Litro 158 teaser

ISSUE 158

2

Reflections

featuring Jeanne Panfely Namrata Verghese Laura Tansley Giselle Leeb Dakota James Hema Pedhu Alaina Isbouts Michael LaPointe

Cover art | Andrew Smith

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Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto | Online Editor online@ litro.co.uk | Ar ts Editor Daniel Janes, ar ts@ litro.co.uk | Assistant Fiction Editor/Stor y Sunday Barney Walsh, stor ysunday@litro.co.uk lunchbreakfic Belinda Campbell, lunchbreacfic@ l i t r o . c o . u k | Tu e s d a y Ta l e s H a y l ey C a m i s , tuesdaytales@litro.co.uk | Essays Samuel Dodson, essays@litro.co.uk | Flash Fiction Editor, Catherine McNamara, flash@litro.co.uk |Contributing Editor at Large Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil D e s i g n A s sis t a n t Elin a N ikkin en | Ad ve r t i s i n g Manager +44(0) 203 371 9971 sales@litro.co.uk

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#158 Reflections / 2016 December table of contents 05

Contributors

07

Editor's letter

fiction

10

/ Apis by Jeanne Panfely

26

Giant by Dakota James

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Kulfiwala by Hema Pedhu

38

My Wife's Novel by Michael LaPointe

essay

15

/ Desi Girl by Namrata Verghese

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I Wanted to Catch a Whale by Alaina Isbouts

19

What Do You Carry and How Are You Keeping by Laura Tansley

flash fiction

24

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Tidelines by Giselle Leeb

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jeanne Panfely is a fiction writer from Marin

County, California. She has received the Walter and Nancy Kidd Award for First Place in Fiction Writing and an Honorable Mention from the literary magazine Glimmer Train. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis. This is her first published work. Â Namrata Verghese, is a second-year undergraduate student at Emory University, a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar, and an English/Creative Writing and Psychology double major. Her work has been published in "Daya Houston," "Alloy Literary Magazine." She was a semifinalist in the 2015 NCTE Norman Mailer Student Writing Award competition, a finalist in the 2016 NYC Midnight Fiction Challenge.

Laura Tansley's writing has appeared in Butch-

er's Dog, Cosmonaut's Avenue, Lighthouse, New Writing Scotland, PANK, The Rialto and is forthcoming in Stand, Tears in the Fence and Southword. She is also co-editor of the collection 'Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form'. She lives and works in Glasgow.

Michael LaPointe, is a writer and critic in Toronto, Canada. He contributes to the Times Literary Supplement.

6 Dakota James is a fiction writer from Texas, now in Brooklyn, New York. His short stories have appeared in various publications including Fiction on the Web, Write Out Publishing, and The Saturday Evening Post. James is also the personal assistant and devoted errand-boy to Theresa Rebeck.

Hema Pedhu is a first generation immigrant who left

the hot and humid shores of her Chennai home for the cold and windy suburb of Chicago, to get her Masters in Marketing and Communications at Northwestern University. It took her almost nineteen years to finally embrace her first love - fiction writing. She lives, works, and writes in San Francisco and is working on her first short stories collection.

Alaina Isbouts received her B.A. from the University

of Colorado. Her work has previously been published in Holl & Lane Magazine. She lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.

Giselle Leeb grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham, UK, where she works as a web developer when she is not writing short stories. These have appeared in Ambit, Mslexia, Litro Online, Bare Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and other places. She recently won the third prize for short fiction in the Aurora and Elbow Room competitions and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2016. http://giselleleeb.cielo. net, @gisellekleeb

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Editor's letter Dear Reader,

If ever there was a year that needed careful Reflection 2016 is certainly that year; a year that has seen the deaths of many legends and heroes from David Bowie in the 2nd week of January to Prince in April followed in June with the passing of the iconic Muhammad Ali– and in fact as I type this, news breaks that Cuban leader Fidel Castro has passed.

ness man Donald Trump, a man with no previous political experience – though many have been surprised by this rise of populist voting, for me this comes as no surprise as for many years the left has been neglecting the voices of disgruntled blue collar workers, voters who came out in force to support Donald Trump – who played on the chaos 2016 has also been a year that has seen a and fears of many of these blue collar workchanging of the guard & establishments the ers the driving force in bringing the Republiworld over, with the rise of populist revolu- cans back into the White House. tions both sides of the Atlantic.

Ever since the UKs rather perverse self-deThe UK had Brexit, whilst in the USA the feating vote in June to the leave the European Republicans witnessed an unconventional re- dream, it seemed plausible that the same anturn to power in the form of Billionaire busi- ti-globalization, at times –xenophobic forces

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@LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

would carry Trump to victory. And for many Americans – and this pains me to say- a woman following a black man to the White House was just simply too much to swallow.

As we reflect and think on the year to come, both France and Germany will enter into elections – and it seems already lessons have not been learnt from events of 2016 as the media are already predicting that in France the far-right do not stand a chance to come into power. I can predict that Germany will not see a coming into power of the far-right as there is no charismatic figure head leading it’s far right – as the UK and the USA had in Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

But it seems all is not lost – the highlight in 2016 for me was the reflective Donald Glover ‘aka Childish Gambino’s new comedy TV show Atlanta, which is an introspective look at the city’s rap scene as well as the cultural differences in society. We must not underestimate the significance of shows like Atlanta and the Arts in general.

From all this – not to sound overly optimistic- we should enter the new year with the thought of what are the opportunities going forward, what solutions can come out of such disappointments and how we as a society can become stronger from them and learn from our mistakes.

Eric Akoto

Editor-in-Chief

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10

FICTION

Apis

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Jeanne Panfely

" I imagine my reflection is another woman, a strange creature who can float next to my window, and keep pace with a speeding train."

We’re on a train and it’s headed south and your hand is on my knee. “I’m thirsty,” I say. You buy me water and I kiss your cheek. This is as kind as we will ever be to each other.

You forgot to pack and we almost missed the train. There will come a time when this bothers me, when I look back and I hate you for forgetting, but we aren’t there yet. I still think running with luggage is an adventure. I still think the way you slip the cab driver some extra cash, the way you say Run a few red lights, we’ve got a train to catch, is electrifying.

We’re on the train and we were almost late and we take the two last seats that are next to each other. We sit across from two young girls. They are American, like us. The older one tells me she is nine and a half. The younger one is seven and three-quarters. I tell them I am twentyfive and two-thirds. You are forty-two.

The girls’ mother sits across the aisle from us. She flips through a British fashion magazine whose title I recognize from our time in London. One girl pulls the other’s hair. They both scream. Their mother turns the page.

The nine year old pulls out an iPad. She plays a game involving sharks, a game involving candy, a game where you can play dress up with a kind of electronic doll. The seven year old makes grabs at the screen, points at things, fights to be included. Her sister tugs the screen away. She puts in headphones and turns on music. “Play your own game, Crissy.”

The younger girl turns her attention to us. She asks us questions and questions and questions. I answer most of them. “Why do you do that thing with your hands?” I don’t know.

“Where do you live?” San Francisco and I guess Portland, sometimes. “Are you two just friends?”

Laughter. “Was that funny?”

You once told me, sometime near the beginning, about an old religion that believed in a spiritual world of light and a material world of darkness. Every person was born with light inside of him or her, and the ultimate goal of the religion was to return that light to the spirit world.

Babies were vessels of pure light. If you wanted to go to Heaven, don’t have a baby. Keep that light for yourself. Eat plenty of lemons.

There is a baby on the train too, with blond, blond hair. His parents speak over him in rapid French and his large eyes dart around the train’s interior. We watch him for the longest time.

Vessel of pure light. ***

15

ESSAY

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Desi Girl Namrata Verghese

A personal essay by a young Indian -American woman growing up in the west, exploring how her culture and identity has been shaped by her experiences.

We were ten years old, and Hannah Montana was still our idol. We were singing into hairbrushes, wearing tank tops that fit our barely-there curves in a way that made people stare. Do I look fat? I would ask, and they would always assure me no, no, not at all, or at least not that much.

“Being cruel was fun. We did it to each other a lot. Those were the days when words meant more and less than they do now, when calling someone a bitch was the most daring thing you could do, and calling someone fat the most hateful. If you really, really despised a bitch, you would call them fat. “ My hair was a problem, in this world of cruelty and words. The Hannah Montana tank tops clung to my stomach, bigger, at the time, than my breasts, and I thought that was the problem but I was wrong. My hair was a bigger problem.

Can I braid your hair? This was the ultimate gesture of friendship. My thin blonde friend—thin like a reed, blonde like the sun; I was a poet even back then—would sink her hands into another friend’s hair— this one thin and brunette, thin like a willow, brunette like chocolate—and her hands would move up and down, in and out, stitching and sewing, massaging and weaving. It was an intricate game to play, this teasing and holding and caressing. Waterfall braids, fishtail braids. Whatever was in vogue back then.

But me with my curls and my frizz, no one wanted to touch my hair. My Indian hair. No, no, don’t worry, you’re not that fat and you don’t look that Indian. That was their compliment to me. That I didn’t look that different from them. That, if you squinted in the right light, maybe I wouldn’t be Indian at all. *** Color is visible. Color is visceral.

There’s no way to get around that. It’s the most primitive way of categorizing, segregating, and ultimately dehumanizing humans.

You can never wear a white person’s skin and parade around in it, the way you could with many other markers of difference—class, for example, like in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro when Susanna can simple change clothes with the Countess and adopt her life and privilege.

We can try to be white, and we do.

But we never will be. That’s why we hate them and we worship them in equal measures. We want to be them. They colonized us, looted us, contaminated our culture and our land and our economy. They cost us our bodies and our lives. And yet.

And yet we slather our faces with Fair and Lovely. And yet we mentally take notes on the way friends talk in "Friends."

And yet we force our coarse curls into flat irons, breaking our spirits and our ends, trying to imitate the glossy glass sheets of blonde we lust after.

19

PERSONAL ESSAY

What Do You Carry And How Are You Keeping

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Laura Tansley

Written in 31 pieces during her 31st year, this essay attempts to address a series of anxieties about place by collecting every ticket stub received by the author in 2015.

1 In 1995 my best friend’s dad showed me a picture frame full of his old stubs: Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Stones, The Who. So it was his idea really. He taught me to be embarrassed that my first ever was Boyzone. But he hadn’t been to a concert worth collecting in twenty years.

2 I’ve gathered it all rather than bow to any boomer peer pressure, and presented a memento map. There’s a danger, though, that by keeping everything I’ll remember nothing. With no peaks or troughs memories are hole-shaped and I might have sacrificed significance.

3 This is 2015 totalled up in tickets. This is me in (spare) time. Just the physical though, that which can be reproduced. There’s a whole swathe of other stuff, QR codes and e-things, digital data that I don’t know how to retrieve or record, that I choose to let fleet and agree to render meaningless.

4 I know it was mild, that I remember. 2015 seemed a steady ten degrees for all four seasons.

But consistency does not reassure me; it may give me scurvy or drown me completely. In the graph of things I’m certain this year, with all its warming and cooling to meet in a middle, will be a turning point.

5 This was my eighth year in Scotland. I am here now, I think, rather than from somewhere else.

23

Short Memoir Contest 10 best submissions will be published in the Fish Anthology 2017 1st Prize: €1,000 2nd Prize: Week on Writers Retreat Casa Ana, Andalusia, Spain + €300

Judge: Horatio Clare

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Word Limit: 4,000

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Closes: 31 Jan ‘17

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Entry fee: €16. (€10 subsequent)

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Tidelines

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FLASH FICTION

Giselle Leeb

I pushed up my sleeves and the thin white slashes all the way up my arms were like tidelines and I had been up sometimes, but now I thought that it might be time to go down.

Did you see me? I walked along the path and the waves swelled high; they never broke but there was a little white boat slapping against them, a little tug rising and falling, and it was a grey time of day and the water was mud-looking.

I walked under the bridge and there was a swell, even bigger, confined between brown concrete pillars. Every day, I thought, up and down, against. Did the concrete sigh in relief when the water stopped at low tide? I had thought of it often, but today it compelled me.

Joggers ran by—it was just after 1pm in London City—and I kept stepping out of their way so that we didn't collide. I imagined running down a ramp to the bottom of the river, silt and almost sea sand down there.

I pushed up my sleeves and the thin white slashes all the way up my arms were like tidelines and I had been up sometimes, but now I thought that it might be time to go down.

I didn't think of it for too long. What's the point. Better to just go straight in and I did.

Once in the water, I was going up and down with it. I was not too far from a pillar and I'd heard the eddies around them were supposed to suck you under. Layers and layers and levels, and I did think that I would like to get down to the bottom and I would get spat up in a different form. I would not be me any more and that might be a good thing, all things considered.

I thought it would be cheating to dive down. I was a strong swimmer. So I sort of hung my arms limp, but they kept coming up of their own accord. The waves kept going in my mouth and it was a natural instinct to spit them out. And I found that I was not being sucked down. I should have researched it better. Too late now and anyhow I hadn't had a computer for years.

I have dark skin, most of it dirt, so I'd hoped I'd sort of blend in with the water, but now the cutter to Greenwich was zooming past, slapping the waves even harder than the tug, and somebody on the deck was screaming. I couldn't hear them but their little mouth was open and their head back. There was a lot of water in my ears by then and I was getting numb with cold. On the boat, people came running, obscured then revealed by the waves going up and down, and I thought maybe the boat might capsize if they all came to the same side. But it didn't. Not at all.

I could see it slowing down. I was still, ludicrously, on the surface. I ducked under deliberately for a moment, out of sheer embarrassment. The taste of that water was awful.

26

FICTION

Giant

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Dakota James

Dealing with the heartache of a broken relationship.

Sometimes when I was on the subway platform my heart would beat really fast, and the train would come roaring down the tracks and the ground would shake beneath us, and I would’ve sworn my heart was a giant. As if it was so big, beating so hard, that everyone else on the platform could feel it too, and so many times in those moments I almost yelled, “I’m not crazy!

Please, I’m not!” I knew it was silly to think that my heart could shake a subway station, but sometimes it made sense. Sometimes it seemed impossible that no one could feel what I was feeling. And then the train would come rushing by.

Our block in Bushwick was often a catalyst for these breakdowns. There was the cemetery right there, for one, the Catholic cemetery, not even three blocks away; it wasn’t ridiculous to think that something was being disturbed. And my neighbors so often screaming at each other; I’d be walking past their paint-chipped house and I’d see this look on his face like at any second he might just bite her cheek and rip it off; and you could see her cowering from his hand even though he hadn’t raised it yet. I’d get into my apartment finally and I could still hear them and I would just cry and cry and cry and Marco would say, “That’s just the way it is here.”

I figured that the city would harden me but it did just the opposite. Leaving the restaurant once (this was in the Upper West Side in Manhattan) I saw one of my co-workers (we were both servers at the time) in a bar by himself. Smiling at his phone and drinking a beer.

I knew he was an alcoholic. I couldn’t help myself; I cried. And then I cried again about how stupid that was. Not because my tears amounted to nothing, but because he was smiling. He wasn’t sad, so why should I be?

When Marco broke up with me it was hard for him. We still lived together in that apartment in Bushwick and he had to deal with me 24-7, a mess, a living-breathing panicked mess. He said what he hated most was the apologies. Whenever I had an episode I would apologize and really (really) wanted his forgiveness. Because he had to put up with someone like me. And that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair either that I always choked up, killing the mood, when he started dating Monique and started bringing her over on a semi-regular basis (twice a week usually; Tuesdays and Thursday usually). That was a catalyst too; at the subway station on my way to work the train would rumble and my heart would be a giant and I would want to yell! The thought of everything and anything him and her might be doing! But how could no one else feel the stupid-hard beating on the platform?

Zoe Scammell

30

FICTION

Kulfiwala

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Hema Pedhu

A mother leaves her child for an afternoon, and in that span of time the child’s understanding of her world and her home life changes.

We were just outside the building and I was looking for her. She was wearing a green saree the color of parrots. But there was no sign of Mother. The air was crisp and the streets were washed clean by the monsoon rains. The kulfiwala’s rang the cowbell, shouting, “Kulfi, kulfi. Malai kulfi. Kulfi, kulfi. Malai kulfi.” Father took my hand and we crossed the street to the kulfiwala’s cart.

They just had another fight. There was no room in the tiny, one-bedroom apartment, that five, sometimes six of us shared, to fight privately. If there was an argument between two people, everyone was involved. I was often a bystander to these fights, feeling the anxiety build up in my five-year-old body as I struggled between wanting to help and wanting to disappear. At the end of their fights, I could never tell how they would respond to me. I only knew that it was best to stay very still and not speak until spoken to.

Her voice trembled when she said, “I can’t do this anymore. I cannot live here anymore. Living here is daily torture. I might as well throw myself under a fast train.”

When she left, she slammed the door with such force that the flat shuddered. It was an old flat built in the forties and by the seventies it was already decaying: paint peeling from the walls, water stains on the ceiling, a steady drip-drip-drip from the balcony where water seeped in during the rains. The flat had a permanent damp smell that couldn’t be driven out no matter how many incense my grandmother lit.

She left her purse sitting on the coffee table. She carried nothing with her except her frustrations. I ran to the door and tried to open it, but I was too short to reach the doorknob.

My fingers grazed the metal, but I couldn’t grasp it and I started to cry. That’s when Father picked me up and said, “Come, let’s go out for a kulfi.”

Father handed me a malai kulfi. I took a tentative lick and tasted the saltiness of my dried tears as they mingled with the sweetness of the malai. The soothing aroma of cardamom filled my nostrils and I felt a little bit of my anxiety melt away.

We walked towards the gardens around the corner. It was the first day after a week of monsoon rains and for once the streets were not flooded with water up to my shins. The usually grimy sidewalk was wet but clean, and the air smelled of wet earth and night-blooming jasmine. My sandals squished sinking into the damp grass. We found a dry bench and sat down. I wanted us to look for her, but I was afraid to say anything in case I caused more trouble. Trouble lurked in every corner of that house and I seemed to run into it more than any-

34

ESSAY

I Wanted to Catch a Whale

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Alaina Isbouts

“When the warm air of early June feels pregnant with the possibilities that summer holds, we return to this house.”

I dipped my toes in the Atlantic today, holding you tightly in one arm, your feet kicking at my hips. It’s been years since I’d done that.

Felt the salt on my body, the way it dries out your skin when you leave the water behind.

What was once a daily occurrence has now become a special treat for me. This is not because I don’t want to do it. I think about the water every day, at home when the dry heat burns my skin like fire. But not here, in this land of perpetual summer. Here, the humidity feels as if you’re slowly being smothered by a wet towel, heavy and suffocating. I am never able to dry off. In this house the sheets are sticky with sweat. When I pull the covers over my legs, pocked with mosquito bites that itch and bleed and wake me up in the morning, they stick to me. They absorb my sweat and feel damp.

This house is empty. For most of the year, it sits vacant. After the fullness Labor Day brings, as summer becomes overripe and ready to turn, we close it up for the fall and winter seasons. Beds are stripped and curtains tied shut. I never see the old glass windows with the frost of winter, never feel the linoleum cold beneath my feet, never pull the blankets up high and tight under my chin. When the warm air of early June feels

pregnant with the possibilities that summer holds, we return to this house. My father drives drives us there and leaves for work, returning on weekends with the rest of the men of our family, and we go up to the room we share with my mother. In this house everything is just as we left it last summer. In the summer this house is filled with women and children, from my great-grandmother and more aunts than there are names to my sister and I. Everything in this house is damp. Sheets, towels, curtains, the clothes on the line that blow in the breeze under the moon. In this house the floors are covered with sand. There is sand in the bottom of the pink bathtub downstairs and the blue shower upstairs.

The shower has tile that is cracked, the grout crumbling away and mixing in with the sand

“When the warm air of early June feels pregnant with the possibilities that summer holds, we return to this house.”

38

FICTION

My Wife’s Novel

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Michael LaPointe A writer reflects on tackling his wife’s Novel.

Now I’m alone with it. In 12-point Cambria font, on eight-and-a-half-by- eleven paper, the manuscript runs to 375 pages. Were the novel published, and I took it from the shelf, it would seem a nicely proportioned volume, slim yet substantial, a book for today. But in this form, here on the desk of my study, the thing overwhelms. It seems impossible that it could have emerged from my wife, who is shrinking every year.

Six inches deep, the fruit of fathomless labour, my wife’s novel dwarfs everything on the desk, where I never should have placed it. I imagine how the novel took shape inside her, word by word – clustering – and I find it difficult to approach, like a body, something that can punish curiosity. Yet I have to sit and begin. My wife printed and served me these papers; she expects a response.

And I’m nothing if not a critic. I have a career and a reputation. It’s generally received that something I write is something worth reading. My wife respects my positions; indeed the prospect of my rendering judgment surely frightens my wife, who might be at the door, fretfully listening for pages turning. Swiftly I open the door— there’s no one. She’s down the hall, or upstairs – perhaps she’s taking a walk – in any case waiting for her husband to become the critic of her novel, a dreadful waiting. I peel back the page.

Our setting is Bethel, “a thread of a town” in the Pacific Northwest, “just a deep homerun from Canada.” The year is 1965. My wife’s novel centres around a high-school relationship between the narrator, Josephine, and a boy named Benjamin Ames. Benjamin is a pure child of the region and the era. When he rides his ten-speed, his hair unfurls in the wind like banners of victory; he stirs Josephine to a spiritual froth. The opening lines are exemplary of her mesmerized, uncalculated voice, so unlike my wife’s: Benjamin once saw the captain of the senior basketball team hit a game-winner against Riverton. He said the guy stripped down to his underwear, pushed through the crowd, and ran out into the night. He said the guy went totally wild. It was the last game he ever played. Benjamin painted that picture in my head so I still have it, a guy going out with a shot, sprinting face-first into the world.

In one of the many artificial felicities that characterize my wife’s novel, and her view of the universe more generally, Benjamin is himself compelled to go out with a shot. He appears in Josephine’s bedroom in the dead of night in October, and confesses that he’s killed a man.

Henry Hu - Accept (Walks of Life)

Henry Hu Henry Hu - Guilt (Walks of Life)

Henry Hu Henry Hu - Accept (Walks of Life)

Henry Hu Henry Hu - Trees and Clouds (Foxes in the Woods)

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