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Kelsey

R E V I E W 2014

Kels ey

R E V I E W

Fall 2014 Volume XXXIII

Upon request, the Kelsey Review is available in alternative format for the visually impaired.

Kelsey Review 2014 Copyright © 2014 It is illegal to reproduce any part of this publication unless written permission is obtained from the individual author. ISSN 0451-6338

The Kelsey Review is published annually by Mercer County Community College, 1200 Old Trenton Road, West Windsor, New Jersey 08550. Manuscripts for the Kelsey Review are solicited exclusively from people living andworking in Mercer County, New Jersey. E-mail: [email protected] The Kelsey Review is published by Mercer County Community College with the financial support of that institution and the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission, through funding from the Mercer County Board of Chosen Freeholders and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment of the Arts. As a community-based publication, we welcome sponsors and supporters interested in joining the Kelsey Review and other MCCC endeavors.

MCCC is thrilled to share the work of many local writers and artists with you in the Kelsey Review. We are fortunate to have such talent and creativity among us. Each year I count the annual issues: this year it is 33 for the Kelsey Review, the literary journal of the Mercer County region. Area writers and artists share their work with the help of an editorial board, and that work is available not only in print, but online as well! Mercer County Community College directly serves thousands of county residents, and indirectly tens of thousands through its many ties to the community. WWFM broadcasts quality programming to the county and even the world through the internet. Kelsey Theater stages a wide range of drama for county audiences, who also have access to the college’s Art Gallery. Our nationally-ranked MCCC athletic teams offer chances to root for stellar local athletes. See more about the college and Mercer County at www.mccc.edu. Once you’re done with this year’s issue of the Kelsey Review, be sure to share it friends and people in your community! Kelsey Review is available online if you’d like to go back and read something again, which means being generous helps the Review visit a wider audience. To keep up with the Review year-round, “like” the publication on Facebook. The Kelsey Review is distributed in part through the Mercer County public library system and funded by Mercer County Community College with additional support from the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission. Each edition of the Review presents professional quality poems, fiction, non-fiction and art that provokes thought and with luck, inspiration. Enjoy what you find here. Sincerely,

Patricia C. Donohue, Ph.D. President Mercer County Community College

From the Editor... I have big news this year. First, this issue is one of our largest. The volume and quality of submissions went up this year by a substantial amount, and in turn we’ve made an effort to put even more material into print this time around. The news gets bigger, however. For those of you reading the Review on paper, feel the pages, smell the aroma of fresh-print, heft the weight in your hands. Turn it around and glory in the cover, by our very own Holly Johnson. It is, alas, our final print issue, at least for the foreseeable future. Between an improving economy and budget issues at state and local levels—the former, paradoxically, pushes down enrollment at community colleges, and the latter—well, the latter prompted a strong review of budgets. Most of the Kelsey Review is funded by Mercer County Community College, and it was necessary to make cuts. Fortunately, and keen-eyed readers will already have noticed, I said the final print issue. The Review continues with another issue in 2015, and beyond, but we will publish entirely online. Change, the one constant, will of course continue, as the editorial board explores the opportunities our new publication paradigm offers us, but the quality and focus of the Kelsey Review will be sustained, no matter how the publication is distributed. We have a brief non-fiction piece this year, memorializing a WW II era bicycle. As always, the Review seeks interesting non-fiction pieces that evoke the unique aspects of the Mercer County area. Spread the word and Like us on Facebook! Old friends return: Carolina Morales, Ken Jaworowski, Wanda S. Praisner, Lois Marie Harrod, Vida Chu, Alan Teplitsky, George Point, Beverly Mach Geller, D. E. Steward, and Damon Williams. We also meet new writers and a new interior artist. Read on for works by Maxine Susmank, Emma Ljung, Dave Olson, and several others. As always, we strive to only bring you the best. Keep those submissions rolling in! Look for details about a new electronic submissions system—no more “snail” mail!—in the spring of 2015. My thanks go to the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission, who provide a slice of our funding. I also recognize and thank Mercer County Community College, which provides the rest of the pie. Most of our readers find the Kelsey Review at local libraries, so to the folks who make that possible, I tip my hat. In addition, fine MCCC employees such as Kami Abdala, Francis Paixão, Brad Kent, and Wendy Humphrey do their part to make the Kelsey Review a reality. Of course, editorial board volunteers Roberta Clipper, Luray Gross, Ellen Jacko, and Francis Paixao deserve thanks, too: Thanks! They are all a joy to work with, and the excellent Review you now hold is possible thanks to excellent common effort. I know there is enjoyment to be found in these pages—read, and enjoy the work of colleagues, friends, acquaintances, those who live and / or work in Mercer County area, the state’s capital district, those who have taken the time to sharpen their art and share it with us. Edward Carmien Editor

Table of Contents “I was a Teenage Mutant or Beauty and the Beast” Carolina Morales................2 “A House in New Orleans” Carolina Morales......................................................3 “Banshee” Carolina Morales.................................................................................4 “Adagio” Julia Cuddahy........................................................................................5 “What the String Secures” Ken Jaworowski.........................................................6 “The Dragon Lady” Vida Chu...........................................................................11 “The Artist Gregorio Prestopino Addresses His Portrait of His Mother” Beverly Mach Geller.............................12 “Denny’s Girl” Cathy Herbert...........................................................................13 “The Cubist” Lauren Fedorko............................................................................19 “Writing Poetry” Don Lasko.............................................................................20 “What a Day Can Bring” Sima Kumar..............................................................21 “Canned Peaches” Lois Marie Harrod................................................................27 “Blizzard” Maxine Susman.................................................................................29 “The Snowflake’s Wisdom” Leonora Rita V. Obed.............................................30 “The Fox at Island Beach” Wanda S. Praisner....................................................35 “Pelican Float” Emma Ljung.............................................................................36 “Agostia” D.E. Steward......................................................................................42 “Shortness of Breath” Elane Gutterman............................................................46 “A Couple of Questions for the Dead Guy” George Point................................48 “Hell Yeah!” Damon Williams............................................................................53 “O Ye Dolphins” Alan Teplitsky.........................................................................54 “The Bike” Dorothy K. Kohrherr.......................................................................60 “The Outbound Express” Ken Jaworowski........................................................61 Contributors.......................................................................................................49 Editors & Staff....................................................................................................52 Submission Guidelines........................................................................................53

Illustrations Cover: Holly Johnson, Ph.D. Electric Tree, Dave Olson Layout: Francis Paixão Web Presentation: Brad Kent

Editorial Board Edward Carmien, Editor Roberta Clipper, Fiction Editor Luray Gross, Poetry Editor Ellen Jacko, Poetry Editor Francis Paixão, Art Editor

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CAROLINA MORALES

I was a teenage mutant or beauty and the beast First, the spasms, a circuit broken, twinging on the side of your face. In the bathroom mirror, you raise your fingers, touch the grimace that stares back. Beneath an unblinking eye, a mouth twists a grotesque grin. Your mother steps in. Clutching coat and purse, she spins you to the emergency ward. A light beams from the doctor’s wand, reads through ocular nerve. A hammer probes knee to spine, climbs to the base of your neck. A sleeve of pressure squeezes your arm. You answer no . . . yes. Helped from the table, you clasp the back of your gown. Behind the curtain you re-dress. The nurse supplies prescriptions, referrals, a pirate’s patch to guard your sight, though nothing to protect your blouse from the dinner that will drool from your slack mouth. Patch off, your fingers press your eyelid down. At night, you tape it closed. The optometrist warns in two weeks time if it doesn’t blink, they’ll stitch it shut. Decreed to therapy mornings, you descend into the hospital basement; circle a sea of elderly patients rafted on their beds, stranded with papery skin, deadened eyes, white hair on edge, groans and moans to the push and pull of their fragile limbs. Alone, you sit in a corner wired to volts that jolt and twitch your grim expression. Finally home, you read pity in your family’s face, horror in your friends’ eyes. Then Christopher, the boy from class on whom you have a secret crush, turns from the group as they leave to press his flesh-warm lips on your stone hinged, gargoyled cheek.

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CAROLINA MORALES

A house in New Orleans

As teenage girls, we’d lie in bed, a cross nailed on either wall above each head, sole sisters in the dark with Wolfman Jack yowling from the station we’d let wail on until dawn. It’s the Wolfman comin at ya, 1350 WKBU— Ah oouuuhhh—then the dreamy rhythm and blues, Aretha Franklin, I say a little prayer; The Animals, . . . a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun; Wilson Pickett, In the midnight hour rocked us in the twin cocoons of our single beds, webbed in the thread of our narrow room, air waves howling from the window’s ledge, beneath a rising moon. Wedged between clouded bottles of white lotion, champagne colored perfumes, nail polish in pinks and roses, the black dial of the radio’s lacquered face edged in the window’s glass eye, outside, the night’s dark fingers bejeweled in city lights. And dredged from the swarming dusk, beyond the yards, the barking dogs, the closed gates, hedged into back streets, out of sight, lights shone on alley walls—shadow puppets shifting shape, drawn with sleight of hand, paw, claw, and fang, lay in wait, arched to prey.

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CAROLINA MORALES

Banshee

From a darkness crowded with heat, mosquito drone, flapping palms, a rush of waves, croan of tiny coquis, she appeared as I faced a sink of dirty dishes, kids sprawled with dominoes dotting the floor in this our third move back to the island, the cement house on the town’s protruding elbow at the ocean’s edge. With the children’s silence, I turned to her silhouette straining the screened doorway, face pressed, lips pursed against mesh—banshee of the tropics, pregnant and barefoot, draped in the film of a faded housedress, a strap slipping from her shoulder, hem floating at her knees, legs scarred with ant bites, dim eyes, neck blotched with sun discolored skin. A gape of missing teeth chewed and spit mumbles and grunts. I motioned her in, offered a glass of water, watched her sip, tried to realize why she’d come, all the while wanting her to leave as I pondered which were the boys or men who led her again and again, if she went willingly or not to lie on the sand behind the rocks, and what of the babies left in the ward that sent her back to a three room shack decrepit with crazy brothers, a crazy mother, an older sister with children of her own. She pointed to my feet as my son deciphered her hollow groans. She wants ‘chanclas,’ he puzzled out. I hurried to my room, found an old pair, watched their thong disappear between her toes before she vanished as suddenly as she’d come. For months I washed dishes, cleaned and scrubbed pots and cups, did not know my son marked the glass she drank from and would not bring his mouth to its lip.

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JULIA CUDDAHY

Adagio

Look for the groom, but stay out of sight. Tell me if she says, “Oui” and spins Her dress to our old songs, or if an orchestra plays preludes and mazurkas by Chopin whose poetic language of notes inspired our first performance in Paris when we played at the Opera Bastille, a happy time together, before the marriage ended and I returned to America. Did she drink from his family’s goblet, or did his mother forbid a second sip, a lucky droplet toasting new love? Read the newspaper’s announcement about how she pleased his eye when they met in our ballet studio. I thought “ciao” meant “goodbye.”

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KEN JAWOROWSKI

What the String Secures

Twenty dollars for a fucking balloon. I ask you, what’s the profit margin on that? Get them from China, penny apiece, then string, helium: ten cents total, tops. Even after you pay the dimwit in the costume who’s walking around the theater peddling them. Now add to that twenty the $76.50 each for the two crummy seats, plus the $8.00 service charge, per ticket, to order them by phone, and you’re starting to get a grasp of my present frustrations. Though, to be sure, my present frustrations started over a month ago, on a Sunday morning. There’s an ad in The Times. Before I can flip the page my daughter sees it, drawn there like the ad is a one-ton electromagnet and her eyeballs are made of iron. She’s 6 years old, can barely read, but they aren’t dumb ­— they use a color picture and buy a space so big even a blind kid can’t miss it: The Buggies Are Coming! Yeah, the Buggies. Stupid show, nothing more than a 30-minute commercial for the homely dolls, joyless toys and other plastic crap they pitch with the subtlety of an air horn blown into a megaphone. The program’s been running for less than a year, and already it’s like crack cocaine to kids, dealt by life-size puppets instead of street-corner pushers. When I hear their theme song, I long for a Buggie-shaped handgun to shoot out the screen. My daughter spots the ad and starts prancing around and squealing she wants to go. I turn the page, hoping she’ll let it pass, but no, the kid’s got a mind like a steel trap and a screech like a rusty hinge. After an hour of this my wife says, quietly, “Maybe you should take her.” Yeah, and maybe I should gargle acid, I want to say, but when I look in my wife’s eyes, I see something there, something sadder than I expected, something I’m not sure I want to ask about. I’ve been putting in 60-hour weeks at work, even when the place can do without me, so I probably haven’t been a model family man of late. In short, five minutes later I’m making a guilt trip to the phone and ordering tickets. Time passes fast, the way it always does when an unwanted event is on the horizon, and it’s raining the morning of the Buggies show. Of course it is. I put the sound of a joke in my voice when I ask my wife, seriously, if she’d like to take the kid, or how about we forget the show and have a nice meal somewhere instead? Her look sends me out the door a minute later with my daughter, and an eighteen-dollar cab ride later we’re there, squeezed into the cramped and costly seats. Somewhere, the executive who runs this sham is laughing at me. I’d love to shove a full-sized Buggie — complete with the fuzzy headpiece and the pointy shoes they wear — up his fat ass. As expected, countless kids infest the place, their parents stuffing them full

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of sugar while plying them with cheaply made expensive trinkets guaranteed to land in the trash, busted, before the weekend’s out. The show begins. Twenty-four minutes late by my Rolex. The entertainment, if you’d stretch to call it that, is lip-synched and talent-free, blasting the Buggies theme while every kid screams so loud I’ll hear it in my nightmares. My eardrums threaten to hemorrhage, but I’m getting a good workout on my arm, twisting my wrist twice a minute to check how much more of this disaster I’ll have to endure. Time sped up to get this day here, and now it’s stretching out this debacle as long as possible. Still, I’m working hard not to be viewed as a bad sport. I fake a couple of grins when my daughter looks up at me and even manage to point at a Buggie a couple of times, though secretly I’m hoping one falls off the stage. Not because I want to see them severely hurt — that would profit me nothing. Rather, it might end the show early. Maybe get us a refund. No such luck. When the lights come up, I flash my daughter my first genuine smile of the day, happy as a clam that it’s time to go, until one of the Buggies — Punky or Pruney or Pukey, I can never get their names straight — calls, “See you after intermission!” I groan and melt into the seat. But it’s about to get worse. During the break the Buggies themselves come out into the audience, each clutching a handful of balloons. My first thought: At least they’re giving the kids something, a thank-you for the mint their parents spent on this washout of a show. Silly me. I watch a guy whip out his wallet and hand over a bill, and I immediately look around for somebody to commiserate with, just one other parent who can see this scam for what it is. No chance. All the sheeple are digging into their pockets too, eager to fork over green bills for a silver balloon in the shape of the troll holding it. No. I decide to make a stand on principle. I will not get taken again. O.K., I’ll cut the bullshit and tell you that I got taken again. Try telling a 6-year-old she can’t have what every other snot-nose urchin around her is being handed. Try doing that, and you’ll be a better man than I. You’ll also look like a cheap prick in front of your kid and the rest of the dimwits surrounding you. I mean, they put these things right in your face while giving you nowhere else to go except out to the lobby, where they’re hawking $30 T-shirts and $8.50 sodas in cups three-quarters filled with ice. Please, go right ahead, try to explain to a kid what a consummate, commercialized, mutant form of capitalismgone-wrong swindle this all is. It’s easier to dribble a football. I seethe as I open my wallet. And I can’t begin to describe the pain that

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comes from placing my hard-earned scratch into the hairy paw of, god help me, a Buggie, with not so much as a “Thank you” out of his furry puss. And the intermission concludes with me twenty dollars lighter and a stomach heavy with bile. The rest of the show is no less a calamity than the first half and the millisecond it ends, I sprint with my daughter for the exit, feet sticking to the gummy floor with every step out of this house of horrors. Not a cab in sight. Correction — plenty of cabs, all filled. A block away, the subway. Screw the cabs. I’ll get us out of the rain and home for a third of the cost. I’m not a fan of going underground. I take a car service to work every day and charge it to my expense report. But for now it’s the way to go, and cheap to boot. I take hold of my daughter’s hand — the same one with the overpriced balloon tied to her wrist  and down we hustle. At times like these, I wonder how my old man put up with six kids. On top of the sheer number of mouths, he was a godforsaken shoe salesman who earned in a year what I take home in a month. And I will swear on my life that he never had anything but a kind smile for any of us. How he maintained that attitude is a mystery to me, and for today it’s a puzzle that won’t be solved, for my nostalgia dissipates when the train arrives. We shuffle onto the back car. It’s a way to go to the Upper East Side, and in the sole stroke of luck of the day, there are two seats open. We sit, and while my daughter plays with her balloon, I close my eyes in a faint hope of willing away the ache that has danced the rumba inside my head since I woke this morning. My lids droop. I hear a child’s giggle. It isn’t my daughter’s. I open my eyes. Across from us is a kid, 3 years old or so, enthralled by the Buggies balloon. My daughter has been pulling the string, making the balloon dance on the florescent strip that runs along the top of the car. The kid is watching, grinning ear-to-ear. The kid’s mother looks like a prize — the kind you get for last place. Lipstick three shades too bright, with the rest of her makeup slathered on with a paint roller. But for all her mangy choices, she’s paid more attention to her hair and nails than she has to her child, who has stood up to get a closer look at the balloon and who will meet the floor the hard way the next time the train stops. She doesn’t notice that he’s moved. She’s buried in some magazine. It’s a wonder she can read. Hardly looks old enough to be out of high school and not quite smart enough to graduate, either, based on her mismatched outfit. The train screeches to a stop and, as expected, the kid plops on his ass. She grumbles something and grabs him by the arm, yanking him to his feet. It’s not a gentle move, but he returns to his seat without a whimper, the kind of response that says he’s already figured out that a crying jag will be greeted with nothing more than an unconcerned shrug. Back to my father, instantly, and I remember him carting the pack of us around, laughing at anything that pleased him and hoping we would too. I worry over every cent, rightly so in this rip-off world, but I can’t recall him ever arguing about money. Not to be sarcastic — alright, I am being sarcastic, it’s not a crime — but it’s probably because there was nothing to argue over, with the shoe trade not exactly putting us in a high-income bracket. Add to that my mother, a housewife who’d immigrated a year before she’d married and barely spoke the tongue, and

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you’re talking a serious shortage of coin in the old Binzotti household. The kid across from us remains fascinated by my daughter’s balloon. I loathed buying the thing, but now that the dough is spent, it’s mine — ours — and I tied the string so tightly around her wrist that the only way it’s coming off is if her arm goes with it. The money has been shelled out and there will be no unexpected loss of purchase, of that I can assure you. I have my principles. “Sit,” the kid’s mother yips. He doesn’t hear. The train is loud and his attention is focused entirely on the balloon. My daughter pulls it up and down a few times, and the kid squeals with glee. “And leave that girl alone,” the mother adds, louder. But she’s back in her magazine a second later. I want to say to her: “What else is he going to do? He’s got nothing to occupy him — no toys, books, whatever — unless he wants to pull the threads out of the cheap coat you bought him.” I don’t say this, of course. She looks like the kind who’d carry a gun. What I do is reach over and hold my daughter’s hand down. Maybe if the balloon stops moving he’ll lose interest. And it does, but he doesn’t. His eyes are still peeled. I had hoped they’d be out of the subway on the next stop or two. That doesn’t look likely. They’re heading far uptown, no doubt to the cheap seats. And things are starting to get downright embarrassing. A few people are looking at the kid now, his single-mindedness more interesting than the ads for divorce lawyers and cut-rate dentists that paper the car. The mother senses this and pulls him back once more, planting him on the seat. She can’t control his eyes though, and a moment later his smile is still bright and his expression is fascinating — a pure amazement at a simple thing, combined with an abundance of wonder. If I can think one more thought on my father here. I was 6 or 7, in his bedroom. Don’t ask for details, I don’t know how I got there, just work with me. I sat on the floor, scribbling in some books I found. I was a kid, they like to scribble on anything, right? So there I am, books spread out in front of me, pen held like a dagger, scritch-scratching away, when my dad crossed the threshold. The breath left his lungs, like he’d just stepped on a sharp nail with a bare foot. I knew something bad had happened. Looked up in fear. It must have taken two or three seconds, but those moments feel like they’ve stretched to today. Perhaps they have. “Let’s, uh, go play,” he said, catching his breath. Then he took me to the yard. I felt uneasy all day. I didn’t know why. That scrap of memory ends there. Twelve years ago he died. After the funeral, my mother gave me a box. Told me inside were the most important things he owned, the only things his father had given him and the only things he had with him when he entered the country, since his other bags had been stolen on the voyage. In the box: a leather-bound English dictionary. A volume of Shakespeare. A history of the United States. I opened them. Scribbles all over the pages. I pretty much ruined the things, his prize possessions. Why didn’t he beat my ass? A fast five to the snotbox would have been more than justified. Hell, even if he just screamed at me, I would have deserved it, so why the hell didn’t he? And goddamn if I’m not remembering this — something I actively avoid recalling — when the intercom on the subway announces our stop.

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I shake my head to get rid of the memories, at least temporarily. And when they are pushed to the rear of my brain I reach inside my pocket and pull out the folding knife that’s attached to my keyring. Open it. The blade catches the eye of the kid’s mother. First thing that’s grabbed her attention since we got on. There’s no telling what she’ll do — odds are running about even whether she’ll scream like a MeeMee or go quieter than mouse — but I’m fast, so there’s no real chance for her to react. I slip the knife under my daughter’s wrist, then pull up, cutting the string, while at the same time leaning down and uttering, quickly and quietly to her, “I’ll buy you another.” I hand the little kid the twenty-dollar balloon. He’s unsure. I look to his mother, who has the same expression. In that look I realize she’s not what I first thought. She’s a damn child herself, scared but smart enough to hide her fear behind tough clothes and a hard attitude. Somewhere in there may even be a bit of careless joy, just like her kid’s. “It’s O.K.,” I say. He’s not sure. So I push it closer, almost in his lap. His sense tells him to beg off. But true to being a kid, he can’t help himself and takes hold of the string. This could look like pompous charity, a holier-than-thou moment. I’m telling you straight out it isn’t, but the kid’s mother doesn’t know that. So I throw a line: “He can give it to someone else if he doesn’t want it.” Then, “We’re getting her another one anyway.” And she too has that apprehensive expression. But she looks at her kid and sees the rapture on his face. She offers a decent-sized smile, just like I do. “Tell them ‘Thank you’ ” she says, softly, to the kid. And he’s still beaming, staring up at the balloon, when those lispy words leave his mouth. The subway door opens. I’ve got my daughter by the hand. As we walk up the steps and onto the street she says, “Dah-dee?” It’s tough to figure out her emotion. She could start to cry or laugh, there’s no way yet to know. I’ll deal with either one when it happens.

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VIDA CHU

The Dragon Lady

Was it Cixi’s singing that enticed the Emperor to summon her nightly to his bed chamber and make her his Empress when she bore him a son? Who would have guessed a Manchu teenager recruited into the Emperor’s harem would end up ruling China for forty-seven years? Historians blamed Cixi for outliving three emperors, ruling behind the screens, squandering the naval budget and bringing down the Qing dynasty. No one saw her as a literate woman who brought up two emperors loved dogs, flowers, and European cigarettes.

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BEVERLY MACH GELLER

The Artist Gregorio Prestopino Addresses His Portrait of His Mother

You sit among the apples, onions carrots, waxed and corded provolone selling your produce to eke out enough nickels, dimes, and quarters to help pay rent. Your coal black eyes dominate. They follow me in the group of boys kicking a can down the cobbled street yelling, running, hitting a ball with a broken stick from your onion crate. You want to buy me Sunday shoes. Your hands red and numb with cold weigh apples, sort potatoes, cut cheese. I didn’t buy penny caramels and saved seven cents a week to buy you gloves for Christmas.

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CATHY HERBERT

Denny’s Girl

Through the tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, I watch the workaday people, heading for their 9 to 5s. Snuggled in closed-up cars, the air conditioning blasts while they sip hot coffee through itty bitty holes. Slurp. Slurp. They wait for the light to change. Gotta quit gawking and get back to business. Those people are not like me. I started working when the sky was pitch black, the damp cool air gliding over my arms, a prickly feeling in the breeze. That’s when every inch of skin feels awake. The early morning dark is full of hope. Everything starts all over. Screwed it up yesterday, you might get it right today. I’ll take it. Late night dark is a finish line. Whatever you got done, whatever fun you had in the bars is all gone. You’re wobbling on the sidewalk, trying to decide if the guy next to you is worth messing with or not. Don’t go all righteous-moral on me: the question is the same whether you just met him or you’ve been with him for years. One of you is just trying to get the key in the lock and get inside. The day is all used up and every bit of every hope, dream, and possibility is all wrung out and dried up. What is it that Jay says? The only person you’ll meet on the road at 5 AM is another racetracker or a drunk coming home, and most of the time, the drunk coming home will be another racetracker. “Always wave as you pass a drunk, it’s probably someone you know.” Reminds me of something my stepdad would say. But it doesn’t make me all antsy when Jay says it. I rode three horses before daylight. Out onto the track for the first set, I can’t see my hand in front of my face. Me and Lonnie gallop in pairs. I hear his horse breathing hard, taking in the cool, clean air. I smell the horses’ bodies as they start to sweat, sweet like the earth. The warm dampness hits the cool air, cooking up a pungent mist. I hear the rhythm of the hooves sinking deep into the soft dirt. All that power under me, but what I like best is that it feels smooth and peaceful, like sitting on a porch swing. There’s no time, no place, just the feeling of bodies moving in space. By 8:30, I’m a quarter of the way through my work, walking out Excavator’s Promise. The horse is a rank SOB, mad at the world. I call him X-Rated. Running out on the track is the only thing he likes to do. He couldn’t have started life with that frame of mind. Every now and then, I think I see how he used to be, when life was all carefree and something to look forward to, when there was promise in his future. He’ll notice another horse across the aisle, and his ears will shoot forward and his eye will melt. Then he’s back to his crappy self. As I walk the creepy thing, he inches his body away and twists his head and neck, angling like a snake ready to strike. As he flattens his ears against his head, I see the whites of wild eyes. He’s going for a bite. I give the meanest pull I can on the lead shank. The metal chain around his nose tightens, pinching the soft skin between every link of chain. His eyes turn into saucers, and he’s somewhere between furious and

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afraid. But settle down and behave? Nah. But we have some things in common. Just as I can’t sit in that traffic sucking down my coffee, X-Rated can’t play by the rules. He just has to make a stand. He’s his own man, you could say. Except his crappy behavior got his nuts cut off long ago. If he was a person, he’d be a crazy guy standing on the corner screaming at everyone. If he was a girl, maybe he’d be like me. Back around to our section of the barn, I give X-Rated a drink and see if Denny’s finished his stall. Denny’s a dark shadow in a stark white T shirt. Squat and square, he’s like a little black bear. He once showed me how strong he was by picking up a 100-pound grain bag in his teeth. I put X-Rated in his stall. Denny brings in the colt’s water buckets and hoists his hay net. Denny talks about his girlfriend. Hell, he always talks about her. I remember the first time he talked about Diane. “She’s so pretty. She has long brown hair.” He looked right at me, waiting for a reaction. “And big blue eyes.” He looked like a bull just waiting for an excuse to charge. I stared blankly. Then I got it: OK, she’s white. And??? Denny smiled and said, “You OK.” What do I care? My own life is so pitiful these days that there’s no way I should even think about judging someone else. My hair is greasy, my fingernails dirty, and my jeans have holes in the knees. I got a lot to contemplate, as they say. “I left her $100 on the dresser this morning just for spending. I always say, hang on to what you got till something better comes along. Ain’t that right?” I agree wholeheartedly. To stay on the shedrow, you got to get along with Denny. He’s the foreman. But all I can think of is how tightly I held onto X-Rated’s halter to keep from getting bit. Johnny rolls his eyes. He thinks Denny’s making it all up. Johnny doesn’t have a girl, but he has a dagger tattooed on his arm with the motto “Born to Raise Hell.” Today he’s full of plans for a night on the town. He curls his upper lip and then flaps it up and down with his fingers, mimicking a stallion’s signal of “Hey baby, I want you.” He grins. His mustache looks like a pencil line of dirt on his round face. I shake my head. “Racetrack crudeness ain’t gonna fly with the secretaries. You gotta get just a little class.” He ain’t pretty and ain’t smart. Still, I don’t like to see anyone fail. “You got no business telling me about class.” My helpful comment has clearly wounded him. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Right under the dagger tattoo. “How about we go out tonight and see what we can find.” He shakes his hips like it means something. “Gotta be better than what you usually do.” I throw a bucket of water at him. I hate being called on that. Jay shows up, puffing on his cigarette as he passes the “No Smoking” sign. He’s all hard muscle and bone. A long jagged scar runs down the left side of his face. Sometimes it looks sharp as razor wire, other times it’s almost soft. I want to touch it. I like his racetrack body with broad shoulders, thin legs, and the strength that comes with steering 1000-lb thoroughbreds around the track all morning. After work, he goes to the Pit Stop, a nearby bar, and doesn’t come out again for hours. I give Jay a leg up on his next horse. I want to really feel that leg, not just support the shin for a brief moment while he jumps up and over. Hold on to what you got flickers through my brain. I get to work. Clean the stall, throwing straw up into the air forcefully so that it hits the walls hard, the good straw staying light on the top of the pile. The heavy urine-soaked matted clumps go splat on the floor. The manure rolls down the sides of the pile like little apples. I pile the dirty stuff in the middle and heap it into the wheelbarrow. Ma-

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neuver the full load across the road and upend it in the pit as steam rises. Grab a new bale of straw, kick it in the middle so that the tightly bound hay flakes fan out like an accordion. Impale a flake of straw on the pitchfork and twirl it, throwing the straw high and loose in the air so that it lands in the soft bed, knee deep and smooth like the quiet sea. It smells so clean. I hear footsteps on the asphalt. Jay is back. In this moment, he reminds me of a cowboy in the old movies, coming back to the old homestead after the cattle drive, except Jay’s wearing a black helmet.— but only because the rules say he has to. And any fool can see it’s not a real safety helmet. If he has a wreck, it’s goodbye brain. I mean, I may be reckless sometimes, but I wouldn’t go out there without regulation head gear. Jay says the colt, Skeet, breezed bad. He gets his wind cut off and fights for breath, stalling out when he runs hard. It must be so scary to suddenly not be able to breathe. All the while, this little guy sits on your back, making you run, digging his legs into your sides, his stick stinging your hips and his pelvis pushing you on. Skeet’s got something wrong with his windpipe. They’ll probably send him home and find him another life. I wish I could go home or someplace like home is supposed to be. I ran away when I was sixteen. Some kids run to the city. I ran to be around horses. They saved me. Jay just mutters, “This colt ain’t gonna make it,” and runs to catch his next ride from Johnny. I walk Skeet, 20 minutes in a long line of horses and grooms, horses and hotwalkers, horses and exercise riders. We’re all circling left which is a bit amusing when you think that, in the Bible, the left hand is always unclean, heathen. Here, you could say that always going to the left is a matter of principle. In the dusty aisle of the shedrow, we make up a world of outcasts, drunks, gamblers — and survivors. While Johnny’s getting the next horse ready, Jay ducks in to the tack room to take a swig out of a paper sack. He puts his finger to his lips as if to say, “Don’t tell on me.” Like his drinking is a secret and I’m the only one who knows. But for just a second, eyes bright with mischief, he looks he looks like a hayseed kid. Bet he was the class clown long ago before he got that scar on his face. Sometimes he has the saddest, sweetest eyes. I always try to say something that catches his attention and really makes him see me, not just another racetrack girl. The first time it happened was maybe a week ago. I was slow getting a horse out for him. “You going to take all day?” he asked, exasperated. “Why not? You got something better to do?” I flashed a big grin, hands on hips, pretending to pout. His narrow mouth half opened in a little “Oh.” He paused, cigarette in mid-air. “Well, now that you mention it, I don’t have anything better to do. We could stand here all day. Call out for pizza. Drink some beer.” “You buying?” I asked. “Sure. I’ll buy. Anytime.” His eyes were sharp and horizon-blue. He looked at me like I was beautiful. Then his face got all hard and closed. I wanted to get him to look at me like that again. It got to be part of my morning routine: flatter and flirt to get this cold-eyed guy notice me and see his face change and the scar, depending on the light, go from all sharp to almost invisible. I didn’t think it was my place to ask how he got it. Some questions are just too personal. But today, not 24 hours later, everything is different. That old routine is all behind me as I sit in the parking lot and look at the night sky. I didn’t see it coming,

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although I should have. Things got real personal with Jay yesterday when I rode up to Aqueduct with him. The horses had gone earlier in the day with Denny. Jay offered to drive me; he said he had to be there anyway. That meant I could finish the barn chores so there’d be less work when we got back. Denny gave me a sad smile when I asked if it was OK. “Ain’t you getting a little tired of this shit? But if you want to, sure. I’d say, ‘Watch yourself,’ but I know you won’t.” I felt like I’d just brought home a report card full of “Fs,” but I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. Sometimes I forget: As much as Denny can tell what a horse is thinking, he reads people just as well. And he usually has something to say about my taste in men. I don’t like it, but I can’t say he’s wrong. “Guess you clean up good,” Jay laughed when I got in the car. I’d wanted to look good. Told myself that it might be cool to change my image a little. I’d even put on some lipstick and eyeliner. Washed my hair. My jeans still had holes in them. Jay passed me a paper bag with a bottle of whiskey in it. The speedometer hovered around 90. I laughed as he swerved in and out of the traffic. Why the rush? “Are we late?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “Have another drink and watch the scenery fly by,” he laughed. “Just like in the morning, going fast, hanging on. Fast is good, right?” He reached over to the radio, hand grazing my knee. I passed the whiskey back to him, touching his hand for longer than I needed to. It felt like we were in a bubble where rules didn’t matter and wildness was just right. The way he glanced at me, it was like we were both thinking about it, circling, hesitating. I thought about saying, “Pull over for a minute” and jumping his bones. I don’t do that routinely, but sometimes, well, why not? I was just about to make my move when Jay punched the horn like he was in a bar fight, accelerating right up onto the bumper of the car in front of us. “Jeesh, you gonna ram him?” Just a couple of inches separated the cars. Tight-lipped, “He needs to get the fuck outta my way.” The driver changed lanes. Jay tailgated right behind him, fist still going mano-a-mano with the horn. “Son of a bitch.” Knuckles white on the wheel, he made a rattling noise, which I think was supposed to be a laugh, and put his hand on my knee, softly caressing while muttering insults at the other car. He glanced at me cautiously, head tilted like a bird about to make a laser quick move to get a worm. I saw why he liked to gallop horses. He liked to make them move. He liked to push them. He probably enjoyed it when Skeet fought for air. I’d seen enough of that shit between my mother and my stepfather. I heard my mouth ask, “How’d you get that scar?” His attention focused on me with so long a stare I had to say, “Ya gonna watch the road?” “My ex-wife.” I must have gone white. He snorted. I flashed back to my mom on her hands and knees on the green linoleum floor, fingers chalk white, trying to reach under the stove for her tooth. Like if she found it, she could put it back into her bloody mouth. My stepfather wobbled over her, eyes glacier blue. And I stood in the doorway paralyzed, fighting for air because I couldn’t breathe. When I got my air again, it came into my lungs so fast I thought I was going to explode. Maybe the whole episode made me a little more clear-headed than normal because I left the next morning and never went back. I wasn’t gonna be my mom and believe in some piece-of-crap guy. But Jesus, we all need something to hold on to.

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“No, an accident in the starting gate.” “What happened?” “A stupid fight that got outta control. You shoulda seen the other guy. Let’s stick with that.” He looked soft and sweet. “How about I tell you the whole story later tonight.” Sort of the way my stepdad talked to my mom when he was planning his evening fun of fists and tears. Yeah, well, predators always know their prey. I closed up inside my own little cocoon. The light changed and his eyes were hard as rocks. For the rest of the day, I thought about how, in a split second, everything can change. One minute, you’re believing in the possibilities, and then, faster than you can snap your fingers, you’re wading hip-deep in a pile of hurt, tears, black eyes, and knocked-out teeth. That afternoon, I finally saw Denny’s girl. I only knew who she was because Denny told me. She just walked by without saying anything. He could have picked anyone out of a crowd and said, “That’s my girl” and it would have looked as believable. She was mousy, pale, with a long nose and beady brown eyes that seemed fixed on something in the distance. Then she looked down at her hand, like she was picking out dinner, and began to chew on a fingernail. Her long brown hair was straight and limp, parted haphazardly down the middle of her head. Her shoulders were hunched like she had a permanent stomach ache. She didn’t acknowledge Denny. Was he making it up? Or was it real? I couldn’t tell. Denny beamed. His smile lit up his face. At least it was real. But just before we loaded up to go home, Diane came over to the stalls. She looked at Denny intently and touched his arm quietly, long pale fingers tracing a pattern on the blue-black muscles. In the sharp afternoon light, I could see her strong cheek bones and delicate features. She looked like she was made out of porcelain. I couldn’t hear her words, but her voice was soft, like the deep throaty sounds the horses make in the early morning. Denny smiled. I felt a knife-edge loneliness run through me. Yeah, Denny believed in his girl, but that wasn’t all. It was real. Of all of us, he really did have something to hold on to. I decided right then that I hoped Denny always told me stories about his girl. I wanted to hear all about her and his apartment and his money. I wanted every scrap of information. In my heart, I hoped Denny’s girl lived for him and had a Tbone steak on the table when he got home. I hoped she treated him really well because he believed in her. “What you doing tonight. You staying or you need a ride back home?” Denny asked me after we were all loaded up. “I’m not staying around here.” “Good, I’m glad you’re not doing something stupid this time. You want to ride up front with me or in the back?” “I’ll keep an eye on the horses.” “That’ll be good.” All the way home, I leaned on the bottom half of the van’s dutch door, just me and a big bay colt looking out at the world. I stood with the wind in my face, watching the world fly by. It was dark when we got back. Now, I’m just sitting in the parking lot, counting the stars. Usually, a guy pulls the stuff that Jay did, and I just go right along with it, wanting to believe that this time, everything will be different. I remember Denny’s sad smile just before I took off with Jay and what it said: “You gonna come

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back tomorrow with a line of bullshit about romance and trying to ignore the fact that you got a black eye for your trouble?” I’m not any different than I was yesterday, but I can feel the wheels turning in my brain. It’s like I said “no” to something that I’ve always said “yes” to. I’m not sure what all this means, if anything, but I’ll take it. The night air smells clean and fresh, and there’s just a hint of a breeze. It’s peaceful. Maybe instead of just hoping that tomorrow will be a step up instead of a screw up, I should think a little more long-term. When I think about how Denny and Diane looked in the late-afternoon sunlight for just that one moment, and how much he believes in her, I smile. How do you get to the point where you’ve got something to hold on to? I don’t know, but I’m going to figure it out. I look at the headlights beyond the chain-link fence. It’ll be morning soon.

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LAUREN FEDORKO

the cubist

I hang onto you like you’ll leave me if I blink I secretly want you to touch me in public, preferably—a bookstore, a museum on the streets, in front of passersby as if I could feel your love in sharp pieces as if time were approaching death as if I had a choice in our certain fate I don’t want to miss your inside-out feelings put together on your skin a regurgitated array of storm clouds the cubist would say I could rearrange you the way I’d like or that I could look at you unassembled either way I like you dismantled and in the dark— a hundred thousand pieces on their backs lying in a peculiar angle you’d still carry a sense of conviction although estranged I know you even when I try to forget I know you even when you’re in pieces and the more things change the more they stay the same the sum of your parts out of order: familiar but new remind me of my place in your world—: a mustard stain on your favorite pair of slacks.

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DON LASKO

Writing Poetry

Step off the lines, He said, in to the spaces between, deep oceans darker than the lines themselves. And the light so blinding! Do not be afraid, take my hand, it’s as easy as walking on water.

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SIMA KUMAR

What A Day Can Bring The day was still sleeping. But the crows were already busy making trouble in the fields. Those fields that should have been ours. The crows cawed and cawed so much I couldn’t get back to sleep. All I could do in the dark was stare up at our home’s thatched roof. Cozy and warm under the blanket between my sisters, I pictured those birds so clearly: Their head and wings black. Their neck and breast gray. Flapping their mighty wings, they soar. Flapping and soaring across fields of ripening crops—I am like them. I swoop down on a stalk of chana, crack open a pod’s waxy skin with a peck of my pointy beak, and then pluck out the single kernel inside. Why strip kernels off an entire stalk? I know better than to do that. The biggest, juiciest chana are at the tippy top because the tops see the most sun as the crops grow. I flap my mighty arms swooping here and there, snatching up kernels, eating as many as I want. And there is no one telling me not to! Lying in the dark, in the warmth between my sisters, I can taste the sweet, tender kernels on my tongue. Thinking and imagining all this, I began feeling a tingling in my stomach. But the feeling wasn’t hunger pangs like they might be because we didn’t have dinner the night before. The tingling was because I was anxious for the day to begin. Every day in the morning we have chores at someone’s house. But today, after so many years, Thakur-ji had returned to the village, and so we had chores at his. Who likes chores? I don’t. And usually I’ll sleep in as long as I possibly can in the morning. Didi will have to shake me more times than there are fingers on my two hands, and eventually she’ll have to pull off the blanket or sprinkle cold water on my face to get me awake. But today I was awake before her, even before the day, because we weren’t going to just anyone’s house for morning chores. We were going to Thakurji’s. And going to Thakur-ji’s meant we would be near the Big House, which was across from Thakur-ji’s well. The Big House was forbidden to us. “Wake up, Didi.” I nudged my older sister sleeping beside me. “We’re going to see the Big House.” I blew a gentle breeze on Didi’s face. Her eyelids twitched and she made a sleepy moan. I drew closer and smelled Didi’s sweet-sleep breath. Her eyes were closed, but she couldn’t fool me. I knew she was awake. With my fingers, I followed the line of her perfectly straight hair partition. After the spring harvest, Didi would be married and leave us for her husband’s home. From that day on, her partition would be filled with red sindoor powder. I hated to think about that time when I would lose Didi, so I said, “You know what I’m going to do, Didi?” “I’m sleeping,” she moaned, but I couldn’t help talking anyways. “I’m going to walk up the front steps of the Big House. I’m going to walk right up the stairs and knock on the door. And the servant, the boy named Chela who plays kabaddi with me and my friends sometimes, will open. Well, when Chela

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opens the door, I’ll look him straight in the eyes and stamp my foot. I’ll say: this is my house, too! I’ll walk right past him like I was a big person, someone very important. I’ll see everything in the house. I’ll take my time walking from room to room. I’ll go into the bedroom where you and Ma and Babu used to stay and see with my own eyes all those magnificent things you’ve told me about: the marble floor with a big, blue flower in the very center, the four-post teak bed, the large, leaning mirror on the wall. I’ll pull aside the mosquito net surrounding the bed and jump on the soft mattress and rest my back on the bolster pillows. When I’m nice and comfortable, I’ll call out to Chela to make me lemonade and sweet snacks, and like a queen I’ll sit on the bed and sip lemonade and eat my snacks one-by-one.” “And what will you do when Mayadin finds you in his home?” Didi asked. Mayadin was our cousin. Her eyes were open now. She had hazel eyes like Babu. “I’ll tell him,” I sat up. “I’ll tell him: Mayadin, you give back Babu’s land. You’re a cheater like your father. Filthy dog. If you don’t give Babu his land back, I’ll . . . I’ll—” Didi gave a laugh and asked, “What will you do, Kamala?” “I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll do something.” Didi sat up and smoothed down the puff of loose hair around her head. The room was becoming colored with the gray-blue of dawn. She began undoing her braid. “Don’t call someone a ‘filthy dog.’” “Ma calls Mayadin a filthy dog.” “Don’t’ argue so early in the morning,” Didi said sharply. She ran her fingers like a comb through her wavy hair. “Will you wash up first or will I?” “I will,” I said. “Well, hurry up. We don’t want to be late.” “We’ll see Thakur-ji,” I squealed in excitement, hugging Didi. “Shush,” Didi said, but I could tell—though she didn’t show it—she was excited, too. “You’re going to wake up Moni and Choti.” Moni and Choti were our younger sisters. “Who’s going to see Thakur-ji?” Choti asked. Choti slept next to me, and next to Choti was Moni, who was snoring. Choti was the youngest and though she was the age when kids start school, she still chewed on her baby blanket, like she was doing now. Choti didn’t go to school. None of us did. Didi had gone to school when she and Ma and Babu had lived in the Big House and had been rich. “We’re going to see Thakur-ji,” I said. “At least I think we might. We have chores at his place.” “I want to come, too.” “You can’t,” I said. “Don’t snap at Choti,” Didi chided. “Sorry, Choti. You just can’t because Ma needs you at home. Go back to sleep. I’ve gotta get ready.” Thakur-ji was like a god in our family because he’d given Grandfather a gift of land. Mallahs—boatmen—don’t usually own land but because of Thakur-ji’s kindness, Grandfather did. And that’s why Grandfather was known as the Lucky Mallah. My sisters and I were the Lucky Mallah’s granddaughters. Grandfather had died before Didi and I were born, before even Ma had come as a bride to the Big House. Thinking about Thakur-ji, I felt that tingling excitement again, like little bubbles forming at the bottom of a pot of water being heated on the chulha. It felt just like that in my belly, little bubbles bubbling, as I got ready for the day. While I brushed my teeth with a bitter neem branch, I had that feeling and brushed longer

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than usual to make them extra clean. I scrubbed my face, neck, and paid attention behind my ears, scrubbing and rubbing with yesterday’s water cold in the clay vessel from the night. I didn’t flinch when Didi combed out the knots in my hair or complain that she was braiding my pigtails too tight. I wanted to look my best. Didi had left the blanket, which we shared at night, for me to fold. So while she washed up, I did my best folding it as she would. My folds were less than perfect though, and in the middle of the blanket was a lump. Didi would have unfolded it and started all over, but I didn’t want the bother, so I stuck my hand between the folds to flatten out the lump. But it wouldn’t be flattened. I tugged at it and pulled out Choti’s lovey. Choti had gone back to sleep. Her fingers were curled as if she was still holding her lovey. But Choti wasn’t holding it. I was. The lovey had once been Ma’s shawl, a pale yellow cotton fabric that had had a beautiful border decorated with chicken stitching. And just like its name sounds, the chicken stitching around the border looked like a tiny chicken had stomped all around the edge, leaving a trail of flowers and vines decorated with leaves. When we no longer lived in the Big House but across the fields, Ma had torn the shawl in half and knotted each corner. The border had gotten frayed through the years and most of the decorations lost, but there were still finger-length sections of the border that showed the pretty chicken stitching. Choti had the lovey since she was a baby. But before it was Choti’s, it was Moni’s. Before it was Moni’s, it was mine. Only Didi, who was the eldest, didn’t teethe on that shawl when she was a baby because when Didi was a baby, she and Ma and Babu had lived in the Big House and life had been very different. But that was before the rest of us were born. We were a family of all girls. Ma wanted Choti to stop chewing on the shawl. “She’s too old to be doing that,” Ma would say. “Get rid of it.” And my sisters and I tried. We hid it in one of a pair of tall storage containers, one for rice and the other for lentils, that had been empty for years, except for layers of spider webs. Choti had climbed right on into the one where we’d thrown her lovey. The containers were taller than she, and we wouldn’t have known she was inside if we hadn’t heard her singing to her lovey. Then we hid it under some hay in the shed where once we had kept a cow named Nandani that gave milk and a goat named Chikku that bleated with happiness when you stroked behind its ears. The cow was sold for Didi’s dowry and the goat ran away. Choti found her lovey buried under the hay in the shed, too. I even climbed up the peepal tree in the village center and hid Choti’s lovey on a high branch and covered it with leaves. She hugged the peepal tree and cried and cried. Ma had said, “Let her cry,” but when Babu returned from laboring on his boss’s land in the evening and found out, he had said, “In the name of god, stop her suffering. Go fetch it.” And I did. No matter where we hid it, Choti would somehow manage to know where her lovey was. It was as if there was a string attached between the two. But like Ma said, Choti was too old for the lovey. Now was my chance, I thought looking at it in my hand. I tiptoed past Choti, sweetly sleeping, to the dark corner of the house where gunny sacks were thrown higgledy-piggledy. The sacks stank of the injustice done to Babu—like cow’s farts and dirt. I opened one sack and placed her lovey inside. This sack I buried under several other sacks. She would never think to look here. And if she couldn’t find it, she’d have to give it up. “What’re you doing?” Didi said. “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Let’s go, then.” She poured remaining water from the clay vessel into a

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stainless steel pot for our sisters to use when they woke up. The empty vessel we would take with us to the river. After our chores, we’d fill it with water to bring back home. “Ready,” I said. Ma handed Didi our food wrapped in two small handkerchief bundles. Though we might miss dinner, Ma usually came up with something for us to eat in the morning. Today was two-day-old bread. Yesterday, it was only one-day old. Ma said sleeping off hunger was easier than to see the day without a single morsel of food. Though broken up, stale roti was our normal breakfast. This morning I wished there were something different. I couldn’t help making a face when I saw the expected bundles. The old roti was supposed to last us until evening. Didi handed me mine. She tied hers into a corner of her sari. I didn’t think anyone had seen the face I’d made. If Ma had seen, in a snap, she would’ve reached for the bamboo switch kept outside the house doorway, always waiting for me to do something wrong. “Don’t make trouble,” Ma said. She cupped my chin and turned my face to hers. Why do you think I’m going to make trouble? I thought, looking right back at her, but didn’t say a thing. I wanted her to be proud of me today. “Don’t you dare take a single step onto Mayadin’s property,” Ma said. “Mayadin is a filthy dog like his father. Don’t even think of crossing Thakur-ji’s well.” I wanted to glare at Didi and say, See I told you: Ma DOES call Mayadin a filthy dog. But I couldn’t turn my head and look at her because Ma held me by the chin. “Yes, Ma,” Didi said. “Kamala, I’m talking to you,” Ma said, peering into my eyes. I wanted Ma to be proud of me. Didi nudged me with her elbow. “Yes, Ma,” I said the best I could with my chin being held. As we walked out the door, I rubbed away the bad feeling of Ma’s firm hold on my chin. I thought, first, Didi was wrong to scold me earlier for saying “filthy dog” and, two, Ma didn’t have to tell us not to cross the well because Didi and I already knew where we were or weren’t supposed to go. There were village laws that we had to follow because that was just the way things were, and then there were Ma’s laws that we had to follow because she told us we had to. Not crossing the well was her law. The punishment for breaking one of Ma’s laws was worse than breaking any village law. From the shed at the back of the house, Babu came out carrying a hoe resting on his shoulder. “All is in gods’ hands,” he said in a low voice when he saw me and Didi. Babu was always talking to the gods and sometimes when he spoke he wasn’t actually speaking to anyone, like this time, only to the gods. Ma was angry with all the gods and wasn’t speaking to any of them. Babu turned in the direction of the long, straight road that would take him to his boss’s land, which was all the way at the edge of the village. Along the way, he would stop at the Hanuman temple, where there is a large statue of the monkey god painted red ochre. On his left palm, arm raised high, Hanuman is carrying mountain peaks from the Himalayas; his right hand holds a mace. What I love most about the statue is Hanuman’s tail, which curls up and is bushy at the end. It waves to me like a flag, teasing me to grab ahold — and pull. Not too hard. Just a bit. And If I did, would Hanuman be angry or laugh? Would he drop the mountains? Didi told me the mountains Hanuman carries were called the Drongiri. I think Babu is like Hanuman carrying something gigantic. Hanuman carries the Drongiri mountains because he couldn’t find the Sanjivini herb so he pulled out the entire mountains and carried

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it across the ocean to Lanka where a great war was being fought. The Sanjivini herb saved Lakshman, Lord Rama’s brother, who was on the verge of death. Didi and I hear this story read by the pundit on Navratri. The pundit reads from The Ramayana, a book that only Brahmins can read from or touch. Unlike the mountains Hanuman carries, Babu’s mountains are actually just one and there are no plants that will make you feel better. Babu’s mountain is his lost land inheritance: our family’s injustice. My sisters and I feel the heaviness of that mountain. Ma is nearly crushed by its weight. At the temple, Babu begins his day with prayer, asking to have strength like Hanuman to carry his burden. I think he prays a long time. After praying, Babu makes his way to his boss’s land where he labors until sunset. “My lovey!” I heard Choti wail from inside the house. Babu turned back to look at me. He had already begun reciting the 108 names of Shiva. Hanuman was one of Shiva’s avatars. Because Babu had started his recitation he couldn’t be interrupted. He continued on the long road. “What’s wrong?” I heard Moni ask. Uh-oh. Better run before Choti suspected anything. I wanted Ma to be proud of me today, not angry. Sometimes it was hard to know which way Ma would go, being angry or not. If I stayed home any longer, I might get it for causing trouble so early in the morning, even though what I was doing was for Choti’s own good. But if Choti cried it out for a while, Ma would tell her it was just as well that her lovey had disappeared. Later in the day, after things had settled down, Ma would be proud of me for getting rid of Choti’s lovey. “Kamala,” Didi said, her tone rising. She looked at me sharply. “What?” I shrugged, all innocent. Didi didn’t flinch, her always-watching eyes saying, you know exactly why I’m looking at you. I smiled. I wouldn’t be found out at home. “We don’t want to be late, Didi,” I said quickly and pulled at her elbow to go. When we passed the bamboo switch leaning outside the doorway, I stuck my tongue at it. Not this morning!

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LOIS MARIE HARROD

Canned Peaches

My hands were small enough to fit inside the mouths of jars so my mother taught me to coffin peach halves, peeled and pitted, as if they were shingles layered inside the Mason quarts which were sometimes Ball and squarish and sometimes rounder Kerr. The peaches fit like fat tongues, thick petals overlapping to the neck and my mother said with each lid that her hands were too big, where would I be without you? My hands are still small, an adaption, some say, to cold — the chunky torso, short limbs and smaller appendages of Inuit, Aleut and Sami, hands inherited from my squat Aunt Lizzie, and passed on to my son, nothing ballerina about us, though my sister’s legs were long and beautiful like my mother’s and sometimes lapped over mine as we slept at night

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and now my mother’s hands — cupped over each other, peach halves, the fragrant and curiously soft tongues of her body, not prayer but labor was her preservation — her hands, the only parts of her body here that seem herself.

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MAXINE SUSMAN

Blizzard

Track through the house on snowshoes, ice from salt-crusted boots drizzles across kitchen tiles. Drive the dogsled through, grinning huskies with ice-colored eyes. We listen to tilting floorboards, this cockamamie frame, grow dizzy skating its trapezoidal rooms, winter skelters full-tailed within us, the bandit raccoon who leers down from the rafters— the animals bed down as we bed down, bedrolls by the fireplace, blizzard and flame.

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LEONORA RITA V. OBED

The Snowflake’s Wisdom

“To confuse snow with stars, Simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.” —From “Too Easy: to Write of Miracles” by Denise Levertov Adele Varens wanted to become French again. She was tired of the way Jane Eyre insisted on sending her to the English boarding school, in order to make her more proper, more refined, and— “Rid her of her Gallic vices, that we must do, dear Rochester.” Not that Jane Eyre would ever know what a Gallic vice was. Her father’s new wife didn’t know how to bite, bicker, gargle or guffaw, burp, fart, blister and bleed. Her idea of gossip was the latest obituary, and whether the dearly departed preferred peonies or ranunculues. Jane Eyre didn’t take many baths, and she seemed to hate the idea of ever being naked over or under water, but despite the dearth of cleansing, she never gave off an animal odour. Not that Jane Eyre could ever be an animal, unless you counted ones that were extinct and therefore too delicate to survive in a brutal Nature. Pheronomes, hormones, ovulatory alarums: Jane seemed to repel these natural defenses as easily as moths are repelled by cedar and other hardy, herbivorous elementals. As for being a somnambulist, well, even that rare talent hardly fractured the nearperfect configuration of Miss Eyre’s genetic makeup. Surely Mr. Darwin’s thesis of evolution could be contested by Jane. Perhaps Adele could contact the Evangelicals; if they ever needed ammunition against the diarist of The Beagle and proclaim Charles Darwin a fake and a heretic, all they had to do was contact Ms. Varens, and she could provide them ample evidence in Jane Eyre. But, to get back to that preposterous index— —Jane hardly opened her mouth when she laughed, didn’t know how to purse her lips, pout, snicker, sniffle, snigger, wail, whine, whimper. Okay, she could whisper, Adele would give her credit for that inimitably English innateness; but what kind of instructions did she give? It was amazing how the English women could make nothing out of a sweet nothing! Jane Eyre’s tongue seemed nonexistent and indifferent to the curls of an orange peel, a chocolate sliver, the Leviathan challenge of a whitebait skin lodged in her canines. As for snoring, well, Jane’s saturnine discipline was such that no matter how often naughty Adele snuck upon the unsuspecting, slumbering Jane and tried to agitate her nostrils with feathers, dead dust mites, and wool knots, try as she might, good old Jane soldiered on and slept without nary a roar! Bloody Jane! All she did was attend to her blind husband’s needs, and oh, if she only knew what thrill could be found in the grasp of a masculine hand freed of the eye’s prejudice! Adele had yet to acquire the biblical knowledge that the Church never talked about, but she could only imagine how ravenous the male sensibility could be once it was denied the discriminatory dictates of the visual.

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Still, Adele had fond memories of her mistress: Jane was one of the few who did not mind Adele’s illegitimacy. Jane had a distinctive way of saying the word ward as if it were an appendage to a prayer or Saint’s name. It wasn’t quite pity in her voice, just the reminder to humanity to “have mercy on those whose misfortune might not be poverty” (for Mr. Rochester never denied Adele her favourite silk ceulean ribbons!) — “but, even worse, God have mercy on them, we must have mercy on those who are ignorant of their roots!” When described in such a manner, Jane might as well have said that Adele was like the one foreign Magnolia tree in the Forest of Arden: she is from somewhere in the Dubious South, but she will never be able to tell her children — if God shall be so good to allow her any — which womb nurtured the paternal seed: what a pity that is, and we must extend our collective hands in prayer. Amen, Alleluia. Adele could almost hear the echo of Salve Regina, Mater misericordia whenever she said, “My husband’s ward.” Whenever her new stepmother talked like this, Adele felt a little bit ashamed of her cynical thoughts and premeditated judgments and uttered an Act of Contrition because whenever Jane talked like this, it was as if she was referring to Adele as St. Winifred, Ward of Wayward Mothers and God’s Mother-in-Law. The new Mrs. Rochester was one of the few persons on earth who didn’t judge Adele, nor did she hold her accountable for her wayward mother’s bohemian recklessness. What was her profession now? Oh, yes, that dancer of the opera comique who had once enthralled Rochester and whose legendary legs held captive not just a stray stocking. Adele would give Miss Eyre that much: she was compassionate, empathetic, unassuming, unpretentious, but that’s why she exasperated her so much at the same time — Why, God, oh why did she have to be so madly, utterly English, so disgustingly virtuous and always so accomplished at doing just the right timely thing and always in such an impeccable manner? The new Mrs. Rochester would never know this, but once she dropped Adele off at the dreaded school, Adele paid an orphan to take her place and assume her identity — at which point the dirt-faced gamine thought a miracle of Saint Lazarus occurred at that very moment, how was it possible that she, of all God’s ignominious creatures, could be chosen to be a French ingénue’s doppelganger — this must surely be an angel of the Mother of God come down into the Midlands to clear the fog of her pathetic life! Adele walked away from the school and into a field of lavender, until she found a horse farm; she hid in an abandoned barn and slept in the stable of a sick colt. Before the old groom — who thought he heard something stir when Adele stifled a sneeze when hay and sawdust agitated her throat — stopped snoring and woke from his nape in the loft, Adele grabbed the chestnut mare’s bit and clamped the horse’s jaw

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shut, until they were further afield, Adele securely mounted, and they made treads on the Highwayman’s trail towards London. By the time she reached the East End and sold the mare to an urchin—most likely the son of a tinker, considering his thick brogue and even dirtier brogues—she overheard the undulations of Continental tongues. No, not Francais, but Castellano! Any reference to Spanish and Spain was a definite No, an unspoken rule in her father’s household. No one told her this directly, but she was to NEVER utter the names Spanish Town, both before but especially after Jane married Mr. Rochester. This rule ran in conjunction with the injunction that she was to never step foot near the attic, its entrance, its environs. Somehow, the scent of Spanish oranges, the lilt of Quixotic musings, was dangerously and inextricably linked with the persona of Berthe Mason. Not that Mademoiselle Berthe had the blood of Catherine of Aragon running in her veins, but she might as well have been the dreaded and discarded Queen Catherine to her father’s Henry Tudor persona, now that he was on to his second wife—a long way from Henry VIII’s record, to be sure, but a quarter of a fraction there. Now that Adele heard the undulations of Iberia amidst the squalor of London, she felt the boiling of blood that she associated with rebellion and the thrill of becoming French again. Adele followed the sounds of the Spanish language until she encountered a quartet of young seamen, all dressed in the distinctive regalia of the rival Empire. One laughed hard—the guffaw that was so lacking in Jane Eyre—lifted her up, until she was in his arms, and he carried her like a baby around the docks of London until they were safely on board their ship, Cebu Perla del Oriente, and by then, he—he told her she could call him Diego, because his full name was Miguel Jesus Francisco Jose Rivera Ribeiro Dos Santos—planted her firmly on his right shoulder, where the crook of his shoulder served as a perfect perch for her slender thighs. On his left shoulder perched a parrot—el perrico se llama Pepe Paco—who waited patiently for him, until a boy barely eight gingerly held the obnoxious bird and planted him on Diego’s broad shoulder. The parrot—who was bilingual in the languages of the rival empires which, respectively, belonged to Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII—repeated, that is, translated, what Diego had said earlier to her in Spanish, but this time in English. “My God, an Englishwoman, Dainty One, your skin is like porcelain!” Adele dreamed of turning the spit of a rotisserie fire as it cooked the perrico named Pepe Paco. She tried to imagine what parrot meat tasted like: surely it was less fatty than English chicken. She wondered if it was possible to internalize the supreme wisdom of the parrot, as she ate its flesh. Was that possible? To acquire the preternatural linguistic and mimetic skills of God’s most intelligent avian, just by alchemizing its flesh in a rotisserie fire? Could she be as eloquent and witty and sardonic as Pepe Paco? Was that how one acquired wisdom? She remembered that one time the snow in England had been severe enough to mimic Russia. Mr. Rochester asked Jane Eyre to bring her outside, so that she could touch the snow. Her father had been very indulgent that day, telling her that she didn’t need to wear a coat or hat, he let her go out in her silk slippers and favourite cerulean blue dress with matching ribbons. Adele did as Jane Eyre did and stuck out her tongue—the one time she ever glimpsed her new stepmother daring to show her seemingly non-existent tongue—

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and tasted the snowflake that fell there. That snowflake lingered on her tongue before it melted. That night, before she slept, Adele imagined where that snowflake had been. What was its itinerary? Did it circumnavigage the galaxy the way Magalhanes did before he died in the Philippines? She recalled the name of the place where he died—Cebu—and now that she realised that she was on board a ship named—Dios mio!—she shuddered, and felt exactly the way those English village widows must have felt when they told her that when a soul dies and cannot enter Heaven, they feel the vague shiver of when someone is walking on their future grave. Adele shuddered, wondering if, like Magalhanes, she would die an ignominious death in a place like Cebu. Or, even worse, in a place that was not yet named on a map and which would be forgotten before it would ever be given a place in the world. That would be her destiny, and she could almost hear Jane Eyre utter it: “Och, the poor thing, born illegitimate, died illegitimate, in an illegitimate place.” But, to get back to that snowflake. That night, Adele wondered where the snowflake had been before it fell on her tongue. What other world had it seen? Had it encountered alien creatures and people of other planets before it encountered her and ‘died’ there in the warm, moist grave of her mouth. Was it possible, when she allowed that snowflake to melt in her mouth, for her to acquire the vast intelligence of the galaxy—the stars, the moon, the planets, and all the wisdom the snowflake acquired, prior to its earth landing—simply by imitating the snowflake’s infinite wisdom of just being, floating, waiting, surrendering. That was the one time in her life, in the interim she spent with Jane Eyre, that Adele Varens was content to be English and loved being exactly like her new stepmother. For that brief moment, she was content, and basked in the wisdom that in those precious few minutes, she and Jane were synchronised body and soul in the less-than-Biblical-but-perhaps-more-precious knowledge of simply being, floating, waiting, surrendering. ***** How dare he! Adele wanted to stamp her foot on Diego’s toes, but all she could do was dig her heels hard into his chest, that’s how high up she was, dear Lord, she could have fallen right into the Atlantic they were now sailing. But there was no chance at that escape route. Diego held firmly to her. He seemed to have invisible hands, which protected her with an iron grip, even as he smoked a thick cigar and drank an ice-cold drink that smelled and tasted much better than the lukewarm English ales. At that dig, Diego guffawed again and held her ankles affectionately. He liked that she was feisty. He seemed surprised at this. He looked at his amigos, and one of them, a Catalonian named Jordi, winked at him, made a vaguely obscene gesture towards Adele’s bosom. She wanted to cry. They think I’m English. It didn’t matter how much she unleashed her inner wench, she could never be like Prometheus and re-discover fire. The steady, gentle rain of her father’s homeland seeped so deeply into her veins that no matter how hard she tried, even the Spanish, the close neighbors of her native France, could not get a whiff of her decadent odor (and, just to spite Jane Eyre, she made sure to outdo her in the abstinence of bathing, never mind that it was not Lent!), that’s how immaculately the English drizzle baptised her with the dreaded purity.

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Obviously, her plan wasn’t working well. ***** For months, she had contemplated her vicious, delicious plan: how to be more like Berthe Mason and less like Jane Eyre. After the fire, and after her new set of parents settled into the simple domesticity of conversation, fireside reading and the simple English pleasures of tea and empathy, Adele knew that her personal Odyssey would begin. She had heard Jane talk about the need to refine her and provide her with an education that would truly make her English. But how to acquire the wisdom that would make her less like her new stepmother and more like, like — — well, what was the proper way to address, call, Berthe Mason? Berthe was not her mother, nor her stepmother, nor her guardian. Who, was, was Berthe? The more Adele thought about it, the more she relished the fact that Berthe was an orphan like her, a (way)ward Soul and continental exile in the land of Henry VIII. Berthe was as much an outsider as Adele. What name could be given to such a kindred spirit? Adele thought about this now, as Diego held her firmly on his shoulder and kissed her calves. The parrot named Pepe Paco looked her squarely in the eye as if he had read her thoughts, and she wanted to tell him to shut up when Jordi glared at the bird and said, in Spanish, the very command she needed — “Callate, Pepe Paco!” That was it: Berthe Mason was like Pepe Paco. An Avian Soul Sister. A kindred spirit of feathery creatures ready to take flight in the same manner that the snowflake took flight around the galaxy and into Adele’s mouth, just so — — just so, What? Just so it could impart its invisible wisdom, however dark and disturbing that it must be locked away in an attic, the equivalent of which is the dark sky, devoid of sun, that necessitates the effective drift of cold as it melds into something so strong that it has no choice but to soften at the first touch of humanity: the tongue, the tooth, the pursing of lips about to speak —

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WANDA S. PRAISNER

The Fox at Island Beach

In a dream it reappears, walks the painted separated center line as though it were a tightrope, hind paws behind front on its way to my car for food— its cover of sand dunes, cracked willow and blueberry bushes, wind-stunted junipers left behind. It looks at me, green-golden gaze calm, steady, almost trusting, pleading—only they’re your eyes I see, son—that visit home from school as you moved toward me from the plane: suntanned, hair nearly blond, our eyes meeting, only now held in cemetery silence, some ancient message cut in stone I cannot decipher, and no Champollion. I wake with that dagger in my gut again, morning a nightmare, no remedy this side of the grave but to get up, make breakfast— yet I still see the fox at Island Beach trotting on that broken golden line, how it sat as I rolled down the window to snap a picture, our eyes connected, but I did not feed it— having read in a park pamphlet that in their hunger for what is offered beyond the safety of their natural habitat, some lose their lives.

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EMMA LJUNG

Pelican Float

The body sinks slowly. Even in death, the wings keep the bird suspended, neck resting on the crest of a wave. Once, twice, it disappears from view, pulled into the side of the aircraft carrier, and the man must crouch down on his stomach to see it. Red tendrils meander through the waves, faint as pollution from the airplanes above; red, but less so than the place where it happened. The man lowers a bucket, pours its contents over the warm metal, rubs his boot over the gleaming mess. Lowers it again, frowns at the smell of salt mingling with blood and gasoline. Lowers: empties. Salt stings his hands. There is a rhythm to everything, even to killing. The broken shovel screeches against the metal before disappearing into the water. The sound holds anger laced with regret. It sounds like a woman wailing in pain. Conscious of the floating body, the man walks across the platform, the bucket’s rope left uncoiled. When he returns, the rope is alive with heat and heavy with water. Of the pelican there is nothing. The woman had brought a watermelon today – bought it, perhaps, from the old man with the white van who seemed to have taken over business now that the even older man with the blue van was gone. From a distance, it seemed to be a good one: not too big, not too brightly green, but the binoculars distorted round shapes so the man could not really tell. In the shade of the parasol, she cut the orb into wedges and the girl ate them, one by one. The man out at sea lowered his binoculars for a moment. Children were unknown entities to him, stranger and more frightening than landmines or machetes, but he had an idea that they changed life for the worse. What was the woman doing, wasting her time like this – couldn’t the child be left at home? And where was their home anyway? The man could not remember when they first had arrived. All seasons were the same here, a suffocating heat that never abated and seemed to suggest that this post was close to hell in more than the usual sense. The narrow stretch of beach between the camp and the scorched town had been empty, home only to carrion seabirds mimicking the airplanes above: a motion from east to west swept up all that emptiness and stuffed the binoculars full of daily tedium. The binoculars held a lifetime of identical places. Only the birds set this place apart from all those other places. Then on a day like any other, a young woman had walked into view, all chest and legs in a red two-piece, a child and parasol in tow, so out of place that even the birds had noticed. Oblivious of their observer, the woman and child had made the beach their own, and the binoculars had made them his. The woman was tanned now, her daughter’s hair bleached white by the sun, whiter than the pelicans dotting the waves. They were part of the beach; part of that eternal motion from east to west. As far as the man was concerned, the woman and child had always been there. He smiled to himself, lips catching on missing teeth, and raised his binoculars again.

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The bird landed with a squawk. It had become restless lately, coming and going without purpose. It was old, that much anyone could tell: a hideous bird with tattered feathers and scars all over its bill and neck. How many years did a pelican live? The man did not know. How many lives did a pelican remember? The man did not care. “Older than this war, you are” he said to the bird. Its beady eyes held contempt, not answers. The first jet had lifted but the engines of the next were making the deck vibrate and the pelican sway. It rattled its wings irritably. On the beach, the woman and child were digging holes, in hats now to keep the heat at bay. The man knew that if they dug deep enough, the water seeping up to fill the hole would be cooler than the warm waves. Perhaps the woman had forgotten her cooler today and wanted to keep the Pepsi chilled — but no, there it was, dangling from the parasol. Next to the man, the pelican squawked again at the roar of engines as the smell of fuel and burnt rubber filled the air. “I know, old bird, I know. Can’t say I like ‘em myself ” said the man but did not lower the binoculars. Every day, the woman arrived fifteen minutes after eight o’clock and stayed for three hours. She was more reliable than the man’s wristwatch, more dependable than the sirens. The child, a girl so small that the binoculars made her near invisible, would build sandcastles while the woman poured herself something from a thermos, and then they went into the waves. Too little to swim, the child was made to wear an inflated ring around her middle, a bright, red thing that made her easier to spot from afar. To the man on the aircraft carrier, mother and daughter looked like two strawberries bobbing up and down on the waves; up and down, side to side, in a manner impossibly foreign to the lines of planes high above. At times, their splashing disturbed the birds roosting on the dilapidated breakers, causing clouds of white to rise through the haze. The pelicans were the only ones who did not care. Rarest of all, they held themselves apart from the other birds, as though they knew a secret too important to share. Yet, the man rarely saw them now — dead, like everything else in this place, or perhaps the pelicans had simply done what people could not and left the turmoil behind. But the old male pelican was going nowhere. This was his beach, his carrier, his sea. Through the binoculars, the man could see him guarding the shore. The blue berets patrolled the air, patrolled the land, but that old pelican patrolled the coast. Sometimes he was on deck roosting before the man got to his post. Sometimes, only the stench of rotting fish told the man that the bird had stopped by on his way out to sea. He had habits, that bird, as private as those of the woman on the beach. Had he been here before the woman and the child? The man could not recall and his binoculars had no memory. Maintaining the aircraft was always the same: time had no purpose, planes could not be loved. Not that the man cared to love.

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The bird had left again. Without the binoculars, it looked like a speck of dust hanging from the sky, but through the binoculars, its flight became heavy, arthritic – wobbly, almost like the chubby girl who was now splashing in the shallows. She wore floats around her arms today, a bright color the man had no word for. The mother wore her two-piece, the red one that made binoculars motionless. She was walking along the beach, a lilting gait that carried her from youth into adulthood. She was a young one, the man thought, not quite young enough to be someone’s daughter, but young enough to know nothing of the world. To know nothing of men, in spite of the child. Unknowing, but willing to learn. Through the binoculars her legs became a golden blur, and the golden blur became a mass of red, throbbing, hurting, tugging on phantom memories. For a moment, dark hair spilled over freckled shoulders as bloodied hands reached for his in a desperate plea for help, the small thing between them slimy and dead. But then the legs, those other legs, froze as white wings fell upon brightly colored berries in the water and for a second, time became concrete, precious, gone. A pelican darted through the water to catch his lunch. On the aircraft carrier, a man screamed. The bird alighted only feet away — closer than it had ever landed before. The attack had made it bold. The failure should have made it ashamed. Not so. “I guess you thought she was a fish” the man said to the bird. “Now you’ve done it. Nothin’ more to look at now and it’s only ten in the mornin’.” Cradling the child in her arms, the woman had left the beach, umbrella and cooler left behind. The man sat down next to the bird, legs dangling over the water far below. After some thinking, he tossed the bird a Twix bar. The bird ignored it. The man pushed it closer with his barnacle shovel, noticing with some surprise that his hands were shaking. The bird looked the other way. “I guess you ain’t keepin’ a wife” the man said after a while. “Guess you ain’t the type to stick around when things get tough.” The memory folded itself into a hidden space, fading quickly. The bird ruffled its feathers. It smelled less rotten today and the man realized its throat pouch was empty. “I guess you thought she was a fish” the man said again. He chuckled to himself. It felt good to laugh. “Too bad you didn’t drown her — the leggy gal might have been up for some fun, without that kid hanging around.” The pelican shifted its weight around, irritated by the plane taking off. “Don’t worry” the man said to no one. “Don’t worry.” Shore leave was never exciting, no matter how long the man had been out to sea, no matter which sea was his current address. Every place was the same. Concrete buildings, rebar sticking up from unfinished roofs. Sun-bleached doors, boarded-up windows. The distant booom of bombs, the pssssh of Pepsi. Scrawny chickens pecking in the dirt, scrawny people pretending nothing was going on. Blue berets, bright suns, gleaming boots. Order superimposed on chaos. Zones, it seemed, bred their own form of conformity, down to the very last item in the supermarket. Bottled water in dirty jugs in the shade. Crates of watermelons. Processed meats in cans. White bread that tasted like dust. Local plants that looked like organs, inedible. The only thing that set this place apart, the man reflected as the jeep stopped outside the store, was the woman on the beach. “That pelican got her kid good” the man said to himself and laughed. The attack had startled him and during the confusing seconds of beating wings and waving

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arms, his binoculars had lost track of the woman. When he found her again, she was carrying the child out of the water, the pelican trailing them like a big, stupid seadog. It had not understood that it has lost, the man realized, and like a dumb dog, it might try to eat the child again. Maybe he should buy it some sardines to congratulate it for trying, like you would buy a good dog a bone. To show it hey, good job my friend, better luck next time. “Better luck next time” the man repeated to himself and stepped out of the sunlight. The grocery store was bigger than most. Someone always profits, the man thought and paused in front of a large A/C unit. It whirred and complained and spat out water but bathed him with air so cold and wintry that for a moment, the elderly man at the butchery counter took on the countenance of Santa Claus. The mechanic rubbed his eyes and turned toward the canned foods section — and there, only a few steps in front of him, stood the woman from the beach. The red bikini was replaced by a sundress, the cooler by a purse, but the man would have recognized her anywhere, in a crowd of thousands. At her side the little girl chattered busily, a language full of song. Their eyes, the man noticed, were as blue as the ocean they had made their home. Why were they here — this grocery store, that beach, this warzone? The child reached for a can of miniature sausages and handed it to her mother as they slowly made their way down the aisle. Trying to read the label, the woman seemed unsure about the text. “It is mystery meat” the man wanted to tell her. “Don’t trust that foreign food — it can be anything, even some rotten old bird.” He took a step toward her but hesitated: without the binoculars, he felt naked. He knew her, knew her intimately, but perhaps she did not know him. The thought alarmed him. He had a fleeting recollection of life before the woman walked onto that beach, a life full of tedium identical to the tedium of today, but with bitter traces of remorse, of loss. She had to know him, had to know that her enigmatic appearance had somehow replaced those feelings with a sense of purpose. Craning his neck to find them, the man saw only the rows of cans standing straight and silent like the best of soldiers. Then he saw a blue beret above blue eyes, and suddenly there was no more mystery. “Pappa pappa!” The girl laughed as the tall man lifted her to his shoulders, grabbing at his ears with both hands, pushing the beret askew. The man from the aircraft carrier shrank into the shadows, into a past long forgotten, but he could not leave. “Excuse me please,” he heard a woman’s voice say in broken English, singsong-like and strange. “We are making final purchases and I am looking for . . . how you say . . . a floating? For my daughter.” What the clerk responded, the man could not hear, but the woman walked down another aisle, gesticulating to her husband to follow. The husband’s boots were polished to a mirror-like shine, the man noticed, and there was a gleam of metal on both shoulder and breast, yet the fading blue of his beret suggested that he was not a recent arrival. Camp Victoria, that must be his station, the United Nations logo emblazoned on both beret and shirt. He was a young fellow, the man noted, but already a major. At the end of the toy aisle, the officer now swung the child from his shoulders, and she shrieked with laughter. Reaching with both hands into the wooden crate, she pulled out a white swan. Inflated, it was bigger than her, many times larger than the red ring that had made her into a strawberry. It would be difficult to tell the difference between her and the pelican, the man decided. Pulling it by its plastic handle, the girl trotted toward the cashier. When she passed the man, she stumbled, and the float fell to its side. The girl looked confused. Without

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wanting to, the man kneeled next to the swan. “There’s the handle, there,” he said to her, pushing the bird upright so the girl could see the handle again. For a moment the child seemed on the verge of tears but then a smile lit up her face, making half-moons of her eyes and displaying to the world a mouth of round, white teeth. Crinkles emerged around her eyes, a happy pattern that made the man wish for the safety of his binoculars — a pattern just like crisscrossing of lines around another pair of eyes the man had once looked into, eyes that in that buried memory were swollen to slits with tears and glassy with pain. They had not always looked like that, those swollen eyes — sometimes they had crinkled into half-moons, laughter riding in the creases around them. That laughter had burned hotter than fire, brighter than sunset, straight into his heart. “Birdie float” the girl said proudly, startling the man, her accent the same as her mother’s. Then she continued her trot toward the cashier, plastic bird in tow. Hidden by the whirring A/C unit, the man watched the family leave. He had no name for the knot in his chest, but it was as cold as the filtered air, as hard as the concrete floor. The sunset breeze held a faint coolness to its edge. On deck, the mechanic watched the darkening seafront through his binoculars. The girl had worn a dress much like her mother’s, he reflected. Blue, like their eyes. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke dissipate in the wind. In a few years, the girl might be just like the woman, or somewhat like her. Not so many years ago, the woman might have been trotting around a beach somewhere on chubby legs, tumbling over sandcastles she had built herself. Not so many years ago. The man swallowed and swallowed again, pressing the binoculars hard into his eyes to erase the images that suddenly welled up unbidden. Dark hair spilling over freckled shoulders. A woman wailing with unbridled grief. A man folding himself into nothing and walking into nowhere. Walking into hell. Jenny had been her name, that woman. Ellie was the name they had picked out, the name for that thing that arrived on a wave of pleasure and left in a stream of blood. It had been easy to forget them, as easy to erase them from life and memory as it was to sign up for another tour. Except when it was not. “Wasn’t meant to be” the man told himself, swallowing hard against the knot in his chest. “Nothing’s meant to be.” A white speck grew into view, a bullet of white across darkening seas. Wings trailing, throat pouch full of fish, the pelican landed. King of all birds, emperor of the sea, it knew every secret of the beach, every mystery, and here it was, flaunting its power without, not once, accepting the friendship that had been offered to it. “I know what you did” the beady eyes seemed to say. “I know what kind of man you are, what kind of atrocities you have committed. I know what you did and I told her about it.” The cold, hard knot grew barbs as hard and sharp as the edge of the barnacle shovel. “Shut up” the man said, knuckles whitening around the binoculars. “I know what you put in Jenny’s coffee. You made it happen, you coward.” “Shut up shut up shut up.” The pelican glanced at him sideways, untouchable in the power of knowledge, and the man realized that it was laughing at him. “She never asked me about having one, the dumb woman! But I never meant to hurt her!” The pelican rattled its feathers. It did not care. The friendship between them was a lie, like everything else, like everyone else; fickle, false. There it sat, a stupid old creature, like a messenger from Satan, and the man’s secrets were being ferried across the water, awing, from aircraft carrier to beach, from distant past into present. It had to stop. It had to stop.

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The barnacle shovel drew an arc into the red sky, a line of death from east to west. Between the scorched town and the camp there is nothing: a sweeping motion from east to west gathers the entire stretch of sand into a single unit. East to west, west to east. There is a rhythm to everything, even to nothingness. The man checks his watch without lowering his binoculars. 8.15. 8.30. 9 o’clock. Every minute has meaning. Every minute holds nothing. 9.15. There is nothing living on the beach: nothing living anywhere. The man lowers his binoculars, gazes toward the distant shore with half-blind eyes. She will not come. Maybe she was never even there. Above, a plane passes, a speck of white against eternal blue. For a moment, it seems to float rather than fly, and its metal wings grow fuzzy like tattered feathers.

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D. E. STEWARD

Agostia

Just two rows from the speakers of Arrigo Barnabé from Paraná powering up a DAT deck as he stands back to oscillate with the percussion and the rock patterns of two guitars and a drum set Like listening to some famous Baroque composer in early career Young composers lacking Beethoven-level energy should be doing something else As should young writers and young artists As should anyone who does what they do for reasons outside themselves Bonnard’s clean, silent, serene nude kneeling in a zinc tub, Nu au tub An image Degas repeated almost a dozen times in 1916 and 1917 While hundreds of thousands were dying in the mud and shrapnel a couple of hours away French intellectual detachment stuns Cynical, smug, shamelessly oblivious Or forthrightly self-absorbed in the manner of Bonnard’s L’Indolente Staring into a sparkling version of Nu au tub lifts like the evenness of living in the sky cube of a fire tower cab The tower view’s color-patch vividness as satisfying as one of Nicolas de Staël’s Sicilian landscapes The visual feast for a lookout living on a tower for months on end was virtually the montane forest equal of open ocean sailing, of long-distance desert and ice floe trekking It approached the stress and ennui of doing time in maximum-security Water cans under the steps, outhouse facing the sunrise, lightning rods on the corners and the tower’s cap, the fire-finder dead center of the cab

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Radios and topographical maps, low cupboards, the four-square catwalk’s trapdoor, painted woodwork, four plate glass walls canted slightly to obviate the glare In the high mountain air Nearly no humidity, lip balm and cracking skin dry in the nearly constant heavy breezes, bees and yellow jackets crazed for moisture sought out nostril, mouth and urethra Clothes dry in minutes, spilled water evaporated almost instantly Swarming ants going for the mountain’s highest point, clustered on the tower cap’s lightning rod Ravens swooped and dived close off the catwalk in the winds streaming across the peak Raptors soared by Fire towers have gone the way of lighthouses and isolated weather stations to electronics and aerial reconnaissance Fire towers had no place to hang Bonnards, no wall space at all because except for floor and roof they were glass Through which to watch the weather of a mountain top, its skies and ambient mountains, foothills and canyons To study everything to the far horizons for consecutive months until the autumn rains On Santa Ana gravity-wind days, it was possible to see all the way to Mexico across the ridges falling away to deep canyons on three sides Eventless days, absolutely quiet nights Paid eight to eight seven days a week, the nights were reading and sleep, down only at the close of fire season after the November rains On a Coast Range peak peering out over the San Gabriel high country, simple lookout duties with all that unreachable breadth stretching out below, around, all sides

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Beguilingly it felt like anything you wanted it to, the mind voyages of grade school, life within a movie, life within a Matisse or a Bonnard The one-room-school feel of it recurrent, the floors and windows, squared symmetry, mood of worn doorsill down wooden steps to gravel and grass, desks and paper, blackboard-wash eraser-clap Outside weather tenseness flickering awarenesses, names, wait, sexual daydream lingering Down only after five and a half months, expanded, spread thin in all directions from the time poised up there in open sky It was confusing for a while with the many inconsequential, petty, non-essential complexities of blandly self-absorbed rattlesnake-in-the-freezer America with its the infantile literal-mindedness Down on the ground beneath the lofty alto-cumulus, the world’s skin seemed noisy, kinetic, cluttered with the energies of all individual quests The news of Rabin’s assassination arrived on the car radio between Chapel Hill and Reidsville before the eastern mountains Barbaric as dropping burning cardboard down a book-return chute, girdling a tree, poisoning a well, dumping acid or chemicals into a watercourse This fin de millénaire of small, brutish, festering ethnic conflicts that are like Rhenish Europe’s Hundred Years War spread across the world The distance to those little wars is only the flying time of a Globemaster with its Fort Bragg cargo from just down the Carolina Road Commando-Ranger-Special Forces raiders fly off from the locale of North Carolina’s tobacco culture From the eighteenth century into the twenty-first John Caldwell, Doctor of Divinity and a mathematician, the founding President of the University of North Carolina, 1793, was called to Chapel Hill from Lamington, Hunterdon County, West Jersey, with his wife, and his stepson who became a professor in Chapel Hill Remarkable eighteenth-century energies, powerful, far-ranging, a touch quixotic in their individual bents Manifest self-confidence was loose across the new republic Significant longevity in Caldwell’s red sandstone cenotaph between Chapel Hill’s Old Well and East Franklin Street

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Vida: Appalachian mission life in the Third and Fourth Roosevelt, Piedmont Virginia in the Carter, rainy nights in Georgia in the First Eisenhower Bunked along the back wall of a dark, olive drab, plank-floor squad tent listening to the Georgia winter rain’s sonorous canvas drum “Seem like it’s raining all over the world” — A Rainy Night in Georgia, On clear mornings the sun’s rise through stands of pines Radiant yellow is cadmium yellow Bright marigold comes up vivid orange yellow, more intense than national school-bus chrome “ . . . What has altered is what // Kant called Categories: the shape of time // changes altogether! . . . // Wanting still, you have no dimension where // fulfillment or frustration can occur. // . . . memory is endless, life very long, . . .” – Richard Howard Oxgall, that dries out as a light chrome yellow, used for book marbling Fire tower sunsets, fire tower nights, fire tower dawns

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ELANE GUTTERMAN

Shortness of Breath

Max conversed with the sweep and style of a city man from Warsaw before the war though he was 80 and about to be discharged from a New York City hospital. Dressed in a fedora, tattered trousers and a jacket, he moved with heavy breaths and slow steps. Ever the dreamer, Max tried to grope me in the hallway on his way to the taxi. I was the social worker hired to help frail patients. I helped Max obtain a home attendant She said he must get rid of the boxes and old newspapers but he got rid of the home attendant. When he could not keep up his apartment I found him a nursing home, not a good one, but the best I could. In another bout of halting breath, Max returned to the hospital. Before I left my job I found him a new place — a nursing home with concerts and crafts for patients, nurses to help residents stay well, real attention to detail. Max, a Jew who escaped death by fighting with the partisans far from Warsaw preferred to live by his wits.

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I looked for him a year or two later, found him in another nursing home a bus ride from my graduate program. He spent lots of time on the roof sharing his bread and thoughts with the pigeons. And often disappeared for walks to the little nearby stores, dressed in a fedora, tattered trousers and a jacket.

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GEORGE POINT

A Couple of Questions for the Dead Guy When the phone rang at 5:30 am, I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. Rob’s sobbing at the other end of the line told me pretty much all I needed to know, even before he said the words: “Dad’s dead.” In the fifty years he’s been my brother, it was only the second time I’ve ever known him to cry. Other than when I was five and he was a baby, but I don’t think that counts. The other non-baby time I saw him cry was in August, 30 years ago. Rob and I had gone on what turned to be our first and only camping trip together, a twoweek drive up US 1 along the Maine coast to Nova Scotia and back. I borrowed my then girlfriend’s car, a ’65 Chrysler Newport with Hydramatic transmission and a 383 cubic inch hemi-head V8, the big-as-a-whale Chrysler that the B-52’s must have had in mind when they sang Love Shack. I don’t know exactly why, but a shitload of tension quickly developed between us on that trip. Things came to a head when Rob and I got into a shouting match outside of Searsport on the way north. I can’t recall what triggered it, or what the shouting was about. I just remember stomping on the brakes and pulling over and telling him that he was my brother and that I loved him, but I wasn’t going to spend what little time off I had arguing with him all the way to Nova Scotia and back, and that if he didn’t want to settle down, he could get out in Searsport and catch a fucking bus home. Catharsis. We hugged, got a bit weepy, got it together and got back on the road. Weird. The sound of my brother crying at 5:30 in the morning made everything that had happened between Nova Scotia and the phone call fall away, and I was suddenly aware of the camping trip and my father’s dying as the start and end points of, of something. The health of our father — calling him “Dad” had always been a stretch too far for me, which tells you something about our relationship I guess — had been spiraling down for a long time, so honestly, the call came as no surprise. Thanks to the persistence of our family doc, our father had been hours away from being admitted to the hospital when he died. No surprise there either. The men of my family are a stubborn bunch, and dying was my father’s only option for avoiding suffering what he saw as the impending indignities sure to be inflicted upon him by the medical-industrial complex and reasserting control over a life that was rapidly slipping from his grasp. “Be right over,” I heard myself say, but I sure as shit didn’t want to go right over. I delayed as long as I dared, but of course he was still there when I pulled up. Phil, the Funeral Director’s helper, was idling outside in The Phillips Home for Funerals station wagon waiting for me to arrive, I guess. The station wagon looked kind of sad, in need of a wash and hot wax. But hey, no big deal, just pickin’ up a Dead Guy I mused, the “Dead Guy” moniker being my ham-handed attempt at putting some emotional distance between my father, his death and me. What happened right after I walked into the house was a blur, the part I had

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to get through before getting to the part I’d really been dreading on the ride over, the part that I had way too much time to think about. My brother looked sad and redeyed, tired and frayed around the edges, like he hadn’t slept in a very long time. Kind of like Phil the Funeral Director’s station wagon. Dead Guy was still in the family room. I will know that I have completely lost all sense of irony on the day I can say “family room” without a slight, knowing hesitation, a day that I suspect will never come. Dead Guy was propped up in the hospital bed that had been my father’s world for the past few months. When I looked at Dead Guy I swear I did a doubletake, struck by the disconnect between the image stored in my brain that tells me whether the person before me is my father, and the sight of the grey, fuzzy-edged form that occupied the bed, looking like a slightly deflated, factory second, blowup replica doll version of the person who raised me. OK, I showed up, saw Dead Guy, did the right thing. I was ready to leave. Get the hell out of there and pull the covers of my daily routine back over my head. Not an option. Rob and I stood on either side of . . . Jeez Louise! Rob and I were standing on either side of our father’s deathbed. Death. Bed. Bed-O-Death. He bed to death? Til’ deathbed do us part? Rob leaned over and tenderly gave his Dad a goodbye kiss on the cheek. The best I could manage was to manage a reverent look and gingerly grip Dead Guy’s wrist. Take a deep breath, keep up appearances, get hold of yourself, all of the above I told myself. Hey, after all, it’s just Dead Guy. We went into the kitchen. One of us brewed some Folgers. Phil the Funeral Director took his cue. He and his helper materialized, wheeling in the gurney. The rhythmic squeaking of the wheels added a peculiar techno soundtrack underneath our conversation. I sensed that the two of us shared the same curiosity — one ear tuned to other’s words of comfort, the other to the sounds of a well-practiced team moving yet another Dead Guy from its deathbed to the gurney, to the sad looking station wagon, to the funeral home, to the cemetery. I hope it doesn’t sound as though I’m dissing Phil the Funeral Director. Phil was the glue that held us together, from that morning until Dead Guy was finally in the ground. Phil handled all the details that needed to be handled as gently, professionally and unobtrusively as anyone could. He didn’t take advantage and even saved us a few dollars on the coffin and the tombstone. Sorry, I mean the “casket” and the “monument.” For me, there was one detail that Phil took care of a little too well that nearly caused me to freak out at the funeral home. When it came time for the wake, I had planned to put myself on autopilot between the traditional viewing hours of 2:00pm to 4:00pm and 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Just zone out, chill with my brother, accept condolences from whoever showed up, and try not to think about the trip to the cemetery the following day. With a little help from Johnnie Black, I had myself convinced that

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that’s how it would play out. Damn that Phil! Or his cosmetician, cosmetologist, Dead Guy Makeup Artist, whatever. I walked into Phil’s Home for Funerals believing that the worst was over. I was expecting to see Dead Guy, the sallow, emaciated Dead Guy that had been carted away a couple of days ago. I can do this, I told myself. Piece-o’-cake. But Dead Guy wasn’t in the casket. Phil had somehow located my father and swapped him for Dead Guy. In the interest of accuracy, it wasn’t exactly my father, but a younger version. He looked to be about the age that I am now, and he was dressed in a suit much more tasteful than anything I had seen him wear in a very long time. It dawned on me that it was the suit that he wore the night that I decided to take him and mom and Rob out to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. They were not a couple that went out much, so deciding where to take them was easy. I made a reservation at the Schnitzel Haus because even back then I figured out that garish German restaurants existed mainly for people who didn’t really know or care about fine dining, but on some special occasion or other felt the need to go somewhere festive where they’d be fussed over and served a big meal. The evening started out painlessly enough. Waitresses in Tyrolean dress, those outfits with puffy sleeves and colorful embroidery on the front, visited our table with trays laden with little glasses of schnapps and big frosty mugs of Bavarian beer, followed by manhole cover-sized plates brimming with food. I recall red cabbage, potato pancakes and some sort of slightly mushy meaty substance enrobed in a brown gravy that developed a shiny, thin skin when left undisturbed for more than a minute or so. I hadn’t planned to do what I wound up doing between the main course and dessert. My determination to salvage some sort of happy memory of the event keeps pushing me, no doubt wrongly, to believe that I was simply carried along by the momentum of the great time we were having, to do one more nice thing to fix this evening in the collective family memory as one that my parents would look back on fondly for the rest of their lives, thanks to the effort of a loving son. Maybe I was inspired by the swirl of people out on the dance floor between courses, smiling and clapping and stepping in time to the driving beat of an oompah band. Except that the evening so far had been neither great, good, nice or even painless. Conversation must have taken place during dinner, but today I couldn’t remember a single word if my life depended on it. I do remember seeing the discomfort in my father’s face as he tried to decipher the menu and the edge in his voice when he had to repeat his order because the waitress hadn’t understood him the first time. I remember my mother going on and on to no one in particular about how quickly their 30 years together had passed. I remember my brother and I sneaking conspiratorial gazes and arching our eyebrows, trying to help each other get through this. So why couldn’t I leave well enough alone? Why did I excuse myself from the table and sidle over to the bandleader with my special request? Because I was still concerned about earning a place as the good son in those days by atoning for the sin of being born. Because, not only had I been a sickly child and a burden on my parents for the first few years of my life, my very existence was the reason that my parents didn’t have the kind of life that they had dreamed of beginning on their wedding day. I know this with certainty because mother told me as much when I was around ten years old. One day I happened upon her, hunched over the checkbook in the kitchen, crying. “Your father and I thought we would save up for a few years and buy our own place,” she sniffled, “but then you came along . . .” I had barely made it back to the table when the band stopped in the middle of a lively number and blared a fanfare as Karl, the bandleader — or was it Klaus? _ stepped up to the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to make a very special an-

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nouncement about a very special couple,” he intoned. “Harold and Rose are celebrating a very special day today, thirty years of wedded bliss!” As he spoke, Karl / Klaus made a seamless sweeping gesture toward our table. “How about a big round of applause for the happy couple!” he urged. A few people clapped. My mother smiled. My father nodded in my direction. I started to relax a little. But Karl / Klaus wasn’t finished. “Would Harold and his lovely bride step out onto the dance floor,” he politely commanded. I had never seen my parents dance. I realized at that moment that I had no freaking idea whether they could. The smile froze on my mother’s face. I saw my father’s body tense. In less time than it is taking me to describe it, his expression morphed from smiling to uncomfortable to angry. I was suddenly aware of the dampness spreading from my armpits. The schnitzel was turning into a solid lump in my stomach. I was sure that the night was just about to turn into a steaming pile of Tyrolean scheisse and that once again the blame would fall squarely on me. Then my father shot me that look, the hard look I knew so well. The same look my mother got when dinner was a minute late, when I got less than an “A” on my report card in any subject, when my father caught the dog peeing on the carpet. The look that always preceded the explosion. I sat there, tensed, waiting for it. But there was no explosion. Then I got it; we were in a public place. My father was not the same person in public that he was when it was just us, the family, behind closed doors. I had discovered this a long time ago, back when I was too young to stay up with the grownups on the rare evenings when the people came over to visit, but old enough and curious enough to slip out of bed and eavesdrop from my perch at the top of the stairs. The father I heard greeting his guests and swapping stories on those evenings was not the same father that interacted with me. I never heard him yell, slam a door, curse, call anyone an asshole or throw whoever or whatever happened to be handy against the wall at those gatherings. The charming, joking conversationalist whose voice floated up the stairwell was a complete stranger to me. In the morning I would try my best to believe that I had dreamt it all. Better that, than to draw what I saw as the only other possible conclusion; that I was a fuckup. I was always doing something wrong. That if I hadn’t come along they’d be living happily ever after in the home of their dreams. That I would never be treated like one of the grownups. By now the other diners were glancing toward our table in anticipation. My father stood rather stiffly and led my mother by the hand to the dance floor. There was another smattering of applause from the patrons, as Karl / Klaus led the band in an oompah rendition of The Anniversary Waltz. Oh how they danced, the two of them, my mother with a dreamy look in her eyes that I never saw before or since, my father’s face wearing a vacant half-smile directed at no one or nothing in particular. I couldn’t tell whether he was happy, sad, enraged or scared. I never did find out. No one ever spoke about that day. His face wore the same half-smile as he lay before me at The Phillips Home for Funerals. I know that a lot of people who attend wakes say that the guest of honor looks as though they are breathing, that you’d swear that they are about to sit up in the coffin and speak. I not only felt the same way at that moment, I really wanted it to happen. I wanted the questions I’d been carrying around all these years answered. “C’mon Dad, did you love me? Did you hate me? Do your forgive me? What should I have done to please you? What? Whaaat!?!?”

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D. P. OLSEN

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DAMON WILLIAMS

Hell Yeah!

Gap-tooth wide in smile Always printing profundity Black artistry Spitting lyrical honesty about the world He is a bearded go man from Newark Eyes Big & Brown with intellect He’s “All Blues” between the lines Jiggered, Jazzy, obsessive innovator of rhythm & rhyme Who planted wisdom in the earth of our mind Jitterbug kool, worsted too Kenta colorful, Afro lovable A monstrosity of nature Hell yeah! A Revolutionary Orator Hell yeah! Louder than, “Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud!” His focus, IS the necessity His struggle, our struggle . . . He told the tale, mountain high — His way Marxist, Leninist, daring and staring At you from the bottom of a city boy’s strut To the swaying trail of a black woman’s skirt tail Always words — Words yelling at political incest LIVE & life speech from another podium A moment to vomit utterance down the dope vein Of creative thought Up a poignant finger wag To bring righteousness from an amen corner That speedy razor tongue That A-Train provocateur He’s the love sweat . . . That makes you want to write: He be LeRoi He be Amiri He be Jones He be Baraka He be poet He be everything . . . LITERARY.

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ALAN TEPLITSKY

O Ye Dolphins

He imagined a helicopter coming to the rescue. They would see a boy, about thirteen or so, lying spread-eagle on a large piece of battered wood, and nothing but the wide sea around him, the raft bobbing monotonously on the dark green waves. “The third day,” he said weakly. “How much longer can I hold out? Nobody even knows I’m here.” Joshua raised his head to see if help was coming, then closed his eyes, blinded by the sun’s sparkles on the empty sea. “Alone,” he sighed. “No one’s gonna come for me.” “Joshua!” Far away, yet as shrill and complaining as ever, his mother’s voice sounded in his ears. “At the bottom of the sea,” he thought, “with her boyfriend. Serves them right.” He was sure she’d been unfaithful when his father was dying at the cancer institute in New York. She’d met a man there who’d lost his wife about the same time, and now, less than two years after his dad’s death, they were getting married. The raft hit some rough water as he wondered how Time would write up their obituaries. Died. Doris Cooper, 54, widow of Jared Briggs Cooper (one-time doyen of New York Bar Association and author, The Darkling Mind); by drowning, in the north Atlantic explosion of the Dolphin III, yacht of her fiance, Joseph Ricatti, 59, Scarsdale scrap metal baron. Ricatti is also presumed dead, but Joshua Cooper,14, youngest son of his author-father, will never be found. The sun seared down like a weight on the back of his neck, arms, and legs. His trunks would be tattered soon, like Robinson Crusoe’s, if help ever came, and he’d be near death, like the Ancient Mariner, with feverish red eyes and a skinny hand. “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” he whispered into the rough planks of his wooden raft. “Joshua!” He pictured his mother at the bottom of a deep pool, tangled in the seaweed and shells. “Josh . . . Josh . . . Josh,” the raft bobbed in the waves. He could feel his tongue, swollen and hot, pulling back at its roots. He let his hand splash in the swells, then withdrew it. A swim might help, but there were sharks everywhere. Joe Ricatti had seen a man get his hand bit off last year not too far from the beach in Acapulco. “Dreadful,” mother had said. “Just dreadful.” He could hear her at the bottom of the sea now, gurgling “Dread-ful . . . dread-ful.” Time meant little to Joshua, bobbing there on his wooden raft in the ocean swells. The future seemed some unknowable source where the waves came from, like a huge boulder dropped somewhere near the hot equator, to be known only at second hand, rippling and swelling here now. The past, though, and dreams, which for him were rooted only a few years back when he was nine, seemed now to ooze out of his skull like the yellow bile and green-gray innards of a stuck pig, enveloping him in the

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awful stench of memory. “Joshua, darling,” her voice crooned. At the bottom of the sea she was, pearl shells for eyes and green weeds laving and choking. She struggled to break free, but Joe was holding her back, pawing at her breasts and thighs. “Dread-ful . . . Dread-ful.” At the bottom of the sea, his mother and the man who was soon to be his dad. He squinted up at the sun, then looked at the reflections on the waves, staring wide-eyed at them, till the white-hot sparkles lifted themselves an inch or two from the swells and dazzled like diamonds on water too salty and dangerous to touch or drink. His mother and Joe were dancing now at the bottom of the sea, and he was standing at a distance shaking his fist at them and shouting: “I’ll kill you, Joe! I’ll kill you both some day!” He closed his eyes and remembered the class trip to the slaughterhouse in Philadelphia. Fifth grade, it must have been. Miss Wyndham-Walker’s social studies class, from the Sedgely School in Princeton, before Dad had taken on the big job in Hartford. “And here, boys and girls,” the official guide in white droned on, “here we have the sorting room, where the sows are skinned and analyzed, or portioned as we say, for the marketplace.” “Remember, class?” Miss Wyndham-Walker needlessly added, “Analysis means a breaking apart.” Joshua sighed. His father had once been in analysis. “Why’d ya have to die, Dad? Why?” He peered into the water, half-expecting to see his father’s face, but saw only his own, dark and distorted, on the rolling sea. “I’m lost, Dad.” A cool breeze started to blow and raised the waves, making him feel sick. He looked away toward the far horizon but could still feel himself getting dizzy. “Can’t ya help me, Dad?” he murmured. The swells grew higher as a wind came up. He leaned over the raft again and tried to trace the outline of his now wildly distorted face. “Dad,” he said, “I’m afraid . . . and the bottom of the ocean, it looks so dark.” “The dead sows come in here,” the guide said, pointing to a rectangular opening in the white-tiled walls. “The carcass, hanging from its hindquarters on that moving chain near the ceiling there, is dipped in hot tar, passed through a cooling chamber, then stripped of its hide.” The guide paused as if bored, then turned toward the rectangular opening and waited. The class looked at him, then at the opening. Soon the network of chains began rattling slowly around the ceiling and the first carcass appeared in the rectangular opening. It was dipped into a steaming vat, raised shiny, black, and dripping, and whisked into the cooling chamber, where, through a frosted plexiglass shield, only the shadows of several white-coated workers could be seen pulling at the carcasses with long hooked poles. There was a sound of hides being ripped and flayed, the men grunting and laughing. When the sows emerged again and were moving into the larger room, their

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bodies, now hairless and pink, were much bigger—longer and more swollen—than Joshua had imagined pigs could be: small patches of gray and brown hairs, which the hot tar and stripping process had missed, were matted on what appeared to be gigantic bloated muscles with heads stuck on at the bottom, the pigs’ eyes gaping and their large snouts turned upward in exaggerated surprise. The chains rattled and the workers in their white uniforms stood poised at their stations, knives in hand, as one sow followed closely upon the other—huge, hung, gaping, and dumb. Joshua stopped his reverie. He knew what was coming. He forced himself to concentrate on limericks and bits of poems he’d had to learn for English, but at the back of his brain, on the scrimmed and wired stage of his memory, the relentless drama of the pigs was passing as a sort of dumb-show accompaniment to his frantic tongue. The sows were moving around the white-tiled room, past a prune-faced old woman in white. Then, her knife flashing, the surprised heads fell onto a metal table, and the pink carcasses moved stage left to the man ahead, as the woman gouged out the startled eyes with two deft motions of her blade. “O ye dolphins,” Joshua began, letting his tongue play at random with some lines from Lycidas, “waft the hapless youth. Do not, do not, do not let him wel-ter to the parch-ing wind.” The sow, headless and pink, hung before another man in white. A quick motion into the orange-pink belly, and the gray-green innards and yellow bile oozed and coiled onto the stainless steel sorting table. Joshua cleared his throat loudly. “Sunk though he be in a watery grave, save, save, ye dolphins, save.” He shook his head violently till he could feel his brains knocking against his skull, but the little drama continued. He cleared his throat again. “Dad,” he said hoarsely. “Dad.” The wet innards of the sow lay before the class. Miss Wyndham-Walker approached warily, her eyebrows arched, her neck bent and strained. “Sir, what is that?” she asked, pointing to a dark bulge in one of the loops. “A malignant growth of some kind?” The man in white smiled and asked the class to gather round. When they were all close, their eyes fixed on the growth, he carefully slit its casing with a boning knife. The class gasped. Miss Wyndham-Walker said “Oh my heavens” and turned sickly pale. “A piglet fetus,” the man announced. A pig in miniature, no bigger than Joshua’s fist, gray and slimy with dark eye-lumps under its filmy lids, its tiny suggestion of a mouth turned up in an imbecile grin. “It looks quite dead,” said Miss Wyndham-Walker. Joshua shook his head again. “O ye dolphins,” he began. “O ye dolphins.” But the tiny fetus still lay there, wet and grinning at the back of his skull, and he remembered overhearing his mother talking to her bridge ladies one afternoon: “So there I was, forty years old, and I thought, ‘That’s it—I’m going to die,’ and I was all upset, so I went to the doctor, and I said, ‘Doctor, I think I have a growth of some kind, and I’m so upset, and I haven’t even told my husband, because I think it’s getting bigger,’ and when the doctor examined me”—she couldn’t keep from laughing— ”he said, ‘Mrs. Cooper, that’s no tumor. That’s a baby!’” She laughed and laughed. “My tumor was Joshua,” she said, and laughed again, “My baby!”—and the gray fetus lay there grinning amid the coils of innards on the stainless steel table in Joshua’s mind. The guide was conferring aside with Miss Wyndham-Walker. When she came

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back to the group, her eyebrows were arched in her frequent look of dogged Sedgely School progressiveness. Those who cared to, she announced, could follow the kind gentleman to the slaughter area for a brief look at what she called “the initial step in the manufacturing process.” The guide smiled for the first time. “All right, you Sedgely Stalwarts,” he said, “Follow me.” The slaughter area was really two rooms: a large pen fenced off from the main room by waist-high metal gates and a long rectangular room opening from the right of the pen near the gates so that you had to crane your neck around the corner to see into it. There was no barrier to the long room, but the sows, quiet and huddled together, seemed instinctively to shy away from it. “The pen holds three hundred of them,” the guide said. “They’re quiet now, but watch.” He nodded his head and the chains began rattling along the ceiling in the rectangular room. The sows began turning and squealing, bumping into each other and goring each other with their hard snouts — rih-errk! rih-errk! rih-errk! They were biting and turning with terrified gaping eyes, their hooves thumping on the wooden floor but always staying a neat distance from the rectangular doorway. The animal stench was suffocating, and Joshua, holding on to the metal gate, leaned back to gasp some air from the white-tiled sorting room. “You’ve all heard of cowboys,” the guide began. He chuckled. Five frecklefaced young men in faded jeans stepped forward from the corners of the pen. The guide paused dramatically, scanning the tense faces of the Sedgely bravados. “Ride ‘em, sow-boys!” he yelled. The sow-boys scurried and laughed and shouted through the herd of squealing pigs, slapping their hindquarters with wide leather straps. The sows ran blindly at each other, jumping and turning, always keeping clear of the rectangular door. “Get ‘em in there!” the guide shouted. “Get those fat dogs in there!” One of the young men jumped on a sow and began slapping its buttocks with the thick strap, riding it like a wild bronco in a rodeo. “Come on you fat mama!” he shouted. “Git in there, you! Git in there!” The pig squealed and turned, then, the strap beating harder and faster, she ran blindly toward the rectangular door. A chain rose magically, swiftly, from the threshold, grabbing the sow by the hind legs, tumbling her and lifting her to the ceiling, moving her slowly backward into the room as she squealed and fought wildly to get loose. One by one, nine more sows ran tormented and blind toward the door, were upended and moved into the room, until the room was filled with the sound of rattling chains and the ten sows hanging down, shrieking and pleading. The boys craned their necks and stared at the sows in amazement. Joshua let his hand drop over the raft, feeling the cold water lap and plash against his palm. He remembered how pale and exhausted his father had looked in the hospital. “Be strong, son,” he’d managed to say. “Be kind, too.” He could hardly speak, but he said it again. “Mom’s gonna need you . . . Be strong, Josh . . . Be kind.” Joshua hummed up and down the scale, random, incoherent melodies, trying not to remember. A small man in white advanced from the far end of the rectangular room, a long, wide knife in his hand. He stopped at the first sow and paused, looking toward the Sedgely boys. Then he turned, raised his arm, and plunged the knife into her throat. Two of his classmates staggered backward from the gates and one started getting sick, but Joshua kept looking at the stuck pig. Even in memory Joshua stared at the screaming pig. Its cries before, in the pen, and then hanging, trapped, from the

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ceiling, were of fear, of terror. But now the noise was like something from a nightmare—almost human, screaming of an infinite pain and wrong, as of betrayal—an unbearably rotten trick after so much suffering and despair. The man in white advanced steadily, pausing in front of each sow, then the arm poised, the blade flashing, and the same anguished screams, the blood spurting wildly to the floor, so that by the time the man reached the last sow, he was covered with blood, and the screams of the ten dying pigs welled up like repeated blasts of pain and fire around the boys’ ears. It was a long time before the sows hung quiet from the ceiling, their eyes glazed and gaping, the blood oozing slowly from their snouts. It would be a long time, too, perhaps never, before Joshua would forget the slaughter, and when he did forget, the scene would lurk somewhere in the convolutions of his brain, waiting to explode in dream or memory. But in his dreams there was only one sow hanging, and only Joshua watching, and only the blood-covered man, smiling, with dark eyes and white teeth, before the knife flashed and plunged. He sensed, too, that the slaughter was taking place in a dark, forgotten room of the old brownstone on East 82nd Street, and sometimes it was his father hanging and screaming, his mother wielding the knife, and Joshua watching; or his mother hanging, his father wielding and smiling. But there were other such dreams from which he’d awake in a thick sweat with a scream welling in his throat, dreams when the night shimmered dark and scarlet in his small room, and he choked on the smell of the sow and her hot blood and flesh. “Joshua, please won’t you come?” “I’ll handle this, Doris.” From the bottom of the sea, the watery ghosts of green and coral, pearls encrusted on their brown flesh, the sun’s diamonds sparkling in their seaweed tresses. “Dread-ful . . . dread-ful.” They had returned. Joshua felt light-headed and sick. He forgot for a moment where he was, then felt the salt spray blowing in his face and the raft bobbing wildly in the waves. He shuddered as something hard and cold touched the back of his leg and the raft moved slowly backward over the swells. “A storm’s coming up, darling,” his mother said. “There are all kinds of warnings on the short wave.” Joshua felt the raft being turned around. Joe Ricatti, a cigar stuck in his mouth, was pulling him in with a long hooked gaff. He was frowning. “Ya oughta listen t’ yer mom, Joshua. Don’t they teach ya at that fancy school?” Joe kept pulling the raft closer, while Doris leaned over the side of the yacht, shaking her head in affectionate disapproval. “Just like your father, Joshua. You’re just like him.” As Joshua got ready to board the yacht, black clouds were streaming wildly toward the boat, and his mother’s jewels dazzled in the sun. She looked very fleshy, old, and painted, her lips a frosty orange against her leathery face, her small green eyes set far back behind her nose, her platinum hair blowing in the wind. She kept shaking her head and smiling. Joshua stood up and said nothing, just staring at them. Joe looked at Doris. “What the hell’s wrong with the brat!” “Please, Joe!” Doris said. Joshua cleared his throat. “Request permission to board the Dolphin III.” Joe heaved a hateful sigh and sneered, chomping down on his cigar and pursing his lips as if he were about to spit. “I’ll be damned!” he said. “Permission granted. Now come on, ya crazy kid!”

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Joshua stood on the bobbing raft and smiled a while longer, making Joe furious. The sun was darting in and out behind the dark clouds, and the wind was stronger now and cold. He imagined Joe lunging at him with the gaff and piercing his side, and he could feel himself slipping feet-first into the sea. He closed his eyes, descending slowly to the depths, his arms and hair flowing upward. It felt as if the sea were rushing up through his brain, flushing out all the blood and stench and horror of his memories and dreams, and then, when he could hold his breath no longer, as he screamed his final words — D-a-a-a-ad . . . s-a-a-a-ve . . . m-e-e-e-ee! — a large silver dolphin swam under him, lifting him up and up and up. He could feel his father’s presence, but couldn’t see him — “She’s just a woman, son,” he heard him say. “He’s just a man” — and as they continued rising to the surface, he found he could breathe in deeply, not air, but his father’s love and strength. When they broke through the waves and he was safely on the wooden raft again, he heard his father’s words echoing in his head: “Be strong, son . . . Be kind.” He turned his head slowly from the approaching storm, both the raft and the yacht rising and falling in the heaving waves. He looked carefully at his mother, then at Joe, and sighed heavily. They seemed suddenly older and more vulnerable, their faces barely masking their respective sorrows and fears. “He’s just a man,” he thought. “She’s just a woman.” He tried to smile warmly, but Joe, misreading his kindness, erupted. “Come on, ya little bastard!” and brandished the gaff at him. “If you don’t get yer butt in here right now, I swear I’ll tan yer hide!” “Joe!” Doris said. “Don’t be so in-sen-sitive.” For a moment, as Joshua started to climb aboard, he thought he heard a voice from the ocean depths . . . ”Dread-ful...dread-ful,” it said — but he ignored it, and when he was finally standing on the rolling deck of the Dolphin III, he held out his hand to Joe. “I’m very sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you, sir,” he said, shaking his hand firmly. “You’re a good man, Joe.” Then he hugged his mother quickly and stepped back. “Now don’t anybody worry . . . there’s still time for us to make it home.” Then, trying to balance himself, he stretched out his arms and smiled broadly. “I have risen,” he said.

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DOROTHY K. KOHRHERR

The Bike

In 1954 I got a brand new baby sister and a third-hand bike. My sister was soft and cuddly. The bike had sharp, dented rims and rust spots. It was a boy’s bike and I was a girl. My Dad said, “This bike is well built and just your size. It began life during the war and was made to last.” My Dad was right. The bike was twelve years old, five years older than me. It was a steel workhorse, stripped down for economy to conserve rubber and metal for the war effort. It was a faded red; its white stripes an ancient cream. There was no light, no basket, no reflectors. Even the chain lacked a cover. The spare frame had two bars looped up and down and forward and backward connecting the wheels, pedals, and seat. It was a bike. My Dad said, “ Now that you have a bike, you have to learn how to ride.” I had a boy’s bike. Originally it belonged to our neighbor Jay. He was now nineteen zipping around in a souped up Chevy, the muffler announcing his arrival and a trail of exhaust his departure. The bike a mere memory. Next, my brother Bob owned the bike. At twelve he was now the proud owner of a brand new Schwinn. Its black chassis gleamed. The spokes made you dizzy just looking at them. The tires were substantial, defined by clean white lines. There was a chain guard, so your socks would never be sucked up into the sprockets and become slick with grease. He had a Schwinn, I had a bike. After dinner, my Dad and I wheeled the bike to the park. We approached the baseball diamond in the day’s fading light. The packed earth of the baselines would be my guide. Dad helped me hop onto the seat, lifting my leg over the center bar. He said, “Now, take it slow. You pedal and I’ll hold onto the seat.” It was a wobbly beginning. I pedaled and Dad trotted. We rounded first, and second and third and triumphantly came into home plate. We stopped and burst out laughing. I was riding a bike. Dad asked, “Would you like to go around again?” Off we went. This time I was pedaling faster. Dad let go of the seat and I was on my own. My legs pumped and burned. I sailed past third base the proud owner of a WWII Murray Flyer.

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KEN JAWOROWSKI

The Outbound Express

You catch the outbound bus seconds before it pulls away, the thrill of making the early commuter express home lost amid the thoughts of the meeting you just left. You’re walking the aisle sideways in heels as the bus jolts into motion. You pitch forward, no free hand to grab hold of something. Still, you manage to stay upright despite carrying a handbag and a laptop, and you make it three quarters of the way back, where a single empty space by the window beckons. The guy in the aisle seat waits to be asked to move, though he surely saw you coming. You crouch and jostle over and sit, then inhale deeply. It’s been a hell of a day. The alarm chirped the first time this morning at 5. You smacked the snooze until 5:27, then used the hourlong commute to the city to rehearse your part of the presentation. Soon your eyes were drifting from your notes to the window, where the skyline loomed. That sight used to fill you with boundless energy and endless optimism. Those feelings have waned in the past 17 years, and cynicism has spread over your wonder like mold over an old orange. But the sight of the skyscrapers still amazes. You leaned your head back and drifted off, and woke to find the bus pulling into the station. At the office, weak jokes were told with shaky voices, while forced smiles struggled to cover worried expressions. You were drinking your third cup of coffee on an empty stomach when the team met in the conference room to rehearse. Kevin, the company tool, announced that he wanted to begin with a measure of the stakes. More likely, he hoped to sound like the self-important twit that he is. “WMX accounted for a full eighteen percent of our revenue last year. And for the three years prior. If we sign them for four more years, we’re set. If we don’t sign them, well . . .” He trailed off, no doubt because he thought it sounded dramatic. You glanced across the table to Michele, who could always be counted on to lift an eyebrow or twitch her nose in a way that sends you coughing to cover the laugh that starts deep down in your throat and hurts your cheeks to hold back. But Michele was buried in her notes, scribbling nervously. She had a baby last year and her husband is a full-time Ph.D student, so the thought of the layoffs that could follow the loss of this account was enough to have her biting her nails a day after her manicure. You became more serious too, and actually listened to Kevin. When you first landed at the company, right out of college, you were sure you’d leave soon, right when something new came along. Six months, a year, tops. You’d make up smart-ass comments in your head when putzes like Kevin spoke, and amaze yourself by keeping a straight face while you were thinking something like, “Well there, Kevyboy, why don’t you shove that laser pointer up your ass and fart some red light?” When you came to realize that an exciting job wasn’t about to materialize, or if it did it wasn’t going to pay half of what you currently earned, you stopped making fun of his kind. It was easier to nod and say “Yeah, sure, of course” when they spoke. It was simpler to just go on how you’d been going on. That’s continued to this day.

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And now, though you are loathe to admit it, you aren’t unhappy that Kevin is running the team. He takes this all very seriously. He’s prepared, and that could save your job. More coffee, more practice, lunch was skipped, and at 2:00 sharp the WMX crew arrived. Kevin wasn’t half bad on his feet, and you too looked good when the WMX honcho remembered your name and called your part of the presentation impressive. They barely touched the lunch platter that Kevin had catered in, and after they left, you and the rest of the group devoured it as you decompressed and planned the follow up. The consensus was that the meeting could have been worse, and there was even some good news when WMX announced that one of the four other bidders had dropped out. Soon the lunch platter was wiped clean, and Kevin made a big deal of telling the team to go home early. He himself was staying late, as usual. But you worked hard, slept little, and weren’t feeling all that great to begin with. So you hurried out of the office, even breaking a bit of a sweat as you speed-walked to the station. And as you hustled to the gate, you were frazzled and wiping the perspiration from your forehead. But at least you made the express bus to go home. You take the seat, rearrange the bags to give you the most room, then close your eyes. Your stomach growls so loudly that the guy next to you looks over, and the funny sound of it triggers your first genuine smile of the day, even if that smile is only to yourself. Much of your life has been to yourself lately. Last year, a very short breakup ended a very long relationship, and since then you’ve lived inside your head a lot. “Getting my shit together,” is what you tell those who ask what you’ve been up to. But not many inquire. Most of your friends are married and busy, and you see less of them each year. Even trying to arrange an after-work drink turns into a scheduling impasse that often ends in a promise to figure it out later, a vague time period that usually never arrives. Your life has gotten quieter than it should be, but you tell yourself that’s not so bad, not at the moment. Plus, your job has been a mess, today’s meeting the culmination of so much work. After this week, you swear, you’ll start contemplating some changes to your life. There’s a big part of you, the mocking, unforgiving side, which, if it had a face, would flash a sarcastic smirk at that last thought. If it had a mouth it would tell you that you constantly put off changes. It would say that you always use the excuse of being “so busy.” And it would remind you that you often promise that changes are coming, though they never seem to get here. If that cynical side dug deeper, it would also say that this inertness — this waiting, apathetic part of you — could be the reason that your last relationship died on the vine. That cynical side has no voice, yet it says these things just the same inside your head, and you respond: Yeah, fine. You’re right. Now leave me alone. It’s been a tough day and I deserve to relax. Especially with the way I’m starting to feel. Your stomach growls again, this time lower, harder, and you readjust your position, bumping the guy next to you. Anyone else would overlook it, but this guy, who was so adamant in avoiding eye contact when you needed the seat, now gapes directly at you. “Sorry,” you say. He doesn’t give the requisite “No problem,” or “It’s O.K.,” like most other commuters would. Instead he turns away after a smug sniff. And from nowhere, your cynical side seizes the moment, blindsiding you when it says: Ten years ago — heck, five — even a jerk like that would have been happy that you’d bumped into him. You’re wearing a nice skirt, silk top . . .

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That’s when you fire back: Stop it. Shut. Up. You exhale hard, hoping a physical response will drive these thoughts from your head. God damn it, you think, I really don’t need this now. You shift again, trying to get comfortable as your head starts to ache too. You look out the window for a distraction. The bus got caught in traffic on the way out, but now it moves steadily, and since it’s an express, you’ll be home in under an hour with no stops in between. There’s not a lot to see, with the city behind you and the bus taking the turnpike route. This time, your stomach doesn’t growl so much as it gurgles, and you feel a pressure that is as unpleasant as it is untimely. You’re going to have to ask the guy next to you to get up so you can go to the toilet. That thought isn’t pleasant, nor is the idea of using a dingy facility on a moving vehicle, but what’s got to be done must be done, so you say to him, “Excuse me” as you start to rise. He’s confused and shifts only because if he doesn’t you’ll bump him again. He barely half-stands, letting you squeeze by. You’re up, then past him, and when you turn toward the back of the bus a realization stops you. There’s no toilet. You’re standing in the aisle taking this fact in. Then you look again, as if one will appear with repeated viewing. After hurrying on the bus you didn’t notice the absence of a toilet, and your mind now processes the fact that, of course, express buses often aren’t equipped with one. You’re staring so long that a few people glance up to see if there’s a problem. Your seat mate is back into his reading and before you make a move, you realize that you are feeling more queasy by the minute and that sitting down won’t help the situation. Still, you can’t stand in the aisle, so you say, “Excuse me” again. It comes out far weaker than you’d like. This time, the guy doesn’t attempt to mask his annoyance as he slaps down his magazine and rises. You reluctantly sit, with a grimace. Your mind considers the morning’s culprits — those half-dozen cups of black coffee, the lunch platter that sat untouched before you helped pick it apart. All that junk is swirling around in your stomach, and at that very moment you spot the highway rest area fly past. You process the sight not so much as irony but because it’s a place you often use as a timing mark — from there it is 35 minutes until your stop. You close your eyes. But the pressure is increasing, and there’s no way you’re going to sleep. Your stomach sounds again, and you’re not sure if it is the discomfort or the stark realization of your situation that sets your head pounding. Distract your mind, you tell yourself. How much time? You check your watch — 34 minutes. Can you hold out? Are they any other stops? Don’t panic. List your options. Option One: Wait. The list stops there. This bus is not going to stop and there’s nothing else to do. You tell yourself you sound like Kevin, exploring options and assessing situations. But this situation is already assessed to its fullest: You’ve got to use a toilet. Fast. If not, you’re going to mess yourself. Horribly. You feel your face drain of color as a cramp digs into your gut. You squirm in the seat, giving you a bit of relief that lasts just a few seconds before the cramp jabs deeper and the pressure builds. You look at your watch again though it’s no use: You’ll never make it. Upon facing this dreadful fact a little whine sneaks out from deep in your throat. The man next to you glances over. You silently curse him because it’s something to do, something to take your mind off your stomach. To be blunt, the trouble is centered somewhat lower than your stomach, and you’re reminded of this as the next cramp arrives with a burning sensation behind it. But you

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don’t want to use dirtier words in your thoughts, for to think them could be to summon them to reality. And if that reality happens, well, the man next to you is going to have a far more complicated problem than just letting you in and out of your seat. You give a quick laugh, mindlessly, and he looks over again. You wriggle, settle back, and half a minute later your inner voice goes quiet when it realizes there is nothing left to say — you’ve got perhaps two minutes until you soil yourself. It’s a repulsive thought, a disgusting one, but it’s as true a fact as a fact gets. You’ve got to make a decision. Unlike so much in your life lately, this cannot be ignored. “Excuse me,” you say as you half-stand. The guy doesn’t move. He opens his mouth and the expression on his face already says enough about his prissy attitude. You see that, and in a gesture of pure panic you stare directly into his eyes and bark: “Move.” He’s taken aback — he surely didn’t expect that — but he doesn’t budge so you follow instantly, desperately, with: “Get the fuck out of my way.” He does. And you’re out and down the aisle, toward the driver. In a nonpanicked time you’d never think of saying what you are about to say to a stranger, but you just had good practice on the guy next to you and this is no time for subtlety. A cardboard sign above the visor reads ‘Do Not Speak to the Driver While Bus Is In Motion’ but he sees you in the rearview and raises his chin as you approach, curious as to the problem. “I really have to use the bathroom,” you say, trying to add a chuckle to mask the embarrassment, then add, “Really bad.” Saying this brings about a sickening feeling. You’re already bending over to whisper to him, doing your bowels no favors, and the acknowledgement of the situation makes the anguish even worse. Hearing yourself voice the words causes you to clench every muscle you have for fear of having an accident right here in front of the entire bus. You’ve admitted your distress. And now the sensation is about to turn into something far more severe. “I’ll pull over in Heights Village. Just ten minutes, O.K.?” he says, though you both know it’s at least fifteen. “I can’t,” you say and tighten your muscles again. “I just . . . Can you pull over?” “I’m sorry, ma’am. This whole area is a construction zone. Twenty miles, shoulder repairs. No stopping.” You’ve seen the signs, but there’s a shoulder here, and you say to him, “Just, please, do it. I . . . I have to.” You squeeze your eyes shut and grip harder the metal bar you’re holding. The pain in your gut, the building up, is getting dire, and you’re not sure how long you can hold things in. Now your own thoughts have turned on you, cursing you as a child. You’re acting like a child, but you can’t help it as you grit your teeth and clench your muscles as hard as you can, which buys you a momentary reprieve. Yet there’s no question it’s short-lived and you can hear the driver saying it’s just ten minutes, he can’t pull over or he’ll lose his job. He keeps talking, he even seems a bit nervous for you, and you think you’re telling him, “Just let me off you don’t have to wait I have a cell phone I’ll call a car service” but all you can hear yourself saying is: “I don’t care I don’t care I don’t CARE! Pull OVER pull fucking OVER!”

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You step down into the stairwell of the bus and watch everything zipping past you – the wooded area, shrubs, trees. A pane of glass is all that separates you from what is racing by and the driver shouts but he steers onto the shoulder and the bus stops and a rush of air hits you as the door hisses open. You’re a grown woman, how must it look to be running off the bus and over a small rise not ten yards from the highway, hiding yourself from view. There’s no time to waste, no niceties, no couth. You squat down next to a tree as you’re pulling your skirt up and underwear down, and the pressure breaks. You release what you’ve been holding in and as you do, the tears arrive in full force. This is not crying this is weeping, you say to yourself as your vision clouds. You’re thirty feet off the highway next to a tree. The bus may have left with your belongings, but you don’t care. The anguish subsides, your mind resets, and if you wanted to, you might even be able to manage an absurd laugh. But you don’t laugh. You are there, just off the highway after leaving the office, and you must face it — you are weeping.

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Contributors Vida Chu grew up in Hong Kong, came to America for college, and stayed. She has lived in Princeton for over forty years. Her poems have appeared in Kelsey Review, Princeton Arts Review, U.S.1 Worksheets and The Literary Review. Her children stories have appeared in Cricket Magazine and Fire and Wings. My book of poetry, The Fragrant Harbor, published by Aldrich Press, will be out in March 2015. Julia Cuddahy is a recent graduate of Lycoming College. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and a minor in Spanish. In the fall, she plans on attending graduate school for Library Science. One day she hopes to publish a book of her poetry. Lauren Fedorko, M.Ed., is an Adjunct Professor of writing at Rutgers University, teaches AP and Honors high school English, and advises a creative writing club for her students. Her passion for writing is longstanding and ongoing, composed mostly of poetry and creative non-fiction. She enjoys exploring, good company, and travelling the world every chance she gets. Her work is published for the first time in the Kelsey Review, but she will seek further publication in the future. Beverly Mach Geller is the author of seven books for children including a book of children’s poetry, My Family and Me. She received the Jane McHugh Memorial Senior Award for one of her poems and her poetry for adults and children has been published in literary journals and anthologies such as Delaware Valley Poets, NJ Poetry Society, US1 Worksheets, US1 Summer Fiction Edition, Kelsey Review, Poem Train, and Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. Her poem “Shabbat in Jerusalem” is featured on derondareview.org. Her most recent book of poems, Daily Bread, was published by Finishing Line Press. Elane Gutterman was previously published in the 2012 edition of the Kelsey Review. She has taken poetry classes with Anna Evans at the West Windsor Arts Center for the past three years and actively writes and shares her poetry. Lois Marie Harrod’s 13th and 14th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www. loismarieharrod.org. Cathy Herbert, based on Tuxedo, N.Y., works in medical education, recently completing projects for companies that include Novo Nordisk. She became interested in writing fiction and essays two years ago and started submitting material for publication earlier this year. To date, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Delmarva Review, The Lascaux Review, Verse, and www.truth-out.org. She recently co-authored the book Shine On! Shiny Bits of Wisdom, a collection of the most popular words and images from the Facebook page Twice As Shiney (named for a Quarter Horse stallion). The page, with more 500,000 followers from all over the world, seeks to help us appreciate the beauty and joy in the world around us. The book is available through Amazon and other online retailers. She also blogs for LinkedIn.com. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Towne

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& Country, and Neiman Marcus’ The Book. She has been an editor for Practical Horseman, Horse & Rider, Riding Instructor, Horse Show, and the NRHA Reiner, as well as a staff writer for Rodale Books, and once worked as an exercise rider at Pimlico Race Course. Ken Jaworowski is a staff editor and theater critic for The New York Times. He is also a playwright whose works have been performed in New York and London. His fiction has been published in A Cappella Zoo, The Angler, Quay Journal and The Kelsey Review. [email protected]. Dorothy K. Kohrherr’s work has been recognized locally, statewide, and nationally. During her 35-year career within NJ schools, she was honored as the Disney Middle School Humanities Teacher of the Year. Shortly after retiring, Kohrherr transitioned into the professional role of educational consultant where her curriculum work includes creating resources and lessons for the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Her short piece, “Room 535” was published in Visible Ink as part of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s writing program and performed live by Broadway actors. She lives in Lawrenceville, NJ after many years raising ostriches on a small farm outside of Lambertville. Sima Kumar received an MFA in writing from Vermont College. Her works of fiction have appeared in various publications such as Passages North, Colere, and Web del Sol’s In Posse Review. Her recent article on the Indian Christian community in her town appeared in the West Windsor-Plainsboro News. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Mercer County Community College and regularly teaches a class exploring the theme of conformity and rebellion. Don Lasko, a resident of Hightstown, is a retired teacher of English & creative writing at the high school and college levels and of gifted and talented US and international students ages 12-18. He taught for over 30 years at Columbia HS in So. Orange/Maplewood, NJ and is currently a member of the writing group at Twin Rivers Library in East Windsor. He recently introduced the 13th Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi to a pastor/writer friend, who then used the Rumi poem “Buoyancy” as the title for his yet-to-be published novel. This friend also lamented that there were no Rumi-like poems in the “Christian” tradition. “Writing Poetry” is in part a response to this lament and in part Don’s credo for the writing of his own poetry. Emma Ljung is a classical archaeologist. She was born in Sweden, grew up on Cyprus, and came to Princeton for graduate school. She teaches academic writing in the Princeton Writing Program and runs the Santa Susana Archaeological Project in Portugal. Recent fiction has been published in US1 and Quantum Fairy Tales. Carolina Morales is the author of three collections of poetry, Bride of Frankenstein and Other Poems (2008), In Nancy Drew’s Shadow (2010) and Dear Monster (2012) each published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Paterson Literary Review, US1 Worksheets, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. In 2011, Carolina’s short play The Last December was produced by Fire Rose Productions in North Hollywood, California.

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Leonora Rita V. Obed was born in Manila, Philippines, Leonora grew up in Trenton, New Jersey and was educated at Villa Victoria Academy, Notre Dame High School, Saint Joseph’s University, the University of Toronto and the University of Edinburgh. She has lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, London, England, Madrid, Spain, and the west of Ireland. As a writer she has excelled in both the creative and academic circles and, like Oscar Wilde, believes in the Artist as Critic. Her poem, “Eavesdropping on Angels” (inspired by Seward Johnson’s sculpture, “The Awakening”) has been selected by the Grounds for Sculpture Poets’ Invitational. In 2013 Leonora’s poem “The Beggar Maid of King Kamehameha IV” is included in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry II. In 2003 her one-act play Epitome was given a staged public reading at the annual Edward Albee/Last Frontier Theatre Conference, held at Prince William Sound Community College, Valdez, Alaska. Her essay “Riding the Eternal Carousel with Gerard Manley Hopkins” is a part of the anthology Hopkins Variations: Standing Round a Waterfall, published by Fordham University Press. She is currently at work on a novel. She enjoys playing the piano, being a lector at Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, learning the ukulele and cuatro, re-visiting the 1980s through movies and music, hula dancing, belly dancing, Latin dancing, cooking, and taking care of the vast menagerie of teddy bears who manage to move into her West Trenton home, often without her willing. Dave Olson is an employee of the West Windsor-Plainsboro School district and a long time resident of Plainsboro, NJ. George Point’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Kelsey Review, Defenestration Magazine, Princeton Packet, US1, Hudson County Magazine, ARTimes, Gold Coast Magazine and other local and regional publications. When he’s not concocting stories or playing at writing plays, he specializes in marketing and business communication. George lives and works in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Wanda S. Praisner, a recipient of fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, Dodge Foundation, The Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and VCCA, has won the Egan Award, Princemere Prize, Kudzu Competition, First Prize in Poetry at the College of NJ Writers’ Conference, and has twice been a finalist in the NJ Poets Prize. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, she’s read at the Dodge Festival and Governor’s Conference on the Arts and appears in Atlanta Review, Lullwater Review, and Prairie Schooner. Books include: A Fine and Bitter Snow (Palanquin Press, USCA, 2003); On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona (Winner, Spire Press Chapbook Contest, 2006); Where the Dead Are (CavanKerry Press, 2013); and Sometimes When Something Is Singing (Antrim House, 2014). A resident of Bedminster, she is a poet in residence for the NJ State Council on the Arts. D. E. Steward. As a kid D. E. Steward used to hitchhike west from Hunterdon County for summer jobs. One of the best was being a Forest Service lookout. This is the fifth excerpt from this project to appear in Kelsey Review with others in Conjunctions and Denver Quarterly (a dozen in each), as well as many in other literary magazines like Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Gargoyle, Chelsea, Grain, Seneca Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Agni, Notre Dame Review, Los Angeles Review, Antioch Review. Short poetry is published in similar magazines. Maxine Susman has published five poetry collections, and her work appears in dozens of literary magazines. She enjoys teaching poetry in adult education courses and workshops in Central Jersey. She belongs to the Cool Women poetry performance group.

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Alan Teplitsky is a retired English teacher and department head. He lives in Lawrenceville, where he enjoys working on a variety of genealogical, professional, and creative writing projects. His first post-retirement story, “Jacob’s Dream,” appeared in the 2012 issue of Kelsey Review. Damon Williams was born in Atlantic City, NJ and raised in Emmanul County, Georgia. He graduated from Rutgers University, has worked as a television producer and for the NJ Department of Agriculture, and has been previously published in the Kelsey Review. Editors & Staff Edward Carmien is the editor of the Kelsey Review, a writer, and professor of English at Mercer County Community College. He recalls with wide-eyed wonder that his first exposure to the world of the literary journal occurred more than thirty years ago, when he served as first reader for The Antioch Review under the tolerant tutelage of novelist and educator Nolan Miller. Roberta Clipper is a fiction editor of the Kelsey Review. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley and is a full Professor at Rider University. A fiction writer and poet, she has published many stories and two novels, including The Bride Wore Red and Fifty Fifty. On a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she served as a visiting professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India during the Monsoon Semester (fall), 2009. Luray Gross is a poetry editor of the Kelsey Review and is the author of three collections of poetry: Forenoon was published in 1990 by The Attic Press in Westfield, NJ, and Elegant Reprieve won the 1995-96 Still Waters Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. The Perfection of Zeros was published by WordTech in 2004. A storyteller as well as a writer, she works extensively throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania as an Artist in Residence. She was the recipient of a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2000, she was named a Distinguished Teaching Artist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was the recipient of the Robert Fraser Open Poetry Competition Award from Bucks County (PA) Community College. She was the 2002 Poet Laureate of Bucks County and resident faculty at the 2006 Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Her poem “The Perfection of Zero” was featured by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Public Poetry Project in 2008. Ellen Jacko is a poetry editor of the Kelsey Review and earned a BA in English Literature at Rutgers University and an MAT in English Education at Trenton State College. She has had a variety of post-graduate experiences including the study of twentieth century British poets at Exeter College, Oxford University, England. For more than thirty years she has worked at Allentown High School in Allentown, New Jersey where she currently teaches AP Literature and Composition and creative writing. Throughout her career she has worked with students as writers. This includes working for the institution of the writing center and acting as faculty advisor of the yearbook, the student newspaper, and the student literary magazine, and helping her students prepare their work for publication. Additionally for fifteen years she was a member of the adjunct faculty at Mercer County Community College. Through all these endeavors her focus is on helping her students understand the beauty, joy, and power of the written word.

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Editors & Staff Edward Carmien is the editor of the Kelsey Review, a writer, and professor of English at Mercer County Community College. He recalls with wide-eyed wonder that his first exposure to the world of the literary journal occurred more than thirty years ago, when he served as first reader for The Antioch Review under the tolerant tutelage of novelist and educator Nolan Miller. Roberta Clipper is a fiction editor of the Kelsey Review. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley and is a full Professor at Rider University. A fiction writer and poet, she has published many stories and two novels, including The Bride Wore Red and Fifty Fifty. On a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she served as a visiting professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India during the Monsoon Semester (fall), 2009. Luray Gross is a poetry editor of the Kelsey Review and is the author of three collections of poetry: Forenoon was published in 1990 by The Attic Press in Westfield, NJ, and Elegant Reprieve won the 1995-96 Still Waters Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. The Perfection of Zeros was published by WordTech in 2004. A storyteller as well as a writer, she works extensively throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania as an Artist in Residence. She was the recipient of a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2000, she was named a Distinguished Teaching Artist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was the recipient of the Robert Fraser Open Poetry Competition Award from Bucks County (PA) Community College. She was the 2002 Poet Laureate of Bucks County and resident faculty at the 2006 Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Her poem “The Perfection of Zero” was featured by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Public Poetry Project in 2008. Ellen Jacko is a poetry editor of the Kelsey Review and earned a BA in English Literature at Rutgers University and an MAT in English Education at Trenton State College. She has had a variety of post-graduate experiences including the study of twentieth century British poets at Exeter College, Oxford University, England. For more than thirty years she has worked at Allentown High School in Allentown, New Jersey where she currently teaches AP Literature and Composition and creative writing. Throughout her career she has worked with students as writers. This includes working for the institution of the writing center and acting as faculty advisor of the yearbook, the student newspaper, and the student literary magazine, and helping her students prepare their work for publication. Additionally, for fifteen years she was a member of the adjunct faculty at Mercer County Community College. Through all these endeavors her focus is on helping her students understand the beauty, joy, and power of the written word. Francis Paixão is the Senior Graphic Designer in the Publications department at Mercer County Community College. With degrees from both Mercer and Trenton State College in Advertising Design he’s also a lover of the outdoors, an avid board gamer and greatly enjoys reading. Francis aspires to one day write his own novel and has several started but naught to show for his efforts, not yet. He also enjoys designing board games and hopes to publish his first release to stores in 2015.

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Submission Guidelines The Kelsey Review is published each September. The deadline for each year’s issue is May 15th. We respond no later than August 15th. The Review solicits contributions from those who live and/or work in the Mercer County area. Use our electronic submission system (to be announced, spring 2015) to send us your: Short Fiction Length: 4,000 words maximum Poetry Send no more than six pages Essays Length: 2,500 words maximum Black & White Art (suitable for digital scanning) See Below Writers and artists who appear at Mercer County area events such as poetry readings are also eligible. Organizers of such events should encourage those who work and/ or live in the area to submit a short non-fiction critically informed review of the event; the editors will contact the writer/artist to extend an invitation to appear in the Review. We see this as an opportunity to promote such literary and artistic occasions and venues within the county. We invite proposals for non-fiction articles on any topic relevant to the people, history, businesses, educational institutions, artistic traditions and/or government of Mercer County and the surrounding area. “Creative non-fiction” also falls into this category. Except for art and poetry, the Review generally only accepts one item per author. Electronic Submissions: The Review intends to adopt an electronic submission system. Look for it to be announced in the spring of 2015. Submissions by Mail: We no longer accept submissions by mail (or email!). • All rights are retained by the author. The Kelsey Review remains available online after publication. • Payment is in copies (3). • Each year we nominate up to six published items for the Pushcart Prize. See www. pushcartprize.com for more information. • Art: The Kelsey Review uses art in the following sizes: half page, full page, and cover/centerfold (double page size). • We accept simultaneous submissions. If we accept an item placed elsewhere, it is up to the author to clear any conflicts upon acceptance to KR. Send questions via email to [email protected]. We are on Facebook. Edward Carmien Editor

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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