Summer12

Van Gogh's Letters

Dear Theo, I long to write to you again, perhaps it will be a rather long time before we see each other; at all events I hope we shall be in Etten together at Christmas. It was Aunt Mina's birthday last Sunday, and being there that evening, Uncle Stricker asked me a few things about my work, and did not seem to be dissatisfied…I feel that I have made some progress.

Thursday I had a nice morning; Uncle Jan had gone to Utrecht, and I had to be at Stricker's at seven o'clock because Jan was going to Paris and I had promised to see him off. So I got up early and saw the workmen arrive in the yard while the sun was shining brightly. You would be intrigued by the sight that long line of black figures, big and small, first in the narrow street where the sun just peeps in, and later in the yard. Then I breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer - that is what Dickens advises for those who are on the point of committing suicide, as being a good way to keep them, at least for some time, from their purpose. And even if one is not in such a mood, it is right to do it occasionally, while thinking, for instance, of Rembrandt's picture, “The Men of Emmaus.” Before I went to Stricker's, I walked through the Jewish quarter and along the Buitenkant, the Old Teertuinen, Zeedyk, Warmoes Straat, and around the Oudezijds Chapel and the Old and the South churches, through all kinds of old streets with forges and coopers' shops, etc., and through narrow alleys, like the Niezel, and canals with narrow bridges, like those we saw that evening at Dordrecht. It was interesting to watch the start of a new day's work there.

I have written a composition in which all the parables are arranged in proper order, and the miracles, etc. I am doing the same in English and French, and expect to be able to write it later in Latin and Greek too. In the daytime I have to prepare for Mendes, and so I am doing it late in the evening, or for instance as today, deep in the night or early in the morning. After being in England and France so long, it would not be right if I did not acquire a thorough mastery of their languages at last, or at least keep them up. It is written, “Polissez-le sans cesse [sic] et le repolissez” [Polish it (your work) all the time, and polish it again], and also, “Travaillez, prenez de la peine” [Work, take pains].

How are you, boy? Write soon if you can. You thought I was right in returning the money, didn't you?

You know that I would have just loved to come and shake hands with you, and also to see the exhibition, but for the present I do not go out of town on Sundays, I must not.

This morning I had a talk with Mendes about M. Maris, and showed him that lithograph of those three

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children, and also “A Baptism,” and he understood them very well. Mendes reminds me now and then of the “Imitation of Jesus Christ,” by Ruyperez.

Have you heard anything about Carolien? I had to go to Utrecht on the day of Hendrik's1 wedding reception; I congratulated them for you, too. It was a very stylish affair; the room was very beautifully decorated, and the bride looked lovely.

In Utrecht I saw the Cathedral and another old church, and the university building, which reminds one of the cloisters near Westminster Abbey. Goodbye, Theo, have a good time, my compliments to the Roos family. Uncle Jan sends you his regards, à Dieu, a handshake from Your loving brother, Vincent Uncle Jan van Gogh's son.

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Where swans drift on speakings.

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GarcĂ­a Lorca: Paseo De Una Avispa Por Mi "Cualto"

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TABLE OF CONTENTS PROSE

Poodles by Susan Tepper 31 (Micro)

Girls wore poodle skirts in the fifties, I tell him.

The Task. by M. Wilkinson (Micro) Mourners stand in groups.

Snowman by Heidi Heimler 63 (Micro)

Elmira used to live where winter feasted on the weak, the unprepared.

Freckles by Kim Teeple 66 (Micro)

The first time I saw him he was hunched over the bar and a beer bottle. He watched the people across the bar and I watched him. I noticed how sometimes he would mimic a small gesture;

Magic Mirror by Nathan E Tavaras 52 (Flash)

Almost closing time, the park’s nearly empty. Parents amble by, spent from a day of screaming kids. I’m at my ride, the Magic Mirror, itching for a smoke, when a kid walks up.

Rare Glimpse by James Claffey-- April Audio Winner, 76 (Flash)

The Old Man travels home on the ferry from Stranraer, catching the night train in Belfast and arriving in time for breakfast.

Shadow People by Emily Glossner Johnson 13 (Short Stories)

The three Herlihy cousins lived in a mansion called Violet Ridge that sat high on the edge ofdeep and timeless Seneca Lake.

Green Sheep by Gail Taylor (Short Story) 24

Bonnie Peeples dragged two slow steps into her living room and stopped stone still. Something was very wrong.

Crossing the Pond by Charlie Britten (Short Story)48

I understand how Christopher Columbus’s crew felt as they sailed towards the edge oftheir world. I picture them clutching the tall masts oftheir galleon, looking down at the endless and heaving ocean, trying not to think ofthe abyss which, they believed, lay just over the horizon.

POETRY

Lately, by Neil Dyer 42 Our Grandson Seeks the Snow and His Mother in Milwaukee by Tobi Cogswell 44 Don’t Even Think About It (for Owen, who will always be protected) by Tobi Cogswell 67

TABLE OF CONTENTS Equus & Anima by Peter Taylor 46 The Haunting by Holly Day 70 Korean Echo by Tom Sheehan 69 Ocotillo Wells by W. F. Lantry ( Spring Audio Winner) 74

ART and CNF

Book of Kells Detail: (1), (10), García Lorca: Deseo de las ciudades Muertas ( 1929 - 1930), (6), Salon deCasa Noble, 1923 (21), Slavdor Adil, (Granada, 1925),(23), Soledad Montoya 1930, (31), Arlequin Ahogado 1927, (33),Busto de Hombre Muerto,1932, (39), La Vista y El Tacto, (1929 - 1930), (41), Guitarra, 1927, (43), El Beso, 1927, (47), Puta y Luna (1929 - 1931),(57), Siren 1927 (65), Muerto de Amor, 1930, (69), ¡Ecce Homo! 1927 (71), Payaso De Rostro Desdobladi y Cáliz, 1927, (79)

Da Vinci, Horse Detail, 45 Van Gogh Letters ii

INTERVIEW FROM QUESADA --Alejandra TUNINETTI

Things from Life/ In the Death of a Man: Cesaree RODRIGUEZ-AGUILERA , 19 (Translation)

It's possible that the two Spains Anthony Machado refers to still live. The water on the surface is calm but underneath there is turbulence.

UNA ANTIGUA CASONE DE CAMPO by Alejandra Tuninetti 81, -- Translation 83 (Marie Fitzpatrick)

Como diría Marcel Proust, los olores nos traen recuerdos, recuerdos de momentos pasados e irrepetibles, pequeños cuadros en el tiempo, perdidos y reencontrados.

CROSSED SWORDS -- Diana FERRARO The Malvinas-Falklands War 11

Jorge Luis Borges, the main Argentine poet in the 20th century couldn’t but write about the war which opposed Argentina . . .

The Spanish American War-and the Cuban War for Independence 33

A typical conflict between a powerful empire living its last chapter and an energetic and rich country with the will to prevail competed for the world’s attention with the last Latin American war for Independence from Spain. Two writers . . .

The Spanish Civil War 58

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in which one of the varieties of the two Spains alluded in the Machado’s poem “Españolito que vienes al mundo” opposed, Republicans against ationalists this time, many poets,

STRIFE: Northern Ireland Oonah JOSLIN

Slemish, Ballymeana and Beyond 1

Slemish Mountain dominates the landscape around Ballymena and whenever I see it I know I’m home. Seen from the town, it has the shape ofa nurturing breast.

Outside and Blowing Bubbles 3

William of Orange – was a staunch protestant. He had an axe to grind with France because Louis XIV of France, a Catholic, had taken over the etherlands and made William’s family mere caretakers in their own country.

Not My Colours 7

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek story about the subject ofcolour as it relates to Ulster politics . . .

Peace Shouts 9

In the early 1970’s I had a suit – Sunday best; an orange background with flowers ofpink, . . .

Triangulation 11

Ballymena is 16 miles inland but we made frequent trips to Carnlough for the dulse – a type ofseaweed which we ate raw (and ifyou ever need a laxative… ) ‘nough said!

CARLINGFORD LOUGH Marion CLARKE Lough Reflections 8 5

The wind runs in ripples along Carlingford Lough, a shadow cast by a flock ofinvisible birds.

A fresh start 8 6 The Lough Series 88

TRANSLATIONS

Spanish: Alejandra TUNINETTI, Marie FITZPATRICK, Diana FERRARO

EDITORIALS

Bill WEST Louis Comfort Tiffany

from Jelly Jars to Stained Glass -- 77

Shropshire Voices -- 79

Oonah V Joslin

Slemish Does the landscape form us?

This is my mother mountain breast where Patrick prayed six years in whipping winds where only snow and rain come now to rest.

Old as the hill my stony spirit; tough unceasing.

Whose was the voice that broke on the wind; the angel friend who led to shore, ship and freedom in those dark ages?

He, who was not born here, returned to bring the light of the gospel of Christ.

Thus he repaid slavery on our basalt crags with rivulets of blood.

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Slemish Mountain dominates the landscape around Ballymena and whenever I see it I know I’m home.

Seen from the town, it has the shape of a nurturing breast. And in a way it did give birth to the Antrim Plateau and therefore the town itself. It is an extinct volcano plug – part of a fault line that crosses the UK. Saint Patrick is supposed to have been a slave there, keeping pigs and it was there that, praying long and hard for deliverance, he is said to have found God. He escaped by ship but later came back to share with the people his new found faith and every year people make the pilgrimage in his honour.

I went with the intention of walking up it one day. Even at its base the valley falls away sharply into what other people call ‘breathtaking scenery’ and I call vertigo – so that I’m afraid was that.

Given that, in the simplest of terms, the past four hundred years of Ulster’s history has been scarred by different sects of that same religion warring against each other, one might well question whether bringing Christianity to Ireland was that good an idea.

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Oonah V Joslin

Outside and Blowing Bubbles Stood by the gate scowl on my face in the sash my father wore, coloured by King Billy’s reign and Saint Patrick’s lore.

My feet skipped to the whistle, my heart beat to the drum, relentless as our history parading on and on and on and on to the lambeg’s beat and the skirl set in my bones my foot taps now to the memory my throat throbs with the songs.

On that twelfth of July in the early light I snuck out of my bed, put on my yellow dressing gown, tiptoed on each tread carefully downstairs and filled a tin with Fairy suds.

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I reached high to the latch, stepped out and wand in hand, I blew worlds of my own sky high of every hue; they burst in rainbow stains on the path; aftermath of my creation.

God would be cross.

Well, Mammy would and that was the same thing.

I’d taken a liberty.

I was outside blowing bubbles.

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Oonah V Joslin

OUTSIDE AND BLOWING BUBBLES

Deseo de las ciudades Muertas ( 1929 - 1930) García Lorca

William of Orange – was a staunch protestant. He had an axe to grind with France because Louis XIV of France, a Catholic, had taken over the Netherlands and made William’s family mere caretakers in their own country. But William married his cousin Mary, daughter of James II and when James II became King of England, William came closer to the throne through his marriage.

James started promoting his Catholic friends to high office and a lot of people at the top, suspected he was trying to make England Catholic again. They didn’t like it. So an offer was made to William and his wife Mary to become joint rulers in England. The stage for this war of succession to the throne of

England was of course -- Ireland because James had made William Viceroy of Ireland.

William drew supporters from the North and James from the South. After defeat at the Battle of the Boyne, 12th July 1690 James was deposed and William took his place. William was then able to pursue his fight with France, leaving Mary to do all the actual ‘monarching.’ But for the people of the North of Ireland and the protestant Scots, he became King Billy and while the Southerners remained loyal to the Catholic Church, the mostly Protestant North remained loyal to the crown.

Now that is way too simplistic as you will realise, but it is the reason the Orange Order is called orange and Orangemen are Orangemen and it is the reason I ended up on that July 12th at the age of two having this photo taken with my father’s orange order sash draped about my entire person and scowling because I was being made to “stand still” while an older sister snapped my picture.

But we loved the Twelfth Day parades because there were lambegs – four foot diameter drums being blattered by comparatively diminutive drummers wielding long canes. These are not mere percussion instruments – they are war drums and as they pass by your heart jumps to your mouth so that, when they fall silent, the silence itself seems loud. There was McGroggan’s ice-cream and strawberries, huge silk banners and silver bands and a big, long, loud, colourful day out.

That is the world I was born into. It was orange and green and black and white and very simple. But as I grew up, people

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blew each other up – still fighting that war of the succession. I grew out of step with those marchers.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing, to have a multicoloured world where the only thing we blew was bubbles? But that doesn’t exist anywhere. The accepted spectrum may be different but difference is very persistent in getting the upper hand. ## I wrote a tongue-in-cheek story about the subject of colour as it relates to Ulster politics, Com’allye which I am reprising in my forthcoming Story Collection, Mini-Bits and Micro-Bites along with some other Ulster tales. But at The Peace Line in Belfast, those colours were no joke. Red white and blue (the colours of the Union Jack) were Protestant as were orange, purple and black; because of the Orange Order and Black Order – protestant organisations. I was never sure about the purple…

Green was the colour favoured by The Loyal Order of Hibernians -- they too had their marching day and Republic of Ireland’s flag colours, green white and gold were also considered Catholic/Republican; though loyalties did not always divide along such clear cut lines. Nonetheless, it was impolitic to wear a green, white and gold dress on the 12th July and such was my favourite dress when I was just a wee bit too young to understand the vast significance of being on the wrong side of the spectrum.

Not My Colours I wanted to wear my church-window dress green white orange black a confusion of lines cutting across directions such forms and colours as bodied forth not the proud emblems of my tribe

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Oonah V Joslin In the early 1970’s I had a suit – Sunday best; an orange background with flowers of pink, turquoise, blue and a tracery of green leaves. At dusk those flowers shone psychedelic bright and the orange seemed to fade by comparison – like when you see forget-me-nots at dusk and the blue is oh so blue. The Summer ofLove was past; it was the height of The Troubles and coincidentally (and with hindsight) that suit became a metaphor for the peace and reconciliation many of us longed for but thought impossible.

Later as a student, I took part in projects at The Corrymeela Community Centre and other places. I tried then and still do try, in my small but colourful way, to be part of the solution – not part of the problem.

Peace SHOUTS Mandarin collars were Beatle.

Orange was ‘in’.

The summer of love at fourteen was far away as ‘Frisco’ a background only like the orange of my suit my Sunday best.

Come dusk peace shone forth in psychedelic flowers pink power noisy turquoise.

A tracery of green leaves no one in doubt, and the darker it gets, the brighter I shout.

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Triangulation I used to walk all the way round that Mausoleum; the Mussenden Temple.

Now the cliff has crumbled.

Downhill is as downhill does it seems.

The Northern Counties burned down years ago where we stepped over Finn the wolf-hound at two a.m. lying like a threshold stone.

All the haunts of youth are strangely changed.

Giants are rare as out of season dulce, all the way from Larne to Dunluce, my causeways crumble.

Lindisfarne castle, priory and church.

Here are familial names engraved in stone yet in a place my family never dwelt.

We must be branches of some common root to have such names in common in this earth.

And there be castles too along this coast; castles and crumbling cliffs ah - but no dragons no giants Alas! no time machine.

I take flight on foot up on Townhill.

Along Pantycelyn I soar over the lilting town.

If you can see Devon it’s going to rain.

If you can’t see the Guild Hall it’s already pouring down.

A dragon sleeps still at the tip of Rhossili, for this is a land of dragons and of songs, chapels and gymanfa ganu.

I change my tune to Cwm Rhondda; marry one of her sons.

Triangulation is the means whereby one finds ones position in three dimensional space. I learned that from Star Trek.

Anyway, I have had the great privilege ofliving in three ofthe most beautiful coastal regions in Great Britain.

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The real war will never get in the books Walt Whitman

Oonah V Joslin

Ballymena is 16 miles inland but we made frequent trips to Carnlough for the dulse – a type of seaweed which we ate raw (and if you ever need a laxative…) ‘nough said! My university days were spent on the glorious Causeway Coast – the Giant’s Causeway built by Finn MacCool of course. Downhill stands just above Castlerock and we used to walk the Black Glen and out to the Mussenden Temple, a mausoleum at the edge of the cliff. You used to be able to walk around it but not now. Inevitably it will be lost to erosion.

We drank ‘til two in the morning at The orthern Counties Hotel and Finn the Wolfhound scrounged our crisps – would you refuse a giant of a dog? We got through lots of crisps. There’s a hundred miles of Coast Road in Co. Antrim. The drive between Larne and Dunluce Castle near Portrush gives rise to some of the most spectacular

The Sash -- Oonah Joslin

scenery anywhere. !

Next I spent fourteen years in South Wales and married a man from Swansea – the graveyard of ambition, they call it; people who go there don’t want to leave. The Gower Peninsula is uniquely beautiful and there are choirs and gymanfa ganu (hymn singing) and it was of course the birthplace of poet, Dylan Thomas. From Pantycelyn Road high above the town, you can see all the way across the Bristol Channel to Devon and the rock formation at tip of Rhossili is called Worm’s Head with good reason.

I didn’t want to leave either but I have no complaints since orthumberland is full of Castles and coastline of equal stature to the beauties of Antrim and Wales and Lindisfarne has become very special to me not least because I found there family names engraved on headstones and I felt as though I had kin.

We all have landscapes that define in some way, who we are. But as one changes landscapes one changes identity in subtle ways too. We gain one thing by losing another. Who I am now is due to this triangulation -but consequently I am no longer the person I used to be. It is almost impossible now to imagine I am that child in the photo -- there is never any going back.

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Diana Ferraro

García Lorca: Payaso De Rostro Desdobladi y Cáliz, 1927

THE MALVINAS-FALKLANDS WAR

by Diana Ferraro

Jorge Luis Borges, the main Argentine poet in the 20th century couldn’t avoid writing about the war which opposed Argentina and its longtime partner Great Britain, sometimes the closest of friends and, others, the chosen enemy to pound the nation’s chest about national pride, particularly when it had been lost by some government antinational wrongdoings. This feeling has always been smartly played by the British Intelligence for its own purposes and the Malvinas-Falklands War in 1982 was the consequence of the interaction of a blind military Argentine leader with a cunning British leader, Margaret Thatcher, over a South-Atlantic collection of islands which both sides know belonged to the Spanish Empire; they were part of the Virreynato del Río de la Plata, and, with the independence, were inherited by Argentina,

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and later illegally but peacefully colonized by the British. The conflict between property and usage continues until this day.

Borges's poem Juan Lopez and John Ward was published for the first time in the Argentine newspaper Clarín, shortly after the end of the war, on August 26th 1982. Of both British and Argentine descent, Borges couldn't but feel this war as a different kind of civil war: "López había nacido en la ciudad junto al río inmóvil; Ward, en las afueras de la ciudad por la que caminó Father Brown. Había estudiado castellano para leer el Quijote.

El otro profesaba el amor de Conrad, que le había sido revelado en una aula de la calle Viamonte." ("Lopez was born in the city beside the tawny river; Ward, on the outskirts of the city where Father Brown walked. He had studied Spanish in order to read Quijote.

The other one professed a love for Conrad, who had been revealed to him in a classroom on Viamonte Street.")

Both soldiers could have been friends, Borges says, were not that "they saw each other face to face only once, on some overly famous islands, and each one of them was Cain, and each was Abel."

Borges pointed out the tragic human origin of any war and, through his poem, he went beyond his personal feelings to remind us that, in the end, every war can be seen as a civil war, that is, a war between human siblings no matter to which nation they belong. ###

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Emily Glossner Johnson

SHADOW PEOPLE

by Emily Glossner Johnson The three Herlihy cousins lived in a mansion called Violet Ridge that sat high on the edge of deep and timeless Seneca Lake. There was David Herlihy, the oldest cousin; Trey Herlihy, the middle cousin; and Katie Herlihy, the youngest cousin. Ten years before Katie’s birth, Trey was born, and ten years prior to that, David was born.

“Christ died at the age of thirty-three,” Katie was quick to tell David on his birthday that year. On Trey’s birthday, she told him, “Twenty-three is a bad number.”

“I thought thirteen is an unlucky number,” Trey said.

“That’s a superstition,” Katie said. “I don’t believe in superstitions.”

Katie had the body of a ten-year-old and the wizened face of an old woman. Her hair was sparse and her teeth crooked. She needed braces, Trey told her, but she said she liked her teeth the way they were. She lived for her dollhouse, her vast collection of china teacups, and the Lord. Trey lived for David and Katie. And David lived each day a moment at a time, struggling to stay well on his medications and with his careful rituals and routines.

The cousins’ fathers were brothers. Two of them had died within weeks of each other of a particularly virulent influenza, while Trey’s father had run off to Prague when Trey was two years old. David had no knowledge of ever having had a mother; Katie’s mother had a new family in Boston; and Trey’s mother put her head inside a gas oven when Trey was twelve. *** Nicotine and peaches helped the schizophrenia. David believed he had read studies about this, so he smoked a number of Marlboros a day and ate at least two peaches a night. He was beautiful in the way that schizophrenics were beautiful. He believed he’d read studies about this, too.

“Most schizophrenics are blonde,” he told Katie.

“That’s not true,” she said. “That’s something you’ve made up.”

Maybe it was. He looked at Katie’s small form and earnest face and was afraid he resented her. He remembered holding her on a carousel at a fair in the Outer Banks when she was five. He hated the Outer Banks, the feeling of being separated thinly from land on one side and facing nothing but vast, wild ocean on the other. The carousel animal he held Katie on was a pig—a dead, roasted pig with an apple in its mouth.

“It’s eating an apple!” Katie said.

“Yes,” David said, disliking the lie.

Trey came to get them, a lanky kid watching over them, fifteen years old and already in the role of an adult.

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“We’ve got to go home,” he said. “The reports . . . the hurricane—” And so they left the Outer Banks early.

David wasn’t sorry. The beach had been nothing to him. He preferred looking at the young men to the girls with their barely hidden bodies, but he knew the young men ignored him. He found a compass in the sand—cheap, plastic, pointing south. Nothing was right, but he knew he was beautiful in the way that schizophrenics were. *** In the spring, Trey began seeing the shadow people between the black trunks of trees—darker figures in the dark spaces. He saw them at dusk against the wall of the carriage house and along the garden hedge: dark figures, shadow people standing still, but he knew they were looking at him, watching.

Then they began appearing in the house. Before turning on a light in a room, there were shadow people in the corners, or standing around tables and desks, in front of bookshelves or curtained windows or a fireplace—there they were. Trey would blink and they would be gone, or he would look away, thinking that when he looked back and turned on the light, there would be an explanation—what, he didn’t know, but something that would make him think, that's it! I had forgotten the layout of the room and all the furniture and items crammed into it! But whenever he turned on the light, there was nothing. No one. No reason for darker shapes in the dark room.

He told Katie about them.

"There aren't such things as shadow people," she said as Trey suspected she would. She sat cross-legged on her green canopy bed reading the Bible.

"You haven’t seen them?"

"How can I see something that doesn't exist?"

Trey fidgeted with the cap on a doll that sat on Katie’s dresser. "Then you’ve never seen them?" he said, not wanting to let it go.

"No, Trey. I told you! No." Trey knew he probably shouldn’t, yet he couldn’t help but tell David about them.

David was reading Scientific American at the kitchen table, a cup of tea, a pack of Marlboros, and a glass ashtray beside him. "I believe that you believe you're experiencing them," David said. This was something Trey and Katie would say to David about the visions and the voices, and it nauseated Trey. He knew he should stop questioning David, that it would only agitate him, but he couldn’t stop.

"You've never looked at the trees in back and noticed that there are too many trunks?” he said. “And then you noticed that some of the shapes aren't trunks at all but people? The shapes of people, a dozen or more at a time, standing there among the trees?"

“Dozens of them?" David said. Trey noticed a shiver run through him.

"Sometimes, sometimes fewer, but always several. They line up, usually side by side, but sometimes in a line as though waiting to get to the front, such as when I see them along the hedge."

"What are they doing?"

"Watching."

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Emily Glossner Johnson "Watching what?"

"Me. The house. You and Katie. I don't know. I can just tell that they're looking this way. They're facing this direction, even though I can't see their faces."

David shook his head. "I haven't seen them."

"And remember they’re in the house. Don't forget, I've seen them inside, too."

"Dozens at a time?"

"No, not inside. But at least two or three, maybe as many as six. Maybe there are more but my eyes only catch a few."

"What do they want?" David said.

"I don’t know," Trey said.

"Do they scare you?"

"Yes.” *** Katie didn’t want to discuss them. They were contrary to her beliefs. An angel, she might believe. She wished she would see an angel in fact, or the bright light of Christ. But as it were, she feared Trey’s experience.

Rational, reliable Trey. He was also honest and wouldn't make up something such as this. But shadow people—the experience of seeing them couldn’t come from anything good within Trey. She didn’t believe there was evil in him, but since he hadn't accepted Christ as his personal savior, his mind was susceptible to dark forces.

"Pray to Him," she told Trey. "Ask Him to enter your heart and enlighten you, to show you His glory. Accept Him." "But what do you think the shadow people are?” Trey asked her. “What do they want?"

"They’re nothing, Trey. Or maybe they’re your guilt. Your distance from God and Christ."

"That’s bullshit," Trey said.

Katie was used to such responses. She prayed for Trey, and she prayed that the darkness he believed he saw would fade as he came to realize what he should do. *** Trey, tall and handsome, dark while Katie and David were fair, picked young women as he would dandelions and let them come and go with the moon. He made love to a different woman under every waxing gibbous, and by the time the moon was on the wane, he said goodbye to that lover.

One day, he found a praying mantis on the cemetery bench in the Violet Ridge memorial garden. He looked into its insect eyes and believed that it would live forever. It rubbed its insect arms together, conspiratorial, and Trey decided he would pick the dandelion who worked at the library, the girl so tall that it was her job to gather dead flies from the highest shelves in the stacks.

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Her name was Jane, and while they were making love in Trey’s bed, a shadow happened to fall across her face.

Trey froze.

“What is it?” Jane said. She was breathing hard, close to orgasm, and a note of resentment resonated in her question.

“Your face—” Trey said.

“My what?”

And then the shadow passed and Trey once again saw her long, angular features and brown eyes. He came then, and she came, too. Trey was glad—he wanted her to leave. Instead, she lay next to him and talked about the library, the pesky librarians (she was only a clerk), a new haircut she was thinking of getting, a friend who was about to have her third child, her plants, her cats. She shared the cigarettes Trey had pilfered from David, all the while likely thinking Trey must be enchanted by her, for he didn’t take his eyes off her face. But he was waiting for the shadow to return. It didn’t, and eventually Jane left. After, Trey stood naked in his bedroom window, waiting for dusk. *** David was frightened by the notion of the shadow people because he looked to Trey’s rationality, his steadfastness, his love, as an anchor and a hope. David wanted Trey to be certain of everything he saw and have explanations for all of it.

David knew that shadow people had been photographed by paranormal investigators, by even the greatest skeptics among those ranks, but there remained no explanation, and yet these investigators couldn’t help but seek validation. They weren’t lying; they weren’t trying to deceive; they honestly hoped for the truth of what they observed.

But then there was Occam’s Razor: the principle that suggests that the simplest of competing theories is preferable to more complex theories of lesser known data. The shadow people were either mere shadows misinterpreted by Trey, or Trey was hallucinating. Why? Because of David, because of Trey’s father wandering somewhere in eastern Europe, because of Trey’s mother with her body hanging limp half out of the gas oven.

The illness was in Trey’s blood. David paced. The simplest, the simplest . . .

Katie was playing with her dollhouse in the corner of the parlor. The tiny family of four, the grotesque, misshapen dolls with heads too large for their bodies and faces painted wrong—eyes different sizes, mouths too red—were up early for breakfast before church.

“How great thou art,” Katie sang, “how great thou art . . . ” But David heard her sing, “The simplest of competing theories . . . ” It was too much for him. He clapped his hands over his ears and hurried out of the room. *** “Trey won’t get out of bed,” Katie told David on Sunday. She had barged into David’s bedroom without knocking.

16

Emily Glossner Johnson “Let him be,” David said from his bed. “It’s early.”

“But he’s supposed to take me to church.”

“Can’t you miss church this one time?”

“No! And besides, he says he’s afraid of people.”

“The shadow people?”

“No—all people. He just wants to stay in bed. For days now, he’s been in bed. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Go and play,” David said. “Let Trey be.”

Katie stormed to the door then turned around. “You know, if those shadow people are anything, they’re demons! And Trey is a sinner. And so are you!”

“The shadow people aren’t demons,” David said softly, “and do you really think I’m a sinner? Do you think I’m possessed by demons?”

“Of course not,” Katie said, softening, yielding. “You’re schizophrenic.” *** "I'll confront them," Trey said at dinner. They were eating a chicken Trey had roasted and slices of bread and butter. Trey had forgotten to make any side dishes or salad. “How can I not?” Trey said. “I want them to go away."

David and Katie stared at him.

“Tonight, I’ll confront them,” Trey said.

“You don’t have to,” David said.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I?” “Because you don’t need to.”

“Of course I need to!” Trey said. “This chicken is terrible,” he added, pushing his plate away.

David reached out and took Trey’s hand. “You need to go to a doctor,” he said.

“What for?” Trey said, shaking David’s hand away.

“You need to go to church,” Katie said.

Trey glared at her. “Don’t start—” “But it will help you—” “Katie,” David said, and shook his head when she looked at him. *** Trey picked up the misshapen dollhouse family and thought of his mother. She had hit him only once, hard on the side of his head, but then she had cried, called him baby love, and held his stiff, unyielding body.

For days, Trey had ignored Jane’s calls to his cell phone. He wanted sex, and the moon was not yet on the wane. His sexual routine kept him happy, and he wanted a good fuck, but not with Jane.

“Do you remember our trip to the Outer Banks?” David said.

17

Trey turned quickly, surprised to see David in the doorway.

“Why?” Trey said.

“You were right to get us home,” David said. He was eating a peach; Trey could smell it from across the room.

Trey threw the spooky little dolls onto the floor.

“I don’t know what to do,” David said. “I can’t think well tonight. But I want you to remember how right you were to get us home that time.”

Trey wanted a cigarette. “Do you have any smokes on you?” he said.

“No,” David said. “They’re upstairs.”

A ladybug crawled across the roof of Katie’s dollhouse. Trey knew that it had been there forever. He looked over at David and watched him take another bite of the peach. “I’d like to have a smoke and then I’m going out there,” Trey said.

“Please don’t do this,” David said. “Don’t leave me.”

“I can’t help it,” Trey said. Tears welled up in his eyes. “You know I love you, David. I don’t want to go, but I have to confront them.” *** David began hearing the voices and having the visions when he was Trey’s age. He experienced a complete psychotic break six months later and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That night, David, rigid in the window seat, watched Trey walk into the dusk of the yard to confront the shadow people.

Katie, on the floor of the sunroom, poured imaginary tea into her array of tea cups. She hummed a tune that David didn’t recognize.

David looked down and lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, exhaled. Trey had started smoking, asking David for cigarettes, stealing them from him, not yet buying his own, but smoking more and more. David thought of the studies—nicotine and peaches. He thought of the beauty of Trey’s face, the comfort of his head on Trey’s lap during particularly dark times, the feeling of Trey’s fingers in his hair, his lips on his forehead. And then

there were the worst times when he thought he couldn’t go on with the fear and the anguish, the times when Trey would climb into bed with him and hold him down, hold him together.

David looked down at Katie. Would she be able to take care of herself and the two of them?

David took another puff of his cigarette. When the smoke around him cleared, he looked back out the window, but Trey was lost in the darkness. ***

18

Interview from Quesada, Alejandra TUNINETTI

19

Cesaree RODRIGUEZ-AGUILERA

THINGS FROM LIFE In the Death of a Man It's possible that the two Spains Anthony Machado refers to still live. The water on the surface is calm but underneath there is turbulence.

There are other Spains that are not as badly opposed as the one we are talking about; or are not known, or are ignored. For Example: The Spain from the cities of the Avant-garde, the Spain from the villages and towns especially those that are inland and backward.

Are we starting to emerge from the Middle Ages? -- it is a long step. Certain aspects and places have changed a lot, in others almost nothing. Distances sometimes are huge and our city-man has his routes in a faraway village; he returns periodically, revisits old childhood memories.

There's nostalgia in small, lost, paradises, but there is a certainty that it is impossible to get them back because they are paradises-of-memory and our city-man has changed in these years. It is not possible for him to live there, but his longing stays, like a loving taste of the spirit.

Howeve one day -- yesterday -- city-man rushed to his village. The three social classes or caste -- los señores o señoritos -- the artisans; the middle classes; the peasants, they all got together in this moment. It was for a sad happening. A man who belonged to the first group had died -- I don't exaggerate. Among a thousand recent anecdotes that could testify to the firmness of the social separation indicated above, there are some living examples: A couple of just married youngsters, she, who married against strong opposition from her family, just, because he was from a middle-class family, even, though he had a valuable profession; and she, she, who was from a high-class family who were totally ruined. That case is extraordinary because all of them were there without distinction.

The cortege looked endless; I shook hands with all classes. Some hands were soft though most of them were rough and coarse because most of the people were peasants; all and solemn rights were followed. The wake was in the night -- the only night the dead person is in his house. The most intimate and fervent will stay with him all-night long -- ‘Tiscar virgin, Consolation Virgin take him with you today to heaven.’ One gets far away in meditative memories.

In 1907, there was no railroad in this village, the nearest station was built 20 kilometres away. It is said though that

20

Interview from Quesada, Alejandra TUNINETTI

García Lorca: Animal Fabuloso Dirigiéndose a una Casa 1929 -1930

21

Cesaree RODRIGUEZ-AGUILERA

there were very important interests to be attended to, if so, at least, they were decisive. For the railway was to pass through a very big private estate -- the road, if it could be called a road finished in the village. Besides the coaches, stage-coaches, and the carts, and with the arrival of the automobile there were 1000s of men to work land that was not their own. Soon there was not enough jobs for so many people, just poverty, ignorance and fear. But El señor was the other part of the contract and sometimes the contract was begged.

Sooner or later everybody needed the doctor and medicines. 50 or more years of always helping. Any hour of the night; anytime, anyplace. He wouldn´t hurry and he wouldn´t stand apart. He would ask and speak about everything.

He would give … specially, he would cheer one up, also sometimes he would give medicines and if necessary even money. He was perfectly integrated forever in that small, poor world. So truly that when one day -- for a short time -the peasent class had the power in their hands, they protected him -- to avoid mistakes. It´s summer mid-day. Almost blinding light. Terrible heat. People fight to carry that very, light dead body. Behind the silent procession, simple and solemn: Salud para sentinrlo salud para sentinrlo. How loved and heartfelt was this saluation!

Things could not have been simpler. Three castes of an old and poor Spanish village have united around generosity.

Social justices have been dreamt about, but they are apart from the death that hurts, so much.

One experiences different feelings. And inside something, like pain and frustration, are born. Somebody taught us, in a way that we couldn´t or wouldn´t follow. And this united the cofused and mysterious Spain of a recent death, leaves one to cry for oneself. Because the man we buried yesterday in a faraway village in Spain was my father.

Cesaree RODRIGUEZ-AGUILERA Translators: Alejandra Tuninetti and Marie Fitzpatrick

22

Gail E. Taylor

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Slavdor Adil, (Granada, 1925)

23

GREEN SHEEP

Gail E. Taylor

Burl: a lump or slub in wool or cloth The Oxford Dictionary Bonnie Peeples dragged two slow steps into her living room and stopped stone still. Something was very wrong. She listened. No sounds. She leaned on her cane with both hands and darted her eyes without turning her head. No movement. The furniture seemed the same, the lamps, the paintings on the walls, the scolding-ticking of the clock. It was something else. Something was missing, something so obvious that its loss struck her like a blow and she crumpled to the floor with a little bleating cry. When she had regained enough strength, she sat up and checked again: yes, the floor was bare, uncarpeted, stripped and naked. Pulling on chair legs and the side of the piano, she crawled to the table and grasped at the phone. She couldn’t quite reach so she raised the crook of her cane and pulled the receiver close.

“Missing Persons Bureau,” she said and the operator put her through, one of the benefits of age to have your numbers dialled for you. She liked things dialled for her.

“Your name?”

“Bonnie Peeples. 70 Lakeview Street.”

“Name of the person missing, please. Last name first.”

“Last name, Ram,” said Bonnie.

“First name?”

“Sam.” “Sam Ram?” “Yes, Sam the Ram.” “Gender?”

“Male, of course.

“Age? Your relationship to said person?”

“He’s been a member of the family since the crossing in 1847.”

“The cross, ma’am?”

“Yes, when the Peeples family came across from Ireland.”

“A cross? The people of Ireland?”

“Sam came with the family.”

“Ma’am, what are you reporting here?”

“Sam is missing.”

“And Sam’s been with your family member since 1847?”

“Yes, that’s what I just said. One hundred years before I was born.”

“Sooooo. That makes Sam, oh, something like 165 years old. Are you talking about a stolen urn of ashes, perhaps?”

24

Gail E. Taylor “No I’m reporting Sam. He’s gone missing.”

“Fine, Miss Peeples. We’ll send an officer right away.”

The dispatcher switched off and looked at the two uniforms at the counter. “Sergeant Porter, Officer Burle,” she said, lowering her voice so others in the room could not hear, “your beat. Sixty-something at 70 Fairview.

Dingbat.”

The three of them exchanged looks. They knew the Chief was big on community policing, where beat officers made nice in the ’hood and caught petty troubles before they grew big. Porter and Burle, Crime Preventers.

“Soooo, let me get this straight,” Sergeant Porter said to the tiny woman folded into the corner of her sofa with a thick wool throw. Soft tones glowed in the room: peach, maybe salmon. Porter didn’t know from paint and fabric, but he knew ugly, and the cane propped beside this little lady was ugly—a knobbly black excuse of wood with a crooked question mark for a handle. In fact, the whole thing was much too big for this little lady with the tight curly hair and the bright, sharp eyes.

“Your name is Bonnie, did you say, Bonnie Peeples, spelled P-E-E-P . . .” He winked at his partner. “And you’ve lost your sheep.”

The partner choked on a giggle, but managed to sputter, “And you don’t know where to find him.” Then his feeble attempt at composure erupted into a helpless, unmanly titter.

“You may find this funny, officers,” said the lady with dignity, “but that rug is a priceless artefact.”

“Can you describe this rug for us, Miss Peeples?” said the Sergeant solemnly, getting out a tablet.

“As true as rain, as white as the clouds, as warm as summer,” she said dreamily.

“Ma’am? Could you be more specific, please, ma’am? What’s the material, the colour, the size?”

“One hundred percent wool. White, curly wool. Ram-sized.”

Porter made a note.

“With a ram’s head,” she said.

Porter paused before squiggling another note.

“The Eight Wonders, we call them, Sam and his herd.”

Sergeant Porter poked at his tablet.

“Soft as a cloud in spring, the little lambs, soft and cuddly, the softest things you can ever feel,” she went on, “and then that tragic cry of a lamb when he gets separated from his mother, and then she keens, calling for him. I remember my grandmother had three of the little ones to feed, their mothers gone in birthing. So sad. My grandmother held them near the fireplace and fed them with droppers until they could stand on their own four feet. She saved them, too.”

“Maybe yours took those four feet and wandered off,” said the Sergeant, looking up from his note taking.

“Meandered, maybe.” He looked at his partner Burle.

“Or rambled,” said Burle, jerking his head at Bonnie.”

“And Sam, of course, well, he’s just all ram,” Bonnie continued.

“Have you looked in the backyard?” said Sergeant Porter. He gestured to the picture window and beyond.

25

“That there grass is what I would call lush. What do you think, Officer Burle? Would you call that lush?”

“Oh yes,” said Burle. “Rich, even. What we have here is something rich.”

“Can I fix you a nice cup of tea?” asked Bonnie. “Help you think your way through this?”

“No thanks, Miss Peeples,” said Sergeant Porter, “but I got a good one for you. Didya ever see a green sheep?”

“No of course not. Now if you will just . . . “ “Have you ever wondered why that is?”

“Why what is?”

“Why you never see green sheep?”

“Because it’s not true. I know sheep.”

“Sure, there’s lots of green sheep. You just can’t see them against all that lush green grass.”

“Yuk-yuk,” said Officer Burle.

“You make fun of my lawn, Officer, but that grass takes a lot of tending. When I was a girl, my dad would put the herd wherever the place needed weeding and those sheep cropped everything nice and neat.”

“Roto-weeders,” said Officer Burle. He carefully avoided looking at the Sergeant.

“Look, carpets do not wander,” said Bonnie. “This is a serious charge I am making. I expect you to write this up and pursue it. This is very upsetting to me.” She lifted her cane a few inches and tapped it on the floor as emphasis.

“We’ll do that, Miss Peeples,” said Officer Porter, rising to full authority with his imposing uniform.

“Meanwhile, if you leave Sam alone,” and here he winked at Burle, who caught it and manage to choke out, “He’ll probably come home, wagging his tail behind him.”

“You may laugh. Go ahead, Officers, be as cheeky as you may, but sheep are the eight wonders of the farming world. They connected the homesteader to a proud old country. They told the stories of a hardy people.”

“Sheep tell stories?” Burle asked.

“I see you’re wearing a nice warm vest, there Officer,” said Bonnie. “Probably made of wool. And do you like feta cheese? Well, that’s made from goats. Sheep’s milk cheese is much finer.”

“Sheep cheese,” repeated Burle.

“And there is another aspect,” she said, “but it’s kind of ominous.”

“Ominous,” said Burle hopefully.

“Yes. Do you like lamb chops?”

“One of my favourites,” said Burle.

“Well, after the weeding and the wool and the cheese, a good rack of lamb is the fourth wonderful thing from a herd. And it doesn’t stop there. This may be indelicate, but the bones from the animals are ground into the fine china that the English factories produce.

“And then there’s the tails.”

“Tails? Sheep have tails?” said Porter.

Bonnie smiled, as if indulging an innocent child. “Tails are natural,” she said. “People don’t know that. But yes, lambs are born with tails” “I never saw a sheep with a tail,” said Burle.

“Oh yes,” said Bonnie, patiently schooling them. “That’s where the important fat is. The ancient people used it

26

Gail E. Taylor for fuel and for cooking. But the big secret to the tail, is that it’s a delicacy once cooked. My grandfather used to love scooping that straight from the pot with a spoon.”

“The tail?”

“See,” said Bonnie, “other farmers dock the tails of their flocks. Not the Peeples family. Easier to catch them at shearing time, my grandfather used to say. I watched him at the shearing, pushing the blade through the oily wool and taking it off in one unbroken, milky piece.”

“Is that how Sam came to be a rug for you?” asked Burle?

“Oh no, Officer. That came after.”

“After?”

“After all the other good things. The rugs come at the end of the story. The rugs are the climax of the eight wonders.”

“Uh-huh. The climax,” the officers said in unison, but they did not look at each other.

“So, not that I’m keeping count,” said Porter, tapping away at his notes, “but that’s seven things so far: the weeding, the wool vest, the cheese, the chops, the bones, the fat and the rug. What’s the eighth wonder?” He poised his stylus.

“Why, company, Officer, the sheep kept us company.”

“Hoo-kay, Miss Peeples,” sang Sergeant Porter and he snapped his tablet into its case. “We get the picture here.

No need to go further. We understand. This carpet is important, it means a lot to you, and you need it back.”

They set to work, measuring the floor, dusting the doorknobs for fingerprints, and snapping pictures of the layout of the house. They took a photo of Miss Peeples as she rattled on about heritage and legacy and family history.

They bustled about importantly with studious frowns.

“Who was the last person here in your home, Miss Peeples?” Sergeant Porter cut into her little speech about heritage.

“My dear boy, Jeremy.”

“Your son?”

“No, my brother’s son. My dear nephew. He visits on the weekends. He loves that rug. And he loves my sauces.

He wanted my chocolate sauce and the butterscotch. Needed whipped cream, too, he said. He has some project at college that needs these sauces. He’s in that program, what’s it called, the cinnamon tropics, or something. He left early this morning before I was up.”

“So this Jeremy noticed the rug when he visited and it, er, I mean, Sam was here at the time?”

“Oh, yes. Jeremy said how soft and rich Sam looked.” She pointed her cane at S Porter, who eyed the tip with intense focus. When the cane began to move, the S’s feet followed alongside and moved across the floor in a gentle arc. When the cane stopped at the piano beside Bonnie, Porter stopped too. Then the cane floated over to Officer Burle, and he also moved back. They both stood still, straight-backed, watching her, waiting.

“Now,” said Bonnie Peeples, “go get Sam,” and in a flick they were out and lumbering the steps toward the cruiser parked in the street.

“Sam the Ram,” Sergeant Porter said and clapped Burle on the back. “Sammy. Hoo-yah.”

“So let’s debrief here,” said the sergeant once they were in the car. “We got here an old lady whose décor is ruined.”

“Her interior design, so to say,” said Burle.

27

“And the grandfather,” said the Sergeant, not looking at Burle, who finished the sentence anyway, “ate tail.”

“And the rug, she says, was the climax of the story.”

Burle exploded. “Hee-haw. Hoo-boy. You gonna let me write this one up, Serge?”

“Never known you to ask to write up a case.”

“Hee-yow. This one I look forward to.”

They swung the cruiser up the main street of the city and leisured their way toward the university. It was a crisp spring morning, bright with brittle sunlight. No reason to hurry; this case would sew itself up easily. They stopped for a take-out coffee.

“You know, Serge,” said Burle, as he peeled back the cap of his cup to dump in some milk, “that ratty old rug means something to that old woman. Sure, she’s got more wild bats than a Pee-Wee game, but she makes a certain sense. She kept talking about connectin’ to the old country, the link to her past. So, maybe she’s reporting an old rag is gone, but to her that miserable hide is something certain and safe. Remember how she talked about the smell and the feeling of that wool, how it was like saying thanks before a meal, thanks for the animals and the earth, so that her family could eat and thrive and live to conquer and to love. Remember how she talked like that?”

“Yeah. Nuttier than a fruitcake.”

“Battier than a Juniors’ game.”

“One hide short of a coat.”

“One slice short of a sandwich.”

They arrived at the north end of the city, and flashed a wave at the campus-parking attendant. Burle shut off the engine and made no move to open the door, just sat.

“What’s up?” said Porter.

“My dad had something like that, I remember,” Burle said. “He used to talk about his grandfather’s shalaylee.”

“What’s a shell-lay-lee? Sounds like seafood,” said Porter, “or a very bad joke. Which of course we wouldn’t know any.”

“I think it’s an Irish word for ‘walking stick.’ My dad said that his grandfather promised he would get the shalaylee, being the oldest grandson. But something happened. I don’t know. I think the house burned or the grandfather went strange. Anyhow, right after the grandfather died, the walking stick never made it to our place.

Then after about a year, it came in the mail. It was busted in two. My dad barged out of the house and came back corked. He stayed that way for a week, mean and drunk, and then it was over. He didn’t take the effort to repair it.

It could have been, you know. Wood glued or something. He couldn’t take the effort. He never talked about Ireland again. He was a New World person from that day on ’til the day he died.”

“Hmm,” said Porter.

“Which wasn’t long after.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Not long after that my dad died. I was six.”

“Tough blow.”

“Yep. I’d forgotten all about that stupid stick ’til now.”

“That fluffy little old lady’s getting to you.”

“Battier than a pee-wee game.”

28

Gail E. Taylor “Lumpier than a gravel bin.”

“Looser than a goose.”

Jeremy Peeples was a tall thin lad with the same sharp eyes as his aunt. He wore nothing but a towel around his middle and an expensive camera in his hand. Behind him, a slim girl peeked out wearing a red bikini and he tried to hide her.

“Yes?” He spoke fearlessly, but his face twitched. A towel and a bikini, in the northern half of North America on a cool spring day.

Through the crack in the door, the officers could see a white woolly rug highlighted by Klieg lights. Sergeant Porter showed his badge. “You Jeremy Peeples?”

“We’re just shooting a student film here, Officer,” the boy said in a defensive tone. “Nothing off the charts here. Very tame. An ode to art.”

“We have reason to believe you have an article belonging to a Miss Peeples. You are the nephew of Bonnie Peeples?”

“Oh, that’s what this is about.” The young man smirked. “She’ll never miss it.”

“That’s not what we hear.”

“Look, the home care nurse say she’s not supposed to have throw rugs on the floor. Too dangerous for walking.

I’m helping to clear out stuff.”

“That’s not the way Miss Peeples sees it.”

“Gran forgets things all the time. She said I could borrow it.”

“Mr. Peeples, the taxpayer doesn’t hire the police to settle family disputes. The department is willing to treat this as a domestic matter. A misunderstanding, say. Just return the article to your Gran and we’ll be out of your hair and hers.”

“All right. We’ll finish this shoot. You don’t want to crush a budding Cronenberg, do you officers?”

“We’re calling this case closed the minute that rug gets back to Miss Peeples,” said Sergeant Porter.

The police station was slow the next day and into the supper hour. Burle was looking forward to the first night of a four-day furlough. He jangled his car keys as he passed the front desk on the way out. When the phone rang, he picked it up on a lark. It was a quiet night.

“Number 57 station. Officer Burle speaking.”

“Oh, thank goodness it’s you, Officer Burle.”

“Good evening, Miss Peeples.”

“Officer, my carpet has returned and I want to thank you for solving the mystery. My nephew explained everything.”

“Explained? Everything?”

“Yes, Jeremy’s a good boy. He told me everything, how he took that lovely family heirloom to have it cleaned for me.”

“That’s good Miss Peeples. Glad we could help.”

“Well, he’s young. He didn’t exactly pick a reputable dealer. There’s a problem, Officer. A huge problem.”

29

“What’s that, Miss Peeples?” Burle looked at his watch. Fifteen more minutes and he was off. Leave this mess to the next duty sergeant. He needed a beer or three, a game, and a bucket of pretzels.

“Please, Officer, can you come over?”

“Can you give me some details, ma’am?”

“He’s not wagging his tail.”

“Ma’am?”

“The cleaners. My beautiful carpet. My poor, mutilated animal. I don’t think Jeremy knew. I’m sure he would be horrified.”

Burle was not a jolly man, but he had some capacity for humour. This could be a good tale for the locker room come Monday. Plus, he and Porter were supposed to close these cases, not string them. He told the dispatcher he’d clock out later that night and rolled the cruiser out of the station parking lot.

“Have you ever lost something of value, Officer?” Bonnie Peeples looked even smaller in the front doorway of her tidy house. She wobbled a bit on her cane. Burle loomed before her.

“Something,” she continued, “something so real and so true that your very life depended on it?” The officer’s tough face softened and looked in danger of crumpling.

“I wonder, Miss Peeples,” he said softly, “if that cup of tea is still available?”

Anybody passing by 70 Lakeview that evening and looking in would have seen a burly man in a uniform sitting on the floor beside a small woman, both of them bent in concentration with some project or other.

Imagine creeping in close. The man’s visored hat sits on the floor beside him. A flickering light suggesting a fireplace flashes on the man’s brass buttons and lingers in the lady’s silvered hair. Her gnarled hands clutch a large needle. The man holds two pieces of white material for her, a small fluffy chunk and a larger one. They are talking and smiling. The lady stops to brush a trail of curly hair from her eyes, and touches the big man on the arm. He throws back his head and laughs. Imagine the timbre of that laugh: baritone in pitch, as rich as caramel, and as lyrical as a lullaby.

###

30

Susan Tepper

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Autorretrato en Nueva York 1920 - 1930

Poodles

by Susan Tepper Girls wore poodle skirts in the fifties, I tell him.

A large white Poodle is occupying a chair in this dining room. The Poodle sits quietly beside an elderly French woman.

Dogs at the table are something I can live without, he says.

It's kind of traditional here in France, right?

I'm spooning in the most incredible soup. Cream of sorrel. I almost want to order another bowl. I love this

31

soup so much, I say.

It's wonderful, he says. But leave room for the duck.

I will, I say scraping the bowl quietly.

He raises an eyebrow. I tell him that he has supersonic hearing.

It's amazing I can hear at all, he says.

I know he means the rock bands. They are so incredibly loud. He is a maker and shaker of rock bands. He has to wear ear plugs when scouting new bands or will eventually lose his hearing. It's one of the downsides of my business, he likes to say.

Of course there are the upsides, I'd like to say. You weren't the one cleaning planes a week ago.

A week ago I was cleaning planes at JFK. Our whole management team was cleaning planes because the real cleaners went on strike. They call us management but we are really their dogs. Poodles in our demure business suits, we are called upon to fill in whenever there is a strike.

Besides cleaning planes, I have answered phones in reservations, worked as a stewardess, driven the biffy truck under the planes to empty the toilets, and painted yellow lines on the tarmac. And once I stood in front of a 707, as it taxied in, waving my arms to indicate where it should park on the ramp.

But I don't say any of this. What's the point? It's not his fault any more than the Poodle's fault that it's here in the dining room; annoying him. It's not his fault he has a great life, and that mine is, well mine.

###

32

Diana Ferraro

García Lorca: Arlequin Ahogado 1927

THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR AND THE CUBAN WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE by Diana Ferraro

The Spanish–American War—a conflict between Spain and the United States in 1898—coexisted with the ongoing Cuban War of Independence. A typical conflict between a powerful empire living its last chapter and an energetic and rich country with the will to prevail competed for the world’s attention with the last Latin American war for Independence from Spain.

Two writers, the Cuban José Martí (1853-1895) and the American Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote about these wars. José Martí’s role as a patriot would surpass his role as a poet, becoming the “Apostle” of the Independence and losing his life in a skirmish at the beginning of the Independence war, and Stephen Crane, as an American correspondent of war, would survive the sinking of his ship and live many adventures in Cuba. Both have left memorable pages about the war, which go beyond politics to enter in the history of man as a suffering being, struggling for freedom, and in the need to accept war as a sometimes unavoidable mean.

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TWO WRITERS José Martí José Martí (January 28, 1853 – May 19, 1895) was a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. As part of the Cuban Freemasons and through his writings and political activity, he became a symbol for Cuba's struggle for independence against Spain in the 19th century, and is referred to as “El Apóstol,” the "Apostle of Cuban Independence."

Born in Havana, he was the son of poor Spanish immigrants. Thanks to the aid of his teacher, he was able to go to high school just at the time the Ten Years' War, Cuba's first struggle for independence, began. Martí quickly committed himself to the cause, and was soon arrested. Freed after a few months, Martí began the exile that would characterize the better part of the rest of his life.

He went first to Spain and from 1881 until his fateful return to Cuba in 1895, Martí spent much of his time in New York. He reported on life in the United States for many newspapers in Latin America and he wrote everything from poetry (Versos sencillos, 1891) to essays on the United States which he admired for its energy and industry as well as for its Constitution. While pursuing his literary career, he planned the second Cuban struggle for Independence and founded in 1982 the Cuban Revolutionary Party. In 1895, Martí arrived in Cuba to be killed in a small skirmish two weeks later.

His death was used as a cry for Cuban independence from Spain by both the Cuban revolutionaries and those Cubans previously reluctant to start a revolt. Latin Americans worshiped him too and, as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío said, Martí belonged to “an entire race, an entire continent.” The concepts of freedom, liberty, and democracy are prominent themes in all of his works. After the 20’s and 30’s, one of his poems from the book, "Versos Sencillos" was adapted to the song, "Guantanamera", which has become the definitive patriotic song of Cuba. -- (From: Library of Congress- Wikipedia- www.josé-martí.org)

Stephen Crane Stephen Crane ( ovember 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was one, an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American aturalism and Impressionism . He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

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Diana Ferraro

Soon after the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, under suspicious circumstances, Crane was offered a £60 advance by Blackwood's Magazine for articles "from the seat of war in the event of a war breaking out" between the United States and Spain. His health was failing, and it is believed that signs of his pulmonary tuberculosis, which he may have contracted in childhood, became apparent. With almost no money coming in from his finished stories, Crane accepted the assignment and left England for New York. In early June, he observed establishment of an American base in Cuba when Marines seized Guantanamo Bay. He then went ashore with the Marines, planning "to gather impressions and write them as the spirit moved." Although he would write honestly about his fear in battle, others observed his calmness and composure. He would later recall "this prolonged tragedy of the night" in the war tale "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo". After showing a willingness to serve during fighting at Cuzco, Cuba, by carrying messages to company commanders, Crane was officially cited for his "material aid during the action". He continued to report upon various battles and the worsening military conditions.

In early July, however, Crane was sent to the United States for medical treatment for a high fever. Although Crane had filed more than twenty dispatches in the three months he had covered the war, the World's business manager believed that the paper had not received its money's worth and fired him. In retaliation, Crane signed with Hearst's New York Journal with the wish to return to Cuba. He traveled first to Puerto Rico and then to Havana. He sporadically sent out dispatches and stories; he wrote about the post-war mood in Havana, the crowded city sidewalks, and other various topics. Crane finally left Havana and returned to England to meet a lover on January 11, 1899.

Before dying of tuberculosis at age 29, he published several essays, novels, and even a volume of poetry.

Crane's most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is a Civil War tale. (From: The Library of Congress- Wikipedia)

JOSÉ MARTÍ Versos Sencillos XXIII-YO QUIERO SALIR DEL MUNDO...

Yo quiero salir del mundo Por la puerta natural: En un carro de hojas verdes A morir me han de llevar.

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No me pongan en lo oscuro A morir como un traidor: ¡Yo soy bueno, y como bueno Moriré de cara al sol!

XXIX-LA IMAGEN DEL REY POR LEY...

La imagen del rey, por ley, Lleva el papel del Estado: El niño fue fusilado Por los fusiles del rey.

Festejar el santo es ley Del rey: y en la fiesta santa ¡La hermana del niño canta Ante la imagen del rey!

XXVIII-POR LA TUMBA DEL CORTIJO...

Por la tumba del cortijo Donde está el padre enterrado, Pasa el hijo, de soldado Del invasor: pasa el hijo.

El padre, un bravo en la guerra, Envuelto en su pabellón Alzase: y de un bofetón Lo tiende, muerto, por tierra.

El rayo reluce: zumba El viento por el cortijo: El padre recoge al hijo, Y se lo lleva a la tumba

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Diana Ferraro

JOSÉ MARTÍ Plain Verse XXIII- I WANT TO GET OUT FROM THIS WORLD...

I want to get out from this world Through the most natural door: In a carriage of green leaves I’ll be driven to my death.

Don’t confine me into darkness To let me die as a traitor: I’m a good man and, as good I am, I’ll die with the sun on my face.

XXIX- BY LAW, THE KING’S IMAGE… By law, the king’s image Carries the role of the State: The child has been shot By the guns of the king.

To celebrate one’s saint, Is the king’s law: and that day The boy’s sister has to sing By the image of the king!

XXVIII- AT THE FARMHOUSE’S GRAVE… At the farmhouse’ grave Where the father is buried, The son goes by, as a soldier from the invader; the son goes by.

The father, a brave in the war,

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Wrapped in his flag, Stands up, and with a slap, Lays him down, dead, onto dirt.

The lightning glistens, the wind Buzzes over the farm: The father lifts the son And bears him to the grave.

STEPHEN CRANE (Source: Library of Congress-Literature of the Spanish-American War) From “War Memories: The next day we went shooting. It was exactly like quail-shooting, I'll tell you. These guerillas who so cursed our lives had a well some five miles away, and. . .it was decided that it would be correct to go forth and destroy the well. Captain Elliot of C company. . .was to start out at the next daybreak. He asked me if I cared to go, and of course I accepted with glee; but all that night I was afraid. Bitterly afraid. The moon was very bright, shedding a magnificent radiance upon the trenches. I watched the men of C and D companies lying so tranquilly--some snoring, confound them--whereas I was certain that I could never sleep with the weight of a coming battle upon my mind. . .In the morning I wished for some mild attack of disease, something that would incapacitate me for the business of going out gratuitously to be bombarded. But I was in an awkwardly healthy state, and so I must needs smile and look pleased with my prospects.

A description for the New York World, July 1, 1898: Further on the two companies of marines were going through a short, sharp inspection. Their linen suits and black corded accouterments made their strong figures very business-like and soldierly. Contrary to the Cubans, the bronze faces of the Americans were not stolid at all. One could note the prevalence of a curious expression-something dreamy, the symbol of minds striving to tear aside the screen of the future and perhaps expose the ambush of death. It was not fear in the least. It was simply a moment in the lives of men who have staked themselves and have come to wonder which wins--red or black?

And glancing along that fine, silent rank at faces grown intimate through the association of four days and nights of almost constant fighting, it was impossible not to fall into deepest sympathy with this mood and wonder as to the dash and death there would presently be on the other side of those hills--those mysterious hills not far away, placidly in the sunlight veiling the scene of somebody's last gasp. And then the time. It was now 7 o'clock. What about 8 o'clock? Nine o'clock? Little absurd indications of time. . .these indications of time now were sinister,

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Diana Ferraro

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Busto de Hombre Muerto

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sombre with the shadows of certain tragedy, not the tragedy of a street accident, but forseen, inexorable, invincible tragedy.

Actual battle: I knew then that one of my pals was going to stand up behind the lanterns and have all Spain shoot at him.

The answer was always upon the instant: "Yes, sir."

Then the bullets began to snap, snap, snap, at his head, while all the woods began to crackle like burning straw. I could lie near and watch the face of the signalman, illumed as it was by the yellow shine of lantern-light, and the absence of excitement, fright, or any emotion at all on his countenance was something to astonish all theories out of one's mind. . .

These times on the hill resembled, in some ways, those terrible scenes on the stage--scenes if intense gloom, blinding lightning, with a cloaked devil or assassin or other appropriate character muttering deeply amid the awful roll of the thunder-drums. It was theatric beyond words: one felt like a leaf in this booming chaos, this prolonged tragedy of the night. Amid it all one could see from time to time the yellow light on the face of a preoccupied signalman.

Another account of the violence of war, from "War Memories": I heard somebody dying near me. He was dying hard. Hard. It took him a long time to die. He breathed as all noble machinery breathes when it is making its gallant strife against breaking, breaking. But he was going to break. He was going to break. It seemed to me, this breathing, the noise of a heroic pump which strives to subdue a mud which comes upon it in tons. The darkness was impenetrable. The man was lying in some depression within seven feet of me. Every wave, vibration, of his anguish beat upon my senses. He was long past groaning. There was only the bitter strife for air which pulsed out into the night in a clear penetrating whistle with intervals of terrible silence in which I held my own breath in the common unconscious aspiration to help.

###

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Neil Dyer

GarcĂ­a Lorca: La Vista y El Tacto, 1929, 1930

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Lately, after making love, I am most purely grateful for this other human form that yields itself to mine; my quaking flesh now charged by gravity and increase. The moment is no longer marked by a head splitting release, Hephaestus hammering the dome of Zeus, but now an exonerating shiver felt on this known human escarpment – I say this because I’ve visited the black land; some days so far beneath the air that motion plays on a continuously receding horizon; choking on shadows in corners full of broken glass.

And here, in this early summer, late budding trees move in the evening wind under a charcoal sky.

I’ve drawn the drapes to lie supine beneath a ceiling that lowers like some funereal canopy on a coffin. It’s your reaching through the fabric that brings me up to breathe Neil Dyer

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Tobi Cogswell

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Guitarra, 1927

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Our Grandson Seeks the Snow and His Mother in Milwaukee Reluctantly I have to let him go.

I am neither mother, nor grandmother I love his grandpa, and therefore love him.

But it is time for him to go home now.

We kept him laughing and loved, with many hugs and grilled cheese sandwiches, coffee cake when he texted us that’s what he wanted and all the things he didn’t even know – he saw horses at the dentist’s office…

He will always remember that grandpa, and I, are a safe place to return to.

It’s time to not cry, to be satisfied.

Let the little man stand tall as we hug.

Let the little boy run fast off the plane.

Let all things return to how they should be.

Tobi Cogswell

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Peter Taylor

Da Vinci

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Equus & Anima November and I'm walking home after work— shortcut through the paddocks with a chill ground fog closing in around me, animals huddled together stare dull eyes in a dull light, mesmerized by their own breath.

The field is a vision of hoar-frost and sculpture, necklaced with fences.

Air so still I hardly notice them at first— big sorrel and girl— standing twenty yards off after a run.

Body steam swirling around them, she strokes the wet flanks in a curious pantomime of reward or habit, oblivious to everything but the movement of her hands, the impatient stamp on frozen ground.

Adrenalin still pumping its sheer force of being, the horse is restrained by the shy syllables of a girl mounting in slow motion: cold leather yielding to firm pressure of thigh and back, as nostrils flared she turns him, effortlessly, with the enduring gentleness of her will.

Peter Taylor

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M Wilkinson

GarcĂ­a Lorca: El Beso, 1927

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The Task

by M. Wilkinson Mourners stand in groups. Crystal glasses filled with wine glitter in the evening sun. Sandwiches brown and white on oval plates - fillings egg yellow, ham pink, and lettuce wilts in the humid air. Muted voices drift about the garden like waves against the shore. At the edge of shadow cast by the Elm, an earthenware jar tilts toward the soil as if gravity longs for its return. Moss creeps across the base, discolouring orange brightness of its host.

I tire of the scene, close my eyes, and in the dark behind my lids, picture him before reason slipped away.

Back to a time when he was a laughing, dark haired lover, a man who wrapped me in his arms and kept me safe from a changing world, a thoughtful man, and the father of my children.

In this garden, at our grandson’s christening I first saw fear and confusion in his eyes as he looked at the Elm tree, and the flower-filled earthenware jar.

‘Where am I, what am I doing here?’

My heart kicked against my ribs, I took his hand, and my voice shook. ‘You’re here with me, darling.’

I set to wage a war against a tireless foe and was defeated. The place that once housed my soul is bitter, but my conscience clear that each task, and every moment was filled with love. Across the garden the sun sets behind the Elms.

‘Goodbye my love,’ I whisper. (c) 2012 Wilkinson

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Charlie Britten

CROSSING THE POND

by Charlie Britten

I understand how Christopher Columbus’s crew felt as they sailed towards the edge of their world. I picture them clutching the tall masts of their galleon, looking down at the endless and heaving ocean, trying not to think of the abyss which, they believed, lay just over the horizon.

“Here we are, Wendy,” says Margaret, as we roll up at the passenger drop-off point at Gatwick.

“Yes.” I grope around for door handle, as if I haven’t ridden in her car a thousand times before. I need to get out. The socalled ‘natural’ air freshener, dangling from her mirror, is making me feel sick; green and shaped like a Christmas tree, it smells like toilet-cleaner. “Thanks for the lift.”

“That’s all right.”

As I haul my suitcase out of Margaret's boot, hotel courtesy buses roar past, bustling with importance, and seeming to say, ‘We’re nothing to do with you. We carry proper passengers only.’ A black taxi draws up in front of us, its engine rattling as it disgorges heaps of luggage and people in that order, the humans too wrapped up in themselves to notice a sixty-four year old woman hovering by the kerbside and looking clueless. Perhaps as well.

“I'd better go,” says Margaret, nodding at the sign overhead warning us that waiting is restricted to five minutes only. I long to tell her everything. Standing here on the kerb at Gatwick, I can't understand why I haven’t done so, during the preceding days, or weeks, when I had the opportunity.

She raises her eyebrows in that way of hers and I wonder how much my oldest friend, who I've known since schooldays, has worked out for herself. “You’ll be all right. You’ve flown before.”

“Only once. With Bertram.”

“He’ll be there at the other end.”

“Yes.” My knuckles tighten on the handles of my case, forming hard white, bloodless knobs.

“You’ll have a wonderful time.”

I force my mouth into a smile. “I'd better go.”

Unable to bear watching the last link with my reality disappear into the traffic, I turn away, and after a moment I follow the other passengers through an unpromising-looking doorway and up the precipitous slope to Departures. More corridors at the top. Now what do I do? For the thousandth time that morning, I look inside my handbag for my crimson passport and flimsy internet-printed e-ticket with the green Eastern Airways logo on it. Yes, I have them both.

A family stride ahead of me, the mother clutching several passports in the same hand as she’s using to eat a sandwich. She calls to her children, who are kicking up their little legs like frisky ponies as they hurtle along the walkway pushing miniature pink trolley-bags. “Jade. Hayley. Come here.”

I run my eye up and down the rows of desks in the Departure hall... orange Easyjet... blue Ryanair. Keep walking, Wendy.

So many Ryanair desks displaying their harp logo. I quicken my step; I don't want to see harps, not today, not any day.

Dark blue British Airways... red Virgin Atlantic... Keep walking. This is South Terminal, isn't it? Green... yes.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” says the man logging on to the computer at the Eastern Airways desk, as I plonk myself and my

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luggage in front of him. “We’re not open yet.”

I scuttle backwards to the cordon, held in place by two insubstantial metal posts. My mind flits back to Margaret driving back to the village and to her house, which is as familiar to me as my own. My dear friend, Margaret; I haven’t spent as much time with her of late, although she doesn't complain. When I return, I will do better by her. I will, really.

The display at the check-in desk reads ‘Philadelphia’. I’m in the right place, although I can't believe that I, Wendy, am about to fly to the United States. Still I wait. At last I am called over to the Eastern Airways desk.

When the check-in clerk asks for my e-ticket and passport, I hand over the whole wodge of papers in my handbag, including a dentist’s appointment card which drops on to his keyboard. “Sorry, sorry,” I mutter.

“No problem,” said the clerk, handing it back. “Your passport, ma’am?”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“How many bags are you checking in, Mrs Woodier?”

My gleaming new wedding ring cuts into my finger as I haul my suitcase on to the conveyor belt. I don't feel like Mrs Woodier. I’m still Wendy from the garden centre, Wendy who doesn't do aeroplanes.

“We recommend you go through security straightway.”

Security? Yes, of course. I join a long, snaking queue, and, because it’s so slow, I’m able to watch what everyone else does. You put your liquids in a plastic bag, take off your belts, your shoes and jewellery, and put them, with your handbag, into a tray which goes through the thing with flapping rubber slats. Then you walk under the arch and, if it lights up, you’re in trouble. Bit by bit, I edge to the front. Without deigning to speak to me, the female security official beckons me forward, in front of a man carrying a musical instrument in a case.

I go through the arch on the nod. ‘Even though I'm a cheat,’ I think, as I slip my feet back into my shoes. “I've taken advantage of a good man, a grieving widower.” I look back. The security officials are still talking to the musical instrument man, scrutinising parts of a clarinet, pressing levers and watching pads open and shut.

Losing interest, they stuff everything back into the case any old how, and now it won't shut. At least it isn't a harp. ## I was hosing down the tomato plants at the garden centre but I watered him instead. “I'm so sorry,” I said, slapping my hand in front of my mouth. “Really, I am. I'm so sorry.” But, when I saw him laughing, I dared to smile.

“These trousers needed a wash anyway,” he said, lifting the wet patch from his knee.

Next day he returned to buy a shed and, when he said his name was Bertram Woodier, I realised he was the famous conductor, not just because Margaret, who was musical, talked of him, but because, with his high forehead and quiff of white swept-back hair, he looked like one. He kept coming back, again and again, to buy plants, a barbecue, fuel for the barbecue, more plants. “He fancies you,” the other garden centre staff said.

“No, he doesn't. He’s just lost his wife. He talks about her all the time.” Besides, I was too old to be fancied.

Wasn't I? “He was married to Clarissa Bell, the harpist,” Margaret informed me.

“Yes,” I said. “He told me how she was driving home from a concert, very late. She fell asleep at the wheel

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Charlie Britten and drove into a tree.”

“I remember reading about it in the paper. Very sad. I've got her on CD, playing the Matthias Harp Concerto. Lovely piece.” When she took it from the shelf, I saw the photo on the sleeve, of a diminutive woman, sitting astride a concert harp taller than she was, and caressing the strings with her small fingers. “Would you like to hear it?”

I listened, although Margaret's music never did anything for me. One afternoon when she called in on me at work, I introduced her to Bertram, because I thought she’d like to meet a proper conductor. They talked about the Proms for a couple of minutes, then he went off searching for ericaceous compost.

“I'm going to be away for a week or two,” he said, as he paid for it at the checkout. “I'm directing a concert in Houston.” When he returned, I had a streaming cold. He took me into the garden centre cafe, which was supposed to be off-limits to staff, but Joyce at the servery was not going to say No to Bertram Woodier. As he poured out our steaming mahogany brew, he told me about American tea. “They give you a pot of hand-hot water, with no lid, and a plate of herbal teabags. Absolutely useless.” He handed me my cup. “There. Get that down you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve decided I'm going to retire, Wendy. What about you?”

“I can't afford to yet.”

“Marry me and retire now. I'm not rolling in it, but we’d get by.”

Nobody had proposed to me ever before. In fact, even when I was younger, I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, obviously. But what about you?”

“Yes, please.” ## We had a quiet wedding, with just three guests, Margaret and Bertram’s daughters; one was a cellist and the other a violinist, tight-lipped, younger replicas of their beautiful mother, who talked about music continuously until Bertram told them to stop. During the service, Margaret read 1 Ephesians Chapter 13, which is all about love. The words of the Bible lesson went round and round in my head. Like Prince Charles, I didn't know what ‘being in love’ meant and, for a dreadful half hour or so, I hated what I had just done. For our honeymoon, we flew to Italy. This was the first time I'd been abroad, and the airport thing was quite exciting when he was there with me.

I recall Bertram saying you have to keep an eye on the destination board, so I sit right underneath it. One coffee. Two coffees. A trip to W H Smiths to buy a couple of magazines, which I intend to read and dispose of on the plane, that is, before Bertram. He mustn’t see me with women’s magazines. When at last the board flashes up ‘Gate 27’, I leap out of my seat and rush off, because, according to the notice on the pillar, it takes twenty minutes to walk there from the departure lounge. I manage it in fifteen. Seconds after sitting down on one of the red plastic bucket seats, I’m desperate to get up and check the gate number, but I can't, because more and more people are pouring in. They hover around by the wall, including the family with the two little girls and their pink trolley-bags. This is Gate 27, isn't it? A gulf of heat wells up inside me, effervescing as beads of hot sweat on the small of my back, then coursing up into my head. I picture steam billowing through my hair. Some people are afraid of flying itself. They can't make themselves

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believe that a metal machine can stay up in the air, but for me it’s more complicated.

Inside the plane at last, the voice over the tannoy announces, “Welcome aboard this Eastern Airways flight to Philadelphia,” I sink back into my seat. I’m going to be all right.

Until Philadelphia and Bertram.

Ten hours to think. ## After we returned home from Italy, we pottered around and did up Bertram’s garden, with very frequent tea breaks on his patio. Marriage and retirement was proving to be leisurely and relaxing, although he did have one concert outstanding, in Philadelphia. To start with, he didn’t mention it, but, as time crept up on him, and as more and more phone calls and emails winged their way over the Atlantic from Sam, the orchestra administrator, he grew irritable.

“I need a cup of tea,” he kept saying. “Please.” Then, a few minutes later, it would be “Too hot, dear,” or “Too weak, dear” or “I think I’d prefer coffee”. We always called each other ‘dear’, not ‘darling’.

“You don't want to come, do you, dear?” he asked, as he booked his flight online.

“No... I... I suppose not.”

“I'll be working all the time. You’d be by yourself.”

My eye fell on to a copy of the Philadelphia concert programme in the printer: the first item listed was ‘Harp Concerto opus 50 by William Matthias’. “Margaret's got that on CD,” I said, picking it up. “With Clarissa, your Clarissa, playing.”

“Yes,” he said, getting up and walking out the room.

When I joined him downstairs, he was on the phone to Brian, his agent. “Have you spoken to Sam about the Matthias yet? ... Yes, I know what she’s saying, but she can just stop saying it. Who’s directing this show? Sam or me?...

Maybe we did agree it two years ago, but can't they be reasonable? I'm a widower.”

He wasn't.

He wasn't mine either. At that moment, and in pain, I realised that I loved him.

I put my hand on his shoulder but he shook me off. “Are you sure you don't want me to come with you?”

“What would you do there all by yourself? You’re not used to American cities.”

Clarissa could’ve done it. In fact, according to Margaret's CD sleeve-notes, Clarissa had toured the globe giving harp recitals. If she could do it, so could I. “Can’t I come later, for the performance?”

He shrugged. “If you want.”

As the words left my mouth, the abyss opened up in my mind, swelling in its enormity. My ordeal was self-inflicted. ## Ten hours in an aeroplane, with nothing to see but clouds and water. Some of the passengers have to complete US immigration forms, but not me because, as a British citizen, I have already applied for, and received, a visa waiver. It asked me, amongst other things, whether I have ever committed a crime of moral turpitude. Have I? Haven’t I stolen another woman’s man? Stevie Wonder’s song floods, unwelcome, into my mind – ‘I Believe When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever’.

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Charlie Britten

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Soledad Montoya, 1930

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I reopen my magazines, which I have already read cover to cover. I flick through the duty-free leaflet, then move on to the well-thumbed in-flight journal. The chairman of Eastern Airways is showing readers around his nice home in Connecticut, with flowing acres of lawn and mature trees in his garden. He has recently married for the second time, to a smiley lady photographed sitting sideways, wearing several thousand dollars worth of goldbraided jacket. “After Lois died,” he writes, “I figured there’d never be anyone else, but, as a matter of fact, I was able to fall in love again with Barbara, because I’d been so happy with Lois.” I read his words over and over again, until the letters go fuzzy in front of my eyes and I fell into a doze, thinking they couldn't both be right, the chairman of Eastern Airways and Stevie Wonder. ## When we touch down on American soil, a fervent hallelujah wells up in my heart. I almost skip along labyrinthine airport corridors, teeming with rushing people. Big-busted women wearing navy blue uniforms, synched in by belts with bulky buckles, shout, “Get in liiiine.” I’ve done it. I’ve got myself across the pond. Hallelujah.

When we reach the immigration hall, the other passengers press their phones against their ears, so I switch on mine. Beep beep – message from the phone company in Philadelphia welcoming me to their services. Beep beep – message from Bertram Woodier. My stomach lurches as I press the buttons on my phone. My hallelujah wobbles.

I never used to text, until I met Bertram.

“R u here yet? Am @ Arrivals.” The great conductor, with the high brow and the white quiff, texts like a teenager; his – now very serious – daughters had taught him when they had still been normal schoolgirls, and he had taught me.

“Yes. Long queues though,” I punch out. I hesitate. I clear ‘though’ and replace it with ‘tho’.

My phone bleep-bleeps again. “Flight OK?” “Fine.” I nudge my handbag forward as we all move along immigration queue.

“Rehearsals rubbish. Soloist messed up Matthias Harp Concerto this am.”

“Sorry abt Matthias.” I'm slowed down by having to punch out the last word without predictive text, with the result that my phone makes a phlegmatic bleep at the same time as I click ‘Send’ and the little yellow envelope appears top of the screen.

“U still here?”

“Yes.” “Really glad u came darling."

“Me 2 darling.”

###

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Nathan E. Tavaras

MAGIC MIRROR

by Nathan E. Tavaras

Almost closing time, the park’s nearly empty. Parents amble by, spent from a day of screaming kids. I’m at my ride, the Magic Mirror, itching for a smoke, when a kid walks up.

I can see he’s disappointed. From the outside, the Magic Mirror looks like a beat-up roller coaster poking out from an old building of chipping blue paint.

“Just me,” he says.

I nod, letting him walk past.

I’ve seen whole groups head into the Mirror together. None of them look the same when they get out. A lot of them look confused. Some are laughing. Some are crying, not always out of happiness.

The anomaly’s been here just shy of forever. It pops up in legends, in fables. Some people write books trying to explain it. The Tree of Knowledge. A rip in space-time. A trick of smoke and mirrors. Forty years ago, New World Amusements came in and bought the island. Built the Magic Mirror, the ride that carries you just past the edge of the anomaly and back again. Then, they built the rest of the park. Set up the ferry from the mainland and started selling tickets. You’re only ever allowed to visit the park and the Mirror once. I don’t know how they keep track, but they do.

The kid climbs into the front row. I fire up the ride. Gears clanking, the car inches up, into the darkness, and whatever waits at the top.

I don’t know what he’ll see. I’ve never been inside. The one rule of the park is no employees on the Mirror.

Almost a year ago, Jill wandered out of the Mirror, late at night. She worked the archery booth, dressed up like Robin Hood, red ponytail trailing down her back. She was straight out of college, with a freckled nose, and green eyes that flashed, wild, when she laughed. I was eight years older than her. Stagnating. Living alone in a one-room apartment on the island that the company rents out to employees. Kissing her in the dunes made me feel like I was a kid, sneaking in quietly through her window, so her parents wouldn’t hear.

We’d walk the shore at night, stepping through thick reeds, telling each other stories.

“I left home to find myself,” Jill said. She grinned, rolling her eyes. “I know, I know.”

Normally, I would’ve made a dumb joke. Have you tried looking in your back pocket? But I just wanted her to keep looking at me, eyes laughing. I’m here because this is where my dad used to work. A less romantic

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story. Jill didn’t care. She dropped my hand. Then, she slipped out of her clothes. I don’t believe in anything, but seeing the curve of her bare hip against the water made me want to thank God. I told her I loved her when we both were lying in the sand, skin-chilled from the water. She said so, too. I tasted the ocean on her neck. We struggled into our clothes and walked off the beach, through the empty park. When we passed the Mirror, I caught a glint in her eye.

“Let’s go inside,” she said.

“No way,” I said. “They’ll find out.”

“Oh, come on.”

I watched Jill become a ghost. Squinting, like the sunlight hurt her eyes, shivering even in the heat. “If it’s that bad, why do you keep going back?” I asked her this on a walk one night after work. We barely walked together anymore.

“No, you don’t get it,” she said. Her voice was a gust of sand.

“The Mirror’s beautiful. It’s everything else that hurts too much.”

She left the next morning, the first ferry off the island. I guess staying here is my punishment. For sending her through the first time. For being less than whatever flash, whatever hazy dream she saw.

“Besides. Someone’s gotta work the ride.”

The kid that I sent alone into the Mirror walks out now, laughing. I’m glad he’s happy. Soon, the park closes. I’m home, alone.

Her eyes fell, defeated. I wanted to make her happy. Mostly, I never wanted her to stop kissing me the way she was kissing me. So I told her, “You should go.” Laughing, she climbed into the car. I hit the lever and watched her creep upwards.

Gears clanked too loudly in still air. When she got off the Mirror, she glowed. She looked lighter—spun of air. I didn’t care if I got canned, I was just happy that she felt so good.

Six months later, the Mirror breaks down mid-ride. Halfway to the top, the cars stop, then, jerk forward a few times. I jam buttons, but nothing happens. In the darkness, the passengers are quiet. Then, I hear thin wails. Maybe laughing, too. A car must’ve crossed over.

“What’d you see?”

She shook her head. “I can’t really say.”

I guess I was hurt that she didn’t want to share. We didn’t talk much the rest of the night.

Days later, I was still waiting to get fired. Nothing. So, we ended up back at the Mirror two more nights, after Jill begged.

Each time she walked out of the ride, she looked faded. Tired.

I stopped running it for her. Soon, she’d ride the Mirror on her lunch breaks, cutting lines, squishing into cars with visitors.

Other employees whispered. But no one stopped her.

Maintenance brings in ladders and helps people down. Two are missing. Some are crying. I’m not sure why.

The company closes the Magic Mirror after that. Then, the whole park a few weeks later. I’m the one to pull the lever one last time, leaving the cars at their top height, so no one else can ride the Mirror again.

I feel empty, like the passenger-less cars waiting on the incline. At night, I take the last ferry off the island. I start looking for a girl with green eyes, with skin that once tasted like the sea.

###

56

Diana Ferraro

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Puta y Luna (1929 - 1931)

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THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR by Diana Ferraro During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in which one of the varieties of the two Spains alluded in the Machado’s poem “Españolito que vienes al mundo” opposed, Republicans against Nationalists this time, many poets, like Antonio Machado himself, went to exile and others died, like Federico García Lorca, who was taken prisoner and shot. The tradition of violent civil struggles in Spain, inherited also by Latin America, has had in both places a distinctive trait: the finest artists, writers, and poets have always passionately taken sides and been active actors in every civil war while often, at the same time, befriending their artists colleagues. García Lorca, a Republican like Machado, noticed with irony that the intellectual and artists’ brotherhood belonged to a superior and invisible country in which political struggles had not a place. As the very close friend to José Antonio Primo de Rivera—an amateur poet himself—leader and founder of the Spanish Phalanx, the greatest inspiration for Nationalists and later executed by the Republican forces, García Lorca said: “José Antonio, another good guy. Do you know that every Friday I have dinner with him? We go out in a taxi with the blinds up, because it’s not convenient for him to be seen with me or to me to be seen with him!” But García Lorca, even if not an activist, was seen by the Nationalist right-wing forces as an enemy. When the war began, the author hid from the soldiers but he was soon found, dragged from a friend's house, and shot in Granada on August 19/20 of 1936 without trial. Antonio Machado wrote a poem about this terrible and unfair death, “El crimen fue en Granada,” a poem as moving as the poem García Lorca had written about a gipsy killed by the same intolerance that caused his own death, “Muerte de Antoñito El Camborio.”

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Diana Ferraro

Antonio Machado Antonio Machado was born in Seville and moved to Madrid at the age of eight. He studied in Paris where he worked as a translator, and met French poets. He became a schoolteacher. He returned to Spain and taught at Soria in Castile, from 1907, where he met his wife Leonor. Tragically she died very young, and in 1912 he left Soria for Baeza in Andalusia. Loyal to the Republic he left Spain for France when Catalonia fell, and died there in February 1939. He is acknowledged as Spain’s finest poet of the early twentieth century.

Federico García Lorca Spanish poet and dramatist, Lorca was a talented artist and a member of the 'Generation of 1927',a group of writers who advocated avant-gardism in literature. García Lorca read law at the

University of Granada. At the same time he studied music collaborating in the 1920s with Manuel de Falla, becoming an expert pianist and guitar player, which would explain the extradionary musicality of his poems and plays. Later in Madrid, he was the friend of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pablo eruda and also worked with Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel. As a writer García Lorca made his debut with 'Libro De Poemas' (1921), a collection of fablelike poems. In 1927 García Lorca gained fame with his romantic historical play Mariana Pineda where the scenery was constructed by Salavador Dali and the distinguished actress Margarita Xirgu played the heroine. By 1928, with the publication of the first Romancero Gitano he was the best-known of all Spanish poets, and leading member of the 'Generation of 27', which included Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti and others. In 1929-30 García Lorca lived in the city of New York and, after a short visit to Cuba, García Lorca was back in Spain by 1931, where he continued writing poems and plays until his death.

ANTONIO MACHADO Españolito que vienes al mundo Ya hay un español que quiere vivir y a vivir empieza, entre una España que muere y otra España que bosteza.

Españolito que vienes al mundo te guarde Dios. una de las dos Españas ha de helarte el corazón

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ANTONIO MACHADO You, little Spaniard, coming into this world There is a Spaniard who wants to live and starts to live between a Spain that dies and another Spain who yawns Little Spaniard who comes into this world may God bless you.

For one of the two Spains won't fail to freeze your heart.

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA From the Romancero Gitano: Muerte de Antoñito El Camborio (extracto) A José Antonio Rubio Sacristán Voces de muerte sonaron cerca del Guadalquivir.

Voces antiguas que cercan voz de clavel varonil.

Les clavó sobre las botas mordiscos de jabalí.

En la lucha daba saltos jabonados de delfín.

Bañó con sangre enemiga su corbata carmesí, pero eran cuatro puñales y tuvo que sucumbir.

Cuando las estrellas clavan rejones al agua gris, cuando los erales sueñan verónicas de alhelí, voces de muerte sonaron cerca del Guadalquivir.

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Diana Ferraro

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA From the “Gipsy Ballads” Death of Antoñito El Camborio(excerpt) To José Antonio Rubio Sacristán Voices from death sounded Close to the Guadalquivir Voices from old ages enclosing The manly carnation voice.

He nailed on their boots Wild boar bites.

In the fight he leaped, Soapy jumps of a dolphin.

He soaked his crimson tie With the enemy’s blood, But there were four daggers That he had to succumb.

When the stars stab spears Into the grey water bulls When the wheat fields dream Of a rescuing cape of wallflowers, Voices from death sounded Close to the Guadalquivir.

ANTONIO MACHADO EL CRIMEN FUE EN GRANADA: A FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA(Extracto) 1. El crimen Se le vio, caminando entre fusiles, por una calle larga, salir al campo frío, aún con estrellas de la madrugada.

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Mataron a Federico cuando la luz asomaba.

El pelotón de verdugos no osó mirarle la cara.

Todos cerraron los ojos; rezaron: ¡ni Dios te salva!

Muerto cayó Federico —sangre en la frente y plomo en las entrañas— ... Que fue en Granada el crimen sabed —¡pobre Granada!—, en su Granada.

ANTONIO MACHADO THE CRIME WAS IN GRENADE: TO FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA(Excerpt) 1. The Crime He was seen, walking among guns, On a long street Going out into the cold field under the dawn’s stars.

They killed Federico When daylight broke.

The firing squad, Did’t dare to stare at his face They all closed their eyes: They prayed: Not even God can save you!

Federico fell dead --blood on his forehead and lead on his heart.

Let be known, the crime was in Grenade—poor Grenade!— in his native Grenade.

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Heidi Heimler

García Lorca: POEMA DEL ANZUELO 1927

SNOWMAN by Heidi Heimler Elmira used to live where winter feasted on the weak, the unprepared.

After many years of battling the blustery beast, Elmira’s husband announced he’d had enough.

“Pack your bags, woman,” he told her, “We’re heading south.”

Elmira didn’t want to leave, but he gave her no choice. He bought a condo in a sunny development where everyone talked about gallstones and grandkids. Snow became a distant memory, a thing confined to the pint-sized black and white TV perched atop her kitchen table. She lit a cigarette and stared with longing at the minuscule set, its rabbit ears bent at peculiar angles. Despite the antennas, the screen showed nothing but snow. She liked it that way.

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Elmira’s husband, a Zeppelin on a battered recliner, hollered from the living room. His words dissolved into alphabet soup by the time they reached her ears, but she wouldn’t have answered anyway. Lost in the droning wonderment of snap-crackle nothingness, Elmira slipped into yesterday, into a world where Johnny lived.

Elmira loved life as Johnny’s only, but the bottle, a temptress he could not resist, beckoned, beguiled then abandoned him in a room with no windows, just bars. When the doors opened and Johnny came home, he swore he’d never stray again.

She loved him, she said, with a passion that curled toes. Still, it wouldn’t work. His past was a loathsome voyeur that never left, and she couldn’t bear a threesome. Johnny begged, cried, made promises; he even prayed. She played warden and locked herself in, him out. When he ran out of words, he shoved his feet into steel-toed boots and ran off, the flimsy screen door ricocheting behind him.

They found him the next day, a coiled fetus in the womb of a snow-filled ditch on County Road 57, frozen like Lot’s wife after she saw Sodom. Icicle tears hung from his eyes. His heart didn’t beat. Beautiful Johnny, with his untamed cowlick and mournful eyes, his image burned forever into the fissured flesh of her mind.

Hat pressed against his chest, the sheriff delivered the somber news. He handed Elmira a bag of souvenirs, modest mementos from his trip to Johnny’s Demise. She fingered a bundle of keys, a pair of weathered gloves, the silver lighter engraved with an eagle. “Looks like he ran out of gas,” the sheriff said. “Sorry, ma’am.”

When Elmira’s tears dried up, she married a man that everyone else liked. She let him plant his seed, as any wife would, but the kid, a pilot in a damaged plane, ejected prematurely. After a while, Elmira’s husband stopped tilling her soil, and Elmira was grateful.

In the evenings, Elmira would sit alone in the kitchen and tune into the snowstorm on her television. Soothed by perpetual static, she’d suck on smoke and bourbon, and wait for Johnny. When she’d drunk enough, he’d come to her.

And Johnny never strayed. ###

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Kim Teeple

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Sirena 1927

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FRECKLES

by Kim Teeple

The first time I saw him he was hunched over the bar and a beer bottle. He watched the people across the bar and I watched him. I noticed how sometimes he would mimic a small gesture; a slanted smile, a raised eyebrow, a hand sweeping through the air. The gestures were contagious, so I started doing it, too. I ran my hand through my hair, I tossed my head, I blinked. He noticed me and laughed. He said he was an actor and he ordered another round for both of us.

We meet at a beach. The air smells like BBQ and sun tan lotion. The lake smells like fish and green algae. He has freckles on his shoulders and a sunburn. He sits next to me on a towel and tells me stories about his life, about growing up in Kansas. I call him Toto. He says he’s more like the Cowardly Lion.

He sings with some guys, a swing band, on weekends. They play at weddings or in bars in the suburbs.

He says I should come and see them play sometime. “But,” he says, “I’m not that good.” He puts himself down but I get the feeling he doesn’t always believe what he says. We both grew up blue collar and you’re not supposed to brag. Don’t toot your own horn my dad used to tell me.

We meet at a restaurant. We meet at coffee shops. We meet at the bar. We meet for a walk through my old neighborhood where I grew up and I point out where I smoked my first cigarette, and the house where there was a murder. I tell him how I snuck in when no one lived there anymore and saw blood on the carpet. He tells me he’s married.

I like watching him walk. He walks like a sailor, like Popeye.

I go see him in a community play. The play is by Mamet and all of the characters are angry. He throws a chair in the play and I see this whole other side of him.

I tell him I’m fond of him. I’m careful to never say love.

We walk through a city park in autumn. We walk through fallen leaves and I notice the freckles on his arm are the exact same color as the leaves. I want to hang on to this moment because in my life, things are never big like they are in the movies or books. ###

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Tobi Cogswell

Don’t Even Think About It for Owen, who will always be protected Rosemary grows up the side of the wall.

In wind that gains speed it makes haunted house noises, scares the boy from sleep. His dreams of pirates and planets momentarily come to a screeching halt. His brain tries to catalog the sounds, thinks only of the ghosts under the bed that haven’t plagued him in years. He is three again. His mother, smart in the ways of monsters, squirts green-dyed water under the bed. His father yells at the foolishness, tells him to grow up.

Such is the way of customs in this house; protection from one,

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humiliation from the loud other.

This is why he has a horseshoe-shaped scar.

The mother bullied to not have it stitched, the boy scared witless by the thought that he would be tied down and “sewn up”, by monster doctors like the ones under his bed. It’s not always true that two parents are best for a child. One heart fearless enough to slay every dragon is all that he needs.

Tobi Cogswell

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Holly Day

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Muerto de Amor, 1930

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The Haunting I threw the stool at the window, smashed glass All over the front yard. I threw the baby's diapers At the wall, covered the white paint with streaks Of yellow crap. The breakfast dishes joined the glass And the stool in the front yard, the uneaten eggs The cracked coffee cups, the curled, brown pieces Of burnt bacon. I screamed and screamed And tore holes in the unfolded laundry My husband's tube socks, the piles of too-briefly-clean Cloth diapers. "Is this all there is?" I heard Myself saying, over and over. "Is this All there is?"

When the police came, I was asleep on the couch The baby safe and quiet in my arms The two of us wrapped, picture-perfect In a single, clean, warm blanket.

"A ghost did it," I whispered when they asked What had happened. "A ghost got in here And ruined everything."

Holly Day

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Tom Sheehan

García Lorca: ¡Ecce Homo! 1927

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Korean Echo My turn had come; Billy Pigg, helmet lost, shrapnel alive in him, blood free as air, dying in my arms.

Billy asked a blessing, had none since birth. My canteen came his font. Then he said, “I never loved anybody.

Can I love you?”

My father told me, his turn long gone downhill; “Keep water near you, always.”

He thought I’d be a priest before all this was over, not a lover.

Tom Sheehan

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W. F. Lantry

GarcĂ­a Lorca: Teorema Del Jarro, 1927

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Ocotillo Wells White exoskeletons of scorpions litter the ground, shed skins of rattlesnakes, a tarantella's cast off carapace: the signs of transformed life are everywhere, even in this scorched-stone-cindered place.

The dried stalk of a bloomed agave shakes its seed in pods, but at the narrow tip small plantlets form, and when the east winds whip their stalks diagonal, they let go, sail a little ways, and land, setting down roots.

Here every seed and stem falls on the bare infertile stone, yet walking cactus shoots rise tall as men, until root frameworks fail, but where they fall, rent branches send out growth which thrives and flowers here, confirming both the death and resurrection of the lost.

Thorned ocotillos lift their slender red blossoms, like trumpets, through the desert air, and even in the worst heat, merely spread their arms a little wider, when they're tossed by winds, the long hands barely move, endure both drought and frost as if they were a pure image, now rose and green, once scaly gray, of what will be again, if we could gaze outside of time, if we could, patient, stare across the winter's heat and summer's haze and wait, persistent, for that single day when ocotillos' flowering begins.

W. F. Lantry

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James Claffey

The Dancer, Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick, 2010

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RARE GLIMPSE

by James Claffey

The Old Man travels home on the ferry from Stranraer, catching the night train in Belfast and arriving in time for breakfast. Mam is grilling Denny sausages and Galtee rashers to beat the band before he’s taken his pea coat off.

“Come here to me, son,” he cries, sweeping me off my feet and dangling me upside down, my hair brushing the linoleum. “Did you miss your Da? Did you?”

“I did, Da. Yes.” I can smell the whiskey mixed with his Old Spice aftershave even from my distant position near the ground. After righting me and giving my shoulder a squeeze he dances me around the kitchen table singing Percy French’s, “The Mountains of Mourne.” Embarrassed, I wriggle out of his grip and plunk myself down at my chair, tipping the cornflakes into the bowl and trying hard to ignore his good mood.

“Arrah, you’ll dance with your ould fella,” he says to Mam, and drags her away from the cooker by the apron.

“Jesus, I’ll be dug out of you if the sausages are burnt,” she says.

“Give us a kiss.” The Old Man purses his lips and waits for Mam to give in. She shakes her head and laughs, kissing him on his bumpy nose. His hand lands on her bottom and Mam yelps like the neighbor’s poodle, the Old Man grins at her, one eyebrow raised.

“You’re a disgrace,” she says, smoothing the apron and returning to the sizzling pan on the cooker top.

Their good mood fills the kitchen, mixing with the smell of the frying rashers and sausages, and I wonder how long it’ll be before the mirage fades and the Old Man puts a lick on me with his belt, or yells at Mam for something stupid. In the meantime their happiness plays out through the fringe of hair hanging in front of my eyes. ###

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Bill West

Louis Comfort Tiffany

from Jelly Jars to Stained Glass by Bill West

This year Tiffany celebrate 175 years of trade and they will focus on their original core business as jewellers. But in the 1950s and 1960s the retrospective focus was on Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848 – 1933) for his contribution to art and design and in particular Tiffany's influence and innovation in the movement Art Nouveau.

Clara Driscoll was the supervisor of the so-called "Tiffany Girls", a team of talented craftswomen. What was not known until recently was that Clara was the designer of some of the most successful Tiffany lamps, such as the daffodil lamp (above) and the dragonfly lamp which had won a prize at the 1900 World’s Fair.

Previously these designs had been attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany. Driscoll had studied design at the Metropolitan Museum Art School and for 20 years was employed by the Tifffany Studios.

Louis wanted to be a painter. He studied landscape and was attracted to European avant-garde artists such as Léon Auguste Adolphe Belly, a French landscape painter and Orientalist. Also, from a young age Louis liked to travel through Europe and Asia and was captivated and inspired by medieval stained glass and Islamic ornamentation.

Early seeds of his passion for the kind of sensory overload which would eventually lead to his Romano Byzantine chapel designed for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. This chapel secured his reputation when it was awarded 54 medals.

In addition to his delight in line and colour he was fascinated by light, seeking luminescence in his watercolours. He made a study of glass and the different ways glass could appear lit from within. He spent 30 years of his life attempting to create different qualities in glass such as ancient Roman glass that had been denatured through wear and age. He wanted to manufacture new what only age could produce. It was a science and technique in the glass industry that he found lacking in modern glass making in the States and so it was to Europe and in particular the glass-makers of Stourbridge in England that he turned to. Stourbridge is an area with a 500 year history of glass making. A place that later seeded

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some of the most successful glass making industries we have today.

Although Tiffany is remembered for his stained glass windows and his vividly coloured leaded glass lamps this was not his sole aim or product. These were just elements of that sensory overload that he sought to create for his wealthy clients. He pursued these effects on many fronts.

As a painter Louis knew how to layer colours on canvas to give depth of tone. With glass he did something similar by layering different coloured glasses to achieve depth, a process called plating and a significant technical and artistic innovation.

Following in the tradition of the Arts & Crafts movement of William Morris in England he sought to bring together in a vast workshop an army of craftsmen and women representing every relevant technique; glass makers, enamellers, embroiderers, weavers, case makers, carvers, gilders, jewellers and cabinet makers – all working under his direction to fulfil his design brief.

Glass-makers like Arthur J. Nash, a talented glass blower from Stourbridge and Clara Driscoll the designer of the famous Daffodil lamp were attracted to Tiffany because he allowed them to develop their skills in a company of artists rather than simply as employees.

Tiffany oversaw the work, encouraging whatever fitted his vision for a project, reputedly smashing any work that fell short of that vision. And indeed, any glass item that remained unsold was likely to be smashed, glass returning to the “mix.” Tiffany produced complete interiors including architectural elements such as staircases, bronze windows, mosaics, frescoes and mural paintings, marble inlaying and sumptuous wall hangings in meticulous detail even down to the specific patina effect on metalwork and specific instructions on the reapplication of treatments to maintain the desired effects. His workshops produced quality bespoke interiors.

As well as work for the wealthy and influential such as work in the White House for President Chester Alan Arthur there was also a great demand for innovative stained glass to meet an up-swell in demand for ecclesiastical buildings following the Civil War. Louis oversaw the reclamation of centuries-old glass production techniques, patenting different glass products such as the use of metal oxide as a glass colourant and the techniques to produce wrinkled or folded glass surfaces, iridescent glass and 'Lava' glass with a roughened surface. Nash, a talented glass-blower finally produced 'Cypriote' glass, to emulate that same opaque and pitted glass inspired by the ancient Roman glass mentioned earlier. More famous was the so-called “Favrile” glass, a name derived from the Old English word fabrile, meaning "hand-wrought" and renamed by Louis to sound fashionable.

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Bill West Tiffany was not a William Morris yearning for some utopian past. He was happy to seek out the new. In 1885 he worked with Thomas Edison to produce the world's first decorative electric stage lighting for the Lyceum Theatre, New York to stunning effect. Perhaps this, and his ecclesiastical work, is where Louis came closest to making art accessible to common people.

Bronze lamp with leaded glass shade. Tiffany lamps were often made from pieces ofglass discarded from stained glass window work to be re-cut and combined in new and creative ways to produce these stunning designs.

But Louis Comfort Tiffany was too closely aligned to the Art Nouveau movement. In the 1920s when tastes changed he fell out of favour. With the advent of modernity and a movement towards the unadorned and geometric forms of Bauhaus Louis withdrew leaving a vivid but dispersed legacy.

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Shropshire Voices “Juan Lopez and John Ward� by Jorge Luis Borges is a fine poem that sums up that period for me. It reminds me of Strange Meeting (about WW1) by Wilfred Owen, who lived in my home town, Shrewsbury in Shropshire and went to the same school my sons attended: Strange Meeting It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

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Then ,as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'

'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled, Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now...'

Wilfred Owen (1893 1918) Owen's work expresses his anger at the cruelty and waste that war inflicts and it is these words, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend” that appear on his peace memorial in the grounds of Shrewsbury Abbey.

I share Owen's anger, as did Shropshire rose grower Hilda Murrell who was an inspired peace protester. It was she who inspired Labour politician Tam Dalyell who in turn was such a thorn in the side of Margaret Thatcher regarding the sinking of the cruiser General Belgrano by the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror on 2 May 1982, with the loss of 321 Argentine lives. Murrell's nephew Robert Green is reported as having intimate knowledge of the details around the Belgrano’s sinking.

At a time of new austerity, when the sabres start to rattle once more and embattled leaders seek their “Thatcher moment” we should celebrate the words of Borges and Owen and seek their truth. © West 2012

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I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

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Alejandra Tuninetti

Una Antigua Casona de Campo

by

Alejandra Tuninetti

Translation: Marie Fitzpatrick Como diría Marcel Proust, los olores nos traen recuerdos, recuerdos de momentos pasados e irrepetibles, pequeños cuadros en el tiempo, perdidos y reencontrados.

Inspiro y cerrando los ojos siento olor a ropa de cama limpia, fresca y recién planchada, apilada y ordenada en el cuarto de trabajo de la señora Virginia, de techos obscuros y altos, suelos de barro cocido y paredes blancas, austeras, monacales.

Muebles antiguos, algunos bellísimos en su rusticidad, otros, joyas refinadas traídas por algún antepasado marino. Mesas imponentes, candelabros antiguos, altas y esbeltas ventanas.

La señora Virginia, frágil y fuerte, sencilla y altanera, rostro de Virgen granadina, es la heredera de una tradición de campo estoico, de campo de animales y tabaco, frutos y cereales.

El Cortijo fue restaurado allá por el 1800 por un "cura rico". Venía ya de la herencia de la familia Almagro, que acompañó a los Reyes Católicos en la reconquista de Granada. Las tierras de la Vega fueron su recompensa. Una traza de la herencia mora : naranjos plantados por debajo de grandes palmeras, para que éstas los protejan de los rigores del invierno.

Guardan recuerdos estos patios de piedra, los pasillos soleados, las despensas y los secaderos, los campos abiertos, guardan recuerdos de mujeres con pañuelos negros cubriendo sus cabezas, hombres de sombrero de paja y casaca campesina, de manos rudas y nudosas como ramas.

Las manos de la señora Virginia ágiles y tranparentes, repitiendo gestos antiguos, doblar, coser, hacer compotas, mermeladas, lomo en orza ... Las manos de su hija repitiendo gestos pasados, arando, sembrando, recogiendo ... Virginia fuerte cuando hubo que levantar las suertes de casa, amenazada por el desastre. Sus hijas, torreones en torno suyo. Con trabajo y tesón salieron adelante.

Virginia fuerte cuando se enfrentó a la muerte de aquél que fuera el amor de su vida, -:" Un hombre muy bueno, buenísimo, que supo educar a mis hijos" Virginia frágil cuando de pequeña, según una creencia popular arraigada, no le permitían usar la mano izquierda siendo zurda. -:"Mi padre dijo que eran tonterías ¡Dejad a la niña en paz!". Era aquella España del posguerra furiosamente católica, obtusa, dogmática y brutal. De pequeña no le permitía la madre a Virginia

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merendar fuera de la casa para que los niños que no tenían qué comer no pudieran sentirse humillados, además de hambrientos.

Hambre. El padre de Virginia , hombre bueno, daba la sobra de las cosechas a los que tenían hambre en aquella España negra.

España negra y roja, soleada y sangrienta.

España de Federico ... Virginita fue interna a las mojas. : "Unas monjas cultas, severas, que me enseñaron el valor del esfuerzo y la disciplina...eran así esos tiempos".

Virginia moza en flor .Su padre, rara excepción a la regla de una sociedad profundamente machista, le permitió sacarse el carnet de conducir. ¡Una mujer!.. Vaya barbaridad ...

Virginia nos ofrece café con leche y unas rosquillas fritas mientras charlamos. Por la ventana, los campos de maíz que empieza a crecer. Un bonito día de sol. Se oyen voces infantiles por los jardines. Silencio fresco por las altas escaleras y los pasillos. # Profundamente telúrico, femenino, el arraigo de estas mujeres a la antigua casona de campo, a sus raíces espirituales profundas y obscuras como las de los árboles añosos que rodean la finca. Al alejarnos por el camino bordeado de árboles, nuestro automóvil levanta una nube de polvo que rodea nuestra última visión de la casona, a lo lejos...Cortijo del Pino.

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An Old Field House

(Translation Marie Fitzpatrick) As Marcel Proust said, the smells bring memories, memories of past moments, unrepeatable, small boxes at the time, lost and rediscovered.

Inspired by smell I feel clean, fresh and freshly ironed linen stacked and sorted in the laundry room; one of dark and high ceilings, white, austere monastic walls and terracotta floors. Antique furniture,

beautiful in its rusticity; refined jewelry brought here by a marine ancestor. Imposing tables, antique chandeliers, high and slender windows.

The Lady Virginia, fragile and strong, simple and haughty her face that of the Granada Virgin, is heir to a tradition of stoic fieldwork in fields of animals and tobacco, fruit and cereals. This farmhouse was restored here in the 1800s by a 'rich priest'. It came from the inheritance of the family Almagro, who accompanied the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs. The lands of the Vega were their reward. And there still exists traces of this Moorish heritage: Orange trees planted under large Palm, so that they are protected from the rigors of the winter. Memories are stored in these sunny corridors, in the pantries and the barns, in the open fields; memories of women with scarves covering their heads, men with straw hats and peasant jackets, their hands, rough and gnarled like branches.

The agile hands of Lady Virginia repeats the ancient gestures, folding, sewing, making compotes, jams, pork loin in keel ... The hands of her daughter repeating past gestures: plowing, sowing, gathering ...

Virginia strong when it was necessary to raise the luck of the House that was threatened by the disaster. Her daughters, like turrets around her helped and with hard work and determination they went forward.

Virginia: strong when faced with the death of the love of her life,-: 'A very good man that knew how to educate my children. ' Virginia who when small -- according to a popular belief deeply rooted -- was not allowed use her left hand. -:'My father said that it were nonsense, leave the girl alone!'. But it was that the post-war Catholic obtuse, dogmatic and brutal Spain. Virginia who when small was not allowed to snack outside the house, so that children who did not have enough to eat would not be humiliated in addition to being hungry. Her father, a good man, gave his excess harvest to those who were hungry in that black Spain.

Black and red, sunny and bloody Spain. Federico's Spain: "A few severe nuns educated me, showed me the value of effort and discipline ... those were the times." Virginia, a girl in flower. Her father being a rare exception to the rule of this macho society allowed her to get a driving license. A woman!.. Go barbarity.

Virginia offered us cafe con leche and fried donuts while we chatted. Through the window, the fields of

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corn were beginning to grow. It's a nice sunny day. One can hear children's voices in the gardens. And fresh silence by the high stairs and in the corridors. # Earthy and deeply feminine these women are rooted, in this old house, in this countryside; their spiritual roots are as deep and obscure as those of the trees that surround the farm. We leave through the tree-lined avenue, our car raises a trail-of-dust that surrounds our final view of this large house in the distance: Cortijo of the Pino, Cortijo of the Pine.

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Marion Clarke

Lough Reflections The wind runs in ripples along Carlingford Lough, a shadow cast by a flock of invisible birds. On the shore, strands of kelp wave and flip in the briny breeze, like the fat brown eels of my rock pool childhood.

For a second, I hear the excited cries of my brothers and sisters and catch a glimpse of my smiling father, leaning over the beach wall to call us for lunch; I hug myself at the memory before it is bundled up and stolen by the breeze precious stones ... my tears saltier than all the sea air Marion Clarke

"For both my writing and artwork, I tend to draw upon memories of my childhood growing up on the shores of Carlingford Lough. A lot of my early life was spent on Warrenpoint beach, where my siblings and I pottered in rockpools and fished for crabs from the pier opposite my parents' house."

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A fresh start A hanging gannet eyes-up breakfast, sunshine strains in a bruised blue sky.

Dirty waves stumble, nudging each other in an empty game of rough and tumble.

The rock pools are derelict.

No more eels to expose in a stone-flip, no waving anemones that turn to pulp-buttons at a poke.

Precious stones of a rock pool childhood, dulled by time, engraved with memories.

Sulking clouds separate; the sun swaggers on warming cockles and mussels, dribbling slithers of light.

Seagulls and children squeal their appreciation, all is a-flutter, bunting high-fives the wind, tiny leaves tremble on manicured hedges, delphiniums take a bow, encouraged by sea breeze.

On the whitewashed swimming baths a flag strains on its pole.

It bulges with newness and possibility.

Marion Clarke

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Marion Clarke

Parque, 1935-1936

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The Lough Series stormy lough ... streetlights on the seafront lit by sunrise blues on the bay ... harmonicas and sunshine on every corner August heatwave – even the festival flags wilting turning tide ... my sandals dangling shifting sand ... the hermit crab inspects a larger shell coffee and Danish – the Mournes dusted with snow Marion Clarke

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THIS ISSUE: Managing Editor M. Lynam Fitzpatrick

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Senior Editor Bill West

Hosting: Provided by ddWebsites.com Design © TheLinnetsWings.org 2012

Editors for Review ENGLISH Ramon Collins Nonnie Augustine Yvette Wielhouwer

Founded, in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, in 2007 Publisher: M. Lynam Fitzpatick Published by The Linnet's Wings

SPANISH Diana Ferraro Alejandra Tuninetti Marie Fitzpatrick

Front Cover: View of the Alhambre from the Mirador de San Nicolás

Consulting on Copy Digby Beaumont Spanish Translations Diana Ferraro Alejandra Tuninetti Marie Fitzpatrick Contributing Editors Martin Heavisides Consulting on Photography Maia Cavelli Database Design and Management Peter Gilkes Ireland Office: Ard na Cuain, Dromod, Co. Leitrim Spain Office: Motril, Granada, Andalucía ISBN-13: 978-1477604625

Ireland Office: Dromod, Co. Leitrim Spain Office: Motril, Granada, AndalucĂ­a