Distance Zine

distance

i

distance

distance

The Madison Review

Berkeley Fiction Review

Editors Hannah Kekst Matthew Bettencourt Nina Boals Sam Wood Tim Sands

Managing Editors Aaron Saliman Isabel Hinchliff Julia Cheunkarndee Liam Magee

Associate Editors Ellie Johnson Griffin Emerson Kora Quinn Madeline Mitchell Milly Timm Staff Eleanor Bangs Esmeralda Rios Ev Poehlman Matthew Rivard Nadia Tijan Rhianna Prine

Lead Editors Catherine Ly Clary Ahn Kasandra Tapia Noah Hernandez Assistant Editors Conrad Loyer Emily Zakevosyan Julianne Han

distance

distance

Table of Contents Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer | Deep Scattering Layer

Anadromy Hannah Blaser Gott | Radial-capatellar joint fracture

Mouthguard Allison Field Bell | Sometimes our Bodies Fail Us Slawka G. Scarso | Stromboli by Night Steve Castro| Mesopotamia

2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Contributor Biographies

16

distance

Deep Scattering Layer

Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer our support group meets on Zoom and most weeks we talk about insurance raising children making dinner pulling the car over to cry most weeks the group is smaller than it used to be don’t say it we already know we know I know I need to — I know the outcomes are poor — I know it isn’t right — I know Medicaid might not — I know my daughter needs me — I know nobody makes it out of the world alive — I know the numbers — I know you’ve probably already tried — I know — — six thousand million tons of lanternfish like a photoporous blanket are heaving against the false bottom of the world and eating sonar alive I wish I didn’t know anything else I wish we had heard the undulating echo and gasped and reeled in our lines I wish there is no rock bottom past where the deep scattering layer breathes its way to sleep I don’t want to know if it ever gets dark I trust the lanternfish are all I need to see glowing like the earth’s most fireflies maybe there is no abyssopelagic night maybe there are just six billion trillion bottomless tons of lanternfish like coins in a wishing well like whale fall they keep sinking down and down and down and all along the way there’s light.

2

distance

3

distance

Anadromy

Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer I eat water — then salt — then water.

This is an ugly way to live and it makes me ugly This way my kidneys pulse like a heart I remember the taste of birth in my mouth Electrolyte shock — osmote — recompose I don’t — then drink — and then I don’t. mad with latent change I

climbed the dam swam to the

natal salt marsh maws now my body won spans the wide river

where ursus snaps meet the waters

where my daughters teem speed is a relative

many of us never reached the deeps seined unsalted silver

that the sea denies lamina of mineral salts however right

can’t alone sustain an animal edit irrevocably my tissue — maim — revise

weep when commanded by the tide ergo I live until I lose my mind

contorted sockeye ogre deliver is the perfect chiral

anadrome of reviled deified backwards however

remains deified I am bringing something back from this Even if it is only phosphorous Even if I die

4

distance

5

distance

Radial-capatellar joint fracture Hannah Blaser Gott

To break an elbow is no serious thing: a crack through the bone like a split in the ice. February falls on my shoulders, and I bear the burden of blood heavier than before. If I was born into sin, the snow only buries me deeper in darkness.

To heal a broken elbow requires a simple regimen of wrist movements. Among the turns and bends and winces of pain, I am assured of a full healing, but to heal is a soundness too self-assured to comprehend.

I am anxious even in my dreams. You sit across from me, silent in your knowledge of what comes after-life. I think of wooden body-homes buried underground and I cry.

6

distance

7

distance

Mouthguard

Hannah Blaser Gott I am jealous of your mouthguard.

(So jealous that you didn’t wear it for three years.) Tonight, I watch you pluck it from the jar, fit it to your teeth.

I think of the smoothness, how it was made for you. I have a desire to kiss you, right here, right now, but I run my tongue over my own teeth instead, in consolation: angry, jealous, betrayed. Love is like this sometimes. I am like this even more.

8

distance

9

distance

Sometimes Our Bodies Fail Us Allison Field Bell

It’s dawn and I should not call my father. I had the dream again: he’s twenty-two—my age—and he’s driving from New York to California.

A 1960’s Volkswagen with bucket seats, which I always took to mean actual buckets—plastic five gallons like the ones with the sea salt I used to sell at the aquarium store. “No heater either,” he told me. Bucket seats and no heater. So, in the winter, he used a candle. A candle in a car in the winter in New York. And the dream’s just that: the car, the winter, the salt buckets, my father.

And now it’s a few minutes into dawn—the sun’s pushing strips of copper light through the blinds—and I’m thinking maybe I should call him. “Hi,” I’d say. “Just checking up on you, Dad.” The kid in the beetle hauling across the country.

“Open spaces,” he told me. More than anything, he had wanted open spaces. Uninterrupted sky and great swaths of field. No more brownstones or street hockey played between city blocks. I still think the hockey idea is fantastic—hockey and baseball and, pause the game when there’s traffic. Or piss behind a parked car in that way learned by all Brooklyn boys of a certain age. He showed my brother once: lean in, casual, nothing wrong with being human, Danny. Sometimes our bodies are just bodies, Danny.

My father moved away from all that for open spaces. And for sounds too. Can you imagine moving away from a place for sounds? No more sounds at night! Can you imagine living where there were always only city sounds. Sirens and car horns and drunk men and goddamn, the smell on garbage day. But here, he can breathe, he said. Here, it’s all ocean sweeping from shore to orchard to the little house on Hessel road. Coast-cooled nights..

10

distance

I should call him. But in California it’s not yet dawn and I’m the one in Brooklyn now. I should tell him about the dream. Him driving the same roads I know and drove last summer by myself. Endless flat Texas hell, Alabama thunderstorm, Swampy New Orleans Sazerac. The dream’s nice, actually. But I’m still afraid. Afraid because of what my mother told me about the doctor—the thing my father should tell me about but won’t.

“Nothing wrong with being human,” I would tell him. Sometimes our bodies fail us.

11

distance

Stromboli by Night Slawka G. Scarso

As we leave the village, headlamps pointing at the ground in front of us, I can smell broom. Even in the darkness, I can picture it: yellow and thick, the way children paint the sun. But I don’t mention it to you.

The slope is gentle, at first, the path clean, and I sense delicate, ephemeral caper flowers, and wild fennel. But I don’t make you notice, like I usually would.

As we move on the uneven path, carved on the sides of Stromboli’s crater, I don’t tell you to mind your step when I find a rock in the middle. Instead, I feel an unsettling relief, when I hear you trip; and disappointment, when a stranger behind you saves you. I hear you saying Oops, I almost fell, and that nervous laugh of yours that I used to find endearing, but I don’t ask whether you’re ok.

I don’t mention the first time the wind brings the heat, a waft of hot air, like an oven opened to check a steaming pie. Nor the second.

I don’t tell you we’re almost there.

And I don’t point at the little boats, a constellation of lights on the surface of the water, watching us.

I walk on, and I walk up, among the dry-stone walls, the terraced plots, and then the weeds, the ferns, the lichens, the heat coming stronger and stronger with the wind, till there are no more weeds, no more ferns, no more lichens: we are there. We watch the rocks, freshly ejected from this rift in the earth, roaring, rolling above the lava and into the sea; plunging in the water, splashing steam.

With the corner of my eye, I see you standing right on the edge of the flowing lava, our guide telling you to be careful.

12

distance

‘What’s wrong?’ you whisper, and when you turn, your headlamp is not pointing at my face, but at my feet. That’s how I know you already know, even before I pull out the note I found in your jacket when you went to book this tour in the village, even before you find the courage to point at it: Usual place? Usual time? it says, in round, youthful, joyful letters so unlike my hasty, messy writing.

13

distance

Mesopotamia Steve Castro

He was wearing the state of Texas around his neck.

“What part of Tejas are you from?” I asked.

I’m from Hawai’i, he answered.

As the awkward silence ensued, he asked, You must love Bucharest?

I was wearing the city of Bucharest on both wrists.

“I’ve never been to Romania,” I confessed.

“I live in Indiana,” I said, sticking my tongue out and showing him an Indiana Hoosier’s logo tattoo.

He then flipped over his left eyelid, and showed me an H. He then flipped over his right eyelid, and showed me an I. “Guess which Central American city I have in my coat pocket?” I asked.

In response, he took off his top hat & grinned. There it was, on top of his head Babylon, the ancient capital city of the great Babylonian empire.

14

distance

15

distance

Contributors Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals that include The Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, The Cincinnati Review, Ruminate, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and others. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Originally from rural Illinois, Hannah Blaser Gott earned degrees in Creative Writing and Communication from St. Ambrose University.

She currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin, where she enjoys writing, hiking, trivia, and board games. Her poems and creative nonfiction pieces have appeared in the 2015, ‘16, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, and ‘21 editions of Quercus, 3Elements Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Alternating Currents Press, and Sad Girls Club. She was a 2021 finalist in the Midwest Writing Center’s Foster-Stahl Chapbook series.

Slawka G. Scarso has published several books on wine in Italy and works as a copywriter and translator. Her short fiction has appeared/is forthcoming in Mslexia, Ellipsis Zine, Fractured Lit, Entropy and others.

She’s currently based between Rome and Milan and is submitting her first crime novel.

Steve Castro’s poetry is forthcoming in Salamander; SLICE Magazine; Até Mais: An anthology of Latinx Futurisms. Regarding his 2019 debut poetry collection, Blue Whale Phenomena (Otis Books), Richard Cecil wrote, “Read this collection twice: the first time for its flashes of wit, and the second time for its surface-piercing vision.”

Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer (he/him and she/her) is a biologist, ecologist, and poet. Thomas received his BA from Marlboro College and lives in Marlboro, Vermont. Her work has recently appeared in Tiny Seed Literary Magazine, GenControlZ Magazine, The Madrigal, and Plants and Poetry Journal.

16

distance

17

distance

Allison Field Bell Hannah Blaser Gott Slawka G. Scarso Steve Castro Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer

18