Rind Issue 12

Rind issue 12

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Rind Literary Magazine Issue 12 February 2019

rindliterarymagazine.com

All Works Š Respective Authors, 2019

Cover Art By:

Dave Lohr

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Editor in Chief: Dylan Gascon

Fiction Editors: Johnathan Etchart Jenny Lin Melinda Smith Stephen williams Shaymaa Mahmoud

Nonfiction Editors: Collette Curran Owen Torres William Ellars Anastasia Zamora

Poetry Editors: Shaymaa Mahmoud Sean hisaka Lisa Tate

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Contributors

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Fiction: propinquinty/ jeff schneekloth

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south for the winter/ Cameron steiman

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finding jim morrison/ Sheree shatsky

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Poetry: How to wait/ Juleen eun sun Johnson

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Graveyards in wanaque/ Valerie Ruberto

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Acknowledgements Thank you to all of our contributors, past and present, for helping us get this thing moving. Thank you to the creative writing faculty of the University of California-Riverside, Mount San Antonio College, Rio Hondo College and Riverside Community College for your continued support of this magazine.

Rind is on the look out for original artwork and photography for our upcoming issues. If you or someone you know might be interested in contributing, send us an inquiry for more details.

Please support the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival; find them at www.sgvlitfest.com. We’ll be there, and so should you.

Check out our listing on Duotrope. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter. Regular updates on RLM and other fun and interesting things can be found at our affiliated blog site: www.thegrovebyrind.wordpress.com.

If you would like to contribute to Rind, send your manuscript to rindliterarymagazine@gmail.com.

Cheers!

–The Rind Staff

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How to Wait

By Juleen Johnson

Dance yourself clean.

Wait for a train to come play chicken with light until horn howls three times.

Tracks will not wait for you unless you are already dead.

Flung against night like a pin-up upside down in a strip club window.

The way the leaves flutter in the breeze contrast with blue skies.

Softly touches down onto green pastures

until wind brings, yellow bodies back to life.

A blue recycling bin blows in the wind.

Her skirt comes up exposes green frilly underpants.

A paper shred blows as a feather not as packing paper.

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A paper shred blows as a feather not as packing paper.

Styrofoam bounces under feet as leaves wake.

A matchbook reads flammable.

A cigarette as bookmarker.

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Busy Bee

By Jessi Cowan

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Propinquinty

By Jeff Schneekloth The upstairs window was darkened with the gray flashing of the television. It was probably near eleven. I always visited at the worst times. So drunk and careless that I'd wake her up. Her sleepy eyes and sweet forgiving face in the doorway. Once I banged on her door well after two AM carrying a boombox blasting Redman's "I'll Beee That." It just seemed like a good idea at the time. But it woke her kids and her neighbors. I sent her flowers and some toys for the kids the next day. I was always buying her stuff - I'd take the train to NYC on my day off to look for records or candles or trinkets, just something to surprise her. I cared for her. I suspect that deep down I must have felt unworthy of her friendship, that I had to either keep proving myself or just making up for my mistakes.

I knocked and listened for her feet on the stairs.

"Hey there," she said.

She was radiant in cloth pajamas open at the top and bottom so you could see her belly. Her eyes were pink and I could tell that she was a little high too. She was funny when she got high, cursing with gangsta tough talk to strangers. She didn't take any shit.

"What happened to you?"

"It's nothing. Those hippie kids, Danny and Grant and them, started some trouble." We hugged and kissed and she looked at me suspiciously as she held my arms. "And you had to finish it?

Since when do you fight?"

I started to say something but just trailed off, shrugged, tried to smile. My high had kicked in with skipping frames so these kinds of tough questions tripped me up.

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"C'mon silly," she said.

"How're the kids?" I asked, but my drunken voice was so loud she shushed me and I switched to a whisper mid-question.

"They're sleeping. But Krissy's a little brat. She's a diva already. Allen is the man of the house. He helps load groceries, cleans up after himself. Sometimes. He tries his best."

Her living room was a healthy sort of mess - toys strewn all about, a playpen in one corner. Crayon drawings pinned up on the walls. There was an old gray pullout couch across from the TV cabinet full of children's DVDs. All kinds of mystical decorations - little buddhas, jade elephants, exotic candles. A rug with an ancient Indian design hanging from one corner. A counter with baskets of fruit and stacks of mail, opening up to the little kitchen.

"Allen just made me a calendar in school. He drew all the pictures himself."

The TV was showing an episode of the old Monkees tv show. Silly stoner sitcom humor. "Okay you caught me," she said. "They show these at night and I can't help it."

"No it's cool."

Stuff like that was never on my radar but it's why I loved her. One night we'd gotten really high and watched the Monkees Head film. It's a cool flick, a real gonzo art piece. Even old Frank Zappa is in there. I was impressed. She was always into something unexpected, she made the mundane seem cool. She'd get some recipe for a pie which she'd mess up and it would turn out all wrong with dark misshapen crust, or she'd build and paint a misshapen toy box, a coat rack that would fall from the wall. I just admired how fearlessly she jumped into anything, on her own terms.

"Look at your arm," she said.

"Ah, it's not that bad."

I sat down on the couch while she went off to get some wet paper towels. I felt something sharp and found a toy truck underneath me.

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"Here we go," she said.

I tried to focus on her as she carefully cleaned the scrape on my arm.

"Thanks. It's good to see you."

When she was done, she headed across the room for her rabbit, Davy Jones. Cradling it like a baby, she sat down on the couch under her crossed legs. It was comfortable in her arms, nose twitching.

"Here he is," she said. "Who's that? Who's that crazy guy over there?"

I reached over and pet its head. "Hey, Davy."

"This is my buddy. I have to be so careful. They chase him all around. It stresses him out like crazy."

"I'm really sorry I barged in like this."

"No it's fine. Dude, what's with the outfit?" She tugged at the frayed ends of my makeshift shorts. "No, actually I think I can figure it out."

"I went straight to the bar after work. 'Give me a shot of Jack and a pair of scissors.' One of those deals."

"I remember when you used to wear that UPS uniform you found at Goodwill. And you colored on the back."

"It said 'Dutchie's Bud Delivery.' That was kind of goofy."

"Ya think?"

She got back up and went off to the kitchen. I watched her pour wine and ice in two plastic cups. I held out my finger to Davy Jones. He was sniffing a dried spill on the couch. My high had settled in nicely, a warm numbing glow. It seemed better to be stoned and well behaved than too drunk and sloppy.

"So what happened?" she said.

"Ah, it was kind of Bison's thing."

"Oh fuck that guy."

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Bison was friends with her ex-husband Josh, another local burnout musician. Their band was in a perpetual state of flux, mostly just drunken hangouts and house party gigs. That's fine when you're in your early twenties, but they were all in their late thirties. Like me.

"He's a snake," she said.

She reached across to put the rabbit back on her lap. She wasn't wearing a bra, and I couldn't help a peak at her breasts. She was pretty uninhibited anyway. The aroma of burning joss stick on the table permeated the air. A few old roaches in a decorative opium ash tray.

"Hey, have you ever been to the little reggae shack up Water Street?" I asked.

"Yo Irie? Yeah, all the time. I get shirts and stuff there. They have a DJ booth in the back and the guy is always spinning some crazy shit. They're chill as hell."

"You know what? Every store should have a rasta DJ spinning. I'd love to go to the bank or the supermarket and hear some Lee Perry or something."

"Hell yeah. I've taken the kids there before, they love it. Those guys all know me over there."

"I bet they do. Pretty little white girl. Praise Jah." She got up and found a CD from a tower in the corner. "Remember this?"

"Kaya. That's a good one."

"Remember when we played this over and over when we drove out to the Pine Barrens? We all took mushrooms and built a fire."

"Yeah, I was bugging out on that fire. I kept saying, 'Fire was caveman television.' Like that was some big revelation."

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She laughed. "It was. You know, I just talked to Paula the other day. She's a dental assistant up in Westfield. She's doing good."

"That's great."

That wasn't so great. I would have rather heard about old friends in trouble, in decline. This was not out of malevolence but just for my own ego. Everyone passing me by. And by staying the same, I was falling further behind. I'd put my focus in all the wrong places. There was a time when it seemed perfectly acceptable to be a mad drunken poet wandering the bars. But now – not so much. Can it be that it was all so simple then?

"I've been working on lots of poems and stuff lately."

"That's good," she said. There was some pity in her flat smile. "What about school? Are you still thinking of going back?"

"Maybe."

"The way you always talk about your reading and stuff, you'd be such a good teacher. Do know how cool you'd be? I would have loved to have you for a teacher."

"I love you too," I said. Took a big gulp of wine. "Maybe I'll open up my own school. I'll teach classes in Finnegans Wake and Wu Tang solo albums."

"Hell yeah."

"How's your work going?"

"It's okay. They're pretty cool at the office. It's better than waitressing. I don't miss that at all."

"I don't blame you."

I stared out blankly at the TV. The Monkees were cleaning their apartment in fast motion.

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I can't believe you got in a fight," she said. "I almost wish I could have seen that. Remember that time outside the Beach Club, we got away from those guys you pissed off. They wanted to kill you."

"They were marines or something. I got into this anti-war trip with them. Being a real asshole about it too."

"You ran pretty fast out there. You were ready to leave me behind. And then when we get to my car, you start yelling back."

"Yeah that sounds like me. I swear I didn't even want to get into this fight stuff tonight. I just went out to watch or help or whatever. And I got blindsided, this guy knocked me down like a truck."

"I'd ask if you want to smoke but you look pretty lit already.�

"Yeah." I was focusing on the jagged reds in one of the crystals on the table. It looked like half a grapefruit glittering with frozen stones. "Hey, you're still into this crystal shit, huh? Does that really help?" "'This crystal shit?' Yeah, I guess that's one way to put it."

"No I didn't mean it like that."

"I know, I'm kidding. Yes, I am still into that stuff but every time I try to explain it, I can see you working on some smart ass response. There, you're doing it now."

"I really want to know."

"No you don't. You're sweet for pretending though."

"I don't know, I just feel like I need something like that in my life. Like I'm missing what everybody else has. That stuff probably wouldn't work on me though. Nothing does."

"You know, I started seeing this psychologist," she said.

"You did?" My heart sank. I just hated the idea of her getting involved in a relationship.

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"Some of it's covered by my insurance so it's not bad. My mom watches the kids most days anyway."

"Oh," I said. "Wait, why are seeing a psychiatrist?"

"Psychologist. I don't know. Lots of reasons."

"Lilly, you know you're perfect already, right?"

"Right," she muttered. She looked down. "I don't know. It just gets hard sometimes."

"Are you sad?"

"I'm not sad. I'm just alone here. I want something better for Allen and Krissy. I want them to have a house and a yard, all that stuff. It sounds corny, but whatever, it's important. I'm still borrowing from my mom for my bills as it is. And Josh is barely half a father. Like singing Black Sabbath songs in the bars a couple nights can support anything but his own bullshit. The kids know he's bullshit too. Allen does, I think.

He needs a father. They both need so much more than I give them."

Her voice sort of cracked. She looked down at her cup. I wanted to her hug her but I had the sense it would come out wrong.

"I'll always help you if I can, Lilly."

She just kept nodding. There were tears in her eyes.

I felt this helpless longing fall over me. I saw with absolute certainty that there was a world somewhere where we had a life together. Where we lived and breathed each other. I think she saw this too. Or she had at one point and had since abandoned that dream. Now my presence was just another man in her life who would keep letting her down. “You know, 'Life just goes on and on, getting harder and harder,'" I said. "That's from the Stones song. 'Indian Girl.'" Silence. "Good song on a bad album. Emotional Rescue.�

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Her expression was flat, as if she hadn't heard me. She was almost talking to herself. "You don't know what it's like. You don't have all this hanging over you. The kids and everything. You could do anything, you're free. You don't have to stay around here."

The wine was gone and I felt a heavy sadness in the room. It was oppressive, beyond my control.

"Look, I'm sorry for bothering you. I shouldn't have come here so late."

"You're not bothering me, but you just pop in at some crazy times. I mean, I love you but you're like a little vampire. How about normal hours once in a while?"

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, please don't do that. That guilt shit. Allen's started doing it too, he got it from his father. I'll put up with a lot but I don't need another martyr in my life."

"I'm - I mean I'm not sorry."

"Good."

The room was spinning. That's the problem with wine, you gulp it down like beer and you're in trouble. The worst hangovers too. I sort of swayed and almost felt like passing out.

I took the cup to the kitchen, rinsed it. Then put my face under the faucet, wet my eyes, sipped some water. The fridge was covered with pictures of the kids, her and her friends. Little magnets of cartoon animals, silly phrases.

She was there behind me and we hugged and I kissed her cheek. Then her ear, then her neck.

"Okay, okay," she said. She smiled sweetly. "Get some rest please?"

"Yeah, thank you." I started to say something else and then just turned to leave.

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I descended back down the staircase. After I got outside, I stopped and took out my little notebook. I ripped a page and scribbled: "You are the river of the world. I see my true reflection when I look into you. Thanks for the water and wine."

I folded it up and slipped it under the door. Then went out into the night. I had to piss like crazy and I didn't want to ask to use her bathroom. I unzipped openly at the bushes just down from her place. The parking lot was full now, even those places that were empty when I arrived. Everybody settled in. No space left.

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Look Closer By Jessi Cowan

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South For The Winter

By Cameron Steiman “What the—” Joe’s raspy voice broke the silence of the quiet street. “Where’d the field go?” Dampness chilled his skin and sank into his bones. Fingers of mist crept through the chain-link fence surrounding the construction site.

“Keep walkin’.” Joe lengthened his stride, picking up the pace. “Just keep walkin’.”

Buried memories surfaced: a huge gaping wound with exposed floors, twisted girders hanging askew, and rubble littering the ground. Breath clogged in his throat. Forcing it out, he sent puffs of fog into the evening air. The slapping of his faded duffle bag against his thigh became a metronome as his mind struggled, one brick at a time, to wall off the unwelcome thoughts and images crowding it. With each brick added, a lower one cracked and fractured. Sweat pooled at the small of his back.

Joe stopped short when the construction fence ended. Trash had collected inside the corner: balled-up Jack in the Box wrappers, crushed Coke cans, brown paper bags, and dented In-N-Out Burger cups. From the top of the fence, plastic bags dangled and twirled in the wind. Ghosts. Laughing and taunting him.

Icy air gusted across the back of Joe’s neck as a pale blue convertible zipped by. After raising the collar of his coat, he cupped his hands one over the other and blew a long breath into them. He jerked at a skittering sound off to the side. Trash danced and settled, exposing a pair of leather work gloves.

“Need those,” Joe mumbled. Dropping his bag to the ground, he crouched on the balls of his feet, the crack in his left shoe digging into flesh. A depression in the dirt allowed him to squeeze his hand under the fence. He angled his arm toward the gloves; they lay just beyond his reach. He huffed a frustrated breath.

Pushing his shoulder against the fence, he leaned into the metal and gained an extra two inches. He reached his

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fingers as far as possible. Flesh skimmed leather. Nearly there. With his hand aching of cold, he worked the edge of one glove between two fingers and inched it toward him.

“Gotcha.” He clutched it in his fist and slid it under the chain links, then repeated the process for the other one.

Joe slipped his hands into the stiff gloves. Several long rubs, leather whispering against leather, softened the cold hide. Blood flooded into his numb hands, infusing his fingertips with warmth. He shouldered his bag and crossed the street when the walk sign turned green. The construction site gave way to small businesses and apartment buildings. Streetlights flickered on in the hazy mist.

A kid, open jacket flapping and torn jeans sagging halfway to his knees, flew by him on a skateboard.

The wheels scraped and clicked on the pavement. The streets were quiet here, long since emptied of suits and visitors. As Joe walked, he massaged his achy shoulder.

“Too damn cold for San Francisco,” he muttered. Old wounds didn’t like the cold.

Time to find a way south—south for the winter. A laugh escaped his lips, a cackling, hoarse chuckle he’d developed last year after catching pneumonia and being trapped in a hospital for too many days. Maybe he’d go to LA. “La-La Land” as a passerby had thrown out in the wind of a conversation earlier today. Hell, maybe he’d go to San Diego or TJ. Tijuana.

He’d been there once, years ago with a bunch of college buddies. They’d gotten drunk; he’d gotten laid by a pretty Mexican girl. Couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered her body: full breasts, soft ass, and a sexy mole near one of her eyes. They’d driven south to Playas de Rosarito and Ensenada. At night, the stars were like drops of heaven above their heads. TJ, a lifetime ago. Well after ’Nam, but before all the crap happened.

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He stopped under a long awning and dropped his bag. Leaning against the building, he looked at the gloves protecting his hands. They drooped at the fingertips, and paint stained the leather. A rip marred the right glove near its cuff. Otherwise, they were in prime condition. Too much waste in this city. His mind drifted to another place, to other waste. Crumbled cement, twisted metal, screams from people he didn’t know, would never get to know.

“Joe. Joe? I’ve got something for you.”

He looked up and then blinked twice to bring the speaker into focus. He’d been standing. When had he sat down on the stoop?

“Joe? You all right?”

Runner girl. He’d seen her before. At least a dozen or so times. Long, lean body. Today she wore those black tight thingies to protect her legs from the wind and bone-chilling fog. Yellow stripes below her knees reflected the light of a passing car. She wasn’t breathing heavily yet, so he assumed today was a backward day.

Usually he saw her at the end of her run, face flushed and sweat beaded on her skin, but once in a while she reversed her direction and started her exercise near his corner. What was her name? Z… something. Zoey?

Zina? Zeni.

Zeni. He remembered. Zeni, short for Zenith. Crazy name for a person.

“Zeni, baby. How ya doin’?”

“Made these for you.” She extended her hand, holding a clear bag filled with cookies.

“My favorite kind.” He didn’t have a rat’s ass guess what flavor and didn’t give a damn. She’d made him cookies.

Cookies!

Gratitude and warmth expanded in his chest and flooded out in pulsing waves. He opened the bag, and the smell hit him. Peanut butter. Joe pulled out one and shoved it in his mouth. With chocolate chips. The

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gooey bits melted on his tongue. Manners be damned, he couldn’t help himself. He hadn’t had anything to eat since noon yesterday. Coffee and toast, he thought, but wasn’t sure. After his second cookie, he slowed down and brushed crumbs from his beard.

“Thanks. They’re great.” He extended the bag to her. “Would you like one?”

“Nope, all for you.” She smiled and pushed the bag back to him. “Later, Joe.” She ran down the street, visible under lampposts and then lost in the mist and shadows. She was at the sixth streetlight when she turned around and ran back. From a pocket hidden in the waist of her pants, she pulled out a fiver and handed it to him. “Get some coffee or hot chocolate.”

He swallowed the tightness in his throat before saying, “Thank you, baby.” He’d get something hot, linger as long as possible, and put the rest of the money in his travel fund. # The 24-hour coffee shop kicked him out at 2 a.m. after he’d fallen asleep with his head on the table.

Before leaving the shop, he ducked into the can and pissed for a full minute; water and coffee did a number on his bladder. Before unlocking the stall, Joe tucked his hand between shredded sections of his coat’s silky lining and added two dollars to the fifteen he already had in a hidden compartment above the inside of the pocket.

As he left the building, drops of icy rain stabbed his cheeks. A quick right turn brought him into a neighborhood filled with different types of ethnic restaurants, mini grocery stores, and old apartment buildings.

He hustled up one quiet street and down another. A long piece of cardboard tucked behind a stack of shipping pallets stuck out from the entrance of an alley. Just about Joe-length. He dragged it the last block to his destination. He hadn’t been on this street for several days.

*

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A wide stoop beckoned. Joe dropped his bag behind him and hunched in for what was left of the night.

This was the best of his “rooms,” as he liked to think of his resting spots in the city. The angle of the street and buildings kept him out of the wind. Nearby, an exhaust fan blew hot air. He flipped his coat collar up, stretched out his legs, and pulled the cardboard over him like a stiff blanket.

Jen wore blue jeans and an oversized green sweater that reminded him of their honeymoon in Ireland.

He lifted her in his arms, her legs kicking, her laughter resonating in the wind. “Joe Stanton, if you drop me, I’ll never forgive you.” He stood outside their new home in Oklahoma City. They’d watched it grow from the ground up, day by day, room by room. “I won’t drop you if you open the door. Now.” She kicked it open with her foot. He stepped through the front door and into the jungle. In his arms he carried his brother, Bill. Blood dripped down Bill’s face, staining a silver cross necklace and splattering his army fatigues. “You’ll be all right, Bill. I’ll stitch you up. You’ll have a nasty scar but one hell of a story.” Sweat and blood soaked Joe’s Tshirt. The steamy heat burned his lungs. Insects buzzed around him. They landed on Bill’s face, and Joe had no free hands to flick them away. His brother groaned when he laid him on a stretcher. The rat-a-tat of machine guns echoed in the distance. Joe turned to get a med kit, and a concrete wasteland replaced the jungle. A guy sprawled on a sidewalk among twisted and torn car parts. He had a leg missing. Half his face had been blown off, leaving blood pooling on the cement. Shattered glass and shrapnel filled the treeless street. Smoke and dust choked the air and stung his eyes. Joe stood at the corner of 5th and Robinson, the north wall of the Oklahoma City Federal Building crumbled to smithereens at his feet. Steel girders hung, bent and twisted, from the building’s wounded side.

Joe’s eyes snapped open. Where the hell was he? He glanced at people rushing by on the sidewalk. A delivery truck spewed gray fumes as it accelerated away from the curb. A city. His stomach jittered at the thought.

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Chink, chink, chink. The familiar sound of coins hitting the sidewalk brought him back to San Francisco.

Miles and miles away from Oklahoma City.

Three grungy quarters sat at the base of the stoop. He shifted to reach for them, his shoulder complaining at each movement.

“Hey, Bud.” Joe looked up into eyes the color of steel.

“You’re a disgrace to the city.” The man wore a leather jacket, his curly hair skimming the collar. “Try cleaning up and get yourself an honest job.”

It wasn’t the comments that surprised Joe—he’d heard the sentiment before—but the two twenty-dollar bills the guy dropped next to the quarters.

“Bless you,” Joe said to the man’s back. Joe didn’t believe in God, but he believed acts of kindness must be acknowledged. A simple thank you for forty bucks didn’t seem enough. He grabbed the bills and shoved one into a glove and slipped the other into his bag. He leaned his head back against the door.

Jen. Unable to remember the last time he had dreamed of her, he let the image from last night linger.

The green sweater, her blue eyes, her mouth relaxed, laughing. She’d been beautiful in her younger days.

Probably still was. Her auburn hair might be streaked with gray now; the dimples in her cheeks might have disappeared with age. He had no doubt her eyes would still be the color of a clear sky and her slender hands would still move with ease across piano keys.

After the bombing, she’d only worn long-sleeved shirts to conceal the scars on her right arm, but nothing could hide the pain on the inside. The pain he caused by no longer being able to cope, by no longer being able to remember simple day-to-day things. When McVeigh brought down half of the federal building, he also destroyed the walls Joe had built in ’Nam—walls constructed, a brick at a time, out of concentration and a desperate need to bury the horrors he’d confronted as a medic. The doctors blamed Joe’s problems on a

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severe concussion and hemorrhaging from the bombing, but Joe had known better. He had lost his ability to build enduring walls.

And Bill. He couldn’t even remember when they had last spoken. Joe began ticking off the calls to his brother on his right hand, most recent first. Five, no, four years ago, Joe had developed a loose friendship with a suit who occasionally bought him a homestyle meal at Reggie’s Diner. He’d called Bill right after the suit told him he’d been diagnosed with brain cancer. Second, about five years earlier when the loneliness ate at his soul and drink was the only thing that filled it. Third… he stared down at his ring finger. There had been a third time. The memory circled and escaped. He squinted his eyes looking through the haze of days that blended together. About half a year after he arrived in San Francisco, and before Joe landed on the streets, Bill tried to talk him into coming south. Joe had hung up in a huff when Bill didn’t understand Joe’s need to be alone, didn’t understand Joe’s overwhelming desire not to add any more disappointment to those he loved. The memories of letting his family down tasted bitter on his tongue.

Fuck it all. He needed a drink.

Dragging the sheet of cardboard, he walked into an alley ripe with the stench of rotten food and soiled diapers. A rodent the size of a fat cat scurried near his feet. Eleven years ago—or was it twelve?—when Joe first homed on the streets, he might have jumped in surprise, but not anymore. Rodents had as much right to be here as he did. Joe slid the cardboard behind a dumpster overflowing with plastic trash bags and old grocery sacks. Maybe it would still be here in the evening.

With his dreams of ’Nam and McVeigh hounding his heels, he headed down Mission and up 21st. Smells of greasy bacon drifted in the air, mingling with scents of fresh, yeasty bread. A grocer rolled a display of carrots, lying side by side like dead soldiers, to the sidewalk in front of the store’s window. On the street, a beat-up car rumbled from the volume and bass turned too high. Psychedelic rock. Weed music, he and his friends had called it.

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Joe rolled his shoulder against the cold and stiffness that had settled in during the night. When the walk sign turned green, he took a right on Guerrero and walked several blocks along a street sparsely lined with trees. Two women with bags slung over their shoulders hustled past, their perfume sweetening the air. He stopped in front of Paulie’s Liquor. On the slanted roof, a flashing red neon bottle served as a garish advertisement.

Bottle on. Bottle off.

Bottle on. Bottle off.

He rubbed the money in his right glove. The paper felt worn and frail, overused. For the first time in . . . he couldn’t remember how long, he’d have his pick of liquor. Today he could afford the good stuff. Hell, he could afford a selection, a wet dream of alcohol.

He stood outside, shuffling his feet and walking down one side of the street and up the other until the damn store opened. What he should’ve done was find a cozy step and throw down the coins from his pocket, hoping for more. But this morning he had to move. If he stopped, the nightmare and regrets—regrets that he had allowed his life to be blown apart like slow motion shrapnel in a crowded room—would settle like a heavy cloak, squeezing the breath from his body.

The instant the white-haired clerk unlocked the door, Joe hustled across the street and followed a young couple inside. The man wore a suit a size too big, its worn fabric wrinkled and creased as if he’d slept in it. The woman’s auburn hair hung down her back in a neat braid, and her green patchwork sweater, tidy and trim, reminded him of the hills of Ireland. They made an odd-looking pair.

Joe left them in the wine section and headed for the hard stuff. Rows of whiskey, vodka, and bourbon called to him. He removed two bottles of Gordon’s Vodka, eight ninety-nine each. Hell, at that price he could afford four. Or step up to a higher quality drink. Or save some of the money for . . . He pulled on his beard, then

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removed a third bottle from the shelf.

“Awfully cold out today, isn’t it?” the male half of the odd couple said.

“My wife’s ready to move to Palm Springs,” the clerk responded with a choked laugh. “But the only way I’m leaving San Francisco is in a box.”

The booze weighed heavy in Joe’s hands. Palm Springs. South for the winter. He slid two of the bottles back.

After paying, Joe leaned against the outside of Paulie’s and unscrewed the cap. Liquor splashed on shaking hands as he brought the bottle to his mouth and sucked down a long gulp. The liquid seared his throat, burning a trail down to his belly. Last night’s dreams and useless regrets burst into hot flames. Joe slipped the bottle into his coat pocket.

He walked down 19th, skirting a rusty pickup that blocked the sidewalk. A thin stream of sunlight broke through a narrow gap in the clouds and glared off the low cement retaining wall near an entrance of Dolores Park. Joe crossed the street and dropped onto the ledge, letting his duffle bag thud to the ground. A group of teenagers threw a Frisbee, their dog yipping and jumping after it. A boom box playing jazz sat next to two guys cuddling on a tie-dyed blanket. Joe let the sounds of the park blur while he opened the bottle and swigged. It burned like hell, but in another gulp he wouldn’t give a damn how raw his throat felt, wouldn’t give a damn about blood and torn flesh and having to match severed arms and legs with dismembered bodies, wouldn’t give a damn about ’Nam, McVeigh, leaving Jen, or losing touch with Bill.

A kid wearing a sweatshirt and striped baseball cap biked past at top speed. Just as Joe started his next swig of vodka, a smaller kid, wearing the same kind of cap, followed. Before he reached Joe, the younger kid pivoted his head in the direction of two barking hounds. The bike tottered, and the boy tumbled off.

Joe puffed out his cheeks, then released the air like a balloon popping. He screwed the top of his bottle back on, slid it into his pocket, and shouldered his bag. Before he reached the boy, he heard sniffles and saw a

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sob in the rapid up-down of his shoulders. Blond hair poked out from under the baseball cap. The kid looked about seven or eight years old.

“Hey there.” Joe gave the boy plenty of room. Last thing he wanted to do was frighten an already upset child. “You okay?”

The boy stood, his dirty face streaked with tears. His chin was scraped and raw.

“I’m okay.” He righted his bike, sucking in a sob before continuing. “But my bike’s broke.” The front wheel hung cockeyed on the turquoise frame.

“I’m pretty handy. Mind if I give it a try?”

The boy held the bike out.

Joe hunched over it, the wheel between his legs and his hands on the handlebars. His long coat draped over the front tire, nearly hiding it. Joe lined the wheel up with the rest of the bike and quickly twisted the handlebars.

“Good as new.” Joe patted the kid’s shoulder. “My old daddy used to say, ‘If you fall off a horse, you’ve got to get right back on.’” He extended the bike to the boy. “Here’s your horse, son.”

The kid sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of a dirty hand. “Thanks, mister.”

“C’mon, Billy. Hurry up.” The older boy waited at the end of the street, straddling his bicycle. “Game’s starting.”

The boy rubbed his face on a sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I gotta go.”

“Bil-ly!”

The boy mounted his bike. His chest heaved as he took a deep breath; a coin dangling on a thin chain peeked from under his open sweatshirt. Before pedaling off, he flashed a quick wave at Joe.

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“Bye, Billy.” Joe’s sad whisper filled the vacant space. In his pocket, Joe’s fingers hugged the neck of the bottle. The pull of the vodka felt like a lover’s hand drawing him down to bed.

Billy, Bill.

Blood leaked from the wound on Bill’s face, staining the silver cross necklace. His brother groaned, a gut-wrenching sound.

Joe stumbled back a few steps, knocking into a trash can at the edge of the park. It had been a dream.

Just a dream.

He removed the bottle from his coat and unscrewed the cap. Colors dulled as a dark cloud shrouded the sun. A cold wind slapped Joe’s cheeks. The rich scent of coffee drifted in the air.

Coffee. Warmth. South for the winter.

He stared at the bottle in his trembling hand, then opened the top of the trash can and upended the vodka.

Liquor spattered over a banana peel, a wad of bubble gum, a Coke can, and a rumpled front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. To distract himself while it spilled out, he calculated how much money he’d wasted. A nine-dollar bottle with less than a fourth of it drunk, he’d just dumped nearly seven dollars.

What the hell was wrong with him? # Joe rubbed his aching shoulder and strode across the street to the Greyhound bus station. Too many people on the crowded city bus had bumped together, like marbles in a small jar. A blast of heat assaulted him when he opened the door and stepped in. A couple of teenagers, baseball hats facing backward and skateboards dangling from their hands, hustled into line at a ticket kiosk. Joe got behind them and shuffled forward as the line dwindled.

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“Yeah?” The girl behind the terminal window shot him a fast glance.

“What time’s your next bus to Santa Barbara?”

She cocked her head checking her computer screen. On her neck, a tat of Tinkerbelle flashed between strands of blue-tipped hair. “1:05 departure. It arrives at 10:35p.”

The clock above her window read 11:38.

“I’ll take a ticket.” Joe laid forty bucks on the ledge between them. In exchange, she slid him a single piece of paper and a few coins.

Joe had well over an hour to kill. More than enough time for a cup of coffee. Maybe he’d even treat himself to a sweet roll.

He scrubbed his beard with his knuckles. The coffee would have to wait, taking care of business—family or otherwise—came first. He’d seen a phone booth on his way in and ventured back outside to use it, thankful that the terminal still had a pay phone. So many had disappeared over the past couple of years. The door required an extra pull to get the thing open. Joe’s hand quivered as he dropped coins into the slot.

The voice that answered sounded a bit winded and annoyed. “Yeah?” Heavy rock music sounded tinny in the phone’s cheap speaker.

Words stuck in Joe’s mouth like he had eaten too many caramels, and they clung to his cheeks and teeth.

Staring at the zipper of his duffle, he fingered the metallic pull tag and fidgeted with it.

“Hello?” The music faded to nondescript buzzing.

Joe coughed. “Bill.” He spat and then tried again. “Bill, it’s Joe.” “Joe?” A slight pause, then his brother’s tone gentled. He drew the next words out in a long, sad sigh.

“Oh, Joey.”

Joe closed his eyes. Images from the dream crowded him: his brother in his arms, heat swamping him, and insects buzzing his face. A dream, a damn dream, he reminded himself. Although they had both served

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in ’Nam, they were in different units and had only seen each other afterward, stateside.

“I’ve been worried. It’s been so long since your last call.” Bill’s breath whistled through the speaker against Joe’s ear. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m all right.” His blood pounded in his ear.

Bill whispered, “Thank God.” Joe leaned his forehead against the cold glass of the phone booth. The ticket grew damp between his fingers. He sucked in a deep breath, letting it fill his lungs and clear his mind. A siren shrieked. Joe watched an ambulance slow down before turning the corner, its bumper gleaming in the sunlight.

“I’m headed to San Diego. South for the winter.” He released a hoarse chuckle. “South, like the birds.”

The gooey candy feeling returned to his mouth. He cleared his throat.

“I thought I might stop. Stop in Santa Barbara to see you. Be all right?”

“Oh yeah, Joey.” His brother whispered a laugh, a long breathy sound. “More than all right.”

Joe’s throat tightened and he struggled to suck in a breath. He looked down at his free arm and imagined Jen from his dream. He felt the weight of her body pressed against his chest. “Have you…. heard from Jen?” “Yes, we speak from time to time, send emails back and forth in between.” Bill paused before continuing. “When she was visiting San Francisco, she tried to find you. Twice. Her most recent trip was last year. She finally tracked you to General Hospital but you were lost in the wind by the time she got there.”

“I’m not good, Bill.” His stomach roiled like an ocean on a stormy day. “Maybe this isn’t such a great idea.”

“No matter what, you’re still my brother. Please, come. Even if you don’t stay long… I need to see you.”

Bill’s voice grew husky. “I thought I’d lost you.”

Joe stared at his beat up shoes and torn duffle bag. A heavy silence mushroomed between them.

Bill’s voice sliced right through it. “When you getting in?”

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“Tonight’s bus. 10:35p.”

“I’ll pick you up. See you then.”

THE END

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By Max Kenshalo

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Finding Jim Morrison

By Sheree Shatsky

Patricia stopped speaking the day her grandfather died. Everyone who knew her attributed the loss of voice to his passing, but the truth was the mutism stemmed from a mutual agreement between she and her grandfather, a plan of distraction prearranged to shift into place upon his death.

The transition to nonverbal had been easier than expected, for her anyway. She carried a notepad and pen to express her thoughts, but soon learned the voiced quickly tired of the cumbersome nature of communicating with a mute. Most accelerated past the social fluff of language to more immediately address the basic wants and needs of the conversation and be done with her. Prattle and gossip were quickly rid of what became viewed as a onesided conversation, a welcome relief for Patricia who considered herself a loner and awkward among people. As her interactions grew less frequent with the many frustrated by her sudden disability, she embraced the unexpected freedom to better focus on the plan plotted with her beloved Pap. Her hearing and vision rewired as acute compensatory senses and she evolved into a keen listener and hyper vigilant witness of persons and surroundings, both heightened skills of particular importance during the settlement and auction of her grandfather's estate. She had taken to wearing bandanas of varying colors as a means to communicate her mood and intention for any given day, acquiring the headwear idea from a girl in her math class at the community college who wore a bandana everyday tied in a triangle around her head. Patricia sat behind her to study how the corners knotted at the nape of the neck and to better discern the method of tucking the ends inside the knot, so later in the day she could try the look at home.

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She wore the pale green for legal meetings as a conveyance of subdued tone, an implied neutral path of least resistance. As a designated beneficiary, she attended all scheduled conferences, hanging on every word of the attorney as if he were the voice of God and she were Moses transcribing the Ten Commandments to a stone tablet. She acted the part of her father’s demure ally and sweet angel daughter beyond a doubt, peeking out from beneath her bohemian halo to write a response when so directed, closing each reply by a question mark as though she were overwhelmed or too distracted in her grief to reply confidently when in fact, exclamation points punctuated her gut, long jagged lightning bolts of unexpressed disgust that kinesthetically revealed itself as a slight tremor in the pointer finger of her writing hand when the proceedings went too long. If noticed, she cracked the knuckle, smiled and nonchalantly jotted “Fatigue?”

Patricia had the cab driver drop her at the corner the day of the auction. Although she walked this path countless times, today would be a sort of funereal march she would tread with finality each and every step of the way. The bungalow set back off the highway next to Pap’s garage, a massive structure built adjacent to the house. The automatic garage doors stood wide open and she could see clear through from the street to the back yard to the vegetable garden planted in the dead center of the accidental red clay track, an automotive crop circle formed as the result of Pap’s countless test drives of repaired vehicles.

She spent afternoons in the shop during her early school years, waiting for someone to pick her up and take her home, typically her father or maybe one of his girlfriends, but certainly not her mother, who left before Patricia could tug at her to stay. She had picked her own self up and left town to live life on her own terms whereabouts unknown, freed from the double standard expectation that wives be both liberated and domesticated, punching in at work and afterwards at home to begin the second shift of cooking, cleaning and minding the children while husbands settled back with a sweet cocktail certain to lull eyelids to a close behind an open newspaper.

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Grabbing a soda out of the fridge, Patricia pulled up a stool to the workbench and started on her homework, the only time in the day Pap silenced The Doors, his band of choice played nonstop from a grimy cassette player tucked in a corner where he thought the acoustics best. Pap’s claim to fame was his professed ties to lead singer Jim Morrison. Both he and Jim were born the same year in the same place, a small Florida town a causeway west of the Atlantic coast. The singer brought legend to Pap’s life and he took the birthright with him to Vietnam and back to Alabama where he bought the auto repair business from the father of an Army buddy, killed in ’69 at Binh Duong.

While she worked, Pap kept distractions to a minimum, asking her once in a blue moon to provide him a tool when his hands were otherwise occupied inside an engine or he found himself slid beneath a vehicle deep within the heart of a repair, but most days, they worked alongside each other deep in concentration with Patricia taking a break to grab another soda or a snack or listen in as Pap counseled a customer through some mechanical difficulty, which by the time an estimate was presented, he had helped with other issues that drove in with the repair.

“Now, think back,” he’d say to the driver. “When did you first notice the vehicle drifting to the left?”

“Well sir, I hate to tell you this, I hate to admit it, but the night the wife and I had a huge row over money, that was the night. She’d gone out and bought the most expensive roast in the market, wishing to celebrate my birthday, but we had just had a conversation about the budget, how we had to count every single penny. I’m telling you, it wasn’t twenty-four hours previous we’d talked about this very subject.”

“Sounds like a good woman,” Pap said.

The customer crumpled his hat and looked at the cracked concrete floor or at the wall at something unseen.

“Yes sir, that she is. And the aroma of that crown roast, I can’t begin to describe. But we have a system, a poor man’s budgetary system utilizing envelopes—one for the bills, one for groceries and another for emergency sort

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of concerns. She flat cleaned out the grocery allowance and dipped into the emergency funds for that crown roast. And sir, absolutely that indiscretion and considering the day I had at the office, with the boss hanging around the assembly line threatening lay-offs, dinner beyond our means was the last straw in my creel of sanity at that particular moment.”

Pap gave the customer some space, opening the hood or walking around the back of the car to peer down the sides for some unseen shimmy. “It’s tough times, I agree,” he answered. “And something always happens when times are the worse.” The customer shook his hung head low, grimacing a bit, choking back the remorse he’d swallowed since the fateful dinner. “Yes, yes sir, that is indeed true. When things are bad, expect matters to get worse, my own father’s words, almost exactly.” He exhaled as the guilt lifted and went on. “The car, it’s my fault, not hers. She was just being a good wife, knowing how hard I work and wanted to give me a special birthday, that’s all. And what did I do? Ruined it, that’s what I did. Stormed out of the house like a flat fool and slammed into the car, tearing out of the driveway like a didn’t have a lick of sense, all I kept thinking about were those empty envelopes and the crown roast, thinking I’d hope there was enough food in the house to eat over the next two weeks. Next thing I knew, the dog down the street with the lame leg is standing directly in the center of the road. Thank God my eyes were on the road and my hands were on the wheel, but still I over corrected and the front right tire jumped the curb, not once but twice. I was driving way too fast, sir, far too speedy, but I missed the dog, thank God, I missed the dog. And the following day when I drove off to work, that’s when I first noticed the front end shimmy.”

“And for lunch?”

“Sir?” Pap took his pen out his front pocket and began to fill in the work order. “What did you have for lunch later on?”

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The customer’s cheeks pinked at the thought, a slight smile tugging at the memory. “The best roast leftovers a man could ever ask a wife to make. Ate ‘em every day that week and enjoyed every bite.”

“That’s nice, real nice,” Pap replied, presenting the customer the initial figures. “I think we can work a few dollars back into the grocery envelope.”

She passed by the garage and noticed the Lou’s Auto sign was gone, likely set in the yard where potential bidders crawled the property in examination of long tables stacked with her grandfather’s tagged possessions; or knowing her skinflint father like she did, he probably had already sold the piece to a dealer, not wishing to chance a low bid from the yahoos he said lived out here in the sticks. He planned to squeeze every single cent out of the property by selling each and every item belonging to Pap. Her father claimed living in Alabama was akin to being trapped neck deep in thick red quicksand with no mercy of suffocation and as soon as the estate was settled, he would finally break free of the state he so hated but never had enough money to leave. He had plans, big plans, to move on with his own life in a big way.

Patricia checked her watch. She had an hour. She climbed the cement steps to the porch and looked through one of the three slotted windows cut into the front door. From what Patricia could see, the house had been swept clean of everything she remembered and staged with mid-century modern furniture, sleek minimalist pieces red-hot current with young homebuyers. She opened the door and a couple about the same age as her grandparents when they first bought the place brushed past her into the home where her soul would never leave. The woman looked back over her shoulder at Patricia as her husband pulled her along. “I love your scarf,” she said. The purple silk had belonged to her grandmother, dead almost ten years, a gift from Pap following his last tour of duty in Vietnam. “It’s yours now,” he had said, presenting Patricia with the scarf folded into a triangle. “And never forget. Purple is the color of unbridled courage.”

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She stepped quickly through the front room and into the kitchen. Granite had replaced the original wood countertop, erasing a family history of serrated etches and blanched water rings, but the rest of the kitchen was as she recalled, stuck in the sixties with the exception of the upgraded stove her cousin had insisted on buying before taking a chance the old one would catch fire to the house and to their grandparents. “Well, one look and I can tell you, we’d have to gut it,” the woman said to her husband, busy turning on the faucet and looking beneath the sink. Patricia moved past them and opened the door out to the garage to reveal what some would call the real treasure up for bid, a ’48 Buick Roadmaster. A blast of hot air whooshed past ruffling her purple scarf and she though perhaps this was Pap’s acknowledgement of her arrival to reclaim his most precious belonging.

Pap discovered the Roadmaster for sale in a barn south of Birmingham. It was a rust bucket, pitted and dinged with the oil change sticker still stuck on the windshield from 1950. The rebuild would cost plenty, but his decision to buy wasn’t strictly about saving the car. Morrison had crossed his mind when he first laid eyes on the Buick. The singer was a mere five years old when the car rolled out of the factory, who would’ve ever thought a boy with small town roots would become a classic like this car? He had the tools, he had the time, so Pap made a promise to himself there on the spot to restore the Roadmaster and pilgrimage back to his hometown to photograph the car parked out front of the Morrison home. He’d hang the picture in the shop and keep the singer alive by playing his music and sharing the same story with customers he always told Patricia.

“Jim lived in our town only briefly, a couple of blocks from where I grew up,” he’d say. “Who knows, we might have been friends if his father wasn’t Navy. Military families, they move on as you’ve probably heard, never settling in one place for too long.”

Twenty years Pap took to bring the car back to pristine and she was ravishing, the entire vehicle restored from the split windshield to the Dynaflow transmission to the plush interior; as comfortable as driving seated on

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a living room couch. Pap invited Patricia to come along on the drive to Florida after her college classes broke for the summer. As witness of the rebirth of the Roadmaster over the course of her young life, Pap could think of no one else more deserved to join him on a true joy ride as his navigator and photographer assistant.

His physician determined Pap had suffered two strokes previous to the third that landed him in assistive living for several weeks. “Some people feel a rush to the head, shake it off and keep on going,” he offered as an explanation to Patricia and her father. “Another patient of mine attributed his dizziness to a sinus infection, paid the lightheadedness no mind and proceeded to dig out a root cellar beneath his house. That’s exactly where his family found him, lying dead alongside a shelf of jarred chowchow relish.” He couldn’t time stamp how long Pap had left, maybe a month, maybe a year, but the damage had been done and the best he could hope for was today.

Pap wasn’t the type to respond well to unknowns. He didn’t call off the trip and neither did Patricia, so they continued on planning. They routed the southern drive expeditiously through the rural center of the state and would travel back home via the leisurely east coast, with a designated stop at the Daytona Speedway. When pneumonia took advantage of his weakened state, the plans took an unspoken turn. Pap knew his granddaughter as a watcher, not a confronter, so in preparation of what lurked in his future, he shared through rattled breath how her grandmother had once stopped talking, smack in the middle of a lunch of fried chicken and okra. They had lost a child to scarlet fever, a familial sorrow Patricia had not known her grandparents had endured. Pap could never be certain the death brought on her silence as the loss had occurred some thirty years prior, but on the day his wife went silent, she simply put down her fork, collected her plate and did not utter a single word until a year later when she asked her husband to hand her the TV Guide so she could check what time Dallas

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was scheduled to air as that evening, the entire country would learn who shot J.R. Ewing. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her during those twelve months, Pap told Patricia. Nothing. He bought her a slew of composition notebooks and pencils, whatever she needed to communicate and work through whatever claimed her voice. The people she didn’t need disappeared during the quiet time and those who cared about her stuck around. And if you don’t talk, he continued, people will stop asking you questions. A good tool, he told Patricia, to have in your back pocket, to keep others from messing beneath your hood.

She estimated the crowd milling about the garage at around twenty or so, a handful circling the Roadmaster, the rest deep in study of the various tools up for sale. The driver’s side door was open and she slipped inside, the small screwdriver hidden inside her scarf. The windshield split into distinctive halves by a center chrome piece and as her grandfather had instructed, she set to work on the screws, efficient and quick.

“Hey,” she heard someone say, “Hey young lady, what are you doing?” The chrome fell away as if in thank you and by the time she was pulled from the car, Patricia had freed the tight scroll from its narrow hiding place, a certified letter from Pap bequeathing his granddaughter the Roadmaster.

She refused to hand the letter over until her grandfather’s attorney was on site. He reviewed the document and ordered an immediate stay of auction on the vehicle. When her father showed up all bluster force and peacock bravado in claim of his power as executor of the estate, Patricia fetched Pap’s attorney a shovel from the garage and asked him to dig beneath the cucumber patch out back in the vegetable garden. The A&P coffee can had rusted a bit over the previous six months, but the plastic lid popped off clean smelling of clay and mud and old store-brand coffee. Sealed inside a plastic sandwich bag, the attorney found a notarized codicil to the original will along with the car title, naming Patricia executor to the estate and legal owner of the Buick Roadmaster. Several spare sets of keys had been dropped inside, including a set to the safe deposit box Patricia knew housed copies of the documents buried in the can. She drove her grandfather to the credit union that day,

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helping him to negotiate the lobby with his plastic tubing and oxygen tank. She waited outside as an employee escorted him within the treasures of the bank and upon emerging, Pap said, “When the time comes, everything you’ll need is in the first envelope stacked on top everything else.” The fat thick envelope was indeed where Pap had affirmed and filed within his final wishes, Patricia discovered ten thousand dollars bound by a rubber band inside a Florida road map. Across the top bill, Pap had scrawled Patricia-- Gas Money.

She slid behind the wheel and popped a crackly version of Roadhouse Blues into Pap’s cassette player set in the seat beside her. The legal battle launched by her father had been open and shut denied, leaving Patricia to parent his lost dreams of escape. She and her grandfather had put their heads together on the subject of his son and decided when the legal roads cleared, to provide him with enough money to leave the South behind and call somewhere else home. After all, Pap had said, there would be no you without him and for that I am eternally grateful. Patricia paid the auctioneers for their time and donated Pap’s belongings to various charities and the house, she sold to the young couple who reminded her so much of her grandparents. The husband offered her the garage to store the car for as long she needed and she accepted, thinking how much Pap would have enjoyed meeting this young man and sharing the history of the home in the corner of the garage where the acoustics brought Jim Morrison back to life. Patricia drove the sensational car out to the end of the driveway and looked left, right and left again. Not a lame dog in sight. She turned the Roadmaster toward Florida and sang along with Jim and his Doors, if only in her head, quite smartly covered with a white bandana.

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Graveyards in Wanaque

By Valerie Ruberto He asked me why they don’t put fences around the graveyards.

I run through my head the potential motivations.

Would we keep the supernatural locked, confined to a moss packed rectangle Or protect it from the cynicism of a dirt soaked humanity?

Never in my life has so much old brick followed me.

There’s a quaint in the air and it shields my eyes with midnight beauty.

What a place I’ve found myself in.

It’s the way that you can be better at driving on some highways than others (I-287 and I lack the intimate familiarity found between Me and some other choice pieces of hardened tar) And you see the pin prick pierce of the hazards of trucks Haphazardly pulled over by the wayside of the road In an attempt to fish for a few hours of shallow rest before completing their 2 AM drive, Because it seems normal comes in the form of a starlit highway-side nap And I never did quite know how to assimilate.

So bloodshot and slightly cracked I push on.

The orange and white striped beacons outline the road Absorbing my headlights and projecting them back at me As a friendly gesture to guide me back home.

I’m in search of my quiet suburb streets (all of which have met my feet personally) And passing by my convenience stores (the workers of which all know me by heart)

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The Krausers with Christmas lights in March (half dead, A likely friend seeing as we relate in that aspect).

There’s a fenced in rectangle of dirt where brain tissue should sit, Yet nothing ever seems quite as dead as Wanaque does at 2 AM.

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Road to the Sun

By Jessi Cowan

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Juleen Eun Sun johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted and taken to Valdez, Alaska. Johnson earned an MFA from PNCA in Visual Art. She's currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at UMass Amherst. She’s a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Johnson currently writes and creates art in Massachusetts.

Jeff Schneekloth (Shem The Pen) is a writer and musician in Pittsburgh, PA. He is working on a comic novel about a one-handed social activist for 2019. He also writes haikus on twitter: @dropthemichaiku.

Cameron Steiman has an MFA in Creative Writing as well as an eclectic background working as a counselor, software engineer, software manager, writing teacher, and writing coach. Cameron is a National Novel Writing Month Ambassador and spends every November pounding out a rough draft of a novel. Many of Cameron’s nonfiction and fiction works have been published.

Follow Cameron @cameronsteiman.

Valerie Ruberto is a student at Tufts University. She has had three poems published in Yellow Chair Review and one published in Halcyon Days. To read more of her poems, go to http://www.valerierubertopoetry.weebly.com/.

Sheree Shatsky writes short fiction believing much can be conveyed with a few simple words. Her most recent work has appeared in Dime Show Review, Pif Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, The Conium Review and Litro with work forthcoming in the biannual issue of The Shallows/Cold Creek Review. Read more of Ms. Shatsky's work along with her adventures with Wild Words at www.shereeshatsky.com .

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rindliterarymagazine.com

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