Issue 46: A Way Through

A W AY T H R O U G H / 4 6

Spring 2018 $15

ru’mi-nate: TO C HE W THE C U D ; T O MU S E; T O MED I TAT E; TO THI NK A G A I N ; T O PO N D ER

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P LEA S E J O I N U S .

Cover: ELOISA GUANLAO. Still from Noli Me Tangere. Digital documentary.

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staff

E DI TO R- I N - CH I EF

Brianna Van Dyke M A NA G I N G ED I T O R

Kristin Bussard M A R KE TI N G + O U T REA CH

Keira Havens SE NI O R ED I T O R

Amy Lowe P OE T RY ED I T O R

Kristin George Bagdanov VI SU A L A RT ED I T O R

Carolyn Mount B L O G ED I T O R

Charnell Peters P R I NT + W EB D ES I G N

Scott Laumann E DI TOR I A L I N T ERN S

Laney Collins Olivia Scofield A SSOC I AT E REA D ERS

Stacy Bustamante Laura Droege Carly Joy Miller Amy Sawyer G U E ST PA N EL I S T S

Laura Carpenter Susan Cowger Daniel Kytonen May Kytonen Stefani Rossi

contents

NO T ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 85 Last 87

NONF I C T I O N

It Is This, Craig Reinbold 78

FICTION

The Ballad of Rotor Ken, Doug Cornett 20 The Way the Sun Smiles on the Creek, 44 Anna Trujillo Mains Hum, Will Jones 68

VI SU A L A RT

The art of Eloisa Guanlao 33-40 The art of Janet McKenzie 57-64

PO ET RY

16 Dear Phil, Jeff Whitney 17 Dear Phil, Jeff Whitney 18 antiphons from a prodigal prayerbook, John Fry 19 debris field, John Fry 28 When the Fire Came, Logan February 29 Still Life with Fallen Ash, Logan February 30 Fluorescent, Jessica Yuan 41 Land Management, Chera Hammons 42 Black Horse I Am Breaking, Chera Hammons 53 Yesterday, As If Swimming, Cameron Alexander Lawrence 54 Maundy Thursday, Hannah Kroonblawd 55 Mangrove Boardwalk, Kasia Clarke 65 Outside the Rothko Chapel, Where Big John’s Eyes Appeared upon the Canvas on the Eastern Wall, Jesse Bertron 66 Returning to Earth, Todd Davis

2018 Kalos Visual Art Prize

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

E L OI SA G U A NL A O

J A N ET M c K EN ZI E

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N J O S EPH D I BEL L A

F I NA L I STS SA R A C ATA PA NO

S H A RO N H A RT

C H R I STI NA C OB B

RYO TA MAT S U MO T O

LY DI A D I L D I L I A N

S T EPH A N I E S ERPI CK

E R I N E L I Z A B E TH

A S H L EY V O TAW

P E NG H U A N G U O

D EN I S E W EL L BRO CK

6

2018 Kalos Visual Art Prize

F I NA L J U R OR S T EV E A . PRI N CE W RI T ES :

It was an honor to serve as the 2018 Kalos Prize Judge for Ruminate Magazine. I was charged with a great task of selecting a first, second, and honorable-mention winner. In determining prize winners, I used a rubric comprised of three categories: craftsmanship, creativity, and content. I looked at all of the works and determined which artists harnessed those criteria in the most creative and divinely inspired fashion. The exploration of traditional, non-traditional, mixed-media, and performance works are embodied in this year’s winners. The works represent some of the finest examples of art that eloquently challenge, enlighten, and champion the beauty of the human experience.

is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, and resides in Detroit, Michigan. He received his BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana and his MFA from Michigan State University. Prince is an educator and has taught middle school, high school, and is currently an assistant professor of art at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Prince is represented by Eyekons Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Zucot Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Prince is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2010 “Teacher of the Year” for the city of Hampton and the 2014, 2015, and 2016 Artist-in-Residence at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Through his craft Prince has conducted workshops, lectures, and visual sermons internationally in both secular and sacred settings at various colleges, community centers, museums, galleries, and various faith-based institutions.

STE VE A . P R I NC E

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editor’s note

We are given changes all the time. We can either cling to security, or we can let ourselves feel exposed, as if we had just been born, as if we had just popped out into the brightness of life and were completely naked. Maybe that sounds too uncomfortable or frightening, but on the other hand, it’s our chance to realize that this mundane world is all there is, and we could see it with new eyes and at long last wake up from our ancient sleep of preconceptions.

—Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

AND NOW THE BELLS are ringing and the ear of my heart is too.

First three rings. Then silence.

Three more rings. Then silence.

Three more rings. Then silence.

Then in the dark of the sunrise that hasn’t yet happened the sister is pulling hard on both ropes, and both bells in the bell tower, the large bell and the small bell, are ringing, and it is a flurry of dings, so many rings, far too many to count with no rests in between, lasting for what feels like the longest time you’ve ever held your breath.

I used to be a percussionist, counting all the notes and all the rests, playing the bells, the chimes, the cymbals, the gong, the vibraphone, all types of metal reverberating against mallet, mostly in gyms and auditoriums and football fields and recital halls, playing even in Switzerland once, but I never played to a mostly-dark valley like this. I never threw off the counting mind and started swinging with flurry and delight, moved by this offering of reality: this dim, cold day, the bruised sunrise that is beginning just like it did every day before.

8

It’s a way in and under and over and together, a way to move through this life. To ring in this day and the next, each and every one, simply because it is here and so am I. We can ring in this day for whatever our version of the beautiful valley is, for whatever rests in the dark and listens. There is too much delight under this sky and under each of our small roofs not to grab a mallet and begin to play.

With gratitude,

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readers’ notes O N A WAY TH ROUGH

At the office, Terry said I looked like I’d been crying.

“I left Dan,” I said, my body shaking, my world shaking.

I had left him once before but came back after a week, lonely and confused.

I didn’t love him anymore—or did I? I knew I didn’t like him, but I was terrified of being alone. Where would I live when the house-sitting gig was over and my friends came back to town? How would I tell my parents? What would I say to my friends?

All the other mornings that she’d noticed my red, puffy eyes, I had lied: bad reaction to eye makeup. Allergies.

The biggest lie: the stitches in my lip were from falling in the bathroom. The truth: my husband threw an ashtray that bounced off the floor and hit me in the face.

There were other arguments when he punched a hole in the wall or broke the bathroom door trying to “talk” to me while I cowered inside. We had a twoyear-old son by the time I left for good.

Then came ten years as a single mother looking for love in all the wrong places until I understood exactly how I had abandoned myself.

One Saturday afternoon, I went to an Impressionist art museum, bought a book in the gift shop, and ate lunch in the cafe.

On the train home, content and alone, I was whole.

It’s empty around here. There’s a lot of stars, a mostly cadaverous silence except for the wind or coyotes, and a complete absence of trails snaking up the trammeling mountains, which consist of precarious rocks and dense trees, a mean rise tipped by a sandstone jut, the last vestiges of the old country.

It’s a beautiful place from a distance, the kind of place that allows you the freedom to shoot weaponry in your backyard without the fear of someone calling the police—and the people around here do enjoy a good blasting session. My neighbor’s daughter likes to come up from the city on the weekends and shoot her shotgun about. The dogs really hate her.

It’s a long drive for her, and she’s assured me that on the drive up she sticks to “just the road beers.” Then after she pulls up at my neighbor’s, her father’s, she’ll finish a 750ml Jamo to feather the edges of the visit. She kills about a bottle a day, give or take a few fingers. And she brings a lot of ammo and has her way with it too.

I don’t think she has a particular target or anything she’s aiming for; just shoots generally at the mountain, near as I can tell. That’s where civilization stops, where the elongating penumbra of the western face dips us into shade at an early hour.

Sometimes she’ll shoot well into the night.

It’s a nice sound, the stretching echo.

Keeps the dogs desperately curled at my feet.

LINDA C. WISNIEWSKI, DOYLESTOWN, PA

NV BAKER, OJO FELIZ, NM

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11

Head down—glassy-eyed stare tethered over faltering steps. Here I find myself stumbling over damp, broken earth: stones of granite, foothold roots, and puddled, murky water.

It’s a masochist’s game, this mountain running thing—entering the trailhead while the rest of your world sleeps. The minutes pass and accumulate into hours; you center yourself, searching for your breath, stride, and cadence. This is your release; this is your escape; this is your faith.

Rows of maples pass overhead. While the sun still hides itself away, life is beginning to stir. Animal tracks appear in the spread of the headlamp light: a bear? I start whistling aloud.

I’m scaling this mountain, ascending into the sky, and grasping at clouds; bird songs have faded, bark has been dwarfed, and vegetation has failed to germinate; my nostrils are burning, my arched spine aches, my quads are turgid with lactic acid, and my toenails are blackened and loosening. This is only momentary.

This is the void. Pendulum legs swing along their XYZ axis. I’m hoping I hear my outsole connect with dirt. The trees are behind me now. I feel like forfeiting.

Step; step; grasp your quads if you need to; step; watch your breath; step; step; keep your feet; keep your cadence. Let go of the pain.

The sun has risen, the clouds have dispersed, and an infinite skyline lies before me: this summit is the world between my own and that beyond my reach. All of that pain meant nothing, because this, right now, will last forever.

Infertility, reason unknown.

It’s a small notation, concisely ambiguous. It seems to follow me, one doctor to another in this pilgrimage to pregnancy. I’m told it’s common, this “reason unknown,” but the knowledge is not a relief. I’ve been prodded, poked, scanned, imaged—there is nothing to see, nothing to fix, nothing. Nothing but a darkened shadow on an ultrasound, an empty womb that holds nothing but hopes and dreams that slowly decay.

My counselor says that of course I have every right to be angry, to grieve. Her face is slightly flushed, her cheeks and breasts rounding and softening as her own baby grows within her. When she told me— apologetically, sorry that this must be said—I told her it didn’t matter, that of course I wanted to continue our counseling relationship. It was the right thing to say, but I’ve been making fewer and fewer appointments. I ache inside.

Infertility has been like being in a dark room—four walls, no windows, no doors, no outlet. Your eyes will never adjust, and you keep searching for a way to turn on the lights. You wave your arms wildly—is there a switch? A string to pull? A lamp?

You search again, and again, and again.

Your fingers are red, bleeding—rubbed raw from running over the same hopeless walls, searching for something that may not exist. Tired, disillusioned, you desperately expend your heart and soul with no guarantee that there even is a light to begin with.

You begin to think that perhaps you are destined for this darkness. Perhaps there is not going to be a way through.

DEVIN R. LARSEN, MERRIMAC, MA

HANNAH HASSLER, DUNCANVILLE, TX

readers’ notes

I start to notice several months into my journey with this disease that my pupils change frequently. Sometimes, they are constricted when they should be dilated.

Sometimes, they are slightly different sizes. Sometimes, my eyes just seem to darken, as if they are declaring their own exhaustion, the pain that sits behind them. I get to the point where I check my eyes every time I pass a mirror. I ask my mother, “How do they look?” I become obsessed. Sometimes, I lean so close against the glass that I lose sight of myself. It’s just a pair of eyes. Wild, brown eyes, a little gold, with dots at the center that seem to have a mind of their own, the way they shrink and flare open. Sometimes I have to catch myself, remind myself that it’s really just me in the mirror. These are my eyes.

Though sometimes I feel like a stranger in my body, my pain, this shell of my former self, I am not quite such a stranger to my own reflection.

Eventually, I was going to have to take a deep breath and push through.

I came out when I was twenty-four, and, just as I had feared a decade earlier, parts of my life immediately began to fall apart.

Facing the people I loved who didn’t understand or were hurt by my hiding away for so long was brutal. But I grew stronger, wiser, closer to my community and to the truth. Today, happily married to the woman I love, I’m so glad that I chose the hard way, through the weeds to the clearing, where the sun shines clear and warm.

MIKHAL WEINER, BROOKLYN, NY

She laid in bed unable to respond, just breathing. Her body was shutting down.

She had held my hand the day before, an uncharacteristic show of affection. She had done that only one other time, and that was a week earlier. She was no longer the Screaming Monster Dragon. No longer my abuser.

In the quiet, I was able to see her as the STEPHANIE HARPER, LITTLETON, CO little child who had been traumatized and When I was in middle school, I had a diary emotionally frozen in pain. That was her I kept every day. In it I detailed all the reality. I was simply born into her pain. unsurprising prattling on of a melodramat- This was the remnant of my mother who ic preteen. In reading those pages again, tortured my childhood. there’s one theme that recurs relentlessI talked to her after decades of her ly—I like girls. But I can’t like girls. But refusal to listen. I cried. I found I did love I like girls. It’s alarming how long it took her and grieved for her loss and mine. Said me to, literally, see what was written I was sorry and I loved her. I know she before me. I guess I wasn’t yet ready to go heard. She died the next day and I, after through. sixty-five years, I am at peace.

I spent a good long time trying to find a DUANE HERRMANN, TOPEKA, KS way around, but it just couldn’t be done.

12

I talked myself OUT of the possibility that my son had Asperger’s syndrome throughout elementary school. He was diagnosed at thirteen. We had already spent years of reading books about learning disabilities, seeing psychologists, trying therapies with a very wide range of unsuccess.

I scrambled to find out all I could. In the age of Google everyone knows how hit or miss this can be. In the dark of night, I’d go online. Facebook groups, blogs, podcasts and Ted talks. I looked for veterans who had been in the trenches and might have that one little nugget of advice that could save us.

There is such a thing as too much information. So much talk on the importance of early detection. So many stories of kids who were much more severely impacted than mine. So much sadness and despair.

At first, I kept reading these stories because it made me feel better; at least we’re not dealing with that.

By seventh grade our son was only attending school half-days. He was acting like a scared, cornered animal. We pulled him out of high school completely the fall of his freshman year. There was a big sigh of relief, but we still felt guilt and a sense of failure.

I started leaving those Facebook groups.

I stopped reading the newsletters. I quit looking for new information. I look at MY kid now instead of case studies, and I see a fifteen-year-old who laughs, hugs, and helps around the house. Yes, he spends too much time on his computer and suffers from profound social anxiety, but he also cooks dinner, takes the dog for a walk, and he doesn’t talk about dying. I’ve taken the long way around to realizing we're not in crisis mode anymore.

KRISTINA BARTLESON, SEATTLE, WA

Two weeks of unrelenting, deep innervating pain from a nerve compression in my neck. It races down my shoulder blade into my right hand, which has gone numb. It wasn’t one triggering event, as everyone asks about and hopes to avoid for themselves, but too much carrying, moving, doing during a busy holiday season. Too much for a vulnerable body that endured life-saving neck surgery last Christmas and a hip replacement six months later.

When will I learn my limitations? Stubbornness, self-sufficiency, doing are in my genes. I just face it and get through. Living life to the fullest is my mantra, an amplified intention after my twin died suddenly and unexpectedly three years ago.

The pain will ease up, go away—eventually. It’s not cancer, like my former patients endured for weeks, months, years.

How did my father get through thirteen years? How did my mother-in-law manage severe cancer pain with only Demerol injections, the standard of the 1970s? I first turn to ice, massage, acupuncture, herbal therapies, and aromatherapies. But now I need drugs.

From the recesses of my memory, I hear my five-year-old shout in a defiant, arm-stiffening, “But I need chips and cheese now!” as he finds a way through the intense cravings of high dose steroids for his acute leukemia treatment. That was twenty years ago. He survived, we survived, three years of intense treatments, crises, awakenings. Survival is instinctual.

It demands attention. Then awareness, insight, higher consciousness shepherds us to meaning, making sense of whatever it is we are getting through in the moment.

In this predawn, filtered light of shapes and dreams, in this singular moment of reflection, suffering is a universal language of humanity. I am not alone.

JANICE POST-WHITE, MINNEAPOLIS, MN

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readers’ notes

New paths are offensive and screech of difference. They squeak of rebellion. The day I decided to unapologetically express my views and allowed my sound to be heard, stones were thrown. It’s a danger to be different. It is a danger to appear as anything that has not been culturally accepted.

You sound loud and brass. But I think the West Indian sound was meant to be played loud and unashamed. As a Caribbean woman, as a Christian, as a pansexual, I will dance to these loud melodies. My sound shall not be silenced.

book, thoughts unspooling while waiting for the clock to hit 10:45 a.m., departure time. The minutes tick away and my tarrying ends. No more sitting, as work demands must be met.

Rise, I tell myself. Switch off the desk lamp and move across the thin, navy blue carpet. Open the door and exit the room.

Allow effort to conquer the anxiety. Let motion and activity chase away these Thursday morning meditations imbued with self-pity. Go down the stairs today.

FRANCIS D i CLEMENTE, SYRACUSE, NY

They don’t tell you that the desert is freezing at night. That the sand becomes Empty hotel room, mid-morning in New dark as coal dust and leeches the heat and York City. The air conditioning unit roars joy out through the soles of your feet as to life, overpowering the street noise, you keep on walking. They don’t prepare and the lime green numbers on the digital you for the long weary miles of trudging, cable box read 10:36. I am waiting for the where you stare down at the shrouded minutes to count down before I must leave ragged wraps just for something to focus for a video shoot in Queens. on, trying not to think of the blisters they I sit upright in the desk chair, resting cover. my back and my knees before my body will No one mentions that the sun beating on be called into action, lifting camera cases, your head will make your thoughts start carrying tripods and light stands, and to leak out of your bleeding ears, and that pushing an equipment cart loaded with you will see mirages right in front of your video gear. eyes and not only on the horizon. That I am a forty-eight-year-old man with there will be so many false starts, that you severe osteoporosis complicated by will sleep leaning against non-existent compression fractures in the thoracic and palm trees, or that what you hope is the lumbar regions. How much more can this end of deprivation is so often just a shimbrittle spine take before the vertebrae mering haze that will start to buzz into a implode, before the bones are pulverized frenzied shatter when you are mere steps into dust? away.

So this is just a short essay—throwThey don’t tell you that you will begin to away words scribbled in a pocket notesearch on the ground for pieces of yourself KATRINA MCINTOSH, GASPARILLO, TRINIDAD

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in a distressed stupor as you try to recollect the time before. Nor of the monsters that you know walk behind you, keeping exactly in step so that no matter how fast you turn, you cannot catch them. No, they don’t tell you what it is like, those who have passed this way before. Who would believe us?

KEREN DIBBENS-WYATT, KENT, UK

You could see it in their eyes—fear and assumption.

They stare with their Atlantic-blue eyes, blond hair, and reddish, plumb cheeks. They smile at each other and compliment one another, until I pass by.

Then silence accompanies their stares, making me feel the rusted grudge that they hold for me; crawling underneath my skin.

Goosebumps, that’s what you call them.

A toddler came to my seat wearing overalls and a white tee, staring at this rare creature he’d never seen before, or had, but never in a good way. His mom comes. She grabs his hand and throws a threatening look at me.

Not for my actions, rather for what I wrapped over my head. Not about the statement I had on my shirt “We Should Be All Feminists,” rather for the hidden hair underneath my “rag.”

I took a nap, and when I woke up, my head scarf was not on my head. I have no clue what had happened during my heavy sleep. I was so shocked I didn’t say anything. I was afraid that I may scare the other passengers if I demanded the right to cover a portion of my own body.

Luckily, I met people off the airplane who were nice, thoughtful, curious and beautiful. They accepted me and respected my choice.

LINA BAAZIZ, CONSTANTINE, ALGERIA

15

When I was fifteen, I was taken downtown in a paddy wagon. I was with three friends. I’d not had anything to drink at a party; I was a leader at my school. The serious partiers were in the basement getting high, swallowing mustard to disguise the smell of whatever. I was upstairs in the kitchen chewing a piece of mint gum that a cop assured me was to cover the smell of alcohol.

“I don't drink,” I replied.

“That's what they're all saying,” he barked. “You wouldn't be here if there wasn’t cause. Get in there with the rest of them.”

There wasn’t cause. I’d gone to the party to see my boyfriend after our team won the basketball championship. But he’d decided the party would get busted, so he skipped the party, and I got caught with two equally innocent friends.

The paddy wagon was packed with bodies. A sweaty, inebriated guy, caught out on the lawn, got loaded in.

“Call me the Claw!” he yelled.

My friends and I were fifteen and afraid we’d be put in the drunk tank with the older men who’d been rounded up at the bars. We eventually got to call home; my mother picked me up. We were silent on the drive home. I knew what was coming.

My father raged, “You’re responsible!

Don’t you see? There was illegal activity, you’re ruining your reputation!”

A part of me knew then that I was no more who he or “they” said I was, than I am now, forty years later. Here’s a secret: You are who you say you are. You can decide, at least, that much.

SUSAN BALLER-SHEPARD, BLOOMINGTON, IL

J EFF W H I T N E Y

Dear Phil When he was growing up, Catholics told my father there is no almost Heaven, no almost-boy, no almost-girl.

There is only this world and the one after. This baby-tooth earth and paradise is the adult molar grown painfully in the mouth of death. The difference between object and subject is a willingness to act. The river of sorrow comes from the same source as delight. These days I am a tired ghost who hasn’t found his legs.

What about you? A wobbling lobster in a world of pots, no doubt. We live in a time when someone can drive drunk through Times Square one day then write a memoir and sell three hundred million. Music wasn’t the first invention it was the only. Train horn is to songbird as something is to something else.

There is a river in Germany you can walk in if you want to inhabit a previous soul.

There are canyons where buffalo were marched and fell. Their hearts were eaten and their spirits became the clouds holding the next season’s rains. Not a thousand moments in one continuum but one moment stretched across stars until it isn’t even a question what the rope is tied to or who is doing the crossing. Goldilocks enjoyed sleeping and eating and was eaten. “The bears Goldilocks eat” is wrong in English but close enough. Almost. The bears eat. The girl eats. The world eats. And everything is eaten.

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J E FF W H I T NE Y

Dear Phil I used to want a religion the way you might want cake on your birthday. But all I got was teeth falling out of my skull and the sense that Maggie Carlisle was nowhere. That the dead walk one way and we walk another. That the spirit wears a black hat or a white hat and there’s no way to know the difference. That if you cut out every word but god from the holy books it will sound like an upstairs neighbor in the middle of sex. That Jesus looks like a child’s drawing of Jesus or the smashed hand of a city post-storm or Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon wanting nothing more than to visit a planet of endless strangers. Which in some ways is heaven and in others not. I’m writing a story where a 17-year cicada wakes up five years early, the loneliest thing on earth, and has to imagine clouds of his brothers, clouds of his sisters. The way heaven I’m told is or is not. Now I have a bad way of going to parties and contributing little. Like Paul on the road to Damascus doing his best impression of a jellyfish. The doomed school bus burping its last air at the bottom of the lake. But even rocks are beautiful as they drown. A shotgun can get you to heaven or an enemy or more complicated yet no less effective—Time. You want a story?

Fine. Picasso when called from his home by the fascist inquisitors and asked to explain Guernica—who was responsible for it—said, you are. Meaning the bombs and screams and light and yes the dead have their language and we have ours. We all grow new teeth but only once. We all wish for flowers and a mouth to whisper something dirty at. For ten years my grandmother untied the string of the kite tied to the child’s wrist of her mind until it was clear death, my religion, could fit whatever shoe it wears. You know the joke. This land is yours. Was always yours. There will never be another pyramid but we have so many. Never another Kahlo or Van Gogh but there are caves where dead buffalo still walk, large as a child’s idea of kings. And if that’s not enough—if we diminish from too much hunger, we will eat that too. Like a season trying on its thorns or dogs the size of flies chasing each other tethered to their own cross on the martyr’s chest we will have to make do with the world as given. This is no dark crown of moths or ash in the kitty litter more like the night sky in the hammed romance of an adult film.

The one the astronaut looks at from the surface of another world filled with beautiful strangers. Where to get home he has to love absolutely everybody. Again and again. Even his enemies, Phil, them especially.

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J O HN FRY

antiphons from a prodigal prayerbook (preacher’s son) not writ but voice graven on stone flame-spoken fact on flesh iron finger jealous God inner eyelid —nailed there

(gnostic stranger) not dirt not rain in the book of names

serifs shaped like seraphim ink dancing black fire

on white fire spelled where can I flee from souls to be saved your presence indecipherable written in dirt by rain rendered illegible every letter wingless my name

(queer angel) father earth mother sky

for you, I’m still waiting: the little girl

who died inside of the little boy’s heart: you’ve held

her, in me, all this time

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J O HN F RY

debris field

and was this also given for you, the loneliness of limestone’s

memory of water

carried always, a handful of salt

saved from the city that burned having already eaten, having drunk deep of

unleavened bread sacramental wine

and, also, a needle

to see through, thread

for touch only what’s held in one hand

strands of hair, your

sorrow sewn into

a shirt as penitents wear sackcloth and ashes

absence inside an absence arisen, little Lazarus walk in your shoes of fire

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The Ballad of Rotor Ken DOU G COR N ETT

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TH E KIN G D OM ITSEL F

My best friend Gavin and I spend our summers at The Kingdom at Aurora Lake Amusement Park, but we just call it The Kingdom. When we were smaller, seven or eight, The Kingdom was endless, stretching out forever in every direction. When we walked through the big arches at the entrance and saw the fountain in the center of the courtyard, we felt like ancient explorers on the shores of an unmapped continent.

There were sections of the park that we’d seen on the map but had never actually been to, and there were rides that we’d heard rumors about but we’d never seen.

Would the Bone Guzzler really break our necks? Could you really fly off the Banshee into the lake? I remember debating with Gavin how long it would take to walk across the whole park. Days, I insisted. He said maybe a week.

Now that we are eleven, we can hang out all day in the park by ourselves. My mom drops us off in the morning, runs a bunch of errands, and then picks us up in the afternoon. But the park is different now; we know everything there is to know about it. We’ve been on every ride a dozen times. We’ve played all the games and now we know which ones are rip-offs and which ones we can actually win. We’ve eaten all of the food and had stomachaches from most of it. The food all tastes different but the stomachache always feels the same.

One time, Gavin won a cheap stuffed monkey in a Hawaiian shirt, and he tossed it from the very top of the Midnight Marauder, which is the second tallest roller coaster at the park. I was sure we were going to get in trouble but nobody even noticed. This summer he’s been doing more and more of that kind of stuff, which is why he’s so funny, but we’ll probably get busted sooner or later.

All of the rides that used to seem so huge now seem kind of dinky, except the Necromancer, which is the newest and tallest roller coaster in not only the park but the state, too. Unlike the Midnight Marauder, which is wooden and tosses you around and Gavin and I have bruises from it, the Necromancer is metal and super smooth and reaches a top speed of eighty miles per hour. The scariest part isn’t going down the big hill; it’s going really slow up it, click click click, and you feel like at any moment you could just stand up and jump out and there’s no way the little safety bar or anyone else could stop you.

RO TO R K EN

If you’ve ever been to The Kingdom, chances are you’ve seen Rotor Ken. He’s the guy who rides the Rotor all day long, from park opening to park closing. The Rotor is the one where you enter in and it’s a big cylinder, and everybody leans up against the wall, then the walls start spinning and you’re stuck there because of centrifugal force. The floor drops down and you’re just zapped to the wall. It’s weird: you try to lean forward and unstick yourself, but you can’t. It’s physics. You can get an arm out sometimes, or a leg, but you’re not supposed to.

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The Rotor makes me queasy but Gavin insists we ride it because he likes to watch Rotor Ken, who hides behind the entrance door after every ride and sneaks back in, never standing in line. You can tell by the look in Rotor Ken’s eye that he thinks he’s getting away with it, but everybody knows what he’s up to. The teenager operating the ride stares right at him but never says anything.

You hear all kinds of stories about Rotor Ken. Some of them are just stupid and there’s no way they’re true, but some of the stuff could be for real. With a guy like Rotor Ken, it’s hard to tell.

Rotor Ken isn’t a kid at all even though he acts like one. His brown hair is almost see-through and he’s a little hefty, but he wears tight old collared t-shirts that he tucks in so his fat belly pushes out. You know there’s something not quite right about him by the way he moves; he’s always kind of half-running, a little bent over, like a demented granny, and his face always has this fixed expression like he’s concentrating really hard all the time on an impossible geometry problem. He just rides the Rotor, over and over, all day long. Just once, Gavin and I saw him doing something other than riding the Rotor. He was standing and eating a corndog, staring at the fountain near the entrance.

His face was empty like a toy that’d been switched off and the only thing moving was his jaw, up and down, up and down.

Rotor Ken never says a word. But then, I’ve never heard anybody talk to him.

RO TO R K EN ’S U N D ERG ROU N D LA IR

Some people say that the reason Rotor Ken is always the first person in the Rotor in the morning and the last one to leave at night is because he never leaves the park.

Instead, people say, he lifts up a manhole cover somewhere near Smuggler’s Lagoon and goes down into a whole underground world he’s created. Or maybe he didn’t create it and it’s just the sewers, but still he goes down there and has made a home out of it, with all kinds of secret passageways that pop up in different parts of the park. People say he’s decked it out like a house, with a bed and a living room and a couple of metal chairs stolen from the lunch pavilion, but I can’t imagine why he’d need more than one chair.

They say that all he ever eats are half-chomped corndogs that he rummages from the trash behind the lunch pavilion.

It’s true that there are manhole covers all over The Kingdom, and Gavin even tried to lift one up once and it did move, but a lady drove by on a mop Zamboni and we kind of ran away.

Like I said, some of the things you hear about Rotor Ken are just stupid.

WH AT’S W RON G W IT H GAV IN ?

Gavin sometimes buys elephant ears and doesn’t eat them. Instead, he smushes them into the metal chairs at the food courtyard, grinning sort of blankly as his finger

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smears the powdered sugar into swear words. He also insists we ride the baby rides every once in a while, even though we never actually liked them even when we were babies, and he screams his lungs out to be funny. He bangs the sides of the coaster and bugs his eyes out so that everybody stares at us. It is pretty funny, especially when he pretends to barf, but the little kids get scared and the adults get pissed. By the time the ride is over and we have to get off, Gavin’s face is all red and wet.

On the genuinely scary rides, like the Slaughterhouse Dive, Gavin closes his eyes and kind of goes away. If I say something to him he won’t respond. He’ll just grin a little into the wind. Once, the ride operator handed out free pictures that they took of us as we were coming down the big first hill. My mouth was wide open and my hair was flying backward and I was looking over at Gavin, who looked like he was pretending to be asleep.

E LEGY FOR ROT OR JA N E

Rotor Jane loved Rotor Ken. She followed him around everywhere, which was basically just in and out of the Rotor. Rotor Ken never looked at Rotor Jane because he never looked at anybody, but when she was around, he seemed even more uncomfortable than usual.

Rotor Jane wasn’t like Rotor Ken. Nobody knew who she was or where she came from. She just showed up one day at The Kingdom, and when she first saw Rotor Ken, she must have decided that she loved him. She was taller than him and skinny and she talked a lot, but not really to anyone in particular. She was always complaining about things out loud, but you could never figure out what she was complaining about because she’d stop halfway through each sentence and shake her head and look over at Rotor Ken. She smelled like smoke and her eyes had a very sleepy look. I don’t think she enjoyed the Rotor as much as Rotor Ken. I think it made her dizzy. She was always stumbling and swaying, and her old brown sneakers were all scuffed up and coming apart.

One day, Rotor Jane got caught peeing in line at the Scrambler. Gavin and I were in that same line, too, but up at the front. “I din’t wan lose my place,” she slurred, almost yelled. The park workers just stood there, telling her she couldn’t do that, but nobody wanted to come get her. Her arms were up in a “don’t shoot” kind of position and she had little tattoos all over them. The park workers whispered into their walkie-talkies that they needed security. I wondered how come she was over here at the Scrambler and not with Rotor Ken. Security came and grabbed her and then I could see they weren’t tattoos on her arms but scars that looked like they came from a bunch of electrified worms. We never saw Rotor Jane after that.

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GAV I N ’S DA D ’S HOUS E

Gavin’s parents are getting a divorce. He’s spending most of his time over at his dad’s house, which Gavin used to just call his house, but now that his mom moved in with her boyfriend across town, it’s his “mom’s house” or his “dad’s house.” One night I was over at his dad's house for a sleepover and real late, around eleven p.m., Gavin’s mom showed up and wanted to pick Gavin up. The two of us were downstairs in the basement, and we were nervous because we had been playing with the VCR, watching Leprechaun and trying to pause it on the blonde lady’s marshmallow boobies. But nobody ever came downstairs. Gavin’s mom stood at the basement door and kept calling for Gavin, her voice way too loud for how close we were. “Bonnie,” Gavin’s dad kept saying, all quiet. I stayed frozen in place, my hand outstretched on the eject button, not pushing it because I was afraid of the noise it would make. Gavin was lying on top of his blankets, pretending to be asleep. Gavin’s dog Lola was upstairs barking balls-crazy. After a long time, Gavin’s mom left and when we heard the car leave the driveway, Gavin sprang up and wanted to keep watching Leprechaun. After a few minutes, I whispered, “that was weird,” but Gavin was so engrossed in the movie that he didn’t hear me.

When I told my parents about that night, they suggested that Gavin and I have our sleepovers at our house from now on.

F R E E FOR L IF E

Another rumor says that Rotor Ken wasn’t always the way he is. He used to be a regular kid who would come to The Kingdom every so often and ride all of the rides like anyone else, then go home to a normal kid’s life. One day, though, he was on the Howling Ghoulies, which is an old wooden kiddie coaster, and the safety latch malfunctioned and Rotor Ken was flung out of the car and landed on his head. That’s when, the rumors say, Rotor Ken got to be the way he is. Rotor Ken’s family was so upset that they threatened to sue, but the amusement park couldn’t afford that so they offered them free admission to the park for life. It just so happened that was the only thing Rotor Ken wanted to do anyways, was to come to the park every day for the rest of his life and ride the Rotor. That’s why they never say anything when he cheats the line, because they know they can’t.

TH E LA M EDVAV N IK

The re ’s a par k wo r ke r, an old man who drives the mop Zamboni, who has a different theory about Rotor Ken. This old man thinks Rotor Ken is a holy person. He thinks that Rotor Ken rides the Rotor all day so that the world doesn’t fly apart.

“I’m a custodian for the park. He’s a custodian for the human race.” The old guy explains this to me and Gavin as we eat a big boat of waffle fries in the lunch pavilion.

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He was sitting at the table next to us, having an elephant ear, and he overheard us talking about Rotor Ken, so he plopped down with us. “He’s one of the thirty-six.”

“Thirty-six what?” Gavin asks.

And then the guy says a word I don’t understand. We ask, what? He repeats the word and we still don’t get it. He reaches out and tears a corner of the paper waffle fry boat, then takes a pen from his shirt pocket and scribbles something down quickly. He passes it to us. It says: Lamedvavnik.

“The thirty-six,” he repeats. “Righteous people who maintain the sacred equilibrium. See, at any given time, there are always thirty-six people in the world who shoulder the load for the rest of us. We should thank them because without them, chaos would come again. Anarchy.” The old man sweeps his gaze over the park and gives a quick shake of the head: “Hell on earth.”

I eat the last waffle fry and hold back a smile. I wonder if Gavin’s going to say something hilarious to this guy, but he keeps quiet. He’s nodding really slowly, then he turns and looks out in the direction of the Rotor. I look, too, but the Old West Shooting Gallery is blocking the view. A big lady leans down over the wooden rifle and aims, then I hear a faint pop, then the robot piano player comes to life and bangs out a honky-tonk tune. When I look back at Gavin, his eyes are closed, but he’s still nodding.

GAV I N ’S M OM

Gavin’s mom is a second grade teacher: Mrs. Ellis. When I was in second grade, she was my teacher, and she was a really nice one. Mrs. Ellis had a keyboard in the corner of the classroom, and on Tuesday afternoons she would play it and we’d sing, “catch a falling star and put in your pocket, save it for a rainy day.” She had a really nice voice, but you could only hear it in the beginning of the song before all of us kids drowned her out.

Mrs. Ellis loved addition, subtraction, different kinds of trees, and singing “Catch a Falling Star.” She cut stars out of construction paper and wrote all of our names in magic marker, her handwriting big and joyous and comforting. My star was taped up above the blackboard, and one of its points was touching one of the points on Bethany Childress’s star, and that always made me feel embarrassed.

Mrs. Ellis was almost always in a good mood. She high fived us as we entered the class each morning, and anytime we had a class competition, like the costume contest on Halloween, it would end in a tie. One time, though, Brad Modeski said that Mrs. Ellis’ sweater looked like it came from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and she got pissed. I don’t think Brad meant it in a bad way, but Mrs. Ellis definitely took it bad.

RO TO R K EN AT T HE G R EEN HIL LS ST OP & SH OP

Ellen Crispa, who was in my sixth grade homeroom class and who was in Gavin’s

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fifth grade class, says that she saw Rotor Ken at the Green Hills Stop & Shop. She says she saw him with an old man who was all drooped over and slow, and Rotor Ken was eating slices of deli ham from a Ziploc bag and they had a whole shopping cart filled with cans of grape Faygo. Ellen Crispa says they smelled nasty and were taking up basically the whole pop aisle. She says she couldn’t tell which one was leading the other one around.

N OWH ER E IN SIG HT

It’s a week before our first day of high school, and Gavin and I go to The Kingdom for the last time. Last summer, Gavin moved three towns over with his dad, and we’ve only seen each other once or twice since. He went to a different junior high, and this year he’ll go to a different high school. Gavin’s voice has dropped and his face, which used to be perfectly round, has angled out. He’s even got a whisker or two on his chin.

His clothes are brand new and really baggy on him, and he carries around a stick of deodorant in his cargo pocket. I’m still pretty much the same, just a little bit taller.

My clothes fit me fine, like they always have, but Gavin doesn’t make fun of me or say anything about it.

Gavin’s mission is to approach Rotor Ken and to find out what his deal is. He’s just going to ask him straight up, and not walk away until he’s got an answer. He tells me this as he sucks at a cigarette in the parking lot before we go in. Every third or fourth drag, Gavin sucks in too hard and he has a little coughing fit, his cheeks going red and his eyes watering up.

I wonder what Gavin means by Rotor Ken’s “deal.” It’s a fair question, I guess, but I don’t think Rotor Ken has a “deal.” He’s just the way he is. At least, I don’t think Rotor Ken will be able to answer Gavin’s question.

Rotor Ken isn’t at the Rotor. He’s not at the Scrambler, or the Corkscrew, or the Wave. He’s not anywhere. Gavin asks one of the teenage girls who works at the lunch pavilion where he is, but she just responds, “Who’s Rotor Ken?” Gavin is agitated. “You don’t know who Rotor Ken is?”

She shrugs and looks past him at the line of people waiting for corndogs. “This is my first summer here,” she says by way of apology.

We ride the Midnight Marauder and the Terror Tracks. We try the Slingshot but the harness crushes our balls. Gavin tells the ride operator this, but the dude just nods his head sleepily.

After burgers and waffle fries, we go back and ride the Rotor twice in a row. This makes me nauseous and I have to sit down on a bench, but Gavin goes on three or four more times. After the last time, he tries to sneak back in behind the entrance door, Rotor Ken style, but the ride operator snaps his fingers at him and barks, “nope!”

When Gavin finally meets me at the bench, his face is pale white and he says he doesn’t feel too good, either. He uses a park payphone to call his friend Taylor, who is

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a sophomore and has a car, to come pick us up.

On our way out of the park, Gavin lights up a cigarette, which you’re not supposed to do. A park worker sees him and asks him to put it out, and for a minute I think Gavin is going to say something awful to her, but instead he just ignores her and takes a big drag, coughing.

We wait for Taylor near the front entrance. Gavin smokes two more cigarettes, one after another, then starts twirling around in circles, head up to the sky. He’s stumbling a little bit and laughing a slow, drowsy laugh, and he keeps twirling and twirling until I’m convinced he’s going to collapse.

“You good?” I ask, but he doesn’t respond. I ask again, and then I almost ask him what his deal is. Instead, I walk over to a manhole cover near us and try to lift it up, but it doesn’t budge.

When Taylor pulls up in his SUV, Gavin rubs his face and hocks a loogie onto the pavement.

“Shithole,” he says, then hops into the front seat.

AN

RUI NS

A lifetime later, I look up whatever happened to The Kingdom and find a video on the internet titled “Ruins.” I click on it.

A drone with a camera buzzes over the vestiges of The Kingdom at Aurora Lake, capturing footage of the abandoned park on a late winter day. Tall, dead grass pushes up from cracks in the parking lot, which has not been in use for nearly a decade.

Just inside the crumbling arched entryway, an ornate fountain sits in the center of a perfect oval pool, dried to a heavy ash gray. Around it, the brick courtyard reflects a pale salmon pink from the weak afternoon sun.

From above, the snaking path of the Nile Mile water tube seems like the fossil imprint of a serpentine giant. Nearby, the crosshatched bones of the Midnight Marauder splay out lavishly atop the frozen dirt and cold concrete. On the edge of the brilliant blue lake, pine trees poke through the rotting wooden helix of the Corkscrew.

Brown grass and reeds patch over the enormous empty pool where the Wave used MA RY L O Tanother Z to be. Small buildings rest in odd angles to one like children’s toys left out on the lawn overnight.

The drone begins spinning. The deep blue of the lake holds the center, but the stripped brown skeletons of trees that fringe the edges of the park go in and out of focus. The blurs of small propellers become visible in the upper corner of the shot.

The drone spins and spins.

Down there: is that the ghost of Rotor Ken shuffling silently past the hollowedout snack bars and drifting through the mazes of metal bars and there, through a portal unseen, does it slip underground? Or is he there—sneaking in from behind the entrance door to spread his limbs against the convex wall? To whirl ceaselessly for our souls. There, the floor drops away and he closes his eyes against the push.

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L O G A N F E B R UARY

When the Fire Came When the fire came, the village iroko went first. That night, there was no moon, & a grandfather needs the moon to tell his stories. Let me rephrase: my grandfather was long dead when the fire came. So you’ll understand when I say I don’t know a lot of stories.

Mine is one bloodied, then smudged.

Let me rephrase: my account is not to be trusted. But this is how I remember it— the fire came & took the iroko by its highest branches. There was a scream louder than all of the mothers. The àbíkú in the tree climbed into my hair & took root in my scalp. All of the chaos & I stood still.

The huts burned & shriveled. Given a mirror, does a boy make out his own face through thick black smoke? [ stop saying that / grandfather is dead & gone ] The cowries spilled everywhere. I am just ugly enough for the evil to feel invited to my body.

A little girl bled to death while I stood still & got possessed. Bury then bruise then dig up brutally. If I had a grandfather, he would tell this story better. Let me rephrase: I have told you all I remember—wicked white fire, tree reduced to soot—a whole history blacked out.

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L O G A N F E B R UARY

Still Life with Falling Ash A decade sprawled itself all over these ruins & the ashes still aren’t done settling. They dusk & skim across each other, bodies melded, then brand new & untouched. They prism.

They round, morph, shift from gray to something darker. An elegy raised in my glass, for a village that stayed African even after it was razed. I should stop saying I brought this on myself. I lighter fluid, I cry.

I firewood. My mother doesn’t remember.

I extinguisher. The brain is a thing locked out of itself. Password—trauma.

I put my father in a canoe & threw him into the syrup [ you can’t blame yourself for someone else’s diabetes ] Says you. I felt him die, tasted the evaporation. I should stop confessing to this. I am river, so incapable of fire. I drown myself & then all the others, leave the water frothy with a missing surface. My mother doesn’t recall seeing me set the village to burn. Sometimes the medicine makes me tell lies.

So I circle, I explanation, I exorcism.

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J E S S ICA Y UAN

Fluorescent It took years to arrive and your eyes became accustomed to light at all hours, ten loaves of bread wrapped in clear plastic, six-lane streets swept empty by women so invisible they speak only in dreams. When the new moon comes not one of us notices its absence.

When you rise in the morning it is raining, when the train comes you leave.

Ten tiles by ten tiles you scrub again with a woman who is not your sister (this is how you tell time is passing) you are hungry then you are full. *** Turn away from this happiness and there are mountains on the television, a busy street glowing with smoke. The crowd looks like you (does not look at you) until the screen sinks into static. Behind you the women are singing in a language you no longer understand. Above you daylight hovers slowly around a softer earth, a mourning city, ounces of belief poured into the Pacific,

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a smear of plastic pooled in cupped hands.

Even now you know your stubbornness would not survive that history. *** Now in our days, both paint and bedding are made whiter not only through their emptiness but by more viciously repelling the light (chemicals so persistent) they remit ultraviolet as purity we can see. It is not the absence of color or the fading thought which concerns me.

These mornings in the streets sunlight and fluorescence deflect from this body, taking hold of what it can, skin which for years mimicked paper. Still it is difficult to insist on that absorption (what to emit, what to refuse) and who to carry through the electric hum like water hung from two shoulders. Memory dims but history takes the wrong color, some flesh in our culture, a past where they are all smiling and they are not even the ones who survived.

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artist’s statement E L OI SA GU A N LA O

AS A N A RT IST and ecologically-minded humanist, I am interested in performing

history and historiography through visual means, giving careful consideration to the materials I use. Concerns about the unexamined expansion of technology and the unrestrained use of natural resources inform my art practice and historical inquiry. This includes a scrutiny of the impact of technological innovations on labor migrations, colonial acts, and socio-cultural development. My work traces the creation of institutional and symbolic systems as different factions scramble for control, and the ways these systems contribute to or disrupt community relations.

More broadly, I want to reveal the link between compassion and environmental justice, and specifically, I would like to identify who benefits and who suffers. To begin a dialogue regarding my concerns, I am experimenting with spatial structures combined with photographic imagery that become performance spaces for the public.

Within these structures the public enact and reflect upon their role as producers and consumers of culture and society. I reconsider space as subjective sites to be reclaimed for socio-political interaction and creative engagement.

My approach to art comes from the perspective that our cultural environment shapes our socio-economic and political history and identity, but this perspective should not come to the detriment of the natural environment. As a human made product, culture can be unmade, and transformed for the welfare of circadian cycles and natural, biological systems.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Stills from Noli Me Tangere. Digital documentary.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Noli Me Tangere (detail). Installation with paper, bamboo, and digital projection. 200 x 84 x 78 inches.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Noli Me Tangere. Installation with paper, bamboo, and digital projection. 200 x 84 x 78 inches.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Still from Noli Me Tangere. Digital documentary.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Still from Noli Me Tangere. Digital documentary.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Still from Noli Me Tangere. Digital documentary.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Holo Mai Pele. Bamboo and piĂąa cloth. 200 x 150 x 144 inches.

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ELOISA GUANLAO. Holo Mai Pele. Bamboo and piĂąa cloth. 200 x 150 x 144 inches.

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CHE R A H AM M O NS

Land Management My husband has cut all of the stalks off the wild yellow yuccas and left them where they fell.

Our neighbor has told us this is the only way to keep those needled fans from spreading; every inch that a yucca takes up is an inch that can't be used for grazing.

Already, our fields are filled with spines.

The donkey arms herself with the stalks and carries them, stems of cut flowers with no container.

When she tires of this, she eats the waxy petals.

She is dark and glossy, not like common gray burros; the cross on her shoulders hides under her coat.

When we first moved here, we tried making soap from the yucca root.

We dug up several small ones, asking forgiveness.

The root was white and tough, but it lathered.

Now we dig up yuccas and toss them over the fence to rot.

Now the only yucca we allow to keep its embellishment is the red one we planted in the flowerbed when we moved in.

This morning, a hummingbird drinks from red blossoms opened out and emptying their sweetness to many mouths, like holy vessels.

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CHE R A H AMM O NS

Black Horse I Am Breaking I knew going in that he could be the end of me.

He was slender as a long shadow, growing taller in green silence, like the wild sunflowers he sometimes liked to eat the tops off of; I had to start looking up to see him.

He spooked at rumors. How carefully I have prepared him, saddling him over and over with different disciplines, and sending him around me at every gait and direction, rubbing him with tarps and plastic grocery bags, cavorting beside him to get him used to a person's silliness, climbing on the fence and leaning over his back, driving him across the prairie with a surcingle and long reins while I walked behind and the neighbors wondered what I was up to. I am not a person who looks like she could break a colt. No one would ever believe it.

Lovely lovely lovely beast, and terrible with strength.

How I am afraid of him, but still I can't get enough.

This is the only way I know how to make each day leave its own bruise.

Today I must lead him back to the mounting block three times; he keeps shifting away and chewing on my sleeve.

He is slow and calm. To him, this is only one of many hours.

On each side, I rise on arthritic knees over his back, lean, and rub his opposite shoulder, and he watches with his head turned so I can see one eye.

Finally I hold his head to his side so that he can't go forward yet,

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put my foot in the stirrup, and then I am astride.

He has not yet intuited any of my worry. He shifts under me, and we try to understand this new weight.

How I love him for this. How I want and don't want to outlive him.

But we haven't even begun to work, if we are lucky.

Circles and halts and half-halts. Rate and backing. Young horses must even learn how to walk in a straight line.

It will take time and repetition. Consistency of handling.

Years of riding and surviving. Now the wind lifts his mane.

The light has risen to fill the sky. It's so bright here.

This is our last day and our first, the bravest one we'll know.  

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the way the sun ek smiles on the cre

AN N A T R UJ I L L O

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I G R EW U P IN Moose Pass because Dad disliked cities, and the view of mountains

and old-mannish trees and jumbles of fireweed out our living room window convinced Mom of the merit of that prejudice. You grew up in Moose Pass because your father had calculated the apocalypse was only a few years down the road, and further calculations had revealed to him that the only point on the globe isolated enough to offer him and his family a chance at survival was rural Alaska. Every day at five o’clock precisely I left my house and ran down Upper Trails Court, you left your house and ran up Upper Trails, and we rammed into each other in the middle—usually with enough momentum to send ourselves flying—and began our evening’s adventures.

Winter was my favorite season. The mountains glowed glacial blue—or ghostly green, when the northern lights were out—and the trees had abandoned their lightweight summer leaves for winter robes. To make our way to the creek we had to wade through chest-deep snow, our breaths cloudy interruptions in the hush-filled frozen air. When we got to the creek we’d crawl out onto its slippery surface and worm around like baby polar bears. Then we’d press our ears to the ice to try to hear the rushing water beneath or lie still, body heat escaping, and admire the sparkling gardens of frost formations that formed on poking-up twigs and ridges in the ice.

O N E DAY A FT ER a snowfall—a warm, heavy, huge-flaked snowfall that soaked

through our hats and coats and left our chins and noses dripping slush—we got it into our heads to build an army of snowmen.

“They’ll be big, sumo-wrestler snowmen,” you said loudly. “And they’ll guard our creek from unwelcome trespassers.”

You said this for the benefit of Susi Peterson, who lived nearby on Toklat Way and was no doubt lurking behind some trees, plotting how to trick us into coming to her house for a tea party, where she’d make me don a dress sewn amateurishly from old flowered sheets and make you tape on a paper mustache, which would slide off your lip every time you tried to take a sip of your over-sugared tea.

“We’ll give them guns,” I said, “and all trespassers will be shot.”

You and I spent a minute pretending to shoot into the trees. I heard a squeal from behind a spruce and knew one of my imaginary bullets had met its mark.

“Go away, Susi!” I yelled. “This is our creek!”

She came out from behind the tree, red-nosed and scowling. “Fine! You can have your creek, Gracie! And I hope you drown in it!” With that, she floundered away through the snow.

You pretended to shoot her in the back.

Then we got to work rolling truck-tire-sized snowballs and piling them on top of each other. Within half an hour the sky had darkened from salmonberry orange to black, and the only light came from the round yellow moon. Between lifting snowballs and squinting, we were exhausted by the time we’d equipped our snowmen with alder branch rifles. We stepped back to admire our handiwork. They were the grandest things we’d created in all our eight years.

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We went to your house for dinner—moose and noodles and Costco green beans around a table crowded with the elbows of your parents and three older siblings. I sat between you and your father, who approved of me even though he didn’t approve of your oldest brother hanging out with my brother Ben. All Ben cared about was basketball—he was a star player at the high school in Seward—and a tall blond girl named Margot who sang in the choir and ran sprints in track. Ben was too material, your father always said. Any man who wanted a chance at survival when the world blew itself up needed to have his priorities straight.

“So what did you young people accomplish today?” your father asked as we ate. He always called the two of us that—young people—and for some reason this made me feel important. He was a tall, thick-haired, clean-shaven man who wore stiff blue pants and a fur coat that made his torso look six times bigger than it was.

“We built four snowman soldiers,” I said. “And I shot down Susi Peterson.”

“Ha!” Your father slapped the table, making milk in all the glasses shake. “Good for you, Gracie. If Gus maintains your acquaintance, he’ll learn to defend himself properly in no time. Isn’t that right, Gus?” You shrugged. Your ears still shone red from the cold, and your nose had started running from eating hot food too fast.

“Eat up,” your father said, spooning more moose and noodles onto my plate. “Keep up your strength, and tomorrow the two of you can train your snowman soldiers into a disciplined army.”

B UT I T T U R N ED OU T that the next day we did no such thing. We waded through the

snow to the creek to find our snowmen massacred. Carnage of smashed snowballs and broken sticks littered the ground.

“It was Susi Peterson,” I said, so angry I could barely see. We’d spent hours shaping those snowmen, and now all that remained to advertise our efforts was a patch of trampled snow.

“It’s all right,” you tried to assure me. “We’ll just build them up again, but stronger this time. If Susi could smash them down, they couldn’t have been that tough anyway.”

“She’ll pay for this,” I said, but you were already piling up a new mound of snow.

We made our snowmen taller this time, and you ran home to fetch your father’s coffee mug while I kicked a boot-sized hole in the ice so we could scoop out creek water and pour it over our creations to freeze into slick armor. If Susi tried to punch one of these new snowmen in the face, she’d only damage her own knuckles.

But these snowmen just weren’t the same as their originals. Their heads turned out lumpy no matter how carefully we rounded them, and the smallest one’s head kept falling off altogether. We couldn’t find any suitable sticks for rifles, so I tried to fashion guns out of snow, but my efforts kept crumbling back into powdery mounds.

“It’s all right,” you said. “They can be kung fu warrior snowmen who beat up their enemies with empty hands.”

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“I suppose,” I said, but I was grouchy now and just wanted to get home, down a mug of hot chocolate, and plot revenge on Susi Peterson.

I T TH AW ED T HAT N IG HT. The whole next day the steady drip-drip-drip of melting

icicles accompanied my household duties. At five o’clock I pulled on my snow gear and ran to the road to meet you as usual.

But the thaw had transformed Upper Trails Court into a ribbon of ice. My first stride flew out from under me and landed me flat on my back. I scrambled back to my feet and surveyed the road for a minute before making up my mind that the best course of action was to half-run, half-surf down the hill as though riding an invisible snowboard, tumbling a few times on the way.

I crashed into you just a few meters above your driveway. You were having a tougher time than me, trying to claw your way up the road with boots and ineffective mittens. Every time you gained ground you immediately slid back to where you’d started.

The collision knocked both of us into the wet snow of the ditch.

“Slowpoke,” I said.

“Speed demon.” You coughed like you always did when you ran or played too hard.

“A cop’s going to pull you over and give you a ticket.”

We both laughed at that. No cop would ever set a speed trap on Upper Trails Court.

Slogging our way to the creek was like slogging through mashed potatoes. Susi had not been at our snowmen, but the elements had—the thaw had melted the previously plump figures into agonized alien shapes and obliterated the frost formations that had once decorated this site. The ice on the creek had thinned and darkened with shadows of the water beneath. A soggy Chinook wind blew clumps of warm snow from spruce branches onto our heads.

“It’s not so pretty now,” I sighed. Playing here today would only soak us through.

“What do we do?” you asked.

We ended up going to Susi’s house for a tea party. Even bitter enemies, after all, can call a truce once in a while.

WI TH IN A M ON T H the snow turned to slush, within another month the slush turned

to mud, and not long after that, baby green buds appeared on the alders and birch trees and the sun practiced staying up for longer and longer intervals until it decided to abolish sleep altogether. We resumed our adventures at the creek, but now we built twiggy rafts and lean-tos instead of snowmen and hopped across from rock to rock instead of crawling on the ice.

Sometimes we sat and dangled our feet in the water and planned what we would do when the world finally ended.

“Just what we always do, I guess,” you said. “Homework and chores and evenings at the creek, and one day high school in Seward. Then Dad says I have to go to college

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Outside—if the Lower Forty-Eight’s still around, that is.”

For some reason this made me grumpy. I flung a fistful of alder leaves into the creek and watched the water churn them up. “Do you want the world to end?”

“Of course not,” you said.

“Well, I do. I hope the whole world blows up—the Lower Forty-Eight and Seward and Susi’s house on Toklat Way—and all that’s left is us on Upper Trails Court so we can go on playing together at the creek forever.”

From there, sensing my cantankerousness, you switched the conversation to an interesting new topic: tall blond Margot had finally agreed to go watch a movie with my brother Ben. I couldn’t see why anyone would want to go anywhere with Ben, whose feet stank worse than bear scat from too many hours stuffed in sweaty basketball shoes. Needless to say, my opinion of Margot had dropped considerably.

“Next thing you know, they’ll be getting married,” I said, shuddering. “I’m never going to get married.”

“Me neither,” you said. You tossed a couple rocks into the water. “But if I had to marry someone, I guess I could marry you. I mean, I’d rather marry you than someone else—Susi, for example.”

I pondered this. “I suppose if you ever had to marry someone, I’d volunteer. I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I let you end up with Susi Peterson.”

But I didn’t worry too much about this. The world would probably blow itself up before we reached marrying age.

Now that the sky never darkened, we extended our evening romps, sometimes not returning home until midnight or later. My parents disapproved of this. They set me an eleven o’clock curfew, but I didn’t own a watch, and with a never-darkening sky, I more often than not failed to meet it.

Your parents, on the other hand, didn’t care how late you stayed out. “Good for you, Gracie, keeping Gus out in the hearty fresh air,” your father said, slapping me on the back. He slapped you too—hard enough to make you double over. “Every hour you spend preparing now could keep you alive a week post-apocalypse.” Your parents always stowed dinner’s leftovers in the fridge for you to microwave when you came home, and I got into the habit of joining you for late-night meals before dashing home to scoldings, bath, and bed.

SUMMER M AT U RED. The creek swelled with snowmelt, then steadied into a robust,

waist-deep flow. Fireweed bloomed in bursts of magenta, berries lined the brush, and dandelion fluff filled the July breeze with counterfeit snow. You and I whacked our way to the creek one evening to find it splashing with salmon—huge, lazy, red-andgreen mottled fish with angry hooked jaws and pale swishing tails.

“Let’s catch them,” you said. “Catch them with our bare hands, then cook them over a fire and eat them. Wait till I tell Dad!” You stooped over the creek and prepared to make a grab.

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But I stopped you short. “These salmon are no good to eat. They’re spawning salmon.”

“Spawning?”

I understood your confusion. Last year’s salmon season seemed a lifetime ago. The only reason I recalled this bit of information was because one morning last summer Ben and I had come together to the creek and caught a bucket-load of fish, hoping Mom would cook them up for dinner, and she had had to explain to us that our harvest was unsuitable to eat.

“The fish are dying,” I explained. “That’s why they have all those spots—because they’re gross inside.”

You grunted in disappointment. Your father always said that if a man wanted to survive the apocalypse, he had to be able to catch his own meat, and I knew you’d been excited to prove you possessed the requisite robustness. We passed another minute or so crouching by the water, poking the fish with sticks to watch them flick tiredly away.

It seemed a shame that they’d traveled so far upstream just to die, and it also seemed a shame that I’d never get another morning fishing with Ben, because now all Ben cared about was basketball and Margot, and even if he did catch an urge to scoop fish out of the water, he’d just turned sixteen and would need to drive to Seward to buy a fishing license first.

You were my only playmate now—unless you counted Susi Peterson, which I didn’t.

When we tired of poking fish, we decided to build a bunker with the pile of cinderblocks left over from the shed your father had constructed a few summers ago.

We grabbed a couple shovels and whacked away at the side of a hill until we’d dug a hollow big enough for the two of us to crouch inside in case our houses blew up in the shockwave of end-of-the-world explosion. Then we started stacking cinderblocks into sturdy walls. But the blocks were so heavy that lifting just one required both our strength combined, so we abandoned the project halfway through.

N O T L ON G A FT ER that I began carrying a notebook with me to the creek and

spending some time each evening documenting the plants I saw: crinkly-leaved alders, Old Man’s Beard draped on scaly spruces, moss and lichen of all shades, fireweed, forget-me-nots, lupin, and star-shaped wild daisies. Later I’d compare my sketches to the photos in Dad’s Wildflowers of Alaska book and record the scientific names and properties of each: where they grew, whether they were good to eat, etc. As I searched for plants, you examined rocks for gold streaks—you’d been reading the poems of Robert Service and had hopes of starting a second Klondike Gold Rush. For a few days Susi watched us through the trees, but eventually she grew bored with spying and left us alone.

One evening, while trying to toast bread atop the woodstove in your kitchen, I showed your father my notebook.

“Impressive work,” he said, flipping through the pages. “Many people assume

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flowers have only aesthetic value. It takes a practical-minded man—or young woman, I should say, in your case—to realize that flowers’ true worth lies in their functionality.”

“I want to be a park ranger when I grow up,” I told him. “That is, if the world doesn’t end first. Either that or an Iditarod musher.”

“Grand aspirations! Survival skills and a mode of transportation will both be crucial in the end times. And what about you, young man?” he asked, turning to you. “What useful vocation do you think you’ll choose?”

You gave this question a lot of thought, chewing your bite of burnt bread with jelly at least a dozen times before swallowing, swigging some milk, and saying, “I think I might like to write poems.”

Your father slammed his hand against the woodstove, singing his pinky and sending my toast toppling to the floor. “A poet! What kind of an occupation is that?”

“I could write poems about the woods,” you said. “The rocks, and the trees, and the way the sun smiles on the creek. Or ballads, like ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’” Your father’s face clouded. My mind flashed back to the time he’d taken the two of us on a seven-mile hike to Crescent Lake on the narrow single-track between Right Mountain and Wrong Mountain—a path he had extolled as highly allegorical. I now got the feeling you’d wandered too far up Wrong Mountain’s slope. “A poet,” he said, shaking his head. “Who would have thought? I suppose you spend all your time outdoors playing instead of preparing, am I right? That’s the problem with rural Alaska—too much nature, not enough urgency.” He gave me a scrutinizing look. “Do you have a well-developed sense of urgency, Gracie?”

“Yes sir,” I said. Then I turned to you. “Is Sam McGee that guy who froze to death?”

He left us to eat in peace after that, but I had the feeling something had changed in the way he saw our friendship—like he’d finally gotten around to looking it over with a magnifying glass and was surprised to learn it wasn’t as shiny as he’d thought.

TH E N EXT N IG HT when you and I went to your house for a midnight meal, we found

your father hunched over the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad, a construction pencil, and an array of maps. He’d rolled his great fur coat up to the elbows, and the way his hair, usually tidy, stood on end advertised that he’d been running his fingers through it for quite some time.

You microwaved a plate of sausages and then led me outside to eat. We swatted at mosquitoes on our arms and legs and smeared spicy reindeer grease all over ourselves in the process. “Dad’s doing calculations,” you said. “He’s been doing them all day.”

And he stayed at them all the next day, and all the day after that. In fact, your father was so engrossed in maps and numbers that he backed out of the moose hunt he’d planned to go on with Dad, and Dad ended up going with Mr. Peterson instead.

Together they brought home a rack as wide as Ben was tall to hang alongside Dad’s sheep head and caribou antlers above our living room window, plus enough meat to fill two families’ freezers with ground meat and smokers with jerky.

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“Your dad hunts with my dad,” Susi said, “so why won’t you have tea parties with me?”

“That’s different,” I protested. I’d just turned nine and didn’t know how to explain that taking down a ton of meat was a whole world away from sipping too-sweet tea from pink plastic cups, and that even when I was old enough to hunt I’d pick you as my partner over Susi Peterson any day. The trees had turned yellow as the low-hanging sun, and Susi crossed her arms and pouted as you and I tried to snatch falling leaves out of the air.

“Look, a giant leaf!” you cried, pointing straight at Susi. Indeed, she resembled an oversized birch leaf with her bright raincoat and red nose.

“Let’s catch it!” I said, and we both ran at her. She shrieked and sprinted away through the trees, and you and I erupted into a celebratory jig.

“Take that, giant leaf!” I yelled at Susi’s back.

“Blow back to where you came from!” you said.

“Who needs tea when we have a creek?” I said, and we both ran back to its edge and gulped as much of the cold, sweet water as our bellies would hold, just to prove how effectively it quenched us.

Then you turned serious. “Dad wants us to move to Massachusetts.”

I was still laughing, face dripping creek water.

“We have cousins there,” you said. “Dad’s new calculations show that we still have a few years till the world blows up, so he wants my siblings and me to see a bit more of it before it’s gone. He says he’s spoiled us, raising us in Moose Pass. He says he wants us to see cities and billboards and misguided masses. He says that’ll teach me that the world’s nothing to write poetry about.”

I’d stopped laughing now. Water continued to drip from my chin and make ripples in the creek. “You’re joking, right?” I said. I didn’t know anything about Massachusetts except that it was far away. You might as well have announced your father’s intention to move your family to Mars.

You started to cry. We sank down side-by-side on a quartz-speckled rock and stared over the heads of the glowing yellow trees at the top of Wrong Mountain, which advertised summer’s demise with a fresh white layer of termination dust.

“When do you go?” I finally asked.

“A week.”

“Maybe you can stay. You can hide in our bunker when they leave, then live with me.”

But you just shook your head. “I can’t. If I were a real survivor I’d run away into the Chugach Range and live off the land, but I can’t. I’m not tough at all. I’d miss my brothers and sister too much, and my mom and dad—” You choked and started crying again.

“But what about me?” I asked. You couldn’t answer through your sobs. I didn’t know what to do besides scoot close and put an arm around your shoulders. We sat like that for a long time while the sun went down.

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I ’ M SUR E W E M ET at five o’clock every evening that next week, but I don’t remember

much of our adventures. Romps along the creek were tainted now by the heavy ticking-down of an invisible clock.

I do remember thinking, in those days before you left, that your father was wrong about the way the world would end. A planet doesn’t just blow itself up all at once with a grand explosion or zap of radiation. Instead snowmen melt, or salmon spawn, or you wake up one morning to discover you’re sixteen and need to buy a fishing license. Best friends move away and leave you to the realization that a creek is just a creek—just melted glacier running over rocks, with nothing magical about it at all—and there’s no longer any excuse to avoid tea parties with Susi Peterson.

“I’ve decided I want to move back to Alaska and be a park ranger with you someday,” you told me as we walked home from the creek for the final time. “If the world’s still around, that is.”

“I hope it is,” I said.

“Me too,” you said. “We can either be park rangers or Iditarod mushers. And let me warn you now, Gracie—if we race in the Iditarod together, I’ll beat you by a week.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said.

Saying goodbye to you was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but the parting wasn’t ugly. I watched you trudge home down Upper Trails Court, your ears red from nippy pre-winter air, leaves swirling around you and mountains looming all around like snowcapped sentries. I fixed the picture in my mind.

It occurred to me then that endings aren't something to hide from in a half-finished bunker. Because as red-and-green mottled salmon and sunsets over yellow leaves and clean termination dust can testify, endings have their own sort of beauty. And as I walked home alone up Upper Trails Court, I decided your father wasn’t just wrong about the way the world would end—he was wrong about the world itself. Sure, some places might have cities and billboards and misguided masses, but here in Moose Pass the way the sun smiles on the creek reminds me of all those evenings we shared, and that is something to write poetry about.

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CA M E R O N AL E X AN D E R L AW R EN CE

Yesterday, As If Swimming Yesterday, as if swimming in the cool brine of dusk, I walked past a hedge of newly-ripe gardenia, found myself suddenly drunk on a touch of wind, sniffing at the downy nape of May. But today, this scattering among the green, white bells erupting from a solemn confetti of leaves, began to crease into their last hours of exhalation.

I welcome my only fate: to continue making room for what can’t stay, running this halfway house of forgetfulness.

Again, I strip the bed of my joy and make it— this hospitality toward impermanence.

I receive the gifts of the world into the house of myself and love them like daughters, stroking their hair until they no longer seem restless.

Year after year, I lay on the floor beside their beds through the night— I try to stay awake as long as I can.

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HA N N A H K R O O NB L AW D

Maundy Thursday in the library

they are dropping bombs

sky clear over my head

on one side of the world a gun

windows blowing out

my lungs

springtime shaking

but the lake falls into the sky they watch the clouds

desert deserted

looking out on a field of flowers

or gone

they said it would not rain

the children the sun pushing down

in the library someone is screaming

will you wash the ashes away

mother

my heart

mother

learning to read they cannot breathe

oh mother where are my feet

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KA S I A C L AR K E

Mangrove Boardwalk Trees stretch until sky breaks over leaves.

We are on another planet entirely.

Beyond every ribcage stark in the mud is another and the light keeps tapping on our shoulders to the very edge of the mangroves.

We have spiraled into the center of the mud, shimmering in the eeriness of being the only lives we can see breathing, though of course the trees of course the mud of course we are breathing.

We are young and following the straight towers down to their bulging arms. The soft helices of your ears, like seashells trapped in the roots, barely visible in the dark.

I cannot forget the catch of blood on your neck and my fingers pulling back, stained red in the rippling sunlight. Under the water a crocodile. We are warned, but the mud with its evenly spaced holes, your kiss quiet—we could make a life here if they’d let us.

All the brightness in this emptiness, ours.

In the chatter of birds, the crab shadows, I am unsure if we will see a third human ever again, but I’ll swear I love you. The sun touches the mud, sees us alive, two bodies of flesh among the skeleton trees.

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artist’s statement J ANET M c K EN ZI E

I H O N O R T HE FEM IN IN E spirit through diverse, sacred, and secular paintings. I

celebrate each one of us—the iconic individual—living out the abstractness of our lifetimes within the sanctuary of the human body.

I give a visual voice to those in community striving together, or alone, often against great odds, often women in transition searching and fighting for racial, religious, and gender acceptance and equality. I also honor those on the exquisitely beautiful, hard journey of motherhood.

I believe that by continually putting strong, empowering art created from experience and awareness—art reflecting inherent human similarities rather than differences—I am contributing to hopeful, positive change. My paintings featured in this issue of Ruminate reflect a way through—to hope and possibility.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Chrysalis Opening. Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40 inches.

Collection of Rev. Kristina Nyberg, Chaplain, Playa Del Rey, CA.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Pieta—the Suffering. Oil on board. 24 x 48 inches.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Our Children—Our Hope for the Future. Oil on canvas. 36 x 48 inches.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Invitation to Hope. Oil on canvas. 36 x 48 inches.

Collection of the State of Vermont, Waterbury, VT.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Elijah hears the still small voice of God. Oil on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.

Collection of Dr. Angela McCarthy, Fremantle, Western Australia.

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JANET M C KENZIE. The Divine Journey—Companions of Love and Hope. Oil on canvas. 54 x 42 inches.

Collection of Memorial Church, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Magna Mater. Oil on canvas. 54 x 32 inches.

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JANET M C KENZIE. Reflections on the Journey (Dr. Janet Moses). Oil on canvas. 48 x 32 inches.

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J E S S E B E RT R O N

Outside the Rothko Chapel, Where Big John’s Eyes Appeared upon the Canvas on the Eastern Wall.

There are fifty crows screaming around the reflecting pool where I have asked these kids to write about the half hour they just spent in silence.

The kids were bored in there, and I will later learn that most of them are writing, “I was bored.”

They did not learn the difference between a museum and a church.

With one, you go to watch.

The other one, you go because you think you’re being watched.

I am watching these kids burn in ways I know I’ll never burn again. My watching is nothing to them.

They long for someone’s watching who they cannot even name.

They long to one day learn they have been living on the inside of a frame.

They long for what is watching them to give some kind of sign.

I spent that whole half hour being half of something I can never hold again.

I know now what they know, to know you’re being watched will never satisfy.

Once you know somebody’s watching, how you long for them to speak to you.

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T O DD D AVI S

Returning to Earth . . . trust in the light that shines through earthly forms. —Czeslaw Milosz

At the bottom of an abandoned well dug more than a century ago the moon rises from the center of the earth, a crust of ice forming around its edges.

The stand of larch outside our bedroom window sways, golden needles stirring the air underneath its boughs.

I open the window to hear the river sailing away, riding the stone boat of the basin carved by spring floods.

Beyond the faint light of a candle, your voice asks if we might touch and remember how our children were made, how the bodies of our parents were returned to earth.

I want our children’s hands to hold the river, to watch it spill through their fingers, back to a source older than our names for God.

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Beneath a waxing moon we’ve witnessed animals dragging their dead into the light.

Tonight we imagine some suckling their young who are born blind in these coldest months.

Soon the river will freeze, and come morning we’ll break the ice in the well so we may drink.

In dark’s shelter I place the words of a prayer upon your tongue.

You are gracious, saying the prayer back into my waiting mouth.

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Mains Hu m W I L L J ON ES

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EVE RY MIN U TE O R S O Bobby England looked up from the road and searched the rearview mirror, trying to catch his daughter’s eye. Maggie was in the seat behind him. She was avoiding his glances by looking out the window, her forehead tipped against the glass as though the weight of her skull wearied her. They had been driving for almost fifteen minutes and Bobby had not found a thing to say. This surprised him, because he had always been good with kids, and Maggie, after all, was still a child. She was eleven years old, still small for her age. Her bad skin was the only sign that she’d started her change. The girl’s mother swore up and down that early blemishes were the surest promise of future comeliness and luster, but to Bobby it seemed remarkable that this pinched, stony face could support such a flourishing of whiteheads and plump rosy wens. In the dark mirror her face in profile appeared to him as the pale crescent of a grim and cratered moon.

It was August, and the windows of the car were sticky and warm, even at nine o’clock when it had been dark for almost an hour.

He was taking her to see a comet. It was the night of its closest passage, and he was taking her to the only place in the county dark enough to appreciate it properly: a high bare hill, a fire tower with wooden steps and a trap door that opened on a dusty room, creaking above the trees. He’d found it years ago while he was still living with Maggie’s mother, PaulaKay, marking pine stands for Bowater paper. He lived in Carthage now, three hours away, and made his living delivering newspapers in the morning and magazines to clinics and offices in the afternoon. He had not seen Maggie in almost two years.

The night was dim, dim—not one for stargazing. But he needed something special to put himself in the proper paternal spirit. And besides, he couldn’t just show up all of a sudden and drag Maggie out into the woods in the middle of the night, not without a good reason. He had read about the comet in the paper, and thought it would do for a good reason.

“It will never be closer,” he had told PaulaKay last week on the telephone. “Not in her life, probably never. It would be a shame to let it pass. A real shame.” He had prepared this little speech carefully, knowing that she’d break him down, eventually.

Make him sweat and wheedle, which was what he was better at anyways. As he spoke, he pictured her wedged between the arms of a kitchen chair, glaring at the muted television, waiting on him to wind things up. They had met when she was thirty; she had worked behind one of the smeared windows at the City of Luminary Electrical Department drive-through, sucking checks in canisters through a pneumatic tube (he had written her notes in the margins of his monthly bill). When they had first married, her slow speech and slight stammer and wide, recoiling eyes had made her seem perplexed and beguiling. But now that he had left her, grievance lent to her a dignity that nature had failed to provide. She had joined a church and

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started selling real-estate. She had grown solemn and daunting, and he had stayed away.

But she had just laughed on the phone. “Well Bobby, I thought we’d run you off,” she had said, chewing something. She had seemed livened, grateful even, at the chance to shuffle through his failures and derelictions after all this time. “Show her the stars, have a big time. Play daddy for a night,” she said. “After all it can’t hurt.

Can’t hurt for her to have a face to go with the name.”

He had come for Maggie at eight forty-five, after her softball practice. PaulaKay had given him their new address. It was one of the first houses in a new development, and it was so big and tan it made him wince. It had three stories, with dormer windows and vague Mediterranean aspirations. It stood alone in the midst of a vast, arid lawn spread with hay and green netting, nestled in a fresh pink bed of cypress mulch. The driveway advanced between rows of Bradford pear saplings held upright with stakes and string, and Maggie was waiting at the end of it in a pool of swarming yellow porch light, glaring out at the car with her chewed and blinking face.

“She sits in the back seat,” PaulaKay had said on the phone. “The little thing would smother in the airbag.”

Now he wished Maggie were sitting up next to him, where he could get a good look at her. He had not cleaned his car in some time, and every time he looked in the mirror he was reminded of things he was ashamed of. His car was filthy, his back seat crammed with old newspapers and hissing trash bags and slippery stacks of periodicals. The upholstery hung down in folds from the ceiling; hemorrhoids of dirty foam bulged through slits in the leather seats. Maggie was wedged between the rubbish and the door, her knees drawn up against her chest. She looked small and impregnable seated amongst the heaped chaos and disarray.

He tried a couple of loud, exploratory coughs to gauge her disposition and listened for any response. After a minute’s silence he decided it was best to start with something safe, something fatherly and venal.

“You know what you want for Christmas yet?”

“Huh?” “I said, ‘What do you want me to buy you for Christmas?’”

“Don’t know,” she said.

“How about some perfume? Every little girl wants perfume.”

Then, grandly, “There’s some samples in one of those magazines back there. Pick out anything you like.”

Maggie gave a loud sigh and turned back out the window. She was doing her best to appear serene and disavowing, unpolluted by the circumstances. This new sort of adult behavior was still rickety and unpracticed, prone to collapse into tearful fits that her mother had learned to provoke and then ignore. But she figured it might be

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worth trying out on him, in case he had any more of these visits planned.

“Boys like a sniff of something sweet,” he continued bravely. “Something to make them scoot a little closer.”

He held the wheel between his knees and lit a green apple cigarillo, the kind with the sugared plastic tip. It was the only kind he could smoke now without retching, and even then, he only pulled into his mouth. He gaped now and then to release a cloud of wet smoke, and it filled the car with a sweet and acrid smell that reminded Maggie of crushed June beetles.

“Your mom let you have a little boyfriend?”

“No.” He sensed an opening. “I had plenty of little sweethearts when I was your age,” he said. “Never saw the harm.”

Maggie squeaked her forehead sharply on the glass and panted twice to fog it, then pressed her lips into the center of the fogged part and scrutinized the shape. She had felt for some time that her upper lip was too big for the bottom and stuck out. Now she had proof.

“I bet you’re sweet on somebody,” he continued. “I know all the signs.” He puffed gamely on the cigarillo as though to make it play a tune. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“I don’t like boys,” she said. Then, “I’m saving myself,” in a tone she hoped he understood. On Sunday, Brother Jerry had separated the girls from the boys and passed around Oreos and milk in Styrofoam cups. He told them to look at how white and clean the milk was, clean as a little girl’s heart. But each time he dunked the Oreo, the milk grayed a little, and after a few times it swam with floating black chunks. Brother Jerry’s red face had crumpled with tenderness, and he said that he’d have done some things different if he had known that was how it was. He would do anything now to be where they were, still innocent, as yet undefiled. It was the most beautiful thing Maggie had ever heard.

“Nothing so bad about us boys,” he said, his voice deepening to the appropriate pitch for admonishment. “No sense in fighting nature.”

Brother Jerry had said that a little girl had only one heart, and it’s the daddy who holds the key. It was girls without daddies who give it up the fastest, he had said. To any boy who came asking for it. In the mirror Maggie caught the corner of a grin and one eye, roving until it fixed on hers.

“A pretty thing like you,” Bobby mumbled. The ember of the cigarette winked at Maggie in the mirror and went out.

He hadn’t told PaulaKay about the fire tower, which was just as well. She had given him two hours with Maggie; any more than that, she said, and she’d call the police to report a kidnapping, her only girl. She’d added that she had a current picture of him on hand, in case the authorities had lost theirs. He spent a week in prison once for

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putting dead rats on her welcome mat while she was at work. His snake had died, and he had them left over in his freezer. She had thought they were gifts from a neighborhood cat at first until he delivered one in a flaming paper bag.

Their turn was just ahead to the left. There was no road sign, and Bobby couldn’t remember the name, but there it was. He stopped dead in the middle of the empty highway and jerked the wheel around, grinning up in the mirror in time to catch Maggie’s flash of alarm. The belly of the car scraped the bank as it slid off the highway. Things would be easier from here.

“Your mom probably told you we were going to the fields at the high school,” he said. He tried to release some of the eagerness in his voice with a high, whinnying yawn. “I bet she did.”

Maggie said nothing. She was wearing a plastic watch on her left wrist, and she fiddled with the knobs to make the hands glow.

“You been back here before?” he said.

“Don’t know.”

“You mean,” he said, his voice warbling a bit with sham consternation, “You mean your mom never took you to the fire tower?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Well,” he said, as if struck with a blow. “Well.”

Then, “That’s where we’re going.” He raised his eyebrows twice in the mirror, as though to let her in on some secret or devilment. She knew enough about boys to know what he would say next. “Don’t tell your mom.”

The road narrowed, turned to gravel, then to packed clay, creased and rutted by recent heavy rain. The rain had swept the gravel into drifts, leaving the red clay bright and raw, and in the bouncing headlights Maggie could see the newly opened veins of rust and chalk, the glittering eyes of quartz sown amongst the gravel.

They were passing through a young forest growing up over a stand of harvested timberland. Loblolly pine, mostly, still growing in their even rows, but also cedar and sumac, filling in the gaps. Except for the young pines, none of the trees were higher than twenty feet, but they seemed to enfold the road almost completely, greedy for light, choking each other for it. Maggie was not afraid of the dark, but here she felt its presence reflexively, as she would the absence of air. She would drown if she were set down in the middle of them, in the middle of all those trees.

Earlier that week, PaulaKay had sat on Maggie’s bed, scrubbing at Maggie’s forehead with baby wipes. The wallpaper, sheets, and curtains of her bedroom had all been chosen by Maggie herself and were the soft, bland pink of raw chicken.

PaulaKay had said to give her face some time. One day, soon, Maggie would go to bed a caterpillar and wake up a butterfly, and then the boys would sit up and notice.

It had happened to PaulaKay, and it would happen to Maggie, and in the meantime, there was nothing for it.

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The track ended abruptly at an iron tube gate, wound shut with a coil of red chain.

The road seemed to continue past the gate, but the headlights showed only a few pale yards of it. “This is it,” Bobby said. “Last stop.” For a moment his face filled the mirror and rolled across it, so that Maggie could observe each feature separately and in succession: the pale lips, the gape of his nostrils, his eyes, mashed to slits by the force of his smile. His smile lingered for a few seconds, glittering hopefully, even after he had cut the engine and the dark poured through the windows like a gas.

He came around to her window, shining down on her a flashlight with a weak blue beam. Under one arm he held a valise of pebbled black plastic. He took her hand to help her out of the car and over the tendrils of a ruined barbed-wire fence.

“It’s a bit of a hike,” he said. “Watch for thorns. I can’t give you back to your mother with bloody legs.”

And there were many thorns, mingled between the strands of soft, high grass, impossible to pick out in the dark. Bobby took slow, ruthless steps, flattening everything down carefully in front of them. Maggie followed close behind. He kept hold of her hand. She tried to pull away, but he gave a squeeze that made her whimper and heel. The night was sweet and rank and smelled as though it had been squeezed from a gland. In the grass to either side she could see blackberries hanging from their canes, swollen and gleaming from the recent rain. It was too dark to see the clouds of insects that rose with each step, but she could feel the husks of wings against her face and bare legs; she could not help but catch gnats when she blinked or when she breathed. There was no breeze and only the slimmest rind of a moon, the color of rancid pork fat, and above the moon, very far, the comet passed in perfect silence.

It was forked like a silver snake’s tongue and left a froth of indigo and ash to float behind it on the dark.

They passed out of the high grass and through a stand of scrub cedar. The track opened up at the edge of a wide, clipped field that sloped up steeply in front of them.

What must have been the fire tower stood at the crest, listing a little to the right, like a buoy on a high gray swell. It was impossible at this distance and in this dark to say how high it was or how far away, but it was surpassed on either side by two latticed transmission pylons supporting swoops of cable over the plateau to Nine Mile from the dam. The comet hung between them as though caught in the wires. Bobby made a sweep at the sky with one open hand and said, “Once-in-a-lifetime. Good thing I brought the telescope.” But Maggie could already see what was there without it: the stars dimmed by pollen and water vapor to tarnished pewter, the scrap of jaundiced moon. The comet, flat and hazy, a smear of watery chalk. She had expected something else, something brighter. She had expected it to be moving.

“You have to go a long ways out if you want it really good and dark,” Bobby said. “A tip for when you get a little boyfriend. A word to the wise.”

The hill was steep, and Bobby struggled some to keep his breath, though Maggie

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couldn’t see much why. He seemed skinny enough, except for a neat paunch, smooth and round as an upturned bowl beneath his t-shirt. But his breathing quickened as they went. It rose with little chirps and squeaks, building into fits of wild, exultant coughing that made him bend over and spit. “Asthma,” he said, bent over. He tapped his chest with the middle finger of his left hand, “The old black lung,” and grinned.

He coughed hard and swallowed several times in quick succession. His Adam’s apple jumped up and down, up and down, in its little nest of veins.

When they reached it, Maggie could see that the fire tower itself stood in the middle of a sagging chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Outside it was a rain barrel trashcan and a three-legged picnic table. The fence itself was all overgrown, dragged at by nets of honeysuckle and snakehead ivy with dark greasy leaves. Just a tin shack on stilts, she thought. On the gate hung a sheet-metal sign, cut to lace by bullet holes. Maggie read aloud: STATE OF TENNESSEE. NO TRESPASSING. CLIMB AT OWN RISK. “Big Brother doesn’t want us to get hurt on his tower,” he said. “Loves us so.”

He gave the gate a shake and found it locked as he had hoped. He pulled a pair of clippers from his back pocket, with blades thick and hooked like a parrot’s beak.

They were pruners, not wire cutters, but he thought they might do. He snapped the blades a couple times at the air and grinned. But when he started on the fence it only shivered and recoiled, even when he used both hands to squeeze. He tried again but the blades were bent and wouldn’t close. He threw them at the fire-tower, aiming at one of the windows, but they nicked off one of the girders and fell harmless in the weeds.

He would have to count on the comet now for the full effect, but the night was dim, dim, and the comet seemed very far away. As he looked it seemed to glimmer and recede, a pale eyeless creature submerging in a black cave pool. It might look different through the telescope, but he doubted it.

He chose a level spot for the telescope directly underneath the power lines, and it took him almost fifteen minutes to set it up in the dark. The pieces were still sealed in cellophane bags that he tore open with his teeth, and he stopped now and then to pick the bits of chewed plastic off his tongue with his thumb and finger. Maggie watched him from the picnic table.

“Why don’t you take the first look,” he said when he was finished. “Would you do us the honor?”

Maggie bent down, squinted into the eyepiece for a second, saw nothing, said “Finished,” and shied away.

“Don’t be scared.”

“I saw it,” she said.

“You didn’t even look at it.”

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“I’m thirsty,” she said, and stood a little to the side. “I want to go home.”

“We’ll go home when you look at it,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.” He took up a fistful of her hair with one hand and cupped the other under her chin and put her head back into position. “There. That’s better,” he said. “Pretty, isn’t it? Real pretty.”

Maggie was shivering. The comet would not hold still. It wriggled and jolted in its dark circle of glass like a worm under the slide of a microscope. She screwed her left eye tight and tried to focus but it only made her right eye water and sting.

The stars in the lens pulled to ribbons and space itself seemed to flex and concave, as though bent backwards by pressure from the surface of her eye. The pulse in her temple twitched against his palm and she felt suddenly breathless, as though he were holding her head beneath a stagnant pond.

Bobby held her face against the eyepiece and watched her with a feeling close to despair. “Maggie,” he said softly. “Maggie,” he tried again, but could not find anything to say.

And at once Maggie became aware that she could hear it. From the comet came an even, metallic drone, like the whirring of a toy motor. So even and so low that she had missed it, at first, but now it was unmistakable. How could that be, all the way from space? No, not like a motor at all, but the hum of a living thing, an insect maybe. A beetle with a hard emerald back and clicking copper joints, a belly the color of an oil slick. Yes, that was what it sounded like. She blinked, held her breath, and looked again.

Her first glance had confirmed her in thinking that the night sky was ordinary and dichromatic, white points set randomly on a flat black plane. She saw now that she was wrong. The comet was translucent across its breadth and curved like the shaft of a feather. It had the mucous sheen of living tissue. She saw that it had two tails instead of one, and the span between them was webbed with light, a silver membrane stretched thin enough to see the faded stars behind it. There was the great dust tail, the single bone white stab of dust and ash that sheltered the colors that died beneath its curve: filaments of nerve-green and coral, twining like the swirl at the center of a marble. But below the dust tail she saw there was another also, much smaller and darker, a spurt of lurid violet, as though crushed from a vein. The two tails met in a single, quill-sharp point of light and vanished, and Maggie felt suddenly cold. The comet once more began to tremble, like foam on the surface of a wave.

(Pathetic, he thought. What could he say to her that would not be pathetic? His desperation was so transparent, his claims on her sympathy so small. Pathetic, this rooting around for sympathy. For an acquittal, even, from this girl he did not know.)

She came up gasping. “Let go,” she said. “I can’t see a thing with you shaking.”

He dropped his hands to his side. “I can hear it,” she said.

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“Come again?”

“The comet,” she said. “I can hear it.”

He snorted, then swept her to the side with the back of his left hand and bent down to look for himself. He looked for a minute, his mouth open slightly, then stood and wiped fiercely at the stinging circle of sweat around his eye with the corner of his t-shirt.

“Don’t you hear it?” Maggie said. She tried to hum it but her voice shook and trailed off.

“It’s a miracle. A miracle of gawd,” he said. He grinned up at the comet as though it were an eye he planned to gouge.

“You know, your mom used to hear things too,” he said. “Before she found Jesus, your mom listened to the stars,” he said. “Did you know that? She found out what they had been saying the night before in the newspaper.”

“The heavens proclaim,” he said. “They proclaimed to her each morning between the funnies and the crossword puzzle.”

“I want to go home,” Maggie said.

“Did she tell you why she married me? It was the stars. The stars told her to take a chance on Cancer.”

“You could say it’s my turn now, to take my chance on Cancer. You could say that,” he said.

“I still hear it.” Maggie said again, softer now.

And Bobby heard it too. But it didn’t come from the comet. It came from the wires overhead. There was a name for the sound, but he’d forgotten it. And that wasn’t what he’d brought her here to talk about.

He turned the flashlight down on her to make sure that she was listening. “I haven’t got a good look at you all night,” he said.

Maggie tried to meet his eye through the beam of the flashlight, and for a moment, he saw her staring up at him with her chewed and blinking face. He felt at once thin and transparent, already a ghost. He had to look away.

“You have what they call, what they call a ravaging complexion,” he hissed.

“Ravaging,” he said again all slow. “Like something’s eating it.”

He left the telescope where it was at the top of the hill along with its black valise.

They didn’t speak on the way back down.

In the car, Maggie looked out the window the whole time, so Bobby only had himself for company in the mirror. He thought about the tumors feeding on his lungs and throat like mushrooms on a rotten piece of wood, and he thought of Maggie, hearing the news of his death and wishing she had paid better attention.

His own father had been listless and remote, a foam cutter for a sofa factory. But at sunsets and trips to the lake he had become a different person: fond and kindly,

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ready with advice. This was the sort of transfiguration Bobby had counted on for himself. And the closer he got to home, the more he thought that the night hadn’t been such a failure after all. He thought that she would remember him, at least. She would remember him as she remembered the comet: marvelous and rare. Cherished, all the more, for never coming again.

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It Is This

C R AI G R EI N B OLD

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I ’ M LU N CHIN G IN T HE breezeway of a local museum with my mom, my two toddler

boys, and their six-year-old cousin, when my mom gets a text, frowns, motions to me that she needs to make a call, and then disappears long enough that the six-year-old suggests going to look for her. When she makes it back to our picnic she turns her phone to me so I can read the text she’d received, from a long-time family friend— Steven shot himself last night. I found his body this morning.

My eighteen-month-old is on my lap, hands caked with hummus, trying to pull my glasses off. No shit is all I can think to say. No shit. * WE G R EW U P T O G ET HER , if not exactly alongside each other. Somewhere between

family and friend. Neighbor? Cousin? All the obvious labels seem a little off. Forty years ago our fathers volunteered with the local fire department. That’s how everyone met, I think. Two families, six kids: we hung out, camped together, holidayed together, sold cars back and forth, helped each other move, celebrated weddings, jobs, the next generation of kids.

After we finished at the museum my mom went home and invited Steven’s brother and his family over. They stayed until ten thirty, playing board games, the kids falling asleep on the couch with Cars 2 burning up the Blu-Ray in the background. My parents: steadfast, welcoming. I wasn’t there, but my mom tells me: We didn’t talk about it. At his brother’s request. He just wanted a night of normal.

Of the six of us kids, Steven was the youngest. He’d just turned thirty. * Y E A R S AG O SOM EON E handed me a photocopy of Marguerite Duras’ “Leek Soup,”

at 415 words a pebble of an essay.

It’s a recipe: It should cook anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes, not two hours . . . better to put the leeks on while the potatoes are boiling . . . two average-sized leeks will do nicely . . . you can serve it either straight or with butter or crème fraîche . . . you can add croutons when the soup is served . . . .

And it’s commentary: You have to make it deliberately and carefully . . . it takes time, years, to discover the flavor of this soup . . . nothing in French cooking can match the simplicity or necessity of leek soup . . . it could only have been invented by a still young woman of the local bourgeoisie, who on that particular night simply couldn’t face the thought of another heavy sauce—and possibly of many other things as well, if only she knew. You can want to do nothing and then decide instead to do this: make leek soup, I mean.

And there’s a slaying last line that—rumor has it—wasn’t included when the piece

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debuted in some long-defunct, forgotten food mag: Between the will to do something and the will to do nothing is a thin, unchanging line: suicide.

There are plenty of angles from which to interpret Duras: the personal, poetical, political, physical, the psychoanalytical, and there’s been a lot said about this particular essay—but I still never got it. I’d been thinking about it for years, and, nothing. . . . That juxtaposition—wtf ? * ST EVE N S HOT HI M S E L F last night. He’d been living with his parents and I hear the house is for sale. He’d shot himself in the backyard and where the blood— correction: where his blood—had pooled, the green had gone gold, and his mother was worried prospective buyers would wonder why that spot of grass had died.

What if she lied and the truth was outed later? Was she obligated to disclose all the facts? Even if they never asked? My own mother was telling me this and I suggested, Just leave it to the realtor. A non-answer for a non-question. Talking around the issue. Steven shot himself last night.

How little can I say and still say something?

Growing up beyond the bus route, I drove myself to school every day from sixteen on, a twenty-minute commute on County Road DE. Curves and hills hemmed by farm fields and beauty strips and at one particular turn a stand of oaks, with one centurion tree edging the road, arms branching out to keep the phalanx behind in check. I would charge that tree at sixty miles per hour, the following curve rated for thirty-five. Headed home after school, in the after-practice gloam, in the dark after work—to turn, or not to turn? That was the question.

It was an option. Something to consider.

I suspect most of us don’t think of this as a decision, per se, but it is. Every day, we decide, even if for most of us the answer has become reflex.

How little can I say about this and still say something?

* STEV EN S HOT HIM S EL F —a week to the day later I see his brother at the annual

camping trip my mother organizes every year. I don’t see him much, but we’re both married and have two kids and own houses and we’re both back in school, mid-life, trying to step up—so it’s always nice when our paths converge.

He pulls me aside and tells me he’d dragged his brother out fishing a couple of weeks earlier and Steven had really opened up, talking about where he was in life, where the two of them had been, where they’d come from. He tells me Steven had gone on and on about the time he and I had taken a canoe out on the backwaters

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of the Mississippi, years earlier, on another camping trip. We’d spent hours chasing bullheads and catfish, staying out well past dark.

Myself, I have no memory of this, which is no surprise. I’m a creature of the present tense. My mother, consulting the “camping journal” she’s kept since we were babies, tells me it was 1999. I would have been seventeen, Steven thirteen, like a little brother.

When I was thirteen, I saw the ocean for the first time. I stood on some rocks along the coast and took my shirt off, and when the waves struck, the sea spray hit my skin and that was it for me. I come from the land of lakes and forests and suddenly there was a real horizon far enough away for the world to seem infinite in a way it hadn’t before. I wrote a little middle-schooler poem about this and carried that poem around with me for years.

My mom was with me that day and I ask if she remembers but of course she doesn’t. Sometimes those moments you don’t even notice are the moments that define the person next to you.

Think about this: Steven wrote a note before he shot himself. A plan was in place.

He’d been out fishing with his brother, giving him that rare gift of openness, and he’d known all along. Imagine that. Imagine all the things we don’t know. The things we don’t know about the people around us. The things you don’t know right now. * DUR AS:

You can want to do nothing and then decide instead to do this // between the will to do something and the will to do nothing // a thin, unchanging line // suicide.

Sometimes I’ve felt I understood this, but only instinctually, without being able to articulate anything. Does that sort of understanding count? The kind you feel but can’t prove? The kind that pushes you to act one way or another, but you struggle to explain why? * TH I S WAS T HE LAST time we really hung out, camping in western Wisconsin:

That’s my wife in the water. I’m rocking the jean shorts. Steven, sitting on the dock.

It was the kind of humid evening when the air is like a glove exactly the shape of your body.

He was working at a gym then, bodybuilding in his time off. Trading one addiction for another, I said. Exactly, he said. And I don’t know what he thought, but I thought, He gets it. He understands. Really, there are few people who do.

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My wife and I crashed early, after dinner, as we tend to. He dropped twenty bucks and rented a rowboat, spent the late hours on the lake, fishing, and who knows. He’d asked if I would join him, but I took a pass. Why? Habit, maybe: tuck in next to my wife, read a bit, sleep, morning coffee. That was my routine, where I found my joy. That’s where I was in life.

Now I wish I’d gone out with him, of course, but, fuck. Who knew this would happen?

That photo is all I have left.

Fuck, man. Just, fuck. * AT TH E M EM OR IA L S ERV IC E his brother jokes that most of the guests will be my

family, or friends my family has brought into their lives, but this turns out to be only half true—the other half are hockey players. Steven had been playing in a league, and a number of his teammates came out.

That aspect of his life remains a mystery to me, as does, I realize, most of his adult life.

I gravitate to a pin board with photos of him as a kid, one photo in particular: middle

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school, that classic soccer pose, taking a knee with a ball in hand. Full head of blond hair sculpted into that mushroom cut popular mid-nineties. Such a familiar face.

Familiar everything.

Another photo: He’s just a baby and his dad, in sweats and a t-shirt, is holding him against a shoulder. It’s early morning, sunlight sneaking past the drapes to silhouette them. I catch his dad and bring him over and say, This is a beautiful photo. I don’t say, Like looking in a mirror. I hug him, this man I’ve known my entire life, and we both cry. * I WAS T HIN K IN G A B OU T that old tree marking that turn on County Road DE, the

one I used to face down every day—You can want to do nothing and then decide instead to do this: make leek soup, I mean—and suddenly BOOM the Duras made sense to me.

Between the will to do something and the will to do nothing is a thin, unchanging line: suicide. It’s a recipe for soup, obviously. And it’s a recipe for living.

You can want to do nothing and decide instead to do something, anything: buy a kayak, or a plane ticket; head to California, or Peru, or Japan; kiss that friend like you’ve been wanting to; quit that joyless job; go back to school; or keep it simple: do the dishes, mop the kitchen, cut the grass—that’s fine, too; make lunch, maybe a kale salad with cranberries and candied walnuts, or, fuck kale, head to the donut shop for coffee and a cruller; or, whatever. The smallest of actions is fine, a gesture really: just turn the wheel.

In every moment: everything and nothing. In every action, too.

Tap the brake, and turn the wheel. * N OW IT ’S T HA N KSG IV IN G and we’re at my parents. They’re behind on their

winterizing, but that’s fine because Fall has stuck around late this year and it’s crazy beautiful outside—forty degrees, sunny with clear skies. My three-year-old and I shovel a yard of fill from the back of my dad’s pickup—rocks and dirt left over from some postholes I dug for a porch last weekend. We wheelbarrow it bit by bit to the tree-line where it will live, maybe, forever. His little plastic shovel breaks. I find him another. That one breaks, too. I get him a metal trowel. Everyone else cleans out the garage, then the shed in the backyard. Run the gas out of the lawnmowers. Put the deck furniture away. When we’re done I join the kids playing tag.

A little poem I’ve been carrying around lately: If there is a heaven And it is a moment It is this.

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* O N TH E D R IV E BACK to the city, where we live, I tell my wife I wish he’d hung on,

just for days like today, so he could have been there—for myself as much as for him, so I could’ve shared that moment with him. She reminds me days like this were probably rare for him.

I maintain there’s always something, some small joy that makes it all worthwhile.

There’s always that morning coffee, I like to say. But of course, jokes aside, I live for my boys, my family—and I know for all the family surrounding him, he was alone.

I just wish we could have shared one more beautiful day before he had to go. Before he had to go. Before he went, I mean. * B UY A KAYA K , OR A plane ticket. . . . What happens when those little deaths, those

small escapes, don’t work? Head to the donut shop for coffee and a cruller. . . . When those everyday joys aren’t enough? We turn the wheel, most of us, everyday—but choosing life doesn’t make living any easier. Surely Duras knew this. What would she say? Surely Steven knew this—but I really have no idea what he knew.

The easy answer—Do something, anything! Just keep moving!—isn’t always so easy. And that centurion tree, marking that turn on County Road DE, that tree will outlive me. . . . a thin unchanging line . . . * TH I S H AS A L L B EEN on my mind a lot lately, obviously. The other night, a dream:

I was in someone’s living room, post-Sunday dinner, packing up the boys and giving goodbyes. Bye Steven, I said, because he was standing there with everyone else. I turned to go but his brother caught my arm. Do you see him? Is he here? I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to ruin it, like when you’re dreaming and you acknowledge you’re dreaming and then it fades away. I turned and left the two of them standing there together.

At times this death seems unbelievably sad to me. The best I can say is at least it’s over for him, the particular pain and suffering that led him to this.

Good, I say. And just awful.

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contributors

is a fifth-generation Texan. He is finishing an MFA in creative writing at Vanderbilt University. He has worked as a carpenter, an actor, and a middle-school teacher. He is co-director of Poetry at Round Top, an annual poetry festival in the Texas hill country.

JESSE B E RTR ON

is a third-year medical student who splits her time between New Orleans and Australia. Her poetry has recently appeared in the Sun and Anchor.

When she is not seeing patients in the hospital, she enjoys learning languages (six so far) and travelling with her husband. Her favorite flower is an iris. She is a practicing Muslim.

KASI A C L A R KE

is a writer and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He was awarded Ruminate's 2015 William Van Dyke Short Story award, and his work has previously appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Permafrost Magazine, and the Ploughshares blog. He enjoys studying history, watching the Cleveland Cavaliers, and hanging out with his wife, Anna, and son, Leo. DOUG C OR NE TT

When TOD D D AVI S is not in the classroom teaching environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College, he’s in the 41,000 acres of game lands to the west of his house along the Allegheny Front, fishing and hunting and taking photographs of wildflowers and animal tracks and the movement of water over stone. He’s the author of five books of poetry, most recently Winterkill and In the Kingdom of the Ditch, both published by Michigan State University Press.

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is a happy-ish Nigerian owl who likes pizza and typewriters. He is co-editor-in-chief of the Ellis Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tinderbox, Wildness, Bateau, and more. He is author of How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press, 2017) and Painted Blue with Saltwater (Indolent Books, 2018). Say hello on Instagram and Twitter @loganfebruary.

L O G A N FEBRU A RY

lives in the Texas hill country.

By day, he writes about the Middle English antics of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims and similar medieval things. By night, he poetries when and where he can. His bewilderment field guide and breviary for Christianity’s queer discontents, With the Dogstar as My Witness, will be published by Orison Books in 2018. He occasionally hangs out with Trappists and frequents the Davis Mountains whenever he can.

J O H N F RY

was born in the Philippines. Her significant experiences as an immigrant and nomadic scholar-artist influence her versatile art practice and critical inquiries. Eloisa’s interest in the natural world, history, art, and literature began at an early age. Because Eloisa considers art making a social and cultural endeavor, she pursues projects that are research intensive and relevant to current issues. She received her MFA from the University of New Mexico. Eloisa lives and works in California.

EL O I S A G U A N L A O

received her MFA from Goddard College. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Thrush, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Her chapbook Amaranthine Hour received CH ERA H A MMO N S

the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award.

Books include Recycled Explosions (Ink Brush Press, 2016) and The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City (Purple Flag Press, 2017). She lives among the yuccas in windy Amarillo, Texas, with her husband, three horses, two dogs, three cats, a donkey, and a rabbit.

tion, and The Way of the Cross: The Path to New Life, a collaboration with Sister Joan Chittister, OSB. In 2013 McKenzie was the William Belden Noble Lecturer at Memorial Church, Harvard University. Her son, Simeon, is the absolute joy of her life, and she currently lives and maintains her studio in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

lives in Dayton, Tennessee, with his wife, Juliet, and daughter, Eleanor.

He works for an apparel manufacturer, writing technical specifications. His specialties are team athletic apparel and high-dollar thermal underwear. He has lived in Dayton all his life, just long enough to have grown fond of it, and he spends his leisure time reading and fretting over not writing enough.

CRA I G REI N BO L D ’s writing has appeared

WI LL JON E S

is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University. A graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sycamore Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. When avoiding coursework, she can be found watching K-dramas and trying out new crockpot recipes.

HANNAH KR OONB L AW D

CAMERON A L E XA NDE R L AW R E NC E’s

in many journals and won Ruminate’s own VanderMey Nonfiction Prize back in 2013, thank you, as always and forever, Brian Doyle. He also recently co-edited, with Ander Monson, How We Speak to One Another: An Essay Daily Reader (Coffee House Press), and currently curates Essay Daily’s series featuring international essayists. Mostly though, he hangs out with his two young boys and works in the ER of a Milwaukee-area hospital. graduated from Wheaton College in 2017 with a BA in English writing and minors in Chinese and studio art. She now coaches cross-country skiing in Anchorage, Alaska. A short story she co-authored with her sister won the Anchorage Daily News Creative Writing Contest in 2013. She spends her free time running, skiing, hiking in the mountains, and, of course, writing.

A N N A T RU J I L L O

poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, Typo, Image, Forklift Ohio, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Shallow Ends, the Florida Review, Whiskey Island, and J EFF W H I T N EY is the author of five elsewhere. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with chapbooks, two of which were co-written his wife and four children. with Philip Schaefer. Recent poems can be found in 32 Poems, Adroit, Booth, Muzzle, Artist JANE T M C KE NZ I E pays homage to Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Verse Daily. the feminine figure through sacred and He lives in Portland and plays soccer secular imagery. Her painting, “Jesus of the whenever possible.

People,” was awarded 1st place in the National Catholic Reporter's "Jesus 2000" J ES S I CA YU A N is a graduate student global competition, which sought a new studying architecture at Harvard. She has image of Christ. McKenzie's books include published poems in Ninth Letter, the Holiness and the Feminine Spirit: The Art of Margins, Blueshift Journal, and various Janet McKenzie, winner of the Award for student publications. She grew up in Spirituality from the Catholic Press Associa- southern California and now lives in Boston.

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last note ON A WAY THR O U G H

The alders had encroached again. Mom pulled Blake from his bike and me from my books and ordered us to clear the drive. We stood at one end of the chokedup lane and pretended to eye our task, but really we eyed each other. Two years apart, but it might as well have been two million miles.

We worked in silence the first hour.

The second, we chatted for distraction.

The third, we dubbed ourselves knights euphoric on our own valor, battling alder dragons that whipped our arms and stung our noses with their crinkly scales’ green scent.

Finally, dragons slain, shoulders stiff, we walked back up the widened drive.

Two years apart, but for that moment side-by-side.

New snow last night and this morning the temperature hovering near zero. I’m more than an hour from any road, on a mountain that inaugurates the Allegheny Front. My oldest son and I are hunting, trying to get healthy meat for the winter.

I trail tracks into thick laurel, hoping to bump deer who have bedded down.

Spidery branches grab my feet, and I stumble awkwardly toward where I think Noah waits. What we cost the earth, the sacrifices it makes for us, is an old story, one with sacred implications. I hear the sound of a large body running, see the shake of dark glossy leaves. Then the report of a rifle. I trust we’ll find a way through to a time of pink blossoms, warmer months when the effort of living comes a bit easier.

AN N A T RU JI LLO, FI C T I ON

TO DD DAV IS, PO ETRY

During summers when I was a little girl my grandmother often waited for me early in the morning hours with freshly picked strawberries. The time was just for us, alone, in our “summer house”—her Swedish name for our screened porch. She became ill years later, and along with my beautiful father, we cared for her. Esther Anderson, my grandmother, a timeless and inspirational force behind my art, was invariably, softly present for me. She led by example just how to live a life with courage and grace.

My poems in this issue navigate uncertain events and natures, particularly those where memory is unreliable. Each time, it is with a new conceit. Perhaps the self as victim, or as villain, or as observer. In the poem, “Right Flower, Wrong Grave,” Sonya Vatomsky writes: “nobody gives you trouble for processing trauma like a psychopath. I’ve been cannibalizing my sorrows for weeks.” This is the bliss of getting to tell the story. As many times as I want to. In this, a way is made through the dark, into a brighter understanding of myself.

JAN ET M c KE NZ I E , VI S U A L A RT

LO G A N FEB R U A RY, PO ETRY

87

last note ON A WAY THR O U G H

At the end of the suburban block that I grew up on, there was a secret path that led through a thin patch of woods from our cul-de-sac to the one behind us. We kids knew about this secret path, and we knew to only feed ourselves to it during the in-between moments when nobody was looking. There was nothing special about that other cul-de-sac, but we liked the feeling of cutting through the invisible walls of our suburban maze.

One day, a group of us slid into the path only to find that it had been cleared of debris, freshly mulched, and christened with a hand-carved sign that welcomed our passage. We never set foot in it again.

When my buddy and I walked the Camino de Santiago, we passed the time by memorizing stuff together: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the first song that Robin Williams sings as the genie in Aladdin. We practiced our posture, and we practiced our Spanish. We walked with strangers. We told jokes. We drank too much, too early in the day. We drank nothing but water. We made resolutions to do better, to be better. We pretty much stayed the same. At the end of a month, we’d walked five hundred miles. Nothing happened to us, except the time, and the distance, and that where we were, we went there together.

D OUG C ORNE T T, FI C T I ON

J ESSE B ERTR O N, PO ETRY

88

JANET M C KENZIE. The Beautiful Journey. Oil on canvas. 48 x 36 inches.

Collection of Baron and Baroness van Lynden, Kasteel Keppel, Netherlands.