Blog Archives

The Work

Art / Nazifa Islam

 

:: #121 ::

 

Acrylic paint on stretched can­vas, 18“x 24″

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I’m a poet who pri­mar­i­ly writes found poetry—poems cre­at­ed exclu­sive­ly using the lan­guage of anoth­er writer. This means that unlike most writ­ers I’m not often tasked with fill­ing a blank page. I paint when:

  1. I feel a strong need to hold my own art­work in my hands—the intan­gi­bil­i­ty of poems I’ve writ­ten on my lap­top just doesn’t seem cut to it sometimes.
  2. I feel com­pelled to see how I can fill a blank can­vas with only the tools of acrylic paint and my own imag­i­na­tion at my disposal.

My found poems owe so much to oth­er writ­ers; they wouldn’t exist if Vir­ginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and L.M. Mont­gomery had nev­er put pen to paper and pub­lished phe­nom­e­nal work. My paint­ings, on the oth­er hand, belong much more com­plete­ly to me and me alone. They of course fol­low in the foot­steps of abstract artists who came before me, but I’m nev­er con­scious­ly attempt­ing to mim­ic some­one else’s style when I paint. Armed with only mars black, tita­ni­um white, per­ma­nent magen­ta, cad­mi­um yel­low, and cobalt blue acrylic paint, I give myself over to the process of cre­at­ing some­thing com­plete­ly new and com­plete­ly mine. There is a free­dom in paint­ing that just is not pos­si­ble when writ­ing giv­en the very nature of found poetry.

I cre­at­ed my paint­ing “#121” as a gift for my niece who was, at the time I fin­ished it, 17 months old. I knew the paint­ing was going to be a part of the dec­o­ra­tions in her nurs­ery. All my paint­ings are essen­tial­ly orga­nized chaos, but for “#121” I made a con­scious deci­sion to work with bright col­ors, to attempt to high­light fre­net­ic joy instead of my more typ­i­cal (in both my poems and paint­ings) fre­net­ic, over­whelm­ing anx­i­ety and grief. Joy is dif­fi­cult to cap­ture in any medi­um, but it was the word most on my mind while I was paint­ing this piece.

Naz­i­fa Islam is the author of the poet­ry col­lec­tions Search­ing for a Pulse (White­point Press) and For­lorn Light: Vir­ginia Woolf Found Poems (Shears­man Books). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Mis­souri Review, Boston Review, Smar­tish Pace, and Beloit Poet­ry Jour­nal among oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. She earned her MFA at Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty. You can find her @nafoopal

On “Mass for Shut-ins”

Interview / Mary-Alice Daniel

Mary-Alice Daniel 

 

Edi­tor Lau­ren Brazeal Garza: This year, The Account Mag­a­zine was hon­ored and excit­ed to sit down with Mary-Alice Daniel, win­ner of the 2022 Yale Younger Poet’s prize for her sear­ing col­lec­tion, Mass for Shut-ins. Daniels offered insight and inspi­ra­tion as she spoke about her var­i­ous approach­es to writ­ing her haunt­ing poet­ic debut.

 

With­in the first few lines of your col­lec­tion, Mass for Shut-ins the speak­er declares, “Your house isn’t haunt­ed – you’re just lone­ly,” which intro­duces us to a voice that isn’t afraid to speak star­tling truths, wrench­ing from us any delu­sions of com­fort we might cling to with­in these poems. How did you approach autho­r­i­al voice with­in Mass for Shut-ins? Did you begin to write with a par­tic­u­lar tenor in mind? Or did the tone find you?

Spir­its in mul­ti­ple valences haunt the land­scapes or dream­scapes I cre­ate: an umbra of earth­ly vice and unearth­ly totems. My poet­ic choic­es cen­ter 2 things: empha­sis & momen­tum. I want to call the right amount of atten­tion to some­thing (sub­tle­ty or not=tone). Speed: com­pres­sion, lin­eation, relax­ing reg­is­ter, stum­bling up a read­er or let­ting them get there faster. Dif­fer­ent usage of word, dif­fer­ent sin­gu­lar, gram­mar that’s slight­ly wrong/“off”. Do I want to sur­prise them? Or let them down? Or set them up? 

Much of the col­lec­tion works to under­stand a great con­tra­dic­tion: humanity’s lack of con­trol over the uni­verse despite our mon­u­men­tal efforts to do so. How did these ideas influ­ence the col­lec­tion? Did one, in par­tic­u­lar, nag at you as you wrote? 

My poems har­ness and unleash a holy mess of con­flict­ing cul­tures & spir­it worlds: Islam, Chris­tian­i­ty, mag­ic. They per­form cul­tur­al exca­va­tions and experiments—reseeing region, reli­gion, race. I delve into a mil­len­ni­um of oral his­to­ry from my Islam­ic Fulani tribe, along with our indige­nous animism—both in con­flict with the Evan­gel­i­cal gospel I was raised to revere. I ven­ture through invis­i­ble fields of spir­i­tu­al war­fare in my poems. They aren’t auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal; they are phan­tas­mal. My world-build­ing weaves famil­ial lore and folk­ways; new media and mass cul­ture; sci­ence, pseu­do­science, and syn­cretism. 

My poems nat­u­ral­ly encounter super­nat­ur­al sys­tems. Grow­ing up, I was cau­tioned that express­ing neg­a­tiv­i­ty invites curs­es. You incite your own unluck. There is “pow­er” in the tongue, where poi­son can entice malig­nant enti­ties into this dimen­sion. While writ­ing Mass for Shut-Ins, always in the back of my mind was my trans­gres­sion of this super­sti­tion. Tempt­ed by taboo, I write about uncon­trol­lable human impulses—to hurt our­selves and each other—indulging my life­long flir­ta­tion with all that is off-lim­its. My books mull over my apoc­a­lyp­tic para­noia, my loom­ing death(s), and the Hells I pre­dict I’m head­ing to, soon. Briefly, I’m anchored—to this body that dai­ly fights decay; to this sunny/sinful city of angels. Then I remem­ber that my body is Black; my Los Ange­les is an anti-par­adise; my med­ica­tions may cause madness.

In a sim­i­lar vein, ideas of moral­i­ty fre­quent­ly appear in this col­lec­tion but are often jux­ta­posed against a world indif­fer­ent to them—or at the very least, intent on ignor­ing them. The speak­er seems both bound to and dis­en­chant­ed by reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. Can you tell us a lit­tle about these ideas in your work? 

Dream­scapes host—and hold hostage—mutant/machine plus flesh/disease, human/demon, science/miracle, mercy/hellfire. The atmos­phere is charged by folk mythol­o­gy and syn­cretism. My eth­nic Fulani tribe is essen­tial­ly syn­ony­mous with Islam, but I was raised by Evan­gel­i­cal par­ents in a sphere of fun­da­men­tal­ism and apoc­a­lyp­tic para­noia. Along­side such extremes, the indige­nous beliefs of Nige­ria survive—within my fam­i­ly, seen in the cen­ter­ing of super­sti­tion, the cre­dence in curs­es. Per an occult Niger­ian rit­u­al, a will­ing human ves­sel may be pos­sessed by a pan­theon of spir­its. Spir­its pop­u­late my writ­ing, their pres­ence pre­sent­ing the prospect of being haunt­ed or hunt­ed. Inhu­man inhab­i­tants prowl about: godlings, ghosts, bots, birds, major or minor saints. Poet­ry is invo­ca­tion—oppo­site of exor­cism. I invite the oth­er­word­ly inside. 

Through­out my man­u­script, we encounter the spir­its of icon­ic female figures—the fall­en woman; the Bell Witch; the “ultra-black” god­dess Kali; San­ta Muerte, the death saint; Mary, Vir­gin Queen of Heav­en; an aging, light-pho­bic Hol­ly­wood actress; Christi­na the Aston­ish­ing (the patron saint against insan­i­ty); an anthro­po­mor­phic she-goat; a space­girl; a pil­lar of salt. On each of my many, many moons lives a lady. 

You often ref­er­ence Los Ange­les, where you lived while part of this col­lec­tion was writ­ten; and West Africa — Nige­ria, specif­i­cal­ly, where you were born. Place plays a fun­da­men­tal role with­in these poems— though most­ly as spaces the speak­er ori­ents them­selves on the periph­ery of. In these poems, there is no “home” and nowhere is safe. What do terms like home, place, and set­ting mean to you as a poet? 

The term “uncan­ny” is derived from its direct oppo­site in Ger­man, heim­lich, mean­ing “home­like” or “native.” The uncan­ny unset­tles the home—it turns eerie and intru­sive. I am a nomad of many homes and no home; nat­u­ral­ly, my poet­ry charts far val­leys of the uncanny.

Today, my research tar­gets egre­gious gaps and errors in West Africa’s his­toric and writ­ten record. I do this out of neces­si­ty. The glar­ing lack of use­ful doc­u­ments pub­lished about my native land  proves both frus­trat­ing and gen­er­a­tive. So ignored is that ter­rain that the maps inside my mem­oir, A Coast­line Is an Immea­sur­able Thing (HarperCollins/Ecco 2022), had to be drawn by an illus­tra­tor: my pub­lish­er and I found noth­ing mark­ing the loca­tions I men­tion. Every time I review the body of lit­er­a­ture from my over­looked region, I am aston­ished by the dis­tor­tion in its report­ing and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The scarce avail­able mate­ri­als are typ­i­cal­ly dat­ed; deroga­to­ry; lim­it­ed in detail; lack­ing in depth. At first dis­mayed by our era­sure, I real­ized an expan­sive, ongo­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to counter ero­sion. To incar­nate my own inheritance. 

When­ev­er we speak the name of a place, we become par­tic­i­pants in its sto­ry­line. While a PhD stu­dent at USC, I sought to under­stand my adopt­ed envi­rons. I am drawn to desert, assim­i­lat­ing from a sim­i­lar clime. The set­ting of La La Land lent a sur­re­al­i­ty to my schol­ar­ship. The ety­mol­o­gy of the name of the state alludes to Calafia, the queen of a fic­tion­al island inhab­it­ed exclu­sive­ly by black-skinned women: a fan­ta­sy ter­ri­to­ry invent­ed in a 16th-cen­tu­ry Span­ish nov­el. Her char­ac­ter recurs in my work: a focal fig­ure in my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion and memoir—a muse. 

My kalei­do­scop­ic book braids a sequence of essays—each sets a scene nest­ed in Nigeria’s dias­po­ra. Afro-Pales­tine; Ukraine; the tex­tile dis­tricts in Guangzhou; sampi­etri­ni cob­ble­stone streets in Sici­ly; Texas; Thai­land; Moroc­co; the Amer­i­c­as, where our indige­nous spir­i­tu­al­i­ty sur­vived transat­lantic slave trade, remade into the mis­un­der­stood San­tería, Hait­ian Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo. As the prog­e­ny of pas­toral­ists, I have odysseyed the world. My book relates African assim­i­la­tion and adaptation—via per­son­al encoun­ters. Wher­ev­er Nige­ri­ans go, we ani­mate a cor­pus of culture.

Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria bor­der, then raised in Eng­land and Ten­nessee. Her poet­ry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a Cal­i­for­nia Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins pub­lished her tri­con­ti­nen­tal mem­oir, A Coast­line Is an Immea­sur­able Thing, which was Peo­ple’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Non­fic­tion Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fel­low and an alum­na of Yale Uni­ver­si­ty (BA) and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan (MFA), she received a PhD in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture & Cre­ative Writ­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writ­ing at Scripps Col­lege and turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a schol­ar at Prince­ton University.

2 Poems

Poetry / Traci Brimhall 

 

:: WHAT WOULD I DO IF YOU RETURNED AS A CARDINAL? ::

The light threading through morning’s confusion 
isn’t you. The surprised penny isn’t you either.
Hornet at the hummingbird feeder devastates

like wildfires or narrative. Hunger for signs doesn’t 
bring any. The spiritual equity of the monarch 
is still a fortune written for someone else’s hope. 

Sometimes God is mysterious, and sometimes God 
is a knife, an artery rushing to greet the air. Your fear 
fostered so much of my suffering. My childhood 

a revision of yours. The alpine adolescence—
a cosmetology of fireweed, aster, buttercup. I pruned 
your roses, massacre of red flags bloodying the ivy. 

God rejected me for my own good. I trespassed into 
the matador’s closet for the secrets, but I was as alone 
as a medium in a haunted house, quiet as what remains 

of your body. In the mirror, you and not you. My hair 
straighter, thinner. Though I still can’t control it, I care 
for it. The quilt you never made but the music you did, 

your manicure clicking across piano keys. The comfort 
of unhealthy patterns blushing harder than rubies. 
I would do what I couldn’t as a child and turn from you.

:: BODY, REMEMBER ::

Wake up, nerves. Remember touch, breath, touch. 
Oh body, remember those mouths, those hands, 
how you desired all of it, especially blindfolded. 

The best of everything has been love, those pounds 
of joy. Forget toes stubbed on bed edges, bike pedals 
hitting shins, joints sugar-swollen and complaining. 

Remember the infant doppler looping lemniscates 
over your torso, listening for the baby but finding
the native darkness of your interior, blood rushing 

like horses galloping underwater? And remember 
those pop songs you danced to in darkened kitchens 
so passing cars couldn’t see your hips’s enthusiasm 

for a good bass line? Remember last night—the car’s 
engine bragging its speed, shaking the marrow of each 
bone?  You were alive with a great rage, monstrous 

and capable. But don’t worry, you were only an animal. 
One day you’ll get to die like everything you admire, 
and your beloved will forget your face. Remember 

it is not because he failed to love you well, but because 
his brain doesn’t hold faces. Your brain will hold so 
little then, too, so you can become what’s next. It will 

be beautiful, body, your cells undressing, forgetting.
And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow 
like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

Both of these poems were writ­ten while spend­ing time with one of my best friends, the poet Brynn Saito. For the last (almost) 20 years she and I have writ­ten togeth­er. After our MFA, we trav­eled togeth­er most sum­mers and wrote togeth­er, and even if some­times we are just trav­el­ing to each other’s homes, we con­tin­ue to write togeth­er almost every day we’re togeth­er. We walk our dogs togeth­er, make tea, pull some tarot cards, and give each oth­er prompts. Both of these pieces were writ­ten in Col­orado, where we cur­rent­ly spend time togeth­er in the sum­mer. My book Love Prodi­gal con­tains many love poems—love as a roman­tic part­ner, love as a par­ent for a child, love as a child for a dif­fi­cult par­ent, but only one poem explic­it­ly about the love of friends. Which is a shame because the love of my friends has been some of the most sup­port­ive and sus­tain­ing of my life and how I learned a lot about what love should look like. But beneath the clear sub­jects of the love poems in the book is the love of my friends who write with me, who laugh with me, who talk deeply with me, who keep me in love with my own life.

Traci Brimhall is a pro­fes­sor of cre­ative writ­ing and nar­ra­tive med­i­cine at Kansas State Uni­ver­si­ty. She is the author of five col­lec­tions of poet­ry, includ­ing Love Prodi­gal (pub­lished Novem­ber 2024 by Cop­per Canyon). Her poems have appeared in pub­li­ca­tions such as The New York­er, The Nation, The New Repub­lic, Poet­ry, The New York Times Mag­a­zine, and Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry. She’s received fel­low­ships from Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Parks Ser­vice, the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, and Pur­due Library’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the cur­rent poet lau­re­ate for the State of Kansas.

poems from Zombie Vomit Mad Libs

Poetry / Duy Đoàn

 

:: poems from Zombie Vomit Mad Libs ::

[Climate Changed]

                                               The earth is a star.

 

 

 

We’re already dead.


_________________________________________________________________________________

 

[Zom­bie]

One had this prob­lem where they were always look­ing for the radius of things.

 

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]                                 




                                      The crossing over was slow




                                                                                  She couldn't remember.
                                                                                  She couldn't
                                                                                  forget.
 

_________________________________________________________________________________

 

[Zom­bie Babies]


(love let­ter,                          one baby to anoth­er):




hot damn
ur not fuck­ing around
u real­ly know how to see things
thru

_________________________________________________________________________________

             
                                            
                                                           [Zombie Babies]

                                                           (love letter,
                                                                                 the other baby to the first
                                                                                 baby):

                                                           I like that you use the
                                                           infinitive

                                                           that way we don't have to worry
                                                           about their conjugations
                                                           when you're an outcast you can
                                                           only really trust the other
                                                           outcasts

_________________________________________________________________________________

        [zzzzz Zombies]

        The thing is

        they were all wearing masks           when they were asleep                    .



_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombies]

emaciating cat staring out the window

(wind chimes jingling)
 

__________________________________________________________________________________



                                               [Zombies at a Cross Signal]

                                                                                                                       . . . .

                                               candy apple. For in our hearts we are


                                               go      children

                                               slow

_________________________________________________________________________________



[Zombie]

                                               Her hair is radiant.      Like, radiant

                                   radiant. It has that post-illness hasn't-been-

                                   washed glow to it.


_________________________________________________________________________________

           [Zombies]

In the next world, there's a line of haircare products called
Convalescence:

           Crack (Dandruff Control)
           Luminol (Tea Tree Oil 60% Real)
           Glowstick (with Yuccalyptus®)

and cocaine is on the endangered species list.


_________________________________________________________________________________

[Alcoholism]

pregame = blunt force trauma
blunt force trauma blunt force trauma = postgame postgame
= still functional organs after resurrection


_________________________________________________________________________________

        [Two Zombies]

                    Look how even now he pretends to be her little synesthete.

        His truthlessness
        never mattered. Their toxicity neither.


        They meander and bump into things;
        connection's still real.

_________________________________________________________________________________

                                   [Zombie]

                         His vomit hit the top of the lectern and then the bottom so
                         quickly it sounded like a trochee.

                                                                                                 ticktock

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombies]

emaciating cat staring out the window

(wind chimes jingling)


_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]



_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]



_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zom­bie]


_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]



_________________________________________________________________________________




[Zombie]


Maybe then she remembers
                                                           briefly



_________________________________________________________________________________
















[Zombie]

she once saw the northern lights.

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

 

i                                                                                                                                   

These zom­bies wan­der through­out my col­lec­tion, Zom­bie Vom­it Mad Libs (Alice James Books, Novem­ber 12, 2024).

The zom­bies most­ly mind their own busi­ness, meandering—sometimes togeth­er, some­times alone.

ii                                                                                                                                    

Hor­ror is my favorite movie genre. Zom­bie movies are one of my least favorite hor­ror sub­gen­res. I can name only three zom­bie movies I admire and only one that I love. It’s not that I dis­like the zom­bie as a mon­ster in nar­ra­tive. I actu­al­ly think they’re cool and essen­tial to lore about the super­nat­ur­al. It’s just that I find most zom­bie movies uninteresting—so many zom­bie movies are lit­tle more than bor­ing action flicks, cliché alle­gories, or sil­ly gore fests.

When I first start­ed writ­ing the poems that even­tu­al­ly became this book, I wasn’t writ­ing zom­bie poems. Most of the poems I was writ­ing were about artists who com­mit­ted sui­cide (actor Leslie Che­ung and many poets), mad libs, and rela­tion­ships (lit­tle the­atres of romance, fam­i­ly, and friend­ship). As I was writ­ing, I nev­er thought about the poems becom­ing a col­lec­tion until they began gath­er­ing momen­tum togeth­er, in small bunch­es, and com­mon images and themes start­ed emerg­ing.

Some fun things kept hap­pen­ing. Epi­gram­mat­ic zom­bie sketch­es would show up from time to time in between writ­ing the oth­er poems. (I like to think that the sketch­es are like the epi­gram­mat­ic poems in Marie Howe’s Mag­da­lene, a big inspi­ra­tion of mine.) Look­ing back, I think these zom­bie poems were my own rewrit­ing of the zom­bie movie, writ­ing zom­bie mythol­o­gy the way I like.

iii                                                                                                                                  Vam­pire movies are my favorite hor­ror sub­genre. Many are lush and eye catch­ing, have strong themes, and are about romance (my sec­ond favorite movie genre). (I’m not includ­ing Twi­light.)

Prob­a­bly one of the biggest influ­ences on me as far as poet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty and love of film is Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home at Night, a Per­sian-lan­guage Amer­i­can West­ern hor­ror film. Amirpour’s mag­ic is mes­mer­iz­ing. Her tim­ing and fresh eye for con­nec­tion becomes evi­dent in her abil­i­ty to weave togeth­er a wide range of emotions—the dif­fer­ent types of emo­tions elicit­ed by meet cutes, wry humor, vio­lence, or tragedy.

There’s a skill­ful restraint in her han­dling of scenes and in her han­dling of the vam­pire sto­ry. She doesn’t get into the whole mess of trite tropes that oth­er vam­pire movies fall into. She nev­er seems con­cerned with com­ing up with her own unique ele­ments of vam­pire mythology—how to han­dle mir­rors, how to han­dle gar­lic, how to han­dle stakes, how to han­dle infec­tion, how to han­dle the sun. In a way, Amirpour’s vam­pire, who is the voice of jus­tice in the film, is just a girl who walks home alone at night, adven­tur­ing and then bring­ing her roman­tic inter­est along for the ride.

I hope Ana Lily Amir­pour will direct a zom­bie movie one day. Maybe I hope that because it’s too bad I don’t like zom­bie movies more. What­ev­er hap­pens, I owe a huge debt to Amir­pour because she inspired my zom­bie poems in a way that helped me like zom­bies more.

Duy Đoàn (pro­nounced zwē dwän / zwee dwahn) is the author of We Play a Game (Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press), win­ner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lamb­da Lit­er­ary Award. Duy’s work has appeared in the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Poem-a-Day, Keny­on Review, The Mar­gins, and Poet­ry. He received an MFA in poet­ry from Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. His sec­ond col­lec­tion, Zom­bie Vom­it Mad Libs, is forth­com­ing from Alice James Books, Novem­ber 12, 2024.

 

2 Poems

Poetry /  Kasey Jueds

 

:: Second Silence ::

Look up
between the winter

and a goneness,
refusing 	

what snow
permitted songbirds

to understand. You were
your own ghost, surging

through a closed throat, faithful
to these maples

until snow knotted deeper
the window, the sky.

How you scattered
inside the angel’s hands, inside

the birds: a letter
unsent, shriven

in the face of the cold
to come, covered by Later

in her perfect meadow
of milk. That freezing place

arrives coiled
through a second silence, left

to the docile
animal alone.

:: Leafless ultramarine, winter envelope ::

slipped beneath the wrists’
                       translucent skin.
                                   Unknow birds
           where cold works
                                               to soften a name,
                       where the woods, insistent,
           describe ghosts,
                                   this exact failing.
Since there is a tree,
                       there is           this wind
           blotting
                                   the lamp-struck dusk,
                       the empty teacup’s
           pink-flowered cracks. 
Swathes of black, pinned
                                   to mountains, mix vanishing
           with the shapes of pines.
                       To sunder means 
to inhabit corners,
                                               a single streetlight
           sometimes covered with snow.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I’ve been try­ing to write even a por­tion of my love for the Welsh artist Gwen John, and her paint­ings, for decades. I did make one poem for her, 25 years ago, a poem I liked and kept. And then, noth­ing. Or: some attempts, all of which felt life­less, flat. I gave up, though I con­tin­ued to think and read about her, to vis­it her paint­ings when I could. Then this past Feb­ru­ary I took a class with the lumi­nous poet/teacher Mol­ly Scha­ef­fer, and one week Kylie Gel­lat­ly was a guest. Kylie talked us through—so generously—her process of mak­ing col­lage poems. I had tried col­lage before and didn’t take to it (though I love scis­sors and glue sticks). But this time, cut­ting my old failed poems into indi­vid­ual words and shift­ing them around on a blank page, I felt a burst of new­ness and energy.

These two poems, to and for Gwen John, feel, in a side­ways, sur­pris­ing-to-me way, so much more to and for her than any of my oth­er attempts over the years. I remem­ber my Bud­dhist teacher say­ing to me once, “Some­thing is always happening”—probably in response to my com­plain­ing that noth­ing was hap­pen­ing in my prac­tice or my life. In the same way, some­thing was hap­pen­ing dur­ing that emp­ty-seem­ing time, the years I was dis­cour­aged and feel­ing far-from, giv­ing up and start­ing again, try­ing to write toward Gwen John

Kasey Jueds is the author of two col­lec­tions of poet­ry, both from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press: Keep­er, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Star­rett Prize, and The Thick­et. She lives on ances­tral Lenape land in a small town in the moun­tains of New York State.

 

Keeping a Home

Poetry / Abbie Kiefer

 

 
Kiefer-Keep­ing-a-Home-2024

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

The work of writ­ing insists on hav­ing my time and attention—sometimes in ways I wish it didn’t. Nec­es­sary domes­tic tasks are often pushed aside in favor of poem-mak­ing or get done begrudg­ing­ly and with impa­tience. I find that being in the mid­dle of a writ­ing project can make me impa­tient in my par­ent­ing, too. A short­com­ing, to be sure, but one that I try to be hon­est about and address.

This poem con­sid­ers the val­ue of mak­ing art and of mak­ing order and what we do with our ambi­tion to cre­ate. It’s also—for me, at least—about what it can mean to keep a house: in this case, to fold the per­pet­u­al heaps of laun­dry, but also to make the home a place where its peo­ple can learn and care for each oth­er and be frus­trat­ed and keep car­ing for each oth­er anyway.

Abbie Kiefer is the author of Cer­tain Shel­ter (June Road Press, 2024) and the chap­book Brief His­to­ries (Whit­tle Micro-Press, 2024). Her work is forth­com­ing or has appeared in The Cincin­nati Review, Cop­per Nick­el, Gulf Coast, The Mis­souri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The South­ern Review, and oth­er places. She is on the staff of The Adroit Jour­nal and lives in New Hamp­shire. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com.

3 Poems

Poetry / Stefanie Kirby

 

:: Self-Portrait as William Tell as the Mother of Daughters in Post-Roe America ::

I count them
all, the daughters
I did and didn’t have,
the trees they backed
against, the apples on
their heads, red-cheeked
like grief. I count
my arrows, monstrous
bodies held cold
and sleek as bone: each head
a mark, my own hand just
one way to damage
a fruitful body.

::Composition with Wreckage::

An apple is mostly flesh.

At night my daughters curl into question marks on their beds.

Punctuated by holes, a body retains little except need.

A better version ends with an egg split on a sidewalk.

I try to say something about luck, but the words I use are leave and hurry.

:: Daughter as Swallowed Goat::

I This body is not
what I expect:
hooves on my skin
like a drum, taut
as a pond in a mirror.
Almost symphonic,
how a body turns on
itself like a fracture,
cracks from the inside
out to release this
bleating song.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

Grow­ing up in post-Roe Amer­i­ca, my daugh­ters have less rights than I once did. In all like­li­hood, our con­trol over our bod­ies will con­tin­ue to erode for the fore­see­able future. I wor­ry often about what it means to have pro­duced bod­ies that will even­tu­al­ly be capa­ble of sim­i­lar pro­duc­tion, to have passed on this bur­den through a shared bod­i­ly inher­i­tance. How can a body be both com­plic­it in and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly react against the cul­tur­al and now legal expec­ta­tions of pro­duc­tion? The result­ing poems func­tion as my mea cul­pa, an offer­ing to give my daugh­ters in place of an expla­na­tion. Each attempts to trace the guilt I feel as their moth­er and strives to imag­ine an exit strat­e­gy for them. Maybe the start I’ve made here, with­in the world of the poem, will help them move for­ward with the strength they’ll undoubt­ed­ly need in the world I’ve asked them to inhab­it, in the bod­ies I’ve made.

Ste­fanie Kir­by is the author of Fruit­ful (Drift­wood Press, 2024), win­ner of the Adrift Chap­book Con­test, and Remain­der, forth­com­ing from Bull City Press. Her poet­ry has been includ­ed in Best of the Net and Poet­ry Dai­ly, and appears in West Branch, phoebe, The Mass­a­chu­setts Review, The Maine Review, The Cincin­nati Review, and else­where. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.

3 Poems

Poetry / Julia Kolchinsky 

 

:: Tell me it gets easier ::

               every new parent asks,
It doesn’t, I say bluntly & something
               inside us shatters a little, not 
hope, too large, uncontainable 
               in the body, like sky or the layers 
of ocean my son knows
               are named sunlight,
twilight, midnight, abyss, & trenches,
               the further down 
the closer to war. Tell me
               it gets easier, they ask
to hear difficulty or darkness
               are temporary, but the depths 
are endless not because 
               they do not end but because 
we’ve never reached the bottom.
               In water, the difference
between float / sink / swim / drown
               are matters of breath & motion,
little to do with light & everything
               with ease. 
Endurance a resistance all its own.
               It doesn’t, I say again, my face
reflected in the shallow sink
               that just won’t drain.
It never gets easier, I exhale.
               We just grow used to bearing
difficulty. We hold our breaths 
               long enough 
to reach the surface.
.

:: When a friend texted to say her son’s fish died & the child won’t stop wailing ::

I told her if my son had a single wish 
he confesses would bring our cat 

back from the dead though he was only 
a year old when I found Ele P. Hant

motionless in his litter box 
even in death the cat named elephant 

was the most respectable animal 
refusing to sleep in my bed for a whole week 

the way he had for eleven years & my one-year-old 
spent most of his life pulling & smacking & chasing 

the cat with hands the opposite of what we think 
is love but what does a child see as tenderness? none of us 

remain children long enough to know & I asked 
how long they’d had the fish? more than a year she said pandemic  

pet meant to help her son through absence & if not 
replace grandparents & playmates at least give him someone
 
to watch through water & it must have helped 
teach him how we can love without 

touch & this morning I write to see 
how they are doing her son was inconsolable 

she’s worried what this means for bigger 
human losses & I said my son is only afraid
 
of two things: getting a shot & losing me 
all other pain abstraction I say our people 

make every loss catastrophe & every death 
all death & Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote we are all walking
 
cemeteries carrying our dead inside us 
but she writes there has been no mention
 
of the fish or its death & kids are resilient I say we 
are resilient I say resilience & every time 

the word distances from its origin “an act 
of rebounding” jumping back resilience 

meaning not survival but our ability to exist 
that much more distant from one another

:: The day after the longest day of the year::

is longer & hotter & the sun 
              rises as if it knows 
                             it will refuse to set 
              & solstice is a lie 
from an elsewhere
              language meaning 
                            “to stand still” 
              when really 
my son wakes 
              with an urge 
                            to whirl & keep
              whirring knowing no 
stillness & in a single 
              day he has 
                            too many 
              highest & lowest 
points for even his own
              must-know-the-exact-
                           count-of-everything
              brain to quantify 
& I am crying in the car again
                            with his little sister 
              strapped in her car seat 
the hour of daylight
              seems a whole-day long 
                            & she asks Mama, please 
              play “Astronaut in the Ocean”  
because it’s big brother’s 
              favorite & he’s not here
                            after his solar flare hands 
              struck my chest 
the way meteors have pelleted 
              the moon for eons & she’s  
                            so used to being pocked 
              there’s no pain 
anymore just pressure & dent 
              we’re underwater & I don’t hold
                            my breath or breathe
               & no I say to my daughter
trying to explain 
              another’s sadness
                            to a three-year-old 
              who knows only 
her own & screams 
              hot tears I want “Astronaut 
              in the Ocean” & the sun 
                            turns liquid at the wheel 
              & I scream too & we’re both 
sobbing now the sun rising higher 
              & for an instant 
                            through the windshield 
              glare & winding 
mimosa blooms
              Arkansas’ unbearable heat
                            catches in cement 
              & the sun swims 
still in the road ahead
              & I give in & play 
                            “What you know 
              about rollin’ down 
in the deep? . . .” & our tears 
              start to dry in all that wet
                            sunlight & she asks 
             Are you happy 
now, Mama? & yes
              I tell her I am 
                            & when I come home 
              & for a split second 
of radiant stillness 
              my son wraps hot 
                            around me 
              I’ll tell him I am happy 
knowing the sun keeps burning 
              & he cannot stop 
                            long enough to ask

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

These poems come from my forth­com­ing book, PARALLAX, which deals with par­ent­ing a neu­ro­di­verse child on the autism spec­trum under the shad­ow of the war in Ukraine, my birth­place. The book is an account of tak­ing care of the many bod­ies depend­ing on mine, while con­tin­u­ing to take care of my own through the act of writ­ing. As my now eight-year-old express­es his own fas­ci­na­tion with death, vio­lence, and the grotesque, my strug­gles with par­ent­ing over­lap with pro­cess­ing present-day war on the same black soil that took so many of my ances­tors dur­ing the Holo­caust by bul­lets across ter­ri­to­ries of the for­mer Sovi­et Union. These three poems take on the exhaus­tion and non-stop momen­tum of par­ent­ing. Poet­ry has become a way of both pro­cess­ing and escap­ing from the over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence of your whole self being need­ed whol­ly by some­one else, and in some instances, of your whole self being sub­sumed by the needs and desires of oth­ers. These poems are my way of con­nect­ing back to my own voice. My song. My body. My whole­ness. They are a way of cre­at­ing and reach­ing out to a com­mu­ni­ty of fel­low par­ent poets to remind us: we are all in a ver­sion of this beau­ti­ful strug­gle togeth­er, and even when it feels impos­si­ble, we will get through it. And even though it does­n’t get eas­i­er, we get stronger and more able to bear the dif­fi­cul­ty. We are here and will con­tin­ue to be here for our chil­dren. And the page, the poem, the lyric impulse, this will con­tin­ue to be there for all of us. 

Julia Kolchin­sky (for­mer­ly Das­bach) emi­grat­ed from Dnipro, Ukraine when she was six years old. She is the author of three poet­ry col­lec­tions: The Many Names for Moth­er, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). She has two forth­com­ing books, PARALLAX (The Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas Press, 2025) final­ist of the Miller Williams Prize select­ed by Patri­cia Smith, and When the World Stopped Touch­ing (YesYes Books, 2027), a col­lab­o­ra­tive col­lec­tion with Luisa Muradyan. Her writ­ing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review. Her recent awards include Hunger Moun­tain’s Ruth Stone Poet­ry Prize, Michi­gan Quar­ter­ly Review’s Prize in Non­fic­tion, and a Sus­tain­able Arts Foun­da­tion Grant. She is at work on a col­lec­tion of linked lyric essays about par­ent­ing her neu­ro­di­verse child and the end of her mar­riage under the shad­ow of the war in Ukraine. Julia is Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing at Deni­son University. 

2 Poems

Poetry / Eduardo Martínez — Leyva 

 

::After The Shooting, You Have A Panic Attack In The Supermarket::

On a Saturday morning, you drive across Francis Scott Key Bridge,
mindful of cyclists and joggers; the tourists blocking the sun from their eyes
to catch a glimpse of the imperious monument looming over everyone.
Another stone God they’ve come to worship. But you’re here because you’re hungry. 
Stuff your cart with spreads and fancy cheeses that in another life, you could 
never afford, walk through the shiny, polished aisles, greeting others with a nod or 
short, quick smirk. You feel warmth around your eyes. Open the carton of
eggs to examine each one. Looking for cracks, checking the expiration dates.
When all of a sudden, you think, was this how it was? Was this how it happened?
A moment so boring, you’re already thinking of the next boring moment,
and the one after that. Is this it? Lifting and tapping a cantaloupe, looking
for black, welting spots on an heirloom tomato, thinking of the week’s lunch
or lesson you haven’t yet planned. Picturing your students on Monday morning,
staring into the white board’s clean, blank face. Waiting. Remembering all those times 
you hushed their panic during lockdown drills, as you shoved your heads underneath 
tables and desks. You thought yourself ready. Is it? This? Funny how life happens, no, 
funny how life needs death for it to happen, be compared to. Valued. But you knew this 
already. Coming in from the parking lot, barely missing that red light. You knew.
Just as elsewhere, someone is slipping their feet into a new pair of shoes,
while parents set the table for breakfast, sisters get ready to sell raffle tickets,
And brothers forget to heave their hearts to their throats before getting into their cars, 
rushing for a carton of milk they meant to buy earlier that week.
They knew too. You hope. Every one of them.

:: What’s Above Us Is Either Dead Or Still Dying ::

Suddenly there’s the urge to ruin 
every garden I see,
uproot every goddamn flower
until my hands are the throbbing red 

that traumatizes most people.
It’s no longer hunting season, which means 
I can roam freely with the others, if
they’ll have me. They won’t. 

To live through the breakdown, 
one must first understand
the thing that breaks
is always breaking, quietly. 

As such, I try to go unnoticed, 
swept all the rooms I’d been in 
before exiting. Leaving behind
a certain kind of warmth in cushions 

and furniture, unique to those types 
of animals that know of no master’s 
touch. And I think of myself lucky 
having survived all these years 

calming my own blood down 
whenever it felt loud and unbearable, 
and I was alone. Have been alone 
and will be. By this time of night, 

the foragers have crept back
to their rooms, sleeping off
the afternoon’s chores, leaning 
into their loved ones, leaning into 

their very own flesh, the art
they get to live in. Clean and honest. 
It is quiet enough for me to see myself 
as something other than tragic. 

More than an itch on the palm’s open 
surface. As vast and with purpose
as the sky above, silently spreading itself 
over my little, borrowed room.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

These two poems appear in my debut col­lec­tion, Cow­boy Park, which won the 2024 Felix Pol­lak Prize in Poet­ry and is forth­com­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Press. Cop­ing with grief and trau­ma is one com­mon theme through­out the book.

In 2019, my mom sur­vived a mass shoot­ing at a Wal­mart in my home­town of El Paso, TX. Since then, I’ve been cap­tur­ing the after­math and the emo­tions that haunt her and rip­ple through our fam­i­ly. Ini­tial­ly, I was par­a­lyzed by fear, hes­i­tant to write about the event and the survivor’s guilt that gripped our fam­i­ly. The poem—“After the Shoot­ing, You Have a Pan­ic Attack in the Supermarket”—reflects on those weeks when I had to per­se­vere despite bat­tling pan­ic attacks, sleep­less nights, and an inabil­i­ty even to name the trau­ma we endured. I am still on this jour­ney, writ­ing toward under­stand­ing and solace, even after all these years.

I penned “What’s Above Us Is Either Dead or Still Dying” when I returned to poet­ry after a long hia­tus. Liv­ing in Province­town dur­ing the off-sea­son, sur­round­ed by fel­low cre­atives, I immersed myself in writ­ing with­out dis­trac­tions. It was a time of pro­found self-reflec­tion, growth, and heal­ing. I embraced fail­ure, shed my fears, and learned to sit with my grief. Most impor­tant­ly, I learned to be kind to my words and, ulti­mate­ly, to be kind to myself.

Eduar­do Martínez-Ley­va was born in El Paso, TX to Mex­i­can immi­grants. His work has appeared in Poet­ry Mag­a­zine, The Boston Review, The Jour­nal, Fron­tier Poet­ry, Best New Poets, and else­where. He’s received fel­low­ships from Can­to­Mun­do, The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Cen­ter in Province­town, the Lamb­da Lit­er­ary Foun­da­tion, and a teach­ing fel­low­ship from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, where he earned his MFA. His debut poet­ry col­lec­tion, Cow­boy Park, was select­ed by Amaud Jamaul John­son as the win­ner of the Felix Pol­lak Prize in Poet­ry and is forth­com­ing in Novem­ber 2024 from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Press. 

 

 

 

2 Poems

Poetry / Chelsea Rathburn 

 

:: Why I Can’t Watch Poltergeist ::

Because the horror played in endless loops
on HBO the summer I was eight

and my cousins made me watch when no adults 
were home, then told me that I couldn’t tell. 

Because the trap door to our attic hid 
inside my closet, just like the one in the movie, 

so my closet no longer softly glowed 
but seemed to seethe with light from one bare bulb, 

and my cousins all swore it was a portal 
to the Other Side, and though I called them liars

I worried it was true. Because when I learned, 
years later, about the ancient burial mounds 

of the Tequesta that Henry Flagler leveled 
to build Miami’s first grand hotel,

I thought of the scene with the muddy swimming pool
and all the angry skeletons roiling in it, 

and their fury seemed reasonable, and the land cursed. 
Because even though I’d like to read it now

as an obvious metaphor for mindless consumption 
and American greed, I’m afraid that I’ll be eight

again, pressed into the couch cushions, convinced
that I could call my worst fears into life,

and certain that if they came no one would breach 
the lip of the attic door to rescue me.

:: The One About the Haunted House ::

At first, the jokes we made about the ghost 
were jokes, our way of laughing off the lights 
that turned on by themselves in empty rooms 
and the pictures that kept falling from the walls. 
Neither of us believed in ghosts, but we named 
ours Bobby, after the former occupant.
Oh, that’s just Bobby, we’d tell our dinner guests 
when the range hood fan began its frantic spin. 
We’d explain how it all could be explained – 
faulty wiring, shoddy nails – and besides, 
he didn’t die here but in a nursing home.
We didn’t believe in ghosts but by all accounts 
ours was a kind man when alive (we learned 
he’d been married once to a local politician
not known for being kind), and the haunting, if 
it was a haunting, seemed less malevolent 
than bewildered. Neither of us believed 
in ghosts, then things got louder and stranger,
and the problem of our not believing 
seemed smaller than the problem of the ghost 
we didn’t believe in, and though I felt 
ridiculous, I bought crystals and Googled 
exorcists and tried to keep the fear 
out of my voice in front of our daughter. 
It was a joke that sent him packing: my husband 
shook a fist at the ceiling and threatened to call
the ex-wife if he acted up again, 
and just like that, the noises stopped. Our cups 
and plates no longer flew off of the shelves,
and his leaving became a kind of punchline,
though I felt a little guilty no one missed him, 
once I was certain he was really gone.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

For the past few years, I’ve been writ­ing poems about home and foun­da­tions (phys­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal, sta­ble and oth­er­wise). While I’m inter­est­ed in the ways peo­ple choose to build safe spaces in the world, more often I find myself con­sid­er­ing the pre­car­i­ty of home, explor­ing things like infes­ta­tions, haunt­ings, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, and the long reach of pover­ty or abuse across gen­er­a­tions. In a sense, these are ideas that have pre­oc­cu­pied me since I was a child in Mia­mi, Flori­da, liv­ing first in a series of apart­ments and lat­er in a house my fam­i­ly real­ly couldn’t afford. As a kid, I was con­vinced that we would lose our house, so per­haps it’s no won­der that the movie Pol­ter­geist, which I saw when I was far too young, ter­ri­fied me. When I was writ­ing “Why I Can’t Watch Pol­ter­geist,” I had to rely on syn­opses and screen­shots because I could not bring myself to see the movie again. (I’ve always had extreme­ly vivid dreams, and even watch­ing the trail­er for a hor­ror film can give me night­mares for a week.) Giv­en how ter­ri­fied I was as a kid of being dragged to the Oth­er Side through the attic trap door in my clos­et, I’m odd­ly not that fright­ened to find myself as an adult liv­ing in a house where uncan­ny things hap­pen. I’m still hes­i­tant to say that I believe in ghosts, but Bob­by – who’d tak­en his leave when I wrote “The One About the Haunt­ed House” – still shows up from time to time.

Chelsea Rath­burn is the author of three poet­ry col­lec­tions, most recent­ly Still Life with Moth­er and Knife (LSU Press, 2019), win­ner of the 2020 Eric Hof­fer Prize in Poet­ry. Her poems have appeared in Birm­ing­ham Poet­ry Review, Cop­per Nick­el, Poet­ry, the South­ern Review, and oth­er jour­nals. Born and raised in Flori­da, she has called Geor­gia home since 2001 and cur­rent­ly teach­es at Mer­cer Uni­ver­si­ty in Macon. Since 2019, she has served as the Poet Lau­re­ate of Georgia.

2 Poems

Poetry / Aurora Shimshak

Shimshak-Poetry-20241–1
Shimshak-Poetry-2024–2

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

In my first MFA poet­ry work­shop at UW-Madi­son, our pro­fes­sor asked that we invent our own forms. That fall I was going for walks in a restored prairie close to my apart­ment, and the milk­weed along the path was plen­ti­ful. Dig­ging my thumb into one of their pods to release the fly­ing seeds felt like a slice of child­hood, a pathos appro­pri­ate to the mem­o­ry-based poems I was writ­ing. I looked up how many seeds a milk­weed pod held—200 to 250—and decid­ed my words would be those seeds, tight­ly packed, and that some of them would fly out to form their own poem.

I’ll put poems into milk­weeds when they’re not work­ing in oth­er forms. “Milk­weed to Unsor­ry” is a com­bi­na­tion of two poems that weren’t work­ing on their own—the first about my mother’s text mes­sages, the sec­ond about the sig­nif­i­cance of my niece crawl­ing into her lap.

“Milk­weed for the Bed­wet­ting Child” was a fif­teen page poem before I con­densed it into its lit­tle pod, keep­ing only the best lines and lan­guage. The fly­ing poem’s “shame gar­ment” tied to my stepmother’s throat was a sur­prise, new lan­guage that bub­bled up when I need­ed seeds to fly out. 

Auro­ra Shimshak grew up in sev­er­al rur­al com­mu­ni­ties and small cities in Wis­con­sin. Her work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in Best New Poets 2023, Cop­per Nick­el, and Poet­ry North­west, among oth­ers. She teach­es writ­ing to under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and those incar­cer­at­ed at Oakhill Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion. Her man­u­script, Home Movie of a Girl Not Swim­ming, was a final­ist for Milkweed’s Bal­lard Spahr Prize.

2 Poems

Poetry / Martha Silano 

 

:: Terminal Surreal ::

or is it surreal terminal? Something’s going on 
with my mitochondria. Something to do 
with oxidation. My cells 

need help with ridding my body of toxins, which explains 
the bear bile I drank twice daily until it turned out
it was doing nothing 

but making me nauseous. Surreal swirl of feta cheesecake 
topped with macerated cherries. Ooh, that tastes good. 
My husband calls to tell me he just heard 

the first red-winged blackbird of the season, saw bald eagles 
dive-bombing mergansers. I’m just sitting here pretending 
I don’t have ALS, that somehow, I’ll live. 

50 degrees and partly sunny: my kind of day! To forget, 
while I’m listening to honking geese, that yesterday 
a friend went into hospice, 

that the amount of misery is equal to or greater than the number of eggs 
a termite queen will lay in a lifetime—165 million. 
I learned today about the mountain stone weta, 

a cricket that, when it gets cold, freezes 85% of its body. When the blizzard 
passes, it comes back to life. Meanwhile, another eagle’s flying overhead, 
this one solo, heading south until it’s out of sight.

:: Abecedarian on a Friday Morning ::

Almost like it was, this moment, this juncture of
blood pumping from arteries, back through veins,
circling in and out of chambers, my heart’s pending 
demolition, like the not-for-billionaire’s buildings 
east and west of us, like these sturdy, strapping legs
for how long strong? I walked them yesterday past
gators and a pileated woodpecker, a blue-headed vireo 
hardly visible in the wax myrtle, its white-spectacled
eyes, the good news of its population on the rise. 
Just before, I heard a cardinal in the cattails, the kkkkrrrr
kkkrrr of a little blue heron in lettuce leaves I 
learn are native or introduced (fossils in Wyo-
ming and India). It’s hunting for insects, fish, maybe a
North Florida hopper, a tadpole, or the elusive 
Okefenokee fishing spider, who knows, or a 
pig frog, which I was really hoping to see.
Questions arise throughout our deep dive into 
racoon love as four babies making high-pitched
squeaks run along the boardwalk, stopping only 
to make sure their pals are still nearby, cuz no one,
us included, wants to be alone when they die. When this
vacation from the void closes shop, my lungs losing their 
winsome urge to rise and fall, when I can no longer
xxx and ooo, even via text, breathe deep the gathering gloom, 
yak, yap, yawn, yes, yarn, yield, or do that lub-dub thing, until 
zapping myself with a cocktail takes me where I haven’t been.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

The deal is that in Novem­ber 2023 I was diag­nosed with ALS. I knew some­thing weird was going on with my body in ear­ly 2023, but it took at least six months to wend my way from doc­tor, to doc­tor, to doc­tor, to neu­rol­o­gist. When I first found out I was ter­mi­nal, I did every­thing I could to pre­tend it wasn’t true, that this couldn’t be hap­pen­ing to me (aka mag­i­cal think­ing). In ear­ly 2024, I could still walk five miles, but then it dwin­dled to two miles, then one mile, then half a mile, then to no walk­ing at all except around our home and to the front yard to sit on my trusty chaise longue, where I bird­watch, look up at the sky, and watch/listen to song­birds. Today, thanks to a small dose of amphet­a­mine, I’m able to spend a lit­tle more time on that chaise, or in my bed for hours, writ­ing and revis­ing poems, read­ing books about the nat­ur­al world, and doing way too many cross­word puz­zles. As I was com­ing to terms with my diagnosis,I used poet­ry to make sense of what was hap­pen­ing to me, poems that com­bine the dai­ly chal­lenges of liv­ing with a neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­der with the med­ical, the meta­phys­i­cal, the cos­mo­log­i­cal, along with the won­ders of the plants and ani­mals that I am grate­ful to engage with daily.

Martha Silano has authored sev­en poet­ry col­lec­tions, includ­ing, most recent­ly, This One We Call Ours, win­ner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Poet­ry Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024), and Grav­i­ty Assist, Reck­less Love­ly, and The Lit­tle Office of the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion, all from Sat­ur­na­lia Books. Acre Books will pub­lish Ter­mi­nal Sur­re­al, a book about Silano’s expe­ri­ence of liv­ing with ALS, in the fall of 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poet­ry, Paris Review, Terrain.org, The Mis­souri Review, New Eng­land Review, and Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, and in many print antholo­gies, includ­ing Cas­ca­dia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecol­o­gy, and Poet­ry (Moun­taineers Books, 2023), Dear Amer­i­ca: Let­ters of Hope, Habi­tat, Defi­ance, and Democ­ra­cy (Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2019), and the Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry series (Nor­ton, 2009).. Awards include North Amer­i­can Review’s James Hearst Poet­ry Prize and The Cincin­nati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poet­ry Prize. Her web­site is avail­able at marthasilano.net.

The Ceramic French Press At Our Airbnb In Joshua Tree, California

Poetry / Edward Thomas-Herrera 

 

 
Thomas-Her­rera-2024

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

Ear­li­er this year, I was for­tu­nate enough to encounter a poem by William Ward But­ler enti­tled Dear I Can’t Believe It’s Not But­ter [Let­ter #2]. It’s a short, beau­ti­ful piece that starts off rather com­i­cal­ly (as the title would imply), before tran­si­tion­ing into some­thing much more pro­found. I loved it. As a result, I became intrigued by the idea of writ­ing a poem addressed to some­thing that wasn’t alive. Mem­o­ries start­ed flood­ing back about a ter­ri­ble French cof­fee press in our—well, just read the poem. It was nev­er my aim to get as dark as it did, but I’ve always believed that when you allow the words and images to tell you where they want to go, you should do every­thing you can to step out of their way. In the end, you’ll reach some­thing (hope­ful­ly) more mean­ing­ful. When dis­cussing this piece with friends, one of them wise­ly not­ed, “We inad­ver­tent­ly reveal so much about our­selves when writ­ing about inan­i­mate objects.”

Edward Thomas-Her­rera is a Sal­vado­ran-Amer­i­can poet, play­wright, and per­former liv­ing and work­ing in Chica­go, Illi­nois. He has a very long resumé of stage cred­its with which he refus­es to bore you, but he’s hap­py to tell you his poet­ry has appeared in Tofu Ink Arts Press and Beaver Magazine.

 

My Desires Have Invented New Desires

Poetry / Joshua Zeitler 

 

:: My Desires Have Invented New Desires ::

	from a line by Hélène Cixous

I believe in a God who does not exist
           as a discrete entity, but as a collective
yearning.
                 The only way to be Godless
	    is to be satisfied.
			                   Once I added sugar
grain by grain to tea, sipping in-between
	      to test.
		           By the time I tasted sweetness
there was no tea left.
		                       What have I become?
	        I asked my empty cup.
				                          Once I dropped
a teacup because it lied to me.
				                       The break
	        was singular,
		                         clean;
			                             I studied it
	        like a holy text, cutting my tongue
on the sharp edge.
		                  The only way to tell
	     a story is to begin with desire
or blood,
	         drop by drop.

Once I wanted to plant a pill in my body
	     like a seed.
		                  Once I wanted to tell a story
about how I became the thing that grows
	     rather than the dirt.
			                          The only way to dig
is with your hands,
		                   on your knees.

	In this way, digging is like a prayer.

In this way, the prayer becomes God.

	The only way to name a thing
is to interrogate its desires.
			                          To cover
	their mouths and let the years pass.

The only way to pass the years is to want
	       time to stand still.
			                        The only way
to make time stand still is to name its desires.

	In this way, every name is a lie
born of yearning.
		                In this way, every lie
	       is its own holy proof.
			                              Once I learned
my name was the only true part of me left,
	      I cupped it in my false hands.

What shall I become? 
		                        I asked,
				                       wondering
        	if I should let it drop.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

In one month from writ­ing this, I will have an appoint­ment with my gen­er­al prac­ti­tion­er at which I will request to begin gen­der-affirm­ing hor­mone ther­a­py. I’ve been think­ing of this appoint­ment as a poem: a com­pact moment, discrete—I enter the office, I leave the office—and yet spi­ral­ing back­ward and for­ward through my life. Over a decade of doubt, of inde­ci­sion, of weigh­ing what I might lose against what I might gain, has led to this one appoint­ment. And after? I can only guess. Being non­bi­na­ry in a rur­al envi­ron­ment isn’t easy. I have long strug­gled to extri­cate the way I see myself from the lim­it­ed ways that the peo­ple around me see me. Do I have the courage to pur­sue my own hap­pi­ness at the expense of oth­ers’ expec­ta­tions? Many days, I don’t know that I do. But this desire has exist­ed in me so long, it has become its own being, a liv­ing thing I can’t ignore.

I don’t pre­tend that my iden­ti­ty has any bear­ing on the mer­it of my work. When I first began sub­mit­ting poet­ry, I grap­pled with the first sev­en words of my bio­graph­i­cal state­ment for a long time. Joshua Zeitler is a queer, non­bi­na­ry writer…Who cares? The inevitable answer: I do. Words from Joy Ladin in Trou­bling the Line echo through my mind: acute, defin­i­tive, life-chang­ing. I some­times won­der whether I would iden­ti­fy as non­bi­na­ry if I weren’t a writer. This is not to say that I doubt the valid­i­ty of my iden­ti­ty, but that writ­ing has allowed me the free­dom to explore those spaces of self that might oth­er­wise remain long, threat­en­ing shad­ows in the monot­o­ny of my day-to-day life. Poet­ry expands to accom­mo­date the com­plex, unsta­ble, con­tra­dic­to­ry rela­tions between body and soul, social self and psy­che (Joy Ladin’s words again), which cap­i­tal­ism can­not. My writ­ing and my iden­ti­ty are mar­ried, inextricable.

And then, of course, there is the ques­tion of the name. When I sent out that first sub­mis­sion (anoth­er moment that acts like a poem), I knew I was mak­ing a choice. It didn’t have to be per­ma­nent, but I would be bet­ter off if it were. How­ev­er my name might not fit who I have become, I decid­ed, it was a gift from my moth­er. Our rela­tion­ship has become frac­tured, per­haps beyond repair, and so I think of my name as the one thing from her I will keep, a way of hon­or­ing her. Which ways of being are closed off by this choice? Which are bro­ken open? If there is an answer to be found, I will find it on the page.

Joshua Zeitler is a queer, non­bi­na­ry writer based in rur­al Michi­gan. They received their MFA from Alma Col­lege, and their work has appeared in Pit­head Chapel, Paci­fi­ca Lit­er­ary Review, The Q&A Queerzine, HAD, and elsewhere.

 

The Miracle

Fiction / Jean-Baptiste Andre

 

:: The Miracle ::

            Under the flam­boyán tree turn­ing from mar­malade to rust, whose late sum­mer canopy dripped a slow hail of igua­nas, Joaquin con­fessed to Maria his night­mare. In it, Joaquin was suf­fo­cat­ing as the air in his room was sucked into the black hole in the cen­ter of his palm. Joaquin felt a push at the back of his head, pulling his eyes into the dark­ness. Gasp­ing, he tried to close the hole by press­ing his hands togeth­er. Instead, his hand was pulled in and when his skin crossed the bar­ri­er from air to void he felt the ori­gin of grav­i­ty and he him­self was swal­lowed and gone. Then he would wake.

             The air hung chill and sweet from bloom­ing hibis­cus. An igua­na thumped to the ground beside them and scur­ried away. Sum­mer had end­ed abrupt­ly as it had start­ed. The two twelve year-olds hud­dled togeth­er, Maria half a head taller than Joaquin. They shared choco­late eyes and olive skin, though Maria’s black hair fell straight down to her shoul­ders where Joaquin’s lazy brown ringlets bounced above his eyebrows.

            “Show me again,” Maria demanded.

            Joaquin held out his left hand. He had sausage fin­gers, and a wide palm col­ored in patch­es of peach and pink. In the cen­ter of his palm, where mus­cu­la­ture left a soft-slop­ing val­ley, there was a hole in the shape of a per­fect cir­cle. About as wide as her thumb, when Maria rotat­ed Joaquin’s hand face down, the hole was per­fect­ly see-through. Morn­ing light bore through the fleshy cylin­der onto the grass and high, thin hair of weeds at their bare feet. Maria flipped the hand again. Palm up, the hole was rimmed with shiny pale scar tis­sue, and entire­ly black. It was the same dark­ness as the far cor­ner of Maria’s room at night.

            Maria and Joaquin shared a room that sum­mer, cousins from dif­fer­ent cor­ners of the island sent to stay with their grand­fa­ther, Doc­tor Pas­cal. Maria had begged her par­ents to let her vis­it him, des­per­ate to feel new soil between her toes. Joaquin had been sent when he snuck into a cop­per mine, land­ed on rebar, and punched a hole clean through his hand. His par­ents thought it pru­dent to allow the doc­tor in the fam­i­ly to exam­ine the pecu­liar injury.

             The doc­tor con­duct­ed tests behind doors that were closed to Maria, but Joaquin told her about them just the same. Joaquin could still move the fin­gers on his left hand with rel­a­tive ease, but was stiff when try­ing to touch his pinky to his thumb. Joaquin’s grand­fa­ther found the blood clot­ted as nor­mal and smelled no dif­fer­ent than ordi­nary blood, vicious and metal­lic. When Joaquin placed his palm down, the hole appeared like injuries the doc­tor was famil­iar with, and objects could pass through it as a tun­nel. When fac­ing up, the hole was dark, as if light itself did not pass. Objects pushed through the hole did not appear at the oth­er end and could not be pulled back out.

             While the doc­tor con­duct­ed his tests, Maria con­duct­ed hers. She pushed a stick into the dark side of Joaquin’s palm with no resis­tance. It dis­ap­peared. She pushed a stick halfway in, and tried to pull it back out. The stick end­ed at the point of con­tact with the hole, cut off in a cross sec­tion. She found that if a pen­cil was held at an angle and rotat­ed, the hole would neat­ly sharp­en the pen­cil to the finest point.

            Tonight, Maria had anoth­er test planned.

            “Stay still for a moment, you’re too rest­less,” she told Joaquin.

            “Well maybe you’re too still,” he coun­tered. “What are you try­ing, anyway?”

            “I want to see what hap­pens to my nail,” she replied.

            “Try if you want to. I’m not touch­ing it after that dream.” Joaquin stuck his palm out like a fish­ing lure, invit­ing Maria to bite.

            She gin­ger­ly grasped his wrist, and as she low­ered her fin­ger to the edge of the dark hole he jos­tled his hand. The hole missed Maria’s nail by a hair.

“Care­ful! Don’t leave it hun­gry, it’s impa­tient,” Joaquin teased.

             “Oh shush, be seri­ous now. I want to see how it reacts to liv­ing things.” Maria stead­ied Joaquin’s hand and brought her left index straight down, pre­cise like a nee­dle thread­ing a bead. The nail dipped slight­ly in and Joaquin flashed a grin. Maria jerked her hand back, and she let out a cry.

             “Ouch Joaquin! I said stay still!”

             Beads of blood spot­ted the flam­boyán tree, set­tling on it like ver­mil­lion lichen. Joaquin’s smile sagged and he went pale.

             “Your fin­ger, Maria, the tip is gone! We have to go to Grand­fa­ther, but he can’t find out it was me! He already thinks I’m a freak,” Joaquin said, pac­ing around Maria while she assessed the dam­age. She clutched her fin­ger in a red-soaked hand­ker­chief as the pain pulsed from hun­dreds of nee­dles to a burn before set­tling on a throb­bing ache she could not be sure was hers.

             Tak­ing deep breaths, Maria turned to her cousin. “Joaquin, I need you to get me some tall weeds, half a lemon, and ginger.”

             “Done – you start think­ing of an excuse for Grandfather.”

             When he returned, Maria tied the weeds tight­ly around her wrapped fin­ger. “For the bleed­ing,” she mum­bled, as the ache flared back into spikes.

“For the pain,” she con­tin­ued through a mouth­ful of gin­ger root.

             “Infec­tion,” she fin­ished, squeez­ing the lemon onto the hand­ker­chief that wrapped her fin­ger. Red fad­ed pink, and pain seared as the juice reached the open wound. Maria, grown cold, broke into a sweat.

            Joaquin eyed Maria’s fin­ger as if it were the dan­ger. “Are you alright now? Why did­n’t you just go to Grand­fa­ther? It would have been faster.”

            Maria slumped. “I’ll be fine. Heal­ing is heal­ing, no mat­ter how you do it. Good things take time. But you’re right, we should go see the doctor.”

            Their clop­ping steps echoed down the coarse brick road to their grandfather’s estate. It loomed before them, white­washed arch­es grow­ing proud­ly from stone foun­da­tions. Between the slim pil­lars, blue tiles embla­zoned with red flam­boyán flow­ers dot­ted the walls. Inside the house, it smelled of med­i­cine. Sharp met­als and alco­hols threat­ened their nos­trils. Maria craned her neck to peer down the west hall­way into the room where her grand­fa­ther con­duct­ed his tests, and Joaquin looked every­where but there. A bronze voice sum­moned them to the study.

            “You are late.” Their grand­fa­ther was a large man with a thin­ning crown of steel and sil­ver hair. His skin was like dry clay, cracks and folds set as if he was always smelling an infec­tion. He spoke to both and nei­ther of them, read­ing his jour­nal. “Chil­dren should be on hand when called. Sit. Maria, your finger.”

            “An acci­dent with a fish­ing line out­side; my fault. I wrapped it and soaked it in lime juice,” she replied.

            Joaquin nudged her and mouthed a thank you. The doc­tor did not notice.

            “A peasant’s treat­ment… but effec­tive.” He cleared his throat. “No mat­ter. Sum­mer is end­ing. It is time to think of your future. Joaquin, your injury is at most a curi­ous defor­mi­ty. You can still join my prac­tice. We will estab­lish the Pas­cal Cen­ter of Med­i­cine. I have enrolled you in the board­ing school I attend­ed at your age. You leave for the main­land the first week of fall.”

            The doc­tor clipped Joaquin’s bud­ding protests. “It is done, Joaquin. Maria, you will return to your vil­lage and your par­ents will pre­pare you for a suit­or in these com­ing years.”

            “I want to study under you, Doc­tor. Can’t I learn med­i­cine?” Maria asked.

            “Med­i­cine is a man’s field, Maria.” Doc­tor Pas­cal eyed her wrapped fin­ger. “But your wits may be use­ful. I will talk to your par­ents. Per­haps you can find a suit­or here.”

            With that, their grandfather’s eyes went back to the jour­nal. They were dis­missed with­out a word.

             The last red rays of sum­mer bled out onto the cof­fee fields as Joaquin pre­pared for his depar­ture. When Maria’s fin­ger healed, she saw her left index was cut clean a cen­time­ter short­er, like a sen­tence inter­rupt­ed. Joaquin often apol­o­gized, but she cut him off.

             “Now we know. Just be care­ful,” she said.

             In those final days, Joaquin and Maria found the oth­er chil­dren in the neigh­bor­hood would pay to see Joaquin’s strange hand, though he nev­er let any­one else close to the demonstrations.

             “I don’t want to be a doc­tor, Maria,” he con­fessed after one such show.

             “And I don’t want to stay here for­ev­er,” she replied. “But things will work out, just wait.”

             Joaquin was shipped off to the main­land the next morn­ing. After his numer­ous tests, Doc­tor Pas­cal pre­scribed his grand­son a glove to cov­er his unsight­ly disfiguration.

 

*

 

            Maria built tow­ers. She stacked the jars of herbs in the back of the phar­ma­cy, and not­ed inven­to­ry in her ledger. Her grand­fa­ther had sug­gest­ed she find an alter­na­tive when she pressed him on start­ing her own stud­ies in med­i­cine. Instead, she became an apothe­cary. Few could afford med­ical ser­vices out­side of emer­gen­cies, but knowl­edge of native plants and poul­tices were in high demand across the island. If it made enough prof­it, he would spon­sor her trip to the mainland.

            The glass jars reflect­ed back the warped light of a young woman of nine­teen, changed from the day she had first begged to work in the phar­ma­cy. Her jaw was sharp­er and she stood half a head high­er than before, but her cut fin­ger had not grown back a mil­lime­ter. Her reflec­tions stood straight for a moment, before a thump brought them falling at all angles. Maria quick­ly caught the tum­bling flasks in the hem of her dress. One slipped through the gap in her grip and the glass cracked in a spi­der­web. She whipped around to see who had slammed the door. Her eyes slid over the dusty wood shelves and found him. Sebas­t­ian, the phar­ma­cist who often stole looks at her and made promis­es to whisk her to dis­tant lands stood dumb, arms at his sides star­ing straight at Maria.

            Maria cursed the unsteady jars and her hand.

            “What is it, Sebastian?”

            “Joaquin is back. He brought a woman. You should go see him; I will cov­er the phar­ma­cy. He’s in the town square.”

            Maria set her jaw and marched out. Her steps echoed down the dusty cob­ble­stone and ruf­fled a pan­de­mo­ni­um of par­rots. Green and red crests flashed up out of sight. The white spire of the church stared down the town square, framed by col­or­ful geo­met­ric build­ings. Trees dot­ted the court­yard, and this evening the fall breeze brought chil­dren who claimed the space as theirs. Through the whirling flock of chil­dren chas­ing their ball, the smell of charred tobac­co and leather waft­ed to Maria. At the end of the trail stood Joaquin, fin­ish­ing a cig­ar with the may­or. As she approached, Maria heard Joaquin’s part­ing words.

            “And I thank God to have been blessed with this gift. I hope to share it…” He trailed off when he saw his cousin approach­ing. “Maria! How have you been? I hear the old man tricked you into fol­low­ing his practice.”

            “Joaquin, you look well.”

            Though she had grown, her head only reached his shoul­der now. Where the island years had sharp­ened her fea­tures, Joaquin had round­ed out on the main­land, his skin stretched shiny and elas­tic. His fuller fig­ure was hugged in a dark embroi­dered coat with sil­ver cuff but­tons which matched the sil­ver white glove on his left hand.

            “You seem to have hit suc­cess after aban­don­ing us,” she said.

            “I didn’t aban­don any­one. I took a chance instead of wait­ing around for one.” Joaquin picked at a thread on his coat.

Maria tried anoth­er approach. “So, who is this woman I hear you came with?”

            Joaquin smiled and his eyes glint­ed. “You must be talk­ing about my busi­ness part­ner, Elle.” The fine­ly dressed woman stood off to the side of the square, ges­tur­ing at a crowd and shak­ing her gold­en hair. The chil­dren had aban­doned their soc­cer game, rapt, and a small hand­ful of adults observed at a cau­tious dis­tance like cats around a fire.

            “We found each oth­er at board­ing school. Just like when we were chil­dren, Maria, peo­ple pay to see what I can do. We trav­el, she gath­ers the crowds, and I per­form.” Joaquin beamed.

            Maria tried to scratch an itch on her miss­ing fin­ger­tip. Joaquin went on.

            “No wed­ding ring yet? You must be near­ly twen­ty, not get­ting any younger.”

            “And you’ve got­ten fat­ter, but I’m not try­ing to make lard out of you,” she replied.

“I’ve missed your wit.” Joaquin chor­tled. “I need to speak with Grand­fa­ther, will you walk with me?”

            The two retraced famil­iar steps to their grandfather’s estate. They passed worn hous­es with tiles cracked like chipped teeth, and Maria recount­ed the fate of neigh­bors and friends well into the final chirps of the evening. Joaquin told of dif­fer­ent trees and peo­ple who talked from the back of their throat. He spoke of cities with cathe­dral libraries and hid­den gam­bling hous­es where wish­es were grant­ed. He shared his plans to take his act across the mainland.

             Steel­ing her­self, Maria turned to Joaquin. “When you go back, take me with you?” In years past it would have been an order.

            “I will, sweet cousin,” he said. “But my act needs some sup­port before it can go across the coun­try. I need your help con­vinc­ing the old man. If he invests in us we can make some real money.”

            “Won’t the show grow on its own?”

            “You won’t get where you want by wait­ing, Maria.”

            They arrived at the white­washed arch­es of their grandfather’s estate. Maria kept it tidy. Despite some stained paint and a few pil­lars that had bloat­ed with soft wood dur­ing the last hur­ri­cane sea­son, the struc­ture was near­ly unchanged. The thick canopy of the flam­boyán tree still shad­ed the rear walls of the house. They stepped in, and Maria crossed to the west hall­way to deposit her inven­to­ry list.

            “You use his exam­i­na­tion room?” Joaquin stayed a few feet out­side the entrance and gave it a sus­pi­cious glance.

            “It’s my apothe­cary office. The doc­tor doesn’t prac­tice any­more, he just over­sees the pharmacy.”

Maria led Joaquin to the study. The doc­tor sat in his chair like they had been cut from the same stone.

            “Sweet Grand­fa­ther, it makes me hap­py to see you in good health,” Joaquin said as the two entered the study.

            “Why are you here, Joaquin?” The scowl lines around his mouth cement­ed. “The last time you wrote was to aban­don my practice.”

            “It hurt me to do so, Grand­fa­ther. But I’m here to make it up with an invest­ment for the future. Just like you were fas­ci­nat­ed by my injury, so are peo­ple all around the world. I have a show, and it’s mak­ing good mon­ey. My part­ner and I want to take it across the main­land. As our main investor, you’d make a return many times over.”

            “No.” The reply came immediately.

            “You–” Joaquin choked on his words.

            “Why not?” Maria asked.

            “I am a man of med­i­cine. I will not spon­sor a freak show,” the doc­tor replied.

            “You would be miss­ing out on a big oppor­tu­ni­ty,” respond­ed Joaquin.

            “My deci­sion is made.” The doc­tor looked down at his jour­nals. The con­ver­sa­tion was over.

            Maria broke the silence. “The apothe­cary was my idea, and a good invest­ment. If this is suc­cess­ful we could still expand to estab­lish the Pas­cal Cen­ter of Medicine.”

            The doc­tor held Maria’s gaze. She pressed on.

            “At least go see the show.”

            And so it was that the doc­tor and Maria pressed against a throng of whis­per­ing adults and chat­ter­ing chil­dren lat­er that night. They sat on hay bales that poked through seams in uncom­fort­able places, so the shift­ing audi­ence was like a rest­less sea. Lanterns lit an emp­ty stage.

            “BE-HOLD,” a woman’s voice boomed off­stage. “The eleventh won­der of the world, the hand of dark­ness, the man who wields the black hole!”

            With a flour­ish, Joaquin and Elle stepped onto the stage. They both wore capes that punc­tu­at­ed their every move.

            “The HAND!” she announced, draw­ing everyone’s eyes to Joaquin. He care­ful­ly removed his sil­ver glove. “The back, a tun­nel straight through!” As she spoke, she scanned the audi­ence as if search­ing for some­one, and undid her cape. She fold­ed the thin fab­ric diag­o­nal­ly along one cor­ner, and thread­ed it through Joaquin’s palm. The audi­ence mur­mured, rapt.

            “The front, an abyss!” The heads around Maria bobbed for a bet­ter view as the woman pulled out a thin stick the length of her hand and thread­ed it into the hole. The woman’s eyes pierced the audi­ence as she pushed the stick in, her fin­gers an inch away from the hole, before she let go and the last knuck­le of the stick fell back and bounced off the stage. The crowd whooped and clapped. Maria’s short­ened fin­ger throbbed, and as the lights dimmed time seemed to warp.

            In a fever dream of déjà vu, Maria watched Joaquin and his part­ner per­form a dis­tor­tion of the tests that she and Joaquin had con­duct­ed as chil­dren. Joaquin gave a hair­cut and drained a glass of water. He passed a mouse through one side of his hand, and bisect­ed it with the oth­er. Maria watched the tail drop to the floor con­nect­ed to a stump of a stom­ach.  The hind legs twitched, scoot­ing the corpse a cen­time­ter before stop­ping, leav­ing a wet, dark pud­dle. Joaquin sharp­ened a dart by rotat­ing it at an angle on the hole’s edge, and Elle threw it into an apple an audi­ence mem­ber held aloft. The peo­ple pulsed with each act, and the doc­tor sat trans­fixed next to Maria.

            Maria shout­ed with the rest of the crowd when Elle brought a rifle onto the stage.

            “Armed!” she cried. She aimed at the sky behind her and a shot echoed around the square. She reloaded the rifle as Joaquin spoke for the first time in the show. All voic­es ceased.

            “And, you can see, my gift can also stop death.” He care­ful­ly grabbed the bar­rel and aimed it at his heart, plac­ing his palm against the muzzle.

            “Armed!” cried his assistant.

            Maria closed her eyes.

             The shot rang out, and smoke drift­ed lazi­ly from the bar­rel, unaware of the mir­a­cle stand­ing unscathed before it. Joaquin took a bow, and the audi­ence erupt­ed. Even the doc­tor clapped at a mea­sured beat. Maria sensed that some­thing was try­ing to claw its way up her stomach.

            Joaquin wait­ed for the uproar to set­tle before address­ing the crowd again. “Now, for a quar­ter, any of you can be part of this act.” Mur­murs pooled in the audi­ence; some­one not­ed that it had already cost a nick­el to watch. Joaquin pressed on. “For a quar­ter, any one of you can come up, and with this mir­a­cle to stop death, I will shave your beard, I will cut your warts, I will trim your nails!” Joaquin beamed, and sud­den­ly peo­ple pushed to get in line. Maria and the doc­tor stood aside, though Maria noticed the crease that appeared in his brow when he made cal­cu­la­tions or busi­ness decisions.

            “You were right, Maria. It is a sound invest­ment,” the doc­tor would lat­er tell her. “Peo­ple pay to see miracles.”

 

*

 

            When Joaquin had per­formed his final show on the island and board­ed a ship for the main­land, Maria felt a sink­ing dread that he was already lost at sea. He did write, how­ev­er, to con­firm once he had safe­ly made it, and to inform her that his show was almost ready to take across the coun­try. He wrote two more times in as many years, once to ask for a lit­tle more mon­ey, and once to apol­o­gize. His part­ner had left the show when busi­ness was good, and the show had devolved ever since. He was sin­cere­ly sor­ry. He did not have enough mon­ey to bring Maria with him to see the main­land. He did not have enough mon­ey to pay back his grandfather.

            Soon after, her name seemed to become Poor Maria. “That Poor Maria, all of that debt and her ail­ing grand­fa­ther.” Not three years lat­er still it would become, “Poor Maria, her grand­fa­ther gone and her all alone. And the Pas­cal estate snapped up by debtors.” The apothe­cary had been her sanc­tu­ary, and even there the soft fra­grance of dried herbs was taint­ed with pity. Sebas­t­ian had become a kind com­pan­ion in the months fol­low­ing Doc­tor Pascal’s death, some­one to work along­side who saw her grit as a choice, not just as an accep­tance of hard­ship. He made gen­tle advances and helped her run the phar­ma­cy as she ran the apothe­cary. He brought her fresh Sat­ur­day ros­es and cooked her his mother’s Pal­lela. One day, he vowed, they would sell the phar­ma­cy and tour the main­land. “Mar­ry me,” he said. She did. Maria wore her wed­ding band on her right hand; she did not want a reminder of what was missing.

            Soon after the mar­riage, the promis­es of trav­el fell to hard busi­ness deci­sions. “In a few years,” Sebas­t­ian coaxed, “the phar­ma­cy will be prof­itable enough again, and we will be free of this place.” But then Sebastian’s niece was born, and a nephew, and new blood pooled and pushed the con­ver­sa­tions of leav­ing far­ther apart.

            Sebas­t­ian still brought Maria her Sat­ur­day ros­es. When Maria asked for lilies, he laughed. “Lilies couldn’t hold the depth of my love.” They danced, and made love. They set­tled into lives around each other.

            It was around that time that Maria heard again of Joaquin. He did not write, but news from the main­land spread like fleas. Cus­tomers who came in said he was found by a her­mit who had prac­ticed every reli­gion to ensure his sal­va­tion. This man believed Joaquin’s gift was the final one wor­thy of wor­ship. When the her­mit had Joaquin’s mir­a­cle fed­er­al­ly rec­og­nized, Joaquin became a mat­ter of great con­tention in the church. One Sun­day, Maria was prepar­ing plan­tains for mofon­go when Sebas­t­ian sur­prised her by get­ting up to mince the gar­lic. A raw, angry sweet­ness stung her nose as his knife thumped into the soft wood of the cut­ting board.

            “Thank you, love,” she mur­mured as she turned back to her plan­tains. She lopped the stem and head off of a plan­tain, hard green skin giv­ing way to a soft cream center.

            “What do you make of this news of Joaquin?” Sebas­t­ian asked.

            Maria cupped a plan­tain in her left hand, and ran her knife down its spine. “He only sent three let­ters. None since grandfather’s mon­ey ran out.”

            The thud­ding stopped. Sebas­t­ian scraped the gar­lic off the cut­ting board into a clay bowl with a blue glaze. He float­ed the gar­lic in olive oil, she watched it cir­cle and weave like eels.

            “What about his mir­a­cle?” he asked.

            “What about it?”

            Maria gripped the plan­tain until the peel popped, and she pried off the tough skin. The body of the plan­tain was bare, half of the flesh out, half of it still stuck in its shell.

            Sebas­t­ian began prepar­ing the onions, soak­ing them in vine­gar and salt. “Do you think he will come back here? He may have enough mon­ey to pay us,” Maria slowed beside him. “To pay you back. He owes you that much.”

             Maria ran the knife again down the plan­tain, this time down the abdomen. Along the inci­sion, she wedged her fin­ger­nail to peel back the hybrid of car­ti­lage and bark. Rigid, it dropped to the coarse cloth beneath it. She chopped the plan­tain in deci­sive strokes.

            “Joaquin owes me a fin­ger­tip,” she count­ed up the knuck­les on her short­ened fin­ger. “He could not pay me back if he want­ed to.”

            Sebas­t­ian chuck­led and hand­ed her his ingre­di­ents. “You could reach out. Just con­sid­er it.”

            Chunks spilled from the pes­tle as she mashed the plan­tains in with the gar­lic and left­over pork. They ate in silence.

            The next month, a local priest deemed it unac­cept­able that Joaquin should found a reli­gion out­side of Christ, and declared that if God grant­ed Joaquin a mir­a­cle, He could grant anoth­er. To prove him­self wor­thy, the priest stuck his palm with a tack. When no mir­a­cle ensued, the priest excom­mu­ni­cat­ed Joaquin from the con­gre­ga­tion. Con­ver­sa­tion about Joaquin was deemed blasphemous.

            This sig­naled the shift of chat­ter away from the church pews and into the rows of the phar­ma­cy. As peo­ple drift­ed to and from the apothe­cary in the back, rumors col­lect­ed around Maria like dust on the shelves. She gave more mind to the dust, but could not close her ears to the chat­ter. On the main­land, it was said, Joaquin was per­form­ing bless­ings and mak­ing holy water. Peo­ple absolved them­selves by whis­per­ing their sins into his palm, or offer­ing writ­ten accounts to be con­sumed by the void. Spir­i­tu­al men claimed his was the palm that held the tur­tle with the world atop its back, and Joaquin after was said to trav­el with a tur­tle, though some accounts said it was a tor­toise. Each sto­ry made her fin­ger flare with pain; she was sure the stump was get­ting short­er still. The tales echoed from the apothe­cary to the phar­ma­cy, and would often worm their way home in Sebastian’s ear. Sebas­t­ian would recount a rumor, and when Maria asked him to stop he claimed his faith pre­vent­ed him from engag­ing fur­ther any­ways. In their few years of mar­riage Sebastian’s piety had solid­i­fied as much as his prag­ma­tism. He now also claimed that Maria’s fan­tasies of sail­ing away were just dreams, child­ish in the face of their bud­ding family.

            Maria’s abdomen had begun to grow, and Sebas­t­ian start­ed to call the bud “their mir­a­cle.” She hat­ed the pet name, but came to believe its truth as she watched her body wage war on itself. She devoured rasp­ber­ries by moon­light but could not keep them down in the morn­ing. Her legs cramped, and her skin pol­ished from ochre to bronze.

            “I will see you at the phar­ma­cy, my love,” Sebas­t­ian said as Maria accept­ed the kiss he plant­ed on her cheek. “And I will see you not a moment too soon, my mir­a­cle,” Sebas­t­ian added as he cupped Maria’s stomach.

            “Don’t call it that,” Maria snapped.

            “Aye, all of this busi­ness with your cousin is passed, love. Let’s not talk about him any­more, it’s unholy.”

            “When our mir­a­cle is born,” Sebas­t­ian sug­gest­ed the next day, mas­sag­ing Maria’s feet, “We should close the apothe­cary. You will want to stay home with the child.”

            Maria stood up, winc­ing. “How do you know what I want?” She left him, bare­foot, col­lect­ing dirt on her soles.

 

*

 

            When Maria’s womb had grown to the size of a coconut, a hur­ri­cane and a bout of flu shook the island. Hous­es sunk like deflat­ed cakes. Wood­en pil­lars stood bare, snapped like bro­ken bones, and the flat­tened flam­boyán tree of the for­mer Pas­cal estate held its roots up in sur­ren­der to the sky. Gulls flew in an emp­ty blue while chil­dren wad­ed through islands of debris, call­ing when they found lost trea­sures. Maria walked trench­es through soft mud attend­ing the ail­ing town. The sick, clutch­ing to their mir­a­cles, made a spe­cial effort to share their news of Joaquin, and con­grat­u­late Maria on her com­ing child.

            She eased the fever of a short, bald­ing man, who promised he would build Maria a wood­en crib. He boast­ed that Joaquin had once cut his hair to the quick, and showed her the spot where hair had nev­er grown back. She mend­ed twin sis­ters, one with a bro­ken ankle and one with a sprain, who claimed Joaquin had break­fast­ed with the pope. The oth­er twin asked who would bap­tize Maria’s child. An old­er woman, whose skin was stiff and wet like she had drowned, stared at Maria with hol­low eyes. Through wheez­ing breaths, she told Maria how she had heard Joaquin was vis­it­ed by a Bud­dhist monk who believed he could achieve Nir­vana inside the void. Maria’s fin­gers flailed to make a heal­ing poul­tice as the woman con­tin­ued with her sto­ry. The monk had stuck his whole fin­ger inside the hole, and Maria nev­er heard the rest. The woman died, inter­rupt­ed. Maria returned home and held back a sob.

            “You should not do so much, my love,” Sebas­t­ian said lat­er that night. “Our mir­a­cle needs your health. We both need you.”

            “The hur­ri­cane, the flu… I don’t want to die here,” Maria replied.

            “We don’t get to choose where or when,” Sebas­t­ian said, “but you can try to avoid run­ning into it head first. You should rest.”

            “Bet­ter to run; I’m tired of being root­ed here.”

            “Non­sense, Maria. We are home.”

            Over the last months of her preg­nan­cy, Maria began squir­rel­ing away a small for­tune. She sold her jew­el­ry one piece at a time, and as her apothe­cary stores were sold she filled the jars with mon­ey. She told none of this to Sebas­t­ian, though she was sure he would not hear her if she did. She told him instead she was see­ing a doc­tor to check the health of the baby, and vis­it­ed the island’s largest port town to secure pas­sage to the main­land. Out­side the tick­et master’s office, the smell of sea spray and palms swirled in lazy loops with the frigate birds.

            Sailors near­by pre­pared a large ship for pas­sage to the main­land under an open blue sky. She watched them scur­ry like ants find­ing sug­ar as they inspect­ed sails and secured car­go. Her stom­ach kicked her rest­ing hand, and she was flushed with warmth. Over the gen­tle lap­ping of the waves, she heard them plan their brief stay in the main­land. With each inn and meal sug­gest­ed Maria’s heart reared in antic­i­pa­tion. They drift­ed in and out of gos­sip, and it did­n’t take long for the sto­ries of a strange reli­gious icon with a hole in his hand to crop up.

            Maria, used to the rumors, lis­tened with half a mind as she watched the sailors scut­tling about. Quick­ly, she real­ized these rumors were unlike those she had heard previously.

            “On the run!” one sailor shout­ed. “Peo­ple lookin’ to get their debts paid!”

            Anoth­er quick­ly jumped in. “How’d a Mes­si­ah owe mon­ey? Ain’t it con­sid­ered charity?”

         ” I ‘eard his hand been known to erase some impor­tant papers. Could be the state or big mon­ey types after ‘im,” replied the first sailor. “Either way he’s just up and disappeared.”

            The con­ver­sa­tion waned and waxed again to the tides, and Maria released a breath she hadn’t known she was hold­ing. She felt uncorked, hope and envy and rage bub­bling inside of her, foam­ing up and spilling out. She sat, count­ing her breaths, wait­ing for anoth­er sailor to dis­count the sto­ry. No objec­tion came.

 

*

 

            Maria gave birth to an earth­quake. Her daugh­ter shook bones and cracked the sky with her first cry. Maria took the shak­ing bun­dle in her arms and named her Gen­e­sis. Maria said silent good­byes to the ones that came to vis­it. In a week or two, when Maria and Gen­e­sis were strong enough to trav­el, they would leave for the mainland.

            The morn­ing of her depar­ture, Maria pre­pared bread and clothes and gath­ered her hid­den stash of mon­ey. She was cut­ting slices of cheese when there came a knock at the door. She jumped. Sebas­t­ian was not sup­posed to be home until that after­noon, by which time she would already be board­ing a ship to the main­land. She con­tin­ued slic­ing, hop­ing it was a mis­take. Any­way, Sebas­t­ian would not knock. Gen­e­sis began wail­ing from her crib as the knocks came a sec­ond time. Maria gath­ered her daugh­ter in her arms, gray eyes and an angry pink mouth star­ing at her. She answered the door.

            A deflat­ed man with blotchy skin stood out­side. Maria bare­ly rec­og­nized him, but her fin­ger flashed with pain when he spoke. “Maria, I heard you’d set­tled down here. It’s been so long. I need help.”

            “Joaquin.” His face sagged but his choco­late eyes and tou­sled hair were the same. Each indi­vid­ual fea­ture could be traced back to the Joaquin who had vis­it­ed the island near­ly a decade ago, but put togeth­er he looked dis­col­ored and worn thin. 

            “I can’t help you,” she said.

            “Maria, please. I am sor­ry I left with­out you. I am in debt and in danger.”

            Gen­e­sis con­tin­ued to cry, and Maria wor­ried peo­ple would come check in on her. She need­ed to fin­ish prepar­ing before she could leave. “Come in.”

            Joaquin was in the kitchen before Maria could close the door, eat­ing a slice of the cheese she had been cutting.

            “Leave that,” she said, and Joaquin slith­ered to the oth­er end of the kitchen. His hun­gry eyes lin­gered on her pack. Maria wrapped Gen­e­sis against her chest.

            “I need mon­ey, Maria. I’m sor­ry I have to ask.” Joaquin extend­ed a bony hand. His oth­er hand hung limp at his side, but the glove pulled her eyes.

            “No. I’ve giv­en you enough.” Maria turned and con­tin­ued to cut slices of cheese. “But for the boy you once were, I can spare a meal. Sit.”

            Maria passed him a cov­ered plate of arepas and Joaquin devoured them silent­ly. After his third arepa, Joaquin lift­ed his choco­late eyes. “What is the lit­tle one’s name?”

            “Gen­e­sis.”

            Joaquin laughed. “Maria and Gen­e­sis, a divine fam­i­ly – the father must be Joseph. Where are you head­ed with that pack?”

            Maria stiff­ened. “Sebas­t­ian is hard­ly divine. You were wor­shiped.” She paused. “You aban­doned me.”

           “I was a God and a fool.”

            “You were self­ish. At my expense.” She trailed off as Gen­e­sis squealed.

            “I won’t apol­o­gize for liv­ing the life I was giv­en.” Joaquin’s brown eyes hard­ened and he stared at Maria cold­ly. “There are debtors fol­low­ing me, who will find me here. I’m ask­ing for your help but they’ll just as soon col­lect my debt from fam­i­ly with­out asking.”

            Maria could her­self sink­ing fur­ther into the soil she had been stuck in her whole life. She had been born one foot in the island’s maw, and every time she had come close to leav­ing it tried to swal­low her whole. She braced her hand against the counter to cut through the dizzy­ing sen­sa­tion. She fin­ished slic­ing the cheese and stored it in the pack. Her last prepa­ra­tion done, she turned to Joaquin. “I won’t be trapped here. I’m leav­ing the island, and your debt will stay your own.”

            “So you are sneak­ing away? Genesis’s father might be very grate­ful towards the per­son who warned him…”

            “We will be long gone.”

            “Will you?” Joaquin stood and stalked a step towards Maria. The swal­low­ing sen­sa­tion was back. This time it seemed the air was being pulled down around her. “Stop,” she whispered.

Joaquin took anoth­er step.

            “Yes, cousin?” he asked, his voice drip­ping in hon­ey. “You’ve thought of anoth­er way to help me?”

            Maria paused for a long sec­ond. One arm gen­tly bounced Gen­e­sis, snug against Maria in her ban­deau. In her oth­er hand Maria clutched the cheese knife. “Please leave.”

            “What are you going to do with that? You won’t do any­thing. You think so high­ly of your­self because you suf­fer in silence. We want the same things, you know. The only dif­fer­ence is while you sit around and hope to get reward­ed for good behav­ior, I’ve nev­er stopped scrap­ping until I get what I want.”

            Joaquin lunged and reached. Frayed sil­ver threads became the last bar­ri­er between skin and obliv­ion as Joaquin’s glove closed around Maria’s arm.

“Let go!” Maria writhed, jostling Gen­e­sis in her wrap and set­ting her to wail. Joaquin held fast and tight­ened his grip.

            Maria swung her knife down, and caught the flesh below his wrist. A brack­ish red spring bub­bled up and stained the fad­ed sil­ver. Joaquin screamed, clutch­ing his mirac­u­lous hand to his chest.

            “I’m leav­ing, and you have a choice. The knife is lodged between your radius and ulna. It like­ly nicked an artery. You can take the knife out and try to catch me but you’ll cause per­ma­nent dam­age, maybe need an ampu­ta­tion. Be rid of your curse. And maybe Sebas­t­ian will pay your debt.”

            Joaquin’s eyes swelled with fear and venom.

            “Or,” Maria con­tin­ued, “choose your hand. Wait here for Sebas­t­ian, don’t move, and he will like­ly save it. Stay stuck in your past and your debt. I’m choos­ing my future.” Maria grabbed her pack and left with Gen­e­sis, Joaquin’s plead­ing sobs fad­ing behind her. She mouthed a final good­bye to her cousin and the wav­ing palms that shad­ed the streets. She spared a final glance to the cob­ble­stone square and the church that watched it. From the back of a cart she watched the town sink into the val­ley around it.

            Maria’s soft padding steps gave way to a sat­is­fy­ing clop as she walked up the gang­plank. She had not been chased or fol­lowed. The tick­et mas­ter had accept­ed her pas­sage with­out a blink. As the island reced­ed into the salty spray, Maria held Gen­e­sis close to her breast and spoke soft­ly of the trees they would see, the libraries like cathe­drals, and the lives they would live, self­ish­ly theirs.

 

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

When I was in third grade, I sharp­ened pen­cils by push­ing them into the elec­tric sharp­en­er with the palm of my hand. The spin­ning eras­er tick­led; it was my favorite class­room job. One day, I tried the trick with a pen­cil whose eras­er had been pulled or picked out, leav­ing only the thin met­al frame of the eras­er. It cut a per­fect cir­cle into my hand, and, being the dra­mat­ic lit­tle boy I was (and like­ly still am), I thought the skin in the cen­ter of my palm would uncork, spilling all of my blood until I died. I still have a scar in the cen­ter of my palm in the shape of a per­fect cir­cle. I prob­a­bly shed more tears than blood that day, but in this sto­ry I tried to tap into the feel­ing before I knew I would be fine, where the con­se­quence of injury was only lim­it­ed by my imag­i­na­tion. This sto­ry began with the ques­tion: what if I had “uncorked?”

Once I had iso­lat­ed my premise – an injury cre­ates a mag­i­cal hole in a boy’s hand – I strug­gled to find the point of view for my sto­ry. I knew I want­ed the boy to grap­ple with the allure of his gift, but I wasn’t sure where to go from there. Would it be a sto­ry of cor­rup­tion? If so, how could I show his trans­for­ma­tion over a long peri­od of time? Where I want­ed to focus on the expe­ri­ence of some­thing seem­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly impos­si­ble yet real, answer­ing these ques­tions and stick­ing to the boy’s char­ac­ter felt like it would force me to explain the impos­si­ble. These prob­lems ques­tions led me to find the final struc­ture of the sto­ry, where­in the sto­ry focus­es on an observ­er, the boy’s cousin, and their life as periph­er­al to this impos­si­ble event. The shap­ing of this sto­ry often forced me to reassess the divide between the events I want­ed to occur on paper and the feel­ings I want­ed to gen­er­ate for the read­er. Posi­tion­ing the pro­tag­o­nist as a wit­ness but not as much of an actor in the impos­si­ble ele­ments in the sto­ry allowed me to pre­serve the feel­ings that orig­i­nal­ly inspired the sto­ry: pain, fear, awe, and the uncer­tain­ty in the lim­its of reality.

Jean-Bap­tiste Andre holds a Bach­e­lors in neu­ro­science from Bow­doin Col­lege, a teach­ing degree from Relay Grad­u­ate School of Edu­ca­tion, and is cur­rent­ly pur­su­ing his MFA in Fic­tion at the War­ren Wil­son Pro­gram for Writ­ers. He works as an admis­sions coun­selor and lives in Las Cruces, New Mex­i­co, where his part­ner is study­ing medicine.

About Graham

Fiction / Lisa Lang

 

:: About Graham ::

            Klee’s phone rang just as she stepped from the car. It was her moth­er, want­i­ng to know did she buy bis­cuits from the supermarket?

            “No,” she told her. “Remem­ber, no more sugar?”

            “What did that doc­tor know?” she replied in Greek. “He should do some­thing about that breath.”

            By the time she fin­ished the call, Dami­an had tak­en their bags into the cot­tage. She gazed around at the Moon­ah trees, the grassy slope and the sand­stone cliffs, the gold­en after­noon sun pour­ing like syrup over it all. There was anoth­er cot­tage next to theirs, with the same white weath­er­board, sash win­dows and cream trim. They were coun­cil-owned, rent­ed out at low cost to artists. Soli­tude, peace, nat­ur­al beau­ty – it was every­thing you expect­ed from an artists’ retreat. But walk­ing the neat gar­den path, she felt a shim­mer of doubt. Was retreat real­ly the solu­tion to a cre­ative rut? Weren’t you just retreat­ing fur­ther into your­self, when you, in fact, were the problem?

            She found Dami­an in the first room off the cor­ri­dor, set­ting up his com­put­er mon­i­tor on a heavy­set, wood­en desk. There was a modem, twin­kling in the cor­ner, and thin­ning car­pet which smelled vague­ly of rice. Through the win­dow she could see a spindly rhodo­den­dron, and the win­dow of the sec­ond cottage.

            “Let’s hope they’re not nud­ists,” she said.

            Dami­an grunt­ed as he bent towards the pow­er socket.

            “Speak for your­self,” he said. 

            Klee found flo­ral sheets in a linen clos­et. They were vel­vety from wear, vio­lets fad­ed to mauve. Dami­an found an assort­ment of cups and glass­es in the kitchen cup­board. He poured two large gins and topped them up with warm tonic.

            “We haven’t even unpacked,” said Klee.

            “I want to go see the water, before it gets dark.”

            They set off across the grass, gin slosh­ing. From the cliff edge they saw the calm, indi­go bay, the water turn­ing clear at the shore­line. There were coloured boats with white sails, like Italy, she thought, though she’d nev­er been. She sipped her gin, tast­ed salt. Rest­ed her glass on the wood­en rail.

            A large fer­ry cut a dot­ted line, white as chalk, motor­ing toward the pier.

            Klee inhaled the sea air, its briny fresh­ness like a promise of renew­al. Dami­an looked towards the horizon.

            “Are you think­ing about Gra­ham?” she said.

            “Why do you think I’m always think­ing about Graham?”

            “Because that would be a total­ly nor­mal reaction.”

            “So if I say no, I’m not normal?”

            “Yeah, that’s exact­ly what I said.”

            They both turned at the sound of tyres on gravel. 

            “It’s the nud­ists,” he said.

            A woman dragged a roller case up the path towards the door of the sec­ond cottage.

            “Hi,” said Klee. “We’re from next door.”

            “I could hap­pi­ly die here,” said the woman. “It’s heav­en, isn’t it?” She spread her arms wide. “I’m Pamela. And that’s my son, Byron.” She ges­tured to the young man lean­ing into the boot of their car. She was around six­ty: dark curls grey­ing at the tem­ples, a large medal­lion worn over her loose, black linen smock.

            “Are you poets?” she con­tin­ued. “I indulged rather heav­i­ly dur­ing my preg­nan­cy with Byron.”

            “No, we’re – Dami­an makes video games, and I –

            “Which games?” Byron hur­ried towards them, swing­ing a duf­fel bag. “Any­thing I’d know?”

            Dami­an, of course, said nothing.

            “Heard of RTW?” said Klee, and watched his eyes grow wide. He was younger than she’d first thought, mid-twen­ties at most.

            “Are you kid­ding me? I frig­ging love RTW!”

            “And what one earth is Arty W?” Pamela tossed her head.

            “No Mum, it’s the let­ters: RTW. Round the World. It’s only like, the biggest game of the last two years.” He then explained, with a ten­der­ness and patience that sur­prised Klee, how it worked. You trav­elled round Asia and Europe col­lect­ing expe­ri­ences. Full Moon Par­ties, Glas­ton­bury, a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. You col­lect­ed as many as you could before the mon­ey ran out. If you got robbed or ripped off, the mon­ey went quick­er. But you could also top up by busk­ing or pick­ing fruit.

            His face was soft, almost yearn­ing. Pamela looked from Byron to Damian.

            “And you – what did you say – pro­grammed it?”

            “He did it all,” said Klee. “The nar­ra­tive, the pro­gram­ming – all of it.”

            “Well, that’s real­ly some­thing. I’d love to hear more, maybe over a drink?”

            “Prob­a­bly they’re here to work,’ said Byron.

            “We should let you unpack,” said Klee.

            “I have a some­what lack­lus­tre Neb­bi­o­lo,” said Pamela.

 

            “Come by tomor­row at eight.”

            “You can go,” said Damian.

            Klee float­ed the sheet above the mat­tress, before bend­ing to tuck it in. Dami­an opened one bed­side draw­er, then another.

             “The last thing I need is some RTW fanboy.”

            Dami­an had not made a game in over two years. Before that, he’d spent years try­ing to cre­ate a hit, some­thing to be played in lounge­rooms the world over. But he’d made RTW almost on a whim – a game of nos­tal­gia, for age­ing Gen Xers who stilled pined for a thump­ing Lon­don club, a sexy night on the beach in Barcelona, while they queued for sausages at Bun­nings. And it prob­a­bly would have been anoth­er niche game, if it wasn’t for the pan­dem­ic. The game was released just as nineties nos­tal­gia began to surge, along with case num­bers and restric­tions, its wild suc­cess sur­pris­ing everyone.

            Dami­an opened the last of the draw­ers. Klee picked up a lumpy, syn­thet­ic pillow.

            “Pamela seemed inter­est­ing. Did you see her necklace?”

            Dami­an shrugged. Klee stuffed the pil­low into a flo­ral case.

            “It was real­ly unusu­al. It had these blues and greens sort of flick­er­ing over the metal.”

            “You wan­na get drunk?” he said, clos­ing the draw­ers. “Go look at the stars?”

            Oh yes. Get drunk, look at stars and could they please talk about Graham?

 

            Klee slept late and rose a lit­tle worse for wear. The sun was cloud-fil­tered, pale where it seeped beneath the blinds. She wait­ed for the cof­fee to boil, savour­ing her dry mouth and wool­ly head. Maybe it’s just what they’d need­ed, a lit­tle fun. She car­ried Damian’s mug into the room where he was already at work.

            “Thanks,” he said, face blank with concentration.

            She returned to the kitchen and perched at the wood­en bench with a note­book, a pen and a glass of water. She had all the time in the world. All she had to do was cre­ate a char­ac­ter, a role that could be played by a short, olive-skinned, forty-year old woman. Not the kid sis­ter and best friend roles she’d set­tled for in her twen­ties. Not the moth­er roles of her thir­ties: serv­ing up chick­en and clean­ing toi­lets in cheesy ads. The role of a woman – sub­stan­tial and experienced.

            She felt the press­ing, almost-phys­i­cal need to check the news.

            To phone her moth­er, who may have for­got­ten to take her medication. 

            She remem­bered a swarm of ants on their back veran­da – she’d meant to lay poi­son before they left. Would they be gath­er­ing strength, march­ing into the house, embold­ened by their absence?

            What, she won­dered, made borscht taste like borscht? Was it dill? And why was she think­ing of the Rus­sians, was it because of Chekhov? If only she could chan­nel Chekhov, write one char­ac­ter as ful­ly alive as his.

            She need­ed anoth­er cof­fee. Writ­ing was exhausting.

            When she went into Damian’s room, he was star­ing out the win­dow, where Byron was cir­cling his cot­tage, arms behind his back.

            “How am I sup­posed to think, with Lord Byron out there, act­ing all Byron­ic? What’s he doing, com­pos­ing sonnets?”

            “You can ask him at our drinks tonight.” She car­ried the per­co­la­tor over to his desk and tipped cof­fee into his mug.

            “Did you write?” he said.

            “I wrote a list. Phone Mum, buy ant poi­son, look up recipe for borscht.”

            “So you already have your nar­ra­tive. Daugh­ter feeds poi­soned borscht to unsus­pect­ing Mum.”

            “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this writ­ing caper.”

            “You gave it a morn­ing. No-one can say you didn’t try.”

            “Speak­ing of try­ing, how’s the new game?”

            “It’s – lack­lus­tre. Now shut the door on your way out.”

 

            Klee phoned her moth­er, who com­plained about her new care worker.

            “He smells like a he-goat.”

            “Mum.”

            “I’m not say­ing he’s not nice.”

            “Well, nice is something.”

            “What am I sup­posed to do, put a peg on my nose?”

            Her Muma was a chain smok­er; she doubt­ed she could smell much at all.

            From the win­dow, she watched Pamela strid­ing down the path in bathers and a sarong. It was on the cool side for swim­ming. She had a plush tow­el thrown over one shoul­der like a jaun­ty cape.

            “You could always have anoth­er cigarette.”

            “What?”

            “Noth­ing.” 

            At quar­ter past eight they knocked on the cot­tage door. Klee held a bowl of cashews. Byron answered bare­foot, in jeans and a fad­ed t‑shirt.

            “Hi,” said Klee. “We brought snacks!”

            He ush­ered them through, his ges­tures and nod­ding head like an impres­sion of hos­pi­tal­i­ty he’d gleaned from TV.

            “Um, so here’s the couch. I think Pam’s get­ting the wine.”

            The couch was the same beige fab­ric as theirs, but draped with a soft, green throw. They sat, with Byron tak­ing the wood­en, lad­der-backed chair. Dami­an reached for a fist­ful of nuts.

            “So, are you both artists?” said Klee.

            “No, Pam’s the artist, a jew­eller, actu­al­ly. I just study pro­gram­ming. I’m pret­ty much the family’s black sheep. They’re all super into the arts.”
            “Damian’s a black sheep, too,” offered Klee. “His family’s basi­cal­ly all lawyers.”

            “Com­put­ers aren’t not the arts,” said Dami­an.  “They’re just anoth­er medium.”

            “Exact­ly!” Byron half-lift­ed out of his seat. “Like your game, RTW, that’s real­ly cre­ative. I love it how in the Barcelona sec­tion, you go up the hill to the park to see all those Gaudi’s. It’s real­ly cool how you have to dodge the bag-snatch­ing dudes on motor­bikes. But those Gaudi’s – they’re so beautiful.”

            “You like the art?” said Dami­an. He wiped the salt from his hands onto the thigh of his jeans.

            “Yeah, some­times I don’t play to win, but to see what there is to see. Like that Gau­di Park, there’s all these hid­den mosaics, and the birds’ nests built into the wall.” He laughed, touched his face with his hand. “Which obvi­ous­ly you know all about. Sor­ry.”

            “No.” Dami­an was lean­ing for­ward. “That’s actu­al­ly inter­est­ing. I cre­at­ed those places to be, like, intrin­si­cal­ly reward­ing. You don’t get more points by explor­ing more – I want­ed peo­ple to hang out there because they were beau­ti­ful or what­ev­er. Sort of despite the game. But I’m not sure it worked that way.”
            “No, it total­ly does! Well, for me it does.” Byron shrugged and looked down at his feet. “For what it’s worth.”

            “I was just tan­go­ing with a very stub­born cork,” Pamela swished into the room. She wore anoth­er linen dress – pale this time – and a dif­fer­ent neck­lace, damp hair falling to her shoul­ders. She placed the bot­tle and glass­es on the side table.

            “Drinks?”

            Pam poured then sat back in the deep armchair.

            “So how did you come up with the idea for your game?”

            “Mum,” said Byron. “He prob­a­bly gets sick of talk­ing about it. It’s like if you met Leonard Cohen, and only want­ed to talk about ‘Hal­lelu­jah’.”

            “You know, I actu­al­ly did meet Leonard once?” She reached over for a hand­ful of nuts. “It was back in the eight­ies, when I was trav­el­ling around the Greek Islands. His aura was tremen­dous­ly pow­er­ful. After­ward, I could work with no stone but onyx for a whole year.” She bit down on a cashew. “I was won­der­ing if you were Greek – but the name Klee threw me off.”

            “Yes, it’s short for Kleio.”

            Pamela’s face opened into a grin.

            “I knew it! Didn’t I say she was Greek, Byron?”

            “Mm,” said Klee, rais­ing her glass to her mouth. “But Leonard Cohen – tell us more.”

            Pamela raised a sin­gle eyebrow.

            “Oh, we just sort of crossed paths for a time, you know how it is, when you travel.”

            “No,” said Byron. “My trip was can­celled when the bor­der closed, remember?”

            “Maybe if Byron blocks his ears, we’ll find out a bit more,” sug­gest­ed Dami­an, and Pamela threw back her head, her laugh rock­ing the old arm­chair on its feet.

            “Oh, she’s not hold­ing back on account of me,” said Byron, cross­ing his arms.

            “He’s right,” Pamela sat up. She poured more wine into their glass­es. “Chil­dren need to see their par­ents as ful­ly human. Do you have kids?” She placed the emp­ty bot­tle back onto the table with a sol­id clink.

            “Dami­an has a son,” said Klee. In the dis­tance, a car­go ship blew its horn, long and deep. “He hasn’t met him though.”

            “Because I didn’t know about him,” said Dami­an. “I’m going to meet him, at some point.”

            “A secret son! Tonight’s tak­ing a bit of a Poldark turn, isn’t it?” Pamela tossed the remain­ing nuts into her mouth, picked up her glass and leaned her elbows on her knees. “Do tell.”

            Dami­an frowned. He took a long swal­low of his wine. Klee cleared her throat.

            “Well, about a month ago, an old girl­friend of Damian’s got in touch and told him he has a son, and the son wants to meet him. Gra­ham.” Klee opened her palms and shrugged. “Graham’s twenty-two.”

            “That’s an awful­ly long time to keep a secret,” said Pamela. “No one noticed a lit­tle Gra­ham run­ning around, and thought to men­tion him?”

            “She moved to Hong Kong before the birth to stay with her moth­er, who’s Chi­nese. I guess she need­ed the help. When she moved back, every­one just assumed the father lived overseas.”

            Pamela laughed.

            “So you have a ful­ly-grown, Chi­nese son called Gra­ham. Isn’t that rather marvellous?”

            “But that’s messed up!” blurt­ed Byron. “To keep his own son from him.”

            “I expect she would have been fright­ened,” said Pam. “Dami­an could have stopped her going to Hong Kong, if he’d known. Legal­ly, I mean,”

            “That’s part of it,” said Klee. “She also says his fam­i­ly looked down on her for being Chi­nese, and she didn’t want her son to have the same experience.”

            “That’s not true,” said Dami­an. “They looked down on all my girl­friends equal­ly. It had noth­ing to do with Jade being Chinese.”

            Pamela brought her fin­gers to her lips and turned to her son.

            “Byron, will you go fetch the good chi­anti? I think they could use anoth­er drink.”

            “I’ll just go use the bath­room,” said Klee.

            When she stood, she felt a slight rip­ple of intox­i­ca­tion. She took a breath and made her way toward the rear of the cot­tage. She sat on the pink toi­let, star­ing at the same pink tiles and grey­ing grout as the bath­room in their cot­tage. They’d told very few peo­ple about Gra­ham, only her moth­er and Damian’s parents.

            It wasn’t so long ago they’d decid­ed against becom­ing par­ents. When Klee hit the crunch time of her late thir­ties, they’d debat­ed the pros and cons of par­ent­hood, land­ing firm­ly on the side of the cons. Then came the bush­fires. Images of black skies and flam­ing kan­ga­roos, grey-faced hol­i­day mak­ers shel­tered beneath their beach tow­els. The smoke had bare­ly cleared when the pan­dem­ic struck. It all seemed to affirm their deci­sion. Cli­mate change! Plague! Home learn­ing! And now Dami­an had become a par­ent with­out her, while insist­ing that noth­ing would change.

            Klee flushed, wor­ried she’d been gone too long.

            In the lounge, Byron had moved to the couch, where he and Dami­an peered at some­thing on Damian’s phone.

            “What is it?” She pic­tured the pho­to­graph of Gra­ham that Jade had sent: a gen­uine baby-face, smooth, round cheeks, with Damian’s crooked smile.

            “It’s a pro­to­type of my new game,” said Dami­an, with­out look­ing up. “I want Byron’s opin­ion on something.”

            Their heads were near­ly touch­ing. Byron mur­mured some­thing, and Dami­an laughed. They could have been boys, the same age, hang­ing out after school. Klee picked up a full wine glass from the table and sat in the hard-backed chair.

            “So Dami­an says you’re an actor?” Pam was stroking the pen­dant with her thumb, dark sil­ver speck­led with green and bronze, like leaves on a pond. Klee want­ed to feel its sur­face, to rub her thumb over the tex­tured metal.

            “I was. Now I most­ly work in my friend’s bookshop.”

            “Why stop?” Pamela tilt­ed her head.

            “Well, there’s only so many sequels they can make of My big fat Greek wed­ding.”

            Pamela smiled.

            “So you gave up. You’re the prac­ti­cal one, he’s the dreamer.”

            “No, I – dream.”

            “And then you wake up.” She shift­ed the cross of her legs.

            “You don’t even know me.” She imme­di­ate­ly wor­ried it was rude.

            “I know peo­ple.” She waived her hand at the couch. “I know Byron could nev­er be an artist because he wants to please every­one. I hope you’re not a peo­ple pleaser?”

            “I think – there’s a dif­fer­ence between car­ing and pleasing.”

            “Hmm.” She looked right into Klee’s eyes. Who did that? Nobody. Cer­tain­ly not now, after two years of social dis­tanc­ing. But for the first time in a long time, Klee felt entire­ly vis­i­ble. All her sad­ness and desire and wor­ry. Her fears for her mar­riage, her hopes for her work, and the enor­mous, indi­gestible fact of Gra­ham. And she knew exact­ly the kind of char­ac­ter she want­ed to write.

            Dami­an laughed again, and Byron looked like he’d won the lottery.

            “That’s it!” said Pam, bring­ing her palms togeth­er beneath her chin. She point­ed her steepled hands at Klee. “I knew it. You were in that ad. Chick­en in a tick­en, bok bok!”

 

            It was a small gath­er­ing, in the pri­vate room of Klee’s local bar. Dim and woody, with an open fire in one cor­ner, and a sleek white machine silent­ly fil­ter­ing the air in anoth­er. Her Mum sat in the sole, vel­veteen arm­chair, stout and smil­ing in her best jack­et. A table was laid out with mini pies and quich­es, where two of her old friends were laugh­ing with a young actor from the show. The bar­tender hand­ed her a negroni, a glow­ing orange orb to match the fire.

            “Um, sor­ry, but could I get a self­ie? For my Mum? She’s a huge fan.”

            She turned to the bar­tender in sur­prise. She’d been com­ing here for years, long before the show first aired, but he wasn’t one of the regulars.

            “Sure, OK.”

            She smiled into the phone, angling her face to the right.

            “Klee, you’re like, actu­al­ly famous!” Gra­ham bound­ed toward her, then turned his crooked grin on the bartender.

            “She’s not that glam­orous, you know. Not when you’ve seen her in uggies and pyja­ma shorts.” The bar­tender laughed, and Klee felt the rum­ble of inter­est between them, before the bar­tender began to clear emp­ty glass­es from a near­by table.

            “Oh my god, you didn’t tell me YiaYia was here!” He fold­ed him­self in half so that he could hug her Mum where she sat. YiaYia stroked the sleeve of his for­est green blaz­er with approval.

            “You look very nice,” she told him. “Very handsome.”

            “You do,” he said. “What’s this jack­et, Chanel?”

            “This very, very old. Like me,” she replied, beaming.

            “Come on! You’ve been shop­ping online again, haven’t you?”

            “No!” She gig­gled. “I wait for you.”

            Gra­ham some­times used his phone to order her things: plants and kitchen­ware most­ly, and then refused to let Klee pay him back. She reminds me of my PoPo, he would say, mean­ing his grand­ma in Hong Kong. He still couldn’t go see her – not with flights priced through the roof.

            “What are you drink­ing?” said Klee. “Order what you want, there’s mon­ey on the bar.

            “I’ll have an ouzo with YiaYia.”

            “You do know you’re not Greek, don’t you?”

            “Oh my god, you’re so annoy­ing! You’re my step-mum, and you’re Greek, so I prac­ti­cal­ly am.”

            “For­mer step-mum,” she said, soft­ly enough that it dropped beneath the oth­er bar sounds. She could final­ly think of Dami­an with­out the heart-bruis­ing pain of that first year apart, when she’d some­times sobbed into her mother’s lap like a child. It was also the first year of her TV show, Step­ping In. The one she’d writ­ten to give her­self a decent role to play, and then she’d had to play it – the hap­pi­ly mar­ried woman com­ing to terms with her husband’s new­ly dis­cov­ered adult son.

            She watched Gra­ham talk­ing to the bar­tender, their easy flir­ta­tion. Graham’s elbows on the bar, the bar­tender touch­ing bot­tles on a shelf.

            “Klee! Hap­py birthday!”

            Her friend Rose, squeez­ing her in a bearhug. She’d brought a date, and there were intro­duc­tions, and then a quick roam around to make sure every­one was com­fort­able. She didn’t have to wor­ry about the actors, those born extro­verts. But some of her friends were less outgoing.

            “Wowowow, is that me?” said Gra­ham. He was hold­ing a beer with a fan­cy label, tip­ping it toward the actor who played her step­son on the show. “I mean, I’m even hot­ter in real life than I am on screen!”

            “I can intro­duce you, if you like.”

            “No thanks.” He took a sip of his beer and pulled a face. “Even nar­cis­sists have their limits.”

            “I said meet him, you don’t have to snog him.”

            “Like he could resist.”

            They watched the actor talk­ing to Rose, his charm and self-dep­re­ca­tion evi­dent even from across the room.

            “How’s Dami­an?” she asked. She resist­ed the urge to ask about his new wife and daugh­ter. Gra­ham screwed up his face.

            “Ugh, his mid-life cri­sis is just so het­ero­nor­ma­tive, it’s embar­rass­ing. But who cares – tonight’s about you.” He reached into the pock­et of his blaz­er and pulled out a small box of cor­ru­gat­ed black card­board. “Hap­py birthday.”

            She took off the lid and saw, nes­tled in black tis­sue paper, a pen­dant. Dark sil­ver, dap­pled with green and bronze.

            “This was sooo expen­sive, you bet­ter like it,” he said. “But you can change it if you want, I kept the receipt.”

            “No.” She ran her fin­ger over the met­al. It was rougher than she’d imag­ined, almost grit­ty. An arte­fact from anoth­er life. The one where she thought her career was over and her mar­riage was strong. “It’s perfect.”

            Gra­ham touched her sleeve.

            “He actu­al­ly looks real­ly ter­ri­ble. Kind of squidgy and middle-aged.”

            “Thanks,” she said, and drew him into a hug. Then the lights went out, and Rose was walk­ing towards her with a cake, and a sin­gle, fizzing sparkler. Like a bril­liant star, or a car­toon dia­mond. If they renewed Step­ping In for a sec­ond sea­son, she could wear the pen­dant on the show. It was all still up in the air. The net­work peo­ple want­ed her on-screen hus­band to leave her for a younger woman.

           Too cliched, she’d argued. She knew what they real­ly want­ed: to bring in a hot twen­ty-some­thing to boost the rat­ings. We need a com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor, they said. Sea­son one, the com­pli­ca­tion was the son, George, but by season’s end the Step-Mum and George are get­ting along, so we need a new complication.

            Did they think she would just give in, that she was some kind of peo­ple pleas­er? That she’d sur­vived a pan­dem­ic, a divorce and her own use-by date, just to be pushed around by a bunch of suits?

            “They sold out of gluten free,” whis­pered Rose, set­ting down the glis­ten­ing choco­late cake. “Sor­ry.”

            They sang hap­py birth­day, the actors mak­ing it sound half-decent with­out quite drown­ing out her Mum’s tune­less shout. She would deal with the net­work on Mon­day. Tonight was a time to cel­e­brate, to drink negro­nis, to watch flirts in their nat­ur­al habi­tat. Who knows, she might even eat some gluten.

 

            Klee met with Dan and Sam from the net­work in a light-filled tim­ber café, the walls hung with hes­s­ian cof­fee sacks. It was lull time – after the morn­ing rush, but still too ear­ly for lunch. Sam was eat­ing a muf­fin, a cumu­lous of flour and berries over­spilling its paper cup. He was maybe Graham’s age, the colours of a bicep tat­too show­ing through the sheer white of his shirt. Dan was old­er than Klee, shrewd, blue eyes emerg­ing from some seri­ous under-eye bag­gage. Klee was ide­al­ly caf­feinat­ed: her words pep­py and bright, but not gushy.

            “So get this. The com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor isn’t a young woman. It’s not a love inter­est at all.” She paused to smile, hop­ing there were no lin­seeds stuck in her teeth. “No, it’s an old­er woman. Forth­right, opin­ion­at­ed, blunt. Some­one whose words can poke at the fab­ric of their mar­riage, all the fray­ing bits. But also, a per­son inter­est­ing in her own right. An artist. Maybe the one-time lover of Brett Whitely.”

            She saw the slight dim­ming of Sam’s lumi­nous face. He had no idea who Brett White­ly was.

            “Or maybe, um, Hugh Jack­man.” Which made no sense, age-wise. “I mean, a Hugh Jack­man type.”

            “I don’t mind that,” said Dan. His large fin­ger tapped the rim of his cof­fee cup. “I don’t mind that at all.”

            Klee swelled with the sense of her own com­pe­tence. She could do this, this busi­ness stuff. Not only could she act, and write, she could speak net­work speak with the best of them, too! Dan raised a fin­ger at the pass­ing wait­ress, point­ed to his emp­ty cup.

“The prob­lem isn’t the char­ac­ters,” he said. “It’s the fact you’re being sued by your ex-husband.”

            “What did you say?” She felt the curved gloss of a lin­seed, wedged against her incisor.

            “You’re ex-hus­band. Dami­an. He’s suing for a share of the prof­its. Says you col­lab­o­rat­ed togeth­er on the show’s concept.”

            “No, that can’t be right. It doesn’t even sound like Damian.”

            Dan slid his phone across the table­top. Klee reluc­tant­ly picked it up. On the screen was a legal doc­u­ment. As she scrolled through the pages of legalese, she spot­ted a famil­iar name, the best friend of Damian’s Dad, a fel­low lawyer. Of course, it wasn’t like Dami­an, it was just like Damian’s fam­i­ly. She remem­bered how her for­mer father-in-law had refused to meet Gra­ham until he’d tak­en a pater­ni­ty test. Dan coughed into his hand. She watched a dol­lop of phlegm land near his thumb, and forced her­self not to recoil.

            “I can sort this out, leave it with me. It won’t be a problem.”

            She drove straight to Damian’s house. It was the same sin­gle-front­ed Vic­to­ri­an they’d lived in through­out their mar­riage, only with a clam-shell sand pit in the front yard. She stared at the bright blue plas­tic and rang the bell.

            When Dami­an came to the door, he looked much like he always had. Gra­ham had called him squidgy, and there was a cer­tain soft­ness to him, most­ly around the hips. He stood unshaven, in track­suit pants.

            “Has some­thing hap­pened?”
            “You mean, apart from you suing me?”                                                                                “Oh, that. Yeah.” He turned and she fol­lowed him down the nar­row cor­ri­dor. The bed­room door was closed, and while the house still had the musty breath of hid­den damp­ness, it was over­laid with some­thing sweet. Baby pow­der, or youth. But it was still cramped and gloomy, at least until they reached the back end, which had been trans­formed into some­thing impos­si­bly love­ly and bright. Open-plan every­thing, flow­ing seam­less­ly into a court­yard froth­ing with jas­mine. All the sev­en­ties pok­i­ness and dark nook­i­ness was gone. Gone too, was the dan­ger­ous oven that occa­sion­al­ly burst into flame, the lou­vered tim­ber pantry and orange tiling. There was an island bench, a daz­zling cof­fee machine.

            “Mac­chi­a­to?” he said.

            He picked an emp­ty pack­et of pods off the bench, then flat­tened it with his hand.

            “The thing is, Becky can’t work right now. She has post-natal depres­sion. And my last game didn’t sell. We’re in a pret­ty tight spot, to be hon­est, with the kid and all.”

            So maybe get a job? Wasn’t that the solu­tion cho­sen by mil­lions of peo­ple who also need­ed mon­ey to live?

            She thought of the sev­en years she’d worked in Rose’s book­shop. The end­less, sleepy bore­dom of Mon­day after­noon. The brood­ing boys in cardi­gans who bought Sartre and Camus. The con­de­scen­sion of mid­dle-aged men. The tantrum throw­ing chil­dren with their ner­vous, appeas­ing grand­mas. She’d thought she’d be there for­ev­er, that one day she’d be sell­ing those Camus boys Good­night Moon.

           “Let me get this right,” she said. She placed her palm on the cool, mar­ble bench­top.  “You left me for a younger woman, who you then got preg­nant. And now you’re suing me because you can’t afford to pay for the kid?”

            “Well, it sounds bad when you put it like that.”

            He rubbed a hand across his eyes, his shoul­ders slumped.
            “I bor­rowed mon­ey from my par­ents to fix this place up. Before the baby came. Becky said it wasn’t safe, and I thought I could pay it back once the game sold.” He glanced at the clock, it had just gone mid­day. “Lis­ten, do you want a beer?”

They sat in the court­yard, on stripy, padded lounge chairs. The mild air was tinged with the jas­mine that cov­ered the whole back fence. She placed her emp­ty bot­tle on the paving where it teetered on the uneven brick. They had talked, through one beer, then anoth­er, most­ly about Gra­ham. He was bare­ly talk­ing to Dami­an, had shown lit­tle inter­est in his new sister.

            “Don’t you think it’s weird that he prefers to hang out with your moth­er than me?” Damian’s fin­ger traced the ridge of moss grow­ing between two bricks.

            “Don’t wor­ry about Gra­ham. Graham’s a top kid. He’s the best.”

            “He thinks I’m a douche bag.”

            “And he doesn’t even know you’re suing me.” She smiled. “Yet.”

            She clocked the look of dry amuse­ment on his face. It was so famil­iar, so Dami­an. They’d been the best of friends.

“Tell me some­thing.” She tapped the arm of his lounger. “What’s it like being with some­one who doesn’t remem­ber the nineties?”

            An ant wan­dered onto his hand and began to climb his knuckle.

            “Fan­tas­tic. Nostalgia’s overrated.”

            She knew then that his mar­riage was in trou­ble. It was intu­ition, or the way he couldn’t joke about Becky, even for a sec­ond. She looked back into the house, at the gleam­ing oven and stove­top. It was too clean, like a film set. She shift­ed in her chair.

            “They won’t green­light the sec­ond sea­son with a law­suit hang­ing over the show. They might even can­cel it, decide it’s too hard.”

            “You could lose the show?” He frowned and picked at the label on his beer.

            “Maybe.” She shrugged. “I hope not. I’m not sure I can start again, again.”

            In the silence, she could hear a dog howl­ing. It sound­ed tru­ly bereft. Would she real­ly not be able to start again? She was only 44. But you didn’t get too many chances in tele­vi­sion. She thought about being on set, the intense cama­raderie of the actors. The sin­gu­lar, grat­i­fy­ing pride of hav­ing her very own show. And there was some­thing else, too, the way her late suc­cess made sense of her life, gave it nar­ra­tive cohe­sion, all her fail­ures mere steps on the long road to tri­umph. She reached for the strap of her hand­bag and stood. She would not cry in front of Damian.

            “I bet­ter be off,” she said. “I have to take Mum to the fruit shop.”

            “She still refus­es to buy her veg from Coles?”

            “What for I give Mr Coles all my mon­ey?”
            He laughed, and there it was, a tiny catch in the fab­ric of her heart.

            “You know, I’m not going to sue you,” he said. “But I did give you the show’s con­cept. Remem­ber that weird artist’s retreat we went on, with that kid Byron, and his Mum?”

            She wedged her bag beneath her arm and nodded.

            “You were freak­ing out about Gra­ham,” he con­tin­ued. “About being a step-Mum to a grown-up, and I said, that’s what you should write about.”

            Is that how it hap­pened? She actu­al­ly couldn’t remem­ber. Was it real­ly his idea, after all?

            “What will your par­ents say?”

            He waved a mag­nan­i­mous hand in the air.

            “They can sue Becky’s doc­tors. They gave her the wrong med­ica­tion when she went in for rhinoplasty.”

            “Ok, then. Thanks, I guess.” She stepped over the emp­ty bot­tles. “Take care.”

            “Could you um, do me a favour, though?”

            She stopped, sure he would ask her to speak to Gra­ham, to put in a good word on his behalf.

            “Becky real­ly wants a Becky char­ac­ter on the show.”

            “You want me to write Becky into my show?” She shift­ed her bag to the oth­er arm.

            “Yeah. She doesn’t like that your char­ac­ter and mine are still married.”

            She resist­ed the urge to laugh out loud.

            “Tell her it hap­pens in sea­son three.”

            She turned and walked quick­ly back through the kitchen. Only when she got to the hall­way did she allow her­self a grin. She opened the front door. The plum tree across the street was so full of blos­som it looked like a cush­ion had burst. She walked towards the car. The nud­ists, she thought. That’s what we called them. But she couldn’t for the life of her remem­ber why.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

This sto­ry was writ­ten dur­ing a res­i­den­cy at the Point Nepean Nation­al Park on the south­ern tip on the Morn­ing Penin­su­la, Vic­to­ria, Aus­tralia. It was the first time I’d trav­elled since the lock­downs of 2020 and 2021. I swam with wild dol­phins and found the odd echid­na trundling across my front yard and enjoyed sun­set drinks with oth­er artists. But I was also check­ing in on my Mum, who I’m a car­er for, and every taste of free­dom was tinged with wor­ry for what she was doing and how she was cop­ing. The sto­ry was writ­ten with this dual mind­set. I was con­scious that while care­giv­ing might fea­ture in sto­ries, it wasn’t often in the back­ground, the way oth­er types of work is. I want­ed the care­giv­ing there, infus­ing the sto­ry with its anx­i­eties and plea­sures and insights, with­out being the actu­al story.

Lisa Lang is a writer from Naarm (Mel­bourne). Her nov­el, Utopi­an Man, was a win­ner of the Australian/Vogel Lit­er­ary Award. Recent sto­ries have appeared in Jake and the Four Faced Liar. She works in a library to keep her toy poo­dle, Sap­pho, rolling in mackerel.

It’s Time for Dodger Baseball

Fiction / Sandra Marchetti

 

:: It’s Time for Dodger Baseball ::

            At the top of the cement steps, Rita froze. She rec­og­nized him from the poster out­side the sta­di­um. It was the man with the voice.

            “What’s wrong, Mam­ma?” Max asked.

            Rita stood with mouth agape watch­ing the man flash a smile as he hus­tled along. He was the first “offi­cial” Dodger she saw that day—after all, Rita and Max had arrived right when the gates opened. He gave a few kids’ hair a quick ruf­fle as he walked—it seemed as if his arms were per­pet­u­al­ly wav­ing. But as he was about to shoot off down the con­course, Rita locked eyes with him. She rose out of her seat, point­ing and even­tu­al­ly screech­ing. She heard her­self and real­ized she sound­ed as if she had seen a phan­tom. He looked down at her shirt and back at her eyes—it was the yel­low she and Max were wear­ing. As soon he laid eyes on them, she knew they had made a huge mis­take. Two bum­ble bees in a sea of blue. She crossed her arms over her chest. He acknowl­edged her with what seemed like an uncom­fort­able nod then picked up his already hur­ried pace, head­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion toward a secu­ri­ty guard and a con­crete col­umn back by the con­ces­sion stands—he was head­ing up to the booth.

 

*

 

            The first time she heard that voice Rita was work­ing the dial in her old ’55 Mer­cury just look­ing for a sooth­ing tune. Clean­ing rooms at the Inter­Con­ti­nen­tal was tough work and she was spent—the com­mute only added to it. It was amaz­ing how peo­ple treat­ed the suites like their own per­son­al garbage can, dumps she had to flip in under an hour for the next “four star” guest. Maybe she could find out what the weath­er would be like on Monday—her reg­u­lar day off—but instead a dull crin­kling came from the speak­ers. Rita stayed with the sta­tion as she crawled to a red light. When the coupe ahead of her stopped short, near­ly ram­ming the lead car’s bumper, she snapped alert and heard a voice say slow­ly, “Now up for the Dodgers…” It was the first Eng­lish sen­tence she real­ly under­stood all day. At the hotel, every­one talked so fast she couldn’t process it all. Rita had picked up on some words that sound­ed sim­i­lar in Ital­ian and Eng­lish, like “city,” “accept­able,” and the dread­ed “traf­fic,” but sen­tences were hard. This voice spoke so slow­ly she could almost keep pace, and best of all, only one per­son was talking.

            Rita knew about the Dodgers. Her six-year-old loved base­ball ever since com­ing to the States a year and a half ago, and he want­ed to be on the Dodger grounds crew. When he went out to help his uncle with the yard­work, he trailed the rake behind him, pre­tend­ing to redis­trib­ute dirt on the infield.

            “You’re not old enough to get a job at the sta­di­um,” she teased.

            I will be soon!” Max said. “I’m going to water green­est grass in Los Angeles.”

            Max had been to one ball­game with Uncle Ray, and after that he was a goner. The TV didn’t always work, but Max checked the box scores every morn­ing, sneak­ing in under Ray’s legs, scrap­ing his long lash­es against the paper. The neigh­bor­hood sand­lot group had adopt­ed him and some of the big­ger kids gave Max an old yel­low Pirates’ jer­sey to wear. It wasn’t exact­ly Dodger blue, but it was bet­ter than nothing.

            When the TV wasn’t on the fritz, he’d yell into the kitchen, “Mam­ma! I gio­ca­tori stan­no gio­can­do a base­ball! Drys­dale is pitch­ing!” and gig­gle. She mar­veled at his abil­i­ty to trans­late seam­less­ly between the two languages—the advan­tage of learn­ing the words as a child. 

            Rita tried repeat­ing what the man on the radio said: “Now bat­ting for the Dodgers.” Now…bat-ting for the Dodge-rrs…” It didn’t come out quite right—that “r” was hard to say—but she was able to stam­mer through it before he con­tin­ued. She couldn’t make out all the names he rat­tled off after that, though one sound­ed like her boss’, Mr. Davis. She repeat­ed it. Rita under­stood when the voice said, “Out at first!” Davis had to walk back to the bench. She loved that. 

            Rita would turn the dial toward the sta­tion to find the voice day after day. “It’s time for Dodger base­ball!” She felt a rush just hear­ing the phrase. He seemed to have a grand way of speak­ing. She liked the silences too—more time to repeat words aloud as she drove the car. She tried, “two outs in the inning,” “the sky is a beau­ti­ful deep shade of blue,” and “recov­er­ing from an arm injury.”  It was a long dri­ve on the sky-high free­way, and his voice calmed her as she gripped the wheel.

            When Rita got home, Max would ask her about the game. “I lis­tened up to the bot­tom of the fourth inning,” she would tell him. The look on his face! Rita had to laugh. Koufax had a “knee-buck­ling curve­ball” Rita report­ed. She tried to repeat the words the man had said, slow and clear, though her tongue rolled over “knee-buck­ling” a cou­ple of times.

            “You passed my test!” Max said, and laughed pulling Uncle Ray’s tran­sis­tor out from behind his back. He had been lis­ten­ing too.

In bed that night, star­ing up at the ceil­ing, she rehearsed “knee-buck­ling” and vowed to use it at work.

            The next day, Davis laughed right in Rita’s face when she remarked that the Pres­i­den­tial Suite was so dirty it was “knee-buck­ling.” He shook his head as she pushed her cart past him. Even­tu­al­ly Rita would dis­cov­er the mys­tery narrator’s name. It was an odd one. Vin. Vin Scul­ly. Like Vin­cent? She said the name out loud. Was he Catholic too? As she was sound­ing it out, a man in the next car caught her eye. He gave her a con­fused look, and Rita imme­di­ate­ly cast her eyes down­ward. She pressed the gas to inch ahead and con­tin­ued, “I’m Vin Scully…”

            His name didn’t sound like any oth­er Angeli­no, and his voice didn’t match what peo­ple from LA sound­ed like. His words were so slow, and some of the words came out dif­fer­ent­ly than how Max or Mr. Davis pro­nounced them, but she want­ed to lis­ten. Even when the game seemed to speed up, Vin was clear and direct with his sen­tences, rais­ing his tone and quick­en­ing his pace just a bit for the occa­sion. She learned “out at the plate!” was a big deal. Rita was pleased with her­self, know­ing that lis­ten­ing to base­ball was bring­ing her clos­er to Max too. 

            Rita had want­ed to be the one to take Max to his next game. Maybe if they went togeth­er, she could play the part of Mr. Scul­ly, and nar­rate the game with Max’s “col­or com­men­tary.” She need­ed to work on her Eng­lish to move up at the hotel and despite Davis’ cru­el­ty, lis­ten­ing to the games was help­ing. She flashed back to the time, sev­er­al months ago, when some cowork­ers threw her clothes out of her lock­er and stacked phone books inside, telling her to mem­o­rize them. No more. Rita’s new phras­es includ­ed: “crowd­ed park­ing lots” and “it nev­er rains here.” She used these to great effect when com­ment­ing on the weath­er and traf­fic jams near her work. Davis even noticed, say­ing “you’ve picked up a few new lines.” The night­time front desk clerk told Rita she was going to be leav­ing soon—about to get married—and Rita fig­ured that if she could start string­ing sen­tences togeth­er she might be able to inter­view for the job.

            Ray had lucked into the tick­ets for the game he brought Max to—a gift from one of his land­scap­ing cus­tomers who wasn’t going to use them. When Rita asked her broth­er how to buy a pair, he raised his eye­brows and chuck­led, “I’ve nev­er bought tick­ets before and with your Eng­lish? Good luck.” They were lucky to stay with Ray after Joe died, and she didn’t want to press him. She asked one of the bell­men at work where she need­ed to go and he told her “The box office, of course!” Rita heard about the box office on broad­casts. It was at the ballpark—1000 Elysian Park Avenue. She knew the exit for Dodger Sta­di­um, but she had nev­er got­ten off the free­way there. 

            The fol­low­ing Mon­day, she creaked the Merc off the exit ramp and parked in a lot so big she couldn’t see the end of the asphalt. After fol­low­ing a series of con­fus­ing signs, she found where tick­ets were sold. The sta­di­um looked aban­doned so ear­ly in the day. She walked up to the con­crete fortress and saw a pic­ture of a red­head­ed man with a micro­phone next to him plas­tered on one of the gigan­tic walls. Under the micro­phone was a cap­tion, “Vin Scul­ly, Dodger Broad­cast­er.” She couldn’t believe it. See­ing the red hair and blue suit—he was not as she expect­ed. His huge white teeth and grin­ning smile must have been a foot tall! Rita kept walk­ing toward the sign that said “Box Office.” The first five win­dow shades were pulled down, but the last one was half open, a slash against the mid­day sun. She gird­ed her­self to speak and with a smile announced to no one in par­tic­u­lar, “Two Dodgers tick­ets please!” and began to release the ten­sion in her shoul­ders. A hunched man in the booth pushed his head into view and looked at her quizzi­cal­ly. Rita repeat­ed, “Two Dodger tick­ets, per favore!”

            “What game, lady?” the man asked, his eyes squinting.

            She knew this feeling—she’d had enough of these con­ver­sa­tions, end­ing in total con­fu­sion and defeat. Rita looked at her Keds on the hot cement. She stum­bled and said, “I…I don’t…” He turned away, but then reap­peared and slid a lit­tle fold­ed paper under the win­dow. It had a checker­board of games list­ed on it. She looked for a game on a Mon­day, but there were bare­ly any. Going month by month, she kept look­ing and final­ly found one. She point­ed to the date on the sched­ule, and the man peered down. He pulled the tail end of the paper clos­er to his glass­es. He said “You’re gonna have to tell me—I can’t read that!” Rita balled her left fist around her purse strap and told her­self —just say it! She had heard Vin say “upcom­ing games for the Dodgers…on Tues­day the 17th the Dodgers start a series with the Giants here at Dodger Sta­di­um at 7:15 p.m.” In his voice, it sound­ed so nat­ur­al and easy.

            Slow­ly she said, “Reds. August fif­teen. Two tickets.”

            The man laughed, “Plen­ty of good seats for that one! Where do you want to sit?”

            She hand­ed over a five-dol­lar bill, hop­ing to avoid fur­ther conversation.

            “The best that will buy you is two down the left field line,” the clerk said.

            Rita replied, “Ok,” and he reached down into his drawer.

            She slid the tick­ets in her purse and with a nod swift­ly walked away. 

 

*

 

            After Vin dis­ap­peared around the cor­ner, Rita sat back down. She couldn’t help replay­ing the encounter in her head. She had fan­ta­sized about meet­ing Mr. Scul­ly and her laugh­ing at one of his sig­na­ture lines, an exchange she could impress Davis with lat­er. That was nev­er going to hap­pen now. She tried to lis­ten to the music fill­ing the seat­ing bowl. It sound­ed like a fun­ny sort of piano. Max called it an “organ,” but she wasn’t sure if that was the right word. She knew organs were inside your body—a kid­ney, liv­er. Still, she appre­ci­at­ed the dis­trac­tion. By the end of one of the songs she could make out the cho­rus “It’s a beau­ti­ful day for a ballgame…”—and it was. Warm and breezy in the shade. She sang along under her breath. Max gig­gled while rac­ing the chalk cart that paint­ed the foul line all the way to the out­field wall. He yelled, “Jim­my! Ron! Don­ny!” when his favorites came out to take ground balls or stretch, and made sure to point each one out to Rita so she knew who was who. It was as if the sounds she had been lis­ten­ing to for weeks stirred and took on color—the bright green of the field, and the white, blue, and red of the uni­forms were crisper than Vista Vision. All the sounds had shapes teth­ered to them now. Despite tens of thou­sands of peo­ple in the seats, this place felt serene. She turned around in her seat and saw a man falling asleep, his wife fill­ing out a score­card next to him. 

            The lull end­ed when she heard some­one roar, “Does any­one here speak Ital­ian?!” The secu­ri­ty guard she saw ear­li­er was scream­ing the phrase as he charged down the third base line toward her. Huff­ing and wip­ing his brow, he kept it up: “Ital­iano? Any­one here speak Ital­ian?” Rita’s moth­er told her sto­ries about Ital­ians being tar­get­ed dur­ing the war. She got scared and sunk into her seat. Despite her best efforts to wrap up Max’s hands and keep him qui­et, he squirmed in his seat and wig­gled his arms, “Si! Si!!!” Rita squeezed her eyes shut.

            Max got the guard’s atten­tion and he start­ed climb­ing up the aisle. The guard looked at Rita and asked, “You! Do you speak Ital­ian?” He might as well have had a flash­light and a pistol.

            Rita stam­mered, “…Si… yes.”

            The lum­ber­ing man said, “Come with me! The name’s Jack—I work secu­ri­ty here at Dodger Stadium.”

            Max ran out ahead as Rita began to stand. Her brain screamed at her to sit back down.

            Jack looked at Max’s Pirate jer­sey and said, “Too bad you’re not a Dodger fan. You could be a real hero today!”

            Max piped up, “Oh we are!”

            “The boys…it was a gift…the neighborhood?”—Rita stam­mered in Jack’s direction.

            “Yeah, this is my only jer­sey, but I love Sandy, Mousey, all of ’em!” Max cried.

            Why was he look­ing for Ital­ians? Why did Max raise his hand? The best-case sce­nario was that she’d be the butt of a joke, bal­anc­ing a meat­ball on her nose. Still, the guard looked des­per­ate and grate­ful, so she con­tin­ued behind him until they approached the elevator.

            Jack asked her, “Do you know who Vin Scul­ly is?”

            Rita said, “Yes, I lis­ten to Dodger games on KFI,” repeat­ing a phrase she had heard Vin him­self say one hun­dred times and at each sta­tion break.

            “Good, good!” Jack said. “Look, Vin is stuck in there.” He point­ed at the elevator.

            “It was repaired ear­li­er today and some­thing went wrong. He’s got to broad­cast the game…” he looked down at his watch, “in less than 45 minutes!”

            She looked at him puz­zled. Jack’s words ran togeth­er like pas­sen­gers jammed into a bus, but Max saw Jack’s pan­icked expression.

            Max translated—“è bloc­ca­to nel­l’as­cen­sore e ha bisog­no del nos­tro aiu­to! Vin needs our help!”

            “Vin is trapped?” She couldn’t imag­ine the game with­out him.

            Jack spurt­ed, “If Jer­ry has to do play-by-play…the fans won’t even know who’s up to bat!”

            “But we can’t repair it…?” Rita stat­ed with a befud­dled look on her face.

            She turned around and looked back at her seat. This was total­ly bat­ty! Work on her Eng­lish, she thought. Get a pro­mo­tion, she thought. Help a stuck broad­cast­er out of an elevator?

            Jack said to Rita and Max, “He already tried pry­ing it open with his hands. And he called the shop—all the repair crews are out and won’t be able to come for hours. ‘Fino a stan­otte,’ they said. We think the kid answer­ing the emer­gency phone only speaks Italiano.”

            Jack mimed a tele­phone receiv­er when he said, “Ital­iano” and looked direct­ly at Rita.

            Max said, “L’as­sis­tente par­la solo ital­iano!” Rita got it, and nod­ded slow­ly. Vin need­ed a trans­la­tor. Maybe Max could help, she thought.

            Jack banged on the ele­va­tor door: “Vin, I got a cou­ple I‑talians out here. Ring up the ele­va­tor com­pa­ny again. Just tell them what you want to say and they’ll trans­late for the kid!” 

            “I don’t think that’s gonna work, Jack…” Vin used that same tone when he described the Dodgers ground­ing into a dou­ble play, but his voice was only a faint echo sur­round­ed by the white noise of the stadium. 

            “Just call them, Vin!” the guard pleaded.

            “Okay, fine.”

            After a peri­od of silence, Rita heard Vin on the phone. He was try­ing hard to sound patient. It was tough to make out what was hap­pen­ing, hear­ing only one gar­bled end of the con­ver­sa­tion in a lan­guage she bare­ly under­stood. Streams of peo­ple con­tin­ued to enter the park and the crowd noise thickened.

            They pressed their ears against the ele­va­tor doors. The cold met­al was actu­al­ly pleas­ant on the warm day.

            “I am Vin. Your name?” There was a silence as Vin lis­tened to the boy on the oth­er end. Then he spoke again, “Gio. OK, Gio, look. I’ve got a cou­ple of folks here who speak Italiano.”

            “You ready?” Jack asked her. She nod­ded but her flip­ping stom­ach disagreed.

            “Jack, this plan is ridicu­lous!” Vin griped from the ele­va­tor. Rita sti­fled her sigh as Jack motioned him on, even though Vin couldn’t see. They waited.

            “ I am going to speak to you in Ital­ian, Gio,” Rita heard Vin say. “Je par­le Ital­ian. I am stuck. Hold on.” he said.

            Rita thought—French? What’s he doing? Then she thought about the “Ital­ish” that got her through the first few months at the hotel. Maybe he knew some French from school or some­thing. Why not? she decided. 

            “Jack, ask them how to say ‘how do…open…doors?’” Rita heard faintly.

            “I can’t hear you Vin! Can you say that again?” Jack said.

            Vin pound­ed on the met­al and yelled, “TRANSLATE: how do I open the ele­va­tor doors?” This time, they jumped back from their lis­ten­ing perches.

            “Can you tell him how to say that?” Jack asked Rita.

            Max was sup­posed to do this, but he was look­ing off at the field instead. A long bat­ting prac­tice home run cracked in the dis­tance. So, in a soft, stac­ca­to rhythm Rita began.

            “Aiutami—ad—aprire—l’ascensore?” she said, and looked over to Jack. 

            Once Max heard her voice, he nod­ded his approval. Jack bel­lowed the line up to Vin best he could, lock­ing eyes with Rita the entire time. They heard the broad­cast­er repeat parts of the ques­tion over the phone. Jack looked on, mouth gaped in antic­i­pa­tion. Rita’s face tightened. 

            Silence for anoth­er minute. Rita thought about what she was doing there. Couldn’t Jack just call his boss? Maybe the fire depart­ment could get him out. Where was the shop’s fore­man? Her spi­ral was halt­ed by the worst sound­ing sen­tence she had ever heard Vin Scul­ly say. The first phrase sound­ed like mas­sa­cred ver­sion of “Salire sul­la ringhiera?”—the only thing that real­ly made sense. Despite his chop job, she knew its mean­ing. Gio told him that the first step was to climb up on the rail­ing around the edge of the car. 

            Rita knew what Gio want­ed Vin to do, but she need­ed Max to explain it. She called him over, but he was long gone, eyes big as lol­lipops watch­ing Lefeb­vre hit the last pitch of bat­ting prac­tice deep into the left­field bleachers.

            “What did he say?” Jack asked Rita, urgency rush­ing his words.

            “He’s going to have to climb up the rail­ing!” she blurt­ed. “You need to get up to the ceiling!”

            Ears back in posi­tion, they heard a shift in weight above, and sev­er­al groans. Vin had to try but was clear­ly still look­ing for a res­cue. Rita did her best to mim­ic the loud voice she used when call­ing Max in for dinner.

            “You have to move to the top!” She felt a bit like Vin herself—narrating the action for some­one else, paint­ing a pic­ture so they could see. Look­ing at her watch, it was past 6:30. She knew he need­ed to start the broad­cast in just a few minutes—it was now or nev­er. Rita heard an exhaust­ed sound­ing, “Gra­zie, Gio” and a dull ring, pre­sum­ably Vin hang­ing up the phone.

            Vin shout­ed, “I’m going for the rail!” but the sen­tence came out halted—a click­ing sound echoed from his mouth. Rita looked over at Jack, con­fused. He mimed drop­ping some­thing down his throat. “Luden’s Wild Cher­ry. He’s got­ta have them for his voice. Espe­cial­ly with this—today…” ges­tur­ing at the ele­va­tor. They heard Vin push his weight against the front walls of the lift and then pull his feet up with a swing­ing clunk. Rita imag­ined he might be using the crook of the phone box to get up off the floor. He slipped and they heard his weight land square on the base of the car. Rita winced. After 30 sec­onds or so, Vin tried again, and some­thing hit the ground and land­ed with a bounce, ring­ing. The phone receiv­er? That would con­firm her the­o­ry about him using emer­gency box as a step­ping stone.

            Rita thought about the ele­va­tors at the hotel. They had thin met­al handrails all along the sides of the car. She knew it would be tough to bal­ance on that. Her mind cranked on the pos­si­bil­i­ties, but it was going to be a strug­gle for one per­son to do all of this. When this hap­pened on The Dick Van Dyke Show, anoth­er man lift­ed Rob up, and he got on his shoul­ders. As the clanks died down, Rita thought about what Gio had said next. “Rimuo­vere il pan­el­lo del sof­fit­to,” per­haps? Vin had run through the words so fast, repeat­ing them right after Gio, but that seemed log­i­cal to Rita.

            She screamed at the slit between the doors, “Now you’ve got to remove the ceil­ing tile!”

            More grunt­ing from inside. They heard shuf­fling and then anoth­er crash to the floor, but this one seemed lighter.

            Vin yelled out “I knocked it out! There’s dust every­where, but I can see cables! What do I do now?”

            Rita had to tell him. “Mr. Scul­ly?” she asked. “You have to reach up in there, find the lever, and pull it!” Gio’s last instruction.

            All she heard was cough­ing. Anoth­er loud thud on the ground and pant­i­ng fol­lowed. At this point, Rita wor­ried that the cables would begin to fray. “There’s no way I can get any fur­ther!” the echo cried. “Jack, what about that crow­bar, hey?”

            He yelled between labored breaths, “I can’t get all the way up there, Jack. I need some help!” 

            Jack sighed and said, “Is there any­thing in there you can use to push through the ceiling?”

            “I can’t even get to the ceiling!”

            Jack said, “Well, you got the tile down, that’s something!”

            Rita clenched her fists. She thought about how Vin would describe this sce­nario in a game: “He reached out across his body and snagged it on a line…” She braced her­self. Vin could work alone.

            “The only oth­er thing in here is the sign, Jack. But it’s mount­ed on the wall, you know?” If it was any­thing like the one out­side the ele­va­tor on the wall next to her, Rita thought it could maybe be of use. In sig­na­ture blue script on a sin­gle piece of heavy alu­minum, “Dodgers” was engraved and behind that the logo—a base­ball shoot­ing sky­ward with a long trail of red sparks. “Sopra il offit­to tiare la leva! Use it like a bat, Vin!” As soon as the words escaped Rita, she cov­ered her mouth with her hands. She couldn’t believe she was advo­cat­ing the destruc­tion of prop­er­ty! Still, it was an emer­gency and she was asked to help. Jack looked at her and shout­ed up, “Rip it off. Go for it, man!”

            They heard Vin get on his feet and again the car start­ed to swing. Max said, “He’s try­ing to pry off the sign!” This whole thing felt wrong. Vin screamed, “Jack, tell O’Malley I’m gonna pay for this!” Jack said under his breath, “You sure will…” Only Rita heard it. The tug­ging con­tin­ued. They could tell when the met­al tangs released from the wall by the sound of Vin’s impact against the doors and the result­ing: “Ahhh!” Rita could envi­sion Vin career­ing back­ward with a wicked force, clutch­ing the sign. Jack shout­ed, “Is every­thing alright in there?” What a line! All they could hear were a few loud grunts and a thud. With their ears tuned to the doors, Rita and Max’s con­cerned looks focused on gapers who walked by slow­ly, shov­ing ker­nels of pop­corn into their open mouths. Anoth­er guard had showed up to shoo patrons away, but Rita saw he was hav­ing lit­tle suc­cess. She looked back at the sign behind her. It was a two-foot-long “X.” There must have been dozens of them around the new ball­park. They heard Vin’s ver­sion drop to the ground. At this point he need­ed to catch his breath any­way. From the pho­to in front out by the gates, he was approach­ing mid­dle age. Did he have it in him to fin­ish the job?

            “Did he say what side the lever was on?” Vin asked.

            Rita snapped alert. With her hands clasped around her mouth, she shout­ed, “To the right!” before she could even think about it. Is that what Gio said? It had become a game of tele­phone at this point, and she wasn’t sure. Peo­ple were always telling Rita that the key to learn­ing Eng­lish was con­fi­dence. Vin said that about ballplay­ers look­ing to improve their bat­ting aver­age as well. This was the time to try. 

            “OK, I’m going back up!”

            They heard grunt­ing again. At this point, it was ten min­utes until first pitch.

            Jack got on the walkie-talkie and told some­one, “We’re work­ing on get­ting him out. Get Jer­ry ready to go on!”

            Once they heard a bewil­dered “10/4,” Jack pushed the radio back onto his belt. Jack could envi­sion sweaty Jer­ry, pac­ing upstairs.

            Rita whis­pered to Jack while mim­ing, “He should hold the ‘s’ at the end of ‘Dodgers’ like a knob and use the rest to swing with!”

            Jack called up, “Why don’t you try hold­ing the nar­row end of the sign like a bat, Vin? Just swing the hell out of it!”

            The trio could make out a pant­i­ng consent.

            They lis­tened to the famil­iar sounds of Vin start­ing the whole pro­ce­dure over again. Rita could envi­sion Vin hold­ing the Dodger plac­ard in his right hand, its comet trail dan­gling. The scene remind­ed her of a James Bond movie. He yelled “I’m going for it!!” Then came the bashing—the unmis­tak­able sound of a long met­al plate hit­ting any­thing and every­thing above the tiles. They felt the sides of the car knock­ing into the shaft and debris falling.

 

            Vin screamed, “I haven’t hit any­thing yet!” He seemed to be search­ing for his bal­ance. They braced for a thud but it didn’t come.

            Rita encour­aged, “un’al­tra vol­ta!” and then quick­ly the trans­la­tion, hit­ting her­self on the fore­head as she yelled up: “One more go!” She remem­bered her hus­band Joe whis­per­ing that to her right before her final inhale and push at Max’s birth.

            “I’m going in!” Vin shout­ed. Sud­den­ly, they heard that Vin had made contact—the clash of two met­als meet­ing. Max and Rita locked widened eyes and then looked over to Jack. She said a prayer that the sign wouldn’t snap. They heard a grunt through clenched teeth. The alu­minum whizzed off the iron bar and land­ed with a clunk. Did the sign fall into the shaft? Had the lever moved at all? If not, Vin was cooked. Rita thought about her tiny cab­in with Max and Joe on the boat. Stuffy and hot, Vin must have been exhaust­ed in there. Just then they heard a slide and a squeal. Final­ly, “krr-shunk.” The car jerked and began what sound­ed like a slow sink. “It’s hap­pen­ing!” she thought. But the doors didn’t crack imme­di­ate­ly. Was it a false alarm? In her pan­icked hope, she got up from the ground and smoothed her hair and skirt. The doors opened into the set­ting sun. Vin flashed a smile and she smiled right back.

 

 * 

 

            In the shade down the third base line, she felt the breeze in her hair and adjust­ed her well-worn blue cap. It was a long game, but the Dodgers were good this year and she was ready for anoth­er stretch run. Gib­son had just made his Dodger debut and Her­shis­er was hav­ing a sea­son for the ages. Cy Young-wor­thy. She put aside her score­card and looked down on the field for Max. If she wasn’t quick, she’d miss him. The grounds crew was an ever-present abstrac­tion mark­ing time in a base­ball game—appearing at planned inter­vals, trawl­ing their rakes behind, then sud­den­ly gone. She rose out of her seat and waved, but he didn’t see her. Rita turned to Ray and smiled. She hadn’t seen her broth­er since she’d got­ten the posi­tion at the con­sulate, but was glad they were able to cel­e­brate his 50th togeth­er. As the sev­enth inning began, she raised the radio to her ear. Rita heard the famil­iar voice men­tion St. Joseph’s Day, and her sens­es perked. “Jeff Hamil­ton was born on March 19th,” Vin said. He went on, “You know, I owe a debt to the Ital­ian peo­ple…” She straight­ened up a bit and thought back to before she got her dream job, before Max grad­u­at­ed from high school, before she even got her pro­mo­tion at the hotel, to when a few yards from here, she had saved the day. Vin con­tin­ued, “Did I tell you about the time…?” She closed her eyes in the fad­ing sun­light to lis­ten to the sto­ry one more time.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

“It’s Time for Dodger Base­ball” was writ­ten on a dare. As a poet, I had nev­er writ­ten a full-length short sto­ry and an edi­tor asked me to try it. This was such a chal­lenge for me because my full-length col­lec­tions of poet­ry are about the same length as this one sto­ry. I wrote a piece that reflect­ed my family’s immi­grant expe­ri­ence, the expe­ri­ence of the stu­dents I tutored in Eng­lish lan­guage con­ver­sa­tion cir­cles in my day job work­ing at a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege, and the sus­pense­ful Alfred Hitch­cock thrillers I loved. Still, it wasn’t quite right upon my hun­dreds of “read alouds.” I met up with a fic­tion writer I admired, Matthew Thomas Meade, who taught me how to write dia­log and a thing or two about “in medias res” plot chronol­o­gy, which helped the whole thing click into place. Thanks to him for doing a favor for this poet.

San­dra Mar­che­t­ti is the 2023 win­ner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Base­ball Poet­ry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length col­lec­tions of poet­ry, DIORAMA, forth­com­ing from Stephen F. Austin State Uni­ver­si­ty Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Con­flu­ence (Sun­dress Pub­li­ca­tions, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chap­books of poet­ry and lyric essays. Her poet­ry and essays appear wide­ly in Mid-Amer­i­can Review, Black­bird, Eco­tone, South­west Review, Sub­trop­ics, and else­where. She is Poet­ry Edi­tor Emeri­ta at Riv­er Styx Mag­a­zine. Sandy earned an MFA in Cre­ative Writing—Poetry from George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty and now serves as the Assis­tant Direc­tor of Aca­d­e­m­ic Sup­port at Harp­er Col­lege in Chicagoland. This is her first pub­lished short story.

I Need To Write, So Here Goes.

Fiction / Ben Nunn

 

:: I Need To Write, So Here Goes. ::

            I have always lived in a box. And so has she. Our box­es are made of wood and they aren’t tall enough for us to stand in, but we can sit criss-cross-apple­sauce or lie on our sides. In the win­ter, spi­ders will often tuck them­selves into the cor­ners. They sit in their lit­tle webs and wait out the cold. On the wood­en floor, I can see the sub­tle impres­sion of where I sleep. It’s a small, faint oval.

            There is a rec­tan­gu­lar slit in both of our box­es, about the size of my two fists. Through it, I can see her box and she can see mine. It’s always been that way.

            The chasm between our box­es is just a bit longer than two out­stretched, reach­ing arms. In the spring, lush grass­es and tiny pur­ple flow­ers spread across it. It’s a tan waste­land of dead grass in the sum­mer, an ocean of orange and brown leaves in the autumn, and a gen­tle storm of snow in the win­ter until the spring melts it away. Every cycle of sea­sons it is like this.

            Food grows from our box­es’ wood­en ceil­ings. It begins each morn­ing as lit­tle green hairs, wisps of vines sprout­ing above our heads, always a mys­tery what it will grow into. And grow it does, excep­tion­al­ly quick. By the time the sun is halfway through the sky, fruits or pota­toes or sliv­ers of bread are dan­gling at our eyes. She likes to show off what­ev­er she gets. Her eyes will bright­en, and she’ll stick out her pear, or a hand­ful of dough­nut holes through her slit. I’ll laugh and show her mine.

            Along with new food, every morn­ing a new object appears in our box. Always in the back-left cor­ner. What­ev­er I get that day (a hand­bag, a heart pin, alu­minum foil, an emp­ty pill bot­tle) I will place in the cor­ner at night and the next morn­ing a new item replaces it. Same for her, of course. The stick of coal I’m using now came today, and I’m hunched over using my wood­en walls to write this on. I am thank­ful for this lit­tle piece of coal. I need to explain this strange feel­ing to myself, to wrap my head around every­thing. I’ll get there.

            I’m not sure what she’s doing as I’m writ­ing this; I chose the wall left of the slit so that I couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see me. Most days (most days before Yes­ter­day that is) we would just stare at each oth­er. Her eyes are wide and brown and full of curios­i­ty, always glis­ten­ing in the sun (even in cloudy weath­er, there is a mag­ic there). The slit frames them so per­fect­ly, two brown plan­ets trapped in that lit­tle win­dow. When I look at her she doesn’t look away; when she looks, I can’t.

            In the days before Yes­ter­day, I would imag­ine what her shoul­ders or her knees were like beyond that slit win­dow. Were her legs scrunched up like mine were? Her hair was often what I thought about more than any­thing else. She had shown me once, on the Per­fect Day.

            It was weeks ago, in the begin­ning of win­ter. It had been snowing.

            The box had giv­en us both coats to wear that day. That moment alone makes me want to believe in some­thing divine. We were cozy, pulling tight­ly on our coats, just lazi­ly observ­ing each oth­er’s eyes. Then, and I still don’t know why, she had moved a brown stream of her hair through her fin­gers and let it tum­ble out of the slit. It fell in a wavy sort of way, loose yet com­posed. It had a shine of oil. Snowflakes would land in it, and melt into brown lushness.

            She could only fit one eye through the open­ing along with her hair. I crossed my legs, rest­ed my fore­head against the wall, and just stared out. I felt com­plete. It’s dis­tress­ing to think about this now, but it was Per­fect then.

            That was a while ago. We would look out towards each oth­er, find­ing the other’s eyes through the snow, but less often after that day. It had only got­ten cold­er, and we didn’t get any more coats. I had only enough ener­gy to shiv­er in the far cor­ner of my box, mess­ing idly with what­ev­er object I received that day. I’m a bit ashamed but while wait­ing the cold days away I thought about lit­tle else but her. I wish I knew what she was think­ing right now.

            It was snow­ing Yes­ter­day when every­thing changed, but I can’t talk about that yet.

            I think I have to explain the Crea­ture Day. There is a con­nec­tion there that I have to understand.

            The Crea­ture Day was months ago, dur­ing autumn. I had wok­en up to a new sound. It was a sub­tle crunch­ing of leaves, soft­er than hail, loud­er than a squir­rel. We had seen plen­ty of squir­rels in our time, me and her. We’d watch them find an acorn and gal­lant­ly hop away to hide it. They were too qui­et to ever wake me like this.

            I peeked through my slit. The morn­ing out­side was still blue, bare­ly warm­ing up. She was already awake, star­ing intense­ly at our new com­pan­ion. Birds would land, squawk, and fly away. A whole world of insects and bugs would accom­pa­ny us through­out the sea­sons. We even saw a fox once. This thing, this hulk­ing crea­ture, was noth­ing like that. It was mas­sive and yet had a frail majesty to it. Atop its head was a crown of antlers much larg­er than any deer we had seen before. I had to get on my stom­ach and peer up through the slit just to see the top of it. It had come from the for­est to our right and was in our clear­ing nestling its head through the leaves.

            She stared at it and I did too. It didn’t care about our box­es or our stares. It just brushed its way around the leaves, care­ful­ly bend­ing its giant frame down to nib­ble at the grass under­neath. I snuck my eyes away from the crea­ture for a moment and focused on hers. She did the same. We were both in this realm of pure won­der togeth­er. It was just the two of us, com­plete­ly ensnared by this beau­ti­ful creature.

            That was the Crea­ture Day. I think it’s impor­tant to what hap­pened Yes­ter­day because it was the com­plete oppo­site feel­ing. Yes­ter­day we were again ensnared, but it was by hor­ror instead of won­der, a red rope instead of a creature.

            Yes­ter­day, it was snow­ing, but it was warmer than usu­al. That morn­ing my new object appeared; it looked like a toy. There was an orange han­dle that you could squeeze and at the end of a short rod was the head of a green ani­mal that I did­n’t rec­og­nize. When I squeezed the han­dle, the ani­mal’s mouth shut. Open, shut, open, shut. I care­ful­ly maneu­vered it through the slit to show her. We’d often do this, mere­ly out of curios­i­ty. Open, shut, open, shut. Her eyes were amused, watch­ing. I don’t think she knew the ani­mal either.

            I was ner­vous to do it; I didn’t often play the fool. Yet, when some lazy snowflakes float­ed down between us, I swooped my lit­tle green ani­mal at them. I squeezed the han­dle and the ani­mal ate a snowflake. Quick­ly I looked over to see, and thank­ful­ly, I saw her eyes full of excite­ment. I did it again. Then again, swing­ing my lit­tle ani­mal all over the sky between us, catch­ing snow to her amusement.

            I didn’t want to push my luck so I even­tu­al­ly tucked my toy back inside my box. When I did, her eyes dis­ap­peared for a moment before return­ing. Then, from her box’s slit, her fin­gers dan­gled out her object of the day: a thin red rope. It is because of this rope that I am writ­ing, it is why I feel this strange way.

            It was long and apple-red. It was prob­a­bly as long as I am tall, maybe longer.

            I think because I was so play­ful, she want­ed to rec­i­p­ro­cate. Her wrists were bare­ly able to fit through the slit, yet, in that same jol­ly spir­it, she was able to sling that rope around and around and around. It flung snow from the ground and smacked snowflakes in the air. I gig­gled. It was­n’t fun­ny per se, but I don’t think some­thing needs to be fun­ny to laugh.

            It felt like anoth­er Per­fect Day.

            Then it hap­pened. She swung the rope in such a way, with such force, that the tip of it, the frayed red hairs, touched the out­side of my box. It stayed there, in the snow, limp. Some­thing in my stom­ach began to churn. It took me only a few sec­onds to under­stand, star­ing at the red rope that was graz­ing my box, the rope that began way over in her fin­gers: we were touch­ing! We were touching.

            There had always been a chasm between us and now there was a bridge.

            All the time I spent imag­in­ing her, shiv­er­ing in my box, star­ing at the spi­ders in my cor­ners, seemed to lead to this. I think that’s why I have this feel­ing. It’s in my chest. It’s some­thing angry, some­thing frag­ile. It’s her.

            I’m not sure what that means, but it felt right to write. I have to keep going.

            It got worse, and it’s my fault. It’s entire­ly my fault.

            My arms are much thin­ner than hers and can reach through the slit fur­ther, almost until my shoul­der.  I could reach the rope down on the snow if I want­ed to.

            I had want­ed to and I wish I hadn’t.

            I stuck my fin­gers out first. I avoid­ed her eyes. My fore­arm was then out into the frigid air. My shoul­der was jam­ming against the slit, my out­stretched fin­gers twirling around the frayed ends of the rope below. But I was able to grab it, and with a sud­den ter­ror, I lift­ed the red rope off the snow and into the air.

            My heart is nor­mal­ly quite calm in my chest, but I remem­ber it slam­ming, rup­tur­ing with a for­eign feel­ing as I stared down the length of the rope. My fin­gers, our fin­gers, hold­ing up the long red rope in a taut line. I fol­lowed it with my eyes until I met hers. Her beau­ti­ful brown eyes were full of fear. Where the Crea­ture was a mag­i­cal con­nec­tion between us, that rope was a hor­rid, all-too-real one.

            I remem­ber think­ing: I could pull on the rope. This red-hot feel­ing want­ed to pull, to get clos­er, to see how the brown of her eyes melt­ed into the black of her pupils, to see if she had the same lit­tle rash­es across her skin as I do, to reach out and feel her hair…

            At the same moment, I want­ed to cry. I felt it change. The mag­ic of our lit­tle world was gone; I could pull her and she could pull me.

            What was she think­ing at that moment? I would have giv­en up my dai­ly objects for­ev­er just to know. But I think I know, and that’s why I feel this way right now.

            She dropped the rope first, and I imme­di­ate­ly fol­lowed. It fell onto the snow, dead, and out of reach from both of us. She van­ished inside of her box.

            I felt child­ish. Every­thing before that moment was igno­rant inno­cence. Of course, we would nev­er live our whole lives with­out fac­ing each oth­er, real­ly fac­ing each oth­er. But that bridge has been burned for­ev­er and I’m going to rot. I’m going to rot away alone! I’m going crazy. Why did it feel so hor­ren­dous­ly wrong to hold that rope, to think about pulling her closer?

            I’m los­ing my con­trol, my lan­guage. Spew­ing like this doesn’t help me any. Let me regain composure.

            That was Yes­ter­day and that feel­ing has­n’t left me. Nei­ther has the rope. It didn’t dis­ap­pear this morn­ing like the objects always do; that scar­let line across the snow was still there when I woke up. My ani­mal toy, care­ful­ly placed in the back left cor­ner, was gone and this coal had arrived.

            The morn­ing had just become orange when I looked out­side; the slit in her box was dark and vacant. Her box seemed some­how clos­er than it had been.

            I say ‘woke up’ but I nev­er real­ly went to sleep. I kept imag­in­ing all night what it would be like if we didn’t let go, if we pulled each oth­er togeth­er. Per­haps I would have pulled a lit­tle clos­er, then she would have, then me, then her until our box­es were pressed against each other.

            Would she have hat­ed me once she real­ly saw my eyes, my face? Would she shrink away into the cor­ner of her box and I into mine?

            Or would we have, I don’t know. I won­der what her fin­gers feel like. That’s a thought I’ve nev­er had before and now I can’t get it out of my mind. She got a lit­tle bot­tle of skin cream a few sea­sons ago. I think she used it. I bet her fin­gers would feel soft.

            I’m on my stom­ach right now, writ­ing in the final mar­gin of this wall. I hope she can’t see me. I need to take a break and switch walls, my wrist hurts, my chest hurts. I’ll start again soon

.

*

 

            She still has not shown her eyes today. I look after almost every sen­tence, and each time I regret it. My chest feels like an emp­ty box. I keep say­ing chest but I mean heart, I think. She has a box in my heart and it’s vacant and full of cold spiders.

            The world taunts me. A blue­ber­ry muf­fin has grown for me today. I plucked it from the ceil­ing vines and its sweet smell was nau­se­at­ing. She nev­er told me those were her favorites but I knew. I know what the sparkle in her eyes meant on the days when she showed me a blue­ber­ry muf­fin out of her lit­tle win­dow. I don’t want to eat it.

            I began writ­ing so that I may hope­ful­ly under­stand myself bet­ter, to put words to this swirling feel­ing. And I know what it is. It’s just her. It always has been. It’s half of my heart, my soul writhing in regret for not pulling on that rope, to get clos­er. It’s the oth­er half in a com­plete spi­ral of ter­ror and anger over what I have ruined, of what could have been.  I thought under­stand­ing would give me peace, but I, wait-

            There she is!

            What I just watched has made this wal­low­ing despair worse. Her wide wrist, moments ago, stuck out through her slit, her fin­gers reach­ing for the rope below. She was painful­ly far away. She could not reach the rope as I had done ear­li­er. Her wrist snaked back inside her box, defeated.

            I feel defeat­ed! I’m scratch­ing my skin with my left hand as I write with my right. It’s a ter­ri­ble habit that I thought I left behind. She will nev­er get anoth­er item as long as the rope lays out­side her box. And that is because of me.

            I just tried to reach for it too. My fin­gers could scrape the snow, but the rope had bent away from me when I dropped it. Anoth­er inch and maybe I could have grabbed it, then some­how tossed it back to her.

But I couldn’t and she didn’t look.

            I miss the days, the beau­ti­ful days of just watch­ing each oth­er. I’m hun­gry, I’m starv­ing but I will not eat this cursed muf­fin. I don’t even know why I am writ­ing this; it will all be gone by tomor­row morn­ing. I don’t have the ener­gy any­more to write or think and I’m tear­ing at my skin and my chest is shak­ing in piti­ful breaths.

             The Crea­ture and her hair on Per­fect day is all I want to think about, but it feels wrong to, it feels gross. It’s near­ly night­fall now and the coal is just a peb­ble between my thumb and fin­ger. I think I feel worse than before. This has not helped me. Per­haps what­ev­er I get tomor­row will.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

            I love love. It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly human thing and impos­si­ble to prop­er­ly define. As I began to write this sto­ry, I was begin­ning a new rela­tion­ship, and strug­gling with what love feels like. Should love be an obses­sion? At what cost, then? Is it wrong for love to be so man­ic and with­out rea­son? And what does it feel like to not be feel­ing the right things? I didn’t find these answers, but the man in the box is my explo­ration. I want­ed to block out every­thing in our world and put this man and his feel­ings in the sim­plest set­ting pos­si­ble. Per­haps then his inse­cu­ri­ties (which of course were my own) could find space to feel them­selves out.

            I didn’t want to “solve” this prob­lem with­in this sto­ry. Being in a rela­tion­ship is not always a table on four steady legs, but is more a long and uncer­tain process. I wished to cap­ture just a glimpse of that process between the man and woman and no more!

Ben Nunn is a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin, study­ing film and cre­ative writ­ing. He’s worked under best­selling authors who’ve taught him to write suc­cinct­ly and pow­er­ful­ly. He enjoys focus­ing his sto­ries on the absurd and the outcast.

The Dead Talks

Fiction / Ada Pelonia

 

:: The Dead Talks ::

It’s a sui­cide, the whis­pers say. Bystanders mur­mur, ‘What a waste—’ of tal­ent, of intel­lect, of a son. The eldest of five sib­lings, he is the fam­i­ly’s pride. The rope wrapped around the tree’s branch by the back­yard sets a tell­tale sign. The police think it’s a sui­cide, too. But the signs of bruis­ing on his arms and grip marks on his face per­mit a deep­er probe.

The offi­cer says he’d been dead for six hours. The roost­ers have crowed ear­li­er, now squawk­ing relent­less­ly by their feet. His moth­er says noth­ing but sobs at the confirmation.

“My son would nev­er do that, offi­cer,” his father says in a brood­ing voice before tak­ing a puff from his cig­a­rette and spit­ting his phlegm on the ground. “My son’s an archi­tect, you know? Peo­ple can get jeal­ous. Some­one else must have done this.”

The police stay mum, mere­ly nod­ding. They ask per­mis­sion to check the house, and his father leads them in.

“My son’s room is on the left.” His father points at a door. Out­side are his sib­lings, their sullen eyes blood­shot red. His father notices and clench­es his fists.

“Get them out of here,” his father orders. His moth­er scram­bles from behind, stag­ger­ing as she holds their clam­my hands and leads them to the kitchen.

The offi­cer enters, ask­ing the oth­er to take pho­tographs. A draft­ing table sits in the cor­ner of his room with blank trac­ing papers strewn on top. Crum­pled Post-it notes brim­ming on his trash bin with rigid let­ter­ing of the word “ideas” fol­lowed by ellipses. Emp­ty draw­ing stor­age tubes are stacked beside it.

His lug­gage has been left open on his bed with a few fold­ed shirts inside and heaps of clothes around it. Under­neath are two torn air­line tick­ets. The offi­cer takes them, soot cin­ders leav­ing traces on his gloved hands. He jots these in his pock­et note­book and places them in plastic.

They check his cab­i­nets: pen­cils, tri­an­gu­lar scales, Cop­ic mark­ers, lin­er pens, and a pile of sketch­books. The offi­cer asks the oth­er to flip through the pages, seek­ing a let­ter. They find noth­ing but house and infra­struc­ture sketch­es, cutouts of hous­es from mag­a­zines on the right with his ver­sion on the left. His draw­ings had scrib­bles on them, the traces of ball­point pen leav­ing marks from behind.

The police leaf through the pages of his sketch­books until they open the last one from years back. A suite of poems penned in flow­ing cal­lig­ra­phy swirls on the paper. Every page offers stan­za after stan­za of poet­ry, all with “For David” inscribed under each title. Wedged between the last few pages was a filled-out MFA appli­ca­tion form from a uni­ver­si­ty abroad.

They take the sketch­book inside anoth­er plas­tic evi­dence bag. The offi­cer paus­es, note­book and pen in hand, and asks who David is, this person’s rela­tion­ship with him, and if his father thinks this cer­tain David may know some­thing behind his death.

“He’s just a friend, offi­cer. I can assure you that lad can’t hit any­one to save his life.”

His father snorts, shak­ing his head. The police exchange glances, their eyes prob­ing for more. But the offi­cers set­tle with assur­ing his father that they’ll give him the autop­sy report when it’s done. They say they’ll return after a few days before tak­ing their leave.

Upon sit­ting, a cup of black cof­fee has already been served at the table. His father is about to drink it when thun­der­ing knocks clash at their door.

“It’s prob­a­bly David—” his sis­ter tries to stand, but the scald­ing cof­fee drench­es her first. She stum­bles, her lips quiv­er­ing. His moth­er grabs a tow­el, her shak­ing hands wip­ing the spillage. His father heaves, fists clenched on the table’s edges. Like gears click­ing in their respec­tive places, the table turns qui­et, and they let the inces­sant knock­ing rever­ber­ate in their ears.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

 This sto­ry takes cues from a scene in “Move to Heav­en” where one of the char­ac­ters said: “There comes a moment when you begin to see what the deceased want­ed to say and the thoughts they want­ed to share.” It comes with com­mon sense that the dead don’t talk and they nev­er will. But I firm­ly believe in humans’ capac­i­ty to present their lives, the way they’ve lived (or not), which tran­scends beyond death and speaks to the liv­ing. Be it the pile of jour­nals on their bed­side table, a jar of pen­nies in every cup­board, their wal­lets filled with bus tick­ets and can­dy wrap­pers, or the trin­kets they left behind in the nook and cran­ny of the house—every nuance brings the deceased back to the liv­ing, shar­ing a sto­ry or two that’d elic­it stom­ach-turn­ing laughs or wrench­ing pain of woes, a kind of after­life that begs to be understood.

Ada Pelo­nia (she/her) is a jour­nal­ism grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of San­to Tomas. Her work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in HAD, Eunoia Review, Gone Lawn, and The Account, among oth­ers. She has been nom­i­nat­ed for Best Microfic­tion 2021. Find her at adapelonia.weebly.com or on Insta­gram @_adawrites.