2021 theme: RUPTURE

writers in the attic

RUPTURE

RUPTURE

writers in the attic

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works selected by

HARRISON BERRY

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General operations of The Cabin are generously supported by: The City of Boise Idaho Commission on the Arts National Endowment for the Arts Idaho Community Foundation and two generous and anonymous foundations.

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org (c) 2021 The Cabin All rights reserved.

Layout by Ashley Smith Edits by Tyler Weber Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 285 copies.

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PAST ISSUES

APPLE | 2020 Juried by Malia Collins

FUEL | 2019 Juried by J. Reuben Appelman

SONG | 2018 Juried by Samantha Silva

GAME | 2017 Juried by Diane Raptosh

WATER | 2016 Juried by Susan Rowe

ANIMAL | 2015 Juried by Rick Ardinger

NERVE | 2014 Juried by Kerri Webster

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THANK YOU TO OUR MEMBERS Annual members of THE CABIN at the Sustaining level or above receive a free copy of the Writers in the Attic anthology. Thank you!

Suzanne Allen Mary Jane Bagwell Thomas & Dr. Angela Beauchaine Pam Bernard & Donna Ehrenreich Dianne & James Bevis Jamie & Owen Brennan Hollis Brookover & Milt Gillespie Kym Browning Nancy Budge & Gay Whitesides Kara Cadwallader & Jon Getz Darla Christiansen Lindsay Clarke-Youngwerth Nicholas Cofod & Janice Alexander Judith W. Collins Jill Costello Paul & Heidi Cunningham Staci & Rick Darmody Tim Debelius Terri Dillion Stephanie DiNunzio Gwen Dry Phyllis Edmundson & David Yearsley Carolyn Eiriksson Deborah & Bill Eisinger Theresa Fox Steve & Allison Frinsko Stefanie Fry Marshall & Leslie Garrett Julie & Andrew Gendler Craig & Heather Getzlof Laura & John Gibson Kris & Brad Granger Elizabeth Greene Sarah Griin Margaret Griith Jackie Groves Greg & Julie Hahn Bobbi Hansberger Kelly & Greg Harwood Michael Hassoldt Alice Hennessey Deb Holleran Marilynn Jackson Linda & Steve Kahn Tom & Teresa Killingsworth

Vivian Klein Vicki Kreimeyer Elsa J Lee Brooke Linville Carol & Brent Lloyd Jane & Bill Lloyd Drew Lobner Sarah Lurie Pat & Gary Machacek Beth Malasky & John Cheslsey Julie & Tom Manning Molly Mannschreck & Matthew Schwarz Bill Manny Susan May & Andrew Owczarek Yvonne McCoy & Gerry Wenske Randi McDermott Beverly McLean Barbara McTigue Kelly Miller Stephanie Miller Betsy Montgomery Cheryl Pasley Clayton Stacy & Mark Pearson Seth Platts Mary Ramos-Duke Wendy Rancourt Kathleen Rockne Cathy Rogers Anna Rostock Darwin & Charlotte Roy Bonnie & Marshall Sharp Tracy Sidell Samantha Silva & David Nevin Michael Spink & JoAnn Butler Marilyn Stave David Stearns Russell Stoddard & Sarah Lunstrum Bridget Vaughan Mikel & John Ward Nancy & John Werdel Jem & Katie Wierenga Rebecca Wood Anne Woodhouse Don Zancanella

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CONTENTS Harrison Berry Introduction • 17

FRACTURE D.M. Kofer Repairs Under Pressure • 25

Diane Raptosh My Brother • 29 S. G. Hamilton After the Sample • 30 Mara Bateman The Flood • 33 Eileen Earhart Oldag Rupture Stone • 35 Genalea Barker Uninvited • 38 Jenn Sutkowski Shattering the Illusion of Control • 43

BREACH James McColly Snow Birds • 51

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Kathryn Durrant My Mother’s Rolls • 52 Amanda Nida Compromise • 55 Captain Bill Collier No Ruptured Skull Today • 59 Allison Fowle Breach • 61 J. L. Stowers Ruptured • 62 Sonya Feibert A Man Named Joe • 67 Alyssa Stadtlander it is natural • 69 Carolyn Bevington The Rapture and The Rupture • 70

SCHISM Jamie K. Corbin ABCs for My 1, 2, 3 • 77

Judith McConnell Steele First Frost • 81 Genalea Barker Seasons Change • 82

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Diane Raptosh My Pronoun • 86 Julia McCoy Dear Marcie • 87 christy claymore The Journey of a Magnum Opus • 92 Eliszabeth MacDougal Parosmia • 94 Trevor Warren Sound of Bees • 95 Driek Zirinsky Descend • 98 Farley Egan Green Questions • 100

ERUPT Rex Adams Bullighter • 105

JoAnn Koozer Step into the Wave • 109 Stephanie Nelson Fetal Position • 110 James McColly Octopus Heart • 114

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Anita Tanner Beauty Shop • 115 Mary Walker Invisible Tigers • 117 Laureen Leiko Scheid Embrace Embarassment • 119

PLUME Eric E. Wallace Lark Ascending • 125

Stacey A. Leybas Because of Mount St. Helens • 130 Mara Bateman Child’s Moon • 134 Kim Monnier Acts of Nourishment • 138 James McColly Gregor’s Cousin • 139 Liza Long Three Days in Houston • 140 Eric E. Wallace

By The Numbers • 143 Anita Tanner Miracle of Wood • 148

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Kathryn Durrant Dinner Conversation • 150

DEBRIS Mark Woychick Manifest Palimpsest • 157

Bonnie Schroeder Fault Lines • 158 Farley Egan Green A Funeral Sestina • 161 Cameron Morit Ten Seconds to Rupture • 163 Liza Long How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube • 167 Kara J. Fort Exhale • 169 GiGi Huntley The Walk • 171 Kim Monnier Good News on the Wind • 175

ABOUT

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MEET THE WRITERS

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INTRODUCTION Harrison Berry When I was in the second grade my teacher Mrs. Elm assigned the class to write a short story. Mine was about an Antarctic expedition gone haywire: The scientiic vessel crashed into an iceberg, forcing the crew to evacuate. All seemed hopeless for a few sentences as the members of the expedition slipped on the ice and met a rookery of friendly seals, until the captain remembered he’d packed an inlatable spare boat, complete with a laboratory.

Reading over my work, my mother alerted me to my error. Stories, she said, have conlict, something mine only suggested. The problem was one of low stakes. By losing its boat my expedition lost nothing; and a reader should expect the destruction of the vessel to have some kind of impact on the story overall.

That is the story of the irst story I ever wrote, and I tell it because I think there are universal elements about this creative process that bear on what writing does for the artist and for the world. Judging The Cabin’s Writers in the Attic contest this year was a tremendous honor, and reading and re-reading the work of so many talented authors gave me a chance to consider where our craft its into the outline of things.

I was in the middle of considering a professional change when The Cabin asked me to be a part of this contest. For the previous eight years I’d worked at Boise Weekly, irst as the calendar editor, then as a reporter, and inally as its managing editor. One of my duties was to organize the Fiction 101 contest, which I looked forward to all year. I loved gathering the judging panel and reading the entries, and seeing how our guest artist illustrated the winners.

Finally, we’d throw a party where authors would read their work.

Writers in the Attic is a scaled-up version of that. The stories are longerand you can submit poetry. Plus, the winners are published in the lovely book you’re holding. But also, writing contests draw out the things that concern us, and trends always emerge. For this contest I read a lot of pieces about war, miscarriages and bees. The theme of this year’s Writers in the Attic is “rupture;” and while a handful of entrants slipped the word into their pieces like the mystery ingredient on a reality cooking show, there were some who took a

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more conceptual view. Every entry, however, betokened its author and pierced the storm of fraught news events, politics and hot takes. Art matters. You matter.

Art is more than an antidote to a toxic environment: It’s a positive civic good. Just as public art beautiies public spaces, literature enlivens civil society.

It calls on us to interact, promote, critique and care; and is salubrious to the democratic impulse. You hold in your hands one of many sinews that hold people together, and the pieces in this book prove that strangers can make you feel something. Maybe that pithy story or heady poem can help refocus your mind’s eye.

The Cabin plays a special role in all of this, holding workshops, camps for kids and public readings by major authors. Writers in the Attic is one of the Treasure Valley’s cultural factory loors. It invites broad participation and ofers a chance at publication. Though I judged these entries incognizant of who wrote them, I like to think that I selected pieces representing a broad range of writers so any reader might be able to imagine their own work printed in a future edition.

After leaving Boise Weekly, I took a job writing for Boise State University, and in my spare time I do freelance journalism. At this point, I can safely say I am a writer. Do not mistake this for some kind of self-congratulation.

Writing is really hard. It loosens the lid on the pickle jar of your insecurities, and questions of craft like “Do I make sense?” or “Is this good?” distract and stymie.

Publication can bring other soul-aches. Some people fear this part the way others fear public speaking. My own experience of seeing my work in print has been an exercise in integrity. Every edit and correction feels like a personal attack at irst, but learning to use judgement, make mistakes and be wrong with grace has been worth every bite and sting. It’s the same for the artist: Your criticism of your own work doesn’t stop after publication. If anything, it intensiies, and the only way forward is to recognize that you will blunder, get rejected and occasionally fail. The good news is that in time, these things will happen less often and you will develop the wherewithal to deal with them better when they do.

Seeing one’s work in print can billow the soul, too. A byline should be asource of pride and a sign that someone sees the merit of your work. I chose 18

these pieces because they struck me. Each has a fresh conceit, takes an original approach, ofers a sharp image or simply says a thing in a really engaging way.

On every page of this book is something that inches, skates or soars toward its point.

My mother demanded revisions to my story. The captain and crew should be rescued. They should face a threat, like polar bears. I erased much of what I’d written and wrote down what mom said, but hadn’t learned my lesson. I still leaned into circular storytelling and endings tied up with a bow.

When I was nearly 30, an editor and great friend who was fed up with my dithering journalism told me to seek out the conlict in things. His practical advice echoed my mom’s words of wisdom, and I felt as though I’d been restored to thought and speech. Writing can confront the world or something in ourselves. It can split the atom of an idea or dare a reader to dive into a sea of pure imagination. Set loose, literature has the power to level challenges, set expectations and transform.

HARRISON BERRY

July 2021

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RUPTURE

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FRACTURE I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

OSCAR WILDE

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REPAIRS UNDER PRESSURE D. M. Kofer It was hot, and we were parched.

The sun seared the Idaho desert like an oven set to broil; baking my skin red, wringing sweat, dry-roasting grass and fragrant sagebrush.

There was no water because my uncle and I had a water pump halfway out of a well. He was sufering too, his thinning red hair soaked under his hardhat.

“I need a break,” I said, putting down a pair of two-foot pipe wrenches.

The work order said: Low pressure. Air in water. My uncle had said, ‘Probably a hole in the pipe.’ We were working behind a service truck itted with a tower and winch, extracting 21-foot lengths – called joints - of steel pipe and checking them for holes. Hence the wrenches. Two men made for a quicker job; one ran the hoist while the other unscrewed and wrangled pipe.

“It’s not breaktime yet,” by uncle said. “Bet you had plenty of breaks at that liberal college.”

I swallowed a retort embittered by the heat, and went to the cab anyway to slosh some warm water into my mouth. I eyed my water bottle, mentally rationing it for the rest of the job.

It’s honest work. Folks build a home in the country, but there’s rarely any public water outside of town. And groundwater in Idaho can be deep – hundreds of feet below ground, tapped by a well and pumped to the surface.

I walked back. “You done yet?” My uncle again, dirty and sweating, glaring at me as if the worth of a man is how dirty and sweaty he gets.

I swallowed another retort, adjusted my hardhat, and hefted my wrenches.

“Bet you voted Democrat so you could get your free stuf,” he said.

In my mind, I smack him with a pipe wrench. Instead, I channel the anger into my wrenches, breaking old pipe grease with mad and muscle.

There’s no repairing a broken piece of pipe – it has to be replaced. Hoist, unscrew, set aside. We ind the leak. Rust ate a pinhole in the steel, and water pressure had blown it out.

“Better pull it all and make sure there aren’t any more.”

I agree. Silently, because I’m irritated. I am done working with my uncle,

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but better another hour to get it right, than four to do it twice.

Hoist, unscrew, set aside. Hoist, unscrew, set aside. The heat is sweltering, the truck exhaust sufocating. Each minute is an hour. My face and shirt are dripping, my arms trembling from the weight of the wrenches.

We reach the end - a sleek metal pump and motor threaded onto the pipe.

“Here it is, now you can go take your democrat union break.”

“At least if I were union, I’d get more than ten bucks an hour. With no beneits.” The words spilled before I could catch them.

“I’ll let you know when you’re worth more than ten bucks an hour.”

I had it. I threw my wrenches down with a clank.

“So turning a wrench is worth ten bucks, but you’re making thirty doing what – pulling levers?!” I swore at him, and stormed of, as much to hydrate as to get away.

He said nothing, but I could tell my uncle was mad as he yanked the lever to hoist the pump up for a closer look. At that moment, a hydraulic hose – weakened, but unnoticed – burst in a spray of hot, brown hydraulic luid. It sprayed like a pressure washer, dousing my uncle, the tools, and the truck.

My uncle swore and tried to duck, but he still caught a full frontal blast of brown oily goop. He raced to shut the engine of and stop the hemorrhage.

He glared at me over my water bottle. I saw his eyes calculating, trying to ind a way to blame me. He said nothing - I was ten feet away when the hose blew.

I said nothing back.

He tore some blue shop towels from a bent, dirty roll and scrubbed the worst of it from his hands and face and coveralls. I left to stretch my legs, and heard him dial the oice on his cell phone.

“Yeah, we blew a hose. Need a hydraulic repair shop. Nothing we can do, till we get it repaired. Pump’s out, on the ground. Yeah, if we have a spare hose and luid, I can patch it and get the job done. OK, we’ll do that and get it in the shop Monday.”

I set down my water bottle and went to examine the pipe. The broken part was easy to ind: a hole the size of a quarter, pitted and laking. Enough to let pressure out and air in. I checked the rest of the pipe, scraping rust barnacles with a screwdriver, poking and testing the steel underneath. My uncle swooped over to ind something to criticize, saw I was working, then wandered of muttering.

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I inished checking the pipe. No more holes. Then I swapped the holey one for a bright new length, still shiny from the factory. I tightened the connector, then lopped into the hot seat of the truck. No engine meant no air conditioning. My uncle was sitting there too, sweating in the heat. Neither of us spoke.

It took an uncomfortable hour for the company truck to arrive with the parts. My uncle leaped at the sight, practically running to meet them. They exchanged some words, parts, and plastic jugs, then the truck drove of. My uncle climbed to the broken hose at the base of the tower with tools and parts.

I hopped out.

“Anything I can help with?” I said.

“I got it.”

I had just found a thin patch of shade to sit in when my uncle hollered, “Could you get me a three-eighths nut driver?”

I stood, legs protesting, and dug into the tool bin. Quarter, ive-sixteenths, ah - three-eighths. I grabbed it with gloved hands and held it where he could reach. “Sure, here you go.”

“Thanks.”

Thoughts and feelings bounced around in my brain. I decided I didn’t want say any of them. He was already cranky, and I didn’t feel like enduring another tirade.

I changed my mind. “We charge, what, a hundred bucks an hour for labor?”

“Something like that.”

“I know the truck needs gas and maintenance. You make, what, thirty?”

A grunt.

“I just igure, I’m the one sweating on these wrenches, and you’re just pulling levers. It’d take a lot longer if you were by yourself.”

Another grunt. Which means I’m right, and he knows it, but he’s not going to admit it.

“So I igure ifteen is probably fair. Maybe we can evaluate after a few months.”

Silence.

“Also. You don’t have to like my politics, but it’s a free country, and I’d appreciate if you’d ease up about it at work.”

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Silence, but for the click of metal tools.

After a few moments, “Probably better that way. Think I’ve got it. Start the engine?”

“Sure,” I replied. I stepped to the driver’s side and turned the key. The engine coughed, then caught and growled a happy diesel growl. I listened from the cab and heard nothing, which was good, because he’d have been cussing if the hose blew again. I tore of a couple shop towels to wipe of my wrenches.

My uncle was already testing the winch control levers. So far so good; not even a drip.

Wordlessly, we lowered the pump back into the well, then hoisted and threaded the next section of pipe. Joint after joint descended into the cool depths. We got to the new section I had prepared, and my uncle picked up a wrench to help tighten it.

We set our wrenches, then heaved to twist the pipe tight in its itting.

“You got a good seal on that,” my uncle said.

“Thanks,” I said, surprised. I tried to think of a compliment to return.

“Looks like the hose is holding.”

“Hope so,” he said.

We got to the last joint of pipe, which had an angled itting for hooking into an underground pipeline. My uncle stopped the winch and went to turn the pump on.

I stood there, waiting. Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes were stretching to uncertainty when I felt a hum through my feet. A few seconds later, water gurgled from the pipe. I rummaged to ind an old white gas-station soda cup, and collected some water. It was red and rusty from agitating the well water. I dumped it, waited a few seconds, and collected some more.

Barely pink, which meant the well was cleaning up. A minute more, and my uncle approached.

“It’s clearing up pretty good,” I said.

“Any air?

“Nope.” I dumped the pink water and took some more. Clear, and no air bubbles.

My uncle looked. “Cool. Let’s hook everything up and head home.”

I looked again at the cup, then drank deeply of the clean, cool water.

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MY BROTHER Diane Raptosh My brother fell out of the sky near Reno and now has severe double vision. Yet he can sense as each self overlaps with her inner daimonion.

He sees wakeful brains sporting twinned souls, spots a Diane in each Duane, and his probity scans every couplet as half an octuple. Brother, it may be some ine form of shrewdness, this shadowed acuity, turning each I into towns of two people.

Their joint task: to double the number of words meaning we. So, let’s have this Let’s phrase act as example of always inclusive. And let’s peg another the Loyal We of the People. Let us eat chili fatale over olive loaf. Let’s swig and think too — how|when|whither feed 98 mouths of the quenchless oppressor.

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AFTER THE SAMPLE S. G. Hamilton You skip Urgent Care and take medications from the master bathroom.

Antibiotics for bronchitis. Ciproloxacin for urinary tract infections. Silver nitrate sticks for when mouth ulcers get serious. It isn’t until you’re in your teens that you learn that most people need prescriptions for basic pills, but Dad brings them home from the oice, whether he’s supposed to or not.

He brings his work home, too. He has established a nest in front of the living room television. A green chair, the cushion now imprinted with his behind. The too-small side table with the day’s local newspaper and a Diet Coke. On the evenings that he’s home, he turns on Bill O’Reilly and pecks at his work laptop with his foreingers. Sometimes he gets so fed up that he pays you ifty dollars to transcribe his notes for him. You’ve suggested Mario Teaches Typing. He says he’s too old to learn anything new, and besides, what can Mario do that you can’t? So, you transcribe notes on urinalysis results, prostate cancer, adult circumcisions, and testicular torsion. You come to understand the penis not as a sexual object but as an appendage to which many, many bad things can happen. What Dad normally accomplishes in an evening, you inish in thirty minutes, but this never turns into a daily routine.

Hiring his teenage daughter to type his notes, even with patients’ names hidden, falls into a moral gray area. But more importantly, you’re a high school student with your own work to do. You have your own future that does not revolve around old men’s crotches.

Someday you’ll realize that if Dad didn’t bring his work home, you would have hardly seen him at all.

You’re seventeen now, and life is changing. You drive Dad’s old sedan.

College application deadlines are fast approaching. You have your irst boyfriend, but you never kiss him. The male body is repulsive.

You pack your own lunch in a brown paper bag, the same meal every time: two dinner rolls cut in half and stufed with provolone cheese and pepperoni. You throw a banana in there as well. The night before school, you place the bag on the top shelf of the refrigerator and go to bed.

Now is the day of the big calculus test. It’s ifteen ‘til eight, and there’s no

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time for breakfast. You cram last minute integrals while smearing concealer across your pimples. You grab the brown paper bag from the fridge and drive to school on an empty tank. Four hours later, with your calculus test completed, you begin your lunch period.

At the urology clinic on the other side of town, Dad opens the refrigerator in the urinalysis lab. He takes a brown paper bag from within. Inside, he inds a banana and two dinner rolls stufed with cheese and pepperoni.

You, in the high school cafeteria, open your sack lunch and ind a tightly sealed urine sample.

You roll the bag closed.

Time passes without you. Your friends discuss math problem number two.

You clutch, in your lap, a bag of number one. Whose number one? You didn’t look at the label. You don’t want to look at the label. You will never forget what you have just seen. The white plastic cap. The translucent cup. Golden, sloshing, room temperature luid.

You stand. You deposit the brown paper bag in the trash bin. If you were hungry, you could buy a school lunch. You’re not hungry anymore. You don’t say a word for the rest of the school day.

When you get home, Mom asks you to help her put the leaf in the dinner table. The two of you grasp opposite ends and pull. The two halves slide apart.

You wonder if it was Mom’s urine that you disposed of today. Is she getting screened for a disease? She appears healthy — and strong — as she its the heavy table segment into the issure.

The table is set. Mom, your sister, and you are in your seats. Dinner does not begin without Dad. Mom’s attempts at conversation izzle in the void. You smell spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove. Your sister sits with her elbow on the table. She has just started an acne medication. Does she need monthly urine tests?

Dad comes home at eight. He tells us he’s sorry. He needed to inish his notes.

Wash your hands, Mom says.

I washed them at work, Dad says. They’re sanitized.

It’s the same exchange every night.

I know where those hands have been, Mom says. Wash your hands.

He washes his hands. Mom brings the food. So much spaghetti. So many 31

meatballs. You serve yourself. You haven’t eaten today. Dad tells us about the testicle surgery he performed this afternoon. Sometimes, you don’t know how much luid there’s going to be until you get in there.

You stab a sauce-drenched meatball with your fork.

Was it Dad’s urine? Does he need to test himself for prostate cancer? No, it couldn’t be him. He doesn’t need to store his urine overnight in his home refrigerator, not when he could produce a sample at the clinic.

Forks on ceramic. Quiet slurping. Ice cubes against glass.

Dad tells you this interesting thing he read: did you know that in ancient Rome, they would brush their teeth with urine?

No one responds. The urine sample hangs over their heads. As years pass, the vision will fade, but it will never go away.

Dad will start leaving his laptop at work. He will come home later.

Sometimes, you will hear the door open after you’ve gone to bed. Then his footsteps. The crack of a Diet Coke. The schedule has changed. You may go days without seeing him at all.

Can you see him? The clinic has closed, but there he is, pecking away at the keyboard.

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THE FLOOD Mara Bateman She didn’t know her own strength, and when she left a curse came down upon the place.

Through the winter cold crept into that vacancy, cold so sharp there was nothing it couldn’t cut. It froze the sap in trees, splitting them open from the heart. It killed cars on the highway in lonesome lines, their twin tracks dragging out behind them and only the white, lat winter ahead.

Birds departed, all of them. Even the cardinals went missing, when most Christmases they hopped merrily from bush to bush. Ponds froze to the bottom so that bass hung suspended and bulging and dead as old insects in amber.

It had never been so cold. Wives left their husbands for the blazing beacon of the Des Moines airport, shining escape across the plains. They emptied their accounts and lew south or westward and the frozen, black parking lots were strewn with station wagons and hatch-back Hondas, doors popped and empty as eggs.

The earth froze so hard it moaned. Men moaned, alone with their microwaves and trap-lines and abandoned, truculent children.

And then spring came, abruptly, from the east, cracking the rigid world in a lurry of rain and mud, gasping back to life. Dead ish popped to the surface of ponds, corklike. Reeds and last year’s grass fell limply to the mud. What buds had survived, burrowed deep in the memories of trees, burst forth, white and yellow, and men sighed with relief and removed their mittens and called their wives long distance leaving messages: “Come home now, honey, the worst is over.”

But they were wrong. It had begun to rain. The rain fell and fell and would not stop. Lightning forked the horizon, or lashed in thundering, bright banners. Flocks of thunderheads lew grey and heavy across the plains, an endless tide, as if some far away ocean had been lifted into the sky and was now upturned over southeastern Iowa. Some people even swore the rain that fell that spring was salty as the sea and someone said they saw seaweed and small silver ish, the occasional crab, spinning in the downpour.

First the ields turned to mud, ashy gray and gluey. Then they turned

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to lakes, dimpled with droplets. The brown and white rivers bulged in their banks and inally the two met, so that the whole countryside lowed with a confused collection of currents, and hilltops and rooftops and barntops turned to islands, and everyone moved to the second story and slept with the creaking of a restless river below them, gulping at their sofas and TVs and ovens and covering everything with weeds and muck and dead pigs.

It was a state of emergency. It felt like the end of the world.

And she was miles away, the news from the Midwest luttering in her peripheral vision, an ignorable lutter, while in the irritation of her passage a curse fell, careless, hateful, scouring out the homes of bachelored men to mud.

I knew that she was unhappy here. She signed often, and angled her body unerringly westward, even in conversation, even in windowless rooms, at night, while sleeping. She stayed indoors and cried over the bendless, tired rivers. The species of dead birds.

I showered her with love-gifts — cupboards and chests and cabinets built from white pine and oak and cherry that I cut and set and rubbed as smooth as oil. I distracted her with stories on full moon nights, or on dark ones, when night light slid through the curtains and her eyes went again and again to the latched door and the truck’s keys, hanging beside it. I loved her and made love to her and that held her attention for moments at least, and she laughed and ripped the comforter to shreds, and the look in her eyes was a deep and endless purpose that I drank and drank and was drunk on.

Then one evening in the fall she was gone, the truck and key gone too, and a bath run hot and steaming, its white loor lined with smooth stones, the kind that only show their colors when submerged in water.

Our bed was slung to one side, crooked and unmade, the boards under it pried up and the space below them empty of its treasure, the secret that held her here, lapping.

Had she searched and searched each day when I departed? I imagined it: the lifting of each upturned mug. The groping at backs of cupboards, corners of drawers, beneath the mattress. I laid down on the crooked bed and cried.

In the night the irst frost came, heavy and hard as glass.

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RUPTURE STONE Eileen Earhart Oldag ―rupture and gasp sick swollen gut oppression bursts its bile over all over us again we gasp disease of latworms power disorders us disorders human natural order sweat of green lies power over justness infects rabid dog power over glory all glory undone rancid power putreies its own raw meat spews sickness sickened we gasp— ―rupture and low Earth eats itself belches back ire ash old form molten to unformed too raw too sharp too hard to be life but patient 2,000 years if a limber pine has rooted in this crater work is underway this world a promise remade promise ocean cold salted crown of reef elastic sky cloud stretched rebounded promise jungle rain forest sedged seep ferned spring waterfall mossed uplift mountain mesa plateau down-cut gorge litter of loods promise earth a bunting bag or shroud promise ire reining purity of ire—

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―rupture stone and pray living and dead we turn to stone if tap root of pine tree is chisel chisel through stone chisel onto stone last prayer pray mystery of feathers back into being pray egg pray industry of beetle determination of termite annoyance of gnat pray true light for tortoise resonance for bat and whale pray luminescence pray parable of elephant outrageousness of kangaroo incongruence of hippo and girafe pray education of herring and mullet journey of salmon and lamprey pray spit of frog pray nightshade cacti aloe and elderberry purpled skin amber muscle of plum pray seed cedar sequoia bristlecone baobab ebony pray mangrove

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pray might of magnetism and migration pray instinct senses prowess purposeful death by talon web or jaw pray power into every being but human― ―rupture and recompense pray power into all beings but human pray human heart stone chiseled wind weathered to sand unreposed ocean buried pressed powerless powerless over human natural other over any other before we do this one to another ever again—

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UNINVITED Genalea Barker Toby checked his watch yet again as his knee bounced under the table.

Van was late, and Toby grew more nervous by the second. He’d felt his friend pulling away these last few months. Now, the request for a public meeting upon Toby’s arrival in town was a tiny but ominous needle, puncturing the security bubble of their familiar friendship.

A bell signaled the arrival of another patron. Nerves settled temporarily as he watched Van walk through the door in a calm and steady stride. Upon making eye contact, Van grinned widely.

“Tobe!”

Toby stood, embracing Van warmly. “Good to see you, man. I’ve missed you.”

“It’s been too long.” He concurred.

Toby gestured to the cofees resting on the table. Van smirked, sliding easily into his chair.

“How is it being back home?” He asked after a sip.

Toby sat, clearing his throat. “Same as always. Good but weird.”

“Ever think of moving back?”

These were dull questions that Van already knew the answers to. Old acquaintance discussions, not intended for life-long friends.

Toby shrugged. “I’ll always love Montana, but I it better in Denver.

They’re more accepting of who I am.”

Van nodded, saying nothing. After a lengthy and awkward silence, Toby inally gathered the courage to ask the haunting, pertinent question.

“What’s happening here, Van?” Van took another sip of his cofee, then sighed. “Tobe, there’s no easy way to say this.” A painful pause followed. “You can’t be in the wedding.”

Toby’s heart plummeted into his stomach. “What?” No response. “Why are you saying this? Now?” Van winced. “Look, I don’t want to make this a big thing. I just can’t have you be a groomsman. You can still come as a guest.”

That tiny puncture threatening all things familiar and safe now burst.

Toby’s whole world seemed to crumble around him 38

“I can still come to the wedding?” He asked, his throat dry, his voice small.

Van nodded, ofering a one-sided grin. “The wedding I was asked to be a part of six months ago.” His anger and volume rose steadily. “The wedding I took a week of work for. The wedding I drove ten hours for. I can still come to that wedding? How generous.”

Van’s eyes roamed the room. “I know it sucks.”

“Sucks? Seriously? That’s it?”

“We just decided to keep things small. Only have family and really close friends participate.”

Toby felt hollow. A harsh laugh escaped his throat. “Close friends?”

“Toby…”

“Is Mark still a groomsman?”

Van answered tight lipped, barely audible. “Yes.” “Mark. Whom you never missed an opportunity to complain about since we were fourteen. Whom, in your own words, you merely tolerate when necessary. He’s in the wedding, yet I’m being uninvited at the last minute.”

“Mark is inescapable. Our moms are like sisters, you know this. And you’re not uninvited from everything. You can still come—” “To the wedding. As a guest.” The room seemed to spin, and tears crept towards the surface. He forced them down, refusing to let that dam burst.

“Why, Van? And don’t tell me it’s because we’re not close friends, because if you say that again, I think it will literally kill me.”

Van hung his head, ashamed.

“We’ve been friends twenty-ive years.”

“Tobe…”

“When Lauren broke your heart in tenth grade, who’s couch did you cry on? Who was the irst person I came out to? Who helped me ind the courage to come out to my parents? Was I just imagining you practically living in my basement every summer break through college?”

“We’ve grown up since then.”

“Yes, we have. And I seem to recall being there for most of those milestones as well. For instance, who did you tell irst about proposing to Chantel?”

“You,” Van mumbled, iddling with his cofee cup.

Heavy silence hung between them.

39

“I thought we were brothers,” Toby inally managed. “Now, you’re tossing me out while making room for Mark?”

“I’m not tossing you out.”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing!” Toby paused for a slow breath, attempting to quell the lames he assumed must be visible on his cheeks. “At least tell me why.”

Van shook his head. “It won’t change anything.”

“Is this Chantel?”

“Yes, it’s Chantel.” He threw up his hands. “She told me how you bullied her back in high school. She just can’t put it behind her. I thought, given a little time and some convincing, she’d get past it and give you another chance. But she can’t. Neither can her parents. They freaked when they found out you were in the wedding. You caused Chantel a lot of grief back then.”

Toby scofed, furrowing his brow. “Oh, that’s hilarious.”

“Why is that hilarious?”

“Because she literally bullied everyone back then. She’s was almost as big of a bully as her dad.”

Van rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

“You don’t remember? She called me Queer Toby after I came out. Loudly and consistently, with a cocky grin on her face. And have you also forgotten how when things didn’t go her way, her dad would just ix it? He made a teacher cry at least once a semester. I assumed, when you two started dating, that she must be diferent now. Because you wouldn’t date a bigot with zero grasp on reality. When you got engaged, I thought she absolutely must have changed, because you wouldn’t marry anyone like that. Guess I was wrong.”

“She’s not like that.”

“Isn’t she? Tell me, Van, which is more believable to you, having known me almost my entire life: I bullied Chantel Granger in High School to the point that over a decade later, she hasn’t gotten over it, or Chantel and her parents are homophobes who can’t stand to be around me for fear they might catch the gay? Your honest opinion, deep down in your soul. I’ll wait.”

“It’s not about that.” Van spoke timidly, clearly doubting his own words.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering to lie about it. You think she’s suddenly going to want me around after you’re married? You’re not just booting me out of your wedding. This is you booting me out of your entire 40

life.”

Toby’s anger converged with sorrow as he spoke, causing his last few words to escape as awkward croaks. He cleared his throat, desperate to keep his composure.

Van ofered nothing in return, save a loud swallow as he relentlessly readjusted his hands on the tabletop.

Feeling moisture beginning to sting his eyes, Toby stood abruptly, leaving the café without a word. Halfway to his car, a hand landed on his shoulder. He stopped but didn’t turn.

“Don’t let this drive a wedge.”

Toby laughed sharply. “This isn’t driving a wedge. This is the wedge.”

“I love her, man. She makes me happy.”

“Wonderful. Congratulations.” He continued to his car, his shaky ingers fumbling with the key fob. He missed unlock and clicked panic instead. “Dammit.”

He struggled to silence the alarm.

“Tobe, I hope you’ll still come to the wedding.”

“Why?” Toby turned, then. “Would it make you feel better if I pretended this isn’t a big deal? That it doesn’t hurt like hell?”

Van made tight ists. “It hurts me, too! You know I love you, bro. But I love her more. She comes irst.”

“And that’s exactly how it should be. But the moment you realized you loved someone who couldn’t tolerate your bro, you should have picked up the phone! You strung me along for months letting me think I was still a signiicant part of your life, then pulled the rug out from under me when it was convenient for you. After I’d come all this way…”

Toby paused a moment, attempting to camoulage a cry with a cough.

“So no, I don’t think I’ll be coming to the wedding. I hope it’s everything you both ever dreamed of. Thanks for a great twenty-ive years, or whatever.”

Toby slid into his car and slammed the door. He gripped the steering wheel, focusing his eyes there. He sensed Van’s presence disappear as he slipped away.

His knuckles white, his eyes on ire, Toby didn’t realize he wasn’t breathing until his head began pounding and his vision went blurry. With a quick and panicked gasp, air illed his lungs again. A sob followed, sharp with anguish.

Toby had felt loss over the years. He’d watched loved ones die. He’d felt 41

heartbreak and unrequited love. Nothing compared to this new loss of his dear friend, who had voluntarily severed the bond without an apology. Two decades wiped out in a single conversation.

Toby turned the key and put his car into gear. Hesitantly, his eyes shifted upward, and he caught a glimpse of Van’s stone-still igure in the rear-view mirror. They both knew with certainty: this was no temporary parting. With a single nod, Toby drove away, leaving a fragment of his heart behind him, taking along only the memories of the friend he’d once called brother.

42

SHATTERING THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL Jenn Sutkowski The call you don’t want: “May I speak to Jennifer, please?”

“This is,” I answered, shaking because it was Kelly Dusenbery from The Hofman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Unfortunately—” That word echoed and ampliied in my head so loud I swore my husband could hear it because he peered around the corner at my face as I slumped onto the couch with the heft of the news. Suddenly there was a crack in the ground between my old life and me.

F-ing cancer?

I was diagnosed with Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, stage zero, in my right breast. After my irst mammogram (and subsequent biopsy) at age forty. Like, huh? It’s nearly the last thing you expect.

“In Situ’ means it is in place, in the duct, it hasn’t spread,” Kelly said.

“That is good. It is the earliest stage, and you’ll have surgery and probably radiation but not chemo, and then you’ll go on medication, and if you tolerate the medication, you’ll stay on it for a few years.”

I took a deep breath and sighed long and hard.

“OK?” Kelly said.

“OK”? Can I say no?

How about: “Yeah, not OK. Smell ya laterrrr. Byeeee.”

But I said yes. I mean, what the hell else was I going to do?

I wondered how much of my body I would lose. I had cat scans and ultrasounds and MRIs and blood tests to check if the cancer I had was the only cancer I had and whether I was prone to more cancer. While waiting on my genetic testing to come through – to see whether I had the BRCA-1 or BRCA2 mutation – the room that was my body expanded and contracted like I was on acid.

“How much of this am I going to keep?” I wondered, holding my breasts and my belly. Sharp butterlies lew through my stomach with every thought.

“Should I have a mastectomy? A double mastectomy?”

43

Ovarian cancer tore my mother from me when I was twenty-four. She had breast cancer irst. She did not have the BRCA mutations, but she had a variant of one of them. What if I was walking the same short road, canyons on all sides? What if my path was precisely her path? She was terriied as she was going through her illness. You could smell her fear in the curtains. You could smell through the whole house when she emptied her colostomy bag. And she was ashamed.

“Your path is not your mother’s path,” my friend Sara told me. “It just cannot be. It is your path.” Having someone like this to share that with me showed me it was diferent. Also, my husband was more attuned to my needs than my father was with my mother. Dad tried – they even went to Germany for alternative treatment when my mom refused the last chemo course. But sometimes, while she was in treatment, he was pouring Johnny Walker Double Black into the chasm where his certainty had been – certainty that being a good Catholic would keep our family safe.

My genetic testing came back without mutations. OK, just a lumpectomy.

“Something, maybe nothing,” on my breast MRI sent me into another swirl of searing panic, so I breathed (too quickly) while dangling over another potential abyss. There was nothing extra there, either. Phew.

A lot changed in the week after my diagnosis. I suddenly gave so fewer shits about so many things. I stopped (temporarily) caring what people thought.

I also realized I didn’t allow people to nurture me enough and started lowering the drawbridge to let myself receive without guilt.

I couldn’t decide whether to tell my father about my diagnosis. He was struggling with Alzheimer’s and I didn’t want him to languish in the vague memory that something was wrong with one of his kids. The part of me that ached for my parents’ love during this momentous time felt ripped from his side. I didn’t tell him. I leaped into the trust that I’d ind what I needed, though, and my sisters drove up from New Jersey to Cambridge to help me through some appointments and surgery.

“Mom told me before she died, ‘Make sure you take care of Jenn,’” my sister Karen told me. I wept with gratitude. Maybe Dad couldn’t scoop me up, but in a way, my mom could.

After recovering from my lumpectomy, I was ready for take-of in the radiation machine. It was pretty easy sailing, relatively speaking, besides the 44

time the techs set the thing up to radiate the wrong breast. I listened to Beach House almost every day for those six weeks on that excellent sound system in Radiation Oncology while they zapped me with the healing light ray – that’s what I called it. It was like being in space.

So many women held my hand step by step over this uncharted territory.

Sure, there was a physicist who poked my nipple with a pen by accident, searing me with blistering awkwardness. The women, however — all amazing.

“You’ll see a lot of people down here going through some intense treatment and stuf. You’re not their comrade in arms,” Dr. Lamb, my radiation oncologist, said. Because what I had going on was not so bad compared to, say, the woman in the wheelchair clutching a giant mason jar of green tea.

The fatigue was exactly as gravitational as I’d heard. One day while driving, I thought, “I can see how people could just slip away and die from this kind of exhaustion.” I scrunched and opened my eyes so as not to ironically lose my life in a car accident while being treated for cancer.

I savored small, sensual moments, like soaking in a bath, reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and putting my hand on my husband’s shoulder while he slept. There was, in fact, joy on this side of the pink line. But even though it was “not life-threatening,” as my breast surgeon had said, I still felt the ground slip away from me as I stared down my mortality.

“What do we want?” my husband and I asked ourselves. I had already been wanting to leave Cambridge. We had many friends there, but I was starting to feel like I was squishing myself into the Cambridge-shaped box instead of living somewhere my body could breathe. I was lucky – not everyone could pick up and go.

“I want to go to Boise when this is over,” I said. We would visit about every six months on our way to or from Pocatello to see my in-laws. We were in a cross-country band with our dear friend in Boise and thought, what if we lived there? So, we visited, looked, found something.

“It happened so suddenly,” my sister Mary Beth said about our move.

Some friends agreed.

“True,” I said. “But it was time.” We would still travel back and forth to Boston for a bit but living somewhere I could hear myself think felt like a bridge to whatever was next and right.

45

Before we left Boston, my husband and best friends and I snuck into Walden Pond and skinny-dipped during the full moon.

“I need to seal myself back into being a body in the world instead of a body in a hospital,” I told them.

I would have to remind myself (and still do) that I trust my life. And this could have been a more disruptive story had I not had privilege or insurance or a nurse practitioner who pushed me to get a mammogram even though the guidelines for age and screening were changing. Other people in my position might not have had a mammogram at all.

Out West, I was grateful for the quiet of the high desert and playing music with friends after my life felt like it could fall apart or, like, end. Cancer is a sledgehammer that upends your life if you’re lucky. You might heal of it.

But if you’re like me, you’re left with post-traumatic medical stress in the hole where the cells that went awry were. After a rupture like that, tucking into a new place and continuing to heal helped me see there wasn’t an ever-widening crack beneath my feet. I tried to focus on the steady ground instead of all the potential gashes to come, even though I often found myself absentmindedly picking at my body for more lumps and clots and manners of my demise.

But this is what life does. So, choose to focus on the hands extended to you while lailing in the cosmos. Look into the void and be afraid – but reach out and keep moving forward. Oddly, perhaps, I prefer this path to the one I would have remained on had everything stayed perfectly intact. There was only ever an illusion of control anyway.

46

47

48

BREACH I want to test and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain.

SYLVIA PLATH

49

50

SNOW BIRDS James McColly Just above the snow Juncos and goldinches Descend Devouring the seeds Of a dormant syringa.

But not devouring Just testing And tasting.

51

MY MOTHER’S ROLLS Kathryn Durrant My mother’s rolls were the star of Thanksgiving meal, not the turkey or pies. We timed the entire meal around the warm creations. They were so tempting that we couldn’t help reaching for one hot out of the oven, even though we knew we risked burning our ingers. It was a risk all of us were willing to take.

My mother passed away ten years ago, I never thought to ask for the recipe while she was alive. I’d seen the stained card throughout the years at family Thanksgivings. It always lay on the counter, dusted with lour, just out of reach of the dough my mother would roll out to the perfect thickness. Over the years following her death, I searched for the recipe in the books I’d inherited from her. Sprinkled throughout the pages of her Betty Crocker cookbook and a few others, I’d found 3x5 cards in my mother’s handwriting. Good recipes, for sure, but never one I was seeking.

By chance, my cousin mentioned Thanksgiving and my mother’s rolls to me as we reminisced about our childhoods. “You know,” she said, “that recipe was really my mother’s.”

A tremor of excitement moved through me. “I didn’t know that.” I cleared my throat, not quite daring to hope, “do you have the recipe?” She couldn’t possibly have guessed how much a positive answer to this question meant to me after all this time.

“Yeah, I can email you a copy.”

I looked down at the printed email when it came as if it was a sacred text.

Combine the lukewarm water and yeast. I sprinkled the tablespoon of tiny tan beads into the water and watched as they ruptured open. This action was a sign the yeast was alive and would grow. I set aside this mixture while I combined one cup of boiling water and one cup of shortening in a large bowl. So much shortening, I thought as the mound of white melted into the steaming water like a miniature iceberg. To this, I added salt, sugar, cold water, and four eggs before returning to the smaller bowl. The yeast had grown and was now lovely tan foam. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the heady yeasty smell before pouring it in to do its magic with the other ingredients.

I glanced at my Bosch mixer. No, I gave my head a shake. My mother 52

mixed the lour in by hand, and so would I. I couldn’t risk not having them be perfect for modern convenience’s sake. First, the mixture clung to my ingers in a gooey mess, but with each addition, it became more dough-like until I could move the mass from the bowl onto the counter and knead it “lightly” as directed. I returned the dough to the bowl. My mother always said “Rise,” but the Great British Bake Of television show taught me the correct word for this step was “proof.” Still, I was following my mother’s recipe, so when I covered it with a dishcloth, I whispered the word, “Rise” like a prayer before leaving it to do its thing. My kitchen soon illed with the smell I remembered so well.

Within an hour, I turned out the dough onto a “slightly loured” counter to roll it out to less than a 1/2 inch thickness. Memories looded my mind.

My mother always used a drinking glass to cut out her rolls. There were times she let me do this part, so I knew just what to do. I took a glass out of the cupboard. I pressed down into the soft dough, making a circle. I could hear my mother’s voice, “Make them closer. Each time you roll the dough out, it will become tougher.” I aligned the glass as close to my irst circle as I could.

Next, I needed to brush melted butter on one half of the circle. Growing up, my family wasn’t fancy enough to have a pastry brush. Instead, my mother would dip the back of a spoon into the butter and dab it lightly onto the roll.

I got out a spoon and anointed each piece in delicious gold. Now the recipe noted, “Pick up each circle and stretch to an oblong shape.” With care I pulled and folded. My muscle memory took over. It was important not to crush the tiny air bubbles the yeast had provided.

I looked at my rows of beautifully shaped dough on the baking sheet.

They looked exactly like my mother’s. The recipe said that they needed to rise another 30 minutes. I draped a cloth over them as if tucking them into bed for a nap. I set my oven to 400 degrees. The taste of my youth was close.

The rolls had doubled, just as they should. I slid them into the oven. “I’ll see you soon, my lovelies,” I said to them as the heat wafted up into my face.

The recipe said, “bake for 20 minutes,” but I knew that was wrong. These were delicate creations needing a close eye. There would be no ordinary kitchen timer for these works of art. They only needed to be in the oven for as long as it took to gather everyone to the Thanksgiving table and quiet down enough so someone could say grace.

I turned on the oven light and pulled up a chair to the oven’s window.

53

Already an aroma of baking bread illed the air around me and grew more intense with each passing minute. My mouth watered, and I took deep breaths.

After an eternity of about eight minutes, they were lightly golden. I reverently pulled them out of the heat and set the baking sheet down. Out of habit, I reached out for one, even though I knew I might burn my ingers. After all this time, I knew it was a risk worth taking.

54

COMPROMISE Amanda Nida Sean’s wife kissed him softly on the cheek before she left for work. He pretended not to wake up and only squeezed an eye open after he heard her car drive away. Today was the day. He was leaving town. Consequently, he was also leaving Maggie.

He jumped out of bed and began gathering up his clothing. He didn’t have much time to pack, but he hadn’t wanted to start early and perhaps alert Maggie to what he was planning. He glanced back at the purple comforter he had tossed aside. It was a choice of Maggie’s, covered in a bland pattern of interlaced lowers. He hated that blanket. It was almost as bad as the bed it lay on, a blocky monstrosity that was a wedding gift from Maggie’s parents.

But no more of that. In only a few hours, he would be on a light across the country to Orlando. A short connection to Key West and he’d be on a beach with Francis. No return light had been booked.

Stacking his shirts in his dusty suitcase, he could still smell hints of his wife’s perfume wafting from the bathroom. It was the slightly chemical jasmine smell of the Chanel perfume he’d bought for her birthday ive years ago. She still wore it every day. Her bottle was almost empty. I need to buy her another bottle, he thought.

But no, he’d be long gone. He shouldn’t need to remind himself. There would be things like this that he would miss; the routine of home or whatever.

Christmas wouldn’t be the same without snow, but Sean liked the idea of palm trees strung with lights.

The early morning light in the room was still dim. Outside he could hear his neighbors heading out the door and on to work. That wouldn’t be him, not anymore. He couldn’t stand his job. He’d always wanted to be a writer, and had even written in his spare time…or at least he used to. But for the last twelve years he had worked as a consultant at an insurance company. The work paid well enough but it was dull. Once he got to Key West, though, Sean was determined to set himself up as a writer, to get back to his passion.

He zipped up his suitcase and set it upright before heading to the kitchen.

Maggie’s cofee cup and toast plate were still sitting in the sink. He licked the tap on and began rinsing them but then froze, the plate still in his hand.

55

What was he doing? He didn’t have to do this anymore. But he always cleaned up Maggie’s breakfast dishes, since she had to leave for work earlier. Sean shrugged of the thought and put the dishes in the dishwasher just as he always did. He supposed he might as well, since he was almost done anyway.

Sean glanced at the wall clock. Still only 8:30. He wasn’t due to meet Francis at the airport for another two hours. He went to the fridge to get some breakfast. The fridge door squeaked loudly. They really did need a new one.

Perhaps once he sold his car, he could send Maggie the money. He grabbed the dish of pasta from the previous night and sat at the kitchen table, eating it cold.

As he ate, Sean could hear, distantly, the sound of a commuter bus going by. He hated how close they lived to the main road, and yet he and Maggie had been living here for close to ifteen years. It was supposed to have been a temporary place. They had planned on moving up to a northern suburb at some point. But they’d settled into their row house and had just gotten used to it. From time to time, they still brought up the idea of moving, when a promising house was listed. But nothing had ever come of that.

It was like that bed, Sean thought. Neither he nor Maggie liked that ugly thing her parents had given them. But they hadn’t had anything else when they married, and they’d never gotten around to replacing it. Everything about their life together had become a series of compromises that nobody really wanted.

Sean knew he wasn’t happy with Maggie anymore, but he’d thought it was because their life together was so far from what they’d planned. Certainly, the fallen expectations were a part of it, but being with Francis, he realized just how much he’d compromised his life. He had suspected, as a teenager, that he might be gay, but he’d ignored those thoughts, pushed them far out of consideration. In his early twenties, he’d met Maggie. The two of them had hit it of well and that was it.

Or rather it wasn’t, because eventually he met Francis. Francis had started as a temp at the insurance company about a year ago. Casual conversation had led to the two of them having lunch together, and then to dinners and now Sean was practically living a double life. But not for much longer. Francis was a few years younger, but Sean barely noticed. Sean just felt like he could talk to Francis in a way he hadn’t with Maggie in years, maybe ever. Francis listened to him, for one thing. He hadn’t felt like anyone had actually listened to him for a long time. Maggie had the awful habit of nodding absently whenever Sean 56

tried to tell her something.

Sean looked at the clock again. Only ifteen minutes had passed. With almost two full hours still left to kill, he decided to go ahead and tidy up the bedroom. He made the bed and picked up the hangers he’d left on the loor when he packed. He was still going to be leaving a lot behind. Most of his clothing and belongings. He was quite certain that Maggie wasn’t the kind of vindictive person who would throw it all out. He could send for it later.

Rummaging through his collection of ties, though, a thought occurred to him. He didn’t need any of these things. Perhaps the best plan for starting fresh would be to actually start over completely. Take nothing much from his old life.

Just the clothes on his back. Yes, he liked that idea.

He slammed the drawer shut, rattling the dusty photograph on top of it.

The photo in it was faded now, from years sitting next to the window. In it, he and Maggie had their arms around one another, standing in front of Times Square. It had been their irst or second anniversary; Sean couldn’t remember which. They looked happy in the picture. He admitted to himself that they really had been, once. But that had faded.

His cell rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, expecting to see Francis’ face on the screen. But no, it was Maggie. Sean hesitated a moment before answering it.

“Hello?”

“Oh, hello dear. I’m glad I caught you.”

“What? Why?” Sean’s palms started to sweat. Was it possible that she knew? How could she?

“Well I just wanted to let you know that I’m not going out with the girls tonight. I’m just not in the mood. Instead, I thought you and I could go get dinner somewhere? Or take-out. We could make it a night in.” Her voice had risen in pitch, as it did when she made a suggestion that she thought he would turn down.

Sean took a deep breath. Should he tell her now? It seemed awful for him to string her along with these plans. What he was doing wasn’t good; he knew that. But he really had wanted to leave clean, without the confrontation. He didn’t know if he could face her.

“How about a night in?” he said. “We haven’t had a night together in a while.”

57

“Yeah, we haven’t. I’d like that. Well, I hope you have a good day at work then. I’ll let you get back to that.” Maggie’s voice was light again. Sean could hear the smile in it.

“Oh yeah, thanks.”

“I love you, Sean. I’ll see you at six.”

“I love you, too,” Sean said. He hung up quickly, since he knew Maggie hated to hang up irst.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. For all that their life wasn’t what he’d hoped, he really did care deeply for Maggie. He did love her, even if not in the way he should. Looking at his little suitcase, he knew he loved her too much to do this to her.

He’d called things of with Francis once before already. He knew Francis wouldn’t put up with it again. They’d be done. Already, he could feel Key West fading away.

The commuter bus rattled by again. Sean guessed it was probably the 9:05. He didn’t even have to glance at his watch to know for sure.

58

NO RUPTURED SKULL TODAY Captain Bill Collier Concord Naval Weapons Depot, Concord, CA As a young man, I attended U S Navy Flight School and became a helicopter for the United States Marine Corps. After Vietnam, I left active duty and decided to experiment with civilian helicopter lying. In 1974 I worked out of Stockton Airport, California for a small operator named CALICOPTERS. The company won a contract to spread synthetic fertilizer on the grounds of the Concord Naval Weapons Depot about 40 miles to the west. The Navy stored nuclear weapons were stored in underground bunkers on this base, but the surface ground was leased to local cattlemen to graze their herds. This keep the grass down and help prevent grass ires.

I departed Stockton airport in my Alouette III helicopter at irst light.

My support crew had departed an hour earlier, a small parade of vehicles, including a fuel truck, a larger tank truck full of ammonium nitrate synthetic fertilizer and a conveyor belt device on a trailer used to deliver the fertilizer from the bottom of the larger truck to my spreader buckets.

We had briefed to meet at the guard shack at the entry to the base. I lew to the designated rendezvous point but my crew was nowhere to be seen, and I saw nothing resembling a guard shack. I thought I must have misunderstood, so I began a search for them. I followed the road between the small hills onto the base, and started searching. I lew low-level around the base for several minutes. After about ive minutes, I saw a Military Police vehicle following behind me, lights lashing but thought little of it. I did a U-turn and lew to the other end of the base. I the MP vehicle shadowed me, lights still lashing.

Finally I saw what I thought to be the guard shack. It was about twenty by thirty feet, bristling with antennas, and several oicial looking vehicles parked beside it. This must be the guard shack, I’ll land here and ask the MPs if they have seen my crew.

As I shut the helicopter down, the Military Police truck rattled to a halt in the gravel about 50 feet in front of me. When I walked towards the guard shack, a Marine corporal with a rile in his hands approached me briskly from the MP truck and ordered smartly, “Down in the dirt on your face, now!” I 59

tried to explain why I was there and that I was looking for my crew, but I could tell from his demeanor that he was quite serious. If I didn’t get down he was going to put me down, hard. I felt that he was aching to give me a vertical butt stroke with his rile. I saw him shift his body weight, getting ready to deliver a blow, but he checked himself and instead gave me a second irm command, “Down, now! Face down in the dirt!” I lopped down onto the cold, muddy soil.

Prone on the cold, sticky soil, I slowly reached back and slid my wallet out of my left rear jeans pocket, and handed up my pink reserve ID showing that I was a Captain of Marines. This will get me a little respect. None! The corporal didn’t care; he was focused on protecting his nuclear weapons from my heinous threat. I stayed put, getting muddier, wetter and colder. After about ive minutes a U. S. Navy Lieutenant Commander appeared. I was allowed to get up of the ground and speak with the corporal’s superior oicer.

I learned that my crew had had a mechanical problem with one of the trucks and never made it to the base...of course they were diicult for me to ind because they weren’t there. Worse yet, I learned that no one had ever bothered to inform base security troops that we were scheduled to do the job.

I had put the whole base on high alert with my lying low and slow around the base.

After things got all settled out, we distributed tons of fertilizer to the grasslands atop the bomb storage bunkers. Grass ires were prevented, so the Navy was happy. The cattle got fat, so the farmer made money, and I wrote a nice letter to the commander of the base, proudly commending the Marine corporal for his no-monkey-business professionalism. I hope he got promoted... and I am eternally grateful that he didn’t rupture my skull with his rile butt.

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BREACH Allison Fowle I can’t remember if you apologized like you meant it, if it was the kind of apology that could carry me to the other side of what you did or the kind that keeps me stopped in time.

Here’s what I can remember: the stray cat that brushed against my leg while I confronted you in the parking lot before work.

A cat I knew, had met before, a cat with a way of appearing uninvited, unannounced, unexpected as your hand on my ass.

I sleep now with my jaw clenched, dream of cats slinking in through windows I left open, sidling through the unlocked front door.

My fault, no apology owed.

I forgave you but I didn’t mean it, know you’ll be back to crawl through the window, and tell me I misunderstood.

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RUPTURED J. L. Stowers Cara stared out the airlock’s viewport, struggling to ignore echoes of her shaky breath within her helmet. Goosebumps spread on her clammy skin as the destruction rotated into view. The airlock was always cold, but the sight outside truly chilled her to the bone.

“Wow,” Devin’s voice rasped through her earpiece. “When they said an asteroid collided with IODS, they didn’t mean a glancing blow.”

“Guess not,” Cara answered, her mouth dry. The Interstellar Object Delection System was Earth’s defense against asteroids. And, while it had succeeded in redirecting the latest threat, it did so at great cost. “I thought they were just nudging it.”

“Maybe they hit it a little harder, just to be certain.” Devin turned to her, his experienced eyes ofering little reassurance. “We must be careful. Anything in there could easily rupture a suit, or worse. But we have to succeed. Just because Earth is safe for now it doesn’t mean there won’t be another threat.”

She took a deep breath. “This isn’t a job I was expecting.”

“I don’t think any of us expected this. The ion beam should have worked.”

Their ship neared the wreckage. The asteroid had demolished the crew section. Bits and pieces drifted away from the corpse of the space station.

Bodies of the crew tumbled sluggishly among the debris.

“Are we supposed to just leave them there?” She forced herself to look away, as though seeing their bodies in this state violated their privacy.

“Our mission is to get the data recorder and get out. Another crew is coming to… clean up.”

“This is as close as we can safely get. Take the ponies and proceed with caution. We’re too far out for a tether to reach, so be careful.” Control announced.

“Copy that, control,” Devin replied. He turned to Cara. “You ready?”

“No tether? Take the ponies? It’s a graveyard out there! I collect samples from asteroids. I’m not a irst responder. I don’t have the ield experience you have.”

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Devin pursed his lips. “Yeah, it’s dangerous… but we’re the only ones here. As it is, it will take a year to get back to Earth with this thing. Who knows how long it’ll take them to analyze the data? Sometimes, you have to take big risks for big rewards.”

“I don’t want a reward. I want to live.” Her voice cracked with the last word.

“You aren’t listening to me. Earth needs us. Trust me, I asked about every alternative. They wouldn’t send us in there if there were any other options.”

She knew he was right, but it didn’t ease the dread nestled in her stomach.

Devin strapped one of the small thruster packs onto the front of Cara’s suit before attaching one to himself. He then clipped his tether onto her suit.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise.”

With a clumsy, gloved hand, Devin pressed the large red button, which triggered the lashing light both inside and outside the airlock. Thirty seconds later, the door hissed open. He grabbed the front handle of Cara’s pony and kicked out into open space.

Her pulse raced as he dragged her from safety of their research ship. They glided toward what was left of IODS. “Kick on your pony, ive seconds, now,” Devin ordered.

They accelerated toward their target. As they neared, Devin maneuvered to face Cara and kicked on his pony booster to slow them down. The jagged maw of the breached hull engulfed them like a whale scooping up a feast of krill. The ocean of stars yielded to twisted fragments of the once-mighty space station.

“Grab that pole up there.”

Cara fought to push her fear aside as she reached out with both arms to grab the pole. Devin hooked his secondary tether around the pole and clipped it to itself, but despite their slow approach, the inertia was too much for Cara’s grip. “No!” Bracing himself, Devin grabbed the tether connected to Cara and pulled hard. Cara felt the jerk, but it only slowed her down. She scrambled to grab onto something, anything, before she hit the jagged wreckage on the hull’s other side. Finally, the line went taut, and she stopped short of a mangled mess of metal.

“See? I told you I’d keep you safe.” Devin forced a nervous laugh.

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Staring at a broken pipe that would have impaled her had she gone another half meter, Cara said, “Can we just get the thing and get out of here?”

Devin unclipped his secondary tether and pushed of toward a hallway. “It should be in here.”

She followed cautiously through the twists of metal that jutted out every way she turned.

At the end of the hall was the IODS engine core, and the resting place for the space station’s black box. The consoles were lit up with warning lights.

Devin removed a wrench from the tool bag around his waist and started loosening the bolts, each tumbling away once freed.

Cara snatched up a bolt somersaulting toward her helmet. “You shouldn’t be so careless. One of these, at the right speed, could take out an entire ship.”

“The clean-up crew will account for every nut and bolt. That’s their job.

Mine is getting this” — Devin grunted as he heaved the black box free — “out.”

The box slipped loose, and Devin clung to it as it tumbled. The tether went taut and then tugged Cara again. As she grabbed a pole for support, a sharp pain stabbed her palm.

“Shit!” But she didn’t let go. Not until Devin had stopped.

“Sorry, wasn’t expecting it to ly out like that.” He gestured. “We’re done.

Let’s go.”

“My suit’s breached.” She released the pole, droplets of blood bubbling around her hand.

“What?” Devin straightened. “How bad?”

Cara ripped a repair patch of the front of her suit and slapped it on her palm, but the blood continued to seep out. Droplets loated into her line of vision inside the suit.

Devin braced himself at the opposite end of the hall and yanked the tether to pull her toward him.

Cara loated toward Devin, ramming into him. Their combined force dislodged a sheet of metal, causing it to silently bounce out of the hull. Devin winced as he grabbed her hand.

“The patch isn’t holding because of the blood. Shit.” He ripped the patch of his chest and slapped it on Cara’s glove where hers didn’t seal.

As he applied pressure, droplets of blood rose behind his head. “Devin!” she 64

gasped, realizing that it wasn’t just her blood orbiting them.

“I told you I’d take care of you.” He ofered a half-smile.

Her eyes fell to where drops of red and green lowed freely from his ruptured suit and his pony’s fuel line. “No…” she muttered in disbelief.

“Here.” He strapped the black box to Cara’s secondary tether. “Get it back.”

“Not without you!”

“We won’t have enough thrust to get all the way back and slow down. Not with a ruptured fuel line.”

“I’m not leaving you here.” Cara felt a surge of power as she pushed her way through the rubble. The tear in his suit was too big to patch. They had to get back, now.

“I’m losing life support.” His breathing grew labored.

“You’re getting back on that ship with me.” Cara unsheathed her knife and cut Devin’s secondary tether, angling them toward the open side of the ship, and kicked on her pony. A few seconds later, Cara was towing Devin at full speed as he fought to remain awake. “You better hang on.”

No reply. He was unconscious. She lipped herself around to brake, but her pony didn’t have much fuel left. It didn’t slow them enough. They were coming in too hot. She maneuvered Devin around and kicked on his pony. It sputtered a partial burst. Still not enough.

Cara wrapped herself around Devin, the black box between them, and tucked her head as they sailed through the airlock door. On their way through, she slapped the red button just before they slammed into the opposite side.

Cara’s arm crunched, and Devin lailed.

She untangled herself to reach up and slap the button to close and repressurize the airlock. By now, her own vision was fading fast as darkness invaded. Something wet ran down her face, stinging her eye. The metallic taste entered her mouth. Blood. She squinted at Devin’s blueish face before the dark overcame her. *** Cara woke in sick bay.

The ship’s doctor stood over her. “You’re awake. Good.”

“Devin?” She tried to prop herself up.

“When you hit the interior airlock door, you fractured your collar bone 65

and got a concussion. But you should make a full recovery.”

Her voice ratcheted up. “And Devin?”

“He’ll be alright. Thanks to you. The black box is safe too. We’re on our way back to Earth.”

She fell back on her pillow, happy to be safely aboard the research ship.

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A MAN NAMED JOE Sonya Feibert I met a man named Joe last night.

I met Joe because he was riding my bike as I walked home after work, bikeless. It was dark and the desert air was cold by the time I left the brewery and prepared for a longer journey home than I’d hoped for.

Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. A bike, and the person riding it, came into view.

I zeroed in on my water bottle nestled in the metal holder on the bike bar.

“Hey!” I shouted in that moment of realization. “Hey...that’s my water bottle.”

Joe hesitated for a moment. He slowed. He rolled over to me.

“I think that’s my bike,” I said.

“I found it,” he said defensively.

“Okay.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” he said.

“Okay. Thank you for inding it.”

“It was unlocked.”

That was fair. Rushing to work after a soccer game in the park, I hadn’t locked my bike. That detail slipped my mind until we were closing for the night.

The realization hit me around 10 p.m. I’d stayed busy enough all day, passing out beers and cleaning the brewery, that I hadn’t given my bike a second thought.

I ran outside to look at the bike rack. No surprise, but the little bit of hope I’d had vanished: my bike was gone.

Too embarrassed by my carelessness, I didn’t say anything to my coworker. I would walk home. It was ine. It would be ine.

And now, here was my bike in front of me, with someone else straddling it.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. I thought I’d never see it again,” I told Joe. Joe got of the bike. He wheeled it to me.

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“I thought about how I could get around more easily. I thought about how I could get to the store with this bike. It would make things easier,” he said.

“Can I repay you?” I asked. “Could I buy you something to eat?”

Somehow, all I felt towards Joe was gratitude. Maybe he’d taken my bike, but now he was returning it.

“Okay.” Joe said.

“I don’t have any cash though. What if we go to the gas station across the street?”

“Okay,” Joe said.

We walked to the gas station, I pushing my new found bike, Joe walking, back on the ground, bikeless.

We walked, and Joe told me about serving in the military. How afterwards, he got out and couldn’t ind work. He dealt with anxiety from his time serving overseas. Now, he just wanted a job, but he couldn’t ind one. He’d been living without a home, trying to ind work and go on with life.

We got to the gas station. Joe said he would wait outside.

I went inside and bought anything I saw that might taste decent: a few sandwiches, Snickers, water, an apple, chips. As I checked out, I took out $40 for Joe. We sat outside the gas station a few feet apart, backs up against the building.

Joe shared more about his life. He was trying to ind work, to ind a more comfortable life, the kind of life some of us have and many of us take for granted. He didn’t have a support system. Any head start he’d had was long gone.

I told Joe I needed to get home. I thanked him for giving my bike back. I didn’t know what else I could do.

The bike he returned to me sits in my garage, one tire lat, the chains gathering rust.

I still think about Joe. I wonder how he is. I wonder if he found a job.

And I wonder, if I saw him again, would I tell him to keep the bike?

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IT IS NATURAL Alyssa Stadtlander it is natural, the changing the seed, deeply planted in the earthy darkness the caterpillar, cliché and honest in her shadowy conines the raindrop tears itself from the rest and embraces the fall my yet-again wobbly-legged heart in the stable, birthed the angels in the wind celebrate the newness of the birds in the nest, stretching that slippery, fragile apparatus attached to their back I hear the noise outside and, knees buckling, grow my way through it the seed back in the soil of my body no more, no more

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THE RAPTURE AND THE RUPTURE Carolyn Bevington Part One — Priorities of Youth “Thou art beautiful, O my love as Tizrah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as any army with banners. Turn thine eyes away from me , for they have overcome me. Thy hair is as a lock of goats that descend from Mt. Gilead.” — Song of Solomon 6:4-5.

While most girls were swapping Bonne Belle root beer lavored lip gloss for bubble gum, I was mostly concerned about being a righteous Born Again teenager. Well, at least sort of.

I grew up Catholic — the whole shebang-from baptism, and irst communion to conirmation. But when I was 14, I was sucked into a vortex of emotion, friendly loving faces, heavenly promises and the shushing of sinful desires which made them even more tempting at a non-denominational evangelical Christian church. To cement my thinking into the mold of Born again-ness, I attended what were called Memory Parties at my youth group leaders house. Every Monday night we’d memorize Bible verses. We each found our own spot on the basement loor. We were cramped, deliciously closequartered in a weirdly pleasant co-ed mix of Dad’s Old Spice, pheromones, teenage spirit Pre-Nirvana, and Love’s Baby Soft perfume. When everyone took their assigned verses to memorize and recite back to our leaders for pizza party points, Julie and I muled our laughs and felt a rush from reading the book of The Song of Solomon. It wasn’t one of the books we were supposed to be memorizing so we got in trouble but it was worth it. The words were so enthralling that we could actually picture that if a guy told us our hair looked like a lock of goats descending from Mt. Gilead — that that was an awesome thing in 1984, the year of Our Lord and Big Big Hair. The importance of what we were accomplishing as we fed our hearts with The Word tempered itself as we lay around laundry piles and dusty bowling trophies. The best part of the night was the plate of warm Everything Bars and yes Kool-Aid-but it wasn’t grape. It was neon lime green.

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Part Two — In the Time of MEGA “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” — Colossians 3:16 Our was one of the irst MEGA churches in the U.S. nestled in a Chicago suburb. Every Thursday night high schoolers came together as Son City where we’d meet for games, sports competition, Christian rock worship and the message of contemporary Christianity. Our Son City driver, Julie’s mom, had a bumper sticker on her Ford station wagon the words of which I emblazoned all over my school paper book covers — as a witness to my fallen and lost peers: “Warning — In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.”

It seemed that all the Son City girls I spoke with had a crush in one degree or another on Joe the twenty-something blonde haired All-American Son City Christian Rock band leader. In fact, many of us seemed to re-dedicate and become Born Again every single Thursday night as we bawled our teenage hormones away and Joe led us to accept Jesus as Our Personal Savior for the umpteenth time. He said that God would collect every tear that fell from our eyes, that God knew the number of hairs on our Big Hair heads and that His thoughts of us were as many as the grains of sand on earth.

Part Three — The Four Humors Next to the words of the Rapture bumper sticker, I made four sketchy drawings of the four humors of Greek medicine that we were learning about in Senior English class. I liked the fact that, for example, melancholic’s element was earth, choleric’s was ire, phlegmatic’s was water and sanguine’s was air. Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile were used to describe a person’s temperament and in the case of Shakespeare used for his character development. I would soon have intimate knowledge of at least the melancholic and choleric humors in my own earthly mortal coil.

As life imitates art, at 18 my doctor and 2 surgeons diagnosed me with having a blocked bile duct and a gall bladder illed to the brim with many 71

green raspberry looking stones. I had to hole up in the hospital for ten days with a tube attached to a bag that held a dark green blackish bile liquid from my recovering bile duct. My scar with staples measured 8 inches long across my belly — pre-laparoscopic times. As I lay in bed I daydreamed about Christian rock god Joe exorcising me of my melancholic black bile — the sadness I felt at my unrequited love for him. The bile that kept coming out of me was dark blackish green and yellowish at the same time. My choleric and melancholic humors were working overtime. On full faucet blast, I would soon learn about another sort of humors exorcism.

Part Four — The Poetic Rupture Before The Rapture “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, Neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away.” — Revelations 21:4 My recovery took about three weeks at home but I was still on time to go to my irst high school dance called Turnabout where the girls asked the guys to the dance. There would be no hot and heavy slow dancing or groping because A — I was a Christian girl who didn’t do such things even if she thought about them and B — I had this little green monster bile bag and tube hanging with tape of my stomach which would have felt awkward for Gary my safe Son City date to feel. I was missing Son City so much that I begged my Dad to go to Son City and he reluctantly agreed making me promise to not play dodge ball which was not a problem for me. I hated dodge ball. Even nice Christian youth group dodge ball.

That irst night back at Son City, me and my little monster bag and tube reveled in the dark auditorium seats chewing on my new Bonne Belle cotton candy lip gloss while watching Joe’s piano lourishes and tickling of the ivories.

I went into a — a dreamy state where I imagined he asked me to stand up and be recognized for God’s healing hand in my life. Then I loat to the stage and he catches me and gives me a brotherly kiss on the forehead as I melt into his arms.

At the end of the night, Julie’s Rapture Mom, Julie and a few other kids and I make our way down the road to McDonalds. I walked into the French 72

fry smelling lobby and saw this familiar blonde head of hair talking to Dan our fearless youth pastor. It was Christian Rock God Joe. I had never met this god in person because he was in the band and there were at least 500 of us kids at Son City every Thursday night. I didn’t think he had ever seen my face or remembered me from the auditorium seats. Well, soon he would never forget his night at the smelly McDonalds.

Standing in line within eyeshot and drooling distance of Joe, I feel a pop then a warm splash of about 1½ cups of warm luid pooling on the greasy McDonalds loor at my feet. Tucked under my jeans, my bile bag burst right in front of him. An unintended exorcism of my melancholic and choleric humors.

I ran to the bathroom and wouldn’t leave until Julie’s Rapture Mom came and got me. The coast was clear and my now forbidden idol Joe had left with Pastor Dan but not before he introduced himself to all the kids in our group except for me, who was sitting on the toilet in the French fry smelling bathroom.

For the rest of the academic year, my senior English class focused on the unit of Poetry — every kind, type, style and era were touched upon. When the time came for us to create our own poetry, I already had my poem written.

Carolyn and the Melancholic Monster was good poetry. Can I hear an Amen?

May it be so.

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SCHISM I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

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ABCs FOR MY 1, 2, 3 An Alphabet Story for My Daughters Jamie K. Corbin A is for adversity. Its inevitability is the cause for your instruction.

B is for Black girl magic. You possess an innate beauty, power, and resilience. Generations of perseverance will lead you to accomplishment despite the systems surrounding you, designed to stile your success.

C is for childhood – interrupted. Your father declared it time to protect you with the explanation and education of what it means to be Afro-Latinas in America when you were just 7, 5, and 3.

D is for double standards. They are diicult to accept, so don’t. Speak up for yourself and for others, ight for justice and equality, and don’t yield to discouragement.

E is for education. This is your path forward into progress, and the reason you’ve never lived a day without books; the reason we teach you to read and think before you step foot in a school building. Commitment to your education is a strategic, rebellious shot ired against the injustice that awaits you, an indignant response to the severely punitive literacy laws of the past. Your ancestors fought to open the doors to educational opportunity for us, and we will not waste their sufering and sacriice.

F is for freedom. It’s a declaration, a promise, and a dream that will never come to fruition as long as we allow unjust systems to stand from sea to shining sea.

G is for gun rights. This constitutional guarantee to self-protection exists in writing only. Tamir’s mother knows all too well that in the hands of a Black child, toy guns can be life-threatening. No, darlings, you may not play with your friends and their water guns this summer, or next...or ever.

H is for Holy Trinity. They who decree the imago Dei with each breath of life given, spoken into every shade of lesh found in creation. You are imagebearers of God, beautiful contributions to the kaleidoscope of cultures and souls that constitute the citizenry of Heaven. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit 77

are your authority, source of love, and eternal salvation. Never forget that.

I is for “I can’t breathe.” the terriied last words of George Floyd, a pleading echo of community trauma reverberating through generations. Just like George’s momma couldn’t protect him, your father and I couldn’t shield you from the sufocating grief for what was lost this summer; it trespassed on your souls without consent this summer, little ones. I’m sorry.

J is for Justice for Breonna Taylor. She’s an embodied symbol of our country’s forced, but honest confession of how little a Black woman’s life is valued. Our country’s wicked, perverse theology of power and oppression determined this value long ago, but no longer can it be denied in good faith by those who have been complicit in its existence. Will this change before you are considered women? I just don’t know.

K is for Klansmen. They have been emboldened to abandon their white hoods when they lynch Black people in hoodies like Trayvon Martin, or attack our nation’s capitol with a treasonous lag in tow, waving on errs of white supremacy.

L is for lives that matter. Black bodies should matter, just as much as any other. Black lives matter. Your Black bodies and lives are valuable, full of wisdom, worthy of respect, dignity, honor, love, and trust. We remind you of your ancestors’ contributions to our country and point out what you ofer the world on a daily basis, desperate to arm you for this life-long battle.

M is for Martin Luther King, Jr. His words speak to your mission: Be positive peacemakers – bring forth justice – rather than negative peacemakers who accept a lack of tension as an accomplishment worthy of praise. Your own brothers and sisters in Christ might call you divisive as you ight for justice, but it’s injustice that is divisive, not your eforts to end it. Don’t be silenced by those seeking to keep a peace that doesn’t actually exist.

N is for natural hair. Twists, braids, crowns, pufs, cornrows, or wild and free – you are fabulous, and by extension your hair is fabulous, but your beauty extends beyond your hair. Yes, it is unique and exquisite. No, you don’t have to let people touch it.

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O is for one another. Our family operates within the words of Jesus, and He shares many directives about how we are to interact with one another – if you start and end with love, you will be on the right path. Loving well is a life skill that sounds simpler than it is. It takes intention, humility, and practice.

There will be times of deep conlict when disconnection will seem faster, when vengeance will seem more satisfying, when violence will seem safer – but resist the temptation and save yourself the heartache of losing your integrity and witness along the way. Love one another well, that is how you change the world.

P is for pasión. An abundance of it courses through your little bodies even now. Son Latinas who love iercely from la corazón. Don’t listen to those who would shame you for it, and don’t ever apologize for it – God gave it to you for a purpose. Using your pasión wisely will energize you, but using it in any way other than what He intended will leave you depleted and hurting.

Q is for questions. “Why don’t people like my Black skin?”, “When did you know our church didn’t want us?” “How can one country have two lags?”

We struggle with what to say because the answers are complex, don’t make sense, and you are still so young. This tension between the honesty we have always promised you and the protection of your hearts is itself a relentless reminder of why we have to continue ighting for what’s right, even when we are tired.

R is for representation. Alicia Keyes, Yara Shahidi, Caila Marsai Martin, Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, Coco Gauf, Amanda Gorman, Vashti Harrison, Abby Phillips, Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Priscilla Shirer, Jo Saxton, Jackie Hill Perry and so many others, all using their Black girl magic to make a way for you to do the same for future magic bearers.

S is for status quo. You are Black girls with brains, beauty, and boldness. You pose a grave danger to the ways of the world, sweet girls, so do not be surprised when the world comes after you. Stick together – lift one another up, protect each other, and celebrate even the smallest of victories – especially when your father and I are gone.

T is for tax. Being Black in America will cost you something. Your health, opportunities, and dignity will be unfairly taken from you.

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U is for understandings. You need to understand that history is fundamental. You must learn it before you share it, and share it before you can inluence it. Understand that ighting for social justice is a journey – some are farther along than others. You will have to discern whether the moment calls for patience and grace or a healthy boundary to remain an efective agent of change.

V is for visionary. The world needs you, my loves, to lead in a way that opens hearts, minds, and eyes to imaginative thinking. Lead in a way that opposes oppression, create power and share it.

W is for wait. People will admonish you to wait patiently for justice. That is a tactic meant to disarm you, to make you question if what you are seeing and experiencing is as oppressive as it feels. But, justice is not something that is absent today and then arrives at an agreed upon date. Justice is an ongoing proclamation that demands defense. Waiting is not a choice.

X is for xenophobia. Sometimes it is said that people are afraid of what they don’t know. But I think people are more afraid of what they do know. There is a racial reckoning going on in our country, and the Church is not exempt.

People are afraid because they know wrongs have been done. Their bodies can feel their complicity, even if their minds don’t want to acknowledge it.

And, their hearts are at odds with their creator. Fear is a powerful emotion that makes people do ungodly things. Love, however, is the opposite of fear. Choose love.

Y is for yearn. Your father and I long for a diferent reality with all of our being. We will ight alongside you, for your grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren until our dying breaths.

Z is for Zion. We have an eternal reality. Mijas, do not lose your faith along the way. This world, with its unjust history and systems, is not our forever home. While we are here, our family ights for what is right. It is your duty as a citizen of Heaven to practice and share now what we will experience later: love, peace, joy and justice.

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FIRST FROST Judith McConnell Steele How do you tell the children?

Pull out dark clothes lying deep in shuttered trunks.

Thick pants, strapped at the cuf, muled sweaters, double skirts that drag the ground.

Heavy boots with metal brackets, studded soles to struggle through long nights.

Tamp down your vegetables end to end in sootcellar dirt beneath the ragged loorboards.

Buried where no dogs will dig, lost until you need to eat.

Wax and sharpen all the skis though sun warms your skin so rose you cannot remember white on white on endless, dirty white.

Cannot see drifts racked higher than your house now lung open like a summer heart.

Dig long graves, while earth gives under your bare foot.

When all you want to do is lie in green soil, roll and roll.

Stand up. Prepare to bury your dead saints while you still have the strength.

Tell the children.

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SEASONS CHANGE Genalea Barker The slam of the storm door startled me. “Mom?” No response. I set down the laundry basket, heading for the back of the house. “Mom?” Nothing, except an ominous smell wafting through the screen.

“No!” A steady stream of profanities left my lips as I raced for the garden hose, my heart racing. Mom stood calmly at the fence, matchbox in hand, completely oblivious to all but the pile of burning leaves in front of her. Not without struggle, I heaved the running hose across the lawn and began waving the water in an erratic pattern over the lames. Heavy smoke rose as the leaves hissed.

“I’m going outside to walk along the fence,” she’d told me thirty minutes before. “I need a little exercise.”

“Wonderful idea, Mom.” The large back yard was lined entirely with privacy fence, the gate far too inicky and heavy for her to open alone. She couldn’t escape, she couldn’t engage any neighbors in conversation, it was a perfect solo occupation for her, and one she did rather frequently.

I’m going to walk the back fence; it’ll be good for me, had apparently turned into, I’m going to rake up a pile of dry leaves and set them on ire. Thank God I’d heard the door slam.

Mother began shouting at me while I doused the lames, my eyes burning from the smoke. “I don’t know why you have to ruin everything I try to do! I don’t know why you can’t ever let me have an idea!”

I ofered no response, focused solely on dampening the blackened ground so nothing could rekindle later. I thought back to that morning’s positive airmation from my daily calendar. I breathe in the calm; I release the tension.

Appropriate.

Taking in the smoky air felt strangely soothing. I smelled my childhood.

My little brother Cole and I camping under the stars with Dad, listening with fascination as he told stories and pointed out every constellation. I smelled a time when my own children were little, roasting marshmallows and making s’mores in the irepit on summer nights.

I breathed out my anger, allowing space for those sweeter memories to 82

ill me up. Allowing myself to be more than an exhausted caretaker. In those memories, I was a daughter, a sister, a mother, a friend.

Mother was still ranting, though her voice had softened. She was remorseful, even if her words weren’t. It’s not my fault! I just wanted to clean up the yard! I’m allowed to clean up my yard!

I turned the hose of and reeled it up before making my way to her side. I didn’t argue the fact that it wasn’t even her yard; it was mine. Instead, I gently reached my arm around her. “The leaves are lovely in the yard, Mom. They give it color.”

“I like a clean yard.” She fussed.

“I know.” I took another slow, controlled breath. “Why don’t you hand me that match box?”

Her shoulders relaxed as she relinquished it, her eyes misting. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I pressed my temple against her white hair. “I know, Mama. I know.” I began to guide her back towards the house, holding a steady arm under hers.

“Goodness,” she gasped, “what a lovely Spring morning.” It was midOctober.

“Yes, Mom. Today is lovely.”

She suddenly stopped walking. I glanced down to examine her hesitation.

Immediately recognizing the ambiguity in her eyes, I braced for impact. “Who are you?” A knife in my heart every time, never less sharp or painful.

“I’m Carol, your daughter.”

“Right.” Though she was clearly still confused. “Is this my house?”

“It is, now, Mom. You moved in with me a few years ago.”

“Why would I do that?” She threw a hand up, exasperated.

“When Daddy died, you didn’t want to be alone anymore.” She couldn’t be alone anymore.

“My Gary is gone?” Her eyes illed with tears.

“Yes, Mama.” I hugged her closer. “I’m sorry, but he passed.”

For a moment, she caved completely to my embrace. For a moment, we were both lonely and sad for the same reason. As the haze lifted from her mind, however, she promptly shewed me away. “I knew that, I knew that.”

We resumed our walk back to the house. By the time I reached to open the door for her, she had already shifted gears again. “I’m so glad you decided 83

to come visit me today, honey.”

“I’m glad, too, Mom.” I replied, making sure she saw my smile.

I helped her settle comfortably into her recliner, ofering her the Sunday paper before hiding the matches.

“Carol, have you seen these headlines, lately?” she called. “World’s going to Hell in a handbasket!”

“It certainly is.” I agreed.

She read a few minutes more before hastily and sloppily folding the paper.

“I just don’t want to read any more of that nonsense.” She held the paper out for me to take. “It does no good to let all that negativity in. No good.”

“Agreed.” I took the paper from her and helped it into the trash, full-well knowing in an hour, I’d regret having done it. Where’s the paper? You know I like to read the paper!

I took a seat across from her, watching as she picked up her book of large print crossword puzzles and a pencil. She didn’t always ill it out. Sometimes she just liked to do it in her mind; sometimes she ignored it completely and opted for idle conversation; sometimes she would begin it and forget where she was or who I was minutes later. It varied day to day, hour by hour.

I can breathe in the calm; I can breathe out the tension. The words ran through my mind on a loop. My mother and I didn’t always have tension in our relationship. It wasn’t until she moved in with me and I became her full-time everything that the dynamic had truly shifted.

There were days I wanted to scream into one of her needle-pointed pillows until my lungs gave out. There were days I felt like a child; completely helpless, missing my Mommy, wanting her to come back from wherever she’d gone that she couldn’t remember me. Then, there were those days, where I felt utter relief that nothing horrible had happened despite her best eforts, yet absolutely terriied that I could lose her at any moment, and not just to her broken mind.

She made a few marks in her book and pride radiated from her smile. I was swept back to mornings around the breakfast table with her, Daddy, and Cole. Mother, nursing her mug of cofee heavily diluted with Splenda and cream, focused solely on the day’s crossword. Daddy, black cofee in hand, cursing intermittently at the sports section. Cole and I attempting to stile our laughs every time he used a really naughty word. Mother rarely noticed, just 84

worked at her puzzle, that same glow about her as she had now.

I stood, deciding to sneak a peek. “How’s your puzzle this morning, Mama?” I leaned down to kiss her on the top of her head, but stopped short when I saw what she’d written in the provided squares.

The irst answer had come easily enough: ADAGE. But that was it.

Nothing but her name illed the rest of the boxes, over and over again.

RHODA. No last name even. Did she remember her last name today? Possibly not.

“That’s good, Mom. That’s good.” I blinked back tears. She closed the book and set it down next to her, reaching up to give my hand a quick squeeze afterward.

I rested my head against hers a moment, a rope tightening around my heart as I breathed in her familiar scent. Ivory soap and just a hint of perfume, same as it had been the last sixty years. I ofered a kiss on her cheek, then stood to go have a silent cry in the bathroom. Before I could make it more than a few steps, I heard her chair groaning as she stood.

“What a lovely Spring morning we’re having,” she remarked, clasping her hands together. “I think I might go for a walk along the back fence.”

I wiped my face with the inside of my shirt, cleared my throat, then turned around to face her. “That’s a perfect idea, Mom, Do you mind if I join you?”

“Oh! That’d be lovely. You know, I’m so glad you came to visit me today. I get so lonely.”

“I’m glad I came today, too.” I joined her in her current version of the world.

“Maybe you’ll meet my daughter one of these days. She comes to visit me sometimes.”

I tensed up briely, pushing the pain aside. I breathe in the good. “I’d love to meet her.” I release the tension. She linked her arm in mine as we stepped out into the brisk October morning that still smelled of burning leaves.

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MY PRONOUN Diane Raptosh I want to found a new pronoun that bridges the gap between self and bromeliad, lichen and ire ant, bedlam and boredom.

I’m going to breed a new pronoun poised to make power wake afraid—to endstop its its and free throws. Undo its home brews.

Each now, I plan to see each thou as they are, and not as cut-outs from earlier trauma.

I plan to nutmeg this vowel-meringue noun with equal jots boundlessness and dissolution, lay it in leaf-litter berms. I vow to crowdfund a word that kneecaps certitude. That donkeys around in a global cleanse of identity—every cell bowed and braying Xah to new blue nonets of suns.

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DEAR MARCIE Julia McCoy Marcie’s mother was gone. Dead. Doornail. Marcie saw her in the coin.

Put her hand on the mahogany. Tossed dirt into the hole. And yet, she was still sending her postcards.

Marcie found the irst in the heel of her boot, the paper worn and ink running from sweat.

Greetings From Des Moines, it said on the front, bubble letters illed with landmarks.

Dear Marcie, Here in Des Moines. Spent most of the day at the botanical gardens. Wasn’t my jam. The dome overhead keeps everything alive even during winter. Didn’t feel real.

Ran out of money for bus fair, but remembered people leave change in fountains.

Anyway, sorry for leaving. I’ll keep in touch.

Love, Mom She told Dziadzia immediately. That was his rule before, too. When her mom came for sudden weekend road trips or midday school pickups, when she ripped the stable fabric of Marcie’s life, she must tell him.

“Dziadzia.” She held out the card. “Mom sent me a postcard.”

He held the card to the light and squinted, though she knew he struggled with written English. She waited for him to ask before she read it out loud.

His chest rattled. “She never let go easily.”

“Should I write her back?”

“I suppose. But keep your hopes low.”

Marcie sat at the table that night, postcard facedown. It occurred to her, even though her mother’s body was decomposing in the earth, her soul may not know that it was gone. It would be mercy to tell her.

Dear Mom, Thanks for the letter. I’d like to see the botanical gardens. I wouldn’t mind the

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dome. It keeps the plants safe.

Mom, do you know you’re dead? I don’t want to frighten you. But I think you’re supposed to move on.

Love, Marcie Marcie stuck the letter in her boot, but didn’t check until the next morning to conirm it was gone.

When she’d asked Dziadzia what to write, he suggested the hard truth.

Sometimes the situation called for it. Marcie wasn’t sure. Did her mother need the hard truth two years ago when she came home and asked to live with them? Did Dziadzia need to kick her out and tell her never to return?

Marcie was nine then, small enough to listen under doorways. Dziadzia always spoke Polish to Marcie’s mother, her mother responded in English. Marcie understood her mother was not right, was a little violent, and that Dziadzia was losing his strength as he aged. But still, what if he let her stay? One day could change everything. Maybe softer truths were required.

It wasn’t a week before the next postcard arrived. She found it wedged in a tree on her walk to the park. Greetings from Wyoming.

Dear Marcie, I’m sure that’s what he told you. I’ve been dead to him for years. Remember, you can’t trust a word he says.

Wyoming was a lot of lat space. I found a statue of Abraham Lincoln on a rock formation. Not a full statue. Just his head. Seems disrespectful, given how he died.

Listen, you keep up with your grades. I’ll come by soon and get you. Hang tight.

Love, Mom Dziadzia rubbed his bad knee as Marcie read the postcard that evening.

“She is dead, right Dziadzia?”

“She is, myska. We saw the body.”

She saw the other one, too, though she hadn’t mentioned it to Dziadzia.

A picture in the newspaper of the man her mother hit driving the wrong way 88

in the dark. Dziadzia told Marcie her mother was drunk, the man was not, and both were killed instantly. He hadn’t shown her a photo, though. It was probably the right choice, as she dreamt about the dead man now.

“I’ll write her back again.” She kissed Dziadzia’s forehead. “I’ll tell her how I know.”

Dear Mom, Dziadzia didn’t tell me you were dead. I saw you in the coin. We had to cover most of you up because of how you died. Again, sorry, but I know you are dead. You should try to move on.

It’s like Lincoln, mom. He doesn’t care that his statue is just a head because his ghost isn’t here to see it. Ghosts are supposed to move on.

I will keep my grades up, though. Promise.

Love, Marcie She left the postcard in the crook of the tree and kept walking.

The third postcard came to her on the bus, shoved in the hood of Anthony Cummings, who sat in front of her. She did her best to snatch it without him noticing, and then slouched down into the bus seat, digging grooves as she pressed herself into the foam padding. Greetings from St. Augustine.

Marcie, I think I’d know if I were dead. It’s ine. You’re my daughter. I know daughters get this way with their mothers. I did. You know I once cut holes in your babcia’s favorite dress because she wouldn’t let me go out with a boy?

St. Augustine is ine. Humid. They have a museum of midieval torture. I won’t go into details, but it’s pretty gruesome. But really, no one should be shocked by what one human does to another.

Love, Mom Marcie bit the inside of her cheeks to keep herself from shouting, and 89

understood hard truths. She scribbled a response in the margin, hoping to inish before Anthony got of at his stop.

Dear Mom, You are dead. You hit a man with your car. You were drunk. I think you might be in hell.

Love, Marcie She hoped her mother’s spirit could read the cramped writing. She shoved it in Anthony’s hood, and when he turned around, he smiled at her. Marcie blushed.

She found the reply on her pillowcase the next morning. Greetings from Carson City. The writing was large and jagged, the words squeezed at each end to it. There was a scent of alcohol.

Marcie, I don’t know why you are telling such lies. Only bad girls tell such lies and you are no bad girl. I would know if I hit a man with my car. These are stories that he’s told you and you believe them. I would know If I was in hell because I was once. I was a teenager and pregnant and he sent me away. Couldn’t have a pregnant girl in the house he was so ashamed. So I know I’m not in hell because I’ve been there and this isn’t it.

Marcie waited three days to share the postcard with Dziadzia. She hid it in her coat pocket, bending the corners until they ripped clean. He didn’t ask if she received another one, but she thought he knew. The third night, she confronted him on the porch while he smoked his cigar, shaking as she read it aloud.

“Did you do it, Dziadzia?”

Dziadzia let the cigar hang loose. “Tak. I did, myska.”

Marcie thumped down on the sidewalk, too heavy to hold her own weight.

Dziadzia eased next to her.

“I made many mistakes. Your babcia was dead. I didn’t know how to care 90

for my daughter, so I sent her to a school for girls like her. I thought it would be a good place, but it wasn’t. I’ve always regretted sending you both away from me.”

Marcie curled her ingers. “But you brought us back.”

“I was there the night you were born. I held you, and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. But these things cannot be undone. I couldn’t ix my daughter.”

“Why’d you send her away? When she wanted to be with us?”

He patted her hand. “I could not help your mother anymore. But I had to keep you safe.”

They sat until the irelies burst into the darkness.

“Will you let me write the reply, myska? I know what to say.”

Dziadzia had to read the words to her. Idź do naszego ostatniego miejsca. Tata.

Go to our last place. Dad. She wanted to see the postcard vanish from her pillow, but she yawned, and it was gone by the time she opened her eyes.

The next morning, they drove out to Michigan. Marcie watched corn pass until she fell asleep. When she woke, they were at the family cemetery. Dziadzia took a bottle of water and a trowel, and Marcie followed him to Babcia’s grave.

They visited on the anniversary of her death, but this was not today. Still, as he always did, Dziadzia cut the grass from around the plot, washing away the dirt.

“Your mother will be joining us.”

They waited for long hours in the shade of a nearby tree.

“This is our last place.” Dziadzia split a sandwich from his pocket. “When we buried your babcia, we held each other and we both loved one another. The last time we knew for sure.”

Marcie watched ants swarm around a piece of bread that had fallen from his pocket. The sun stretched the shadows from the headstones and they waited.

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THE JOURNEY OF A MAGNUM OPUS christy claymore Holding you for the irst time was akin to seeing DaVinci’s sketch after seeing Michaelangelo’s sculptures: so many wonders in one day left me a little numb, a little unsure of how to take in one of the best pieces in the whole of the world.

And so I held you day after day, looking and looking to ind the feeling I should feel, but it turns out that awe blows you open like dandelion seeds never to be caught except by the wind, uncatchable itself. And so as you ran today and I heard the car coming, I shouted.

STOP. Stop little one, please observe the hazards: dust and time and horsepower.

I remember how awful I felt: you were scratching your own face with your razor-sharp infant ingernails and so I tried to cut them with tiny ingernail cutters, and at the second or third nail, I cut your skin instead accidentally and baby-you cried and so did I. Until recently, I never again attempted it, giving the job instead to your father.

And I remember bathing you and I remember you laughing and loving the warm, soapy water in your baby bathtub, but then the water was cooled and I had to lift you out and dry you and though I had never touched a wet baby seal, that’s what your slippery skin was like and my heart almost ruptured: slippery-soft, wet baby skin, tile loor, oh my god don’t drop him.

I held you as close as possible, more afraid than ever.

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You run ahead of me now, or you stay behind, moping, and when I hear a car rushing our way, my heart races as it did when I irst lifted your slippery masterpiece out of that tiny little tub, and now I can not hold you as I did then: close to my chest, hand over your soft head.

And I know you are slipping away slowly into your own life, slipping as I couldn’t let you in infancy, but as I have to let you now with each passing day, slip and slip into a life that will hurt you and cut your heart even more brutally than some small, infant nail-cutters.

But for as long as it can, my heart will break with yours.

And as your infancy caused me to be brave so I hope my presence will guide you in your own quest for courage.

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PAROSMIA Eliszabeth MacDougal Distinguished in the lavender Varieties, we pass The blossoms between us Nutmeg and cinnamon in your grounds While my mug hums with almond and vanilla Sweet and simple, to curl in the glow Of your skin, complexity of sweat In the tangled hairs tickled by my nose You pull your arm down, kiss me silly I think it’s sinuses at irst until you call From the ER And can’t breathe And I can’t smell the peppermint oil So I’m sure I know before I know for sure When you begin to wake For more than leeting moments in the day And we can share one room again Our ardor has no odor And appetite is gone November and December pass in haste I snif my vials regularly, glad I can But the mouthwash has an expired taste And the lavender scrub we made’s gone bad The bag of cofee must have rancid oils So I switch to tea Yellow onions at the grocery smell of rot I buy the green The air around me reeks of unfamiliar My sister rolls the window down Tells me, it’s me Our household stank of sickness growing up I know the taste of croup, the smell of strep Before the onset, but this Is irst an illness odorless That as its calling card Warps the fragrance known and loved the best 94

THE SOUND OF BEES Trevor Warren Something was missing in the air, like just after a storm and the whole world feels stiling and empty. Where before there’d been a hum. These were the times it was easier not to see anyone and to hole myself up in my drab apartment. I listed reasons not to go out like I was telling them to a therapist.

Oh, so you think that because some people wear surgical masks in public there’s a secret plague no one told you about? Tell me more about that...

Until there was, and the masks were hanging everywhere. Of of ears, car mirrors, and of of the crabapple tree in the center of campus. The masks were hung all over it like a dreadful bloom.

That was done nearly a year ago, right about the time I got to college.

One mask appeared; it had maybe blown there, and then the rest gradually followed.

Sometime before winter, when I got back to my apartment, a package was dropped on my doorstep. I thought I could hear it buzzing before I even picked it up.

You’ll bee okay — Dad; on the note, and inside were cotton gloves, neatly tied in an intense yellow ribbon — a glimpse of sun.

The card pictured a tiny honeybee hovering fatly past a lower.

Finally, I could breathe deep without feeling sick. I pressed my face into the lavender and honey infused gloves and the world, drunk all on its own and loud, stopped.

Dad was the only one who really understood me. And I could feel the stretch of my own smile behind the gloves. On the back of the card were the words Mystic Honey, a spa and shop owned by Shari, a friend of Dad’s who made cosmetics and things from honey.

I’d always suspected that they were together: Dad, still reeling from his divorce — Shari who never married.

I liked that Dad still kept bees. Growing up, they had illed the spaces underneath the outside of my bedroom window for as long as I can remember.

I hadn’t slept as well since going away to school and the humming had stopped.

I thought a lot about those boxes that Dad had built, like small 95

shantytowns — his one whack at saving the world. And it was pretty great. For a long time, I was pretty sure that the only things he believed in were those bees; the way he treated them like his gaudy little babies. And I loved watching him fumbling into the big white suit and mask and walking around like a spaceman.

Since leaving home, I’ve missed the bees almost as much as I missed him.

And my irst summer in college I’d read poems by Sylvia Plath, which made it a colossally sad summer. I wondered if her dad had lost bees; I was so constantly afraid that they might die in their little boxes. So much colony collapse disorder was hovering around Treasure Valley. It had already gotten to several of the colonies kept by our old neighbors along the Snake River.

For most of them, the bees were up and gone, stolen by disease or some kind of change that only the bees could sense.

I would have visited sooner but traveling was impossible that summer of lattening the curve, and most of the sunshine was replaced by silence.

I remembered once, at twelve or thirteen, Dad tried to tell me that I was somehow existing in too many places at once; which was why I had panic attacks, he said; that’s why I felt chronically overwhelmed, he said; that’s why I was so worried.

“If humans were more like bees,” he’d have said, “we’d work together instead of feeling like we have to be everything at once and do everything alone.”

Those words illed my head a few days from then, when Dad would call to say grandpa died.

The worst feeling in the world would be when grandpa’s box is lowered into the ground and I’m watching it from the face of a computer. We’d all be on a video call, even mom. From all those miles apart, the air will seem thick with static, like we’re all there together. I’ll remember imagining that the way the bees communicate through chemicals and through the electromagnetism of the earth; that’s how we’re all communicating then. Not through the fuzzy speakers of the laptop.

And the ceremony will be shared from Aunt Marta’s phone. Aunt Marta, who will be in her scrubs, in the middle of the worst of it, will somehow be able to hold the phone still for the time it takes for the box to disappear. She’s haunted by more than a tree of face masks. But she’s who will link us all 96

together. Dad will be hovering in front of the camera, trying to keep everyone’s moods lifted. He’ll say something like, “Pop is inally home with Queen Bee.” The name everyone knew Grandma by. She started the irst family hives, and I was glad she didn’t have to be around for all of the colony collapse and empty boxes.

Shari will be there, too. She’ll stand close to dad, and maybe their hands will link, and mom will be standing apart from her new husband. Shari even decides to send them home with a collection of soaps and scented gloves and bath bombs.

Days later we’ll ind out that it wasn’t what everyone thought that took grandpa, it was just his heart that had ruptured. Sometimes things did that.

Even when we’re like bees, always sensing something invisible and sometimes abandoning each other, we’ll always ind a way to connect. And I’ll decide to book a ticket home to help Dad build another bee box.

And when I go home and I lay in my old bed, I’ll hear the hum again.

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DESCEND Driek Zirinsky I sign the permissions, hand my life over to strangers.

I kiss you goodbye, take the elevator down to the operating assembly line, the door closes with a hiss.

Down there I weigh in and strip of everything I brought with me, even my wedding ring as if I am being born in reverse, a naked thing without a mother to comfort me.

I am laid out on my gurney inside a curtained cubicle and hear urgent voices, the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum, the tear of another curtain. They are next.

The nurse tells me her name, struggles to ind a good vein for the iv. Already I am bloodless, a spirit thing trailing lines of tubes so I will not get lost.

The surgeon rips my curtain back. He wears a dark suit, like a movie star. He says it’s a long wait today, they are behind schedule.

He marks the site with a Sharpie. If anything is a mistake, it will not be that.

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My four escorts wheel me to the holding area. I am now the chosen.

The man in blue marks my spine my body is covered with black markings, a map or an eloquent spider’s web.

Then the OR, green ghostly igures swim about preparing for me, inject luids to make me relax. In my dream the clang of metal hammering, a miasma of voices.

I wake up somewhere else, Holly the nurse pulls me up, her hand a branch back to the living world. The surgeon in his dark suit sends me upstairs to a warm room where you wait

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QUESTIONS Farley Egan Green You heard the word AIDS from the doctor.

And then?

You walked, walked, walked, you said, took the subway, took a cab.

To your apartment?

I like to think you went to a park by the Hudson in the city you loved, but that’s unlikely.

You wandered, you said, until it felt real but I don’t know what happened next.

Was there someone to hold you?

Were there people to tell?

If you ever said, I don’t remember.

I can imagine but I will never know.

A week later you called us, your family, one by one, each call inserting a chisel between you, who were dying and we, who would pass you by.

For John Egan, 1954-1988

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ERUPT I heed not that my earthly lot Hath — little of Earth in it — That years of love have been forgot In the hatred of a minute: — I mourn not that the desolate Are happier, sweet, than I, But that you sorrow for my fate Who am a passer by.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

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BULLFIGHTER Rex Adams I ight bulls. American style. No cape, no tights. No sword either, or a bunch of picadors stabbing the poor bull, wearing him down. I like my bulls living, all their hot blood pumping through their veins, not streaking down their briskets and forelegs and blackening the dirt around their hooves.

I wear a cowboy hat, baggy shorts, cleats, and pads. I wear a little makeup, but no clown face. It’s war paint.

I’ve watched those Spanish and Mexican bullights on YouTube. The matadors remind me of ballerinas, especially when the ighting bulls pick them up and toss them around.

My dad, he rode bulls. He also bareback and saddle bronc horses. He could steer wrestle and rope, too. At least that’s what he always said.

If he did I never saw it. Not even a video. He had one buckle. Although it had a bull rider on it, I knew it was a steer riding buckle from the Eighties.

Dad didn’t just tell me he did all those things. He told everyone behind the chutes, in the arena, around the concession stand. He would stand on the back of the bucking chutes yelling at my friends and me, “You girls better try hard!” Once I was old enough to realize everyone laughed at him, I’d try to ditch him. But it was hopeless. He always found me. Usually I was behind the chutes rosining my bull rope. He’d strut over, his belly pressing against his championship steer riding buckle and slap my back and ask something like, “You got a good one today?” I would stand there staring down at my gearbag, thinking, Please Dad, get the hell out of here. But he wouldn’t leave. He’d go around slapping all my friends on the back too, saying, “How about you pussies? You got a good one?” His voice loud, almost yelling.

I couldn’t stand that he had to pull my rope every time I got on a bull. But I loved the bulls so I escaped Dad by heading out into the arena to ight them.

Dad, he doesn’t embarrass me anymore. Mom shot him. The shooting even made the news: Local Woman Shoots Husband with Hunting Rile.

Mom, a tall, slender brunette with long hair braided into a thick rope that trailed down between her shoulder blades, was out of Dad’s league and he knew it. I suppose that’s why they fought all the time.

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It was one of their typical ights. Screaming, cussing. Dad slamming his ist into the wall or the refrigerator. Mom grabbing her truck keys and storming out the door, headed out to who knew where. But this time Dad followed her out into the driveway, stood in front of the driver side door and let his voice boom. “You ain’t leaving! Not until we work this thing out!”

Mom turned and stomped back into the house, grabbed her .300 Savage out of the coat closet, spun around, walked outside. She stopped a few feet from Dad and pointed the rile at his chest.

Later she would say, “I was just trying to scare him.” Maybe she was just trying to scare him. I don’t know. I was upstairs in my room. I didn’t come down until after I heard the shot and Dad screaming. Anyway, when he wouldn’t move out of her way she pulled the trigger, supposedly thinking the chamber was empty. It wasn’t.

I suppose I should be happy. He’s not on the back of the bucking chutes spouting his mouth of. If I wanted to, I could head back behind the chutes and start riding again. But the bullighting, it has me now. I guess I should thank Dad for that.

American bullighting is more like boxing than ballet. It’s all about your footwork, knowing where to step in and get their attention without taking a shot. And once you get their attention, that’s when the footwork really matters.

Bulls have four legs. Humans two. That’s like a four banger racing a V8. You’ve got no chance if you run straight ahead. Catch their eye, move to their hip. No hurry, no panic. Once you panic you take a hooking. You’re going to take one eventually, no matter what, but if you panic it’s a guaranteed every-bull event.

Taking a hooking is part of the deal. Sometimes you don’t have a choice.

Take the other day. I was ighting in a practice pen south of town. Practice bulls are young with no brains. They’re all buck and ight. When they whirl on you the rage gets into their muscles, ripples under their hides. Anyway, this kid landed on his back. The air burst from him and he lay there like a lipped over stinkbug, legs and arms waving around. I stepped in, slapped the bull between the eyes, but he just closed them and kept spinning. I grabbed a horn, but the bull jerked it out of my hand and kept whirling. Feet landed all around the kid, stepped between his legs, next to his head. Landed everywhere but on him.

Soon he’s going to take a hoof to the face or guts, maybe the nuts. Somewhere real bad. That’s when you have no choice. So I jumped right in on the bull’s 106

head. I folded my legs up like I was doing a cannonball. My ass landed between the horns. The bull’s head lipped up and I lew into the air. When I came down I was on my feet and already running, the bull right behind, inally out of the spin and of the kid. The kid rolled away and crawled back to the chutes. It didn’t take much to shake the bull. He stopped and pawed, lipped up dirt and shook his head. But it was a bluf. As soon as the out-gate opened he trotted out of the arena.

That move got me a lot of love. The kid I saved walked over and shook my hand. I knew him well enough. He was one of those who gave my old man grief. Two girls sat on a bench next to the arena. They watched me real close after that. One of them, a short thick-thighed blond — the kid’s girlfriend I found out later — smiled at me in that skin-tingling way. I smiled back. Later, while I leaned against my car slipping out of my gear, she came up and asked my name. I told her. That night she PM’d me. It won’t be long and I’ll move in on her.

In her message she told me I was brave. A lot braver than her boyfriend, she said, who may act like he wants to ride bulls, but really he’s scared shitless and is always looking for a reason to turn out. I kind of feel bad for him because I understand. I’m scared all the time too, just not panicky scared.

That’s the kind that hurts you.

If my dad was scared dying there in the driveway, he didn’t show it. After I’d called 911, after the paramedics and county sherif had shown up, he yelled in that same voice he always used behind the chutes; he yelled over and over again, “She didn’t mean to! It was an accident! Please! It was an accident!”

Is it true? I hope so, but I’d never known anyone in our family to bring a loaded gun into the house. But I wasn’t there. He was and she was and while he was dying the only thing he cared about was saving her. He did. Saved her from prison anyway.

He used to embarrass me, but now I ind myself wanting to brag about how he told my mom over and over again that he didn’t blame her and he was sorry for blowing up at her. I want to tell about how my mother leaned over him while he lay with his organs and arteries ruptured and bleeding out and how he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her to him, smearing a bloody hand print on her back. How he held her and wept and begged those cops and paramedics not to arrest her. I want to tell everyone that my dad was as tough 107

as he always pretended to be, no matter how much they laughed at him. But I don’t say anything. Because at the same time I want everyone to forget who I am, who my dad was, who my mom is. I want to ight bulls. I want to save bull riders, the ones who laughed at my dad, and then slip into their girlfriends’ private messages, into their cars, and eventually into them. That’s what I really want because each time I do I’m getting a little something back for my dad.

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STEP INTO THE WAVE JoAnn Koozer Slight rumblings would begin within Dad’s deep chest, where a father’s dearest words remained ready, where life’s funny tickles found their voice His wide grin and nodding head alerted us to a coming eruption Maybe a book lay in his lap, amusing golf tales by P.G. Wodehouse, perhaps a Reader’s Digest joke page, or at a family gathering, uncles retelling expansive hunting stories rivaling a Patrick McManus romp with a wild-eyed deer Rumblings rattled their way up and out of him, joined by gufaws, shaking belly providing propulsion Laughter loud, full, unfettered inevitably followed by squinting eyes overlowing, his white pressed handkerchief unprepared to stanch And we who looked on felt it coming, stepped into its path joyfully drowning in shared merriment, letting our sides split wide open

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FETAL POSITION Stephanie Nelson Monitor lights brightened the room but it was dark enough for Cora.

Dark or not wasn’t keeping her from sleep, it was the babies crying. She rolled to her side in the hospital bed and touched the soft remains of pregnancy on her stomach. She moved her hand down until she reached the C-section wound dressing, which rustled a bit under her ingers and then the pain struck.

It had only been quiet for ive minutes and her body melted a little into white bedding, looking for sleep anyway.

She had sent Jef home for the night even though he’d slept in the awkward chair-turned-rollaway-bed for the past two nights and swore he was used to it. Hopefully this was the last night she’d be in the hospital and he might as well get a good night’s sleep she told him. One of them should. What if you need something? He said. I have nurses, she said. As if he’d be any help, he was such a hard sleeper. Jef patted her head like she was the family cat, grabbed his work jacket and walked out at 5 p.m.

Sure, Cora had pain medication but the most recent dose was wearing of.

She looked at the hands on the clock hanging over a dusty rose-papered wall by the door and then at the whiteboard where the nurse wrote her pill schedule.

Sleep was the only way to get through the next two hours.

The current silence pushed the hope that she’d succeed and enter sleep’s palace after all. It curled up around her and held her until the airy invitation arrived at the same time a pinched noise began from a few rooms down. The single cry was methodical at irst and she was wide awake again.

Cora assumed she’d be dealing with for a crying newborn for months to come. The crying wasn’t pleasant, but it was part of the package of having a baby. She just didn’t think it would be part of this package. Still laying on her side, Cora covered her ears with her hands and cried throaty tears to drown out the noise. She didn’t even ease into it. First stop? Absolute sobbing.

One newborn cry triggered a second and a third until they were speaking a bawling baby language through hospital walls to each other. Cora heard observations that devolved into existential questions. It’s cold. I’m hungry.

Change my diaper. Help me sleep. Don’t make me sleep. Who am I? Why am I here?

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At least you are here, Cora cut them of. She thought of new mothers annoyed at their baby’s cry, perhaps wanting to sleep, like her. She raged against these imaginary mothers, shaming them with how dare yous until guilt made her stop.

Now the babies were at full volume, like the hours before. Cora grabbed a second pillow and held it over her exposed ear but no matter how hard she pushed it against her face, the hypoallergenic pillow allowed shrill entry. When one was inally cold with tears, she switched it, chancing the brief exposure to noise in the exchange. She looked at the clock and it had only been thirty minutes so she lopped her head down again and when she landed, a question erupted.

What am I going to do with the baby’s nursery at home?

That paradise of chocolate brown and blue that she and Jef chose for the walls because they didn’t know the baby’s gender. All the baby shower gifts, the closet full of diapers, the drawers full of baby bodysuits. She imagined herself standing in the nursery in her hospital gown, holding a lighter and licking ire into the empty white wood crib and strutting out like some badass almost-mom from a movie nobody would watch.

All ive pillows were too wet to lay on now, so she tossed them and grabbed the bed sheet and balled it up, holding it over her head as she laid on the naked mattress.

The newborns were still in full dissonance and she swore every baby within a mile must be participating and she was their magnet. Cora saw cries like brand new baby souls shooting out of toothless mouths and congregating outside her door. She looked at the hallway light poking through the bottom of the door and saw shadows crawling around, babies targeting her. She felt numb like maybe she’d throw the door open and dare them to come in and maybe they’d bring him along too. But then again, no. He wasn’t with them.

Cora had grown him inside but imagined him at every stage of life outside and now he lay cold in whatever hospital morgue was downstairs. She’d given him his irst and last bath when he died two days ago, the day he was born.

The photographer came to take pictures and she even put on mascara for it.

She thought of his tiny body as hers folded in half in the hospital bed. She had washed him with a sponge and warm water. Why warm? He didn’t know the diference, but she couldn’t chance it. His skin was soft and his features perfect.

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He knew.

All these mothers will raise their babies, but not me, she thought. Why them and not me? Good and nice Cora replied, “Wait a minute, would you have their babies pass away too just because yours did? It’s not their fault yours didn’t make it.” Good Cora would use euphemisms for death so everyone else felt more comfortable. But this Cora said, “I don’t want to see a single goddamned baby until I give birth to one that’s alive.” It sounded reasonable, she thought.

The feverish newborn noise was at a high plateau and loud baby souls raged against her hospital door as if they heard what she thought about them and about their mothers. The babies cried in unison and it was the droning rhythm of a phone’s busy signal. Sorry, Cora, the Universe is busy fulilling everyone else’s dreams and can’t get to you right now.

Her eyes were so swollen from crying that she could feel along pufy eyelid rims with her ingertip. Squishy, full of luid, they were tight and didn’t hurt but she imagined if they illed any more they would explode, pouring out four oceans of tears she could cry for her lost child. Two brown eyeballs would be loose and bobbing against the deluge until they grow gills and swim in saltwater. It amused her to imagine her eyes submitting notice that they prefer living underwater and maybe they’ll keep doing this forever, thank you very much.

The crying newborns began a decrescendo and Cora looked at the clock on the wall. One more hour until pain medication. The cries settled into faint suckling noises as the babies found milky bliss and she felt something warm on her chest and looked down to see she was leaking. She’s supposed to be pumping to ease the pain, but what’s the point? The pain is here and a breast pump can’t ix it.

It was quiet for ten whole minutes and Cora was nestling into her pillowless bed when the door to her room clicked open and a nurse arrived for a routine check. At irst the nurse stood there looking at the pillows on the loor, Cora’s swollen face and two perfect wet circles on her hospital gown. But on cue, the newborns started up again and the nurse looked back into the hallway and gasped louder than she meant to. Cora rolled over, crying again.

“Oh honey. I’ll get you some fresh pillows and let’s see,” she looked at her watch, “You’ve only got a few minutes until your next dose so let’s get that 112

going.” And she rushed out the door, careful to close it tightly as if that would help.

Next, a warm hand landed on Cora’s shoulder and when she rolled over, two bright pink pieces of foam sat in the nurse’s hand.

“I didn’t even think to ask for earplugs!” Cora cried.

The nurse only nodded but her eyes gleamed wet too.

Cora took the medication and inserted earplugs and silence swallowed the sound of crying babies.

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OCTOPUS HEART James McColly Resting on a seabed A Japanese clay pot Tied to a rope Ofers refuge To a shy octopus.

The pot is Pulled to the surface But the octopus Will not attempt escape Feeling safe Inside the Takotsubo trap.

Deep within a chest Chambers of the heart weaken Then fail, and balloon Taking on the shape Of a Japanese clay pot Resting on a seabed.

Takotsubo syndrome Triggered by a sudden shock The loss of a loved one An earthquake Being pulled to the surface Inside the shelter of a clay pot.

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BEAUTY SHOP Anita Tanner For Len First hairdo after his death you lean back, your neck guillotined on the bowl’s rim, the pulse in your temples heavy as sea water, your bones wearying, pocked as sea coral, your eyes like scaled ish left out to dry on the deck of circumstance.

Your hair in the running water becomes a child gone too deep, lailing in the sulphur pool, panicking at what water can do when your strokes and footing fail you, guttural gulps burning down a wrong throat.

You cough and spit and ight for air, your eyes alame, watering like small ditches on the family farm.

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Irrigating for Dad you pace the summer pasture, weighting the dams with heavy stones but they lose hold and the life-giving liquid is lost down a far ield.

You think of his death as him swimming at sea, diving for shells, waves pulling him further and further out, depleting him of all he has to ight the foreign waters.

The towel wrapped around you now becomes a clot that will stop what your head and heart cannot help but lose every time water gushes as it does now in and around your memoried ears.

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INVISIBLE TIGERS Mary Walker Amelia always needed earbuds when she left her home. The world was too loud and too chaotic for her to process. Her whole life felt like she was being hunted by tigers. With her earbuds, she could control the chaos; she could control a small part of her world, and that was enough to keep her together in public. Today she needed to make an emergency run to the supermarket- she had a head cold, and needed decongestant. A simple in and out, with no fuss.

She went out to her car, took a stabilizing breath, and turned on the engine.

The clock in her car read 3:23 PM as she listened to the afternoon radio host discuss downtown traic. “Looks like the afternoon rush has creeped up early on us, folks! Congestion in the lower area of the city is expected to put you back about 30 minutes. Hope you aren’t on your way to an important meeting! Haha, well, here’s today’s top ifty… with no commercials!”

Amelia felt her stomach sink; she hated traic. All those people on the road, especially tailgaters, gave her a pit in her stomach. She steadied her mind and continued on the way to the supermarket. A rundown blue sedan followed close behind her almost the whole way; even in the congestion with all its frequent stops. She only breathed a sigh when they turned into a drive-thru, leaving her behind. The tension in her shoulders grew as she turned into the parking lot, and she searched for a spot.

Her preferred spots were far away from the doors; in her mind there was less chance of a crash, or some creep trying to abduct her. She shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts of what could go wrong just in the parking lot. She did a quick checklist in her head of everything she needed for her trip: phone, check. Cross-body bag, check. Keys, check. Earbuds…earbuds? This was bad.

She forgot her earbuds? How? She always had them with her. The thought crossed her mind of just coming back another time but her sinuses persisted against the idea. Amelia had no choice- she had to go into the store without her line of defense.

Immediately she was hit with multiple diferent sensations. The sound of carts rolling and clanking against one another. The consistent, erratic beeping of the checkout aisles. The smells coming from the deli section. Her brain tried to process it all at once and it made her skin crawl. Amelia once again brushed 117

against her pocket, hoping her earbuds would magically appear in her pocket; no dice. She was already on edge, her nerves keeping her on her guard against invisible tigers and she hadn’t even gotten past the self-checkout.

Without wasting time, Amelia walked at a brisk pace to the pharmacy section of the store. She knew she was on a strict time limit before she couldn’t take it anymore and she wasn’t going to leave empty handed. She heard some teenagers laughing over in the toy aisle; she had to remind herself it wasn’t at her expense. A large group of people wandered at a snail’s pace in Amelia’s path; her irritation rose, and she pushed past them as politely as she could muster. Each step felt like walking through thick mud, yet her pace kept consistency. At last, she arrived at the pharmacy section. She made her way to the cold medicine and grabbed her decongestant. The irst half of her adventure was over. All that was left was to get out there and return to the quiet and the safety of her car.

At this point, her timer was close to zero. The walls of the store began to close in on her: the tigers were getting closer. Everything became louder and harder to ignore. Every conversation had equal space in her mind, along with every clunking footstep and every nauseating smell of cheap perfume and cigarettes she passed. All her senses were under attack, and she knew the time she had left was short: she felt her throat begin to tighten and her eyes begin to burn. She needed to keep herself together for just a few more minutes. She approached the self-checkout and every sound felt like a slash to the heart. The plastic bag she placed her decongestant into felt numb in her hands. She felt disconnected from everything happening around her as she left the store.

The trek back to her car felt like an eternity. With no haste, Amelia unlocked her car and got inside. She set her decongestant in the passenger seat, and started to take of her bag to set alongside the decongestant.

The tigers inally pounced on their prey.

She struggled to pull her bag over her head, the strap getting stuck on the hood of her sweater. All at once, Amelia exploded into a maelstrom of expletives and rage, directed at no one but herself and the bag. She threw her bag to the side, letting it fall to the loor. She gripped her steering wheel as shame came over her for her outburst. She let herself cry, pressing her head to the wheel, the sensation of the leather bringing her back to the world around her. Once she felt she was ready, she turned on the engine and began her next journey to home, leaving today’s tigers behind in the parking lot.

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EMBRACE EMBARRASSMENT Laureen Leiko Scheid First day of kindergarten.

My beaming daughter ready for school ponytailed and backpacked crayolas and painter’s smock stainless reusable water bottle a radiant smile and all her baby teeth.

A ive-year countdown to this moment.

Pride swells as my independent baby girl prances through the brightly adorned hallway of bulletin boards welcoming rainbows sunlowers and apples upper and lower case letters framed in a manuscript road.

Smiles and I love yous.

Bittersweet emotion.

Snapshots and family selies wishing to stretch time.

Happiness gurgles to sour stew.

Last night’s tortilla chips and abundant pico de gallo churn in my belly like a front load washer.

There’s no escape, only unloading.

My reprieve; a kindergarten restroom.

Two tiny stalls with child-size commodes designed for mini people.

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Violent Eruption!

Heavy metal dire Rhea!

My foul violation echoes through the unfortunately-acoustic school.

Noxious breeze follows.

Hand soap cannot wash this embarrassment.

I muster the courage to exit.

A gracious grandma-volunteer greets children and other nervous parents.

Her grin and twinkle say There’s no room to pretend.

Deep mauve cheeks apologize to the luminous hallway its inhabitants but especially to my sweet girl.

Little arms encircle.

Her embrace hugs away parental and gastrointestinal shame.

We laugh for this is living.

Unconditional love.

Poetry material.

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PLUME All art is a kind of confession.

JAMES BALDWIN

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LARK ASCENDING Eric E. Wallace The silence was exquisite. Amy loved how the expanse of virgin snow seemed to hold the air in thrall, breathless.

She slowed, stopped. The slight swish of her skis ceased. Her soft exhalations grew quieter. From the side of the trail, a branch cracked, clumps of snow mule-thumped, a raven grated.

Stillness again.

Above the white expanse, a morning alpenglow reached out, yearning, to the horizon.

The air quivered with possibilities.

Amy resumed skiing, feeling perfect rhythm, perfect balance. To be a dancer, she thought, is to dance in all things, in all ways, at all times. On stage and in the studio, of course, and not just in the pieces, but in the classes, the stretching, the exercises, the repetitive slow building of the choreography, even in the tiredness, the aches. To walk, no matter where, with poise, with a lightness of step, testing gravity, always ready to loat if gravity miraculously no longer resists.

And the arms, oh the arms. Consummate instruments of grace and power.

Cross-country skiing made a ine counterpoint to her dancing. It was a diferent way to respect her muscles, her breathing, her bearing. A time to combine exercise with contemplation. Today she was deep into thinking about next month’s solo, a new work she was creating herself. She loved being a member of the company, blending into the whole, the luscious synchronicity of the ensemble pieces. But the solo, dancing to her own design — the choreography, her costume, the lighting, all of it — that was reaching toward heaven.

Her piece was about unfulilled longing. She was thrilled with the music she’d chosen, a romance for violin and orchestra beautifully suggesting a soaring bird. It spoke to her so intimately she rarely heard it without tears emerging.

The raven, the black-feathered trickster, rasped again.

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Janelle. Jet-black hair, lithe sensuality, the newest dancer in the company.

When you meet someone for the irst time, occasionally there’s an immediate mutual dislike, an instinctive antipathy. That was true with Janelle. Amy couldn’t igure it out. They weren’t really rivals. They weren’t even in the same works on the program. But from the start they simply didn’t like each other.

In classes and at rehearsals, when they couldn’t avoid each other, they coldshouldered, they bristled.

Just thinking of Janelle now soured the morning. Amy picked up her pace, almost ready to turn around.

There was a crunching in the shrubbery, an eruption of snow, a huge, lumbering brown igure emerging in front of her, smelling of rotten leaves, snorting steamy gray breath. Amy linched, twisted.

One binding didn’t yield. One Achilles tendon did. Dramatically.

Later she described hearing a sound like a gunshot, falling, thinking someone had ired at the moose, instead hitting her left leg. She remembered the glacial kiss of the snowbank, the savage pain, tears freezing on her cheeks, the irrational thoughts of that this was jealous subterfuge by that trickster Janelle, the solo ruined. She didn’t much remember the helpful skiers, the trip to the hospital, the imaging or the surgery.

Casts, crutches, a ridiculously-ugly pneumatic walking boot and the long weeks required for therapy and healing: all meant there was no way Amy could participate in the dance concert. Beyond morose, she hobbled about as little as necessary, retreated to her apartment, was rude to her roommate, sank into herself. She did not visit the dance studio.

However, many of the dancers in the company came to her, commiserating, recalling their own past injuries and how they bounded back, danced again. They tried to make Amy laugh with normally-unfunny stories of broken arms, twisted knees, perverse dislocations, burns from the looring, and, in one case, lacerations from a tumble through an unforgiving backdrop.

Everyone tried not to talk about how rehearsals were proceeding without her.

Amy, her recovering leg propped on a suede ottoman, didn’t inquire. She watched snowlakes drift past the window and struggled not to relive her last moments on the trail.

One morning, without invitation, Janelle showed up. She removed her parka and put it on an armchair. There was very little sign of the tall, athletic 126

woman in dirty unitards. Today she looked like a gypsy. She wore a pufysleeved white blouse and a frilly multicolored skirt. A big copper pendant dangled from her neck. A beaded headband fought to restrain her long black hair. She was wearing a spicy perfume; Amy guessed Windsong. Dancers were supposed to avoid distracting scents in the studio. There, the joke was, it was eau de sweat. Amy craved that now. Not this sweet stuf.

Janelle thrust a bouquet of lowers at her and perched on the ottoman, dangerously close to the injured leg. Amy forced a brief, wan smile and plopped the lowers indiferently on a side table. Was this maddening woman here to lord it over her?

“Rehearsals are going well…” Janelle said, her voice annoyingly amiable.

Amy stared at her. God, she thought, she’s breaking rule number one: don’t rub it in.

Janelle went on. “…but we miss you, all of us do. They’ve had to move Sharon and Candy up to cover your place in the ensembles…”

That’s right, turn the screw…

“But then there’s your solo…” The black hair danced on its own.

“Yeah, well that’s done now, isn’t it?” Amy tried not to snarl. She wasn’t entirely successful.

Janelle smiled awkwardly. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve been wondering if — ” “ — you hardly need my permission, do you?” Amy glared at the ceiling.

“The solo’s up for grabs. Take it.” She paused. “Thanks for coming.” She shifted her foot. It bumped Janelle’s thigh.

Janelle slid quickly sideways, stood. “Sorry. Well then…” She turned and began rustling into her parka. Another gust of perfume.

Amy wrinkled her nose. She closed her eyes. A long silence. She heard the parka drop back onto the chair. More silence. She looked up.

Janelle was studying her. “I don’t know why it’s this way between us, Amy” she said softly. She pushed back her errant hair. “There’s no reason is there?”

Amy shrugged. “None I can think of.”

Janelle sighed and shook her head resignedly. “I know somehow we got of on the wrong foot, but…” She stopped, stricken. “Oh jeez, I’m sorry. I didn’t think…” She bit her lower lip. “…on the wrong foot?” Amy started to laugh.

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Janelle snorted. Amy choked and sneezed. They laughed loudly together.

When the mirth settled, Janelle sank back onto the ottoman, reached for Amy’s hand. “I have a plan,” she said.

She explained. Amy listened, asked questions, nodded, smiled. There wasn’t much time, but it just might be possible if they worked on it during every free moment.

Three weeks later, at the company’s winter concert, a sellout audience applauded bravura ensemble works, trios and a quartet.

But it was a seven-minute piece, a ‘solo for two,’ which people were still talking about as they bundled up and shivered out into the cold, star-illed night. The program notes said one of the dancers, injured in a skiing accident, had insisted the show must go on. The work was titled Amy’s Dream.

Complete darkness. A narrow spotlight beam faded up on a front corner of the stage. A young woman, dressed in street clothes, dozed in a wheelchair, her left leg elevated and bandaged below the knee.

Low orchestral chords, soft, tentative. The woman, her eyes still closed, raised her head, dreamt.

A single violin began a long, ethereal lutter, rising, falling, seeking. The lighting brightened. A black-haired woman in a lowing white gown shimmered into view, circled the wheelchair, leaned tenderly towards the dreamer, whirled away in bigger and bigger ovals.

She slowed, claimed the stage and seemingly the very air above it, moving with contemplative grace and lyricism. And longing.

The tempo of the music increased. In a kinetic tour de force, the dreamdancer leapt, battled with gravity, ran against imaginary walls, fell, rose, spun, reached high, lung herself low.

She rose again, approached the wheelchair, hesitated, pirouetted into darkness.

The orchestra murmured introspectively. The violin melody soared higher and higher. The dreamer in the wheelchair shuddered, opened her eyes. Her arms lifted, wove languid shapes in the air. Her head and torso swayed. Her hands stole to the bandage, unwound a ribbon of white, spiraled it out and upwards, rippling it in slow, sensual movements.

At the melody’s ecstatic peak, her arms rose joyfully above her head. In a burst of light, the dream-self reemerged, danced around the wheelchair, 128

gestured lovingly at the dreamer, glided backwards, turned, led, ran higher and higher up a long ramp, leapt forward, vanished.

The high, sweet notes thinned, faded away. The ribbon fell. The single spotlight beam narrowed. The young woman in the wheelchair slowly lowered her arms, smiled inwardly and closed her eyes.

Darkness. A storm of applause.

Janelle stood beside the wheelchair as she and Amy acknowledged the standing ovation.

“Friends?” she whispered.

Amy reached up and took Janelle’s hand. “Friends.”

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BECAUSE OF MOUNT ST. HELENS Stacey A. Leybas When the volcano erupted We watched the mountain crumble.

Stay inside, they told us. You are safer there.

We listened and stayed.

The streets emptied.

Schools and shops locked their doors.

Do not come, they told us.

We spent a hundred thousand heartbeats waiting.

Fear and the stories we heard kept us inside.

When we dared emerge with timid steps the air was thick with toxins.

Wear a mask, they told us. You are safer that way.

We listened and masked.

We spent a million heartbeats behind layers of fabric sheltering our lungs, muling our voices.

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But outside we found each other.

Hope built momentum.

We came together reclaiming repairing restoring recovering reviving, a thousand eforts moving as one.

The landscape, the mountain, was diferent after that.

Like part of it was missing.

Or maybe just diferent.

But we were okay.

When the pandemic descended We watched the world crumble.

Stay inside, they told us. You are safer there.

We listened and stayed.

The streets emptied.

Schools and shops locked their doors.

Do not come, they told us.

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We spent ten million heartbeats waiting.

Fear and the stories we heard kept us inside.

When we dared emerge with timid steps the air was thick with toxins.

Wear a mask, they told us. You are safer that way.

We listened and masked.

We spent ifty million heartbeats behind layers of fabric sheltering our lungs, muling our voices.

But outside we found each other.

Hope built momentum.

We came together reclaiming repairing restoring recovering reviving, a million eforts moving as one.

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The landscape, the world, will be diferent after this.

Like part of it is missing.

Or maybe just diferent.

But we will be okay.

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CHILD’S MOON Mara Bateman I wake up in the dark to some activity among the sagebrush. There is no wind and the pale cold of the night rests like a still hand on my chest. But: there is talk among the small, gnarled bodies nearby.

I stay still, barelynot the grass beneath me, barelynot the moon shadow resting like a hound along my side. It’s new, this type of listening, fragile. To disturb these conversations is to destroy them.

So I lay there, still as last year’s leaves, and listen.

There is a disturbance in the sagebrush. A roaring monster arrived and departed in the night, its eyes long legs of light across the hills; its feet rubbertreaded, crushing grass and branch and bird.

In the broken frost of its passage something is left behind. Something living, smaller than a polecat, larger than a rabbit, with a naked face and two moon-eyes. An owl predicts its death. A mouse hides under it, and perceives it has a heart.

Above me, the moon ticks towards setting. A small breeze says hush.

I stand up and let the shade slide of to crouch at my feet. I turn in the direction of the disturbance and walk. The sagebrush taps me and chimes with ice, but doesn’t speak. My breath is white. I might arrive too late.

I don’t, not quite.

There is a tear in the hillside ahead, tire tracks that cut down to the frozen mud. Here is where a truck turned back. Here in the grass is what it left behind.

I walk over and kneel down. A little face looks up at me, frowning. Fists kick a little.

Carefully, I pick it up. It’s heavier than it looks. The mouse darts into the grass faster than an eye.

I don’t know anything about babies. This is certainly the irst one I have ever held. I know something about seedlings, however, and it’s winter. I open up my coat and plant the baby snugly against my chest. It folds in. It becomes a seed of itself, knees and elbows itting frog-like. I zip it in tight.

There are antelope out here and in the pre-dawn I go to visit them.

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They lift their long heads at my approach, but mammals are easier than woody things and there is soon an understanding. Herds are kind to the hunted, the lonely and unarmed, the orphaned. As long as you can keep up.

I hold the baby up so it can suckle. The mother swings her head around to look at me.

“It’s not mine,” I say, and then, “Yes, it does have to be carried.”

The baby sucks. Maybe it is a good baby, a smart one. Or maybe babies will suckle anything, when given it. I don’t know.

I thank the mother. She bows her head back to the grass, needing nothing.

I tuck the baby back in my coat. It sleeps.

At the top of the hill the sun comes up. Above it, the faded moon remains, abandoned by the retreating night. I sit facing the dawn and make tea. I watch the frost glitter. I see the irst beads of water form and ill with a globe of the world.

I watch the baby sleep and begin to think. The rising of the sun encourages it. This is what I think in one hundred diferent ways: What the fuck am I going to do with this baby?

I should have left it where it lay, in a bed of frozen grass, until the cold quietly closed over it. It had barely arrived in the world. It had nothing to miss.

And the high, cold hills in winter are no place for a baby. Soon the snow would be deep. Soon I would be buried under it, sleeping in white tunnels and dreaming long, long dreams.

The baby makes me think about the past, before, when the talk around me was the beeping of human voices and all their accessory chaos. The irst good things I learned were from trees.

At least babies can’t talk. But, of course, they learn. They watch and watch and they listen and listen and like the earth itself they seed their own minds with a landscape, all in secret.

When I look down again the baby is awake, and the air is just warm enough to smell like sage.

The baby’s eyes are blue, and look up through their water like summer rocks in a stream. It watches me. Suddenly it looks away, up. I look, too, and see a bird loating there, alongside the lingering moon.

“Red-tailed hawk,” I tell the baby.

The baby seems to consider that. Then it frowns and pees, drenching my 135

shirt and pants. The liquid is hot at irst, but rapidly cools and grows clammy.

“Oh, baby,” I say and pull it out of my coat. It begins to cry.

At the stream I wash the baby, which I observe is male, and myself. I wrap him in my coat, but he is cold and quiet. The afternoon sun is blotted with clouds and weakening.

I ind the antelope mother again on the hill crest, but the baby’s head droops and he won’t suckle.

I consider if he will die. I don’t want him to.

The antelope advises a storm is coming, and before long I feel it too; my eardrums begin to ache and the clouds snarl together on the horizon. It is colder now.

I huddle the baby close and walk downhill towards the river. We can’t stay here. It is time to travel, south and forward, home, to the land of temperate giants.

Overhead the moon is still there, following us, as the sunlight is submerged. A child’s moon, I remember that being called. Or a ghost.

There is less time for preparation this time, but I let uncertainty pass through as a shiver and listen, walking on the ears of my feet, softly, down among the tree fringe along the water’s edge.

This time of year the river is thick with ice, free only where it lows fast and steep. Here the ish come, feeding, and may be caught. I don’t go there today, though, but walk where the trees are thickest, where the spring loods and leaf-shed have made a mulch.

The cottonwoods sigh to the river willows, dreaming, all naked and asleep.

Even here the ground is hard frozen. Spring is a better time for traveling.

Summer or fall. Winter is worst.

But there. There, I can feel it, at the base of a birch, a tiny crackling, a giggle, a chirp, muled deep beneath the earth.

I sit down under the birch tree and cross my legs. I rest my back against the tree and the baby against my chest. I am still. Still except for the tiny movements inside. Cells, dividing. Blood moving its cargo from port to port.

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The tiny mouths of my lungs, sipping air, separating, sifting.

Under the earth there is movement, too, subtle threads and endless intentions.

I sit there, my skin slowly dying, slowly being reborn. I breathe the tree and the tree breathes me. I sit until the presence beneath the ground recognizes me. I sit until our patterns begin to align, thread by thread, cell by cell, until I sink down into it, until I am among its ranks, one spark in a universe of sparks.

The irst snowlakes begin to fall. The sky is heavy, gray, white. More snow falls. It lies, silent, thicker and thicker, until my open eyes see only white lakes spinning and my shut eyes only white threads, growing.

The baby’s heart putters against my ribs. The baby is me, I insist, when the presence inquires. I am a woman with two hearts.

The white becomes a road, a tree, a face, a herd of antelope, a mushroom, a forest, a sea. It becomes anything. It becomes everything.

Be —, I think, and the end of the thought is whiteness and the black beauty of the inside of the earth.

I wake up with my back lat on soft and unfrozen earth. My heart is roaring like a sea-cave. My limbs are absent, and then arrive, trembling, aching as though with a tremendous efort spent. It’s not a free ride.

I listen for my second heart and ind it, then feel it; squirming, hungry, awake.

I open my eyes to columns reaching up and up towards swaying, far tips, tufted green, wandering rainclouds overhead. The air smells like wet green.

Woods. Moss. Fungus and the distant sea.

I turn my head to one side. A sword fern is unfurling beside me, its new growth coiled like the spring of Spring.

The baby speaks a syllable and burrows against my chest. I lift him up, even though my arms tremble like ancient arms, or never used ones.

“Look,” I say, as his eyes roll from thing to thing. “Listen. Redwood tree.

Fiddlehead. Home.”

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ACTS OF NOURISHMENT Kim Monnier is it a sacred leap ripping through tensile surface trading one world for another insectile object of hunger and instinct on the boundary— a baptism into air and a diferent gravity— uncertain as ever of success would it be rapturous to be seized by talons and carried away or return to water and watch as concentric ripples above expand then fade away

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GREGOR’S COUSIN James McColly Whenever Moth arrived Fun drained out Like water Through a trapdoor.

Dusty Smelling of chalk Always telling the same story About his lost lame.

Moth woke one day Finding himself an insect.

So much better to have wings Than skitter along the ground Moth explained.

Yet unable to take his eyes Of any lamp in the room.

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THREE DAYS IN HOUSTON Liza Long “A new theoretical model suggests that as the universe expands, everything, from galaxies, planets and atomic particles to space-time itself, will eventually be torn apart before vanishing from view.” — Hannah Devlin, “This Is the Way the World Ends,” The Guardian, July 3, 2015.

1. March 19, 1989 She meets her father in the maze of tiled tunnels beneath One Shell Plaza. It’s late November, but he is wearing a lightweight wool summer suit, the standard uniform of a senior level oil company corporate counsel. When he sees his oldest daughter, his face lights up.

They choose Fuddruckers for lunch. She has lived in Texas four years now and still can’t say this restaurant’s name without snickering. When they moved west from Pennsylvania her seventh grade year, her parents bought her a custom t-shirt, locked velvet letters spelling out “Yankee by birth, Texan by force.”

In true Texan ethos, Fuddruckers displays bloody fat-marbled cow carcasses in its windows. She is still eating beef then, but she’ll remember the window of headless skinless cows when she decides to stop. They talk — about school, work, their latest obsessions. Her father’s current ixation is the chemical compound methyl ethyl ketone. “I sometimes dream of going back to school and getting a chemistry degree,” he conides.

Her current obsession is T.E. Lawrence. “Why Lawrence?” her father asks. She thinks. Why Lawrence? Because he was both a bastard (when that mattered) and the quintessential proper English product of an Oxford education. Because he dressed up like an Arab. Because he lost his brother in the war that didn’t end all wars. Because she has a schoolgirl crush on a closeted gay man. “Because he embodies the problem of heroism in the modern age,” she tells her father.

2. June 7, 2000 “If you lie down on the sidewalk, you can get the whole building in one shot,” my husband, a self-styled photographer, informed me. I squinted at him 140

in the bright sunshine, then lattened myself on the pavement and pointed my sturdy Canon at the sky.

My husband was right, as usual. From this angle, I could imagine my dead father standing at his window, looking down at us from the corporate counsel oice on the 24th loor of One Shell Plaza.

My husband was a Californian by birth; this was his irst time in Texas.

We left our two young sons with my mother for a weekend getaway to attend my ten-year high school reunion.

My father met my future husband just once, at a college luncheon for Honors program graduates. A year later, when my father died and I took a leave of absence from the Classics Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin, my future husband proposed to me in California, where my family moved just before my father died. It seemed so serendipitous (except for the part about my father dying).

But before he got on one knee and pulled out a ring, my future husband told me about a dream he had.

“In my dream, your father was Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof,” my future husband said, “and I asked him for your hand in marriage.”

I had never told my future husband how much my father loved Fiddler on the Roof, how he would dance around the kitchen jiggling his belly and belting out “If I were a rich man” in a rich tenor, more Frank Sinatra than Zero Mostel, sending my mother into its of giggles.

I took this dream as a sign from God that this man was my soulmate, so I said yes.

After my father died, my mother never laughed anymore.

That afternoon in Houston, from my prone vantage point on the pavement, I looked up at my husband. He had tied a white t-shirt around his head to block the sun, and with his self-described “noble visage,” bright blue eyes, and self-assured expression, his resemblance to Lawrence of Arabia was uncanny.

“I think there are tunnels underneath the sidewalks here,” I told him as I scrambled to my feet.

“That’s ridiculous,” my future ex-husband snorted. “Why would they put tunnels under Houston? It never snows here. And it’s too close to the Gulf — the tunnels would lood.”

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“You’re right,” I said. “I must have imagined them.”

3. November 5, 2018 She slips out of her hotel room on the 20th loor and inches along the carpet, pressed against the locked wallpaper of the inner wall, trying not to look at the vast empty space to her right. The laughter from the hotel bar in the center of the spacious 26-story atrium is a faint murmur here.

As she nears the elevator and safety, she accidentally glances over the rail. She sees her own body splayed out by the fountain, legs bent at awkward angles, eyes open but blank. With a shudder, she stabs the elevator button, and as the doors open, she stumbles inside. She is safe. She manages a faint smile at the other occupants. One woman compliments her on her red patent leather pumps.

She is in Houston for a conference. She writes books and gives speeches and teaches college now. No one else knows about the ghosts here, the lickering wisps of past and future that surround her here.

When the elevator reaches the lobby, she spots the marked entrance to the tunnels. The knowledge that the tunnels are real — that she has not imagined them — washes over her, and she breathes easy for the irst time since her divorce.

She joins the throngs of commuters, moving by instinct to the familiar white limestone façade of One Shell Plaza’s tunnel lobby. She squints at the elevator, praying for her father to emerge when/if the fabric of space-time rips to reunite them.

Once upon a time, she told her father that Lawrence of Arabia never recovered from the war. He died in a mysterious motorcycle crash when he was 46, the age she is now, her father’s age when he got cancer in 1991.

The elevator doors open, and a man wearing a lightweight wool summer suit, the standard uniform of a senior level oil company corporate counsel, steps out. His face lights up as he sees his daughter, engrossed in her phone.

And watching this familiar scene play out for another father and daughter, the rips in her own fabric feel patched and mended. She knows then that unlike her father when he was her age, she will keep living for a while longer.

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BY THE NUMBERS Eric E. Wallace From the street to the garage, the driveway was 100 yards, 2 feet, 1.44 inches long. Vincent had carefully measured and remeasured it himself, doublechecking the estimator’s igures before agreeing to have the old dirt driveway paved.

It wasn’t that Vincent was fussy to the point of being anal — though he was — or that he didn’t trust people — he didn’t — but more that, he lived for numerical accuracy.

Apart from the surety of numbers, life was uncertain, capricious, unfair.

A prime example was the coronavirus pandemic, which chose to commence only a week after the paving was inished. Suddenly the driveway was barely needed.

Vincent and Olivia, childless, both recently retired — he from an accountancy irm, she from teaching high school biology — went into lockdown on their ive Idaho acres and dove into their individual pursuits.

Olivia tended to an expanding number of garden plots, planted and nurtured an orchard, raised chickens in a PETA-approved coop, spent many hours Zoom-communing with other retired teachers and pampered her cats, Petal, Pistol and Sepal.

Vincent manipulated his holdings in the stock market. He improved his chess game and competed on the internet with players from around the world, memorizing every move.

He took daily walks (4) around the perimeter of the property, interspersed with laps (6) up and down the driveway. He crisscrossed the grounds along luscious curves based on Fibonacci spirals, his routes adjusted only when Olivia grumbled about intruding on her plantings.

He learned the number of posts and rails on every section of fence (460), the average number of paving stones on each pathway (17.5), the height of each evergreen (range: 10 to 33 feet), the average number of twittering quail in a covey as measured against the marauding of Olivia’s cats (15/9).

At supper one night, Olivia announced that his daily numerical accounts had become boring. She stretched out the irst syllable of bo-ring in a lippuckering way, holding it, by his mental clock, for a bravura 1.5 seconds.

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Vincent countered Olivia with a verbal spreadsheet tallying her own yawn-inducing comments about quantities of raspberry canes culled, potatoes, onions and carrots planted, peaches, pears and apricots produced (less fruit damaged by insects or gnawed by raccoons), eggs laid per week and feline tummy troubles assuaged by sympathy, warm blankets and doses of slippery elm.

Since they were boring each other with minutia, they took to reading at mealtimes. Olivia devoured novels, Vincent dined on chess histories and actuarial tables.

Lockdown passed peaceably enough until Vincent, on one of his perambulations, thought he spotted an anomaly on the driveway. He stopped, stared, scowled.

Venturing across part of the asphalt was a thin crack, the minutest of fracture lines, a scar on the near-perfect surface.

Vincent pulled out his pocket tape measure. The crack was so small that an accurate reading of its width was impossible, but he estimated 1/4 of a millimeter. Length was easier to determine: coming from the east side of the driveway at an angle of 89.81 degrees, the whispery fault line extended 3 feet, 1 and 3/8 inches.

When Vincent reported this to Olivia, her eyes glazed. Actually, they double-glazed. She said if it troubled him to have a Grand Canyon on the property, he should lex his warranty muscles. He called the paving company, but discovered they were one of those businesses whose motto was ly by night.

He decided on a wait and see approach. Perhaps the crack would remain as it was, almost unnoticeable, while serving as a reminder never to trust anybody.

But it was clear the crack was widening. And lengthening. And deepening.

Vincent measured and charted. He acquired calipers, a depth micrometer and a inely-calibrated tape measure. He pinned 16 sheets of graph paper to the living room wall and plotted dates and times against every measurement.

A nanometer here, a micron or a millimeter there, duly recorded. In multiple colors.

Olivia rolled her eyes, but as she’d been rolling them for years, Vincent was immune.

On the 40th day of observation, he noticed a miniscule mound of dirt 144

near the center of the crack. Ants. He estimated the average length to be 3 to 5 millimeters but warned himself against getting sidetracked into entomology.

Not wanting to hire an exterminator — undoubtedly ly-by-night — he spread out 4.45 ounces of chili powder mixed with 3.3 ounces of Borax.

By the 51st day, the crack was 3 feet, 2 and 1/4 inches long. No more ants, but earthworms (3) slid nearby.

For a time, over their otherwise-quiet suppers, Vincent tried providing a daily update to Olivia. She stared, snifed, briely nodded — appearing to be somewhere between mystiied and disgusted — and ducked her head back into her book du jour. When the crack reached 3.2 millimeters in width, Olivia quit raising her head. Vincent stopped his reporting but kept measuring.

Length: 4 feet, 1 and 1/8 inches. Average increase: .5 millimeters per week. Average width: 3.3 millimeters. Increase: .2 millimeters in 1 month.

Average depth: 5.1 millimeters. Increase: .3 millimeters in 5 weeks. Ants: 3, lethargic. Earthworms: 1, listless.

Vincent charted it all, putting up more graph paper (6 sheets). Olivia growled about redecorating the living room wall. As a precaution, Vincent memorized his igures.

But it wasn’t purely about numbers. As he hovered over the crack, he imagined he could still smell the tarry odor from the paving project. Then it had been the smell of progress, the triumph of man over nature. Now he took the smell to be a taunting. And was that a whif of sulfur? His mind jumped to his Sunday school days and a fragment of a hymn, Satan crushed forever, sung, he knew, in 2/4 time.

Vincent mused aloud at dinner. Were cracks in driveways really the devil’s work? He cleared his throat and repeated the question. This time Olivia lowered her Danielle Steele, gave him a long look, popped a homegrown cherry tomato into her mouth, crushed it thoughtfully, returned to reading.

The crack lengthened, widened, deepened.

On the 70th day, as Vincent poked and measured, his mind leapt to another boyhood memory. Digging to China. That’s what his parents said about his boyish spade work. Dig deep enough, Vinnie, and you can tunnel all the way to China.

China! Vincent laughed with a grim, wide-eyed epiphany. His tape measure, his new depth sensor and his other instruments were manufactured in China. His shirt, pants, socks, underwear and work gloves were made in China.

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That was it! The Chinese had dug through from below, tunneled the 11,772.3 kilometers to Idaho. Suddenly it made sense. Those tunneling ants: Chinese.

The earthworms: Chinese. The snake he’d seen slithering past the crack: from China. My God, was this the Chinese Year of the Snake?

Breathless, he ran to report his breakthrough idea to Olivia. She wasn’t in her gardens. Not in the chicken coop. Not in the orchards. Not even on the back porch Zooming. He at last found her in the bedroom, packing suitcases.

She muttered she was going to visit her sister in Wyoming. He needn’t worry about the cats. They were going too. So were the chickens. Estimated date of return: not established.

Vincent asked whether she wanted the issure statistics emailed to her daily or weekly. She convulsed into a it of manic laughter, and he retreated, iguring she’d let him know.

When Olivia drove from the garage, Vincent was crouched at the side of the driveway, using his new digital laser to conirm the current length, 4 feet, 9.23 inches. He glanced up to see Olivia’s Honda rolling directly toward him (at approximately 1.25 mph). At the last moment, the vehicle turned and crunched over the crack, the cats meowing and the chickens clucking. Vincent took out his calipers and began recalculating the average width.

He stopped, dropping both the calipers and his jaw. Had Olivia mentioned Wyoming? That was it! This issure was no accidental happenstance, no devil’s work, no Chinese tomfoolery. It was a message, an alert.

He’d long been fascinated by the great Teton fault in Wyoming, centered 473.312 kilometers to the northeast. He had books, videos, charts aplenty on the subject. Experts thought that with one cataclysmic eruption, the western states would heave and buckle and split asunder in a mighty rippling earthquake, Richter 9.5 or higher. This crack in his driveway was a tease, a scout, a harbinger. The Big One, the granddaddy of all quakes, was coming.

Soon. And he, Vincent, would be at the forefront.

He ordered a seismograph, a tent, a cot, loodlights and a generator, and he methodically planned a round-the clock vigil.

He wondered anew why people said the pandemic was terribly disruptive.

How could that be? By keeping him home, it had brought new purpose and focus to his life.

He alone would be prepared. When the West split open, he’d be here, 146

measuring everything. And dancing gleefully — in 4/4 time — right on the edge of the beautiful chasm.

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MIRACLE OF WOOD Anita Tanner —that wood could come in that thin and blonde for kindling after the dark bark after the ax whack and the crack of white opening the stria of wood gouging, indenting my armloaded skin —that I could feel it roll piece by piece into the bottom of the woodbox layered with wood chips chunks of bark the hint of pinecone mixed with damp earth —that wood could come in from the cold dark shed and give of so much heat in a snow-blown frozen winter sometimes the only light in the early morning farmhouse —that the colored ire could make jewels of our eyes and surprise us

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—that even a split log frozen and snow-buried could load our ire with sizzle heat the moisture dropping never drowning out the coals —that wood could look like loaves of Mother’s bread the hardened crust the sliced steam my teeming nostrils welcoming

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DINNER CONVERSATION Kathryn Durrant “Short of an H. G. Wells’ time machine, a Delorean, or Dr. Who’s blue police box, there’s no reason for me to answer.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, “It’s hypothetical. That’s the fun of it. What if you could go back to one day in your life?”

He leaned toward me, a wicked gleam in his eye. I braced myself to maintain a neutral expression.

“What day would it be? I know. That day you told me about. You know, seventh grade French. When your skirt fell of. I’d have liked to see that.”

I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “Seventh grade? You were a pervert that young?”

With a wolish grin, he said, “You can drop your skirt for me anytime” Shaking my head, I let out a moan. “At the rate, you’re going that won’t be soon.” I knew it was a lie. Even a hint he was serious about me and the skirt would drop. Since the beginning of our friendship, we teased like this. Back and forth, pretending to be crazy mad for each other. Except that it no longer felt much like pretending to me.

With a leer, he began again, “No, I got it. When that guy–” Before he could dredge up yet another of my embarrassing moment, I interrupted, almost shouting, “What about you? When the coach picked you to go into the game. Huh? You pulled your sweats down so fast your basketball shorts went with them.” I waggled my eyebrows up and down.

He shook his head, “Low blow, I expected better from you.”

I placed my hand on my chest as if ofended. “Me?” Lordy, how I wish I’d been at that high school game. But he couldn’t know that.

“I’ll have you know some scientists believe a rupture in the spacetime...” he snapped his ingers to help bring the word to memory.

“Continuum,” I deadpanned, knowing full well he knew the word.

Forgetting a word was his go-to trick to draw me back into his world of science iction.

He snapped again and pointed his inger at me. “Yes, continuum. For that lucky lady, you get a prize.” His wink suggested something sexy. My mind strayed to a lot of things I wished he’d do. His rush of words pulled me back.

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“You’d time travel. Although it could be a parallel universe. There’s a strong school of thought in that direction.”

I had to stop him.

“I love it when you talk nerdy to me.” My lips twitched in an efort not to smile.

A corner of his mouth turned down. He knew I would not go down the sci-i rabbit black hole with him. Without thinking, I reached across the table for his hand, but he pulled away a moment before I would have touched him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying and failing to keep the laughter out of my voice.

His mouth tightened. He was skeptical of my apology, and rightly so. We both knew I wasn’t sorry.

“Okay,” I said in resignation, not wanting to end our meal together on a downbeat. “Just one day? Not to meet someone from history, keep Lincoln from being shot?”

Eager to have my participation again, he leaned forward. My breath caught.

“Just one day.”

I raised my eyes toward the ceiling, pretending to think. I glimpsed the beginning of a smile on his lips. Lips that I longed to kiss. I couldn’t lower my eyes until I was sure my genuine desire for him wouldn’t show. I let out my breath and gazed into his eyes.

“It’s a hard question.”

He sat so smugly now, arms folded across that broad chest. Sure of his victory in converting me to his favorite iction. It wasn’t enough that I’d cited Dr. Who at the start of this nonsense. He knew I was a hardcore murder mystery fan. I would not bow to this type of literary blackmail.

With solemnity I started, “I’d go back to the irst time I met you.”

His eyes widened at the direction I was taking.

“Only this time,” I lowered my voice to a sexy purr. “I’d walk right up to you. Pull you away from that stick of a blonde woman you were with, and yell, ‘He’s mine until the end of time,’ and kiss you as if my life depended on it.”

He unfolded his arms from across his chest and lattened his hands on the table.

“What?”

“Never mind.” He shoved his chair back. “For that, you can do the dishes 151

without me.”

I leaned back, watching him walk away. “Jack, come on. Don’t be a sore loser. That could be a legitimate answer, even romantic?” Even true, I thought, glancing over the dirty dishes from our meal. I pursed my lips at the turn of events. He couldn’t be that upset. He should have laughed. It it right in with our playing at being crazy for each other. I gathered the plates, glasses, and utensils. Banging around, I made as much noise as I could. Raising my voice in indignation, I called out, “The punishment doesn’t it the crime.” In reply, I heard the Netlix opening chime.

Setting my load down hard on the counter, I stared at the white enamel sink. I had no dishwasher. They had converted the old Victorian into ive apartments. The rental ad drew me in with the magical words quaint and cozy.

Code for no modern amenities like a garbage disposal or dishwasher. I’d fallen in love with the place and signed the lease. Then just as quickly fell in love with another tenant, Jack.

He always helped with the dishes when he joined me for dinner. I yanked the hot water tap on. “Maybe I’d go back to that day. Not sign the lease. Find me a nice high rise,” I muttered under my breath while squirting the liquid detergent under the water’s stream. I made one last efort, wailing, “This isn’t fair.”

Silence.

Plunging my hands into the lufy white bubbles, I grabbed a glass, swished it around, and rinsed. I felt him join me. His arm brushing up next to mine.

“You’re taking too long.”

It was a relief to have him by my side, yet at the same moment thrilling.

Being with him was becoming an emotional tug of war.

“I just started.”

He took the glass, picked up a dish towel, and began wiping it dry.

“See,” I wiggled my ingers in front of his face, “not even wrinkly yet.”

He grabbed my soapy hand and raised it with a lourish to his lips. A smattering of bubbles clung to the side of his mouth.

“I’ll love you until all of you is wrinkled.”

I reached up to brush the bubbles away. My inger grazed his lip. If only that could be true. I looked away before he could see my longing. It amazed me 152

I could reply, “You say that now.”

He moved to put the dry glass in the cupboard. “And I’ll say it then.”

No grand gesture, no teasing tone to his voice, no hint of things to come with a sly wink. Just sincerity. I handed him a plate. He would be a man of his word. The force of my love for him wrapped around my heart. I’d been teasing him earlier. But I knew if I could go back to that day, I would have done exactly as I’d answered if it meant now both of us would be in love, instead of just one of us. Overwhelmed by how hard pretending was becoming, I blurted, “Why the question?”

I scrubbed the plate in my hand, now well beyond clean.

Wiping dry the plate I handed to him, he said, “I read an article about Ray Bradbury.”

Relief looded over me. We’d moved out of the danger zone back to friendship. I’d rather have that than show my hand and he not love me back.

“He said he got his story ideas by asking, ‘What if ?’”

I dropped a handful of latware into Jack’s side of the sink.

“So?” He rinsed each piece, focusing on the water splashing over forks and spoons. I waited. He set the inal knife in the drying rack.

“I’d go back to the irst time I met you too.” He turned, caught me by the shoulders, and moved me to face him.

“I would run to you. Pull you away from that boring bald guy you were with-” “You mean my dad?”

I knew where this was going. I tried to pull away and began laughing.

Instead of letting me go, he wrapped his arms around me. Now, inches from my face, he said, “I’d yell, ‘She’s mine until the end of time.’” He lowered his lips to mine. Startled, I moved to step back. He pulled me in closer and deepened the kiss, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, becoming a full participant. We parted just enough for him to whisper against my lips, “And kiss you as if my life depended on it. Because it does.”

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DEBRIS The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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MANIFEST PALIMPSEST Mark Woychick Raging ire, spewing lava, ravaging winds Does the earth live and let live, forgive the insult after the wound closes and the scar shines?

As we beat ploughshares into shivs, Vilify, live and let die, ight ire with circular iring squads, might makes blight.

Yet in scorched soil, seedlings ind a fertile void. What inill will vest, be made manifest in the palimpsest?

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FAULT LINES Bonnie Schroeder Los Angeles, California, 4:30 AM, January 17, 1994 Noise yanks Amy from sleep as the bed beneath her sways. The house shudders and creaks, and closet doors bang against each other, lurching in their metal tracks. In another room, glass shatters. The tremor lasts less than twenty seconds, but it is enough for Amy to register Jason’s vacant spot next to her. A Southern California native, Amy is no stranger to the sickening rumbles underfoot when the earth throws temper tantrums, the pressure of two tectonic plates grinding against one another, intensifying until one of them gives.

Amy opens her mouth to call Jason’s name. Then she remembers. He’s gone. Has been gone for a month. She’s alone.

Wait. Not alone. The dog. Where is the dog?

“Luna?” she calls, her voice thick with fear and sleep.

No answer.

“Luna?”

The dog’s usual sleeping spot is a foam bed in the corner by the window.

It’s empty now.

Silence follows that irst tremor, but Amy knows to brace for more. Sure enough, here it comes, almost as strong as the irst. How long does it last?

She can’t tell. It feels like forever. By then, of course, she is full awake, and as soon as the shaking stops, she climbs out of bed and presses the light switch, a useless attempt. Naturally the power is out. But, she remembers, there’s a lashlight in the nightstand drawer, and, miraculously, it works. The beam illuminates the closet’s sliding doors, one of which has collapsed against the other, shaken from its track. She shoves it aside and claws through the pile of tumbled clothing, looking for shoes to protect her feet from broken glass — only to remember she’d stashed a pair of sneakers under the bed for just such an emergency. Such is everyday life in earthquake country.

She wobbles to the kitchen and inds wreckage everywhere: broken glasses and shattered china litter the loor. So many times she’d asked Jason to secure the cabinet doors — but it had been a halfhearted request. The inconvenience of opening and closing doors itted with earthquake latches had seemed to outweigh the possible beneit.

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She remembers the dog. Poor Luna! She must be terriied. Where would she hide?

Another silence descends as Amy searches the house. Then the sirens begin, illing the darkness with their wail. And, from a corner of the living room, an answering cry: Luna.

Amy’s lashlight beam catches a pair of glowing eyes. Luna, a solid black shepherd mix, invisible except for the relection of those eyes. Amy stumbles over fallen houseplants and books to reach the dog. She kneels and hugs the trembling animal; Luna whimpers, licks Amy’s face and paws her arm.

Another aftershock hits, milder but enough to set Amy’s nerves laring.

Luna barks, then whines.

“Shh, girl, it’s okay,” Amy says, but she fools neither the dog nor herself.

Things are very far from okay. The house probably sustained damage, Jason has left her, the world is ending. Her watch’s glowing face tells her it’s 4:53 AM, long before daybreak, and Amy isn’t sure she wants to see what dawn will reveal.

When the latest tremor subsides, Amy takes a deep breath and heaves herself upright. She has to clean up the fallen glass in the kitchen before Luna steps in it and shreds the pads of her feet. It is a small act, but it’s the only thing she can think to do. Luna is glued to her side, but Amy puts her in a sit-stay at the kitchen entrance, thankful for those hours of obedience training. She had tried to get Jason to come with her, but he always had an excuse, something he needed to do that was more important than training a dog. Amy’s dog. “Your dog,” he’d say, and she tried not to hear the sneer in his voice.

“My dog,” Amy whispers, and thinks, my dog, my house, my paycheck.

She’d willingly shared them all, but her gifts went unacknowledged. The moment of clarity hits her like a slap on the side of her head as she realizes, not for an instant has she thought “If only Jason were here.” Nor has she wondered where he is, or if he’s all right. Nor, at bottom does she really even care at that moment.

Once the kitchen loor is safe to walk on, Amy feeds Luna her breakfast and watches her eat. The dog’s needs are so simple, she thinks. Luna is easy to please. Not like herself. Not like Jason.

The land line phone is out, of course, but by some miracle Amy’s mobile phone must be working, because it chimes. Amy swings the lashlight beam 159

over the kitchen counter, inds the phone, and lips it open.

“Hi,” she says, in a dazed voice she almost doesn’t recognize.

“Man, that was some shocker,” Jason says. “Scared the shit out of me.” A pause follows, and then he asks, “You okay?”

Amy sinks to the loor, and Luna presses against her as the ground ripples and the house grumbles. It’s being shaken to pieces, she thinks.

“I guess,” she says. “The house isn’t, though. It’s a mess. No lights. It’s so dark. I’m amazed this phone works.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I know. It’s scary the way — whoa, here comes another one — ” he stops talking as another aftershock rumbles through. Amy will later learn there were several thousand of them in the hours and days after the initial quake. Buildings collapsed; others exploded. People died. She wants to scream at the earth, beg it to stop, please, please stop and be still! Instead she takes another deep breath and pulls Luna even closer.

“Yes,” she says. “That was a bad one. How about you? Everything okay where you are?”

“Uh... yeah, I guess. Things are pretty messed up, but I’m not hurt or anything. Can’t see a damn thing though, in the dark.”

“Yes.” “Okay, well, I gotta go. Just wanted to see if you’re all right. You hang in there.”

“Sure. Thanks. You too.”

And he’s gone.

“Well,” Amy says to Luna, “at least he called to see if we’re alive. That means something, right?”

Luna licks her paw and rests her head on Amy’s thigh.

Even if she could see, there’s no point in cleaning up the mess because another shock wave would jolt it all to the loor again. So Amy leans her back against the wall and strokes her dog, grateful that, yes, the house is at least still standing, not on ire, not collapsing inward. She’s not injured, at least not from the earthquake, and neither is Luna. The house will weather this disaster. It’s old, but as her father always said, it has good bones. The foundation is strong.

It’s been through worse, and maybe she has, too, although she can’t remember when. If survival counts for anything, however, she and her dog and her home will be all right.

Amy closes her eyes and waits for daylight.

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A FUNERAL SESTINA Farley Egan Green You’re old enough, says Aunt Diane, for nylons to wear with your black patent lats. This I kind of like though, really, I’d rather have heels.

She picks out stuf in department store aisles: garter belt, hose, a navy-blue suit. Is navy dark enough for the dead?

My Mom’s black jacket is lined with pink so I guess it is okay.

In a strange school with cousins while grown-ups go somewhere to plan. Bored, tired, of friendly pats, of sidelong looks, from teachers I don’t know. Okay what do I do. Go along? I will, but math and grammar I ask you? when Daddy will not heal?

Nothing to say at lunch. Feel lat, feel dead.

A walk with Uncle Howard. He’s been assigned by Mom to bring up the subject of seeing Daddy dead.

He doesn’t look bad, says my uncle, looks asleep. He’ll not be tough to remember that way. Okay?

No, I say. No thank you. No way. It smells of winter, my jacket too tight, the snow and the pavement a narrowing aisle.

First-ever limo ride, just a mile, in dress-up clothes to the Cathedral where people are waiting in pews. Out of the car? Okay.

Mom squeezing my hand as we walk down the aisle.

Breathing heavy, biting down. No use. Brown loor made of tiles, bronze casket up ahead. Guess he’ll really be in there. Guess he really is dead.

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Finished with crying, service is done, we get in to the limo again. We ride, through the town above a river to a fancy club. Lunch, then I follow my uncle’s heels downstairs to where you can bowl. I’ll play Uncle Howard, I’ll play, but Daddy is still dead you know, and bowling dressed up is weird, okay?

Back home little brother has started to stutter. Don’t speak of it please Mom says, at all. I’m afraid he’ll get stuck if we tease him so shhh, no comments, okay?

Two black-coated priests pay a visit to pray, ofer hope. No good she says, when your husband is dead.

She stays in their bedroom, shuts the door to the hall.

I sit in my room, which my dad painted pink.

Feel lat, feel dead, got nothing to say.

Can’t weep and don’t want to think. Okay?

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TEN SECONDS TO RUPTURE Cameron Morit California. Morning. Golf. The sun is still trying to get over those mountains in the east, the jagged peaks all backlit like someone traced ’em with a lashlight. A little colder than you igured for Palm Desert, even if it is January. Might have done you good to wear more clothing, but it’s too late now because Billy boy unfolds his long frame and exits the town car and it’s not about you anymore. Not when you recognize the guy coming toward him. The clock starts.

How it works is you got about ten seconds to igure it out, someone’s bothering your guy. Fewer, usually. You’ve seen eight. You’ve seen three. You’d better be tight if you get only three.

He looks familiar, this guy, but you know him from the East Coast. What’s he doing way out here? Looks like Elvis Costello with those fruity glasses. Looks like trouble. What is that ink on his neck, a pair of dice? What’s that dangling lanyard, a homemade press credential?

That’s one and a half seconds right there.

You want to get him to the ground to where you can put a Ferragamo on his neck, but you can’t do that. You’ve got to just stand there and wait. It’s a long wait, but pleasant for the agony. It’s in those moments that you are most alive because it’s then that you’re most aware.

Two seconds.

Alive? No. This job is killing you. It’s working a hole in your guts while you keep the other guy alive, the 42nd President of these United States. Killing you because you assume the worst in people and then go lower. Murphy. That’s your name. And that’s Murphy’s Law. It’s 2015, you’d think people would forget, but a guy is president once, he needs you forever, needs you so close you can smell what soap he’s using. Billy boy is an Ivory guy.

You’ve done your advance, you know it’s only a one-story clubhouse – swept, secure. You know which guys have the morning tee times, and which caddies have a record. But now there’s this motherfucker from the East. The artsy-fartsy glasses and crescent-moon sideburns, Elvis Costello but with red hair in full retreat. Freckles. Mid-thirties. Just last month he was standing there at the southwest entrance of the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan, 163

bells ringing, everyone drunk on Christmas. Billy boy, gone all vegan and slim, breezed past him and into the building for a Time cover. Sighting number two came at the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year deal at Chelsea Piers two days later, everyone was lapping it up as Billy boy talked teamwork and how we want to think we were born in a log cabin we built ourselves, when what you really wanted was to listen to Madison Bumgarner talk about mowing down Kansas City Royals. But there was Elvis, again, among all those New York magazine types.

You see a guy twice in a row like that? You ile it. Could be nothing.

Now, though, he’s in California. Once you’ve placed the guy, you’re at three and a half seconds. Billy boy strides onto the cart path, and that’s four. And here comes East Coast Elvis, his arm stuck out, nothing in his hand, ive seconds. He and Billy boy are inches apart, and then – contact – and now you got yourself a handshake, six seconds. The back of your neck is practically on ire as Elvis tells him how great he was at the Sports Illustrated thing. Seven, eight, nine seconds, and you start to relax, just a little. You’re thinking Elvis is all right, but Billy boy isn’t letting go of that handshake, he does that, so they’re still connected as they walk. They stop, and Billy ixes him with those blue beauties. “What’d you say your name is?”

You’re thinking the guy is about to fall under the spell, that Clinton charisma, but then something changes quick, it always happens quick, like a freak rupture out of nowhere.

“Motherfucker,” the guy says, throwing Billy’s hand back at him. “Gore lost because of you, we’re in Iraq because of you, I got ambushed in Fallujah because you couldn’t — ” He never inishes. Elvis’s lanyard proves handy as you yank him hard, backward and of his feet, those rock star glasses lying of his face and skittering down the cart path. Two things you should have noticed before: Those dice tattooed onto his neck aren’t dice, they’re dog tags, and he’s got a nice zipper scar runs right up between ’em. Military.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” you ask. “Get out of here. Now!” Because something’s ruptured in you, too, looding you with chemicals from every ight you’ve ever had. The wire is popped from your ear. G.I. Elvis’s broken press necklace dangles of his shoulders. He gets his glasses, straightens. “Go,” you say, pointing at the jagged mountains. “I won’t ask twice.”

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He smiles, a dumb, broken-toothed thing that will keep you up at night, and you look at each other for a long goddamn second. You’re half-hoping he comes at Billy boy again and gives you cause to improvise, do what you really want to do, but he makes the right call and walks. Shoots you a tough look over his shoulder as he goes, like it saves him face. The boss is ghost white as you fumble out an apology, pretty damn certain this is your last day of work.

“I’m alright,” he says, holding up his hand like he’s being sworn in. “I’m ine.”

But you’re not; you played this all wrong and now you got yourself an incident. You reset your earpiece and call it in as Billy boy ducks into a tent for some breakfast, shaking hands like nothing happened. You can’t eat. You love to eat. He has some fruit and goes outside, watches the golf from a little walledof garden area, and you try to organize your thoughts amid all that quiet, the smack of a ball, the izz in the air, the tinkly applause.

“You don’t look well, Murph,” Billy boy says.

You want to tell him you were supposed to pitch for the Yankees. You want to tell him you’re tired of the crazies, the guy in the wire-rims and Utah Jazz jersey said his cat watched the State of the Union on TV and had the Polaroid to prove it. The people who try to bring him ice cream or McDonalds, which, shit, you can’t allow that. And the women. Good Christ, the women.

You see how all that stuf could happen with the intern and the one who couldn’t even spell her own name, Gennifer with a G, God help her.

“I’m ine,” you say. He nods but neither one of you believes it, and he saunters of to ind more hands to shake, and you follow, always you follow, always thinking the worst.

You’re not well, you’re not ine, because you’re stuck on your life, not his.

Maybe it’s your birthday, turning 42 like Billy always will be, and thinking of Jennifer, your ex down in New Orleans who made your birthday meal how you like it, the lamb on the grill with the mint sauce. She hated you as a human shield, did this thing when she was stressed, her hands worrying a strand of purple beads around her neck. Worked the purple right of the beads, she did, but maybe it’s not too late because maybe you’re not dead yet.

The rest of the day is quiet as a sleeping baby, which is how you like it.

Elvis has left the building and Billy boy stays late to honor another serviceman on the 18th green, this one with the good manners not to scream at him. The 165

sun bleeds away, the chill creeps back into the air, and you want to call her and make it real, let her know you’re going to hang it up while you still can. Maybe she can come up to the city for your birthday, make that lamb again like she used to. Maybe the two of you can work the purple back on those beads.

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HOW TO SOLVE A RUBIK’S CUBE Liza Long That thing will blow your mind the fat man seated next to me said gesturing to the metacube of cubes I pulled out of my bag before takeof — my worry beads a toy to keep my hands busy, to hold my buzzing brain in check on airplanes or in supermarket lines Why do I still use this cube you gave me and not a new one?

Is it the predictable slick turns or the satisfying snick as another layer falls neatly into place?

Or is it the memory of that hour stuck in the San Francisco airport when we missed our light, a typical trip—you meeting clients in expensive restaurants; me walking through the museum of modern art quietly snickering at the thought of Boise-born-Bjork-loving Matthew Barney dressed as General Patton outlining his art aesthetic with a sharpie on the vast expanse of white waved wall— that hour when I solved the mysteries of the universe for the irst time, your hands guiding mine?

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Snick. Snick. Snick.

The middle layer’s done now solve the H, the satisfying click of double double toil and trouble double back up right now the top is solid yellow.

Then mix the whole thing up again to ix it.

Well how about that says the fat man as the last piece slides into its proper place— order from chaos god’s in his heaven etcetera.

(If only all the rest were like this cube governed by simple algorithms that solve the mysteries of loss and grief and pain of love and life, of you and me and we.

How about that).

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EXHALE Kara J. Fort Exhale I went to the store again Another warning before “the lockdown” when I passed strangers in aisles I quit breathing swallowed my panic instead but made eye contact and gave a knowing nod as if we all knew what this was all about I think how often in life have I swallowed my feelings without thought and got by with a nod pretending I’m stronger than I am with strangers understanding why my world does not feel like home I wonder how often in my life have I isolated myself in shame with empty shelves inside, numb as usual pretending our world is normal when its anything but my silence is my best defense

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I ponder how often has news buried itself in my tears expressing all the grief I have no language for yet I masquerade as if tragedies around me shouldn’t cause alarm like it does my collective soul Is it possible all those strangers between the eggs and the milk have ceased their breath on account of me? their smile masked but loneliness mirrored in similar junk food thrown in their cart?

Maybe we are stronger than we think maybe years of detachment and dismissing have somehow given us practice to hope, experience in loss, so when a pandemic hits we know just when to exhale

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THE WALK GiGi Huntley Alma was six miles past the old country bar when the sidewall of the tire ruptured. It was after midnight, and she was still wearing her dirty forest ranger uniform. Good thing it came with comfortable shoes and a warm jacket, because the bar was the only place close, and the spare was never replaced after the last blow out.

She wasn’t afraid of the dark. For her, worse things had happened during the day, and being a ranger meant she carried a gun. She grabbed a lashlight from the glovebox and started the trek. Coyotes yipped from the river below; owls hooted from the hill above. It was beautiful. She thought about how her husband Ed would have loved it — a dark walk, animal sounds, only the half moon and stars providing light.

She clicked on the lashlight.

She missed him every day. Cancer had taken him from her ive years before. Being alone meant she kept the ranger job even when she should’ve retired. She was good at it, so no one pushed. The skin on her face showed every year. She joked that her wrinkles were a map of every gravel road she’d ever driven, every creek she’d ever ished. She igured it would take a couple of hours to get back to the bar. She wasn’t as quick as she once was.

“Well, the old truck is still getting me where I need to go. Can you believe it? The odometer has probably turned at least twice since we bought it. I had to clean the carburetor a few weeks ago. Good thing I remembered how. Too bad I forgot to put the spare back, huh?”

He never answered, but she was always talking to him. She wished sometimes that he were a ghost, following her around, laughing at the way she reused tea bags still. “You know that Lipton is pretty cheap stuf, right? We can aford for you to use more than one bag a day. Treat yourself !” he would kid her.

She chuckled, swatting at a moth that came for the lashlight’s relection on her glasses.

Life wasn’t always easy. Dad was a drunk who used prospecting as a way to avoid family life, only coming home to get Mom pregnant or yell that

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none of them were good for anything. There was always a wayward cousin squatting, sometimes pregnant themselves. Food was scarce. She remembered her youngest brother poaching a doe one winter, quietly dressing it in the shed behind the house. Alma dug away at the frozen earth that day, hoping to ind an old onion or garlic bulb to help with the stew. It was the best Christmas of her youth. Dad lived in Nevada then, only he called it “being away for work.”

Mom was a saint. She died when that same little brother was in Vietnam, his wife pregnant with a granddaughter she would never see. Alma tried to stand in for their mom, getting the kids gifts and making sure everyone had a place to go on Thanksgiving.

Motherhood never came her way. She never questioned why.

She started as a secretary, but hated having to wear pantyhose, so her husband talked his bosses into letting her take a ranger job. They igured she’d hate it and quit within a season. She showed them.

“They’re bringing in younger and younger kids to train for your old job.

No one seems to stick, though. Guess this generation can’t handle the workload they threw at you.”

The coyotes yipped a response.

“I’m thinking about selling the house. I don’t need a big place anymore.

I’ve been falling asleep on the sofa anyway. Some young family would get better use out of it. Gabby says I could get an apartment at one of those old folks’ homes we used to laugh at. Might be nice not to have to do my own cleaning.

I could inally read all those books you bought from that book-of-the-month club, too.

“Glad the bar is downhill, but my knees are gonna ache tomorrow.

Remember the bruises from that time we tried skiing? Of course, that’s nothing on these veins on my legs. Looks like an interstate roadmap down there.”

Each step made a satisfying crunch. These old river roads were her favorite spots. She’d take her own truck out and ish after work. It was the best part of the job. The blackberries were done for the year, but when it was season she’d bring home a bucketful and eat them warm while she fried up her catch.

Fishing was the one thing she could do with her dad that supplied any kind of happy memory from her youth.

“Shouldn’t have stayed out this late, Ed. I’m too old for this. Driving at night… It just doesn’t work. I have to drive so slow. And I fell while climbing 172

up from my favorite hole and dropped the ish into an old blackberry bush.

Didn’t bother going after them. It’s a good thing I keep those horrible granola bars you loved in the truck, or I’d a starved by now. It’s like chewing on particle board, though. I never understood how you could like them.”

She glanced down at her watch. If she was walking her normal 20-minute mile, she was halfway there. She hoped the downhill slope was giving her a few minutes.

Something crackled to the right where the river wandered. She moved the light that way and saw a row of glowing eyes looking back. She kept walking, turning sideways to keep the light their way. A family of raccoons ran across the road behind her, and she lit the way up the embankment for them.

She rounded a bend and saw the lights of the bar below her. She was always amazed that a bar in the middle of nowhere could bring in enough money to stay open, but she was grateful this one was there.

“Remember all the stories I would tell you about Uncle Glenn? How I’d head out to pan for gold with him and always ind a giant nugget? Still can’t believe it took me years to igure out that it was always the same rock,” she laughed, “He’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m hoping you two have met by now. I saw an old truck the other day with dozens of bumper stickers on the tailgate like he used to have. Felt like a wink from him. Tell him I said hi.”

Her outstretched foot rounded over a large rock, and she barely stopped herself from falling.

“Damn it!”

The lashlight hit the dirt, bouncing once before landing and dimming.

Alma picked it up and shook it, glad to see the brightness return.

“Just a loose battery. Thank goodness.”

Her ankle felt a bit wobbly and there was a new soreness, but she walked on just as rapidly. Being able to see the bar gave her reason to quicken her pace.

“Thinking I’ll actually buy a beer while I wait for a tow. I hope it won’t take too long to get someone out here. There weren’t a lot of cars when I passed it around midnight. Maybe I’ll just hitch a ride with someone into town and come back for the truck tomorrow.”

She guessed she was just over a mile away and started a slow jog. The ankle wasn’t happy, and she was feeling the last ive-ish miles. She saw someone 173

pull out of the lot and head her way. She waved the lashlight to get their attention.

“Hey! You okay?”

“Yeah. I blew a tire and realized I didn’t replace the spare. Any chance you can give me a lift back to the bar? I turned my ankle. It’s starting to swell.”

“Hop in the back.”

She hoisted herself into the backseat. “Thanks.”

“Not sure you’ll get anyone out here tonight to give you a tow. If you can’t, I’m heading into town.”

“Thanks. Mind waiting until I put in a call?”

“Not a problem.”

They pulled up to the door. Alma carefully jumped out, putting her weight on the good side. They walked in together.

“Hey! Back for more?” The bartender nodded at the men.

“Yeah, we found this woman up the road and gave her a lift.”

“Can I borrow your phone? I blew out a tire and want to see if anyone can give me a tow.”

“Sure, but I don’t see it happening. It’s almost 2:00.” He bent down and pulled a rotary phone from under the counter.

“I know, but it’s worth a call.” As Alma picked up the phone to dial, her vision went dark, and she fell to the loor.

The obituary mentioned it was an aneurysm that took her that morning.

The whole town talked about how she managed to walk almost six miles before dying. Her job was illed within the week, and her house was sold in three.

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GOOD NEWS ON THE WIND Kim Monnier the luttered and fallen oak leaves somersault turn frog and leap at random turns gathered together they invite our jumping cling tenderly to coats and knitted hats reminisce on branches then let go of attachment once again

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THE CABIN is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners.

The

WRITERS IN THE ATTIC (WITA) program a submission opportunity for

writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a one-word theme. With submissions blind-judged by a local writer of acclaim, selected poems and iction are published in a yearly anthology. Now in its tenth year, this publication is meant to be a platform for building an inclusive community and provoking creativity and experimentation througha love of writing.

2021 Theme. A pipe bursts in the night. An Achilles snaps mid-step. A wrecking ball smooches concrete. Gas lines, arteries, ear drums. An old sycamore to a foundation, linoleum to an egg. Coronavirus to 2020. Rupture.

The Cabin is shattering its irst decade of Writers in the Attic with 2021’s theme,

RUPTURE. Judge

HARRISON BERRY is a longtime writer and award-winning journalist

from Boise, Idaho. After completing his master’s in journalism at the University of Iowa, he returned to his hometown and got stuck in the lypaper working at Boise Weekly, where he served in a number of roles and eventually became its managing editor. There, he covered hard news topics, as well as literature, theater, music, food and the visual arts; and managed the Boise Weekly Fiction 101 Contest. His work has appeared in American Theatre; VinylMe, Please; The Idaho Statesman; Idaho Press; Sandpoint Reader and elsewhere. He currently works in communications for Boise State University and as a freelance magazine journalist.

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MEET THE WRITERS Rex Adams

has had work appear in The Georgia Review, Writers in the Attic: Song, New Plains Review, CRAFT, Sky Island Journal, Everyday Fiction, and elsewhere. He’s been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net award. He is the father of two young daughters. Currently, he resides in Caldwell, Idaho.

Genalea Barker is a native Idahoan with a lifelong love for the written word and an Associate’s Degree in English Literature. Along with publication in Rupture, her short stories have also earned her First Place in the Idaho Creative Authors Network Writing Contest (twice). An ever busy, full-time mom, Genalea writes, edits, and queries her work in between raising her four children.

Mara Bateman

lives in Boise, Idaho where she works as an acupuncturist and bodyworker. A native of the Paciic Northwest, much of her work relects that place, its beauty, oddity, and possibility. She is currently working on the publication of her irst novel.

Carolyn Bevington

is a Chicana poet and writer who published her irst book of graphic poetry with 10 illlustrators called Wide Eyed Wonders Graphic Poetry Project in 2019. Wideeyedwonders.com

christy claymore is a former adjunct professor of English and Humanities, an aspiring adventurer, and an explorer of the sacred. her boys are her very heart, and she inds herself while running wildly on the beautiful trails surrounding Boise.

Captain Bill Collier lew helicopters for 32 years all around the world. His “Rupture” story is but one small incident taken from his soon-to-be-published third book of his trilogy about his gypsy-moth life of daring and death-defying adventures and… misadventures. He retired to Sandpoint in 2008.

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Jamie K. Corbin

is an educator who has been navigating whiteness and nonwhiteness her entire life due to her own transracial adoption and her interracial marriage to her greatest ally, Kelvin. She is raising her three Afro-Latina daughters to change the world by loving themselves deeply and sharing that love generously with others. Jamie is passionate about using stories to build connection and empathy as she works in her community to develop equipped, reliable, and action-oriented allies.

JoAnn Koozer enjoys all the social aspects of being human and sharing life’s challenges and victories whether through journal entries or writing poetry, the creating and telling of all of our stories, allowing written moments, ideas, and people to live again and again. World travels as a young girl fueled her curiosity about other cultures and lands. Idaho is now home base. The Cabin and local poetry groups have been wonderful discoveries that support her writing habit.

Stephanie Nelson is a freelance writer living in an old house in Boise with her husband, two kids, a cat and a dog.

Kathryn Durrant is an attorney by day but at night is glad to switch from the facts only side to her creative side. She has written two romance novels and is working on a third. Although she has no published novels, she won’t give up. Her children encourage her in her dream. She is a member of the Idaho Writers Guild, the Coeur Du Bois chapter of Romance Writers of America, and The Cabin. She enjoys gardening, reading, and spending time with her nine grandchildren.

Sonya Feibert Kuhn

is a writer, comedian, and improviser who grew up in Eastern Oregon with plenty of space for her imagination to run wild. She got her start penning letters to Harry, Ron, and Hermione. While she waits to hear back, she’s happy to make a living as a freelance writer.

Kara J. Fort

is is a former journalist/magazine publisher turned communications leader serving global clients from southern Idaho. Her last poetry was published in Phoenix Downtown Annual Poetry Competition. Once kicked out of the Walter

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Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU, she was asked back to guest lecture and teach. Her unconventional, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable tales are marinading for a juicy memoir, although her ultimate writing dream is to be a subsidized poet.

Allison Fowle is a writer and educator whose previous work has appeared on The Dirtbag Diaries, Out There, and Freelow podcasts. Allison is a passionate advocate for environmental justice, and her work primarily focuses on threats to Idaho’s wildest places. She lives in Boise with a hound dog named Pilot.

Farley Egan Green is a Scripps College graduate and retired from a writing/ communications career. Her poems have appeared in the Trestle Creek Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, and her high school alumni newsletter, which could hardly turn her down. She lives in Coeur d’Alene.

S. G. Hamilton

earned her MFA at the University of Idaho. She has Bachelor’s degrees in History, Asian Studies, and Civil Engineering. She was the 2019-2020 Hemingway Fellow and a 2019 Centrum Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Stonecoast Review and elsewhere.

GiGi Huntley is obsessed with stories. So much that she owns a salon and does hair, knowing that she will hear more honesty working behind the chair than she could ever hope for with a notebook in hand. She is a published writer with magazine bylines that include a name she tossed aside years ago. She starred in a full-length indie ilm, wrote for numerous blogs (some her own), and created scripts for local ilmmakers. She is an artist and poet who posts her work daily on Instagram and Facebook, was recently awarded an Alexa Rose grant along with a Boise Weekly cover, and believes that everyone should be creating something daily, even if that means serving a beautiful meal to others. She is currently inishing her novel In the Margins. Look for updates on gigihuntley.com.

D.M. (David) Koffer is a fourth-generation Idahoan and the third generation to work for the family business. He holds a Master’s degree in English from Idaho State University, with a focus on linguistics and Old English. When he’s not pulling

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pumps or running the oice computer, he’s usually writing or practicing martial arts. David lives in sunny Southern Idaho with his wife, son, and a delightfully quiet Chihuahua named Tattoo.

Stacey Arrington Leybas writes stories for children ranging from picture books to middle grade iction. Outside of writing, she enjoys teaching music classes, digitally scrapbooking, and cheering on Arizona sports teams. She lives in Kuna, Idaho with her husband and ive kids.

Liza Long mis a writer and Assistant Professor of English at the College of Western Idaho. Her book, The Price of Silence: A Mom’s Perspective on Mental Illness (Hudson Street Press),was a 2014 “Books for a Better Life” award winner. She is also a coauthor of the Open Education Resource irst-year composition textbook, Write What Matters. She lives in Eagle, Idaho.

Eliszabeth MacDougal

graduated from Brown University with degrees in Literary Arts and Geology-Biology. Most of her writing consists of letters to friends, and her inspiration comes from her studies of the natural world. She is excited to begin a PhD at Tulane, studying wetland ecology and restoration.

James McColly

irst developed his interest in moths, birds, and octopuses as a lad exploring the tidepools of the Paciic Coast. He and his fellow child criminals spent busy days picking pockets, running shell games, and shoplifting decongestant tablets and laundry detergent. His rare beach excursions allowed him to dream of better days ahead. Learn more at jamesmccolly.com.

Julia McCoy is a middle school teacher, world traveler, and a long-time member of Writer’s Write. This is her fourth publication in WITA.

Kim Monnier enjoys the challenge of paring down language in describing the world around us. Creating images that explore our perceptions. A former English teacher, he is also a member of the editorial committee of The Whistle Pig, a Mountain Home Arts Council literary publication.

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Cameron Morfit is a Staf Writer for the PGA Tour and has had a long career as a sportswriter. In addition to golf, he has written about rodeo and arm wrestling, astrology, and Arco the Atomic City. And yes, he has met Bill Clinton, an encounter that inspired this short story.

Amanda K. Nida

is originally from Emmett, Idaho. She received a degree in creative writing from Seattle University and a master’s in library and information science from University of Washington. She is a librarian at College of Western Idaho and spent the last year writing and getting way too into gardening. She lives in Boise with her husband.

Eileen Earhart Oldag writes from Boise, Idaho, where she spent the last yearplus keeping a Covid diary and losing her religion. She was a founding member of Upper Gladstone Writers’ Workspace in Shreveport, LA, and she continues to value the poets and critics in local writing circles. She’s previously published in Crosscurrents and Writers in the Attic.

Diane Raptosh had her collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. She teaches literature and creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her seventh collection, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, will be published next month (Etruscan, August 2021). www.dianeraptosh.com

During the COVID-19 shutdown,

Laureen Leiko Scheid

began journaling and writing poetry with her two elementary school aged daughters. “Embrace Embarrassment” began as a dare. Laureen is thankful for family, friends, and teachers in Hawai’i and in Idaho. Laureen is honored to be included in this year’s anthology.

Bonnie Schroeder has been a storyteller since the ifth grade, when her teacher 183

suggested she put her vivid imagination to work as a writer. She took the advice to heart and has pursued the craft of iction ever since. After escaping the business world, she began writing full-time, completing two women’s iction novels, Mending Dreams and Write My Name on the Sky — both published by Champlain Avenue Books. In addition, she has authored numerous short stories which have appeared in print, as well as screenplays and noniction articles, including a newsletter for the American Red Cross. She lives in Boise, Idaho, where she is a member of the Idaho Writers Guild. Her website is www.bonnieschroederbooks.com

Alyssa Stadtlander is a writer, actor, and musician from Boise, Idaho. She studied Piano and Theater at Wheaton College (IL). She began writing poetry as a child, and since then, her writing has morphed into an opportunity to consider her own journey of becoming, to ofer words of hope hidden in ordinary things, and to tell her story through the gift of rhythm and words in such a way that readers ind their own. She currently spends her time writing essays, poetry, and songs for her personal blog, Bird Songs and Saints, working at her local grocery store, playing Chopin, biking along the river, and hiking in the foothills surrounding the city with her family. You can ind more from Alyssa at alyssastadtlander.com.

Judith McConnell Steele

is a published poet, writer and teacher, the author of two books of newspaper columns and a novel, The Angel of Esperança. During the long year of Covid rupture, she wrote poems in her pandemic journal.

J. L. Stowers

grew up in the small town of Shoshone, Idaho, watching the stars with insatiable curiosity. Question-illed notebooks gave birth to ideas, then stories, and inally books. Stowers enjoys writing space opera and post-apocalyptic tales with a focus on exploration. You can read more of her work in the novel The Cost of Survival or within the Ardent Redux Saga. Visit her website www.jlstowers.com for more information.

Jenn Sutkowski

is an author and musician in Boise, Idaho, currently working on her irst memoir, Tender Weirdo, and her second solo album. She was a columnist and feature writer for The Newport Mercury for twelve+ years, has contributed to Huf Po and Elephant Journal, and has an MFA in Screenwriting and an MLA in

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English and American Literature and Language. Interests include: hanging with her husband and their three cats, her bands — Trippy Hearts and East Witch West, and invoking just the right word or harmony by staring into space.

Anita Tanner

feel most alive. She’s perpetually Reading and writing makes energized by the world of ideas. Living in Boise for seventeen years blesses her life.

Being a mother and grandmother enhances her ability to love and be loved.

Mary Walker

is a 19-year-old college student currently living in Idaho. She’s lived here for almost 8 years now and has enjoyed most of her time so far! She doesn’t usually write many pieces in her spare time. She’s usually too busy to write recreationally but she tries to make time for it all the same. She’s hoping to have more time to enjoy her hobbies this year, and to relax before college picks up again.

Eric E. Wallace, who lives in Eagle, Idaho, is the author of three short story collections (Undertow, Hoar Frost and Stonerise) and three literary novels (Emperor’s Reach, The Improviser and Mind After Mind), and his work appears in numerous literary journals. This is the eighth Writers in the Attic anthology to include one or more of Eric’s stories. His website is www.ericewallace.wordpress.com.

Trevor Warren is a JD candidate at the University of Idaho College of Law. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University where he served as iction editor for Thin Air Literary Magazine, and his work is published with The ABA Journal and Assay: A Journal of Noniction Studies.

Mark Woychick

is a long-time Boise resident who writes occasionally. Now that his work has been published, he’ll likely be emboldened to write more often. Mark is grateful for the ongoing encouragement for his work from Jim, Norm, and, especially, Nicole.

Driek Zirinski is America’s oldest emerging poet. She also knits, cooks, and grows lowers in a pot. She used to be a professor at BSU.

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RUPTURE e attic

writers in th

A pipe bursts in the night. An Achilles snaps mid-step. A wrecking ball smooches concrete. Gas lines, arteries, ear drums. An old sycamore to a foundation, linoleum to an egg. Coronavirus to 2020. Rupture. The Cabin is shattering its first decade of Writers in the Attic with 2021’s theme, RUPTURE. The Cabin is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. Writers in the Attic, or WITA, is an annual contest for local writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a theme chosen by The Cabin. This anthology is a venue that showcases the talents of our community.

THE CABIN Log Cabin Books LITERATURE / POETRY