Stork Magazine Issue 32 (Spring 2022)

STORK Spring 2022 ISSUE • VOLUME 32

Stork Magazine is a fiction journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College. Initial submissions are workshopped and discussed with the authors, and stories are accepted based on the quality of the author’s revisions. The process is designed to guide writers through rewriting and provide authors and staff members editorial support and an understanding of the editorial and publishing process. Stork is founded on the idea of communication between writers and editors— not a simple letter of rejection or acceptance.

We accept submissions from undergraduate and graduate Emerson students in any department. Work may be submitted at stork.submittable.com during specific submission periods. Stories should be in 12-point type, double-spaced, and must not exceed 4 pages for the flash fiction issue. Authors retain all rights upon publication.

For questions about submissions, email storkstory@ gmail.com Stork accepts staff applications at the beginning of each fall semester. We are looking for undergraduate students who are well-read in contemporary fiction and have a good understanding of the short story form.

Copyright © 2022 Stork Magazine Cover design by Jacob Martinez Cover illustration by John Newton Illustrations by Katherine Fitzhugh and Hannah Meyers Typesetting by Eden Ornstein, Jacob Martinez, and Aubrey McConnell

MASTHEAD Editors-in-Chief Taylor McGowan John Newton

Managing Editors Hannah Meyers Nina Powers

Head Designer Eden Ornstein

Design Team

Jacob Martinez Aubrey McConnell Katherine Fitzhugh Tiffany Chung

Head Copy Editor Anna Carson

Copy Editors Ella Maoz Maggie Lu Chris Chin

Prose Editors

Michelle Moroses Kate Rispoli Cindy Tran Sage Liebowitz

Staff Readers Izzy Desmarais Gabriel Borges Faith Guanga Charlize Triozzi Abby Love Ryan Forgosh Sam Kostakis Sara Fergang Ruth Fishman Georgia Howe

Social Media Manager Anansya Latka

Staff Advisor Stephen Shane

Letter from the Editors Here at Stork Magazine, we pride ourselves on publishing some of the best fiction works that Emerson’s student body has to offer, and it is an honor and a privilege to showcase the eight wonderful stories contained within these pages.

However, there is far more to Stork than the completed magazine that we place in readers’ hands at the end of every semester. Our goal is to serve as an incubator—not just for our talented authors, but for every single student on our roster. Aspiring editors get to evaluate literature in a collaborative setting and share their thoughts and suggestions with the writers; aspiring authors get to practice revising their pieces based on our detailed feedback; aspiring designers get to try their hand at creating a magazine from scratch, from the cover art to the typesetting. In our meetings, members of the next generation of publishing professionals get to hone

their skills in an environment where there are no grades and no wrong answers.

We are deeply grateful to our authors and staff, who all made the choice to dedicate hours of their precious extracurricular time to cultivating both their talents and their peers’—a choice that is especially meaningful in a time when it sometimes seems as if exhaustion and burnout are not just feelings, but states of being. We are also deeply grateful to you, our readers, for taking a few moments to appreciate your classmates’ efforts and escape into the worlds they have created for you. That, too, is an especially meaningful choice, and we do not take it for granted.

Weave between the nights and days depicted here in eight lovely works of flash fiction. Experience two haunting highways. Converse with the holy and the mundane. Peer into a mysterious pit.

Stroll through lush gardens and sunburnt fields, and find yourself through the past. As you set out upon this voyage, we hope you enjoy the experience as much as we’ve enjoyed preparing it for you. So turn the page—the thirty-second edition of Stork awaits.

Taylor McGowan & John Newton

Editors-in-Chief

Spring 2022

CONTENTS 14 20 26 32

Ghost Outside the Truck Stop off I-95

By Jay Townsend Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

I-83

By Zoe Leonard Illustration by Hannah Meyers

Neon Jesus Over 7th Street

By NB Nightingale Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

Blue Diner

By Michelle Moroses Illustration by Hannah Meyers

CONTENTS CONT. 40 48

Joan, Existing in the Hours of Daisies and Sunflowers

By Tanya Cliff Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

The Pit in Jesse Pickett's Backyard

By Lark Rodenbush Illustration by Hannah Meyers

56

Sunkissed

By Jacob A.L. Martinez Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

60

Paper Keys

By Karina Jha Illustration by Hannah Meyers

Ghost Outside the Truck Stop off I-95

by Jay Townsend Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

D

ead armadillo in the single-stall restroom at the truck stop off I-95. Dragged there, maybe, by some weirdo. Big chunk out of its middle flattened like someone hit it with their car. Flies sitting on the exposed flesh. No leakage on the dirty, dark-gray tile floor. Gonna be a real fucking hassle for the janitors.

Real fucking hassle for me right now because I don’t think I can use this bathroom with that dead thing’s eyes staring up at me. There’s a nice big park outside but I’m not going there. Feels wrong to go out there in broad daylight and it’s hot out there anyway. Though it doesn’t smell like a dead armadillo.

Could save me and the janitor both some trouble by picking it up and tossing it into the bushes outside but I’m pretty shy about touching dead things for reasons that should be obvious and it’s not like the smell would go away if I moved the corpse.

15

Might as well. There’s a sink right here and I can probably prop the door open with my foot while I fling the thing outta range of the gray cement sidewalk ringing the squat tan building that is this restroom, so nobody sneaks in while I’m doing my Good Samaritan dead-animal-disposal routine.

Thing feels gross in my hands, warmer and heavier than I’d like, and the flies all buzz away from the body and into my face. I sputter and give them a good cursing and slam the ball of my foot into the door, then realize I forgot to unlock it. So I unlock it with my free hand and then I kick the door open and throw the body like a frisbee towards the green. It lands in some bushes and comes apart a little, spinning like that, leaving a couple bits of itself behind on the sidewalk. At least it’s out of the bathroom now. I turn around and lock the door with my non-armadillo-corpse-touching hand and do my business and when I open the door again, there’s a man standing there. Tough-looking guy, at least a few inches on me, though that’s no achievement seeing as I’m pretty Irish and we’re not known for our height.

But he’s strange because I can see some odd, glittering scales around his eyes, the same russet as the armadillo’s, and he’s bald and wearing a full suit and a bowler hat. That’s no real way to dress, not this time of year, but he’s not sweating. He 16

looks at me, smiles, and tips his hat and says hey, would you mind burying me?

I’m not one for superstition so I say, I’m not really into burying folks alive, thanks, and he says, oh, no, I’m dead, you just threw me into the bushes over there and would you please finish the job? You seem like an alright sort.

I ask him if that means he’s the armadillo’s ghost, and he says yessir. I ask why he’s a man, then, and he says he looks like a man to me and I look like an armadillo to him and that it probably has some cosmic meaning but he is uninterested in cosmic meaning and just wants to get buried.

I don’t see the point in arguing, or in asking too many questions, so I sigh and walk over to the bushes and fish out the corpse. Hold it twohanded this time, taking it ’round to the back of the truck stop where there’s a bit of mulch that’ll be easier to dig up than the grass. Grass in this part of the state is always just some big interconnected mess: pull up one blade and it’ll turn out it’s connected by the roots to fifteen other ones.

Used to pull them up as a kid, see how far it’d go, get yelled at for tearing up the yard.

I make a nice, shallow grave and lay the armadillo corpse in it and lean over the stinking mulch and say, go to Heaven, I guess, if that’s real.

I turn and the ghost is still standing there and he says, you were supposed to put flowers on my 17

grave.

I say I don’t have flowers, and he says, if you don’t put flowers down, I’ll haunt you, and I say, you know what, I’d like some company on the road, anyway. Go ahead and haunt me.

Fine, I will, he says, and when I get back in my car he climbs in too and he asks where we’re going. I say, we’re going to North Carolina, and he says, I’ve never been but I don’t like the sound of it. I say, then stop haunting me, and he says, I will, and disappears. And by the time I turn onto the highway I’m wishing he kept haunting me, because he didn’t seem half bad. I guess I could’ve at least asked him what happens when you die.

But it’s too late now. I hope he can find someone else to give him flowers.

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19

I-83

by Zoe Leonard Illustration by Hannah Meyers

Y

ou drive me forty minutes out of town to get to the bookstore I remember from when I was thirteen. That’s where I bought a book called Best American Poets—the one I lent to you the first week we were together. On the way there, one of our tail lights goes out and we get pulled over on the side of the freeway. I start crying because there is weed and a pipe in the center console, and we have both been smoking. You tell me to calm down, just calm down, as the officer approaches and grab my sweaty hand with your sweaty hands.

You ask me to look at you.

You, with your hair bleached yellow with dark roots growing in. You, with that scar on your chin from where the dog bit you. You, with your lips that feel like silken flowers. My angel, I have never 21

seen you so scared. Your dark eyes are swimming, searching for something in mine. A promise? A kiss? Reassurance? I don’t have it—my eyes are red and leaking. Yours are red from being high.

You crack open the window for the police officer and I look out my side of the car, the other way, to hide my face. The ten feet of grass between me and the concrete noise barrier are as thick as a jungle. Kudzu hangs down and cloaks a nearby tree in a ghillie suit. Its hand stretches out to a metal door in the wall. Those little specks of blue in the grass could be chicory. I flinch when you reach past me for the registration. Your hands are shaking as you look for it. I can smell your sweat.

I pick up a loose sheet of paper that falls to the floor next to a beer can, which I slide under the seat. She takes your things.

We will go to jail and never finish high school. We will never go to college. Or you will go to jail, and I will have to wait for you. I imagine the officer pointing a gun at you. I imagine you being led away in handcuffs. What if my mother demands that I leave you and tells me she was right all along? What if I can’t survive without you? What if I disobey her again?

Before I met you, I thought that I wanted to die. In school, the grief would bubble over my head and just pop, or my heart would shrivel up and stop pumping blood. Then I saw you for the 22

first time, looking at me through a gap in the library bookshelves. When you asked me my name I just whispered, making you come over to ask again. When you first touched my hand, I was stunned—it was like someone had turned the lights back on. I adjusted to the radiance and could see clearly—more than clearly. Like a seeress foresees catastrophe, I could see the future.

Ours is living. There is a little house somewhere west where you and I sleep in the same bed. There is a garden where we plant tomatoes and wait for them to grow in the summer. But is this crystal ball a bauble cast by a fisherman into the blue?

Am I about to be yanked by a hook and left gasping for breath? I look out the car window again.

I wonder if that door in the wall leads to a place just as dense as this. Behind it there are woods where the fingers of giants stretch out into a canopy that shelters us from the sun. I could lead you. We’d open the door and follow a deer trail down the hill, concealed by brush, untraceable.

We could leave the car—it’s a beater anyway— and go hide for a while. We’d throw our phones in a river so our parents couldn’t find us. We could sleep in the woods, in a leaf pile, with our bodies pressed together, my back to your stomach, your head in the crook of my shoulder. On the way here we passed a raspberry bush, fruiting, and in the forest, the fields stretch far enough to subdue 23

our hunger if we pretend we are small, like rabbits.

I wouldn’t mind not going back if it was us, together. I’d cut my hair, and we could dye yours another color—silvery gray or dusky auburn.

Take out cash, then bury our wallets in the woods. Emerge again at this spot on the freeway, wave down a trucker to take us north, far north, where it’s dark most of the time and we can see the aurora borealis. We’ll build a house there and grow tomatoes in the summer.

She gives you back your things and tells us to be careful.

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Neon Jesus Over Seventh Street

by NB Nightingale Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

N

eon Jesus flickered in the rain, delivering temporary reprieve from the Holy Ghost.

He’d only disappear for half a second at a time, if that, giving that pre-hope feeling that his tyrannical reign over Seventh Street might be over until he came right back. His arms stretched out along the front of the Trinity 24-Hour Church for the Repentant in what was meant to be a loving, all-encompassing gesture. Something to really guilt-trip every wretch on the block, ruining the locals’ sleep and making everyone vaguely sad.

The supplicant, who often found himself huddled in the alley next to the church, was one such affected sleeper. Exhaust from the church furnace made him feel a little less like a discarded thing, and the reverend was the property owner who called the cops on him the least, so that was a 27

fair exchange for the ruined sleep. But still, Neon Jesus was a point of ill-ease. His smug glow could still be felt around the corner from where the supplicant lay. Even as the leaden shower beat down on his head, the supplicant could see the damned electrified prophet’s insincere smile burned into his mind.

Emerging from his pile of rags, the supplicant went to get a better look at Neon Jesus, attempting to drink in the light of his chartreuse foe as he had many times before. He stumbled from his alley into the middle of the street. Cars were not a hazard: even at the best of times, this road was a ghost town. The wind was picking up and a chill went through the supplicant’s bones. Towering above his head was the Holy Bastard, draped in the outline of decadent robes. He looked down at his hole-filled jacket and his jeans, which were held together by duct tape that was already starting to peel. Neon Jesus wore sandals, but the supplicant had no such luxury. Luckily, his hard-calloused feet barely felt the rough city ground anymore. Neon Jesus had so much while he had so little, and it was a fucking two-dimensional sign.

The wind refused to let up. In the back of his mind somewhere, the supplicant remembered cops chatting about a tropical storm after pulling him off of a park bench. Anyone else who 28

could be found on Seventh Street had made their way to refuge at this point, but a safe place to stay wasn’t enough for the supplicant. Not anymore.

He looked Neon Jesus in the eye and whispered, “Do your job. Protect me.”

Rain was coming in sideways, hitting so hard that each drop felt like a tiny needle in the supplicant’s face. The wind created a deafening whistle as it funneled through the streets. The supplicant remained firmly planted. Keeping his eyes open stung as water kept splattering into them, but he thought he could see Neon Jesus wobbling. The idea seemed impossible. In spite of all his theatrics, the supplicant knew it was just a sign and not a living thing. But still, images flashed in his mind of a glowing hand reaching down and wrapping around his body. He imagined himself feeling warm and safe, the promise of Neon Jesus’s embrace finally realized.

A sharp twang rang out louder than the storm as somewhere above him metal snapped.

The sign fell before the supplicant’s feet, transforming into a cloud of sparks and glass shards.

He felt something cut his left cheek. Before him lay Neon Jesus’s face, deprived of electricity and looking rather dull for it. The savior was no more.

As the supplicant stood among the ruins, he saw windows light up all along the street. Rubbernecking neighbors were peeking out to see 29

the destruction. Finding only a dirty old man and some broken glass, the windows soon went dark again. The supplicant shuffled back into the alley.

The rain was letting up. He sank back into his pile of rags, as if nothing at all had happened, content and finally able to get some shut-eye.

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Blue Diner

I

by Michelle Moroses Illustration by Hannah Meyers

t’s between a frothy milkshake (swirled with strawberries and topped with whipped cream, with the little metal canister of extra milkshake on the side) and a plastic basket of french fries (crispy, somehow longer than any actual potato I’ve ever seen) that the light that has been flickering off and on for half an hour comes back on at full blast and shines on your face. It beams down onto us, and I notice for the first time that you have a mole on your forehead. From then on it distracts me the entire time you’re talking, and I don’t catch a word you say except for snatched-up bits here and there, skimmed right off the top, like fat from milk: your sister’s a narcissistic bitch, and Christian in homeroom smiled at you in the hall, and you hate your dad ‘cause he’s always yelling for no reason, and my sweater is cute, in a stolenfrom-your-grandpa type of way.

“Really cute,” you say, pulling at my sleeve, throwing me a smile.

33

I say, “You’re cute,” in response, and you snort into your straw before sucking down a long line of pink foam. It’s 2 a.m., and the diner is empty except for us and the tired waitress with her hair in a messy bun and bags under her eyes.

“Are you sure? Look at my face. Look, look at it.” You grab my chin, forcing us eye-to-eye, an inch apart. “I’m having stress breakouts.” You tilt your head so I can see the lines of angry red dots pricked up like bug bites along the underside of your chin. After two seconds of me staring in captivation, you push my lips together so they’re puckered like a fish’s and I nearly fall off the plushy, cherry-colored barstool in my attempt to get away. You laugh as I grab the counter for balance, grin as I glare. There are a few moments of silence as I decide whether or not to spit in your face, and then you point at my fries: “You gonna eat the rest of those?”

Later, sitting shotgun in your mom’s hatchback, I have no idea how to tell you that you absolutely cannot drop me off at home right now, because I will die if you do. There’s a car in the driveway that I’d really rather not be there, but time and again it is. You said earlier that I’ve been acting weird lately. I could tell you everything— tell you all about the man my mother keeps bringing home, the oddly provocative things he says to me, how I hate his eyes on me, how I hide in 34

my room until he’s gone. There’s nothing I can do about it, so can you just keep me here with you?

Did you tell me about the guy you made out with in the back seat the other week? The tall, sandy-haired one who plays lacrosse for Midtown Regional, how he seemed cool for half a second but then he asked to see your naked feet and things got really weird really fast, so you blocked his number? You must have. It must have slipped my mind. How could I forget something like that?

The streets fly by as you drive, and the two of us are silent. We used to talk a lot about going away somewhere together. We could travel for a long time, you and I; we’d go all over.

Nowhere in particular, but I do have some ideas.

The world’s tallest thermometer is located in Baker, California. There’s a hotel shaped like a potato in Boise, Idaho. The world’s largest boot is somewhere in Minnesota. But there’s nothing wrong with staying put either, I suppose. New Jersey was listed as the diner capital of the world in my brother’s copy of Guinness World Records.

We could just stay here.

But we don’t talk about that kind of stuff anymore. The clock strikes eleven and you drive us to the harbor and we sit there together, legs dangling off the edge of the dock, just close enough to the water for us to brush our toes against the 35

surface.

“I bet Trevor wishes he could see this,” I joke.

You cock your head. “Who?” I frown. “Trevor? Tyler? You said his name before. Feet dude.”

“Oh,” you say, nodding. “Travis.”

“Ah,” I reply. You check your phone for the time, look back to where the car is parked. You’re always so transient. How do I get you to stay here? I draw my foot sharply through the water, splashing up dirty harbor slush all over your pajama pants.

I’m expecting a shout, a war cry, a “fuck you,” but instead you just wince a little bit, narrow your eyes at me. “Cold.”

I grimace. “Sorry.”

“You know how much pollution there is in there? And, like, dead fish and stuff?”

“No.” You suck in a breath. “Me neither.”

The mole on your forehead is hard to see in the dark, but I’m still looking at it. I’ve been focused on it this entire time. I should point it out to you, just so you know where I stand.

“I wanna jump in,” I tell you. “I wanna go. I wanna go for a swim.”

And in a parallel universe, the farthest one from my own, you grin and say, “Yeah. Me too.”

And I let you pull my ugly grandpa sweater off 36

of me, and I take off your pajama pants, and we dive in. We let the freezing, murky water close over our heads, and we sink down deep like there are rocks in our pockets, and at the very bottom we open our eyes and see each other the way we always have: clouded, filthy, surrounded by trash.

We’d die next week of cholera, but we could make it one holy hell of a week. We’d go from here to the largest collection of brains in jars in Connecticut, and then to the largest ball of twine in Kansas, and then to the Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada. Maybe we’d die in California, and they could take our temperatures with the big thermometer. Are we dying? Yup, we’re dying. A thermometer that big doesn’t lie. Or maybe we’d make it back to Jersey, to Blue Diner, and have watered-down coffee and burnt scrambled eggs for our last meal before succumbing to typhus or whatever ancient disease is still carried by the floating bodies of deceased guppies in this moonlit cesspool. We’d go, exhausted and withered down to our roots, because that’s the only state in which we find each other whole.

Listen. It’s not like I think about us dying together all the time. I wouldn’t be thinking about it at all if not for something you said to me last week, something about wanting to jump off the dock. Maybe to feel the rush of cold or to emerge, soaking wet and foreign, to see the late-night 37

couples walking on the shoreline, but your implication was something worse. I saw you trapped there forever, encased in that unclean fishbowl with your limbs suspended in the water, sinking, perhaps, the ocean beneath you resembling a bottomless pit.

“Let’s go swim,” I say louder, pulling at your hand. But you just shake your head. Your phone lights up and I catch the name that caused it: Brendan, whom I know from Intro to Psychology.

He’s funny and does theater but isn’t gay and is friends with your brother, so you know he drives a Mitsubishi.

“Sorry, man,” you say, shutting the phone off and standing up. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’m gonna go home.”

Okay. You pull into my driveway ten minutes later and I thought it would feel horrible to see his car there, but I’m only sort of numb.

“Tell Nick I said to go fuck himself,” you say as I unclick my seatbelt, and I could hate you forever for the fear seated deep in my stomach that you just reminded me of, fear that he’ll be in the kitchen when I walk in, and that this time you won’t be there to come pick me up when things go pear-shaped. All I can think is that I wouldn’t do this to you. If it was your dark house, your creaking floorboards and your absent mother and your strangers that let themselves in through the 38

back door, then I would never let you go back in there. Not for Brendan, not for the continental United States, not for the world.

“I wish,” I say, but I don’t tell you what.

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40

Joan, Existing in the Hours of Daisies and Sunflowers

by Tanya Cliff Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh Five

When Joan is five years old, Grandpa Joe leads her outside to his garden, where the sunflowers stand tall and bend at the top like gentlemen nodding. Even on her tiptoes, arm stretched to the sky, she cannot touch their faces. Grandpa Joe hands one to her. She cradles it in her arms like a baby. The petals remind her of the silky edge of her blanket.

Joan and Grandpa Joe hide in the garden rows between the tomato plants, avoiding a sink full of dirty dishes and an overgrown lawn. Grandpa Joe gives her a cherry tomato, deep red and warm from the morning sun. She dislikes tomatoes and asks if he has any carrots.

“The only carrots I ever grew were the stringy ones that came out the top of my head,” he says.

His hair is white, soft, and wispy, leaving her as the 41

last in their family with auburn locks. Grandpa Joe wipes tomato pulp off his chin and grins when they hear Granny calling. Joan pinches her nose and pops the fruit in her mouth, expecting to gag.

Instead, sweet juices explode on her tongue.

Once home, she hangs the sunflower to dry on the headboard of her bed. Years later, Joan slips one of its paper-thin petals into her wedding bouquet.

Twenty-nine

The depth of love Joan feels frightens her.

While she weeds the pea and cucumber patches, her young daughter Ava dances and sings in the flower bed, sticking daisy petals in her pockets and hair. She skips over to the tomato vines, where Joan discovers her stuffing sour green fruits into her mouth like candy. She explains that the tomatoes aren’t ripe until they turn red. Ava, always quick to share, offers her one, calling it “yummy.”

Humoring her daughter, Joan pops the fruit in her mouth and pretends to like it, thinking she will spit it out after Ava runs back to the flowers. But Ava isn’t so easily satisfied, and, unwilling to spoil the heartwarming illusion, Joan swallows and smiles. As Ava dances away, laughing, heaven kisses Joan’s earth through her child’s bare toes.

All her life, Ava favors unripe tomatoes and gardens with daisies. Joan fills her backyard with many varieties of that flower—in beds and in containers on the deck, along paths, and around 42

her vegetable patch—anywhere she can make them grow. Joan wins awards for her flowers and saves the ribbons and newspaper clippings in a box next to Grandpa Joe’s trowel.

Fifty-four

Excited, Ava calls to say, “It’s time, Mom! The baby’s coming!”

Ava, who is in pain and has dilated to five centimeters, says, “Hurry.” Joan rushes downtown toward the hospital with fresh-cut daisies bouncing on the seat next to her. Is she going to be Grandma or Nana? Certainly not Granny.

She laughs out loud. Laughs until the accident-clogged traffic slows her, and her empty gas tank forces her to fuel up. Not wanting Ava to worry, she calls the hospital from the gas station pay phone. Instead of Ava, the front desk connects her to a nurse from surgery. Surgery? Did she hear that right? Upon hearing the words “emergency C-section,” Joan leaves the phone dangling and drives, speeding through red lights, her heart racing.

She abandons her car outside of the ER and forgets her flowers, crying out for Ava as she runs.

A doctor meets her in a sterile room, and words vibrate off the cold walls: fetal distress, emergency C-section, brain aneurysm. The doctors are sorry; the baby survived, but there was nothing they could do for Ava. 43

A few days later, Joan scatters daisies over her daughter’s casket and weeps. When she returns home, she pulls all the flowers from her pots, discarding the begonias and bright pink camellias, leaving only the dark dirt. For weeks she tills every inch of her lush garden, madly digging and raking until her hands blister and bleed and nothing remains but the barren soil.

In a year, Oliver says his first word: “Gan-ny.” He loves Joan like a mother. He has silky red hair and a kind spirit. When he turns five, he helps her start a new garden. While he digs holes, she plants the flowers. Instead of rows, he tills in squiggles and crisscrosses that make Joan laugh.

Eighty-four

“What are these, Granny?”

Joan leads her great-granddaughter Daisy, who is five years old, into her garden. It is a place they wander frequently, yet Daisy always finds something new.

“These little flowers? Bellium, fairy garden daisies. I planted them last fall.”

The discs of the small flowers beam up from the patch like endless suns or smiles. Sometimes Joan imagines them as the faces of a million watches, counting minutes in pollen and seeds. Joan picks a handful and places them in the child’s strawberry-blonde curls; she tells the 44

story of Queen Ava, who visits the garden every year after the snow melts, spreads seeds with her laughter, grows plants with her tears, and sings and dances among the blooms in warm summer winds.

Ten years later, Oliver looks through the house for Joan. If they hurry, they will still have time for dinner before Daisy’s high school production of The Sound of Music. Since Daisy won the role of Maria, Joan has talked of little else.

Oliver calls out repeatedly and worries because Joan fell twice last month. She promised to use her walker, but it’s sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor with damp towels drying on it like a clothesline. Fearing the silence, he heads out to the garden. He discovers Joan lying in the flower bed in her new dress, freshly cut flowers scattered near her. He calls 911.

An hour later, they cover Joan’s body and take it away. Oliver lingers and remembers digging holes, jagged rows, and Granny’s laughter. Twilight deepens, turning the garden’s pale petals to ash. He weeps as he gathers Joan’s cut flowers— her final bouquet. If he doesn’t leave soon, he will miss Daisy’s performance. A soft breeze seems to respond, kissing the tears from his cheeks and urging him on.

Oliver holds the cut flowers—pink camellias and begonias—for Daisy through both acts of the 45

musical, their petals trembling as he chokes back tears.

A few days after the funeral, Oliver and Daisy find Grandpa Joe’s old trowel and collect the clumps of daylilies waiting in Joan’s wheelbarrow.

Daisy tells Oliver the story of Queen Ava as they dig holes in the moist soil and plant the flowers in a crooked line.

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The Pit in Jesse Pickett’s Backyard

by Lark Rodenbush Illustration by Hannah Meyers

O

ur Jesse Pickett, he would write letters, seal them up in old containers, and throw them down there. But he ain’t never heard the thud of them hitting the bottom. We didn’t know how it worked, exactly. It looked like one of those sinkholes that you’d see on the television every so often, the way it just dropped straight down in the middle of Our Jesse’s backyard without tearing up the dirt around it. He could see through to the other side if he squinted, but he could only really make out the faint blue of the sky. But when he went and dropped a canister down there, he got himself a response a couple hours later.

He used old soup cans, broken thermoses, and PVC pipes with those little plastic end caps glued on—anything that would keep his letters safe. At first, he did the polite thing and exchanged pleasantries with whoever lived on the other side—hi, hello, how y’all doing over there?—y’know, things like that. He introduced himself to the stranger— my name is Jesse Pickett. Can I get yours?—and, 49

well, he got back the damndest answer.

You see, the guy on the other side? His name also happened to be Jesse Pickett. And he also lived in Laredo, Texas. He also drove that old Chevy pickup that his dad had helped him fix up all those years ago. He also worked as a janitor down at Memorial Middle School, and he was also the kids’ favorite janitor. See, Our Jesse and the Other Jesse? They were the same damn guy, down to the dirt underneath their fingernails. They had the same parents, same friends; hell, they even had the same damn memories.

The Other Jesse knew every little detail and every little thought behind every little decision that Our Jesse had made in all of his thirty-five years.

It was a remarkable thing. The only difference between Our Jesse and the Other Jesse was that the Other one knew about a couple of things that hadn’t happened to Our Jesse yet. All the letters that the Other Jesse sent, well, they were dated two days ahead of when Our Jesse read them. The Other Jesse would write about the rain, and sure enough, it would rain two days later. If he mentioned a newspaper headline, we’d see the same damn thing on the newsstands in just two days' time. Our Jesse told us that the Other Jesse even helped him win four grand on a racing bet. From how he told it to us, what had happened was that the Other Jesse got real damn lucky, and then two days later, Our Jesse got just as lucky.

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Now, Our Jesse, he went and he taped up all the letters from the Other Jesse around the house like a proud father hanging up family photos. He invited us all over to read them. He read everything to us out loud, even doing different voices when talking like he was other people.

Our Jesse—God love him—was never much of a creative type, so we knew damn well he wasn’t making up the story or writing the letters himself. And besides, he took us out back and showed us the pit himself so we could get a good look at it. Our Jesse even built a fence around the pit so nothing would fall into it. We all just stood around, looking into the pit. It went on for what must’ve been miles, but wouldn’t you know it? We could see the blue of the sky on the other side.

Our Jesse carried on with his life, going to work and making regular appearances down at the hardware store. He told us that he’d been working on a little shed that would go around the pit to keep it safe. We would catch glimpses of the construction from our backyards. It was a piecemeal thing, built out of scrap lumber and clapboard. But it served its purpose: it hid the pit from any prying eyes and gave Our Jesse a private place to talk to himself.

And the two Jesses did keep talking for a while—or at least we assumed they did,because two weeks went by without us hearing so much 51

as a word about the pit or the Other Jesse. Two weeks passed, and the only time we saw Our Jesse out and about was when he went to work and when he went to get his groceries. Two weeks during which we saw him going out into his shed and staying there for hours on end. We would hear him sometimes, laughing, yelling, things like that. One time, one of us could even hear him crying, but we never knew what he was reading that made him so emotional.

Then one day, out of the blue, Our Jesse called us up and told us to come on over. He didn’t tell us nothing more—just said it was real important and that we needed to hurry. He sounded real panicked. What we saw when we got there was madness. There must’ve been hundreds of them: pages and pages of his and the Other Jesse’s letters. Our Jesse’s walls were plastered. We tried to stop and read them, but Our Jesse wouldn’t let us, insisting that we sit down at the kitchen table.

Now, the Other Jesse’s handwriting had always been the same as Our Jesse’s: legible, if at times cluttered. But with this letter in particular, we could barely make out the chicken scratch, and the message he’d written was brief. Real brief, matter of fact. He had scribbled down just five words.

Pray for salvation, Jesse Pickett.

Our Jesse, well, he just shoved the paper in our faces and asked us what we thought the 52

Other Jesse meant. Of course, any guesses we had were as good as Our Jesse’s. We didn’t know. The only person who knew anything about anything that hadn’t happened yet was the Other Jesse, and we couldn’t call him up and ask him. So we all sat there for a moment, just staring at those five words. It got quiet—real quiet—and then Our Jesse muttered something under his breath that we couldn’t parse.

What Our Jesse did next, though, we’ll never forget. He ripped the paper from our hands, ran into his backyard, and locked himself up in his shed. We rattled the door and tried to break it down, but none of us had any luck. There had to have been four different kinds of locks on that thing.

Our Jesse barked at us to leave him be, but we couldn’t just abandon him when he was acting so troubled. We just heard him in the shed, shouting, “JESSE? JESSE PICKETT? JESSE PICKETT, CAN YOU HEAR ME?” down into the pit.

Our Jesse’s words echoed, but we never heard the Other Jesse shout back.

Then Our Jesse heeded the words that the Other Jesse had written. He shouted down into the pit a prayer so loud it damn near shook the clapboard from the shed. “JESSE PICKETT? JESSE PICKETT, I ASK YOU FOR YOUR FORGIVENESS. BY GOD, I AM SORRY IF I UPSET YOU—IF I HURT YOU. I TRUST YOU, 53

JESSE PICKETT. I TRUST THAT THIS IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO.” And then Our Jesse, well, he unlatched the locks and let the door swing open so we could get a good look at him as he stepped back and let himself fall into the pit.

We don’t know what happened to Our Jesse Pickett. But in two days, we’ll find out.

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Sunkissed

by Jacob A.L. Martinez Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

T

he sun hadn’t set in three days. It sat in the sky in a perpetual noon, heat washing over the dry grass with only the occasional cloud to give it a break. The farmers stood in their fields, drenched in sweat. They gazed at their land and cursed the gods that had frozen the sky in its place. Acres of tomatoes rotted into a bleak brown as the people’s skin burned red.

Two boys watched as their parents tried to set up awnings over their plots, to lessen the sun’s gaze before it was too late. The boys had tried to help, but their mother had ordered them to rest in the shade. A constant crunching drifted through the fence as their cows chewed on the dying grass, letting out quick, shallow breaths as they ate. They had been out in the heat for too long.

One boy opened the gates and chased the cows to the nearby riverbed. The animals’ hooves splashed in the stream as they submerged them57

selves in the cool, shaded water. But one cow did not rise. She lay on the grass with her eyes shut tight, chest rippling with pain after every breath.

She meekly lifted her snout to point towards the gate, sending her calves off with the others. The other boy saw her and approached, fearing for her health. Her hide was almost too hot to touch.

He sprinted for the shed and brought out two buckets. He filled them up with cold water from the river and waddled to the cow with one under each arm. One pour. Two pours. He ran back to get more water as his brother watched the other cows bathe, gathering what he could for them to snack on. Three pours. Four. The water dripped down the back of the cow’s head and pooled in the grass. Five pours. Six. His brother helped him fill the buckets in the river, taking breaks from collecting any green grass. Seven pours. Eight.

The runoff had begun to seep into the dirt, forming an outline of mud around her. Nine pours.

Ten. The boy’s shoe got stuck in the mud after the last pour, and he slipped to the ground, scattering the buckets.

He could see his parents panting on the other side of the field, their shaky arms dripping with sweat. He could see the way they walked just slightly slower when passing under an awning.

The cow’s eyes flickered open. The boy pushed her up onto her shaky legs, and she mooed hesitantly 58

before slowly making her way past the gate. She lay down in the water with her calves, and the boy rested his head on her back, a moment of safety from the unrelenting light.

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Paper Keys

by Karina Jha Illustration by Hannah Meyers

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t six years old, my mother decided she would be a pianist. She had always been a strongwilled child. It first manifested in her refusal to attend preschool; even when her parents hired the thirteen-year-old girl next door as a nanny of sorts, my mother still spent most of her time by herself in their tiny apartment, suffering from self-inflicted loneliness. To fill the time, she flipped through old books and played her father’s scratched vinyls on the half-broken record player.

Hours spent singing along to the same few classics planted the idea of an extravagant musical career in her little mind, and she paced around her narrow futon for three days before taking the matter into her own hands. She taped several sheets of notebook paper together on the kitchen floor and lay on her stomach to draw a full keyboard in pencil. You could tell that she was very careful to color the black keys inside the lines from the way her head tilted and her lips pressed together. Satisfied with her work, she rolled the paper out on the kitchen table and sat down to play. A tea stain seeped through the white keys, and my mother understood she didn’t know how to begin.

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The beginner piano book my mother had spotted at the record store cost about the equivalent of two or three dollars. But it was very difficult to purchase something for oneself at six years old, especially when all that was in your pockets were wrinkled chestnuts from the tree behind the playground. So she set herself to prying kopecks out of the sidewalk cracks, one at a time. By the end of the week, she had gathered not even a quarter of the total cost of the book. It was not going fast enough; she would have to find another way. Fame waited for no one.

As it turned out, an easy alternative was taking money from her mama’s wallet. After only a few instances of undetectable theft, my mother acquired the necessary funds to buy the book.

And after only a couple of weeks, she had it memorized from cover to cover. One week later, in her first music class on her first day of first grade, her fingers danced over the keys and the other children stood in silent awe. My mother came home beaming to find her mama standing in the kitchen with a frown, the paper keyboard and piano book in her hand. There were few places to hide something in an apartment so small.

“Where did you get this from?”

“I made it.”

“I mean the book.”

“I bought it.”

“With what money, Larisa?”

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My mother shrank.

“Yours,” she whispered.

There was a long silence, during which her mama unrolled the paper keyboard and examined her daughter’s careful tracing.

“Well, are you any good?” she asked.

Despite her family’s lack of wealth, my mother had a piano teacher within the month. Yana was an exceptional musician; she’d taught at a conservatory in Kiev for many years before meeting her husband and moving to Kozelets. Once a week, my mother would make the long walk to Yana’s house, where the two of them would sit hip-tohip on the piano bench to drill scales and rhythm exercises and simple tunes.

“You’re a quick learner,” Yana told her once. “I could see you on a stage some day, Larisa.”

Sometimes the two of them would sit down for tea after the lesson when Yana’s husband wasn’t home. There would be honey biscuits and jam and two cups of rosehip tea on little saucers painted with rabbits. Yana would ask after my mother’s school, her mama, her papa. My mother’s favorite days were when Yana would tell stories about her performances in Kiev.

“Is it true you played for ten thousand people?”

Yana laughed and spooned some sugar into her tea. “Oh, no. Definitely not ten thousand. I’m 63

not sure exactly how many, but it was one of the larger halls in Kiev, yes.”

My mother gaped, starry eyed.

“Wow . . . Tell me about the time you played for the Kiev mayor again! Or the time the soloist you were accompanying arrived halfway through the show!”

And Yana would. But every once in a while, Yana’s husband would come home early from a bad day at work. My mother would watch him storm around the kitchen, slamming cabinets and muttering foul words under his breath. Whenever Yana tried to calm him, he would slap her hands away, hard enough to leave angry red marks. She always apologized to my mother.

“I’m sorry, I’ll have a talk with him. He knows he shouldn’t act like this in front of my students.

Would you like some more tea? I bought pryaniki, too. Here, have two.” But all my mother could think about was how Yana’s red-beaten hands would shake as she placed the biscuits on her rabbit-painted plate.

On my mother’s birthday, Yana leaned over a plate of lemon meringues and handed her the sheet music to “Für Elise” by Beethoven, rolled up and tied with a pink ribbon.

“Happy birthday, little pianist,” she said, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my mother’s ear. Meringues forgotten, my mother reached over the narrow kitchen table and wrapped her 64

small arms around Yana’s neck.

“Spasibo.”

That evening, my mother traced the music notes with her meringue-sticky fingers under the lamp by her bedside until her mama came in to scold her and turn out the light. In the dark, she pressed the sheets of music to her chest and smiled at the cracks in the ceiling.

On the first day of snowfall that winter, my mother’s mama sat her down at the kitchen table. The chair was cold through her woolen skirt.

“Your piano teacher is dead,” she told her. It had been a lover’s quarrel. Yana found out about her husband’s mistress. You could hear their screaming from a block away until Yana’s husband grabbed the kitchen knife that sat on the shelf under the painted rabbit teacups.

For two full days, my mother wouldn’t speak.

She refused to go to school, spent hours shut in her room curled under the quilt on the futon, shaking quietly. When she finally emerged, the floor was littered with the sheet music she had shredded.

“I know you liked Yana,” her mama said.

“We’ll find you another teacher.”

My mother said nothing, only rolled out her paper keyboard on the kitchen table and began to 65

tear it apart.

She never let me touch the piano in our Kiev apartment. It was stationed permanently in the living room, dusty and crowded with picture frames and vases of wilted flowers.

“It’s not for playing, Lena,” my mother would say. “You look, but you don’t touch.”

But on the days I came home from school before either of my parents returned from work, I would pry up the creaky fallboard and choose a key to play—just one. The neighbors were nosy, and I was clever enough to know they would ask questions about a new pianist living in our flat, so I kept to one key each day, working my way from left to right. The piano was long out of tune, so each key rang slant and sour when I pressed it with my small finger. After eight keys, I was in love. And after twelve, I mustered up the courage to ask my mother for lessons.

It was a Sunday morning, and she was frying syrniki at the stove, a sunflower-patterned apron tied around her waist. I wrung my hands beneath the kitchen table.

“Mama?”

“Da, Lenchik.”

“You know the piano in the living room?”

She flipped a syrnik. “I hope you haven’t been playing with it.”

My palms were damp with sweat. “I was 66

hoping I could use it.”

“Use it?” My mother turned around, the wooden spatula in her hand slick with butter. Her eyes narrowed. “So you have been—” “I thought I could have lessons,” I blurted, then promptly shut my mouth. A silence followed, during which my mother’s face went very pale and she set the spatula down against the rim of the pan. She leaned back against the counter beside the stove.

“Lessons,” she repeated.

“I know we can’t afford much right now, but I could get a job! Oksana sews toys and sells them by the playground—she made enough money to buy new shoes . . .” Her expression made me stop.

“Lessons,” she repeated again, pulling out the chair beside me and sitting down heavily. There was a streak of flour across her cheekbone. I held my breath, ready for her to gather her wits and scold me, tell me that I was ungrateful, that we were only just managing to pay the rent on time.

But instead, she looked at me in a way I couldn’t understand. I could smell the syrinki burning on the stove, and I thought she might cry. Guilt pooled in my stomach. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked, I—” She waved me silent and shook her head with a small smile.

“Well, are you any good?”

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About the Authors Tanya Cliff is a cancer survivor who resides in the beautiful Driftless Region of Southwestern Wisconsin with her family and furbabies. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction at Emerson College and has recently had fiction published in New Flash Fiction Review.

Karina Jha is sophomore Writing, Literature, and Publishing Major at Emerson College. She has won multiple awards for poetry, short story, and flash fiction, and has been published in Aura Literary Arts Review, Heartburn Review, and Plum Literary Magazine.

Zoe Leonard is currently a student studying for her Creative Writing BFA at Emerson College in Boston.

She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to Stork, she has recently had work featured in Wilder Things Magazine, Gauge Magazine, and Lunchbox.

Jacob A.L. Martinez is a senior creative writing student at Emerson College. He has been published in Black Swan.

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Michelle Moroses is an undergraduate publishing student at Emerson College. Her previous work can be found at Poets Reading the News, The Penn Review, and others.

NB Nightingale is a playwright and writer currently in Emerson’s Fiction MFA program. NB’s plays have been performed from coast to coast in the US and can be found printed in Aspire Magazine.

Lark Rodenbush is a senior Creative Writing major at Emerson College. They write short length fiction, with a focus on horror and speculative fiction.

Jay Townsend is a writer, illustrator, and animator graduating from Emerson this semester. They are coeditor of the pulp horror magazine READER BEWARE and the writer of audio drama mini-series Atlas of Angelon.

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About the Type The running text for this issue is set in Adobe Caslon Pro, designed for Adobe by Carol Twombly based on specimen pages by William Caslon between 1734 and 1770.

The display type for this book is Yu Gothic Pr6N, designed by Morisawa Inc.

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