Pour Vida Zine 4.2 (Winter 2017)

Pour Vida

Winter 2017 (4.2)

Table of Contents “On Vondelstraat” by Adam Iannucci McClelland………………………………….p. 3 “Sleeping Beauty” by Sophia Ihlefeld…………………………………………………….p. 4 “Scattered Grammar,” “Bruises,” and “Seven Years in Pieces”

by Paola Rodriguez…………………………………………………………………………..…p. 10 “Lego Man” and “They Were Gay” by Rick Jordan…………………………….…p. 13 “Capitol Gain” by Thomas Piekarski………………………………………………..….p. 15 “We’re Down That Road, Now” by Gerhard Schneibel…………………..........p. 17 “Our War” by Hunter Clarke………………………………………………….…………….p. 23 *Cover photograph by Mark Wyatt To be considered for upcoming issues of Pour Vida lit zine, please send submissions of writing and artwork to pourvidazine@gmail.com

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“On Vondelstraat” by Adam Iannucci McClelland a mother walks with her young daughter, a garden of houses, the smell of rain.

Beyond them a tulip market, bulbs in crates because it’s fall because everything is bulbs is you lonely in the dark dormant in soil, in this room.

The young daughter takes her mother’s hand. A drunk on the trains platform is a kind of departure.

The murky canals, bicycles, the wax museum where you stare waiting for an eye to twitch.

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“Sleeping Beauty” by Sophia Ihlefeld Caden’s mother never tucked him in at night. She started work right after they finished supper, just before the sun went down. Caden would never be tired enough to justify sleep at that time. Although yes, they had their tiny room together, with the little worn bed in which they both slept when they could, and the fading lamp in the corner, that’s not where Caden spent most nights.

What his mother didn’t know was that Caden never slept in his bed on the nights she worked. He’d lie there as she gathered everything necessary in her purse, including extra makeup, and perfume and a little yellow box she’d purchased at the pharmacy, and closed the door behind her, locking it so he’d be safe. Then he’d pull on his coat and use his little fingers to twist the lock back again, before following at a distance. When they got to the low house set deep in the groin of the city, Caden’s mother would disappear through the front door into her assigned room, and soon a red glow emanated from the windows.

He would drag a wooden chair next to the doorway, armed with his plastic toy baseball bat, and wrap a blanket around his shoulders against the cold. Tucked in for the night.

She didn’t seem to care at all for what went on outside that door, only for the work she did within, and so Caden never feared she’d see him.

Men of all kinds, young and old, dry and bony, sweaty and fat, limping and sure-footed, hesitant and bold, would go to visit his mother.

Caden knew it was because she was so beautiful, with her hair the color of champagne she’d never drink and lips like the roses the suitors would never bring her. He stood guard, ready to defend her if the need arose.

They gave him no glance as they barged past him through her door.

Caden knew when her shift ended, making sure to put the chair back in its rightful place and scurry home before she emerged.

It was 1971, and Caden had just turned nine years old. After he blew the candles out on their blue-frosted cupcakes, his mother apologized for having to leave and instructed him to be a good birthday boy. She pulled him into a tight embrace, kissing him all over his face while he waited patiently. Caden chewed his cupcake slowly, savoring the moist sweetness as she left the room and stopping to let his tongue trace the outline of his mouth and swipe away any stray, artificially flavored icing. Afterwards he headed out, his blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a scarf and his Little Tykes yellow baseball bat resting over his right shoulder.

Everything was gray, from the pavement to the streetlight to the faces of passerby looking down at him. Their eyes were gray too, glazed over with disinterest and only once in a while sparking with curiosity at the sight of an armed nine year old. Even the air was gray; it tasted of ash and smelled like a sunken corpse. The wind had teeth, sinking into the flesh of Caden’s cheeks and ears and tearing at his clothes. He took up his position at his mother’s door.

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The last man Caden saw enter that night was tall with a square and expressionless face (usually they either looked excited or nervous or guilty). The man wore a ring on his left hand, and a collared shirt the color of my morning oatmeal. The man strode into Caden’s mother’s room without hesitation.

Caden’s eyes had begun to droop against his will; he blinked them angrily, pushing the sleep away, as he heard his mother’s voice rise from behind the thick wooden door. It was usually so quiet, save for some creaking; Caden’s spine straightened and his fingers tightened on the baseball bat.

Caden strained to hear what she was saying. Something about money. The man’s voice was gruff through the crack under the door.

His mother’s voice was an over-boiling teakettle. Caden imagined her a bear, rearing up against the only man he’d known to anger her.

Get back here, you prick! I’ll call my boss! I want my fucking money, pencil dick!

Caden’s eyes widened. She’d said a bad word, which was followed by many more. Her shouts were now entirely clear to Caden. But he couldn’t hear the man’s replies, if he gave any. The man’s silence was more threatening than any words, as if he were a bomb just seconds from exploding.

There was a crash of glass and a thud. Her angry screams turned to whimpers. She said Caden’s name. Caden stood up, thinking she was calling out to him, but then he realized she was using Caden as a plea for mercy. More dull thumps behind the door, and seconds that were minutes that were hours passed. Caden couldn’t hear his mother anymore.

Caden wanted to kill the man, to kick down the door himself and barge in, bat raised. Caden wanted to hit him and hit him until his mother was happy again. But his skinny legs were rooted to the spot, his blanket pooling around his feet. What if his mother didn’t want his help, he thought? What if she was angry with him for being there? He could do nothing but stare at the door. He willed himself to do something, anything.

He would have given anything and everything in the world to be able to act in that moment. But he was frozen, afraid, impotent.

Then the door swung open, not tentatively like most times, but all at once. The man stood there, his expression the same as it had been when he walked in. He considered Caden, and Caden cringed back, but then he brushed by without a word.

Caden rushed in, searching for his mother in the dim lighting. A lamp had been the source of the shattering he’d heard, glass shards littering the ground beside the desk.

His mother was lying on the bed, her head tilted slightly away from Caden. Gently grasping her chin and turning her, he saw plum flowers blossoming along her right cheek and forehead, crimson trickling from her scarlet lips.

Mother? Mother wake up.

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She wasn’t listening. He pulled her shift dress down over her thighs and the strap back over her shoulder.

Mother please!

He pushed himself onto his tippy toes, kissing her cheek. His tears washed onto her face.

Her eyelids fluttered slowly against Caden’s forehead. He pulled back.

Oh, my little prince, she whispered, smiling up at Caden, Get out of here quick. *** Thirty years later, Caden’s alarm went off at 7:35 AM. He rolled out of bed after a satisfying exact eight hours of sleep, swiping his thumb across the framed photograph of his mother as he walked down the hall.

He’d tried, and learned mostly successfully, to make the picture a cause for fond remembrance and reflection rather than anxiety and emotional upheaval. The coffee pot, already filled with rich-smelling coffee grains and water, hummed to life at his bidding. He turned up the stovetop to level six and cracked two eggs over a pan, watching them sizzle softly. The yoke was gooey, running around Caden’s fork as he scooped his breakfast tenderly onto his tongue.

Once he was fully dressed, dark hair shaped into a gentle curve above his forehead, Caden shrugged on his dark pea coat and headed off to work.

About a week after his ninth birthday, when it became apparent that his mother was never coming home, Caden’s neighbors had taken him in, treating him as their own. They were a kind couple, but never asked what had happened to Caden’s mother. The man, Mr. Kramer, had a beer gut and a shock of white hair in the middle of his head. He was gruff, but eventually relented to his wife and took Caden under his wing, bringing him to work at a nearby construction site and showing him the ropes. First came safety. Mr. Kramer decked Caden in oversized rubber boots, gloves, safety glasses, and a yellow construction hat that wobbled on Caden’s skull.

Then Mr. Kramer taught Caden all about the different types of tools, from compactors to levels to tape measures to tampers to vibrators to screeds to trowels to kneeling boards. Caden took to it quite quickly, watching Mr. Kramer and the other workers, and by the time he was nineteen he had begun rising in the ranks.

When he decided to move to Chicago when he was twenty-five, therefore, he had enough experience to transfer straight into a project manager job at Turner Construction Company. He enjoyed it well enough, both for his evident skill at the job and the control he was able to enact over almost every aspect of each project.

Caden arrived at the site for the new strip mall they were in the process of building – one of Caden’s more ambitious jobs. He spent the day

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scrutinizing spreadsheets, instructing his colleagues, and pretending his button-down wasn’t being blanketed in dust just like the worn t-shirts of all his subordinates.

Caden nodded politely to everyone as he left at the end of his shift, receiving some reciprocal nods and a wave or two. He tried his best to get along with them, but though he’d been raised among construction workers, this group was even more raucous than what he was accustomed to and their personalities tended to grate against his patience. And Caden didn’t like the way they talked about women. He’d had his fair share of one-night trysts with women from the dive bars near his apartment complex, but he’d never felt such contempt or disrespect for them that his coworkers seemed to. Even if he’d been able to throw a joke or two around with them before, he couldn’t bear to talk about Lily that way.

Lily was the love of Caden’s life, and he made his way to her directly after work. He couldn’t wait to be in her warm, inviting arms. Caden had been seeing Lily for about three months now – they’d bumped into each other on the street one evening as he was walking home from work – and his heart never felt so full as when he got to kiss her thin lips or hold her body against him. He knew she looked at him differently than she did other men, that their relationship was special and pure. He knew she developed relationships with many men as part of her work, but also that she didn’t see him as one of them. She always tasted of sweet smoke; Lily sucked on her cigarettes during their long conversations in her motel room, about love and life and death and family and pain. She understood him like no other; she knew every inch of his soul. After his mother’s murder at the hands of a violent, cheapskate client, Caden had been alone for so long; Lily was the angel sent from above to tether his lost heart. Her love was the first to rival that of his mother’s, for the affection of his adopted parents was appreciated but lukewarm.

“Love is like a wave, crashing over you before retreating back into the ocean,” she’d mused, when he had asked her if she’d ever been in love.

He knew at that moment Lily’s wave was knocking him breathless; he was drowning in it. Except his lungs sucked the water in greedily.

Caden whistled as he walked, the frigid Chicago air scraping against his wet lips. An abandoned flower stand from the long-gone summer caught his eye, and he strolled over to take a look at the remaining contents. A group of withered yellow tulips huddled together in the corner of the bottom wooden shelf; Caden plucked them from their hiding place and tucked them tenderly into the breast pocket of his coat.

Strolling confidently through the motel doors, Caden nodded at the bored-looking concierge and walked to room seventeen, his favorite place in the world. He knocked three times, and she opened the door.

“Hey there, Caden,” Lily murmured in the doorway, her voice low and sultry. “Come on in, baby. I missed you.”

Caden didn’t enter right away, lingering instead in the doorway so he could take in her face. Auburn hair fell in loose ringlets around her

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shoulders, and her brown eyes, flecked with yellow, gazed up at him longingly. His hand reached out to her cheek, tracing the porcelain skin with his thumb.

She took his hand from her cheek and led him inside, seating them both on the sagging bed. “Happy Birthday, Caden,” Lily whispered onto his lips.

“You remembered!” Caden leaned back, his eyes wide as he beamed at her.

“Of course, baby. It’s not every day my best man turns 39.”

Caden couldn’t control himself any longer; he lunged, kissing her soft lips passionately and moaning as she melted into him. Her skin was hot to the touch. Shuddering, he caressed her breasts lovingly, kissing each perfect one and then her long neck and then back to those luscious lips.

The bed became a riot of sighs and whimpers and flying clothing. There was no better feeling in the world than being inside this incredible woman, feeling her writhe against him and call his name.

Panting beside her afterward, Caden leaned into her neck. “I love you, Lily.”

He heard her sigh contentedly. “Happy Birthday, Caden. That was amazing.”

“That’s it? Don’t you have something else to say?”

Lily reached her fingers tentatively to his lips. Her voice was soft, placating. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate to be falling in love right now.

You know who I am, Caden. Don’t pretend you don’t. I still like seeing you, baby."

Caden nodded. This was her way. She would come around; their connection was too strong to be broken by mere occupational hazards.

They lay there for a long while, together on the faded blue comforter.

He hated to leave, but he knew he had to get some rest before the long workday tomorrow. Removing several crumpled twenties from his old leather wallet, he placed them on her bedside table, telling her to treat herself to a new dress. He loved spoiling her.

Caden kissed Lily deeply before snatching his coat from the chair by the door and making his departure.

Just a few steps out of the motel, as he swung the pea coat over his shoulders, Caden realized he’d never given Lily the tulips. They were crushed by now anyway, but he was sure she’d appreciate the sentiment.

Retrospectively, he should’ve found lilies to add an extra level of romance, but perhaps that would have been too clichéd. Turning on his heel, he made his way back to her room.

He stopped abruptly outside Lily’s door. Her screams and moaning came to him as clearly as if she were yelling right in his ear. He did not hesitate. His legs were long and strong, kicking the door straight off its hinges as he’d wanted to thirty years ago.

Caden’s gorge rose as he stepped into the room. Lily: on her hands and knees. Some man: kneeling behind her, his hands in her hair. She was

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louder than Caden had ever heard her.

They all froze as Caden entered. “Who the fuck are you?” the man shouted.

Caden took three long strides, socking the stranger with all his strength straight in the jaw. Then he kicked the man, now fallen on the floor, right in the belly, hoping he was moving some organs around. Caden fell upon the man. Caden rained blow upon blow on the man’s face, like a baker pummeling dough into shape. Caden only stopped at Lily’s voice.

“Stop it, stop it! Are you insane? Get off of him, Caden! You’re going to kill him!”

Panting, Caden picked the man up by the hair and threw him out the doorway. The stranger scuttled away, probably to go tell his wife he’d been mugged and let her nurse his wounds.

“Get out of here,” Lily’s voice was trembling.

“Lily, I don’t understand!” Caden pleaded. “I was saving you!”

“I don’t need saving, Caden. I never want to see you again. Get. Out.” Caden was crying now. “Please don’t make me go, Lily. Please. I love you! That man could have hurt you!”

Lily’s face was pinched with rage. She stepped up to him, grasping his chin firmly and looking him in the eye. “I am a prostitute, Caden. I fuck you for money. You know this. I do not love you. I do not need your help.

Get. The. Fuck. Out!” Caden remained standing there, frozen to the floor. He couldn’t make sense of all this, of the way his body was heating like a pig over a roast. He couldn’t comprehend why his beloved was making him go.

“Get out!” Lily screamed once more, hitting him across the face.

Caden broke. Caden gripped her skull, to stop her, to remind her how he used to hold her. Caden pushed her to the bed, trying to rekindle the intimacy they’d had less than an hour ago. Caden put his hand over her mouth, to stop her unwarranted screaming, whispered of his love into her ear. Caden pinned her arms, when it became apparent her blows would not stop. Caden placed his hands around her neck, to stop her thrashing.

***

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“Scattered Grammar” by Paola Rodriguez You are the most exquisite sentence I can never seem to get down right, and I would lose myself in every language to find new ways to write you over and over.

Your dimples are the commas that I scatter throughout your form you are the run on sentence I can’t finish because I never figured out how to let you go.

I’m trying to write you away from my every thought, forget that the sound of your voice is the melody for my words, and feeling the scruff on your cheeks is enough texture to write a novel, let them know even the roughest parts of you make me come back for more, like the night I said we’d never work but still I ended up in your bed, your lips pinning me down and your hands making me feel like I could see God. The feel of you is in the lighters I find, the warning labels scratched off, in the chiming of my car when I leave my keys in the ignition, in my sweaty palms when I try to reach for yours.

You are the most indecipherable sentence that I’ve ever tried to read, but writing you is the only way I’ll keep myself from going numb.

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“Bruises” by Paola Rodriguez There are days I find my skin has bruised from thinking of you too long.

They reveal the memory of you and the way I’ve held on every time I try to fight against the feeling of you and I. There are purple fingerprints clustered together throughout my body every time I leave you.

The formation of small nebulas in your empty space.

Little gifts for me to find when you’re gone, surprising me with the idea of having been so lost in you I didn’t notice the pain your presence brought with it.

But sometimes I find that the bruises formed only inside my mind, in the nooks where I keep your song with me, in the corners where I find your long hellos and short goodbyes, in the darkness where I run into the shadows of your being.

There are purple clusters acting as a constant reminder of the permanence of your mark, going past skin-deep, where I trace the memories I keep safe in me, if only just to keep the idea of you and I alive.

There are days I find my skin has bruised from thinking of you too long, but I would take the aches of your hold, if it meant I could feel you more.

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“Seven Years in Pieces” by Paola Rodriguez

I We’re learning how to accent our letters in a romantic language, a foreign idea we never truly mastered when it came to ourselves.

II You’ve become the secret I keep between library books.

Kissing my wrist between whispers, you’re realizing the permanence of you in my skin.

III All you left behind was the memory of your arms wrapped around someone new.

I left claw marks on your skin when you ripped yourself away.

IV I ran into your ghost tonight--its rejection made a monster out of me.

V I heard you’re lost in a city I don’t belong in. I wish I could have picked up your pieces.

VI Your face is fading from my memory, yet I find the small details of you in strangers.

I’m walking the streets with a lump in my throat and a knot in my chest.

VII You came back and into me like a hurricane, but all you found were my looks of quiet agony.

I shouldn’t have let you pick up my pieces.

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“Lego Man” by Rick Jordan In a two-hundred year old Southern cemetery row after row of saints and sinners rest having left behind the pains and pleasures of earth, all wishing they could take it with them and those behind offering their best attempts to make that happen.

Tall tombs to re-enforce large egos, little lambs with cloud-soft wool for infants, brass plaques flash heroically as if this battle is not lost.

And there, a six foot sentinel in primary blue and yellow and red.

An unsightly, unseemly wonderful monument marking the resting place of an active ten-year-old who loved, more than anything, playing with Legos.

What if there were fields and fields of such honest markers – “Here is where they lie, here is what they loved, here is how we will always remember them.”

A birdlover’s binoculars A cook’s spatula A fan’s ball glove.

And yours?

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“They Were Gay” by Rick Jordan They were gay before the shots were poured before the shouts of celebration as a favorite song began Before the club before dinner before college before high school before their first box of Crayons It was their choice to go to the bar to stay ‘till last call to take their stand in the open – no closets He was offended before he was angry and his anger turned to disgust and his disgust turned to hatred and his hatred turned to terrorism Turnings, turnings, turnings All choices, turnings To choose to be who you are is to turn from who you are not and to turn, for some, into a target

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“Capitol Gain” by Thomas Piekarski While Monterey is magical, San Francisco amply sublime, Paris radiant, London wondrous poetrypiekarski@yahoo.com with resplendent cupolas, museums and bridges, Sacramento is the epicenter of modern progress.

This Capitol is where it all happens. Here initiators of change flourish, great ideas brewed, with billions spent for the benefit of multicultural constituents.

From these steps the great state of California is formed. Fitted. Functions. Leads the world in innovation. Nobody wants to confiscate your guns, buddy, this isn’t old Tombstone or Dodge. You can carry a piece if you want, but please just don’t shoot.

Welcome autumn rains record-setting, grasses green, temporary respite from drought while wildfires rage in the Southeast. Man can’t overcome Mother Nature so those fires carry on while we get needed water.

Recently on Facebook I wrote “Some politicians flip-flop. Most lie. And the worst are cockroaches, cowardly, who thrive in dreadful damp darkness.”

But here they pass laws for the betterment of us all.

Life is a dream, an elaborate illusion. And so we might as well roll the dice, let it all hang out while we have the chance. For this cosmic miracle can’t last forever, so there is absolutely nothing to lose.

Those protesters can rant and rage all they want.

I’ll sit here perfectly still on a bench along a broad pedestrian path, with a frontal view of the Capitol.

It’s dome painted ashen gray, but it should be gold.

Wondering why the clouds overhead don’t implode, why that sky-high palm is so skinny, why it sways when there’s no discernable wind. Roses withered.

A crow caws thrice in succession. Hello my Avalon.

Hello mercurial rise, for the Japanese maple shimmers crimson in the glistering sunlight.

Helmeted cops race bikes around as many sexy

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women jog along the sidewalk in tight leotards.

Here in the Capitol city, blacks and whites don’t fight. Hispanics marry Asians, whose children trade tweets, bank on love to stock open souls and foil anyone who would dash their dreams.

This morning I drove down Broadway past the Post Office, Thai restaurant, dive bars, Tower Books and hospital to view the mighty Sacramento River as it rambles from Shasta Lake.

Marina on my left, the river at my right, I watched a replica clipper ship, its masts barren, chug against the flow, the passengers energized, motor powered by diesel that left a thick gray haze in the chilly air.

A busy squirrel plucked a piece of discarded rag on the bank, scurried off, so excited at the find, dug a hole in soft earth and buried it so that it would be saved for what future use I’m sure I’ll never know.

Happy days aren’t here again since they never left, and can’t be stopped so long as the river still flows, isn’t drained from excessive use by the farmers and exploding population whose thirst is insurmountable.

The old rail yard once a bustling hub is now a toxic waste site, abandoned, its ramshackle buildings spooky as Dracula’s infamous castle. The legislators who huddle in the Capitol are pondering what to do with it.

They’re resourceful, creative, but may well tank if the river does go dry one day and threatens the freedoms we take for granted in this state.

Rain, rain, rain, oh let it rain. Rain on heads of government, rain until the dams can’t hold, rain that our story will be told to generations so distant they may not resemble us in the least.

A chopper hovers above the Capitol, its blades slicing the sky to bits, so loud and obstreperous.

Yet it’s necessary security, as we must make sure no harm will come to our elected representatives.

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“We’re Down That Road, Now” by Gerhard Schneibel The day spent processing work orders to send out crews had worn me down, so I called Laura to say I wouldn’t be home for dinner and instead drove out to the Martin Mill Tavern to get drunk. Three fluorescent lights were switched on inside, there were no windows and most of the seats were vacant. The bartender placed my bottle of beer on the sticky polyurethane bar top.

“Is Vitaly in today?” I asked him. “I want to see if he’ll make me something off the menu.”

“I’m sure he’d be happy to, Andy. He’s back there.”

“I’ll go in a minute,” I said, glancing down the bar at the other men drinking. They looked gloomy in their ragged t-shirts and dirty work jeans, each with his eyes fixed on a different TV. The first beer broke the tension in my back, and the second and third sent my mind drifting. If, on that morning half a year ago, I had gone to check on Leah I would have stopped the overdose. I’d woken up at four to pee, and the coroner’s report said she died between three and five in the morning. Her lips were blue and her skin clammy by the time I finally went in there to wake her. The TV was flickering and the air was foul. She’d wrapped herself in her blanket like she knew she would be going alone.

“You look like you’re thinking,” the bartender said, clearing away my bottle and handing me a fresh one.

“Not really. I’m just hungry,” I told him, getting up to go into the kitchen. Vitaly, nineteen years old and sitting on an overturned milk crate beside the dish sink, was thumbing through a magazine with a naked woman and Russian writing on the cover. His apron was smudged with grease and a cigarette was tucked behind his ear.

“Slow tonight,” I said, leaning on the counter and looking down into the grill at the pilot flame burning there. “You want to come by my house when your shift ends?”

“Sure, I can… ends after ten.”

“Do you still have some of those Ukrainian dumplings you made?

“You like?”

“How about you give me some with a hamburger?”

Vitaly nodded, turning the page of his magazine without looking up.

He took the cigarette and placed it between his lips, searching in his pocket for a lighter. “Okay,” he said.

“You know the English word ‘weary,’ Vitaly? That’s how I feel right now, with all the horrific shit happening in the world that gets packaged as entertainment and put on the market. I know what’s going on -- I’m not dumb. I’ll live for years and then get a heart attack or cancer since I’m protected by the most expensive, advanced military in history. That’s after I destroy the environment around me and leave behind a mountain of trash. Why should I care about cruelty to animals if humanity can’t stop

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abusing itself? Maybe we’re just dirty, you know? Is it the same way in your country?”

“No,” Vitaly said, setting aside the magazine and getting up. “I go to smoke and then I make your food.”

It was nearly eleven when he finally came out from the kitchen wearing his hoodie and jacket and carrying a backpack. I tripped getting off my stool and we left the tavern together. Outside the air was cold, and my car was one of three parked under a single street light by the crumbling edge of the asphalt lot with a tangle of kudzu beyond. Getting in, I shoveled the pile which had accumulated in the passenger seat onto the floor with the shopping bags, junk mail and soda bottles lying there before opening the door to Vitaly. Rolling down the windows and pulling onto Martin Mill Pike, I let the wind buffet my face as I drove the straightaways by holding the bottom of the wheel with only my fingers to keep from veering out of my lane. I coasted through the curves in the road of my suburban neighborhood, where the lights in all the houses had been turned off hours ago.

“Come on in and let’s say ‘hi’ to Laura,” I told Vitaly as I parked beside the boat in the driveway of our split-level. “She’s been wanting to see you again.”

“She remembers me?”

“Oh yeah, she remembers you,” I told him.

Laura was on a recliner in our den downstairs wearing a sweatsuit and watching reality TV. She looked at me walking in, and I could see she was feeling sad. She always was.

“Oh, hey, Vitaly,” she said. “I was wondering when you were coming over again.”

Going over to open the little wood cabinet in the corner, I took out a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses. Lying inside was also my nine millimeter pistol and a carton of ammunition. When I turned around Vitaly was seated on the sectional with his backpack between his feet, and I sat next to him, pouring a glass of whiskey to give him before taking one myself. “How do you say?” I asked, lifting my glass.

“Za zdorovie!” Vitaly declared, tipping back his own.

The whiskey had such a nice, earthen taste coupled with the bite on my tongue that I poured another round. “I bet I outdrink you, Vitaly.”

Laura laughed at me and muted the TV, looking over at Vitaly. “Go easy on him. He only ever had a daughter, and she never drank. I don’t know if he’s up for a Ukranian drinking contest.”

“Don’t worry,” Vitaly said, taking the full shot glass and holding it. “I drink light beer for so long here with everybody else... I’m out of practice.”

“Don’t you miss home? You visit your family, right?”

“I miss them.” Vitaly’s adam’s apple palpitated as he drank the shot.

“I miss my friends… my mother’s cooking. I can’t travel because overstay tourist visa. People where I come from is poor but have simple souls. It’s

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not like here. Here people is rich, but bitter. It’s like they are in poverty.

Well, anyways... I can’t leave.”

“Your mom must miss you terribly, though. I know I’ve missed our daughter every day since she passed away. What’s strange is that lots of the time it’s like she’s just off on a trip somewhere,” Laura was saying.

My guts felt warm and my eyes wandered around the room as I listened to their voices. The wood paneling that had been on the walls since we moved in years ago still made the room feel comfortable in winter.

Potted plants along with a watering can stood on a small table by the window and the curtains were shut. I knew that, once Laura started talking about Leah, she would say she’d always wanted a second child. She would say she’d had more love to give; more capacity to nurture. Every time she started down that path I couldn’t help but think about how fast those years with Leah went by. I didn’t say anything, because I knew she was suffering, but we could have slowed things down and lived on our own terms. We could have been tighter as a family.

“Are you paying any attention?” Laura asked me sharply. “Vitaly’s telling us about the time he went with Leah to visit friends in New York.”

“Really?” I poured another round. “She never mentioned that to us. I thought they just spent weekends together at his apartment.”

“We did all tourist things… Statue of Liberty, Central Park, Broadway; we stayed with my friends,” Vitaly said, his speech now slow and uneven. The whiskey wobbled in his glass and some spilled as he brought it to his lips.

Vitaly was four shots ahead of me, and I poured him another. “Did she ever talk about me and her mother? What did she say?”

“Really, Andy?” Laura asked, cocking her head and rolling her eyes at me. “You’re going to ask him... that?”

“It’s a simple question,” I said, jarred by the anger in my own voice and asking myself why the hell else she thought I brought the boy around.

“Leah was an amazing person, wasn’t she?” Laura asked Vitaly, ignoring me.

“Yes, no doubt,” Vitaly said in measured words.

“I never got tired of hearing her because her empathy and insight were so far advanced for an eighteen year old,” Laura was saying to him.

“She was a better person than me… the best I’ve ever known, and she loved you. We stopped fighting after you met her, you know? She didn’t feel attractive to boys because Andy kept her from dating. I know how lonely she felt; my own dad was like that.”

I passed Vitaly a shot and we both drank. For a moment my train of thought was broken and I felt armored. There was only a hazy sensation and a silent moment without emotion. Laura’s words felt irrelevant.

“My English was then so bad, and she was only American girl who would talk to me,” Vitaly said after a minute, looking around the room. “I think she was bored. She like me being foreign, and we try different things

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together. In New York we climb into a subway tunnel with my friend, a photographer.”

“That’s dangerous!” Laura said, covering her open mouth.

Suddenly Vitaly didn’t look so well. His eyes looked startled and the color drained from his cheeks. “I’m going to be sick,” he said, standing quickly and going up the stairs. His knees nearly buckled under the weight of his gyrating torso. We heard him go into the bathroom and retch.

“One too many,” I told Laura, grinning.

“You did that on purpose.”

“No,” I said, shrugging. “Maybe.” Vitaly’s phone was there on the couch and I picked it up, swiping the screen to find it unlocked. Opening his text messages, I scrolled back in time found the last conversation he’d had with Leah.

“Have some now… really good,” he had written to her the night she died six months ago. “Come get it.”

“I will tonight. I love you,” she’d written back.

I showed Laura the message. “I thought he was her drug dealer. This proves it.”

“We should confront him,” Laura said, her voice wavering. “I’m not sure this is proof.”

Going over to the cabinet with the nine millimeter, I took out the box of ammunition and pressed three bullets down into the magazine. The water was running and Vitaly was moving around in the bathroom upstairs. I pulled back on the slide with a metallic scraping sound.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked. Her eyes were wide.

“I’m just going to scare him,” I told her, placing the pistol on the coffee table and sitting within reach of it.

When Vitaly came back downstairs his face was pale. “What’s that for?” he asked, his eyes narrowing when he saw the pistol. The wobble with which he’d entered the room disappeared, the muscles in his arms and legs suddenly seeming tight and his joints limber. He thrust his hands in his pockets with his shoulders slouched forward, and his head drifted to one side ever so slightly as he surveyed the room.

“Sit down,” I told him.

“No.” “I’m telling you to, not asking you.”

Vitaly shook his head.

“Andy give me the gun. You can’t be doing this.” Laura said, a current of hysteria running through her voice. She was at the edge of the recliner, her torso slanted forward and palms on her knees.

“I know you gave Leah heroin,” I told Vitaly, holding up his phone.

“You’re the reason she’s dead. How come you did that? Why did you let her do that to herself?

“She was an addict. That was her fault, not mine. I just provide recreation,” Vitaly said. When he took his hands out of his pockets he was

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holding a switchblade that he flicked open to reveal a serrated blade. “I’ll stab you if you get near that gun.”

“Vitaly just leave,” Laura said, crying. “Just go up the stairs and out of the house.”

“And let him shoot me in the back? He shouldn’t have done this.”

Time felt suspended. The pistol was within my reach and Laura was sobbing. Vitaly stepped closer to me and watched to see if I moved. I thought about Leah as a toddler and the clumsiness with which her mind had come to life. She’d grasped the meanings of my words in rough iterations, coming to understand when I combined them with an action or an emotion on my face. I had been in love with that clumsiness.

“You had a right and a wrong path, Vitaly. You could have taken care of her.”

“You judge me?” Vitaly’s laugh was abrupt and sneering. “You spend all of life sucking the resources from the world.”

“I raised and protected my daughter.”

“So? Seven billion others love their kids. Sometimes you live with your own mess and don’t make it someone else’s problem. Just shut up.

Just put hands behind your head.”

“Vitaly, please,” Laura said, begging. “You can leave. I won’t let him shoot you.”

I didn’t move. My hand wasn’t far from the gun and Vitaly was watching me. His eyes revealed nothing but he seized on some sudden resolve and sprang forward. My hand shot out towards the pistol but Vitaly was on me before I could curl my fingers around its handle. The clammy palm of his hand pressed against my cheek as he pushed my head into the couch cushion. From the corner of my eye I saw him force the blade into my belly, down to its hilt. A warm, tingling sensation flooded my abdomen as the knife went in, and its teeth tugged at my skin as he pulled it out.

When Vitaly pushed himself off me, the strength coiled in his forearms struck me square in the chest. He looked at the streaks of blood on his knife and turned to dash up the stairs. I could hear Laura screaming in an unbroken, high-pitched wail, but the sound was muted as though it were coming to me through water. Touching my belly, I found the wound and felt for its edges with my fingers. Underneath my frayed shirt, wet with blood, were the rubbery edges of my open skin. My eyelids felt heavy, and I let them slip shut.

When I came to in the hospital I felt calm and was aware only of the bed’s warmth and the antiseptic smell in the air. I started to sit up but felt a searing pain in my side, so I lifted just my head off the pillow and looked around the room.

Laura got up from her seat and came to the bed. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I can’t believe he stabbed me.”

“You threatened him with a gun. I didn’t say that when the police asked. They arrested him before he got out of our neighborhood.”

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“How long have I been here?”

“About one full day. The doctor says your kidney is damaged.”

I was certain I would recover but didn’t care, anyways, and didn’t linger on the thought of my kidney. Instead, I found myself crying. “I couldn’t do it,” I told Laura. “I couldn’t make myself care about anything. It hurt, and everything was set up for me to not care.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, taking my hand.

“Leah,” I said. “I couldn’t make anything matter to me, and she could feel that. That’s why there was a void in her -- it was my void; I created it.

Even now I don’t know how I would have changed that.”

“You never wanted to waste your words or emotions because people talk and act without thinking, right? You never trusted yourself to care about anything: politics, sports, art, culture, religion, the environment, society... so you only ever existed halfway to her, and me as well.”

“I just had a job to do an money to make.”

“It was never that simple; you lived in doubt,” Laura said. “If it’s any consolation, though, I don’t blame you for what happened. Leah was young, and young people sometimes do things that take them from us: cruel, but true.” ***

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“Our War” by Hunter Clarke At 0645 we stood at attention.

Stripped down to cotton candy pink underwear and the training bras our mothers bought for us in the girls’ section at Target, we waited for the nurses to weigh the sins of our bones.

At 0800, 1300, 1800 we marched, stomping left foot then right as the earth shook beneath us, into the mess where we took stock, organized each piece of ammunition and point of attack until we understood the battle ahead.

Monday mornings we stayed at orange as we mashed chunks of granola drier than gunpowder between our teeth and swallowed grenades filled with spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt that exploded in our bellies, forced them to ripple and swell.

Other days we slipped straight into red.

Our hands shook as we loaded our guns with bites of chicken nuggets and potatoes deep fried in oil.

We cried as we shoved the barrels into our mouths.

Afterwards, we patched our wounds knitted our shattered skulls back together with macrame bracelets and therapy under the watchful eyes of the nurses and wrote letters home about how happy we were to keep shooting ourselves dead three squares a day plus snack and a Boost before bed.

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At 2200 the lights shut off.

We traced patterns in the stucco on the ceiling of our barracks and dreamed about the ghosts of little girls with ice-cream sticky fingers who paid the price for our sin before we knew who our enemies were, before we knew not to negotiate with terrorists.

Before we knew that we could not wage a war against an idea that had taken root between our neurons without killing ourselves first, before we knew that we could not raise the dead even by giving them an empty shell to call their own.

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