Issue 269

After ten years of publishing beautiful words from a diverse collection of writers, poets, and essayists, Crack the Spine is closing to new submissions indefinitely. But before we go, we wanted to share the remaining work in our care. Please enjoy this finale (for now) issue of Crack the Spine, which we offer in our “original format” born over a decade ago (bit of a sentimental moment here), as well as our newer flip-style digital format.

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Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door Is a Jar, The Phoenix, and other journals. Edward is also a published poet.

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“The Sink”
Short Fiction by Noelle Nori

March, 1950

You’re brand new. Shiny. Gleaming. Porcelain white like the one in the bathroom under the mirrored medicine cabinet but better, infinitely better, for you’re in the kitchen, under the window that looks out at the little fenced-in yard, with its crab grass and chain-mail fence, its big maple ready to burst tiny green fingers any day now, ready and waiting for someone to come sit under it. Prime real estate.

May, 1950

It’s been a cold and lonely two months. Aside from the agent who comes every once in a while and turns on your tap to make sure it still runs, you’ve just sat here, being put to no use. You can’t understand it. It’s a good house; you saw it for yourself (well, most of it, anyway) when they carried you inside. You got a good look at the rest of the kitchen. Sure, it’s not enormous, but it’s got room enough for a table. An “eat-in,” they call it.

June, 1950

Today a lady stepped up to you. You could hear her approach, footsteps tapping across the linoleum. Water bubbled deep in your throat. They were nice footsteps, not angry like some you’ve heard but not altogether delicate either. She placed her warm hands against your edge, gold band tinkling, and let out a deep, contented sigh as she gazed out at the backyard.

“Come here, honey,” she called, and you thought you would not mind listening to the sound of that voice, smooth and flowing, not as thin as water but not thick like molasses either. Just right, like…warm milk.

Another set of footsteps approached, different from hers but still nice: solid and rhythmic with a slight hinge in the middle so you could anticipate the come-down, which softened like a fading song. The lady lifted one hand, and suddenly you were aware of your own coldness. It hadn’t occurred to you before that you were cold, that cold is your default-state. She pointed one red, round-tipped fingernail at the window, at the maple with its sprawling green hands swaying in the breeze. She smiled, and her white teeth reflected your own whiteness.

“See? Even the tree is waving at us.”

January, 1951

Eww. This is not what you signed up for. Don’t people usually do this in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet? But the lady didn’t make it to the toilet; instead she shot up from the table and ran to you, and the man shot up after her, his chair careening across the floor. He reached her in two long, bounding steps, and when she was finished and had rinsed her mouth and yours clean, she turned to his questioning eyes with a smile and a nod and looped her arms around his neck. You don’t understand how she could go from sick to happy so quickly. And the man’s eyes aren’t worried anymore but smiling too.

They must be crazy.

August, 1951

Well, this is a new sensation. Bare skin. Soft. New. Not just a finger or a hand but a body, a tiny little body, perfect and whole, everything in miniature. The little body that people call Emily likes to coo and make noises, and this makes the lady coo and make noises, and when the man gets home (you can tell when it’s almost time because the whole kitchen smells like roasted potatoes) sometimes he will – not exactly coo – but he will smile and laugh in a way that says if he knew how to coo, he’d be doing it.

December, 1952

You are getting too small for Emily, which is a real shame because you enjoy her company. She splashes and laughs and sometimes floods the kitchen floor, but the lady doesn’t seem to mind, just throws down a towel and drags it around with her foot until the linoleum is a tan fleur-de-lis desert again.

June, 1955

You are doing your job, a good job. You are holding all they ask of you, stacks and stacks of dishes, pots, pans, swallowing whatever they give you, carrot peels, an errant leaf of lettuce, and even when a knife gets caught in your throat, you don’t complain, just wait patiently for the man to get on his knees and fix you. And he does, he’s gentle; he does a good job. You can breathe again. But for a minute you wish you couldn’t; you wish he hadn’t. Because it’s relentless; they empty you out just to fill you up again, and this is what you were meant for, you know that, but, well, sometimes it’s hard, that’s all.

December, 1957

You thought those days were done. You thought this was your life now: dishes and suds and knives in throats. An existence of utility. But two soft little bodies have come to visit you, and while there are still dishes and suds – more than ever before – you don’t mind it so much, not if it means they can stay. They gurgle like you do sometimes.

June, 1958

One day there were two; the next there was one. The lady spends a lot of time by you, looking out at the maple, squinting as though if she looks hard enough, long enough, she’ll find hidden in the branches what she has lost. Sometimes she twists your handles full force and heaves over you, dry heaves like she might be sick but can’t get anything to come up. You wish she could. Even though it would be disgusting, you’d gladly swallow her sickness if it would make her feel better. You wonder if maybe she is too exposed out here, if maybe she hadn’t better try going into the bathroom like the man does when he needs to be alone with his sadness. You wouldn’t be offended, even if you are much nicer than the bathroom.

November, 1958

Somehow things have fallen into a routine again, although not like before. Tonight at dinner the little one made a mess, green gook (you think it is mashed peas) all over his face and hands, down his shirt and in his little wisps of baby hair. The man brought him over to clean him up, and you realized you hadn’t seen him up close in a long time, not since there were two of him. But the lady didn’t let you get a good look, didn’t let him stay, just swept him up in her arms and carried him to the bathroom.

“It’s too big,” she called to the man over her shoulder.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The sink – it’s too big.”

“What are you talking about? If anything it’s too small.”

But the bathroom door closed and the water turned on and that was the end of that conversation. Emily came over to refill her glass of water, and the man brought the dishes by.  You wanted to say something, do something, offer some sign of comfort, for you saw the look they exchanged when the lady left the room. But there was nothing for you to do except the same thing you do every night after dinner. So you did that and hoped it would be enough, but you know what the lady means. You will always look too big for one baby, when there used to be – and should be – two.

July, 1959

You can hear her in the bathroom, and her heaves are real. At first you were glad, but it’s been three months of this and now you are beginning to wonder if she is sick, really sick, not just sad-sick. Sometimes she’ll stare out your window with this vacant look on her face, not the searching look she had last year. It’s scary; you’ve never seen anyone look like that, like they’re not all there, like any moment they might disappear.

October, 1959

You’ve never tasted this before. It’s like…acid, burning. Mixed with…tin. Tonight, the man came and stood over you and poured something strange down your throat. It was copper brown and clear all at the same time, and the lady was yelling – she never yells, in fact she barely speaks anymore – but tonight she was yelling, yelling, yelling, as the man opened a squat glass bottle and poured out its contents. She took off the gold band and threw it at you. You caught it in your mouth and wanted to keep it there, but the drink kept coming, liquid gold escorting gold.

Somewhere in there the yelling turned to crying – no, not crying – sobbing, horrible, wretched sounds like when you had that knife in your throat. You wanted to catch her tears, but she wasn’t standing over you; she was standing in front of you, forehead pressed into the white starch of the man’s shoulder. And he put his arms around her and clutched her hair, and you swear he was crying too, although you couldn’t hear his tears like you could hers. And later she made him open you up and find the gold band. Somewhere deep down you had latched yourself shut to keep it from going to that place where it could never be found again, that place where the reason she cries is.

***

And so it goes. Long days, busy days. Dishes, dishes, dishes. Hands under running water: large, rough ones, soft, squishy ones, the lady’s; you will always recognize hers, even if the fingernails are no longer red. She still stands over you sometimes with that vacant look in her eyes, but she’s stopped heaving and you haven’t tasted that horrible burning taste again. On good days a small sailboat comes bobbing along, with a small body leaning over you until before you know it, there are no small bodies anymore, everyone towers over you, then one by one they disappear: your sweet Emily. Bobby aka Boat Boy. The man. The lady’s hands turn wrinkled and mottled, and sometimes it makes you sad so your handles squeak and sometimes you are afraid to cry. And then all of a sudden there is no one at all for long stretches of time – days, weeks, months – and it is like before, way before when you were brand new and waiting. But now you’re not sure what you’re waiting for anymore.

March, 2018

Today you heard footsteps tapping across the linoleum. They were nice footsteps, not angry but not altogether delicate either, and for a moment you felt that old bubble of excitement rising up. It’s the lady! She’s come back! She steps up to you now and rests her hands at your edge, and you can tell at once, it’s not the lady, for there’s no gold band tinkling. But the hands are soft and warm and still familiar: Emily’s hands.

Two more pairs of footsteps follow, and Emily moves aside for someone – a young woman – to take her place by you.

“I know the kitchen’s a little dated, but it has a good layout. The sink has a nice view of the backyard,” Emily says, gesturing, and a weird taste ripples through you, sweet and sour at the same time. She hasn’t come back to reclaim you after all. Still, it’s nice to be noticed again, to be remembered. You might be old, but you still have your view.

“Come here, honey,” the young woman calls, and you think you would not mind listening to the sound of that voice. She steps aside, and a man comes up to you, cooing and laughing at the small cooing body in his arms. But before he has a chance to look at the yard, she moves him aside again and leans over you, taking deep breaths.

The man shifts the baby to one side, and the chubby legs splay around his frame. He touches the woman on the shoulder and peers into her face. She glances at him from the corner of her eye and nods.

“Is she all right?” Emily asks, alarmed.

“She’s very – sensitive,” the man says.

“Oh.”

The young woman is upright again, chewing her lip. She looks from the man to Emily and back again. “This is going to sound strange,” she says. “But did anyone ever die in this house? All of a sudden I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

Emily is silent, but it’s an active silence, like she is weighing something in her mind. “I have a brother. But his twin died as an infant.”

“So your brother, too.”

“Yes.”

The young woman turns her head to stare out at the backyard, at the maple with its tiny buds ready to burst.

“How did he die?”

“No one knows. Well, now they call it SIDS. But back then they didn’t know. They still don’t, not really.”

“He’s in the yard,” the young woman says, not moving her head.

“What?” Emily comes and stands next to her.

“He’s in the yard, playing in that tree. I can see him – his spirit.”

“That’s strange. My mother –” Emily’s white knuckles gleam against your white edge. “She used to think she saw him. Right after it happened. Until one day,” Emily shrugs, “she didn’t any more.”

Everyone is quiet except the baby, who is making noises and kicking his legs against the man like he is gearing up for a cry. The woman takes him in her arms.

“I’ll show you out,” Emily says after a moment.

“Why?”

“You won’t want to buy this house after that.”

The young woman looks back out the window, jiggling the baby to an inaudible tune. “He’s gone,” she says after a moment. She turns back to Emily. “He was just saying hi. He knew you were here.”

Emily doesn’t say anything.

“You don’t believe me. It’s all right; a lot of people don’t. I’m sure you weren’t expecting someone like me to show up.”

“Well, you get all kinds of people at an Open House,” Emily says with an awkward laugh.

The young woman glances at the man. “We’ll go, though. I’ve made you uncomfortable.”

“It’s not that. It’s just…” Suddenly Emily looks like how you remember her, like little girl Emily. “Do I tell my mother?”

“She’s still alive?” the woman asks and then seems to catch herself. “I’m sorry, I just assumed…you’re selling the house…”

“She doesn’t have long. Half the time she doesn’t recognize me, although she has moments of lucidity. I don’t know if she even remembers she had a child who died. I don’t want to distress her.”

“I’m sorry,” the young woman says, a pained look on her face. She drops a kiss to the baby’s head, and she and the man turn to go.

May, 2018

You are starting to get nervous, although you can’t pinpoint why. You haven’t seen Emily in weeks, not since she and a man in a navy blazer were here. Emily had said something about not being able to sell – too many memories – and hope had surged within you. But she meant not being able to sell it herself, not not selling it period.

“We’ll price it to flip,” the man had said, and now you realize, it’s that word, flip. It makes your insides do exactly what it says. “Unless you want to do any work to it beforehand?”

Emily had glanced around the kitchen, and you swear her eyes had lingered on you. She shook her head.

She hasn’t come back.

June, 2018

You have not seen so many people in the kitchen since Boat Boy’s high school graduation. But this is not a friendly crowd; it’s the exact opposite. People are tearing up the linoleum and putting axes through the cupboards, and you know it’s only a matter of time before they come for you, too.

You wonder where you will end up. Probably in some garbage heap somewhere, with flies buzzing and stink all around you. That’s if they take you out whole and don’t crack you in pieces and pull you apart, scattering your remains who-knows-where. At first you are angry. You still work just fine, you want to tell them. What a waste to replace you just because you’ve fallen out of fashion. But eventually you tire of being angry and you become sad, and when you tire of being sad, you become nothing, vacant and hollow. That’s what you were before, before they put you in here, before the lady placed her warm fingers on your cold white edge, only you didn’t know it; it was your default-state.

You wonder if that is what she felt all those years ago when she used to stare out your window with that look upon her face. You wonder if now she feels something again. You hope she does; you hope she’s found what she was searching for and is sitting with it under the big maple, its sprawling green hands swaying in the breeze.

 

Noelle Nori received her MFA in Writing with a Fiction concentration from Spalding University’s low-residency program. Her work has received an Honorable Mention nod from Glimmer Train Press.

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Dissolver
Poetry by Howard Algeo

You are the dissolver of birdsong
On knees bent with attitude
Your voice an artifact of the future

Newark was once 2-0-1
Culture once culture
Skin and sky of similar density

Sniffles, coughs, earaches, and
Genuine glances are betrayers of deceit
Backing into you and asking

Did you die or something?
And what did you do to the birds?

 

Howard Algeo has been published in the online edition of Paper Darts. He is a home health care executive, currently serving as Director of Business Development and Training for Seniors Helping Seniors. Howard holds a BA from Temple University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Also a stand-up comedian, Howard feels writing comedy and writing poetry are very similar: It’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out.

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My Adult Life
Microfiction by Sophia Bannister

Perfect Harriet died after two days. Scout stank so foully my mother had him returned. A week before he was plopped cage-and-all back on the counter, Alex Retzloff warned it was my survival in middle school or the mouse’s. I’d brought Scout to live in his Science lab since it was over-filled with tarantulas, snakes, and odd little fish anyway, but the weird and bearded animal-lover ended the arrangement on account of his students holding their breath. The 6th graders’ pinched noses were particularly dramatic.

I doubt I’ll ever bother to count the mice of my adult life.

 

Sophia Bannister is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she studied writing and the history of science. In addition to assisting a graduate course on poetry and bioethics at Case Western University, she currently does social media and outreach for the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Her work is featured in Prometheus Dreaming.

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Iesu Grist
Flash Fiction by Bethan Jones

Iesu was born on a quiet street in the middle of winter when snow steepled the valley sides like a church. A long birth it was, for Iesu’s mam, who puffed and panted on the old green-blanketed bed while her husband prayed above her.

Ein Tad, yr hwn yn y nefoedd

Blood stained the sheets as the midwife told her to push and push again. Iesu didn’t cry when he emerged into the dull light, blinking at them with his too-old eyes. That was when I knew, see, his mam would say. That was when I knew he’d special.

Deled dy deyrnas, gwneler dy ewyllys

Iesu went to my school but he pulled the legs off beetles and the wings off flies, and put his hand up girls’ skirts when he thought no one was looking. We went to his birthday parties because we went to everyone’s birthday parties, played musical chairs and pass the parcel, but no one ever wanted to pass to Iesu.

Dyrno inni heddiw ein bara beunyddiol

We went to Iesu’s birthday parties until the year I turned eleven, the year that Iesu stopped coming to school. They said it was an accident and they buried his mam on the grey mountain, Iesu and his father the only ones there to pray for her under a sullen sky. They said, much later, that had been the breaking point. I thought he’d broken years before.

Phaid â’n dwyn i brawf

We hardly ever see him now, holed up in his mam’s house on the side of the grey valley. People pause when he passes them in town. Sometimes they whisper. I’ve only ever seen him once. The other side of the road, early one morning. I kept my head down and carried on walking.

 

Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate working on her PhD by publication at Cardiff University. She has published extensively on anti-fandom, gender and cult television and has been published in the journals Transformative Works and Culture, New Media & Society and Sexualities. Bethan also writes flash fiction, taking inspiration from the south Wales valleys where she grew up and now lives. She obtained an MA in creative writing from Cardiff University in 2010 and her work has been published in The Binnacle and The Pygmy Giant.

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The Mission of Rouses Point
Short Fiction by Ken O’Steen

In wintertime it was dark by four in the afternoon when the train left. The station in Rouses Point was made of red brick that had become pocked and sullied due to age and the brutal climate. The yellow light that managed to seep through the windowpanes at dusk looked tired, and it made scant impression on the snow just below the windows.

The drive from the house in the town of St. Albans in Vermont where I lived took forty minutes on a good day. There were bridges over Lake Champlain in two places, first crossing into Alburg, which was on an island, and then the one from Vermont over into New York. By late December the lake was frozen solid.

I waited on the platform burrowed into my overcoat, and when gusts would blow the snow sideways I would try to brush the flakes away before they had a chance to dampen the wool. I took the trip several times a week, returning the next day on a train that originated in Montreal, and got me back into Rouses Point usually by noon.

The journey to Saint-Lambert, just south of Montreal on the other side of the St. Lawrence took an hour and a half, at least half of that spent at the border crossing. Customs would have absorbed infinitely more time had I chosen to make the frequent trips by automobile. Because of the border, as well as challenges presented by the weather, the train was the only reasonable choice.

I often napped while I was on the train. I was usually tired, if not completely worn. When I disembarked at Saint-Lambert I would walk to my destination, heading down Victoria Avenue to the neighborhood where the two-story brick house was one of many like it. I normally stopped along the way for groceries or takeout food, or for household items that were running low. The person to whom I made these regular visits lived in the apartment on the bottom floor. His name was Isaad.

The origin of the visits was a promise I had given to my brother Randal prior to his death nearly a year before. I had agreed that I would do as much as I could to sustain the general well being of the man my brother had told me once was the only person he had ever loved. It was a promise to a brother I had barely known during most of my life.

We had grown up in Winston-Salem, a small city in North Carolina where our father had been an executive at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Randal was born a full fifteen years ahead of me, my conception obviously a fluke, and had gone away to college shortly after I’d begun to walk. He moved for good to New York City immediately after he graduated.

Randal returned to visit no more than two or three times in all the years I was growing up. Neither of us was bosom buddies with the dad we had, yet the distance between Randal and the man was epic. I came to understand only much later of course the degree to which Randal’s sexuality had played a role, a period that was virtually the dark ages when it came to matters such as this, our father harshly conservative to the very end.

Randal was six foot two now, had rugged, concave cheeks, and brown hair and eyes, same as I. We both retained lingering traces of our Southern accent. His voice was a resonating baritone, and he talked fast, a legacy of his years in New York.

Randal’s life and my own converged finally in Vermont. Randal had left New York in the late Nineties, before that working in graphic design for several magazines, all the while aspiring to exhibit drawings and paintings, and never making it closer than the fringes of the art world. Finally disillusioned with his career, the futility of his aspirations, and the city itself, which he described to me at the time as “becoming Disney-fied,” he made a dramatic late in life turn.

As I remembered it, when he moved to Burlington, he mentioned Vermont electing a socialist member of congress as something that had grabbed his attention. He returned to teaching math in high school, having minored in math in college, and having taught it for a year when he moved to New York.

I came to live in Vermont some years after that, mostly on his recommendation, choosing to live thirty miles up the road, in St. Albans. At the time I was on the brink of having languished for twenty embarrassing years on the bottom rung of the LA music scene, watching as the relationship to the woman I was in love with crumble after twelve. I wanted as far away as possible in every sense. Yet it still would be several years before Randal and I became close.

~ ~ ~

After my visits with Isaad, I would walk the few blocks to my room for the night. Even though it was a short distance, it was often icy, and I would bring a pair of attachable cleats that I would affix to my boots before I made the walk.

My regular nights were permanently booked with Mrs. Lapointe at her lodging house unless I notified her otherwise. She had three spacious rooms for rent in the massive house, managing it alone even at eighty-four. It was not unusual to encounter her barreling through the halls with stacks of linen. Students, tourists, and regular business travelers rented her rooms.

In the morning, I would make the walk back to the station and board the train again. Once home, I would rest in the early afternoon, later spend some time at the piano, or patching songs together on the computer. Then I ate something before I left for work.

For years now I had performed in a musical trio at The Money Tree, something of a landmark bar and restaurant in town.  The owner Sal was something of a throwback, a New Yorker who had spent his early years banging around the jazz clubs across Manhattan. He believed our traditional jazz repertoire was the music eminently suitable for an establishment such as his.

Jazz was a departure for me- I hadn’t spent a lifetime playing the music. In Los Angeles I had played over the years in a mainstream rock act, an alt-country group, and an indie electronica band. Later I tried the solo route, writing my own music, first aspiring to a Tom Waits brand of cabaret Skidrow blues. Once or twice someone from A&R at a local record label would show up and watch a show. Yet nothing of consequence ever materialized. There were days now when I regarded it all as mostly a colossal waste. At the Money Tree I could earn a paycheck playing music at least.

Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday were my working nights. Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays I journeyed to visit Isaad, taking the single train a day in each direction. Though the visits were important to do, such a schedule often saw me weary. I had no time for paling around with friends, and since the break-up of my relationship, I approached romance with an attitude between cynicism and pure indifference.

~ ~ ~

It was shortly after my arrival in Vermont, that Randal made yet another sharp turn in life. America had invaded Afghanistan, and not long after that, Iraq. Randal came to the realization that rather than continue pouring his disgust into opposition, he must do something that was directly positive. He took a job in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, where he taught math at the INVEST school. The school had been established for the general education and vocational training of women and girls. When he returned to Vermont permanently, among the things Randal told me, including some harrowing tales, was that he had met someone and fallen in love.

“His name is Isaad,” he revealed, with a kind of shimmer in his eyes.

“An Afghani then?”

“He was born in a place called Herat in eastern Afghanistan, but he went to college in London, and lived there for a long time. He went back to Afghanistan for many of the same reasons that I was there, in his case to teach English.”

Our mother and father died while Randal was in Afghanistan, and he hadn’t returned for either funeral, though I’d attended both. Despite the wrath that persisted toward our father, Randal reserved a dollop of warmth for our regrettably subservient mother, with whom occasionally he had been in touch. He never pined for our father’s love or affirmation.

“Mom didn’t care how I lived my life, really. I give her credit for that. We at least had some kind of long-distance relationship,” he told me when we first reconnected in Vermont. “Still, the fact that between the two of them, she never stopped pretending she was just as bothered by my queerness as he was, was just a little too pathetic.”

I was agnostic about how my brother and my parents related to one another. We had grown up entirely separately, in different eras, and with parents at different stages of their lives. Our father had become slightly more humane later in life, even as he remained arch-reactionary, including his views on sexuality.

Some are born into a family whose bosom they nestle into naturally and altogether comfortably. Randal and I were not. Half the world wasn’t either. So, in my view, this was far from tragic.

~ ~ ~

Isaad had made his return to London around the same time Randal returned to Vermont. The two hoped eventually to live together, though Randal had no desire to live in England, and America was out of reach for Isaad. He qualified neither for the Special Visa Program extended to Afghanis who had worked with the American government, nor for a family visa either. In London, Isaad obtained a tourist visa for Canada, and there, in Saint Lambert, he and Randal settled in together.

It was around that time I used the bulk of my own portion of our inheritance to buy a drafty white Victorian house on the top of a hill overlooking St. Albans. There was a clear view of Lake Champlain, with its thin powder of snow continually whisked across the frozen surface by the winter winds. Main Street, along with the fountain and the statue in Taylor Park were clearly in view. Best of all was the sad, sallow face of the illuminated clock on the tower of the Congregational Church staring at me with friendly benevolence.

Though we infrequently got together in person, Randal and I remained in regular contact by phone and email. We enjoyed a growing ease with one another. One might say that at last we became brothers. We shared our views on art and politics, books and music, and in many respects our views were remarkably similar. One thing Randal did not confide was his own illness.

Learning he was close to death with the sudden onset of a deadly pneumonia, was jolting. About the concealment, he said, “Finally, I had a family life worth having. I wasn’t about to muck it up with a lot of moroseness.”

It was when we last spoke, there in his hospital room in Montreal, that he asked for my promise to care for Isaad. He seemed to require it for his own peace. Though I knew Isaad, and had spoken with him from time to time, I was unaware of the extent of his own frailty.

“He will need your help,” was one of the last things Randal said to me before I left. “It took me most of my life to find him. He’s rare. Such beauty in every imaginable way.”

Isaad’s knees were bad, one of his hips had deteriorated, and he could scarcely walk. With our inheritance, Randal was able to leave ample funds behind in their joint bank account. But it was obvious Isaad couldn’t survive alone, not without assistance. The prospect of being shipped to England, or worse, Afghanistan, or warehoused in a home for the elderly, rightly terrified him.

And thus, began those somewhat arduous days, of late-night piano-playing, alternated with journeys across an international border, chores in Saint Lambert, and banal responsibilities at home.

~ ~ ~

Spring came, and the town square became lush again. The lake turned from icy gray to crystal blue. Looking out from the bridges on the trip to Rouses Point, boats bobbed in the water again, and during walks from the station in Saint Lambert, the air was filled with the smell of coffee brewing, and baking bread.

I told Isaad on one of my earliest visits, the day in fact I brought him the urn with Randal’s ashes, how unseemly I believed it was, that he and Randal could never share a home in America.

“I’m a gay man from a warring Muslim country,” he said. “Your country isn’t waving me in.”

He was engaging company, mordant as they came. He had short bangs in front that were still dark, while the rest of his hair was interwoven with gray. His salt and pepper beard was smartly trimmed. He was strong in his upper body, even as his legs had lost their firmness. His olive skin was remarkably smooth for a man of his age. He often wore black, and might have been mistaken for a trendy Londoner out for an evening in the West End.

One afternoon after I had taken the trash out to the bin in back, and changed a light bulb in the kitchen, the two of us sat and talked. Isaad was taken with the beers from the microbreweries in Vermont I sometimes brought along. He told me things about he and Randal’s time together in Afghanistan I hadn’t heard from Randal.

“We were somewhere in the Nahr-e Saraj district, coming back from a couple of days in Kabul. All of the sudden rockets and shells started going off all around us. We got out of the SUV and ran for a tiny uninhabited house that must have been abandoned for a long time. We got down behind a blasted-out mud brick wall and covered our heads. We were clinging to the wall, when a rocket landed about fifty meters away, raining down dirt and clay. It was almost completely dark it was so thick, and Randal said, I thought I’d forgotten how to pray, but I’m remembering now.”

“No, he wouldn’t tell me about that,” I said, laughing.

“Another time we were on the road with one of the school’s security men, who travelled with us at times. We stopped for a famer who was lying in the middle of the road, with what appeared to be a piece of shrapnel stuck in his leg. Then all hell really broke loose, gunfire and explosions and rockets whizzing over. The security man shouted, Apaches, which were the British gunships. The Taliban will go now, he said. We were terrified the British would shoot us before we even had a chance to tell them who we were. Maybe god was so impressed with Randal putting aside his atheism to ask for help, that he saved our lives.”

“I’m impressed you didn’t wet yourselves.”

“Honestly, I think Randal believed his activism for gay people in New York in the Seventies required more bravery.”

“I’m guessing you never came out to anyone in your own neck of the woods growing up.”

He laughed hysterically, and said, “Oh hell no.”

One night I cooked spaghetti, which I was extremely good at, and over dinner Isaad and I talked a great deal about Randal, and to some extent our benighted heritage.

“He told me he worried how you might turn out growing up down there. Said he thought it could go either way. But he got the feeling pretty early on, that you weren’t likely to remain among the fold there.”

“I looked up to him as a typical older brother, even though I didn’t know him much. I thought of him as sophisticated. One thing I always appreciated when he called, especially when I was in Los Angeles, was that he always asked me about my music. He sounded genuinely interested. Or at least made me feel that he really was.”

“He told me he realized you were a highly talented musician after you sent some tapes.”

Isaad was curious about living in Los Angeles. Was it exciting? Was it as vapid as it was reputed to be?

“It’s the kind of place where everything said to describe it is true to some extent, whether good or bad. There’s more natural beauty than television and movies usually convey. There are more bookish people there than you’ve been led to believe.”

He told me some about Herat, where he had spent his childhood.

“I was a fish out of water in much the same banal way as you and Randal were, and countless others who know from early on they want to be somewhere other than where they are. I guess you could say I bided my time, went along with the religious fairy tales, and fantasied about the future. The Russians, like the Persians, were always keen on crashing in, and the final time I visited my mother and father, the Russians were using Herat as an operational base. But even a place you’re alienated from can elicit your pity and outrage when its people are routinely tyrannized, or shot to pieces in the crossfire. So, I went back to work at the school. Best of all, I met Randal.”

One November afternoon with sleet coming down, we were sitting in his always-toasty apartment watching news on the CBC. There was a story about protests against the administration in the United States. I said something admiring about his and Randal’s activism. He said, “Randal had a refreshing lack of warmth for a do-gooder. Always allergic to sentiment.”

I told him that the only time I’d detected sentiment from Randal was when he spoke of Isaad. This caused him to tilt his head down, and his eyes to well up.

It occurred to me one day on the train back to Rouses Point that I must have learned more about my brother from Isaad, than directly from Randal.

Late one afternoon I knocked at Isaad’s door, holding a heavy bag of groceries. When he didn’t appear, I continued to knock. I heard a door open upstairs, and then a woman of about forty descended the stairs, stopping before she reached the bottom.

“I don’t believe he’s coming back,” she told me in English, apparently not a native Québécois.

“They took him to the hospital, but I think he must have been dead by then. My husband found him collapsed in the hallway. It looked like he was going for help, but there was nobody around at the time. The rescuers said they believed he had a heart attack.”

On the train ride back to Rouses Point, hefty flakes of snow began to pour down, and while the lake had yet to freeze, I could see as I crossed the bridges that it had turned its winter gray. Our parents had died, and Randal had, and so Isaad’s death seemed inevitable, the next domino of death to tumble over. And here I remained, unworthiest of them all. Our dad, for all his obdurateness, at least managed to be a success. Our mother had become a society matron, and in the process raised a couple of sons, who hadn’t killed anyone, or hurt people.

I came to realize it was not so much what I’d failed to accomplish that was the origin of my ruefulness, but rather, that I no longer would be doing the single thing of indisputable value beyond myself I’d ever done. Wasn’t it antithetical to the all-consuming life of the artist, acting on behalf of others? And so, perhaps, the last embers of artistic illusion burned out.

~ ~ ~

I made one final trip across the border. There I retrieved the urn containing Randal’s ashes from Isaad’s apartment in Saint-Lambert, after which I went to collect Isaad’s ashes from the mortuary in Montreal. Then I set them side-by-side on the bookshelf next to my piano.

Our trio at the Money Tree snatched its occasional shiny moment. Even the lighter side of jazz required considerable skill. As a journeyman, there was dignity in being regularly paid.

I walked home those early mornings after work, wrapped in my overcoat. I passed the gazebo and the statue in the park draped in fresh snow. I trudged my way to the top of the hill. Out my window was the sallow clock. Looking back at me it appeared not to be judging much, presiding over us with such sad wisdom.

 

Ken’s stories have appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Eclectica, Switchback (University of San Francisco), ELM (Eureka College Literary Magazine), Litro, Pif Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Literary Juice, Fiction Week Literary Review, London magazine The Wolfian, and other publications. Ken is from Los Angeles, and currently lives in Proctor, Vermont.

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Celestial Navigation
Poetry by Shelli Cornelison

A woman so new the world can still choose to consume her as girl lies in the backyard and watches the night sky become ocean, a luminescent ship enrobed in fog sailing directly above her. The lights of a jet passing through shallow clouds comprise the truth of the image. She knows this, but she squints against the edges of reality, embraces the eroticism of illusion.

The grass is damp from an early evening rain, her t-shirt wicking droplets from the blades and clinging to her back. Fire ants claim the exposed flesh of her legs, pierce and inject their toxins. In the days that follow she will have to fight the compulsion to scratch. This angers her more than the current discomfort, the fact that their aggressions will linger on her skin, force her to remember.

Black waves swallow the vessel in the sky. She imagines it will be crushed but not lost. Scattered among the stars, the wreckage will swirl, broken bits of shimmer tumbling by instinct to form a new constellation. The intimate shards of its figurehead will coalesce into the personal lodestar of hybrid woman-girls everywhere, a beacon to guide them when they find themselves suddenly adrift in foreign depths.

Elders and influencers have raised her on censored wisdom and filtered images, led her to believe if she ingested enough, she would be ready to take on the world, but now she knows the truth: the compendium is incomplete.

Tempest tossed, still armed only for the nuisance of familiar predators who have nibbled at her on land for as long as she can remember, she met deep sea monsters who could eat her whole, and regurgitate a doll in her image so beautifully unblemished and convincing no one would even notice she was hollow when she floated back to shore.

Her eyes scan the night sky, beseech the newborn star to emerge. She thinks of all the “star light, star bright” wishes she spent on the old star, the one that doesn’t serve new women. But the debut star will burn for them alone, and with its inaugural glimmer, she will invoke safe passage, and the return of her guts, the thickening of her skin.

She ignores the tiny punctures and their incessant sting, proving her strength, if only to herself. Some night soon she will be a whole new woman.

 

Shelli Cornelison misses writing in coffee shops, and eavesdropping in between getting lost in her own words. She almost even misses the monsters that hog table space and talk on their phones. Her work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, The Forge, and Hunger Mountain.

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Matryoshka Doll
Creative Non-Fiction by Deborah Moreno

It was dusk, that time between moods when our house went dark with my father. Each night, he stomped his feet in the front entry as though trying to release snow from his boots. Even in the summer when there was no snow, he stamped, shaking off a day’s worth of worries from Chicago’s streets. If the thumps sounded too hard, I knew to stay out of his way.

When my father walked through the front door that evening, he found guests sitting in our living room. My mother jumped to greet him.

“Look who’s come to see us,” she said.

I watched my father put on his polite face. Mr. and Mrs. Garfield, our family friends, had stopped to say hello.

“Welcome home!” Mrs. Garfield said.

She got up to hug my father, but he allowed her only a kiss on the cheek as he gripped his briefcase. Mr. Garfield stood to shake my father’s hand and explain why they had come.

“I finished work early, so Shar and I decided to walk around the neighborhood,” he said. But then Mr. Garfield then paused. “We don’t want to get in your way.”

Mr. Garfield, a red-bearded and kind-spoken man, signaled to his wife that they should go. But my father told them otherwise.

“No, stay, stay,” he said as he put down his briefcase, took off his coat, and hung it in the closet.

My father walked back to the couch, slipped off his suit coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, sat down, and crossed his legs the way I’d noticed men did—right ankle to left knee, 90-degree angle.

“We were just telling Jackie about our upcoming trip to Moscow,” Sharlene said.

The Garfields and their four children lived several blocks from us. They were all American born, but Sharlene sometimes wore a scarf around her head as though she were a Shtetl wife from the old country. A colorful, hand-painted wooden doll sat on her living room mantel. When my mother and I visited Mrs. Garfield’s house, I often reached for the beauty, twisting her in the middle where another doll rested inside, safe and sound. The doll, a seemingly singular object, was in fact, a doll inside a doll inside a doll, each hiding, concealed, and diminishing in size until the last one, a tiny baby, lay in the palm of your hand. Mrs. Garfield called it a Matryoshka doll.

“I brought it back from Russia, the Soviet Union,” she said.

It was exceptional, but also just a doll, a fake representation of a girl. Real girls were far more complex. For instance, inside me, I was a jungle monkey swinging from tree to tree, grabbing vines, and perching on high limbs. When climbing Dewey School’s monkey bars, I beat all the boys across—hand over hand—from one side to the other.

I was also more complicated than an ordered Matryoshka doll because, in third grade, I’d decided I wanted to be like Marie Curie, who discovered radiation. I also wanted to be like Maria Tallchief, a ballerina. And Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady. I’d read their biographies, checking them out of the school library. Hopes and dreams nested within me like a doll inside a doll inside a doll.

That night, the Garfields sat on our living room couch chatting with my parents. Then their attention turned to me.

“How’s school?” Mrs. Garfield asked.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“And piano?”

“I’m playing a Kabalevsky.”

“A Russian composer. How wonderful,” Mrs. Garfield said.

Her son, Craig, and I studied piano with the same Hungarian piano teacher, Mrs. Simon.

“I think Craig is playing that piece, too,” she said.

But Craig was behind me in piano. He played the pieces that I’d learned long ago. His mother compared us often, but it wasn’t fair because I’d started earlier. Still, Mrs. Garfield’s inquires suggested a competition. My mother and Mrs. Garfield also half-joked about making a shidduch, a betrothal, with Craig and me.

My father’s foot shook, and he bounced and rotated it. His evening routine had been stalled by the Garfields’ visit. He sat in his work clothes, but I knew he wanted to take off his suit, toss his button-down shirt into the hamper, and watch TV in his bedroom. Our family hadn’t eaten dinner either. My mother had been preparing a chicken and potatoes dinner when the Garfields stopped by.  My father smiled at our guests, but that springy foot told me the truth. I’d better stay quiet and out of his way.

Just then, the back doorbell rang. I could tell the difference between the front and back doorbells because one sang with a melodic ding-dong, and the other gave off a flat, tinny clink, like a penny thrown into a fountain. The back doorbell was my opportunity to escape the attention of the grownups.

“I’ll get it!” I said.

“Well, this is quite the night,” my mother said. “Lots of visitors!”

I took off through the living room into the kitchen. The doorbell rang again. Someone was in a hurry.

“I’m coming!” I shouted while unchaining and unbolting two locks. I opened the door, stepped onto the back porch, and discovered my grandfather.

“Can you let me in?” he asked through the screen door.

I unlatched and opened the door. Tears clung to his jowled and mustached face. He didn’t say hello or offer his usual bristly kiss on the cheek. Instead, my Grandpa Granat, my father’s father, looked past me, searching for something.

“Can you get your mother?” he asked.

“Are you okay, Grandpa?” I asked.

“Just get your mother, will you?”

His clipped tone caught me off guard.

“Sure,” I said and headed toward the living room where the Garfields were still talking about their upcoming trip to the U.S.S.R. When grownups discussed that country, certain words sprang up: dissidents, restrictions, repression, the gulag, free Soviet Jews. That night was no different.

“We’re helping a particular family . . .” Mrs. Garfield explained to my parents.

I needed to interrupt the conversation, but how could I? I wasn’t supposed to be impolite.

“Uhm, excuse me, Mrs. Garfield,” I said. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need my mother.”

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked.

“For heaven’s sake. We adults are talking. Go play,” my father said.

“Grandpa Granat is in the kitchen,” I said.

I paused for a moment. Should I tell? I needed to get my mother into the kitchen to talk to my grandfather, but I also feared my father. I took a chance.

“He says he wants Mom. Um, he’s crying,” I said.

My father’s face dropped, and he turned to my mother.

“Jackie, see what’s going on.”

My mother got up, and the two of us hurried into the kitchen.

While leaving the living room, I heard Mr. Garfield say they’d better be on their way.

“Really, we didn’t mean to take up your evening,” he said.

Mr. Garfield’s voice trailed off as I followed my mother into the kitchen.

“Harry, what’s the matter? Is Nettie okay?”

Harry and Nettie were my father’s parents. They lived in Skokie, a few miles away.

“Can I speak with you privately?” my grandfather asked my mother.

“Yes, of course. Let’s go in here,” my mother said. She led my grandfather into the family room where they whispered. I waited in the kitchen, standing alone, unable to discern what they were saying. My father said goodbye to the Garfields at the front door.

“I hope everything’s okay,” I heard Mrs. Garfield say.

“Oh, I’m sure it will be fine,” my father said.

Snippets of conversation drifted from the family room.

“My goodness, Harry, I’m so sorry,” my mother said.

“What will Nettie say?” my grandfather asked.

His voice rose and cracked. Another wave of tears spilled from him. His sobs spread through the room like fog, clouding my understanding.

What I knew of my lawyer grandfather was that he’d once written to the Soviet government asking about his hometown, Radziwilov. He’d received an official government letter denying the town had ever existed. I’d seen the typewritten sentence with my own eyes. One sunny afternoon, my Grandma Nettie had pulled the onion skin correspondence from her china cabinet drawer. She drew it out with care, opened the folded piece of paper, and spread it on her dining room table. I stared down at the words: Radziwilov—town unknown.

“This is what you call repression, the denial of facts,” she said.

According to the Soviet officials, my grandfather had conjured the location of his birth, the trees he’d climbed as a boy, the market where his mother had shopped for food, the town where his father had worked.

On the day he’d received that letter, the Soviets had made the first fourteen years of his life vanish. He’d been lucky to come to America in 1914. He’d learned English well enough to attend college and then law school. He’d applied himself to the United States Constitution and the American way. He’d secured a job, married, fathered two children, and bought a house. He drove an elegant car. He had no Russian accent and gave no outward hint of a previous life in Mother Russia, another world, another time, another culture. The Soviet government had made his early life evaporate just like that—poof!

Now, in 1976, my grandfather stood crying in our American house. I did not understand his tears. Was he homesick, longing for his town in Russia? Maybe he could not tolerate Chicago any longer with its dirty, cracked sidewalks and its ugly, scar-faced criminals.

After closing the front door behind the Garfields, my father, mother, grandfather, and I converged in the kitchen.

“Bruce, there’s some bad news,” my mother said. “Your father was fired from his job.”

My grandmother Nettie did not know the news because Harry could not bring himself to tell her.

“Can you phone her, Jackie?” Harry asked my mother.

My mother hugged my grandfather.

“Harry, it’s going to be okay. You’ll see. She’ll understand.”

My father slid his hands into his pockets, saying nothing.

Harry’s wife would be mad, crazy mad. Even I knew that. My grandmother Nettie had a “supposed-to” list a mile long. A person was supposed to attend temple on Sabbath, or you were no Jew. You were supposed to eat her chopped liver, or you were insulting her. You were supposed to have a job to make money so you could support Israel. A home was supposed to be lick-off-the-floor clean. My grandmother was a cleaning tornado, bustling through her house with dust mops and furniture polish. She painted her basement and re-tarred her roof. Then, she sat at the kitchen table to drink black coffee and smoke a cigarette.

She always had a piece of fish in her refrigerator. When you said you were hungry, she’d say, “I have a piece of fish.” She was a good cook, so you ate the fish. She made mandel bread, eastern European cookies, and stored them in a tin inside her pantry. When my birthday fell on Passover, which it often did, she baked sponge cake. The religious rule was not to eat leavened foods for a week. My mother had instructed me not to tell my grandmother that we ate bread and cake at our house on Passover.

“Don’t tell, don’t tell,” my mother said.

My mother was good at smoothing things over, relaying to people just what they needed to hear. She telephoned my grandmother while my grandfather stood in the kitchen, rubbing his hands together. My mother’s voice was fresh and sweet, like a sheet hanging on a summer’s day.

“It’ll be okay, Nettie. It’ll be okay,” my mother said into the phone.

After the call, my grandfather stopped crying.

“Do you want a cup of tea, Harry? Come to the living room. Sit down, rest.”

“No, I’d better be going. You’ve been very kind, Jackie.”

That was my mother. Very kind. Doing the right thing, the expected, the polite.

My grandfather walked out the backdoor, the screen slamming shut behind him. My mother followed and walked him to his car. Then came the sound of his wheels rolling down the gravel alley.

The coast was clear for my grandfather. He could go home and face his wife now. But I stood alone with my father in the kitchen. The Garfields were gone. My grandfather was gone. My mother was outside. My father’s irritation with the entire evening—the Garfields disrupting his routine and my grandfather losing his job—sobbing in our kitchen—had turned to anger. He pulled his right hand from his pocket and grabbed the back of my neck. My eyes widened with shock.

My father contracted his hand and lifted my body. The tips of my toes barely touched the floor as he pulled me over the kitchen’s linoleum floor and into the carpeted living room. My father’s muscular hand gripped my neck, tightening like an animal clamping its prey. Once we got to the living room, he jerked and pushed my body onto the couch.

“Let me tell you something, young lady,” he said. “You never say a man is crying, especially your grandfather, and not when company is sitting in the living room. No one is to know our business. Do you hear me? You are never, ever to reveal family business or anything that goes on in this house.”

I nodded my head yes while staring at my hands with shame. I pressed down my anger, pushing it deep into my bones.

In school, I’d read those biographies, true stories about Marie Curie, Maria Tallchief, and Eleanor Roosevelt. What would they have done in my situation? From somewhere within, I felt the presence of my new friends who were exemplars and guides.

“I should make you sleep in the woodshed tonight,” my father said.

“No! I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m really sorry. I won’t do it again.”

He laughed.

“I bet you won’t,” he said. “You don’t like the idea of spending a night in the woodshed, do you?”

He smiled, showing his teeth, his top lip spreading thin.

My mother walked into the room.

“What on earth is going on in here?”

“Your daughter doesn’t want to sleep in the woodshed tonight,” my father said.

“What are you doing, Bruce?”

My mother saw the terror in my eyes.

“I’m teaching your daughter that no one is to know what goes on in this house.”

“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “Calm down, Bruce.”

“Debbie, why don’t you get upstairs and brush your teeth. It’s time for bed.”

But then she remembered we hadn’t eaten dinner.

“Oh, with all this company tonight, we forgot,” my mother said. “Go wash up. I’ll get the food on the table.”

I headed up the stairs toward my bedroom feeling my father’s eyes follow me. They bore holes into my back. As I climbed, I knew that, in a few minutes, I’d have to descend the same stairs, walk to the family room, and sit before a plate of food at the dinner table. My father would be seated to my left, only an arm’s reach away. I would have to swallow my food, press it down. I anticipated the potatoes catching in my throat.

 

Deborah Moreno received her undergraduate degree in English-writing from Knox College in 1989 and a Master of Theology from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University in 1993. She’s worked as a journalist off and on for the past 20+ years. In 2014, she received an MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In addition to daily news reporting, she’s published as a poet, columnist, and freelance feature writer. She’s currently reporting for Tri States Public Radio covering portions of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa.

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Gemma
Short Fiction by Floyd Sullivan

Late one afternoon, after a long day of photographing sets of cereal bowls, I went to my front window and looked out at the neighborhood. A long day for me is anything over four hours. Although I have “recovered” from COVID-19, I tire easily and become exhausted quickly. My employer makes no demands on me, sending only small items to be shot in my makeshift kitchen studio. They never give me deadlines for the projects, and are attentive about shipping and picking up photo samples so my apartment doesn’t turn into a small warehouse. Nonetheless, I need and take several lengthy breaks every day, usually on my couch.

Warm October light filtered through the trees that lined the street on both sides. The leaves of several maples had turned brilliant red and golden yellow. Across the way a young boy, very blond and perhaps six years old, stood surveying the scene just inside his house’s attached garage. He seemed to be at a loss as to how next to get into mischief. His little brother, maybe three, appeared out of the darkness behind him and together they began to rifle through the toys, tricycles, and scooters piled along the side wall of the garage. An elderly woman sat in a purple camp chair on the front lawn and watched them.

Elderly? She was probably my age.

I silently wished the little fellows luck in their search for adventure and turned back into my apartment. A postcard lay on my coffee table, a Monet “Stacks of Wheat” painting filling one side. I found a pen and sat on the couch.  My sister and I have been exchanging Charles Dickens quotes while sheltering in place. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, about two hours north and west of my apartment at the far northwestern border of Chicago with the suburban village of Park Ridge. We had been estranged for years, but the virus made many of us rethink and forget past hurts. We began sending each other postcards. No phone calls yet, though.

My boss Connie had sent me a small stack of Dickens novels to read while recovering. Connie herself succumbed to the virus not long after she sent me the books. I couldn’t go to her wake or funeral. Hell, I’m not sure she had a wake or a funeral.

Several bookmarks stuck out of my copy of A Tale of Two Cities where I had noted quotes I might send to my sister. Because the October light was so beautiful, I wrote this in the space to the left of the postcard’s address box: “The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had never given, and would never take away.”

Satisfied with my choice, I put a stamp on the card, picked up my mask, and ventured outside to the mailbox at the corner across the street. Over the weeks I had coordinated my periodic walks around the neighborhood, or drives through the city and suburbs, with mailing my postcards. I enjoy taking pictures of the mailboxes with my cell phone camera and posting them on a WhatsApp family thread I call “Mailbox of the Day,” challenging my siblings and their kids to guess the intersection, a somewhat silly but entertaining way to stay connected during the pandemic. If Wrigley Field or another landmark is visible in the background, no problem. But if the box is at a typical city corner, family members have to find clues in the names of businesses, distant street signs, or addresses on buildings. If on occasion I forget to post, so to speak, a mailbox, I hear about it.

I had posted pictures of my corner mailbox before, but I liked the way the sun was hitting its curved top, and its faded blue color, mottled by decades of harsh Chicago winters. After dropping the postcard into the box’s slot I took my cell phone out of my pocket, stepped to my right about six feet, aimed, and pressed the shutter release button.

“Whatcha doin’?” said a little voice behind me. I turned to see the small blond boy from the garage down the block. I quickly touched my mask to make sure it was in place. He was barely as high as my waist. He looked up at me with one eye squinting and his head tilted toward his right shoulder. He wore a yellow tee shirt decorated with a smiling green dinosaur, blue jeans, and brand new green gym shoes, one of which was untied.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m taking a picture of this mailbox.”

“Why ya doin’ that?”

I shrugged. “I guess because I like the way it looks.”

“Sounds kinda dumb to me.”

“Yeah, it’s kinda dumb. But it’s kinda fun, too.”

“Did you mail something?”

“I mailed a postcard.”

“Oh.” He looked around me at the mailbox. “Wanna take my picture?”

“Your picture? Why, sure, if it’s okay with your mom and dad.”

“It’s okay. My mom takes my picture all the time.”

“Well okay! Can you stand right there and smile? Then I’ll show you the picture and you can tell me if you like it and maybe I can send it to your mom and dad.”

“Don’t you want me to stand next to the mailbox? That would be a better picture than just any old blue mailbox all by itself.”

“Now that’s a great idea. Tell you what, I’ll walk over to the curb and then you come here and I’ll take your picture with the mailbox.”

“Okay,” he said. “I know I gotta, like, not get too close because of the germs.”

“That’s right.” I stepped down off the curb and into the street as the boy went to the mailbox, without touching it, and smiled broadly. I framed the shot and pressed the button.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice to my left. “What’s going on here? Maynard, what are you doing?” I looked up. The “elderly” woman who had been sitting in the camp chair walked toward us holding the little brother’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This very nice little boy asked me if I wanted to take his picture with the mailbox. That’s what we were doing.” She stopped and stared at me. She was tall and thin and wore a thickly knitted black cardigan sweater over a white blouse and tan cotton slacks, but no mask. Her gray hair, streaked with white and a hint of the same blond as her grandson, was pulled back in a bun.

“That’s a little odd,” she said as she stopped about a dozen feet away.

Oh my God, she thinks I’m a pervert.

“I’m a photographer,” I said, suddenly very uncomfortable and nervous. “I live across the street.” I pointed in the general direction of my building, my hand shaking slightly. “Look, I’ll bring up the picture and put my phone down on the ground and you can look at it and if you like it I can send it to you, or copy it to a jump drive so you don’t have to give me your email, or even tell me your name if you don’t want to, and if you don’t like it I can delete it, or I can delete it without you looking at it at all.”

“Gemma, it’s okay,” said the boy. “He even mailed a postcard.”

I raised my phone. “I’ll just delete it and go back home. I’m sorry.”

“You’re the one who has coffee ready for that couple every Monday, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Coffee on the sidewalk. Very nice. Does the couple live in the neighborhood? They don’t look familiar.”

“They live in Park Ridge on Northwest Highway.”

“Really? I live near there, too.”

“Then you don’t live over there?” I gestured at the home attached to Maynard’s garage.

“No. That’s my daughter’s house. I help with the kids most weekdays while she’s at her job.”

“They look like good kids.”

“No grandchildren of your own?”

I shook my head and swiped at my phone to change the subject. “Would you like to see the picture of your grandson?”

She smiled and shrugged. “Of course.”

“Here you go.” I set my phone on the sidewalk and stepped back a dozen feet.

She leaned over and looked down. I knew she couldn’t see the picture well without picking up the phone, but she was being careful. “I guess it’s all right.” Maynard ran to the phone and didn’t hesitate to grab it. She began to say something to him but must have realized that it was too late to stop him.

“Rick Peters,” I said.

She turned to me. “Pardon?” She’s very pretty, I thought. The fading afternoon light softened the signs of aging that were apparent as she first approached. I could almost see her as she must have looked as a young woman.

“My name. Rick Peters. Nice to meet you.”

She put our her hand. “Louise. Louise Lundy.” I extended my right arm toward her and we pretended to shake from the correct social distance between us. “My grandchildren call me Gemma.” She laughed and looked at her grandson. “Come on home, Maynard. You have a Zoom play date with David in ten minutes.”

“Can I send you the picture?” I asked.

“You’re not going to post it anywhere, I trust. Facebook? Instagram?”

“No. I promise. I may show it to my siblings so they can see how cute my little neighbor is.”

“Oh sure. And he is a beautiful boy, isn’t he?”

I smiled and nodded. Maynard frowned and said, “Come on, Gemma. I gotta meet David on the tablet.”

She turned toward her daughter’s house. “Maybe you can copy the picture to a USB drive so I can show it to Maynard’s mother.”

“Absolutely.”

When I returned home I sat on my couch and looked at the picture of Maynard and the mailbox. It was just about as cute as it could be. I did some minimal cropping and retouching using my phone’s tools, and posted it on the family WhatsApp thread.

#mailboxoftheday #myneighbormaynard

Twenty minutes later my phone blinged, notifying me that I had a new text. It was my sister in Madison. She wrote: “’The sun, – the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man – burst upon the crowded city and weathered post boxes (ha ha) in clear and radiant glory.’ Apologies to Oliver Twist! Love the mailbox. You need to feature more ‘models’ in the shots!”

A couple of minutes later my phone let me know that someone else had commented about my shot. It was one of my Florida brothers who posted, “Howard (or is it Sibley?) and Ozark, Chicago (or is it Niles? Or East Ave in Park Ridge??),” a small joke referencing the fact that my side of the street is Howard Street in Chicago, but across the street, where Maynard lives, it’s Sibley Street in Park Ridge. The village of Niles is a block east. He couldn’t resist rubbing in the confusion caused by Chicago and Park Ridge refusing to cooperate with each other regarding street names.

Maynard and his brother, and their grandmother, came outside every afternoon around the same time, weather permitting. Luckily, afternoons were mild and sunny most days those first couple of weeks of October. I decided to shoot a series of photographs featuring Maynard at the mailbox, one taken from the west, one from across the street to the east, one from Sibley/Howard from the south, one from the East Avenue (Ozark Avenue in Chicago) public sidewalk to the north, one with Maynard peeking from behind the mailbox, and a few with both little boys, Maynard unfailingly putting an arm around his brother’s shoulders. My siblings at first enjoyed the series, but eventually wondered when I might venture out to new neighborhoods for fresh mailboxes. One of my nephews posted a comment that said, “Cute kid but your block is getting boring.” I didn’t mention to them that my real reason for the multiple views of the Ozark/East, Howard/Sibley mailbox was I wanted to see more of Gemma.

We got to know each other. I learned that she was divorced with two children and five grandchildren, the other three, all girls under ten, living in Kansas City. She had retired from her job as manager of our local Trader Joe’s when Maynard’s little brother was born. She said she saved her daughter hundreds of dollars a month in daycare costs by watching her grandsons weekdays.

One afternoon the boys’ mother must have had the day off because when I stepped outside a woman who looked to be in her thirties sat in the camp chair instead of Gemma. I was disappointed.

When the weather turned too chilly for the kids to play outside I only saw Gemma when she left her daughter’s house for the day, walked past the mailbox, crossed Sibley/Howard, and continued south on Ozark. A couple of times I made a point of being outside when I knew she would be heading home. We waved to each other.

One afternoon I decided to meet her, without being invited, at my corner on the Howard side of the street. She wore a heavy army green jacket that extended almost to her knees. I told her I had a postcard and asked if I could walk with her as far as the next mailbox. “My brothers are demanding new looks,” I said. She laughed and nodded, and reached into her coat pocket for a mask decorated with an all-over yellow and red floral design. We began walking as she placed the loops over her ears. We tried, but didn’t always succeed, to keep six feet apart.

“Maynard misses posing at the mailbox,” she said. “Sometimes he watches out the window, waiting for you to leave your house with your postcards.”

“I’m flattered. I can still take pictures of Maynard at the mailbox, but I might not post them.”

“Perfect. I’ll bundle him up tomorrow at, what? Four-thirty?”

“It’s a date.”

I asked her how long she had lived in the neighborhood. “I grew up in Park Ridge, about halfway between Han Solo’s house and the First Lady’s.”

“No kidding? I knew Hillary lived here, but not Harrison Ford.”

“About three blocks away from each other, actually, but I don’t think they knew each other. They’re five years apart, I’m pretty sure, so they weren’t at Maine East at the same time. But I get to tell people that I went to the same high school as them, just a few years later.”

“Me, too. I went to the same high school as a famous writer, but a few years later.”

“What writer?”

“Hemingway. Oak Park High.”

“Ha ha! Not sure which of us has the better pedigree.”

“Growing up in Oak Park was probably a lot like growing up around here.”

“Safe. Father Knows Best idyllic.”

We turned a couple of corners and came to a mailbox at Overhill and Jarvis. She stopped and said, “Here’s one. And you can have an American flag in the background. Can I see your postcard?”

“Sure.” I handed it to her. She looked at the picture side first, a still life called “Vase with Poppies.”

“Van Gogh. I don’t remember seeing this painting before. Very nice.” She turned the card over. “May I read your Dickens quote?”

“Sure.”

“’We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on.’ Great Expectations. Also nice. I like your postcards and your mailboxes.”

“Thanks.” I took the card from her, dropped it in the slot, and said, “I guess this is where I turn back.”

I wanted her to suggest that I continue walking her home, but she said, “Well then, have a very nice evening, Rick Peters.”

I bowed. “And you also, Louise Lundy. Gemma.” She smiled and nodded once. We pantomimed another socially distant handshake.

The next afternoon I again met her at the corner. She was already wearing her mask. As she crossed the street I heard a door slam in the direction of her daughter’s house. She turned around as she stepped onto the curb on my side of Howard. I glanced to my left and saw Maynard running toward us along the public sidewalk. He turned at the mailbox and without pausing ran into the street. From the west a small black car, maybe a Honda, maybe a Toyota, maybe a Ford, sped toward the intersection.

She shouted, “Maynard stop!” But he kept coming. I heard a scream from Maynard’s house and knew that his mother stood at their front door.

Maynard raised one hand above his head. He was holding something, like a small ball. “Gemma! Gemma! You forgot this!”

Gemma ran back to the curb. “Maynard!”

The little boy turned toward the approaching car. He froze and stared at it. The black car sounded its horn in a long squealing blast, swerved, and jumped the opposite curb, knocking the mailbox onto East Avenue with a loud metallic thump. Gemma ran into the street and picked up Maynard, holding his head tight against her chest. She carried him back to where she had stood with me, and began to sob. I heard his mother scream his name as she jaywalked toward us, carrying her younger son under her arm. When she reached our side of the street she carefully placed the three-year-old on the nearest lawn and wrapped her arms around Maynard and his grandmother.

“Gemma,” said Maynard, trying to free himself. “You forgot the rock I made for you.” Gemma pushed away a bit as he extended his hand toward her. He held an egg-sized rock painted blue and red.

“Oh, Maynard,” she said, and pulled him to her, one hand grasping the back of his head.

“Maynard,” said his mother. “You know you’re not …”

Maynard turned to his mother and started to cry. “But Gemma forgot her rock.”

The four of them crossed the street, Gemma and her daughter glancing quickly at the driver of the small black car. He was a stout boy with shaggy blond hair. He wore a deep red Niles West High School sweatshirt. He stood on the street next to his open driver-side door, his face white and his arms limp at his sides. I thought of berating him for speeding on a residential street, but stopped myself. He looked as frightened as Maynard’s mother. He glanced at the mailbox, misshapen and lying on its side in the street, and back at the little group as they approached the house. I guess he was satisfied that they were okay because he got back into his car and drove away.

I waited at the corner. When Gemma came out of her daughter’s house I crossed the street and silently took her arm. She didn’t resist. We said little as we walked the mile to Northwest Highway, but as we stood waiting for a traffic signal to change at Touhy Avenue she said, “I know how important a little thing like a rock can be to a small child. I should have made a point of holding it tight in my hand so he could see me carry it out the door and down the street. I should never have put it down on that table. And I should have thanked him again and again and again for giving me this lovely,” she took the rock from her coat pocket, “this beautiful work of art.”

She lived in a modern five-story red brick apartment house, one of four identical buildings surrounding a large central courtyard. We stopped outside the entrance. I looked in the glass door and saw a lobby strewn with promotional fliers and menus from local restaurants, the same junk that often cluttered my own front stoop. She found her keys, looked at me, and hesitated.

I decided not to make her decide. “I’d like to see you to your elevator,” I said, “but I haven’t been inside another building besides my own since March.”

She smiled and nodded and pulled me close. “But it’s nice to touch, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very nice.”

 

Floyd Sullivan grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a BA in history. His previously published fiction includes Called Out (Amika Press, 2017), a novel Chicago Tribune columnist and WGN radio personality Rick Kogan described as, “A winner. A fabulous, ambitious novel.” His short story “Composite,” was the lead story in the debut issue of Writer Shed Stories, a new literary magazine. He was a 2018 Hemingway Foundation finalist, and his story “The Crossing Guard” appeared in Hemingway Shorts, Volume 3. His story “The Beano” is scheduled for the September/October issue of Alfred Hitcock’s Mystery Magazine. In addition, his stories have been published on numerous blogs. He is a freelance writer and photographer, and lives with my wife in Chicago.

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Mob on the Capitol Steps
Flash Fiction by Richard Widerkehr

My friend says she was under the water between Oakland and SF
when she got the news.  Her son thin as a blade, his gut stopped up.

I watched security cameras on TV, the mob chased a lone guard
up flights of steps, one flight at a time—he’d hold them

a few seconds and retreat.  No backup.  Here foothills hold
the sky and smoke boils over; the mob dukes it out with cops

in the rotunda. My friend wants what’s righteous to write her,
tell her how to save her son.  I’m hills, I’m smoke, my country—

we love you like smoke loves fire it escapes from. We escape.
Two yellow placards on the goat shed for our dead friend,

one decapitated flower. Corona was a place; now everywhere
is a place which says, Knife-skin at the back of our knees. This isn’t

a virus that runs its course. Two angels, one of vengeance,
one of flame.  Each cries out, I’m not you, you’re not me.

 

Richard Widerkehr’s work has appeared in Crack The Spine, Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, Atlanta Review, and many others. He won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. His third book of poems, At The Grace Cafe, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review.

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“Underwater Flight” by Mick Ó Seasnáin

Mick Ó Seasnáin has continually attempted to farm his quarter acre lot in the small town of Wooster, Ohio while catering to the diverse and often unanticipated needs of his students and his three rowdy children. His wife tolerates his creative habits and occasionally enables his binges of writing and photography. Find more of his work at https://tinyurl.com/MickOSeasnain.

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*Click
Poetry by Penelope Hawtrey

There’s no light where i am. only nameless hands and feet.

*click

i’m searching now, for something else. hands run along the wet stone wall. With a finger, i run along the bumps and around the corners of rough, uneven brick.

*click

death knocks at the door.

finds us.

the old. Weak.

those who have battled c.

those who have lived in the trenches with H.

*click

my hand runs along the top of the tunnel.

fingers outline glass, wire, steel: mixed up together.

i caress the edge. of a dead light.

chest rises.

falls.

*click

dead baby.

a gunshot to a man’s head.

i can’t move my feet.

no, they can’t move.

*click*click

it’s a maze.

there’s no map.

no way out.

*click*click*click

what’s that sound?

*click

It sounds familiar…

…it’s some distant memory?

i’m trying to remember…

…is it a giggle?

i turn back the way i came.

*Click

My foot kicks something. Blindly, i trace a finger across the edges. damp wood. There are three peaks: one to the left. one on the top. one to the right.

my fingers run down a fourth edge, almost post-like. that’s, anchored into the ground.

it’s a cross.

i step back.

*click*click

there’s a garbled sound of an infant’s phlegm-filled laugh.

i smile.

i stand.

then, i turn away.

*click

i’m relieved when my foot doesn’t catch anything else.

*click

In the darkness, sits a ninety-five-year-old man: lived through the Depression, WWII, he’s a…

…POW survivor.

He’s still here.

*Click

Music plays. Bach? Mozart? Beethoven?

The sound is desperate, melancholy, romantic, joyful….

*Click

Both of my palms lay against the damp, cold, tunnel walls.

It’s familiar what’s before me: warm.

Someone’s there? What’s the word?  It’s something old?

Friend?

She calls to me. Waves.

i don’t remember her name.

there’s something in her hand: A plate of cheese, cured meats, and fruit?

she steps forward.

i walk away.

*click

a baby cries…

*click

stomping feet hit the ground; the echo of clapping from men, women, and children. The sound of voices singing: unknown, joyful lyrics.

*Click

People are on the ground.

Sleeping.

they’re peaceful.

my hands, wrap around steel. lift my shovel. Throw the dirt.

water drips from my eyes.

i raise a hand. rub my nose.

Run my hand. across my numb face.

*click*click*click

she’s here. she lifts one finger from the handle. Then another:

one.

One.

*CLI*

there’s the smooth edging of the glass in my hand.

i raise it. to my cracked, burnt lips.

Cool water soothes my swollen tongue.

Soft cheese rolls over my tongue.

Salty crackers, i raise to my lips.

Greedily, i shove grapes into my mouth.

i don’t belong here…

*Cl

they tell me their stories. dead family and friends. Lost babies. Burnt homes. Empty fridges.

*C

She pours red wine. We raise our glasses. Clink them together.

And then we toast, in memory, to all that’s been lost.

***

Then,

…we dance.

 

Penelope Hawtrey has been published in literary journals such as Potluck Magazine, the Furious Gazelle, and the Thieving Magpie. She’s also the author of a children’s fantasy novel. To find out all the latest connect with her at www.penelopeshawtrey.com.

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Leadership Potential is Code For…
Microfiction by Emily Unwin

What a perfect capitalist drone. Give her a few years, and she’ll be part of the Loft business pants, blazer, flats, and belly-button length pendant cult. She walks around with a clipboard. Remembers the same token artifact about Jeff,

How’s your wife? Good? What about that report on sales? Coming along?

She’s fully bought in, buzzing in and out of the hive. Concrete stories. One-way windows. (Can’t have CocaCola knowing our secrets).

It’s ironic how we kill the bees but so closely emulate their structure. Praise none but the queen, our capitalist honey bee.

 

Emily Unwin is the co-founder of Finley Light Factory—a marginalized artists’ co-working space—and tacky!—a monthly zine for queer + BIPOC artists—both based in Athens, GA. She’s studied poetry and narrative history under Natalie Eilbert and currently apprentices under Amy Bonnaffons. Emily has an upcoming publication in the Magnolia Review and was a finalist for the Cuttyhunk Writers’ Residency with Chen Chen.

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Two Traveling Songs
Poetry by James Miller

1.

White Elephant Flea Market, two miles back.
Four motels lined up along I-10 in their blood-
orange stucco. Seventeen rattling rigs stuffed
with iced artichokes.

Crossing the San Jacinto river, our bridge
alights on the northern tip of what may once
have been a marshy islet, thick
with geese or egrets.

Chrome world, southwest shipyard.
Colonies of locked metal sheds—seal-grey
and weathered blue paints fleck
from their ribbed flanks.

2.

In my tenth summer I visited
the grandparents, held
their coffee table nothings
in my hands.

A thick traveler’s foot
carved of cherry, big toe
curved beyond
wincing.

The Irish Heart, palm-sized.
Forty pages of Gaelic crosses,
tourist hills, blanked
Galway verses.

This brass turtle,
whose shell taught
my tongue its first
lesson.

 

James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typehouse, Rabid Oak, pioneertown, North Dakota Quarterly, Yemassee, Phoebe, Mantis, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, Grey Sparrow Review, Blue River, 8 Poems, After Happy Hour, Two Hawks Quarterly, Concho River Review, SOFTBLOW and elsewhere.

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The Little Ones
Short Fiction by B. P. Herrington

At midnight he wended through hectic weeds down from the hillside house to a barn cloistered in pines.  Where the ground between trees shimmered with moonlit fallen straw, he quietly raked a patch until the wet earth beneath showed black.  He gauged the perimeter, wagging his head.  He went to the station wagon parked in shadows against the barn and unlatched the back hatch.  With only a scrap of moon to see by, he reached beneath the tarp there and took hold of a leg—he knew by the delicate ankles that it was the girl.  As he pulled her out, the full weight surprised him and he lost his grip.  She fell heavily into the leaves.  The other he pulled out—the boy—was heavier, but he was now careful to shift the uncooperative body.  He sized them up laying there and returned to the cleared ground.   His shovel tore the damp loam and its knotted tentacles of grassy shoots.  He tossed aside clumps that glistened with grubs and the sap of roots.  A pair of headlights flitted between fence posts on the far-off road.  He leaned on the shovel until they passed.  Then the terse music of the shovel’s chopping went on until at last he climbed out of the hole and brushed himself off.

He squatted clumsily and dragged each of the children behind the barn.  In the scarce light, the pit he had dug seemed a long black canvas framed by glistening straw.  He pulled the girl’s body along the edge and pressed his foot into her back until she tumbled down.  After the boy had rolled loudly and thudded at the bottom, he sat on an overturned bucket by the edge and smoked a cigarette.  He felt he deserved it now.  He looked down on the tangled elbows and knees catching moonlight in the pit’s blackness.  A fascinated voice in his head—an intelligent interviewer—asked to know what drove him.  It was a public radio interview in quiet, thoughtful tones with close microphones that picked up his every sigh.  He would begin his answer, stumble, rethink.  He would rewind and the interviewer would pose the question again, and he would refine his reply.  He put out his cigarette and the interview continued as he shoveled dirt back into the pit.  Now he saw himself on a stage, squinting in the spotlight, just himself and the interviewer in comfortable chairs with a low flat table between them for their glasses of water.  A few people in the front rows scratched notes on legal pads.  He rephrased his responses until he struck just the right balance of cleverness and a tide of knowing laughter swept the audience.

~ ~ ~

  The old judge was too tall for most doorways and though age had left him swaybacked and potbellied he still embodied the authority of his office.  He came to supper in the dining room, an austere chamber with massive cherry wood furniture and a prominent stained-glass window at the head of the table.  His wife was arranging the day’s mail beside his plate in two stacks, personal and business.  She looked up and said shakily, “Well, finally,” and went to her place across the table.  The cook, a dour old woman with a side-cocked jaw, brought in the last serving dish and made the judge’s plate.  Out of the personal stack the judge took a large rectangular manila envelope and frowned at the torn opening.

The wife said, watching, “Well, either I’m your de facto secretary or I’m not.  Envelope like that, it sure looked like business to me.”

“I got nothing to hide,” the judge moaned.  He rolled his eyes at the cook and said in a stage whisper, “Alas.”  He thought his wife might laugh but she did not.  The judge extracted a handwritten letter and began to read.  He glanced up after the first page and met his wife’s gray, welling eyes.

“You mind telling me what it is you intend to do?” she asked flatly, as if speaking to a stubborn child.  He laid the letter aside and opened his mouth, but she stood and cut him off.  “If you even think about giving that monster the time of day, I’m gonna make your life a living hell,” she said red-faced.  She walked out, telling the cook to serve her in the sunroom.

When the judge heard the hiss of the sunroom’s sliding glass door, he fell at ease in his high-backed chair.  He read the letter as he finished the excellent meatloaf—

Your Honor,

I approach you with a full appreciation for the awesome responsibility of your service on the bench.  I must confess my deeds to you.  I cannot make you see as I see.  But I know that you are capable of understanding me because I met you, in fact, not long ago in your own home.  When I was a high school junior, I came to your house with your grandson Oliver and you were the first person ever to take seriously my dream of pursuing an artistic vocation.  As you spilled forth your admiration for Giotto’s perspective and the gloom of Caravaggio, I saw at once that beneath your façade of small-town folksy glad-handing, you are an authentic and learned man at heart.  I know you headed north for college when you were a young man for the same reason I, too, must escape: Texas has suffocated us.  You left and returned home a promising politician.  I have been accepted by an art school in Chicago.  It is crucial that I go away just as you did, but I am penniless.

When the local paper published the call for artistic proposals to celebrate our town’s centenary, I saw at once that the commission would have funded my artistic studies.  The recognition, though local, would have bolstered my career.  But the decision was left to hometown dilettantes and busybodies in the Arts League.  And I was defeated by Sarah Strickland, of all people—my own high school art teacher!  Only a mind as insipid as hers could have produced “The Little Ones,” two Rockwellian children cast in bronze, like naiveté incarnate, frozen as they mindlessly twirl in the center of our municipal park.  Your Honor, you must agree that I was robbed of an opportunity!  After the unveiling, I went straightaway under cover of night and I freed our town of Mrs. Strickland’s tawdry emotionalism with hammer and hacksaw.  I’ve buried them deep in the ground like the trash they are.

In lieu of the penalties set forth, I implore you: allow me to replace Mrs. Strickland’s farce with an honest work of art.  You will see that it is a reworking of the plans I originally submitted.  If this decision is entrusted to you, I believe that justice will finally prevail.  Please find the project details enclosed.

Sincerely,

Peter Cravey

The judge put the letter away and ponderously sighed.  He is an egotist, the judge reckoned.  Perhaps an egomaniac.  He could still see the handwriting’s tight obsessive coils as he looked to the faltering stained glass light.  He took out the crisp, folded sketch and spread it beside his plate.  The cook brought in the judge’s coffee and warily eyed the finely drawn plans as she slowly arranged a spoon and napkin.  He did not notice her shadow fall upon the page or hear the loud whistling breath of her nose.  He did not even seem to mind the clatter as she cleared the table.  He was falling into the drawing’s three-dimensional field as the plane of its surface warped past his eyes and enfolded him.  He stepped into a structure supported by many narrow columns like an ancient portico.  All about him in the air hung numbers that marked intervals and proportions.  Each column was adorned with an oval plate upon which a human face had been etched.  The sense of space was concrete, but time rippled in many directions.

The cook stormed through the dining room, irked that the dawdling judge had kept her so long.  He saw her out the door with a sheepish shrug then trudged up the stairs.  His mind still swam in the weightlessness of the sketches so that his aged body felt all the more burdensome and earthbound.  The narrow stairwell he had ascended every night since he was forty-two now presented an alien series of shaded angles and points along converging lines.  When he rounded the bedroom doorway, he was troubled to see his wife still awake, arms folded, staring down the bed.

“I want to hear it from your own lips,” she said coldly.  “Answer me this: you telling me this man isn’t an idiot and a delinquent?”  The judge sat on an antique chaise lounge and worked off a shoe, grunting.  “Fine,” she said.  “You won’t answer me that?  Well, answer me this: you think us ladies at the Arts League are know-nothing busybodies like he said? Uncultured fools?  Is that what you think we are?”  The judge shuffled around the corner to take off his clothes.  His wife called out, “Would you like to show your face next month at the Arts League and say that right to the faces of all my friends?  Could you say that to Rowena?  How about Evelyn?  Could you say that to their faces?”

“I must remain objective,” the judge called from the closet.  “Solemn duty,” he muttered.

His wife huffed.  “Objective, my foot.”  As he eased down on the bed, she said, “So that’s it?  That’s all you have to say?”  He shrugged.  “I’ve got a mind to go find him myself and knock the fire out of him,” she said, clicking off her lamp.

The judge lay down in a swath of moonlight.  He might have otherwise had great difficulty falling asleep knowing that his wife seethed beside him.  But on this night the fine cursive script of the letter—at once manic and deliberate—gyrated across the vaulted ceiling.  No.  You are not a fool, he thought.  Or perhaps we are both fools.  There are, after all, many kinds.  What he might have said before his wife fell asleep—if he held the same authority at home as he wielded in his chambers at the courthouse—was that if she would only open her eyes, she would be astounded by the number of fools about her, the most egregious of whom was  right under her own nose—their eldest son, Teddy, who had gotten into Rice University on his father’s name and money, performed not terribly well, but returned home to become a legendary prosecutor, sending more men to Death Row in Huntsville than any attorney his age.  With sufficient whiskey in his gut, Teddy had confided to his father that wrongful convictions did not trouble his conscience at all and that the executed represent, at the very least, the dregs of society.  The judge had no doubt that this was more reprehensible than an egotistical artist.  But his views went unexpressed on the domestic front.

And what does this criminal artist expect of me?  I am sworn to uphold the law.  As the judge dozed off, the peak of the vaulted ceiling hued from gray to blue-green and he felt the grass of the city park between his toes.  He crossed the quaint wooden bridge over the duck pond, its sunbaked, weathered planks soothing his tender soles.  He thought wistfully of leaping barefoot through thickets in boyhood.  All things change.  That is the way.  Where the bronze children once gleamed on a pedestal, he came to a wide, open air pavilion—just as he had seen it sketched on the crisp paper.  He stepped onto its cold floor, a mosaic of large angular slabs in earthy shades of red clay and greensand and basalt.  Throughout the pavilion, thin metal poles ran from floor to ceiling, and on each one a bronze human face was fixed with a swiveling joint.

Walking among the poles, the judge saw his own face looking westward, unwavering on its pole.  His wife’s face—a lovely likeness, he thought—turned slightly away and wagged in the breeze.  They were flocked by the faces of grandchildren and church folk and courthouse staff, all swiveling gently.  Just behind them, the faces of the Arts League ladies seemed to confide in one another in a half light.  And in deeper shade, the faces of the wrongfully convicted, bearing the bittersweet resignation of those vindicated too late, slowly revolved in chorus.  The judge walked from pole to pole and stared each visage thoughtfully in the eyes.  Surprisingly, they did not give the impression of death masks.  Rather, they struck him as perfect distillations of each soul.  Perhaps, he thought, this is how it will be when the Judge above all finally examines us.  He will see that all the faces are so much alike, more so than we ever perceived.  A man in an orange jumpsuit, obscured by the forest of poles, sat outside the pavilion on a low bench.  He leaned forward with elbows on knees, watching the judge and wringing his hands in despair.

“You are the artist, young man?  I appreciate your work here,” the judge called out to the hunched figure.  “You had a magnificent vision.  And you stated your case very well, I suppose.  Considering.”  There was no answer.  “But I am not the Great Judge.  You know that, don’t you, young man?  I am a judge of Jasper County, Texas.  And you broke our laws.”  The poles formed a cell enclosing the man.  “You might have gone about this differently.  But you were an egotist and a fool.  Some fools pay the penalty and some do not.”

A gust swept over the pond and shook sweet gum burrs out of the boughs.  The ducks bustled down the banks and slipped into the black, dimpled water.  When the wind reached the pavilion, the faces on the poles spun and creaked.  Five-pointed leaves blown loose from the sweet gum tree danced along the mosaic floor and flew through to the other side.  The unchanging faces slowed in their revolutions and settled on a westward gaze, burning bright as new copper against a sun that never sets.

 

B. P. Herrington is a native of the Big Thicket region of Texas. His studies took him to the University of London and the Royal Academy of Music. He is an emerging writer whose work has recently appeared in Post Road Magazine, Pamplemousse, and Adelaide Magazine.   

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Existential Arm Wrestling
Creative Non-Fiction by Kevin Stadt

My fourteen year-old son, Sky, beat me at arm wrestling.

Spun me into a bit of a crisis, if I’m honest. I’d not expected it so soon. We’d arm wrestled for years, and it had always just been cute. Maybe I’d pretend to lose, or let him almost win, or win quickly, but add words of encouragement. “Don’t worry, buddy. Someday you’ll beat me for sure.”

But I didn’t mean in the eighth grade, for God’s sake. I’m not Schwarzenegger or anything, but I lift weights. And although gradually graying, I’m only 44.

I guess I should have seen it coming. We live in a small town in the Korean countryside, my wife’s home town, and at his middle school arm wrestling among the boys is a big event at lunch or between classes. More and more I’d come into his room to find him watching arm wrestling competitions on YouTube, or the top competitors’ training routines, or their technique tutorials.

Technique. Turns out, there’s a lot more of it than you’d expect. Some months back, when my status as undefeated champion still stood, my son challenged me with a twinkle in his eye. I laughed, agreed, and we squared up. Right out of the gate, he twisted my wrist into an uncomfortable position of weakness and tapped my knuckles to the table.

After beating me, perhaps because some part of him didn’t yet really want me to be weaker than him, or maybe just because he couldn’t hold back his secret, he said, “It’s not just strength. Technique is really important. I’ve been watching arm wrestling technique videos.”

That’s when I found myself in my bedroom, door locked, studying arm wrestling tutorials with deadly seriousness. Purely for the purpose of not losing to my son.

Top roll. Hook. Side press. King’s move.

And after learning the basics, I regained the title. All was right with the world.

In the next months, however, he suddenly sprouted up and filled out, testosterone flooding his blood. One week I was a little taller than him, and the next week he was a little taller than me.  His shoulders widened and chest thickened. He seemed to live at the gym, not just doing regular weightlifting, but devoting himself to arm wrestling training in particular—hours grinding out towel pull-ups, heavy negative preacher curls, and side-press reps on the pulley machine. My wife drove him an hour and a half to get lessons from the Korean national arm wrestling champion, who has YouTube videos of himself pulling trucks with one hand. We even ordered special, bulky grips from America that attach to dumbbells and barbells for grip strength development.

And the eating. We used to struggle constantly to steer him away from junk food. With the new training, though, he ate purposefully and constantly. He ate clean, focusing on whole foods and above all, protein. High-protein meals. Protein shakes. Always with the protein.

His school uniform looked like it would tear at the seams or pop buttons at any moment. I asked, “Sky, do the kids at school say anything about your muscles?”

“Everybody does,” he said right away with his new, deep voice.

So despite my crash course in technique, it wasn’t long before he beat me again. I remember it like you recall a car accident, surreal and in slow motion. Damned if I didn’t put everything I had into it. Red-faced, grunting, breaking out in a sweat, veins in my arms and forehead popping out. But he won.

I can’t put my finger on the emotion that washed over me. Not quite existential doom, not purely embarrassment, not simply sadness. But it tastes much like the one I struggled with the week before I turned 40. Or the time when I was at the checkout at the grocery store and looked up at the security camera footage. I saw a guy with a big bald spot and remarked to myself, “That guy’s going bald,” and then realized the camera was right above me.

So after he won, I demanded a rematch, and he beat me soundly again. I saw myself go through the stages.

No, no, I was just tired. Didn’t sleep well enough last night. Worked out too hard earlier. He started out in a better position. Etc.

What the hell!?!? God damn it! Seriously?

It’s okay. I’ll just train harder. Maybe I’ll start doing the exercises he does.

What’s the point? He’s only going to get stronger, and I’m only getting older.

These thoughts pulled on one side, but soon another perspective on the other side began to hook me. This was no longer the baby I used to cradle, bottle feed, and sing to sleep. Or the little boy who looked up to me to provide and protect. No, this was a man. A man bigger and stronger than me.

Better than me at something, for the first time.

This new feeling, too, is hard to name. It’s not just pride that he’s grown up. Nor is it simply relief at knowing that my mission as father is more or less successfully accomplished. And it’s beyond the Zen let-go-or-be-dragged brand of realization.

Whatever it is, I’ll take it. My heart is full as I look forward to the next way he’ll better me, inevitably.

 

Kevin Stadt holds a master’s degree in teaching writing and a doctorate in American literature; he currently teaches writing at Hanyang University. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bewildering Stories, Enter the Aftermath, Kzine, Lazarus Risen, Phantaxis, Stupefying Stories, and many more. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ariel Chart, Autumn Sky Poetry, Barren Magazine, The Bookends Review, Front Porch Review, Gravel Magazine, Jellyfish Whispers, Neologism Poetry Journal, and Rust + Moth. He lives in South Korea with his wife and sons, who are interdimensional cyborg pirates wanted in a dozen star systems.

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Maskless-ness
Poetry by Zara Imran

I went to the bathroom and
cut a piece off of me
and tucked it
safely in my clutch.

I’m bleeding from the amputation
but he thinks it’s a lipstick stain
from the hickey he’s trying to carve on me.

He thinks I’m wearing the mask
to be sexy.
his eyes go wide and his pulse throbs
behind the imagined mystique of it.

‘So mysterious,’ his breath steals my air.

I lean away and laugh.
That grating laugh,
that he hates so much.

Because of the cigarettes I smoke
Which he thinks I shouldn’t.

It makes him mad. And I know
His curiosity isn’t meant to kill a cat

Can you tell my little laugh is a lie?

I’m dying inside darling
And all I can do

Is make sure my nails,
painted harlot red
scrape a piece of skin on your back, as they
break.

 

Zara Imran is a student of Social Development and Literature at Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan. Her research work as a student is centered around gendered aspects of development. Her literary work has been previously published in LitBreak Magazine, The Desi Collective and The Rapport Magazine.

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Knife
Flash Fiction by DS Levy

In the middle of Blue Lake, a cluster of ice shanties huddle together against a gray sky and howling wind. Overhead, a gaggle of Canadian geese fly northward. Ellie looks out the kitchen window, hands plunged in hot dishwater. She squints at the plywood shack.

Yesterday, her husband went out with his ice auger. This morning, Ellie heard him up early, drawers and closets banging shut. She woke to the smell of coffee, but by the time she’d gotten out of bed, he was gone.

She scrubs and rinses a dirty plate, sets it in the drying rack. The shacks remind her of port-o-potties, or bright upright coffins. Joe’s out there watching his lines with his one good eye, waiting for a snag. Fishing, she knows, is all about waiting. Patience, a virtue.

Underwater, her fingers graze a sharp blade. How many times has she told him she’d give him a soapy bucket of water to clean his fillet knife outside? But no, here it is commingled with plates and saucers and cups. A scale thin and clear as a contact lens floats on the surface. She holds the blade eye-level, sees her own wide eyes distorted by soapy water, then looks out at the shanties.

Some men go out on the ice to be alone. Some bring coolers of wine and beer, and drag gas-powered grills on runners. Some tell stupid jokes (Why are fish so smart? They swim in schools.), some tell misogynist jokes (What do fish and women have in common? They both stop shaking their tails after you catch them.), and some tell raunchy jokes (If a skeleton fingerbangs a fish, is the skeleton boning it?). She told a few when she was still on the ice. Not thigh-slapping he-haws, just plain old chestnuts. That’s how she got Joe’s attention one winter’s day—that, and the 20-pound pike she hauled up.

She rinses a plate, remembers how Joe made her parade around the village of shanties with her catch. “Look at this ‘beaut, fellows! Whaddaya think?” She’d wished he hadn’t meant the fish. Later that spring, when he’d asked her to marry him, he was drunk on one knee in Barnacles Brew Pub, a glint in his good eye. After they were married, he insisted she stay home. The ice wasn’t a place for a married lady, he’d said.

At first, she’d heard it was a fishing hook that took out his left eye. Years later, she’d heard the real story, how he’d gotten caught with another fisherman’s wife who’d paid a visit to Joe’s shanty. It wasn’t the first time her husband had gotten caught either, she’d learned.

Ellie watches his shanty all day. Yesterday, Petra Wilkins, a young girl with a mouth like a lamprey, paid him a visit. Today, Ellie watches, waits, knowing her husband’s catching more than just fish.

She empties the greasy dishwater, watches it whirl down the drain. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she squints out at the lake, sees Joe coming in, pulling his sled, hunched against the wind. Petra’s red parka disappears in the opposite direction.

It’s late afternoon, purplish-black snow clouds rolling in off the lake. She looks around, tidies up. Straightens her hair in the mirror. Joe likes a clean, well-ordered house. Even with his one good eye, he never misses a thing. She picks up the dish towel and dries the fillet knife. But instead of putting it away, she leaves it on the counter.

 

DS Levy lives in the Midwest. She has had work published in New World Writing, Bending Genres, Bull Men’s Fiction, Atticus Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and others. Her flash chapbook, A Binary Heart, was published by Finishing Line Press.