Kithe - Spring/Summer 2022

s p r i n g /s u m m e r 2 0 2 2

a journal for new art + literature

untitled Acrylic and paper, 2022 Rachel Coyne

vol.3

f e a t u r i n g L e e Wa r e, W i l l i a m H a w k i n s , Erin Shapland, and others

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Poetry

EDITORIAL NOTE Welcome to a new year of Kithe!

“Kithe” (pronounced kai-the) is an old Scots word meaning “to make known." This year, we've renewed our commitment at Kithe is to honor all creative voices, and we're hopeful that our third issue continues to bring our readers stories that have otherwise gone untold and art that has gone unseen. As we move into the warmer months of the year, we're reminded that even in the darkest times that we weather, personally or as a society, art lifts us up and lights the way forward. The art and writing in these pages is a testament to that hope. Thank you for continuing to join us on this creative journey. Enjoy!

EDITORIAL BOARD LAUREN HOBSON Editor-in-Chief JOSHUA JAMES AMBERSON Editor KATIE BORAK Editor KARLEIGH FRISBIE BROGAN Editor CYNTHIA CARMINA GÓMEZ Editor M.L. SCHEPPS Editor

Jessamyn Duckwell - 1 MG DeNike Gannon - 7 11 Erin Shapland - 16 28 41 49 Caitlin Thomson - 20 Violeta Garcia-Mendoza - 40

pmdd Muzzled Hope Blue Hope Enclosed You Will Find a .PDF Copy of Your Email Address Braver than [you too!]

Parlay on Three Winters She left behind a big, weird fruit, and it's beginning to soften.

Unpeeling an Orange in the Future Nocturne

Writing Andrew Mart - 3 William Hawkins - 9 Ryan Harper - 13 Pat Janowski - 17 Haili Jones - 21 Candace Jane Opper - 23 Lee Ware - 29 Christopher X. Ryan - 36 T. Thompson - 45 Bethany Reid - 46 Jacquelyn Kraut - 51

A Drink for the Dead Our Given Names Tolba Do You Even Know What That Was? Boys Love Buzz On the Killing of Wolves Pipefish Grandmother is Dead (Again) Alice, Stepping Westward Bubbles

Art Rachel Coyne - Cover 35 Jordan Robson - 2 Tara Conway - 8 42 50 Abbey St. John - 12 Adam Land - 15 34 Avery Mags Duff - 22 43 Lauren Paredes - 27

untitled untitled untitled Mary Agnes Aunt Alice's House Victoria & Christopher Daybreaker Traveller Frontier The Carroll Street Apple Tree The Pizza Hut Apple Tree Field Notes from the Alchemist No. 1

pmdd

jessamyn duckwell i let the salmon rot in the fridge. i had meant to cook it and eat it with my boyfriend. i made pesto from the basil that just barely made it in my waterless garden, basil and the nettles that grow taller nearly up to the window. i eat and eat the spicy flowers i grew whose beauty makes me guilty. their bright faces curse my hands to failure. i will let the rest wilt. their round leaves will yellow into waste. i pace the halls at night ignore the dirt gathering in all the corners. my boyfriend says babe your house is falling apart so i take another shower watch the blood unspool down my legs to the drain. is it over? there’s another dead rat in the yard. crabgrass chokes out the strawberry patch. my tits nothing but ache, and ache and i must get on my hands and knees beneath the sun. i let the burrata curdle peaches on the counter flower with mold i take another pill to make it stop it doesn’t stop. i look—out the window where’s the moon—why can’t i see the moon

1

Kithe/Duckwell

untitled

Photography, 2020 Jordan Robson

Kithe/Robson

2

A Drink for the Dead Andrew Mart

I

smell my hands. They stink like deli meat and cigarettes. I saw Ricky’s face in a roast beef sandwich right before my smoke break and I took ten minutes longer than I should. He’s been dead for about a year now and has been haunting me ever since. Alonzo says that’s probably normal. The fact that I’ve been running on only a couple hours of sleep pretty consistently for the past few weeks probably isn’t helping much either. Alonzo gave me some weed that he said would help, but now I just lie in bed, stoned to my core, mind racing, feeling Ricky’s ghost watching me from the dark corners of my room.

Sometimes he’ll take on the form of an inanimate object, often a poster on my wall, usually David Bowie or Madonna. Other times I’ll hear his voice faintly in the distance, barking like a dog.

I’ve been working the graveyard shift at the twenty-four hour Subway for about six months now.

Most mornings Alonzo just walks home and plays Nintendo or whatever it is that he does, but this time he agreed to go to Shooter’s with me and Sid. Sid and I always go to Shooter’s after work on Mondays. Since Monday is my Friday, I try to stay up as long as possible to get back on a normal schedule for my weekend. Somehow that’s evolved into an all day drinking binge. I told Mom I’d go see Grandma with her at the retirement home tomorrow morning. In the past I would have tried to get out of that, but now that Ricky’s gone and it’s just Mom and me, I’ve been trying my best to be a good granddaughter.

It’s six in the morning and winter now. It’s cold.

Still dark out but the streets are lit up with headlights, people going to work, people who choose to live in the daylight. I chain-smoke three cigarettes while Alonzo takes hits from his weed pen, just staring at his phone. I watch him, trying to make out his shape through the billows of smoke, vapor and condensation, the light from his phone making his

3

Kithe/Mart

face appear as if it were floating in space. I start to zone out on this when I hear Sid’s broken-down Volvo wagon sputtering up the parking lot, the muffled hip-hop blasting from the stereo.

Sid used to work with me when I was at Pizza Hut and is about ten years older. He doesn’t work nights but he’s an alcoholic and is more than happy to wake up early if it means he’ll have someone to drink with for the day. This morning I could tell he was still pretty drunk from the night before, but he’s probably the best drunk driver I know. Also he lets us smoke in his car. I don’t know hardly anyone that lets you do that.

“Good morning subhumans!” he says, cranking down his window. His breath smells like beer and coffee. “Just push all that shit to the side and make yourself a seat! If you’re hungry I think there are still some slices from last night somewhere.”

The inside of his car is littered with delivery receipts, paper plates and old pizza boxes. It smells like it too. I roll down the window and light another smoke. Sid is short and skinny but with big biceps. His biceps are the only muscular part of his body. It’s not noticeable at first glance, but when he flexes it looks as if someone had implanted a rock the size of a child's fist. He has dark greasy unkempt hair specked with dandruff and a ratty-looking, acne scarred face.

When he was in middle schdool he had gotten in a fight and got the tip of his nose bitten off. He looks like someone that’s lived through something and that’s what initially drew me to him. He’s wearing his fake leather jacket that’s a little too short and a little too wide for his mostly scrawny body. I used to think he looked silly in it, but now I can’t imagine him wearing anything else.

We get to Shooter’s at six-thirty. They don’t serve alcohol till seven so we split an order of pancakes and sit in the back near the pinball machines. Ricky’s

voice is blaring out of the jukebox singing Garth Brooks. Alonzo’s still stoned, yammering on about some video game he’s been playing. Sid is half listening to him, eyes on his phone. I’m looking around the bar anxious for seven o’clock to roll around, contemplating the other people in the room.

The bartender fidgeting with the television set, an old man hunched over the bar, carefully cutting into his chicken fried steak; a vending machine attendant restocking potato chips. Ricky used to suck quarters out of vending machines with one of Dad’s industrial vacuum cleaners from his old shop. That was probably the closest thing he ever had to a job, that and shoplifting from the 7-Eleven. Maybe if he had lived long enough to go back and finish high school he would have gotten a real job one day. Dad always talked about him taking over the family business, but I'm pretty sure he was just joking. At least Dad died first so I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway. I see Ricky’s reflection in the pool of syrup left on our decimated plate of pancakes and snap out of it as the bartender plops down tall cans of Oly and a round of shots. He knows us too well. I hate that. My face reddens.

“Holy crap you guys drink like this?” I always forget that Alonzo is the type of person who only drinks on his birthday.

We make a halfhearted toast and down our shots, chasing them with our beers. Alonzo handles it surprisingly well.

Sid gets up from the table. “I’ll get the next round.”

Alonzo gives me this look like we’re crazy and I just smile as I get up to have a smoke outside.

As I open the bar door I’m overtaken by the sunrise. Blood orange rays, slicing through the smog, illuminating the tops of the buildings. I wish that I could find some sort of meaning out of such an awesome display of colors and light, something about hope, the promise of a new day or some other Hallmark card bullshit, but it’s just a pretty sky, that’s all. It’s beautiful for now, but soon it will fade and turn a boring blue or grey just like every other stupid fucking day.

When I get back inside I can see that Sid and Alonzo are now a drink or two ahead of me. Sid intently listening to an animated Alonzo. He’s talking about swallowing things again. When Alonzo was in middle school he was known as the kid that would eat anything. Apparently he was some kind of a legend. He’d eaten pencils, rocks, quarters, chili peppers, glue sticks, erasers, mostly school supplies, but those are the kind of things that are handy and disposable when you’re that age. His greatest claim to fame was biting the head off of a frog they were dissecting in science class. He doesn’t do it anymore, but it never takes long for him to

bring it up to someone.

“You get to a point where you have to ask yourself: do they like me for me or because I’m the guy that eats weird stuff? Anyway I had to retire, turn my back on those fools, had to get in touch with me, you know?”

“This guy is awesome, Vicki.” Sid looks like he’s found a new best friend and I feel relieved that they’re getting along. I’ve only known Alonzo since working at Subway, but I’m glad we’ve become friends. He’s about my age, kind of chubby, roundfaced with the patchy facial hair of a fifteen year old who still hasn’t learned how to shave. He still dresses like it too, always wearing a pair of baggy pants that seem one size too big, causing his butt crack to show every time he bends over. He has this thing I noticed where he can’t ever look a person in the eye and always seems to be staring just barely off to the side of your face as if both of his eyes are lazy. I’ve always felt at home with socially awkward people. It took awhile for him to open up to me but now that he has I can’t get him to shut up.

I finish the rest of my drinks and feel a warm buzz rising up from my chest. I'm starting to relax as I catch my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

I’m far away but not enough that I can’t tell that I look like shit. Bags under my eyes, my roots starting to peek out from the purple dye. It’s only in times like these that I wish I hadn’t stopped wearing makeup in high school. I’m about to get up for another round when Ricky’s nasal croon sweeps over the jukebox again. This time it’s a Sheryl Crow number and it’s making me uneasy. Once when I was shopping at Target, Ricky’s voice came over the sound system singing a moving rendition of a Celine Dion song. To be honest it was actually really impressive, but it made me cry and look like I was fucking crazy.

What kind of person cries to Celine Dion while picking out deodorant? I run back outside for another smoke before Ricky has time to get to the chorus. Why does he seem to only sing songs that he knows I hate? Even beyond the grave he is messing with me the way only an annoying older brother would. In life, Ricky had a really great record collection. I don't know what happened to it, though.

He must have sold them or something; there are a lot of things he used to have that I can’t find. All that’s really left are some blacklight posters and his old dirty laundry. I found a Dead Kennedys t-shirt of his that I always liked; it’s too big and got holes in it but I wear it sometimes anyway. I don’t think Mom’s even touched his room since the funeral. Sometimes I go in there to be alone; Ricky never bothers me. I should probably try sleeping in there, but it’d freak Mom out and it smells weird. Sometimes I wish Ricky would talk to me instead of just staring at me Kithe/Mart

4

or serenading me with shitty pop songs. I look down and see his face in a pile of dog shit and roll my eyes, head back into the bar.

By now Alonzo is completely shit-faced. He’s basically talking nonsense, something about Pokemon I think. Sid gets him to swallow a nickel and I have to tell him to stop. I get Alonzo a glass of ice water and some pretzels and sit there watching him as he swallows them whole, holding this intense look on his face as if I should be impressed.

“Look at what you started, Sid.” I turn to look at him and see he’s beginning to nod off. I guess he was a lot more drunk this morning than I realized.

Luckily Shooter’s is one of the few places in town that won’t kick you out for being too fucked up, which is honestly the main reason we keep coming here. I’m about to flick his earlobe when Alonzo starts choking on a pretzel and makes a face like he’s gonna puke. I rush him outside, barely getting him to the side alley where he proceeds to decorate the side of a dumpster. He’s still wearing his Subway uniform. I contemplate taking a picture and sending it to our boss, but decide it’d be mean.

“You doing okay buddy?” I pat him on the back causing him to burp up another mouthful. “I need a sec. Just let me sit here.” He’s lying down on a pile of dirty blankets that I’m pretty sure someone used as a bed fairly recently, but I don’t say anything. I tell him I’m gonna go check on Sid, but when I get back inside Sid’s nowhere to be found. “Have you seen my friend?” I ask the bartender.

“Just left.”

Sid has a tendency of leaving without saying goodbye after having partaken in a few too many. I run outside and see his car is gone. I pay our tab and grab Alonzo's jacket, then walk back out to check on him. He’s got his weed pen out and appears to be doing just fine. It seems like smoking weed has actually sobered him up. I light up the last of my cigarettes. “Sid ditched us.”

“Dang… What should we do?”

“I don’t know, walk maybe?”

We take the side streets, drunkenly zig zagging our way back to our side of town, eventually ending up near the waterfront. I don’t recognize where we are at first but soon realize we’re under the bridge that crosses the river. I hate this fucking bridge. It’s where we spread Ricky’s ashes. We were supposed to do it in the ocean but nobody wanted to drive all the way to the coast. On that day we walked to the center of the bridge and said goodbye. It was just Mom and me and a couple of Ricky's loser friends. Mom lit a cigarette and said back when she was a kid this is where everybody used to dump their trash. What a touching eulogy, Mom. I don’t blame her for being the way she is. She's had a hard enough life and learned early on that there wasn’t any use in crying 5

Kithe/Mart

over things. Everybody deals with things their own way and I've learned to respect that. I know she's taken it pretty hard, I just wish she had a better way of showing it, or at least a better way of comforting me. I start staring at the ground and am feeling pretty shitty about it all. Alonzo’s still casually puffing away at his pen and seems to notice I’ve gotten a little lost in my head. “You want some of this?”

I nod and take a hit, it’s way too big and I cough my guts up. Alonzo’s laughing. My eyes water. I rub them dry and the world unblurs, creeping back into focus. I regain my breath, feel my heart pushing against my ribs. Anxiousness washes over me. I slowly watch the shadows on the pavement wave and ripple around me. The sides of the buildings going in and out of focus, the colors bleeding onto the street. Everything is quiet. Ricky is everywhere now. The piles of trash and litter are Ricky. The puddles are Ricky. The graffiti covering the buildings now all read Ricky. Ricky’s face now grinning down at me from the overcast sky. The honking trucks in the distance howl like Ricky. I close my eyes and am shielded in red, I take a deep breath. When I open them I realize I’m getting the spins.

“I feel sick. I need some water or some food or something.”

We’re in an industrial area now, surrounded by warehouses. Stacks of pallets tower above us. Old tires and rusty barrels. Everything distorted and transforming out of shape. I try to stare at the ground, darting my eyes as the cracks on the asphalt bend and twist beneath me. A forklift appears out of nowhere shaped like Ricky's head and I let out a scream. Alonzo pulls me along by the hand. High above me hangs a billboard of Ricky eating a triple decker taco. A flock of seagulls squawk in disharmony, Ricky’s voice bouncing off the metal warehouse doors.

We finally stumble upon some sort of biker pool hall. A long line of shiny motorcycles parked in a row outside. Alonzo leads me in and seats me at a table. Ricky is singing Alice in Chains on the stereo.

The sound of clacking pool balls echoes throughout the bar. I keep looking around the room trying to find something to rest my eyes on, but all I see is Ricky. Ricky as Sam Adams on my coaster. A poster of Ricky, giving me the finger as Johnny Cash. Ricky as a stain on the barroom floor. The voices in the room slowly becoming Ricky’s one by one. I can’t hide. I can’t talk. I feel like everyone is looking at me.

“You need to chill out. You look crazy.” Alonzo is now in my face forcing a glass of water into my hands. I put my head down and sip from it sheepishly. Alonzo leaves to go to the bathroom and I am left alone with my thoughts, as images of Ricky hover and swirl around me, slowly closing in. I shut

my eyes and am flooded with memories. The way Ricky would always steal me an extra Clark Bar whenever he went to the store. The time he brought home that cat and it pissed all over Mom’s bed.

Sneaking out of the house just to walk around on a warm summer night. The night he picked me up from that party way across town when I accidentally ate all those pot brownies. The sound of him hocking loogies in the side yard as he’d pace around, talking on his phone. If I concentrate really hard I can still smell him: musky and stale, chewing gum, B.O., his feet when he’d take off his sneakers, him smoking in his room after my parents went to sleep. I start feeling light headed, cold sweat beading on my forehead, a slight shiver runs down my body and I feel like I’m getting the chills. I open my eyes. The bartender has put a new song on and I recognize it immediately.

It’s “Bawitdaba” by Kid Rock. Ricky used to wake me up before school blasting this from his boombox, jumping up and down on my bed till I’d scream. I hate this song. I feel the blood rushing up my spine.

It starts off quietly, its repetitive lyrics slowly creeping in. A choir of angry Rickys chanting the chorus like a mantra, over and over, intensity building, the nonsensical words piercing my skull like needles. By the time the drums finally kick in, I can’t take it anymore. I scream at the top of my lungs, bumping the table and knocking over our glasses of water, shattering them on the floor. I duck underneath holding my ears, my face red, covered with tears and sweat. I slowly feel myself disappear.

I come out of it and I’m walking down some alleyway, Alonzo a few steps behind me, hands in his pockets and head down. I slowly start to remember what had happened. He gives me a sideways glance. “You been seeing your brother again?”

“Yeah.”

I start to cry and Alonzo puts his arm around me. I lean in. We walk a couple more blocks without talking before I recognize where we are. We’re by the old cemetery. The main gate is locked but after a little walking I spot a hole in the chain linked fence.

“Hey let’s cut through here.”

The grass is muddy and wet with most of the gravestones sunken in, the engravings worn down and illegible. We weave through them, attempting to decipher the names and the dates. Some hundreds of years old. Some look more like old rocks than actual graves. We both take a seat on a large tomb and quietly take it all in. It’s so peaceful here.

I’m finally starting to feel better, it seems like the weed is wearing off. I reach for my cigarettes, rummaging through my backpack not remembering they're not there.

“Is this where your brother is buried?”

“No, we cremated him. Spread his ashes in the river. Well most of them. I kept some. I've got the rest in my backpack right now actually.” I pull out a little baggie where I’ve kept the rest of Ricky.

Alonzo jumps to his feet. “Oh man that’s it!

That’s why he’s freaking haunting you!”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to spread the rest of his ashes! I saw this on YouTube.”

“I don’t know if-” Before I can even finish what I’m saying, Alonzo snatches the baggie out of my hand. I try to take it back from him, grabbing him by the shirt. He stumbles a step backward and then with little hesitation, stuffs the baggie in his mouth, swallowing it whole. I let out a scream and lunge at him. He trips on a gravestone and falls backwards and I’m on top of him now, pounding him with my fists. He grabs at my wrists to stop me, and I fall into him and then suddenly without even thinking, my tongue is in his mouth.

I close my eyes as he puts his hand on the back of my head, running his fingers through my hair. I find myself pulling him towards me, my hands on his face and neck. I move my hands down his body as he lets out a soft quiet moan, but the voice is not his. It’s Ricky’s. I close my eyes tighter and bite onto his lip, tears gently falling down my cheeks. Ricky tells me to stop, but I bite harder, my mouth filling with his blood. He tries to push me away but I won’t let him, I pull him tighter and tighter against me, my nails digging into his skin. He finally gets away from me as I scream out Ricky’s name, but when I open my eyes, Alonzo is there on the muddy grass, staring back at me like I’m crazy, his hand covering his bloody lip.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”

I repeat the words, tears streaming down my face as I slump down on a gravestone, cold and wet.

Alonzo frozen, unable to speak. I sit there for what feels like an eternity, my head buried in my knees, sobbing endlessly, till every tear has left my body, till I shrivel and crack and crumple and dry to dust. Till I am picked up by the wind and carried high above the city, over Shooter’s, over Subway, over Grandma’s and over my house. Into the shitty old river, to be carried to the sea, to the bottom of the ocean, where Ricky waits for me. ■

Kithe/Mart

6

Muzzled Hope MG DeNike Gannon If she’d been born a man, she’d have been a pilot soaring above earth beyond restrictions and constrictions. She played basketball and loved the grit and sweat and teeth of it. Proscribed by birth to be other than wife, mother, she couldn’t take that energy into the world.

Holding her firstborn, she folded into the quiet of the parlor. She stilled her limbs and told herself this is what I’ve always wanted. And come to think of it, no, I always wanted to be a pilot.

Muzzled hope, quiet Counsel, both bitter and sweet.

Foregone desire. Girls.

7

Kithe/Gannon

Mary Agnes

Acrylic, Oil, Burning Materials & Vintage Photograph Tara Conway

Kithe/Conway

8

Our Given Names William Hawkins

S

ay amen, brothers and sisters, because everything’s amen in the land of highway crosses, this Big Top Kingdom of God, this, revival country—and revival is hallelujah so long as your hands are raised, so long as your fingers are on God and your palm on the preacher, for it's preacher's voice you hold while your eyes make heaven out of the back of your eyelids.

Preacher asks if we will be saved. Choir sings, choir stomps, choir is possessed and the ghost is Holy and every hymn its exorcism. Preacher hollers. See that fine spray of spit fly out his mouth and bounce off the air, because the air is already full, sister, soaked through in the sweat of us, brother, the heat of us, this air thick and beat back by a hundred paper fans which sound like crows flapping off roadkill.

Preacher asks if we will be saved. His neck bulges and artery and vein swell together, two rivers of blood and the valley of his throat between them. He screams the promise of our Savior. Can he hear an amen?

Say amen.

But Edgar. We say amen, but Edgar. We sway. Edgar is still. We stomp. Edgar is still. We say amen.

Edgar says nothing. Edgar’s sweat stays on his skin, makes him glow, gives his eyes halos. Edgar is looking over the preacher’s shoulder, through the cracks in the choir, Edgar is looking at the backside of the tent like there’s a hand writing out, This Is All There Is And There Ain’t No More.

Sunday school teacher says God made Adam and named him so. God made Eve, and Adam named her everyone’s mother. Adam and Eve made Cain, and Adam and Eve made Abel. Sunday school teacher says Cain slew Abel. Cain gave the Lord his grain. Abel gave the Lord his lamb. Abel did right. Cain did wrong. God is not a vegetarian. Say amen.

Edgar says, But. Teacher says, What. Edgar says, But God named Adam. Teacher says, Yes. Edgar says, And Adam named Eve on account of being everyone’s mother. Teacher says, Well? Edgar says, But Adam and Eve named Cain. Adam and Eve named Abel. Teacher says again, Well? Edgar asks, How did they know? Teacher says, What do you mean? And Edgar asks, How they know they got the names right? Did God tell them? Teacher says, All mommies and daddies name their babies. Edgar says, Yeah, but how do they know they’re doing it right? Teacher says, Quiet, don’t make me come over there.

And Edgar does stay quiet until five Sundays later then he stands up and shouts. But it ain’t amen, it’s, See! Edgar says, See! Teacher says, Edgar Lewis. Edgar says, See, Simon was Simon until Jesus called him Peter. Simon had the wrong name. Simon’s Mama and Simon's daddy got it wrong. His name was really Peter the whole time. Teacher says, Stop it now, Edgar Lewis. Edgar says, My name ain’t Edgar.

9

Kithe/Hawkins

Teacher says, Oh yeah, smart man, what is it? Edgar says, I’ll let you know soon as Jesus tells me.

Preacher points. Where his finger lands a lady faints. Where a lady faints there’s a dimple in the crowd, everybody’s arms catching her, nobody lookin’ at her while they do, everyone too busy with the heaven they’re trying to blink back into their eyelids.

Mama waits for Daddy in the kitchen, me watching from under the kitchen table. Mama says, You’ll never guess. Daddy says, Jesus, what now? Mama says, That’s why, that right there, that’s why he’s the way he is. Mama says Edgar needs to learn respect. Daddy doesn’t say nothin’, because Daddy knows what that means. In the backyard, Daddy calls Edgar to him. Edgar must go to the willow and pick his branch. If he doesn’t pick right, Daddy will pick for him. Edgar knows what to do. Edgar’s done it before. I watch from the kitchen window as he snaps off his switch from the willow. I watch him bring it back to Daddy and Daddy says pull down your pants and bend over and Edgar pulls his pants down so his whitey tighties almost glow under the coming moon and Daddy strikes once, twice, three times and asks, Well, Edgar, have you learned your lesson? Edgar says nothing, he just shakes. Daddy says, Answer me, Edgar.

Edgar says, Don’t know if I should, Edgar might be someone else. Daddy throws the switch away. Daddy says, That one wasn’t good enough, go get another. If you don’t pick right, I’ll pick for you. Edgar hitches up his trousers and walks to the willow tree then walks around it to the woodpile Daddy has in the back and Edgar pulls out a thick cottonwood limb Daddy hasn’t chopped yet and Edgar drags it behind him all the way to toss at Daddy’s feet and says, Here, and Daddy looks down at the cottonwood limb and says, “Aren’t you a clever one?” and Daddy tells Edgar to get inside cause he’s got half a mind to use it. Edgar comes back all tears and Mama herds him to his room telling him she hopes he’s learned his lesson and no one sees but me Daddy in the backyard, looking down at that broke tree limb, worry on his face, Daddy looking like an old man for the first time in his life.

Preacher asks who will be saved and I say I will but only Edgar hears me and he shakes his head.

Preacher asks again, Who will be saved? And they stumble into the aisle, the drunkards and wifebeaters, the sluts and no-goods, the rotten and ne'er-do-wells. They will be saved. They will go to heaven. You can go to Heaven if you’re saved. That’s the deal. And if you’re in Heaven you can find God, and if you can find God you can ask him what you want to know, so I say I will be saved. Edgar shakes his head and Mama keeps her arms up and her eyes under her heaven. Preacher asks, Can I hear an amen? I say amen.

Preacher asks me if I want to be saved, and I am stumbling, am caught up in the course of the repentant, hands at my shoulder pushing me on to salvation, salvation a sweaty preacher reaching through the people at the bottom of the stage, pushing through them to reach for me, pulling me up, saying I will be saved. And from the stage everything shakes and the people shake with it. Preacher puts his palm on my forehead and shouts the Word down his arm, asking if I want to be saved. And the last thing I see before crying yes is Edgar, the one thing not shaking, Edgar alone still in the swaying people, Edgar’s eyes open, watching me.

Brothers and sisters. I say this to you. Anything can be a prayer, so long as you point it the right way.

A memory is just another thing. There is Edgar, in the crowd, and there is Edgar watching us put Daddy under his name, Daddy’s name clear in the stone, surrounded by the host, a choir singing a hymn, everyone murmuring their amens. But everyone isn’t Edgar. Haven’t I said? Preacher says I am saved, and when I get to Heaven, I will ask God what Edgar’s name is. But I’ll be too late asking and God was always too late answering.

For as I am saved Edgar turns and walks the road thinking it might be Damascus on the other side, that the voice of God might come at last, but Jackson ain't Damascus and New Orleans ain’t Damascus and neither is Houston or Denver or Los Angeles or any of the Best Westerns and Greyhound bus stops in-between. Edgar is waiting for God to shout his name and while he does he kills time with all sorts of Heavens, because Heaven is everywhere, Heaven comes in syringes and pills and powders, you can split Heaven apart with a credit card or pour it over ice. You can even ask Heaven what her name is and she says Jewel and anything on the top is ten and anything on the bottom is fifty.

My brother never finds his name. My brother suffers the name Edgar in a box on a county coroner’s form. Too many Heavens and not enough hallelujahs. They ask me if that’s him and I say it is and they say thank you and I say you’re welcome and the woman who found Edgar said he was lying so peaceful she would have thought he were sleeping if his eyes hadn’t been open, and I do wish to God she hadn’t told me that because the least God could have done was grant my brother one last Heaven on the back of his eyelids. This nice lady hugs me. She smells like the bottom of a kitchen table. She says, bless his soul. And what else can I say? Amen. Amen, amen. ■

Kithe/Hawkins

10

Blue Hope

MG DeNike Gannon

We caught an ancient mud-brown fish only once.

A strange fish, large and fat, a big wide mouth.

Torpid, trusting, she lay gazing up from the bottom of the slick fishing pail.

She was dead, anyone would think: cold to the touch, no electric quiver suggested otherwise.

In the tackle shop, his eyes lit up: a stargazer! who knew?

Who knew they were still here!

Go put her back!

Let her go!

Impossible to get out – white tunnel above stagnant water and fish stink a little circle of sky blue hope the pail tipped, in the shallows, in the muddy brown bayswater brackish, stunned lying still a beat too long.

Oh no, she’s dead!

We held our breath, nearly giving over to grief. that stargazer ancient mother of mystery gulped a skyful enormity, an ocean of water – one tremendous gulp – held it and in a singular oxygenated fit, turned tail and disappeared, a muddy splash.

Who knew how long a stargazer lives?

There must be others.

Now the stillness of a day is no more connected with death than scent.

11

Kithe/Gannon

Daybreaker

Mixed media, 2022 Abbey St. John

Kithe/St. John

12

Tolba

M

ornings in May I watched her, moving earth in the distance. She labored in the shoulder of the road, raking the sandy aggregate that collected and lingered on Maine roads as spring arrived, as the white neighborhood turned green. I always stopped and stood at the rim of her employ, about six feet away. She kept digging. Each slow sweep of her claws left little discernible mark. But her hind quarters had sunk several inches below the plane. Her shell covered in pale dust, she had breached the dry surface and was working the darker, loamy brine underneath. The mother snapping turtle worked before the light was full.

She was getting somewhere, clearing the grit we lay down for our seasonal traction, the gruel of safe passage in a state of long, white winters.

Tolba: carrier of life.

The street paralleled a stream—a placid, flow-regulated stretch of water that housed a sampler of slightly-urbanized central Maine fauna, perfect for slightly-rustic townspeople.

Kayakers and ducks used the handful of little private docks jutting from the banks. New to the state, I had quickly taken to the constant partial contact upon which all of its residents seemed to insist.

I was not alone, bearing witness to the mother’s labor these mornings. Several human regulars were tracking the site. Meeting at her nest or passing one another somewhere else along the road, we would share progress reports. These were the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we augmented the ordinary Maine social distance, giving each other more berth than we granted the turtle.

We were enamored and concerned. The nest was streamside, about twenty feet up and across from the water’s edge, so the mother need not cross traffic to reach the water. Most of us figured the mother would be fine; an object of her prominence on the side of a quiet road would deter even murderous motorists from risking their alignment. But what of her offspring? Female snapping turtles do not remain with their nests. The mother would lay her eggs, refill some of the excavated area to ensure it blended in with the surroundings, then leave. Absentee parenting? Perhaps. But mother snapping turtles knew that, in a world of skunks, raccoons, crows, and other egg predators, visibility was a liability.

In a world of humans, though, visibility and safety bear unsettled correspondence.

Discussion among the upright neighbors concerned the costs of disclosure and concealment.

Should the nest remain undisturbed and unmarked? Neighborhood lawn crews and kayaktoting vehicles sometimes parked on the road’s shoulder. Walkers seeking proximity to the water traversed it. Ours was a white neighborhood; our dogs abounded, nosing around in the dust. To minimize the wear on my knees, I myself often veered onto the shoulder on my jogs; I am sure others did as well. Because the eggs could take months to hatch, even the circumspect among us might lose track of their location. Had the mother buried them deep enough to withstand any and all of this, the weight of strangers and allies? Some of us

13

Kithe/Harper

Ryan Harper discussed contacting Animal Control to relocate the eggs. Ours was a white neighborhood; we suspected the authorities would know best. But cooler heads prevailed. Snapping turtle eggs stand essentially no chance once removed.

Exposure, we reasoned, was a possible remedy. We could avert accidental violence by alerting passersby to the nest, perhaps cordoning it off with ropes, or posting a sign. But that way lay danger as well. Attention-getting strategies might keep the nature-respecting and boundary-abiding Mainers from harming the eggs; most Mainers respected nature, and they loved nothing more than healthy boundaries. But there were enough individuals who delighted in transgression to give me pause. If we posted a “turtle nest” sign, giving notice of the precarious life underground, we ran the risk of attracting the malevolent, even if they were a minority.

A week before the snapping turtle appeared, I had come upon a dead beaver on the beginning of my jog. The carcass lay by the side of a well-trafficked road, several hundred feet away and uphill from this same stream, where I regularly saw beavers swimming. Although the creature’s distance from the water struck me as suspicious, I would have thought it had simply wondered in front of a car. But it was not crushed. And its tail had been cut off—very cleanly, clearly by a knife. My chest warmed with a rage that stayed with me the entire run. I wanted to do damage. I thought of the signs posted in the fall at the head of my favorite wooded trails— reminding runners and hikers of the start of hunting season, urging us to wear bright orange clothing. I wanted damage done.

I was not sure the young snapping turtles would benefit from revelation.

Some enterprising person disagreed. A few days after the mother departed, her last scratches receded into the aggregate, her labor reassimilated into the settled dust, someone placed a bright orange traffic cone at the site. A miniature, no taller than the mother herself, the cone could have been knocked askew by even slight turbulence, placed and replaced over the increasingly illegible surface.

After a few more days, the terrain eventually went completely even.

The cone disappeared.

This is all I know.

We had drawn the mother out—our road’s shoulder, mimicry of undomesticated grounds, illusion of the wild’s security at the margins of development. Or had she drawn us out? Had the mother turtle, dust of our construction on her back, accounted for us as she worked the ground for her posterity? Watching us watch her, morning by morning, had she tracked our designs, inflected and reflected, and adjusted her own—new courses of action according to the looming, manifold witness of the upright? I later learned that mother snapping turtles might dig several nests in one gestation period. They might place all of their eggs in one nest. They might divide them. They might leave some nests empty.

I never saw an egg, nor moved earth. ■

Kithe/Harper

14

Traveller Oil, 2021

Adam Land

15

Kithe/Land

Enclosed You Will Find a PDF Copy of Your Email Address Erin Shapland

It would be a genuine privilege to work to apply to work for your company.

I look forward to references, please contact related software at or via email at the safety of children and families.

I have been consistently praised as the job entails working on one’s own.

I hope you’ll find I am a photographer and photo retailer in sometimes hostile situations.

Please take the time to whom it may concern, I work as hard as to review my attached resume providing a fun and welcoming experience to operation of heavy machinery.

Over the past few years I have worked I am a diligent in customer service.

These jobs have given me responsibilities include work with independence in my tasks, as well as managing peculiar opening and sorting which I hope to bring to this role as the candidate you are looking for and in customer service, in this position. I can be reached as efficiently as possible.

My experience in time-management and Thank you for your consideration.

For references, please contact hearing from you soon.

Kithe/Shapland

16

Do You Even Know What That Was? Pat Janowski

O

[September 1970]

ur first trip away from the boy. A blessed pause after the past 18 months. Breastfeeding done, the husband almost finished with school. Some old friends from college getting married—the perfect excuse for a long weekend in New Orleans, the city a first for both of us.

We got up early. I loved walking around, the husband loved to beat the crowds. He didn’t read fiction but A Confederacy of Dunces was one of the few non-medical texts he’d made it all the way through and enjoyed. On Canal Street, we stopped in the shade, breathed the warm, muggy river air, admired the recently-erected statue of Ignatius J. Reilly.

“Eructations,” I said. I knew how to burp on command, and I did.

The husband laughed. “Myrna Minkoff, you minx,” he said.

Streets narrowed toward the French Quarter. Gallery doors were not yet open but looking in windows was free. Around a corner, a goth girl stood with her arms crossed, smiling, watching two fratboys. One of them, a dude in a Hard Rock Café t-shirt, had a hand on a metal sign pole, the other hand on a mailbox next to it. He was laughing and saying “Ah” and “Ow”, his buddy going “See? I told you!”

I met eyes with the goth girl and slowed. The husband dropped my hand and kept walking, not very far though.

The girl raised her eyebrows. “Have you done it?” she said.

I stopped walking. “What?”

“Move,” she said to Hard Rock. He stepped back, rubbed his hands together, shook them like to get water off. “Grab the pole,” she said to me.

The husband, walking back, was frowning. “Are you sure you wanna do that?”

I put one hand around the pole, my thumb and fingers not quite meeting at the back. “Now what?” I looked at the girl.

The husband circled the fratboys, stopped inches away from me. “Come on, we should get going.” He said it low.

“Put your hand on the mailbox,” the girl said.

“Wait.” The husband stopped short of grabbing my arm.

When I touched the mailbox, a thrum went through my body. I looked at my hands—on the pole, on the mailbox: my flesh didn’t appear to be moving but I felt it oscillating, like a low heavy buzz, a bass note you can’t hear but only feel. Vibrations emanated outward from my chest and legs and arms and head, displaced the invisible water in the humid air, lapped against the gallery windows, passed through the trees, and spilled into the brain pan of a trombone player waking up a mile away. He would have eggs and Tabasco for breakfast. I could taste it on my tongue.

Then we were walking away, the husband holding my arm instead of my hand, his palm slick from more than just humidity. He said: “Do you even know what that was? What if it was dangerous?”

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was just thrilling and fun as hell? I couldn’t stop smiling.

In the Quarter, quiet streets were starting to wake up—a few people, then a few more. Bright morning sunlight. The husband needed a restroom break, so we stepped into an open doorway. A

17

Kithe/Janowski

bar.

“You should probably order something,” he said softly out of the side of his mouth, no doubt thinking soda or coffee. He kept moving toward the back.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, the dark bar against the cool white tile. The bartender stepped up.

“What would you like?”

“Um. I'm not sure.” Endless bottles in the still air, doubled in the mirrored wall. So many choices. A coke would be ridiculous. “What's a good morning-type drink?” My insides were more alive than usual. “Something from New Orleans.”

“How about a fizz?” he said.

“Gin?” He nodded.

I'd never had one. “Sure.”

It was cooler in the bar than on the street, still damp but not muggy. I saw him sprinkle powdered sugar and squeeze a lime as well as a lemon. I didn’t see if he added orange flower water, cream, so many variations I would learn later. I knew there was raw egg white—why not live dangerously? The Styrofoam cup was surprisingly light.

“There's your protein.”

It was sweet, tart, rich and foamy. It didn't even last till the end of the block. **** Two years later, this pregnancy was going to be so much easier. The second line showed up on the pee stick and my boobs immediately began to hurt. I had never stopped with the prenatal supplements after the boy, it was easier to just stay healthy. We'd be trying again soon anyway, and now look.

I broke the news to the coven over a planning lunch. It was going to be just us girls at the beach.

“Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be drinking much next weekend.”

“Huh?” “What? Why?” Drinking was kind of the point.

Kristi had an eight-year-old. “You're pregnant!”

I smiled.

“Aw man! We'll have to do all your drinking for you!”

My inner certainty, the superiority of what I was doing instead, had me feeling sorry for them, depending on alcohol to have a good time.

The husband didn't bother taking off work for the doc appointment that week. “It's just an ultrasound to pinpoint the date,” he said, and I agreed. He would already have to leave work early the next day to do the childcare pickup and get ready for his own beach trip. Unaccustomed to soloing with the boy, he’d decided to go to Dr. Joe's house in Long Beach. A retired seniorattending, Dr. Joe delighted in having med students and residents come out, especially with kids.

He loved to see everyone in a relaxed atmosphere, to watch the kids tumble around on the sand, to give the students a break, a glimpse of their possible futures.

Feet in the stirrups, I was happy my OB ignored the standard jelly-on-the-belly transducer and went straight for the wand—an ultrasound probe inside a slim and bland-looking dildotype-thing. The wand gives the high-res pics, really shows what's what, especially early on. On the screen, the familiar curved black and white image filled with old-style late-night TV snow, the black hollow space inside of my uterus, soon to be filled with a growing fetus.

“There's the egg sac.”

Was that it? That sort-of bubble resting on my uterine wall?

Then the doc shifted the wand, approaching from a different angle. “Hmm.” He shifted the wand again. And one more time. His voice was gentle. “Well, I see an egg sac, but there doesn't appear to be anything in it.”

There was a loud buzzing inside my ears. I’d swallowed an iceberg and it was stuck in the center of my chest. My body—fuzzy, cold, and warm—had disconnected from the world around it, physically separated from everything by about a half an inch.

The doc checked the equipment, re-inserted the wand, confirmed what he had first seen, or rather, not seen. A blighted ovum he said, a fertilized egg attached itself to the uterine wall, started to form a nice little nest, and then just decided to stop growing.

I called the husband from next door, an unused office with a bare metal desk and black Kithe/Janowski

18

institutional phone. By the time he arrived I was back in the exam room, ultrasound equipment unplugged and moved to the side, waiting for the local anesthetic to kick in.

Dilation refers to the cervix, or the uterine opening, which has to widen before a baby can come out or a surgical instrument can go in. Curettage is what is done with a curette: a long, thin instrument with a small scoop or sometimes a loop at the end. When the cervix dilates enough, the doctor inserts the curette and scrapes the products of conception off of the uterine lining.

That's what the doc called them, products of conception. Best to do it immediately; removing extraneous matter from the uterine lining helps to prevent infection, and allows the uterus to begin regenerating itself for the next try.

I felt a distant tugging as he scraped. No direct sensation. My body moved with each pull of his hand.

My OB paused. “How're you doing?”

“Fine.” The husband held my hand, it was as numb as my abdomen.

Pull. White acoustic tile on the ceiling. Pull. Dotted with different sizes of small holes. Pull.

Something slipped, a loud metallic clatter on the floor to my left. The already quiet room fell still, silent. A long moment.

“Oops!” I said, figuring someone had to.

My OB put his hand on the outside of my calf. “Not really one of the words you want to hear your doctor say in the middle of a procedure,” he said.

“No, it's okay.”

“That was the speculum; it slipped out. Sometimes that happens.” A pause, more soft metallic sounds. “Okay. I'm going to put in another one now—don't worry, it's a fresh one, it's clean.”

They gave me codeine for the pain but I still needed some extra-absorbent pads. It was a cloudy day, but I wore my sunglasses—not that anyone would be looking for my swollen eyes, slumped down in the passenger seat, waiting in the parking lot as the husband went into the drugstore.

Then at home, I curled up in bed while he called Kristi. Change of plans.

The husband and I decided to head out together to Dr. Joe’s instead, with the boy, a day ahead of the rest.

We sat on stools at the counter looking into the kitchen. Dr. Joe put out a plate of crackers, a weathered board with two kinds of cheese. Olives. A small bowl of sliced apples, a shallow plate of quartered hard-boiled eggs. I sat and picked, went to bed and tried to read. The husband had promised the boy they'd sleep in the tent outside the first night.

In the morning, Dr. Joe was busy putting together the barbecue sauce for the ribs, a whole-day steaming and smoking and grilling affair, part of the feast for the crew arriving later.

“Breakfast is on the way.”

Clouds out the window, the glass cloudy too in the corners, moisture in between the old double panes. No ocean to see, just the broad expanse of tall sea grass, bending down in waves from the wind. Artifacts cluttered the many shelves, a carved African wooden figurine, fossils, an oldfashioned instrument with dials and a liquid-filled glass bulb, a barometer? Photos of Dr. Joe with a group of smiling students in white lab coats, in a primitive-looking village somewhere in Asia, holding up a large fish in a boat at sea. Books and more books. Fiction mostly.

I stepped down a couple of stairs, past the kitchen into a small sunken area. Another window looked out over the grass, waving, waving. There were more shelves, these ones holding every type of alcohol imaginable. Below, a blender, a tiny sink, a bowl of lemons, a counter half-covered in glassware with a fridge underneath. I opened it: a jar of cherries, lime juice, orange flower water, cream. Eggs.

Dr. Joe joined me, wiping his hands on a towel. He threw the towel across a shoulder and gave me a hug. I sneezed. He stepped back and looked at me.

“How about a fizz?” he said.

“Gin?” He nodded.

“Sure.” ■

19

Kithe/Janowski

Unpeeling an Orange in the Future Caitlin Thomson My mother's best friend declared that I would play an important role in the apocalypse when I was born. Most days my mother ignores this. Other days she squints as me as if someone else is there, a different future hiding in my wild waves of hair.

The first present my husband ever bought me was a pot full of hyacinths.

Our children brought home lice and I became accustomed to using a metal comb. Examining each strand for passengers.

I killed the Rolls-Royce of houseplants, but at least I had a clean apartment.

When the pandemic arrived, we hadn't had friends over for a month. Too scared of giving them lice. Our family in Vietnam were already on lockdown. Move while you can, my brother-in-law advised. We packed wearing N-95s. Our reflections, strangers in the elevator’s mirror.

The basil grows in pots all winter long, the back window a heady cloud of green.

When the border closes, a friend in the states texts me — Do you think your mother’s best friend was right? It takes me a minute to remember the context.

In the summer we move the basil into the backyard, only for it to be consumed by racoons.

No. It's just an apocalypse not the apocalypse, I write on my phone, the kids plastered against my back.

Kithe/Thomson

20

Boys

B

Haili Jones

oys I loved you boys I loved you all. Every last one of you, in my way. I loved your long bangs and shaved heads and mohawks, your floppy hair and metal hair and new-wave hair and Suave-clean hair and greasy hair and hard-gelled hair and goofy perms and mullets and your straight-banged farmboy cuts—that rooster in the back, yes, your cowlicks. I loved your Levi’s and Dickies, your Carhartts, Girbauds, even your belt buckles and Wrangler butts. Baggy and saggy or pegged at the legs, your bondage pants and patchwork pants and black everything or white everything, blue or red.

I loved you on skateboards and bikes, on surfboards and snowboards and skis. I loved you riding snowmobiles, four-wheelers, motorcycles. I loved you in your dad’s car, your mom’s.

Your V-dubs, Impalas, and bitchin’ Camaros. Those muffler-rattling trucks. Hanging out of sunroofs and leaning out of windows in the sunshine, under the moon. I loved you walking, running, wrestling, balling, shooting, spitting, flying—free.

Boys my god you boys I loved you boys. I loved your arms inching around my back in the movie theater, those studied yawns, those cracking voices and thin dustings of facial hair, those games of chicken on my leg.

Your sweaty palms, your dry palms, your hairy palms, your fingers in my mouth. Your hands hot on my thigh, my belly, my face. Your hair-pulling hands, your throat-choking hands, your bra-snapping, high-fiving, hand-holding hands. Your hands in the waistband of my pants.

I loved you with bows and arrows, with guns and knives, with switchblades and butterflies.

I loved you throwing rocks and wielding sticks, climbing trees and building forts, roping cows and trapping gophers. I loved you lighting off Black Cats, bottle rockets, sparkler bombs—bang!

My love was indiscriminate and all-embracing. I kept your boxers and t-shirts and baseball caps and do-rags. I wore your pants. I made a list of you. I kissed you all. I never could resist you all and wanted to be irresistible too. To every last one of you lovely ugly boys you. ■

21

Kithe/Jones

The Carroll Street Apple Tree Oil on board, 2022 Avery Mags Duff

Kithe/Duff

22

Love Buzz Candace Jane Opper

T

he first was a neighborhood boy named Bobby, who lived in a small gray house behind a tight wall of shrubbery. Bobby was an army brat who vaguely resembled Ralphie from A Christmas Story. Four years my senior, sixth grade to my second. The only interest he had in me was an interest in my older brothers, who owned a trike and sometimes let neighborhood kids ride two-up.

Bobby predated the fear of rejection. I pursued him with uncharacteristically theatrical sass—a dynamic that annoyed him but amused the rest of us, especially our older brothers who teased him incessantly for having wooed a second grader. It was a game to me: win the affections of an older boy.

Even my mother had a hand; she referred to him as “Little Beau” and we constructed elaborate scenarios in which he and I arrived at innocuously romantic ends (à la sharing a plate of crinkle fries at the local roller rink).

I was fortunate to have the help of the Beltucci twins, a gregarious posse my mother referred to as the “screaming mimis” for the impressive volume of their combined shrieks. The Beltuccis and I hatched a plan that involved them telling Bobby they heard that he liked me—an experiment in reverse psychology we must have gleaned from sitcom television. As a pair, they were fearless. They pushed their way to the back of the bus where the older kids sat, their little hands on not-yet hips, to do my bidding. I sat toward the front and watched the neighborhood roll by, feigning an air of unconcern worthy of Don Corleone.

Bobby did not take the bait. He retaliated the next day by sending Bri, a member of his own posse, to the front of the bus to confront me. Bri was an intimidatingly rich brunette who also lived up the street, in a house with lampposts and a semi-circular driveway.

“Do you have a crush on Bobby or something?” She rested her chin on the top of the pleather seat-back and draped her forearms over.

“Why do you ask?” I distinctly remember saying exactly that, as though I planned to cunningly turn the inquiry onto her. The Beltuccis flanked me like two obedient guard dogs.

Bri scoffed—a small, cruel sound that girls make in their throats to signify pity. “He doesn’t like you,” she said. “He’s in the sixth grade.” She shook her head and got up, receding toward adolescence.

My diary from that era shows no documentation of this epic rejection, only a drastic drop-off in Bobby references. The last thing I remember is hearing that he and his brother were coming over to play Nintendo with my brothers, so I cued up Tiffany’s “Could’ve Been” on a portable pink tape deck but for some reason or another only his brother came. After a certain point I no longer considered the state of my posture as I walked past his house. A year later he and his family moved to the valley, fifteen minutes and one universe away. I never saw him again.

The Crush is a quintessential incarnation of youth, a fitting reflection of the painful oscillation in our morphing bodies. While lacking the regularity and infamy of something like menstruation, it inspires within us a similar wariness to admit each aching, messy instance is secretly gratifying, an affliction meant to prepare us for the manners in which our brains and bodies (and hearts, if we’re so inclined to go there) can and will betray us. A Sex Ed teacher explained the phenomenon by way of pheromones.

Imperceptible hormonal chemical signals, she sang, while readying one of many mortifying filmstrips. This inspired a series of jokes about body odor, the kind we could smell during gym class and the kinds we could only imagine by way of salacious metaphorical comparison. What she did not tell us is that pheromones are much less obvious than body odor. They are subliminal olfactory messages typically found among insects and wild boars, not humans. The quest for the human sex pheromone is complicated because human response is garbled with various disruptions: our other senses, learned behavior, context. I never believed the pheromone theory anyway. If one boy’s pheromones attracted me, why didn’t they attract everyone? And if I was oozing as much pubescence as I remember, why weren’t boys throwing rocks at my bedroom window every time I ovulated?

23

Kithe/Opper

I was a skeptical child who craved rational explanations and infatuation struck me as nonsensical and emotionally crippling. That this feeling came on without warning or cause made me uneasy. How did a person go from being unremarkable to irresistible, so much so that one found herself unable to sit still in his presence? When I felt a crush coming on, I fought it hard, but in the battle with infatuation one will either lose or lose sorely. I had no choice but to accept each like a bout of strep throat: an unavoidable sickness that attacked us all at unpredictable intervals.

My mother assigned karmic explanations to life’s haphazard moves and would have said something like “the stars are aligned” had I any interest in confiding my crushes to her. By the fourth grade I was filled with shame and awkwardness and her enthusiasm toward my burgeoning girlhood repulsed me; she was too excited about my coming-of-age, too quick to make a thing of it. For my tenth birthday, she bought me a glossy, pink back-to-school binder set, very much unlike the busted dinosaur-themed Trapper Keeper I had been using. The artwork featured free-floating hearts and pursed lips and C.R.U.S.H. acrostics like Can’t Resist Urges to See Him. I looked up at her with embarrassment and confusion. She smiled and cocked her head. “I saw them in the CVS and thought they were cute,” she said. Perhaps the folders were her way of saying: I know what’s going on.

I can admit only now that I secretly loved the surrender of premature lust, a sweet relief for a child bound by sense and reason. Infatuation was the Stockholm syndrome of my childhood. I pressed myself into its arms the way I sometimes pinned a fresh piece of cinnamon gum against the soft flesh under my tongue and held it there for as long as I could while it threatened to burn a hole in my jaw.

Between the ages of seven and twelve I entertained a variety of irreconcilable crushes that shared little common denominator other than my admiration: the army brat, Scott Baio (circa Charles in Charge), the guy who bagged groceries at the IGA market who looked like Scott Baio (which is, I suppose, a common denominator), the boy who couldn’t spell and eventually became a talented glass blower, Wil Wheaton as Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me, a boy I played flashlight tag with at a Fourth of July party and never saw again. I could feel each approaching but had no control over when it happened or toward whom I’d direct these spontaneous affections. Infatuation adhered to no system of taste or logic. If I had a type it was only as specific as Male: 10-25 years old. Hints of preference surfaced when groups of boys like New Kids on the Block or the male cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 entered the picture, at which point we were expected to attach ourselves to a single member. The one you chose evidently said something about the kind of person you were: rebel, girl-next-door, princess, bookworm. We craved labels because they sold us the illusion of an identity we were just beginning to explore.

I’m not sure the boys I chose said anything about me other than that I was an avid watcher of primetime television. The way we navigated infatuation said far more than the objects to whom we’d attached such unyielding feelings. While I was a one-epic-crush-at-a-time type, my friend Jill was the kind of girl my mother described knowingly as “boy crazy.” Jill easily managed multiple crushes, each one profound and nuclear in its own rite. More importantly she voiced them with little apprehension to whoever was willing to listen, as though she had nothing to lose. She spoke of each boy with an air of achievement, the way some of the other girls showboated their equestrian ribbons.

Crushes were the center of Jill’s universe and thus the center of our friendship. After school, we often locked ourselves in my bedroom and fantasized that we were sisters grounded by our authoritative and severe father (consequently neither Jill or I had a father who was present) for some or other infraction. At the news of our entrapment, our heroic crushes would climb an imaginary lattice that led to my second-floor bedroom window where Jill and I would repay them with a heavy make-out session.

This involved tongue-kissing the two-dimensional 8x10 glossies we had torn from magazines like Teen Beat and BOP, then throwing ourselves onto the bed in a fit of uninhibited glee.

I quietly envied Jill’s transparent boy-craziness. Outside the privacy of my bedroom I had become a hopelessly surreptitious child, reluctant to expose my crushes because I saw them as a point of vulnerability but also because the public airing of such sentiment seemed to inevitably result in its degradation. That all girls fell victim to these bouts of madness—oftentimes directed toward the same few boys—stripped them of meaning. I didn’t want to admit I had succumbed to the same arbitrary love buzz that affected my classmates, whose crushes I had watched crescendo into declarations of neverending love and just as easily fade into the dull indifference of lost interest. I wanted for my romantic investments to maintain a greater sense of integrity, to achieve the kind of epicness I had seen in fiction. I wanted for my crushes to be love.

The archetypal crush was not acted upon unless several months had been invested in one’s pining. This was to assure it was not some fly-by-night romance but bona fide true love, a condition that often made itself as obvious as the training bras that shackled a few of our ribcages. Jill’s was a boy named Chris who was good at math and had once brought an abacus to school for show-and-tell. It was commonly known that Jill had had her eyes on the young Chris for most of elementary school. While her other boy Kithe/Opper

24

interests came and went, she always unexplainably returned to this pale, nerdy boy whose parents dressed him in polo shirts and loafers as though Yale were just around the corner.

Sometime in the fifth grade Jill and I read a book called The Love Potion (from Eve Becker’s short-lived six-volume Abracadabra series) in which two preteen cousins use their magical capabilities to concoct a brownie recipe with seductive powers. Ambitious and restless, we resolved to try our own version of this spell on Chris. We were egged on by my mother, who bought the brownie mix and told us to make sure we greased the pan.

The book’s love potion recipe called for all the ordinary brownie ingredients, plus a *pinch of magic.* Jill’s neighbor Susan suggested we supplement green M&Ms because she had heard they possessed seductive powers. Our efforts resulted in a pan of brownies that resembled mossy earth. “It’s too green,” Jill said. Susan reached in and tasted the experiment. “It tastes like a brownie.” She shrugged and we went ahead as planned.

The next day we brought the love brownies to school along with a crystal I had found at a yard sale and tied to the end of a shoelace. During recess the three of us surrounded Chris in the middle of the blacktop. Jill held a small paper plate of swampy baked goods in front of his face while I read the spell out loud from our Love Potion paperback. Susan suspended the crystal over Chris’s head, chanting some gibberish and skipping around him in circles. I don’t remember that last part being in the book, and it was likely Susan’s improvisational necromancy that lessened our chances of success and scared the living algebra out of Chris, who stood still in our center with his palms out in helpless defense. I can’t remember if we got him to consume anything, though it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway since he and Jill were of a wildly different pedigree.

My own aspirations reached far beyond our school and our town and our age group. I discovered my magnum opus crush one afternoon at the Cinema 4-plex during a matinee of The Neverending Story II. This mediocre sequel presented to me soon-to-be heartthrob Jonathan Brandis, fourteen and groomed for teen stardom. His ripe pubescence revealed a blond and fair-skinned boy who had mastered the expression of pensive complexity that so captured our tween hearts. Looking back, I’d say his eyes were his most striking feature—bluer and brighter than the sapphire birthstone rings I admired at jewelry kiosks in the shopping mall—but at the time his young athletic body was what pushed me into a hunger I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. I can trace it back to a single shot in the second scene of the film: an underwater view of Brandis’s taut torso in a pair of yellow-and-white striped swimming trunks, rising to the pool’s surface after a dive. The image made me feel like I was in danger of peeing my pants—a feeling whose significance was as yet lost on me—but I attached myself to that boy with the urgency of running through a sprinkler in July.

I used my bottle-return money to invest in every teen magazine at the newsstand, slim publications that cost $2.75 and were filled with photo collages, interviews, and centerfolds that unfurled into 17x22 creased posters. It was through these magazines that I learned Brandis had grown up in nearby Danbury, Connecticut—my state, the state where my bedroom and imaginary lattice resided. I thought all actors grew out of Beverly Hills or other places that called forth game show montages of palm trees and resort hotels. Danbury was richer than where I grew up, but like our town its trees were non-exotic, and it could be reached by highway in fifty minutes or less.

The magazines also listed Brandis’s fan club address in the back amongst ads for the latest Baby-Sitters Club books (ads for books!). Under a spell of false hope, I composed a letter on a set of personalized pink stationery my mother had purchased from a mail-order catalog. I knew there’d be other girls—lots of them—and assumed they were foolish enough to fill their letters with confessions of their affections, so I did not tell him I loved him, or even liked him. I crafted the letter to reveal the portrait of a true fan in admiration of his talent. The coincidence that we had both grown up in Connecticut did not go unmentioned; this was the detail that would seal our fate. I mailed the pink envelope from the postal box outside the IGA market, checking twice to make sure it made its way down the slot.

After an arduous two months, a response arrived. I gingerly carried the envelope up to my bedroom and locked the door. Inside I found a trifold, typewritten letter on official fan club stationery: Thanks for the letter, I couldn’t do it without my fans, look for my upcoming blah, blah, blah, signed Jonathan Brandis. The envelope also contained a 4x6 black-and-white autographed headshot and an official fan club card, which I was instructed to sign and keep in my wallet.

Naturally I believed this correspondence would be the start of an epistolary romance—the only realistic avenue for our love affair considering his demanding career and our relative four-year age gap.

Fortunately, his parents still lived in state, so we’d have plenty of opportunities to rendezvous. My mother wouldn’t be crazy about the commute to Danbury, but she’d have to understand. I didn’t even care that our marriage would result in my fan-club card reading “Candace Brandis”—an unfortunate assonance a friend indicated to the amusement of all the girls at my lunch table.

The obvious next step was to write a reply in which I divulged my hobbies, a variety of biographical information about my family, and my aspirations to move to California to become a director. I used the

25

Kithe/Opper

same pastel stationery, took it to the market mailbox, double-checked the slot, and returned to obscurity with the confidence that I was meant for bigger things.

Some time passed. Sixth grade pushed toward seventh. Brandis’s newest feature Ladybugs came and went from the 4-plex and I watched him on the big screen with the careless supremacy of a long-time girlfriend.

My infatuation seemed to have ascended into something more profound, something that didn’t require squealing or other gratuitous forms of open sentiment.

When his second response arrived, I treated it like the first and brought it to the privacy of my bedroom.

Carefully sliding my index finger under the flap, I removed the envelope’s contents. Inside was a trifold, typewritten response on official fan club stationery: Thanks for the letter, I couldn’t do it without my fans, look for my upcoming blah, blah, blah, signed Jonathan Brandis. I flipped it over and looked at the back: blank. I opened the envelope to search for any additional items—a handwritten note perhaps?—but found only an identical 4x6 autographed pic and another fan club card with a blank spot for my foolish name. I retrieved the first letter, which I had folded into a tiny square and hidden in my jewelry box, and held the two next to each other.

Exact replicas, even down to the loops in his stamped signature.

I buried the letters and the autographed photos in the trashcan where I hoped my humiliation would eventually decompose. Then I stood on my bed, removed each of Brandis’s glossy 8x10 photos from the wall, and tucked them among the stack of teen magazines. The absence left scattered vacancies of vivid blue wallpaper whose blueness drained the room of anticipation. As Tiffany famously said: Could’ve Been.

Over time our crushes became avenues instead of dreamy, overgrown cul-de-sacs. We traded Teen Beat for Seventeen or Spin. The windows of desire ebbed, making room for the visceral matter of clammy handholds and chapped lips meeting each other in TV-lit family rooms. Jill moved quickly; she’d had a miscarriage by the time we were freshman. I wanted boys as badly as she did but understood on some level that consummation was a kind of death. I took my time, sitting on my living room floor watching Angela Chase and Jordon Catalano in My So-Called Life, mulling over the bittersweet ways we would all lose touch with our capacity to long for the sake of longing.

But that is a lie, or, at least, a rosy embellishment. At fifteen I was tired of unrequited love and impatient for the real, messy thing. I may have gotten pregnant, too, if I’d had the chance. That moment on the living room floor wouldn’t take place until years later, during one of several re-screenings of My So-Called Life, after I had already had plenty of real messiness and missed the simplicity of unreturned longing. Only then did I realize the crush is a privilege, precious and fleeting like long, aimless summers and freezers full of Klondike bars that don’t threaten your pant size. At what point in our adult lives do we allow ourselves the bliss of unfulfilled desire? Our unrealized appetites are now disappointments, pipe dreams, failures. We are no longer possessed with the kind of hunger that can only be exorcised by twisting our bodies up in sheets and screaming into a pillow. I suppose sex is infatuation’s natural successor, but it was the unrequitedness that fueled us and drove us mad, that lit up our insides and pumped carnal electricity from our guts to the tips of our nail-bitten fingers. We didn’t like boys or girls as much as we liked wanting them and perhaps even not being able to have them. When they didn’t return our affections or the sincerity of our letters it hurt for as long as anything does: until something else comes along. And while we waited we embraced the hurt because we had earned it, because it had yet to wreck us, because it made us feel alive. Like that fresh piece of cinnamon gum. Just ten more seconds.

END ■

Kithe/Opper

26

Field Notes from the Alchemist No. 1 Vintage book and acrylic paint Lauren Paredes

27

Kithe/Paredes

Braver than [you too!]

Erin Shapland

Always there’s a woman in the mirror— shoulders and clavicles mouthed like a photo trying to get a better look.

There’s nothing behind her eyes but wood, wall, woods.

Email over wrinkles, hand over hand.

You should strive to have perfect taste in music (and all things as much as you can).

If you ought to like it, you like it!

What a simple person, easy in all the most ways.

But then the radio broadcaster’s voice got too mean.

Were you hearing the radio broadcaster?

If you were unable to hear the radio broadcaster the first time You might consider reading this poem more correctly in the future.

Kithe/Shapland

28

On the Killing of Wolves Lee Ware

W

hen I walk my dog, two out of every three people we encounter will ask me if he is a wolf. I can see why they ask—from certain angles he does look like one. Boreas, pronounced Boris, is an Alaskan Malamute-German Shepherd mix that I adopted from a shelter. After I explain his breed makeup and how we came to adopt him, these people always tell me what a strikingly beautiful dog he is and then usually add, “but he sure looks like a wolf.”

These conversations play out as though scripted from the classic storyline. They all but say, what big ears you have, what big eyes…

I’m surprised by how the same people who believe my dog a wolf are not afraid, but in fact want to get as close as possible. They squat and welcome his nose or tongue to their face.

Boreas is very curious and friendly towards everyone, but not overly affectionate with strangers, so the squatted humans usually only get in a few good pets before he slips away to sniff or pee on a nearby bush. I recognize in their eyes a desire to touch something wild, even if in our case it is only an illusion.

It is also true that some people we see on our walks do not wish to encounter us at all. They do not stop to say hello, do not ask to pet him, indeed, some of them will cross the street to avoid us altogether. Whether it is his size or his wolflike semblance, some are hesitant, if not afraid, of his outward appearance. Once a man said to me, looks like you got yourself a real big bad wolf. At the time I awkwardly laughed it off, but I couldn’t stop wondering about the pervasiveness of that archetypal image.

“Big bad wolf” appears 966 times in peer-reviewed journals when searching the library database and 66 times directly in the title of the articles. Scrolling the first couple of pages, I could tell very few of them had anything to do with either fairy tales or wolves. Of the 66 articles, 58 simply utilized the image of the big bad wolf as a shorthand symbol for negative news in subjects ranging from economics to wind propulsion.

Fairy tales are embedded into our culture by virtue of their prevalence in early childhood.

We see references to Cinderella to Peter Pan to Red Riding Hood and we automatically know it means rags to riches, boys who don’t grow up or mature the way we think they should, or as in the case of Red, the danger of straying from the path lest the wolves will get you. They matter because we ascribe to them values and lessons to be learned. In this way, they help to socialize a society, becoming internalized beliefs about the world that largely go unquestioned.

But Red Riding Hood is not about just anyone straying from the path – it is specifically a cautionary tale aimed at young girls. Why is it only girls who should not go into the woods alone, why is it only girls who should not stray from the path? While the fairy tale wants me to believe it’s to keep them safe from the dangers of real wolves or symbolic wolves—i.e., predatory men—I don’t think it’s about safety at all. The stories of keeping women safe have always been stories about controlling them.

When I imagine meeting a wolf in the wild, it is always a gray wolf and always in the woods. But there was a time when I could have met a wolf nearly anywhere in the northern hemisphere—as far south as Mexico City and as far north as Greenland, less than 400 miles from the North Pole. Wolves lived throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, Russia, China, and out into the islands of Japan, adapting to nearly every environment they confronted: deserts, plains, tundra, valleys. Even the ocean itself could not deter the wolf. A subspecies known as Sea Wolves swims miles between islands off the Pacific Coast of Canada, 29

Kithe/Ware

hunting salmon and other fish which comprise a large percentage of their diet. Wolves are or were or could be again one of the most adaptable mammals to have ever roamed our planet— perhaps second only to humans.

Like most large animals around the world, wolf populations dwindled dangerously low as human populations expanded into necessary wolf territories. But similarities stop there.

While man has hunted all apex predators for sport or trophy or from fear, the story of the wolf is particularly disturbing for reasons that are difficult and painful to pin down. As Barry Lopez wrote in Of Wolves and Men, “the history of the killing of wolves shows far less restraint and far more perversity.”1 In the United States, wolves are the only animal White Americans hunted with the intention and government sanction to exterminate. But we were not content to simply kill the wolves; many engaged in grotesque forms of torture. Their methods included burning them alive, ripping out their jaws, slicing their Achilles tendons. Men drug wolves from horses with nooses caught in their mouths so that all of the wolves’ teeth busted out. They stretched them between horses and beat them with pliers. They wired their mouths shut and left them to starve. Some would bait male wolves with female dogs in heat because once their mating begins, the animals cannot separate, so they could simply club the wolf to death.

By the middle of the 20th century, White Americans had nearly fulfilled their desire to hunt the wolf to extinction, successfully eliminating them everywhere in the lower 48 states except small swaths of land in Minnesota and Michigan. Only the protection of placement on the endangered species list in 1973 gave the gray wolf a chance at surviving. But the hatred was so embedded that people in Minnesota threw the carcasses of dead wolves on the steps of congress in outrage over the decision.

I learned that Boreas’ particular mix – the Alaskan Malamute and German Shepherd – is a designer breed known as the Alaskan Shepherd. But unlike the famous designer dog, the Labradoodle, which spawned numerous other doodles, the Alaskan Shepherd doesn’t have a clear purpose. Labradoodles gained popularity for the good-natured trainability of the Labrador and the hypoallergenic coat from the Poodle, making them an appropriate guide dog for those with allergies. When you think of the Malamute and Shepherd – two strong working dogs – it’s difficult to ascertain what the value of mixing them would be other than creating a very wolfy looking dog. On the other hand, all dogs are the result of humans manipulating desirable traits, whether specific skills to help us with tasks or certain looks that pleased our particular tastes. But sometimes it seems that the more we seek the domestication of the wild and manipulation of the natural order, the more we lose sight of how much we also need a wolf to remain a wolf. That is, we fail to recognize the interdependence of species necessary for maintaining healthy ecosystems. Perhaps even when we understand the importance, our egos allow us to believe we can force nature to submit to our whims. After-all, what is the distillation of dog breeding but a desire to manipulate and control the outcome of a species normally left to natural selection.

Even though conservationists worked to change public opinion of wolves, centuries of socialization could not be undone. In the mid-nineties, when wolf restoration was underway, ten Canadian gray wolves were released into Yellowstone, and within a month one of the wolves had already been shot and killed. Some locals said the hunter responsible could run for governor and win on that platform alone. In The Decade of the Wolf,2 the authors wrote that they realized they could not change people’s minds so quickly. Indeed, another thirty years later and the story hasn’t really budged.

In May of 2021, the Governor of Idaho passed legislature making it legal to kill up to 90 percent of the state’s wolf population, which currently rests around 1,500. It’s not just that they could drastically deplete the wolf population, but they’ve also made it possible to kill them in just about any way a person feels like killing: shooting from airplanes, ATVs, and snow mobiles; baiting wolves at night and hunting them with large spotlights; even entering a wolf den to kill not only grown wolves, but the pups as well. One can trap and snare a wolf year-round on private property and hunters can purchase an unlimited number of tags for the sport. In September of the same year, Montana passed similar laws to make the killing of 1 2

Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. First Scribner Classics ed. New York: Scribner Classics, 2004.

Smith, Douglas W., and Ferguson, Gary. Decade of the Wolf : Returning the Wild to Yellowstone. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2006.

Kithe/Ware

30

wolves as easy as possible. These laws passed because the Trump administration removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list. The justification given for killing wolves on such a large scale generally center around fear of bodily harm and loss of livestock in addition to socialized beliefs.

In a report3 published in 2002 compiling wolf attacks, researchers found no documented cases in the 20th century of fatal wolf attacks in North America even when humans provoked wolves, including taking their pups, cornering them, or trapping them. However, there were numerous reported deaths by other apex predators: 17 from cougars, 72 from brown bears, and 25 from black bears. A second report4 compiling wolf attacks from 2002 to 2020 found two documented cases: one fatality in Canada and one in Alaska.

While wolves rarely attack humans even when provoked, they do on occasion attack livestock. In 2020, wolves killed roughly 102 cattle and sheep in Idaho, or one for every 28,000. The state has an estimated 2.8 million combined cattle and sheep and offers compensation for livestock lost to wolves.

Because the brutality inflicted on wolves seems out of proportion to the likelihood of either personal harm or even the extent of property loss accrued by wolves, it’s understandable to want to find another explanation. According to Ted Koch, who has long worked in wolf recovery programs including the reintroduction of them in Idaho, the reason wolves evoke such powerful emotions is because they are so similar to ourselves, which in turn magnifies our idolization or disdain for the animal. “We gravitate toward them because we see them as being like us or we recoil in fear because we fear they are like us.”5 Lopez6 wrote the fear of wolves stems from theriophobia, or the fear of beasts, which is, of course, an insecurity rooted in the self and really, a fear of one’s own nature.

The history of extreme aggression toward wolves began with the shift toward an agricultural society away from the woods. Once we began to actively control and manipulate the natural environment to meet our needs, including mass domestication, we also began to hate that which reminded us of our less civilized selves. We began to fear what we no longer had a relationship with: the woods and those that live there. And ever since, to go into the woods has been seen as a straying from societal norms.

My imagined wolf remains stuck in the woods because as a White American with European heritage this is where I was told I would find him. According to Joyce Thomas, a scholar of children’s literature, the woods is the most recognizable and widely used setting in European fairy tales and holds significant symbolic meaning. “7 Its edge constitutes a literal threshold between man and nature, the cultivated and uncultivated, the tame and wild, the known and the unknown.” According to fairy tales, it is in the unknown woods that we are most likely to encounter dangers such as wolves. And while these stories may account for some of the reasons we fear or dislike wolves, I am more inclined to agree with Lopez when he wrote that the scope and cruelty of wolf killing stems from not understanding our place in the universe and not having the courage to admit it. We cling to outdated thoughts and beliefs because it’s harder and scarier to examine ourselves, who we’ve become, and where we are headed. We lack imagination in our inability to see other ways of being in the world. And so what is at stake by holding onto the fear of wolves and subsequently the treacherous way in which we persecute them is not just the wolf’s existence, but the possibilities for our own.

In stark contrast to White Americans, most First Nation societies cultivated and sustained deep respect for wolves, learning from their hunting patterns and techniques as well as their social family structures. When the Trump administration removed the gray wolf from federal protection, they failed to consult with Tribal leaders, which violates the federal government’s trust responsibility to sovereign nations and demonstrates a complete lack of consideration 3 Linnell, John, Reidar Andersen, Zanete Andersone, Linas Balciauskas, Juan Carlos Blanco, Luigi Boitani, Scott Brainerd et al. "The fear of wolves: A review of wolf attacks on humans." (2002).

4 Linnell, John DC, Ekaterina Kovtun, and Ive Rouart. Wolf attacks on humans: an update for 2002–2020. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), 2021.

5 https://gazette.com/news/coloradans-asking-themselves-is-it-time-to-bring-back-wolves/article_fc9af11e-8eca-11e9-8e94-afb087dc52e0. html 6 Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. First Scribner Classics ed. New York: Scribner Classics, 2004.

7 Thomas, Joyce. "Woods and castles, towers and huts: Aspects of setting in the fairy tale." Children's Literature in Education 17, no. 2 (1986): 126-134.

31

Kithe/Ware

for Native voices. In a letter written to Secretary Deb Haaland, the first indigenous cabinet member, leaders from nearly 200 Tribal nations in the United States appealed to the Biden administration to correct this violation by relisting the gray wolf. In their letter, they drew on the cultural and spiritual importance of the wolf embedded in many of their own stories.

Featuring frequently in creation myths and as guardians, wolves are associated with protection, healing, and hunting. In their letter, they wrote: “Had either the Trump or Biden Administrations consulted tribal nations, as treaty and trust responsibilities require, they would have heard that as a sacred creature, the wolf is an integral part of the land-based identity that shapes our communities, beliefs, customs, and traditions. The land, and all it contains, is our temple.” 8

The story of Red Riding Hood goes back thousands of years through oral traditions.

Scholars see fragments of the story among 10th century French peasants and possibly in Norse mythology. The extraordinary thing about oral traditions is that audience participation is often encouraged, along with the ability to challenge or question the storyteller. In this way, the audience engages in a collective authoring that reflects their particular values and needs, allowing the tales to evolve accordingly.

Charles Perrault is credited as publishing the first printed edition of Little Red Riding Hood in 1697. In this French version, neither the grandmother nor Red are saved. In 1812, The Brothers Grimm sanitized the story to suit the values of the Bourgeois audiences of their time, providing a happy ending—except for the wolf—and removing the part from the French account where Little Red takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with the wolf.

While the Grimm version remains the most recognized, over the last few decades, many writers have adapted and modified the tale. A few have even chosen to give a voice to the wolf in Red Riding Hood’s story. While these are probably well-meaning experiments, what I’ve noticed is they tend to villainize the little girl instead, depicting her as self-absorbed and obsessed with her looks, or worse, flaunting herself to the wolf in a vaguely sexualized way. In one version the wolf warns the grandmother that Red might grow up to be a lusty lass. God forbid. Perhaps it is human nature to want a villain in a story. It’s certainly common to blame young women for any kind of trouble they find themselves in, especially when society has taken such pains to keep her on the virtuous path.

My own life reflects back to me the desire to stray. I have drifted from job to job, state to state, apartment to apartment. I am naturally restless, preferring to wander than to nest.

When younger, people were friendlier to what I often was told were unconventional choices because they believed I would outgrow them. They told me eventually I’d want children, want to marry, want to settle into a career. Eventually, they assumed, I must assimilate into our capitalist and patriarchal society. If a woman strays, if she risks disobeying the lessons taught, she might be thrown to the wolves instead.

Adopting Boreas corresponded with my entrance into a graduate program for creative writing in my mid-to-late thirties, a choice that received very little excitement, a fair amount of skepticism, and lots of well-meaning jokes, including my own as a way of self-protection.

Despite learning to read at age three and writing stories at five, I never claimed the word writer for who I was or what I did, and when friends applied it to me I blushed with shame.

Growing up in a working-class family, my father made it abundantly clear that no one cared what I – a poor girl from the sticks – had to say. He also made it known that a woman who does not marry and birth children has something seriously wrong with her. He would place a large and gritty hand on my shoulder and tell me if I pursued writing, I would end up a ditch digger like him—his tone condescending and presented as all knowing. It is only now, under the external validation of an advanced degree, that I squeak the word writer to describe what I do. As the word bloats in my mouth with all the ways I qualify its meaning, diminishing myself in the process, I still after all this time feel the hands of humiliation on my shoulders.

I have several friends who’ve told me that realizing the futility in pursuing their own artistic passions and instead turning toward high paying corporate or marketing careers was the best thing they ever did. I believe this is true for them and am happy they found their place in society, but what stings is that these choices seem to always be upheld and 8

https://www.relistwolves.org/tribes

Kithe/Ware

32

unquestioned as the correct one.

Our society does not offer much support or encouragement for artists and so as they say, everyone must compromise. But if one compromises too much, their voice is not only lost to the dominant narrative of how to live, but also assists in closing off other ways of being in the world for generations to come, dictating how the future will look.

I’ve been told an artist needs to position themselves from a vantage point where they can observe the society in which they live. It’s necessary to be able to look closely but with a less vested interest regardless if the artist comes to criticize or condone that society. But this seems a luxury only those benefiting from the dominant narrative can afford, and perpetuates the image of the artist as an outsider. As though art can only be pure if made from the isolated individual.

In other words, a lone wolf.

A lone wolf is not only a rarity among biological wolves, but also a bit of a fallacy. An unattached wolf in the wild is most often a young wolf that has dispersed. Dispersal is a biological necessity to keep diversity among wolf genes. Occasionally, when a young wolf reaches sexual maturity it will opt to leave the pack, but not because it wants to be alone or thinks it could survive on its own. Rather, it’s quite the opposite. Its sole purpose is to find a mate with whom to build a new community of wolves.

In 2021, a gray wolf captured the hearts of many on the West Coast for his epic journey of dispersal. The wolf tagged as OR-93—the 93rd wolf tagged from Oregon—travelled over one thousand miles, further than any wolf in recorded history, originating around Mount Hood and zigzagging south near Los Angeles. While I feared he may be shot, his end came less intentionally, being struck by a car, and his body found along Interstate-5 in Kerns County. Gray wolves had not been seen in the Central Coast of California for over two hundred years and his presence gave many a sense of wonder and hope for what it might be like to see wolves roam free once more across the Golden State.

One night while Boreas was sleeping between us in bed, my partner said aloud the words I had wondered myself but didn’t want to pursue: would we have adopted him if he didn’t look the way he looks? Would we love him as much?

It’s line of thinking reminds me of uncomfortable stories I’ve read: Each time a film or television show features a husky or wolf, the purchasing of sled dogs goes up and in turn, the number of these dogs found in shelters. Often the desire for the wild appearance of these dogs is not matched by the ability to give them what they need. Indeed, Boreas arrived at the Portland Humane Society along with several other very wolfy looking dogs, none of which had any known information regarding their prior living situations—only speculations.

Boreas was found along a highway in Southern Oregon near the woods. The shelter employees doubted that Boreas was a stray as he was far too healthy and friendly with humans, showing no desire to run off. Because no one came to claim him, it is more likely someone found themselves unable to care for him and so drove him far from their home, tossed him out of their car, and abandoned him to the woods as though the forest is a dumping ground for those things we no longer need or want. Boreas was cast aside for reasons I can only guess at. But what I am most haunted by is whether those who left him out there on his own without protection—much like what we have done with the wolf—did it hoping he’d find a way to survive or whether his survival made little difference to them at all. . ■

33

Kithe/Ware

Frontier

Acrylic, 2021 Adam Land

Kithe/Land

34

untitled

Acrylic and paper, 2022 Rachel Coyne

35

Kithe/Coyne

Pipefish Christopher X. Ryan

U

pon arrival the father and the son found the beach empty. No toddlers scampering underfoot, no seaglass-hunting fogies ambling past, no teens hurtling themselves across the waves on foam planks.

Nothing but furrows of sand broken up by encroachments of ammophila breviligulata, common beach

grass.

“Today we are kings,” the father said lowly and with little vigor to the son, then kicked open his ancient beach recliner, with its bent arms and frayed nylon.

“What kind of kingdom is this?” the son asked while unfurling his favorite towel, adorned with a particular franchise of space warriors.

“Paradise,” the father said, gesturing toward the helixes of fetid seaweed baking beyond the reach of the sea. “Or its weird cousin.”

They quickly took up their positions, melting into repose beneath a sun growing increasingly bold as the clouds shied away from the coastline. The son dared open the cooler, and the father, though miffed, declined to pursue a conflict. The boy was twelve now, full of anxiety and overconfidence in equal measure.

Then, growing peckish a short while later, he joined the son. The cookies were ample, and for nearly an hour they spilled dark crumbs on their chests and sipped pink lemonade full of slivered ice. They read their books. Gulls mocked them overhead. On the ocean a few boats skidded along in a recalcitrant breeze. The father drifted between reading and dozing.

By noon the warmth was supplanted with a typical July sultriness. The father scratched the crumbs out his chest hair and hiked up his shorts to expose alabaster upper thighs. “Get some sun, son.”

As the son twisted out of his shirt, the father looked away, pretending not to notice the son’s increasing over-the-waistline-puff. The son was an ice cream fiend, and he’d quit summer basketball—said he didn’t like the father’s favorite sport.

The father clenched his cup, lemonade slipping through the cracks. To staunch his fury, he shifted his thoughts to the school’s new second-grade teacher. Her boyish haircut. Her dainty feet. Her restrained mannerisms and easy laugh. For weeks now the father had been meeting her for lunch, alone, at the smokers’ table behind the gymnasium. And then there was the wine. The walks. The talks. The— “Are dark waters always coldest?” the son asked, shielding his eyes while peering out to sea.

“Indeed. Deep colors harbor old grudges from long-dead creatures.”

The son squinted at him. “That from one of the books you teach?”

“No, I made it up just now.”

Now the son smiled. “When you gonna finish your novel?”

The father waved his paperback in the air. “Only a hundred pages left.”

“No, your novel.”

“Ah. The narrative is fermenting. Like wine. Takes time.”

“Fifteen years? Sounds more like vinegar.”

The father sneered, and his book tumbled from his hand. “Alright. Let’s swim.”

With matching grunts, the father and the son rose from the sand like tired crabs and approached the water as if unwilling to startle it. They then proceeded in slow, male increments: ankles, knees, balls, chest, chin.

“We just ate, you know,” the son said, referencing school beach trips. The rule was firm: an hour must elapse between eating and swimming. Kids had cramped up and drowned, teachers claimed. The worse of them had floated out toward the islands where whales had battered their corpses and gulls had plucked shiny trinkets off their wrists.

The father, also a teacher—at his own son’s school—didn’t care about the swimming law, nor the whales and shiny trinkets. He struck a cupped hand against the surface, sending seawater into the son’s face, then Kithe/Ryan

36

took off swimming. Once the son caught him, he climbed onto the father’s back. Despite how heavy the son had gotten, the father let him leap off his shoulders. The son wasn’t strong enough to let the father do the same, but he could carry him underwater like a baby.

As they raced against the tide, the father glanced toward the beach, hoping to spot the second-grade teacher. She would already be encased in cream to protect her fair skin, perhaps wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. But she had declined the father’s invitation. She would never come, not until he finally— “Too slow, geezer!” the son called out.

“Oh yeah?”

When the father caught the son, he shoved him beneath the water. The father glanced at the beach again—was that a car door slamming?—and held him there a moment. Under the surface, the son struck his calves like little tunas. When the father finally relented, the son resurfaced with a girly screech and spewed out a mouthful of chocolatey vomit.

“Enough horseplay,” the father said, wading back to shore. “Let’s warm up before the sun changes color.”

“I almost died,” the son said, coughing, bewildered. A cloud of half-digested cookies twisted around him.

“Dying now and then is all part of becoming a man.”

“Oh really? How many times have you died?”

“A thousand. A million. Every morning.”

At the water’s edge, the father paused. The beach was no longer empty. A woman had indeed settled near their camp, but this was not the second-grade teacher. Blond, buxom, and wearing oversized sunglasses, she was the type of woman seen on motorcycle calendars, in porn magazines, on ironic greeting cards.

“Jeez,” the son said. “Sitting so close.”

With the son shuffling behind him, the father proceeded slowly toward his chair, his eyes burning with salt, his skin bearing welts where jellyfish had stung him, his fists clenching as if attempting to crush the sand in his palms into jewels.

The father and the son settled again. Beside them, the woman lay on a wide, pink towel, her buttocks rising from the sand like two small hills that’d been polished with a soft cloth. Her radio played the type of soft rock the father often heard emanating from his students’ radios in the hallway. But this woman was nothing like his students.

The father pretended to read—a thick fantasy involving itinerant wizards and shamans who spoke in riddles. He briefly thought of his own unfinished work, how their beach neighbor was the type he’d envisioned as his heroine, a woman who vacillated between the archetypes of salvation and undoing. Her presence though, her proximity, was unnerving. What was her rationale for encroaching on their quadrant of quietude? Had she not seen their aggregation of crap? The father poured himself more lemonade, which leaked from the cracked cup and down his leg, attracting wasps. He waved them away as if proffering a hello to the interloper, then forced his gaze back to the book. Soon he was traversing a prairie full of flaming serpents.

A few minutes later, voices made him look up again. A group of young men strode onto the beach.

Boisterous, loud, and sexually ripened, they were the type of summer bums who washed ashore in droves to tend bars, rent mopeds, wipe down sailboats, and shingle houses. With their shirts off, they were nearly indistinguishable. Only one was different: shorter, hairier, his chin nonexistent, his chest sunken. These newcomers settled around a massive red cooler, beers in hand and hats on backwards despite the effulgent glare caroming off the water. They seemed unaware that anyone other than the father and the son were within earshot.

That is, until the sunbather stood and brushed herself off. Like a clan of meerkats, the bums’ heads pivoted toward the woman, watching as she adjusted her top and ran her fingers through her billowy golden hair as if to allow in yet more sunlight. She stretched, giving off a tiny primal shriek, then made her way to the water’s edge. She stood ankle-deep a long moment in the unseasonably cold water before inching forward. Once up to her knees, she splashed water on her arms and thighs so gently it more resembled a christening than a dip in the sea. Eventually she waded up to her waist, then her collarbones, but she never plunged beneath the surface. All the while her sunglasses remained in place. A gull landed nearby and floated eye to eye as if keeping watch. Even the waves acquiesced, abating for her brief visit.

When she returned, the father and the son delved back into their books, but the bums got busy. They dug out frisbees and took up strategic positions on the sand, making sly advancements by diverting their discs with deliberately bad tosses. One frisbee rolled up against the father, but he was game and flung it back, waving to one he mistook for a former student.

“That’s the star footballer I had back in ’96.”

“No, Dad. He was way taller.”

37

Kithe/Ryan

The father shrugged. “Looks like him.”

The sunbather adjusted her radio and turned the pages of a magazine. Maybe she would like one of our warm Fig Newtons, the father thought, or something not yet flecked with sand.

No, the son would surely tell the mother.

As if their frisbees had lost all momentum, the bums drifted back to their spot, the woman having given them nary a glance. Meanwhile the father sought refuge beneath a towering golden mushroom. The protagonist of his paperback faced the terrible choice of beheading a centaur or pledging his loyalty to an evil necromancer, which made the father close his eyes as if the words had become too bright to look at. He began to doze off.

He startled when a passing figure darkened his pages—the small, strange beach bum. The father and the son joined the others in watching as this man ambulated himself to the sunbather’s area and said hello. She looked up at him: arms as undeveloped as the day he was born, an unruly patch of chest hair, legs like tent poles. He introduced himself, something inane and monosyllabic like Doug, Todd, or Bob. “Nice to meet you,” she said, forgoing a name.

He remarked on the quality of day, and they both looked out toward the sailboats.

From there the scene unfurled in slow motion, all the other males watching with awe as he squatted beside her towel like an ape soliciting the kindness of tourists. He didn’t have anything particularly notable to say, but the chatting continued nonetheless. Neither his tone nor his choice of words were tinged with innuendo or were even mildly suggestive, which impressed the father. It was simply the effort of a hopeless putz—that’s what the father christened him—reaching out to a woman with nothing but options.

The sunbather turned onto her back to better converse with her visitor, her breasts falling softly to either side. The putz sat beside her, honing in on a small but common grain to propel their dialogue forward. Still her eyes remained hidden behind the sunglasses, which unnerved the father. He wanted to ask this fellow what color her eyes were. But he dared not. Instead he folded his novel back on itself, breaking its spine beyond repair, then twisted in his chair to face the other direction.

With time, the father’s and son’s interest shifted to lunch.

“Want tuna or cheese and tomato?” the son asked, uncapping the cooler.

“I’ll take whatever speaks least to your heart.”

“Uh, ok.”

You’re a terrible cook, his wife had said two nights earlier when she’d found out dinner would be pancakes with a side of potato chips, to which he’d replied, It’s true I have my flaws.

Every few bites, the father spat out sand that had mysteriously crept into the innermost recesses of their sandwiches.

His wife was a good cook and never missed a meal. She was the heroine in the first twenty-five chapters of his life. But the narrative was shifting beneath him.

As soon as the father had jammed his crust into the sand, nearby activity caught his attention. He might have uttered something aloud, or perhaps it was in his head, but the son saw it too. Beside them, the putz sat slathering suntan lotion onto the woman. As she twisted and writhed to make her body available to him, he tenderly and without hurry ran his fingers under her top’s strap, then layered lotion on the backs of her knees and thighs. He stopped short of her buttocks and then her feet, like either a gentleman or coward, though the father knew it was hard to call him the latter. It was almost chivalrous. Was he the necromancer? Did he wield magic in his tiny fingers?

“We should swim again,” the father said, jamming his feet deep into the sand as if searching out pockets of coolness. “Your mother wants us home by four.”

“Ball dive?”

“Sure.”

They took to the water again and tried to repeat the same pleasurable games they’d played so many other times, but the image of that strange little man running his hands over the skin of a minor deity eviscerated his verve like an undertow. Would the second-grade teacher let a goon like that touch her with such… mettle?

“Dad! Ignore the sexy lady and toss the ball.”

“What?”

The father looked toward the horizon where the son bobbed among the whitecaps. That pleading face.

Those rubber cheeks. The useless breasts. The father cocked his arm, then fired the tennis ball with such force that it split the peak of the wave and struck the son between the eyes.

Blood trickled into the water as the father held the son and pinched the bridge of his nose. “…so hard, Dad. Just a game. Ow. Ow…” “I said I was sorry.”

Kithe/Ryan

38

The son’s crying ceased faster than the father expected. He knew the son didn’t want the woman to witness such a display.

The father, chilled, said he was going back. The son asked him to toss him his mask; he’d stay in. The father did so, then sat dripping with the book in his lap, the words now lifeless on the page. His own novel was better—the second-grade teacher had even said so, though he’d only written 52 pages so far.

“Dad, watch!” the son cried out as if still eight years old. He was nearly a teenager now, and these silly games needed to drift away like yesterday’s rotting flounder. The father glanced up, watching the son plunge down to the seabed to take stock of all the little creatures. Over the years the son had gotten exceedingly good at catching a variety of these things, from minnows to crabs to strange mollusks, and he’d once even caught a pipefish with his bare hands. He’d thought it was a seahorse and rushed out to show his parents.

“No,” the mother had said, “that’s a pipefish. It’s beautiful but not the same.”

“Admire it a moment,” the father had said, “then put it back and hope you haven’t changed its life for the worse.”

That was last summer, before the second-grade teacher had arrived, back when the sandwiches were devoid of tiny rocks. The son hadn’t caught another pipefish since.

The son stayed under longer with each dive, even as clouds moved in. The father’s mood darkened along with the coastline, and it grew darker yet as the putz went to fetch a diet soda for the sunbather. He cursed the putz, casting spells at the daring loser as he cracked the can with an overly long fingernail. Meanwhile, the son had gone quiet.

It was the bums who saw. Three of them rushed into the surf while the fourth alerted the father, still transfixed by the events beside him.

“Oh fuck,” he muttered.

The bums carried the son from the water as easily as the son had once carried that pipefish. By the time the father reached them, they had the son’s mask off. Stringy vomit dripped down his pink face as his stomach heaved in and out. The father patted him on the back, told him to breathe, then tried to whisk him back to their camp to end this embarrassment.

“Give me a minute, damn it,” the son said.

The father recoiled, then stood akimbo, waiting for the son to collect himself.

Only the putz and the woman had remained in their spots. Whether they’d even looked up when the bums had dislodged the son from the current, the father couldn’t say. Nor did they ask after him once everyone had returned to their spots.

What would the second-grade teacher, who had yet to chaperone a beach trip, have done? Would she be panicked, composed, apoplectic? He wanted to learn all her emotions, her dirty misgivings and perfect terrors.

He would explain this to her tonight. Then he would tell the mother. Lastly, the children.

For now though, he needed to prepare a talk for the drive home, about how this incident was their secret.

Otherwise, the mother would never let him hear the end of it.

The son slipped on his scuffed and laceless basketball sneakers, then rinsed out his mouth with the dregs of warm lemonade. “I want to go, Dad.” “We’ll go when you’re okay.”

“Please. I died like a man, and now I want to leave.”

“As you wish,” the father said, fighting back a chuckle. He’d finished his book anyways, and he hated being without a fantasy.

They packed up their belongings, and after thanking the bums one last time, the father said to the son, “I swear that guy was in my English class in ’96.”

“It wasn’t him, Dad.” The father slammed his chair shut. If he couldn’t trust his mind, how could he justify such a decision?

They were just about to make their way up the path when the putz returned to his pack. The father slowed in his tracks and cocked an ear, but none of the putz’s friends asked about the sunbather. Nor did they congratulate or goad him or pry for details. The putz simply brushed off his towel and lay smiling to himself.

The father threw the cooler and chair into the back of the truck, then glanced back toward the woman, but the dunes blocked his view. He saw only the sea, which now looked as flat and hard as a toppled tombstone.

He shivered, then wiped his brow. He was hungry, and the mother said there’d be pizza tonight.

“What a day,” he said and climbed in beside the son. ■

39

Kithe/Ryan

Nocturne

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza Somewhere in September, the river’s quiet lapping; the night edged in branch black, the sky ink blue; the first migrating birds, and—far below the flyway, land-bound— you and I, flightless as sun-warmed stones and curled body to body, lie there looking up. It might have been last century we last spent the night outdoors, but tonight the past becomes us, becomes a tunneling hush: a hundred, thousand birds above steered south by stars or specks of magnetite. Love might be elsewhere, otherwise and still whatever instinct tells the birds to go, could that same certain force keep me in one place, turned towards you? Hips, wrists, fingertips: we are no birds but lips as soft as wings, moving in murmuration; these flights between us made of more than habit: porch swing, stairway, open door; the years like fingerprints of us upon each other’s bodies, breath the only part of us earth’s gravity can’t hold, night-blooming with the scents and senses: magnolia mixed with woodsmoke; bouquet of mint, rosemary, thyme; the garden not yet spent, and you and I entwined.

Kithe/Garcia-Mendoza

40

Parlay on Three Winters Erin Shapland

41

Kithe/Shapland

I like to watch them go and to have some removed and to have another and leave unannounced through an unconventional door.

Yours devours: I draw kisses with one and two puzzles untasted crackling as a fallen tree this living tourist trap.

What a coincidence I was just thinking of you— you’d say ‘my ears were itching.’

Aunt Alice's House

Acrylic, oil, burning materials, and vintage photograph Tara Conway

Kithe/Conway

42

Grandmother is Dead (Again) T. Thompson

M

y father’s side is a loud and particularly raucous bunch, especially when they’re crying.

Grandmother is dead. There’s a closed casket, that everyone chipped in to buy, with a silken banner over the front that says:

A Loving Husband

One of my dad’s sisters is yelling at the funeral director, another is laughing, a brother defends the sash as a sign from god or a message from the recently deceased. Nobody’s removed it yet, but when they do, they neglect to check the contents of the coffin. I don’t know, I would have. A different sister shows up late—completely trashed and wearing those costume glasses with a plastic mustache attached—while the other nine siblings fistfight in the parking lot for their rightful place as pallbearer. The dust settles, just in time for Amazing Grace, and the director of the parlor hands out a dozen instant icepacks. This must happen more often than I think. When the service is over they put grandmother in the ground, we take a family photo, and everyone smokes over the plates of crackers and cheese. Mom falls asleep watching an event venue projection of Finding Nemo with my nieces and nephews. My dad’s side is talking, aggressively, about betrayal and money and missing savings bonds.

You can try to play detective, but, fair warning, dad’s side could stump Sherlock. Later, we have one last sit in the on-site church. The holy water smells like skin and I gag at the sight of the oily film floating on top. Dad tries to say something meaningful to me but someone starts vacuuming the carpet.

Church acoustics are truly indiscriminate. Dad bawls in the pew.

My mother’s side is small and relatively quiet, even when they’re crying. Grandmother is dead. Fuck, what do we do with her? My mom’s dad, grandfather, wants do something traditional (something about a mountainside and a couple of days and in Korea), but that would cost too much and even with our combined expertise, we’d have to google how to do it right. Ok, we decide, we’ll just cremate her and sprinkle her in Asia (one of these days when we get around to it my mother explains lovingly).

The memorial is at our house. I help my grandfather lug a gallon of fermented cabbage up from the depths of the basement while dad buys a Safeway fruit platter. My mother has suddenly manifested roughly fifteen aunts and uncles who come bearing gifts of food that we don’t have enough space for.

Where did they come from? Blood relation means little with these aunts and uncles. Everyone communicates in misunderstandings. They all talk in an English I have to translate for dad because mom has lost all patience with him. Dad eventually gives up and watches baseball in the garage. Some of the uncles join him, but nobody talks. They just grunt and gasp and yell, I’m assuming, the pinnacle of mourning. Inside, the aunts are telling stories about grandmother and her adventures in catering, dental hygiene, and— lastly as a retirement hobby—home decorating. The last aunt shows up late. By now everyone is drunk. Time for speeches. The youngest and most inebriated aunt begins, throwing up on the kitchen floor almost immediately. Good thing it’s tile. She keeps talking and we don’t stop her. Some of us cheer her on until an uncle accidentally missteps and slides through the vomit, it’s mostly transparent—alcoholic, and tackles her. My mother frantically throws full rolls of paper towels and bags of frozen peas at the slimy and unconscious corpse-like bodies. Frozen peas because we don’t have any instant icepacks. The ambulance comes and assures us that everything will be ok.

Everyone is silent; waiting for my mother to speak first. One uncle burps, points, and says something about the vomit on her elbow. Dad says, “What?” Mom bawls in the driveway. ■

43

Kithe/Thompson

The Pizza Hut Apple Tree Oil on board, 2021 Avery Mags Duff

Kithe/Duff

44

Alice, Stepping Westward Bethany Reid

S

tepping onto the platform at the depot in Harris, Alice lifted her free hand—the one her husband did not clasp—and filled her lungs with air heady with cedar and smoke. A wagon sat at the lee of the platform, and a man of forty or so in a beard just beginning to grizzle, shouted to Jim and Jim hallo-ed back, then began rousting out their bags and handing them down. He handed Alice down, too, and the man scooped her up and plopped her on the wagon seat, winking at her as he let go.

Winter was barely over, yet along the roadsides a red bush pocked the green. Wild currant, the man with the wagon called it. All around, big hills spread out like bear skins, one flopped over another. Steepled to the northeast, stood the white mountain some called Rainier and others, Tahoma.

They crossed a plank bridge and the man pulled his horses up and pointed. The river was full of logs in such a quantity as neither Alice nor Jim had ever seen. He told Jim about a peckerwood lumber mill on a bend of the river nearby. “Not easy work, but easy to come by.” Jim asked the name of the mill owner, and asked, too, if the town had a house for him and Alice to live in. The man chuckled. “It ain’t so much a town as that.” Alice watched the logs floating downriver and imagined riding astride one, going faster and faster away.

There was no job at the first mill, but the owner sent Jim to another place, Chandler, a day’s journey over the primitive roads. Chandler was a new town, rows of company houses, each set on a quarter acre, small, a kitchen with space for a table, a single bedroom. His first week at the mill, Jim lost a finger in the shingle saw. “I won’t do that again,” he said that night as Alice unwrapped the bloody stump, wanting to see it. “Did they keep it?” she wanted to know. “What’d they do with it?”

Their little house stood on Front Street. They had a barn, though it was more of a shed. Jim bought a mare and little cart, but the cart had a bent wheel, and there weren’t so many places a cart could carry a body. Alice borrowed a bridle from a neighbor and took to riding out bareback.

She called the mare Ginger, for the delicate way she stepped through clearcuts treacherous with uprooted stumps and briars, threaded together with rough, muddy roads. Alice came home bedraggled, her everyday dress torn at the hem, smudged with mud from wherever she’d sat to eat her lunch. Ginger’s legs and haunches, too, came back scratched and muddy. Alice could curry the mud out of the mare’s coat, but her own dress began to look old with so much mending.

When Jim discovered she was pregnant, he forbade her to ride the mare. “A woman’s got no

45

Kithe/Reid

business riding anyhow.” He marched officiously with the bridle to the neighbor’s and told them he wasn’t poor and wouldn’t be beholden to them again for tack or nothing else. The man refused the dollar Jim offered him. “I ain’t no store,” he said.

When she lost the baby, she wasn’t sad. She knew wives had babies, and that she would have them, but she was only young. There was time. She found herself thinking about her first kiss.

Jim’s older brother Anson. Her breasts, sprouting beneath the thin material of her dress, had made her feel both shy and powerful. When she saw Anson, watching her, she left the others walking home from school and wandered into the woods. His lips had been soft. Because she kissed him back, he wouldn’t believe it was her first.

Anson had given Jim the money for the train to cross the country. It was a long way, West Virginia to Washington, heavy with all they left behind. She thought of how Anson had said, “I can hop a train—single man can do that.”

Jim had been stunned to see the hundred dollar note. Alice stood back, watching them, and finally said, “Jim’s not got a word to say. Wishing he was single, too, I guess. Wishing he was you.”

“I wish I was him,” Anson had said.

For a while she rode the mare with just a rope through her halter. But within a few weeks, she had held out money enough from the grocery account to buy her own bridle. She stood in the back of the grocery where the tack hung on one wall and she stared at a saddle blanket of an intricate woven pattern. It made her think of fir trees, the way they laddered into sky. She supposed it was Indian. The grocer had followed her across the store, and she turned to him and asked how much it cost.

He was a burly man in late middle age. His belly pushed out his shirtfront and he’d done a poor job shaving, leaving tufts of beard. Alice could see that he didn’t have a woman. By his eyes, which were like Anson’s eyes, she knew he wanted one.

She left with the blanket clutched against her chest, against her breasts, which the man had sucked noisily, like a nursing infant. The blanket’s smell filled her nose, pleasing her even more than the sight of it had.

The next day, eating her lunch on the blanket behind a charred stump, she spied a small skull under the lip of a root. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand. It was a gopher’s skull, maybe, too large for a vole. She peered into the holes from which the eyes had once peered out, where the eyes had once rested, snug in their cave of bone. How old had the creature been when it died, how much had it seen of the green world? At home, she cleaned the skull and set it at the back of the table that stood beside the kitchen sink. Soon she had five skulls lined up there, two smaller even than the first. One was much bigger, maybe a deer’s or a goat’s. It had teeth she could wriggle out of the jaw and put back, like the pieces of a puzzle.

By the time Anson found them, it was late summer. Alice came back from a ride and was putting up Ginger when he surprised her, slouching at the barn door and grinning.

“You’re a right mess,” Anson said.

“Not like you ever minded how I look.”

“I mind nothing else.”

In the house, Alice washed up and put coffee on, then began making supper. “Ain’t this fine?” she said. “You two together again.” Anson commented on her collection of skulls. He knew—or imagined he knew—what animals they were. Jim laughed and said he guessed Alice wished his finger bone were there among them.

She felt a ripple of emotion cross her face. After they ate, Jim brought the whisky bottle to the table and poured some for him and his brother, dowsing the bottom of Alice’s cup. She thought of communion when she was a little girl and went to a service with her grandmother. “This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood.”

At the height of berry season she had seen an Indian family for the first time. The mare caught sight of them before Alice did, freezing, then pulling up her head with a jerk. A man, two women, one old, one young, four children. They watched Alice, wariness written on their faces.

When the man turned away and walked into the woods, the others followed, the older woman on his heels, then the children, leaving only the younger woman. She was too far away for Alice to discern her age. Was she a wife or a daughter? Ginger stretched her neck and took a bite from a red huckleberry bush.

While Anson was with them, Alice was unable to ride, and she resented it. He took the mare some days. A neighbor woman got her to help put up preserves and green beans. “All those men in your house, you’re going to need them, come winter.” The gardens in Chandler were bountiful. Jim said Alice should have kept one, and Anson defended her. “Man’s gotta plow up the ground and

Kithe/Reid

46

plant it. The woman can take care of it then, but she can’t plow.” Jim swore and said their mother hadn’t needed no man to plow for her. “If you wanted a woman like Ma,” Anson said, “why’d you marry Alice?”

Anson was not content to work in the mill. He wanted to be outside. So when he had explored enough on his own, he took a job with a logging crew and left to work in the camps. Alice expected him to come to them that first Sunday. “He needs a home place, don’t he?” she said to Jim. “Ain’t we his folks?”

“He’s maybe found himself a squaw,” Jim said.

The image of the Indian family came to Alice. “Squaw’s an ugly word. I don’t want to hear you say it.”

Jim laughed. “An Indian woman can be mighty ugly.”

Alice pulled away from him. “They’re called Chehalis. That’s the tribe lives round here.”

The younger woman, that day in the clearing, had been beautiful. Her face, radiant in the sunshine. Beyond pretty. Her black hair in braids, framing her face. A man’s work shirt over a drab skirt, but around her neck, something white, the ivory of teeth or small bones maybe, strung together.

The next year was 1911 and once the train put a spur up to Chandler, new families began to come. The Thornes, from back home, came in the spring. They began building a big house to the west of town, part of the land Alice and Ginger sometimes crossed. She found a new path, riding farther and farther out, avoiding the logging camps and the crews of Chinese laborers building a spur of train tracks through the hills to the ocean. Spring speckled the ground with tiny orchids, lavender and white. In the low, swampy places, skunk cabbage flared up like weird candles.

In mid-April she found the family again. She had been thinking of them, wondering where they had gone, when the mare walked right into their camp. She thought she might be a witch, to have made them appear.

She dismounted and stood beside Ginger. It didn’t seem “Good Afternoon,” or “How’d you do,” would make sense, so she said nothing.

The older woman spoke passable English. “Eat,” she said. They didn’t have a lot, she gave Alice to understand, but they would share.

Alice ground-tied Ginger and sat down, a little apart from the others, unsure. The children rearranged themselves to sit beside her. When the woman handed her a bowl of venison stew, Alice said, “Thank you.”

The man was not with them. Hunting, maybe. She hadn’t been given a spoon, only a piece of flatbread. She watched to see what the children did, then dipped the bread into the bowl and ate off of it. The meat was tender, not like the venison steaks she fried for Jim. Her mouth watered around it. She hadn’t known how hungry she was. The children whispered and tittered like little birds, and the two women watched, amused. They had a rude shelter with a roof, but when darkness began to fall, Alice took the blanket from Ginger’s back and spread it on the ground near the fire. She lay down and sleep swarmed over her. The young woman covered her with another blanket and the fire died to red coals.

She stayed five days. They were camped beside a stream and Alice fetched water in their hide bucket, tipping it to the side and letting the water fill it. They didn’t call themselves Chehalis, but Ts-a-lis. Shifting sands. The children braided her hair, remarking on its light color and decorating it with crow’s feathers. They taught her how to build a trap for a squirrel, and how to catch a fish in her bare hands. She was good at being still. She learned some of their words, a greeting and “dinner” and “deer.” The younger woman, it seemed, was the older’s daughter. She walked Alice to the top of a hill and showed her the Pacific, unfurling to the west. Alice hadn’t known it was so near.

On the sixth morning a cold rain began. Their shelter was cramped and Alice saw that it would be better if she went home.

Jim acted glad to see her, but that was show for the people looking on, for Anson, too. Alice didn’t have to be a witch to sense it in him. Not dead or lost, she made Jim look foolish and his eyes even when he laughed held a look like murder. When the neighbors left them alone, and Anson had gone to sleep in the shed, Jim slapped Alice, hard. He told her she wasn’t to ride the mare again. That if he found her riding it, he’d kill it. “You hear me,” he said, holding her chin so tightly it would be bruised, “I’ll kill it.”

He had been drinking—the other men congratulating him on getting his pretty wife back safe.

Alice told herself it was the whisky talking and that she would ride the mare again. That he would not kill it. If he tried to—she’d take the mare and not come back. She didn’t dare say it out loud.

He came to bed late, and woke her, making her get up on her knees so he could enter her from

47

Kithe/Reid

behind, thrusting and cursing until he collapsed across her back. The next morning he said, “We’ll go to church from now on. That’s where a Christian woman wanders to, not God knows where into the woods.”

The Methodist was the only church in Chandler, so they went there and Anson went with them, at least that first Sunday. The people stood and clapped their hands and shouted. Alice was glad her face was bruised, glad everyone knew Jim was a brute.

During the sermon she thought about the stream beside the camp. Then she thought of Anson. She leaned forward and looked past Jim at him. Some people said he was courting the Thornes girl. She was only fifteen and Alice felt a pang of sorrow for her. Then the memory came of the first time she had let Anson have her. It flooded her. She remembered how he had pushed apart her legs and pressed his lips and tongue into her sex, how she had felt as though her whole body was turned to water, into a pure stream running over white stones. In the church pew, Anson looked back at her gravely, and she thought, “It didn’t happen to him.” It was her life and not a man’s. Her story. She sat up straight, studied her hands in her lap. The words of the hymns and the sermon flowed around her. The blood of the lamb, the Lord mighty in battle.

She was pregnant again. She took long walks through the fields. Sometimes she turned the mare out of her paddock and they went together, but she didn’t ride. What was the use of it? She plucked foxglove blooms and put them on her fingers like little caps. They made her heart feel like a bee, like she, too, was buzzing. Salmonberries ripened and their gritty sweetness lay heavy in her mouth. The vine maple went gold and then scarlet. One day she came across another skull, large as her fist, and round. Jim said it must be a cat. Anson showed up not long after. “Damned if it’s not a monkey skull,” he said.

She lay in bed that night, the autumn air smelling of apples. Jim stroked her swollen belly. She could feel the stump of his finger and she turned to him, opening herself, drawing him into the act almost before he knew what had befallen him. She climbed astride him and began to rock forward and back. She thought of the younger woman in the family that had taken her in, the Ts-a-lis girl.

She thought of the clear stream that ran beside their camp. What would it be like to kiss her? To put her tongue there? Rose petals.

As Jim finished, she thought, What had a monkey been doing in these woods? Where had it escaped from? How had it lived? But she already knew there was plenty here to live on. There was plenty and more. ■

Kithe/Reid

48

She left behind a big, weird fruit, and it’s beginning to soften.

Erin Shapland

My love got on an airplane today to be with a man whose baby wasn’t— but insisted with jarring repetition over a wet phone call he has nothing to do with it.

It's hard reconciling her old, fierce ownership with the sudden, tangible new idea that they both always wanted to move to Chicago in this week of this month of “Just help me pack please, I’m sure I mentioned it, but I’ll explain when I have the words” and perfectly met only three months ago.

It can't be helped when kicking balloons, tossing paper plates and rinsing forks, rubbing hair and hands and arms through with paraben- and sulfate-rich soaps.

It can’t be helped in my quiet bedroom after taking in our last moments of touching her temperature, her perfume, her atmosphere, this feeling I've forgotten something important.

49

Kithe/Shapland

Victoria & Christopher

Acrylic, oil, burning materials, and vintage photograph Tara Conway

Kithe/Conway

50

Bubbles Jacquelyn Kraut

S

urprise. The sink is full of dishes.

I am always repeating the same tasks. Feeding this physical body of mine, and my brother’s, and his daughter’s. Digesting and defecating. Flushing toilets, throwing out diapers, scrubbing the food crust from ceramic plates. When I finish all of the dishes, an oily ring clings to the sink, and so I clean that as well. The next day I begin this all over again, feeding and emptying, dirtying and washing.

My niece’s name is Kelly. She is three. Her eyes track the light rainbows across the wall like a cat.

I am always wondering what she is thinking about, but when I ask her she won’t tell me.

It goes like this: Kelly, what are your thoughts?

A blink. I have no thoughts.

Now why does she say things like that? I know this is not true—her mind is clearly whirring, turning like the washing machine, thudding like a drier. I know it is not true because she will be bent over a toy car, animating it, and then she’ll suddenly look up and ask me: Aunt Selena, have you ever saw a tiger?

Now, in order to arrive at this question, something had to make her think of a tiger. Then she wondered if I had seen one. Perhaps she doesn’t know what a thought is, and that is why she won’t tell me what she thinks about. I bring this up to her when she sits at the kitchen table, eating yogurt.

Kelly, I say. Do you know what a thought is?

She lifts her shoulders. She taps her spoon on the yogurt and it makes a wet sound.

I say, a thought is an idea you have in your mind. A voice in your head.

Kelly pushes her yogurt bowl away from her and hops off her chair. I’m done with this conversation, she says. ** On mornings when Art is at work, I help Kelly dress, make her breakfast, and drive her to daycare. She goes three days a week. In the car, we drive under trees with no leaves and through piles of gray slush. The city is cold and sparkling and wet. My hands are dry on the wheel.

What will you do at school today? I ask Kelly, who is lounging in her car seat and gazing out the window.

Play, she says.

Who will you play with?

Jasmine and Cam and Leo. We pretend we have a hundred cakes and eat them!

That sounds like fun.

Yep, she says, kicking her legs.

I park the car and extract Kelly from her car seat. Once inside the school, she kisses me goodbye and hurries to the costume station.

The house is quiet quiet quiet with Kelly and Art gone. Art works long hours at the hospital.

Seven days on for twelve hours each and then seven days off. When he’s home, the house is full of him—his music, his dirty shoes tracking salt, his clothes draped over the arms of our chairs. He puts on one record after another. He dances on the rug with Kelly. He lifts her above his head and flies her in a circle until she screams.

When they’re gone, I have the house to myself. I sit at my desk with some tea. I work as a proofreader. I stare at words on a page. I change which to that, and other such things. Every thirty minutes, I have to look out the window at something at least twenty feet away, to give my eyes a rest.

I look at the bird feeder. I look at the snow. I look at the icicles hanging off the next building’s fire escape. Drip drip drip. They get sharper and sharper as they melt, they turn to teeth.

This is the apartment that Art and I grew up in. We played in the little yard all the time, retreating there when the house was too angry and full of the voices of our parents. We made mud pies and had races and threw a softball back and forth. When we got older, we smoked weed behind

51

Kithe/Kraut

the two trees. I’ll bet those oak trees were a few feet apart when they were planted, but they grew so large that they melded together. We stashed the weed there, in the crevice between the two, high enough that only Art could reach it on tip-toes.

We have always been friends, Art and me, and we’ve always been enemies too. Now we raise Kelly together. When I think about this, I see an image: our four hands cradling her, spooning warm water onto her baby hair, pulling socks onto her little feet. I see another image too: Art and I next to each other, connected like the two oak trees. Always, I feel myself itching for space, getting tired of the potty training and the cooking for three, the quiet and the loudness in such extremes.

In my life, I feel either completely alone or utterly crowded, unable to find a corner for myself with no one else’s laundry touching it. But then the warmth pulls me back. Kelly pulls me back.

I look back to my page. I reorient my eyes. I mark an extra space between two words. ** My world felt the largest when I was in college. I went far away from home, four states south.

I walked in Georgian woods draped in Kudzu, I read books in rooms with tall windows. My professors liked me, which surprised me. Teachers never liked me in school before. They thought I was surly, they accused me of giving them looks, and when I asked genuine questions they often mistook them as challenges. My classmates, too, said I intimidated them. I was never sure why people perceived me this way, when in my head I was all soft and vulnerable and wanting, but there it was nonetheless.

Somehow, in college, it was different. I studied writing and comparative lit, I had a few short stories published in college magazines. I made more friends than I ever had before, all of them interesting and interested in lots of things I had never known about before. My friends and I spoke for hours in messy rooms, lounging on dorm beds and on bean bag chairs, snacking and ordering greasy pizza. We drove north to hike on the Appalachian Trail and returned hours later, sore and exhausted. We went to parties where strands of Christmas lights cast red and green glows on our skin, where we sunk into cat-clawed couches and passed joints. We joked about the end of the world, about disaster, about how we’d never have children. We were coping. Back then, I felt close to it, the world. I felt close to my friends and fellow students, struggling to study through long nights and racking up tens of thousands of dollars of debt. I volunteered at an abortion clinic, I attended my classmate’s father’s funeral. I, too, felt close to the people from history I was reading about all the time—victims of colonialism, of capitalism, of workhouses and slave ships, women burned on pyres for curses and tens of thousands of peasants revolting in England. I felt close to the authors of the texts I read, whose words reached me across time. When you feel close to the world, it hurts you, and I felt open to that hurt, and I gave myself to it.

I remember the stream that ran through the side of our campus. You could find it by walking under a bridge and descending a tree-covered hill. There were bigleaf magnolias, old rotting logs, lines of ants, mud and flies and cabbage moths fluttering in spirals. I went down there often. And when I was walking down, one foot after the other, passing saplings and older trees and random bits of trash, I felt like I was walking toward something. Water to dip my feet in. ** Tonight, the wind howls. I am putting Kelly to bed. I am reading her a book about bats, her favorite one. The room is all blue shadows and orange lamp light. The curtains are closed tight, and I know that beyond them is the alley, the neighbor’s house, the street, and so on, concrete and trees and dumpsters and swing sets and highways forever. But Kelly is next to me, her little limbs reaching halfway down the bed, the covers up to her chin. My words carry softly through the room. The crisp sound of a turning page.

I finish reading and close the book.

Aunt Selena, Kelly says, her voice sleepy and sweet, tell me about when you were little.

Okay, just one and then it’s bedtime, I say. These are Kelly’s favored, most precious stories, the ones she asks for only before bed. Even now, before I begin, she closes her eyes to listen. She twitches in excitement.

I tell her about how when Art and I were little, and when our mom read to us before bed, we would argue. We argued about everything—what book we wanted to hear, what side of Mom we got to sit on, the brightness of the lamp, who was hogging the covers. We argued so much that Mom, exasperated, forbade us from saying stop. To avoid the word, Art and I said cease or halt instead, words that sounded ridiculous in the pitch of children.

Kelly grins. She tries the words out for herself.

Kithe/Kraut

52

Now I sit with her until she falls asleep. It doesn’t take long for her to drift off, for her eyes to roll back under partially open lids. I try not to jostle her when I stand up. I avoid the creaks in the floor.

From the doorway, Kelly is a lump in the bed, a suggestion of a child. I feel an urge to walk back into the room and lift the covers, to make sure the shape is still her and not some mannequin replacement. Should I check? I shift my weight to the front of my feet, about to step forward. I listen to the wind push against the window, I hear the apartment creak. I hear the clock down the hall tick.

There is a siren far away, barely audible over the wind, but then it gets closer and louder. Someone has died or injured themselves, or someone has jacked a car or shot a gun. Just a week ago, a woman died three streets over, killed by a man who wanted to steal her electronics. The news reported the amount of money he pawned them for, a pitiful amount that would buy him a meal, maybe two.

People are always doing things on the other side of these apartment walls, little actions that aim to amount to something.

I end up walking back into the room and lifting the covers. Why do I need to check when I just sat next to her, when her voice said Goodnight Auntie just ten minutes ago? But I do. There she is, human mammal curled up in sleep. She has two legs and two arms, five digits on the end of each. She has two ears and a nose and her chest moves up and down as she breathes. I check all of this and take none of it for granted. ** When I do dishes, I feel that I have always been doing them. My mind reaches back to all the moments I have washed dishes before and connects them in a great strand, so that the moments seem eternal, unpunctuated by life. I don’t know why this is.

I use a reusable sponge. One side is soft and one side is rough. There are lots of dishes in the sink this morning, because I didn’t do them last night. There are pots from the pasta I made. A saucy spatula. Kelly’s little plastic bowl with the panda on the bottom. Art’s plate that he used after his shift. The colander has little bits of hardened noodles on it. I scrape at them with my fingernail.

Art does not have to work today. This is a relief for me. I will take care of Kelly this morning while he sleeps, but then he will take over. I am meeting a friend.

Kelly eats toast with peanut butter and a banana for breakfast. I cut up the banana into thin slices. She picks them up with her fingers and places them on her tongue like they’re the Eucharist.

When she eats her toast, she rotates it, always biting from the edges, until it is gone. I watch her eat while I sip my coffee.

Will it snow today? she asks.

Probably not, I say.

Aunt Selena?

What?

How many bugs look like bees but aren’t bees?

What made you think of that? I ask.

She shrugs. How many?

I don’t know, I say. Probably a lot.

Look it up!

I pick up my phone and search “Insects that look like bees.” I can’t find an exact number, but together Kelly and I look at pictures of the mimics. We look at bee flies, hover flies, bee beetles. Kelly comments on their fuzzy bodies, their large eyes, their papery wings. She asks me to zoom in and in and puts her finger on the screen, as if to touch them. After she finishes her toast, she gets a piece of paper from her art drawer and begins to draw one, the yellow crayon tight in her peanut-butter fist.

It’s flying to a flower, she says.

I take the L to the north side of the city and walk a few blocks to Nate’s apartment. I text him when I’m at the gate, and he comes down to let me in. He’s shivering in his bare t-shirt, his arms covered in goosebumps.

Hurry up, he says.

Alright, alright.

His place smells like leftovers. Like plastic containers and congealed sauces. The coffee table is covered in books, a candle, a stick of Chapstick missing its cap, a mug stained with tannin. Nate offers me a glass of water.

We talk briefly about current events, have-you-heard and can-you-believe? It’s tedious and it’s what we always do when we’re together. Nate is relentlessly informed, one of my only college friends who hasn’t become more moderate as the years went on. Our voices are exhausted, we sigh. Nate runs his long fingers through his hair. He rubs his eyes.

53

Kithe/Kraut

Tell me about Kelly, he says.

The question jars me, following all the dark talk about the world. I don’t like the two things side by side. The world/Kelly. I want her to exist in a pocket in my head, in a little toddler-sized world filled with plants and a future.

Well, I say. She asked me about insects that mimic bees this morning. I have no idea what made her think of that.

Maybe she saw a fly that looked like a bee?

We were inside, I say. And it’s winter.

Nate stands up. That reminds me, he says, opening a drawer. I just got some mushrooms. Psilocybin.

Oh? I say. He opens the baggie and smells them.

About two grams. Want to split them?

I nod. As I follow Nate into the kitchen, I wonder—maybe Kelly has no thoughts after all. Maybe her mind is a great landscape of feeling and images, all blooming and meshing and decomposing again. A prowling tiger in tall grasses, a zooming yellow and black fly. A hundred decorated cakes lined up in a row. A wanting, a marveling, a hunger.

We blend the mushrooms into smoothies for lunch: over-ripe bananas, blueberries, almond milk, maple syrup. We put the mushrooms in last and puree.

Nate’s kitchen window faces south, and the sun comes in yellow and warm. It sits on our jeans and chests, it makes my arm-hair look golden. We lean against the counter side by side, drinking and breathing.

After some time, the colors seem warmer. I look at my arm again, at the length of it, the texture of my skin, the freckles and moles. My bony wrists and round knuckles and chipped nails. Nate puts his arm next to mine. He’s got a scar beneath his elbow, and goosebumps.

We smile at each other and laugh. The laughter feels like bubbles rising from my stomach, my fizzy belly. I put the empty smoothie cup on top of Nate’s pile of dishes. I look in the sink.

There’s an oily pan, a fork. A plate with a spoon. An empty mayo jar. The sponge sits at the bottom, new and blue and artificial. I pick it up.

What are you doing? Nate asks.

I squirt a bit of soap on the sponge and turn on the water. A jet of clear-sparkle warmth streams out, spilling over my palms and between my fingers. The water looks thick, like gel. I shiver. I squeeze the sponge, I pick up a plate. The water runs over the ceramic, carrying the food crumbs away. Shiny, hard ceramic.

Are you seriously doing the dishes? Nate asks me.

No. Come here, I say. I squeeze some soap from the sponge onto Nate’s hands. He smiles, moves his fingers below the stream.

Down in the sink. The soap bubbles on the plate. It seems that each bubble is full of me, of my life, each perfect and round and fragile. Art in one, Kelly in another. Our apartment full of toys and diapers and music and tears. Kelly’s snot is a bubble. I wipe it with my fingers. Her face is pink and puckered from crying. Now she’s smiling and wrapped around me, my baby koala, baby bear, her fingers at my collar. The Earth is a bubble, green and blue and pink, turning on a plate, shimmering ephemeral. I am doing dishes and crying, and washing dishes clean. ■

Kithe/Kraut

54

Contributors Tara Conway

"Aunt Alice's House," "Mary Agnes," and "Victoria & Christoher"

jessamyn duckwell

As a mixed-media artist, I especially enjoy how painting and photography enable me to transform my imaginary world into physical pieces of work. My art is often a serendipitous discovery as I experiment with new subjects, concepts, and mediums.

The South has been my home for the past 18 years, which is a fortunate thing as an artist because I am most inspired by my surroundings. During my time spent in this beautiful place, I have devoured its sights, scenes, and history. All of this has led to my recent southern gothic-themed series. Through this series, I aim to create a visual time warp to illustrate how time waits for no one‚ an existentially bittersweet concept that is especially present among the live oaks and decaying architecture of coastal Georgia.

My path towards becoming an artist was unique as I practiced law in Savannah before going to art school in North Carolina and teaching in New Orleans. I am currently enjoying the chaos of raising two young daughters with my husband while living on a remote island among the golden isles of Georgia.

jessamyn duckwall (they/she) is a queer, genderfluid poet. They are an MFA candidate in poetry at Portland State University and serve as poetry co-editor at The Portland Review. When not writing, they enjoy reading tarot cards, talking to plants, drinking tea and making soup. Their work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Pathos Literary Magazine, and other publications. They live in Oregon with their child and their dog.

Rachel Coyne

"untitled" and "untitled"

Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, MN. Her books include Daughter, Have I Told You?, Whiskey Heart, The Patron Saint of Lost Comfort Lake and the YA series The Antigone Ravynn Chronicles. Follow her on Instagram @imrachelcoyne.

55

"pmdd"

Avery Mags Duff

"The Carroll Street Apple Tree" and "The Pizza Hut Apple Tree"

Avery Mags Duff grew up in Akron, Ohio, and has been making art their whole life. They are a graduate of the University of Akron with a BFA in Painting and a BA in Spanish. They are also active in urban farming, fermentation, foraging, and experimental music.

MG DeNike Gannon

"Muzzled Hope" and "Blue Hope"

MG DeNike Gannon is a teacher and poet in New York City. Her poetry has been published in River Heron Review, Naugatuck River Review, and 2 Horatio. She has studied poetry with Alice Notley, Elaine Sexton, Tim Seibles, Robert Pinsky, and Jenny Xie. Whenever possible, she is outside breathing the fresh air and thinking of new words with which to build pictures in poems.

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza "Nocturne"

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, and photographer. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, West Trestle Review, SWIMM Every Day, Stoneboat, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Western Pennsylvania.

Ryan Harper "Tolba"

Ryan Harper is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies.

He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Inkwell, High Shelf, Consequence, Fatal Flaw, Tahoma Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. A resident of New York City and Waterville, Maine, Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.

William Hawkins "Our Given Names"

William Hawkins has been published in Granta, TriQuarterly and ZYZZYVA. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Haili Jones "Boys"

Haili Jones is a writer, editor, and performer living in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Bitch, The Notebook: A Progressive Journal for Women & Girls with Rural and Small-Town Roots, The Tishman Review, and online at LunaLuna, The Manifest-Station, and Hip Mama. She also performs with Mortified Portland.

Jacquelyn Kraut "Bubbles"

Jacquelyn Kraut is a writer and nanny living in Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail and Alloy Literary Magazine.

Adam Land

"Traveller" and "Frontier"

Adam Land (b. 1976) is an intuitive abstract artist who lives and works in Houston, Texas. He states, "Painting is a balancing act between opposite ideas - direct observation and instinct, control and spontaneity, even between the literal and the symbolic. Although a painter is deeply involved with his own private investigation of thought, his real aim is to communicate a uniquely personal message to the viewer.”

The artist is skilled in several different mediums and art forms which include painting, sculpture, and ceramics. You can find his art in numerous private and government collections and businesses.

Adam’s exhibitions include exhibiting at Spectrum Miami, part of Art Basel Miami Week, and more. His art has been selected for several juried exhibitions, through which he has won various awards.

He is also the recipient of awards from Jerry Goldstein Foundation, Gallery Ring Gallery and High Shelf Press magazine.

Adding to his artistic contributions, Adam has served as a curator for exhibitions held at UNCC, Charlotte, NC, Silver Street Studios, Houston, TX, and other venues. He also donates a portion of certain art proceeds to the ‚ “Houston Food Bank”.

Adam’s first experiences to art occurred when he was looking to attain an architecture degree.

Having only an engineering portfolio, he was needing to require certain necessary artistic skills and portfolio items.

Ceramics was the only open class and that was all it took.

Adam received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Andrew Mart

"A Drink for the Dead"

Andrew Mart lives in Eureka, California. This is his first published story.

Candace Jane Opper "Love Buzz"

Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, and a visual artist whose work explores the intersection of personal and cultural histories.

She is the author of CERTAIN AND IMPOSSIBLE EVENTS (2021), selected by Cheryl Strayed for a Kore Press Memoir Award and featured in NPR’s 2021 "Books We Love." Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Narratively, Literary Hub, Normal School, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Vestoj, among others. Originally from the marshy woods of southern Connecticut,

she lives and works in Pittsburgh with her spouse-man, writer Patrick McGinty, and their son.

Lauren Paredes

"Field Notes from the Alchemist No.1"

Lauren Paredes is a storyteller across mediums with a soft spot for the unusual. Her work has appeared in TRNSFR, Warm Milk, phoebe, Storm Cellar and elsewhere.

Her first chapbook of poems, Otherwise, Magic, was released in 2019 by First Matter Press. She currently resides in the Berkshires, nestled between hills.

Bethany Reid

"Alice, Stepping Westward"

Bethany Reid’s Sparrow won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux. Her stories, poetry, and essays have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, and Persimmon Tree. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their grown daughters. She blogs about writing and life at www. bethanyareid.com.

Jordan Robson "untitled"

Jordan Robson is a writer and photographer from Seattle, Washington. Her work has previously been published in Papeachu Review and Burningword Literary Journal. She currently lives in Southern California. Keep up with her on Instagram: @j.r.photoss.

56

Contributors Christopher X. Ryan

Caitlin Thomson

Born on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Christopher X. Ryan now lives in Helsinki, Finland. His debut novel HELIOPHOBIA is forthcoming from Montag Press in late 2022. His stories have been published widely, and he was recently awarded a fiction-writing grant by Kone Foundation. He can be found at www. christopherXryan.com.

Caitlin Thomson is the co-founder of The Poetry Marathon, an international writing event. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Adroit Journal, The Penn Review, Barrow Street, and Radar. You can learn more about her writing at www. caitlinthomson.com.

"Pipefish"

Erin Shapland

"Enclosed You Will Find a PDF Copy of Your Email Address," "Parlay on Three Winters," "She left behind a big, weird fruit, and it's beginning to soften." and "Braver than [you too!]"

Erin Shapland is a poet and dancer living in Bristol, CT. When she isn't working toward her MLIS, Erin keeps two beautiful rats, competes and teaches ballroom dance, and regularly pours water on an assortment of house plants.

Abbey St. John "Daybreaker"

Abbey St. John is an illustrator & cartoonist based in Portland, Oregon.

57

"Unpeeling an Orange in the Future"

Tia "Theo" Thompson "Grandmother is Dead (Again)"

Tia "Theo" Thompson is a Graduate Assistant in the MFA program at Portland State University. They study fiction. They often experiment with trope and narrative cliché. Many of their pieces focus on the examination and expectations of intended audience.

Lee Ware

"On the Killing of Wolves"

Lee’s writing has appeared in The Normal School, Green Mountains Review, Oregon Humanities, Propeller, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Tom and Phyllis Burnam Award for fiction. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.

Editorial Board Lauren Hobson

Founder, Editor-in-Chief

Lauren writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing, and her work has appeared in Riverteeth, Entropy, Backcountry, and elsewhere. If she’s not reading new work for Kithe, she’s writing about being a human in the natural world or about nature in the human world. Her dog, Cedar, is her constant companion. She loves stories about brave women and gentle men.

Joshua James Amberson Editor

Joshua James Amberson is a Portland, Oregon-based writer and creative writing instructor. His work has appeared in Hobart, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tin House, among others. He's the author of the essay collection Everyday Mythologies and the mixed-genre collection Slow Motion Heroics, both from Two Plum Press.

Katie Borak Editor

Katie Borak is a teaching artist seeking unexplored avenues. They make short queer blackout poems from pulp novels and long stories about icebergs, fanaticism, and the sea. Outside the classroom Katie can be found in the garden with dirt under their nails.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan Editor

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a houseplant mother, a jigsaw puzzler, a record collector, and a recovered addict. Her work appears in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Huffington Post, Entropy, Water~Stone Review, Lana Turner, NAILED, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

Cynthia Carmina Gómez Editor

Cynthia Carmina Gómez is the Director of Community & Civic Impact at Portland State University. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. She enjoys long hikes with her pup Romeo, cooking for her family, and documenting the stories of ordinary people's extraordinary lives.

M.L. Schepps Editor

M.L. Schepps is a writer, publisher and editor in Portland. His writing has appeared in the Oregon Encyclopedia, We Are The Mutants, The Portland Review, Popula and the award-winning zine Is It Just Me or Are We Nailing This? Essays on BoJack Horseman. His debut novella Split Aces is forthcoming from Korza Books in January of 2022.

58