Montage | Issue #1

“Spring will soon be here, it will finally arrive. The flocks of birds are preparing, they are already lining up, gathering their strength to fly back. The strong ones will fly in the front because they are stronger; the younger ones will fall behind and try to stay in the middle, they will fly flapping their wings in the air, which will already be full of commotion. The flight of birds is a structure; it’s not the flapping of just one wing. The world exists only through a montage; so does unplotted art. It’s impossible to write anything without montaging, without juxtaposing; at the very least, it’s impossible to write well.”

-Viktor Shklovsky Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot

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HELLO, FRIEND. The Montage Literary Arts Journal is a biannual periodical of undergraduate creative writing, edited and designed by students at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The Journal exists for one purpose only: to publish the finest creative work that this campus has to offer. With reasonably good integrity, we’ve endeavored to bring you a fine cross-section of the more inspired undergraduate work that we’ve seen. What you hold in your hands is the realization of our goals.

ENJOY.

SPRING 2007 STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF

JEFF WAXMAN

ASSISTANT EDITOR

DAVID SHEFFIECK

TREASURER

HELENA LIVITZ JEFF BRANDT

ASSISTANT TREASURER

LAYOUT EDITORS

SARAH KOWALIS DAVID SHEFFIECK JEFF WAXMAN

PROSE EDITORS

MICHAEL SQUEO HEATHER GAUEN

POETRY EDITORS

SHANNON LARSON JAMES KNIPPEN

ASSISTANT EDITORS

DAVID BELLMORE ERIC DUNCAN KATELYN EICHWALD KEVIN HARTMAN RAFAEL IBAY SAARAH MALIK JENI REINKE RACHEL STORM ALEKSY TARASENKO-STRUC

COVER DESIGN PRINTING BY CIRCULATION

DAVID SHEFFIECK UP CLOSE PRINTING, CHAMPAIGN, IL 600

CONTENTS

UNTITLED - HOLLIE DAY THOUGHTS WHILE PEEING ON YOUR GRAVE - NIK ALLEN SMOKING DRUGS - WILL KURLINKUS ORPHANS - KATELYN EICHWALD LOGOS - JOANNA NG STEPPING ON GLASS BAREFOOT AT THE SHORE OF LAKE PEORIA - NIK ALLEN MEHE DOST - RACHEL REINWALD HAIKU - ALEXA RODHEIM WHILE YOU WERE NOT SAFE I AM NOT SAFE - JAMIE VAN ALLEN BIPEDAL BALLAD - NICHOL CHONTAFALSKY CLOSED DOORS - RACHEL STORM THE GREATEST EPIC - ANAND OROSKAR SHE REMINDS ME OF HER - AUBREY ELSPETH REYNOLDS PSYCHO-THERAPY - ALYSSA OLTMANNS GUARDING MAIN STREET - BREANNE REINHARD TO LYDIA - CHRIS KNOWLTON NOT LIKE HIM - AUTUMN J. WEST RESURGENCE - JAJAH WU A MEETING - KEN BEAVER “SAY SOMETHING - DAVID SHEFFIECK ON W. TOUHY, CHICAGO, IL - JEFF WAXMAN HI- MICHAEL SQUEO ROMULUS & REMUS - PHILIP WILLIAMS BROOKSIDE MINE - JAMES KNIPPEN THE FACE IN MY PIANO - SHANNON LARSON

5 6 8 9 17 21 22 25 26 28 30 32 34 41 43 52 53 59 62 67 71 72 74 77 78

UNTITLED

BY HOLLIE DAY

There had been a steady decline since the cocktail party, since the sticky summer night filled with spilt martinis and boathouse sex. Now, he sat on another sticky summer night on a sticky vinyl bench in a sticky booth. He fingered the slowly growing pile of crumpled sugar packets before arranging them into a neat little stack before waving the waitress over for another cup. Weak, filmy coffee. The kind that tastes exactly the same no matter what greasy spoon you’re frequenting.

He wiped his face with his hand, felt the sweat on his brow. Both elbows on the table, he cradled his face in his hands, trying to figure out exactly what his next course of action should be. A month earlier, he hadn’t messed up yet. Everything was going pretty well and he knew he was happy. What the fuck had happened? The fiancée was out of town on business and then there was the cocktail party. Too many missed drinks and an old ‘infatuation’ walking back into his life. He hated the saying, usually dismissing it as a lousy excuse, but, in reality, one thing had led to another.

Slugging back the cup of coffee, cringing at the taste of it, jittery hand waving for another cup. How many was it now? He had lost count. He poured sugar into the new cup.

How could he have expected his fiancée not to find out?

And when she did find out, of course she left him. She wasn’t the kind of person to deal with bullshit, and that’s what he was full of, at least according to her. She was probably right. He fingered the swollen patch on his face. She definitely didn’t put up with bullshit. She was usually quite the non-violent person, but he had learned the hard way that she could, in fact, throw a mean punch.

He got up, straightened his back, the usual crack of his spine the only satisfying thing that had happened to him all day. Looking around and realizing that he was the only patron of the diner and hoping that his waitress, nametag emblazoned STARLA, wouldn’t take it the wrong way, he fumbled in his pocket for a moment before leaving the diamond ring as a tip.

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THOUgHTs WHILE PEEINg ON YOUr grAvE

BY NIk ALLEN Tonight, it seems

my heart and bladder have come to preach in unison for the sacred state of your memory.

Let go.

Parting the loose pile of inverted soil with a jaundiced stream and a sigh of relief, I wonder what amount of me will stain the oak ďŹ nish of your young casket.

The sight and the release are too glorious for me to witness, as I curb my head towards the milky dots carelessly littering the heavens.

Struggling with my tongue For the words of a eulogy, they soon stumble into the hum of an elegy.

We wilt/and trial from guilt/and bile.

The turn/return/the stand.

(Pause)

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THOUgHTs WHILE PEEINg ON YOUr grAvE “The turn, return, and stand.”

“...”

“No, it doesn’t work.”

Oh, what a mixed procession.

The clouds heave with my struggling breath, the evening pales in my liquored sight, but the moon does not lament without you; its ancient face has turned to night.

Oh, what a mixed procession.

These incongruent emotions convene, these awkward cousins tandem mourn, my old and sore demeanors, they’re nothing more than tired.

sMOkINg DrUgs

BY WILL kUrLINkUs This guy and this girl on a bench Said, “hey smoke these drugs.”

I said, “no way fools, drugs are for fools” These guys were all smoked up on marijuana and full of smoke and shit They were saying to me, “Smoke these blunts dude.”

I was like, “Yo, you guys are suckas.”

These were like so dumbies.

There were these hot girls though one time And they were like, “let’s smoke some drugs and do some sex.”

And I really had to think about it.

But I just let them do the drugs and then I didn’t do drugs but We still did up the sex in their backyard on a picnic table Then they got arrested for drugs But I didn’t plus I still got sex.

This one guy Shawn gave his dogs some smoking And the dog was so messed I was like Shawn that is bullshit Then I hit Shawn with a bat And ran him over with my car.

The End

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OrPHANs BY kATELYN EIcHWALD You are seven when you first hear about the bearded man walking into homes and fucking the mother and sliding under the fingernails of the father until it hurts. It happened at some kid’s house a couple blocks away. They both left, his mom and dad, so he had to stay with his aunt and uncle. That’s your worst nightmare, having to live with your aunt and uncle. They’re nice people. But almost-family is not enough when you know what it’s like to sleep between two people who love you more than anything. That’s why you hate orphan movies. Nothing’s going to make it better, not even taking down the newspaper overlords and saving the livelihoods of newsies everywhere, not even if some pretty Disney family takes you in and says, “You’re ours, now.” It’s still not better, and no one gets that except for the kid. He always looks fake-happy at the end, you know? Like he knows he’s supposed to be happy but shit, his parents are dead, and you want him to pass the mashed potatoes and ask fake-mama how her day was?

You are nine when he comes. Your mom kisses you on the forehead and touches your short, prickly hair and says, “Sweetie, I love you forever, ok?” And then the bearded man puts his big, long-fingered hand on her shoulder and she walks out the front door, just like that, just like nothing at all.

Your dad breaks the dining room table with the bearded man’s face. Lying on the hardwood floor with his nose in four hundred pieces of bone, the bearded man leaves fat smears of red on the arms of his coat. He holds himself and laughs. Your dad goes into his bedroom for a minute, then into the back room of the garage, with all the tools and stuff, and shoots himself in the head. At least you assume it was the head. No one ever tells you.

By the time the bearded man leaves, his nose is fixed, whole, smooth, like it was never broken. You keep it to yourself.

This is what happens. You aren’t making it up. You are there.

You go to stay with your aunt and uncle. It kills you the first night, and it doesn’t get better, so when you are twelve, you leave. That doesn’t work, so you try again at sixteen. At seventeen and a half, it works.

You are tall. You still have the buzz cut you’ve always had. You don’t even remember what your hair looks like long. Weird, probably. You like the buzz because sometimes you can’t shower for a few days, when your car won’t pull off the road, or when you don’t have money for a motel. You have a car you keep clean and a perpetual

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kATELYN EIcHWALD stress headache and fuzzy memories of a hundred motels, a thousand pastel paintings, a million bibles in the top drawer. You drive a lot. You sleep on the side of the road sometimes and don’t actually mind that much. If you lean the driver’s seat way back until it clicks and make a sweatshirt-ball pillow or something, it’s ok, it’s not bad, it’s better than some things, like that kid Max’s house where you slept in the bathtub and tried not to listen through the thin wall to Max screwing some girl he found. The girl came in during the night to pee and you just pulled the curtain across and pressed your eyes shut tight and tried to remember what it was like to have a birthday cake, or play Monopoly, or run errands with mom. You were glad you could still remember, mostly. The details are gone, but you can still see her face, and dad’s too. She had long hair. Her nose was thin and straight. Her lips were small. She wore lots of rings on her fingers that she’d take off when making cookies and put on the island in the kitchen in a little row.

Dad had a cleft thing in his chin. You have it, too. Sometimes when you look in the mirror you see him, sort of. You don’t know if you like it or not, having pieces of a dead man in your face.

You work jobs. A door factory for three weeks, sleeping in the car. You actually showered in a public sprinkler that month. It was so ridiculous it made you laugh, and you lay in the grass of a park under the cold spray and laughed at what you’ve become, this wanderer, this drifter, this man living for himself like a cowboy, and how silly that is because you are not a cowboy and you are not really a man, because you always thought you needed a father to become a man, or at least a father figure, and you never let your uncle slip into that role because it didn’t feel right and he worked all the time anyway.

And you laughed and laughed until you hurt and the water stung your eyes and all you could think of was how you were an orphan, a real, honest-to-god orphan like in the movies. And isn’t that funny, how things turn out just the way you fear?

This life doesn’t suck as much as it could, you think. You have money, usually.

A little bit, at least. You eat in diners and at Burger King; you don’t beg. And you get to see stuff, travel around looking for work. You saw the mountains two years ago. There’s this guy who lives up in Colorado, in this place called Estes Park, this crazy tourist town with Starbucks and t-shirt shops and shit, but if you drive out of town and don’t stop until the road ends, you can climb the rocks and breathe the thin air and watch the rain in the mountains miles away, like a sheer blue sheet dropped from the clouds. Not wet at all, not where you are, just blue. And then you fall asleep up there, on a little rock plateau with stone digging into your back, your boots gray with dust, and when you wake it’s past

OrPHANs midnight and the night is black and blue and deep, the way you imagine blood looks inside your body. You can’t climb down because you can’t see the rocks but you can’t sleep because you’re fucking terrified of coyotes so you sit there and smell pine and shiver and feel like you’re being cleaned from the inside out. It feels good.

In the morning, you climb down, get in your car and drive down to the valley to work a job pouring cement for new sidewalks in new subdivisions with hardly any trees.

Colorado erases things for awhile.

Last summer you stayed in a motel in Wisconsin with this girl, Alex. The whole summer. She had hair like your mother’s, long and brown-black. She had a tape deck—who has tape decks anymore?—but she had one and she played classical music, all strings and high notes. She would always ask, with her hand by her mouth, always touching her lips, “Sweetie, do you like this one? Do you like this?” and you would always say yes, of course, because you wanted to screw her. But because you liked her, too. She had a killer smile, really wide and large, and these perfect teeth, so when she smiled sometimes you had to sit down. She’d jump on the motel bed, higher and higher and touch the ceiling, laughing, and fall on you in a brown tangle of limbs. You miss her.

You really do.

You hardly ever talk to the people you used to know. You call your aunt on Christmas when you can get to a phone, and one of your friends from high school, this tall, broad guy named Dave, tracked you down a couple years ago and showed up outside your motel room one night with a case of beer and his hair in a ratty ponytail, just like in high school. He said he was in the area and he heard you were around too, but it was an obvious lie and you felt awkward for hearing it. You watched Lethal Weapon 2 on the motel TV and talked about stuff, his job at Walmart, his supposedly hot girlfriend, your trip to Mexico, until 2 a.m. when he looked over at you from the end of the bed and said, “Hey, so I think I saw your mom the other day, isn’t that fucked up?”

You didn’t answer. You watched Mel Gibson pop his dislocated shoulder back in by throwing himself against a wall.

“That’s bullshit,” you said quietly. “No way in hell.”

“I swear, man. I swear it was her. It was a while ago, in this shitty town in Nebraska somewhere, I was visiting my buddy on my way west, and we were sitting on his porch one afternoon and she walked by with this skinny little girl. She was wearing a blue dress, or a skirt, just something blue. She didn’t recognize me so I just ignored her.”

He fingered his ponytail, and the gesture was unexpectedly delicate. “I’m serious, man.

kATELYN EIcHWALD I’m serious.”

You knew he wasn’t lying, but you didn’t believe him. You couldn’t. In your head you saw your mom walking down the sidewalk as if she were in a home video from the 70’s, the colors shifting and bleeding into white. Her dress was the color and texture of blue glass in a window.

Dave left at four. You watched TV until dawn.

Now you are twenty-three, and things are the same, except you have this phone, this motel phone, and you are sitting on the bed, and you are holding the phone to your face, rough with a two-day beard, and you are listening but you aren’t. Because this isn’t making sense.

“Who is this?” you say.

“Ellen. I said my name was Ellen, don’t you remember?” She sounds like she’s yelling, but you can barely hear her. It is a strange sound, to hear someone yelling so far away.

“Um, no. Um.” Your body is tingling. “How did you get this number? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying your mom is dead. Okay? That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying your mom is dead and I don’t fucking want to take care of your sister, she’s a brat, and I have better things to do, okay? So you need to come get her.”

Your immediate thought is that this lady doesn’t know what she’s talking about because your mom is already dead. You are numb. The lights in the room are off, the curtains drawn against the sun, and you think that maybe if you pulled them back and let in the light this would make more sense. “Okay,” you say dully, because you don’t know what else to say. “Where are you?”

She is about two days away. When you hang up, you lay back on the bed with your shoes on and take five minutes, just take five minutes. You feel your hands shaking where they rest on your stomach. Tomorrow, you’ll quit your job and start driving and then you’ll see some bitch named Ellen and then you’ll meet this girl who may or may not be your sister. You wonder if she’ll look like your dad. You wonder if she won’t, and what that’ll mean.

You drive straight through, except for when you sleep once at a rest stop halfway there and dream about your mother. She kneels in front of you and touches your face.

She is visibly pregnant. Her expression is soft and sympathetic, like when she’d press on

OrPHANs Band-Aids, like she knows how much it hurts, but you have to be brave, okay? You feel her hand on your cheek like every nerve in your body is reaching for it. With the other hand on her round stomach, your mother says, “She’s mine.”

Your mouth is sticky and bad-tasting when you wake. You’ve only been asleep for an hour and a half, but this rest stop is getting old already. You mutter to yourself a little bit, find the men’s room, and leave.

Twenty miles later you wonder if you should grieve for your mother. If you should do it again. If fourteen years was not enough. You used to make up the ways she could have died in your head and choose the ones that seemed the best, the nicest, the most redeeming. You never considered, tried to never consider, that she might have lived because that would mean the bearded man didn’t kill her. In your child-mind, that would mean she wasn’t a victim, she wasn’t a martyr. It would mean she chose to stay away.

You’ve been an orphan since you were nine. That’s the way it is. When your mother walked out the front door with the bearded man’s big leather coat draped over her shoulders, flapping at her ankles, she died. You don’t give yourself any ambiguity.

It’s taken you fourteen years to get used to the orphan thing, and now you’re starting to handle it, starting to wrap your big hands around it, so some bitchy lady named Ellen can’t rip that away and then give it back, just like that. Your mom is dead.

Big news.

Unless, you know, she isn’t. That lady could be wrong, you suppose. And wouldn’t that be something else?

It’s an ugly little town in Nebraska called Normantown, and when you pass the ugly little sign your eyes are raw and your legs are cramped. You turn right at a Baptist church with no ‘B.’ It’s dusk, and the sky is in layers. You try to watch the clouds move like sheets of paper sliding against each other, but you have to focus on driving in this unfamiliar town.

You find the house the bitch directed you to. It’s a painted lady in total disrepair, like painted ladies usually are. There is a skateboard on the front sidewalk and the grass has not been cut in a long time. You hate seeing houses like this, houses that could be beautiful but aren’t.

The car door slamming is a loud noise on the still street, and you flinch. You parked a few houses down out of habit. As you walk up the sidewalk, you notice your

kATELYN EIcHWALD legs shaking a little bit. And your hands hurt, like you sliced them with paper and then started cutting lemons. And your lips, there’s something weird with your lips, like they’re tingling and swelling, like you’ve been making out too long, mashing them against teeth for hours. You don’t know why you’re noticing these things right now, why they all seem so important.

Standing at the doorway, you see your hand rise and your index finger press the doorbell. You are afraid, more afraid than you can remember being in a long time, not since you got shot at two years ago. And this is worse, anyway. Of course this is worse.

It seems like she just appears. Just—and she’s there. Through the screen door, she looks like a ghost girl. She is maybe twelve or thirteen. She has puffy eyes like your mom had, like you have when you cry. Her hair is short and dark and sort of squiggling out from her face.

“Hey,” she says. “What’s up?”

They have a crappy couch. It’s the color of brown sugar and you can feel the dirt when you touch it, so you keep your hands in your lap. You are used to dirty things, but somehow, this is different.

Ellen has the girl already packed, duffel bags stacked and sliding by the door. The girl’s name is Megan. There was a girl named Megan in your class in elementary school, maybe 2nd grade, and she was too skinny with dull brown hair that folded in and a mouth that was always open. You tried to never talk to her.

This Megan is wearing blue leggings and a white dress, one of those dresses that isn’t actually supposed to be a dress, like, you’re supposed to wear something under it, except you always think the leggings are stupid because you like the bare backs of thighs. But this is your sister. Your sister? She’s just been standing there by the door. A few minutes ago she asked if you wanted a coke, and you said no.

“So,” you say. “So Megan.” This is all you can think of to say. You want to touch her hair and wrap her in your big arms. It comes to you suddenly, how much you want her to be your sister, how absolutely important it is to you, how unusual this feeling is.

“Yeah,” she says, balanced on one leg like a little girl. When she puts the other leg down, her shoe leaves a gray print on the blue. “So are we leaving?”

“Um,” you say. “I don’t know. Do you want to come?”

“Yes,” she says with no hesitation.

The house feels desperate and empty. The walls are all off-white, and the carpet is

OrPHANs mottled with faded stains like bruises.

“Where’s…Ellen?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Whatever.” It reminds you that she is a little girl.

“Megan,” you say. “Who’s your mom?”

She’s balancing again, but she can’t hold it. Her foot hits the carpet with a muffled clap. She bends, slides her fingers into a compartment on her duffle bag, and pulls out a picture. Her fingers are small when she hands it to you.

It’s mom. I mean, of course it is. You knew it was when you saw Megan’s face, but this makes it official, you guess. She’s sunburned, with her arm around a slightly youngerlooking Megan, and they are both smiling softly against a backdrop of lush green trees.

Your jealousy feels like a broken rib.

“Megan,” you say, and your hands are shaking, still holding the picture. “Who’s your dad?”

Megan’s lips are pursed tight. “I don’t really want to talk about it,” she says, and crosses her arms, and you are hit with a cold wave that takes you whole and smashes you back into the couch, because you know it’s him, it’s him, he’s her father with the leather coat and the bloodied nose, sprawled on the floor, laughing. You know.

Also, she has his nose.

First, the rage. It starts in your head and forces itself downward through your body. It doesn’t last. You got tired of rage a long time ago, so now it moves fast and is gone. In its place is sympathy. You hope she doesn’t know what her father did, but she probably does.

That’s not actually true. About the rage. It doesn’t really leave. At least, it hasn’t yet.

“You know,” you say, and your voice is shaking. “Your dad pretty much destroyed my family. You know that?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Well. Me too.”

You guess she’s right about that.

When she’s walking to the car, she blurs. You are a little bit afraid of her, it’s true.

It’s because of the way she blurs like the bearded man when she moves fast, like when he would move in the big leather coat and his lines would bleed and you’d have to blink. Like how you’d think you were crazy if you hadn’t seen his blood smeared on his coat. How you replayed your dad smashing his face into the table a million times in your head, thinking that you missed something. But you didn’t. You didn’t.

In the car, you don’t know where to drive. Megan looks so tiny in the passenger’s

kATELYN EIcHWALD seat. Her duffels are in the back. You like the way she looks enveloped by the leather seat, safe in your car, your sanctuary. She fits. It feels to you like she’s always been there, like she was in the bathroom of the gas station and just got back.

She plays with the automatic window, up and down. Up and down.

“Are we gonna go?” she says, “or what?”

LOgOs

BY JOANNA Ng

In the world of Pilliput no one dies of old age. Some are killed by moving vehicles.

Some fall victim to falling objects. Some annoy their spouse too much. One person even invented a new hybrid nut and choked on it. An infinite number of ways to die exist, but those who do not die in a creative manner never die of old age. There is only one natural way to die: talking.

Every person born into the world has an allotted number of words. Whenever a word escapes from one’s lips, their count of words left decreases. When a person has only one word remaining, he or she can speak one last utterance before immediately dropping dead to the ground. Every word spoken is one word less of life, one closer to death. Living in Pilliput can be distressing because it is quite common for people who are talking on the street, in a car, or at a birthday party to drop dead in mid-sentence.

No one knows or can even guess how many words they have in their bank. The curious-minded have tried conducting studies, but no conclusive theories have evolved.

Some people have as many as 2 billion words to live; others have a mere 10 million to make something out of their lives. Although word assignments seem random, noticeable trends have developed in society. For instance, a pattern emerges each year of women having a higher natural mortality rate than men. Perhaps females have been mandated to speak less than males. A more reasonable explanation hypothesizes that women simply talk at a faster rate than men or participate in more nonsensical, unneeded chatter. These theories are all speculative.

A person who has no care about restricting speech on average uses approximately 48,000 words a day. However, in Pilliput, people have grown accustomed to being talk-thrifty. In every day conversations, speakers omit short words, avoid unnecessary adjectives, opt to stay vague than be specific, and regulate their vocalizations quite meticulously. Some follow strict regiments and guidelines to control their speech. The citizens of Pilliput appear quite polite (in speech at least) partly due to the fact that most see the waste in cursing. One self-help book offers an example of a person swearing 20 times a day. If he could bite his tongue everyday, in one year he would have saved 7,300 words of his life. People bite down on their tongue so much that it’s no wonder the middle finger comes up so frequently.

Manda, a citizen of Pilliput, was a word miser. She had the fear of the word from

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JOANNA Ng a young age. This paranoia had much to do with a garrulous aunt dropping dead at her seventh birthday party. The aunt’s unfinished story about potato salad haunted the girl, and Manda started to think carefully before she spoke. At first she shut up whenever she encountered topics she deemed trivial like celebrity scandals or popular people gossip.

But the fear grew, and so grew the list of trivial speech.

One year at a family reunion, the children organized a game of hide-and-seek (a good game for its character of silence). Still at an innocent age, Manda found a blue box and laughed inwardly at discovering such a choice refuge to hide her from the world.

She stepped inside and as soon as she closed the box, she heard a distant cousin yelp the designated time word. Manda shrunk and further hid herself inside her hiding place. She was smiling at her good luck until her senses became aware of a rancid, stinky smell.

Cringing a bit, her eyes adjusted to the dark and she looked around the corners and edges of her cage. Then she realized. She was crouching in a porta-potty.

Manda instinctively let out a quiet shriek and then slapped her hand over her mouth before another sound could escape. A rational girl, Manda decided revealing herself was better than making company with filth for 15 minutes. The poor child! She tried to escape, but her little hands could not open the door of the cursed poopy container.

What could she do? Certainly an option was screaming for someone. It was not pride that prevented her from crying out for help. No, pride is but a mouse to the lion of fear.

Fear is a truly powerful emotion. She could not bring herself to waste words in a foolish game of hide-and-seek. An hour later (no one even realized she was missing) an uncle complaining about potato salad poisoning discovered a paralyzed Manda. That traumatic experience remains unspoken of to this day.

By her sensitive teenage years, Manda’s standard of silence was extensive if not infinite. When people asked how she was doing, she would only reply with a smile or a shrug. She discovered if she ever conveyed worry or sadness or anger, people would pry with questions that facial expressions could not answer. Manda avoided any chance for conversations that required using up her precious words. She was not content with a life governed by nodding and pointing, but it was no use to dwell on her unhappiness since she couldn’t express it anyway.

Sometimes people took her silence for indifference. But she was far from apathetic to the plights of Pilliputians. Manda excelled at listening and often received much information from lonely people. She wanted to help, but sometimes listening is not enough. When words of comfort were necessary, Manda could feel her soul struggling to

LOgOs break through the bonds that tied up her tongue. But fear rarely allowed even a few vague remarks to escape through parted lips.

While there are those like Manda bound to muteness, others choose free speech.

Simeon, one such liberated from fright of the word, thought wisely and spoke freely. He knew the power of encouraging and inspiring words. He could appreciate the humor of a spontaneous and witty comment. He knew the necessity of sharing a story to help another person. He loved watching the reactions after delivering a pick up line. He understood that some circumstances of stubbed toes require an appropriate expletive. Simeon had a profound affect on all those he conversed with because in him they saw that the words bring life, not death.

One can observe a human phenomenon in which people are drawn to those who possess qualities they wish to emulate. In that manner, Manda developed a deep affection toward Simeon. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Manda would try to be in earshot of him, for his words quenched her dry tongue. However, she was too afraid to come any nearer because she knew he would desire ever increasingly intimate conversation.

One night, Simeon and a group of friends went out. The restaurant they dined at had a neglected machine that facilitated the forgotten art of karaoke. Simeon was the first brave soul to sing his heart out. His companions did not have the same fearlessness but Simeon urged them on.

“Be courageous!”

Slowly, one after another, he won souls onto the stage. They could not deny his encouragement. They could not ignore his example. The night was filled with out of tune crooning and unabashed laughter. When no one was brave, Simeon would take the stage and perform again until bravery was aroused in someone else. As Simeon sang his last song, a message accompanied the music and lingered thick like fog wishing to seep into every organic crevice. While karaokeing through the middle refrain, his voice silenced as he sang his last allotted word. Simeon’s soul passed peacefully.

At his farewell funeral, hundreds of people wanted to share how he had impacted their lives. As Simeon would have wanted, multitudes of people gave many-worded eulogies. Even after the ceremony, people could not stop talking about Simeon and his profound influence. How bittersweet that the best speeches expressing love are spoken when the person’s ears can no longer listen.

Manda’s grief was great. The loss of hope shook her terribly hard. But she had been too accustomed to silence, so she could not speak of her heartache. In her mind she was

JOANNA Ng too far gone. So she withdrew and hid, spending the rest of her life never parting her lips again. Year after sad year took its toll, and finally when she was an extremely old woman, she slipped on a dropped fruit and died alone.

Her funeral was hushed and quiet. People who had known her when she at least lived a small existence had long since died after telling lives. No one could speak on her behalf because no one knew exactly who she was. No stories could be told of her because she kept her stories locked away. So her death was followed by the same silence that had plagued her life.

A Pilliputian once philosophized, “Speaking is like breathing. Every breathe I take brings me closer to death. But if I stop breathing, I am sure to be dead shortly. It appears I’m bound be a dead man regardless.”

In a world like Pilliput, only one word matters.

sTEPPINg ON gLAss BArEFOOT AT THE sHOrE OF LAkE PEOrIA

BY NIk ALLEN

There should be a delta where the two of us meet, but that word doesn’t fit: I never sprang from you, and I swear what is left of me is not the end.

The wound, my factory, is spilling a pint or two of iron and oil into your mouth; It struggles alone above the hunger of gravity.

It commiserates with all the other remnants of ardor; empty bottle rockets and still blue patchesall useless halves in the absence of pressure, fire, and velocity.

The shadow of Interstate 74 crucifies the vagrant red puddleone plank, the southern path of water; the other, the eastern path of steel.

From here, it looks like an isthmus dividing a sea of light.

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MEHE DOsT

BY rAcHEL rEINWALD

Sports clothes baggy on a small frame, mandated by Mother, frizzed black hair and gap toothed, you came to me, spinning tales of ex-lovers, following at your feet, that I did not believe then, and should have.

You pushed your way, like elbows thrown in basketball games, into our friendship.

But I did not mind too much.

On Sunday afternoons, this exotic girl threw her hands in the air, warning me about frightened Hindus having to run someplace safer sixty years earlier (One more piece of land every time becoming Dar-ul Islam, land of Muslims).

While stewing strange herbs in boiling milk and eating spiced samosas, Baba jaan would enter, reminding us with newspapers folded under his suit-coat arms to keep the music down while dancing.

Bollywood girls like princesses lured forbidden boys across the stage in Fiza.

As they performed Sharara, we spun and crawled across the room, long sashes dancing in the air.

Crushing our saris against the rug-covered cement,

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MEHE DOsT you taught me how to curl my lips around foreign sounds: Mujhe mast mahaul mein jeene de.

Our legs jangled with payals, barefoot, arms up to elbows in gold bangles, bindi on our faces and henna lacing up our ďŹ ngers.

Nightfall, and your mother would scatter us back to our homes.

Later, you could not look at me sama, rubbing coconut oil into your hair, scented black pearl locks, smearing charcoal on your eyes and glossing your lips.

We snuck Boys in the basement window, brought them up on crunching carpet steps, as your mother walked down the other set, stirred by the commotion.

We stuffed them in the closet, hid their shoes, Musk seeping from crack under door.

Your mother appears, dark eyes boring holes in us, suspicion lingering in the air like teargas.

We played pool.

You, national champion, clacking balls across the table, pushing the cue stick like elbow bullets.

The boys came in, stenching tequila and rum, playing swords with their sticks, frustratingly trying to show you they owned you, there is no winning.

You didn’t give in then, sitting on the edge of the soft green table, one toe barely touching the ground, game point.

rAcHEL rEINWALD Now, I meet you forty-five sets of sixty seconds away.

I can feel every one of them as the rubber grips the concrete highway, and I grip the steering wheel, its nodules trying to hold my hands.

You, dressed business casual, give short hug.

We pick out masala and jasmine rice, water no ice.

Mohammed sits timid but stern in the corner of the booth ear pressed to phone, asking you when he can leave I, bring up twirling in silk scarves.

You, put one slim, polished finger to your lips, looking sideways at Mo. “My religion will not permit it,” you say. “It isn’t your religion,” I say.

Now it is. But I can still remember passing rose water candies under the desk in class.

HAIkU

BY ALExA rODHEIM

I only have five, And this time only seven, Oh, look, five again. ’

’

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WHILE YOU WErE NOT sAFE I AM NOT sAFE

BY JAMIE vAN ALLEN for Allen ginsberg

Part I I saw the evening news, the shuttle launch no one could predict would explode, the begrudging acceptance of the unpopular vote, the officials who won’t wash their hands in public restrooms unless someone else is present, the avalanche of uncertainty and fear, the child with the prescription, and I saw Allen Ginsberg.

I saw Allen Ginsberg in the brilliant fruit of the open-aired supermarket, the smudges on subway doors, the blood that runs, the wrinkles around our mouths that improve with age, the cracks in the sidewalk that lead up to the pentagon and in the closed caption I watch television preparing for deafness.

I saw Allen Ginsberg argue with the magazines at the corner drugstore, leaf through the stacks of the Berkeley Public Library, buy two pairs of pants in a thrift store in East New York, call out to Carl and walk through a field of dry corn in late October in search of a pair of shoes and ointment for the cuts and calluses.

I saw Allen Ginsberg touch the cover of a book and hear the incantations of jazz, taste the soup and disparage its dryness, smell an album to see if it was scratched, listen to the phone that refuses to ring on time and doesn’t disappoint and eye yesterday’s paper for what ended as a surprising failure at levitation.

I saw Allen Ginsberg contemplate the distance between two similar stars, wonder if the libraries have finally dried out, mourn heartbroken America that’s losing the fight, hail teenage angst, decide which mystical vision can be trusted and entertain millions of underprivileged with a super poetry reading of the mind.

I saw Allen Ginsberg demand two nickels instead of one dime from the confused cashier, claim to the weatherman that the sky is burning brightly red, white as well as blue, insist the marijuana and peyote took him places customs couldn’t touch, order the stoplight to change immediately because how could it not know he was in a hurry and later require neither bed nor blanket nor bolster to be bored to sleep.

Part II I know he walks from the pages, But I can usually find him standing erect on my bookshelf—

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WHILE YOU WErE NOT sAFE I AM NOT sAFE Competing in the contest.

“Pick me! Ah, pick me!” he cries.

“It’s a shame,” I say and he agrees.

Scrambling out of the book to walk awkwardly from the shelf, He shakes the weariness from his limbs, straightens his robe, Adjusts his glasses and appears more appropriate than ever.

I tell him it isn’t safe.

“The madness is still veiled as normal,” I say.

“I know, but I should leave. I don’t get out enough.”

For now he stretches, climbs back onto the shelf and into the book to wait.

Today the shelf, Tomorrow attention.

BIPEDAL BALLAD

BY NIcHOL cHONTAFALskY My feet have never known the joy of finally reaching the shores of Lake Michigan on a nearly moonless night, but they have known the relief and exhaustion at the end of the long walk there and the sudden appearance of pointy, half-frozen sand pebbles, almost necessitating actual shoes. They do not know that, on such a night, until we get up close, it is as if the sands continue into infinity, or else turn into a solid sheet of glass. That the water could be invisible and yet so expansive boggles my mind, but my feet know only how the water holds onto the day’s warmth much longer than the land.

My eyes know just how unexplainable, how moving it really is, as in a dream-like state of consciousness, over blankets on the sand, we search for shooting stars past Mars on the horizon – Mars so orange and small, like a tea candle where the moon should be. My feet recall only the darkness below the blanket and the unfairness of bareness as all the socks remain packed back at the cabins. I shake and tremble through night as the wind bites colder, harder, more swiftly.

And my feet still sting from the impact of leaping up to a late alarm, frantic along with all the others. They know the anxiety and restlessness, but also how we gave in to time and paused to gaze upon the lake in the daylight.

My feet remember the hot summer sand, now thoroughly reheated by the morning sun: its roughness, its grit, and the dull, throbbing pain of just standing there shuffling too long, watching the tide rush in and pull away. They long for the squish of the sand just beyond the edge of the waves, so cool and speckled with lake-polished pebbles, smooth and icy underfoot. They know all too well the burn of the asphalt across the length of the parking lot and a deep longing for that forgotten pair of flip-flops languishing somewhere off near the edge of a dune. They relish in the gush of the mud at the edge of the holding pond as we move inward, but abhor the moss at the bottom of the stream which entangles the toes with its tendrils of slime.

My feet delight in the crunch of the leaves and the sting of fallen gumballs on the walk back through the woods past trees and thorn bushes with no discernable path before them, all to avoid the freshly paved road and make up lost time. They shudder at the thought of the sticky black tar that cakes in every last ridge, between

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BIPEDAL BALLAD your toes, and under your nails, the kind that refuses to budge for weeks, leaving a slight sticky feel like stepping in day-old Kool-aid spills on fake linoleum. It’s probably best just to brave the briars but still, again, what has become of those shoes?

As the cabins come into sight, my feet step on a jagged rock and, just for a while, forget their manners. They live by the simple fact that lucky monkey bandages can fix almost anything and that the toasty fire inside will mend any wounds the monkeys can’t. My eyes know the people, the trees, the windows, the stairs, but my feet know only the familiar path now resumed, and it is enough to push them onward, so very close to home.

cLOsED DOOrs BY rAcHEL sTOrM Planted in our wicker chairs, We let willing glances catch The fall of words unspoken In our open palms.

And as our bellies mourned, The groan shook those maple doors, Straight from their hinges.

Soon the room shone Blue as the delphinium Planted with the pots still ‘round.

And hands held themselves.

Weary of letting children run wild in bustling streets.

Knowing red, yellow, green, Meant nothing here.

But still tick-tocks echoed Faintly through that charcoaled sky And summer set Tired after weeks of disregard For her sun and moon.

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cLOsED DOOrs And like children, Worn eyes drifted from their intentions And to those cotton sheets That whispered goodbyes to the day.

Sulking toward our chambers, We closed those whimpering doors.

Yet urged each brassy key Under and back into the moonlight To summon the making of my exit Your entrance.

THE grEATEsT EPIc

BY ANAND OrOskAr Though it renders a great disservice to Valmiki, I am obliged to reveal—in short—the beginnings of the great Ramayana. It is these beginnings which are believed to have been founded by him: as his quill flowed, the epic was concurrently unfolding.

The Ramayana, whose comedic and tragic twists, can be explored as both (or neither) comedic and tragic. In Ayodhya in India, Rama, the avatar of Vishnu, is born to Kaushalya, the second wife of Dasharatha, to rid the world of Ravana, a demon who rejoices in the spreading of death and destruction. Sent into exile by his haughty, jealous, yet powerful aunt—who retains the hopes of her own son, Rama’s cousin Bharat (after whom the true name of our country has been derived), to become the king of Ayodhya. The omnipresent Rama’s peaceful dwelling in the forests of Chitrakuta interferes upon that of a certain Rakshasa (a demon) who happened to festive in that locality. Her name is Shurpanakha, and she is the sister of Ravana. She is spurned by Rama, and upon learning that his true affection belongs with his wife Sita, she becomes livid and attacks Sita. Rama’s brother Lakshmana lashes his sword upon her Shurpanakha’s face, disfiguring her nose. In shame and in anger, an insipid Shurpanakha returns to Ravana’s dwelling—the island Lanka, miles away from the southern tip of India, to inform him of this injustice. Ravana is impatient to exact revenge upon his sister’s tormentor. He takes his flying chariot into the forests of Chitrakuta, and successfully lures and kidnaps Sita away from Rama. And so begins Rama’s quest to redeem his wife.

The events that transpired more than five thousand years ago were themselves ordained by the almighty Aum (pronounced OH-m). In the Hindu philosophy, Aum is the Omnipresent through whom souls seek fulfillment. Literally the magic of the word of God is heard in its pronunciation. When spoken, the first part of Aum, the breaking of the silence with “oh” is significant. The first part of the word and of God speaks of the creator Brahma, who created the world and the Heavens. The second part is the sustaining of the word—“ohhh”—and worships preservation, literally paying tribute to the preserver Vishnu. The quick and firm closing of Aum—“m”—the closing of the lips is representative of the very destruction that completes construction, that of Shiva the destroyer. Contrary to popular belief, Hinduism is only ruled by one God, but Aum’s disciples, demi-Gods, propagate the bounds of the Universe.

It was Aum who took one of his disciples, Vishnu, and sent him to destroy yet another disciple Ravana—as an avatar in the form of Rama, son of Dasharatha. This begs

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THE grEATEsT EPIc the question, if Aum were almighty, how could Aum allow evil to one of his disciples?

Perhaps Ravana had failed in his penance to Aum—the desire for power and chaos onto fellow man. Perhaps the boons Ravana had sought were granted, so Aum sent the preserver, a part of Aum, to Earth to grant the disciples’ boon (the destruction of evil), and conceived the events that transpired thousands of years ago. In Hinduism, everything is Maya, an illusion and divine mother to good, evil, and Aum Himself. Thus, it becomes more logical to see that the actions of one disciple to another are in equilibrium. As all pray to Aum, so seek all individual prosperity, whether it touches mankind for better or worse. And so begins the Redeemer’s quest to redeem Himself.

On July 4, 2005, six armed terrorists marched into Ayodhya, weapons raised towards the temple of Rama. They came to destroy the people, they came to destroy the city, and they came to destroy Rama—all to let their virtues be heard. It was a set of boons that allowed these two events to meet: a peaceful Ayodhya where Lord Rama had empired and been inspired, and the Ravana, the Lord of Rakshasas, who sought to recover the power which he had once held high. Evil was gunned down in the rare evasion of tragedy, when the Indian government came to the aid of the helpless. But revenge had been sparked and Tragedy stirred. No less than three days later, another set of Rakshasas avenged their kind in London, where a series of coordinated bomb blasts shattered London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour—where 50 disciples were destroyed in the detonations.

A greater epic, the story of Evil, is neither novel nor unique. It occurs now, it occurred yesterday, and it will occur tomorrow. It will fight for itself for its strength, as it knows, too, that Good will fight against it to sustain permanence. However, what is Evil and Good is unbeknownst to all—save Aum the Redeemer, whose actions are the single consistency in a labyrinth of salvation, for those who strive to be, and are bestowed boons that guide them towards prosperity, tranquility, and satisfaction. And thus begins, sustains, and ends the Redeemer’s perpetual quest for redemption.

sHE rEMINDs ME OF HEr

BY AUBrEY ELsPETH rEYNOLDs When she was young, and he was not as old as he was now, he would watch her wash his dishes. Barefoot, usually wearing his sweatpants folded over once at the top so they just rested on her ample hips, a perfect resting place for a lover’s hand and too big sweatpants. She would wash the dishes, humming to herself, paying little or no attention to the television he painstakingly installed in the kitchen for her benefit. He would flit in and out of the room, finding excuses to retrieve a coin he’d left on the table, a brochure he’d just yesterday carelessly flung on the counter. He loved to watch her, methodical, purposeful, doing something for him she knew he despised doing himself. They would have silent conversations, exchanged in glances through eyelashes, droplets of water that clung to fingertips and then were sucked in by his thin t-shirts, hummed melodies he didn’t know, and canned laughter from the television.

Today, she was not so young, and he was older, and she was washing the dishes while he was eating his lunch and trying to watch the news. She’d just gotten home from work and heaved a deliberately audible sigh, ostensibly aimed at the pile of greasy plates awaiting her in the sink. He narrowed his eyes at her back and stabbed at the volume button with his finger. She seemed not to notice.

The water ran into the sink, gradually filling it. The sound always reminded him of the scalding hot baths he used to take to rid himself of headaches. He relaxed for a moment, chewing with relish, and remembering the way she used to look doing the dishes. Slowly, she lowered the plates and coffee cups into the water, and he found himself hypnotized by the way the soap bubbles glistened and shined, slipping over her nimble fingers as she carefully guided the dirty dishes into the sink and then reached for more. He remembered those hands for a moment, all the times they’d glistened, all the times they’d touched and held him, caressed him, massaged him.

The distinctive screech of a fork tong on stainless steel punctured his meditations.

“Jesus Christ!” he bellowed. “Can’t I even watch television in peace!”

He threw himself back from the table, knocking his empty plate off in the process.

They both watched as it hit the floor. It spun and sang for a moment, but did not

34

sHE rEMINDs ME OF HEr break. He looked up from the miraculously intact plate to her. Her eyebrows were raised, and he could tell she was vaguely shocked by his outburst, but her casual faÁade soon found its way back. She returned to her washing.

“I’m surprised you heard that with as loud as you’ve got the television,” she said over her shoulder. The smugness in her tone did not escape him. She had noticed the volume after all, but had filed it away to use against him when the opportunity arose. That habit of hers was particularly irritating to him because every little thing she did annoyed, enraged or inflamed him. He could not ignore her, could not file her away neatly in his memory. She was everywhere, unavoidable. Occasionally, and today was such an occasion, he felt like she was a gas, permeating his life with sinister stealth. And sometimes, when he was feeling the way he felt today, he resented the hell out of it. As he opened his mouth to deliver a scathing retort, the screen door opened.

“Hi, Kate,” she said casually, rinsing a saucepan.

“Hi,” Kate responded politely, with restrained enthusiasm, stealing a glance at him, smiling shyly. “I was just going to leave my check in your mailbox, but I saw your car in the drive, so here I am.” Kate shrugged, and it made her look young.

“Oh, well.” Soapy hands were held up for display at the sink. “Just hand it to Seth. I’m sure he’ll be happy to take anything you have to give.”

Her smirk was getting more and more infuriating as the afternoon wore on.

God, he hated when she did that, exposed his lechery to all and sundry. It wasn’t even lechery. Well, it certainly wasn’t perversion. Kate was beautiful, lovely, graceful, eager. And old enough to know it.

But Kate just grinned, neither shocked nor disgusted, apparently.

Intriguing.

“Here you go, Seth,” she murmured, lingering on the –th at the end of his name, just the way he liked it. He could feel the smirk from the sink as he snatched the check from Kate with a quick “Thanks” with absolutely no lingering.

“Well,” Kate exhaled, abruptly changing tone, rubbing her palms on her jeans, “I’ll be downstairs, I guess. I’m going out later to get groceries so, if you need anything.” She shrugged again.

“Bye, Kate,” she said from the sink, still scrubbing and rinsing with fervor.

Kate waved quickly at him, just a brief flutter of her fingers, really, and he felt

AUBrEY ELsPETH rEYNOLDs deflated, suddenly, ashamed at the tautness in his belly. Here we go again, he thought. Vaguely, he heard the screen door snap shut.

“Well,” she began, breathy, imitating Kate’s interjection, “I’m surprised she waited until I got home.” She was still smirking at him with that desperately vicious amusement of which she was so capable. “Maybe you should go visit in the basement tomorrow. A diversion might do you good, Seth.” She drew out his name, contemptuously.

“Stop,” he begged, shaking his head, dropping his elbows onto the table.

The tautness in his belly was coalescing into stone.

“I know it must get boring, all day by yourself, waiting for me to get home.”

“Stop!” he choked.

And, surprisingly, she did. He thrust his fingers into his thinning hair. His scalp prickled as his nails dug in. The water ran, as she continued to scrub and rinse, gently but purposefully. This was something she knew how to do. She had a rhythm, a procedure. This was a tangible activity, she’d told him more than once.

Not philosophical. Get the dish clean. It is either clean, or it is unclean. She didn’t love to do it, but she was required to, and so she did. And enjoyed it to a degree only someone plagued by abstractions could. Someone barked side effects on television. A car drove by.

“She reminds me of Her,” she whispered, small, grave, disconsolate.

Oh. Her. Capital ‘H’, Her. The Her. He supposed he knew this was coming.

He’d been cantankerous, out of sorts, restless, impossible. And then there was Kate, this beautiful young woman, renting their basement.

She had stopped washing. Her wet hands gripped the edge of the sink. He was suddenly and acutely aware of the miniscule elevation in temperature and humidity as the water continued to run. But he wasn’t thinking about relaxing, curative baths. He was thinking about fireworks and fur coats and the smell of cigarettes and brick doorways and Florsheim shoes. Death-of-a-salesman shoes, she called them. Her head was bowed at the sink.

He took a breath.

She held hers.

“She reminds me of you,” he said, all hostility gone, trying to make her

sHE rEMINDs ME OF HEr understand. She shook her head once and plunged her hands into the dishwater to retrieve her sponge.

“No,” she protested. “I was never that -” “Yes,” he interrupted forcefully, “you were.”

She turned then, unshed tears in her eyes, and gave him a watery grin.

It happened on New Year’s Eve. That December had been hellish. She was working diligently on her degree, showered constantly with accolades, successful, driven, going places. It was then he first started to resent her. She was too busy to pick up her socks, too busy to wash the dishes with any frequency. She was always smiling at someone else, expressing gratitude to someone else.

She would return home from class and chirp at him about Kant and communism, postmodernism, Chaucer. She was always distracted, stimulated. She was getting smarter by the day, while he got older and more exhausted. He couldn’t keep up with her.

“Listen to this sentence, honey,” she would say, and by the first comma he’d feel groggy and cotton-mouthed.

She was surpassing him. She was leaving him behind.

He was sure of it.

At a university event that concluded the fall semester that year, he looked around the room and saw all the poet-looking graduate students, younger than him - her age, even. He looked around at her professors, all attractively tweedy, and wondered which one she wanted to sleep with. He knew about her smiles, about what they could do to a lonely man in his forties.

He’d always thought, since the beginning, that she’d be the one to stray.

He was wrong. She wasn’t.

She was absolutely devoted to him, he found out afterward. Devoted to the idea of forever. And besides, she “wanted him to be happy,” as she reminded him in their numerous discussions after New Year’s. As if watching her grieve the loss of their intimacy, their two-ness, made him happy. As if finding her sniffling into his dirty laundry made him happy.

They’d fought. It was New Year’s and they were out, celebrating. And they fought about - something. He couldn’t remember. She probably remembered. She’d prob-

AUBrEY ELsPETH rEYNOLDs ably never forget.

He stormed off, left her with friends she’d run into in a bar he didn’t particularly like. As soon as he shoved the door open and felt the icy air slam into his inflamed face, lick his burning ears, he was ashamed. He was being petulant, he knew. He hung his head, and watched his shoes, newly polished, carry him down the street. It was freezing, of course. He shoved him hands in his pockets, hunkered down in his jacket, the picture of a brooding man.

He wasn’t sure where he was, or where he was going, when he heard his name. For a moment, he wasn’t sure it was his name he heard. But then he lifted his head, and saw Vivian. She was the new wife of a friend of his. A real trophy, a prize. She waved at him, and smiled, and he was undone. He wanted to cannibalize the carelessness with which she threw herself at him.

They fucked in a doorway in an alley, her arms and the fur coat her husband bought her for their first anniversary wrapped around him against the cold. He watched the puffs of his breath grow darker and more frequent as he neared climax. Fireworks exploded overhead. Vivian pulled her skirt down to cover her knees and drew her panties up. She lit a cigarette and winked at him.

“Happy New Year, Seth.” She sauntered down the alley away from him. He could hear the crowds separated from him by a matter of yards. He had never felt more alone. He fumbled with his belt, his fingers numb not from cold.

When he found her after an hour of sticking his head in bars and scanning the crowds for her distinctive hair, she rushed up to him.

“Did you get any pictures of the fireworks?” she asked, forgiving him for their earlier disagreement. His blank look told her everything she didn’t need to know. She was stricken, afflicted with the knowledge of something terrible, the wretched betrayal.

“You,” she began, her breath yeasty. “You smell like -” and she vomited on his shoes.

When she finished with the dishes, she announced she was going out like she was declaring war. Seth suggested she ask Kate to go for her, but she was resolute. It was like she’d decided something, for him and for herself. When she kissed him goodbye, it was like kissing someone with cancer, or someone very old. He had this horrible feeling he might never see her again as she was now.

sHE rEMINDs ME OF HEr As he watched her car back out of the driveway, and then plunge forward down the street, he wondered what he was to do in her absence before forcefully reminding himself she’d be right back.

He stood in their kitchen, watching water drip off the newly-washed dishes in the rack beside the sink.

He listened to the purr of the ceiling fan as it swung ceaselessly, laboriously, around and around. Seth had an instantaneous inkling he knew exactly how it felt to be caught in a circle, inexorably spinning.

He indulged himself for a moment, acutely aware of the peeling linoleum and the flickering fluorescent light, and the window that had to be propped open with a two-by-four. All the leaky, creaky appliances, escutcheons, and cabinet doors seemed to nod the heads they didn’t have in sympathy. He almost wept.

Instead he sighed, and pulled a faded dishtowel from a drawer and began to dry the dishes. He turned on the radio, tuned it to the jazz station he favored, and set to his task.

“Don’t explain,” Billie Holiday begged her lover, as the screen door slammed for the fourth time that afternoon. It was Kate.

She had not been wearing shorts before. And she had most certainly not been wearing that shirt. And he was reasonably certain the last time she was in his kitchen, she had been wearing a bra.

He swallowed.

“Hi,” she whispered. Oh. God. “Hi,” he responded, shocked by the steadiness in his voice. He had no idea from where that surety was derived. His heart was quaking. He wanted her so badly. He could feel himself – The plate fell all the way to the floor and shattered before he realized he had dropped it. Kate squeaked and hopped backwards. She hadn’t been barefoot before, either.

He looked from the floor, from the remnants of the china, to Kate and back again. Whatever he was thinking before was not what he was thinking now. He walked past the girl in his kitchen to the closet and retrieved a broom and dustpan.

As he began to sweep, he asked Kate what she was doing there.

“Oh,” she said casually, breathy, like when she said his name. “Your wife

AUBrEY ELsPETH rEYNOLDs came down to tell me she was leaving. So, I thought I could come up and visit you.”

“We’re not married,” Seth stated frankly.

“What?” She was confused, and it wasn’t a good look for her.

“We’re not married,” Seth sighed, as he scooped the ruinous shards of porcelain into the dustpan. “She’s not my wife.

“Oh.” Kate nodded, the confusion disappearing, replaced with a coy smile. She lifted herself onto the countertop and crossed her legs at the ankle, wiggling her toes which had been painted a painfully bewitching shade of pink.

He dumped the broken pieces into the trash, and restored the broom and dustpan to the closet. When he returned to the kitchen, he placed himself on the opposite side of the room as Kate, by the window. Kate was talking, and Seth was watching her mouth move.

He heard her car hit the curb as she turned into the driveway. He looked out the window as she opened her door.

It was one of those unaccountably beautiful days when the sun is shining and it’s warm, but cool. As Kate bit her lip and gazed at him through her suggestively lowered lashes, he watched her retrieve the grocery bag from the backseat of the station wagon and proceed up the brick walk.

She hefted the bag she carried, tossing one of her shoulders back, and the wind caught her hair and the sun stroked her face. And she turned her face to the sky and closed her eyes and that small contented smile she made sometimes appeared. He looked back at Kate, who was grinning at him suggestively.

The screen door slammed again, and she stepped into the kitchen, stopping abruptly as she crossed the threshold, her gaze drawn immediately to his, questioning, trying not to be hurt. Just as that hardness, that resolve, that had appeared just before she left, began to seep back into her face, he looked from Kate to her and smiled fondly, his gaze infused with affection for the woman who washed his dishes.

She smiled back, unwavering.

“Laura,” he said.

PsYcHO-THErAPY

BY ALYssA OLTMANNs Psyche Psychic psychedelic elations Telepathic equationsYou don’t know it, I do.

Probe Problematic erasings Enigmatic tracings, You don’t know What’s true

Per Persuasive Perversions Invasive Inversions I don’t want itI do

Con: My Conscious Subconscience Elicit electrolysis Curb the curb that’s In view

Guilty emotives I don’t have remorse for: Tie down or tie upTear down or tear up.

41

ALYssA OLTMANNs Finding excuses in reasons, Don’t hide what you’re meaningLie down or lie upStare down or stare up.

Figure out your psychology, Figure out your vocabularynow.

I don’t like to write down your feelings, Because you can take them back so quicklyClean out the basement, Clean out erase them Doll up or wear down, Take out or tear down-

I’m a constant idolation endulation-

Living alone

gUArDINg MAIN sTrEET

BY BrEANNE rEINHArD Rodney drove his car east on Main Street and then eased his car onto a side street. He exhaled heavily as he parked next to Denekoff’s. Main Street’s pride and joy was the cobblestone streets that had been laid upon the founding of the town over two hundred years earlier. These red brick streets were chipped and worn down, and there was a horrible dip in the road right in front of the small gift store. No matter how slowly Rodney drove, his front bumper always scraped the bricks. Across the street from Denekoff’s, there was the deli as well as an antique shop and a video store. The clock tower on the courthouse a few blocks away was just striking ten o’clock as Rodney unlocked the front door and entered the store.

Rodney had worked in the gift store for nearly twenty years. He was there six days a week including holidays, except Thanksgiving and Christmas. He arrived promptly and consistently at ten each morning and took his place on a stool behind the counter, from which he seldom moved until five o’clock (except for the five minutes it took him at noon to walk to the deli and buy a pastrami on white).

Rodney was the third clerk hired by Jeffery Denekoff, Sr. when he first opened his gift store. Jeffrey Denekoff, Jr. would eventually become the sole owner after inheriting the business in his father’s will. Jeffery, Jr. was four years younger than Rodney himself but never let his age influence his authority over his employees.

Rodney was the oldest staff member when he began; his colleagues generally suffered from pimply faces and tumultuous hormones, so Rodney at the ripe old age of thirty-three was chosen as acting manager. As the years progressed, most of his coworkers were women or girls; for the most part, the store stocked items that were flowery, lacy or strawberry-scented, so the town’s young men chose instead to pump gas or carry groceries. Rodney didn’t mind the lack of male company—but rarely had he pursued any of the attractive younger women with whom he spent so many working hours.

Back in his early days at the store, the old ladies in town called him ‘that homosexual at Denekoff’s’ and gave him sad smiles over the cash register; the high school kids called him that ‘stupid queer’ and hurled rocks through his apartment windows. Rodney wasn’t gay—he just didn’t bother with women, and

43

BrEANNE rEINHArD he never had. He lost his virginity to Carol Woburn when they were juniors in high school—and stopped answering her calls the next week.

Decades later, he began sleeping with Miranda Jamison, who worked with him, on his couch on the weekends and in the Denekoff’s fitting room on slow days. She was twenty-nine, and he was forty-four. After her thirtieth birthday came and went, Miranda confronted Rodney as they lay naked in his living room.

In the post-coital silence, he could almost hear the tick-tick-ticking of her aging womb. He didn’t care for children, he said, and didn’t want to learn how to be a husband. A few minutes later, he rose, pulled on his faded grey underwear and went to the kitchen for a slice of leftover pizza; a few days later, she handed in her resignation to Jeffrey, Jr.; a few weeks later, she left their small town for the big city; and a few years later, Rodney heard she’d become the wife of a state senatorial candidate.

Now, at fifty-two, Rodney just worked. Day in, day out. Each day was more or less the same. He reckoned the women just weren’t worth the trouble.

And Rodney wasn’t one to make new friends, and the few friends he had taken the time to make in high school left their small hometown for university life over thirty years earlier and rarely returned.

Just work and nothing and no one to return home to at night. Not even a cat, a dog or a goldfish. Rodney was alone; he’d accepted that a long time ago, and he didn’t care at all. He had turned down offers to play in a coed slow pitch softball league for six summers in a row before the organizers took the hint and stopped asking; he had declined more than a few Sunday dinner invitations from the Ferguson family over on Spring Street before finally receiving an earful from Mrs. Ferguson before she hung up the telephone. No friends for Rodney—just work.

It was dark in the section of the store that Rodney entered. There were no windows, but after twenty years, Rodney knew his path well. He walked to the left and flipped on the long fluorescent light above the greeting card display and continued back to the small office that contained most of the switches for the west room. He ducked into the employees-only restroom, cursing as he caught his foot on the strands of loose carpeting that never failed to trip him up, and turned the fuse in the fuse box that provided light to the remainder of the store.

The middle section of the store had a large display window with three man-

gUArDINg MAIN sTrEET nequins, standing watch over Main Street at all hours of the day. The two cash registers sat on the orange countertop that was centered with the fingerprinted window, and two stools sat behind the counter. This middle room contained the majority of Denekoff’s merchandise. Behind the employees stretched parallel rows of wooden tables covered in collections of gaudy costume jewelry, plaid dishcloths and floral table runners, porcelain angel figurines—actually, they were only plastic—scented candles made from soy—because the smoke burns cleaner—and a wide assortment artificial flowers, wreaths and garlands.

The last room was the smallest and the emptiest—the east room used to be a storage room until Jeffrey, Jr. had it renovated eight years earlier. The only items on display there were the hodgepodge collections on the sale table and a few racks of nightgowns and housecoats designed to fit the nighttime needs of older women. Rodney went to the back of this east room where the furnace and air conditioner were located and cranked the temperature down to a chilly sixty-two.

He heard the door open and as he walked back into the main room, he saw Carla Martinez stroll into work, ten minutes late. He nodded to her in a slight greeting and took his place on the wobbly stool behind the left register.

A moment later, after depositing her bag back in the office, Carla sat down and retrieved the nail file that she stored under the counter.

“Could be a slow one,” she said.

“Tuesdays usually are,” he replied.

A gray-haired woman made her way into the store just after ten-thirty and wandered into the greeting card aisle. Carla sighed and hopped down from her stool to check on the customer. After being assured that no help was needed—the woman was doing just fine, but thank you, deary—Carla returned to her seat, picked up her pencil and resumed her celebrity heartthrob crossword puzzle she had torn from the store’s copy of People magazine. Glancing up at Rodney, she rummaged through the pile of magazines that Jeffrey Denekoff supplied as a goodwill gesture toward his employees. The only other current issue was a Newsweek, but he waved it away as she offered it.

They couldn’t see the woman from where they sat. Rodney always felt that it was bad business sense to keep the employees in a room separate from the door. He was sure numerous kids had swiped birthday gifts for their mothers over

BrEANNE rEINHArD the years. However, Jeffrey Denekoff never seemed to think of this problem, and Rodney had never cared to mention it to him. He hardly gave a second thought to this particular customer, although he did imagine a scheme involving get well cards and adult diapers that was simultaneously amusing and disturbing.

Then the woman came through the door from the west room carrying two cards. She laid them on Carla’s side of the counter and began digging through her beige handbag for her matching beige wallet. As Carla rang up the total for the two anniversary cards and placed them in a small bag along with the receipt, the woman glanced up at Rodney and smiled at him sadly. Hmm, he thought, there’s another one who thinks I’m gay. But after the old woman had received her change and put it safely back in her bag, she walked slowly around to Rodney’s side of the counter.

“I was so sorry to hear about your aunt, dear,” she told him, patting him lightly on his hand. “She was a real sweet lady.”

Rodney just stared at her and shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it.

What happened?”

Her face registered a look of shock. “Well, your aunt’s passing last week, of course. A stroke, you know? And the funeral services were last Friday, but I couldn’t make it seeing as I had a doctor’s appointment up in Brockton that afternoon.” She paused, and seeing no change on his impassive face, asked, “Didn’t you at least see her obituary?”

“I don’t read the paper.”

The woman nodded and gave him another sad smile, different this time, then turned and walked out the door. Rodney saw Carla looking at him, so he shrugged and turned his head the other way.

And so the pair sat as another hour ticked by—Carla with her crossword and Rodney staring out at Main Street. The new mailman passed in front of Denekoff’s and raise a friendly hand in greeting, pausing only slightly as he realized he wouldn’t receive a reciprocal gesture. A pair of well-dressed, middle-aged women walked on the other side of the street, carrying several shopping bags from stores one block over. The women paused outside the antique shop, examining a wicker rocking chair. One of them leaned over and rubbed the underside of the chair, then withdrew her hand quickly as if she had found a splinter. The women left the chair and entered the antique store.

gUArDINg MAIN sTrEET A few minutes later, a little black girl scurried down the sidewalk across the street. She was wearing a yellow top and little grey shorts, and her sandals slapped the pavement as she ran. Following several yards behind her was a grayhaired white man and his graying-blonde wife. Rodney had seen them before and thanks to the gossip from the small-town women, he knew their story. The man was the reverend at the First Baptist Church over on Pine Street, and his wife worked as the secretary in the church office. The couple had lived in the town all their lives, high school sweethearts and such, and after they were married, he accepted the job as pastor at the town’s most attended church.

For over a quarter century, they had taught Sunday school classes and put on vacation bible schools in the summers for all the children in town, but they had not been able to have kids of their own. Something about her was the problem—or maybe it was him. Rodney couldn’t remember what the busybodies had said as they shopped for candles and wind chimes—he only knew that the couple was childless.

They had finally decided to adopt a child; a little over a year and a half ago, the reverend and his wife adopted a six year old black girl from the city. Apparently, her mother had died during labor and the father had some kind of drug problem; again, Rodney didn’t know for certain.

The girl turned and waited by the wicker chair for her parents to catch up.

She tugged on her father’s hand, grinning up at his wrinkled face. She must have said something funny because Rodney saw both the reverend and his wife cock their heads in laughter as they ushered the small girl into the store.

Rodney sighed and looked at the clock hanging above the window. Ten minutes before noon.

“I’m getting lunch,” he said to Carla.

“Just a minute, let me run to the bathroom first.”

“I’ll be less than five minutes. You can wait,” he told her as he strode into the west room to leave Denekoff’s.

Rodney crossed Main Street and veered left towards the deli. The door of the antique shop swung open, and out came the little girl. She noticed him watching and she waved to him. Rodney entered the deli. As he was waiting for his sandwich, he could see in the mirror behind the counter that the girl had pressed her face to the glass door. He paid for his sandwich and took the white paper bag.

BrEANNE rEINHArD The girl hopped back from the door as he approached. She scampered back to the wicker chair and plopped her small frame down on it. As Rodney stepped off the curb, he slid a sideways glance in the girl’s direction. Again she noticed and gave him a large smile, minus her two front teeth.

Rodney returned to his seat behind the counter with his pastrami on white.

“Same old, same old, huh?” Carla said. Rodney unwrapped his sandwich.

She looked out the window. “Pretty cute little girl, huh?” Still nothing.

Carla shot him a withering look as she headed for the bathroom, muttering, “I really don’t know why I bother…”

Rodney shivered. The air in the store was too cold, even for him. He stood up and walked back to the east room. After cranking the thermostat up a few degrees, Rodney returned to the registers and unwrapped his lunch.

He took a bite of his sandwich, and a glob of mayonnaise fell on the countertop. Rodney reached for a napkin and wiped away the drip. As he looked back out the window, he saw that a dark blue, four-door car had parked in a parallel spot in front of the antique shop and the wicker chair. The car was facing the wrong way for the parking spot.

Through the display window, through the car window, Rodney saw a young black man, maybe in his late twenties. The man made a slight motion for the girl to come near the car. When she did, the man opened his door and scooped her in. He placed her in the passenger seat, and Rodney could clearly see the fear on her small face.

The driver said something to the child, reached towards her and smoothed her hair. She looked back at the antique store where her adoptive parents were still shopping—and then back at the man. He smiled at her and drove down Main Street.

Rodney sat back, as much as one can when sitting on a stool. He shook his head a few times and then took a few more bites of the pastrami.

Carla returned from the west room and picked up the copy of Newsweek.

After only a couple of minutes, she put the magazine back under the counter and glanced out at Main Street.

“Guess that preacher and his family left,” Carla said. “That little girl sure was a cutie.”

Rodney shrugged and ate the rest of his sandwich. When he was done, he

gUArDINg MAIN sTrEET told Carla to watch the registers for a while. There was Christmas merchandise that needed to be ordered, and Jeffrey, Jr. had left a note for Rodney to get it done as soon as possible. In the office, Rodney sat at the desk, relieved to have a chair with a back, and pulled several catalogues out of a bottom drawer. He had been there for no more than ten minutes when Carla shouted his name.

He rose and returned to the main room. Carla wore a look of concern and pointed out the window across Main Street. Rodney saw the reverend and his wife now standing in front of the antique store, looking up and down the street.

They were yelling, and though he could not hear their voices, he knew the name they must be calling.

“The preacher and his wife—they’ve gone into all the businesses on that side of the street,” Carla told him. “They can’t find their little girl.”

Rodney was silent.

“You were sitting there. Did you see where she went?” Carla persisted.

Rodney was still silent, and they both watched as the reverend hurried across Main Street and into Denekoff’s.

“My daughter,” he cried. “She’s run off somewhere, I’m sure somewhere right along the street, but we just can’t find her. She didn’t come in here?”

Rodney shook his head. Carla looked grave.

“You didn’t see where she did go, did you?”

Again, Rodney’s head shook, and Carla said, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see her.”

The reverend closed his eyes and shook his own head.

“I’m sure you’ll find her soon,” Carla tried to soothe him. Rodney pulled at a loose thread on his pants pocket.

The three of them gazed out the window at Main Street. They saw the reverend’s wife return to the antique shop’s doorstep. They saw her shake; they saw her collapse into the wicker chair.

“Dear God,” the reverend said. He rushed out of the store and across the street to his wife.

“I’m going back to the office,” Rodney said. He walked out of the main room and through the west room to the office.

He sank into the rolling desk chair and for the first time, he thought about what had happened. Really thought about it. He had just seen a crime commit-

BrEANNE rEINHArD ted—he was a witness to a kidnapping. Rodney had seen all the TV cop dramas, and he knew what being a witness meant: long interviews with the police, offering details to create a composite sketch of the man, identifying him from a lineup, testifying in court. It would take so much time. Rodney felt tired. He sighed, crossed his arms on the desk and rested his head on them.

“Rodney.”

Carla’s voice shook him.

“Rodney!” she hissed at him as she walked into the office. “What the hell are you doing?”

Groggy, he rubbed his eyes and looked at the desk clock. After three o’clock. “What do you want?”

“The cops are here, they want to talk to you. Ask you questions about the girl. They still can’t find her. Main Street’s been a mess all afternoon, but you wouldn’t know, been sleeping back here. Cop cars and an ambulance and everything.”

Rodney stood up.

“I already talked to them. Told them she was there, I went to the ladies’, came back and she was gone. I said you’d seen her when you was getting lunch and that you were sitting up there eating while I was in the bathroom.

Rodney closed his eyes, composed his thoughts, and followed Carla back to the main room. He saw two of the town’s policemen standing in front of the counter, one in uniform and one in plainclothes.

He listened to their questions, but nothing they might have said would have changed his response.

“Yeah, I saw the girl. Passed her when I got my sandwich at the deli right before noon. You say they reported her missing at 12:15? Yeah, it was probably a good twenty minutes before that I was out there and saw her, just sitting on that chair.

“Yeah, so I brought my food back here and sat down, and like Carla said, she went to use the restroom. Just then I got to noticing how cold the store felt and remembered that I’d turned the air way down low this morning. Thought I’d turn it back up a bit, so I went to the east room over there and fiddled with the air conditioner a while, you know. When I got back to the counter, I didn’t see the

gUArDINg MAIN sTrEET girl anymore.”

One officer had been taking notes of Rodney’s story while the other questioned him. They seemed satisfied with his answers, and with Carla’s earlier, so they prepared to leave, reminding both employees to call if they remembered anything else, anything at all. Carla looked Rodney up and down as the policemen went out through the west room.

“Are you sure you’re telling them the right thing?” she demanded.

“Didn’t you think it was cold in here?” he replied.

She glanced in the direction of the east room and then looked back at Rodney.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And didn’t it feel better in here after noon?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Rodney nodded.

“I don’t feel so great,” Carla murmured.

Rodney pulled a ledger out from under the counter and picked up his nubby pencil.

Carla rubbed her temple and slightly moaned. “My head is throbbing.”

“Just go home,” Rodney said. He couldn’t stand another hour of her whining. “Day’s almost over. I’ll take care of it.”

Carla retrieved her things from the office and left without another word.

Rodney returned to his stool and put the ledger away. That work could wait until tomorrow. He alternated between watching the red bricks and the clock, as the latter ticked towards five. The vehicles left the street until there were two, then one, then none. The three mannequins stood frozen in place, always watching Main Street.

At five o’clock, Rodney turned the ‘closed’ sign and locked the door. He fished in his pocket for his keys as he sauntered to his rusted sedan on the side street, not glancing at all at the wicker chair on the sidewalk.

TO LYDIA

BY cHrIs kNOWLTON

You have the most beautiful of woman curves A pregnant you, round mother earth.

Glowing globe inside Your womb, gentle hill Of a stomach that rolling tucks under sloping cradle that was once our universe too. O turn, drifting planet Revolve spin rotate kick Push out into space Where glowing molten magma child will one day Molded, Solidify to fertile earth itself, Crystalized adult.

Perhaps you are so beautiful Because I see forming a glowing Hopeful future in you, as you carry The weight of the world in your belly.

52

NOT LIkE HIM

BY AUTUMN J. WEsT The south side of Chicago breathes short, shallow breaths. The streets are nervous. They twitch and tremble and shake from the sounds of horns honking, sirens blaring, and loud voices clashing horribly against each other. The buildings are jumbled, twenty per block; bungalows, two-flats, projects, and brick apartments. The people are active, always active. Winos hover outside of liquor stores. Drug dealers stand stationary on corners with shoulders high and hands buried deep in pockets. Groups of people wait impatiently for the bus. Children skip through the chaos on their way to school. The city runs, and while some are content to simply wave it along, others feel the need to sweat along side it. My big brother was one of those people. He was always trying to beat something, and he was fast.

“Come on, get loose!,” Reggie yelled at me. Then, he leaped into the middle of the street just as a car was coming. We were late for school. I tried to follow behind him, running as fast as my ten year old legs could carry me. But, I wasn’t fast enough. Tires screeched against the asphalt as a car tried to avoid me. It came to an abrupt halt and a woman leaned out the window.

“Hey, don’t run out in the street like that! You gon’ get yo’ little ass ran over!,” That’s what I remember her saying. She waited for my feet to touch the safety of the curb. Then, she sped off.

My brother looked down, shaking his head as I reached the other side. “You too slow,” He said to me as if I wasn’t already aware. “You can’t think about it. You just gotta….go,” He took off down the block. We were two and a half years apart in age, but the distance, the actual distance, between us could never be measured by numbers. Reggie was unconcerned with whether I could keep up or not. He didn’t think. He just went.

I will always remember that day, not because I almost got flattened by a car, but because it was the first day that Reggie ran away. It was the first time, of many, that I would wait after school for him to walk me home. It was the first time he would never come. *****

53

AUTUMN J. WEsT Reggie ran away from home thirteen times. I counted them. Between the ages of ten and twelve, I stood in his footprints and pointed my mother in the right direction. The reasons for this were like him, sporadic and sudden.

I would wait alone after school, digging my boot heels into the dirty snow on the corner of 72nd and Wabash. There were times when my fingers turned so stiff, I thought they would break off at the joints if I bent them. So, my mother was forced to give me a separate set of keys to the house. Then, there were those times when my brother waited an hour after we got home to disappear. He would tell me that he wasn’t going to wash the dishes, or that he wasn’t going to do his homework, and then fly out the back door. I was often left alone. So, my mother had to teach me all the codes to the alarm system.

It didn’t take much to make him flee. He just couldn’t stay put. I convinced myself that something chased Reggie, maybe a ghost. It was something that only he could hear or see, and it made him run away.

My brother was always angry, even when he was not. It was in his eyebrows, thick and bushy and turned in towards each other. He was tall for his age, at every age. And, in that way, I was forced to look up to him.

But, seeking advice from him was like shaking a magic 8-ball. He only had three responses; “Stop being a punk!”, “Stop crying!”, and “Get over it”.

Reggie was popular among friends and last among students. He was at once anxious to know and hesitant to learn. Playing sports might have been his salvation, but rules were his personal hell.

I remember long nights of my mother pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor, my stepfather calling everyone in the phone book.

They never found him by calling out. Instead, each time, someone called with a tip. “I saw Mook on the corner of 79th and Lowe, Mr. West.” A concerned friend might call and report. “He stopped by here earlier and ate. He said you dropped him off,” My grandmother would offer terrified.

There were too many people living in her house for her to keep up with my brother. My mother’s face was stale at these moments, occupied and empty.

Sometimes she would repeat the word “why” in the most frantic of rhythms and bury her face in her hands.

“Don’t be like your brother, Autumn,” she would plead with watery eyes. “Don’t be like him.”

NOT LIkE HIM And I wasn’t like him. We were the exact opposite. I spent years of my life trapped in the aftermath of his actions. He was the person in the car zooming past on a rainy day. I was the one standing next to a puddle on the curb. Everything he skipped over, hit me in the face. I was nothing like him. I was there to witness the pain on my parents’ faces. I was the one that watched the family being pulled apart like so many pieces of debris whirling around in a tornado. We were nothing alike. While my mother struggled through his homework with him in fourth grade, I was upstairs finishing mine alone. While he hollowed out crates to hang on the wire posts in the alley for basketball, I was inside making collages out of magazines.

When he was escorted out by the police for stealing Sour Straws from the store, I was left in isle 9 crying. Our real father was an alcoholic, and though I never cared to listen to a word he said, my brother would carry on whole conversations with him. ****** “Look at that,” My brother once said while we were walking down the street. He pointed down at the concrete.

“Did you know those is diamonds on the ground?”

He stopped.

“No, they ain’t!” I rolled my eyes.

“Yes they are.”

“Then, why are they on the ground?”

I asked in disbelief.

“Cuz don’t nobody want them no more.” He answered simply.

We both gawked as the sun reflected bright whites, sparkling reds, and shimmering greens against sidewalk. I knew they were really broken pieces of glass, but I pretended to believe. Reggie was always dreaming up fantastic explanations and outrageous definitions for reality. When I was younger, I thought he did it for me, but as I grew older I began to think that he did it for himself. He saw what he wanted. I saw what was. ****** At the age of fourteen, my brother ran away for the last time. At

AUTUMN J. WEsT the age of forty-four, my mother hunted him down for the last time. Three days after his initial flight, my grandmother called the house.

“Come get him,” She said over speaker phone. Somehow, Reggie ended up over her house, after exhausting all of his options. This time, my mother’s face was cold and determined. This time was different.

I’ll never forget the ride to pick him up that day. The blocks passed my eyes one by one, in slow motion. The ride was silent. No music.

No conversation. No nothing. I noticed every abandoned building that day.

I spotted every vacant lot. I knew my life was going to change. I could feel it, solid in the air. It was just my mother and I. She looked over at me and struggled her face into a smile. Then, she grabbed my hand.

“I love you.” She said. “I love both of my children.” I’ll remember those words for the rest of my life. They shot across my ears like a disclaimer in a prescription drug commercial. I knew she loved me. She told me that everyday. Why did she feel the need to say it like that?

We pulled up to my grandmother’s house and my mother got out. She rang the doorbell and seconds later my brother and grandmother appeared. I watched through the car window as they moved around like characters on a muted television. My brother’s face was blank. I wished I could tell what he felt, but I couldn’t. His face was void of emotion and life.

My grandmother looked at Reggie with a forgiving affection and took his head in her hands. She kissed him on the forehead and gave a strong long hug. Then, she gave my mother a kiss on the cheek and waived to me in the car. I waived back, remembering that I too could be seen. My mother and Reggie began walking back toward the car. He glared at me and motioned “get in the back seat” with his thumb. I did. I always did. They sat in the car, but my mother didn’t start it.

“Reginald,” she called his full name like she always did when she was angry. “I told you the last time you left, that if you did it again, you couldn’t come back home.” She spoke calmly.

“You kickin’ me out?” I saw fear on my brother’s face for the first time.

“No. I’m sending you to Louisiana to stay with your great aunt and uncle. Maybe it will help you to get away from this damn city.” Mom

NOT LIkE HIM started up the car. The majority of our family lived in Louisiana, between the Shreveport and Benton area.

“Yes!” Reggie celebrated. He was happy to go. He was always happy to go. “When do I come back?” He asked with eyes wide open.

“I don’t know,” was my mother’s reply. Simple. Sudden. Permanent.

My brother glanced at me through the rear view mirror, confusion in his eyes. He said nothing else, and neither did my mother. I think I must have felt every single pot hole on the ride home that day. ****** I don’t remember my brother packing. I don’t remember the days before he left. I don’t remember any conversations or dinners. I don’t remember talking to him or seeing him move about the house. I do, however, remember the train station. I remember the burning in my throat as the whole family navigated the great halls of Union Station. Echoes of people’s conversations danced in a blur around my head. People were hugging goodbye and kissing hello. We made it to the holding area and waited in silence. My brother’s eyes shifted from side to side, his hand clutched tightly on his book bag strap. He looked…scared. Finally, he turned to face me. He stared at me as if he were looking into a mirror, like could show him what he wanted to see. But I could not.

His train was called and the family gathered at the gate. My stepfather gave Reggie a brief hug and palmed his shoulders. “Be good,” He said something to that effect. My mother grabbed him tight and started to cry full tears. She told him she loved him. He shook his head, “I know.”

“I just want the best for you,” Mom explained.

Reggie didn’t say goodbye to me. He nodded his head instead. Then, he disappeared from the gate onto the train.

I cried as we awaited the train’s departure. I didn’t think I would, but I did. That is a hard feeling to describe, watching someone go.

Not knowing if or when they will return. Maybe he would be a man and I would be a woman the next time we saw each other again. The truth was,

AUTUMN J. WEsT I didn’t quite know who I was without him. Without Reggie as a point of comparison, who was I supposed to be? My whole life I felt like I barely knew him. I didn’t understand him. Sometimes, I thought I hated him. Yet, he made me who I was. I was me because I was not him. I, somehow, in some way, formed in contrast to my big brother. All the times he left me alone were never as absolute as this one. I cried at the train station because I realized that, that identity is relative, that I was relative, and that even reasons were relative. Sometimes, we are who we are because of the people around us. Maybe I was who I was because I never really had an option.

Perhaps if given a choice, I would choose to be something different. It was a scary thought. Personality was relative. My brother never needed a reason to leave, because he never felt he had a reason to stay. I never needed a reason to stay because I never felt I had a reason to leave. It was that simple.

rEsUrgENcE

BY JAJAH WU

Resurgence: that is, of memory, restraint, implosion. for those of us who have grown up in self-sustaining embassies, small encroachments, homesteads on foreign ground the dust under our feet begins to resemble other dust, the kitchens smell like old kitchens in other worlds.

The smell of oil, or sauce, or spice. Old kettles, blackened pots sheened with past meals no matter how hard we scrub them with 2cent pieces of steel wool.

We clap aluminum on the kitchen walls, as if 2cent foil will keep us from mucking up the cream white, the ice white sterility Of borrowed walls and tile-tops.

In the spring of a month a long time month ago, I urged no to my father (certain of disaster) my father who made me stand and stare: he poured water outside our second story apartment stained the cement on what no one would call terrace in an uneven circle.

He bowed twice to air while I stood stiff half cracked my back bobbing my head hoping to my new heaven the neighbors wouldn’t pop their heads out one-two-three and see us in some lost ritual, some unknowable shame.

My father’s hand never left the door, propped it open through the whole dumbshow, inviting in his suicided brother who, even if he had known where we lived, couldn’t have found the money for a transpacific flight from his grave

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JAJAH WU to Stillwater, Oklahoma.

But I was talking of kitchens, not those awkward yellowfaced ghosts that trail behind me, pay them no mind, they like their stories outloud too much.

On feast days or saint days (we called them something different but I am speaking after all to you) we piled the table: mishmashed, smashed potatoes my mother said (so they are anyway), roasts, wintermelon, bittermelon, mooncakes, silver scaled fish and bright rice, soda pop, and jewish wine.

We kept the walls sealed, the stove scrubbed, whole pieces of my mother’s fingers went to the scrubbing, but still when I took the landlord up the staircase and show him the whole lonely arena, husked rooms and funereal curtains, something of us stays. It smells like Chinese food, he says.

I peeled my skin back in shame.

I tell him quick: the fridge we cleaned half a year once, the floor half a week once.

Hell, he says, it still smells and jots down the fine.

A tragic tale.

But in my sleep sometimes, it goes down different, I say: We forgot the ceiling and the ceiling is the culprit, being so much and so little like sky, you tend to forget the sky (it is too generous and keeps bad company, covering any heads it finds) perhaps the smell of us is in the ceiling, or maybe we spread too much, our arms, my sister and me, a redundancy of skin and fingers, we grew too much over the formica counters, she crawled and I followed.

But more likely we have leached roots into the cracks between the stuck on tiles. We cleaned the carpets, but some seeds are too small to see,

rEsUrgENcE they slip out with our nightmares and dreams, out our skin and eyes and hair (my skin does not peel back as I say this) out the soles of our feet and the tops of our heads, so that no matter how deep your eradication, hygienic sprays, orange gels, and inoculations, some new tenant will always say how despite the whitewashed walls and windowpanes, rooms decamped and ready for new use, the kitchen smells of us immigrants and our food.

A MEETINg

BY kEN BEAvEr

In front of a small building I’ve never seen, in a city I’ve never been and the things around me dance in shadows. The square is black with only bright yellow light spilling room two secluded windows off-back, a man with a pointed nose and a black wide rimmed hat snarls in my direction but he isn’t looking at me. Sounds from he sidewalk like there’s small stones exploding into tiny pieces, quick ideas briefly evaporating to dream and children falling scraping their wrists on jagged stones and falling into heaving masses of whiteness. I have an idea that something isn’t going quite right. The subway station is to my left but I don’t know where to take it because the signs are in another language and I don’t know where I am or where I’m supposed to be anyway.

I sit down in the back smoke corner of a small coffee shop and think that people are looking at me. Sitting alone in a round circular berth I order nothing and lay my head against the wood. A waiter tells me there’s a one drink minimum so I get a black coffee and stare at it for almost an hour. That’s about when she comes up and offers me a cigarette. Her eyes are wide open and bright blue, presenting an enthusiasm that’s absent in her voice. I accept and we smoke and she talks about herself. In the back of her car the skin on her stomach wrinkles her back pressed against the wall and arms around my shoulders. She talks to me like she’s bored and when I get out I leave a sock in her car and I’ll never see her again.

Eventually on the train I chew on dry bread and try to fall in love with every girl I see. One, beautiful thin with black straight hair looks back and smiles and my stomach lurches forward, I get off the train not really knowing where I was going to begin with it didn’t really matter. A kid gets off with me with a single strap brown bag and I follow him to an apartment where he disappears though a gothic doorway. I sit across the street, he’s inside with his father in front of the television, neither of them are saying a word or looking at each other and I feel comfortable. In front of a gas station I go inside to buy cigarettes and the operator looks at me like I don’t belong buying cigarettes from him and I can’t think of a reason, walking down the sidewalk, that he’s wrong. The sky glows red, and dark patches of small birds hover around the half-sun. One drops, suddenly rapidly and hits the ground and it sounds like a bird hitting the ground. Almost

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A MEETINg immediately tiny brown dots spill from the cracks and encompass his body and I see his beak decompose and crumble in seconds. I sit on dirt and take notes under an elm tree with thick branches, a man in a lime green overcoat sits down next to me and tells me not to go, I wasn’t planning on it but nevertheless I get up and leave and he begins to sob, I think about asking him about it but decide it is better left untouched.

The next morning of the appointment I’m sitting on the same bench waiting for a black car with American license plates, he’s coming to tell me about my dead son. I’m going to kill him. He has trusting eyes because he knows you can’t fuck with him even if you want to. He puts his hands in his pockets and glides along next to me like a ghost.

In his voice I can hear a thousand high screams, the flags been at half-mast for six years and I can’t see it getting any higher, and don’t know what will happen if it drops. His teeth are full of meaty chunks that look stringy. His breath smells like hot blood, he continually clicks his teeth as we talk and it makes me want to die. He’s the prefect he tells me, of the area, of everything. A medicine-doctor sticks his head out of a ground floor window, it smells like purple incense. His eyes are covered in silver lenses, he yells something about Spanish Tuesdays and is shot on sight from an invisible barrel. “What is Spanish Tuesday” “Never heard of it” and we walk on. I can hear his stomach growling through his chest, sounds like a hundred fishheads with metal teeth devouring one another constantly, like taking a bite off a wet pear.

My son died in war, form what can guess, in sand, but we’ve been at war in sand for decades and will be forever, once you go in there you can’t come out, it was never supposed to be a holy war but somehow it always turns into that. To the right a bright orange prison jumper flames stuck in barbed wire, the head that was covered by a black hood and seems to be hanging by something that isn’t there, the body screams without a voice and audience. He looks at it and spits near my shoes “Why would that happen?” and he wasn’t looking for an answer.

I can see them following us, swarming around corners like bulletproofed roaches, scattering up fire escapes and down subway stations, trampling people under black boots in the process. An old woman that must be a hundred explodes and her pupil rolls two inches and by the time I look up she’s gone and the news trucks are pulling up. The blonde woman gets out with disheveled hair and her skirt pulled up to her chin “I don’t

kEN BEAvEr know, something about things like this just make me…:” and a camera man with glassed eyes and greasy hair cannot believe his luck, he came without even getting hard now clutches himself in agony as his shriveled balls beg for pornography.

We get to the office. Thousands of people mostly brown complexioned stand by the gates throwing flowers and stones, his arrival is a mix of raw agony with heart touching extravagance and I get the feeling that this happens everyday and he loves it. A woman clutching her baby to her bare breast tears silently near the corner. As the man approaches her she drops to her knees and covers her baby’s head with her thin hair. He puts his finger under her chin and she looks up weeping. Her husband cups the kid as they take her, quivering, and you can hear them just passed the gate while husband empties his stomach on the yellow grass, shaking, he sets the boy down and runs headstrong into the brick until he’s a bubbling mass on the ground with a shaking wrist, and all the while the men pounce around like caged animals released and howl towards the growing moon with high pitch squeals, she rolls her eyes back and thinks about June.

Through the reflecting windowless hallway, a window would mean an eye hole, he walks with his chest to the roof, stopping only briefly to insist on the correctness of the institution. “If it were wrong, then where would we be right now,” gesturing to the window in some other room, instead of responding I check my reflection in the mirror and tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. I am led to a room where he leaves me with a glass of water that doesn’t look like water, I drink it anyway, because fuck him. When he comes back he’s looking shorter younger and altogether a much different person than he was before. It’s once we get out the door and I’m sweating and realize that it’s actually a woman wearing the same thing that he was and who floats along just the same too.

She’s got a short cut hair and speaks like she’s French, even though she’s obviously an American trying to speak like she’s French and really she’s just a big green-eyed corpse with skin falling from under her arms floating around in the air by the chair that I’m sitting in with wet palms and suddenly again alone and I feel something crawling up my leg and ignore it.

I’m thinking about State, and thinking about how many hours or days or even it could be years for all I know and it doesn’t matter. Every so often they bring the

A MEETINg muddled water and I love them for it because it makes me indifferent. I was so indifferent before I came here I can’t even dream. I haven’t been awake and I haven’t slept in probably just as long, when she comes in and slides herself right up under my chin and I can smell her and feel her bumpy skin rubbing right against the stubble on my face, her tongue running circles around my hanging flesh. I’m not sure the last time I’ve eaten but I know I’m not hungry and the room tastes like moldy rock, it’s cool and sharp like underground. The last time she came in she grabbed me right there and I didn’t respond a bit, my eyes sagged like they were on a string and dried out in shrivels. I can’t open them and when they’re closed I see piles and piles of my son swirling in red fetal juices sucking a glowing white underdeveloped thumb and I feel nothing for it whatsoever, soon enough I’ll have nothing of him left, I can feel him slipping out from under me like a rug, drifting towards rays of shining heaven where there’re people waiting and muttering under their breath and whoever’s waiting behind the podia in the white seem like they’re more interested in tossing shards of red meat down towards the mud, each time he gets up close to the gate it closes with a reverberating echo and then suddenly it swings open.

This time it’s him for sure, she’s standing in the corner, nude, with both hands clutching her bush and she’s got her back pressed up against the wall moving up and down so that dust stone dust is hovering around her like a cloud, a line of murky blood rolls over her shoulder and he glances, eyes like a chipped diamond and talks through his teeth “Looks pretty good over there doesn’t it?” and then stands stretching, adjusting his crotch and walking over to the corner he starts to kiss her on the forehead, she laughs an awful slamming siren laugh and throws him to the ground with a shrug, he looks up like the apocalypse and she spits three times, into his eyes and once in his mouth, he falls back paralyzed and curls into a stone ball. I hear a noise behind me like a grocery cart, my head sags to my chest as I struggle not to fade, looking back up she’s gone.

We’re in a large room with Americana decoration, blue tiles and mailboxes with white numbers, a wooden chair with a straight back. She’s across the table so far that I can’t be sure that its’ her but I know that it is. Piled in front of me- on copper plates from the North West, in silver glasses gurgling red, in bowls big enough to feed God- it’s him, crawling towards me through sand, limbs awry, rolling over himself in constant correctness, his diaper sags like it’s about to burst open his stomach. I get up and run, as fast

kEN BEAvEr as I can which probably is just a little slower than most people walk and I begin to hear the sound, like I heard in the prefect’s stomach, like I heard exploding in the streets in my baby-nightmares, a sound that the world must have made when it began and certainly made when it ended, and piled high in front of her licked clean like pearls, piled high almost to the ceiling and she’s using presidential fingers and her toes and feeding, just feeding and to the left grabbing one by one Kentucky arms and legs and beaks with silent nostrils, heads with silent eyes and invisible pupils and the sounds of neurotic calendar excrement sunsets echoing through fecal stench and her skin flaking off that she sucks up like pepper. She’s sneezing and as she does her shoulder dislocates and rolls back into place, she looks up at me and without a word everything’s clear and whatever’s gone is too late. So I remove my clothes which she watches in tense anticipation, I step up onto the table and feel a cool draft form where I can’t tell, the table is cold and thick and wet chunks under my feet between my toes, she stops only briefly and I drop to my knees and fall into finite comatose where she’ll eat me like she ate my baby

“sAY sOMETHINg

DAvID sHEFFIEck

Come on, Cathy. Please? I thought we were supposed to be having fun tonight, weren’t we? Breaking out of the routine, you know, doing something besides just watching TV and drinking and sitting around?

Of course you know – it was your idea. You were the one who wanted this. Not my fault if it ended up sucking. I couldn’t help it; I didn’t want to do it anyway. Don’t fuck with the formula, I always say.

I don’t really always say that, you know I don’t. When have I ever said it before?

Never, that’s when. I was excited about trying something new, just as much as you were.

I thought it was a great idea. I tried to like it, I honestly did. I mean, I don’t really have the money for it, and you weren’t gonna pay for anything cuz you don’t have money either, but that’s beside the point. I thought this all turned out a lot better than I expected.

The point is, I went into it thinking it was a great idea too. Definitely. So that’s why I don’t get why you’re shutting me out like this, that’s all. Just let me know what’s going on. Why won’t you? We don’t even need to talk about it, if you don’t want – just tell me and I won’t even comment on it. And then we can both go to sleep, and deal with it tomorrow or whenever. Whenever you want to.

I understand: you don’t want to talk about it. Okay? Message received, loud and clear. But you’re really not thinking about how I feel right now, are you? You’re just being selfish – you’re not talking to me just because you know it bothers me. You should think about how I feel, when you’re lying there and I’m asking you to say something and you just refuse to. You’re always going on about how thoughtless I am, but you know that’s just carelessness. What you’re doing now? It’s thoughtless. Really, genuinely thoughtless. You call me thoughtless, but it’s always been just you.

And you know why? It’s cuz you don’t care. About me, I mean. It’s obvious how much you care about yourself. But if you cared about me, even just a little, you’d tell me what’s going on. That’s how you could show me you care.

Still nothing?

Are you even awake?

Jesus, I honestly can’t believe you’re fucking doing this! I’m trying to talk to you, trying to work things out, and you’re shutting your goddamn eyes and trying to sleep.

Why do I even bother? It’s obvious you don’t have any interest in working things out,

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DAvID sHEFFIEck going to sleep like that. How can you sleep at a time like this? It’s inhuman, that’s what it is. I could never do that; I’m normal.

Well, anyway, I was thinking of something you mentioned yesterday. About ‘Ligeia,’ remember? I don’t think it has anything to do with the supernatural, or Poe’s fucked up ideas about women, or whatever it was. I think the whole thing’s just a result of the narrator being doped out of his mind. He’s an opium addict, you know. And he’s just hallucinated the whole thing, or at least most of it. I think that’s the point of the story, that Poe sorta tests us to see if we’re gonna accept this fantastical resurrection or if we’re gonna realize it’s just a hallucination.

What d’you think of that? Got something to say about that? Does it make more sense to you? Or less.

Well, I think it’s convincing. You should too. Hey, gimme a little more of the blanket, wouldja? It’s cold in here.

Well fine – if I have to pull it off of you, that’s fine too.

You know, it wouldn’t really be that hard for you to just tell me why you’re so upset at me. I didn’t even talk to her, not more than a few words, so I know it can’t be that.

And I mean, you know you’re upset, I know you’re upset, you know I know you’re upset.

So just say something. What’re you trying to avoid? What’s gonna be accomplished by keeping me in the dark about this whole thing?

Whatever it is. I’ll never know if you don’t tell me.

Nothing, that’s what’s gonna be accomplished. Nothing at all. Completely unproductive. But, you see, if you tell me, then we can talk about it. We can figure it out, fix the problem, that sort of thing. The sort of thing people are supposed to do in these situations. You know.

I don’t even know what your problem is, you see? How’m I supposed to work this out all on my own? I need to know what this’s about. I don’t even know; I don’t have any idea. And I don’t think you do either. If you did, you’d just tell me.

It just seems like such a shame, you know what I mean? The night started off so well, for both of us. We were having fun, right?

I really care about you, you know. I really do. I want what’s best for you. And right now, that’s for you to talk to me. Trust me on this, baby, just talk to me. Don’t hold

sAY sOMETHINg back – whatever it is you’ve gotta say, just say it and then we’ll figure it out. There’s nothing so bad that we can’t work through it.

You know, it wasn’t my fault we missed the first bus. I meant to double-check the schedule, but I know I told you it’d be between five and ten after. I remember that very clearly, it was right before you went to the bathroom. Very, very clearly said that. And you nodded and said okay, so you heard me – don’t try and deny it. So this can’t be an issue of me being late. I mean, I’ve been on time for at least a month now. I haven’t kept you waiting once that whole time. It’s something I’m working on, cuz I know it bothers you when I’m late. But this time, I wasn’t. So it doesn’t make sense for you to be mad at me for that.

Look, you don’t need to say much, just as long as you say something. What if I listed off ideas about why you might possibly be upset, and you just said, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to them? What about that?

Is it cuz I was late getting over here?

It was only a couple minutes, anyway.

Is it cuz I didn’t suggest getting ice cream afterwards?

I didn’t even think you might want some – it’s sorta cold out still.

Is it cuz the waitress was sorta a bitch to us?

That’s not even my fault, so I dunno why you’re taking it out on me. I mean, I stiffed her on the tip to get her back for it, you know. You were there. You’re always doing this, and by this I mean taking shit out on me when it’s not my fault. Not stiffing waitresses. You always overtip, even when they’re lousy. But seriously, at a place as nice as that? They really should have better service. It was busy, like you said, but c’mon – it’s her job to get us what we need, when we need it. I don’t see anything wrong with tipping the way I did, do you?

How about you just stop doing this, and say something to me. So we can stop playing these little games. Let me know what it’s all about.

It can’t be that you’re still pissed about me talking so much during dinner. I mean, you weren’t saying anything – what was I supposed to do, just let us eat in silence, like usual, like we’re old repressed married people? I had a lot to talk about, but if you didn’t want to listen to it you could’ve just said so. I woulda shut up, if you’d said something. I know you don’t believe me, but I would’ve.

Is it cuz I wanted to change our plans for next Wednesday?

Look, I know you don’t like it when I do that, but really – it’s days away, and at

DAvID sHEFFIEck least I’m letting you know ahead of time this time, right? That’s gotta count for something, doesn’t it? It should, at least. I just was thinking, and I realized I didn’t have space in my schedule for us to do much that night.

Maybe we could still do something, if you really wanna. Like, I could take you out for coffee or ice cream or something, as long as we did it real quick. I just don’t have much time, that’s all. I’m a busy guy. You know that. But I like spending time with you, so we can try and work something out. How’s that sound? Huh? What do you think of that?

Hey. Hey. I’m sorry, okay? I’m really, sincerely sorry that I upset you. I didn’t want to. I didn’t mean to. But I did. So I’m sorry. I apologize. I care about you, I’m just an idiot sometimes. I wasn’t even thinking, that’s all. Now how about you tell me what’s up, huh? You owe me some sort of explanation for all this, after all I’ve been through. And we need to get through this, or else I dunno what I’m gonna do.

Don’t you agree? It’s late, you know. I need to be up early in the morning, and at this point it seems like you’re just drawing this out cuz you don’t have to and you like to see me suffer or something.

I know you don’t actually like to see me suffer. That’s just how it seems right now, a little. Think about it. We’ve been talking about this for forever now, or at least I’ve been talking about it forever, since you don’t seem to want to talk about it, and we’re not getting anywhere. I don’t even know when we started.

Really, I don’t even know how we started. Like, what set you off. Don’t have the slightest idea. I’m sorry for it, I really am. But I’m totally confused by it.

I’m still as much in the dark as I ever was. So c’mon, you owe it to me. You owe it to us, right? We were supposed to have a fun night tonight, remember that? What happened to that? So please, I’m asking you again for the absolute last time. Come on.

Say something.”

ON W. TOUHY, cHIcAgO, IL JEFF WAxMAN (2620.)

When I came off the street and out of the slush, the hem of my coat was stained the same gray color as the cuffs of my pants and the winter sky. I stood outside the only familiar building on the block and contemplated going inside, but the little boys were out for recess at the yeshiva across the street and their ball had escaped them over the fence and crossed the road to bump anxiously at my ankles and the little boys called to me for it, confined to one side, with their small hands pushing through the bars and clapping insistently and their soft payos curling at their temples and an instant later, I could see the faces of six million of my people behind another even higher fence, but I turned away from them and I went inside (2625.) through two sets of smudged glass doors and past the troll at the front desk. I passed a dozen cells full of empty people before I came to her room and crouched in front of my own flesh and blood where she lay in dirty dappled twilight amidst the stench of immobility and I looked into her crusted, filmy eyes and I slowly asked her my question in the lowest of low tones, and she showed her rotting teeth rotting and slurped back the thick saliva pooling in her fat lower lip and blinked back the scum floating on the watery surface of those watery milk-eyes and she stretched her cracked and pale bloodless lips, but no answer came out with the breath that choked and rattled through that clogged and clotted throat and no answer lay in her dead wet eyes and I got up, knees popping from my low crouch, and I left her there in that soggy rotten soggy bed and went past the empty full rooms pushed through the double sets of double doors and I was back on the street (2919.) and away walking away from the thinking corpse in that living crypt and I was angry and hungry and thoughtlessly looking through the window of a storefront and I could see dozens of loaves of bread of every kind. Dark weighty ryes and golden challah, braided and glazed in bright egg. The woman behind the glass counter was faded with flour and wore her hair under a shamatta and her wide thick shoes poked out from beneath a dark dusty skirt and I went into the bakery where sunlight filtered through lazy clouds of sugar and flour and unthinking yeast and I bought a black loaf of pumpernickel which I ate while I walked through the gray slush that overflowed from the gutters and stained the hem of my coat and the cuffs of my pants with the salt and dirt and filth of winter while shrewd little birds picked at the heavy crumbs that I left behind as I left it all behind me.

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HI

BY MIcHAEL sQUEO

Reply to: hous-246168842@craigslist.org Date: 2007-05-06, 8:32AM CDT

hi My name is Matthieu, I’m 34 years old, I’m from Caen, FRANCE, I’m looking for a live-in position in Champaign.

I love movies and anything in regards to the natural, from outdoor walks to very long hikes, I’m always laughing also. Many of my friends have told me I’m an honest man (honesty is my own determination) and I’m a good listener and know how to hear what you really feel or mean. I know how to dance, I’m physically fit, DRUG FREE, I wait with interest to hear from you. I adapt to all circumstances, for example, in Los Angeles (I’m in Los Angeles for a small bit now) I knew my younger brother Paul only because I’m living with him so the next week I went for a walk at a gym and after 3 miles I made two friends because of luck and my determination.

It is as simple as 123.

Just like you I’m ready for a HOT summer and have enough money to treat myself and you to dinners. I’m always smiling and laughing, easy going, straight, responsible, I saved a woman’s life once, she choked on one bar of Noir au Grué de Cacao (a very delicious dark chocolate that I bought her also) and I performed a Heimlich Maneuver in less than one minute. I’m the type of man you will need around the house, if there is anything in your life that you can’t talk about you can because I’m ready to listen and will speak to you on a large number of topics, from physical fitness (I’m developing diet programs featuring RESULTS that I can teach you) to boyfriend or girl friend problems to even long discussions in regards to the Frankfurt School or Ludwig Wittgenstein, what ever you like.

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MIcHAEL sQUEO I am not worried because of my personality of determination, I will have many friends in Champaign but I would love to meet you personally as well. For example, in Caen there are film theatres with large and real velvet curtains for when the film begins, and that will be what it is like when we meet.

I wait with eager interest to live with you, please write to me soon, I know we will find a way.

rOMULUs & rEMUs

BY PHILLIP WILLIAMs i

Whispering laughter spills from a dead woman’s womb And it is here, in pale, wintry focus, that we share space Cradled by fragility through waxing waters Below I told you once to never harm me Cooed it beneath the fig tree where mossy roots licked our floating limbs Smiled at you while suckling beasts musty with wilderness Our animistic love sang like the bowing of trees dancing in wind The scent of wolf’s milk Burning wildly across your lips ii There was no convincing you that it was dead a giant stuffed animal bleeding on the road Its final leap enlivened howls pulsing like laughter

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rOMULUs & rEMUs from your eyes Neither of us had seen a wolf that close Its parted mouth a thing to carry keener than famine I looked back hoping no one would drive beside us wondering who the blasphemers of corpses were, poking the pregnant beast with an ice scraper But you were so curious as if you knew her before her tits withered on the cold asphalt As if she coddled you Lupa, with her parted mouth moaning your name I’ve always had faith in the unfed portions That they would not open in a sting of hunger, brand new, hewed against my flesh like wolf’s teeth

PHILLIP WILLIAMs

Driving home, Lupa’s feral hair knotted in our memories What empires do we speak of now that we know the violence of our thirst?

How could we forget, so soon, the stain of moss, the scent of milk climaxing all around us?

Both of us Bursting For a taste of our own

BrOOksIDE MINE

BY JAMEs kNIPPEN From the cage of her shaft,

the mine hums eerie melodies

that begin within her hollow belly.

Traveling down the manway,

among the skips, pipes & cable,

desperate men meet grave possibility

for between 17 & 32 dollars a day.

Is this worth the pain of knowing

that her stope’s roof crumbles like ash,

just as a black lung between the fingers

of a Harlan County surgeon’s hands?

Her vent shafts are an old miner’s lungs,

the clean air they see moving slowly,

falling into her chasms & orepass,

joining curses of Yarborough’s name,

restive breath, silent prayers to God.

77

THE FAcE IN MY PIANO BY sHANNON LArsON The surface of you is harsh like a cold stone that has been polished by water when I watch, before touching.

Touching, I feel my tips to your sockets small, straight slit into separations of high box table mounds low burrow to the earth crevices.

Touching, you become no longer of a stern, unsoftenable surface.

I can smooth you press into the wrinkles on your face feel the tiny eyes that move under the film of your lashes that blink in tune with my fingertips.

You pull my weight down through tiny whorls and cracks that look like desert weave.

I am taken to the belly where your veins are kept to the belly where your veins are hammered by the blood you’ve sucked down through my fingernails.

You allow my blood to carry the bone till it is taken to the feet where your balance is made to the feet where my pedaling ankle has been made apprentice.

You nudge toward my parts with your damper pushing up the dirt where my foot, on yours, is found Touching. You walk on me from my underground, and I am made no longer of a stern, unsoftenable surface.

78

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & OTHER THINGS Montage is a Registered Student Organization of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. As such, Montage does not discriminate on the basis of the author’s race, nation of origin, sexual preference, sexual orientation, religion, age, morality, or political beliefs. Work will not be rejected purely on basis of the race, creed, nation of origin, sexual preference, sexual orientation, religion, age, morality, or political beliefs expressed in the submitted work. Even if we could discriminate on these grounds, we probably wouldn’t. As people go, we’re A-OK. This issue was funded in part by Student Organization Resource Fees and also by the English Department at UIUC. In addition to very generous support from these organizations, this issue has also received significant funding from the following people: Renee Lopiccola, Carol Neely, Moira and Doug Squeo, & Madeleine and Scott Waxman.

Further thanks to Amalia at One World Pizza, for her help with fundraising and to Steve Davenport, Mike Madonick, and Deb Stauffer.

Lastly, a special thanks to Bar Giuliani, the spiritual and physical home of the Journal.

Montage Literary Arts Journal is distributed gratis for your pleasure.

If you’d like to support the Journal, checks for any sum can be made out to:

Montage Literary Arts Journal and sent to:

Montage Literary Arts Journal University of Illinois Department of English 608 South Wright St. MC - 718 Urbana, IL 61801

This issue’s epigraph is from Viktor Shklovsky’s Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, trans. Shushan Avagyan, Dalkey Archive Press 2007.

All other work ©2007 Montage Literary Arts Journal, UIUC

GOOD BYE, PAL.