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Art Maryanne Buschini received her art studies education and completed independent studio work at Kansas State University, University of the Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Barnes Foundation. She is an experienced art instructor in both historical and theoretical forms. Ms. Buschini is originally from Valhalla, NY. She has two adult sons and lives with her husband in Malvern, PA, where she maintains a painting studio. Enzhao Liu is a painter working in Philadelphia and Beijing. He graduated from China’s top art school, Central Academy of Fine Art with a Master’s degree in 2015. He had a solo show at Henry Rousseau’s Garden in Beijing last summer. His work has also been shown in many major art museums in China, such as National Gallery of Art, CAFA Art Museum, and Zhu Zhong Museum of Art. His paintings are in the collections of CAFA Art Museum and Ningbo Museum of Art. JaFang Lu is a realist painter based in Philadelphia, PA. She graduated from the City College of New York University with a B.A. degree. She attended the Art Students League of New York and studied drawing and painting with numerous instructors. One of the instructors was Nelson Shanks who later founded Studio Incamminati, a painting atelier, in Philadelphia in 2002. He invited her to study and teach at the school where she is currently a painting and drawing instructor.
Durga Thackeray is a Mass Media graduate from India. She is an avid artist with a keen interest in intricate art. She showcases her art through ArtByDurga on Instagram. She intends to pursue fashion design in the near future. Morgan Craig has exhibited throughout the U.S.A. Canada, Europe, and Australia, including SPACES in Cleveland, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts and the Australian National University. Craig has received numerous awards including, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. He has also been invited to several residencies including, Cite Internationale des Arts, the Macdowell Colony, UCross, Proekt Fabrika in Moscow, and Red Gate in Beijing. Selections from his oeuvre were recently featured in several solo exhibitions, including Western Illinois, Vanderbilt, and Salisbury Universities. Upcoming solo exhibitions are scheduled for the University of Central Florida, and Colorado State University. Fabio Sassi makes acrylics and photos. He uses logos, icons, tiny objects, and discarded things. He often puts a quirky twist on his subjects or employs an unusual perspective. He enjoys taking the everyday and ordinary and framing it in a different way. He also likes the imperfections in objects and believes that those imperfections add a lot of value. Fabio is living in Bologna, Italy. His work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi. foliohd.com
Rathalla Review | Annual 2018 rathallareview.org Managing Editor
Production Manager
Fiction Editors
Poetry Editors
Creative Nonfiction Editor
Flash Fiction Editors
Art Editor
Social Media/ Outreach
Christopher Eckman
Roma Narkhede
Swayer Lovett Beth Moulton
Stacy Wong Katie Pettine
Watsuki Harrington
Maddy LeMaire Carlos Jose Perez Samano
Mahmoud Analkali
Matt Conte
Copy Editor Alex Ellis
Readers
Kimberly Grandy, Linda Romanowski, Megan Yates, Sarah Dintez
Faculty Advisor
Carla Spataro, Director of Creative Writing
Letter from the Editor
It has been a fabulous adventure working with such a diverse group of humans to publish this
issue of Rathalla Review. When I first started as managing editor, I was a little nervous; the previous editors of Rathalla Review left me with some big shoes to fill. I’ve had the special privilege of getting to know past editors like Yalonda Rice, Trish Rodriguez, and Tiffany Sumner, and it’s no wonder how it came to be that I was handed the magazine in such great shape. If I was ever overwhelmed with the responsibility, I needed only to look to the talented members of my team who supported me and helped guide me through the learning process of becoming a leader. I couldn’t have hoped for a more unique combination of brutal honesty and sincere dedication in my group of genre editors. Our school motto, The POWER of Small, says everything about what a focused group of dedicated individuals can accomplish. This issue would not be in your hands without the Rosemont College MFA Program, led by our director, biggest fan, and on-demand therapist Carla Spataro. You were always there when we needed help and your ability to make decisions and follow through is why we have such a strong sense of community. A special thanks to Roma Narkhede, who has worked tirelessly on this publication for almost two years. In every issue since the Fall of 2017 her eye for design and fantastical taste has decorated the covers and pages of this publication, elevating it from a collection of gifted writers to an object of beauty. Finally, we wouldn’t have anything to publish without the submissions of our beloved writer and artist community. You challenge us and push us to work harder and go further with every submission. For you, our reader: I hope you find something between these pages that intrigues, inspires, or ignites something within. However this publication finds you, know that you are capable of more than you ever dreamed.
Christopher Eckman Managing Editor, Rathalla Review
Content Rain
6
What Is It That We Have Left? Sun and Moon The Wrong Side of the Bed Introduction to Editing Willing to be Dazzled Road Movie: Post Fordian (for Baudrillard and Nader)
9 10 16/17 18 19
By & By
22
Carol
23
Rhizome
24
Descent
25
Bequest
26
Constellations of Southern Birds
31
Lost Archive
32/33
On Driving
34
We Do Not Wish the Apocalypse Cycle Of An Empire, Peddling Toward Revolution
Floral Forest
8
Bobby
JaFung Lu
Watched
7
37 38 39 40 41
Contributors Kristin Macintyre is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. She teaches freshman composition and enjoys drinking coffee in her small garden. Kathryn Kruse is a writer living in Chicago. She is also the director of Residency on the Farm, an interdisciplinary artists residency. She holds an MFA from UNLV. Among other places, her work is forthcoming or has appeared on the walls of the I Hope You Are Feeling Better Collaborative Art Exhibition, on the stages of the San Francisco Olympians Festival, and in the pages of Indian Review, The Manchester Review, Interim, and The Adirondack Review. Matthew Taylor is from Washington State. He graduated from the MFA program at the University of Minnesota in 2017, and his short fiction has also been published in Cirque Journal. Suvi Mahonen is a freelance writer based in Surfers Paradise on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her non-fiction appears on many platforms including The Weekend Australian Magazine, HuffPost and The Establishment. Her fiction has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies including in The Best Australian Stories and Griffith Review. A portion of a longer work-in-progress was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Mike Wilson is from Lexington, Kentucky and has had work published in U.S. and European magazines. He has written a biography titled Warrior Priest: The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and The School of the Americas Matthew Koskowski is a graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, and currently works as an academic advisor at a college on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Along with writing, he spends most of his free time trying to make his young daughter laugh. Esther C.H. Walker grew up near the rolling foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Her fiction has appeared in the Virginia Literary Review and Sleetmagazine.com. She lives and works in Hanover, New Hampshire with her husband. Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at UMKC and lives with his wife, Lili, in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in over 50 different magazines, including New Letters, pamplemousse, Fourth & Sycamore and TYPO.
Alice Lowe reads and writes about life and literature, food, and family. Her personal essays have appeared in more than sixty literary journals, most recently Baltimore Review, Stonecoast Review, The Chaos, Citron Review, Room, Pilcrow & Dagger, and Fish Food. Her work is cited among the Notable Essays in the 2016 Best American Essays and was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Alice is the author of numerous essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf ’s life and work, including two monographs published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London. Alice lives in San Diego, California and blogs at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress. com. With more than 100 stories in U.S., Canadian, U.K., and Australian literary journals, Robert Earle is one of the more widely published contemporary writers of short fiction. Vine Leaves Press published his story collection, She Receives the Night, in 2017. He also is the author of a nonfiction book about Iraq (Nights in the Pink Motel/Naval Institute Press), a novel (The Way Home/DayBue) and was contributing editor of a book of essays (North American Identities/ Stanford). He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College • poetry • creative nonfiction • short story • novel • dramatic writing • writing for children and young adults www.rosemont.edu/comewrite
Rain
Kristin Macintyre
—Above, the marbled sky
opens, pours full the ground, the garden trenches. You watch long hours rain leap from the roof, fill the yard bucket, spill over the birdbath. The window glass shows you calm & I imagine you a child: hair damp flowered with soap—your mother’s voice echoed along the bath tile—a pitcher’s spout steady overhead, your mouth shy open, tipped empty up—
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The Wrong Side of the Bed Matthew Koskowski
I found a monster in your bed tonight. He was snuggled up under the covers, just as cozy as can be. He had Bear with him, squeezed tight. He said he usually sleeps under the bed, but it’s so cramped down there with all the toys and boxes and dust bunnies. He said the top of the bed looked so comfortable, and you weren’t there, so he thought he’d give it a try. He said he hoped it was alright. He was very polite. For a monster. He asked where you were, and I told him I don’t know, because I don’t. Not really. He asked when you’ll be back, and I didn’t say anything for a long, long time. Then, while I was not- saying anything, he interrupted and asked me what happened, so I told him. I told him the same way that I told Grammy and Grampy, the same way I told the reporters without faces who came and talked to us after. I told him that you were at school and that someone came into the school with a gun. I told him that this person, this man, started shooting the gun, and he shot you, and he shot some of your friends, and he shot some of your teachers. I told him that you died and that you won’t be home anymore to sleep in your bed. I was crying, then. I cried a lot. He handed me a corner of the blanket so I could wipe my face. He asked me, “Why?” Without thinking, I said, “X, why, z,” like I would when you’d ask, “Why? Why? Why?” without stopping. We would always laugh after that until we forgot what we were talking about. He just looked back at me, silent and blank. I sighed, and I told him I don’t know why,
because I don’t. I don’t know why that man killed those people, killed you, killed himself. I don’t know why your school wasn’t safe, why I thought that it was. Why we keep our guns safer than our children these days. Why we love them so much. Why I couldn’t keep you safe. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know why. Why couldn’t I keep you safe? I don’t know. Why? Why? He said, “X, why, z,” and I cried. After I settled down a bit, after I hiccuped out all my tears, he put his hand on my hand on the bed. His hand was scaly and rough. It scratched and hurt a little, but it was nice to hold a hand all the same. He said he was sorry. He said he had to ask. “I am a monster, you know.” I told him I know, and I said, “It’s ok.” He really is very nice for a monster. He asked if he could sleep in your bed overnight. I told him he could. I didn’t think you would mind. He asked if I would read him a story. I did. He asked if he can come back tomorrow night, too. I said, “Yes, stay as long as you like.” He said he’ll have to keep asking me, “Why?” He said he’s a monster; it’s part of the job. I told him it will be nice just to have someone there in your bed, filling the air up with breath and the night up with dreams.
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Introduction to Editing Matthew Taylor
I
t is 2008, and you graduate with an English degree that you hope, somehow, to use. You browse the craigslist writing/editing listings, and see the post for Editorial Intern. The job requirements are reasonable: interest in books, BA in a related field, relevant work experience. Luckily, sophomore year you completed a tenweek internship at a literary agency, and they provided you with a form letter of recommendation. You read the ad to your boyfriend, sprawled out on the bed, and when you say the name of the publishing company, gobin&schmitz!, lowercase and ampersand and exclamation mark and all, Brandon cuts you off—“Hey, that’s where Beth works.” From what you know of his friend, Beth always wears oversized gray sweats and seems vaguely heartbroken, but she can put your résumé on the top of the stack.
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Nepotism works. You leave the shower dripping to answer your buzzing phone, and it is the call to schedule an interview. Your voice quavers, you say yes to everything. You brainstorm who to borrow a blazer from and make plans to shave your ironic beard. You think to pinch yourself, although the notion seems borrowed from somewhere, perhaps a movie where a celebrating person pinched themselves, and then you think that’s good, because this is exactly the sort of detail an editor should notice. Next, research. What, exactly, does the company do? Begin to doubt basic terms. Publishing—the activities or business of a publisher, especially of books or periodicals. Uselessly, you take notes. You break to consider practical measures: what to wear (your one pair of black shoes, $30, Payless), how to get there. The company is at an office park eight miles away, and can be reached by two buses, a transfer, 55 minutes. You mentally multiple by two, five times a week. You tell Brandon it seems far and he shrugs, says, “People have commutes.” Commute to the interview. Shake the rain off your umbrella before boarding the bus, feel the breeze generated by passing cars while waiting on a concrete highway island at the transfer point. Endure the little uphill walk from the park and ride, and stroll through a parking lot to find the lobby where on the directory you find gobin&schmitz!, suite one. A sign. Greet the receptionist; accept a glass of water. See Beth walking down a corridor, wearing a baggy sweatshirt that you didn’t realize fell under the category of business casual. You wave, but she doesn’t see. Maintain good posture while waiting; consider a magazine. Flip to a new page on your legal pad, write today’s date and concentrate on it as people walk by. It’s warm, and the noise of the place begins to fill your head—telephones ring, voices murmur, the receptionist taps on his keyboard. After a while, a woman clacks across the tile floor and says your name. Everything about
her is miniature: short black hair, small eyes shining behind designer frames, the patterned scarf tied around her neck. This is Linda. She greets you, her face pinching into a smile, and then leads you down a hallway, past rows of beige cubicles. The cubicles have name placards, and some of them are further adorned with “fun” printouts—Brian Paulson has cut out a life-size Chuck Norris face and pinned it to his wall, the vibrant red mullet bespeaking quality laser printers. Linda takes you to a room where three women are waiting behind a sleek mahogany table. Meet the editors. Elizabeth is the Managing Editor. She pronounces her name with a hard I. Val has the countenance of a volleyball spiker at a press conference. She is the Senior Editor. Sarah nods and says good morning—you will later find out that her title is, simply, Editor. Linda clarifies that she is the Adult Books Group Senior Managing Editor, “but you can just call me the boss,” and when she waves her short arms around the word and laughs, you laugh too. You are learning the style guide. The editors take turns asking rapid fire questions. You smile, agree, confirm. There is a way of speaking here, you notice—of emphasizing certain words. You begin adopting this. “What are your pop culture interests?” “Would you say you have an editorial eye?” “Do you have experience with client expectations—and deliverables?” “Would you say you have a knack for predicting trends? A willingness to keep current?” “What—in your opinion—is the next big thing in publishing? In other words—what’s hot?” Val, who has been mostly quiet, flips through your résumé. “At the literary agency, you communicated with authors?” You clarify, communicated decisions. Clarify further that interfacing occurred primarily with the agency owner. Unsaid: You opened unsolicited submissions and sent back a form with boxes to check as to why the work was being rejected. You
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were instructed to always check the same box on the form. “And how,” she continues, “Would you describe your decision-making process?” You hiccup. When making decisions, you start, you keep an editorial eye to the process, meaning, you obtain the directives so that there’s a clear vision of process— “Ah,” Linda snaps her fingers. “Big picture thinker.” Smile. Say exactly, and gesture with one hand, supine, as if she finished your sentence. She is a woman who looks as though she may at any moment burst into show tunes. You later learn about her theater background, and wonder if she was predisposed to like you because you’re gay. After the interview, you realize they didn’t ask about your favorite authors, your opinions about books. But the thought passes, and you move on to thank-you cards: one to Linda (“and the entire editorial team!”), and one to Beth. Two weeks pass, and then you get the job. Go out to dinner with Brandon. He says, “I knew Beth would pull through,” and you eat steaks and with your mouth full suggest maybe you had something to do with it too. Split the check. In text messages, your friends marvel. They are working in cafés and as tutors, and you are the English major who got a job in the field. Together, you go out and get wasted. Because the job doesn’t start till Monday, you go out and get wasted again. Beginning is disorienting. The position starts at 30 hours per week, which is perfect. HR amends this to 29.5 hours per week, because at 30 you would be full time and eligible for benefits. It is a three month contract. You meet the associate editors, Cecelia and Ingrid. Everyone is white, except for Ingrid, who has waves of red hair and is paler than white. If gay counts, you are the only editor approaching a minority. You’re introduced at the all-company Monday morning meeting. Roger Schmitz and Albie Gobin once did this in
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their basement, you’re told. Now there are over seventy souls here, curating art, but they can still all fit shoulder-to-shoulder in the break room. There are editors, and designers, and marketers, and production people who coordinate with the printers in China. You are introduced as a recent English graduate with big ideas, and the room of people clap—not applaud, but one, singular, inunison clap. Sarah takes you around, tells you the bathroom is in the lobby, shows you your cubicle, your Mac. She says she’ll be back later, and you sit at your desk, your new home. You check email. Cecelia, a quiet woman whose eyes always look disappointed behind her narrow glasses, sends an email to the adult books group. Subject: Cactus in Sink. Message body: Be careful—there is a cactus in the break room sink! You grab a piece of paper like you’re going to make a copy and go to the break room, where you see a diaphragm-shaped cactus in a clay pot in the basin. Exactly as explained, you think. Cause, effect. Advertisement, product. Your life is a series of events that have led up to this point, and now you go to work. Make copies. A photocopier this good must be used. The editors use you, Editorial Intern, to make extras of the manuscripts they’ve been working on. Collate changes. There are freelance copyeditors and proofreaders—galleys of books are sent out, and come back with proposed changes. Learn proofreaders’ marks. Learn what an en-dash is. Learn that STET means “let it stand,” and is used as an editorial override. Observe that editing is a series of cuts. Secondary to that, it is a system of identifying widows and orphans. Delete, delete. Have a performance review. Your collating and copy making are perfect. Have a three-month contract extension, and share the news with Brandon. He asks back, “So, you’re still a contractor?” At gobin&schmitz! the meeting rooms have inspirational names. The Amazing Room, The Brainstorm Room, The Capable Room, The
Dazzling Room. They are always referred to in full name. Only Brian, a designer, gets away with colloquialisms. “Impromptu meeting in Dazz,” he’ll stretch his head around the cubicle barrier and say. Cecelia and Ingrid grin and rise. But it’s not a joke; he truly needs their input in The Dazzling Room. “Dazzle us,” is Ingrid’s reply. You eventually learn that gobin&schmitz! is not quite a publishing company: they are book producers. This should have been obvious from the web research, from the foyer where the vision statement is mounted in silver block letters, each the size of a fist. But you’re not familiar with the term until you’re ensconced in it. Publishers consider ideas and select what to publish. Producers generate ideas, sell them to publishers, and execute. Hence the ideagenerating meetings. Get the team together, and hone in on what will sell. Elizabeth, the Managing Editor, goes first. “Dogs,” she announces. She’s authored a book called The Definitive Dog Bible. “Let’s be honest. Dogs sell.” Last week Elizabeth said, “Vampires are hot,” and the group spent the rest of the meeting caucusing on the undead. She’s had you run the numbers for a pitch, and so you agree. You tell her that approximately 40% of American households own dogs, and she agrees because she already knows. “Doggy calendar, dog tricks, dog kits—puppies. Puppies are cute and they sell.” You listen to the rhythm of her speech and fold your sheet of yellow legal paper in half. Go out with friends. No one can stay awake past eleven anymore, and the beer makes you groggy. Joke about how old you’re all getting, and then you’re home and asleep before the SNL monologue. Congratulations: You’re promoted from Editorial Intern to Editorial Assistant. This is a full-time, hourly position. The new role involves drafting more marketing copy—writing pitches to publishers. Your company makes books with
gimmicks. It does reproductions of ephemera. In the middle of a coffee table biography on Marilyn Monroe, there’s a vellum envelop, containing a reproduction of the original letter sent to her by John F. Kennedy... and so on. You learn more ways to phrase these pitches than you thought possible. The books are all-in-one resources, containing keepsake mementos with thoughtful, hand-selected recreations—the perfect presentation to captivate readers. Think about how anything can be hand-selected. At an idea meeting, you propose the Kitty Kalendar, and the idea doesn’t go through because interest in cats is fading. Beth is in the room, and she seems to scowl with disgust that you didn’t know this. Vent about some of this to your boyfriend. Notice that everything you say, he follows up with “That’s an office job for you.” This seems dismissive, but it’s raining outside, and you know how Brandon gets when it’s cloudy. Get curious about other jobs. Brandon is an administrative assistant, and you realize you have no idea how that translates to an eighthour day. Visit him once at his office, and see the many rows of cubicles with little half-walls, the stapler in the middle of his desk with a sticky note affixed to it, with cursive handwriting reading, “Staples please! :)” Brandon is a secretary. gobin&schmitz!, you learn, loves fun. Costumes are encouraged at Halloween, and Sarah tells you that the editors are going to coordinate, all wear sandwich boards displaying blown-up pages from The Chicago Manual of Style. You gather in a corner office and assist with the pasting of sheets to poster board, the threading of string to make shoulder straps. A vendor sends along bottles of wine, which you drink out of a plastic cup at 4:00 PM. Come December there is a holiday party—you take Brandon, chew on carved meat procured from a buffet tub. In the spring, attend a barbeque in the park, play bocce ball. Projects start and finish. You’re promoted from Editorial Assistant
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to Assistant Editor. You get health insurance. You’re salaried. You’re still collating changes, and now that you’re trusted to do this perfectly, you may input changes into InDesign, click Save. Richard in marketing informs you that you’re going to be the foreign books liaison. Learn that this mostly entails emailing European editors, ensuring they can access the files, reminding them about deadlines, and reading multiple foreign versions of your name. Richard always wears turtlenecks in neutral colors, and has a sign hanging above his desk that reads “If it weren’t for coffee, I’d have no personality whatsoever!” One evening, while waiting for the files from an obstinate Japanese editor, you stay until 7:00 PM. Val is still there, and tells you there’s leftover wine in The Amazing Room, but you know you’ll be too tired if you drink it. Albie Gobin and Roger Schmitz are seen around the office less and less. Invite friends to your apartment for board games, and start referring to the company exclusively as Goblin Shits. Brandon is upset that you eliminate him in Risk, and he gets shouty in your building hallway. Your neighbors are nice to not complain to the landlord, you think, and your friends clear out without comment. Albie Gobin has an idea for a book about guitars. Classic American Guitars. The book will be the real size of a guitar and will sell for three thousand dollars. Elizabeth tasks you to research guitar expos and “feel them out.” You’re instructed to cold call guitar experts, learn from the source, interpret the vibe. The guitar experts seem confused by the calls; they think you’re joking when you describe the project. This is the wrong answer. Suspect that Elizabeth is making you source the wrong answer for Albie so that she won’t have to. Get assigned to take over your first solo project, a knitting kit that comes with needles, yarn, and a small instructional booklet. You don’t know how to knit, but Ingrid hands off
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the project and assures you that you’re working with a local expert, owner of their own craft boutique. As you read the manuscript in its current state, it seems to you that the expert author shouldn’t, in their introductions to basic techniques, borrow so closely from Wikipedia. You clean up spacing; move a few words around. The production assistant you work with, John, is a soft-spoken, open-faced man, who can’t seem to get the vendors to keep the yarn at a consistent weight. Have another tedious shouting match with Brandon. “You know what your problem is?” He waits, like he expects it’s a question you might be interested in answering. “Your piss. Poor. Attitude.” He punches out the words like that. “You are going to die miserable. And alone.” You think you should be more upset, but all that really strikes you is the bizarre tone. You think he must be quoting a TV show or something, but before you can run a red pen through his words, he’s out the door. Barack Obama is elected president, and they play his inauguration address in The Dazzling Room. You take a lunch to watch. Later in the day, Linda emails you, uncharacteristically terse. “Meet me in Dazzling Rm at 3:00.” From the tone—the dropped article and abbreviation—you know it’s trouble. You walk to The Dazzling Room, and the biggest surprise is seeing John already there. It lessens the blow to not be the only one, and though you don’t yet know it, more will follow. Linda comes in the room, followed by Albie Gobin. As he talks, you watch John’s face. He’s older—thirty. Newly married, a house, a receding hairline. Albie tells you both that you’ve valued, but that we all know what’s happening in publishing. There are certain factors—there’s the matter of keeping the gears oiled. There’s staying lean and sharp. You realize that it comes from the top down, this habit of talking in maxims, in riddles. You start smiling, then look down and shake your head slowly, try to play off the grin
like shock. Albie keeps explaining, but he can’t just say it—he can’t just say you’re fired. When you walk out, everyone seems to know. Even Val gives you a hug—though you get the sense that she’s just as upset for herself, worn out by the prospect of working more late nights. It isn’t all bad— there’s a short severance, and Linda offers a letter of recommendation. You’ll have time again for friends, but no money, and you suspect that introducing yourself as unemployed isn’t a good pick-up line. But for now you’re happy, relieved. You’ll never again be summoned to The Dazzling Room. You place your palms down on the surface of your desk, feel its cool, scrub your shoes against the carpet. It’s a load off, really, to remove the mantle of editor, to no longer have to always be cutting, reducing, deleting. You listen to the office hum for the last time. You’re going to take the two buses home to your apartment and sort everything out. You’re going to do something else.
Weekend: June 21-23, 2019 Weeklong: June 23-28, 2019
Retreat highlights
• workshopping and discussion • craft lecture and interviews with authors • faculty readings • open mic • networking opportunities • CNF, poetry, short fiction, novel, children’s picture books, YA, and finding an agent
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Bobby Suvi Mahonen
S
trands of light blue twisted, crossed over, then sank into the expanse of knitted wool only to emerge at the next stitch and repeat the pattern again. They ran in parallel symmetry, converging up to the pompom at the top of the cap. Around the circumference of the brim ran a border of yellow on which marched small embossed elephants, each holding the tail of the one before it with its trunk. Fine wisps of dark hair the same colour as Nick’s curled out from beneath the edge to cling to its fuzzy surface in places. When we’d bought it eight weeks ago I’d thought it was too small to fit anyone, but Nick had correctly guessed it would be the right size.
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The skin of Bobby’s forehead not covered by the cap was furrowed, as if caused by a frown. This accentuated his eyebrows, delicate lines of barely-there hair on the ledge of his sockets, inclining medially up to form an arc at the top of the bridge of his nose. His nose was short, more like a nubbin, tilted slightly upward at the end like mine; its tip was a little raw, as if wiped by a tissue one too many times. I ran my finger over the smooth and doughy surface of his swollen lips. Velvety glossed skin a few centigrade cooler than mine. Drooping in loose repose, colour not right, a dusky shade of purple. He lay in my arms, loosely wrapped in a green flannel blanket, the back of his head resting in the crook of my left elbow. His body was both light and also strangely heavy. I held my arms still, though there was no reason why. Looking at him, I tried to align our eyes. His lids were parted slightly, a hint of blue between moist lashes. As I sat there, propped with three plastic-covered wipe-down pillows between my back and the bed’s head, I kept wanting, almost waiting, for those eyes to blink. Nick sat on the edge of the bed, arm on my shoulder, looking at our Bobby. Afternoon light angled in through the window and cast Venetian-striped contrasting shadows on our son’s already mottled cheeks. My finger moved downward, tracing his chin, then onward across his jaw to his left ear, curving to avoid an open patch of sloughed skin. It wasn’t the only one. There were two on his right cheek and a large one on the side of his neck, the full extent of its angry margins concealed by the collar of his Peter Rabbit jumpsuit. Made of the softest white cotton, it was the outfit I’d planned for our baby to wear on his first trip back to our home. Across the garment multiple little rabbits sat on their haunches, cheeks puffed with chewing, holding a large carrot whose tip was missing. Sewn into the outside seam of the left shoulder was a tiny blue tag saying this was a genuine item. Matching mitts and booties were still in the bag.
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I moved aside a fold of blanket so I could see more of him. His left arm was angled, bent at the elbow, resting on the front of his chest. The embroidered cuff of the suit’s sleeve was hitched a short way up the forearm. Between the rim of the cuff and the base of Bobby’s closed fist circled a thick, clear plastic band fastly secured. In the pocket of the band, a slip of paper had words typed on it in small letters, the portion visible to me saying, ‘Baby of Alicia Rus …’. The bend over his wrist’s bony prominence obscured the rest. A vein line of discolouring more pronounced than that of the skin went up the back of his hand to the fourth knuckle dimple. Lifting his hand gently I straightened his four fingers and thumb from their loose clench. The webbing between them was puffy and wrinkled, like he’d been soaking in a tub for too long. Such small and frail digits despite their also waterlodden state, the creases over their joints swollen to mere faint lines. On his distal pads were enlarged whorls of print. Opaque slivers of flesh were peeling back from around the nails. I closed his fingers again, covering his hand with mine. We remained in silence. Me, my husband, and our baby. I was conscious of sounds from outside the room—muffled voices, the ping of a call bell and the diminishing roll of a trolley. But these didn’t enter my reverie. The only noise that was real to me was the whistle of breath from my nostrils and the clicking of the clock’s second hand. A mere moment in time, yet this seemed like forever. “Would you like an autopsy to be performed?” Dr. Taylor had asked us. “Is it necessary?” I said. “It’s your choice. But it may help to find out exactly what went wrong.” “We’ll think about it,” Nick said. Dr. Taylor stood there by the side of my bed. His gaze kept shifting between Bobby and the green blanket. From the edge of my eye I saw his hands move to cross each other and rest
at the front of his belt. Speckles of blood soiled the cuffs of his white shirt. I wanted him to leave but also needed him to stay. It was as if I had the delusion that he was somehow able to reverse this. He remained there for a few more awkward minutes, then made his excuses and left the room with a final “Sorry.” It was then that Nick had put his arm around my shoulder, and we stayed that way with Bobby cradled against my swelled breasts that were aching with the need to lactate. “You haven’t called my mum yet, have you?” I asked Nick as I held onto Bobby’s hand. “Do you want me to?” I shook my head. Once our families knew, it would be real. I stared across the room at the wall opposite. Glints of slatted sunlight reflected off the glass that protected a framed painting. A lamb standing on a hill’s green slope. Underneath it, against the wall, was an empty cot on wheels. It was the one in which the midwife had brought Bobby back in to me once she had cleaned, weighed and dressed him. I looked back at my son and squeezed his hand gently. His soft nails pressed into the folds of my palm. I turned to look into Nick’s bloodshot eyes. “Can you ask the midwives if there are any nail clippers around?” “Why?” “I don’t want him to be buried with long nails,” I said. I started to cry.
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By & By
Cameron Morse
Deep in the shade of my third year since diagnosis, the swing set rafters cobweb above the blackened planks. Cicada casings cling to its underbelly, their bodies missing. I can no longer hear them screaming. The cricket hums to itself its little lamentation. Autumn comes, and my bimonthly visit with the oncologist tomorrow morning, a wheelbarrow to be pushed from the wood pile to the back patio, unloaded and pushed back again.
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Descent Esther C.H. Walker
She saw the kid go down. The pond was a short cut to school. It was icy now. She had thought it was icy enough. The coffee pot screamed at her. The neighbor’s dog was yelping. Bits of buttered scone covered her fingers. She shoved her bare feet into boots. She left the back door open. The kid wasn’t calling out. She didn’t hear splashing. She looked for the rope that weighed down the tarp covering the woodpile. A squirrel ran by her. The dog followed. She started screaming. She didn’t know what she was saying. She hoped it was: “Please help!” She plunged arthritic arms into the water. She grabbed for a flash of purple. Her eyelashes began to freeze. The skin folds gathering around her elbows as she leaned forward into the water began to turn blue. Her breath was elusive: she couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it. Her nightgown cleaved to her stomach like the membrane of an onion. The frozen snow felt like razor blades against her knees.
What am I doing here again? she thought.
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Bequest
A
Robert Earle
fter his father died, Harris’s mother didn’t want to talk about what Harris took to be the big issue: her Pennsylvania fieldstone house needed work. The problem wasn’t money. Harris had money; so did his mother. She had been a middle school principal and had a pension plus Social Security plus the money she made when she’d sold the sixty acres behind the house to a country club. That sea of green over the back fence was Harris’s favorite childhood memory. He had loved finding lost balls and selling them to golfers passing by, a dime for a MacGregor, twenty cents for a Titleist.
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The one with no money had been Harris’s father, who returned from WWII and didn’t want to live a regimented life. No office for him. He became a broker for several insurance companies, and his Mercury was his office. For secretarial help, he employed a series of homebound women up and down the Schuylkill Valley from Philadelphia out to Raponikon, where the Harris family lived. These women were what preoccupied Harris’s mother, not fixing up the fieldstone house. She wanted Harris to locate as many of them as possible and give each a check for $1,000. Harris asked if his father had left some unspent money in a checking account or an old shoe in his closet. His mother didn’t laugh. No, the thousands of dollars would be from her. But none of these women had worked for his father in twenty years, Harris objected. “Just find the ones you can. I’m sure they will appreciate it.” Harris became the man he was by getting through his mother’s middle school without being sent to her office, a frightening place for anyone to end up. She had total, dispassionate command of her students, her teachers, and even, she put it this way, her parents. Perhaps, as a consequence, Harris and his mother never were as close as he would have liked, and he didn’t understand her. Not all her fault, though. According to Harris’s two ex-wives, there was something remote about him, too. Attractions and attachments were problematic for Harris, although at fifty-six, that didn’t matter much anymore. He thought that a man his age should be a kind of cloud, drifting wherever, looking down on whatever, not involved anymore. Destined, like a cloud, to separate, disintegrate, just painlessly cease to exist when some other, more energetic cloud absorbed its vapor past all recognition. These women his father had employed, for example: hadn’t they already completely merged into the mists of the past? There was a slap-up room overlooking the fourth green in the attic that became his
father’s file room known as the morgue. His correspondence, copies of policies he had sold, claims records, and long green ledger books were stored in cardboard boxes, wooden milk crates, old suitcases, and the kind of storage trunks wealthy folks used to take on voyages to Europe. His father liked to hold onto these dead letter materials “in case.” In case of what? Harris had asked. His father had laughed and tousled his hair and said, “In case there was still some money stuck in there.” He’d needed that dough to pay for his Mercury, his clothes, and his happy hours drinking at taverns up and down the Schuylkill. Harris went up to the morgue, threw open the window against the stink of dried envelope glue and old luggage, and uncovered scraps of paper with names and addresses and odd little clues that enabled him to make a list of women to visit. He found a receipt for an electric typewriter delivered to a Mary Lee Hart in Villanova. He found a wad of letters addressed to his father c/o Flo Turk, Assistant to the President, Tom Harris Associates, Narberth, Pa. He found a box of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils imprinted with the name Jane Jorgensen that his father apparently had neglected to give to Jane Jorgensen, their erasers now hard as tires. His father undoubtedly had sex with some of these women. Harris could picture him parking on a street in Ardmore or Jenkintown. He could picture his father checking his hair in the rearview mirror. He could picture a housewife, kids at school, husband at work. MILFs, they were called now. And now Harris would make a post-mortem payment for premortem mischief ? He hated the idea and tried proposing to his mother that one of his daughters from his first marriage, Lorna, chronically short on cash, take on this assignment. He’d pay her to deliver the checks while he concentrated on what needed to be done to the fieldstone house. Maybe in time I’ll move back into the house, he thought. It was a dangerous notion,
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presupposing his mother’s eventual passing, but Harris liked the idea. The more he talked, the more he persuaded himself he was on to something. The house’s shadows and spaces and seasonal moods were features of his mind and, surprisingly, his mysterious heart. His mother said no to the idea of Lorna seeing these women. She spoke in that flat-as-aFrisbee voice of hers, the one that cut through the noise of a school assembly she wanted to settle down, and her eyes were dark with a finality he had seen in two women’s eyes before. Was his mother divorcing him somehow, or was she simply telling him it was his job to clean up after his father because he had been just as faithless? He went to see three women in quick sequence—Flo in a nursing home; Gail in the same house where she had done work for his father on the same maple dining room table under the same imitation Tiffany glass light fixture; and Sandy in her daughter’s house in Manayunk on the cliffs above the Schuylkill. Then there was Anna in Roxborough. In Conshohocken, where his father was born, he met a woman named Timmy who wore blue jeans and a cowboy shirt on her scarecrow frame. He heard, “Tom died? I’m so sorry,” and, “Oh, my goodness, Tom Harris, what a sweetie!” and, “Tom? I haven’t thought about him in ages.” To make his visits seem less crass and more personal, Harris recounted his father’s diabetes and his glaucoma. There had not been much to him for fifteen years except his failing health. Nor was there much to these women except similar physical struggles. It was the weight of high blood pressure, Parkinson’s, shingles, or angina, not the weight of adultery with Tom Harris, that was squeezing the breath and life out of them, drying out their skin and hair and nails, pressing them like faded flowers between the last few pages of their lives. Once Harris thought he had spent
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enough time on a woman’s sofa or in her kitchen, he brought out the check. He knew, as he knew a lot of useless things, that half of all Americans would have difficulty scrounging up a thousand dollars in an emergency. Nonetheless, he had to tell his mother that some of these women were not enthusiastic about her gift. They felt she might need the money. They said they knew Tom Harris wasn’t all that successful. They fretted the way old people fret when anything happens, good or bad, preferring nothing to happen, or the same familiar things to happen, and that strangers with news of the dead didn’t come knocking. His mother listened to him for a minute or so before tuning out, not interested in the kinds of anecdotes that were, as it happened, his father’s stock in trade. In various ways, Harris tried to lure her into explaining more clearly what she wanted from this exercise. He tried joking about a given woman, how awful she looked, as if to imply his father couldn’t possibly have had an affair with her; he tried explaining how hard he had to work to get in a given door, to persuade a woman he wasn’t there to sell her life insurance, like father like son. His mother did comment once that she thought giving these women the money was the decent thing to do, perhaps intimating that she always had thought his father had shortchanged them the way life shortchanged almost all women. But “decent” could mean other things, and she didn’t use the word again. Harris stopped trying to make them all out to be hags. His mother would catch on as she no doubt had caught on to his father’s minimizing way of describing a gal willing to call prospects for him, a woman good with numbers, a woman who could type like the blazes. Having sold his data processing business, been divorced twice, put his four children through college, and lacking hobbies (he’d sold his boat and the cabin in the Poconos), Harris feared waking up and not knowing what to do
after his second cup of coffee. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Women his age discomfited him. Whenever they were involved—with their beaucoup ideas about what to do with him—he felt like a cloud on a chain, a cloud that didn’t know how to drift in the right direction by itself. But to a degree he supposed that he never had felt his life was entirely his own, subject to his control and direction. From his mother, he got the sense that it wasn’t, while from his father, well, the sense he got of himself was odd. Harris was much more successful in business than his father, but his father still put him down. He’d once said that Harris needed the organization he’d built because he didn’t have his father’s mind. All the data processing in the world could be handled right here, Harris’s father had said, tapping his forehead. This comment came at the time when a grown son lets his aging dad have his say. Harris had shrugged off his father’s claim that he could have made a fortune if he’d wanted. Even when he was enfeebled, Harris’s father knew exactly what to do after his second cup of coffee—start on bourbon, which didn’t cost millions. The women kept popping up. Some would refer to others, or Harris might realize that a note he’d passed over in the morgue meant so-and-so had not been a client, so-andso had been one of his father’s women, and he would have to inform his mother, and she would go to her maple secretary and uncap her fountain pen to make out a check in her preferred midnight-blue ink. Then she would blow on it and tear it from the pad and give it a few waves in the air to be doubly sure the ink was dry, hand it to Harris, and remind him to put it in an envelope. Harris would remind her that he had envelopes, lots of them, in the glove box of his Mercedes. Perversely, his car was becoming his office as he retraced the twists and turns of his father’s itinerary up and down the Schuylkill. One morning, Harris drove to the address of a woman named Beatrice Mars,
like the candy, who kept the chain on the front door in place when she opened it. He explained he was Thomas Harris, Jr., and said he came bearing her a bequest, the word he habitually misused to suggest that the check signed by his mother was actually a remembrance from his father. Beatrice Mars let Harris in after staring at him as long as a person might spend looking at a favorite dish broken in pieces on the kitchen floor. Her row house in Germantown —the red velvet walnut-framed sofa, the pleated silk lampshades, the large mirror above the fireplace mantelpiece, the heavy swag of the drapes, the handsome striped wallpaper, the crown molding, the ageless oak floor—was a dated example of excellent colonial taste. These furnishings did not look like the possessions of someone who once did secretarial piecework. Harris also saw that, in her day, Beatrice Mars had been a large, handsome woman like his mother. Even now, slightly stooped and saggy, she remained attractive. Her short gray hair was well cut; her white blouse and gray wool pleated skirt were well tailored. She offered him a seat on the sofa and looked at him as if she had been awake for so long that she had abandoned the distinction between thinking and dreaming. That’s how his mother seemed these days, he realized. Exactly, unnervingly the same. She was not, she corrected him, Mrs. Mars. She was Miss Mars. Beyond that, Harris wondered if she would have anything to say—she just kept looking and looking—so he began making his little speech about his father’s illnesses and death and the family’s gratitude for the assistance Miss Mars had given him when he was active in business. Beatrice Mars interrupted him to say it wasn’t a business affair. Just like that. Not a business affair. And she kept studying him, his eyes and mouth, his forehead, his shoulders, his chest, his arms and legs. She especially looked at his hands, prompting him to clasp them, which he had not intended to do because his routine required that, at a given point, he reach into the
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interior pocket of his suit coat and extract the envelope and be gone as quickly as he could get out the door. Harris sincerely hoped Miss Mars would resist going further into her relations with his father. His father was dead. No one had affairs of any kind with his father anymore. That was the point. And Harris hoped she’d have the propriety to leave all that alone, but she sat there looking at him with those milky blue eyes of hers, eyes similar to his own, which his first wife, when she had still loved him, called Staffordshire china eyes. “So…you didn’t do any work for him?” “No, I didn’t.” Obviously, Harris could not now give her a check signed by his mother, although he’d already used that word of his, bequest. What was he going to do about that? “But you knew him.” “Yes.” As with his mother since his father’s death, Harris felt as though Beatrice Mars was prepared to make him guess what she was thinking if he didn’t have the guts to ask her outright. There was something almost ethereal about her, something that drew them together as she seemed to float on the edge of the overstuffed chair opposite him. It felt as though somehow she was touching his face, as though her dry, old-lady fingertips were stroking his cheeks. Or was it the scent of her cologne that conjoined them? He couldn’t place it, but he knew it. Maybe it was simply her, the way she smelled, the natural scent of her skin. He glanced away, doing what you do the first time you are in someone’s home, complimenting it with your attention. His eyes drifted about, taking in the handsome wallpaper again, the shimmering drapes, the fine clock on the mantelpiece, and the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace where he saw a framed blackand-white photograph of himself as a newborn, wearing a knit cap thin as a sock. He recognized it immediately as the first photograph of him
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ever taken. For a moment, he seemed to lose the ability to see, but that didn’t matter. Beatrice Mars was floating somewhere in his brain. She then said something that assumed his visit was the bequest. He was so addled he didn’t really hear how she put it, just captured the sense of it, and that it was time for him to leave before what he’d brought her came apart in her hands. When he returned to his mother’s house, Harris put the check made out to Beatrice Mars on the maple secretary. There was no more talk between them of hunting down his father’s former secretaries. They focused on repairing the fieldstone house.
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On Driving
Alice Lowe
1
. Sixteen—sweet sixteen—a milestone, momentous in itself, but for me it meant I could get my driver’s license. It would be the instrument of my longed-for flight—or at least the first fledgling steps—from the nest. I would have wings, I would soar with the eagles. I was a year younger than my classmates (I’d skipped an early grade), so driving would legitimize and elevate me in the eyes of my peers. I envisioned myself in a pose appropriated from a collage of movie images: cool and sophisticated behind the wheel of my dream car—a yellow Sunbeam Alpine (Grace Kelly drove a blue one in To Catch a Thief)—with big dark glasses á la Audrey Hepburn and curls of smoke wafting from the cigarette in the corner of my Revlon-emboldened ruby-red lips.
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2. I’d completed both in-class and behind-thewheel driver’s ed at school, then aced the written test to get my learner’s permit six months before, as soon as I was eligible. Days after turning sixteen, having won my father’s seal of approval on my demonstrated driving acuity, I applied for my license. Dad took off work to accompany me to the DMV and proffered last-minute coaching on the way. “Don’t be in a hurry—think before you act,” he said. He knew my weak spots. “Don’t hold the wheel in a death grip. Remember your rear-view mirrors.” I reassured him—“Don’t worry, dad, I’ll be fine”—and I was until the examiner slid into the passenger seat and I took the wheel. “Ready? Let’s go,” he said. At that instant I came unglued. I was so nervous I backed into the bumper of a station wagon in the parking lot. The examiner didn’t flinch, didn’t disqualify me on the spot. “It’s ok,” he said, “take a deep breath, calm down.” He subtracted some points and we continued the test, but I was too rattled to think, much less drive. My mistakes were minor after that, but they added up, and I flunked the test. I tried again a few weeks later. My dad gave me a tranquilizer before we left home—half a Miltown. “Just to settle her down a bit,” he said in response to my mother’s raised eyebrows. This time I performed with calm precision and impressed the examiner (not the same one) with my attentiveness and skillful parallel parking. 3. I drove every chance I could, my father in the front seat beside me. One quiet Sunday afternoon he said I could take the car out by myself to run an errand within the confines of our small town. As I approached the main intersection—the only one at the time, now that I think of it—the light changed to yellow. I had entered the crossing, but instead of dashing through, I braked and backed up a bit to clear the crosswalk. I patted myself on the back for my good sense. Wait’ll I tell Dad, I thought; he’ll be pleased. When the light turned green I stepped gently on the gas and—still in reverse—backed into the car behind me. It was a light tap, and there was no damage to either car.
I dissolved into snotty, gulping sobs. “I just got my license,” I wailed to the other driver. “It’s the first time I’ve driven alone.” She laughed at my tears, my hysteria. “No harm done,” she said. I never told my father. 4. A driver’s license as a set of wings was a flawed metaphor, I soon realized. My passport to freedom wouldn’t be official until I had wheels of my own. I was a senior in high school and worked parttime in an office about five miles from school. My father ferried me daily between home, school, and work. There was no possibility that my parents could or would buy me a car, so I saved almost all of my dollar-an-hour earnings, and after a few months—to Dad’s relief and with his blessings—I bought a ’49 Ford for $100. That’s about $800 in today’s dollars, which wouldn’t buy much of a car, but I lucked out. It was a sturdy two-door, in decent condition for its twelve years and considerable mileage. Its buttercream paint job and tan upholstery would pass muster with my friends too. My car—did I name it? I can’t recall— performed its required tasks commendably by day, but at night and on weekends it turned into a magic carpet. It swooped me out of the house and into the social whirl. I could hang out with my friends at the drive-in, go to parties, cruise the beaches and back roads with the radio turned up full blast. 5. My mother never drove. A New Yorker until her midthirties, she didn’t need to. When our family moved to California she gave it a try, but she was too nervous and gave up after a couple of informal lessons. She channeled her anxiety into the part of the Nervous Nellie backseat driver with all its stereotypical behavior.
She glued her eyes to the road as if she were steering, as if her efforts were needed for safe navigation. “Slow down, Harold,” she’d say, and “Watch out for that truck,” though my father’s cautious driving was never cause for alarm. My brother and I used to tease her when she grasped her armrest and slammed her foot
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onto the floorboard. “That’s the way, Mom—good thing you have brakes on your side too,” we’d say. She would inhale through her teeth, jaws clenched, a hissing, slurping sound. Once we gave her a lollipop and said, “Here, suck on this.” 6. It didn’t take long to get over the initial thrill. After graduation I moved away from home and went to work full time. I bought a new car, a powder-blue Ford Falcon. My independence secure, driving soon became merely a means to an end—it got me from point A to point B. I had no desire to explore new vistas, didn’t take delight in the freedom of the open road, the wind ruffling my hair. I’ve never been relaxed behind the wheel, then or now. My mother’s legacy? I drive at or under the speed limit and rarely change lanes. I don’t trust other drivers. I’ve gone on road trips over the years—cross-country, up and down the coast—and always donemy share of the driving, in spite of my companions’ mutterings: “You drive like an old lady. It’ll take us all day to go fifty miles at this rate. Can’t you speed up?” 7. Mid-span on the Coronado Bay Bridge twenty-some years ago I had a panic attack. I froze at the highest point, where the bridge swoops around in a crescent. The bay shimmered below, and the barrier suddenly appeared flimsy, the drop too close for comfort. The steering wheel wanted to wrest itself out of my hands and send me plummeting over the side or into oncoming traffic. I limped and lurched the rest of the way across with a death grip on the wheel. I gulped air from the open window until I reached solid ground. When the same symptoms—sweating, hyperventilating, wooden limbs, scrambled brain— started to occur on overpasses and freeways, I could talk myself down and pull off at the next exit. Until it reached a point where I felt I was a danger to myself and others. A brain tumor, which I was certain would be detected as the cause, was ruled out. I was referred to therapy and told my condition was a type of agoraphobia. My own research unearthed the more precise “hodophobia,” an intense and irrational fear of travel that takes on individualized characteristics
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such as mine. Neither the cause nor the cure was known. I feared I was losing my mind, literally driving myself crazy. 8. I battled my demon for years. I tried various approaches, including mind over matter (“Just do it!”) and tapping (the Emotional Freedom Technique). I never conquered my phobia, but I’ve adapted to it. I rarely drive on the freeway and never across bridges, but I can get anywhere in San Diego on surface streets. I live in a central neighborhood where most of what I want and need is accessible on foot. I’m an inveterate walker, and I’ve whittled my driving down to essential errands and appointments. It was Joan Didion, or maybe Ruth Reichl— both fellow hodophobia sufferers—who said that the crazy people are the ones who drive on today’s superhighways, that it’s more rational to fear and avoid them. 9. After I retired from work, I looked toward the day when I would be able to relinquish the steering wheel. I have a friend who stopped driving when she moved from San Diego to Seattle—she gets by with public transportation, online shopping, and a little help from her friends. Now, though, I learn there are health hazards for seniors who give up driving. Studies have shown a decline in physical and mental health, a greater incidence of depression among older people who don’t drive. I wanted to stop driving for my wellbeing only to be told I should continue for the same reason. Still, after driving for more than fifty years I yearn to fold my wings and hang up the keys. A new interpretation of freedom.
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We Do Not Wish the Apocalypse
Kathryn Kruse
W
e recognized or own domesticity at the first bomb. We did not wish to fight dogs and other humans for scraps of food. We did not dream of being leaders among men, breaking into empty government labs to research cures to radiation poisoning. We did not wish to watch our skin boil with tumors. A life without stocked grocery stores and 401Ks did not appeal. In middle school Hiroshima had been assigned reading. We remembered the part with people’s eyes liquified and sliding down their cheeks, congo lines of blind leading blind snaking through the wreckage. Hi-roh-shuh-muh? Heer-oh-shee-muh? It will end and we still won’t know how we are supposed to pronounce the word. Perhaps, if it had just been only the one bomb we might have stuck it out but more came and more and before the news service cut out they offered sobering predictions. Some members of congress said good-bye. They tried to apologize. We appreciated that they did not just hide away. They came out onto the decks to address the crew, as it were, to atone for us all. Us. We could take some pills and lay down in an embrace. We could concentrate on our fingers tangled in each other’s hair. We could hold a small hope that our bodies, wrapped around each other, might undergo some sort of mummification and, in a few millennia, end up in a museum, humanity having limped back from the edge, our final moments a testament to something grand like love. That kind of future thinking was a bit much, though. After the TV cut out and the bombs kept coming we were ready to lay down with our bellies still mostly full and our morality uncompromised. That was enough. The fish, though, we could not leave the fish. It felt wrong, of course, looking into the tank at the lithe and muscular little bodies, to make the decision for them. The fish are, of course, captive. Not domestic. Captive in their tank with multi-colored gravel. Maybe they preferred to wait it out until the end. Maybe they preferred to see if something good might not come of genetic mutation. Eventually, though, we acknowledged that it was our own heartbreak at the impending ruin of their silvery beauty, of their foreign and peaceful lives, that lead us to take out the spare ice cube trays and spoon fish into the squares. Fish hotels. Fish coffins. The electricity had gone and so we only opened the freezer door once. Good-bye, we said, Good-bye. Rathalla Review | 40
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Watched Mike Wilson
In furtive darkness, mind bumps phantom furniture navigates trepidation without a paddle one step ahead of angels on each shoulder strikes deals with criminals shushes sissy conscience. Mind is a cruel master a huffing puffing masochist lifting weights of countless measure mesmerized by up and down ponies on a carousel. Then, by dint of meditation or mercy alcohol or death mind stops falls from me like
floating
me
see
down
a
dress.
and
turn
a river.
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I
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Rathalla Review is the literary magazine published by the students of Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate Publishing programs. Our mission is to give emerging and established writers and artists an outlet for their creative vision in our online and print publication. We publish the best fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, poetry, and art, culled from a nationwide community of writers and artists. Rathalla Review’s staff, comprised of MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing candidates, merges the creative arts and the business of publishing into a shared voice and vision.
All written work in Rathalla Review remains copyright of its respective authors and may not be reporduced in any form, printed or digital, without the express permission of the author.
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