Philadelphia Stories Summer 2017

Cultivating a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

S UM M E R / 2 0 1 7 / F R E E

VOICES RAMONA DEFELICE LONG / LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED DENNIS LAWSON / COMBUSTIBLE L.D. ZANE

CONTENTS FEATURES 3

VOICES (fiction)....................................................................................................................................................RAMONA DEFELICE LONG

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LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED (fiction).....................................................................................................DENNIS LAWSON

14 COMBUSTIBLE (nonfiction)............................................................................................................................L.D. ZANE 18 LETTERS FROM LIMBO (review)..............................................................................................................JENNIFER ROHRBACH 21 DON'T TELL ME YOUR CHILDHOOD WAS NOT A MINEFILED (review)..................MARK DANOWSKY 24 AN INTERVIEW WITH MOLLY PEACOCK (interview)...............................................................JULIA MACDONNELL 28 LIKE IT REALLY IS (column)...........................................................................................................................AIMEE LABRIE

6 THE MAN IN BUILDING H.........................................................................................................................S.R. GRAHAM 13 MADAGASCAR..................................................................................................................................................STEVE BURKE 20 DEAR PYLVIA SALTH.....................................................................................................................................KAY COOLICAN 27 GETTYSBURG PARABLE............................................................................................................................ED GRANGER

ART Valley Forge Farmhouse, Summer by Jeff Thomsen

Point of No Return by Tilda Mann

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Tilda Mann is a painter primarily working in oil. Mann’s narrative work derives from her everyday life and memories.

On a formal level Mann is interested in color, shape and texture. She trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and lives in Wynnewood, PA. Mann grew up in Los Angeles, and is still influenced by the vivid colors that surrounded her childhood days there. www.tildamann.com

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Blue Haired Girl by Tilda Mann

Joanne Barraclough creates oil paintings on linen, using still life, landscape, figures, and imaginative combinations of these genres as subject matter. As well as studying with numerous artists in the area, Barraclough studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and has a BA from Temple University. Her paintings have won awards and have been exhibited extensively. Barraclough has also studied piano and flute and is an accomplished musician. Visit www.Barracloughart.com

Christina Tarkoff’s studio is in Drexel Hill where she resides.

Tarkoff's goal is to create paintings that make one feel a moment in time, transporting one from their daily life to that of another time and place. “Streets of Philadelphia-Summer Fun” captures the joy of a long-standing summer tradition of playing in the fountain on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. You can see her full body of work at www.christinatarkoff.com.

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Lonaconing Windows by Eric Loken

Diver's Dream by Joanne Barraclough

Eric Loken is a Pennsylvania based photographer and musician. Upon his retirement in 2007 he renewed his passion for the arts. With a focus on nature and landscapes, Loken has traveled throughout SE Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey capturing images of the beauty and history of the region. His travels include historic and rustic locations in various states of decay. In addition to photography, Loken plays jazz saxophone, vibes and flute. eloken.zenfolio.com

Emblem by Emily Mills

Scratching the Surface of Friendship by Annalie Hudson

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Jeff Thomsen grew up in Glenside, PA, and attended Abington High School, the College of William and Mary, and Temple University Law School. In 1991, Thomsen enrolled in the certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Thomsen lives in Havertown, PA, where he maintains his studio, when not painting and drawing out of doors. www.jeffthomsenart.com

Streets of Philadelphia - Summer Fun

by Christina Tarkoff

Life in a Fishbowl by Joanne Barraclough

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Publisher/Executive Director Christine Weiser Fiction Editor Mitchell Sommers Assistant Fiction Editor Amy Luginbuhl Creative Nonfiction Editor Susette Brooks Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor Rachel Mamola Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick Contest Coordinator & Assistant Poetry Editor Nicole Mancuso Art Editor Pam McLean-Parker Art Director Derek Carnegie Executive Assistant Fabi Malacarne

POETRY

COVER

Publisher/Editorial Director Carla Spataro

Emily Mills graduated from Arcadia University with a BFA in illustration in 2006. She tripped and fell into the business world for a number of years but has since escaped. Now she uses ink and watercolor to create images that merge innocent and unnerving imagery or explore pattern and texture. Her work can be seen online at Ectmills.com, in galleries and on young adult book covers.

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Annalie Hudson is an intuitive abstract painter. At 50, she bought canvas and acrylic paints; and told stories in color. Life’s journey has taken her from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and back; as well as Europe, South America and China. Annalie’s paintings have been in various juried art shows & galleries in Pennsylvania, Arizona and California. “Ten Years”, her one woman show was at the Hill School Boyer Gallery in January. www.annaliehudson.com

Philadelphia Stories, founded in 2004, is a non-profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry, and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. The mission of Philadelphia Stories is to cultivate a community of writers, artists, and readers in the Greater Philadelphia Area. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!

Marketing Assistant Dom Saunders Web Design Loic Duros Board of Directors Alex Husted Alison Hicks Concha Alborg Mitchell Sommers Will Woldenberg Fiction Board

Addison Namnoum Erik F. Cwik Aidan O'Brien Ilene Rush Aimee LaBrie Jon Busch Alex Brubaker Kate Blakinger Alexandra Karpa Kate Centofanti Ally Evans Kathleen Furin Alyssa Persons Kerry Young Amanda Knight Surie Keysha Whitaker Andrew Linton Kristin Moyer Brenda Adey Lena Van

Brian Ellis

Leslie McRobbie Brianna Garber Melissa Foster Brittany Korn Nathan Long Carolina Ortiz

Owen Hamill Che Yeun Robert Kerbeck Chelsea Covington Maass Rosanna Duffy Cierra Miller Sara Asikainen Clare Haggerty Shelley J. Schenk Daniel Huppman Tiara DeGuzman Daniel Pontius Tracey M. Romero Darrah M. Hewlet Victoria Calhoun Elizabeth Green Vivienne Mah Walt Maguiure

Creative NonFiction Board Andrea Vinci Deborah Off Jacqueline Massaro Julia MacDonnell Chang Rachel Mamola Sarah Wecht

Poetry Board

Peter Baroth Deb Burnham Liz Chang Blythe Davenport Liz Dolan Vernita Hall Kathryn Ionata Shira Moolten Jennifer Rohrbach

SUPPORT PROVIDED IN PART

BY THE PHILADELPHIA CULTURAL FUND.

Voices Ramona DeFelice Long

“Lila, you have to hold my hand.” Michael is using his Big Voice, the one to remind me he is five years older and this, in his mind, makes him the boss of me. I don’t like my brother’s Big Voice. My right foot is on the bridge, my left still on the path. I put my hands behind my back and twine my fingers together.

“De. Li. Lah.” Michael holds out his hand. “Gimme your hand.”

I feel like spinning around to run back home. If I do, Michael will have to follow me because it is the last week of summer and Mama said he has to take me with him to the creek while she gets her classroom stuff ready.

“Okay,” I say, “but only across the bridge.”

I hold my hand out but he doesn’t take it.

“And the road,” he says.

I grab his hand, but it’s like grabbing old Play-doh.

“Say it,” he says. “You’ll hold my hand across the bridge and the road.”

“Okay!” I cry. “The bridge and the road!”

He smiles. I don’t want to smile back, but I do anyway.

On the other side of the bridge is the road. Michael stops and looks—left, right, left—and says, “All clear.”

At the woods, I forget to let go of his hand and we walk together, bending where a stand of bamboo hangs over the path, past a clump of rotting trees somebody cut down but never cleared. Bugs crawl all over the logs and some on the path. I raise my foot to stomp on one, but Michael yanks me back.

“Don’t, Lila. The bugs eat the wood so it can decompose and feed the earth. It’s the cycle of nature.”

Now he’s using his Smart Voice, the one that reminds me he gets straight A’s and wins the 6th Grade Science Fair while my first grade teacher tells us about cocoons and butterflies, which I already know because Michael read a book about it to me one night when thunder cracked all around, and I went to his room to make sure he wasn’t scared.

“Bugs are gross,” I say, but I don’t try to stomp any of them.

We leave the path past a tree with a piece of twine wrapped around the trunk. Michael says that won’t hurt the bark the way a nail does when the county puts up signs about trespassing on city property and beware of controlled deer hunts. Michael won’t put a nail in a tree because he says all things, even trees, have feelings.

“If that’s true,” I asked the first time he said it, at dinner when he refused to eat Mama’s meatloaf and only ate mashed pota-

toes and broccoli, “Why aren’t your potatoes crying?”

Daddy had sputtered out his drink and Mama had bitten down hard on her lip. Michael’s face got stiff and he didn’t talk for all the rest of dinner. At bedtime, I went into his room to make sure he wasn’t worried he had hurt the mashed potatoes' feelings. He told me to go away, but I didn’t, and after a while, he clicked on his reading light. He read me a book about someone named Boo Duh until Mama came in and said it was time to sleep.

She tucked me back into my bed. I said, “Won’t Michael ever eat meatloaf again?”

She answered in her Smiling Voice. “Oh, I think your brother will get past this when he gets hungry enough.” But Mama was wrong. Michael never ate meatloaf, or chicken, or even fish sticks ever again. At Thanksgiving, though, Daddy said Michael could believe whatever nonsense he wanted about trees and bugs, but Grandma’s human feelings would be hurt if he refused to eat her turkey. Michael said okay, but I swiped the slice of turkey from his plate and ate it for him, and for Boo Duh. The twine around the tree marks where we go off path.

There’s a spot where the trees block out the sun and the ground is covered with moss. We cross over the moss on the rocks. It’s dark, and I was scared the first time, but Michael explained the leaves make a canopy just like the one that hangs over my bed that used to belong to Mama’s grandma. It’s called a sleigh bed, and it is draped with a sheet of what Mama calls eyelet. Sometimes I look up at the white eyelet overhead and pretend I am in a real sleigh, and the canopy is a sky full of snow.

Other times, I imagine the sky is backwards and the dark eyelet holes are the stars and the white fabric is the night sky. Or I think about the King Tut story and I pretend my canopy is all that’s between me and the top of a pyramid. Or maybe it’s a magic carpet.

One time, when I had chicken pox, Michael came into the bed with me and I told him all the things my canopy could be, and it made me forget to scratch. He said my canopy stories were stupendous, a big word I liked. I felt Big when I told him my canopy stories. If not Big, the same size as him, anyway.

Tonight, maybe, I’ll make the canopy over my bed a layer of moss. I daydream about that until we reach the creek.

Michael stops in front of it. The bank is supposed to come right up to the carpet of fallen leaves and grass, but there is drying mud there now. “Why is it so low?” he says, but not to me.

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He’s using a Faraway Voice.

He crouches and scoops a handful of water. I would tell him, “Don’t drink that!” but I know he already knows. He smells it and dribbles the water out of his palm.

“Beavers?” he says. He stands and walks so fast along the creek, I can hardly keep up, but then he stops and I run right into his back.

I peek around him. Ahead, at the bend, the creek is blocked with sticks, logs, leaves, rocks, mud. A funny looking branch pokes up from one side, near the bank. Whatever he smelled before, I smell now, too.

“Is it beavers?” I ask. Miss Manning read to us about beaver dams and had us draw a picture. Maybe one of the beavers died and that’s the smell.

Michael stands on tiptoe. He lets go of my hand and turns around. “Stay here, Delilah. Right here, understand? Don’t.

Move. I mean it.” His voice is a new one. It sounds…mean? Mad? Not mean. Not mad. Something else, worse than mean or mad.

I give him a head start, five or six or seven steps, until he’s on the other side of the dam, and I rush to his side.

“I told you not to move,” he says, but his voice is funny. Maybe from the smell, which is so bad on the other side of the dam that my stomach flips over.

He grabs my shoulder and tries to turn me away, but I fight him. I’m not some little kid who can’t see a dead beaver.

I kick his shin. He bends over and I spin away and climb over the rock.

Behind the creek is a deer. The funny branch was not a branch.

It was antlers. The deer’s body is fat and flies hover around it, but its eyes are open and its face rests on a rock above the water.

Except for a small bloody mark on its neck, it looks normal, like it could get up and eat the honeysuckles growing in a tangle nearby. Behind the dam, the creek is high and the water moves up and down, slowly. The deer bobs with it.

“It’s out of season,” Michael says. He is beside me now. He kicks at the rock, hard, and says a word he is not supposed to ever say. “It’s not deer hunting season.”

I don’t know what that means, but I don’t notice the smell anymore. I am too sad that the deer is in the water, all alone.

Michael pulls on my arm. “Let’s go. We have to call animal control.”

“Who?” “Animal control. They’ll come and get him. Like the time at Grandma’s?”

I nod, remembering the dead deer we saw on the side of the road near Grandma’s driveway. Daddy made a phone call and a white truck came and two men lifted the deer into the bed.

When I asked where they were going, Daddy said they were going to give the deer a proper burial.

I curl my toes in my shoes, as if that could keep me here. “We shouldn’t leave it here alone.”

Michael says, “Lila, it has to be removed. It’ll rot and poison the water.”

I don’t understand this. If the bugs can eat the logs and return it to nature, why can’t the deer stay in the water and go back to nature too? It is too confusing, but the smell tells me Michael is right. And the deer needs a proper burial.

I jump off the rock. We go a few steps down the path and I am glad to smell the honeysuckle again. Another step and I turn back.

“Wait,” I say. I reach into the tangle, careful not to touch any poison ivy, and I grab a honeysuckle vine. I pull and pull while Michael asks what I’m doing, but I yank until the vine snaps and I almost fall backward into my brother.

“Lila, we have to go,” but I’m already scrambling back up the path and over the rock.

I hold my breath and lean over to wind the vine of honeysuckle through the deer’s antlers. When I’m finished, I remember the men who tossed the other deer into the bed of the white truck.

I say, “We should say a prayer.”

I don’t know if Boo Duh says prayers, but I put my hands together and Michael does too. I close my eyes and say, “Rest in peace, deer. I hope you go to heaven.”

Michael says, “Amen.”

I hold his hand back through the woods, down the path. At the road, he looks left-right-left, and we cross. When we get to the bridge, halfway across, he lets go and turns, leaning over the edge. He is breathing hard, as if he’s been running. I think maybe he’s going to be sick.

I peek over the railing. The water is so clear, you can see all the way to the rocks in the stream bed and the minnows swimming around. There’s a clean smell here, of water and trees and bright sunlight. Maybe a tiny scent of honeysuckle, too.

My brother makes a strange sound. He’s crying.

I’m not sure what to do, but I take his hand as if I am the one who is bigger and smarter and braver. His body shakes. I hold on until the shaking stops and he sniffles a few times.

Finally, I tell him, in my best Little Sister voice, “Let’s go home, Michael.” I tug on his hand and he follows.

Ramona DeFelice Long writes fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and personal essays about women, family and culture, and the foibles and quirks of personal dynamics. Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications, and she provided a flash piece inspired by Dorothy P. Miller to PS Books' EXTRAORDINARY GIFTS: Remarkable Women of the Delaware Valley. She is a transplanted Southerner living in Delaware.

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BLUE HAIRED GIRL by TILDA MANN

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The Man in Building H Poem by S.R. Graham

He splits cells and grafts them together, an art he perfected with his children, a family crafted from multiple marriages. Microbiology is not often associated with the domestic, but he was raised in the years when a station wagon had bench seats big enough to haul little sisters to the skating rink, little brothers to the ballpark.

He still wears the same L.L.Bean ushanka from those chilly college days, when he paid for State with side gigs and scholarships.

He took a job to pay for his weddings, his church tithes, and those five kids he put through college, no matter the picket lines that winked on and off like Christmas lights outside his windows: people who think pharmaceutical research is conspiracy to make the rich richer and the poor sicker.

His eldest daughter is waiting for him now, shivering at the ——ville platform, back from a world removed from this germ warfare. He wants for her what he has: a family, a pension, Americana unbroken. She laughs.

He doesn’t mind his children’s selfishness.

At night he locks away his stains and slides and passes through door after locked door, the virus sleeping cleanly in the lab behind him.

S.R. Graham is a Pennsylvania native currently enrolled in the University of Florida.

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LIFE IN A FISHBOWL by JOANNE BARRACLOUGH

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Like Nothing Happened Dennis Lawson

It’s an hour drive from our office in Wilmington down to Dover, and my colleagues wanted to carpool, so I’m praying something goes wrong. Getting pulled over speeding is the most likely possibility—lots of state cops patrol Route 1, snagging cars that are just over the speed limit. Maybe John could suddenly feel ill and cancel the whole thing. He’s the owner and founder of the firm, but he’s on his way out. He’s finally retiring in a few months. He’s sitting in front of me, in the passenger seat.

Harris, my boss, is driving his leased BMW. The back seat is uncomfortable. It’s raining outside. Everyone on Route 1 is driving sensibly, including Harris, except for this little Kia that passed us a little while ago. And then, there it is, pulled over on the side, with a cop standing in the rain at the passenger’s window. Harris slows down to fifty-five as we go by. I’m stuck here.

The good thing is, I’ve taken the afternoon off. I knew this morning would be exhausting. I can maintain my friendly, charming, professional face for only so long before I can’t do it any more. This is an hour down, probably at least an hour meeting, and then an hour back up. My only saving grace is that Harris has an early afternoon meeting, so we can’t do lunch.

“See that, Thomas?” John says. “That’s what I was talking about. As soon as I saw that little heap fly by, I knew he was a goner.”

“He had an appointment in Samarra,” I want to say, but that’s too weird for these two.

“Especially in this rain,” I say instead.

A lot of people in business question the value of the arts. I learned to act in the theater club in school. If not for that, how would I be able to act like a normal person?

he can’t keep up with the present. We recently lost a client because, at an event, John took credit for some creative that the client had actually designed in-house. The conversation got back to the client.

Finally a staffer leads us into a conference room, and then the Director and two more of her staff members join us. All women.

I can already hear John complaining about it. On the way home, he’s going to say that it used to be that you’d sit down with some government guys at Fraizer’s Restaurant, have some beers, and hash out a contract.

We would’ve been better off bringing John’s wife. She’s number three for him. She’d been previously divorced herself, and she went into this marriage with eyes wide open. She has a fun sort of cynicism about her. I used to flirt with her at staff parties. She ignores me now.

The Archives staff has all sorts of insightful questions that we’re not remotely ready for. At some point, I tell a lie about doing research there in college, for no other reason than to make it seem like we aren’t completely clueless.

As we’re walking out of the building, a young woman comes striding in. She’s a tall, thin redhead in a long black coat and black rain boots. I hold the door open for her, and she doesn’t acknowledge me. I recognize her from somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it.

“Let’s get out of here,” John says.

In the car, Harris tries to put a positive spin on things. He says that the Division of Arts has just put a request out, and that we’ll have a better idea of what state agencies are looking for in the “present climate.” I want to tune them out and figure out how I know that redhead. But I know that if I do that, I’ll end up staring out the window and seeming like a nutty spacecase. So I force myself to make occasional contributions to the conversation.

I’m going to drop dead if I don’t have some coffee.

Delaware’s Public Archives are in a large brick building with a striking, glassy cylindrical façade. We’re there to deliver a presentation on a potential marketing campaign. The Division of Archives had put out a request for proposals, and John thinks it’s going to be easy pickings.

We hurry in to get out of the rain. Harris signs in for us, and the girl at the desk tells him that it’s going to be a few minutes. I walk around and look at the current displays.

It turns out that the Director of the Archives has a meeting with the Chief Deputy Secretary of State, and it’s going long.

Harris and I should’ve spent more time on the presentation.

At the same time, I like it when John is revealed to be out of touch. He thinks he can just bank on his past reputation, but

Harris and I chat for a few minutes at the office and then he takes off. I go through my emails while eating lunch at my desk.

Then I’m out. I stop at Dunkin Donuts for a coffee. The weather has improved, slightly. The rain has stopped, leaving us with a miserable, gray December day. Maybe my therapist will brighten things up. I have a one-thirty appointment.

I hop onto the highway because it’s the quickest way to North Wilmington. Right now I’m driving a black Acura. I prefer the feel of my previous car, a V6 Accord, but the Acura has better

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EMBLEM by EMILY MILLS

9

leg over the other. “As in, I’m not going to go hang around the Archives to try to bump into her again, and ask her if she dances in Philadelphia.”

“I think that’s a prudent decision.” She looks down and writes something on her pad.

“I’d be more inclined to go back to that club the next time I get to Philly. I could tell her she’s very memorable.”

“Do you think she would appreciate that?”

“Wouldn’t you?” In a movie, Dr. Flynn would stride across the room and slap me, and the tension would electrify the air.

Instead, she says, “Did you ever go back to the woods?

Where Jillian disappeared?”

Candy—not her real name, ha ha—is in a bathrobe when I get to her place. She lives in an apartment over a convenience store in Claymont, a couple exits up I-95.

I found her in the back page section of an alternative Philly newspaper.

Candy—not her real name, ha ha—is in a bathrobe when I get to her place. She lives in an apartment over a convenience store in Claymont, a couple exits up I-95. I found her in the backpage section of an alternative Philly newspaper. She tells me to wash up while she gets ready. This is the downside to going to her place—the shower is not a pretty sight. I wonder if she takes baths in there? I shudder at the thought.

I’m not going to let my visit with Dr. Flynn prevent me from having a good time. Dr. Flynn brings Jillian up fairly often, often enough that I shouldn’t be surprised when she does. But when she does, she does so gradually. She asks my permission: “Can we talk about Jillian today?” She’s never come at me out of the blue like this afternoon. It feels like a new step in our relationship. It’s in the open: She wants to dominate me. Perhaps she believes she can provoke me into saying more.

Later on, when Candy and I are in bed, I ask her if she could bring me a little whiskey. She takes heavy steps into the kitchen and then practically drops the glass on my chest. Once she’s been paid and we’ve had our visit, she wants me to get out. But the lounging is one of my favorite parts.

“Next time, I’m going to ask you to dance a little bit for me,” I say.

“Drink up,” she says.

I can’t stop imagining her submerged in her bathtub, her dead face just below the surface. Like this is a movie where I can see the future, and my awareness of the possibility of her death allows me to prevent it.

It wasn’t a movie that put that image in my head though. It was the police, back when Jillian was missing. They questioned me for hours. I was twelve. My mother was fine with it—whatever it took to find Jillian.

I remember the names of every detective who spoke to me.

Franklin was the worst. “You watched her drown,” he said calmly. “Her face was under the water, but her eyes were open. You kept her down there, and then her eyes were closed.” I give him credit for being so poetic about an awful incident. In hindsight, he couldn’t have been that bright. You don’t close your eyes just because you died.

I get dressed while Candy fixes herself something to eat in the kitchen. The rain has picked up again, tapping at the windows.

“If the police found you dead here, do you think they’d suspect me?” I want to ask, but I know I can’t. I keep trying to come up with some variation on that that I could get away with, but nothing doing. The silence is getting weird, so instead I say, “I’m thinking of getting a Breitling watch. Do you think I could pull it off?”

“I’ve got another appointment sweetie, so we’ll have to chat

looks. I roll along the Concord Pike and its various strips of retail shopping. I’m starting to relax.

I sit in the waiting room, reading an issue of Sports Illustrated and drinking my coffee. Dr. Flynn calls me in, right on time.

I sit down on the couch. Dr. Flynn makes some notes at her desk and then sits on the leather chair that faces the couch, with her white pad of paper on her thigh. She is in her 60s, older than I usually go for. She’s taller than me in her high heels and meaty.

I take stock of today’s outfit. Blue blouse under black sweater, black pants, no socks or stockings, two-inch black high-heels.

Faint eyeliner, red lipstick, an odd assortment of rings and bracelets. I believe that over the course of the year or so that I’ve been seeing Dr. Flynn as my therapist, her clothes have gotten tighter and tighter.

“How would you describe your mood today?” she asks.

I can feel a smile pulling my lips along. I show Dr. Flynn more of myself than I show most people. “I’m pretty excited,” I say.

“Why is that?”

“I had a meeting for work today, and I saw a woman who I know I recognized from somewhere. It took me a while, but now I remember who she is.”

Dr. Flynn crosses her legs. I detect a faint bounce in her aerial foot. More and more, I feel compelled to ask her to join me on the couch. I think she would—if I asked her. What would I call her during sex? Dr. Flynn? Lisa?

“And who is she, Thomas?”

“She’s a go-go dancer. I saw her in small club on South Street in Philadelphia. She wore a leather vest and denim skirt, and she danced to ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog.’ That’s an old Stooges song.”

Dr. Flynn watches me for a few seconds without speaking.

Then she asks: “Do you think that’s really the case? Or were you having a fantasy?”

“John and Harris saw her too. I held the door for her.”

I realize I sound defensive. Dr. Flynn waits for me to say more.

This reminds me of our conversations about John’s wife. I get the sense that Dr. Flynn only believes around half of what I tell her, maybe not even that, which is a big part of why I feel so relaxed around her. I don’t think she takes me all that seriously.

“I’m not planning on making a big thing about it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“What would constitute a ‘big thing’ to you?”

I enjoy her repetition of my words. I lean back and cross one

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DIVER'S DREAM by JOANNE BARRACLOUGH

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next time.” She taps my cheek twice with the palm of her hand, harder than I like, though I’d be laughed at if I called them slaps.

“Oh, by the way, my rent is going up. So my prices are going up.”

I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned the Breitling.

pour another.

Kate knows that a girl went missing when I was in the sixth grade. But I grew up in Massachusetts, and Kate’s not all that curious about it, so that’s the extent of her knowledge on the subject.

I creep down the stairs into darkness, and even though I don’t want to think about it, I’m thinking about it. I turn on the light in the dining room, where our bar is, and pour myself some more Jack Daniel’s.

I have around an hour before my extremely pregnant wife is going to get home from work. Ideally, I’d like to sit in front of my stereo and drink a beer and let the day melt away. But on days I visit Candy, I try to step up my husband game so Kate doesn’t feel ignored. I stop at the grocery store to buy lobster—one of Kate’s favorites—so I can cook dinner for her and surprise her.

I kill the lobsters with compassion on the cutting board in the kitchen, with a knife through the head. Quickly.

Kate used to have a job working for a nonprofit, but then the money dried up. There are too many nonprofits in Delaware anyway. So then she registered for this program in Wilmington, where you get intensive training on programming for several weeks. Now, she’s programming for one of the big banks in Wilmington. You better not criticize the banking industry around her. She was always a little more conservative than me, but it shows more now. We had some political debates this past year.

She likes Trump. I don’t really care anyway.

It’s nice and bright in the kitchen as it gets black and dark outside. I turn on the lights in the living room, and downstairs in the family room. I hate it when I’m home alone without Kate and the darkness is all around. For instance, and there’s no way I can ever tell her this, I think our house is haunted. I can feel the presence when I look out at our backyard. Sometimes, when I’m mowing, I have to stop and pretend like the machine seized up, because I can’t bear to be out there.

The presence seems to be female. Sometimes, when I’m downstairs alone, or if I’m up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I can feel her beside me.

Jillian and I grew up in the same neighborhood, and we used to ride our bikes everywhere. There was this big stretch of woods behind a local development, and we liked to go exploring there. The fall was better, since the poison ivy had died down by then. We would walk instead of riding our bikes, trying to be less conspicuous.

That day, I was throwing stones at a stream. It had rained the day before, so the water in the stream was rushing like a river full of dangerous rapids. I imagined being swept away by the current. Jillian hopped over the stream and kept walking.

I didn’t really mind—we got separated in the woods all the time. But then I heard a weird sound. It was like a car door slamming. It didn’t make sense, but at the same time, it wasn’t that unusual. Sound carried in a weird way in those woods, so we’d hear all sorts of things that were actually far away. It still gave me the heebie-jeebies though, so I hopped over the stream myself to find Jillian.

I followed the path all the way to this clearing, which we usually avoided because older kids hung out there sometimes. I could hear the highway nearby.

I followed the path back out, thinking Jillian must’ve taken a detour and would be back on it. Still nothing. Finally I went home and told my mother.

The police found Jillian’s body that night, around a mile from our path. She was in this deep part of the woods that’s pretty hard to get to, because there really isn’t a path. It was almost like she sailed along the stream, because she had drowned. The police never arrested anyone for it.

Kate waddles in, eight months pregnant. She looks exhausted, but not unhappy.

She gives me a quick peck on the cheek, and then she notices the kitchen.

“Lobster!” she says. “Oh, honey, thank you. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

She goes upstairs to put on her pajamas.

We talk about our days while we eat. She reminds me that the following Thursday, we’re going to her ob-gyn after my weekly appointment with Dr. Flynn. I’d like to talk about Breitling watches—should I go for a dressy one, or maybe a big chronograph?—but I decide to wait until after the baby is born.

Later on, Kate lies down on the couch, and I rub her feet before applying nail polish. I think that what I love most about her is that if I told her too much about myself, she would leave. She gives me a normal, pleasant life. From what I’ve read, I think I’ll feel normal when I’m in my mid-fifties. And I’ll have a wife of 20 years and a kid just out of college to help me enjoy being alive.

I’m looking forward to it.

I know that experience messed me up. I try to live like it didn’t happen. Just a fantasy, as Dr. Flynn says.

I get back into bed. I drink my whiskey steadily, but it doesn’t relax me. I’m still wide awake, and I’m thinking of the redhead.

The go-go dancer. When I don’t know a person, I imagine that we can make a connection. We can have drinks, and feel that spark, and then go out to the woods, where we can be under the sky together. So much sky, and it feels like it’s just for the two of you. And all of the things that you keep hidden can come up.

This part of me, it wants to connect with someone who will understand. I know that can never happen though. That’s what keeps me in bed, and waiting for my alarm, and being a solid chap.

Acting normal, like nothing happened.

That is, if I can keep this life going for the next 20 years. It’s ten o’clock and Kate is asleep in bed. She used to sleep on her stomach. Now she sleeps on her side, and she snores. My tableside light is on and I have a book open. I’m wide awake, as if all the coffee I drank today is hitting me right this second. I’ve already had a large tumbler of whiskey, so it looks like I should

Dennis Lawson has an MFA from Rutgers-Camden, and he teaches at the University of Delaware and Wilmington University. His stories have appeared in the Fox Chase Review, the Rehoboth Beach Reads anthology series, and the crime anthology Insidious Assassins. He received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts as the 2014 Emerging Artist in Fiction. He lives in Delaware with his wife and daughter.

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Madagascar Poem by Steve Burke

The island is this: rimmed with trees over centuries the rest gone for firewood unrestrained red clay soil bleeding into the sea That’s how I felt when you left ninety percent gone and that tossed to the breeze ash char the axe-man’s chuckle I still burn hope this finds you as me: out in mid-Ocean smoldering

Steve Burke lives in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia; has been published in various journals, read at many venues about the area; in 2014 had his chapbook After The Harvest published by Moonstone Press; has two book-length MSS-in-waiting -- 36 Views Of Here and Nothing Doing.

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Combustible L.D. Zane

Grace and I met six months ago. Mutual friends who had been conspiring to get us together finally succeeded.

We decided to meet at a popular local diner for coffee. I arrived early and sat on a fake leather bench in the cramped lobby with others who were waiting to be seated. I nervously tapped my feet on the floor.

The anxiety of this first date must have also shown on my face. A middle-aged lady sitting next to me to my left asked, “Blind date?”

I turned toward her, sheepishly grinned, and answered, “Yes.” “That’s how we met, almost ten years ago,” she said, and motioned with her head to the man sitting to her left. The hostess called their name. As they stood, she looked back at me, smiled, and said, “Good luck.”

I gave a half-hearted smile in return and mouthed the word, “Thanks.”

Although Grace and I had no idea what each other looked like, other than vague descriptions our friends gave us, we instinctively recognized each other when she walked through the door. She had a smile like Annette Bening, and that was all I could see.

It was six p.m., the height of the diner’s dinner trade, but we managed to corral a window booth. Grace and I bonded and trusted each other immediately. We talked over coffee for five hours. I left the waitress a generous tip for allowing us to rent her table. Now in our sixties, Grace and I decided we didn’t want to go through life alone anymore. Two months later, she moved into my apartment.

One night, as we lay in bed, Grace asked, “How would you describe our relationship, Lewis?”

She has a knack for asking these weighty questions at the most inopportune times. It’s always when I’m ready to fall asleep.

Somehow, she knows that’s when I’m most vulnerable.

“What?” I asked incredulously as I rolled onto my right side to face her. She had already turned off her lamp. My eyes squinted as I tried to focus on her, aided only by the broken bands of light from the street lamp sifting through the blinds behind her.

Once, as I was falling asleep, Grace pondered aloud if I thought people with short-term memory loss could remember those lost memories, say ten years later, when they would become long-term ones. I was speechless considering her bizarre idea, while she quickly fell asleep.

“How would you describe our relationship? It’s a simple

question.” The muffled sounds of midnight traffic rose from the street two floors below our apartment.

Perhaps for her the answer was simple, but not for me. I was no more prepared to answer that question in my sixties than when I had to answer it forty years ago in my twenties.

“Not at this hour, when I’m exhausted and want to sleep. And why would you ask that particular question now?”

“Because this is the perfect time to talk—when we’re together and have no distractions.”

She’s right, partly. With our schedules, it’s probably one of the few times we get to talk to each other. I still work a fulltime, modified, second-shift job. I rarely get home before ten p.m. and, by then, I just want to vegetate. Grace is retired, but teaches both a day and evening English as a Second Language class on a volunteer basis.

“You mean other than attempting to get some sleep before I have to wake up in six-and-a-half hours?” I asked.

“Well, that’s an hour longer than me. I’m up at five-thirty.”

“That’s out of habit and your choice, Grace, not mine. Good night,” I said as I rolled back facing away from the window.

“And where are you going?”

“Hopefully to sleep, please?”

“You’re not answering my question, Lewis.”

“I thought I just did,” I mumbled into my pillow.

“I heard that, and it’s not the answer I was looking for.”

Lord, help me. Exasperated, I turned on my nightstand lamp, rolled over once again to face her—like a dog learning a new trick, propped my pillow up against the headboard, and sat upright. “Christ. You really want to know?”

Grace is a pebble compared to my boulder-like build. She inched closer to me, reclined, placed her left hand under her head as a prop, and said, “Yes. I really want to know. And don’t bring Him into it. I asked you, and He’s not going to help you answer the question.” I’m Jewish. Grace is Catholic, and she doesn’t take kindly to me using her Lord’s name cavalierly.

“Why?” “Why He’s not going to help you?”

“You know what I mean, Grace. Why do you want to know?”

“Because by knowing what you think and feel, I believe we can make our relationship better, stronger.”

“Okay. That’s a valid point, I guess.” I was doing my best to appease her.

That may have been her goal, but from what I know about

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VALLEY FORGE FARMHOUSE, SUMMER by JEFF THOMSEN

Grace’s past, I believe the question stems from insecurities about where she stands in a relationship. I struggle with those same doubts, as perhaps most people do when embarking on a new association, whether it’s personal or business.

She’s had two marriages. Her son and a daughter were from her first—which lasted only six years, and was fraught with her ex-husband’s infidelities. The second was almost four times longer and ended when she became a widow. That was seven years ago.

I had only one marriage that endured longer than both of hers combined before I called it quits. With my ex, what I did was never enough. Never enough money, affection, attention.

My worth, to her, was ultimately reduced to what I could give her.

Our three children have the same mindset. My relationship with them is strained, at best.

Grace and I have shared morsels about our past relationships, her more than me. I’ve lived my life on a need-to-know basis; the truth comes out in dribs and drabs at my convenience.

Perhaps—no, not perhaps—I know that was one of the many reasons my marriage ended in a heap of hot, smoking ash. I reluctantly shared that with Grace. She asked me to promise her that I would do better in our relationship. I said I would, and I always do my best to keep promises.

I’ve managed most of my insecurities: not being a good enough provider or father and husband, which stem from my previous marriage. There are probably also a few that I’m not

conscious of, or willing to admit, but I still feel their effects. Those are buried so deep that some shrink attempting to excavate them, like an archaeologist digging for the bones or artifacts of an ancient civilization, would likely first find Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

Most of Grace’s questions are innocuous and odd, but somewhat humorous. She can be so endearing, but it’s when she asks questions about us that those entombed skeletons uncover themselves and rise to the surface. I don’t know why I’m unable to keep them interred.

I tried to deflect. “So, let me ask you the same question. How would you describe our relationship?”

“I asked you first, Lewis. I’m calling your hand.”

I took a long pause and slowly shook my head. I don’t see any way out of this. “It’s like when I was in ’Nam, on the river boats.”

“How so?”

“It was hours, sometimes days, of boredom split up by moments of sheer terror. You just never knew when the next attack was coming, or from where. Like now.”

She responded matter-of-factly, “So you’re equating my question to an attack?”

“Kind of. Not a frontal attack, mind you. Just coming out of nowhere.” I wasn’t smiling, and my tone was dark and anxious.

“Interesting,” she said, staring at me.

Every time she says that and gives me that stare, I know she’s thinking of another question, and each succeeding question gets more intense, more focused.

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eating grapes and sipping wine. Her dark, brown eyes narrowed and focused directly on me. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we’re combustible, Grace. Your questions are like an open flame around gunpowder.”

“Bullshit, Lewis! We’re not combustible. You’re combustible.”

She pointed her finger at me, and said as emphatically as she could, “This isn’t about me. This is about your ex. Isn’t it? Just admit it.”

“I’m not admitting to shit, Grace, because that’s not true,” I groused. “This has absolutely nothing to do with her.” But it did.

More so, it had everything to do with me believing I wasn’t good enough for Grace.

“The hell it doesn’t. It’s always about her when it comes to us. Talk about living with ghosts!” She rolled her eyes, smirked, and shook her head.

I was losing ground and Grace knew it. She was about to unsheathe that dagger.

“Well, here’s what I really mean, Grace,” my voice elevating to match her finger pointing. “You ask these off-the-wall questions…”

“Oh. So, questions about our relationship are now off the wall?” she cut in.

“No. You’re twisting my words. I mean I just never know when those questions about us are coming, and that’s what terrifies me!” What really terrified me was that Grace might believe I’m not worthy of her, and I didn’t have the courage to say so. What if I wasn’t?

“There you go, Lewis. It’s only when I ask those questions about us. Thank you for finally admitting it. And it really doesn’t matter when I ask them, does it?” She paused. “DOES IT?” Grace folded her arms across her chest and looked away. She wasn’t fishing for a response. Like any good prosecutor, Grace never asked a question to which she didn’t already have the answer.

I took a deep breath, collected my thoughts, and added sullenly, “I’ve fought one war in my life. I’m not going to fight another one. This relationship, like my marriage, is beginning to resemble Vietnam. Except in ’Nam we used bullets, not words.

But the effects are the same: the walking wounded.” I sighed deeply, and I said, “There’re only so many conflicts a person can fight, and I want to be done with all of them.”

Grace turned her head toward me, her arms still folded. I couldn’t decide if the look in her eyes was hurt, anger, or confusion. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I cared. I just wanted the discussion to end.

“What do you mean, Lewis?” Gone was the confidence in her voice.

In hindsight, I did care because I tried my best to limit the damage of that combustible moment. I gently slid my hand to touch her arm. “Grace, I’ve learned over the years which battles to fight, and fighting to keep us together is one endeavor I’m more than willing to undertake. I’m not a conscript in this battle.

I’m a volunteer. But please, stop treating me like a combatant.

Start treating me more as a medic.” I just wanted to be someone who stopped the bleeding and saved the patient, but I wasn’t sure if the patient was me, her, or us.

I asked Grace to look at the sign that I made which hangs by our bedroom doorway. It reads: “I would rather be crazy with you, than sane without you.” Then I leaned into Grace and said, “Why can’t you just accept that I love you—that I’m in love with

I’ve managed most of my insecurities: not being a good enough provider or father and husband, which stem from my previous marriage. There are probably also a few that I’m not conscious of, or willing to admit, but I still feel their effects. Those are buried so deep that some shrink attempting to excavate them, like an archaeologist digging for the bones or artifacts of an ancient civilization, would likely first find Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

“Then does my question scare you—terrify you?” she asked.

“No. Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“It’s damn annoying. It frustrates the hell out of me.”

“I believe what frustrates you is that you know the answer and are afraid to face it.” Her tone softened, and she smiled. “You’ve gotten so much better at opening up, Lewis. I truly mean that.

Just answer the question, please, and we can both go to sleep.”

Her smile was convincing, and I bought it. I wanted to buy it. It was the same smile that beguiled me the first time we met.

I’ve learned that Grace was a damn good prosecuting attorney in her life before retirement. It showed at times like this.

She used her charm before asking those final piercing questions, which felt like the last thrusts of a dagger into some woefully unprepared witness.

“No. That’s not the way it works with you, Grace, and you know it,” I said, even more agitated. “You’ll have twenty more questions. You always treat me like a hostile witness in these bouts, and I know I won’t be excused from the witness chair until you’re finished with me. But truth be told, I mostly feel that you’re prosecuting some ghosts—not me—and it’s not fair.”

She didn’t directly address my anxiety. Instead, she said, “I promise this time I won’t. Answer the question and we can both get some much-needed rest.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Once again, I was sold like some buyer on a used car lot being told that the car I was about to purchase was only driven to church by a little old lady.

“Fine.” Here it goes. “Living with you is like residing in a fireworks factory where they allow smoking. It’s not if there will be an explosion, it’s when.” The explosion was coming from within me. This is my previous marriage all over again, I thought, always having to prove myself.

That retort apparently got her attention, because she now sat upright, no longer assuming the pose of a Roman emperor

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you—and that I want us to work?”

I could see the corners of her mouth turn upward ever so slightly. Then she spoke. “I suppose I like fireworks, Lewis.” She kissed me and then said, “Now go to sleep, sweetheart. I know I will. It’s late.” Grace rolled away from me.

I turned off my light, realizing that our conversation ended the same way it began—with me in the dark.

L.D. served seven years in the Navy, which included a combat tour in Vietnam on river boats and five years aboard nuclear-powered, Fast Attack submarines. At 67, his life is quieter now. He lives in a small city in southeastern Pennsylvania and is a member of The Bold Writers group. His short stories have been published in, among others: Red Fez, Indiana Voice Journal, Remarkable Doorways Online Literary Magazine, The Writing Disorder, The Furious Gazelle, Slippery Elm, Cobalt Review (Print), and Evening Street Review (Print). He has had several public readings at Albright College in Reading, PA.

Be the writer you were born to be.

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sju.edu/philastories 17

Letters From Limbo Review Jennifer Rohrbach

In Letters from Limbo, Jeanne Marie Beaumont weaves multiple narrative threads in her collection of poems to create a tapestry binding together past, present, and future. The book is separated into three parts: “Crossing”, “Asylum Song”, and “Holding.” The unknowing speaker explores a family secret that has impacted her entire life, and suggests that the past inevitably crosses into the present and future. The family secret is the focal point of the “Asylum Song” section while the poems entitled “Letter from Limbo” create another narrative thread. These epistolary poems in the first and third sections are written in a more conversational tone.

The “Letter from Limbo” poems describe a universe, perhaps separate from ours, in which souls are suspended. Beaumont alludes to a kind of purgatory where “fires / from the land beyond our border conspire / with unfavorable currents to turn up out heat” (11), yet the residents of Limbo never seem to suffer.

Rather, the letter writer describes their perpetual burden, saying, “I can’t escape the something-I-forgot-to-do / sense, that what that slinks over the mind’s / ledge, sinks out of reach” (11). Interspersed between the letters in “Crossing” are ekphrastic poems on pre-1900s pieces of art, many of which depict snapshots in time and portraits of elderly-looking children frozen in stiff positions. These, along with the poem “Old State Asylum: Two Photographs,” set a grim tone for the middle section, “Asylum Song.”

Beaumont mentions in her notes that most of “Asylum Song” is found material. Indeed, many poems in this section cite clinical data, documents from Norristown State Hospital in Pennsylvania, and her own collection Placebo Effects. The speaker pieces together the truth of “Asylum: Case No. 10518” and the details of her grandmother’s death after being placed in a mental asylum in 1927. “Who killed Anna K.?” asks the speaker in “Post Mortem” (52). The potential culprits—nightshade, alcohol, and morphine, among other personified medications—refuse to take or place the blame, nor do the official hospital documents. Instead, the cause of death less than three weeks after Anna K.’s admittance is “Exhaustion from Mental Disease (Mania)” (“Asylum: Case No. 10518”, 35). Utilizing the scarce records available, Beaumont reveals the horrors of mental health asylums in the early 1900s, especially for women, and the frustrations that still haunt family members who might never know the truth about their loved ones’ deaths. In “By Way of Farewell,” the speaker, still searching for answers, pleads, “O tell me, my manic grandmother, / Why your young heart grew weaker and weaker?” to

which the grandmother tragically responds, “—It was hope, alas.

A lack” (55).

In the last section “Holding”, the speaker brings us into her present and reflects on what she—and we—have learned. She recalls her childhood and how the shards of her grandmother’s death were still buried in her mother, and are now buried in her as well; how she was never told the truth of her grandmother’s story, but “sensed secrets were being held, / heard the hush round certain names, / but it all swirled too remote to matter / to me, terrible daughter that I was / (it’s only now I feel the shame)” (62).

Letters from Limbo ends with a “Letter from Limbo” poem in which the author leaves us with one last piece of wisdom: that there is beauty in the present. In Limbo, wherever that might be, its residents find comfort in unfulfillment and have discovered their truth. If we interpret the author of the letters as Anna K., we can find comfort in the fact that the life she now lives might be more than the emotional limbo she was living on earth. The author writes in the first letter of “Holding”: If granted reprieve, some of us argue We’d refuse to leave. Isn’t this the best Of circumstances? How have happiness Without hope? How hope without chance of rescue? (59).

The grandmother in “By Way of Farewell” attributed her weakness to lack of hope, and if Limbo can provide such a service, the author reasonably claims, “Immersion in this indefinite haven’s / My sweet sabbatical under the sea” (“Letter from Limbo”, 59). No one knows what life looks like after death. In Letters from Limbo, Beaumont attempts to connect the stories of a woman’s past and another woman’s present to explore a potential future. Ultimately, the poems in Letters from Limbo show us that despite the perils of the past and the uncertainty of the future, we can be content.

Jennifer Rohrbach is a senior English and Creative Writing student at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. She is involved in her campus newspaper and literary journals and won her university's creative writing prize in 2015 and 2016. She usually writes fiction, but has been poetry intern at Philadelphia Stories this spring.

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STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA – SUMMER FUN by CHRISTINA TARKOFF

The Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry CELEBRATING RISK AND INVENTION IN POETRY Philadelphia Stories hosts the annual “Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Prize” to celebrate poets of all backgrounds, experience, and styles.

DEADLINE

NOVEMBER 15, 2017

VISIT WWW.PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG FOR DETAILS

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Dear Pylvia Salth Poem by Kay Coolican

I am drunk & listening to 4:49 a.m. in the shower again on repeat, thinking that if steam handles lips the way hands handle match tips, then you handle me the way “too” handles “close” (& there may never be enough hot water).

Now, think of all the things we can count on our fingers like the certainty of smoke: when it fails to leave a burning thing behind, we choke.

Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Kayla Coolican is a freelance writer and poet based in Somerville, MA. A student at Lesley University and regular performer at The Cantab Lounge, she adores collaborative work, and spends her free time as the volunteer editor for a local indie lit-mag. In Cambridge, she is best-known for her steamy spoken-word piece, “Seducing Johnny Appleseed,” featuring in numerous Boston slams and solicited for radio performance in 2016. Kayla also nurtures a quirky art portfolio and enjoys pairing her written work with Apidae-inspired illustrations. She looks forward to completing her first chapbook soon.

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Don’t Tell Me Your Childhood Was Not A Minefield A review of Thaddeus Rutkowski’s Guess and Check

Mark Danowsky An effective technique in poetry is to guide the reader on a journey that feels like you’re discovering together as opposed to resorting to a heavy-handed didactic approach. Guess and Check is not a collection of poetry, however, Rutkowski employs this tactic as we follow his protagonist on life’s obstacle-ridden path; a process of trial and error while navigating a magnified reality—scenarios wild enough you want to believe they couldn’t possibly happen, but not far-fetched enough to be disregarded as absurd. As a result, these stories uncannily hit home. You get that back of your head worry—somewhere in America lives are unfolding in a frighteningly similar fashion.

The family dynamics in Guess and Check illustrate how a person acquires life experience—often in bits and pieces, by hearsay and chance—like the child who touches the stove and learns it is hot, Rutkowski’s protagonist puts his finger in his father’s fly-tying vice. His father initially shows him the vice saying, “You should learn to make something useful.” Playing with the vice later, the child notes, “My fingertip would have burst if I’d kept going.” In Guess and Check, all is consistently on the brink, consistently on the line.

was too tired to inflate it completely. When morning came, I was again lying on the floor, with only a sheet of plastic between my body and the wood.

Instead of dwelling on grim fatalism—calling to mind Hunter S. Thompson’s term “The Doomed”—Rutkowski’s characters are resilient—they don’t get down on themselves, they roll with the punches. After a scene of brutality, in the next vignette they generally seem no worse for the unpleasantness experienced before. Or perhaps, these characters are simply that well-trained in compartmentalizing the horrors. You put them in a box, you put that box in the attic, and you do not enter that antic under any circumstances.

What I said about characters managing to appear undamaged is not wholly true. From scene to scene the protagonist may seem to cope, but then you’ll wince watching his exposure to abuse without displaying emotion. Of course, this is a survival mechanism—but from the outside looking in it’s frightening to bear witness to the learned behavior response that results from repeated trauma.

Guess and Check is a thought-provoking book, subtly nudging the reader to reflect how our choices shape our reality and lead us to our present selves. Engaging with the text, here’s something that tumbled onto the page after sitting with G&C for a while: We learn lessons over and over. Mind you, I don’t mean we learn the same lesson over and over, although certainly in some cases that is also a truism. Rather, my sense is we adopt a methodology for lesson learning, and we rely on this strategy to find our footing in any new circumstance. At some point, we all learn that fire burns. How we learn that fire burns is what makes us individuals. The branch splits with each choice creating the unique tree that is a human life.

When a teenager shoots one of the family dogs and the protagonist confronts the teenager for an explanation, the teenager says, “He was running across my yard, so I picked up my .22 and plugged him.” The section breaks here.

Reading these stories, I occasionally felt Murphy’s Law—that anything that can go wrong will go wrong—was somehow at play. The following, though it may appear to be a low stakes example, illustrates the point well—if you can’t even manage the energy to secure a decent night’s sleep it feels the universe has aligned against you.

He’s babysitting a child one day and lets the child handle the weapon. When the mother arrives to pick up the child she is less than pleased.

Once awake, I noticed that the air had gone out of my mattress; I was resting on the hard floor. I blew up the mattress, but I

“Did you have to take a course to learn how to shoot?” my friend asked.

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Violence and gunplay escalates throughout the text. Here too there seems to be a lesson about indoctrination into normalcy. Later, the protagonist is living in New York and decides to reclaim a gun his father had given him as a child. He looks into obtaining a permit, but the paperwork is cumbersome. He opts not to bother with the paperwork; possession of a firearm is simply not a big deal to him. After all, he grew up around guns.

In this next gunplay example, Rutkowski’s dark humor comes through:

LONACONING WINDOWS by ERIC LOKEN

“Yes,” I said. “The instructor set up a cabbage and told us, ‘This has the consistency of a man’s head.’ Then he pointed a shotgun at it and pulled the trigger.

“My god,” my friend said.

“Just showed what could happen.” I said.

In the shared kitchen I found lizards living behind the appliances. They were geckos of some sort. They clung to the walls when I made coffee. Maybe they liked the heat radiating from the stove coils, or maybe they just liked clinging to walls.

He said he wanted to go to the bottom of the pit. He said he was already there.

In these vignettes, Rutkowski offers lessons that are not always clear cut. And, at times, you're left wondering what it all means, what kind of lasting effect would these experiences have on a person. As the protagonist is followed from childhood to adulthood, I kept wondering how someone could undergo all of these damaging experiences and come out on the other side unbroken. Maybe that's a question Guess and Check requires of its readers. Who among us can say they’ve made it this far unscathed?

Rutkowski employs humor that offsets the frenetic uncertainly and darkness. And the humor increases when the protagonist is an adult. The reader can bear in mind that there are glimmers of light at the end of the winze while navigating the dangerous waters of childhood that occupy the early sections of G&C. Here’s a glimpse into Rutkowski’s protagonist as an adult: Later, I walked my guest out to the street and helped her hail a cab. I must have been nervous, because when I shut the car door for her, the metal frame hit me in the face.

Before I wrap up, here are a few more examples of Rutkowski’s memorable voice:

Mark Danowsky is a poet from Philadelphia. He is Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and Founder of the poetry coaching and editing service VRS CRFT.

Even in daylight, the flames were filled with energy.

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SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF FRIENDSHIP by ANNALIE HUDSON

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An Interview with Molly Peacock Julia MacDonnell

The astonishing literary life of multi-genre writer Molly Peacock proves that creativity can do better than survive the meager soil of its birth: It can go on to flourish, restless and varied, finding and, when necessary, generating its own nourishment, even amid the noise and violence of contemporary life. Peacock’s new poetry collection, The Analyst, her seventh, just published by W.W. Norton, explores her 40-year long relationship with her psychoanalyst, one that began when Peacock, in her early 20s, fearful and floundering, arrived in New York City to begin her career as a writer and teacher. Her analyst’s stroke at 77, and the analyst’s subsequent loss of memory and language, but her pivot toward painting as a means of self-expression, triggered Peacock’s collection. With exquisite lyricism, stunning imagery, and sly wit – the hallmarks of Peacock’s oeuvre – The Analyst offers a luminous meditation on their rare and ever-evolving relationship.

though, and she reached out to a me that had existed years before, in the recesses of her long-term memory. We began a new post-therapy relationship. I then had the privilege of watching the person who helped me claim my life as a writer reclaim her own life—through painting. She cannot read. She had to relearn what a key was, to relearn how to lock a door! But those nodes of growth I was talking about worked for her. Her girlhood talent for painting has rescued her. The minute she got out of the hospital she began to draw. And draw away from her previous life.

And draw herself into her coda. I wrote the poems obsessively from 2012 to 2015. And then, as it became clear that I had to return to my life, and that she had made a small, peculiar, but vital life for herself with a lot of professional and family help, I stopped, and realized I had a book.

In general, how does a poem, or any other new work, begin for you? Can you describe, briefly, your writing process?

I am writing all the time, either in my head, or on paper. New ideas burgeon, and they are kind of in the back of my mind. I am relaxed about this. I know new ideas will come. It’s one of the pleasures of a long life of writing.

What success has been most meaningful to you?

My greatest successes are my relationships. I have a remarkable forty-two-year friendship with the poet Phillis Levin (Mr. Memory and Other Poems; May Day). We have seen every poem the other has written over all this time. My relationship with my husband began when we were thirteen years old. We are able to keep great solitudes in our marriage, solitudes that hold our creativity apart, yet hold our personalities together. My relationship with my former analyst began when I was 26 and continues, despite her stroke and move across the country, to this day. I can barely define it, even though I wrote a whole book of poems about it. These relationships feel like art to me. In each one we are, together, writing the book of two strangers becoming more and more familiar. Yes, I am thrilled by each writing success as it happens. And probably the New York Times Book Review of my second book of poetry, Raw Heaven, is the most significant success. That landed me on the map of contemporary American letters, and from then I have had a place. But my ever-changing relationships, with growth rings for their years of development, are like great trees in my life.

Recently, after a launch for The Analyst at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Peacock, generously agreed to an indepth electronic interview. Here is an excerpt (find the complete interview at www.philadelphiastories.org): The Analyst seems to me to be a return to your work as a more traditional poet after the successes of Alphabetique and The Paper Garden. How long were you working on it? When did you conceptualize it?

My long-time therapist had a stroke in 2012 and closed her practice. Though I had finished our time of analysis, we had check-in appointments for decades and were very close. When I thought she would die, and that I would never see her again, I was catapulted into a strange grief-with-gratitude state. Poems poured out of me. But she survived! Her memory was blasted,

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Any advice for young writers?

Yes, you have the time to write. Yes, you can write with a full time job, sick parents, a puking dog and children with head lice.

I dare you to write fourteen lines of poetry or prose in 45 minutes. Just about everyone has 45 minutes in a day: 15 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at lunch. Women! Keep your writing in your purse. Don’t reach for that brochure in your dentist’s office waiting room: read your favorite writer—you. Get out those drafts from your bag and revel in your own ideas. That will get you to the next line, the next sentence.

What can we expect next from Molly Peacock?

I’m working on The Flower Diary, a biography of an amazing floral still life painter, Mary Hiester Reid, born in Reading, PA. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, met and married a Canadian painter, ran away to Europe with him, then returned to his home in Toronto to make a career. A married artist! And binational…. Do I hear an echo?

Julia MacDonnell’s second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, was published by Picador in 2014 to widespread praise in national media.

The paperback and a German-language edition were published in 2015.

Her first novel, A Year of Favor, was published by William Morrow & Co. Julia serves on the nonfiction editorial board of Philadelphia Stories.

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG

Suburban Philadelphia fe ust be more to l i ere m “Th

ing everything n hav .” tha

Simplicity

Most is the glory I shall try to people won't of expression. tell the truth, realize that but the result writing is a craft. will be fiction.

poetry, creative nonfiction, short-story, novel, dramatic writing, or writing for children and young adults

MFA in Creative Writing MA in Publishing Double Degree in Creative Writing and Publishing

M.F.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Publishing at Rosemont College 25

www.rosemont.edu

Spring Event Highlights Philadelphia Stories celebrated the winners of the annual Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry during April’s poetry month at a reception at Rosemont College. This annual national poetry prize features a first place of $1,000 cash award; three runners up received $100 cash awards for individual poems. The winning poems were published in the spring issue. The prize will open again on June 15; see www.philadelphiastories.org/poetry-contest for details.

Carla Spataro addresses a full house at the annual Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry reception at Rosemont College.

Judge Lamot Steptoe introduces winner Nancy Davis.

Left to right: PS Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick, Winner Nancy Davis, PS Executive Director Christine Weiser, Judge Lamot Steptoe, Editor's Choice Harvey Soss, Runner Up Will Jones, PS Editorial Director Carla Spataro, Editor's Choice Maggie Lily, prize sponsors Joseph and Matthew Sullivan

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Gettysburg Parable Poem by Ed Granger

After his speech the people who’d assembled to imbibe the mulled wine of his baritone went home and tried to rebuild everyone, while the President click-clacked back to Washington wreathed in the steam of engines he’d unleashed then stalked like a gaunt apostrophe across the street to telegraph Ulysses Grant to “please come get this

business over with” before his hair made wisps of smoke like Little Round Top and his bristling jowl grew sunken into Devil’s Den chewing its hallowed dead.

“Expect worse” Grant’s reply read.

Ed Granger lives in Lancaster County, PA, where he grew up knowing the magic of Dutch Wonderland, and how to pass a buggy without spooking the horse. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, The Broadkill Review, Potomac Review, Roanoke Review, Free State Review, Naugatuck River Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Delmarva Review, and other journals. And yes, he has taken his own daughter to Dutch Wonderland, too.

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Like it Really is Aimee LaBrie

My stepson is reading Romeo and Juliet for his eighth grade English class. I asked him what he thought about it the other day during dinner.

He shrugged and tucked a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

“I don’t want to ruin it for you,” I warned. “But it doesn’t end well.”

“I know,” he responded.

I told him that when I was in eighth grade, I memorized the entire balcony scene from the play. I didn’t tell him that I had done it because I prayed that someday soon, Jim Hurst of the swim team and I may have a similar exchange. Never mind that I lived in single level house in Florida, and the only impediment to our romance was my Coke-bottle eye glasses and his total lack of interest. I pictured a balcony at the Don Caesar, myself in an eyelet dress with sassafras wound in my feathered hair. Him, standing below, possibly in just swim trunks, would call up to me in a deep voice with only a hint of crack, saying: “I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptis’d; henceforth I never will be Romeo/ Jim.” Somehow, it would work out sans the dual suicide and despite the chasmic-sized popularity differences.

It did not. Wherefore art thou, Jim? (Actually, Facebook tells me that he’s a pro golfer living in St. Pete with twin daughters and a wife named Bethany Anne.)

But these early ideas of romance and storytelling stayed with me as a writer throughout my teen years as I struggled to come up with love stories that illustrated that same longing and defiance that captivated me at age thirteen. I’d write heroes with barrel-chests and tousled golden curls, heroines with eyes that were always a weird color—grey like slate, churning sea green (?), lavender. They were loosely based on a mixture of Shakespeare, the movie Blue Lagoon, and romance novels I stole from my aunt JoAnne. Inevitably, the women wore bodices and the men had ripped blouse-like shirts. I cared mostly about the exteriors, the long descriptions of the way waist-length hair rippled in the summer breeze or the man’s white teeth gnashed with desire, much like a stallion’s, the “maiden blush” bepainting a cheek.

I’d come up with these scenes and show them to my mom, an avid reader, who would concentrate on the lined notebook pages and hand them back with vaguely encouraging words to keep at it.

I knew what I was writing was phony, stolen. Until I was a junior in high school, I hadn’t been kissed. I hadn’t even been in danger of being kissed. There had never even been hand-holding. The closest I had come was a note from Steve Crossett, one year older and a red-head, who’d written that he thought I was “a pretty decent person.” Pin that one up on your bulletin board next to a photo of Christopher Reeves as Superman ripped out of Seventeen.

I asked my mom for advice. How did she think I should write love scenes? She paused, considering. I could see that she was weighing her options. “Write it like it really is,” she said finally. What did she mean?

She thought for a minute. She knew that I spent an inordinate amount of time in the library, and very little time with the opposite sex. Unless you counted Wednesday night bell choir practice. “I mean, write about leaning into kiss someone and you miss. Or your elbow going numb on the table while you’re waiting for your date to finish his boring story. Write about what it’s really like, not what you think it should be like.”

This is possibly the best writing advice I’ve ever received, along the lines of well-worn maxim to write what you know. I had thought that writing was all about imagining yourself into the world you wanted to inhabit. It is that. But it’s also about being able to see that situation as it truly is for your character—to picture all of its complexities and discomforts— the alive parts and the numb parts, the perfect moment and the awkward one. My love stories have mostly been awkward ones. Awkward, funny, lovely, horrible, and true. That’s the writing world I inhabit, and though I still love the tumbling poetry of Shakespeare, I stick to what feels most true to my experience.

PUSH TO PUBLISH Saturday, October 14, 2017

Whether you are an established writer or just getting started, this one-day workshop will provide valuable resources you can use to get your work in print and online.

READ MORE AT www.philadelphiastories.org/push-to-publish

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RESOURCES Come As You Are is the sequel to Christine Weiser’s critically acclaimed debut novel Broad Street. Come As You Are is a novel about balancing work, family, and a chick rock trio.

Ten years earlier, these thirty-something women were best friends who played in the late ‘90s Philadelphia girl group, Broad Street. Time and circumstances drove them apart, but when they get an invitation to play an esteemed national tour, they put aside their differences to reform their old band.

50 Over 50 is a collection of poetry, essays, and fiction by women over age 50. This anthology features work by notable authors like Robin Black, Bonnie Jo Campbell, J.C. Todd, Vickie A. Carr, and Rachel Pastan. While many of the writers included are emerging authors, all of the work has something funny, thoughtful, and compelling to say about sex, family, loss, and love.

Available online at Amazon and IndieBound

Available online at Amazon and IndieBound

Creative Writing

Janet Benton’s debut novel Lilli de Jong (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) is set in Philadelphia in 1883. It’s the diary of a young Quaker who gives birth at an institution for unwed mothers.

“So little is permissible for a woman,” writes Lilli, “yet on her back every human climbs to adulthood.”

Workshops Express your unique voice. Find joy in

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AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

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SEE WWW.JANETBENTONAUTHOR.COM BOOK GROUPS WELCOMED

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Sit in on one workshop meeting as a guest, by appointment only.

Alison Hicks, MFA, Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio www.philawordshop.com • ah@philawordshop.com • 610-853-0296 Monday evenings in Ardmore • Tuesday evenings in Center City Private Consultation for Manuscript Development

Interested in joining a Great Books discussion group?

There are over 50 groups meeting regularly in PA/NJ/DE using the Shared Inquiry Method for discussing significant works of literature or non-fiction.

Contact us to find a Great Books discussion group in your area: phila1@greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org

Rachel Kobin, Philadelphia Writers Workshop www.phillywriters.com • Rachel@phillywriters.com • 610-449-3773 Tuesday and Thursday evenings in Flourtown Private Consultation for Manuscript Development

For further information about Great Books events on the East Coast, see

www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org

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A MAGAZINE THAT CREATES COMMUNITY THANKS TO MEMBER SUPPORT, PHILADELPHIA STORIES HAS BEEN SERVING THE WRITING COMMUNITY OF THE GREATER DELAWARE VALLEY SINCE 2004 IN THE FOLLOWING WAYS:

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