The Pudding

a literary journal by the English Department at Gulliver Preparatory School

the pudding.

ESSAYS POETRY PROSE

the pudding.

Issue One

Edited/Designed By Monica Rodriguez

contents essays

My Favorite Room ....................... Dorielys Guerra States of Savagery: Cannibalism and the Political in Post-War Fiction ................... Timothy Bielawski Little Orphan Annie ................. James Mulder Moving Around:

A Confession .................. Jonathan Schoenwald There’s No Place

Like Home ....................... Frank Steel

poetry

Empty Eyes ................................ Inelissa Artzt Possibilities ............................. Brenda Feldman Marriage Through

the Seasons .................... R. C. Ganser S. F. ............................................ Monica Rodriguez Recurring Dream ...............

Adam Schachner Waiting is for

the Dying .................

Andrew Woodbury

prose

To Whom It May

Deeply Concern .......

On the Passing

of Tom Heinemann .....

Good Soldier .......................

A Battle of Wits ................

Hoyt Olsen Tyrone Sandaal Judd Shapiro Paige Vignola

art “Bay City Morning,” photo by Monica Rodriguez; “Octopus,” drawing by Adam Schachner; “Good Soldier” photo credits: “Gas Station” from wallpapers-3d.ru; “Into Bondage,” oil on canvas, Aaron Douglas, 1936.

Empty Eyes

By Inelissa Artzt

Broken smiles reveal the pain of a life barely lived.

Tear soaked lips remind us where we’ve been.

Sun kissed cheeks promise tomorrow will be better, but Empty eyes don’t lie.

States of Savagery: Cannibalism and the Political in Post-War Fiction

By Timothy Bielawski

ABSTRACT

States of Savagery argues that, more than just the consumption of individual bodies, cannibalism figures the political struggle to define the boundaries between self and other, as well as the dangers inherent in this struggle— the possible eradication of the personal and social body.

Cannibalism thus registers the interrelationship of political incorporation and state violence. It marks the ways in which political entities are envisioned as body politics that consume and expel, that violently rend individuals in the making of “The People.”

Through analyses of John Hawkes’s The Cannibal, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, this dissertation elucidates the nexus of political organicism, biopolitics, and state violence. It explicates how these novels utilize the cannibal trope to clarify the relationship between the “life” of the political body and the slaughter and consumption of “disposable” peoples. Cannibalism registers the unavoidable swing between biopolitical principles and necropolitical

violence. It illuminates how the concept of the nation as a biological body entrusted with protecting its citizens’ bare life inevitably leads to the notion that the political body must consume in order to survive and to metonymically feed its citizens. While political organicism sanctions sacrifice and naturalizes the political aggregate’s consumption, the trope of cannibalism acts to denaturalize this violence and detrivialize the death of the other.

Chapter 1 Colonialism, Consumption, and Political Bodies

Within twentieth century Western discourse, cannibalism has largely been understood as the territory of psychopaths and serial killers and thus wrongly perceived apolitically.

What is forgotten in this context is that within the history of the West, cannibalism has traditionally been viewed as a group activity, indeed as the distinguishing factor in categorizing particular groups. The word “Cannibal” is in actuality a corruption of the word “Carib,” and thus marks a specific ethnic identity (Sanborn, Sign 179). As Merall Price claims, the term constitutes “a specific ethnic group, membership of which is dependent upon presumed social practices as much as upon national or territorial identity” (89). The Greek word “Anthropophagi” similarly equates social practice with identity: “‘Anthropophagi’ is, in its original Greek, a formation made up of two pre-existing words (‘eaters/ of human beings’) and bestowed by the Greeks on a nation presumed to live beyond the Black Sea” (Hulme, Colonial 15).

In both cases, cultural identity is subsumed in the single practice of eating human flesh.

Within colonial discourse, cannibalism and political identity are concomitant, hence the identification of each anthropophagous group as a “nation of cannibals.”1 This

appellation, employed by a diverse set of explorers from Walter Raleigh to Stanley Livingston, was bestowed on hundreds if not thousands of groups during the age of exploration.2 As the defining mark of a political group, cannibalism is not seen simply as a cultural aberration: for Westerners it signifies the essence of the other’s being. Since in the Western mind the prescription against eating humans is regarded as the fundamental mark of civilization, cannibalism is used as the fundamental index for civility;3 it stands in for a general sense of lawlessness and a lack of humanity.4 Thus, for Herodotus, the Anthropophagi “have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law” (qtd. in King 108).5

What is important to realize in the examples above is that the cannibal is consistently figured as a political enemy rather than a personal enemy. The colonial explorer’s personal fear of the cannibal is understandable enough when one considers Christian beliefs at the time on the importance of bodily integrity for future resurrection, but his fear does not explain why cannibalism grips the national imaginary to the extent that it does throughout Europe and why the cannibal is depicted as such a virulent public enemy. To fully comprehend the meaning of cannibalism and the reasons why this practice has haunted Western consciousness for so long, one must understand that what the cannibal threatens is more than the death and destruction of the individual, but the death and destruction of the political order.

On the most basic level, the cannibal serves as a political threat because he is viewed as an irrational political being, a figure of unredeemable savagery. Thus, more than any other figure, the cannibal embodies what Immanuel Kant calls the unjust enemy, an enemy whose “will, whether expressed in word or deed, displays a maxim which would make peace among nations impossible and would lead to a perpetual state of nature if it were made into a general rule” (qtd. in Baucom 185). In Ian Baucom’s words, this figure functions “not

merely as enemy,” but as one who is “resolutely inimical to the existence of the social order” (176). For Baucom, “the legal figure of the bandit, brigand, or outlaw” is the embodiment of the unjust enemy during the colonial period (184). However, I would argue for the primacy of the cannibal as the archetype of inimical life. As a being whose defining practice embodies the state of nature and the primal horde, he is the true “specter of the man who is wolf to other men” (Baucom 184).

The brigand and the bandit are only inimical to the extent that they resemble the primitive savage, to the extent that they embody the savage’s barbarity and refusal of justice.

Moreover, these figures exist in a certain relationship to the law that the cannibal does not. They possess an understanding of justice and the law that is often thought of as beyond the cannibal savage’s innate capacities. The bandit and the brigand enjoy a greater capacity for personhood, a capacity for reform that the cannibal does not. Thus, to employ Carl Schmitt’s term, it is the cannibal who is the true “outlaw of humanity” (Concept 54): with him alone is peace truly impossible.

The annals of colonialism are laden with these truths.

Within these texts, cannibalism consistently stands for an opposition to European rule. As Peter Hulme points out, there is a direct correlation in Columbus’s accounts between “those who eat men” and “a capacity for resistance” (Colonial 41).

Invariably, the response to such resistance is the elimination of the threat. As early as 1494, Columbus is drawing a link between cannibalism and the right to enslave. He speaks of paying debts “in cannibal slaves, fierce but wellmade fellows . . . which men, wrested from their inhumanity, will be, we believe, the best slaves that ever were” (Columbus qtd. in Price 88).

Cannibalism is thus viewed as justification for subjection; it announces that the practitioner is only quasi-human and undeserving of humane treatment. Nowhere are these facts more evident than Queen Isabella’s famous edict of 1503. Of the

Carib Indians, she states:

If such Cannibals continue to resist and do not wish to admit and receive my Captains and men who may be on such voyages by my orders nor to hear them in order to be taught our Sacred Catholic Faith and to be in my service and obedience, they may be captured and are to be taken to these my Kingdoms and Domains and to other parts and places and be sold. (qtd. in Price 89)

Unsurprisingly, once this edict was in effect, “islands once thought to be inhabited by Arawak upon closer investigation turned out to be overrun with hostile cannibals” who were then enslaved (Arens 51). Such treatment is, in fact, in line with the church, as the Romanus Pontifex of 1454 stated that natives’ “failure to convert and pledge submission to Christian sovereignty meant that they could lawfully be killed” (Price 89). Indeed, the history of colonialism shows that the response to the so-called cannibal quickly moves from enslavement to outright extermination.

In the colonial context, cannibalism is a practice that seems to justify the use of any form of violence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Vasco Nunes de Balboa’s response to the natives of Panama. Balboa writes, “These Indians of the Caribana well deserved death a thousand times, because they are very bad people…I do not say make them slaves according to their evil breed but even order them burnt to the last, young and old, so that no memory remains of such evil people” (qtd. in Kiernan 81).6 In a form of pseudo-cannibalism, Balboa reportedly fed these offending Indians to his dogs (Kiernan 81). The cannibal thus comes to be seen as an existence that cannot be tolerated. The only solution for this enemy seems to be total obliteration.

While on the surface such a response to native peoples seems to be an unnecessary and unwarranted show of violence, it is in fact totally in keeping with Western political logic.

To fully comprehend this fact, one must understand that within the early modern period, Western nations conceived

their political structures explicitly along the lines of the human body. Colonialism therefore must be understood as a struggle between political bodies—bodies, that like the human body, incorporate and can be incorporated. What cannibalism registers, then, is the possible annihilation not only of the individual body but also the political body that inscribes the personal body and gives it meaning.

What cannibalism symbolizes, then, is a “complete loss of ontological being” (Joomba 73); this explains why within Western logic the cannibal is seen as the most virulent threat and why his existence must be liquidated at all costs.

The primary European conception of the nation in the early modern period is that of the body politic. In its classical formulation, the body politic is the corporate entity composed of ruler and subjects. In the words of one Elizabethan legal scholar: The king has two Capacities, for he has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has . . . the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation . . . and he is incorporated with them, and they with him, and he is the Head, and they are the Members, and he has the sole Government of them . . . (qtd. in Kantorowicz 13)

The paradigmatic example of the body politic in Western politics, and the place where the analogies between human body and political structure are taken to their fullest, is Thomas Hobbes’s idealized political body, the Leviathan.

Hobbes’s prosthetic state acts to “extend, mime, imitate, even reproduce down to the details the living creature that produces it” (Derrida, Beast 28). In all possible ways, this “Artificiall Man maintains his resemblance with the Naturall” (Hobbes 175). Hobbes details the bodily correspondences of the social order down to the finest minutia:

The Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other

Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seate of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the peoples safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; . . . (Hobbes 9)

The nation, like the human body, is thus understood as “a harmonious hierarchy of diverse parts” in which “every limb has its proper function” (Harris 42; Kantorowicz 225).

Such a formulation naturalizes the composition of the given social order. Each group is assigned a natural social role that must be executed in order to ensure the proper functioning of the nation. This fact is best illustrated through Livy’s story of Menaenius Agrippa’s role in counteracting the uprising of the Plebeians (which is repeated in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus). In order to assuage the plebeians, Menaenius tells them:

Long ago when the members of the human body did not, as now they do, agree together, but had each its own thoughts and the words to express them in, the others resented the fact that they should have to worry and trouble of providing everything for the belly, which remained idle, surrounded by its ministers, with nothing to do but enjoy the pleasant things they gave it. So the discontented members plotted together that the hand should carry no food to the mouth, and that the mouth should take nothing that was offered it, and that the teeth should accept nothing to chew. But alas!

While they sought in their resentment to subdue the belly by starvation, they themselves and the whole body wasted away to nothing. By this it was apparent that the belly, too, has no mean service to perform: it receives food, indeed; but it also nourishes in its turn the other members, giving back to all parts of the body, through all its veins, the blood it has

made by the process of digestion; and upon this blood our life and our health depend. (qtd. in Santner 37-38, n. 3)

Any opposition to the prescribed social strata is equated here with bodily disorder that threatens the health of the body politic. This fetishization of order is particularly apparent in Hobbes’s writing, where he states of the Leviathan, “Concord” is “Heath,” “Sedition” is “Sicknesse,” and “Civill war” is “Death” (9). Under this logic, regicide becomes a form of suicide. Employing this view, James I of England argued, “It may very well fall out that the head will be forced to garre off some rotten members . . . to keep the rest of the body in integritie but what state the body can be in, if the head . . . be cut off” (qtd. in Kastan 163).

For the purposes of this dissertation, what is significant in the preceding passages is the extent to which these analogies between nation and human body lead to certain types of political violence and the naturalization of this violence. In particular, these analogies open up certain possibilities for the consumption of humans by the state. As in the story of the Plebeians, the organistic understanding of the political body prepares the way for certain people to be “served up” for the benefit of others. Thus, in a very real sense, the prosthetic or artificial man that embodies the nation is cannibalistic.

Given the European conception of the nation as a political body, a body that resembles the human body down to the finest details, the political understanding of cannibalism is now more evident. Through the concept of the body politic, what Hulme refers to as “the ideological role of cannibalism” can now be grasped: the fact that while cannibalism is “figured as the devouring of human flesh,” the “threat” it presents “is in fact addressed to the body politic itself” (Colonial 86-87).

Cannibalism arguably becomes a central issue in Western politics during the colonial era because this is the period in which the relationship between self and

other becomes focalized. What changes under colonialism is that the political body is increasingly understood through its relationship with the outside world, with all of the “foreign bodies” that lie outside of the nation (Harris 142).

What cannibalism registers is that within the Western logic of domination, the relationship between self and other is ultimately a question of consumption and incorporation.

Colonialism should be viewed, then, as a tale of expanding and contracting political bodies and the colonial encounter as a contest between political bodies in which one body will inevitably consume another. Symbolically, the colonial explorer embodies the larger body politic that he serves: like the traditional hero, he is the “vessel of the whole culture’s collective consciousness and the agent of their will to survive or their aspiration to power” (Slotkin 28-29). His successes mark not only the aggrandizement of his personal body, but the expansion of the political body; conversely, his death and consumption at the hands of “cannibals” signals the fragility of the social order itself and the actual possibility of its negation.

What is ultimately apparent is a direct link between cannibalism—the physical incorporation of humans—and imperialism—the political incorporation of humans. As C. Richard King argues, for Western nations “[t]he presence of cannibalism, real or imagined, demands that social orders and subjectivities be remade in the image of the West” (109).

The “cannibal” is quite simply the body that the social order fears cannot be contained. Because of its refusal to be incorporated into the political body, the cannibal body is understood as “resolutely inimical” to the political body itself and must be masticated through violence. The charge of cannibalism therefore marks the West’s future relationship with “the savage”: if he gives up anthropophagy, then the savage is tamable and can be incorporated as a pseudo-subject; if not, he must be exterminated. In either case, his culture is overwritten, swallowed up by the European order; his body and

the culture that gave it meaning are digested by the victor’s political body.

But what the European fails to grasp in this scenario is the extent to which he defines the cannibal other by disavowing his own desires to kill and consume. Through a process of projection, he assigns his own “cannibal” desires onto the other that he imagines wants nothing else than to negate his own existence (Hulme 85). This projection explains the “general European predisposition for finding cannibalism in all non-European parts of the world” (Hulme, Colonial 80); wherever the European goes, he is confronted with his own desire to consume.7 Moreover, it is through this work of projection that the European political system accomplishes the ideological work of constructing a civilized self, an identity established through the opposition to cannibalism. As Geoffrey Sanborn claims, cannibalism functions as “the limit that humanity requires in order to know itself as itself,” for it is through “its abhorrence of all forms of ‘savagery’” that humanity defines itself as such (“Missed” 194, 189).

The supreme irony, however, is that within the colonial context, Western political bodies—the supposed bastions of civilization—perpetuate the same violence they attribute to the “savages” they seek to stamp out. In the early modern period, nowhere is this irony clearer than in the chief emblem of both sovereign and savage violence: the severed human head. Disarticulated human body parts found among native peoples were consistently interpreted by Westerners as evidence of cannibalism. In particular, severed human heads preserved as trophies were considered unequivocal evidence of anthropophagy. The equation of “head-hunting” and cannibalism is exceptionally notable in the case of Pacific Islanders.

The Maori practice of preserving heads led to the belief that all groups in the region consumed human flesh. Sanborn notes that by the nineteenth century “cannibal” in fact became a “common racial epithet” for all peoples of Pacific Islands (Sign 129). Ironically, this “proof” of cannibalism was also

the chief marker of sovereign power at the time. In England it was common practice to exhibit the decapitated heads of traitors on London’s Tower Bridge; these heads were, in fact, “a major tourist attraction” (Greenblatt 173). The resemblance to headhunting is even more astounding when one considers that these heads were often “thrown into the kettle for parboiling” in order to preserve the flesh (Covington 80).

The similarities between sovereign violence and native “savagery” did not go unnoticed by certain critics of the day.

For instance, Sir John Burrows points out the similarity in his critique of John Anderson’s Mission to the East Coast of Sumatra. Anderson claims that the Battas are cannibalistic based on their display of victims’ heads; however, Burrows points out that a “Batta, who had seen the human heads which no long time ago were stuck upon Temple Bar, would have just as good proof for saying that the people of London were cannibals” (qtd. in Sanborn, Sign 178). The “spectacle of savagery” that supposedly defines the other in actuality resides in the heart of the European political order (Sanborn, Sign 127); the violence of European civilization is ultimately indistinguishable from that of the primitive savage.

WORKS CITED Arens, W. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy.

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Covington, Sarah. Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth

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Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Trans. Geoffrey

Bennington. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement

Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. 1913.

Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became

Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses

of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge:

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Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1996. Print.

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1998. Print.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean,

1492-1797. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Jooma, Minaz. “Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates).” Eating Their

Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity.

Ed. Kristen Guest. Albany: SUNY P, 2001. 57-78. Print.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval

Political Theology. 1957. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.

Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare After Theory. New York: Routledge,

1999. Print.

Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and

Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven: Yale UP,

2007. Print.

King, C. Richard. “The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary

Cultural Critique.” diacritics 30.1 (Spring 2000): 106-23. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.

Phillips, Jerry. “Cannibalism qua Capitalism: The Metaphorics of

Accumulation in Marx, Conrad, Shakespeare, and Marlowe.”

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Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 183 203. Print.

Price, Merrall Llewelyn. Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism

in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge,

2003. Print.

Sanborn, Geoffrey. “The Missed Encounter: Cannibalism and the Literary

Critic.” Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of

Cultural Identity. Ed. Kristen Guest. Albany: SUNY P,

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---. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Post Colonial Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Print.

Santner, Eric L. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the

Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. Print.

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Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

“Into Bondage” by Aaron Douglas, 1936

Possibilities

By Brenda Feldman

It’s possible to be free

of shackles binding my wrists and heart

of toil tearing at my limbs

of sweat staining my torn shirt It’s possible to be free

of humiliation, indignities

of succumbing to others’ demands

of long days and longer nights It’s possible to hope

to dream for a better life

to touch the stars

to roam beyond Undeterred Undefeated Unbroken

Marriage Through the Seasons

By Raymond Charles Ganser

Time rolls forever on As it always will do And so the Earth she turns Its change the one constant.

In spring they poked new heads, Then strode down the white aisle.

Hand in hand two as one, And turned and kissed and ran Over the sprouting grass And by the blooming bulbs.

Storms did blow (as they will) Pulling at shallow roots Testing their youthful strength.

In summer tanned heads beamed, And through tall grass they played.

Warm suns saw many sons And girls with braided hair.

Strong and deep roots did grow, Careful and wide arms did reach.

Long days of sweat and strife With thirst and sun-roughed skin, They learned love would nourish.

Autumn slowly rustled in.

Proud heads watched colors run, Artful trees and calm breeze, Smoldering fires glowed warm.

Ev’ning strolls by gray surf Their life as one was gold.

Silent signs of future Fell and kissed heads lightly All while life’s treasures grew.

Winter comes to all life As sun gives way to night.

Longer walks, cold gray nights: Winter must make it so.

Yet heads of white droop not For love can’t be buried.

A new spring waits like morn.

While tracks in fresh snow mark From whence and where they go.

Time rolls forever on As it always will do And so the Earth she turns Its change the one constant.

My Favorite Room

By Dorielys Guerra

The lights are bright and shining. I walked in and immediately saw my reflection on the mirror before me. This is no ordinary room for my mother, sister, and me, it is our “meeting room”—the bathroom. Here in these tan-colored, squared tiles I remember having the best and most unusual conversations. Usually before any special night out, date, or just to get away from Mimi’s (abuela) hearing range we sought comfort or refuge in this room. I particularly remember one day when the three of us were discussing my sister’s upcoming wedding. Although it wasn’t her first or second wedding, in fact it was her third wedding; we were engaged in an enthusiastic and energetic conversation.

Mabel, my sister, was arranging my hair.

I was going to be the maid of honor and she was the boss. Even if it wasn’t about her wedding, she was always the boss. We’d already discussed how my mother’s and Mabel’s hair should look. (I always seemed to be the last one to get this done. I guess it was because I was “la niña.”) Out of the blue Mabel said, “You know, we really are not a normal family. Whose family have you ever heard of who has family conversations in the bathroom?”

I guess, for our family this is the one place where we can find tranquility and solitude.

The bathroom is more than a place of utility; rather it’s where we share happy and sad moments, where we run to when we can get away and only the shower curtains knows what was said.

Little Orphan Annie

By James Mulder

I had never wanted a cat. When I was young,

my family always had dogs, and I was used to them.

Dogs are friendly, fun, and slobbery. Dogs, for the most part, will follow commands. An owner makes suggestions to a cat.

During the winter of 1991, I was working on an army base in Nuremberg, Germany. The First Gulf War had started and most of the soldiers had been moved to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. One afternoon a friend called and said, “Jim. I have a cat you have to adopt.”

I told my friend that I didn’t like cats and wanted nothing to do with them. She became persistent and I finally said I would take the cat on a two week trial basis, but after that, the cat was going to a shelter.

Once the terms were agreed upon, I went to pick up the cat, whom I immediately named “Annie”-after the comic strip orphan.

When I first saw Annie I thought she was the ugliest animal I had even seen. She was skin and bones and her fur was literally falling out. She had been found wandering in a military barracks subsisting on a diet of field mice and bugs. Under her fur were numerous dark spots put there by soldiers who

had extinguished their cigarettes on her. I took her immediately to a vet to get her shots and to have her checked out. The vet said she was about two years old and was reasonably healthy for an abused animal. He recommended lots of good food and a comfortable bed.

I brought Annie home and fully intended not to become attached to her. BIG mistake. After her third night in my home, she jumped up on my bed, flopped down next to me, and started to purr. I called my friend the next day and told her, “I have found a home for the cat.” “With whom?” she asked. “With me.”

That began my love affair with cats. She turned out to be the ideal pet. She was affectionate, demanding scratches, pets, and cuddling. She was clean and loving of everyone. She liked nothing better than to lie next to me while I was reading or watching TV and to turn on her purr motor.

I brought Annie with me when I moved back to the states. She lived until 2003. She had a stroke and I had to face the fact that she was suffering and needed to rest. I took her to the vet and held her as she went to sleep. The vet saw how distraught I was and said, “You have to get another cat.” I thought, no way; I cannot go through this pain again. Two days later, however, I was at the shelter adopting Lola.

Lola is Annie’s legacy. Annie showed me the great joy of being owned by a cat and she lives on in my love of Lola. Little Orphan Annie went from being abused and hurt to being the most spoiled cat in the universe—and she deserved it.

To Whom It May Deeply Concern

By Hoyt Olsen

September 17, 2014 To Whom It May Deeply Concern:

I am delighted, particularly during an

economic downturn, to have a remunerated position as Head Guidance Counselor here at Our Lady of South Beach Prepurgatory School, a position which provides me the opportunity to write this contractually obligated letter of recommendation on behalf of my remarkable advisee, Diego Rasputin de Ferrets. Admittedly, I do not know Diego—or D-Raz, as his one friend calls him—nearly as well as his previous guidance counselor, Barbara Bobble.

However, Miss Bobble unexpectedly decided to take early retirement this past May, approximately when it was learned that Diego would be returning for his fifth year here at the Prep.

While I have not been able to reach Miss

Bobble for her latest insights—due simply to the insurmountable bureaucratic red-tape involved in contacting anyone who has entered the Federal

Witness Protection Program—I still vividly remember her heartfelt pronouncement at her retirement party that I would never have another advisee as “special” as Diego. I fully concur now that I have had a chance to have several faceto-face meetings with Diego, the latest after he somehow acquired my home address. Particularly noteworthy are Diego’s extensive community service hours during his junior and first senior year with the local branch of Locos Y Brutos, which according to Diego is a sort of international fraternal order devoted to providing hard-toobtain pharmaceuticals to inner city residents.

While it is unfortunate that D-Raz’s extensive involvement with this endeavor ultimately necessitated his 67 absences during the second semester of his first senior year, his mother Coddle de Ferrets reassures me that his new, less detachable ankle monitor will significantly improve this semester’s attendance.

When actually in attendance, Diego’s

noteworthy character made a significant impression on his teachers, whose commentaries still in Miss Bobble’s files include the following memorable remarks: Law and Litigation instructor Mr. Gouge Wallsing testifies that “I have never previously had any student who possessed such intricate working knowledge of Florida’s juvenile justice system as Diego. Furthermore, Diego offered the class impressive insights into the implications of the Fifth Amendment, which he invoked repeatedly during class discussion.” English teacher Mr.

Tyze Sandals, instructor of the special senior seminar in the Neoclassical Surfing Lyrics of Brian Wilson, notes that “D-Raz brought a groovy sort of mellow but subterranean vibe just by sharing his aura.” Of the week Diego spent in her class, dance instructor Ms. Gnarly Bartenderas specifies that “Diego amazed us all one day when he improvisationally busted out several new moves and his dance partner Sandra, who is expected to recover full mobility by early November.” His anthropology instructor Mr. Cudbia Marshun states that “Diego brought a fresh contemporary relevance to my lecture on ‘Neo-Primitivism, Territoriality and Tribal Aggression’ while just sitting at his desk quietly sharpening, sharpening, repeatedly sharpening his pencil with his fingernails.”

History of Rock and Roll instructor Mr. Gatrick Piffin speculates that “Diego manifests the same musical inclinations as the trend setters who put the acid in acid rock—which is, incidentally, why I turned down his generous offer to bring the brownies and punch during Psychedelic Music Week.” Concerning D-Raz’s ability to put together unusual projects, mathematics instructor Mrs. Prowleen O’Alleys writes that she was “blown away

by Diego’s showmanship demonstrating variables in the laws of probability with his special dice.”

Still more remarkably, his Studio Arts instructor— who has requested that her name be redacted from all correspondence concerning Diego—describes his artistic replication of a fifty-dollar bill as “So spot on that I had to have chemical analysis of

the micro-fibers performed to confirm that it was his own original work and not an actual fifty.”

Admittedly, Diego’s 1.87 weighted GPA—

although bolstered by the A+ he earned this past summer in his AP Abnormal Psychology class at Rikers Island Community College in New York—is beneath the norm for Our Lady of South Beach Prepurgatory students. However, it is commonly understood on campus that while Diego’s abilities do not always manifest themselves in traditionally academic ways, he nevertheless possesses remarkable intelligence that his modesty causes him to conceal.

Just this past week, during the special faculty meeting on the recent vandalism in the girls’ locker room, Dean of Students Gus Toppo remarked, “I’m pretty damn sure Diego knows a whole lot more than he’s ever willing to say.”

From my every experience, I can fully

attest that not only myself but every teacher and student will be exceptionally delighted when Diego Rasputin de Ferrets graduates and moves on to college life. I know that D-Raz will take full advantage of every single unsecured opportunity to advance himself at your university should you accept him, please God, for the sake of my wellbeing.

Sincerely yours, Constancia Burnes-Eager Head Guidance Counselor Our Lady of South Beach Prepurgatory School

S.F.

By Monica Rodriguez

fog –

sweeps in across the bay

dropping a milky veil upon the city

gently caressing the treetops

on its way across the sky

slowly, cautiously, shrouding the landscape

a thick, rolling curtain

stopping time - silencing the

earth.

“Bay City Morning” by Monica Rodriguez

On the Passing of Tom Heinemann

By Tyrone Sandaal

“13 August 1990. Dear Tyrone, Mirta tried her best to get us together over this past weekend, but it just never happened.”

So begins a letter that has logged a lot of miles with me. Miami to Claremont to Redondo Beach to Boulder to Houston to Washington, DC. Back to Los Angeles and therein, North Redondo Beach, Fairfax, Manhattan Beach, and Hawthorne. Twenty-two years later and 2,743 miles along I-10 and the letter returned home to Miami, where its author, Tom “Paul” Heinemann, was living out the final two years of his life in the company of his wife, my mother’s cousin, Mirta. He wrote it on personalized stationery in neat gothic letters because he was an architect and admired clean lines. At his memorial service, his sister brought out two line drawings of buildings in the Gables done in the same ink, in the same careful and caring fashion as the letter he sent to my 18-year-old self on the eve of my greatest adventure.

“We were tickled to hear of your acceptance and scholarship to Pomona. Pomona is 1/10 of 1% of LA, and is as distinctive as Watts or Glendale or Malibu.

You will not have to do a lot of travelling around to appreciate The Center of the Universe.”

School was generally easy for me. I was a skilled memorizer, eager to please, efficient and earnest with my work. My PSAT scores and Cubanness helped generate a lot of mail from colleges all over the country, a pile that sat atop my Hitachi. At the same time, I became fascinated by a classmate in one of my elective classes. He was eminently hateable at first sight. He was a proud and arrogant Key Rat

who walked in each day with a lip snarled as if the smell of learning disgusted him, and a copy of Surfer Magazine as his only book. On days when he was conscious, he never once stopped flipping its pages. He was the Spicoli to my Hamilton and before the end of the first semester he had convinced me that surfing was everything and that Cali was King.

I applied to two colleges in Los Angeles because of him. USC’s letter arrived first and the aid package dealt me a harsh reality check. By the time the letter from Pomona arrived, I was resigned to going up state. I ripped it open and was ecstatic to be accepted, but it was when I saw the aid award that I started jumping and screaming and ran practically through the screen door and around and around the Little Havana duplex. Never since have I felt that sort of exhilaration. When I finally settled down enough to explain to my family that I had a full ride to a top liberal arts college, they responded with: “Why so far? What about the earthquakes?” They couldn’t get it. But Tom did. Having he and Mirta in my life provided me with just enough sanity to know that what I had accomplished was special, worth the fear and hurt of my immediate family, and most importantly, was the right thing to do.

Tom understood what awaited me; in fact, he was instrumental and purposeful in cultivating it.

“I just finished Bonfire of the Vanities. A plot almost spinning out of control; language that sounded almost as if it had come off a hidden recorder. Only a non-New Yorker from England or Richmond could savor the mad life and sounds of New York the way Tom Wolfe has put them down on paper.”

Mirta took an interest in me early on, likely before I even remember. Her mission was to provide

my brother and me with experiences that my ailing mother and overwhelmed grandmother could not. With Mirta I saw Lady and The Tramp, The Aristocats and The Karate Kid, and on these movie excursions went to restaurants where I learned about different cuisines and table manners. Mirta made sure that I had the quintessential child experience, a trip to Disney World. I treasure the handful of pictures that remain of my six-year-old self wearing a woolen hat and gloves and the memories: the crispness of a cold winter day in Orlando, the monorail that ran through the hotel, the nausea that I took from the teacups to the stale interior of 20,000 leagues Under the Sea. When she visited our home, her unique laughter and joie de vivre were infectious and grew the cramped space, so those were the best Sundays, when the phone would ring and my grandmother would tell me that Mirta would be stopping by in the afternoon.

On occasion, she would be accompanied by her first husband and then things were different. She was not the biggest voice in the room and there was a tension in those gatherings that as a child I could feel, but not identify. Those visits, I spent outside.

Eventually the first husband would be replaced by a tall, white man from Baltimore that we called “Paul� (a confusion that he would sort out for me in the letter) and it was the first time that a native English speaker spent any time in our house. At the memorial service, Mirta told the story about how they first met, soon after her divorce. She had started to do all of the things that her husband had denied her, including participating in the chorus at her church, but living a free and independent life can be terrifying. After practice, Mirta knelt at an empty pew, shut her eyes and prayed. She asked God to help

her during this difficult time and when she opened her eyes, this giant man was kneeling beside her.

Tom enthralled me. Everything he did he did with great calm, joy and consideration. At Noche Buena he would eat great spoonfuls of my grandmother’s black beans and wash them down with the only beer we ever had in the house, beer that he brought. He loved to laugh like Mirta did, took interest in my piles of books, and sat comfortably at the end of the table, talking to me mostly, one of the two other English speakers in the room. He seemed to know everything and the conversation filled that piece of me that wanted to know everything too. During the darkest times, Tom and Mirta would have my brother and I spend a few days at their house. On those occasions I learned that peace was possible, what a family table looked like.

We held hands to pray and were expected to finish our vegetables. We spoke intelligently about world events, discussed books. Books! Tom pushed hard for me to consider his alma mater, St. John’s in Annapolis and its Great Books program. Around that table it was decided that I was old enough to travel alone to visit Mirta’s mom and dad in Puerto Rico, despite the protests of my grandmother, the only plane trip I would take before my great adventure west.

What I loved best though was the silence. In their house I could hear myself think; I could read a book without interruption. I was invited to use their computer to play Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand and played it in the quiet of the upstairs office to my heart’s content. In their home, I was free to learn, to grow into a citizen of the world, and to live in possibility instead of fear.

“Don’t just keep in touch. Let us know your thoughts as you start out on a great new life. We love you and want to know where we can give you momentum.”

The letter travelled with me to his memorial service. I tucked it into my pants pocket with the intention of reading it to those assembled. Part of why I have hung on to it for so long is simply that I find it beautifully written. It preserves his voice well. As his family spoke, his two sons from his first marriage, his sister who spoke of his talent for writing, drawing and photography, and finally George, his grandson on Mirta’s side, it was clear to me that his voice lived on through them, through us. George spoke about the dinners that he experienced and it touched me to know that it was the same for all of us that ever sat at Tom’s table.

I sat in the peace of that church and considered the letter, reading it to myself and thinking about the words. Let us know your thoughts.

You made me feel heard, Tom. A great new life. Was it ever. Momentum. I came to your service in need of some. There are low moments in a teacher’s life when the work seems to be too much in return for too little.

I saw clearly how many you taught, how forever grateful we are for your presence in our lives, and how you will never be forgotten by us. I have chosen a life that gives me the chance to do the same and for your part in that, I give thanks.

Recurring Dream

By Adam Schachner

It’s after hours at a K-Mart, Or Wal-Mart, Or any large mart and the store is deserted Except for me and the octopus.

I’m running for my life down one aisle and up the next, frantically searching for the charcoal briquettes and tearing my shirt into small strands.

It’s hard to see because the industrial strength lights have been shut down and only the occasional security lamp is on overhead casting lonely spotlights onto shelves of Frankenberry Candles and waffle makers.

I frequently trip over debris from the shelves The octopus has knocked over.

The octopus.

A godforsaken leviathan.

Like a B-grade Jules Verne movie prop Brought to extravagant life and dropped in some banal commercial Hell one night every month for years now.

I don’t know what I did to provoke the octopus and make it my nemesis, but, I’ve no doubt it’s more than my match.

The octopus must be thirty or forty feet high, its head pressed improbably flat against the ceiling its tentacles flop for meters on-end, spastically tossing aside tractors and gallon jars of stuff.

It smashes pock-marked suckers down upon shelves, crushing them while hunting for me.

And for all its slime and stench and aggression, it never makes a sound.

Not a peep.

Just the whisper of shifting muscles and crashing house wares.

Net Loss.

And of course I’m crying as I run.

I have to whimper, even in my adrenaline frenzy of feral fever it comes out that way: “I don’t want to be that guy who died by octopus!

I want to be the one who died bungie jumping or drowning in a vat of white chocolate.”

But fate is dementedly conniving.

Dorothy got Oz. I got the octopus.

So I have a plan: The torn shirt, the charcoal briquettes— it’s all a a desperate gambit.

What I’ve done is I’ve raided the liquor section and helped myself to some high-proof alcohol— As a tentacle brushes a Martha Stewart bedroom set over my head I hide under a kiddie pool shaped like a pitiful turtle without its shell.

I stuff my shirt strands into the bottlenecks.

Grasping my cocktails, I dive from under the turtle and dart between the rows of merchandise, Fervently scanning the shelves for charcoal bags.

I figure matches are too small to spot,

and I’m dodging under a crimson-ringed trunk of death cartilage as it smashes the makings of happy homes all around me.

So I skid around corners and hold my thumbs over the tops of the bottles, keeping the rags in place and searching with pathetic urgency for those sandpapery large bags with distinctive color schemes of BLACK ON WHITE And WHITE-framed BLUE, knowing that wherever there’s bags of charcoal, somewhere close by is a match to light my drinks.

And I run and I slide and I fall and get up again, skid on the recently mopped floor and search with pathetic urgency for some charcoal and the salvation it will bring me.

Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round

--Talking Heads, “This Must Be The Place”

Moving Around: A Confession

By Jonathan Schoenwald

I started in Pittsburgh. Then I went to Phily, and then to Boston, and then Northampton, MA (with summer stops in Connecticut), then to Connecticut, then to Martha’s Vineyard, then to Maine, then to California, then to Pittsburgh, then to California, then to Ohio, then to California, then to New York, then to Rhode Island, then to Germany, and finally here, to Miami. So what—or where—is home?

In a lot of ways I agree with the Talking Heads: home is where I want to be. Is it about the place? Yes, of course—it’s always nice to live in a place that aligns with who you are as a person. In the end, for me, it’s less about the place than the people.

My family and I spent last year in Hamburg, Germany. We put 95% of our stuff in storage, shipped our car over (filled to the brim with suitcases), and flew out of Boston on July 6, 2013, with one suitcase each. The plan was to spend a year there and return to someplace in the US. Did we care where we moved? Of course we did. But when I was entertaining job offers and we were contemplating what life would be like in a variety of cities, some very close friends gave us great advice: what counts is being together as a family and having friends close by. And of course they were right: during the year in Germany I never once thought, “Oh, too bad I don’t have that [fill in the blank], which happens to be in storage.” I never missed a thing. On the contrary, we had my wife’s family close by, we made friends, and we had each other. Yes, it was a bonus that Hamburg is a beautiful city (a strangely well-kept secret about northern Europe). But on each trip back to the US

for job interviews I would return to Hamburg and think, “I’m glad I’m home.”

Hamburg became home for me in less than a year simply because we had what we needed. Yes, it sometimes felt temporary; we knew we’d be leaving, but despite that understanding we settled in to the point where leaving—our original plan—was actually painful.

I have to say, however, that my many geographical moves haven’t always come out of choice. Sometimes I’ve been forced to pick up and leave. That happens to most of us at some point.

And those of us who choose academic careers realize that schools are not movable objects, and working remotely is not—at least at this point—a viable option.

When I think about my own moves, though, there’s something else going on. For much of my life I believed that there was always something better out there, that where I was somehow was not as good as the next place or job or partner. Many of my first moves came out of that compulsion—to climb an imaginary ladder and advance through this fabricated hierarchy. That desire to find the next best thing forced me to focus less on the place than the people, although I confess that I didn’t understand this at the time. I do know that by my late 20s I decided that I was being stupid in how I lived my life, that I was ditching perfectly good relationships and leaving nice places because I thought something better was just around the corner.

Did my moving stop there? Of course not. Unless you have the luxury of working for yourself, it can be hard to have complete control over where you live. Pursuing such a dream has a distinctly American history to it, which maybe is

why characters like Jay Gatsby or Dean Moriarty serve as such powerful iconographic figures, or why Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” is engrained so deeply in our history and culture that, one could argue, it has influenced everything from foreign policy to the unusually high mobility rate of Americans.

But through each move I realized more and more that the place mattered less and less. You are born into a family, then you create a family, you acquire friends, and you create a network that, more or less, encompasses them all.

Years ago I heard a lecture by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who talked about happiness. His formal field is psychology and his Nobel is in economics, but he does research on just about anything he wants. In this talk Kahneman argued that money doesn’t buy happiness (it can, but only to a point). Moreover, even major life events have their limitations: getting married, having children, and finding a great job can all increase happiness, but none of them sustain it year after year. What sustains happiness, Kahneman said, was having friends and consistently doing things with those people. Meeting up for a regular dinner.

Going on vacations together. The simplest of things.

Unlike my esteemed colleague, I’m more convinced than ever that home is where you make it, it’s where you want to be and where you happen to be. Those elements that make up a life are far more crucial than the place. This isn’t to say that place doesn’t matter at all—I mean, who wouldn’t want to live in a great spot like Miami? But at the end of the day, it’s the people, not the place that makes us feel at home.

There’s No Place Like Home

By Frank Steel

My home is where I am.

– Bob Marley

While I have to admit being a huge fan of Bob Marley (and no, not for that reason!), I have to disagree with the sentiment he espouses that home is a nomadic concept, able to move and morph according to any stop along our geographic journey.

No doubt this stems in large part from the life I was fortunate to lead, including spending much of my life in a relatively small, local area.

Chestnut Hill, a wonderfully livable suburb within the city limits of Philadelphia, often referred to as “bucolic” and/or “tony” in the literary mags that provided both insight and review of all elements of our historic and actually dynamic city, was also a truly remarkable place. My family and friends had literally everything we needed within two or three miles, and everything we wanted, such as museums, urban life, the arts, and all the positives and negatives that go with the 5th largest city in the United States within ten miles. So while I am a Marley fan, I think Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, had more insight when she tapped her heels together and repeated that, “there’s no place like home,” in that there is really only one place for each of us that is our true home.

Home is the place that makes you who and what you are. There is no doubt I am not the same person that I was when I was 5 or 25 or even 45 (that is as much counting as I plan to do here), but there are certain elements of me that were forged in the place I am from, that help to shape the reactions I have to certain situations, the ways I am able to grow, and will affect the things I hope yet to accomplish. I was fortunate to be born in a time where material needs not the issue for most people in our country, in a place that emphasized smaller town family values, with parents who loved to travel. My life was a series of interactions with other people with a long shared history, a sense of common beliefs, purpose and mission, these are the forces that shape who we are, and to me, they collectively form the entity we mean when we think of “home.”

Recently, the music artist Sting, in an interview on creativity on NPR, and in a related TED talk about overcoming the “creativity block” that had begun to stifle his work, realized that “going home” had released a whole new side of him, but one that had been in him all along. He suggested that he needed to “put himself in someone else’s shoes” and that it turned out that the “landscape I’d worked so hard to escape from, that I had exiled myself from, would be the place that would allow songs that had been bottled up to emerge.” It is clear that “home” is much more than a current living arrangement, it is a collection of experiences and lessons which, for better or worse, form the fabric of our being, that in short, make us “us”.

The blogger Enceno Macy recently wrote an overly pessimistic view that, “Soldiers and sailors dream of home, and from their songs and old poems so did colonists and pioneers. Someday a poet or song writer on a distant planet or terraform will write longingly of a polluted, war-wracked, stripmined, uninhabitable home called Earth light-years away.” While I hope that is never the description of any place that is part of me, it does drive home the idea that there is a place that is home for each of us. Maybe it is better to remember the words of T.S. Eliot as we each consider the relation of where we have been to where we are from, “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Good Soldier

By Judd Shapiro

Riding back from Vegas just before dawn on a

Sunday morning, I tried in vain to get my head clear after a sleepless, tequila soaked night in celebration of Joey’s upcoming wedding. Vegas isn’t my thing, and honestly, neither is marriage.

The rest of the guys were staying another day,

but I had a class to teach Monday at 8:00am. Pete had gotten up while I was leaving the hotel room that morning, and as he struggled to walk to the bathroom he felt the need to tell me that my students wouldn’t miss me if I called in sick. Being a good soldier, I flipped him off and told him I’d see him next weekend at the wedding.

Twenty miles out and the neon lights began

to fade behind me, replaced by the slightest hint of warmth from the rising sun at my back. I was cold, and I needed something to take the chill out of my bones. A few more miles and I pulled in to a small gas station. Walking past a weathered old man parked in a lawn chair, I entered the wooden shack, poured myself a small cup of coffee, grabbed a bag of powdered donuts, and put a twenty on the counter as I pointed out the window at my bike and said, “Let me have the change in gas.”

I strolled back out and filled the tank.

Leaning against the pump afterwards, I finished off a few donuts as a white Mercedes pulled in. A man got out of the driver’s side rather quickly and slammed the door shut. Guy was upset about something, but I ignored it and went inside to use the jon.

When I came back out he was in the midst of a heated conversation with a brunette by the front of the car.

Then, just as I was about to turn away, she slapped him across the face. I had no idea what he did, but I figured the next act included him begging for forgiveness. Apparently, he wasn’t feeling it, because the son of a bitch actually got in his car and took off heading north, leaving princess and me in a cloud of dust.

Slightly amused, I tossed the remaining donuts

in my saddlebag and quickly kicked over my bike. Not quick enough, though. Her short, tight dress got the best of me. And the heels. I’m a sucker for heels. So I paused. Two. Three seconds. And she turned...Jesus. Out of my league. Nevertheless, if high school taught me anything, it certainly revolved around the premise of , “What the hell...”

“I’m headed to L.A. Give you a lift if you don’t

mind the wind in your hair.”

She looked at me. Right in the eyes. I couldn’t

tell if she was pissed at the question, her situation, or the still present dust in the air from her long gone friend. Standing about ten feet away, it then dawned on me that her dress couldn’t have been more than two inches beyond the holy grail. It hadn’t dawned on her, though, and in what seemed like two steps she was next to me with her left hand on my shoulder, swinging her leg over the seat. I remember thinking that the old guy behind us in the chair must have appreciated the view.

I took off my jacket and handed it back to her.

While she put it on, I turned slightly to the left and glanced down to make sure the kickstand was up, but all I could see was her bare leg. I think I uttered Jesus’ name once again under my breath before telling her to hold on. She responded by wrapping her arms around me and sliding forward. She was warm.

I eased the clutch out and pulled onto

Interstate 15 heading south towards Barstow, and as I hit 75mph it occurred to me that Pete might be right...

A Battle of Wits

By Paige Vignola

They stand face to face on the mountainside with the fledgling city barely awake beneath them.

The one with wild hair and deep blue eyes runs this fingers through his black beard, his back rigid with the tension of unreleased anger while contemplating his more composed and tranquil opponent. He stamps his feet in irritation at the presumptuousness of this younger upstart’s challenge to his domination, internally battling with his desire to rid himself of his present enemy and the knowledge that such an action would not go unpunished by a higher authority.

For her part, she stands, cool gray eyes focused on his face, crinkling with suppressed humor at his obvious discomfort and her self assurance of an indisputable victory. The people of the city overshadowed by these two giants are only vaguely aware of the dispute above by the unseasonable churning of the waters in the gulf below; the Sea God is angry, that much they know.

“Uncle, I believe we should settle this dispute by peaceable means,” the gray-eyed goddess offers.

“Let us each offer a gift and select a judge to determine whose offering is of greater value to the people and the city.”

“You suggest that gods should pander to mortals seeking favor?” he scoffs.

“In fact, I do, Uncle. Should you and I wage war to determine who has the greater right to this scrap of land, what would then remain worth obtaining? I for one would prefer a simple solution that will allow the victor to enjoy the spoils of her gain.”

The calm aspect and air of self-assurance of his brother’s daughter brings the dark god’s suppressed fury closer to the surface. “ ‘Her’ gain, is it? Let us not declare the victor before the fight has even begun,” he seethes at her. “Yes, I will agree to your terms. We will each proffer a gift to the city. That which is deemed greater will pronounce the victor. Let the best man win.”

The Earth-Shaker smiles in condescension at the younger Olympian. A city on the sea is always in need of his favor. The messenger of the gods is dispatched to the king below informing him of his weighty duty.

“I will go first,” the goddess suggests.

“I think not. You may be the child of my brother but I owe nothing of my rank to you. I am your elder. I am the more powerful. I will go first,” the sea god bellows as his niece hides a smile behind her shield.

“Of course, Uncle.”

The great deity raises his right arm in which he holds his magnificent trident aloft over the mountainside of the town. The muscles in his wrist flex as he grips the symbol of his power tightly before thrusting it down toward the earth, scoring the rock with its triple point. An immense spring bursts forth from the fissure, spouting

seawater so high in the air it rains down on both the Olympians and the inhabitants of the city below.

Cecrops, the king and judge of the people, raises his hands in the air, cupping them to receive the great god’s gift. Once full, he lowers his hands to his lips and darts his tongue into the wetness his finds. He makes a face. “Salt,” he proclaims to the crowd which surrounds him. The people shift nervously wondering why the god would think a salt spring would be of use to them.

The goddess steps forward. “Now, Uncle, it is my turn. Let me show you a gift these people will truly appreciate.” She produces a sapling tree from the folds of her robe and with delicate fingers plants it in the ground at her feet. “With this olive branch I offer the people of my city wood, oil, and food. The branch of this tree will also symbolize peace and allow my people to remove themselves from unwanted wars.” With a slight bow and a smirk she turns to the sea god and whispers, “Wisdom, my dear Uncle. Shall we see who wins?”

The king below considers the gifts of both gods and proclaims loudly to all those who hear, “Let the Goddess of Wisdom be our patron as she more fully recognizes the needs of our people.”

The Earth-Shaker roars his displeasure. The salt spring, symbolizing a guarantee for naval supremacy among the warring Greek cities, is rejected in favor of domestic security and peace. He feels tricked by his niece, who maneuvered him into offering his gift first whereby she was able to offer the people a greater explanation of her gift. His cold blue eyes darken as he looks into her calm gray ones. “This is not over,” he warns as he turns his back on the city and dives into the sea.

Waiting is for the DyingA Dickinsonian Tribute

By Andrew Woodbury

Waiting is for the Dying— Yet only the Living know!

A constant Battle rages— Before the letting Go. When They moan, We listen— (5) When They cry, We cringe.

But They are long toward Dying— And We but short of Hope.

Time is deemed most precious— It’s measured by Degrees.

The Dying grow more cautious— The Living cease to see.

(9)

The Hours pass like Dirges— Revered by Those who know.

For all the Others, just a blur— Spectators at the Show.

(13)

The Pain is grueling, I suspect— To any of Us here.

The Living sit and watch and stare— But Dare not Interfere.

(17)

The Room is dark, consumed with Sleep— (21) The Sounds have all grown still.

The Smells are layered, Pungent— The Air exudes a Chill.

The last Leg of the Journey— From Death to that beyond— A heavy Contemplation— Mustered all along.

(25)