Virginia Literary Review: Spring 2023

VLR

VIRGINIA

LITERARY

REVIEW

Spring 2023 / Volume 45 / Number 2

The Virginia Literary Review www.vlronline.com vlreditor@gmail.com Spring 2023 Staff Editor-in-Chief Ella Dailey Production Manager Miriella Jiffar Poetry Editors Emma Gorman Ellaina Jung Mia Tan Prose Editors Sofia Heartney Stasia Winslow Art Editors Katie Huffman Isabel O’Connor

Founded in 1979, the VLR is published twice a year in the fall and spring. The review staff considers literary and visual art submissions from individuals at Virginia colleges and universities during the first three-quarters of each term. For more information, please visit: www.vlronline.com Copyright 2023. No material may be recorded or quoted, other than for review purposes, without the permission of the artists, to whom all rights revert after the first serial publication.

Although this organization has members who are University of Virginia students and may have University employees associated or engaged in its activities and affairs, the organization is not a part of or an agency of the University. It is a separate and independent organization which is responsible for and manages its own activities and affairs. The University does not direct, supervise or control the organization and is not responsible for the organization’s contracts, acts or omissions.

Contents / Spring 2023 Poetry 6 / The Mystes 13 / Raspberry Picking 22 / Glow Stars 44 / Wishing for the Night Train 48 / My mind the aquarium 56 / Anaxarete

Jeffery Huang Emma Lally Claire Huchthausen Adam Stevenson April Navarro Jeffery Huang

Prose 10 / Mean Girl Friend Protection Racket 14 / Poplar Springs Courtyard 18 / Magnus 21 / Theatrics 23 / Somewhere to Nowhere 32 / The World Fair 33 / roots 40 / Nineteen 46 / Deathbed Confessions 50 / The Ram in the Thicket

Jaime Goh April Navarro H. Cannon Slayton Emily Hall Wren Opela April Navarro Anneliese Thomas Haylee Ressa Hayley Davis Aaron Osborne

Visual Art Cover / Drawing Studio Window 8 / Conversations 1 9 / Conversations 2 16 / Untitled 20 / Lust and Protest 31 / Goldfish on Paper 39 / The Portrait of a Mother 49 / The Crazy Ex 57 / Drawing for a Friend

Madison Hinton Gabriela Gutierrez Gabriela Gutierrez Lilah Kimble Madison Hinton Maha Momtaz Gabriela Gutierrez Maha Momtaz Wells Woolcott

The Mystes I sought only (“only”!) to be disenchanted, only (“only”!) to be disencumbered, only (“only”!) to be disenthralled.

To that end did I slit the throat of a screaming swine and let the earth imbibe its blood and the sky inspire its smoke; to that end did I wash myself of myself in the plashing waters of Ilissos; to that end did I set forth on that path open only to the untraveled, that path paved with the prints of virgin feet; to that end did I add my voice to the Mother’s as she cried and called for her child,

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her Kore, the Maiden; to that end did I starve myself, my inanition— hateful vestige of my bodily being— kindling for the fire of the kykeon.

Yet, in the end, what I discovered within the heart of the Telesterion proved only (“only”!) to be an enchantment, an encumbrance, a thralldom all its own.

Jeffery Huang

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Mean Girl Friend Protection Racket When Gail joined our class, she introduced herself in an accent exactly the same as mine, or at least the one I’d labored tirelessly to destroy. From then on everyone expected us to be best friends. Sister Celeste simply plopped this lanky, moon-faced creature down in the chair beside me, hissed help her adjust in my ear, and that was that—partnered by desk, partnered for life.

I only acquiesced to these fascistic machinations because I needed someone to accompany me on toilet breaks. For schoolgirls going to the bathroom is a communal activity; to perform your daily ablutions alone is perverse and godless behavior. With each passing day new connections are midwifed through a stall door.

Even so, it is difficult to explain how we grew so close so quickly. By the time we graduated middle school, our bathroom clique had expanded to encompass Patricia and Xinyue, then Adithi and finally Bea. But none of them could dream of having what Gail and I had. It was like she’d answered a vanity ad I had pinned up long ago and forgotten about, saying hello, I’m here, are you like me?

I had known since I was six that my principal sin was Envy, but only after Gail and I started hooking up did I discover just how much there was to sin about.

Throughout our sophomore summer, Gail pivoted back and forth between ascetic Christian temperance and manic predatory sluttiness. She said the novelty kept her metabolism on its toes, helped her digest the protein bars she ate in lieu of meals.

She said it healed her somewhat, being out in the wild wet wilderness, untethered from the suffocating metropole of her parents and six stepsiblings. I was happy to play field physician. Gail was built like a shrinkwrapped mattress, her flesh soft and sighing, her bones steel coils designed to be crushed over and over unto eternity, and to spring back every time.

Afterwards, we would sprawl out over the dew-kissed grass, nude and numbed by my mother’s prescription anxiolytics, mesmerized by the mosquitoes drinking from the pale meat of our thighs. We spoke, mainly, of ourselves. Often it felt like there was no other subject worth the breath. This was the year we delved into self-diagnosis, so enamored were we with the prospect of every action we took being predetermined not by divine commandment but by some custom-made alchemical cocktail sloshing around in our skulls. Our astrology was clinically backed.

The girl code is very simple. You don’t have to like whomever your friends like. You do, however, have to hate whomever they hate. As a result of this rule, I have an encyclopaedic memory for slights both real and perceived. It goes all the way back to the cradle. I have never, for instance, forgotten my aunt ashing out her cigarette on the plastic crocodile of my safari-themed crib mobile—it brings my 10 / VLR

mother immeasurable satisfaction to hear me recount the tale at Reunion Dinner whenever my aunt pleads pescatarian and refuses to try the homemade potstickers.

So: every morning before the first bell, Gail would update me on who our newest nemesis was, what they said or did that was so unforgivable. Their eyes had flickered past her when it came time to choose teammates for softball yesterday.

They’d once posted a tweet that could, upon close analysis, be construed as being directed at her. They’d stolen a covetous glance at the mediocre middle-aged Life Science teacher with the long scraggly soul patch, the one who would leer at our chests in the hallways before we’d even started wearing training bras. Her texts sang with that crisp perfect grammar honed by our shared era of remedial English, and they always tapered off into ellipses, trusting me to decide their fates on my own.

The power contained within those three dots cannot be undersold. At Gail’s behest I wormed my way into friend groups through bootlicking and subterfuge. I secured confidences. I planted the rumours, the ugly little half-truths that couldn’t be traced back to me because I left no trail, paper or otherwise. I waited, weeks sometimes, for the telltale fissures to appear, for infidelities to be revealed and skeletons to come sidling into the sunlight. Then I wedged my pick in and hammered the conflict wide open.

“So weird that she would say that,” I’d murmur within earshot of a girl bent over the water fountain.

“I didn’t expect you to be this nice,” I’d remark to an acquaintance during a group project, feigning awed bewilderment.

“Oh, my bad… I just assumed you were invited.” I could flush on command.

I was known for my retiring and studious disposition, even if—to my mother’s eternal chagrin—my test scores hovered somewhere in the seventieth percentile. This reputation proved infinitely useful. If you speak very little, people listen when you do.

In the end it was just like my mother used to say: I have my finger on the prostate of this town, and baby, neither of us is experiencing any pleasure.

This would be the state of the union until senior year. It was Patricia, dear, honest, keen-eyed Patty, who informed me that Gail was fucking the mediocre middle-aged Life Science teacher with the now even longer and even more scraggly soul patch.

I was grateful for the news. Patricia understood what loyalty looked like. She stated the facts without judgement. She did not offer empty words of comfort, knowing they would have fallen like dead leaves from her lips. She left me alone when I excused myself to sit in a stall and cry.

What was it about him, I wondered. What did she see in his sweat-slick mirror of a scalp, encircled by prematurely greying tonsure? Was it the formaldehyde lingering like a chemical ghost in his unwashed vest? His voice, miraculously able 11 / VLR

to induce deep sleep in the most hardened of insomniacs? His mind, of all things, engineered in a lab to contain nothing but toad-themed trivia and ceiling grout?

What was I so incapable of providing that she had to seek in another?

Because I respected Gail, because I believed she was worth it, I did something I would never do for anyone else. I confronted her directly. I texted her, asking to meet, and she acquiesced readily. I drove her to a secluded lot on the outskirts of town. And I asked her why.

“Oh, it’s just the borderline,” she explained, eyes luminous against the onrushing dusk. She tapped her temple. “Makes me do crazy things. Nothing personal.”

She was referring, I realized, to the latest personality disorder she’d been flaunting like a sweepstakes prize, the designer diagnosis she’d acquired after a battery of online psychology quizzes. I could recite the symptoms by heart: mood swings and impulsivity and unstable relationships.

“You’re not mad, are you? It’s not like we ever defined what we were.”

“I’m not mad,” I said, and meant it.

“Okay. Good.” She smiled sweetly, preciously, broad hands folded on her lap as she relaxed into her seat. “Let’s just talk about this? Communication is so important, and I really value our friendship. I hope we can work through this like mature adults.”

I agreed: nothing personal.

I put the car into drive, and I guided us back to our secret spot, the dark dense woods where she first took my innocence and I hers, where Patricia, Lynette, Adithi and Bea were now waiting with rope and duct tape.

If you remember anything at all about the girl code, remember this. The moment you violate it is the moment it stops protecting you.

Jaime Goh

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Raspberry Picking With thanks to Seamus Heaney Late August, and the sun goes down.

You head out to cull the day’s ripening, trying to snatch each glossy emergence before the birds.

Not far out in the meadow’s curb, we hear it, the sharp yelp, the knot already in my belly when I see the rippled flesh, the porcupine, blood spit mixed and limp in the gray dog’s jaws.

When I shout he drops, and every quill stands out like a stain against his tongue, his nose, his whiskered cheeks. We hold him close. Red like the raspberries, like the jam you bought me yesterday spreads to us too. Quill scratched we hold him down as the car flies round and down the bends, and fear-mad dad swerves between the lanes.

Until the clinic’s steady reception.

I stand in the handicap bathroom and pick dark thorns from my clothes. One lodged in my knucklebone, and raspberry pricks along my sister’s hands. I go back outside to clean the peppered seats.

Last August we should have hoarded every day.

The black dog filled the shallow muddy ditch, alive with summer, and the gray dog watched and introduced himself to every bush.

The body fermented, raspberry stains would not leave the black dog’s leg, his nose. Hardly fair the way the rot crept in and spoilt the year’s picking, spoilt the black dog.

Emma Lally

13 / VLR

Poplar Springs Courtyard Maggie sat on a tree stump in a corner of the hospital courtyard. It was smoke break, and she was done with her smoke. Seated on the stump beside her was a woman of ambiguous age still working on her menthol. The woman also wore PJs and the ward-provided mint-green jacket, though unlike Maggie she had shoes on.

“You’ve got to learn to savor it,” the woman said. “You’re like a baby. No control.”

Maggie nodded.

“That’s fine. Do you wear patches?”

She shook her head.

“Good. Don’t start. I don’t either, but lately I’m tempted. I was trying to quit when I was outside. Probably that’s why I’m back in here.”

The woman laughed. Maggie clutched cold grass between her toes. She looked to the sky. The setting sun colored the clouds overhead a dull, grayish gold.

For less than a moment, an angel-winged galley sailing swiftly across the golden hills, its rowers steadfast, leaving in its trail wispy rings that expanded and dispersed, giving the upper atmosphere its bleachy smell. Once spotted, the vessel plunged into a cloud, leaving no entrance wound.

Her first visual. That was it, then.

The woman took a good look at Maggie, who was beginning to cry.

“You’re young,” she said. “It’s your first time?”

She nodded.

“You’ll get out soon.”

The bushes lining the courtyard’s perimeter bore veined, blood-red leaves.

Maggie snapped off a two-leaved stem and twirled it between her index finger and thumb like the blades of a helicopter.

Wings of Pazuzu. Frightful flight. She dropped the stem on her stump.

These thoughts were not her own, even though she was the one thinking them. An ancient scholar was at work many years away, his wisdom oblique and likely useless.

All knowledge is not created equal, she was learning, yet this did not disqualify it from being knowledge. The ancients have their reasons. No one was wrong, ever.

That was the universe’s ultimate love: its guiding principle was inclusion. At the end of time is laughter, so do not cry. The Mongolian shepherd boy’s ideal eternity was as valid as Dante’s, an atheist’s, her own. But still. One must parse the noise.

The dead were fighting for her cognition, stampeding over each other to be heard.

A fresh mind was inhabiting the Poplar Springs courtyard, barefooted, clothed in pajamas and a mint-green jacket, potential emanating from every fold.

The smokers in the courtyard were zoo animals, their oglers invisible. The 14 / VLR

black halls of the National Aquarium of her childhood were lined with bright squares of light, each square revealing on approach a living tableau—an estuary, a prairie stream, a rainforest pond. The walls of the boxes were painted, lovingly painted, and the fish were tricked into forgetting their captivity. A potent illusion.

The memory, like all memories, was a clue to her current predicament. Out here the courtyard’s wide windows had their insides obscured by translucent murals of Great American Landscapes: mountains, taigas, canyons. The disunity of the enclosure betrayed its artifice. Sand clashed with snow, redwoods with tumbleweeds. No attempt at verisimilitude was made.

But of course, this was also a clue.

“When I say, ‘back in here,’ I don’t mean here specifically,” the woman said after a satisfied exhale. “I mean another place like this. This is number three and the worst by far. You know J–––? With the funny teeth? He says the food in jail is better than here, and I believe him. Christ. Longest I’ve ever spent anywhere.

Thanksgiving is when I got in. Almost a month. Feels longer. Time is weird here, I’m sure you’ve noticed. My case worker’s a bitch. I don’t know which one you have. The guy or the girl?”

“The girl,” Maggie said.

“A real bitch. Be careful with her. She’ll seem nice, and you’ll want to be honest with her, but don’t. She’ll twist it and use it against you. Is the court keeping you here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you here by legal mandate? Do you have a hearing?”

Maggie nodded.

“Christ. Well, me too. I’m sorry. Don’t be scared.”

A squirrel ran jerky circles around the courtyard’s center, then scurried up the one dead tree, leaping from a branch onto the building’s roof. It looked in the direction of the two women on the stumps, then darted up the roof ’s slope and out of sight.

She was done with her menthol now.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked. “Please don’t be offended.”

Maggie nodded.

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

Tears streamed down Maggie’s stubbled cheek.

“A girl, then. It’ll be okay. Don’t tell J––– I think his teeth are funny.”

April Navarro 15 / VLR

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Magnus Sometimes things are exactly as they seem. Sometimes they aren’t, but most of the time a spade is a spade, and a star is a ball of gas in the sky. Magnus did not believe this. His room, the quiet study in the back of the apartment where he and his husband lived, was strewn with faux marble statues of nude men and women in varying sex positions, unashamed and uncovered. Bars of fake gold stacked on top of bookshelves full of titles like ‘Icelandic Elves and their Origins’ and ‘The Untold Stories of Faerie Peoples.’ He explained that he usually received students in his classroom, but since my parents and I were only three people, we had been invited back to his apartment. He said his husband was preparing pancakes for us.

My father and I had balked at the idea of paying this man seventy dollars an hour to talk to us about things that didn’t exist. My father thought he was a madman. I perhaps looked upon him a little more favorably, being closer to the age where magic is widely accepted as the thing by which the inexplicable is explained, before the principles of math and science can be properly taught and the idea of the unknown comfortably reconciled with. My mother, the one who had insisted on bringing us to this man’s shining white apartment with its statues and books, did not share our views of skepticism. While we had come to reluctantly experience a curiosity, she had come to learn.

Magnus began by explaining how he knew what he knew, how many years he had spent studying the elves and fae peoples, and how he interviewed those who claimed to have met them, how he told a fake story from a real one. Magnus had never met one of these fabled people himself, but as he leaned back in his chair, a large man with long, greying hair and an even larger occupying presence, I could not help but be drawn into his orbit, if only for a little while.

“Elves live in trees,” he said. “They don’t like to interact with humans, but sometimes they give us gifts.” At this, he produced a pot from underneath his chair. It was silver-grey and covered in chipped white paint. “This was given to me by my friend, who met an elf. The elf gave this to her.”

Magnus handed the elf pot to me. I turned it over in my hands, looking intently for any sign of its origin. It was a pot. I handed it to my father, who handed it to my mother.

His husband came in with the pancakes. They were very good, topped with clotted cream and strawberry jam, wrapped up like thick crepes. My father would later say this was the only good part of the afternoon, and I would later agree with him. I looked at the pot in my mother’s hands as I ate, studying it. I wondered how, if at all, I might determine a magical scratch on the metal from a real one.

Magnus told us about how his brother had been the Prime Minister of 18 / VLR

Iceland and about how President Obama had expressed some interest in Magnus’s program when they’d met. About how his own brother did not believe in elves.

My father then mentioned being a lawyer, and Magnus made fun of him for it. He asked my father if he liked his job, and my father said that he did, though how true that was, I still do not know. I ate my crepes and wondered how someone so old could still believe in elves.

When I was little, I used to build fairy houses out of sticks and moss and mud in the exposed roots of trees. I left out shucked beech nuts for the fairies to eat, and oftentimes my fingernails were left bloody by the exercise of removing them from their shells. When I returned to the base of the tree the next day, the beech nuts were usually gone, eaten by some squirrel, or blown away by the wind, and I fancied that the fairies had enjoyed my gift to them. Even at that age, I knew that there were no fairies, but it was easier to pretend back then, to wonder and suspend my own belief in truth.

Sitting with my pancakes in the white apartment, I wondered if Magnus really believed in what he said. I wondered how he could, how the world had not beaten the magic out of him yet.

Somewhere quiet, I wondered just when the world had beaten it out of me.

H. Cannon Slayton

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Theatrics Dear friend, I know they say you don’t know you’re in the good ole days until you’ve left them. I always thought you must know, at least right before things end, in most cases. If you know that something in your life is leaving, then you must know that those good things tied to it will leave too. But it’s true. I suppose. I mean, I knew they were good. I hadn’t realized they would ever be past tense. I convinced myself they wouldn’t be. The thing is: I wanted this. I wanted to leave. Not leave you but leave a thing which just so happened to include you. Caught in the crossfire. It’s all so “coming of age movie”-esque.

When we sat in the car last August, I wanted to say goodbye as I always did. “Better luck tomorrow,” as I won the thumb wrestle, but there would be no “tomorrow.” There was a tomorrow, obviously, but not like there had been. As we drank the milkshakes and looked at the descending fog, I knew the end credits were approaching. It is not a movie, though. Movies are permanent, the motions and words captured in stills. You could look at it a hundred times and the source would always be the same. Your perception may change because you may change, but the movie doesn’t change. It’s always there. Memories aren’t like that. Our memories are constantly, each time we recall them, tainted by us in the way we are now. As we puzzle them together over and over, we fade them, lose pieces, bend the corners. So, how can I ever know what, exactly, was real? I believe we, in our crocheted hats and sharpie-drawn tattoos, were real. I have to; I cannot bear it not having been real. I want to stay in touch, pen pals at least. Really, I want to find some way to make it go on, but if that carefully particular ecosystem is burned up—can it?

You played a radio station I would never listen to, then got out to pump the gas. Some song came on. I don’t know what it was called, though I had heard it before, but I remember it said, “I love you like the mountains.” I thought of how I’d never seen it coming, never tried. The friendship just was always there, every day, every week. I want to thank you for that day. It was a peaceful end to a friendship built on chaos.

“Make your mark on the world,” you said.

“But mother earth already has so many scars.”

“May your mark be gentle, then.”

We were Musketeers for a time—fleeting in that theatrical way.

Love, your friend Emily Hall 21 / VLR

Glow Stars When I consider your heavens … what is man Psalm 8:3-6 A child bouncing curly-headed eager to turn out the lights to show how his curtains glow in the dark We stand in blackness blanketing Legos and plastic baseball trophies gazing until silent green stars come out Who tells the child to discriminate between this watching and the wonder of galaxies?

We build ceilings but Ah, we add stars Claire Huchthausen

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Somewhere to Nowhere Someone gave the little turtle a jetpack, and every day at 8:43am it leaves its house to fly lazily around the town. Everyone in town, Jamie included, agrees the turtle is a wonderful neighbor. On rare occasions it likes to bring people gifts, but most of the time it enjoys just saying hi to everyone. Most people, at the times when the turtle likes to fly past, try to do something outside if the weather’s nice or just wait at their front windows so they can make sure they’re available to say hi. It occasionally eats people, but only once or twice a month.

At 8:40am, Jamie perches himself on the couch, waiting for the turtle exactly as he has for the past nineteen and a quarter years of his life and taking a quiet moment to inspect the new house again. It’s good and bright, but not too bright like the old house was. The old house had both east and west-facing windows that let in too much sunlight. The rays would catch on his dad’s cowlick and light it up like one of those lightbulbs from the cartoons, making him look like he perpetually had a new idea. That cowlick bothers Jamie endlessly.

The turtle flies past, pausing to tap on the kitchen window. Jamie startles. He whips his head around but smiles when he sees the turtle. The turtle smiles back, then flies along cheerfully. Jamie watches it disappear down the street. Little dust fuzzies drift through the air on their way from somewhere to nowhere at all. The lighting dims slightly as clouds block the morning sun. The change in light makes everything seem to suddenly shrink, and Jamie realizes he needs to leave before he suffocates.

Snatching his mom’s scratchy old tote bag from its spot on the back of a kitchen chair, Jamie hurries past the house’s maze of doors and hallways until he manages to spill himself out onto the front stoop. He pauses to let his eyes adjust as the change in light floods across his vision. It’s spring and finally starting to get less cold, and the humid breeze feels good against Jamie’s goose-bumped arms. “’Morning Jamie!” calls his half-bald and half-blind neighbor, Mr. Sprinkles, who is cutting his grass by wielding the biggest pair of automatic lawn trimmers Jamie has ever seen.

“Good morning, sir! How are you doing today?” Jamie calls.

“Excellent! What are you off to?” Mr. Sprinkles hollers back. He doesn’t want to turn the trimmers off, so he resigns himself to yelling over the noise. Jamie knows it’s too loud for his neighbor to hear him, so he yells back something arbitrary and runs off waving before Mr. Sprinkles can say anything else.

He does feel a little bit bad because he knows the man likes him and could probably use some company this morning, but to be honest, Jamie can’t stand the smell of grass being cut. It smells like the embodiment of the color green, which he hates because it reminds him of artichokes, which taste like the embodiment 23 / VLR

of green. He hates the color green, and he hates artichokes. For years he’d been forced to cope and eat them anyway. They were one of his sister’s favorite foods, and that was back when the whole family had to twist itself in half for his sister.

He never held that against her, but he certainly held the artichokes against her. At least, he used to.

Even so, he thinks, he probably should have told his mom he hated them so much, and maybe she wouldn’t have made them so much. But he didn’t, instead claiming he wasn’t hungry night after night at the dinner table, only to sneak out later to find himself something more appetizing. He still tries to avoid green if he can help it. But the only thing he hates more than green is being reminded.

Today, he can’t escape it. He trots past house after empty house, the red shingles lining the edges of roofs like eyes carefully watching where he goes. Most people are out cutting their grass this morning despite the grass not being tall enough yet, and the smell of green is everywhere. Jamie frowns beneath the polite smile he bestows on each and every neighbor. No one uses their cars, so Jamie can walk safely down the middle of the street, keeping his distance from the flying grass shards spitting at him from yards on both sides. He keeps walking down the street, full of smiles, until he finds himself confronted with the turtle’s quaint little doghouse at the very edge of the neighborhood next to the town’s business center.

The town did right by the turtle when they created the house for it. Jamie wasn’t there when it happened years before he was born, but he always appreciates the effort they put into it. The house is an identical four-foot-tall miniature copy of all the other houses in town. It has a few windows, one of which supports an air conditioning unit and another a heater. Though he’s never seen it, Jamie has heard that there’s a special magnetic rack on the ceiling to hold and charge the turtle’s jetpack when it doesn’t feel like wearing it, as well as a perfectly accurate clock hung precariously on the back wall. Even more impressive though, and what Jamie can actually see and appreciate, is the turtle’s yard. It has its own miniature clean white picket fence. The fence is wreathed by a patch of tiny flowers, which are amusingly conical and floppy.

Jamie doesn’t realize he’s been staring, but he’s aware of the sun beating down on the tip of his head and the breeze from earlier that is now nowhere. The turtle comes back from its fly around to find Jamie still just standing there, blocking the gap in the little white picket fence and the steppingstone path the turtle likes to use to get to its front door. It clears its throat, but not impatiently. It tries hard to be nice to the townsfolk.

Jamie’s face heats up as he hurriedly steps to the side. He squats down to the ground. He knows the turtle is insecure about everyone looming over him and wants to make amends. The turtle just smiles and carefully strolls toward its gate. Jamie watches and wobbles on the balls of his feet, not entirely sure what he should be doing right now. The turtle carefully bites off one of the tiny floppy 24 / VLR

flowers then turns to place it at Jamie’s feet before meandering inside. Jamie picks up the offering, not realizing he’s crying until a tear rolls off the side of his face and drips into a crease in his palm.

He starts to make the long walk home, bracing himself for more neighbors and even more green, but everyone has gone inside or gone to work now that the turtle has passed, and he is allowed to walk peacefully. He tries to keep his mind focused on just taking one step at a time; left foot, right foot as the road rises up to meet each foot halfway, and the sun falls down on him like a thick plush blanket. At some point, his house appears on the right, so he goes in. In the kitchen, he finds his favorite water glass, the one with the purple stripe around the base and the dent along the lip. As he fills it from the sink, he notices that the stripe is the exact same color as the turtle’s flower. He drops the flower in and sits and looks at it for a while.

It’s not much to look at. Jamie puts the glass on a sunny patch on the windowsill and goes to take a nap.

Lin lives for chaos and distraction. He runs out the door, barely remembering to close it and definitely not noticing how well-trimmed Mr. Sprinkles’ yard looks. Then he turns and jogs up the street. He knows from his lifetime in the small town that if he takes two rights and three lefts, not in that order, the streets will lead him all the way around town and back to where he started. Lin patrols the loop until about a mile up when he finds his supervisor. They’ve parked their buggy outside a squat little house pushed up close against its neighbors that looks exactly like all the others. Lin tries his best to ignore that three doors down is the house his family used to live in. He tries his best to ignore the memories, too many memories, that come from that house. Like the memory of how the sun arched so particularly beautifully through the windows of the back room where his daughter died.

Lin walks quickly inside, hoping if he sneaks in quietly enough, his tardiness will go unnoticed. It doesn’t. The supervisor, Lin’s colleague, and two other new coworkers are gathered in a wide huddle, staring at an adorably average bowler hat sitting on the floor. The hat’s owner is gone, and a line of little turtle paw prints mark a path to the front door, under the men’s feet, from the brim of the hat.

Since the hat’s owner hadn’t died, he’d just been eaten, there won’t be a funeral like there was for Jamie’s sister. But there is still work to be done.

Lin stays at work cleaning out the house of the man the turtle ate this morning. It isn’t hard work, just removing belongings and food and running around with a broom, but it is boring and keeps him occupied for a while, which Jamie is quite 25 / VLR

honestly fine with since he had already been planning on avoiding his father all day. After doing some housework and meal prep, he even leaves the house to go to the library that afternoon and stays late past when he thinks Lin will get home.

But that night, for the first night in many, Lin decides the two of them should eat dinner together again. Since Jamie is gone, Lin has to text him and then wait for him to show up, which he doesn’t do until approximately 8:39 that night. Jamie had seen the text when it had arrived an hour prior, but he pretended that he had not and kept reading his library book. At 8:42pm, he slips in through the front, hoping his dad already ate without him. But Lin hadn’t.

Lin has two bowls of pasta and bean soup waiting on the table. Jamie stops by the fridge to grab some shredded mozzarella before sheepishly lowering himself into the chair across from Lin. Spoons clink against the sides of bowls as they stir up the soup as if it were hot. It’s already cold, but neither of them cares. The plastic cheese bag is opened with a sharp crunch, followed by the satisfying plops of cheese collapsing into the broth. The soup on the stove spurts a little.

“How was your day?” Jamie asks.

“The turtle ate someone today. It was Finch Roberts. He lived right up the road,” Lin said.

“Okay,” Jamie says.

“That’s the third one this week,” Lin says.

There is another sudden zap and then the dry crinkling and rustling of croutons trapped in an old plastic bag. Spoons clink the bowl as stirring recommences after the new addition of croutons. A rogue piece of fuzz flits through the air and lands on Jamie’s nose. He blows at it, and it jumps off to float itself elsewhere on a nonexistent breeze. The turtle taps on the window. Jamie and Lin turn to wave and smile before going back to their clinking and slurping. Jamie finds it difficult to look up from his soup. His sister had inherited most of her physical characteristics from Lin, so now she is all Jamie can see when he looks at his father.

“I like your flower,” Lin says without looking up.

“The turtle gave it to me,” Jamie says.

Lin nods in acknowledgment, but Jamie is too busy looking down at his bowl to notice. He picks up spoonful after spoonful of soup and drinks it quickly, barely chewing, until his bowl is empty enough. He gets up and washes it at the sink. The sound of the water cascading from the tap is deafening. Once the bowl has been washed and safely put back in the cabinet where it belongs, Jamie leaves the kitchen. Lin is still sitting at the kitchen table, his cowlick attentively waiting for a sunbeam to turn it into some kind of idea for how to make things better.

When Jamie wakes up in the morning, he finds that Lin has already had to leave for work. He pads back into the kitchen in his fuzzy socks. The turtle’s flower 26 / VLR

looks just a little less floppy today and even has its own baby flower growing out of the side of it. Jamie carefully cradles the tiny bud, amazed at how soft the tiny thing was. Then he puts the flower back. Twenty-four hours did nothing to improve how boring it was.

The turtle comes by right on time as always, tapping on the window and smiling its odd little turtle smile. Jamie smiles back and waves. Then he goes to get dressed before going back into the kitchen to make himself an egg for breakfast.

As he eats, he hears four soft knocks at the door. He cautiously gets up and approaches, aware that no one ever goes to anyone else’s house. His footsteps echo on the pale wooden floor. The front door slides open with a dull creak, and Jamie looks down to see the turtle standing on the front step.

“Hi,” he says.

The turtle smiles, drops two more of the soft floppy flowers, and then turns and wobbles off. Jamie stands in the doorway and watches it go down the street.

A rush of cold assaults his back as more warm breezes flow past the front of his face. The turtle’s little feet make perfect circles on the dry asphalt as it plods around, sniffing every blade of grass as it passes by.

Jamie doesn’t know what to do with the flowers. He doesn’t particularly want them or know what to do with them, but he takes them inside anyway. He dumps the water from the glass into the sink with a splash that catches onto his wrist and arm. Grabbing the gray and brown dish towel hanging next to the sink, he wipes off the water as the faucet refills the glass. All the flowers, old and new, go back into the glass when it’s full, but this time he doesn’t stop to look at them before leaving them on the windowsill. He knows what they look like and is starting to not want them there, since it occurs to him that they technically count as green.

That night, Lin doesn’t try to have dinner with Jamie again. Instead, after getting home from work and eating cold leftover soup, he knocks on Jamie’s door.

“You can come in,” Jamie calls. Lin cracks open the door to find Jamie lounging on an armchair with his computer in his lap. He slips inside, leaving the door open.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Jamie says. Outside, the wind whacks a tree branch into the side of the house. Inside, Jamie clicks on a lamp, bathing both himself and his father in a disgustingly warm yellow glow. Lin takes a moment to stretch his toes under his green striped socks.

“I was thinking, after dinner last night.” Lin pauses to clear his throat. “Maybe it’s time to get your own house somewhere. I think this is just a little too painful for both of us,” Lin finishes. He is keenly aware of the hair prickling the back of his neck and the oddly cold temperature of Jamie’s room.

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“Yeah, I was thinking that too. There’s an open house right next to the library I might apply to move into,” Jamie says as he feels tensions he doesn’t even know exist release from his back. He has been considering it for a while and is relieved beyond words that Lin is thinking the same thing. Lin nods once and turns to leave but pauses.

“There were some flowers on the doorstep when I came in, by the way, so I put them in the glass with your other ones,” he says, then closes the door behind him.

Out of the blue, Lin feels like he’s about to choke. He doesn’t want Jamie to move out, because he’s the only family Lin has left, but right now it’s just too hard.

All he can think of when he looks at Jamie is his daughter and her excruciating absence. Her death had been painful for all of them, but Jamie’s mother had faced the worst of it. She couldn’t stop blaming herself for what happened and, to be around her husband and son, whose profound grief felt like the manifestation of all of her guilt rolled into two physical people, was too much. She humored their moving to another house in an attempt to not remember so much, but it didn’t help, and she began to think about elsewhere. No one knew what lay past the wilderness surrounding their town or if any other towns existed at all, but it didn’t matter. She left quietly one evening after saying a final goodnight to Lin and Jamie, leaving nothing behind but a scratchy old tote bag and a pair of green striped socks. Lin never blamed her for leaving them. He understands why she had to, just like he understands now that he and Jamie will be better off not reminding each other every day.

That night, at 2:43 in the morning, the turtle wakes up suddenly, unexpectedly finding itself ravenous. It straps on its jetpack, picks four more flowers from its yard, then lifts off under the night’s enchanting canopy of stars.

Jamie wakes up to find the house silent, but not in the usual way. It’s too early for his dad to have left yet, so he cautiously goes into Lin’s room. The bed is unmade and on top of it is a pair of green striped socks. The window is open, and the smell of sunshine bounces playfully around the room. A few small turtle footprints decorate the windowsill, disappear, then reappear next to the socks. Jamie assumes the turtle opened the window when it went to eat Lin, and it must have just forgotten to close it when it left.

After a quick breakfast, Jamie gets dressed, grabs his bag, and heads out, intending to go either to the library or to apply for the house. Upon opening the front door, however, he is stopped when he sees four more flowers waiting for him. He adds them to the glass and tries once more to leave. This time is more suc28 / VLR

cessful. At this point, the turtle has already flown past, so he heads in the opposite direction in an attempt to avoid more flowers. They smell very sweet, but still smell like green, and Jamie is oh so tired of being reminded.

He unwillingly thinks about his sister. She used to like to climb trees and lay in the grass, which always bothered Jamie, but he could never bring himself to tell her that it did. She got along so well with the turtle when she was alive and would have loved its little gifts of flowers. Heck, she probably would have even planted them and started her own floppy flower garden.

When he arrives at the edge of the neighborhood, he stops again at the turtle’s house. Most of the flowers are gone from its yard, only three are left. There is no breeze today to relieve the sun, so Jamie feels like his face is going to bake and peel off in the heat. He keeps walking, having made up his mind about what to do. He is going to apply for that house first, and then go to the library after. The current house just feels weirder now that the turtle has eaten his dad. That was his dad’s house, and Jamie wants his own. As he walks up the street, he hears a voice up ahead and starts to walk faster, suddenly aware of the fact that he has yet to see anyone today. Sweat beads on his forehead.

In the distance, he can see his dad’s supervisor in his blue bow tie and tall blue shoes. Next to him, on the ground, is a blob that Jamie has to squint at for a few seconds to identify as the turtle. The supervisor is talking, then he squats down and offers his hand to the turtle. The turtle takes a bite. Then it takes another bite.

Jamie backs up slowly and ducks around the corner onto a different street.

He keeps walking, taking random turns at random times unthinkingly, until he realizes he is right back where he started, and he realizes why he hasn’t seen anyone around today. The supervisor is gone now. All that remains of him on the ground is a blue patterned bow tie. The turtle is also nowhere to be found but has left its little footprints near the bowtie heading further down the street.

As much as Jamie usually just wants to be alone and avoid everyone else, the realization that he is completely alone in the town now hits him across the face like a sack of stones. He is suddenly aware of the fact that he hates this stupid town.

He hates knowing every side street and every single minuscule detail on every single building. He hates the house where his sister died a day before her twentieth birthday. He hates that everyone knew about what happened to his sister, and he hates the pity he got for it. He hates that his mother left for nowhere and got freedom, but he hates that he wasn’t brave enough to do the same thing. He hates that the turtle took everyone else away from him so soon after his sister’s death. But he doesn’t hate the turtle.

He runs home, his feet pounding in time to his frantic heartbeat, glancing over his shoulder at the red shingle eyes staring at him from the roofs. Once he gets there, he runs into Lin’s room, past the lonely pair of socks, and into the desk drawer where he knew Lin kept a few extra matchbooks. Jamie tries to catch his 29 / VLR

breath before dragging one across the scratchy strip to light it, then drops it onto the socks. He watches it for a moment, making sure it catches, then leaves the house and heads back into town. It doesn’t occur to him until he is too far away, and it is far too late that he left the glass full of flowers on the windowsill in the kitchen.

The turtle’s house miraculously survives the blaze as it sweeps through the town, and it is the only thing that looks alive in the middle of a field of ash. The turtle doesn’t go home until after the fire has eaten the entire village. It picks the last floppy little flower from outside its fence before going inside the little house to find Jamie there.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie says. He doesn’t feel particularly sorry. He finds the turtle’s house to be very cozy. The turtle carefully puts its jetpack back onto its rack on the ceiling before going to Jamie and giving him the flower.

“Thank you,” Jamie says, smiling at the turtle. It really is very nice and polite.

It was no wonder his sister had loved it so much. It had loved her in return, and its grief over her death had increased its appetite tenfold.

The turtle takes a bite of Jamie’s knee.

Wren Opela

30 / VLR

31 / VLR

The World Fair The World Fair is in town, and Emily’s uncle promised to take her! He tells her that it’s just a county carnival and that the real world fair should sue. Emily nods her head and stops talking even though she doesn’t understand. She falls asleep in her mother’s childhood bedroom and dreams metallic dreams of cars and rockets.

The man in the ticket booth gives Emily a silly smile. He says that he’s friends with Emily’s uncle. When we were in high school, the man says, we would go to the carnival every year and see this fortune teller. Do you remember her, Tommy? God, wasn’t she something. She always gave me a better fortune than you ’cause she liked me more. Tommy doesn’t say anything.

On the midway, Emily asks her uncle why his friend is missing so many teeth. He tells her that all the people in this town rot away and that their teeth are the first to go. He adds that she should leave here and live by the sea when she’s old enough. Emily tongues her teeth and thinks about the whales rotting at the bottom of the ocean. Do whales have teeth?

Time for some games! Emily holds up a cork gun and takes aim at cardboard UFOs dangling from the ceiling. Some of her shots get pretty close but none of them land. She tries and tries again and again, never improving. She wants one more try—just one more—but her uncle can’t stand watching her lose. He buys her some cotton candy. Emily doesn’t like cotton candy because it reminds her of the pink stuff in Grandma’s attic. She eats it anyway to be nice, unaware of her uncle’s own distaste for cotton candy. He saw the pink stuff as a kid too. There were spiders.

Emily wants to ride the merry-go-round. There’s no merry-go-round, so she must mean the Ferris wheel. The sun is low in the sky when they reach the front of the line. Emily kicks her feet as their seat makes its way to the top. It stops, and they take in the view. Beneath them is the carnival, beyond it the town, and beyond that a patchwork of farmland that never ends. Tommy forgets himself. The little stranger starts to cry, soft and mournful sobs. This isn’t the tantrum of a child. It feels important. They never warned him about this situation, never told him what to do, so he pats her on the head a few times. Firm pats. It doesn’t seem to help.

April Navarro

32 / VLR

roots There’s a picture of me that I hate, twelve or thirteen, in a too-big t-shirt with a sparkly logo on the front, working in my mother’s garden in what was then our backyard. It is the awkwardness with which I don’t look at the camera that bothers me about this picture, more than the jeans that are also too big and frayed from me walking on the hems, more than the dirty hands I haven’t yet grown into.

Attempt # 0: A chunk of years in middle school during where lima beans keep coming up, where germination is an important subject. I do everything right: damp paper towel in a bag, a row of five or six small seeds, set up on the window in the sunlight.

I know it is right because she helps me. But I move through the years without this small success. The process will have to be understood in the abstract—small reaching from the richness of the central seed, a simultaneous stretching up and down, the intake of both stability and sunlight—the object lesson refuses to comply.

But the memory I have of that day is, once the perspective has been set back down behind my eyes, a good one. We are filling the raised brick planters around the back patio with herbs, with vegetables that will never be harvested, squash and zucchini, tomatoes. It feels good to have my hands in the dirt, to let it get on me.

Something pleasant in the sense of physical accomplishment, having altered the landscape, in even a small way. No. That’s what I feel now, an imposition.

This is what I go back to when I can’t remember—where did I learn to spread out the roots of a plant, to double-check the drainage, to give it a little extra water the first time? It must have been my mother, saving the spillage as she rinses rice, starch being good for growing things.

Attempt #2: Early high school, still in the house on eighth street. My mother buys my sister and I plants, small at the base with long vines and small soft leaves.

Mine dies within the month, my sister keeps hers alive for a few more.

I can’t seem to keep houseplants alive. This may not be a fundamental flaw, though it sounds like one. This is what happens: I go to Walmart or Lowes. Pick up 33 / VLR

two or three at a time. What I want is herbs mostly, rosemary, mint, basil, lavender, maybe some parsley. Take them home, upend them in the yard, spilling the dirt and dust out of the plastic cup. Break up the root tangle, forced into an unnatural shape, but gently, trying to limit the damage. Put them in a new pot, water them well. And repeat.

Once, I read that gardens are essential, heavy with (both real and literary) meaning because they represent home. In the sense of original home, of trying to dig our collective way, handful by handful, back to Eden. I’m not sure I believe this. When I leave to go back home, I take my plants on the road.

I leave them on the windowsill near the kitchen (in sight (hopefully) in mind), and come back to find my mother has repotted them. She doesn’t understand why I’m so upset by this. I try to say she has moved beyond metaphor. She says that this one is better, is bigger. Both of my parents have this, practicality, or a sort of fundamental reasonableness which didn’t get passed on to me. Or perhaps didn’t take root.

Attempt #9: I have finished another year of college, and find myself, mostly without intention, back in my parents’ house in Washington, DC. It smells, independent of location, like rose hand soap and dull lamplight, inertia and floor cleaner. I have spent the colder months trying to teach myself to cook in my apartment, gathering herbs, basil and rosemary, weak and wilting parsley. Here, I struggle with cooking, following someone else’s recipes, I let strawberry juice leak into and stain the butcher block countertop, burn my hand to blistering on the gas stove. At some point, the small plastic pots I left on the windowsill are gone, and I find them transferred to the heavy blue and green planter outside, where they will be heat-killed by September.

My mother does not have a garden in this house, only the succulents in decorative bowls placed out of reach of the animals, the massive terra cotta flowerpots resting empty on either side of the front door. Maybe because she hasn’t had time, maybe because she doesn’t intend to stay. This city, with its impossible traffic patterns and sense of frustrated energy, the house under the airport’s northern approach path where engine noise rattles in the walls so that of the pictures never hang straight, none of it a choice. An assignment, the Air Force’s temporary positioning of my father. On the military base, you don’t have to worry about mowing the lawn, about the beds in front of the house: this has all been contracted out, someone to come in to do it for you.

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Attempt #3: Partially as a joke, my sister buys me the smallest cactus I have ever seen.

About the size of my thumb. It sits on my desk for weeks before I am fully convinced that it is an alive, a growing thing. When I come back from college, it is still there but weak looking, thirsty. I let the sink run over it, over-generous.

Too much, it slumps over and dies a few days later.

The house my family lives in when I go to college, the house I leave, is down in the flatlands, in a country where the seasons function on two levels. There is summer, there is (briefly) fall, winter comes in cold, but there is also a distinction between the rainy and the dry season. When everything stops this is the place and the season I step back into: my same bedroom, humidity lying on top of everything, rain that cuts the sunlight hours down into single digits. The four-square walls become a temporary quarantine zone. My mother leaves a bag of dried mangoes on the dresser, cups of coffee outside the door. Monitors me for signs of infection. In this strange enclosure, I sleep excessively, waiting for my body to catch up with the sun’s track over this place. Watch and re-watch old television shows.

She startles me sometimes, coming up from outside to knock on my window. First floor, my view of the backyard’s dead and trampled grass is becoming increasingly obscured by the tomato plants she has planted against the outside wall, which she spends time and more time on: teasing them to grow around metal cones, picking away dead leaves and the abandoned husks of cicadas. When the hose turns on, I hear it, the stiff joints of the water pipes in the wall behind me, and sometimes I think I can hear the tomatoes too, a softer sort of aching movement, working their way from the wet rich earth toward my head.

There is an odd economy that comes from living this way, moving in with the intention of moving out. As in: some things belong to the house. Some things around here are borrowed, like the wine glasses lined up on the back shelf in the pantry, like the set of plates I have been instructed not to touch. These are things my mother worries about: my body, the potential for breakage, my body and what goes into it, what the next person will think, the physical memory we will not leave: broken window screens and coffee stains in the tile grout. My cells are working to metabolize, to memorize a chemical lesson I’m not sure how to communicate.

Some things around here are only temporarily in our care, like the expensive rug under the table where we do not eat that nonetheless gets vacuumed every week, like the bonsai trees in small pots in the backyard.

Attempt #5: Summer after my second year in college, I don’t leave the dorms. Neighbors, 35 / VLR

then roommates slip away toward home, toward summer jobs. I sit in our uncomfortable plastic deck chairs, trying to get a tan. I buy a small lavender bush and set it directly on the windowsill, where it will leave a water ring among the dead blue-bottles and the dust, damaging the paint. It’s a word-heavy summer.

I set off the smoke detectors, I lose track of time. End of August, when my mother reenters the country, I am waiting for her at the Baltimore airport, pre-dawn, both of us somewhat dazed. Blurrier that I am, she takes the driver’s seat. My grandmother has sent along an orchid to give to her to warm up the inevitably borrowed space in her future. One long stem, white petals. I spend a week with her in temporary lodgings, a townhouse with dated air conditioning, bury the bottle of antidepressants in the bottom of my bag.

We walk around asking each other if there is a gas leak smell.

When I come back to college, the lavender has died.

In my camera roll, my hand against a cracked pot, fingers stretched out. I have a tendency to measure things with my body. For example: I have no real understanding of any distance over about ten miles, over what I have forced my feet to cover. Six thousand miles is entirely meaningless, but I understand twelve hours of hands and feet swelling and boredom verging toward claustrophobia and engine noise. I can drive six hours, three and three, a break to snap my vision back into focus, ease the tension of my lower back. At first I don’t believe that the new house is only thirty miles from the city ‘proper,’ the pain and drag of an hour on the train feels like something much greater. This lack of perspective gets me in trouble when I first get to the east coast, too many years of living of islands perhaps, the assumption that I can drive anywhere I want to go with no forward planning. This breaks, finally, in a sudden rainstorm, complete loss of sightlines, nothing to do but pull onto the margin of the highway and wait, and wait.

I ask my mother: does that help? I send her another angle. I assume my hands are a measure that can be translated. Sure, she says, without conviction.

Thanks. Neither of us has any real understanding of how to tend to the bonsai trees, one of which has grown to the point that it has broken through its pot.

Though stunted, they are, I learn, still growing, and care is required to maintain the dense ball of roots, to maintain the artificial smallness and the still-aliveness. Etymology—the literal translation of the word is “planted in a container.”

First developed in ancient Chinese horticulture, the art reemerged under influence from Japanese Zen Buddhism. The goal—patience, bringing nature down to scale, a contained and manageable sort of growing. There are two wires wrapped around the roots of this one, which will have to be cut, then redone. A new container, slightly but not too much bigger. And always, the danger of transfer shock, that a

36 / VLR

rooted ting will react poorly to being dropped into a new situation, that a circumstance it finds inexplicable will not be accepted.

The front of this house, the last in the line of houses I will think of as mine and not my parents’, is mostly rock. Beds of small stones, two large trees, a decorative hollow stone temple in which we will find the second to last (number twenty-three) of the PBR cans my father’s friends hid throughout the house. The landscaping crew spends a lot of time here, one woman in particular spends hours seemly turning over rocks, picking twigs off the ground, until my mother begins to suspect she’s spying on us. It is under the car port, in the van that will be wrecked within three months, that I tell my mother I think I need to talk to someone about what I suspect has become a diagnosable depression. She says no, not to, this is a bad idea, because because because.

Attempt #8: My greatest sin, and the one I won’t be able to live down. There is a candle next to the small decorative plant on my desk, and I am not keeping my eyes on the flame.

You won’t think something like that, so soft and green, would burn.

If asked about this, my mother would say no. This is not what happened, I remember incorrectly, or I speak only to do damage. I remember: the shoes I was wearing, white high-top converse that I will later get rid of and then regret doing so, the smell of the hand lotion in the bag at my feet, neroli and hibiscus. I remember laughing, because, even in the moment, I understood the absurdity of it.

I speak in an attempt to clear the damage, to move it out of the cartilage of my rib cage. I have never asked my mother about this.

I leave because I am able to leave. Another year, another apartment, my desk in front of a window that opens outward from the middle, a view of the down slope of the hill in front of me, a plane of leaf litter in all seasons, cars passing by quietly above it, college students passing by loudly above it. I buy a few cactus plants, things with spikes, things that are difficult to kill. Lined up along the edge of my desk, just out of the frame of my desktop camera, of the view of the therapist. Somehow, they survive, though I spend most of that winter with the window cracked open.

Attempts #10, 13, &c: The one thing I’ve been able to do, maybe because it requires very little, is to grow things in water. When I was younger I was slightly disgusted by the jars found in my grandmother’s house, something growing in glass and water, all 37 / VLR

the twisting over themselves roots visible. Now, I appreciate that you can see the process, if you remember to look in on it, if you look closely. In the new apartment I hang small glass jars from one of the exposed water pipes in the celling.

There’s a row of them up there, unburied, growing.

The feeling, tied to a smell. A wind blows in from the first garden, and it brings a low squeezing ache behind the diaphragm, a physical reminder of the original sin, and its consequences: the pain of birth, the pain of cultivation, the irreversible exile. ‘The wind of Eden.’ I don’t remember where I heard this, but I remember where I am standing when I felt it, on the corner across from the house before and before and before that, inexplicably lost, trying to apply and old map to a new landscape. They are planning to cut down the row of massive trees that lines our street, they have grown too well, too big, now dangerous, and so to be lost. But that is next year, and by then we will be gone.

They are at least fifty years old, wide around the base, with greyish bark that occasionally comes off in strips. I remember the smell of them, the shadows over the dining room table, but not the name. My sister does, and immediately—banyan, she says. You writing a poem? I say no. I have become expert in operating in the space between truth and technicality.

The banyan is technically a species of fig (Latin name: Ficus benghalensis).

Though the fruit it produces is inedible, it provides a temporary home for the pollinators, wasps who bury themselves in among the sour and the bitter. As the tree grows, aerial roots form with the branches, drop down slowly, and when they reach the ground, dig in and begin to thicken. Over time, this may lead to a phenomenon that has been called ‘walking’: root by root, the tree finds new ground, root by root, shifting away from the origin point.

Anneliese Thomas

38 / VLR

39 / VLR

Nineteen 1. It’s bad luck to leave socks on the floor. Please don’t do that, I say. Please don’t leave them on the floor like that. I wince at the anxiety in my voice. Then I am nine. There is vomit on the carpet and anxiety in my voice again. But what is there to be anxious about? They take her to the vet, and she comes back to wag her tail at me. It happens again the next month, then the following winter, and my happy dog comes back again. Strange how it’s only my socks she eats.

Strange how my carelessness hurts an animal I love. Aren’t I powerful. But I don’t want the power. I’d rather be nothing than to blame. I am nineteen. I fix the stones in the backyard, so the D is visible again. I clear the weeds that have sprung up since the last time I was home. There are socks piled up on the dresser, on the bed, and on the desk. There are no socks on the floor.

2. The timing of your thoughts matters. That object I just touched I will likely never touch again. That railing on the way down to the subway station, that table in a store my mom called tacky, that thumbtack on the art room bulletin board, they are gone from my world as soon as my fingers leave their surface.

My mind associates this permanence with urgency. Each object I will never touch again deserves an ending. The ending is whatever I am thinking when my finger leaves the surface. That railing on the way down to the subway station is forever linked with the ache in my feet, that table in a store my mom called tacky with my courses for next fall, and that thumbtack on the art room bulletin board with the hours it would take to reach my best friend. At first, I like that I can pick these endings. I can draw up a happy memory, and it will be fixed permanently to the tangible. Isn’t my mind powerful. But soon the idea of a bad ending haunts me. I have a thought of malice, and it becomes fixed just as easily, more easily, than the pretty thoughts. Permanence is my best friend until it isn’t.

3. Take prints too. Do you want just the digital versions or prints too, ma’am?

Ma’am? If you had looked at the film instead of just exposing it you would not be calling me ma’am, sir. These are very much the photos of a nineteen-yearold girl. These are the photos a of girl whose father held up a Fujifilm digital camera on her fifth birthday. Her life is chronicled on a flash drive that sits in her parent’s safe, not in the photo albums downstairs. But I want to be in the albums. I want to feel the memories, see them lined up two by two with my father’s handwriting on the adjacent lines. “Brynn’s first birthday” in slant block letters. Haylee’s is on the computer. I’ll take prints too. I’ll add them to the walls of my room, the piles on my desk, and the edges of my windows. These 40 / VLR

are very much the photos of a nineteen-year-old girl because half of them are washed in brown. The exposure is too high, the flash is off, and the figures are barely visible. She did not grow up with film. Where did this attachment come from then? I send a Kodak folder to my best friend in the mail (perhaps I am aging myself), and she feels the same connection. Can we all agree the prints are more enduring than the flash drive in the fireproof safe? I certainly would set fire to a flash drive long before I burn a print. Permanence is a fine line, and good objects deserve good endings after all.

4. Speaking of permanence, the moon never changes. What do you mean I say?

It grows out of the horizon. It expands and shrivels. It turns orange and pink and white. Look at the moon, my mom says. It’s incredible tonight. Tonight, as in right now, not yesterday or the day before, but right now, the moon is more beautiful than ever. How can this be if that mass in the sky is the same size and the same color day after day? Who is changing? Yesterday I wore clips in my hair, and I cried on the bench outside of airport security at the thought of being away from home for two weeks. Today I trim my hair with scissors and board the plane with my return ticket in four months. Yesterday I did not know what leaving my socks on the ground could do, but today I cannot forget. I was powerful yesterday, but I did not know it until today. The moon does not change, but it is really something tonight.

5. Write it down or it is gone. Gillian Flynn makes me want my words to last as long as Camille’s. I tie journals together with string and place boxes with handwritten notes in my closet. The first is nearly eligible. It says JoJo remember to feed Daisy in childish block letters. The handwriting improves as my palm moves deeper into the box. It turns feminine in the eighth grade but shy’s away from the curly q’s in the tenth.

Didion amends the box of notes, and a notebook appears. There is only one entry. It says, “engagement ring gone.” The date is February 12th. On February 5th, I looked to my left to realize the girl sitting next to me in class wears an engagement ring. The phrase “ring before spring” rattles in my head, and I march home to laugh with my friends about the irrationality of it all. Mocking displays of love and turning my back on the femineity of curly q letters usually make me feel stronger. But now it makes me desperately sad. On February 7th, the girl doesn’t come to class. I say the girl because, at that point, I did not know her name, and at this point, I have invaded her privacy enough. The day I make my lone journal entry, she returns without the ring, and for a moment, I feel her loss. I feel the permanence slipping away from her, and I scold myself for poking at the holes in it a week before. I created this story, but did I create

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the ending too? Aren’t I powerful after all. Would I still rather be nothing than to blame?

6. While you are writing things down, make a list of what you eat today. I do not spend any time pondering what I consumed yesterday or what I might tomorrow, but it seems important that right now I choose correctly between rice and pasta. It suddenly seems vital that I stay away from grapes (too much sugar), yet the influences of this new habit are mysterious to me. Isn’t my mind strange?

Shouldn’t I know why it is working this way? But the influences come a mile a minute, and I don’t like to admit which ones are true. Then one day I say, enough. I stop the train in its tracks. That was an option all along, apparently. I am getting better at control. Or am I getting better at losing control? I hope it is the latter because then I can say I am improving. You’re still too tense, they’ll respond. Let yourself have some fun while the world is still exciting to your eyes. I’ll go out, I promise. Then I’ll return to write it down. I don’t want to lose it, do I? 7. You’re more asleep than you think. My dad tells me this in the middle of the night. I sit on the other end of the invisible phone line, knees to my chin, back against the ceramic bathtub. Don’t do this to me, not tonight, I say to an empty audience. Self-sabotage, that’s what this is. I can have a hundred nights of good sleep but as soon as I want it, as soon as I need that sleep, my mind rebels. It freezes. Or does it? I close my eyes and language changes form. I converse with myself in a series of integral equations. I ponder my plans for tomorrow only in terms of Northern Renaissance paintings. I shift onto my stomach then to my back, and the bridged bicyclic compound rotates in my mind. Why can’t I sleep? I ask myself in the prose of Jane Austen. In the morning, I will remark that was certainly not consciousness. Then why are these episodes of quasi-insomnia so frustrating. I yell at my mind to stop, to slow down, to let me rest, to let me catch up. I yell at the empty audience. I can’t stop the train this time. It sounds its horn and leaves the station shaking in its wake. Aren’t I weak. Isn’t my mind powerful.

8. Blink three times at 11:11. Stop with the superstitions I tell myself. You are not a silly girl that pays to have her palms read. You make fun of those silly girls who click their heels together and expect to be home. But still, isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Why not blink your eyes and make a wish just in case? I might as well lift my feet as the car goes over the train tracks while I’m at it. It can’t hurt. But can’t it? Can’t it make you crazy that you have to blink when you see certain numbers? Suddenly it is out of my control. Aren’t I weak. Now I am blinking at the microwave clock. I am eating two blueberries and not one and 42 / VLR

making a note. I am touching the side of a car and then doubling back to give it a better last thought. I am snatching socks from the bathroom floor. The moon is not its most beautiful tonight. The train sounds its horn.

9. Nine is a magic number. Give me three numbers, I tell my mom, my sister, and the boy who lives two houses down the street. Any three, and I can turn them into nine. The last three on the license plate of the truck I begged my parents to let me drive—326—three times six is eighteen, eighteen divided by two is nine. The seconds left on the microwave when the power goes out—471—four times seven is twenty-eight, twenty-eight minus one is twenty-seven, 2 7, two plus seven is nine. The score of the football game when I change the channel—12:5—five times two is ten minus one is nine. The day I was born—August 9, 2002, 8.9.2—that one’s too easy. Nine is a magic number. The man with hyperthymesia told me so. Then he told me August 9th, 2002, was a Friday, and in New York it was hot. God, it was hot, my mom would tell me. That’s what I get for having summer babies. I should’ve named you June, July, August. June, July, August. One, two, three. And three always gets you to nine.

10. Nine is a magic number, but nothing stops at nine. The world stops at ten. Ten fingers, ten toes. Ten Commandments, ten realms. How does it feel to be double digits, Haylee? I roll my eyes. I’d rather be nine, Grandpa. Now he is ninety but must wait for one hundred for the grand party, for a letter from the president. It’s always ten, never nine. Nine is not enough. Nine is the railing down to the subway that reminds me of the ache in my feet. But after I touch the railing, the person behind me taps their fingers on it as they contemplate how Clinton defeated Bush. The next person slides down the stairs and fixes their memories of Hurricane Andrew to this object I claimed as my own. 1992 was ten years before I was born—what do I know of these memories?

Now I am nineteen. I am nine and ten. I see my thoughts on the railing, but I see the thoughts of others too. I hear the anxiety in their voices, the elevation in their heartbeats. I open my eyes to ten, and the light blinds me. I open my ears to ten and hear every genre of music. I touch ten and feel a world of film pictures. I worry less now about learning to control nine, about slowing the train at my signal, because I know I will never be able to control ten. Ten is far from permanent—always changing, always growing. Or so it seems. The moon is really something tonight, don’t you think?

Haylee Ressa

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Wishing for the Night Train Late at night sometimes I walk by the railway that runs beneath a concrete overpass that banks and directs red and yellow streams of light, giddy voices and the confident strides of youth.

And sometimes late at night I see the passenger train stop, that hulking form, disgorging some and accepting others and yammering and huffing and looking like a living fossil from a black-and-white age.

And sometimes late at night I stand on the overpass staring down at the metal traveler coming parsimoniously and directly from faraway places— always so single-mindedly— and standing there, with the train below and the gauzily veiled stars above and a certain emptiness within, I stare at the train and wish that the piece of me that feels and names emptiness, could board the train and ride away from me— but not forever and not entirely— but for long enough to feel the weight of existence, the fear and the knowledge, slough away.

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So that someday late at night as I experience everything directly with nothing coming between me and the experience, an unnamed life, free from all pretense and expectation, I’ll watch my train come in (while not realizing it’s my own) and then all of a sudden, without apprehending or naming or expecting it, I’ll have come home to myself.

And it will be my calling and election made sure my resurrection to life in life my breath bearing the spark of consciousness sweeping up like the spirit upon the waters.

Adam Stevenson

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Deathbed Confessions I’m sorry that we have to see each other this way, my wife. Your shaking, delicate hands grasping my unmoving, limp one. Your chest heaving in and out with raw desperation, while my own wheezy breaths grow shallower by the minute. Your face is flushed red as you bat your tear-swollen eyes. They are staring into mine, which, as I imagine, are glazed over with looming death.

My entire body lies perfectly still on the cold hospital bed, inundated by dozens of tubes that connect to machines that blink and beep and beckon the occasional doctor or nurse to your side, who are undoubtedly offering their sincerest condolences for your husband’s soon-to-be untimely death. If I had enough strength, I would tear all this useless machinery out of me so I could kiss you and hold you in my arms one last time and tell you how much I love you and just how much you mean to me.

But I don’t.

I don’t have the strength, nor the fortitude, to sit up and open my mouth because I know what painful words would follow the “I love you”s and the “You mean the world to me”s. Every single one of my solemn regrets and sorrowful mistakes that I made as your lawfully wedded husband would come spilling out, flooding you with anger and disappointment.

I know this may be a little selfish, but I don’t want to soil your image of me before I die. I don’t want the last thing I see to be your face scrunched up with disgust and hatred, and the last thing I hear to be your fading footsteps as you leave me to die with the tubes and machines as my only company.

But if I were stronger and less selfish, the first thing I would tell you is that I always hated the meatloaf you made us every Monday evening after I arrived home from work—Meatloaf Monday, as you affectionately called it. It was always a bit too dry and over-seasoned for my liking. Sometimes it was terribly burnt to a deep, charred black, and other times it was undercooked a shade of slightly worrying pink. A few times, I thought about revealing how I truly felt about the meatloaf, but then you would always smile the sweetest smile as you placed the plate on the table in front of me, half-joking that you were proud that you were carrying out your family legacy by cooking a meatloaf recipe that had been passed down on your mother’s side for generations—six to be precise; you would always count them on your fingers. And when I saw the glimmer of pride in your eyes as I lifted a forkload of your great-great-great grandmother’s meatloaf recipe into my mouth. I knew that I couldn’t say anything and that the risk of salmonella was worth every bit of your happiness.

And if I were strong and less selfish, we would be sharing a laugh over this right now. You would probably forgive me and say that you were surprised, perhaps even a bit flattered, I managed to keep my meatloaf hatred a secret for so long. Or maybe you would reveal that you always hated the meatloaf too, but only made it 46 / VLR

every week because you thought I liked it and that this whole conundrum could have been easily prevented if one of us just spoke up.

Then after the laughter died down, I would tell you that you weren’t actually my first love like I misled you to believe all these years. Your expression would instantly sober as I would tell you how, before I met you in our sophomore year of college, I had a high school sweetheart. She was beautiful, both inside and out. She could charm anyone with a flash of her smile and a bat of her eyelashes. She reminded me a lot of you, actually. I wouldn’t divulge too many other details about her, not to make you feel jealous or inferior or like I loved you any less. But what you would need to understand is that I loved her very much, and we ended our relationship when we went to colleges on the opposite coasts. When I met you, I pretended that you were my first love. I wanted to make you feel special, and my relationship between my sweetheart and I felt too… personal—yes, that’s the word—to act like it meant nothing to me at that time.

At this point, your entire demeanor would have shifted. You would try to hide just how upset and betrayed you are, but I would see it in the subtle contort of your face. You would have a harder time forgiving me compared to the meatloaf debacle, but you eventually would. That’s when I would deliver the ultimate blow: I’m still in love with my high school sweetheart. And I don’t work on Mondays.

I would tell you how we reconnected just a few months after you and I had our wedding. She moved back to our state then, so while you were away on a business trip, I went to see her. It was only supposed to be a one-night affair, but it only reignited the love I had for her. I kept coming back to her every Monday, without fail, while you were none the wiser.

After you take your time absorbing this news, you would wordlessly glance at the calendar on the wall to your left and confirm that today is indeed Monday. You would know that, if I weren’t currently by your side, dying, I would be by my mistress’s side, thriving.

I would tell you that I was a stupid, selfish coward who didn’t want to choose because I loved you both and couldn’t imagine a life without either of you. But by then you would have already stormed out, dooming me a lonely death without either of the women that I love. And I would have deserved it.

But because I’m too weak, selfish, and most of all, scared, I leave you in ignorance. Maybe you’ll find out these things on your own. Maybe you never will.

For now, I’ll shut my eyes knowing you, nor I, will ever be at peace.

Hayley Davis 47 / VLR

My mind the aquarium towers above a dead city. houses memories wet and dry. hangs in frames black boxes impalpable. dissolves all difference at lights out. struggles in a strangle of red algal blooms. lines hallways with tableaus of love and terror. soaks us in baths that are our skin. drowns boys and girls in place for future inspection. keeps in columns immaculate jelly tangles. hides in utility closets the names of obscure gods and rivers. lets flourish river fish as long as the oldest memories are far. forgets its parts from time to time. kills all but the adaptable in brackish waters. tames mangroves like bonsai. feeds the fish with long dead divers. revels in a cruelty our ancestors will detest us for. waterlogs freeze-dried ice cream. shatters its glass when it comes time to join the sea.

April Navarro

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The Ram in the Thicket Seamus Einhard Erle’s son had been dead only two hours when Seamus got too drunk off the liquor he had been rum-running to properly tie weights to the boy so that he could give his son the proper water burial he had given his own late father at sea. It had been the same sort of burial Seamus had expected to be granted by his epitaphless son. And so, as Seamus slept on the boardwalk amidst his bottles of whiskey and vodka and rum and gin, which had by now been spilled onto the deck by the mercurial tides of the Atlantic so that a plume of choking sterilization lingered around him, his shipmates discussed what to do with the body of this boy. The boy’s name had been Isaac Seamus Erle, though these men had no way of knowing that. They, too, discussed what to do with Seamus, but his corpse, which still pumped blood and oxygen through his thinning, varicose veins, was much too large to be moved by only the three men who had found Isaac and his father in this unchristian way.

These three sailors had not known this boy was aboard their ship. And as Isaac’s empty, still-open eyes searched for nothing but maybe pity in the men, the oldest crewman took off to find adequate rope that might fit well around the boy’s thin wrists. Seamus had tried to use spare hawser from below deck to bind the boy’s wrists to sacks of ammunition so that he might sink and resist the buoyancy of his own bloated, effluvial organs, but the hawser had proved too thick and slipped over the hands of the child. The hawser had been stolen by Seamus. The ammunition had been stolen by Seamus.

On his way to the cabin, the oldest—a man named Biago—sunk his boot into the ribs of Seamus, the thief and the smuggler of children, and spat on him in the sort of way crewmen do after winning a physical altercation. Seamus did not stir, but contorted onto his side so that the bile could seep out of his mouth so as to not drown him as this lifeless boy had now been damned to do.

Isaac Seamus Erle’s mother, Emelia, was not presently alive to protest her partner’s reproachable treatment of her only son’s corpse. She had died in childbirth as God had condemned her to do, as consequence for the illegitimate birth of her son. This is what Emilia’s father had warned her would happen, and this is the parable he would sermonize upon her as she complained of fever and excessive bleeding during the weeks leading up to the birth.

And when Emilia’s father refused to take in the child, asserting that the death of his wife the year prior had made the home unfit for child raising, Seamus took off with this part of himself not as a widower but not a husband either. It was a shame her father could not grant Seamus the parental relief he so desired; he had figured the old man’s beliefs were well in line with those of his own late father and that the boy might be raised according to ideas not so distant from his own.

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But no, it had been left to Seamus to impart those beliefs unto this boy who now believed in or prayed to no one.

And when Biagio returned, appropriately thin galvanized cable in hand, he found that the other two men had not moved away from above the boy’s corpse but instead had crouched down in closer view of it so that their voices might not be heard elsewhere on the ship. There was really no reason for this. The tides of dawn carried the ship through an inescapable cacophony so that nothing quieter than a shout could be heard; not the convulsing, vomiting Seamus, not the curses Biagio spat into the misty air. Biagio bent down beside these men so he could properly tether the boy.

On all accounts, it really had been a shame Isaac died as young as he did.

Seamus had been traveling with him as soon as he could keep upright on a rocking boat, and by way of counting the number of trips up and down the coast they had taken, he figured the boy had been about eleven years of age. He figured this made him thirty-one.

In spite of Emilia’s death, Seamus had done his best to put a sturdy head on the boy. He told his son of the blessings of God and had preached to Isaac the parables he could remember from his own father’s teachings. He told his son that his mother had been a sinner and that God had deemed her unfit to be a mother. He said that the boy’s life would be a chance to cleanse all the sin and lust and damnation she had brought into this world. He said it was all for the best, and that the two of them would make on just right. A lot of this hadn’t made sense to Isaac; a lot of it hardly made sense to Seamus. Isaac couldn’t understand God, and he couldn’t understand why they were always on a boat and why he had been made to hide underdeck so much. Seamus wasn’t in a position to explain God any more than what his father had told him because he had never been given a Bible or a proper prayer book to read by, and all he could do was try his best to explain why they were seabound.

These here people of the United States—that’s where they lived, he explained—had been denied their civil liberties for too long, and he was doing his duty as a son of God to grant the people those liberties again. But selling freedom was a dangerous business, he had told the boy, and that was why each night when he said his prayers, he had better to make sure to include his daddy and the good people of the continental United States.

Seamus’s father, the sailor Edgar Abraham Erle, had been in the business of freedom, too. That much Edgar explained to Seamus. Seamus had spent his early years as a stowaway on the cargo ships his father captained; they’d sail down past the boot of Florida to Cuba, only to cruise past the entire east coast before docking in Canada. And in spite of how well-traveled Seamus was, he had never set foot on a piece of land that wasn’t part of the United States. You stay here now, Edgar would tell him before shutting and locking the trapdoor to the hold. And while the 51 / VLR

child Seamus didn’t have any light or books or fresh air to breathe, he had a cross.

It had been carved of driftwood by his father, stained a deep umber by motor oil; it was a present for his tenth birthday. And there, in the dark, he’d massage the wood and toil it around in his hands so that it might smooth pleasantly into his grip.

For days Edgar would not return to him, and there below deck, Seamus’s eyes would make demons out of the dark. His father had warned him of this. The evils of the Devil would find him before the fire of God, and only by resisting and fighting this temptation could he be burned clean. God sent to him a heavenly wrath, one he would only ever see in the eyes of his father, and there in the dark, he would bloody his knuckles against the hull. He would flail against the steel, swinging his meek arms until God could make tools of them. Only when Seamus’s fists met the rivets would he recoil and writhe in pain, in the pain and suffering condemned unto him by God. The fire of the Savior burned hot in him. But that fire below deck took the air as its fuel, and after his fits Seamus would lie there on the cool metal, gasping desperately for air until breathlessness gave way to oblivion. His father would find him in this unconscious state. And every time he did, he would resuscitate the boy Seamus so that God could burn him up again.

On one of the rare cruises the ship harbored no other crew, such that Seamus was permitted above deck, Edgar Abraham Erle died. Seamus found his fat body sat lifeless at the stern, and only after his father failed to prevent a heavy gale from sending the helm spinning did he realize that the days of Edgar were no more. The stokes smacked his father’s meaty hand as it spun, such that the wheel began to wobble in its bore, and Seamus had to squeeze between his father’s indulgent belly and the felloe to properly resume his now solitary course.

His father had prepared Seamus for this, though, and had made the proper arrangements. Seamus made his way below deck to retrieve the hawser his father had allotted and heaved up the ladder a tarp of sailcloth folded neatly, which had previously served as his bedding. He laid out the sailcloth onto the deck and fought the wind to keep it down. With one foot on the far corner, he pried the man from his seat until the body fell free. Edgar landed face down on the tarp. With his arms stuck up under the corpse, Seamus heaved until the body was wrapped fully. He tied a clove hitch around his father’s chest and ankles, as the man had demonstrated, and prayed the Lord’s prayer out into the sea.

The body splashed into the calm waters and floated up to break the surface only once again before it sunk to an opaque depth. Seamus took his wooden cross out of his pocket and casted it out to sea. On the surface of the meek tide, it undulated as a demarcation of where the body had been laid to rest; the sign of the Savior floated there for some time, and as far as the boy Seamus knew, it was still there.

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When Seamus and his own son Isaac had made their first excursion out to sea, Seamus had fetched a piece of driftwood out of the shallow docking waters so that he might make his son a cross to bury him by. Barely a decade later, this cross, pale and unpolished, now had itself wedged under the belt of the dead Isaac. The sign of the Savior protruded into his abdomen, and as more men crowded around the body on that vessel, Biagio retrieved it so that it might be more carefully examined.

It was a crass piece of work. He held it up in the morning sun. The edges were sharp, the wood was split. It was a blasphemous token of all Seamus had not learned from his father and everything he had tried so desperately to inherit. Biagio casted the cross out to sea, over his shoulder, and beyond the railing. It floated somewhere in the saltwater.

Despite his open, bloodshot eyes, the boy looked calm. His face had long ago surrendered to a calmness none of the men on that boat had ever known or would ever find, and his arms bent inwards so that the boy could cradle himself.

Apart from his hands, the body was not bloody or bruised, and it appeared as though he might’ve only been sleeping. The fingernails that had remained on his hands hid below them a dried crimson. The ones he had lost were replaced by gnarled, purple stubs.

When Seamus awoke, the haze of the long-dead Edgar already fading from his mind, Biago already had the boy over his shoulder and was standing with one boot on the lowest rung of the railing. He had intended to toss the boy out into the water in this way so that his face would remain heavenward, and the last thing he would ever see would be the bright morning sky. Seamus, still inebriated, saw his shipmate in this way, performing this hellish mockery of the service his son deserved. The other men stood around Biago, facing out to sea, with eyes searching for the toes of each other’s boots. In his stupor, Seamus shoveled the men out of the way. He broke through the lines of their profane gathering and shouted with the crashing of the sea into their disparaging silence. With a lurch, he wrapped his arms around the shins of Biago and wrested him from the railing. The anger he had met in the dark had found him again, and with a fire only the Savior could spark and kindle, he thrashed mercilessly onto this devil. A splash registered somewhere in Seamus’s mind. The crew collapsed onto Seamus, and he found his arms constrained by men he could hardly remember. But the Holy Spirit had made its home in Seamus. With a bite into the bicep of the man constraining him, he yanked his arm free with a heavenly strength and scrambled to the railing. Below was his son, floating in the water. The weights hadn’t been enough. Seamus was starboard.

With a deafening splash, he broke into the water beside Isaac. There under the sea was a silence he had only known in the moments the Savior had spoken to him, and as he looked up to see the corpse of a stowaway son, he heard the 53 / VLR

Lord speak. The Lord told him that a deluge would wipe the world clean. A deluge would come to rid the world of the sin Seamus had known so well in Emilia, and of the sin his son would never see. The Lord said that it would be the days of Noah, not the days of the Son of God, that would begin the second coming. The words were nothings, quieter than the overhead sun’s journey across the sky. It had been only a second, and Seamus broke through the surface again. The salt of the ocean had kissed gently his unholy lips and had stabbed at his eyes. He blinked, and there those men were, looking down at him over the railing. His struggling arms hit something soft, and he turned his wide, salt-stained gaze.

It was a child. It was his child. The dead child floated, tied, and constrained by a wrapping of galvanized cable. His son had been baptized in the unchristian saltwater of the Atlantic, where the mercy of the Lord had been spread too thin, diluted too much amongst too many unholy men. It was here that Seamus met the edge of God’s mercy. He looked down over the precipice and saw nothing but a rising flood. And as he stared into that white, bloated face with still-open eyes, he knew his son had been given the same baptism his father had given him.

Seamus had been the age of his own dead son. The boy Seamus had awoken in a cold sweat on his sailcloth to the sound of the hull door being opened. And as the light of the stars flooded below deck, Edgar Abraham Erle scooped Seamus off his cot and carried him up into the night. He kept his eyes closed for fear of stirring his father, but even through his eyelids, he could see the paleness of the stars illuminating the dark. This was the most light Seamus had seen in days. The boat rocked, and his father rocked him too, but the lapping of the waters against the hull was quiet, and it felt to Seamus to be a dream.

The tide loudened, and Seamus felt a coolness upon him. At first, it was the tip of his scalp, dipped into the ocean, but soon all but his face was below water.

The meek waves of night sloshed at his ears. He opened his eyes to see his father.

A silhouette against an empty moon and starlight, the face met his own. Behind the eyes above him was a wrath from on high, an anger Seamus had known only by his bloody knuckles in the dark, and as Edgar realized his son was awake his hands moved from supporting the back of his head to around his neck. Edgar’s fat fingers tightened against his throat. Suddenly Seamus’s entire head was below water, and the salt and ocean flooded his mouth and nose. Seamus choked on the sea, he tried to scream and cough an entire ocean out of his mouth, and his arms bat weakly against his father’s swollen wrists. Through the water, he could make out his father’s round head and the light of the moon behind his cauliflower ears. Between his screams, he heard the spoken words of baptism. When Seamus realized unconsciousness would soon find him, he began to pray. He prayed for his mother, whom he had never known. He prayed for this ship and the men that were on it.

He prayed for his father that God might find the mercy to save his soul.

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When the boy Seamus awoke on the sailcloth, he was certain that it all had been a vision sent by the Lord. This blessed the boy with an ephemeral jubilation; he knew now he was to be a prophet as his father had been, he could save the world from greed and lust and damnation. The teachings of Edgar had become material. But Seamus got out of his makeshift cot to find it was damp, along with his trousers and hair. This was a plague to Seamus.

But the boy had been born again. Edgar had sat Seamus down below deck years after the baptism and told him this. He had been cleansed and blessed in the name of the Lord, and his soul would find eternal salvation after his death, which would be many years from now, he said. Edgar told him that the two would find each other again because of what had been done on that night, and he beseeched his child to do the same when the time came for him to have a son of his own.

The man then taught the boy how to tie a clove hitch. Seamus blinked the salt out of his eyes.

Seamus crawled onto deck with the corpse of Isaac in his arms. He mourned his father then; he mourned the fact that he had no one to ask if the baptism had been too late. The teachings of Abraham became clear to him then. He spun his head around, looking for someone to ask if he had passed the Lord’s test as Abraham had, as his father had. The sailors stood around him with the sun of noon now over their shoulders. Seamus looked face to face and saw only sorrow and pity, faces bereft of anger looking down at him.

His eyes met Biago’s, who squatted down to be level with Seamus and the boy on the deck. In one hand was a wad of cable, in the other was a folded tarp of sailcloth. Biago, so close now to the face of Seamus, could feel the heat of the man’s red eyes scalding his face as the rage of the Lord supplanted the emptiness of sorrow. Biago recoiled, dropping both the rope and tarp before leaving him as he was. Seamus watched as the men left to resume their duties. Someone was already swabbing the deck where Seamus’s libations had been spilled.

And so, with one foot on the far end of the sailcloth to keep it down against the wind, Seamus rolled his son onto the tarp. He took the cable in hand and tied two clove hitches, one around the boy’s ankles, one around his hollow chest. He prayed the Lord’s prayer out into the sea and lowered the body into the water.

Isaac’s eyes sank out of view. In the distance, Seamus could make out something floating. The sun, riding high against the blue pall of day, intermittently caught the ebbing tide so as to sheen these crests. They flickered in Seamus’s bloodshot eyes.

In the silence, the Lord again commanded his servant, and his gaze turned upward.

From a clear sky rain began to fall, and Seamus knew the days of Noah would soon be upon him.

Aaron Osborne 55 / VLR

Anaxarete The sun is bright today. Its light glints off the glassy blue-green combers as they sough against the shore. In the sky, seabirds wheel and weave between white wisps of cloud, their cries strident and wild. A citharista strings his instrument and fills the summer air with tuneless twangs he tempers into song.

Ancient olives in their groves groan and sway in the salt sea breeze, knurly branches bowed by the weight of unnumbered centuries and their own bitter fruit, puce and perse against silvered leaves. Atop an eminence a palace stands, cream marble flecked and veined with pink and gold. Secreted deep within its walls, a princess sleeps, her limbs spread out and tangled in her silken sheets, her lips half-parted in half-finished prayer, her soul adrift on the strange, surging seas of dreams.

Jeffery Huang

56 / VLR

57 / VLR

Spring 2023 © Virginia Literary Review