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THE MACHINERY First Edition
First published February 2016
Themachineryindia.com
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Editor’s Note The Machinery is a literary collection built by a group of 20 year olds who love literature and art. Over the last couple of months, many amazing things happened since we launched the magazine. The submissions have increased every day, as being listed on The Submission Grinder and Duotrope helped us tremendously. The response from the writers and readers has been warm and exciting— keeping us motivated to work. The Machinery is about the writers, the artists, and their works. We're grateful towards each of the writers and artists published in this collection. Each work of art and literature is accompanied by self-written short bios of the author and the illustrator. These were works that challenged what we knew about literature, poetry, art and photography. These works challenged what we knew about the world, incited emotions that we didn’t know existed within ourselves. We hope that you keep giving us this support in the future, and of course, enjoy this issue. Himanshu Goel The Machinery 3
INDEX Poetry 1. Home Cooking by John Grey 2. And a one and a two by Colin James 3. Incantations by Bandhan Chauhan 4. Three Haikus by Denny E Marshall 5. Hands by Mitchell Waldman 6. Don’t five and dime me by Robin Dunn 7. We by Steve Loring 8. Hypocrite by Aarushi Grover
Fiction 1. Basilica by Gregory T. Janetka 2. The House of Cards by Caretza Formica 3. Vein Raiders by Shawn Mansouri 4. Deferred Dreams by Pranav Kapil 5. Not Quite the Flower by Alina Stefanescu
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HOME COOKING by John Grey
Illustration by Arpitta Jairath
He’s back from Baghdad. This call of duty is his mother’s kitchen. The chicken’s dry but not like desert sands. And there’s a murkiness to the cabbage. But at least it’s free of body parts. She never was much of a cook but he’s just thankful that her recipes don’t include bomb-making. Her intentions are to make sure he grows 6
even though he’s already at his optimum height and weight. She still can’t get over the fact that he’s no longer a child but she’s not the enemy and that’s good enough for him. And those that join him at the table he’d give your life for but the odds of that happening are of lottery-winning proportions. This is peace. This is what he wanted for the land his unit occupied before reality started calling in its chits. Now, only home holds out such pleasurable prospects. And its battles to reach this serenity were modest, bloodless, and in no doubt of their conclusion. Someone says, “Pass the salt, please.” It’s accomplished without a shot being fired.
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About the Author
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Perceptions and the anthology, No Achilles with work upcoming in Big Muddy Review, Gargoyle, Coal City Review and Nebo.
About the Illustrator
Arpitta Jairath is a nineteen-year-old studying in Delhi University, still searching for an aim in her life. She is an amateur photographer and Instagram is her best friend.
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And a one and a two by Colin James
Illustration by Modita
The enemy archers were doing a remarkably accurate job. If it wasn’t for the distinctive sidestep developed one boring Sunday by Chieftain Farrelly, our numbers would be way down. We can hear our oppressor’s laughter yet our resolve is of a practical nature, and our walks now incorporate this felicitous way of avoiding death, if only barely. As we negotiate our everyday tasks, it isn’t our intention to attract any other marauding admirers that frequent this otherwise sanguine plateau. Alas, another group is now arriving from the west. Chieftain Farrelly is busy choreographing a new routine that may just provide us enough creative control prior to the impending solstice. 9
About the Author
Colin James has a chapbook of poems, A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity, published by Pskis Porch Press.
About the Illustrator
Modita is doing engineering in UIET, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She aims to travel the world, and has becoming famous as an artist on her bucket list. Her Plan A is to make her parents proud and Plan B is to open up an Art Gallery. 10
Incantations by Bandhan Chauhan
Illustration by Rohit Thakur
Radiant, his glistening body Pure crescent Reflects obscurity Violent soulless descent Soft strokes, his lips Scarlet permanence Warm finger tips Omitting conscience Damp, his potions Worth my vile Gasping incantations A cold lie. 11
About the author
Bandhan Chauhan is a student of dental surgery. She wishes
to be a singer. She likes to write songs and usually leave them incomplete. These incomplete songs turn into short poems.
About the Illustrator
Rohit Thakur (19) Basically from Chandigarh, Ironically living in his parent’s living room. After dropping architecture and being a nightclub photographer he stays out whole night either shooting chicks in clubs or doing street photography. 12
Three Haikus by Denny E Marshall
Illustration by Nathaniel Madlem
lost somewhere in space finally find floating sphere HAL 9000 moon elevator seven point four hour ride broke both loudspeakers dreaming sideways airplane propeller bedroom ceiling fan
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About the Author
Denny has done poetry and artwork for a long time and a few years ago started writing fiction. Have had art, poetry, and fiction recently published. Have a website, www.dennymarshall.com.
About the Illustrator
Nathaniel Madlem is a freelance photographer hailing from San Diego, California, originally from Seattle, Washington. He enjoys landscape photography, as well as organized photoshoots, and is currently gearing up for a five-week expedition to the North Pole. 14
Hands by Mitchell Waldman
Illustration by Arushi Gupta He would swear at the boxes they would never stop coming-tape 'em, stuff 'em, pack 'em-the routine never died until the skin of his narrow fingers would grow chafed, calloused, cold from the sharp edges the tiny blades that blurred his vision that slipped beneath the skin into his heart. And at the end of the day he would look down at the palms of his colourless hands shove them into his pockets afraid to take them home 15
to caress his sprightly young wife his new-born son afraid that from his touch would flow the daggers he kept locked up in his head.
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About the Author
Mitchell Waldman’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Waterhouse Review, Crack the Spine, The Houston Literary Review, Fiction Collective, The Battered Suitcase, and many other magazines and anthologies. He is also the author of the novel, A Face in the Moon, and the story collection, Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart (Wind Publications), and have served as Fiction Editor for Blue Lake Review. (For more info, see his website at http://mitchwaldman.homestead.com).
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About the Illustrator
Arushi Gupta is a 20-year-old alien studying to be a dentist in Chandigarh. She is a die-hard otaku and wishes to go to Japan soon. You can find her singing Japanese songs, making some artsy concoction or taking weird photographs in the streets of Chandigarh.
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Don’t Five and Dime me by Robin Dunn
Illustration by Garima Mahajan
don't five and dime me on the long hurrah after the short goodbye don't tell me the truth just look away it's all right don't pride me on the scale and the scent on the tail and the bent philosophy you poured over my head it's gone not mine it's gone 19
don't jive and crime me on your sick salvation just give me the stick and let me drive
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About the Author
Robin Wyatt Dunn writes and teaches in Los Angeles. http://www.robindunn.com
About the Illustrator
Garima Mahajan is our proof-reader who lives in a yellow spaceship that's drifting in a wormhole. When she's not reading, you can find her taking pictures of windows, or planning world domination.
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We by Steve Loring
Illustration by Sachit Kapil
We all push for first blood when fascia breaks it’s common sense to protect your own Besides real hell is feeling a gun steel its face against your skin it’s digging a shallow grave, hands clawing through hopeless earth real hell is a falsehood 22
opening your skull real hell is that whisper on the periphery you would kill to hear real hell is held within a tightly bound pack wrapped around the waist sweat dripping, a figure drenched in blue the satchel charged, intact he backs away and waits while inertia sits confined, fused the superpressure cooks and screams to a head detonation confirmed fissile the boy walks with his secret wish the first impact hits, killing hundreds a firecloud billows and the living stagger into choked chaos the breathing above the dying cleave, bloodied praying there is more than this
they watch the sun fall scorching out they feel the earth rise up and engulf everything until there is nothing they drift, shapeless, asking this present darkness to let them in 23
to forgive them to absolve and shrive them of everything and every thing but they’ve forgotten they are forgotten everything they were taken and all they ever will be gone.
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About the Author
Steve Loring is a poet/lyricist/screenwriter based in Los Angeles, California. His work can be read in Spin, Billboard and The Los Angeles Times. He currently splits his time between coasts, LA being his lady and New Hampshire being his first home.
About the Illustrator
Sachit Kapil is an amateur photographer from Chandigarh. Passionate about photography, he is out to grasp onto the art and portray the world through his eyes.
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Hypocrite by Aarushi Grover
Illustration by Stephen Pikarsky
You are weak. Weaker than that malnourished tramp on the street. Weaker than that sheer fabric you wore to beat off the heat. You are weak. Your best defense? Self- victimization. Offense? Running from that realization. You are dependent But not tenacious. You hurt too much But burn away the evidence. 26
Hypocrite. But, are you? You feel too much, I have heard them say. You love too much, You say it aches. Night and day, you hand him the chords. A mere puppet now. You are powerless. He is oblivious. You say you are strong and independent. You say you have big plans. You show me clippings of your dream destinations. He walks in, you stuff them in a jar. Hypocrite? Yes, you are.
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About the Author
Aarushi Grover is currently pursuing bachelors in pharmacy from Punjab University. If something bothers her, she is conveniently in self-denial, she writes. She gets her answers. She gets a processed thought. If a relentless person or thought has made itself too comfortable in her heart, she writes. she gets over it. For 6 years, these string of words have been confined to one particular drawer in her cupboard. This poem is one of those.
About the Illustrator Art by Stephen Pikarsky.
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Basilica by Gregory T Janetka
Illustration By Garima Mahajan
He likes to come here to sit because here he can’t see the driver’s faces. The parade of cars in the interim between masses is full of drab colors – muted reds, tans, whites, grays – all of which are self-driving. From the bench where he sits, the horizontal wooden slats of the fence hit at precisely the level of the driver. No one stops here so no one 30
ever gets out or gets in. Just an endless parade of remote controlled vehicles. The air smells of incense, the kind of his youth, the rich, heavy, oppressive kind that only exists in Roman Catholic churches. Do they buy it in bulk? There must be church supply warehouses out there. The Catholics in America aren’t anything if they aren’t capitalists. He wonders how this place got along for so many years – hundreds, in fact – without bulk incense. No doubt cheaper that way and it was comforting to know baptisms, marriages and funerals would always carry with them the same distinct scent. He shifts his feet over the bricks that have been worn smooth by thousands of pious parishioners over more than two centuries, not to mention the indigenous converts who contributed most to the wear, dragging their feet as they were wont to do. Errant notes from the human-powered pipe organ float past. He used to be in there, where his mother was now, but today he dropped her off like a child at daycare. The mission was Spanish, of course, and the first in the state – perhaps in the country? No, there must have been others before it. Situated on a hill, eyes of the faithful looked out from here and saw God, in the fields and the trees and the mountains. Now, from this bench, he sees generic apartment complexes, miles of asphalt, those sedate cars, miniature million dollar homes in the distance. But there are still trees, 31
massive ones towering the apartments and the cars, and the mountains, with plenty of green space that no builder has yet figured out how to develop. There was still a god, some sort of one, out there and in his head, and it was in those green leaves waving in the wind, and it was in those pristine hills, and in those worn bricks; the majority of whom had ever touched them, and all of those who laid them, long returned to the earth. Trails of clouds in the sky stretched out like long emaciated fingers as the bell tower rang out. Mass was over. His mother would be returning soon.
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About the Author
Gregory T. Janetka is a writer from Chicago who currently lives in the outskirts of San Diego. His work has previously been published in Foliate Oak, Flyover County Review, Gambling the Aisle, The Flash Fiction Press and The Journal of Microliterature. He is terribly good at jigsaw puzzles and drinks a great deal of tea. More of his writings can be found at gregorytjanetka.com.
About the Illustrator
Garima Mahajan is our proof-reader who lives in a yellow spaceship that's drifting in a wormhole. When she's not reading, you can find her taking pictures of windows, or planning world domination. 33
The House of Cards by Caretza Formica
Illustration by Modita
Once upon a time there lived a man in the woods, The Carpenter. He just a carpenter, no more, no less, which very well implied that he built things, no more or less. He took to his work religiously though, hammering out the grandest of designs, and nailing in the most intricate of detail into them. 34
But like I said, a carpenter he was, pulpy, and rough around the edges, just like some of his unfinished work. The Carpenter worked out of a cabin, that he had built himself, naturally. As for where he lived, nobody was really too certain. He drifted around quite a bit, appearing only when there was something a bustling interest going on, like that relative of yours that wafts around the family gathering from conversation to conversation, with a glass of wine in hand. But, be sure, when you were tired of trying to renovate your affairs all by your struggling self, you could hike your way up to that live-in logbin, and he’d be there, ready to work for you with a whistle.
So one day, just as hands of the rusty clock, in crook of the rustic cabin, closed the deal on his work day, The Carpenter decided it was time to close shop. Strangely, for the past several hours he had not been battering at something, or polishing an object down to diamond perfection. No. What he had been preoccupied with was building a house of cards.
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Really? A man so talented as he had squandered away his time stacking up cards among weedy bits of tobacco creeping along his work desk? But he was rather fond of what he had just created, mind you. It was quite a triumphant structure of stick-thins, standing as tall and sturdy as any great fire engine-colored bridge you just might so happen to stumble across in San Francisco. The Carpenter chuckled and folded hammish arms as he stood back and reviewed the design. At the apex, he’d made a point of balancing a King and Queen together. With their foreheads nuzzling each other, Mother Earth will quickly become infatuated with Father Time. Being young, heady and spritely, she can’t help but be bonded to his black sobriety. A maturity accompanied by a weariness that is the only thing he can’t extinguish. And he does hate it when her gardening gets unruly. He takes to them with a fluid hand and icy sickle.
To make up the precedent row, The Carpenter had laid out The Jacks of the Pack. Now the Jacks were the King’s younger brothers you see. They sometimes went by the title of Dream. They were sleepy men, with the leaky faucet of sand from Mother Earth’s garden constantly sprinkling into their eyes. They lounge around, stretched out, yawning, stretching over to tug at the corners of The Tens (the row 36
hoisting them up) pinching at their collarbones, whispering, whispering heart-breaking beautiful things in the Tens’ ears, so that they might be inspired to stand straight, stay strong and keep their dreams close to them. To create pillars with dreams, and produce a temple of the improbable. The Tens are the most resourceful of all the cards after all. How grand they are, The Carpenter must have thought while sliding them into place, to be so close to the truth about what lies at the tippy-top. And what of the bulk of the card matter, you may ask? The fat part of the framework that’s made up of, in The Carpenter’s construction at least, many many many many colliding, coexisting cards. Well, had packed the meaty chuck of this meal with cards of different numeral designations. Nines mingled with Fives, and Two stepped on Threes, and Sevens knocked heads with other Sevens. This chaotic order, played out by cards that hum like subatomic particles, is regulated by presence of Diamonds, Hearts, Clubs and Spades between them. They have Riches, and Love, and War and Restitution, and the degrees by which is present is dependent on the type of cards tango-ing it out together.
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Oh, and The Carpenter, without having paid too much attention to it, had slipped in some Jokers around some pretty unstable parts, which, in hindsight, maybe wasn’t the best of things to do.
But, and don’t lose focus now, The Carpenter is proud of papery pyramid. Prouder of it than most of his work that he is regulated to do. This is a magic trick, a whim, an amusing pass time that bubbled over and left something wowsey at the bottom of the pit. Finally, the first and largest row here is made up of the Aces. Piddly little bunch, you’d think, to form the basis of this colossus, but these seedlings are knocking together with potential energy, and with just the right amount of these, as The Carpenter calculated, they will shoot up and wrap their way around their successors.
And so, after skimming over every detail of his work, flawed or fluid, The Carpenter unwrapped his arms, drew in a watery breath, struck up his pipe, and then abruptly shuffled out the door. And he never came back.
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The last thing The Carpenter built was that House of Cards. He had abandoned his cabin entirely for some reason unknown, disappearing entirely after that. Not that he had ever really been around much before, being the travelling-salesman type.
So the cabin still stood after that. It stood as an artifact, as a haunted place echoing with the coming-downs of a hammer, sealing promises. But that House of Cards still remained. It still stood up, under slick piles of sooty dust, building up and pressing down on it. The dust, covering everything, tingeing the colossus grey.
And you know something else? Before slipping off, The Carpenter didn’t close the shutters. So the window is wide open And today’s forecast calls for a pretty bad storm.
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About the author
Caretza Formica is a 21-year-old biotechnology student at the University of Camerino, only during the times when she actually studies instead of writing amateur poetry, making cookies, and contemplating Life, The Universe and Everything.
About the Illustrator
Modita is doing engineering in UIET, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She aims to travel the world, and has becoming famous as an artist on her bucket list. Her Plan A is to make her parents proud and Plan B is to open up an Art Gallery. 40
Vein Raiders by Shawn Mansouri
Illustration by Martyna Jerks
Homeostasis is not equilibrium. It’s a balance, a delicate flowing exchange, an everlasting metabolic dance. Neither dancer is permitted to stop. The music cannot end. Equilibrium is death to all living things. That is the first rule of vein raiding that I learned—that and never harm the infrastructure of the patient. Specialized Intravenous Mechanisms of Nanomedical Science, or SIMONS as we call them, changed the entire field of medicine. It wasn’t necessarily the smartest guys in the room that ruled the school-yard anymore, they were only along for the ride: reading monitors, mapping strategic entry 41
points, guiding us through anatomical terrain. We thought we’d seen it all. Pilots always think they’ve seen it all. But we were wrong. When something new pops on the scene there is always a fundamental question that goes unasked. What are the repercussions? The folks over at SpecBot never asked. They just saw dollar signs. I’d like to think—as something of a physician myself—that remnants of the old system still survive; that old Hippocrates still inspires healers to ‘do no harm.’ But as I quickly raise my hand cannon to tear a path through a throbbing vein, I can’t help but wonder if harm is inevitable, collateral damage to see Lazarus rise from the grave again. It was a two-man procedure, a simple lung infection: Streptococcus pneumonia. The old ways of antibiotics were inefficient now; we had lost the red queen’s arms-race. But the SIMONS kept our heads afloat, kept our feet pounding on the evolutionary tread-mill even though we’d seen anomalies. The superbugs were rare, spotted off the coastal regions where conditions were ripe for them to flourish. A pilot coursing for the hive of a superbug could lose his entire squad in minutes, or so I’d heard. A midge, twenty little specks of technological wonder, was the size I’d entered with. A squad shot through a small 42
gauge needle into a tangle of fleshy freeway. My line of sight would be blurry for the next 20 or 30 seconds as I washed ahead of my midge. It’s like watching someone descend a water slide, first person view—only digital and less wet. The operation room had been cleared of all unnecessary personnel. This was a special case. The president was ill. She lay still on the table, throngs of tubing and fibre optic wires sprouting from her body. Dr. Warner had warned me that her case was one of the anomalies, a superbug that had plagued her for weeks. So I brought Hawkins along for the ride to keep the internals adjusted. No harm in helping homeostasis along for the day. Hawkins and his midge would push the electron transport chain to capacity: priming cytochromes, pumping protons and splicing nascent proteins to length, while I made my way into the lungs. And when I got there I was greeted by a single SIMON, armed to the teeth. It was tearing through tissue with small projectiles packed with TTX, a toxin that slowly shuts down sodium channels and eventually causes death on a microscopic scale. This was no simple lung infection. It was a cover-up, an assassination attempt. The foreign SIMON had attached itself to a large antibody, twirling through the lung matrix while laying waste to my 43
squad with bursts of heavy metal. Every hit minimized my chances of success, every miss necrotized the president’s lung tissue. Hawkins caught the SIMON across the neck with a plasma blade, and its head floated away, twisting slowly toward the vein he had just entered. The infrastructure was in shambles. Before we disconnected and jumped out of our suits, I shot myself up to the SIMON’s torso and eyed the inscription on its chest. SpecBot.
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About the Author
Shawn Mansouri is a research associate in a lab that develops repellents against mosquitoes. His most recent publication is "The Tracks of Ridge Rock Station" by Disquieted Dreams Press in their Best Horror Shorts, 2015 anthology.
About the Illustrator
Martyna Jerks is from Poland. She dreams of becoming a doctor and to change a world little by little, she makes photos every day and uploads it on Instagram with help of her dear friend Mateusz, whom she had met on this page (IG) and they started talking about photography. 45
Deferred Dreams by Pranav Kapil
Illustration by Pranav Kapil
I sit at the window watching the sun escape the alley. It rises above, floating as if, slowly, to fall and settle into the next alley, the one after mine. My name is Sophia Augusta Roses; I’m the half created character in multiple stories. I exist as fragmented fiction in the minds of many men, but the women, they know me. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself an animal preparing for winter, and through the gallery in my pocket, I picked memories to burn; leaving behind a wolf’s howl to mark my anguish.
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I was born a score and a few years ago. And no more than a few years ago I gave birth to a trembling child. He is dead now, a sigh lost in flailing rhymes, forgotten, just in time. I was born in Glasgow on a Sunday morning. My father worked as an accountant with the army, my mother was a nurse. My mother was a church lady; she died giving birth to me. My father raised me. Aware of the treachery of laws and the solitude of ideas, I grew up to the age of 15 when my father’s drinking got the best of him. Thereafter I was taken in by a distant relative of my mother, an aunt, a Mrs. Duberfield. She brought me here to a place no less cold than any home I had ever known. It was a small parish community called Bloomburg. I am terrible at dance, I always have been but I can sing, I joined the church choir and spent my time with growing affection towards our lord, our saviour, Jesus Christ. I grew weary of this affection which had transformed to a degree which I believe is love. I never gave it much thought other than the little thoughts that occasionally get formed when you are stranded in a vast sea of emotions. When the war started my guilt called for a dutiful service in the name of what I had lost. I went to war. Now, there is a regular resounding block of air that someone produces from the magic of two hands and sends it to the back of my head where it creates a chasm and pollutes it with its litter. I am one of the two that have bequeathed the 47
systems of light and numbers in favour of riddles and dance, and bequeathed them to the favour of fables and myths and them to favour arbitration of them all and then to none. These words don’t fall off me at the edge of age yet at the cliff of time. I’m the one that speaks, disgruntled by the flesh that encapsulates me and the ants that perambulate all over, and the things that I clasp in my only hand. Now they leave me to a weariness I have always been aware of, a weariness which chides the creation of thought and the execution of any action. All my life’s words now bid farewell, adieu, and goodbye and greetings such as are not now shared. On their departure they tease and touch me like a virgin being abused by home-bound soldiers after conquering an old man’s disgruntled manifestation. I have often heard stories of women who lost love or lost a child or lost both, I know which sighs remain to be seasoned and the ones which only await a dramatic departure. I wait with no hurry, nor do I understand any sigh to surface any deeper misery. I still sing. I move. I make things move. So I water the plants and serve tea to any who asks.
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About the author and illustrator
Pranav Kapil likes to dabble in many forms of art, photography, painting, doodling, writing, etc. Creating art as he says is a personal necessity. mostly it is a pursuit of finding the ideal escapist distraction. He admits to being greatly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Arthur Rimbaud. He is also a big foreign film buff and a foodie.
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Not Quite the Flower by Anita Stefanescu
Photo by Jaspreet Kaur
The way we hear music differs from the manner by which we encounter lyrics, the words that burden a melody.
As Virgil watched the iridescent blue notes shimmer from the sides of his harmonica, he imagined how they might have appeared in a garrulous old house on the banks of a sinewy dishwater creek. People paid money and pocketed little pink tickets to hear Virgil imagine such things on his harmonica. Tonight, the theatre was packed with swarms of people, each one resembling a statistic. He watched the 50
crowd clap its way into a bar graph. Only to play, so they might spill from their columns, overflowing blue. He imagined his way back into the present, again.
“I try to understand her,” Virgil insisted, “but Mother is one of those types that has serious issues, you know, in the head.” Issues related to perceptual fluency. His father offered a scuffled smile, the kind you feel obliged to step over when it appears on a doormat. He’d been a model doormat, the most suitable husband sort. Virgil was not inclined to disturb the pitch of things as they stood. A fatherly thing to do: Explain to son why Mother’s incomprehensible cruelty stems from the hope of consigning said son to undeserved, endless happiness. All mother really wanted was for Virgil to sparkle and shine like a sonorous daisy, a flower well-groomed enough to merit a place in her well-admired front yard flowerbed.
Virgil shut tight his eyes, following the wind through his reeds, only to find himself digging through the flowerbed, its violet simperings and tawny whimpers infusing the air.
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A musician’s truth: What he remembered was merely the melodies, never the nouns, never anything so meticulous as captions.
On that April morning years before, he had been a better son. A proper boy on his knees, helping his mother weed the pernicious chatter of excess petunias. “Now Virgil,” she warned in that brilliant scandalmouthed fuchsia, “you know you needn’t push your fingers into that little pile of soil right there…” The way a pointing finger transformed the curves of an arm into a straight line alarmed him. He didn’t know. Laying a solid shape of hand on his shoulder, mother described planting the roses when he was but a few-day-old baby, before her words grew thick with mud, scoured by his father’s shadow. Irresistible: the soft, un-plundered soil at the end of any straight line, or how quickly a straight line sprouts an arm, an arrow. Virgil brushed his fingers through “that little pile of soil right there”, keeping the lyric’s instructions intact. Brushing became digging, nails pressing near the roots of the roses in gentle staccato. 52
“Now Virgil,” she often repeated, the words giving way to their tune, the tiny white tibia, the unforaged fibula, the fabula rasa-- mere toothpicks until the ground offered up the side of a snow-scented skull. “Now Virgil, now see what you’ve gone and done to your precious baby sister, your only begotten sibling. You’ve played with Rose’s head and mussed up her tiny baby bed.….”
There was a twin side to everything, one body carrying music, the other bearing the text. He played his part now, knowing it could never be what Rose wanted, not since she rose so rarely these days, a corrugated elephant from the bowels of Virgil’s sigh.
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About the Author
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania, raised in Alabama, and reared by the love-ghost of Tom Waits and Hannah Arendt. She was a finalist in last year's Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize. Her story, "White Tennis Shoes", won the Ryan R. Gibbs Flash Fiction Award from New Delta Review this year. Her poetry chapbook, "objects in vases" will be published by Anchor & Plume in March 2016. You can read her in current issues of PoemMemoirStory, Unbroken Journal, and others. More online at www.alinastefanescu.com.
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About the Illustrator
Jaspreet Kaur is a 22-year-old economics student in Panjab university, India. She has been a winner of Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi award in panjabi poetry. She’s a nature lover and a budding photographer. She thinks that there are hidden universes evolving inside us and we all shall pursue to find those. You can spot her in cafes of Chandigarh sipping life over a coffee and trying new cuisines.
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Modita – Illustrator
Modita is doing engineering in UIET, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She aims to travel the world, and has becoming famous as an artist on her bucket list. Her Plan A is to make her parents proud and Plan B is to open up an Art Gallery.
Arushi Gupta – Illustrator
Arushi Gupta is a 20-year-old alien studying to be a dentist in Chandigarh. She is a die-hard otaku and wishes to go to Japan soon. You can find her singing Japanese songs, making some artsy concoction or taking weird photographs in the streets of Chandigarh.
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Garima Mahajan – Photographer, Proofreader
Garima Mahajan is our proof-reader who lives in a yellow spaceship that's drifting in a wormhole. When she's not reading, you can find her taking pictures of windows, or planning world domination.
Ankur Chabbra – Poetry Editor
Ankur Chhabra, currently pursuing Bachelors of Science from P.G.G.C-11, Chandigarh. A poet who lives in a universe of infinite dimensions, where thoughts travel from one to another, and yet resides in the realms of sanity and rationality. 58
Inayat Pawar – Poetry Editor
Inayat Pawar studies pharmaceutical sciences at Punjab University as she wishes to pursue research in pharmacognosy, intrigued by the magical properties of healing in plants. A believer of magic, parallel universes and bootstrap paradoxes, she wants to travel in time more than anything.
Gursaya Grewal – Poetry Editor
Gursaya Grewal is a 19 year-old studying in ISSER, Panjab University. She has been reading poetry since she was born. She performs spoken-word poetry wherever she can and has started a poetry society in Chandigarh called Kavi-tactic.
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Jaspreet Kaur – Photgrapher
Jaspreet Kaur is a 22-year-old economics student in Panjab university, India. She has been a winner of Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi award in panjabi poetry. She’s a nature lover and a budding photographer. She thinks that there are hidden universes evolving inside us and we all shall pursue to find those. You can spot her in cafes of Chandigarh sipping life over a coffee and trying new cuisines.
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Adarsh Raj, Fiction Editor
“Adarsh Raj (aka Wolf of All Streets) takes life as it comes in his face, and runs down his chin. People catch flies with honey, but he catches more honey(s) being fly. He can fill 18 holes in one day and still find time for golf. Hannah Montana said nobody’s perfect, but here he is. Oh and he stole my girl!” As told by everyone.
Himanshu Goel, Founder and Fiction Editor
Himanshu Goel is a 20-year-old engineering student in Punjab University, India. He is featured in 101words.org, Flash fiction Press, Flash fiction magazine, a long story short, Beam me up podcast and Polychrome Ink and forthcoming in The Singularity and TEO magazine. You can usually find him at a McDonalds or a football field. 61