest gestured to a single chair in front of his desk, watched until Tom perched on its edge, then settled himself in the rolling one behind it. He made steeples with his hands, tapped them against his chin, and fixed Tom with a hard glare. He was a tall, slender man, with a prominent Adam’s apple that plunged several times as his silent stare persisted. Tom met it for as long as he could, then let his eyes slip past to the wall where an old photo hung of the school’s basketball team Father Denny had played on with his father. They’d remained close friends over the years. A bird darted past the open window next to the photo and a truck ground its gears in the street outside. The air held a hint of aftershave.

Finally, Father Denny pushed three sheets of paper across his desk and turned them carefully so they faced Tom. They were enlargements of the Instagram photos Glen had shown him, grainier as blow-ups, but with him and his teammates still clearly identifiable.

Father Denny pointed to one and said, “That’s you, isn’t it?”

Tom nodded.

“From a party Saturday night… we’ve already established that.” His pause lingered. “A student party where

a considerable consumption of alcohol occurred, also verified and admitted to. Several times, in fact.” Father Denny’s eyes stayed fixed on Tom’s as he waved a fingertip over the pages. “And besides yourself, you’ll see a number of your basketball teammates in these photos at this party. They’re also sitting out there now in that hallway behind you. I’ve spoken to them all…everyone except you.”

Tom willed his own eyes not to move. He nodded again.

“So, I’ll ask you the same question I asked each of them.” He paused again. “Were any of you drinking alcohol at this party?”

Except for Father Denny’s steely gaze, everything in the room seemed to fade and blur. There was suddenly no sound. Above his clerical collar, the priest’s Adam’s apple plunged deeply twice. Tom shook his head.

Father Denny nodded slowly, then said, “You’re certain about that?’

Tom re-clasped his hands in his lap. A trickle of sweat crawled down under his left armpit. He nodded.

The priest nodded some more himself, his eyes remaining on Tom’s, as the room slowly regained focus. Tom resisted an urge to swallow. Finally, Father Denny said, “As you’re probably already aware, that’s the same story as all your cronies out there.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. Without taking his eyes off Tom, he gestured with his chin towards the photo on the wall next to him. “You know, the last time this school had a chance to play for a district title in basketball was when your dad and I were on that team.”

He waited until Tom finally mumbled, “I know.”

“We lost in overtime in the semis.” The priest’s voice had lowered. “Couple of stupid mistakes at the end. Niggled at me ever since…your dad, too, I believe.”

Tom allowed himself a swallow and nod.

Very quietly, Father Denny said, “Chance for you and those other knuckleheads outside to redeem all that next Saturday night.”

When Father Denny resumed his slow nod, Tom did the same. He tried to keep his eyes from blinking as rapidly as they demanded. The priest suddenly cleared his throat, leaned forward, and gathered the papers back towards him from the edge of the desk. Without looking at Tom again, he made a motion with the back of his hand like he was shooing away a fly. “Go back to class,” he huffed.

Tom didn’t have to be told twice. He left the office door open when he reentered the waiting area, but something kept him from meeting the expectant stares of his teammates. He passed by each of them quickly without the slightest glance. His steps felt unreal, as if someone else was making them. Instead of slowing, his heart had quickened, and from somewhere, a kind of numbness had enveloped him. He turned the corner into the school’s central hallway, empty and silent now except for the sigh of a restroom door midway down the corridor. Jen Archer emerged from its yawning opening, turned towards the sound of Tom’s footsteps, and they both froze, a hall-pass dangling from her wrist. During the long moment that they regarded each other, Tom understood from her torn expression that she’d heard his name called over the loudspeaker, too, and had seen the Instagram posts like everyone else. As she had in the supermarket, she

tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and raised her fingertips to him with the same small, hopeful smile as the previous afternoon. Then she tugged her cardigan’s sleeve and continued across the hallway into the chemistry classroom that Tom was heading to himself.

Afterward, he didn’t move right away. Instead, he let the echo of the classroom door’s closing die away in that cavernous space and thought instead of several weeks earlier when he’d watched Jen retrieve from the school’s flagpole the clothes of a gay boy strung up there by some football jocks during a P.E. class. While he and other students watched her determined movements, the boy waited beside her, naked except for a thin towel wrapped around his waist, hugging himself against

the chill and his humiliation.

Now, in that empty, old hallway full of diffused, late-winter light, Tom found himself shaking his head. He shook it several times, each harder than the last, then abruptly reversed his steps back down the hallway and around the corner to the front office. None of his teammates had moved from their spots in the row of chairs. He felt their eyes on him like hands as he passed by them and stopped in Father Denny’s open office doorway. He didn’t bother entering further. He remained in that spot where they could all hear as the priest looked up at him with a puzzled frown and asked, “Yes?”

Tom swallowed once, then in as clear a voice as he could muster, said, “I lied…”

William Cass has had over 290 short stories appear in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies. He’s been a Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Pushcart nominee and has published two short story collections with Wising Up Press. He lives in San Diego, California.

A Tribute to the Boatyard

I dreaded the first time I had to go into the boatyard, but I knew there was no choice. I looked up toward the flagpole, squinting slightly, to see the flag flapping in the wind. I knew this was the place. As my older brother, Brennan, and I walked toward the yard, the smell was the first thing I ever noticed. Dead fish and pungent algae ran through my nose, pushing me to breathe out of my mouth. Walking through the rusted gates, the long, yellowed grass was thick and felt unfamiliar in between my toes. My brother guided me to where we were supposed to go. He had two more years of experience compared to me. I followed close, observing as much as possible. I took note of the dirt and algae covering the overturned boats, wondering how anyone could possibly want to spend time in this place. The grass had become patchy and flattened from the years of kids trotting toward the entrance of the class. All around me were sailboats that may have been colorful once but were now too sun-washed to tell anymore. As I continued, the sailing class seemed miles away.

It was not what I imagined when I heard the words sailing class. The class took place in

Jaelen Chuang

a shed no bigger than a one-car garage. The sweaty bodies of twenty kids on a hot summer day surrounded me. The ratio of kids bothered me, way more boys in the class than girls, and I was by far the youngest. As I sat in class, the faint smell of aged wood and gasoline lingered in the shed. I kept quiet, running an internal clock in my mind of when this would end. After what seemed like days in the mind of an eight-year-old, the instructor finally told us it was time to go outside.

My legs started trembling when the instructor said we would begin sailing. As we filed out of the shed to begin sailing, I begged Brennan not to make me do this. He, however, was enjoying my pain. The worn and itchy lifejacket restrained my arms just enough to make simple tasks impossible. By the time I set my boat up to sail, my arms burned from the weight of the tall mast. The roaring motor coming from our instructor’s boat filled my ears, making it impossible to communicate with my brother.

The first time I climbed onto the sailboat I was miserable. Being stuck on a boat with my brother for three hours seemed like an impossible task, but there was no escaping

once we set sail. I thought I would appreciate escaping the muddied ground, but suddenly my perspective changed. The unstable boat seemed as though it would tip any moment when the 10-foot sail swung from side to side. I clutched my brother for comfort. The shiny fiberglass that coated the boat was hot to the touch and made it almost impossible to sit down. My brother held my hand for the first time as our instructor pushed the boat away from the dock. I squeezed my eyes shut, expecting the worst to occur. When I opened them, we were gliding across the water. I giggled, watching the sail catch in the wind. The faded sail glistened in the water, causing the colors to appear brighter than life. When the three hours were coming to an end, I begged my brother to never go back to the dock. Before he insisted we had to return, he did one more lap around the lake. Climbing off the boat, my legs trembled because they were now unfamiliar with the solid land around me. I could not wait to go again the next day.

I feel a sense of peace when I enter the boatyard now, ten years since the first time, as though my worries disappear when I see the lake. The tall trees sway just over the yard, creating a breezy shade in the blistering heat. As I near the shed, it looks just the same as it was. The same rusted door hinges lead to a shed with 20 tiny seats that do not belong. I smile at the sight, thinking about how many memories were made here.

The same odors fill my nose when I enter the yard. The smell of clean-cut grass was new to the boatyard. I had spent hours mowing and weed-whacking to make sure of it. I smile when I see that the grass is still sunken in from where

the new generation walks to the boatyard. I walk over to my boat, inspecting the algaecovered hull. Back then I thought this was a sign of neglect, but now I know that the algae that weathers the boat is synonymous with the worn patches of a beloved toy.

I take new people to the place that was once so daunting to me. Their nervous and confused faces are the same as mine was. I let them sit and observe as I set up my boat, calmly answering all the questions that I asked long ago. My friends are a lot stronger than I was when I started, allowing them to move the boat much easier than I was able to. I hold their hands, as they step on the boat, balancing the weight to make sure the boat doesn’t tip. They watch me push off the dock and hold the sail near, laughing as the wind speeds up and allows us to fly through the water. We spend hours on the water laughing and joking about my life jacket tan lines. When the sun begins to set, I feel a feeling that remains the same from when I was a child. I could spend days on the water without getting tired of it.

I always visualize myself as a child when I go to set up my sailboat. I can hear my old instructor giving me instructions on how to tie the knots. The mast and sail aren’t nearly as heavy now that I’m older. I’ve sailed boats four times the size of the one I learned on, but occasionally, I enjoy returning to the small boat, steering with the same wooden rudder, watching my worries dissipate in the reflection of the sail. I’m more conscious of newer experiences now and how I view them. I am less judgmental entering new situations and often view them as new surprises instead.

Jaelen Chuang grew up in New Jersey all her life. Coming to college was a large shift so the day before she left she returned to a place of comfort for her.

Blue Desk

I went with my parents, my mom a serious antique hound, the day they— we—bought three desks. One was the rolltop which my oldest brother ended up inheriting. Genteel giant with lots of eyes and mouths—knots and such in its rich wood grain, cubby holes, drawers. Refinished and restained, today it would go for thousands of dollars.

The second, which I have since inherited, was that brother’s when we were kids, heavy, but smaller, only three drawers, and two book-shelf areas below, accessible from either side. It was not till I developed a passion for Art Deco, decades later, that I noticed that this desk—which, again, was not mine as a kid, but became mine as an adult—was in the Art Deco style!

The desk of my chubby childhood was also made of wood—some kind of heavy nondescript wood, devoid of personality, since it had no eyes, no grain. Its top surface spread bigger and broader than a twin-size bed mattress; I had to stand to reach its farthest corners. Drawers underneath, but of course no cubby holes.

James B. Nicola

Of the three we bought that day, it was the junkiest. Since the wood was unworthy of varnish and shellac, this behemoth of a basically-crappy-piece-of-not-reallyfurniture-at-all thing was to be painted. And my mother painted it. Did I pick the color? Did I help paint that day? I don’t recall. But I do remember the day the desk turned blue.

Not a blue you would want for your car, or a wall, or a house. Bright blue. Crayola, Sherwin-Williams, forever blue. Bluer than the sky on a kite-flying day. Bluer than the bad of a sad, bawled-out mood.

Every now and then, usually on a Saturday or a Sunday, occasionally on a holiday—one time Christmas Day itself—, or on a birthday—eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, or all of the above—but, unpremeditated, unexpected, after opening assorted boxes and toys, perhaps, I would be struck with a sudden manic desire for order and cleanliness, and suddenly set out to straighten my room. And then the desk top would appear again, with a smile, the

contents in its drawers aligned at attention. And by dinner time the desk would look as hungry as me, and also look like me, me at my best.

And the desk would remain this way a day or two at a time. Sometimes three or four.

And ever since then, even when projects have accumulated, and mess,

and life, I have known that, holding up all the piles and papers of inspiration and experience, I once knew a solidly built piece of functional junk that my mom, or maybe my mom and I together, painted into something like a treasure chest: my huge, unaffected, ugly, beautiful, supportive, precociously pure blue desk.

James B. Nicola is the author of seven collections of poetry, the latest two being Turns & Twists and Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Guide to Live Performance won a Choice award.

The Impending End

I have gotten used to death. One day, even your strongest muscle will grow too weak to pump the blood in and out. Your brain will degenerate, and your thoughts will quickly fall silent. The warmth that once filled your body will turn cold, and just like that, your life on earth has come to an end. However, what I have come to realize is that knowing death is far different from experiencing death. Very different.

Doris was my first. My favorite 93-yearold firecracker who refused to let her age show. She would insist on wearing a dress and matching sweater every day. She would accessorize with her delicate gold and silver analog watch and heart locket necklace. Both were worn just enough to show they had lived with her but kept so nice that you knew they were important. I would comb her short white hair, shave her peach fuzz, and clean her glasses before she would stand herself up and walk downstairs for breakfast.

However, one of the most amazing things was that she was one of the few

Jenna Emery

who still had her wits about her. She would recognize me each morning and ask,

“Wow…you’re still here?” After seeing me at 11:00 PM the night before.

“Yup,” I would reply, “and happy to be, Miss Doris Day!”

That always brought a smile to her face. She would reminisce on her career as a nurse and sympathize with the hard parts of my job. Doris was always looking out for the other residents and made sure they were okay. Even if her body couldn’t keep up all the time, her mind was still sharp. However, that became her downfall because she knew she was dying. Every morning I would walk with her downstairs, and between labored breaths and small steps, she would look up at me and ask, “Why am I still here?”

“Because you still have life left to live, Doris Day,” I would reply. “You are so strong; I can only hope I am like you when I am 93!”

She always met me with a smile, but I knew that no matter what I said, she didn’t want to be here anymore, and I honestly

couldn’t blame her. While I thought she had more time, it only took Doris the next four days to die.

Day one: she said she couldn’t breathe. All shift, she was having difficulty breathing. All her vitals were normal, so I was instructed to help make her comfortable.

“Look at me,” I said, kneeling down next to her chair and grabbing her hand, “it’s okay, let’s try to slow our breathing. In through your nose,” I took an inhale and paused, “and out through your mouth,” as I released my breath. She was trying, but her eyes screamed at me that she was scared and in pain.

That night, she began to try to walk but felt herself buckling under her own weight and nearly collapsed. She couldn’t stand, so I sat her in a wheelchair and took her up to bed. Her head hung low and all I could hear was her faint wheezing. I left that night knowing she wasn’t in good shape, but I tried to stay hopeful that she would bounce back. I couldn’t help but question, though, was this the end?

Day two: Doris said hardly any words. When I walked in, she just looked up at me and shook her head. She was weak and her breathing was still labored. I bared all her weight but could feel her slowly slipping away. She refused food all day and stared aimlessly at the wall for eight hours. She stopped telling us when she needed to use the bathroom to avoid the physical exhaustion that accompanied it. Before I left, I went over to say goodbye. She looked at me, closed her eyes, and tilted her head up slowly to look at the ceiling.

“Take me, already!” she pleaded.

My heart broke, and I wasn’t sure if I would see her when I came in the next day.

Day three: I walked into a sad scene.

Doris had declined that evening after I had left and was worsening. She was brought to the recliner chair in the sunroom on the first floor to sleep because she could no longer make the walk to her room. All her family was there with her, and I was preparing for a long overnight. I sat with the family and listened as Doris fought for every breath. Every 30 minutes I wet her lips with swabs provided by hospice and changed her in the recliner chair.

It was 3:00 AM when I was in the kitchen and Doris’s daughter came out of the sunroom. Her dark, swollen eyes looked up at me and asked, “Have you ever seen anyone die before?”

“Oh, no, actually,” I responded, caught off guard.

“I have,” she replied. “They go quick.”

“Oh,” I replied, hoping that was the case for Doris because she didn’t deserve to suffer.

The rest of the night I thought about what it was like to die. To take your last breath. To be surrounded by your loved ones and see them for the last time before you close your eyes for good. How must that feel? Does it hurt or is it painless? I thought about what it must be like to want to die after such a long life, feeling so tired and worn that simply living seemed an unbeatable task. Was this the end? For Doris’ sake, God, I hoped it was.

Day four: Doris died. It was a Monday morning, and I walked into work and sensed an eerie quietness. I opened the door to see no family members gathered in the hall, and all the lights were on. I knew, before anyone told me, I just knew. She died early that morning, surrounded by her family. I hesitantly opened the door to the sunroom where she took her final

breath and was overwhelmed with a feeling of gloom. I walked in and felt a weight fall onto my chest, and like the air was being sucked from my lungs. It almost felt like I was drowning. This was where she died, and I could feel her death. A chill ran down my spine as I stripped the bed of the sheets and collected her belongings that were left in the room. While I was sad, I was relieved that she was no longer suffering.

I thought I understood death before this, but that was something different. I felt that, and it was indescribable. I watched her die for four days, and I didn’t even know. I had a feeling it was her end, but I held out hope that it wasn’t. Watching the end made me realize, though, that death is sometimes

unpredictable. The people we love can be ripped away from us at any time, and there is nothing more eye opening than that. So, to Doris, I want to say thank you. Thank you for reminding me to live my life to the fullest, hug my parents a little tighter, and to not forget the important things. Thank you for reminding me of the importance of a smile, of compassion, and showing me that I can make a difference in someone else’s life. Most importantly, though, thank you for showing me true strength to fight for life. Your spirit will live within me long after your death and continue to remind me to appreciate the life I was given because we never know when the end is.

Jenna Emery is a second year Physician Assistant major and a Spanish minor. She is currently a part of HOPE peer educators, class of 2025 secretary, and works as a tutor in the writing center. She enjoys reading and baking in her free time!

Tender Fender

In a time before the inventions of child car seats or seat belts, before the twins were born, Dad was driving his three children up a slight incline in the Village of Saint Bernard, an urban area surrounded by Cincinnati. Five-year-old Georgia blurted out, “Where’s Larry?”

Dad stopped our 1949 Studebaker sedan. He turned around to see only two children and an open car door. The rear doors of that blue sedan opened backwards, what they now call suicide doors. Apparently, Larry fell asleep leaning against the handle.

Dad quietly backed the car down the hill two blocks to find my four-year-old brother sitting in the road. The lenses of his brand-new eyeglasses were scratched beyond repair.

My older brother Larry got picked on a lot. He got his first job assembling a variety of toys at the Surprise Shop, a nearby toy shop, later working at Cervi’s, a dank bicycle sales and repair garage in Highwood, riding his bike three miles to work through our wealthy North Shore

Mike Marks

suburb to the adjacent blue-collar suburb after school and on Saturdays. He was a sprocket and derailleur expert before he turned thirteen. When he was sixteen, he got an old dilapidated ‘49 Chevrolet convertible. It came with a conspicuous dent in the right front quarter panel.

Mom called the car “Tender Fender.” She masked and spray painted the rusty beast red, the color of a ripe tomato but more the texture of a grapefruit, accidentally over spraying a bit on the grille and bumpers. She used a fast-drying automotive lacquer that is best applied at close range, but her $10 vibrator paint sprayer wasn’t made for that. The paint dried as it was sprayed; the final finish wasn’t shiny. Larry unsuccessfully spent hours trying to smoothen the cratered surface.

Larry fixed it up mechanically. Using his car, he got a better paying job at the Highland Park News Agency, where Tucker worked. Larry loaded Tender Fender with Chicago newspapers early every morning and sped around several neighborhoods in

Highland Park and Highwood, throwing the rolled papers into subscribers’ driveways, finishing his route before school. He still had the job when he started college, commuting to the University of Illinois at Navy Pier where he majored in Electronic Engineering.

We planned to celebrate Mom’s Tuesday birthday the following weekend in the autumn of 1963, when everyone would be home. On Wednesday I taunted Larry for no specific reason, as little brothers do. Dad tried to break up the kerfuffle, holding me back as Larry snuck back to his room. Dad and I had the classic parent-adolescent shouting match of all times. Without warning, Dad went down. I screamed, “Help!” Larry gave Dad mouthto-mouth, a procedure he learned in high school, before the paramedics got there that sad November. Dad was almost ten years older than my mom, leaving her with five kids, two in college, me in high school, and the twins in eighth grade.

Our family flew to Cincinnati to bury him in the family plot with his parents. Dad was a smoker who had a history of heart disease. At only fifty-three, he left his wife and five teenage kids.

Larry and I smoked, too. Cigarettes cost thirty-five cents a pack. I was the middle kid, a junior in high school. Larry’s always been two years wiser to the world than me.

President Kennedy was assassinated two weeks later. I was sitting near the front of my American History class when the principal came in and told us. That was the first course I ever got a D in. The rest of the world joined in our mourning. Radio stations put out incessant dirges. Thanksgiving was a dark day.

Larry got me a job at the news agency

rolling papers and helping delivery drivers. I worked ridiculous, irregular hours both before and after school, and on weekend mornings. I felt defective being fatherless in this ritzy town. I avoided my friends, became more of a loner like my brother.

Even though we were confirmed Jews, our family tradition always included a Christmas tree crammed with shiny ornaments, tinsel, garlands, and lights. No religious symbols on our trees, no crosses or six-pointed stars. When Rabbi Tarshish of our Temple Jeremiah stopped by to check on us, he admired our Hanukkah bush.

I lost my virginity that year. My girlfriend moved across the country a month later.

But Christmas was our big holiday, the day to exchange presents. In early December, I confided in Larry that I wanted a barbell and weights. He wanted the latest electronic gizmo, a portable mini reel-toreel tape recorder. Each cost over $30, much more that we had ever spent on each other or our three sisters. Now that Dad was gone, we made a deal that we would get them for each other and promise to act blown away on Christmas morning.

There was a light snowfall after dinner when Larry and I hopped in Tender Fender to drive to Sears, the store that sold everything. Larry loved the compact tape recorder they had for sale. A barbell with sixty pounds of weights was almost the same price. We left Sears with our arms full, elated that we got the right things for each other.

We loaded Tender Fender’s trunk, delighted that we would be getting Christmas presents we really wanted. We decided to celebrate by driving down the bluff to Lake Michigan, a couple of miles from home. It was snowing heavier,

but we didn’t mind until we got halfway down the Park Avenue hill. The steep road wound back and forth. Tender Fender started sliding. Its nylon belted bias ply tires couldn’t hold the slippery pavement. Luckily, Larry navigated to the bottom of the incline without a mishap.

Snowflakes glistened as they blew around above the whitecaps. We watched for a moment from the only vehicle in the freshly snow-covered parking lot behind the beach. No way was Tender Fender going back up the hill in that weather, but we were afraid to abandon our newly paid for booty in the trunk of an old car. Since we hadn’t yet exchanged our gifts, Larry insisted that the buyers would carry them home. Larry trudged up the slushy hill with a barbell and a box of unwieldy weights. I climbed beside him with an especially fragile electronic appliance, an arduous mile to the top, another mile home in an imperfect storm – dark, icy, cold, windy, and wet. We slipped a few times, but never dropped our packages.

Fortunately, we made it home without

further incidents. Larry called another news agency employee, who had a four-wheeldrive Jeep to pull Tender Fender back up the hill. Our first Christmas without Dad came, another solemn day. Both Larry and I feigned surprise as we opened each other’s gifts. We were so happy to get what we wanted.

Mom’s boss, who she would marry less than a year later, gave all five of us Marks children our own state-of-the-art electronic widgets, miniature Japanese transistor radios. We didn’t know what to think. They were cool, not something our dad could afford.

My set of weights was soon forgotten, about the same time Tender Fender went to the junkyard. I will never be mistaken for Charles Atlas or any other musclebound celebrity. Larry kept that tape recorder running through college until the case fell apart. He earned an Electronic Engineering degree long before computer courses entered college curriculums. Then he began a long productive career at IBM, an engineer, an inventor.

Mike Marks, the middle of five children born in a six-year span, was taught writing structures from Gwendolyn Brooks in Chicago, later awarded the first Creative Writing bachelor’s degree ever offered at Kansas State University. He and his Kansan wife Anita have raised their own five children.

YiaYia Toma Cynthia Linkas

This is a melting-pot love story. There are thousands, but this is ours.

I’m wrapped in Tom’s arms— he’s Greek, male, utterly “other.” We are walking on a sun-drenched day around the Tute (MIT). He’s telling me about himself, flips around on the sidewalk and walks backwards with enthusiasm. His grandmother, YiaYia Toma is the closest adult to him in the world. “She’s smart and brave and, well, she’s just,” he stops on the sidewalk and hugs me. “She’s my North Star. Franny, you will love her!” Frances is my middle name and already Tom’s love-name for me.

He describes YiaYia Toma— five-foot-two with snapping nut-brown eyes and olive skin. Greek widows dress all in black, and she’s small and adorable in her babushka. “You have to meet her! You two are so alike.”

I’m not sure how to take this. “Alike, how?”

“Full of life.” He squeezes me. We let people pass.

I’m one year free of my life with nuns, my convent school. I’m excited about Tom; joy overwhelms me.

I’ve been a foreigner to joy.

“It’s her joy!” as if he read my mind. “And you should see her huge garden— straight rows of beans, tomatoes, garlic and eggplants. And you wouldn’t believe— she comes in from digging and heads for her whiskey bottle under the sink.” He shakes his big head.

I try to picture YiaYia Toma. I’d grown up next door to my French Memère with her long white hair braided around her small head. She was a seamstress, and never wore black. I’d been surrounded by nuns in black; now I wanted only color.

Yet, here is Tom, chiseled cheekbones and chin, hooded brow, six foot two, and when he moves, all I can think of is a big cat with his thick dark hair. I’m stunned by his love for his grandmother. It is different, odd, wonderful.

When Tom’s family came to America, he tells me, he was the dream. He’d been one of very few to go to MIT from his high school in Ohio – he’d left home in a blaze of glory.

I’m eager to meet YiaYia Toma, but it takes a while. We didn’t jump on planes in 1967. We’d been dating for a year when Tom’s father bought him a car – a rare promise for good grades. When he handed him the keys, all he said was, “Don’t have accidents,” and this became a catchphrase for us. “Bye, honey, don’t have accidents.”

Now we can drive to Cleveland over Christmas break.

We enter the ranch style house and there they are lined up, his mother: Andromache (May) and his father, Haralombos (Carl), his sister, Agnes, lithe and warm with her long dark hair, “Come in, honey, come in.” Two grandmothers look alike in their black— same height, same strength. But there the similarities cease. Their faces are a study in contrasts. Babayana, Carl’s mother, sneers when she looks at me, her tight, bitter mouth stays in its line, her pointy chin. What a dismal mood! I whisper to him in dismay, “They don’t want me here.”

“Cynthia.” May nods to me and I flinch. No one calls me that except the nuns. “You have a Greek name,” she says without a hint of a smile.

Then Tom leads me to YiaYia Toma. She stands very still in her black wool dress, stockings, babushka, takes my hand and holds my gaze. I can’t look away. A once pretty face, now tanned with endless lines that make you want to know everything about her. As she speaks, her head tilts, hands fly, a stream of Macedonian mixed with Greek and laughter escape with the words. The thick dark brows and wide eyes lend her an air of impossible wisdom. I turn to Tom, beg him to translate.

“She says you are only a girl,” he tells me.

“I’m too young?”

“Hell no, she was fourteen when she got married.”

We sit around a wooden table where May is placing platters of pita, feta and olives. “Here, eat,” she says. “Dolmathes! Chourakia!” Bottles of beer— something called mese.

“She must have been cooking all week.”

“Yup. The Son came home,” says Aggie. Tom pinches his mother’s cheek; I realize there’s a lot of pinching going on. To my shock, she slaps his cheek. Hard. “Why you not come for turkey? I make gomo, came so good.”

He’s crimson but chuckles.

All around us are paintings of rolling hills, sheep and stone houses. Their village is built on hills, the roads are cobblestone or dirt. I finger the brown beads on string hanging from the back of Tom’s chair.

“Worry beads,” says Aggie. “You’ll need some.”

“Opiote, here.” May hands them to me. They all talk at once, shoveling squares of filo pastry onto their plates, olives, cheese, so many questions for Tom, and I shrink into myself. Even if I knew Greek, he tells me it wouldn’t help because they mix Greek and Macedonian, the language of Alexander the Great, their village so close to the Albanian border.

May makes me a plate with my own glass of wine on it and beckons me to come. Tom puts his hand on me but no, May wins and I follow her with my food. “Eat in here,” she says. “See? Nice tree.”

The living room is dominated by a silver Christmas tree with a spinner of light shooting colors. The couch and chairs sweat in their plastic covers. The huge lamp in the picture window drips with prisms

around its shade, catching the sun.

Hearty laughter bursts from the kitchen. I stare at the door. I guess she wants to talk to me alone. But no, she leaves me there, she says, “Enjoy the tree.”

She’s proud of it? This is how she treats guests?

More awkwardness— it’s now time to sleep. Aggie gives me her room and goes to the grandmothers’ den. Tom has his own. We wave to each other from the doors. I feel small, like I’m disappearing.

After I slip under the freezing sheets, some awake time passes, and then a light knock. Tom pulls me with him to the basement where we sit on a couch wrapped in crocheted blankets. “May made this?” I hold up the pink and brown one.

“Yup,” he pinches my cheek. I rub the pinch. I hope he stops that when we leave Cleveland.

“They’re treating me like a beggar you picked up somewhere.” Finally, I can speak.

He runs his fingers through his hair, a gesture I will come to love, “Ah, they’re so Greek,” and then proceeds to tell me what he should have months ago. The way he left for MIT in a whirlwind of pride. “They never told me this, but I know. I’m supposed to marry a Greek girl, after I buy a house first and become a doctor. Not till I’m thirty.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

“They already chose my wife,” he shrugs, “but they can’t control me.”

“What?”

This boy is hellbent in his own way; I’ve already seen this. And it’s exactly how they raised him.

We cut the garlic small for May and watch her insert it into the lamb. “Our cousin slaughtered it this morning.” My chest squeezes. There are a million cousins.

This meal is usually for Easter, but May wants it now, and they found a rare fresh lamb. It begins with Mayeritsa, a soup made from entrails and inner parts of the lamb. They eat everything. I get that and admire it. We are not far from it with our French ragout, a stew made from burnt flour in the bottom of the pan and pigs’ feet.

The soup bowls are passed out. We sit around the dining room table. I can see the colors repeating on the Christmas tree walls through the open door. I seem to be safely in my spot right now. And then I look at my soup. There is an eyeball floating in it. Without a doubt, an eyeball.

Tom is seated beside me, I kick him under the table. He sees it and whispers, “Here, give it to me,” passing me his napkin. But May’s eyes are narrowed. “Eat, eat, Cynthia.” She is staring and waiting. I lift my spoon.

I heave.

I swallow the eye.

Carl smiles, looking right at me, and opens his mouth to speak. Tom had told me his father had triumphed over a stuttering problem in his youth. I never find out what he would have said. His mouth contorts into various shapes, his eyes grow large, he’s stymied. I feel terrible because he speaks to everyone else just fine.

The meal done, Tom rescues me. We sneak out back into the trees where he used to play cowboys and cold as it is, we hold each other in the sleeping garden. He wants to not care about their expectations. Is he his own person?

The next day, I stay close to YiaYia Toma.

“They are so pissed off,” I moan. He

kisses my forehead.

Thankfully, on day two, cousin Elenitsa, who is like a sister to Tom, invites us over. She has two sweet little children who gravitate to me. She was raised back in Greece by YiaYia Toma. In her house, not relegated to the Christmas tree, I roll up my sleeves and do dishes, help her serve coffee, lay the table. “You’re fast like us,” she hugs me. YiaYia Toma had come with us— Babayanna, never.

On day three, back at Tom’s, company comes to look me over. And they are many. Carl brought half of Nestorio to the states, sponsoring them, finding jobs and housing, a sort of Greek Godfather. May and Carl’s house is the central heartbeat of the Greek community in Cleveland. It’s always the same, the ouzo and nuts, coffees and pastries in a kind of saucer that has room for both cup and sweet. The men in the living room, the women in the kitchen.

But no, YiaYia Toma sits in the living room with the men.

She’s in the center, eyes dancing, and all of them rapt, joking and telling stories, laughing till the tears fall. Tom says it’s always like that. He and I stand in the doorway; he translates her story in a quick whisper.

Back in the village Toma had a donkey with soft ears, she shows us her small ears under the babushka. The donkey, Marape, was everything she needed; he loved only her. She swept her arms wide. Marape was impossible to move and kicked anyone else. She kicks her long black skirt, “Hopa!” she dances. He often snuck into her sleeping area to breathe on her, keeping her warm. One night, her husband, Yanni

who owned the village store, woke up and screeched, the donkey hee-hawed, it was a disaster.

The men go wild. More sweets are passed, more ouzo.

She launches another story— sparks fly from her eyes —about a wedding in the village, traditions unassailable, a threeday long affair, the reluctant, slow moving groom is ushered along the narrow cobblestone paths to the Church, held up on either side by two men and it’s like a play, he’s crushed to be getting married because his life is over. Toma acts this out hanging her head and moping toward marriage. And along the path, suddenly a villager jumps in front of him holding a rooster and with a huge knife, slits its throat. Toma holds up the imaginary rooster and slashes her hand. She becomes the rooster, squawks, runs around and waves her arms in the spraying blood. The groom has to step over the bloody dying rooster— he’s the new rooster in town!

The men guffaw, tilt their heads and egg her on. “Tell about your gamos, your wedding night!”

“I was fourteen,” she quiets them. “My parents picked my husband. I was terrified. When I found out what I was supposed to do, I locked myself in the closet.”

They all love this story and laugh as though they were hearing it for the first time. “How long in the closet?” She lifts two fingers.

“Hours?

“Days,” she laughs. Adorable.

By the third day of my visit, Tom has stopped translating. Words do not matter now. Toma has sized us up; she watches like a sparkling bird. Tom tracks me across a room. Wherever we sit, YiaYia takes my

hand in hers. I’m flush with love for the boy, but she’s part of it

I’m leaving in an hour. Toma takes me into the den where the two YiaYias sleep. She sits me on the edge of her bed and gives me a framed picture to hold. A young man, yios. I know the word for son. It’s huge in this place.

Tom translates softly— the story falling out of her —ripping at my heart. “Mello.” The boy looks like Tom with the shelf of

forehead and full lips. Her head side to side, her hands chopping the air, her groans, her huge dry eyes asking, asking, why. I hold the portrait close to my chest, kiss the handsome face. Her only son. Yios.

The family hid in the caves when the Nazis came. The weather was cold, brutal, Mello twenty-three, a newly minted lawyer. He got deathly ill— pneumonia, there was no doctor. He died as she held him, right there in the cave. And took with him all his promise.

In addition to writing novels and poetry, Cynthia Linkas’ short story, Baggage, won the PEN Syndicated Fiction contest. Her first book of poetry, Tumbled Time, was published in March, 2020 by Kelsay Books, a finalist in the Nature category for the American Best Book award with American Bookfest. Learn more at cynthialinkas.com.

Grade School Cafeteria

James Croal Jackson

I fell in love with space at a young age no all the cafeterias were too massive. The size of it was fine if confining. Don’t want to talk lunch meat. Or Drew at the table, harping. He is inconsequential so why do I mention him, twenty-some years after? The bullies are the ones who stay. I got smacked in the head by a basketball in the lunch room. The only fair fight’s a food fight. All’s fair in school and in college, there was no privacy. You’d write the names of people you liked on the palm of your hand and burn the paper if you saw them on campus, or heard their names from friends. But that was when they still had nicknames. Today, they’re famous. They still know me but I’ve got my own stories to tell. I wish I could have been a Beatnik, a Hippie. Went in and out of consciousness for a week after my twentyfirst birthday so no one knew I went that hard. I was floating like a bean bag,

involuntarily. A giant driving a tow truck spotted me and told me he was drunk. He crashed into me. I never saw him again.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has three chapbooks: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022), Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021), and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights, 2017). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. Learn more at jamescroaljackson.com.

Artemisia’s Resistance :: Renaissance Bett Butler

Born on the cusp between eras, bereft of mother, left in an edifice of men, betrayed by women time and again: Tuzia ignoring your cries of rape, Banti later recycling your life with all the salaciousness required of a bestseller.

Yours was the old story of women defined by what men do to them: assault, deceit, trial, torture, scandal. Exiled for your father’s convenience, sold to a spendthrift husband, your dowry the expedient forgiveness of a debt.

Some say your resistance lay in owning your own story, channeling ire and anguish into art, painting yourself as Judith, the severed head of Holofernes wearing the face of your rapist.

Some say your resistance lay in teaching yourself to read and write, in shrewd and tactful negotiations with patrons, in your correspondence with the intelligentsia.

“The works will speak for themselves.”

~ Artemisia Gentileschi

Some say your resistance lay in your celebrity, your movement in the haut monde, your work sought in the highest circles.

But perhaps instead, your resistance lay in the act of painting itself: in gazing into the mirror, absorbing the curve of arms, fingers, shapes and shades of flesh and bone, sheen of blood-colored velvet, shadows on tiny knots of tatted lace at cuff and bodice;

Perhaps your resistance lay in stretching and preparing canvas, in mixing colors, in every line and brushstroke, the elusive alchemy of translating imagination into image.

Perhaps your resistance lay in simply living your life as a working artist.

Celebrated in your time, then promptly ghosted by male gatekeepers of history, your work is once again brought to the fore for us to discuss and analyze and argue your motivations with interpretations that tell us little about you but reveal multitudes about ourselves.

This is your genius: Eons later, your works continue to speak for themselves.

The Sign

Bett Butler

I was born too late to remember the sign that hung over Lee Street from 1921 to 1965 in the small town where my grandmother lived and my father grew up people still talked about it, though mostly defending it, said it wasn’t about race, just an expression like “that’s mighty white of you”

but where did that expression come from that white means good and black means bad where do you think that came from

I vaguely remember seeing a photograph of the sign among keepsakes now lost after my father died I was in the office of a man who sold insurance (they grew up together) and there it was a framed postcard, black & white hung eye level on the wall

I wondered why he had it there a reminder? of what? a conversation piece? a conversation with whom? and what would have been said?

Bett Butler’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in small-press publications in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Canada. An award-winning songwriter and musician, she co-owns Mandala Music Production in San Antonio, Texas, where she and bassist/composer Joël Dilley produce music and spoken word licensed for HBO, Discovery Channel, and more

Undetermined

Christina E. Petrides

She’s not really in a rush to meet life’s milestones, still tripping over her own feet, milling around. Her peers are on the cusp of welcoming grandchildren, and she’s had only her first kiss, one boyfriend. Most are in the middle of mortgages, and she’s yet to decide on a country to take root in, much less a piece of property she’d like to buy. Eventually, the latter will be decided for her— She’ll have a patch of ground that is forever hers. But of course, if she’s cremated, she’ll continue to wander, not settled enough even in death to push up a daisy.

Fashion Show

Christina E. Petrides

By training visibly dissatisfied, tall straws stalk unmarked paths in peculiar handcrafts exaggerated to cover or reveal in ways only empresses can afford. Off-stage, relieved mannequins shed their weird skins, wipe away paint, and cheerfully don loose sweats no one films but all comfort-envy.

Christina E. Petrides lives and works on Jeju Island, South Korea. She is the author of three children’s books, and scores of her poems have been published in periodicals worldwide. Her website is: www.christinaepetrides.com.

The Sun Never Rises

I am drunk on the smell of jasmine

Lucidly dreaming along ancient paths

I am dead and born. Alive and buried.

My mother sees my father in my gestures. I am new but my blood is old. Lost. Found. Lost again.

Shaking off snow from frost bitten hands. Wiping blood off a bronze sword.

I see my grandmother in my daughter

My father in my son. Both gone. Dizzy as the moon circles past, Never seems to be out of sight for long.

Kris Green

Ancient as the sun never rises. Wandering into cities of stone, sick, and staccato. Enacting the past battles that are hidden in my blood While whooping as a 6-year-old carrying a stick. The rhythmic drumming conjures nostalgic sacrifices so deep Even Kanye’s voice can’t disrupt it.

The brain cannot conceive what the body knows instinctively. Once dead is not forever dead.

What raptures me - raptures my descendants and ancestors

My soul is new; my body is new.

My blood is old.

I am drunk on the sound of crashing waves

Kris Green lives in Florida with his wife, three-year old son, and new baby daughter.

Water Memory

What is water, but memory?

Principle: Water retains memory of substances previously dissolved.

Louise DiLenge

What is soul, but breath?

Principle: As soul leaves at dying breath, the body weighs 21 grams less.

What is spirit, but vitality?

Principle: Spirit is the animating force in all entities, vital for connection to a larger force.

What is space, but energy?

Principle: Space is a void of vibrating energy between molecules.

Life is a biological concept: the characteristics, condition, or mode, separating a living thing from dead matter.

All life on Earth is based on carbon compounds: long-chain molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids.

Water, is essential to life: allows long molecules to wrap, fold and coil inside membranes to form cells.

While this may or may not be true of all life in the Universe: it is true of all life on Earth. In conclusion: Life has no meaning. Live well and try not to die.

Try not to drown in limpid pool, reservoir, encoded well. Or, deluged by ocean swell.

Internal waves are largest, barely noticed on the surface.

This rolling sadness is mine alone.

Sea serpent wrapped, folded and coiling within my breast.

What is water, but memory?

Principle: Water retains memory of substances previously dissolved.

Louise DiLenge has flourished five decades as writer, designer, performer, and arts producer. One Reel Productions co-founder and Teatro ZinZanni founding principal, solo and collaborative scripts have graced American, Japanese and Spanish stages. Poems appeared in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Consilience Journal and New Reader Magazine. Seattle, Washington is home.

Interdependence

Leon Hendershot

Dear Allison, Even after a year and a half of dodging feminine firestorms And accusatory asks-and-answers you are still here. You take up residence on my shoulder, speaking for me When your memory is necessary for my survival. We are conjoined twins praying to be separated, But surgery leaves scars I cannot afford to display proudly.

Long-lost evidence of your influence is triumphed by The visceral vandalism you have branded on my skin. Fallen eyelashes don’t hold wishes, But reminders that I am not yet myself. That you are everywhere.

I see you in the bathroom mirror after I shower Even if I refuse to wipe away the fog.

I feel you when I get dressed in the morning. I pick and choose my outfits, the fabric Grazing my sides, never fully embracing them.

I hear you when new friends call me by your name. Yet I never introduced you to each other.

I hear you in labored “they/thems” uttered by Classmates, because I am not “man” enough.

I hear you in incontestable “she/hers” followed by “Leon” Because “Leon” is the most feminine name ever.

I am tired of hesitant corrections.

I just want strangers to get it right the first time. But you, Allison, have made that deliberately difficult.

My prosperity does not kill you.

“He/hims” do not drive stakes into your heart. Your soul calls to death and wishes for it all to be over, Even though you were never alive to begin with. You were just a proposition, a hope. Mom’s dream since she was a kid.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve taken that away from her. Her quest for maternal fulfillment. That all she’s prayed for was crushed By some kid’s wishful thinking. And sometimes I wish I could hide away And pretend to be you again so I will Never have to see mom’s face drop When I tell her you don’t exist anymore. I still have your old Tinkerbell costume in my closet. Maybe if I go back, I can fit in it again And give Mom what she always wanted: You.

Signed, Leon

P.S. I may not love you, But I do not blame you For anything.

Written to be used as a performance piece in his school’s spoken poetry event, Interdependence describes Leon Hendershot’s struggles as a transgender man. This year he has started presenting as male in school and has received mixed reactions from classmates, teachers, and himself.

The Black Magicians Show Their Cards

Joshua Merchant

it is never safe but should be.

his peanut headed self reminds me of this by showing me a scar under his finger nail and says thas my brother. i don’t

say a word. i reach in my lunch bag, brown with two golden arches and offer him everything but my toy, which i’d be happy to share. he then shows a blackened heart on his back that looks drawn on, mapping where his sister wandered into the street and the impact used to protect her. i say i love you

before the bell tolls. before a whistle calls forth a single file line // warns us before the slow drag to the bus, before either of us are reminded to count our guardians on one hand. or one finger. before leaving. even if the joy of recognizing someone’s fight can’t be ours for too, too long.

Episodic

before she was taken she would leave mid sentence everyone in the house would transform she’d holler until our faces were recognizable again— half fearful, partially still angry, confused and worried— her face uncontrollably smudged with the building blocks of regret. jenga is fun until your mother is the pillar; a new sleight of hand prescribed a prepubescent launch of cruelty flung from my mouth, a love affair with a pool of scorpions. there was always a sting— she was always falling. rising with a new backless gown, brown socks adorning the ground she walked. she once held a candy cane jar of chocolate kisses like a decaying animal in her hands as if she

Joshua Merchant

were saying we’re broke for the holidays but i can fix it. i can fix us

Joshua Merchant is Black Queer a native of East Oakland exploring the realm of love and what it means while processing trauma, loss, and heartbreak. They’ve had the honor to witness their work being held and understood in literary journals such as 580Split, Anvil Tongue, and Snow Flake Magazine, and elsewhere

Geese on Campus

They travel in pairs, mostly and shit on walkways students trod unapologetically honking at fast cars and families that travel in groups like lemmings behind hosts skilled in the art of walking backward and talking about vast futures.

Eric Machan Howd

When I pass by on my breaks the couples are always the same one standing and one nestled beside. They follow me with their poppy-seed eyes and elegantly crane their necks to study me wings folded behind their backs like great philosophers trying to work through their proofs.

And there’s always one lone bird sagging into the middle of a patch of grass partnerless and quietly watching the sky for a return then curling its beak between the soft feathers on its back. I stay with these birds longer whisper consoling words to them from a distance as I, too, have felt the sharp edge of loneliness at my throat.

My Students Present on Freaks

Eric Machan Howd

Outside, the wind bends the branches as the student body lumbers here and there wearing masks packed by gigantic dark-lipstick mothers. Green grows everywhere under a rare blue sky poxed with swollen rain clouds and every clock in every classroom tells a different time. Technology has failed and my students tell the story of the freak who murdered his family with his lobster claws. They show old photos of parasitic twins and gigantism, pinheads and midgets dancing around the rosie. They introduce limbless men in pillowcases rolling their own and lighting them with mustached mouths as gawkers gawk. They stumble over medical vocabulary with empathetic tongues words like hypertrichosis, ectrodactyly, and lymphedema. The faces grow younger and younger each year and I watch the looks of those not presenting themselves noting how some look away and some cannot look away. I listen as women giddily ask questions about the four-legged woman from Texas and wonder if her two wombs’ periods were in sync with the pull of a moon under plump goddesses and crones. The men cannot identify with the man named from the Esperanto word for wonder who listened to his voices and swallowed a galactic needle whole, puncturing the one part of his body not invulnerable to his God. As class ends, grin-less hangers-on with empty eyes approach me to apologize for typos and ask questions about lateness. What tired stares and eyebrows writhing or undulating with ideas. I feel old as I leave this room where I draw shades each week, where I try to remember the creases on my

mother’s face and father’s forehead— where I silently articulate the fourteen lines of Ozymandias and dance uncontrollably in circles as my students walk away through glass.

Eric Machan Howd (Ithaca, NY, USA) is a poet, musician, and educator. His poetry has been seen in such publications as Caesura, Slant, Nimrod, River City, and Stone Canoe. In 2021, his fifth collection of poetry, “Universal Monsters,” was published by The Orchard Street Press.

New Year’s Eve

Glenis Ann Moore

Come outside into the dark night; the snow is crisp under the stark moon’s rays. The cats are shut in now, watching through the window as bats fly away from the bright.

Bright stars highlight the silken trees where frosted webs glitter and spin like lace. The leaves have gone now but the branches still stretch out feeling their way through the chill breeze.

Breezes come and go with the storm of winter’s harsh embrace which kills so much. We can see no tracks on the solid ice tonight just birds hoping for a reform.

Reform will not come soon for some as we shiver in out coats and warm hats, awaiting the fireworks at New Year’s Eve again. Still it is a clear night, so come.

Glenis Ann Moore has been writing poetry since the first Covid lockdown and does her writing at night as she suffers from severe insomnia. When she is not writing poetry she makes beaded jewellery, reads, and sometimes runs 10K races slowly. She lives just outside Cambridge.

Shower Lines

I’m in the shower and the film starts, in a thin sheen on the bottom, I hear my lines—oh golly!—my 50’s fluffed mashed potato soap hair, my red lipstick, smearing, as I kiss the heroic tile & add the comings of 21st century tongue.

Isabelle M. Hoida

The conditioner spreads under my feet. I slip and giggle, breaking my lines. There are two thoughts. One: racking my head open on the porcelain and shocking the whole set, sudden redness, into the gushing dialogue they write for soaps. Two: joining my sister seated on her bottom, preparing for the slip-and-slide, no cameras, off the set.

When the memory comes back, I see us, dumb, dunking our faces underwater, comparing vaginas, shooting mouthfuls of suds at each other like the turrets in Dad’s video games. I remember coasting through water, a warm cape over my shoulders, a stand-in for maternal embrace, I’m more than an actress, now I’m a daughter. I lie in my grave, so quiet, my eardrums ache. That suck of water into my ears made me wince. Then, relaxing, staring at the shiny ceiling, a corner spider plastered against the house’s damp, white skin.

Now I stand on one foot, my pedestal, and even my weight on this slippery base. My leg elevates, the desire angle, camera eyes, and I pose for the imaginary audience. Razor in hand, I shave my legs like this, dancer-style, seductively, showing nothing, no pain but the hair licked clean off my legs. & I’m famous, in a magazine. Suddenly, I’m embedded into The Stars, golden tipped, and seducing men back to my hotel room.

We used to circle the water, a girl whirlpool. We were weathermakers, trying to fabricate the hurricane, to be in the eye of something important. We sloshed and spilled. I placed a towel down. We giggled until the water fell to dusk and dimmed its temp. We lifted our limbs up to break the gray surface—our phantom limbs escaped to be dried.

I knew then, it was better to be dried by someone else. You got the friction of a hug and the sweetness of a duty being done for you. You weren’t just a pool of water, you were a transformation, a highness, a trumpeted ending to a Hallmark, expected but still raising tears.

Now I just wrap myself. I picture the photographers swooping in for a shot. I feel the bottoms of my feet slippery, covered in a glaze. My toes look so big, each of them, positioned next to each other’s swollen bodies. & I look in the mirror at the pinpricks of blood speaking lines on the surface of my legs.

Isabelle M. Hoida (she/her) is a palmist and poet pursuing her undergraduate degree in Writing and English Literature at the University of Wisconsin – Superior. Her idols include Stephanie Danler, Chilly Gonzales, and her expressive corgi-mix Leo.

Midnight, Dawn, Dusk

1. Downtown, after midnight, along Broadway, under artificial light, past benches, the clocktower, and empty parking lots, there are ghosts that walk again. They are the lost ones, the forgotten ones, the ones without names. They are the ones we locked out of ourselves because we are alive.

2.

At dawn, in the cemetery, where tombstones look like grey heads protruding from beneath blankets of powdered white snow, the sun, blinded by its own radiance, was naïve to autumn’s dying breath. And winter’s bitter beauty cracked its cold whip across the faces of the living while the world was frozen in glass-like frost.

3.

As if we could rewrite history, as if we could turn back time, we romanticize death by chasing ghosts in the bottom of bottles. These autumn days are numbered, marked by crumbling daylight

Tohm Bakelas

that reflects in broken shards of green glass beneath blue dusk. We, who are forever cursed, accept the night as our sun.

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. He is the author of 23 chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including “The Ants Crawl In Circles” (Whiskey City Press, 2022). He runs Between Shadows Press.

Tonight is Not for the Music

Tonight is not for the music.

Tonight is for contemplating what has been lost And what is not here, What will never be here.

Tonight is not for listening

To the clicking of the horizontal blinds

Brushing against the open window’s frame.

Tonight is not for watching at the door

At the flag that whirls like a dervish in the wind, Too high to be touched.

Tonight is for watching the blackness

Resting heavy between the eyes and the ceiling.

Tonight is for the shriek of the dying memories

And the voices of the dying and the dead.

Tonight is for no love.

Tonight is for no touch –

Lying as still as sadness beside a cold pillow, Listening to the agony

That is the silence of four walls in a night That sneer at the very belief in morning.

John Tustin

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com(slash)johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

Mind Map: Origin Story? Hannah Boysko

God was slow to tell me I can still love what I love, even though time had passed. This is about taking care of the antelopes in Zoo Tycoon on my parents’ desktop after school.

It is about grass-stained cleats, cricket song, and dusty baseball hats. Teammates. A game that reunited a family once a summer. It’s about undiagnosed ADHD and dreams that shapeshift and drift like clouds, and not knowing why. Cumulous, nimbus. It’s about a writer who doesn’t write. A riot grrrl lifestyle that died with the pandemic. It’s about grieving, and not-grieving, and being alive. It’s about visiting your middle school in 9th grade and telling your teacher, “I feel like I was never here.”

It’s about the neon gloss of National Geographic Kids, hours reading stories about a salamander, the surfer girl who survived a shark attack, snakes – or worms. I have worms in my laundry room right now, the good kind that turn garbage into gold. My partner says I embezzled them from work, but I think it’s worth the steal.

I loved watching players steal

the bases. My grandma would get so excited, and my dad loved that I loved it. At the stadium, I always wanted to start the wave. Oh I miss playing at the beach with my mom and sister, falling asleep to the sense memory of the rocking ocean. Or the mosh pit.

At some point, I forget myself.

I regret never finishing the bookclub book, and the band that fizzled out after a single practice. I would be the first woman in the MLB, or a word I learned in fourth grade: “zoologist”. I don’t know what that means anymore, and I didn’t like biology or physics or any of the classes taught by unfunny men. Kid pitch autumn turned into hit-in-the-hip fall, and I stopped playing weeks after writing a short story about how I would change history.

I’m not sure about being a woman. I had to stop watching the remake of A League of Their Own, because it was too wonderful.

I wake up early on Saturdays for softball now. I can pet a chicken at my job if I want to. Every few months I get ready to quit, but I haven’t yet. I spend my savings on health insurance, therapy, and tattoos that help me remember.

I study my cats daily. It is a luxury.

I am taking my medicine and showing up for class. I am writing a poem to Start Making Sense, at least, to myself. I even read two books this month! In 20th Century Women, Annette Benning says, “wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed,” and I remember how hard that movie made me cry, how much I clung to its music. Maybe love is a small thing that never leaves.

Hannah Boysko (she/they) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their poetry and artwork have been published in Femme Mâché, OUCH! Mag, and Dunes Review. You can find them watching front-facing comedy videos, asking if she can read you your birth chart, and tending to honeybees.

absolution

it was something i said that sent don quixote out on his final mission he never would tell me what it was but absolved me of all guilt before the windmill decapitated him

RC deWinter

even his ghost is too stubborn to give up the goods though it visits regularly in my dreams the punishment of a sad gray shadow standing in a corner of my mind holding a lantern and a rose

an invisible orchestra plays the songs he sang to me from far away filtered through a film of stardust and dirt i wake up wet in a bath of sweat and tears but refuse the blood

because after all it was not my fault

RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times/2017), The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Anthology (River Bend Bookshop Press, 12/2021) in print: 2River View, the minnesota review, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, the ogham stone, York Literary Review among others and appears in numerous online publications.

Shinrin-Yoku

The Japanese have a bizarre name For an activity I indulge in:

“Forest-bathing.”

Considering this off-kilter term, I do enjoy

Dee Lamont Allen

Immersing myself in a pool of bay laurels, Swim past white alders with strides of my feet, Around evergreens, I make broad strokes, Swim through rows of live oaks, Paddle—but figuratively—into redwood groves, Sit on a rock at woodland’s edge and soak And catch precious breath for a bit— Ears are open, within their range Recurring breeze caresses maple leaves, Birds trill high from proximate trees, Rabbit’s movements in the brush, Dead cedar needles’ crunch under my sneakered feet, Curious hands feel fresh soil, embedded pebbles, dewy grass & clovers, Sizable body of eucalyptus split at The lowest trunk, no doubt Caused by fierce wind & rain, shed bark as always— Don’t touch that poison ivy! Unless you want warty palms!

You could say I dig Bathing in the forest Without the wetness. Personally, I would call it:

Diving deep into the standing green.

Dee Lamont Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California and author of 7 books—”Boneyard”, “Unwritten Law”, “Stormwater”, “Skeletal Black”, “Elohi Unitsi”, “Rusty Gallows” and “Plans”—and 68 anthology appearances.

Three Sovereign Brothers

Sarah Beth Kolodziej

The snow was falling fast, drops of frothy white foam coating the ground.

A bright drop of red sparkled among the white.

It fluttered closer and suddenly its wings and beak were visible among the flurry.

The cardinal hopped from branch to branch as a squirrel scuttered by threatening to intersect its path. Now higher up and safe from reach, the first cardinal was joined by two others, three sovereign brothers, making a red triangle amidst their white kingdom.

Sarah Beth Kolodziej, King’s Class of 2015, teaches AP Literature, Creative Writing, and SAT Prep at Mid Valley HS. Her poetry appeared in Cicada in 2008, in issues of SCOP from 2011-2021, and in the Poetry In Transit 2022 Feature. She is working on her Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction.

Before Words

Harold C. Ackerman

Start with ourselves, before our earliest speech. We can’t remember, so credit our eyes and ears, our noses, drinking the grass, our tongues and touch creeping like snails over the edge, first here then here, then bursting with recognition.

If we had words then everything was This, everything was shining Here, everything sweet, everything stinking without shame, everything singing or roaring, all tintinnabulation we might try to say;

everything as perfect as warm skin or hideous as broken stones everything Now without these names. Or see us crawl together naked across the earth driven by hunger to eat anything not rock; we aren’t children now we have a sort of speech emerging (at hurt at rest, breeding or wanting to breed) that will not send our thoughts across a gap will not let us sample the will of the group will not let us seek peace only coerce will not let us thank God except a smile.

We are hymns without singing threats without innuendo weapons without warning. We are love without promise.

Harold C. Ackerman taught composition and literature for 35 years. In retirement, he writes poetry and short fiction and makes photo art. He prefers terse, thoughtful poems and unphotoshopped images. He has poetry forthcoming at Schuylkill Valley Journal and photo art currently at Penn Review.

See You

Eyes

Edward Michael Supranowicz

Escalator

Edward Michael Supranowicz

Mirrored Tabitha Kenzakoski

Pita

Michael Moreth

Shrouded in Rainbows

Shelby E. Ford

Meditative

Alien Janis Butler Holm

Fog Over Huntsville Reservoir

Brian Emershaw

Hillside is YELLOW!

Brian Emershaw

Short Date

Brian Emershaw

Una Vista De Sevilla

Sarah Heiskell-Mann

Consumed

Sarah Heiskell-Mann

Danse 5

Harold C. Ackerman

Sunflower, Queens, New York

Anna Thorne

Triborough Bridge, New York City

Anna Thorne

Eighty-Sixed

Josh Ulanoski

Little Ones

Josh Ulanoski

Taft Point

Josh Ulanoski

Visual Art Contributors

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/ Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up in Appalachia. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door Is a Jar, The Phoenix, and other journals. Edward is also a published poet.

Tabitha Kenzakoski is a senior at King’s College for Mass Communications with a minor in Marketing. She has been interested in photography most of her life and has pursued a career in photography as well. She has been published in over 20 fashion magazines!

Michael Moreth is a recovering Chicagoan living in the micropolitan City of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois.

Anum Farooq is an award-winning autodidactic artist, and an alumna of Imperial College London. Anum is fond of the creative links between the Sciences and the Arts. Anum’s art relates to exploring, dreaming and discovering the world around us, educating ourselves with inner insights enlightened with natural perspectives.

Shelby Ford is an Integrated Media Design student at Luzerne County Community College and an employee of the Weatherly Area School District. Shelby is a mother of two, a musician, and a self-proclaimed serial hobbyist.

Janis Butler Holm served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in LA. Her prose, poems, art, and drama have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and the U.K.

Brian Emershaw grew up in Northeast PA, and has worked in commercial creative fields in the area for more than 20 years. He’s recently taken an interest in photography, and loves the challenge of capturing the majesty of nature.

Visual Art Contributors

Harold Ackerman taught composition and literature for 35 years. In retirement, he writes poetry and short fiction and makes photo art. He prefers terse, thoughtful poems and unphotoshopped images. He has poetry forthcoming at Schuylkill Valley Journal and photo art currently at Penn Review.

Josh Ulanoski works as the Associate Art Director in the King’s College Office of Marketing and Communications. Photography has been his hobby (and sometimes his job) for the past 17 years. When he’s not at work or taking more photos than he has time to edit, he enjoys bike riding, hiking, traveling, listening to music, and catching up on movies, TV shows, and video games.

Interview with Linda Nestor

“When you walked into the cafeteria, there were so few of us, and we were only the third class of women… every head would turn.” For Linda Nestor and the other women attending King’s in her year, with the college only having only recently opened its doors to female students, the stares alone were enough to foster a sense of solidarity among the girls.

The male students were not the only ones who seemed to be in a state of shocked disbelief. “I had one elderly priest. He only taught astronomy, and I was the only girl in the class,” Linda recounted. “He would be talking, and looking around, and he would look at me like he’d seen a ghost. He must’ve done that all semester. He was just so blown away by having a girl in his class.” This would be the likely setup for many of the classes at King’s: one or two women per class, as the number of them was so little. “There were two floors of women at East Hall,” Linda said. “That was it.” These floors weren’t even full. Despite their low numbers, the girls at King’s weren’t afraid to be themselves. Linda recalled a particular incident involving her roommate and several other women streaking from these East Hall dormitories up to Lane’s Lane. One girl in particular, she remembered, called every news station she could think of so that word of the demonstration spread far past the King’s campus. Administration, she remembers, was furious. Events like this were not uncommon at the time. Another one was after the first snowfall in 1973, involving a giant snowball fight between King’s College and Wilkes University that was battled over the city of Wilkes Barre. It got so big, in fact, that local police had to get involved. “There must have been sixty people in this snowball fight, and they would round up a couple people, but then more people would come. They were pelting the cops with snowballs.”

Linda attributed a lot of these hijinks to the culture of the ‘70s as things began to loosen in society. “The schools weren’t prepared for these attitudes,” Linda said. “Young women running around without any clothes on? The war in Vietnam hadn’t ended yet, so there were a lot of protests and events that they didn’t really know how to deal with.”

The college wasn’t just unprepared for these new ways of thinking. It was also unprepared for the rise of Special Education, Linda’s major at King’s. She was part of the first class to graduate with a degree in Special Education, as it hadn’t even existed until her junior year. Intent on studying the sciences, Linda found that her psychology and science credits, which she turned into her minors, fit right into the flexible requirements for a Special Education major.

The newness of the field gave the students a lot of leeway, Linda said, and the lack of formality meant that, “The informal education we got from that was really useful, at least for me. It prepared me for being on my own, because once I got into the school systems, they didn’t know what they were doing either.”

This informal education was enriched by Linda’s involvement in the theatre. “I got so much from theatre. How to look at someone’s behavior: Why are they acting that way? How do we use psychology in a practical way? Theatre was trying to replicate it.”

Linda found the non-classroom education to be more helpful at King’s than the classroom instruction. Born into an abusive household, Linda said that, “King’s was the first time I had examples of how it could be better. It gave me a safe place to figure out who I was, which I had not had until that point.” She considers herself extremely lucky for her choice to attend King’s, especially since this immense change to her life came from the result of a coin-flip.

After graduating from King’s College, Linda has worked as a special educator both in schools and with agencies for developmentally disabled adults, a curriculum writer, and taught computer science at community colleges. She lives with her husband, who she met at King’s. A writer since high school, she has a science fiction series spanning five books in process and has published a variety of newspaper articles. She now collaborates with King’s and Jennifer Yonkoski to plan and teach at the Alumni Writer’s Retreat held annually for King’s graduates. One of her pieces, a poem published in The Scop titled “Question 57” (written on a dare!), which is a reflection on her upbringing, has been republished in this issue of the magazine.

Poetry from the ‘70s

The following poems, written by female King’s students in the 1970s, originally appeared in earlier issues of The Scop. They have been reprinted here in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first graduating class of women at King’s College.

Peace

A thought

So discreet and real

Christine Partenope, 1971

From the eye of each beholder

It becomes the same reality.

Let Me Consider

Anne Pettinger, 1973

Let me consider life a picnic and the ants the antagonists of man. Let watermelon dribble down my chin and make me giggle and sing a happy tune.

When

You

Look to See My Lifestyle in the Moon

Maryann Engel, 1972

When you look to see my lifestyle in the moon, the lady smiles, her golden eyes and midnight hair like spiders’ houses.

I know where the lady shines in on your floor when you sleep—

She told me that night when she sat on the mountain, looking like a cantaloupe inside out.

I mentioned how your eyelashes need looking after, and though she realized her light was no replacement for my shoulder, she promised to catch their colors in her light as she tiptoed down to morning.

Question 57

Tell me why, Why is it so?

That people must go on tormenting each other.

Don’t they realize? Don’t they see, How much better it could be?

Tell me why Why, for they’re tormenting me.

Linda Stockdale, 1973

A City By Night

Priscilla Anne Klogy, 1973

The maze of streets now deserted, Is lonely, dark and wicked, since The rushing seas of people Retired to their own homes.

The rising moon sheds no light On the towering steel wedding cakes Whose tiers illuminate the black skyline With the brightness of artificial sunshine.

And the water now sadly still, With sleeping ships in its harbor, Is mute to any foreign ripple That may ruffle its virgin state.

No soul’s shadow would dare advance, Lest it be covered by one More deep and fearful than itself And to be lost— in a city by night.

To Santa From Little Sister

Maryann Engel, 1973

Once on a yellow paper with green lines, He wrote a poem and called it Chops. Because it was the name of his dog, and that’s What it was all about. And the teacher gave him an A, And a gold star, and his mother hung it on the kitchen Door and showed it to all his aunts. That was the year his little sister was born, With tiny fingernails and no hair.

And his mother and father kissed a lot.

And Father Tracy took the kids to the zoo, And let them sing on the bus.

and the girl around the block sent him a Christmas Card with a row of X’s on it.

And his father tucked him in bed at night and was Always there to do it.

Once on a white paper with blue lines, He wrote a poem and called it AUTUMN. Because that was the name of the season, And that’s what it was all about.

And the teacher gave him an A and told him To write neater.

And his mother didn’t hang it on the door, Because the door had just been painted. That was the year his sister got glasses with black rims,

And the kids at school told him why his mother and Father kissed alot.

And Father Tracy left Cigar butts in the church pews. And the girl around the block laughed when he went To see Santa Clause at Macy’s. And his father stopped tucking him into bed at night, And got mad when he cried for him to do so.

Once on a piece of paper from his note book He wrote a poem and called it QUESTION MARK INNOCENCE. Because that was his grief and that’s what it was all about. And the professor gave him an A, and a strange stare, And his mother didn’t hang it on the door Because he never let her see it.

That was the year he caught his sister necking on The back porch, and his mother and father never kissed or even smiled.

And Father Tracy died, and he forgot the ending to the Apostle’s Creed, and the girl around the block Wore too much make-up which made him cough when he Kissed her, but he kissed her anyway, and at 3 A.M. He tucked himself in bed; his father soundly snoring.

That’s why on the back of a pack of matches he wrote Another poem and he called it ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, because that’s

What it was all about, and he gave himself an A, and a slash on each Wrist and hung it on the bathroom door, Because he couldn’t reach the kitchen.

Marriage is to a Woman Adrienne Dicicco, 1975

A pink bubble of dreams bursting into reality Upon the termination of the sacred “Honey-Moon.”

A life of hard work and grief giving until she has exhausted all resources

Receiving nothing in return.

Days of wash loads and worries, dishes to do, the kids to look after.

Rising early, retiring late feeling old before her time

Waiting for the kids to get married off.

I Sit on a Bench

I sit on a bench, In Central Park Wondering why: As a written piece crumbles, Formed from selfish hands, Winds of apathy Blow through the mind And the shallows of the heart.

Influencing our lives; The irrelevance of death Hardens the emotions of a people.

Knowledgeable veterans Know Hidden reasons for death, Of martyrs who died in time Before the stench of patriotism Passed over the land, Forming a violent animal Torn between hunger and starvation.

I and my people Know, That for our country, And for our peace

We die right or wrong.

Liz Cusack, 1977

Dream

The ceiling is a weight slowly pressing me down, beside me stands a strange boy.

Outside walking behind a crowd of displaced persons, college students, through miles of stubble brown grass. no buildings, landmarks the sun has lost its yellow in this sky of blanket cloud with few holes.

No words are said, we are driven on, the sky is falling, air grows thin the boy shows me how to breathe putting his hands on my abdomen.

Nancy Klinger, 1978

We are alone, trapped the inhabitants unseen seek us out on this alien world, no sanctuary, the sun went out.

I go off to the right to follow a new path deeply rutted, made for me, the sun reappears.

On my left, a stranger a tall blond boy, robot/enemy? I ask him, “Are you real?”

disbelieve his yes, he calls himself a cosmonaut, mentions the Creators. “Am I safe?”

a monotone response: “Yes, we are going to make you.”

Editorial Staff Bios

Faculty Advisor

Jennifer Judge Yonkoski writes poetry, is an assistant technical professor of English at King’s College, and serves as advisor to The Scop and Campion Literary Society. Her work has appeared in Rhino, Blueline, Under the Gum Tree, Literary Mama, and Gyroscope Review, among others. She earned her MFA from Goddard College. She also serves as the coordinator of the Luzerne County Poetry in Transit program. Her first book of poetry, Spoons, Knives, Checkbooks, is forthcoming from Propertius Press.

Assistant Faculty Advisor

Josh Ulanoski works as the Associate Art Director in the King’s College Office of Marketing and Communications. Photography has been his hobby (and sometimes his job) for the past 17 years. When he’s not at work or taking more photos than he has time to edit, he enjoys bike riding, hiking, traveling, listening to music, and catching

Editorial Staff Bios

Editor

Brandi Naprava is a second-year English/Secondary Education major at King’s College. While not doing homework, tutoring in the Writing Center, or working on The Scop, she can be found searching for new books to read, staring at maps, and taking on more responsibilities.

Assistant Editor

Jillian Snook is a sophomore at King’s College who is also The Scop’s Assistant Editor. In her free time, Jillian enjoys writing, reading, and once in a while, relaxing.

Social Media Coordinator

Ashlyn Golya is a junior at King’s College and is pursuing a major in marketing along with a minor in international business and concentration in mass communications. In her free time, she likes to enjoy the outdoors with family and friends, go see live music, paint, and travel.

Layout Designer

Samantha Bucher (King’s College Class of 2015) is a writer and graphic designer from Royersford, Pennsylvania. She usually has paint in her hair, can say the alphabet backwards, and determines if a day is great or not by the amount of dogs she’s seen. Her written work has been published in Aurora: The Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology, The Northeast Poetry Review, Poetry in Transit, and The Scop.

Staff Bios

Joseph (Joe) Gacek is a junior English and Secondary Education major at King’s College. He commutes to campus from West Pittston, Pennsylvania. He lives with his mom, dad, and two younger sisters. In his free time, he enjoys running, listening to music, and spending time with his friends.

Jess Gittens is a junior History major with a minor in Creative Writing at King’s College. Jess works as a manager at a small business in Forty-Fort, as well as tutoring in the Writing Center. In her free time, Jess loves reading classic literature and researching her favorite historical topics. She also is an avid writer, who focuses her work on the many challenges and undefinable struggles of domesticity, womanhood, and mental health.

John Grebeck is a junior in the physician assistant program with two minors in biology and neuroscience. He is secretary of the Campion Literary Society and a guest contributor to The Crown. John writes poetry and short stories with themes of overcoming struggle and discovering personal identity.

Stephanie Dunlap is a first-year English Secondary Education major at King’s College. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, and taking care of her plants. Stephanie also competes on the King’s Esports team.

The Scop would like to extend a formal thank you to the King’s College English department faculty for their contributions during the voting process!