Rind Issue 16

Editor in Chief:

Dylan gascon

Fiction Editors:

Johnathan Etchart

Jenny Lin

Melinda Smith

Stephen williams

Shaymaa Mahmoud

Nonfiction Editors:

Collette Curran

Owen Torres

Anastasia Zamora

Poetry Editors:

Shaymaa Mahmoud

Sean hisaka

Lisa Tate

Blog Manager:

Dylan Gascon

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.

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Cheers!

–The Rind Staff

Time Enough for Counting

By Leo Rein

I was once told that confidence in poker is like grapes to wine, but my buddy Landon never explained what the fuck that meant. I walked in here with that feeling you get when you steal a wallet with some bills and found your dealer, and now, well, while I’ve still got some chips, I’m running out of time. So, glancing round the table at the players still sitting up straight, I rub two chips together and call. Money I can spare, it’s the time I’m agonizing over.

Garry Reed, supposed to be a real shark, slumped over the table about two hours ago, and an hour and fifty minutes ago he started to smell. No one’s allowed to touch him, and I know that because I saw what happened when someone tried. Now I don’t care if he smells like he’s been baking in the sun for two weeks, I’m not gonna fucking move him. The guy to my left, the guy in the grey suit and grey cowboy hat, looks at his cards like they’re the only picture of the only one he’s ever loved and he’s thinking of all the things he never got a chance to say to her. He takes a deep breath… yup, he folds. The lady to my right tries to subdue a coughing fit, and that thing across the table from me laughs.

I met Garry for the first time tonight. When I walked in, he turned round and beamed at me, hopped out of his seat, and started to regale me with tales about him and Landon. He was chatting on, and I only gave him enough attention to hear him say how him and Landon were “bosom buddies” since they both were “on the tit.” He gripped my hand again in welcome, bounced back to the table, and I wiped my hand inside my pocket.

I used to think I liked people like Garry. Or maybe “like” isn’t the right word. I used to find people interesting, but I had to put up with a lot of them at my job. I worked cards at the small, shitty

casino in town. The work, well, it’s mindless. I had to find a way to enjoy it. Funny, I didn’t like dealing for poker, but I did like watching people play. Like with blackjack, I enjoyed watching people play because people would have these superstitions, they’d follow to get the right card, and then lose. I’ve seen people bet their souls, and it’s like something shuts off behind their eyes when they bust. Then they get up and leave and I never see them again.

Landon stuck out. He was a regular, came around after I’d been working there, what, a year and a half? He played a few rounds of blackjack, lost a horrific amount of money then made an unbelievable comeback. His expression never changed. After that he stuck to poker, with slots as a cooldown. Said he hated poker because he liked losing money, which is why he played slots. Said poker’s easy, just pay attention. Figured I would enjoy hustling.

He sat me down, walked me through a few hands at one of our tables, and made me a few months’ salary. So, I wouldn’t get a reputation around my own work, he suggested under-the-table games. “Tax free” was new and welcome. After a couple of those, he tells me I’m good, I know it, he knows a place I can clean house. Told me the stakes are higher. Yup. It’s my own fault, I thought we’d just be betting money.

It was about what I’d expected, the place, about what I’d hoped for. It’s the kind of place that you’d think is cliché in movies, but then remember that cliches gotta come from somewhere. Dingy, smokey, single bulb of light above us, but spacious enough to get eight of us around the table. Well, five people now, and three bodies.

This sonuvabitch to my right had the gumption, the gall, the absolute cheek to raise instead of check with stakes like these, and now that fucking dealer across from me is gonna raise it again. Doesn’t matter the guy in grey folded, doesn’t matter what… what’s the name, Elouise? Eloisa…? The quiet one. Doesn’t matter if the quiet one calls or has enough of a death wish to go all in, that motherfucker across from me is gonna raise me for my last chip. God help me, I must call it, too.

The quiet one’s teeth clack as she bites her nails. I don’t know what she’s thinking about. I don’t want to know because I don’t exactly want to emphasize with the marks. Oh, sweet Christ she went all in. Oh lord, oh Jesus, oh please no.

Now, see, okay. Look, listen, I like those kinds of plays. I like it when someone does something unexpected and contrarian and doesn’t make sense, but sweet Lord above I don’t want to see anyone else… well. But with a play like that, I’m now convinced she’s holding an eight and I really, really, really could’ve used that card.

Four cards up, the river to come, and here I am with my pocket eights. With the ace of hearts and spades face up, I’m looking at two pair here, and that’s fine. That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s fine, I’m okay, that’s okay. When the flop brought up the jack and the two, that hurt. So close, and nothing to change.

I would love to be playing against myself right now. I’d be the easiest read; it’d be a clean sweep. Or maybe I’d just love to be in another seat, where I don’t have to see that thing stare at me half the night.

It doesn’t laugh this time, which feels worse. It just calmy counts out its chips, matches what the quiet one put in, and makes that into a side pot. Then with quick precision, that motherfucker matches my stack chip for chip. They didn’t have to do that, they’ve got a pile of the $10,000 chips that covers my entire net worth, but no, chip-for-chip, matching denominations.

When that… when it first talked tonight, I thought it was playing a character. The voice was bassey and had a grating rasp to it, and I just assumed they had given a lot of work to an impression of a celebrity I didn’t know. Ah, they finished counting chips, and of course, of course, wrote something on their paper. Balancing the paper on top of the pile, the dealer started to push their chips to the middle, when it stopped and oh… oh no. That’s two.

“Raise. $145,850. Three years of life. One treasured memory.”

The woman on my right. Her name is Grace. She gave me a polite smile when I picked the seat next to her, then went fishing in her bag as I tried to make small talk. She set a pink flask on the table, then turned to me and feigned attention. Play started a bit after that, and I didn’t get the chance to ask her much about herself.

God, I wish she hadn’t raised. That’s who she is to me right now, someone that made my life into this. I didn’t want to look at the dealer while they said the terms of the bet, so I watched Grace, who watched her cards. The mention of the money didn’t faze her. She tensed up a bit with the lifespan business. But her eyes snapped to the dealer when it said memory.

She folded, and that hurt to see as well. The ante alone is gonna bleed me dry if nobody else does. I glance around. Grey hat’s got an expression like he’s trying to come to terms with his fate. I doubt he will. I don’t know what the quiet one’s expression is because her face is buried in her hands. One player is still smiling. I hate it.

I had a few objections to this whole system, like how the dealer gets all the paper bets he wants, and we only get one for the night. But it wasn’t like I was gonna say something. I think it was two… maybe two and a half hours ago, the one with fingerless gloves had asked, before he became a body, what the conversion rate of years of life to dollars was. The thing across from me spoke softly into his ear, and after that I think their concentration was shot. They didn’t stop crying until they stopped moving. But it’s okay, apparently, he was a real dick. He tried to kick Garry after he slumped over, and that put an end to his story, I guess. I take stock. Table’s got an ace of hearts, ace of spades, jack of hearts, and a two of diamonds.

What the fuck am I hoping for here? An eight? I don’t dare to dream, thanks. That’s, what, a one in… forty chance? At best? God I could never do that probability right. But if I fold, I lose my ante. The ante… the ante’s been worth more than the pot, lately. There’s twenty-five years of life on the table for the winner here, five years ante’d in by everyone, and from a life of drinking and smoking in dens like these, a few more years of my life gone and some kind of cancer will bloom.

That’ll happen while I’m here. While I’m sitting here. Like how I watched Garry die peacefully of old age here. It’s only because he won that permission in an earlier round, lucky bastard. Figures that’s the one win someone gets after they use their own slip.

Grace cracks her knuckles, snapping me back to the game. Okay. Got it. Fine. A real all-in, here.

“Call. And raise.” I start to scribble on the one single piece of paper we were given, almost puncturing the page. I speak each word out loud. “Get… out… of… here… alive… and… well.” I start to crumple the paper up but stop myself. I add “Whenever… I want,” and throw it in the pot. “Is that allowed? Is that fine by you?” The dealer doesn’t laugh, but oh god it smiles. I hadn’t noticed it was laughing without a smile Some poker player I am, I guess, oh god I don’t want to see that again.

“All in, plus lifeline. Head’s up,” it said, in the voice of a young man. “That might be the largest bet of the night.” Maybe it was a woman’s voice. I can’t tell.” I shrug, pretending to myself I’m not an open book. “Of course,” it says, “I call.” The guy in grey thumbs the paper by his chips, chewing his pen. It’s so quiet I swear the sound echoes. My heartbeats probably echo.

I hope the guy in grey’s got a better idea than me. I hope all of them get the hell out of here. One of us tried to be smart. The last kid, the eighth one of us, youngest too. He got all bright-eyed and wrote “trapped in here forever” on a piece of paper and tossed it in the pot. Smart idea, I guess. Bad execution. He folded, so he wouldn’t be “trapped in here forever.” He leaned back with a smug smile that’s still on his face. I wish he would’ve slumped over like Garry.

Bullshit, my mind screams at me, for all the good it’ll do. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Yeah, it’s not fair we’re fucked if we lose our lifeline, but this long since stopped being fair. This is poker, not dice.

The dealer pats the deck, burns the top card, then with one beautiful flick of its writs, it sends

another card flying across the table. It flips face-up and settles right next to the rest of the cards, in absolute perfect alignment.

Eight of hearts.

My mind sags. I got it, I got it, I got it, oh my god I got it. Full house, oh my god I got the full house, I got, I got, I got one of the top three best hands on this table. I might be having a heart attack, oh that sweet adrenaline.

Three players still in, me and her can’t bet any more. Time to show. My hand shakes so bad I drop one of my cards face up by mistake. “Full house, eights inside aces.”

Dead silence. I swallow my nausea and try to focus on my breathing. If there’s pocket aces, if there’s pocket jacks, if someone has an ace and a two…

The quiet one, she flips her cards. She’s got a queen and king of hearts. “Flush… ace high...”

I’m so sorry, I want to shout to her. I want to cry and apologize and make it all better, like it’s my fault and like I could. I’m so sorry. And I want to laugh in her face and toss in the air all the money she just gave me.

Dealer flips their cards over, almost lazily. Pocket twos. My heart sounded like a suppressed machine gun, but funny, it feels like I don’t have a heart now. Twos inside aces. A weaker full house than mine. I won. I won. I stand and start to scoop the pot in. My legs wobble, I almost collapse back in my seat. The chips clatter into a mess as I pull it all to me. I’m so fucking rich I won. I did. I played that so perfectly, I’m fucking invincible. I’m so far up I can’t see the ground. I stifle a fit of laughter, all these idiots, these blank slates sitting here thought they could get me? I look around the table since instinct tells me to gloat, and all feeling dribbles away. I won’t look at Eloisa. I won’t. Can’t. Suddenly I remember where I am, and I’m hit by way more guilt than the situation calls for. Like opening a closet stuffed with mud.

“I’m cashing in, out, I mean. I’m cashing this get-out-of-here-now ticket NOW.” My voice cracks on the last word. The dealer nods, reaches under the table, and places wads of cash by the pot. Stacks. More money than I’ve ever had. “Leave your chips. Your final tally,” it says, and pulls out a notepad. The notepad is blank. “A net gain of three memories. A net loss of eighteen years. A net gain of $367,250. Goodbye.”

Eighteen years. I stuff the cash in my pockets, it barely fits. I don’t want the memories, but I’m getting out. I’m shivering. I’m getting out. Where’s the door?

“Do you want a line of credit, my dear?” Dealer’s on the next game, the cards spinning out to the rest. Grace looks at me with her poker face. I mouth an apology, and quick as that her face changes from blank to contempt. The guy in grey antes in, and I watch him age a few years. The quiet one, no, Eloisa, stares down, doesn’t move. I turn to get out, the stairs to the street are down the hall. I remember now, I remember.

“Wait,” she says, “can you spot me a memory?” I look back at Grace, but she’s studying her cards. “It’s mine anyway…” Her voice really is soft. “Sorry, Eloisa, right?” Her head tilted down, but her eyes are still set on me. She nods. Don’t do that, don’t look at me with hope. The guy with the gloves won that from me and then cashed it in for chips.

“Don’t. She’d only lose it,” the guy in grey speaks at last. The dealer grins. I thought about that sometimes. Eloisa went cold, which I was impressed by. I would have gone beyond cold; I would have broken down. She’s still staring, imploring. The guy in grey leans forward and starts in with “But don’t worry,” and holds up his paper, “I know just what to do.” She takes her eyes off me to look at the paper and I run. I run the fuck out of there, up the stairs, and then I keep running. I think a few thousand dollars fell out of my pocket somewhere. I collapse next to a building I don’t know how many blocks away and tell myself I’ll go back to look in a minute, just a minute.

I didn’t expect the worst part to be the memories. Not from the game, but the ones that weren’t mine. Eloisa in the park with some kid I’ll never know the name of. The guy in grey finishing some restoration of some car I don’t recognize. And the guy with the fingerless gloves doing something disgusting that I try so much not to think about. I try not to think about any of them, but I own these memories now and they aren’t fading.

And that’s hard to live with, you know. I don’t know that kid, or how to find them, or anything about any of it. The car looks magnificent. I know it took four and a half years to restore, and I can feel the guy in grey’s pride as he pats the hood. The third guy, I’m glad he got stuck in there. Wished he got worse than he did, and that’s saying something. I’d probably wonder more about what happened with Grace, but I can’t shake a feeling of irritation to her. Like it was her fault I was there. Like it was anyone’s fault.

I can’t find Landon. His phone’s disconnected and someone else is in his apartment. I came to terms with that quicker than I expected. Hell, maybe he was another one that got out of that game. Maybe they all got out of there. Maybe the guy in grey had some brilliant plan. I don’t know.

I joined that game because Landon was my in, but how did the rest of them get there? Did any of them know each other? All I know about Eloisa is that she didn’t speak much, there’s a kid… and her poker face is better when she’s winning. But the guy in grey, nothing connecting him to anyone else. I can’t find out a damn thing about him, or the guy with the gloves. I’m glad about the latter but it’s still their memories I must live with. Christ. And then there’s Grace. Grace, Grace, I feel like we’d met somewhere before. I don’t know how much it matters but I feel like I was robbed, cheated. Or that I stole from them. I keep thinking there were other people there, but I know that can’t be right.

I spent most of my money trying to find more information. One private eye apologized and told me he needed more to go on than “an illegal poker game in town somewhere”, and the physical descriptions of everyone else weren’t much help. No one reported missing matching any of them, but someone should have noticed. I spoke to another private eye because I don’t know what I’m doing, and they knew it too. After four weeks of strong leads and assurances, turns out they just did nothing but collect my money.

I sit on this park bench, staring at a spot that makes me feel someone else’s delight. The memories are wearing me down, wearing me down. I’m tired of feeling my heart, I’m tired of feeling that sick fuck’s pleasure, and for some fucked-up reason I’m tired of feeling pride I didn’t earn. It’s more than just that, though. I’ve taken a lot, from a lot of people, that just didn’t seem real at the time. And now I know they all had memories, feelings, lives, living beyond the boundaries of that casino, living after the game ends, dealing with the losses I caused.

I look up at the clouds, then the people walking past. I take out my phone and dial Landon, who picks up immediately. He’ll know someone that’ll take them off my hands, out my mind, maybe give them to someone else. Kind of like a dealer.

After morning, with crows and finches

By David E. Howerton

After morning, with crows and finches they’re looking for something to eat and me drinking stale coffee.

Worlds in grains of pollen tossed by wind make me sneeze.

Quiet of traffic noise fills ears and my head, wind songs continue to surprise me.

Broken fingers of soul flutter try to catch last remnants of free thought before sinking into nothingness.

Loyal Traitor

By Eva Schultz

Elinor plodded over the rolling grass of the meadow, holding her bound hands up to keep her balance. She stumbled over a rut in the earth and narrowly avoided falling.

“Hurry up,” one of the royal guards said, prodding her with a gauntleted fist.

She stopped short to make him bump into her and laughed as he stumbled sideways. He cursed, grabbed her by the shoulder, and shoved her to the ground.

Three of the other four guards looked back and laughed. Elinor braced against the ground as best she could with her hands tied and tried to rise, stepping on her skirt, and falling again.

Strong hands gripped her under the arms, and in an instant, she was upright, a steadying hand resting lightly on her back. She turned and looked up at Thomas’s face, then pulled away from his touch.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

She glared at the grass and didn’t answer.

“Come on,” a short, broad-shouldered guard said. “Don’t coddle her. If we get her to the dungeons before midday, we can still patrol most of the eastern grove before sundown.”

Thomas stayed by Elinor’s side as they resumed their slow progress toward the distant castle keep. She could picture the expression on his face without having to look – the wrinkle of concern creasing his forehead, the pinched expression in his lips that meant he was trying to think of something to say. After a lifetime in the same meager village, she knew him as well as she knew herself.

And yet here he was in the red and gold crest of the king's men, hunting rebels like Elinor. Ever since the unrest had begun to grow in the outlying villages, she had assumed that he would come with her to the rebel stronghold in the mountains to stand with the common people.

She still remembered the moment that he had told her no – he was going to the castle to join the king’s force. That was the last moment that she had cared about him.

Once the other soldiers had returned to bantering among one another, he said in a low voice, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

She couldn’t resist this bait. “Are you going to stay and watch them behead me, or are you going to rush back out to your patrol duties?”

“That’s not what’s going to happen.” There was conviction in his voice. “The king isn’t executing everyone upon capture, and he’s trying to avoid executing women at all. So long as you haven’t killed anyone, yourself, you’ll be safe.” He glanced at her sideway, as if he wanted to ask but couldn’t bring himself to.

“I don’t believe you,” Elinor said. “Why would he let his enemies live?”

“He’s not like the rebels. They slaughter anyone who they think is opposed to their cause. The king is only interested in restoring the peace. He wants as little bloodshed as possible.”

Elinor laughed, and her own sharp, bitter tone took her by surprise.

“The king is a better person than most people know,” Thomas continued, unaffected by her derision. “Once you see that for yourself, you’ll feel differently.”

“I’ll never stop hating him.” Elinor squinted as the sun peeked briefly through the clouds before passing back into gloom. “I’ll never betray my people.”

Thomas sighed, a sound that Elinor knew too well. She remembered it from childhood, the weary sadness that sometimes overtook him when he was trying to make a point and wasn’t being understood

“I know you don’t believe this, but I do still care about you,” Thomas said. “I care about everyone back in the village. You know as well as I do that almost all of them are just living their lives, tending the land, and waiting for the fighting to stop. They aren’t a part of this fighting.”

“It would stop if the king would give us our freedom.”

“Would it?”

She glared at him.

“We both know the rebels won’t stop until the king is dead, and the castle is a mound of rocks.”

Thomas said it softly, not with the fire that the rebel leaders had when they shouted this very promise to the crowds.

Elinor knew he was right; there could be no compromise, no amendment to the laws that would quell the rebellion. The rebels wanted to utterly abolish the crown, to put all authority into the hands of the individual.

“And if there are factions among the rebels already–” Thomas continued.

“Stop!” Elinor was ashamed to admit to herself that she had no argument against what he was about to say – that the rebel factions were almost as dangerous to one another as they were to the king, so how did she expect a cohesive world to come out of these layers of conflict? Elinor had aligned herself with the more level-headed of the rebel groups intentionally; it seemed such a waste to quarrel and fight and kill one another over what type of world to build before the old world had been torn down.

Just fight for freedom from the king today – that was as far ahead as Elinor had thought. She knew something would have to come next, but her mind was so full of the daily struggle that she had barely let herself think about life after the rebellion was complete.

And now, she would never see it.

“We both know I won’t live out the day,” she said to Thomas. “You can go back to your raids knowing you murdered someone you’ve known your whole life.”

“You’re not going to die,” Thomas replied. “And if I live through this, I’m going to come and find you when it’s all over, and I’ll see that you’re set free. And we’re going to be friends again.”

The way he said “friends” made her wince. If the rebellion had never come, if life had gone on as always, their future together would have been something more. In their tiny village, where there were only so many choices for a young man and a young woman, he would have asked her. And she had always meant to accept him.

They had crossed the plain and were entering the thick foliage of the woods again. Thomas pulled a heavy branch aside to allow her to slip through without scratching her face, and he wordlessly loosened a fold of her skirt when it snagged on a thorny branch at her knee.

She still remembered the last time she had seen him before today, on what she had thought would be the last time she ever laid eyes on him. It had been a nighttime raid on the rebels by the royal guard, some weeks after Thomas had left for the castle, early in Elinor’s career with the rebels. She had eluded capture as the farm burned, trying to find the river so that she could follow it along to the nearest safe house. She had hunched behind a stack of hay bales, watching for any opening to slip away unseen.

That was when she had seen Thomas – her childhood friend, her expected future – standing massive and strange in plate armor and the colors of her enemy. She remembered the glow of the fire on his breastplate, the shadows on his face as he scanned the dim, smoky scene, looking for rebels to capture or kill. For a nightmare moment, she had been sure that he was looking right at her.

Then he turned away – not just his head, his whole body. With his back to her, she had fled. She glanced at him in the dim light of the inner forest, unable to determine his expression in the deep shade. If he had seen her that night, what would she have done? Would she have fled, or would she have tried to take him down with her? She remembered the rage that had boiled over in her heart when she saw with her own eyes the grotesque thing that Thomas had become, and she expected that night would have the last for them both.

He had appeared in her dreams sometimes over the long, lean months of rebellion. In fact, she thought she might have been dreaming about him in the early hours this morning, as she lay in exhausted sleep in the woods, trying to return to the rebels after her latest mission. She had opened her eyes and had seen his concerned face looming over her. For a moment, it had felt like it must just be a part of the dream.

He could have let her go. Even if the other guards had seen her and attacked, she would have had a head start. And if she had died anyway, at least she would have gone down fighting for her freedom. Now, she groveled in bondage in the depths of the forest, on her way to an ignominious death alone on the king’s chopping block. And it was all due to Thomas.

The attack came so suddenly that it took several beats before Elinor understood what was happening. She watched the lead soldier fall, an arrow protruding from his neck.

“Cover!” one of the others shouted, and Elinor stumbled out of the reach of Thomas’s long arms to crouch in the overgrowth. He turned in her direction, but two rebels were upon him, and he had to fight them off. Elinor felt an instinctive flash of worry for him but pushed the thought down.

She scooted backward, the nettles tearing at her hair and cheeks, her hands tugging impotently against the rope. Thomas had let one of the others bind her – yet another betrayal – and there was no give in the rope at all. Unless she could find a way to get free, all she could hope to do was get herself upright, find an opening, and flee.

She scanned the rebels fighting the guards and didn’t recognize any of the faces. If she tried to defect to them, would they accept her, or would they consider it easier and safer to just number her with the guards and kill her?

No, she couldn’t take the risk. She had to get away from all of them, back on the path to her group’s encampment. She surveyed the frenzy of fighting; it had grown from a small skirmish into what was quickly becoming a battle. There must have been another royal troop near enough to hear the action, as

the guards’ numbers had grown. The rebels, meanwhile, had no qualms about hiding among the trees, hunting the king’s men and massing together once the advantage was theirs.

Just beyond the trees, she saw an opening. If she could move past the fighting quickly enough, she could hunch down into the tall brush and put distance between herself and the battle. From there, she would find a path back to her people.

A figure tumbled into the path she meant to take, and she crouched back; it was Thomas. She watched as he attempted to raise himself on one elbow, fell back, and then dragged himself into the underbrush.

She had to go past him; there was no other way out of this dense, leafy trap without a much greater risk of being seen. She watched, trying to determine how mobile he was. He had been injured badly enough that he couldn't rise – she could see that. He had hauled himself into a seated position, watching the melee and gripping a sword in one hand while pressing the other fist against his midsection.

She might make it past him if she ran. Or he might seize her in those long arms, the arms that had baled hay and plowed fields and helped build back her family’s hovel after a flood washed it half away.

He might be able to stop her. But if she stayed here, she would be captured, at best. The crown or the most violent of the rebels – neither was a real choice. All that she had left now was herself.

She turned to the clearing, to Thomas, and rushed forward. The uneven forest floor, heaped with tangling debris, seemed to grab at her and pull her downward with green, snapping fingers. She saw Thomas’s head turn; she saw his eyes.

Gasping in a breath, she flung herself toward the gap in the trees. He lurched forward, his bulk falling almost across her. She fell face-first into the crunch of leaves and branches and nettles, kicked her feel out behind her to ward off his pursuit, and struggled upright, pain shooting through one knee. She could hardly breathe as she limped ahead, the world a tunnel of bark and leaves and screaming.

Straining for air, Elinor came to a stop behind a broad tree and paused to flex her leg. She rubbed at her stinging forehead with her bound hands, and they came away bloody. She choked down a cry, shaking her foot sharply and stepping down tentatively until she was sure that her knee would bear her weight.

She didn’t mean to look back, but she did it anyway.

Thomas lay face down, an arrow fletched with the royal colors sticking from his back. An arrow of the royal guard – her blood chilled as she realized that the shot had been meant for her.

Thomas had thrown himself at her not to stop her but to shield her.

Her mind rushed back to the night when she had seen his face in the firelight – turned toward her, but somehow not seeing her. Perhaps, she realized for the first time, he had chosen not to see her.

He stirred and pushed himself upright on one arm. Perhaps the arrow could still be removed; perhaps he could survive this if he ran right now. If someone helped him run away.

He turned and looked back, and his eyes met hers. Elinor saw him as he had been, sitting with her in the sunshine, their lives unrolling before them like a blank parchment. He raised a hand – to reach for her? To beckon her forward? To wave her on?

She would never know because she turned and ran

The noise of the battle diminished to a whimper, then finally to silence, as she fled. She scraped the rope on her hands against a tree trunk until it frayed enough to break; her hands came away reddened and scored. Hours tumbled over one another; the sun moved down the sky and stabbed at her in fiery lances between the leaves.

She was alone, but he walked silently beside her. She tried to ignore his presence, to remind herself that he was gone, that she had left him in the underbrush and in the past. But he was there when she reached the river, when she followed it to the foothills, when she descended a hidden walkway and paused to whistle the signal at the mouth of a hidden cave. He followed her into the hideaway and stood by as she embraced

her rebel comrades, gulped water from the cup they passed to her, and passed along the intelligence they had asked her to gather.

They laughed with delight at her story of escaping her captors and cursed the souls of the king’s guards who had died in the surprise attack. It was the best possible outcome, they said – one group of enemies attacked by another, heavy losses on both sides, all helping their captured agent to escape. It should have made her laugh in grim satisfaction.

It should have chased his spirit away. But he remained.

At last, as Elinor lay curled in a blanket in a dark corner of the cave, listening to the soft buzz of comrades’ voices eagerly planning their dawning future, she could see him clearly, sitting guard beside her. When he turned his sad face to her, it was painted with disappointment, affection, pain, love. She had prevailed today. She would keep fighting, every day, until her cause did, too. She would leave behind the past, the king’s oppression, the hopelessness of her old life.

But now she knew would never be able to leave him behind.

the suffering happens in the synapses everything is tearing away from symbolic practices & the less successful body is the less successful body & nothing more than that watch watch watch how the dancing crumbles how the dance is crumbling how descent is never new & pleasantness is slow healing in a world that must fight right now & that grass-complete love cannot carry witnesses past their entry into the overexciting now

the echo is a dance of abandonment #5

By Darren Demaree

The Desert

By G.D. McFetridge

Except for holiday weekends, the ribbon of highway winding down from the mountains doesn’t have much traffic. The drop in elevation from the pine-forested peaks to the desert flatlands is over 4,000 feet, and about ten miles farther a dirt road cuts off from the highway and crosses a broad dry wash, and then gains elevation as it follows a series of hills leading to the flank of a granite-studded ridge. Contained by the endless expanse beyond the ridge, the land descends toward a wide flat valley, after which a distant saw-toothed mountain range juts into the blue horizon.

Throughout the sandy flatlands and alluvial deposits, all the way up into the hills, species of cacti and assorted vegetation appear rife with springtime flowers; yellow, lavender, white, orange, and red, and one in particular that is a delicate shade of pale blue. Bees and other desert insects busily collect nectar from the flowers, and the desert is so quiet and windless, if I stood still and held my breath, a faint buzzing sound would fill the air. From the highest point on the hills, the road, now little more than two narrow paths cut by off-road motorcyclists and four wheelers, headed down a steep stretch toward a level area rising gradually towards the base of the rocky ridge. I was racing downhill through powdery dirt and gravel when the front tire of my mountain bike made an abruptly loud hissing sound and went flat in a matter of seconds, the tire wobbling back and forth on the rim. Before I could brake to a stop, I almost lost control of the handlebars.

Once I got off the bike, I cussed my bad luck and unzipped the nylon pack attached to the seat post, took out the tire repair kit, flipped the bicycle upside down, loosened the axel clamp and removed the wheel, using small plastic tire irons to pry the tire loose from the rim.

A wicked ram’s head thorn had punctured the tire. As I inspected the inner tube the location of the large hole was easy to find, but then sweat began dripping down my forehead and

made my eyes sting, so I grabbed my plastic bottle, took a drink, and squirted a splash of water on my brows, wiping away sweat and sunscreen on my long-sleeve shirt. Next, I opened the repair kit and took out a tube of glue and a patch. But the glue had turned rubbery and useless.

So, the question was what to do? I’d parked my van off the highway about fifteen miles away, at the start of the dirt road and I had it figured the temperature was now in low nineties and climbing in incremental leaps. I cursed myself for not having checked the tire patch kit, but I was in good shape for a man of forty-four and accordingly, albeit a pain in the ass, the effort needed to walk back to my van was not beyond my mettle. Provided nothing unexpected happened.

What’s that fellow’s name? Murphy as in Murphy’s Law and if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it did. Thirty minutes into my trek back to the van, the rising temperature joined forces with a bone-dry wind that kicked up from the southeast, gusting flurries of dust and sand. Added to this nuisance, the sunlight’s intensity was getting worse, and I felt it stabbing through my lightweight biking shirt and shorts, pilfering moisture from my body at an alarming rate. I’m not superstitious. But when a large raven appeared like a shadow gliding toward me on the wind, and then swooped down to perch on a vertical rock that reminded me of an old tombstone, I couldn’t help but take notice. What’s stranger still, the raven cawed at me repeatedly in an aggressive manner, as if to suggest I was an unwanted trespasser in his territory, or that he – this particular bird was large and therefore probably a male was warning me not to cross an invisible threshold under his jurisdiction. Although considering we were in the middle of fricking nowhere, what that jurisdiction might be was a matter for debate. He was about fifty feet away, his black feathers glistening in the sunlight, and then, when he’d finally stopped cawing, he canted his head as if to get a better look at me. I howled at him like a coyote, and he cawed one last time, flapped his wings and took flight. I thought no more of him and began pushing my bicycle along the dirt road.

A few minutes later, and without warning, the raven swooped right over me so close I could hear the rush of his flight feathers passing through the air, and as I looked up, startled, my foot slid into a rut and I stumbled and lost balance. I’m not sure how it happened but my shoe wedged in the rut and much of my weight 175 pounds leveraged against my ankle and twisted it worse than anything I had ever experienced. I lost my grip on the handlebars, fell to my hands and knees, my shoe still jammed in the rut, shifted my weight, repositioned myself, inched backwards and managed to free my foot. As I sat clenching my teeth and waiting for the pain to subside, the raven banked off the wind and circled several times, cawed loudly, and flew in the direction of the highway, fading like a small black dot against the wall of blue sky. I didn’t know what to make of it.

During high school and junior college, I played football and baseball, and I’d injured my ankles more than a few times, but nothing like this. When I got to my feet my ankle was so tender I could barely put weight on it. I lifted my foot and tried to swivel my ankle, but the pain was intense.

After mulling over my options, I decided that if I held the handlebars at midpoint and used the bike as a rolling crutch, I would be able to walk and keep some weight off my foot, but regrettably, when I got into position and took a couple cautious steps, the pain made it clear my ankle was unfit for service, at least for the long walk ahead of me.

My best guess? Probably I had torn a tendon or ligament, or worse yet suffered a fracture of one of the ankle’s small bones. This being the case, my chances of making it to the comfort of my van, still many miles away, seemed in question, and I wondered what my chances really were. Should I wait and hope someone showed up?

Fortunately, the wind stopped as abruptly as it had begun, although the rising temperature remained a troubling factor. I checked my wristwatch sunset was a long way off. I’m a rugged individual, athletic and tough by nature and not given to panic, but I will admit I was becoming a

bit concerned. All I had to eat was a peanut-butter power bar leftover in my pack from a previous ride, plus one bottle of water. After considering my options, I decided to eat the power bar, drink some water and rest my injured ankle. Shade where could I find some? Off to my right I noticed a depression that hopefully included a ravine running from the ridge, draining the occasional summer downpour floodwaters to the dry wash I had ridden through after leaving my van. With a little luck the banks of the ravine might be deep enough to offer a thin slice of shade, seeing how the sun was now a couple hours past noon.

It took me almost ten minutes to limp gingerly across the sandy stretch to the depression, and much to my relief it did offer a narrow gulch about four feet deep, with a cut bank creating a shadow just wide enough for me to sit in, my back leaned against the earthen wall. I ate my power bar, washed down with a few swigs of water.

So far, so good, I thought, but I needed to come up with a plan. Even though my mountain bike was almost brand new and had cost twenty-six hundred dollars, I thought about leaving it hidden in the gulch. As a crutch it wasn’t doing much good and pushing it with a flat tire was added effort.

It was at about this point when the full weight of my dilemma became clear. People die in places like deserts for lack of water, and the harsh reality was this: I was in the middle of nowhere with little or no hope of rescue, had maybe fourteen ounces of water, a bum ankle, and no cell phone. Lacking any grand solution, I decided to rest for an hour to see if my ankle improved. The gulch was slightly cooler than the open desert and after a while I guess I drifted off into a short catnap, although I don’t recall doing it and that was the odd part.

It seemed that my brain had switched off without conscious awareness, and when I awoke, I was lying on my back with my head in shadow and my arms folded over my chest. For moment it seemed as if I were still dreaming, looking up at the open sky through the space between the walls of the gulch, and

stranger still were the long feathery clouds in the sky overhead, whereas before the sky had been cloudless. I glanced at my wristwatch. A disturbing feeling came over me and I wondered if I was losing my grip on reality. I sat up and rubbed my face in my hands. “For chrissake get a hold of yourself.”

Once on my feet, having put as little weight as possible on my bad ankle, I slowly shifted weight to my left foot. Resting had helped a little but as soon as I tried to walk, I knew this wasn’t a quick recovery injury. I’d have paid a hundred bucks for a roll of duct tape to bind my ankle.

My next thought was a choice between two disagreeable options. Keep walking no matter what it takes, withstand the pain and risk damaging an already taxing injury, or spend the night in the gulch and hope that rattlesnakes didn’t bite me, and that by morning things would improve. Either way it was a tough decision that stood as the paradigm example of the old saying caught between a hard place and a rock although in this particular case it was a hard place and a desert full of rocks, thorny cacti, dangerous snakes and scorpions, negotiable only by way of a long dirt road.

Then an idea came to me. If I removed the useless front tire, riding cautiously on the bare rim might be feasible considering that much of the return trip was downhill. I also held out hope that my ankle, though unfit for walking, would be less traumatized by pedaling. Riding without a tire would ruin the rim, but under the circumstances it seemed a reasonable sacrifice. I hobbled back to the dirt road, my bicycle in tow.

Removing the tire was easy and I managed to get on the seat and put my feet in the stirrups, and then started slowly pedaling mostly with my right foot. The stretch of road ahead was slightly downhill, and the undertaking seemed workable despite the slender rim’s tendency to dig into the loose dirt and jolt over unavoidable stones and depressions. Though still painful the effort wasn’t stressing my ankle beyond endurance and the initial success of the venture brought a sense of optimism and the

confidence that I could back to my van before the onset of darkness.

An hour later at the approach of a steep section of road dipping into a ravine between the slopes of two adjacent hillocks, I stopped to drink a little water and take stock of whether I should continue riding or try walking the bike. For those of you who don’t ride bicycles, the front brake does most of the stopping; whereas the rear brake, if applied too hard, locks up and causes the bike to fishtail. Lacking the front tire to grip the dirt, I was undecided about trying this stretch of road, but when I attempted to walk, my ankle, which was now quite swollen, made it clear that walking was a failing option.

The reason behind the increased pain was probably because my endorphin level had subsided during the time I had rested in the gulch. Whatever the injury included, it was made more painful under pressured stress, but I had no choice but to keep riding. Midway down the steep section of road the inevitable happened. As gravity tugged and my ability to brake and steer between ruts and other obstacles grew worse, I lost control when the front rim angled into a deep rut and jarred sideways, sending me sidelong off the bike. It was a minor spill as spills go, but my left foot caught in the stirrup and re-twisted my ankle. The pain was immediate and intense enough that I clawed at the dirt and bellowed in agony, and when I managed to ease my foot from the stirrup, all I could do was lie there waiting for relief, staring at the sky, and wonder if things could get any worse.

Out of nowhere, like some sort of spooky omen, I saw a raven glide overhead and bank sideways, disappearing from my line of sight. A moment later, the bird reappeared, circled twice, and landed on the road ahead of me, cawing several times.

It seemed it might be the raven I had seen earlier, and I say this because he was large and canted its head in the same curious way as he looked me over with his dark eyes. I am not superstitious, but this peculiar occurrence seemed to be outside what I would call everyday expectations; and I had the

strangest feeling this bird was somehow connected to what was going on, inasmuch as I felt like bad luck had conspired against me with such deadly precision as to suggest the possibility that I had crossed over into some sort of alternative reality though I know this sounds nutty if not delusional.

Maybe it was the pain combined with a sense of growing hopelessness, hopelessness underpinned by the prospect that my death could become more than a vague possibility. The terse reality was this: my topflight bicycle was half-useless, and my water supply was rapidly diminishing. My van was still many miles away and the air temperature, although dropping, was still scorching. The only thing I could do, for the moment, was shake my head in disbelief and laugh at the irony of my predicament.

The raven had a funny way of hopping, and what I mean is, his gait combined a few steps forward followed by a hop or two, more steps and another hop. His beak was large, and the color of polished ebony and his eyes glistened in the sunlight like little black diamonds. And what was even weirder was that he continued this comical mode of locomotion until he was less than three yards from my feet. Does this little feathered beast see me as a potential meal? That was what crossed my mind. Yet a moment later, after he had stopped, he made two more loud caws and tilted his head side to side, displaying the countenance of an intelligent creature making sense of what he was investigating, perhaps even arriving at some sort of avian conclusion though I can’t imagine what that might be.

“I’m not dead yet, you little bastard. Get the hell away from me.”

I actually said that, and I don’t really know why except that the totality of my circumstances had evolved from generalized distress into a peculiar sense of the irrational. My circumstance was totally absurd a member of the grandest species alive on planet Earth, a man sitting helplessly on a dirt road with the sun beating down on him, while being accosted by a bird. I picked up a stone, to scare my tormentor away, and as I cocked my arm and took aim, he cawed again, fluffed his feathers, bobbed his head up and down and hoped closer until he was les than five feet away, seemingly

oblivious to my intentions.

I wondered if I was suffering heat stroke or some sort of bizarre hallucination. Maybe I was in worse shape than I realized, and my brain was creating its own reality, which may have had little to do with what was really happening.

“No, no … no,” I said. “I’m not going crazy, I’m fine. I am in control!”

But I knew I was in a precarious situation, although there was no way I was losing my mind.

“No way,” I said aloud.

The raven hopped a few more times, stopped and seemed to be peering at my left foot. With a sudden burst of wing flapping, he lifted off, circled a few times in rising arcs and then flew west in the direction of the sun, which was lower in the sky now and only hours from setting behind the mountains. The raven disappeared in the distance; a dark speck lost in the haze of late afternoon sunlight. I tossed the stone and watched it bounce down the road to a stop. I needed to get on the bike and return to the safe haven of my van.

An hour later my ankle was getting worse, and I’m guessing I probably had ten miles to go. The sun was maybe thirty minutes above the horizon, and my water bottle was as empty as my stomach. Gingerly peddling toward a long stretch of sloping road, I heard the metallic twang of a spoke when it snaps; one of the spokes in the front rim, brutalized for lack of a tire to protect it, had given up. A moment later I heard another twanging pop, and within fifteen minutes eight more spokes had snapped. The warped rim was wobbling and jamming against the brake pads, and I was dehydrated, my eyes were stinging and tired and the sun was sinking below the distant mountains, the temperature still plenty hot, and my ankle and foot so swollen I loosened my shoelaces for relief.

I’m by no means religious, but one thing even non-believers often resort to when circumstances turn desperate, is the hope that there’s a God who will intervene. Consider the Titanic. Imagine you are one of the unlucky ones denied the saving grace of a lifeboat, standing on the deck watching the bow of the massive ship slowly slipping under the sea. You begin pleading with God, desperate to cut some sort of deal, hoping that God will suspend the laws of physics just long enough to spare your miserable life. But as minutes pass and the bow goes under by hastening degrees, and freezing water floods over the deck to swirl around your feet, you realize you’re going to die and God’s not coming to your rescue.

The truth is, I wasn’t that far gone but I did feel as if I were teetering at the edge of a precipice and staring into oblivion. Although as I said before, I’m no wimpy man I’m resourceful and tough and ready to do whatever I have to do to overcome adversity.

So, this is what I said to myself:

You are not going to die. You can survive without water for another day or even longer, and no matter what else, you’re going to get back to the van, and if worse comes to worse you can crawl or hop on one goddamned foot. Sleep in the desert if you must, man up and grit your teeth … do whatever you got to do.

Despite this self-bracing pep talk, another part of me was ready to petition God for help. Fear of death pushes a man’s thoughts to places they might otherwise never go it’s the old adage about there being no atheists in foxholes but as I was about to start my supplicatory monologue, a thought popped into my head. You’re going to beg God to intercede and then after a few minutes you’ll realize that nothing has changed it’s still just you and your thoughts viewing reality through of the keyhole of consciousness.

The world is out there doing what it does. It’s like a movie, and you are witnessing it as it moves forward one slice in time after another.

The last sliver of sunlight slipped beyond the horizon, silhouetting the distant mountain peaks.

I was sitting on my butt and staring in the direction of my van, my failing bicycle laid beside me. The desert had cooled and felt almost pleasant, the eastern sky flickering with the first suggestions of starlight, the western sky slightly aglow.

I noticed a light not far from where I would have guessed the big dry wash intersected the dirt road a few hundred yards from my van. I watched the light. It flashed and jiggled, disappeared, and reappeared, and then after a while it disappeared again and didn’t come back. I watched for a long time, the sky now inky dark with stars ablaze, and I wondered what had happened to the strange light. Just as I was about to give up on it, I saw a flash that came and went, and I realized the light was now much closer and perhaps following the road. An off-road enthusiast was, by all appearances, out for a night ride and headed my way. In that instant I felt lightness in my body and a huge weight lifting from my mind; though in the wake of this fluke of luck, I wondered once again if I was perhaps losing my mind and hallucinating the terms of my own deliverance. But the light grew closer, and I heard the sound of an engine.

The vehicle came around a bend ahead of where I sat, and the headlight grew brighter until the glare made me look away. The engine’s noise rattled the darkness and drowned out the night insects and their eurythmic orchestrations, the light flooding me; but then it stopped thirty or forty feet away, and behind the light I could scarcely make out what appeared to be a four wheeler a Honda, a Yamaha and a man or maybe a woman got off and walked toward me in silhouette, casting a long shadow and blocking the light from my eyes.

As the figure came closer, I realized it was a lanky man with a long beard, the raven perched on

made them appear like alabaster stone, statue-like and strangely unreal. I moved my fingers. They seemed to me the fingers of a robot obeying my command but otherwise detached from the mind that was watching them.

Like a rushing gust of wind out of nowhere, the raven returned to the man’s shoulder, and the man turned and walked into the light. I watched the light flicker into nothingness.

That was when I knew that I had already died. And this was part of my new dreamscape, a dream from another universe; a parallel universe wherein my consciousness had fled at the very last instant, taking sanctuary from the ironclad edicts of an unforgiving void. End

Contributors

Leo Rein spends much of his time trying his hardest to do his best. His mother, a writer, taught him the tips of the trade, which boiled down to “read a lot, write a lot, submit a lot.” Currently, he passes the time by reading, writing, and climbing the walls.

David E. Howerton is a part-time programmer and lives in the American River Canyon outside of auburn, California. He has done some landscaping, sign painting, cooking, and made jewelry to pay the bills. He lives a rather quite life. His wife and he live with a bossy cat. He has three adult daughters and eight grandchildren. His hobbies include type design, soapstone carving, walks in the woods, collecting dragons, and growing library of Science fiction.

Eva Schultz lives in aurora, Illinois, where she is a business writer by day and a fiction writer by night. Her work has recently appeared in tdotspec’s strange wars anthology, backchannels, and frontier tales. She lives with a big orange cat named Gus and enjoys drawing, painting, and collecting typewriters. Visit her online at www.evaschultz.com .

Darren Demaree is the author of eighteen poetry collections, most recently the luxury, (January 2023 from Glass Lyre) he is recipient of an Ohio arts council individual excellence aware, the Louise bogan award from trio house press, and the Nancy dew Taylor award from Emrys journal

G.D. McFetridge writes from the unspoiled wilderness of Montana’s sapphire mountains. His short fiction and essays are published in literary journals and reviews across the united states, Canada, the u.k., Ireland, new Zealand, Australia, and India.

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