Spring 2018

featuring creative writing by R. Baxter-Green Wisteria Deng Frances Donington-Ayad Dakota Durbin Briel Felton Rebecca Kahn Jane Kelly Nicolas LĂŠger Paola Liendo Albert Lunn Claire Oleson John-Paul Richard Jojo Rinehart-Jones Leanne Woods Linfei Yang Nicole Zador

Allegheny College University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Emerson College Merrimack College Old Dominion University Brandeis University Carleton College Brandeis University Kenyon College Hamilton College Kenyon College College of Wooster Hamilton College North Shore Community College Brandeis University Brandeis University

cover photo by Hannah Chidekel, Brandeis University

Laurel Moon

Volume 1, Number 1 Spring 2018

Laurel Moon

Vol. 1 No. 1 Spring 2018 Brandeis University

Laurel Moon Magazine Editors-in-ChiEf AssoCiAtE Editors

rEAdErs

russiAn-LAnguAgE ConsuLtAnts

Anne Kat Alexander Danielle Rock Bob Corpening Ivy Gao Caroline Greaney Nicolas LĂŠger Ruoxuan (Andrea) Lei Polina Potochevska Ethan Seidenberg Hannah Shumel Jinni Wang Nicole Zador Polina Barker Sophie Fulara Truman Mooney Michael Golitsyn Polina Potochevska

Laurel Moon is Brandeis University’s oldest literary magazine. We publish two issues each year, in the fall and in the spring. All undergraduates at US-based colleges and universities are invited to submit their creative writing of any genre via our website. All submissions are read blindly.

Copyright 2018 by Laurel Moon Brandeis University English Department PO Box 9110 Waltham, MA 02454-9110 www.laurelmoonmag.com www.instagram.com/laurel_moon_brandeis www.facebook.com/laurelmoonbrandeis Our cover photo this semester was taken by Hannah Chidekel. www.flickr.com/photos/hchidekel

Editors’ Note Welcome to the Spring 2018 issue of Laurel Moon, at once another issue of Brandeis University’s oldest literary magazine and also Volume 1, Number 1. Laurel Moon was initially launched in the early nineties as a showcase for the best creative writing by Brandeis students, but this semester, we have turned a new leaf. In the fall, the editors-in-chief decided the time was right to relaunch Laurel Moon into the form you now hold in your hands—a free semesterly magazine of creative writing by undergraduates studying at colleges and universities across the US, published online and accompanied by a limited print release. We hope that in this form, Laurel Moon will become a forum for emerging student writers to gain publishing experience and to have their writing read—especially for those student writers whose work might not fit the model of creative work produced by, for, and about white, cis, urban, heterosexual men that so many of us are taught to emulate.

For this issue, we read more than two hundred submissions from students at dozens of universities. Every piece in this issue was backed up by passionate arguments in its favor by staff members who evaluated submissions without any knowledge of the writer’s identity or institution.

After many hours of reading and discussion, the staff is proud to present the very finest work that we received.

As part of our mission to highlight different perspectives and voices, Laurel Moon has continued our tradition of publishing works written in languages other than English. For our inaugural issue, we have chosen to feature one poem in Russian along with a version of the same poem in English. Next semester, Laurel Moon will feature writing in another language, to be announced this summer.

Thank you for picking up one of our print copies of Laurel Moon, Volume 1, Number 1. We hope that you, too, enjoy the works we so enjoyed reading and discussing this semester.

—Anne Kat Alexander and Danielle Rock 1

Laurel Moon Volume 1, Number 1 Spring 2018

Contents

1

Editor’s notE

fiCtion 7 18 32

Jane Kelly

If I Knew Where It Was, I Wouldn’t Be Looking Jojo Rinehart-Jones Boys Build Bonfires Nicole Zador Bessie’s Return

nonfiCtion 29 43 54

Leanne Woods Santa Fe Frances Donington-Ayad Rotting Vegetables R. Baxter-Green Chasing Deer

poEtry 4 6 16 26 46 48 50 59 62

Briel Felton eggshell/s Dakota Durbin Ken’s Korner Claire Oleson two poems Linfei Yang The Birds Rebecca Kahn Home Nicolas Léger mourning my mother Albert Lunn two poems Paola Liendo two poems Wisteria Deng two poems

forEign-LAnguAgE suppLEmEnt: poEtry in russiAn 66

John-Paul Richard with Ilia Shcherbakov

68 69

prizEs Contributors

Sing Me a Song

eggshell/s Briel Felton it was my freshman year of college in the mountains where it snowed year round even in the buildings to prepare i stocked up on scarves and a sensational vocabulary my fucking god on cold nights i was confused about my skin i perfected the ends of words pronouncing each syllable like they hurt my mouth i erased their blackened inflections and became a polar white oreo filling but on dark mulberry nights with the warmth of whiskey as shaved lemon ice ringlets melted we all sat in huddles we laughed drowsily and thought this would be chapter 1 of the stories we would tell our kids but i was the stain the only exception in a room of eggshell/s 4

“Hot Nigga� by Bobby Shmurda would play and a field of blue irises would turn to me the white walls i glued together crumbled in my hot hands mitch caught a body about a week ago i mumble the only line i know my cheeks a hot vermilion I a stain in the snow

5

Ken’s Korner Dakota Durbin When I was two years old I lived in New Hampshire above my grandfather’s convenience store.

On Sunday mornings, while mother worked the register, my grandfather would hoist me upon his shoulders and carry me down the aisle of fridges stocked with wines.

One by one, he taught me to pronounce each bottle and would laugh as I began to read them all by myself: Chianti, Merlot, Pinot Noir.

My mother, a dancer of powwows and a player of deer-skin drums, suspected my room was haunted by a Native American spirit, because the room often smelled of pungent musky body odor, the type a toddler’s body could not emit.

Mother had a friend, a medium, who came to smudge the house, a process of spirit purification using white sage and cedar, in an attempt to evict the spirit.

Upon entering our home, she spied in the doorway a gaunt figure, hooded in a feathered warbonnet. She sought communication with the spirit, who spoke, expressing aggravation at the construction that was taking place at the corner of West Side and Birch Hill Road. It was his land.

Yet, he meant no harm and claimed to be my spirit guide, instructing mother to place a leather mandala ornament, above my bedroom doorway, so that he said he may watch over and always remain with me.

Outside, grandfather and I would pick blackberries from the bushes that backed Ken’s Korner. Wicker in black juice stained hands, we would eat more berries off the bushes than placed into the basket.

6

If I Knew Where It Was, I Wouldn’t Be Looking Jane Kelly The unraveling began with dreams about hands. Crushed hands, missing hands, hands paralyzed and misshapen. Bloody stumps, crushed bones, tendons snapped in half. I would wake up with my hands in fists, face pressed into the pillow, wheezing, still feeling the mist of pain before it dissolved each morning. After the third dream, I had the strange, nagging feeling that these were not nightmares, but something more.

“Are you going to be late?” Liam asked. He was lying in bed, facing the wall. Our backs curved away each other, lightly touching at the base of our spines. My alarm had gone off twenty minutes before, a soothing harp song that often sent me right back to sleep. I had begun to rely on Liam to wake me up, which was dangerous on the days we slept apart.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. I lifted one arm, raising it to the ceiling.

I felt like a corpse in a grave shoving her hand through the dirt to the surface. Gazing upward, I saw there, at the end of my arm, a hand.

Perfectly formed. Fingers trim and long, piano-player muscles, a pleasing slope from knuckle to wrist. Whole. With a blink my dreamhand superimposed itself, the skin peeled back and fixed with long-pins, the glossy meat and matte white bones revealed. I had been sitting center stage in an antique operating theater, alone under a single spotlight.

My left hand was limp and bandaged in my lap while my right hand was fixed, by those long-pins, to a small table. A voice that belonged to another hand—a hand in pale yellow latex holding a scalpel—attached to an arm that disappeared into darkness. The voice droned on.

“And you’ll see how the Palmar metacarpal ligaments . . .”

I blinked again and was back in bed. I had never heard the term Palmar metacarpal ligaments once in my waking life. However, my 7

subconscious seemed to have a very firm grasp on anatomy. Maybe we had watched a documentary about human physiology while I napped in the back row of biology.

“You’re really going to be late,” Liam said, his concern showing in the fact he sat all the way up in bed to look at me. “You’ve been late, like, ten times already.”

“It’s only been once or twice,” I mumbled to him. It’d been eleven times, a feat in itself as it was only the fourth week of the semester.

Punctuality used to be my watchword, but waking up and fending off the aftermath of my nightmares had caused my life to fall behind, as if my dreams had shifted me over to a parallel reality where time ran ten minutes slower.

“Are you coming over tonight?” Liam asked as he rolled back over to the wall. I thought for a minute.

“Yeah, we can sleep at your place,” I said, remembering. On Thursdays I didn’t have class until noon, so I would sleep over at his apartment across campus on Wednesday evenings. I skipped last Wednesday to get some sleep.

“You were making weird noises in your sleep again—was it a hand dream?” Liam asked, muffled by the comforter.

“It feels like all my dreams are hand dreams,” I said as I shoved my legs into my jeans and jerked a brush through my hair. I could feel strands giving way, snapping. So far, my hands had been crushed by rocks, paralyzed by spider bites, hacked off with an axe, and had all the fingers surgically removed. The dissection one was new, and I tried to rank it in preference to the other options. The gory images and remembrance of the pain made my stomach lurch sideways.

“I’ll text you later,” I said and slipped out the door to go to class. I checked my watch and considered. I could cut class and do the homework for my other class. The buildings were far apart on the sprawling campus and if I just went to my second class I would be in the right area for my barista shift. Alternatively, I could call sick into work, go to my first class late, then walk to Liam’s apartment early and see if he would make me dinner, and use the time on the walk over to call my mom, which she had been bugging me to do. However . . . I shook my head. I would go to both classes, call my mom, go to my work shift, and bring Liam dinner from somewhere.

Seven hours later I had managed to go to both classes but had called in sick to work and was sitting in on the front porch of the house Liam rented with five of his friends. March sunlight, weak yet somehow still 8

If I Knew Where It Was . . .

Jane Kelly blinding, stabbed between the buildings. I held up a hand to block the light. Blood dripped down cracks in my skin and my nails had split. In another breath, they were fine. I felt uneasy that my dreams had begun to leak out into the real world, like an oil spill that left a greasy coating over all it touched.

Then Liam was walking towards me looking pleasantly surprised.

“No work?” he said.

“Nope. I got the day off just to spend with you,” I said, standing up to greet him.

“You’re playing hooky,” he said, returning my hug with in the placid way he always does.

“Believe my lie, I told it just for you,” I teased, reaching for his hands which did not dissolve into mist or break off when I grabbed them.

“Are you and Tara still fighting?” he asked. I marveled at his ability to pinpoint exactly what I didn’t want to talk about, and then bring it up right away.

“We’re besties, we’ll figure it out. Let’s talk about something else, like the fact I’m going crazy,” I said as I sat down in the breakfast nook.

Tara and I weren’t fighting necessarily—we were just at the point in our friendship where you start to notice the other person’s character faults and haven’t figured out how to deal with them yet.

“You’re not going crazy, you’re just stressed.” Liam put a pot on the stove and turned on the burner. “What kind of pasta?”

“Curly.”

“Done. Did you go to class today?”

“Of course I went to class, but I couldn’t focus.” Liam threw a chunk of parmesan at me with a grater. Obligingly, I began to grate it, watching the soft yellow squiggles gather in a bowl. For a second I imagined grating the skin of my knuckles, but the thought faded.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, tearing fresh basil into the pasta sauce.

“I had another one,” I said. Liam slowly stirred, not needing clarify what I meant.

“Thought about seeing a person? Then you could talk about the dreams, and Tara, dealing with your classes and work and—” “I don’t need to talk to anyone. I’m talking to you and that’s all that’s gonna happen.” I crunched down on a piece of dry pasta and looked 9

pointedly out the window. “People have nightmares all the time.”

“Other people don’t cut class, skip work, and avoid their friends and family. But,” he said, seeing my pointed window—staring, “Other people aren’t you.”

“Damn straight,” I said. Liam looked at me strangely, then drained the pasta.

The girl to my left passed me the exam and my eyes wandered over the page. Nothing looked familiar. My pencil rested heavy in my hand; the line for writing my name blurred and waved. Turning to the window the sky appeared washed out, overlaid by a bright yellow tinge.

The branches of the pine tree were vibrating. I looked back. My hand holding the pencil was stiff, the fingers at odd angles. Was this how normal hands looked?

Focus on the essay questions, breathe, relax. I put the tip of my pencil to the page and it broke, the grey lead splintering off into tiny, microscopic shards. I imagined those shards slowly burrowing their way into my palms. Imagined everything I touched marked with the dark grey smudges. Trailing a finger across a piece of paper and writing my name. The lead overtook my hand though, spreading until my hands were no longer made of flesh and blood but graphite, brittle. Too much pressure and they shattered, becoming nothing more than dust and gritty fragments scattered across the desk.

I turned back to the test. I sharpened my pencil. Then the professor announced that it was time and everyone around me rose and shuffled out the door. The professor looked at me over his glasses.

“You need to turn in your exam now.”

The empty sheet stared at me from the narrow desk.

“I–I didn’t start it yet,” I said, stumbling over the words.

“You haven’t started it?”

“Yes, I–I, couldn’t focus, I was feeling dizzy and—” “Turn in what you have and if you have a problem take it up with the dean or come see me—I have to go to a meeting.” He left. Holding the test like it was toxic, I dropped it onto the pile and left the room.

The dean did not understand me.

“I’m trying to make sure I’m understanding you. You hallucinated during your test?”

“Well, kind of, but not really, I’ve been having dreams, these dreams . . .”

She pushed her glasses up the bridge or her nose with an 10

If I Knew Where It Was . . .

Jane Kelly authoritative finger. She rearranged papers on her desk.

“You failed your test because of a nightmare?” When I didn’t respond, she sighed. “I’m trying to understand why you need to retake the test. Are you trying to apply for extra-time on tests? It can’t be applied retroactively.”

Words were like tar in my mouth as I tried to explain. I watched the concern morph into confusion, disbelief, then a resolute statue.

“I don’t believe there’s anything I can do. If you’re worried you should go to the Student Health Center or try and get some sleep. Talk to your professor as well.”

I left without saying goodbye. Late-dropping the class wouldn’t look good, but it was better than sabotaging my GPA. In my pocket my phone was vibrating. I didn’t answer and let the vibrations continue indefinitely. Wandering back across campus I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what going crazy was like. For a moment, you’re walking in the sunlight and you have your mind and the next moment the trees look like decaying fingers and there’s a sick green tinge at the corners of your vision and you imagine the wind as razors sliding across your skin instead of just gently blowing.

My apartment was still three blocks away. I could walk. That’s a simple thing to do, the one foot then the next. Under my breath I repeated to myself, “Forget about hands, forget about it, forget about it . . .”

At my apartment, Liam was waiting.

“You’re not answering your phone,” he said, brows furrowed. I sensed he wasn’t so much concerned as perplexed.

“It’s off,” I replied, fishing my keychain out of my bag.

“For the last two days?”

“I had a meeting with the dean.” Liam looked at me.

“What for? Are you in trouble?” He said it slowly, as if the idea of his girlfriend and trouble were incompatible ideas. I was with him. They were still incompatible ideas to myself as well.

“I’m not in trouble, I just had some issues with a midterm and was seeing what my options were.” I reached for his hand and tried not to look, tried not to feel the clasping of fingers and meeting of palms. I wondered what it felt like, to hold my hand. Could he feel the tendons and the bones?

11

“Your hands are so cold,” he said. “Are you okay?” With his other hand, he reached out and felt my forehead. “You’re so clammy.”

“I’ve had a week,” I said, leaning against his shoulder and swallowing the sour bile coating the back of my throat.

“It’s Tuesday.”

“I’ve had a seven days,” I said.

“Alright,” he said and led me to my room. He set me down on my bed and sat next to me. We were still holding hands and I wanted to tear mine away, but if I focused all my energy I could stand it.

“Talk.” I looked over at him. His familiar face was in an unfamiliar frown.

“I don’t want to talk,” I said.

“You never want to talk, you cut class, you pick fights with my friends, with your friends, and then you say, ‘I’m fine, it’s under control’ and we both know it’s bullshit.” He looked at the ground. “I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

“That’s my line,” I said quietly. Liam squeezed my hand and let it go.

“I think you need to take some time.”

“I don’t need any time, I just need some sleep and a couple extensions, that’s really it,” I argued, but more as an afterthought. When Liam let go of my hand it felt like it detached, like the ligaments and bones and cartilage were all ripping and tearing apart. I rubbed my wrist and avoided eye contact.

“I talked to Tara and—” He looked over, expecting me to interrupt, and maybe I would’ve, but right then I had to concentrate on not going and running my hands under hot water to make sure they were still part of my body. “We thought maybe you need a weekend away? To think about things and get some sleep away from everything?” He held up some keys. “Remember my family’s cabin up north? Here are the keys.

We could drive down there for the weekend. I bought groceries.”

“Well, if you bought groceries, I guess we have to go,” I said, gingerly holding out my hand to receive the keys. When they hit my palm, I flinched.

Apologies, explanations, telling him how the fights were just distractions, that the flakiness was because crowded rooms hurt my eyes, giving him the answers he craved seemed like too many words for one mouth to say.

“I can’t leave right away, but if you wanted to drive down first, I could come up on Sunday?”

“That sounds great, it all sounds . . . great. Thank you.” With the last of my endurance I looked him in eyes. “I’m sure this is just what I need.”

And so, I drive north. Hills covered in forests unspool before me.

The highway is a dark graphite color and the dead trees fade into a light 12

If I Knew Where It Was . . .

Jane Kelly gray sky and if it weren’t for the vivid colors that haunt the corners of my eyes I would think the world had gone black and white. Two hands on the steering wheel, ten o’clock, three o’clock. One hundred miles, five hundred miles. My hands don’t shake.

I pull up the driveway into the cabin the lake quietly glimmering in the background. The door slams, shoes crunch the gravel. Someone, maybe it’s me, stumbles to the door and puts the key into the lock. The hands in front of me are steady and do not fumble. The lock clicks and the door opens and I step inside. Backpack goes on the couch, dust flies up in the air, and I spin around once, looking at the windows, the generic watercolors, the knickknacks that have been banished to reside in cabin where no one stays long. Where’s the shed? Liam’s stories about a woodworking uncle and summers spent with hands carving and shaping drift through my memory.

It’s down by the water, but there’s no hurry, I’ve made it, I can breathe, I was supposed to come here to breathe, yes? I’m supposed to have come here looking for something, something the friend, the professor, the boyfriend have all asked me to locate. Here’s as good a place to search as anywhere else. Here, where the gray is spread across the landscape with a palette knife, thick and heavy, and I can settle down the colors. But the search can wait, I’ll pour a glass of water first and stand here at the window, letting the dull ripples settle.

Across the lake to the other shore I can see how it will play out.

I’ll sleep here, no dreams will come in the night, I’ll spend the weekend doing my work. I’ll call home and chat with my parents, Tara will stop looking at me with tolerant disgust and dismissive pity, and I’ll start to want Liam again. I just need to find myself, my way, my sanity, my purpose, my center. Find all those things and bring them back with me.

Load them up in the car. Somehow pry open my ribcage and shove them safe behind my lungs, curled up against my spine like a sleeping kitten.

For now, I put some water to boil on the stove. I unpack the groceries. The mundane governs my movements as I shovel forkful after forkful of pasta between my lips. At precisely 8:00pm I send three texts, to roommate, boyfriend, and mother saying “Made it to the cabin!

Feeling better already :)” At 8:03pm I take my book out onto the small screened in porch to read for class. After the mid-term incident, I only use pens; I have one 13

ready now, poised to mark the margins with thoughts and observations.

I haven’t read a word and now it’s 10:00pm and tiredness overwhelms. The sounds of isolation are creeping up the stairs and slinking through the cracks, the animals and the wind and that strange hum that permeates it all. I close the book and go inside and try not to choke on dread as I take off my clothes and wrap myself in blankets, lying there alone in this cabin in the northern woods. If I tell myself I can do this, will I be able to?

The answer comes when I wake up, consciousness rushing back like a hurricane at three in the morning and my breath has become solid in my throat and I can’t breathe, but my lungs continue to heave. I claw out of bed as if out of a grave and my knees hit the floor but I think I’ve moved beyond pain. I slam my hands repeatedly against the floor, trying to make them feel, trying to reclaim ownership. If they’re my hands I can hurt them. Seconds ago, I was in a cave, dark and so far beneath the earth that it was warm instead of cold. There were pits of inky water with narrow paths between them. Running from something unknown, I had scrabbled over the jagged stalagmites, stalactites, who knows which one, stumbling and trying not to look over my shoulder into the darkness.

My feet finally failed and I sprawled against the hot stone floor and my hands reached out to catch my fall, splashing into one of the pools. The water wasn’t water, it was acid and slowly the skin on my hand started to dissolve and I could see the inner workings, the ligaments fluttering as they spasmed . . .

The minutes pass and I focus on breathing. In pursuit of milk—I can’t trust water now—I gently tread to the kitchen. If I can infuse all my movements with a calmness maybe it will sink through my skin and uncoil through my veins. But it won’t, the nightmares keep coming back, and I believe that if it were a reoccurring nightmare, if I could somehow predict what would happen it wouldn’t affect me like this. But the most beautiful dreams turn vicious and leave me clutching my hands to my chest, sobbing.

I’ve ended up outside, somehow. The moon awkwardly hovers between a half moon and a crescent. Even removed from the city lights the stars are murky and smears of smoky clouds obscure patches of the sky. My feet lead me to the wood-working shed. I can imagine Liam here with his uncle, watching from the doorway. Maybe he wasn’t allowed to go inside when he was small because of all the sharp knives and whirring saws.

I open the door and set the glass of milk by the door. There are huge windows that look out onto the water, or maybe it’s acid, and I step through 14

If I Knew Where It Was . . .

Jane Kelly the shadows in the dark, looking for a light switch. I can’t find one, but the adjustment of my eyes reveals everything one could want to shape wood, mallets and hammers and chisels. Tools that create by taking away. I hold a mallet between my hands. It’s firm, and I love the weight.

Something catches the flimsy moonlight and pulls me towards it. In the center of the room is a table saw, the blade a silver half-moon pressed into the table. I reach towards it and unlock the guard that covers the blade and yank it free. Underneath the table there’s a mess of cables and I find the right one and plug it into the wall. Then I flip a switch and the blade begins to hum.

It doesn’t take much, just a moment of determination and bodyweight. As the hum grows louder the acid lake turns back to water.

The delirium lifts and colors are the color they are supposed to be, the corners and periphery are safe. What is pain if just a warning that something is wrong, and now I know what was wrong was the presence which now, removed, is good. The moment I have been warned against has come and I have chosen right. There is a dull thud on the floor that is echoed in the beat of my heart.

It’s harder a second time but I need to be balanced. I have to count down under my breath three, two, one. I can’t grip my wrist like I did before, but that’s all right. It’s messier, jagged, but it’s done. I use my foot to unplug the saw, kicking the cord out of the wall and then turn to the door, reaching for my glass of milk. There are a few dark drops in it, but I capture it between my forearms and manage to bring it to my lips and drink. When I taste iron and cream I know that tonight my mind will be clear and that I will not dream. I will wake up to the sound of loons, crooning, and I will smile. l

15

two poems Claire Oleson

shelter animals your lunch in a plastic bag, the rocks mouthed over with lake, whose dog was this that’s followed you home, body gone blue with the night’s wash, cold and half a block down, mouth open like a prayer book you haven’t memorized yet and don’t love the god to. my father had a crow he could call onto his wrist like time— one question of name and then palm-thick wings: have apparition and half lovely ghost with a habit of prying all the neighbor’s clothes pins off the line, dresses mottled through the grass like broken-off phone calls. my mother dug the pond in our back yard, said she was making me a brother as she tossed heaves of dirt past her shoulders like the diner salt my uncle threw over his back for good luck. my father looked at my mother short and darkly so I believed she could get luckier than the brother of a man who called flying night onto his arm, pecking 16

the air apart for voices and going through the same motions he used for cutting down dresses as he did to say his name in a stunted human tone—meaning I have known myself too deep into your house to be taken out without it falling in.

but real teeth a cluster of taxidermy rabbits— eyes from plastic to glass to gem-wet iris cutting the world up into parcels of false-memory and mirror. and I could have gotten married on the sapphire optics of some cream-bodied prey latched in the arms of a unitarian minister; I did not, instead, went to lunch, in the museum’s cafeteria. chewed, expecting to meet bone or some other gone-song of long, bounding soles. only met sugar and nothing—the ring finger’s crown and its twenty-carat pupil.

17

Boys Build Bonfires Jojo Rinehart-Jones The boys build bonfires every Thursday night, when all life has dimmed and needs to be woken up again in a hot colorful center of light.

The boys don’t know what it is like to split an atom, to watch the smallest building block break apart, but Henry thinks it must be like the feeling of that first-caught kindling on Thursday night, the promise of a warm hour.

When El tells them to go to the woods on a Sunday, Henry knows there is some grave aberration in the unsplit atoms of the universe.

El’s not there when they arrive, Henry with his hair greasy, because, as he readily explains, this is an off day in terms of hair-washing, and usually it wouldn’t be this easy to see the muck in his hair by the light of the flames. Because it’s Sunday, and why is it Sunday? is the unspoken ending to the thought.

This part of the woods is mostly evergreens, spindly perpendiculars spiralling like a single helix of DNA into the rising April heat. Henry loves this bit of the forest, the part that never dies, that stays tall and verdant even when he and his friends are hibernating in their big brick houses, the part that looks soft and pliable from a distance but is sharp up close. The clearing where they light the bonfires is in a grove of these evergreens, and they are always protected, always guarded by the trees, even when they smoke or drink or, as Walsh claims to have done once, have awful teenage sex with a girl from St. Catherine’s. When Henry arrives, he looks up at the trees and, for some reason, wonders if they will protect him tonight.

Walsh jokes to Henry, as he lights the first tiny twig of the night, “We should wring your fucking greasy head out over the fire to light it up.”

18

There is no need: Walsh, as always, is doing a good job as firemaster, and soon the signature glow rubs against the dark fabrics of their legs.

“Is he coming?” Of course he is coming, and Henry feels silly for asking, but he thinks it is one of those things that must be said in moments like these. Someone has to ask if “he” is coming. Someone has to wonder suspiciously, and out loud, what all the secrecy is for. Someone must float a theory, and have it be shot down as patently absurd. This abnormality is really, Henry thinks, textbook.

And El does come, not down the beaten path but lurchingly out of the clearing to their collective right, which Henry notes internally is a further, concerning aberration. El trips into their triangle, now a square, and is already, as if it, and not the fire before him, is the hot burning thing, tearing off his thick woollen sweater, speckled with a substance, exposing his thin and raucous frame for a moment before the shirt underneath falls back to his hip bone. He throws the sweater into the fire.

“Jesus—” Walsh leaps forward as the fire is almost suffocated by the cable and itch of El’s discard, but the fire makes a quick recovery and begins to eat at the coarse threads. Walsh settles, satisfied, but El is already moving to toss his shirt into the flames as well, and there’s a tense moment when Walsh blocks him from throwing it in, saying nothing, asking the obvious questions, protecting his little circle of combustion.

“I need to burn these. They’re evidence.” El takes their silences as an opportunity to add his shirt to the flames. Walsh, with his long firetending stick, adjusts the fabric in the fire, letting it catch in the most appropriate way. The burning smell of synthetic fibers adds to the heady choke of the smoke.

Henry is the only one, it seems, who wants to know why.

“I finally got him,” El says, unbuttoning his pants and stripping them off.

Henry does not have to ask who. “Harper?”

“Yeah.” El hands his pants to Walsh, submitting to the authority of the firemaster. Walsh holds them and waits patiently for the shirt to burn. He seems not to be listening, and Henry wonders if Walsh hears anything said while a fire is going, or if every neuron and synapse is taken up by the ebb and flow of burning oxygen. It occurs to him that he doesn’t know Walsh very well at all.

Henry starts zipping and unzipping his fleece, a buzzing sound that nearly overpowers the crackling. “He’s… Did you kill him? Is he dead?”

El says nothing about this, just folds over himself to rub his bare legs with his palms, chilly and getting chillier, and says, “I wasn’t very 19

good at it. I wasn’t very slick about it.”

“Christ,” says Walsh, and he open-mouth chokes on the air. “Fuck, that smells bad.”

Henry is weak at the knees. He sits on wet leaves and doesn’t feel it and he asks, “How?” El shivers. “Followed him back from the game. He was smoking behind his house. In the woods. I hit him with a rock.”

“Just like that?” Henry asks from below.

El nods. “It’s rock and a head. It’s not hard.”

They all fall silent then, and Walsh starts to light the khakis on fire. El continues rubbing his limbs, moving up to his arms now, and he’s so skinny and long Henry wonders if it all isn’t some vague misunderstanding—this too, he realizes, is a cliché thought—because he can’t see how it’s possible, under the laws of physics, for a man who is such a boy to pick up a rock, let alone raise it above someone’s head.

Then again, he thinks, if he had gotten a chance to kill Harper himself, alone, in the woods, couldn’t he have found the strength also?

He decides no, but he is unsure.

Walsh speaks. “He deserved it.” The khakis are completely aflame now. He pokes them, and repeats, “He deserved it. It’s fine.”

Henry thinks about this. He doesn’t know if anyone, necessarily, is deserving of death, but he’s the weak one of the bunch. No one has ever said it out loud, but it’s true, he’s soft-hearted: you could push a finger into him. He digs his digits into the wet earth and rubs the particles between his pads and he recalls the day that Sam Harper became El’s target.

Sam Harper—a very bad man, a very bad dead man—is, or had been, a fellow student at their school. Henry thinks it’s very probable that Sam Harper is, or had been, a bit of a sociopath, but prep schools are full of sociopaths of the most mediocre sort, the sort to walk their own socio path (Henry laughs to himself when he thinks of this, and decides he must repeat it out loud at some point for comedic effect) and never actually, truly, ruin the lives of anyone else, because most never get the chance. Sam Harper’s chance had come two years earlier, when he found out that their history teacher, Mr. Egert, was engaged to an insurance adjuster named Jonathan. It is Henry’s belief that Sam Harper was not inordinately prejudiced against gay men in particular, and his personal theory about what happened was that Sam Harper, upon hearing this news, was given a spark of inspiration was to how he might get revenge on a teacher who, historically, had not been prone to putting up with his bullshit. On one very memorable occasion, Egert 20

Boys Build Bonfires Jojo Rinehart-Jones had compared Sam Harper—lightheartedly, but at the same time in full seriousness—to Nero, and once Sam Harper had figured out what that implied, he was not very appreciative of it.

Egert was—or is, probably, though Henry hasn’t seen him in two years—a jovial, heavily-built and tall sort of man, who seemed like he would have been intimidating if he wasn’t always wearing cable-knits in every shade from beige to mud and speaking in a lilting and deep singsong. He was from Minnesota, and loved movies about Egypt, and had very floppy hair. Henry thought he was a fine person but maybe not the most successful teacher. He had a habit of jumping around a topic or time period to tell interesting but unimportant historical anecdotes, which Henry found exhausting.

El (Ellis, as Egert had called him) was very fond of Egert, in a way he would never admit, because he’s El, and El is an undersharer, but that Walsh had once described perfectly in a gesture of his mouth upon seeing El emerge from Egert’s office hours, stuffing his extra credit project hastily into his backpack as if it would crumble upon exposure to light. Generally an average student—the grade rankings went Henry, then Walsh close behind, and then El behind them both—El’s grade in history was his report card’s reliable saving grace, always accompanied by the comment, A pleasure to have in class. This was the most suspect of all of the pieces of evidence that Henry had, without intention, catalogued over the years, because in no way, shape, or form is Ellis Louis McElroy, noted cynic, militant atheist, and heir to an industrial waste treatment facility, a pleasure to have in class.

Henry is sure that nothing concrete ever happened between Egert and El, or between Egert and any other student, but he does not have any evidence one way or another. Perhaps El burned that too.

Henry remembers now, as hot chain reactions occur before him, the way that El dragged him to the steps of their dorm to watch as Egert, still holding an overstuffed binder of quizzes, was handcuffed and loaded into a police cruiser. The police had not deigned to turn the lights off on their car, and curious students came pouring out of adjacent buildings to find the source of the dancing reds and blues suddenly projected through their windows. In a horrifyingly comical twist, the arresting officers were both (probably) under five foot six, and they looked so ridiculous guiding this giant of a man into a tiny car, and the giant of a 21

man looked so ridiculous obeying them, that Henry almost burst into laughter. He is sure if he had that El would never have forgiven him.

Even so, he remembers very clearly the terrible feeling that filled up his bones when El turned to him, as Egert was driven away and students started to cluster and theorize, and said, “It was Sam.” Their school closed down for a few days in order to deal with the fallout. Rather than disappearing to recover emotionally from the events of the past few days, Sam Harper and his family did every type of press coverage there was: TV, print, radio, public speaking events. Walsh made a joke one time about Sam Harper “taking his talents to Ellen,” and El had silenced him with a look that made his entire thin and sandy body look suddenly like some very dangerous animal. Then he get got up and turned off the TV and left Walsh’s house. Walsh had just shrugged, and continued watching TV wordlessly, at which point Henry realized he, too, was dismissed, and left.

Egert pled not guilty to the charges leveled against him by Sam Harper’s very well-dressed lawyer: criminal sexual conduct, assault, and coercion. The insurance adjuster appeared in court with him, and had to watch, along with Henry, Walsh, El, and a girl from their history class who was also unhealthily invested in the case for reasons she had never explained and no one had asked about, as the jury came back with a unanimous guilty verdict. The insurance adjuster crumpled, as did Egert, and their lawyer, and El, and half the courtroom. The girl from their history class got up and left without saying a word to anyone. Sam Harper’s family, it should be noted, barely reacted; their investment in the conclusion of their son’s purported molestation ordeal was, apparently, minimal. Wendy Harper, Henry remembers, patted her son only twice on the shoulder with her spindly WASP fingers before searching in her bag for her car keys.

El didn’t say anything for a long time after they left the courtroom.

Walsh drove him and Henry to his Oma’s house, forty-five minutes away from school, where they sat in Walsh’s very nice parlor as she showed them photos from her latest piano concert slash church benefit. El didn’t speak then either, not even to say bye to Oma, with whom he had, historically, had a very good rapport. Walsh, having used up his one idea of how to improve El’s mood, drove them back to school and turned off the car and they sat in silence in the parking lot as curfew came and went. Henry had just opened his mouth, letting out the tiniest exhalation, prepared to suggest that they go inside, when El punched the dashboard of Walsh’s Mazda so hard it left a visible crack in the plastic.

22

Boys Build Bonfires Jojo Rinehart-Jones Blood dripped from El’s knuckles, and he said, with more emotion than Henry had ever heard him use, “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

Two years later, Henry sits at the fire, while the smell of burning acrylic yarn disperses into the air, and thinks about what it is to be an accomplice in a murder case. He finds it very easy. He doesn’t even have to do anything.

Walsh asks El to hand him a log, and El, nearly-naked, brings him one from the pile they keep under a faded blue tarp. It’s public land, so they really shouldn’t, but it’s never been an issue; tarps are replaceable.

Walsh, his broad shoulders so easily contrasted with El’s by the light before him, places it in an emptier part of the fire pit, leans back on his haunches, and asks, without looking up, “So, what now?”

El shrugs. “Nothing. No one saw me. No motive. Clothes are gone.”

Henry says, “The press is going to love it. He was going to Princeton, they’re not going to take it lying down.”

El rubs his toe against some flat rock in front of him. “I don’t give a shit what the press thinks, I care what the cops think.”

He shivers, but it doesn’t reach his face, and Henry, for a moment, has to remind himself of why El isn’t wearing clothes, and then it all comes at once, the truth of it all. The reason that they are here on a Sunday—a Sunday—is bleeding out in the next neighborhood over, or perhaps it’s stopped already, the bleeding, and perhaps Sam Harper’s body has already been found, maybe by his well-dressed mother, and maybe she screamed, or she’s screaming now, or maybe it’s still there and it won’t be found for a while, because Henry has no idea how far into the woods El was willing to go but he suspects it’s far, very far. Henry vomits collard greens into the fire. The gooey acid puddles sizzle instantly. It smells the way one would expect.

He looks up at Walsh, surprised to find that he’s on his hands and knees know, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been that way. Walsh is busy trying to recover the fire from the faltering caused by Henry’s emesis, and doesn’t say anything to him. El, on the other hand, makes a face, which he follows up with, “You alright?”

Henry vomits again, but less this time, and he wipes it off with the back of his hand, an absolutely vile smell now soaking into his skin, and he looks up at El asks, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

El seems confused by the question.

23

Henry stands, and points, not as firmly as he would have liked.

“You’re insane. You’re fucking—you’ve ruined everything. Everything.”

An eye roll. “Don’t be a soap opera star about this.”

Henry runs his hands over his face, and he can smell the collard greens, but his senses aren’t working like they usually do, because he can smell them alright, awful and rancid and dead, but it’s not reaching him somehow, and his lips are rippled as he drags his unclean hands over and over and over his mouth. “All for what, Ellis, for a fucking history teacher? Just some guy?”

He stumbles away from El, then towards him, taunting this tiny skinny boy like in some kind of dance, and he wants to stop the words that are coming out of his mouth, because they’re the kind that you can’t ever shove back in. “You know what, the jury found him guilty. An impartial jury, they looked at all the evidence—maybe he even did it, Ellis, you don’t know.”

El’s face is blank. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Henry is too far gone now, and some part of him is enjoying it, enjoying saying these awful things to the boy who has ruined all of their lives, the boy who for years treated him like a dependent dog. He is shivering, and naked, and is such an easy target. “I do! I do—” It is at this moment that Henry was sent to the ground by El’s fist.

The blow is well-placed, and Henry skids a little on landing, the layer of wet leaves he settles upon sliding over the base earth. He has not been knocked out, but he might as well have been. The only thought that occurs to him is that he can now see how El could kill someone with a rock.

El steps over him, between his legs, and Walsh crouches above him, and whistles low. That appears to be all he has to add to the discussion.

“If you say anything about this,” El says, crouching down and grabbing Henry’s neck firmly, but not tightly, “I’ll kill you too.”

Henry feels iron and copper in his mouth and he realizes, seeing the last dregs of sunlight washed out over the horizon between trees, that there is an order to the world, and that everyone has someone they will follow. Walsh will follow El endlessly, and Henry will follow them both, and El will follow Egert, and the world is just that, people following each other, moving forward, abandoning what’s behind.

He holds his hand out, dirty, covered in vomit and blood and dirt and ash, and El stops the gentle squeeze, straightens up, and asks, like Henry is the most pathetic of creatures, “What?”

Henry wets his lips, to little effect. “Where’s the rock?”

El doesn’t respond, just flits his eyes back and forth to Henry’s, like 24

Boys Build Bonfires Jojo Rinehart-Jones he’s thinking, but not really, and repeats, “What?

The arm Henry was holding out for some illusion of protection drops to the ground. “What did you do with the rock you hit him with?”

El blinks. He says nothing. He doesn’t have to speak out loud the answer, which Henry realizes is that he left it there, by the body. He came here and burned his clothes but he left the murder weapon at the scene.

As Henry struggles to sit up, El sinks to the ground. He looks so tiny, all bones, his bare skin against leaves and rocks, but if he notices this, he doesn’t show it. His mind is somewhere else, perhaps back in the woods behind Sam Harper’s house, perhaps at the state penitentiary a few miles away. They sit there, the three of them, all animosity suddenly dissipated, watching the fire, listening for sirens in the distance. They don’t hear anything but the fire. l

25

The Birds Linfei Yang “Still awake,” she says As a bag of chips lay Seppuku on my desk.

The clock has just ticked 12PM. Outside my window, Stars are climbing up the sky Like dandruff climbing up my hair.

I push myself up from my antique Swivel chair To face her: “no mom, not yet.”

Trying to support myself I lean On the doorframe, The hinge Leaves an angry mark on my forearm.

Take the piss.

In the mirror I inspect and get Distracted. Time to tease The healing wounds and See if there’s anything you missed Under this scab.

Nothing?

Oh well. Back to work it is.

“Still awake?” she says.

Grabbing air in my empty chip bag I accidentally bite myself On the finger as I turn around.

Nearly choking on this sentence Is what I get For not drinking water since 8pm.

My left leg throbs.

26

I fantasize about deep vein thrombosis.

“No mom, anytime now, anytime Now.” I feel a rush of blood to my head— Hear the sound Of a faucet slowly turning in my nose, Dying the crumbs in between the cracks Of my keyboard red.

As I type My book review of The Scarlet Letter I’ll give you a hint: It’s not a very good book.

I would know.

I haven’t read it.

Too late for that I guess.

“Still awake?!” she says A little more insistent this time.

I still haven’t moved from my position.

Chasing Muscae volitantes in my vision as She yells: It’s three AM! I am standing I am standing even My bones let out one deep breath With every crack. Before you know it I am lying again: “I am going to Sleep. Mom. I am done.

Goodnight.”

My Chinese mother is like a warbler.

She doesn’t know her son Goes cuckoo after the clock strikes one.

Oh what a funny joke I am laughing to myself, A voodoo doll Each time Chang’e stabs 27

The Birds Linfei Yang Pins and needles into my limbs I see visions that burn behind my eyelids Near topples me over And hear voices That sound like a chorus of magpies: Still awake? they say.

Still awake? they say.

It is known That the early riser gets the worms, But the late sleeper gets the butterflies.

How can I rest Before I hear the birds again?

So I can know That what I’ve done to myself is right; That I’ve been granted a tomorrow.

Where I can say 操 你 大 爷 To the sunrise And be safe inside the day.

28

Sante Fe Leanne Woods White dawn. Golden rays separated around the opening of a teepee, the one where I had spent the night. My body was cold, colder than I ever remembered being. I lay, contracted at every joint, my knees pulled up to my belly, my fingers curled into fists, my arms tucked tightly against my body, too cold to even shiver. The fire had burned out in the night, and the flimsy zipper of my sleeping bag ripped violently open the first time I rolled onto my stomach. My last hope at warmth was the white light of morning slipping through every crack in the teepee canvas and the overwhelming smell of coffee and campfire. I would have to uncurl. I would have to shake this inexplicable drowsiness that felt more like preparing for death than sleep.

I could hear the rustle of Micah outside of my encampment, and although I had only met him the night before, I felt his presence comforting and familiar. I had told him the night before that I was heading to meet friends in Albuquerque, but that was just one of the many lies I had found myself telling. I was actually headed north to Colorado, where I knew nobody, and no one knew me. He was an Apache Indian, this was his land, tribal land, his teepee, his sleeping bag.

I uncurled, the pain from being so cold was unimaginable to me. But I needed to move, I needed to follow the light and the fire and start to thaw.

“Well, good morning, Sunshine.” He beamed such warmth. “I’m surprised you made it! Fourteen degrees out this morning!”

I smiled, my lips cracked and bled, I could taste the salt and iron, but the warmth of my blood felt like a promise that I was alive, I was here, my blood was still warm.

“Come get a cup.” He gestured and began to pour from an iron kettle.

29

I sat with him beside the fire. The mountain was aglow with crisp sunlight and frost. A light snow covered cacti and shivered white with a bouncing sparkle. It was magnificent. The hot cup in my cold hands ached, but I could feel the blood begin to flow, and my body began to shiver.

“Did you hear the coyotes last night?” He was amused by my suffering, his boyish grin betrayed him. He had the precocious face that lingers with most men, the same face from boyhood, the one that delights in the torment of girls.

I had heard them. They had startled me just after I had fallen asleep.

They were close, so close that I could hear their moans and whimpers, their paws slipping in the gravel and sand.

“Just admit it, you were scared.” He was playful and teasing, but I wasn’t much in the mood for it. “You know, you could have slept with me…”

I rolled my eyes. I enjoyed him, appreciated him, his company, our banter, but everything inside of my body was aching to go. I know these exchanges, I know how these things pan out. I know where this road leads. I’m headed in a different direction, and I’m going alone.

“Just so you know, those coyotes are the least of your problems up here. There’s scarier things out here than a pack of wild dogs.”

My entire life I had known men like him, men who get their rocks off trying to scare girls like me. It’s a way of taming us. They see the wild in us and they want to break it, and when they do, they own you. I am the wild horse. He is the rancher.

I played along, but only because I enjoyed him.

“Ok,” I probed, with an air of sarcasm that I hoped was subtle enough to not be rude, but blatant enough to not be missed, “Tell me all the things I should fear in the north Santa Fe mountains. Tell me what’s dangerous enough to make me want to sleep with the likes of you.” I nudged him gently; the feeling of his body touching mine felt like a pull into an abyss. I quickly shifted away from him. “Like a drowning man grabbing an anvil,” echoed in my mind. The line from a poem I had read years ago, that resurfaced and breathed new air into me whenever I met a man I found attractive.

“Well, for starters, we’ve got rattlers the size of my arm.” He made sure to flex in front of me, his arm a well developed mass of muscle. I could see the veins that began in his hands, and I imagined how they snaked up his arms. He was powerful, yet gentle, a beautiful combination.

“Okay?” I half questioned, half stated, more apparent in my irritation now. I felt let down by his talk of rattlesnakes, I wanted to hear tales of something foreign to me, I was hungry for the unfamiliar, “What else?”

30

Santa Fe Leanne Woods “I don’t think you understand, missy. Our rattlers aren’t those little polite northeast types that give a shake when you get too close. Ours wait for you, silent, poised.” He hunched his shoulders and slowed his speech, he turned to me, crouching, ready to lunge and grab me, springing forward and uncoiling he grabbed at me, but I was ready. I shook away. He laughed; and as he laughed he said, “Our snakes are different, man; their rattle is their kill song. The last thing you hear after the venom hits you.” His breathing was heavy from laughter, the wide clouds of cold condensation escaping him with every breath looked like smoke from wildfire.

I was no stranger to men like him, and I was no stranger to rattlesnakes. I had grown up in California, had lived on both coasts and had spend more time in the deserts from California to Arizona than I could count. I wasn’t letting him win this one.

“First of all,” I listed, “It’s fourteen degrees out here this morning.

They are burrowed. Second, I was very little when my dad taught me exactly what to do if I was bit. I’m pretty sure I can handle it.”

“Oh, she thinks she’s tough. Okay then, tell me exactly what you’re going to do when you get bit by one of those nasty suckers.” He couldn’t resist the urge to taunt and test me. I could feel my stubbornness waking: it uncoiled inside of me, moving up my spine, sitting me up straight, it traveled to my face, furrowing my eyebrows and deepening my voice.

“You tie it off real tight, like a tourniquet, and then you make an incision. You bleed it out.”

He laughed again. But less hearty this time, the wind had left his sails. “Tough girl, good speech. But could you actually do it?”

I paused. In fairness, he had tapped into one of my universal truths, one of the causes of all of my profound shame. I always had a problem with execution. I could feel a sense of defeat that was well known to me, and as I sank into the feeling. My stubbornness was a rattlesnake that lived within me, one that I could feel recoiling, one that would lie in wait for the next man who dared to challenge me, where I was going and what I needed to do.

I imagine that first cut would be the hardest. After that, I imagine that burning feeling would pass, the venom and blood would flow. l

31

Bessie’s Return Nicole Zador The cow eyed Jared dully.

Or, at least Jared thought the thing was looking at him. It was hard to tell as half of the cow’s face had rotted away, its jaw moving around in slow circles despite the lack of cud. Its coat, which once must have been a gleaming white and black, was now filled with dirt and grime, its hooves dragging through the dying grass at its feet.

“Git,” Jared yelled. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked vaguely like Susan. Or maybe Babe? Maribel? It was hard to discern any features, but one of the splotches on its flank did faintly resemble a heart. Maribel then. Jared raised his rifle as he screamed at the beast again, a lurch starting in his stomach and pulsing its way toward his temples.

The cows had all started dying off about two months previously.

Which, although sad and bad for business, had been somewhat manageable. Comprehensible. It was because of some disease and there would be a cure and then everything would go back to normal.

The cows had all started coming back about two weeks previously.

Which was still sad and bad for business, but was no longer comprehensible and was becoming less manageable with each passing day.

The cow with the vaguely distinguishable heart-shaped spot mooed hoarsely as it inched farther into the field, its big brown eyes mournfully lacking expression. Maribel used to have the prettiest eyes, Jared thought, long eyelashes framing the rich brown.

Jared pulled the trigger, feeling the recoil bury itself deeply in his shoulder. Maribel dropped to the ground, jaw still masticating.

He heard the crunch of footfalls behind him, and he turned around from the gory sight.

32

“Maribel?” his father asked, stepping up directly to the carcass, nudging the body with the toe of his work boot. Jared’s father, Elijah, was an imposing man, wiry, but tall, his eyes chips of ice, and deep furrows like a roadmap tracing his face. He turned his suntanned features toward his son, eyes boring, lips tugging down at the edges.

“Yeah, think so.”

“Took her down with one shot?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re getting better.”

“Mmmhhmm.”

Maribel lay on the ground, her hulking carcass rotting and putrid.

Elijah looked at his son; Jared’s face blanched, his mouth a thin red slash, his eyes scared. Elijah had to clench his jaw to prevent the twisted smile he could already feel forming show itself on his features. Jared was seventeen years old, but holding a gun, he still looked like a five-year-old playing Cowboys and Indians with a plastic pistol.

Elijah wasn’t overly perturbed by the undead cow as he had lived through the Chicken Resurrection of thirty-four years ago. Elijah had been a child at that point, but he still remembered how it felt like he had to force the air through his lungs every time he sat with his parents to eat dinner, the hollow sound of the silverware clinking against the plate. The time spent chasing away the clucking fiends with red bulging eyes and bent wings. At first, it had almost seemed like a game, the neighborhood kids making competitions of who could kill the most poultry, who could kill two with one stone, who could kill it when it was crossing the road. But it had taken five years before the last of the head-bobbing dead was wiped from the Midwest, and by that time, it was hard to find the humor in it.

Now, as his life was once again filled with undead livestock, he was more concerned about the nightgown in the second to the bottom drawer of the dresser, folded crisply alongside a few balled up socks and a pair of tights with several runs tracking up and down the legs. It troubled him a little, that it was still there, but it did have such a pretty pattern.

“You might as well come back to get your breakfast,” Elijah said.

“It’s no fun burying on an empty stomach.”

Jared looked on with a mixture of distaste and sorrow, unsure if he was in the mood for the thick and hearty porridge his dad would undoubtedly pull from the pantry. He remembered fondly the days of eggs and pancakes, but since the production of milk and cheese 33

plummeted, they had to get by on old packages of cream of wheat and the oats they had saved in the back of the pantry. The family farm, Pembroke Farms, did still have a few chickens, but Elijah was wary to eat any of them given the situation.

Jared half-expected, on entering the kitchen, to see his mom, who would have looked as haggard as his father, her fingers long and knobby, tapering off into fine tips. Her hair the color of flax seed, only strands of gray twining through the pale yellow. She would have turned her watery blue eyes toward them as they entered the dusty kitchen.

But the kitchen was empty, Jared’s eyes peering through the place her body would have been, straight to the small window over the kitchen sink.

“Wish I could make you something different,” Jared’s father called out gruffly, his voice loud despite the physical closeness of his son. He always made it seem as if he had to yell over a great distance like he was standing on one side of a gorge and everyone else was on the other.

“Ah, that’s okay. I like cream of wheat,” Jared returned lamely. Elijah nodded in a way that made him look wise and focused intently on the slightly off-white lumps that filled the pot he was mechanically stirring.

Jared, with the smooth and thoughtless movements of routine, pulled down two beige bowls and two silver spoons, each mildly stained.

He set them down with care, each at an opposite spot on the rounded wooden table.

Finished, Jared noiselessly pulled out a chair, lifting it slightly to avoid scraping, and watched as the sun started to peak over the wheat fields out of the small window above his father’s head. There would be no great harvest this year. The zombie cows had trampled and eaten most of what had started to grow and autumn had almost arrived. The land was razed, but at that moment, the sun casting hues of gold, pink, and green over the ground, it almost looked peaceful. Like an end that would turn into a beginning.

Elijah hated cooking. It wasn’t that he saw it as “womanly.” In fact, he did most of the cleaning around the house, dusting the floors and wiping the windowpanes. But that was calming, repetitive. If he cleaned long enough, he could forget where he was, forget the never-ending days that dragged along his skin, forget the cows with their vacant stupid eyes, forget his wife with her faraway look in her eyes.

He never found out where exactly she was looking to; only that she wanted to go and he couldn’t take her there. Did she know he wanted to be there with her? To go to a place where the emptiness of horizon didn’t 34

Bessie’s Return Nicole Zador feel like a zipped up body bag? Where he could breathe without having to lick the dust from his teeth?

If he moved his hand around and around the countertop for long enough, the taste of lumpy porridge would leave. Cooking did not have the same effect. His french toast was perpetually soggy, his spaghetti noodles always chewy.

His wife, now she could cook. Even with the limited supplies they had recently, everything she touched seemed to be ambrosia. He’d asked for her secret once, and she had waved the question away, saying, “My grandmother always said it was love.”

Elijah decided it was probably butter. Lots and lots of butter.

Every day started at five, a habit Jared had gotten into as a child, waking up early to go out with his father. Those memories remained overall hazy in his mind, but with moments of sharpness, distinctive images of a rising sun, his father’s back ram-rod straight as he led the way to the barn, showing Jared patiently how to attach the milking machine, how much to feed the chickens, how to calm the calves. It was soothing to start his mornings, in the same way, to feel his muscles fall into the familiar motions, his mind wandering as his hands worked seemingly of their own accord.

Right after the cows started succumbing to illness, Jared would wrench himself out of bed at 5:15am to go milk the cows, forgetting that he wasn’t allowed in the barn any longer, forgetting the smell of rot and puss that permeated the stalls, the milking machine covered in the sawdust from the bedding. Jared would trudge across the grass still wet with dew, his pant’s legs trapping the damp, pasting the denim to his legs. Breathing in the chill air, he would stop up short, the smell slamming into him, sticking its clawed fingers deep into his skin. The low moaning that wracked from the wooden stalls startled him, full of an intensity of pain. Trying to stop his ears to the noise, Jared would turn around, attempting to convince himself he was really lucking out, two extra hours of sleep before school. A chance to feel well-rested.

He was never able to go back to sleep.

Jared hadn’t been back to school since he found Bessie rising from the truck bed on the way to the FDA lab. He had been looking out of the window, watching the wooded landscape whoosh by, the windows 35

cranked opened since the air conditioning had broken three months before. He watched the dust swirl out over the road underneath the truck tires. He wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t started… it wasn’t really lowing, it sounded more like a dry hacking as her hooves stomped against the frame of the car. Jared could still feel the ice that crept up his spine as he slowly turned around, looking through the dusky glass to see legs kicking and head thrashing. He screamed at his father to stop the car. To turn around. To kill it, goddamit, kill it.

Bessie had always been his favorite.

Jared, Elijah remembered in an abstract way as he stirred the white mass in the pot, had been there for Bessie’s birth. His small hands twitching nervously at his sides as he watched the calf come into the world and stand, stumble, on legs that looked more like stalks of grain than anything else. Elijah practically heard the sharp intake of breath, half amazement half worry, that Jared had made, his eyes wide despite the late hour, his body, all but his hands, motionless, despite the draft in the barn.

Elijah could vaguely recall the first time he witnessed a birth. The strange sounds of pain that seemed so alien to him, his eyes trained on the hay and not on the calving. He couldn’t remember any amazement as the mushy looking animal wobbled on the ground. All he could remember was disgust.

That night, with Bessie trembling on a bed of straw, Elijah couldn’t stop staring at his son’s eyes and his slightly ajar mouth, at the way his hands fidgeted in excitement. For a moment, Elijah had been filled with a jealousy so raw that it made his knees buckle. He wanted to be amazed.

“I think that’s going to burn,” Jared spoke up from behind him, the chair barely making a noise as he pushed it back from the table.

Elijah started, staring down at the white goo he’d been stirring.

Particles were stuck along the side of the pot, most of the solution cake, onto the metal bottom. He frowned slightly. “I’m sure there’s a way to make this taste good.”

He could feel Jared shuffle slightly in his place behind him. “Maybe add some cinnamon?” he suggested softly.

“Yeah,” Elijah said, his voice sounding obnoxiously loud as he forced the syllable out from between his teeth. “That sounds like a good idea.”

“Cowpocalypse?”

“Ha. Ha. Ha. What about Apocowlypse?”

“Ooh, that’s even better, Brian. Now it’s up to you, our lovely viewers, have any ideas for what to call this Night of the Mooing Dead?”

36

Bessie’s Return Nicole Zador Elijah snapped off the T.V., the small screen blinking black, the smiling faces of the morning show hosts disappearing along with their bubbling voices. Jared had settled into the living room for coffee after the gloppy breakfast, and he had clicked the T.V. on almost on rote.

“They’re just trying to keep people from panicking,” Jared muttered over gurgled sips of his bitter coffee. His teeth felt gritty with the small clumps of grounds that hadn’t been filtered out.

“Ha,” Elijah coughed humorlessly, “When that volcano was discovered, they made it out that the world was ending. No one gives two thoughts about the cows or the chickens.”

Elijah’s wife had cared about the cows, at least, when they were younger. The idea of farm life had still been romantic to her then, her love of the land still untarnished by thoughts of disease and the weariness of routine. Then, she had lived on a farm fifteen miles to the south of Pembroke Farms, her and the six other children who her mother couldn’t manage. They had gone to the same dusty school with broken down cars parked out front. She was constantly tapping her shoes during math class, creating a rhythm to his day, adding music to his life.

They talked occasionally of the Chicken Resurrection, which was still going on, if only at the periphery of their lives when they were eighteen. Elijah had told her, in hushed tones as they walked along the football field outside of the high school, about how he had almost run away. She had looked horrified then, her mind barely able to comprehend him leaving. She had whispered, a little harshly in the spring air thick with the cloying scent of honeysuckle and wheat, that it was wrong to leave his family behind. They had needed him so much.

He was still so needed.

Need, Elijah mused, was an interesting thing.

Jared blew on his coffee despite the fact that it had been lukewarm to start. He couldn’t disagree with what his father had said; most people didn’t care about the cows or the chickens. All his friends had moved away, to the big cities made of concrete and steel, smoke and glass. They studied things like biology or literature, wanted to “make something of themselves,” whatever that meant. Jared had never seen himself as anything other than what he was. Had never imagined himself as 37

anything other than his father, with hardened hands and removed eyes.

But he, Jared thought, grimacing as the sour taste of the coffee saturated his tongue, would talk softly. There was no reason to yell when the other person was right in front of you, eyes fixed on your face, ready to hear whatever words would come next.

His father had only mentioned college once, a conversation that ended quickly with a plaintive word from Jared about the cost and how he didn’t need a degree to know he was worth something, didn’t need a professor to tell him how to take care of his own animals.

Jared had met his father’s eyes for the briefest of moments before the conversation reverted to his mother’s brilliant culinary skills, how tender the pork chops were, how smooth the garlic mashed potatoes.

They didn’t mention that she was now making them in a different kitchen, her feet padding out a rhythm on a different floor.

“I think it’s time we’d better get a move on,” Elijah intoned matterof-factly, his gaze leveled on his son. Jared shook his mug, watching the brown liquid spin around on the bottom before he set it down with a clink on the old wooden stand next to the couch.

The air felt stagnant as the two of them walked out to where Maribel still lay, her stiff limbs sticking up into the air, dried blood littering the trodden-down grass around the body. With each lumbering footfall, Jared felt his stomach sink. He hated the burying. Because it felt so final. Because it felt so inconsequential at the same time. Because he loved these cows and he wished they would just die, was glad when he was sure, almost sure, they were truly dead.

Elijah opened the car door while Jared walked forward, the rumble of the engine shattering the pregnant silence that had filled the air. Jared made his way toward the barn, his breath sucked into the back of his throat to avoid the cloying smell of death that still clung to the boards, the wooden stalls, the dust floating calmly through the air. He grabbed the blue wheelbarrow, chipped and rusted, feeling the hand smoothed handles glide into the grooves of his palms. Jared remembered seeing his mother behind this wheelbarrow, filled to the brim with dirt for her compact flower garden, the splashes of color from the goldenrod and latent roses, Virginia bluebells and geraniums lighting up her eyes.

There was still a bit of dirt caked into the hollow of the wheelbarrow, along with patches of skin that had peeled off as they moved the cows from the ground to the bed of the truck. Jared blinked quickly, erasing the image of his mother patting soil around cornflowers from his mind.

38

Bessie’s Return Nicole Zador He grabbed the rubber smocks and gloves that hung from the many steel hooks placed around the long room of the barn. Jared loaded shovels into it as well, the clunk softened by the fabric of the protective gear.

He shucked them into the wheelbarrow and started toward the body.

Elijah had told his parents he was going over to a friend’s house the day he had decided he was going to leave. He had shoved some granola bars and water into his backpack with the safety pin that served as a zipper. The lie had slipped out of his mouth so easily, calling it out nonchalantly over his shoulder as he headed out the door for school.

Instead of waiting at the end of the drive for the school bus, he walked onto the main road, his arm outstretched, hoping for a ride into the nearest town with a bus terminal, about an hour away.

It was the money that stopped him. Not the image of his brokenhearted mother or the thought of the extra workload for his father. He didn’t have enough for a ticket to New York, barely enough for Chicago.

He couldn’t live. And what could a fourteen-year-old farm boy do in a city? Beg. And Elijah didn’t beg for much.

A few miles out, close, but not too close, to the edge of the Pembroke Farms property line was a mass grave.

At first, they had burned all the cows, worried about contaminating the groundwater, about spreading the disease, about infecting humans, about the end of the world.

But after a while, the process was too costly to continue and nothing obviously nefarious had happened yet.

The shovel hit dry soil with a rasping sound, a blistering type of laugh. The sun had risen and its rays got caught in the dirt puffing up from the burgeoning hole. Jared coughed as the particles entered his lungs; he stopped his digging, looking over to where his father was moving the corpse into position.

“Can you take over for a little while?” he called out, his voice scratchy.

Elijah nodded, grasping the sweat coated shovel and helping his son out of the pit with his free hand. They continued, taking turns until the proper parameters had been reached. Then the two of them slowly lowered the cold heifer into the ground and covered it with soil.

It always felt empty after they flattened the last of the mound, like 39

there should be something more, should be some words to say, should be some ritual to enact. Should… should… should.

“Well,” his father grumbled, his hands at his lower back as he stretched toward the hard-looking sky. “It’s probably around time for lunch. Let’s go clean up.” He grasped his son’s shoulder in a swift clasp, his eyes meeting his son’s for a brief moment.

Elijah hadn’t been able to catch a ride back home, so he’d walked, his feet dragging only the pavement, his backpack heavy on his shoulders, his three granola bars eaten by mid-day. Darkness was bleeding into the horizon as he edged closer to town.

His mother, looking up in surprise as Elijah had opened the door, asked him why he was home so early.

“I missed you,” he answered hoarsely.

“How sweet,” his mother cooed, her eyes welling with faint tears.

She always seemed bleary-eyed nowadays.

“I am a little tired though. I think I’m going to go to bed.”

Elijah’s body was sore as he laid down on his lumpy mattress. He slept that night, but he woke up with his eyes still heavy and his stomach still leaden. He practiced smiling in the bathroom mirror before he shuffled down to breakfast.

Jared remembered the night his mother left, her face sad. She had crept into his room, the moon heavy in the sky, and told him to come with her. To the city. The farm had been fine, before. But now it was killing them. His father wouldn’t leave because it had grown into his skin, trapped him like throttling vines. He had tried once, she said in a whisper, but now all he saw of the world were these fields and the hateful sun that cracked his skin. But they could get out, if only he would come with her.

Jared had expected it. He had guessed at her leaving when he saw her eyes. Sometimes she would gaze out along the fields looking just like Bessie or Maribel, her eyes cast slightly downward and her long fingers jumping in place, her toes tapping out a beat that was bound to carry her up and out of her chair and into far away streets where she could forever be moving.

Jared came down to breakfast the next morning to burned toast and watery scrambled eggs. He wanted to ask his father about the time he left, years ago, about what his mother had told him as she packed her bag. If she had said anything to him at all?

“How did you sleep?” his father had asked as Jared’s throat clogged 40

Bessie’s Return Nicole Zador with words.

“Good.”

“Susan died sometime last night.”

“Really? She was a good heifer.”

“Yes, she was. I’m going to miss her. She always was so patient with the milking.”

Jared woke up to his father’s yelling. His eyes snapped open, but his body stayed rooted between his sheets. He felt his heart hammer for a few precious seconds until he threw off his light blankets and thundered down the wooden steps, hearing them scream in protest as he launched off of them, hurtling toward the sound, the terrible sound.

There she was, standing right outside the screen door, her head half-gone, her body caked in mud. Jared stopped thinking, his heart striking the floor with a semi-audible thump. Circulating jaw, gnashing teeth. Mud covered the threading throw rug, the red and yellow long since faded to a pink and off-white.

Jared wasn’t scared. Only sadness, a suffocating, oppressive sadness.

“Get my gun, Jared!” Elijah screamed from his place against the wall, his face wrinkled as he stared at the dented face of the cow.

He remembered the day Maribel was born, three years after Bessie.

Jared could recall the thimble thin legs, wobbling on the ground. It had been mid-afternoon and he had just gotten back from school, running through the high grasses which smelled of the sun, his arms pumping furiously in exaggerated motions. Maribel was already there, stumbling with her head rocking from side to side, by the time he entered the barn.

His father had looked at him, drawn in a breath that sounded like a sigh.

As his father walked out of the barn, his shoulders sloping down his back, he called, “Wash that goop off her, will ya?”

Jared left, walking slowly into the bathroom and grabbing a washcloth, running it underneath steaming water. It took only a few minutes of rubbing until he could see the jagged heart on her left side.

He couldn’t do this anymore.

“Hey, Maribel, you’re a good girl,” he cooed.

Jared couldn’t kill her. Not again.

“Get my gun, Jared, what the hell are you doing?”

“It’s okay, Maribel.”

41

He felt his hands dig strangely into her loose skin.

He couldn’t.

Not anymore.

Maribel didn’t last long. At least, not long after Elijah had run to grab his gun, Jared uselessly washing off her hide.

The two stood over the third-time dead cow, Jared’s right hand loosely holding the dripping rag. Slowly, the sound of the gunshot stopped ringing around the house and the only noise was the dripping of the cooling water unto the floor, the soiled rug.

“Why didn’t you do what I asked you to do!” Elijah yelled. It wasn’t a question: he didn’t care about the answer.

“It just seemed… pointless,” Jared answered truthfully.

“That thing could have killed me!”

“You’re still standing, though.”

“No thanks to you! What the hell do you think you’re doing? These things are dangerous.”

“Maribel was never dangerous.”

“That wasn’t Maribel. That was an it, Jared. Can’t you understand that?”

Jared looked down, trying to ignore the aching in his back, the throbbing at his temples. His fingers itched for the times when they could act without thought, when he could wake up with the rest of the world and go out to the barn, his head held high and his arms swinging.

“You should leave.”

He looked up suddenly, the softness of his father’s tone catching him off guard. “What?”

“I would have if I could have.”

“But you need me,” Jared said plaintively. Even though that wasn’t necessarily true. He needed this place, to feel the land under his feet, to convince himself that it would be fine. Fine. Fine. Soon enough it would all be fine. In five years, things would have settled down and he could take over the work from his father or buy out a farm nearby with a small house and a clean barn.

“I would have left. This place will destroy you.”

Jared couldn’t imagine his home destroying him.

“Come on,” Elijah sighed, “I don’t want your mother to have to see this.”

They slowly worked together to drag Maribel out of the front door, their muscles straining under the weight despite the thinness of the cow. The cool air of the autumn morning washed over Jared’s face as the screen door clicked shut behind them. l 42

Rotting Vegetables Frances Donington-Ayad When the refrigerator broke, that was the end. We didn’t want to talk about it but then again we didn’t have to; the intertwined smells of rancid meat and rotting vegetables said it for us. We didn’t want to talk about it because the conversation led to a host of other topics we also didn’t want to discuss. The lack of running water in the upstairs bathroom. The condemnable amount of mold in our basement. The fleas who were adapting to our anti-parasite spray. The vacuum that went unused for a year. The seventeen thousand dollars we owed the mortgage company. The ten thousand we owed in unpaid maintenance fees. Those things we could comfortably (or moderately, comfortably) ignore a little bit longer. But the refrigerator we could not. That’s why it was the end.

I decided to call my grandmother for help. To make a plan of some sort. To try to dig us out of the hole we were sinking further into. My mother had told me a week earlier, Don’t call Grandma for help Fran. She won’t understand. But I called anyway.

A week later we sat in a restaurant booth. The upholstery was silver and disco inspired—a stereotypical New Jersey diner theme. I sat next to my grandmother; my mother sat opposite of us next to her stepfather, Joe. I watched him shuffle positive ideas into her left ear over pancakes and home fries. Each one was a little catchphrase to salvation. We’ll have to power clean the rugs! We’ll have to clean out the refrigerator! We’ll have to get a contractor for the basement! I watched each optimistic plan hit my mother and bounce straight off. She stared down at her scrambled eggs.

She tapped her four-prong fork against the side of a glass Heinz bottle.

I know a guy who specializes in mold! I’ll have him out here next week if you 43

want! He worked on Ms. Carther’s house on Summit Avenue! My mother sighed deeply, cutting off her step-father. She hunched her shoulders over the table, rubbing her palms over her eyelids and asked: “How did I let this happen?”

My grandparents took this question to mean: How did I let myself become a hoarder on the verge of foreclosure? To which there are many responses. Social explanations. Psychological reasoning. All of which they began spewing at her: Being a single mother is hard! Things just get away from you! It happened to us in our basement! But what she actually meant was: How did I become a person who doesn’t care? This my grandparents didn’t consider.

Every plan of salvation they threw at her were ones my mother already knew. Every task they suggested was one she already considered.

Everything they advised she knew would have to be done. The problem was she didn’t care. She knew and she didn’t care. If my mother had simply been unable to devise a plan to save her house than at least that’s a solvable problem. Just clean the rugs! Clean out the refrigerator! Get a contractor! But when you know what must be done and don’t have the will to do it, well, that’s a not-so-easy problem to solve. That’s when something has fundamentally changed; something has irreversibly snapped. It’s frightening. It’s horrid. My mother was right: they wouldn’t understand.

After that question my mother reserved herself to silence and an occasional head nod. I watched her hunching over the diner table, creating a little pocket of oxygen with her elbows, which was hers for just a second. I saw her crouch further into her own seat, sink deeper into her own space, move back to that state of living moderately comfortable.

I tried to swallow toast over the knot in my stomach while fumbling with my mason jar full of orange juice. The diner was trying to be newage. After a final round of stale coffee, my grandmother paid the bill.

An abundance of advice and silence circulated between us. From it, my mother and grandparents had reached a joint conclusion to let the house fold. The fleas, the mold, the rotting refrigerator would all become the bank’s problem. Joe’s catchphrases of salvation to my mother switched in nature but kept their chipper tone. You’ll move in with your boyfriend!

We’ll help you move out whatever stuff you want! We’ll leave the rest to the foreclosure people! I was stuck, though, focusing on the question my mother asked and never received an answer to.

“How did I let this happen?”

In that one phrase I could see my mother on a timeline. I did not see her as the woman sitting in front of me: fifty and battered, aching 44

Rotting Vegetables Frances Donington-Ayad for someone to either understand or shut the hell up. I saw her in her twenties or thirties with anticipations and an endless amount of time in front of her. I saw her as a young woman with opportunities and desires and hopes. I saw my mother as someone who would never expect to ask herself, “How did I let this happen?� in a New Jersey diner, surrounded by family yet completely alone. I saw her as myself, or anyone really, who would never expect to end up where they are. I saw her as me, so sure that I would be safe from the brick wall our lives have the potential to crash in to. I saw her as a child, unaware the brick wall even existed.

Somehow though the realization that this is where she ended up seeped through, and it surfaced in one sentence.

How did I let this happen? l

45

Home Rebecca Kahn I.

Germany

Das Haus of my ancestors has made me pale.

Freckled specter of Six Million past and I, the blue-eyed anomaly.

Blonde Jewess, you look as if you would have survived inferno, internment, the walls of the ghetto greatgreatgrandfathers escaped a few years too soon. Ach du, my hidden identity. I have no sleeves to bear it.

II.

Russia: Odessa? Belarus?

Haunting the village cobblestones lay leftovers from the pogroms, the litter of aftermath: burnt siddurim, shards of glass, children in rows. A sidewalk funeral for the greatgreataunt I have never met. Mourner’s Kaddish amidst the bones of our home. We leave glavnaya tomorrow, v’eemru: amen.

46

III.

Poland, perhaps Lithuania

Tolerance only lasts so long with this birth certificate of displacement, resident of countries constantly alternating.

Still, greatgrandpa has no language of his own.

No wonder hiyim is life and home. Take it with you when you have none.

IV.

Portland, Oregon

This countenance of my ancestors, greatgrandma’s freckles, her smile lines sewn into my face, I was born into this diaspora birthplace.

Genetically, a Jewish-American AmericanJew. One of the few in this family to definitively know the borders of my bayit did not change, did not warrant a leaving.

History the color of the Willamette in June.

V.

Some Other Country in Eastern Europe

47

mourning my mother Nicolas Léger

my father spent his final days in my parents’ queen bed clinging to the cold metal frames and sometimes, i peeked my head in just to watch his shadow float on the wall so it was only natural that when he left behind severed limbs (some mangled some neatly sewn) we confined ourselves to his death bed (my family and i have never been close) looking for the imprint of his torso in the mattress every night (and my mother became the stoic bed frame that was once his life line) for years we submerged ourselves staying far apart to avoid the sting of a recent amputation it’s how we grieved (but eventually, you have to stop. mourning has an expiration date, y’know.) so at 12, the stench of mutilation drew me away (insomnia, maybe) and my mother couldn’t sleep with the TV on all night, anyway i returned to a stale, unused mattress my older sister laid out a new duvet while i spent a summer watching her come and go 48

at some point, my mother’s bed became my brother’s (a concoction of ill planning, ill finances, illness delayed the construction of a second story i’m pretty sure my brother was an accident, too) but i never had to worry about friends sleeping over and seeing my mother on the pull out couch (because having a boy sleep over is wrong like a brother and sister sharing bedrooms) except, i came out while sitting on the edge grasped blankets doused in fabric softener (it might’ve eased the blow) my mom across the room, on my sister’s and i think i screamed i’m sure i cried not only had i spent years navigating dead limbs but now everyone else had to, too (they did try to accommodate which was nice, but) the doctors said you must’ve always known (s) he was a boy and my mom blinked— (she didn’t know anything.) when i had surgery, it was easier to sleep on the couch (fluid filling former breast tissue leaking out of me in foreign tubes) so my mom spent two weeks in my bed, instead bathed and touched me more than she ever had in my childhood yet, a vague disconnect, in a hazed, oxy state when i realized she’s been mourning me, too.

49

two poems Albert Lunn

Reflection

In second grade I sat in Dad’s Mauve Plymouth Voyager with vinyl siding and felt viscous envy I could never grow more life inside me.

In sixth grade I told The Psychologist I didn’t get the point of life.

“You have to make up your own point, what’s important to you?

What do you want to do?” I said I wanted to never do drugs so I could be a good father.

In twelfth grade She came to say She held a body to be and it would soon be whisked away. She told me I couldn’t come. I’ve been looking for that self since.

Crack Ritalin caplets crush them in a pestle with a mortar My Mother bought My Brother It came in christmas paper; he was gonna be a chef I was gonna grow up respectable.

Now I savor nasal drip soul searching from the wrong side of my mirror. Speeding my consciousness so the end will get nearer Pocket handfuls of old oxycodone Found while looking through old family photos Kept them for the future when I’d need an escape.

That night My Brother picked up two or three and I took some too.

50

Unfounded nostalgia “It’s essentially lab made heroin,” he said.

I wonder what heroin is like.

“Like this, but all of it,” he said.

I can’t imagine dying for this.

“That’s lucky,” he said.

Snort K through a sterile straw in My Brother’s tired computer chair with the dealer still there. He was My Brother’s friend. It’s a desk chair but it’s just the computer there on the desk, the lines are on a dinner plate I’ll rinse and use right away cause it’s not dirty but it’s not clean. I try to leave but my legs won’t work. It’s funny. I cry. They don’t feel like my tears.

Teeter Totter on the Edge of Psychosis HeavyDosing Diphenhydramine.

The Pretty Pastels Get Me Face Time With My Shadow People.

Hollow Uncle DoorWay Flickers Asking After Leaving.

Well that’s exactly what I was saying before Memory Fails Before Guilt Grows Legs.

I stay still So The World Won’t Whiplash My Withering Frame. I Haven’t Moved In Months.

Crack Consciousness To Clean To Feign Sober: Shadow People’s Footsteps Don’t Track Dirt On Door Mats.

In sobriety I try to persuade The Psychologist that my dream of death is logical. “You’ve been saying that for a long time now and yet you’re still alive.”

51

Dreams Five years before, my brother told me gin was good like Christmas: “It’s the best liquor to shoot; it’s cheap but it has an earthy pine taste to it.”

We mixed drinks heavier and heavier, sitting on my bed with a notebook writing lyrics to an album we kept dreaming bigger and bigger.

I drifted off while dreaming.

My Brother patted my head told me he loved me told me all would be right once he had a job he’d make sure he took care of me and mom how he always thought I’d be taking care of them how now he was the one on track how it was funny.

It felt good to be cared for cared about safe.

He told me he loved me pulled me over to hug me small kissed the top of my head.

His grip got tighter, his mouth meandered.

My flash pan memory fails me.

I know I pushed him away. and he pinned me down and I reminded him I was not his girlfriend and I reminded him I was me and I reminded him I was his brother 52

two poems Albert Lunn but he wasn’t hearing stop.

I pushed him off and shrunk away, then wriggled out the room.

He drifted off to sleep in gluttony I fell asleep on the couch In the morning, I drank coffee and worked more on our lyrics.

53

Chasing Deer R. Baxter-Green My dog does not chase deer anymore.

She used to, as futile as it was. She bounded after them, not to catch them, but simply to bark, hoping to get them away from the fenced-in square of land that she considered her territory. As good as she is at escaping when she wants to (and she is very good), she never rushed to the gate to see if someone had mistakenly left it unlocked. Instead she would rush to the furthest corner of the fence and stand her ground there, barking until the intruders were gone, and then pissing in the most determined way a dog can piss before coming inside.

We used to goad her into doing it, as much as it probably annoyed our neighbors. Seated at the kitchen table, we can easily see when the deer emerge from the shade of the woods and meander towards the small vegetable garden in the corner of the yard. If the dog was under the table, where she nearly always is whenever people are in the kitchen, we could simply say “Sunshine, deer!” and she would jump up and scramble towards the door, nails scratching without traction on the laminate flooring. She can open the door herself if there’s a crack for her to shove her nose into. If not she would scratch at the same part of the door where she had already scraped off most of the paint, and we would open it so that she could burst through the broken storm door and out into the yard. We would watch from the window as she took off, laughing when the deer saw her and startled back into the brush.

She still knows the words, but she doesn’t act on them now. She perks up her ears, when we say the words, like when we say “walk,” or 54

“treat,” or a number of other terms she’s learned, but she stays under the kitchen table, going back to sleep with her head resting on her crossed paws as soon as we curb our own excitement. The space beneath the table is warm from the heating vent, and sometimes Mom spills a scrap of food that Sunshine can snatch. Outside there is only uncatchable prey. It’s a reasonable choice to make, so why does it make me so sad?

It seems like she’s simply grown too old to care, twelve years of wisdom telling her that she doesn’t need to waste her energy. The deer will be there tomorrow whether she chases them or not. She’s grown bored of them, just like she’s grown bored of the game she used to play where she would find a way out of the fence and let us chase her around the neighborhood for hours, keeping just out of reach until she felt like coming home. Now even when we leave the gate open (rather than held closed with a bungee cord so that she can’t break free even when she flips the latch up with her nose) she just flops down and naps in the sun on the driveway, or in our neighbor’s yard, where the grass is somehow different. She knows that she could leave. She knows that she could spend hours chasing the deer, or darting just out of our grasps. She just doesn’t see the point.

Or it could be that it’s not wisdom, but a simple lack of energy.

She’s always dozed for hours at a time, but now she does it because she’s tired, not because she’s bored, or because it’s in her nature. I see how the energy drains out of her like water from a leaky bottle when she lies down in the middle of a formerly easy walk, unwilling to go any further.

Sometimes I sit with her, hunch down on the curb and run my hand down her back while she catches her breath. Sometimes I call my sister to bring the car around and pick us up. I dread the day I have to carry her, because when her legs no longer move, I will not have the strength to move my own.

Every trip home from school is a confrontation of that inevitable future. When I pull into the driveway, the sun low or hidden entirely behind the ridge after my long drive, I am not greeted by barking. If someone comes to help me with my bags, Sunshine will follow, but after a sniff or two she loses interest and lies down on the pavement to soak up the last bits of heat that the sun left behind. She grumbles and grunts when we go inside, but she always follows, still eager to see what’s going on.

It is strange to live on a different timescale than something you care about. In twelve years my dog has lived most of her life. In that time I have barely escaped childhood. I was eight years old when we first met; she was six months old. If all goes well, I’m expected to live to eighty, 55

give or take a decade. If Sunshine makes it to fifteen, I’ll be surprised. It’s hard to estimate the lifespan of mutts, especially in ones whose genetics are a mystery, but she’s a old dog already. Sometimes I still feel like a child, though I’m older than she will ever be. I wonder if she still sees me as a child, or if I’m as old as she is in her mind. Are we siblings from a different species, grown up together, or will I always be as young to her as I was on the day we met, a day when the sun shone through the clouds for the first time in weeks, when we took her from her concrete cell into our home. Oh, wouldn’t we all like to know what our dogs think of us, and don’t we all hope that it’s something good.

It’s the smallest details that build the most. A sudden death holds the pain of a bandage being ripped off, but a slow one is a bandage being pulled, adhesive tugging at skin and hair, neither one wanting to let go.

I noticed the white hair on her chin years ago, standing opposite to fur the color of autumn leaves. The liver spots came later but they weren’t surprising. No one told me that old dogs grow lumpy with fat until I panicked about a tiny thing I thought was a tumor. Now the signs seem to be everywhere: bare patches of skin where the fur just fell away, clouds in her eyes and a wheeze to her breath. I can’t ignore them. That would be unfair to both of us. Instead I try to treat her aches as best as I can when I see her, enforcing the diet that the vet said would reduce stress on her joints, doing all the grooming that my parents don’t feel like keeping up. Some days it feels like a penance, like somehow I did something wrong when she was young to make her grow old and tired and weak. Some days it feels like I’m trying to erase the years that have already taken their toll, brushing her fur back to something more vibrant.

Some days it feels like the clawing anxiety I felt visiting my grandmother in hospice during the last years of her life, knowing that at some point she loved me, but only seeing the husk of something she once was.

Sometimes it feels like a goodbye.

And that’s the thing about constantly leaving and coming back.

Every time I say goodbye, there’s a thought that burrows deep into my heart, reminding me again and again that this might be the last time I see her. Or the next time. The next. The next. Every visit brings me closer to the inevitable, like the graph of a logarithm drawing exponentially closer to some invisible end. But the graph will never reach its limit. I will.

But it feels wrong to think about the time she has left in any kind of numbers. I hate thinking about it at all, but I have to think about it, because not thinking about it, not being prepared, would only make things worse.

Some part of me says that it’s already worse, that there’s no good way to approach this. It’s the same part of me that wants to hide away 56

Chasing Deer R. Baxter-Green when things get hard, burrow down into my blankets until I can’t feel anything. But that part of me has never done me any favors.

It’s still an open wound though, no matter how much as I try to be brave about it. My mother broached the subject on my last trip home, while my sister and I were teasing Sunshine in her sleep, trying to build a pillow fort around her in revenge for her commandeering the couch.

“You know,” my mother started, unprompted by any of the rest of us, “I worry sometimes that one morning I’m going to come downstairs and find her dead, or Emily will come back from school to find her body.”

When I stared, unable to come up with a response, she continued.

“If it happens during finals week, should I even tell you, or should I wait until you’re done with your work?”

She said it casually, as if she hadn’t just poured acid onto a stillbleeding cut. It took a quiet “what the fuck” from my sister for her to even consider that we might not agree to the proposal. Yes, learning about the death of my dog would cause chaos that would distract me from studying and writing papers, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve to know. No matter what bullshit the world has taught my mother, doing well on an exam is not more important than knowing, than being able to mourn, than the truth.

Is she callous, or am I too sensitive? Is the life of a dog really not that important a thing? It’s a question I’ve had to confront more and more over the years and in an increasingly uncomfortable way as Sunshine’s health deteriorates. My dad is fond of using the phrase “she’s just a dog” as an excuse for not brushing her teeth or bathing her or doing any kind of “unnecessary” task. Mom’s feelings towards her tend to ebb and flow, changing from love to annoyance without warning. Maybe they’re right.

Maybe I’m too young to understand the futility of pampering a dog.

Maybe I do baby her, but I don’t know how else to care. So I cut her nails and brush her teeth. I corral her into the bath and I scrub the caked-in tick repellant from her collar until the water turns gray. I clean her ears and wipe the gunk from the corners of her eyes and try to laugh instead of yell when she farts so badly that it clears the room. I care for her even when doing so is a chore, even when she frustrates me to no end. I care about her when it’s inconvenient, and that’s why I don’t want to let her go.

One night last summer I came home to a yard full of deer, not an 57

Chasing Deer R. Baxter-Green uncommon sight, especially at dusk and dawn, when they decide that the dim light illuminates the roads beautifully. A day of working in the heat and sun and chlorine fumes of the local pool had drained me to the point of exhaustion, but when my headlights caught those black eyes a petty sort of anger pulled me to my feet. I opened the gate and called for Sunshine so that she could come with me. Then I sprinted towards the deer, yelling and laughing as they scattered into the trees, their tails flashing white before they disappeared completely.

When I turned back, Sunshine was sitting where the grass eats away at the edge of the driveway, just watching me as I made a fool of myself.

As I approached her, she tilted her head and nosed at my hand as if to say, Look at you go, you dummy. Don’t you know you won’t catch them?

I laughed as I knelt down to pet her and tried not to think too hard about the fact that I had once watched her run in the same way she now watched me. l

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two poems Paola Liendo

Ode to Theft Somewhere in my past, my not-yet self steals a bracelet from a Claire’s at the mall and thinks she is winning. One Day, she tucks it into a box labeled “miscellaneous,” and acknowledges that she will likely never see it again.

Somewhere in the past, an Omnibus carries my not-yet mother away from Aguascalientes, Mexico and into the arms of my not-yet father.

My not-yet mother has packed her life into a carry-on bag, and she moves into this country with the same stealth that helped her find her way into my father’s heart.

This is a woman who caused a man to fall headfirst into a love four hundred and eighty-eight miles away.

Yes, I would call my mother thief, a trickster.

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two poems Paola Liendo She takes all the ugly of this world, of this language, and packs it away into a drawer or turns it into una belleza. Thank god my mother was able to pack all that love into one carry-on bag—because God must have crafted my mother personally, Made her the kind of woman who breathes in evil and expels goodness for everyone else to grow.

All so I could one day find this bracelet, a gift from my not-yet self, in my “miscellaneous” box and tuck it away—this time, not to forget, but to become the belleza, the thief with purpose, instead.

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Alarm

I. I keep having a dream in which everything is as it should be. In this dream, a girl buys cigarettes at the corner store because they remind her of her father and the ashes he’ll be soon. She dances with her clothes on and it feels like enough. She stops crying over spilled vodka and starts crying because her smoke-and-mirrors parents have diffused into the air, leaving her to look only at her own reflection for her problems. She smiles with those graveyard teeth, points out the sat-ona-hair-straightener scar on her thigh, tells people she cares about them, tells them that she needs them to care about her. In this dream, she lays bare for the whole world to see and nothing bad comes of it.

II. When I wake, heart pounding, I tell myself it was simply a nightmare. The girl’s face becomes more distorted as I rub rheum from my eyes. With each sunrise, it becomes harder and harder to wake up.

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two poems Wisteria Deng

The Ultimate Excuse We blame shaky hands after breaking a test tube in chemistry lab. Tell ourselves it is the strong wind so we cannot run fast enough. It was the heaviest snowstorm in a decade: that night we hit a deer.

Our surrounding is a feel-better collection of escape, the “not-guilty-by-reason-of-humanity” plea, an exoneration before our next attempt to fuck up.

That’s why when someone turns to ashes, we say “he is with the stars” to overwrite the memory of last touch, cold flesh.

That’s why we look at the night sky above—each star a lost love, among them the space of unsaid goodbyes, the last quarrel, a freshly baked muddle.

And there sits the moon, our ultimate excuse for fates that wax and wane.

It is a surface of popped pimples, the lunatic asylum, a rotted dough.

We need a reason to stall the surgery because full moon quickens blood flow. Time for someone to skin a stranger, thrash a wife, perfect the monthly return to beast form, eat another mammal.

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But beneath the dull plaster hides a conductor of the celestial choir. Its shape no spacecraft could capture. Its voice an impending rupture.

The multiples of our pain and growth could not have filled its briefest note.

The Parting Glass Lighted trees along the boulevard separate a city into halves, like parting lips mumbling a tentative goodbye.

That’s the sight of festivals: a lighted town, midnight sun. Someone breaks a crystal snowball. The water flooded every rooftop, seeping into children’s dreams, wetting an empty sock.

Look how we mark time. People of the Bronze Age used knotted string to record events. Now we call each bow a festival—tie the knot with time.

A few knots back, there stood my father, lighting candles for a feast. The dampened wick was trampled by wind, too weak to stall the parting light.

So that wispy fire in his hand flickered. Sparkles of light scorched his face for a quivering second before falling again into the night.

For a brief second, I saw his parting lips mumbling something into the air.

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Foreign-Language Supplement: Russian Each semester, Laurel Moon publishes a small selection of work in a language other than English in order to highlight the linguistic diversity of American colleges and universities and to show a different perspective from the rest of the magazine.

For our inaugural national issue, the editorial staff chose Russian as the magazine’s secondary language.

We have picked one poem to highlight in the Spring 2018 issue, “Sing Me a Song,” an excerpt from a larger work titled The Songs of Siros by John-Paul Richard.

The work is presented here both in Russian and in English. We invite those who do not read Russian to consider ways to engage with the material in both languages, perhaps through listening to another read the Russian poem aloud or researching the topics mentioned in the author’s note.

Finally, we would like to thank Polina Potochevska and Michael Golitsyn for their assistance in evaluating the Russian-language submissions for this issue.

—Anne Kat Alexander and Danielle Rock

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Author’s Note

These two stanzas are taken from a larger work written originally in English and translated into Russian. Three Russian brothers who are serving in the First World War ask an English soldier to tell them a story. The Englishman wandered into their Eastern-Front trench after trying to desert his post.

The brothers are looking for the classically educated Englishman to tell them wondrous stories with his familiarity with the Grecian pantheon, with which they are not familiar because of their Orthodox backgrounds. We used a modified Onegin Stanza working with dactyls along with several iambic lines, in a nod to Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” and the Grecian epic model.

— John-Paul Richard and Ilia Shcherbakov

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Sing Me a Song John-Paul Richard with Ilia Shcherbakov Спой песню мне, всего одну Согрей в эту зимнюю ночь Снега за окном, гонят ветры пургу В снегах все могилы напрочь. Скажи, ведь бывает и хуже порой, Дай мне не сломаться – вернуться домой, Избавь от пронзающих воплей в мольбах – Страдающий стон на холодных губах. Спой мне о вселенной. Дней не счесть, Когда мир не был, таким, какой есть Все были как братья, их можно понять – Никто не хотел никогда воевать За что я воюю? Дай мне ты ответ Вот утро настанет: меня, может, нет. Здесь Бог все решает – он правит землёй Сто грамм перед боем отмерим Господь всемогущий ведет за собой В него, лишь в него мы и верим. Но ты отвлеки нас исторьей своей Если ты врёшь – не поверим мы ей И сказки-страшилки о Бабе-Яге Уже не страшат, если был на войне. Но ты всё же выдумай что-то страшней, Напомни всем нам смысл жизни Душа моя стонет от этих страстей Полна голова скорбных мыслей. Давай говори, тебя я прошу, А я рядом буду, беззвучно молчу.

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Sing me a song, just one small song Ang, For I am weak and cold here tonight The snow helps, falling all night long lamb, Soft graves, entrenched in virgin light, Tell me of the times worse than my own, And help me not break—run for my home, Drown out the sounds, the shrill shrill sounds, A man’s cold lips surrend’ when found, Sing me a song of when things were not Each Day creation—night conduct: Men, women, Worlds, to make unstuck At gunpoint stood though nev’r have been taught, For what, for who, i fight this war, For morn… shall come, though I mayb’ gore” For Gods may live and rule in your lan’ But here where vodka surpasses wine Our God, sovereign, leads with strong han’ ‘tis only him to whom we enshrine But please, a story will pass the night, And if you speak wrong we’ll turn you right, Told Bab’ Yaga, till scared no more, We found our true fears in this war So make us laugh, and scared of worse things Remind us of morals forgot, Heal our souls, from destruction wrought— Ho! Listen to me dark thoughts I bring, And though I ask I further speak, I’ll still, you shall not hear a peep.

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Prizes The Grossbardt Memorial Poetry Prize is awarded annually to one poem by a Brandeis University undergraduate published in Laurel Moon.

Andrew Grossbardt was a poet who passed in the fall of 1979. He studied at Brandeis University and received his Ph.D. posthumously from the University of Utah. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker and in a chapbook entitled The Travellers.

For the 2017-2018 academic year, Rebecca Kahn’s poem “Home” was chosen by Erin Coughlin Hollowell for the Grossbardt award. Kahn’s poem can be read in the Spring 2018 issue of Laurel Moon.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell is the author of two collections of poems, Pause, Traveler and Every Atom. Hollowell teaches for the University of Alaska Anchorage Low-Residency MFA Program, Kenai Peninsula College, and the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. She is the executive director of Storyknife, a women writers’ residency in Homer, Alaska.

The Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit Fiction Prize is awarded annually to one work of fiction by a Brandeis undergraduate published in Laurel Moon. Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit was a student at Brandeis University, a past editor of Laurel Moon, and a member of the Creative Writing track who died prematurely at the end of her junior year. The prize, honoring her spirit and memory, is awarded to a piece of extraordinary fiction published in Laurel Moon.

For the 2017-2018 academic year, Otis Fuqua’s story “A Sound Like Twigs Breaking” was chosen for the Dafna award by Christopher Castellani.

Fuqua’s story can be read in the Fall 2017 issue of Laurel Moon and on our website.

Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels and one book on craft. He teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, and presently serves as the artistic director at GrubStreet.

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Contributors

R. Baxter-Green Hannah Chidekel cover photographer Wisteria Deng Frances Donington-Ayad Dakota Durbin Briel Felton Rebecca Kahn Jane Kelly Nicolas LĂŠger Paola Liendo Albert Lunn Claire Oleson John-Paul Richard Jojo Rinehart-Jones Leanne Woods Linfei Yang Nicole Zador

Allegheny College Brandeis University University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Emerson College Merrimack College Old Dominion University Brandeis University Carleton College Brandeis University Kenyon College Hamilton College Kenyon College College of Wooster Hamilton College North Shore Community College Brandeis University Brandeis University

For more information about our contributors, check out the online version of the magazine at laurelmoonmag.com

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featuring creative writing by R. Baxter-Green Wisteria Deng Frances Donington-Ayad Dakota Durbin Briel Felton Rebecca Kahn Jane Kelly Nicolas LĂŠger Paola Liendo Albert Lunn Claire Oleson John-Paul Richard Jojo Rinehart-Jones Leanne Woods Linfei Yang Nicole Zador

Allegheny College University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Emerson College Merrimack College Old Dominion University Brandeis University Carleton College Brandeis University Kenyon College Hamilton College Kenyon College College of Wooster Hamilton College North Shore Community College Brandeis University Brandeis University

cover photo by Hannah Chidekel, Brandeis University

Laurel Moon

Volume 1, Number 1 Spring 2018