Fall / Winter 2022
Art
First Night of January
After every chance the city
wanders into night,
which in a few hours
will depart like a salesman
through a door I cannot open.
I stay at the cold end
of my room and watch stars fade,
like fireflies fade in hands—
my hands, calloused from overuse,
and still I’m holding myself
like wind holding air to be wind.
Call me, howl, sound
the bell so I know I belong,
though a darker
tower has pinned the sky
like an aperture. I want
to escape,
before the heliotropic hour
when all masks look for a face. Look,
I’ve taken off my face
like a coat in December.
Aiden Heung (He/They) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous Town, currently living in Shanghai. He is a Tongji University graduate. His poems written in English have appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, Orison Anthology, Parentheses, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review among other places. He also translates poetry from Chinese to English, his translations were recently published in Columbia Journal and Cordite Poetry Review. He can be found on Twitter @aidenheung.
Where Have All the Mountain Gods Gone
Northwest Native American legend says that Thunder Spirits used to inhabit the Oregon mountaintops of Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood. When these Thunder Spirits raged, they threw rocks, like missiles. Today we call these projectiles Thundereggs. Instead of throwing them, we carefully slice them into hemispheres. The area between Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood is where the most colorful Thundereggs can be found, a vast field of scattered, intrinsically beautiful, undetonated, ancient weaponry.
In 1980, Mt. St. Helens—miles and miles north of Mt. Hood—blew her top. Seismologists say that a month prior to the eruption they’d detected some activity beneath her. Nothing happened and still nothing happened. And then, suddenly, on May 18th, bam! A direct hit from a long-ago feud? The Mt. Jefferson Thunder Spirit overshooting Mt. Hood by years and miles. Miles and years.
When Mt. St. Helens erupted, my wife was two and a half. That’s why she doesn’t remember it. But her parents say that there was so much ash covering the cars of their Portland neighborhood that it looked like wartime in winter.
The news reported that trace amounts of ash were found as far away as Colorado. That’s where I was at the time, in Grand Junction, also too young to remember.
When my family migrated out west, years later, mom pointed to a basket of hemispherical-cut stones in a Central Oregon gift shop. They were still rough on the outside, but their insides were smoothed-over, straw-blown dreams crystalized in oil spills. Mom told me the synopsis of the Thundereggs’ legend, that they were left as reminders to humans that the gods were once here. She didn’t specify which gods. She didn’t dwell on plurality. She didn’t have to. We’d recently left a monotheist church—or the church had left us, or maybe both were true—and I was just beginning to grasp the transience of everything.
Months after ogling over that giftshop basket of the mountain gods’ remnants, I found my very own near-perfect Thunderegg while hiking in Jefferson County. Mom said the rock that I’d found was special. She pointed to the smallest pieces of embedded quartz glittering from its surface and said it was evidence of its inner beauty. “This will, no doubt, be filled with frozen spills and petrified rainbows. But,” she warned, “it will take somebody skilled in rock dissection to get to that good stuff without destroying it.” She turned it over in her hands. “You can’t just hammer it open. You’ll have to delicately slice.”
I cupped my Thunderegg in my ten-year-old palms the entire ride back home. It felt so warm. The warmth spread through the rest of my body to the entire back seat. When we got home, I put the Thunderegg on top of my dresser where I could see it every day.
As I got older, the rock got colder. I found more warmth in my peers and the opposite sex than that Thunderegg. Eventually, I kept the rock in a shoebox under my bed.
When I moved out on my own, I took my shoebox with me.
Soon, I started my own family. As our family grew, the shoebox started getting lost—under the bed, on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, in the garage—with the rest of the past. The warmth I once felt from that Thunderegg was replaced with the busyness of life, the pursuit of healthy kids, and full-time employment with benefits. Soon time flew the way all the older people said it would. I wasn’t young anymore. The kids were in elementary, then high school, then moving away. We had them young, too young. They were out young, too soon. Then, abruptly, time slowed. Years and miles.
Thirty years after finding that Thunderegg, my wife’s grandmother moved into a care home. We were tasked with cleaning out her house before selling it. In the process, my father-in-law inherited a rock cutter from her basement. He said he hadn’t seen the rock cutter used since he was a kid but thought he could figure it out.
“Looks simple enough,” he said.
That night I drove home and crawled around under our bedframe. I sifted through winter clothing and photo albums on the top shelf of our closet. I finally found the red-and-white box that had once housed a pair of my childhood shoes in the middle drawer of the workbench in the garage. I pulled back the lid, pushed aside the past birthday cards from my grandfather, the only two photos of my dad, and retrieved that Thunderegg from long ago. It still generated heat in my hands. I thought of how it would feel to gift one polished half of this stone to mom. Maybe the other half to my wife.
I drove back to my in-laws’ house with the Thunderegg, now out of its box, riding alongside me in the front passenger seat. It rolled around a little when I took the corners sharp.
I handed the Thunderegg to my father-in-law, in his living room.
He held it between his thumb and forefinger and angled it to the ceiling light.
“Well,” he shrugged, “all right then.”
I followed him into his garage and shut the door behind us.
His garage was chilly and cluttered. It housed everything he had ever thought someone (even a stranger) might need. This isn’t an exaggeration. Once, at a garage sale, he bought a tool that only worked on one specific model of motorcycle that he didn’t own and never planned to. He said there were less than two hundred of this special motorcycle in the world. I didn’t fact-check this because it didn’t matter. Instead, I asked him, “Why would you buy that?”
“Because,” he said, “now I have this tool. I have the solution to somebody’s very particular problem.”
“What are the chances of you running into this somebody?”
“What are the chances of anything?” he replied.
That was the kind of garage I’d brought my Thunderegg to for its unveiling: a place where very particular tools waited for their special purpose.
Together, my father-in-law and I made a table out of two sawhorses and a scrap of plywood. We hoisted the rock cutter onto the plywood. The rock cutter was about the size of a bread machine but was made during a time when everything the size of a bread machine weighed as much as something much bigger than a bread machine. He plugged the cutter into an orange drop cord hanging from the open rafters. He powered the machine on.
At first, there was only an electric buzzing sound from the motor, no movement of the blade. Then there was a mewling, like a dead cow being forced back to life. The mewling was followed by a rattling and popping, the metallic air of the blade readying itself for a dissection. All these noises were slowly transfused into what eventually sounded like loose nuts and bolts tumble-drying, accompanied by a cacophony of dysphonic banshees. That’s the best I can explain the sound. It may be more accurate to say that it was the kind of noise people lose their fingers to.
My Thunderegg, a once-weapon of the gods—perfectly preserved and coveted for thirty years in a small box under multiple beds, closet tops, and eventually a workbench—took less than a minute to cut in half.
I asked him to cut the halves again.
It took no time for one treasure to become four very bland subsections.
I lined the quarters of my Thunderegg in a row on his workbench. I took one piece of the rock in my hand and rubbed the freshly cut surfaces between my thumb and fingers. There was even more heat there than before. But it wasn’t the same kind of heat, only the byproduct of friction. I rubbed the smoothness of the cut sides harder. I turned the pieces of my Thunderegg over and over, considering them. Wishing their beauty into existence. I wondered if, once expertly polished, these pieces would reveal what I couldn’t see. I wondered if every geode looked like nothing until you put more time into it. If this was just another test of the old gods on our new lack of patience. Another test of blind faith. I rubbed the cut surfaces harder, trying to push all the colors I’d imagined into them.
I heard my father-in-law chuckle at my side. I’d forgotten he was there.
“Turns out that was just a very well-rounded sandstone,” he said. “Just fool’s geode.” He smiled expectantly.
“Yeah.” I kept shaking my head. “Yeah.” I kept rubbing my rock.
“Well, c’mon. The game’s on.”
He went back inside to watch the coin flip.
I looked at those four pieces of rock for what felt like a very, very long time. Then I picked up one-quarter of my fool’s geode and hid it under a pile of random tools in my in-laws’ garage. The next day I left a piece balancing on a trailhead sign to Horsetail Falls in the Gorge like the beginnings of a miniature, elevated cairn. I walked the trail that I’d walked so many times, but I couldn’t enjoy it the way I had. The third piece of my rock, I left on a bench seat in the Hawthorne district in the rain. The last piece I hid in the drawer of my bedside table. Eventually, days later, I took that bedside piece out of the drawer and put it on my nightstand underneath the lamp next to my alarm clock. That piece of sandstone was the first thing I saw every morning and the last thing I saw every night.
I started listening to Leonard Cohen on my morning commutes. I went from one cup to four cups of coffee just to stay awake. By the third week, I was singing along with every word of “Waiting for the Miracle.” Maybe less singing, and more muttering. More drinking.
I started feeling less hungry.
I told a guy at work the story of my sandstone Thunderegg. I tried to make an ironic, whimsical, wisdom-studded joke of it. I said, “Expectation is the number one reason for disappointment. Am I right?” Because I didn’t want to say: Have you ever wondered how much of life is only a grand misunderstanding? Because I didn’t want him to say: Aw hell man, don’t take it so hard. I’m sure we can find you one of those jobbers on the internet.
Instead, he said, “So, you’re waking up to disappointment every mornin’?” while scratching his stubbled chin. “That’s pretty sad, man.”
“No. It’s a reminder. You know?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding slowly, “You should try Wellbutrin.”
“I’m not depressed, Paul.”
“I know. I know. It’s probably good for more generalized letdowns, too. I know it’s good for quittin’ smokin’.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Just sayin’.”
“Well, nobody asked.”
I called mom later that same week. She was getting closer to retirement, looking forward to quitting her cashiering job at the grocery store. “What do you think you’ll do with all that free time?” I asked.
“I think I’ll find a cave to live in.”
I laughed.
“I’m not joking,” she said. “With taxes and the cost of living, forget about it.”
I laughed harder.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“I know.” It wasn’t our first cave conversation.
“What’s new with you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Actually, do you remember that Thunderegg I found when I was a kid?”
“Of course! You always were the lucky one.”
“Did I ever tell you I cut it open a month ago?”
“No. How does it look inside? Is it beautiful? Green and purple?”
“It’s only sandstone.”
“What? Darn.” Here she paused and got quieter. “I was so sure. You were still so lucky, though. Remember when you were ten, and we were dead broke, and you found that twenty-dollar bill while riding your bike?”
I did remember finding that twenty-dollar bill thirty-some years ago. But it was just money that somebody else had lost, and I was just a kid that watched the ground a lot, and luck had nothing to do with it.
There are all these stories we tell ourselves to make our time here feel more special, things others tell us to make the time after we leave here seem less unfathomable.
With the phone still to my ear, I picked up my sandstone from the nightstand and started rubbing the sides. The outer portion was so calloused and weathered. The inside is still one of the smoothest things I’ve ever felt.
Maybe I was lucky like Mom said, but I hadn’t made it in life. I had managed, but I was tired. I was the youngest relic I knew. The mountain spirits were dead. Their ancient weaponry: a bunk distraction. My mom: seriously considering cave-dwelling. My sons: moved on. My wife: increasingly concerned about my distance.
“So, you got rid of that rock, then?” Mom asked.
“No. I saved a quarter of it to keep on the nightstand.”
“Is it still beautiful, then?”
“No, not really. It looks the same on the inside as it does on the outside. Only smoother.” I thought about Paul. “Hey, does that sound depressing to you? To wake up to that?”
She laughed. “You know what?” she said. “Anybody can get one of those polished geodes out of a basket in a gift shop. But how many people can showcase a precision-cut piece of sandstone like that?”
“Probably a lot.” I tossed and caught the piece of rock in my palm. “Hey, you’re not really going to find a cave to live in, are you?” A part of me was starting to understand Mom’s loner nature. If I could talk my wife into it, who knew, maybe I’d find my own cave. “What about bears and shit?”
She snorted. “I’m not scared of bears. They should be afraid of me.”
We laughed together and then got silent again.
I held the sandstone a little longer after hanging up. I thought about asking my wife, when she got home from work, what she thought about our assumptions. All our assumptions. Everybody’s. I wanted to ask her what she knew to be real. But I didn’t want to sound crazy, and I didn’t want her to start worrying I was becoming a cliché: just another person my age having an existential crisis over nothing. So, instead of talking to the one person I’d spent the entirety of my adult life with, I just put the piece of sandstone back in my nightstand drawer and told myself to stop being such a goddamn baby about everything.
The next day I started listening to a podcast that focused on making money in a bull market. I couldn’t stand the host, but I made myself focus. I made myself listen. By the end of the week, I vowed never to listen to something like that again. I tried yoga a couple of times, but my body was broken (that’s what manual labor does to a body), so I eventually concluded that “with a ship this broken, you just ride it until the sails peel off.” There’s something holy in devastation. Something true in the tarnished.
I spooled up an old episode of “Jimmy Shit the Bed” in which a character named Jimmy makes impossibly stupid mistakes every episode without ever learning from them. I couldn’t figure out if the creators were trying to say something profound about life, culture, or politics, or just taking the easy way out. Maybe they were trying to make a character that made their audience feel better about their bad decision-making. Either way, I didn’t feel any better.
The other day, I heard the news anchor on Channel 12 saying that geologists detected an increase in seismic activity under Mt. Jefferson, to the north of us. They said that Mt. Hood is producing more steam in the near east. That the areas under the buttes that zigzag through Troutdale and into Portland are swelling. They say something is happening underneath us but not to worry because we’ve got bigger problems: “the market’s about to go Bear.” Or maybe they meant Bare. Either way, I can’t focus on any of it. I just keep wondering what’s happening inside us. If other people are feeling as uneasy as I am.
I told my wife about all of this last night, and she agreed.
She felt like the earth was holding resentment against us, too. I told her I was afraid of losing my mind and living forever and she said, “Well then I guess I’m crazy, also.” I told her I didn’t want to call her Lucia anymore, but Pillar. Not like Lot’s wife and that pillar of salt, but a Pillar-like foundation. Pillar-like ionic structural support. I let her hold my quarter of a sandstone for the first time ever. I wasn’t trying to keep it from her, I just…
But now she feels its heat, too.
I don’t think it’s a Thunderegg. I think it’s more. This piece of sandstone is emitting more heat than I ever felt. Maybe it’s because I’m holding it longer. Or because Pillar and I are holding it together. Holding each other. Maybe the Thunder Spirits were never dead, but just hibernating.
Maybe they’re waking up.
Maybe we’re waking up.
Jason Arias lives on the Oregon coast. His debut short story collection Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion was published by Black Bomb Books in 2018. His stories and essays have appeared in The Nashville Review, River and South Review, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. For links to more of his writing visit JasonAriasAuthor.com.
Two Truths and a Lie
When I was five I got scared to dream after an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. A woman dreamt her house burned down. And then her house burned down
After my aunt’s house fire we helped her salvage. I found her white 1980s vibrator and thin gold band from her first marriage.
I was married once for a few months.
After the reception there was a bonfire. Over my dress I wore the sweater of someone I loved more than my wife. Someone else I loved more than my wife played his guitar. We all sang.
In Paris my new wife threw a cellphone at the wall next to my head. The plaster gasped.
I only have pictures of her from that trip. She only has pictures of me. I’ve never seen any of the wedding.
I went back to Paris years later. Alone and for a long time. I stopped each morning at La Trinité to talk to the Mary statue.
I am not Catholic.
My last night I wandered in to Notre Dame at Vespers. Begged one last time to be better than I am. Years before the flames licked away the wood. Let the sky in. Released all those prayers free to fly wherever they might go.
Whitney Hudak is a CNM and poet living in Newport, RI. She has work appearing or forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, One Art, The Idaho Review and The Westchester Review among others, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a DNP from Columbia University.
The Providers
Summer and the squirrel tail
lush and thick, floating in
molten air. The vendor piling
fuzzy melon, bundles of white chives,
Daikon white candles sprouting wicks.
So much of everything is on
the cusp of wilting.
Summer and still we owe –
paying interest only. No debt
relief, no hardship loans, no
promise of settlement.
All the stories we will hear –
of the orderly parking
patients on the toilet,
stealing their credit cards
though he, too, is
lost in another story –
thinking only of his next fix.
Who then will watch over us, stop us
from dunking a tea bag in a specimen
cup of our own urine? Who then
will watch over the surgeon,
stop the slapdash suturing?
Of the scalpel left inside a man’s gut –
he will carry it with him for years.
Vanesha Pravin is the author of Disorder (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Sarton Poetry Prize and the Golden Poppy Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in The Book of Poetry for Hard Times (Norton) and in various journals. She teaches at the University of California.
The Boys
Fabian introduced his sons to Rock ‘n’ Roll. Never mind the Cumbia or Tango. He blasted music from his little blue stick-shift hatchback as he drove around San Luis, a little beach town in Uruguay, an hour away from where Roma raised their boys.
Nazareth- “Love Hurts”
Shocking Blue- “Venus”
Hollies- “Long Cool Woman”
Smoking cigarettes down to the butt had stained his pointer and middle finger yellow. He carried a gourd, bombilla, and thermos full of hot water wherever he went—on the bus, on the beach, no matter what the time of day or the weather. When he wasn’t drinking beer or Fernet mixed with Coca-Cola, he was sipping scalding maté.
He left Roma for another woman when their four boys were young. But that marriage failed when he traded his new bride for yet another, slimmer one. Drigo, the second eldest and my fiancé, feared ending up like him.
Drigo watched his mother fall into a deep depression after Fabian left. Never getting close to another man, or many other people for that matter. Except for her sons, who she raised alone, alternating between fits of rage and forcibly masculine jokes.
Drigo hated his father. The slime star. The two-timer. The man who broke his mother and left his sons to pick up the pieces. And where was he? A block from the beach, far away from the mess. The boys rarely saw him, especially Drigo. He figured his father liked it that way anyhow.
But that all changed after Roma died.
* * *
Growing up, the boys would visit their father and gather outside on the stone patio to cook asado, served with a side of bread. No vegetables. Just meat. Blood sausage, liver, cow tongue. Salt and heart.
Each visit started with chores. Apply a fresh layer of red paint to the driveway, water the plants, fix a wobbly table or dresser, re-caulk the outdoor shower. The boys complained, saying they should have just stayed in their town and walked the few blocks to their friends to play FIFA, or some other PlayStation game Fabian knew nothing about. They’d sometimes wave their father off entirely, their gazes already turned towards the beach. But eventually, Fabian would get each one of them to work. And eventually, the boys’ faces would writhe uncontrollably into stupid smiles—the kind of smile that comes from a complex emotional cocktail of the shame and pride that one feels for one's parents, ashamed to be proud of being useful to their father, their cool guy, Rock ‘n’ Roll, absent father.
After their chores, Fabian would turn off a light or two inside, pour strong whiskey and play music from his bulky stereo system. The wailing guitars could be heard all the way down to the ocean. His own private club was carved out of a small piece of beachfront property he had purchased back when things were cheap, and he actually made money driving semi-trucks. It was a simple, yet luxurious home. The outside was painted a rusty-colored red with blue trim. Fabian hated to see any chips in his exterior paint job. There were three bedrooms with twin beds in each, except for the master room, which had a comfortable full. The kitchen was bright and open, with tile floors that matched the color of the house and soft wooden countertops. The house was positioned just a few steps from the beach at one of the most extreme southern points of the Americas. But he rented it out to visitors whenever he could, for as long as he could, and spent most days driving big trucks across the country and sleeping in the cab.
When the boys stayed over, Fabian turned up the Rock ‘n’ Roll and danced. They all loved to dance. They raised their cups high and kept their heads low, bouncing along to the rhythm. Eyes closed, smiling, butchering the English lyrics. It’s a long way to the top if you wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll.
One of them would make a fire in the outdoor stove to heat coal for asado. Fabian would dish out cigarettes to all his sons except for Franco who was the youngest. Fabian’s thinning mullet was curly like Drigo’s and twinkled with each wild snap of his head when he told animated jokes.
But no amount of meat or AC/DC would earn Drigo or Franco’s respect. They were the most reserved of the brothers. When they looked at their dad’s distended gut, jiggling as he told full-bodied stories, eyes bulging, drinks flowing, they thought of their mother. They could picture Roma sitting at home, alone, eating a cracker with a thin spread of raspberry jam on top, mindlessly thumbing through a catalog of clothes she could never afford on her housekeeping salary.
So, they didn’t speak much around him, at least until they were drunk, which Franco never was, and Drigo always was, eventually. Fabian tried hard to get their attention. He would look back and forth between the two brothers when he talked. He would take them aside, individually, while the music was loud and everyone else was dancing, to say something swoonworthy. He would fake fight them for the closeness. He would pull them up off the couch to dance with him.
* * *
“You know, she asked me why I left her to be with you,” Drigo said to me over the phone.
I was tucked away in my two-man tent on the California weed farm I had been working on for the past three months. I was confused. And cold. And tired. Sticky resin coated my fingers, and I couldn’t stop seeing hundreds of buds in every empty space I looked at. My Spanish wasn't great—I must have misunderstood.
“What do you mean?”
“After she got sick, we got into a fight. She wanted to know why I was chasing some girl around while my mother was dying.”
My mouth fell open. Roma had passed away the week before. Drigo called me around 10 p.m. after I’d just returned home from a dinner party, drunk. I pulled out my phone and saw several missed calls from him. My stomach tightened. I walked into one of the bedless, chairless, whitewashed bedrooms in the weed house and closed the door. The fluorescent overhead light was harsh, and the room was cold. November 14th. I felt too drunk and alone. I opened and closed my fists several times, breathing into them for warmth. My heart was fluttering, and I tried not to think. Just fucking call him already. This isn’t about you. I looked down at my phone and pressed return call. It rang just once before Drigo answered. His voice was tiny, a high-pitched rasp. He sounded like a dog or a little boy. I’m not sure that he even spoke, but I understood. I slipped to the ground and let my head fall to the side, pressing my face hard against my phone, trying to absorb it into my skin—trying to absorb him, his intimate whimper. I could feel my ear throbbing, getting hot. The moment had arrived.
I had left the family at the height of Roma’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Drigo and I had already traveled around quite a bit the year she got sick, and she didn’t seem to be getting any better. We needed to go be with her. But I knew a gal, who knew a guy, who could find me trim work. Good work. Good money. Just a month and I’d have enough to keep us going. I’d put my head down and trim until my fingers blistered, deep into the night. Drigo would take care of his mom who saw ghosts when she took morphine, and I would go to sunny California to see my friends and make thousands of US dollars trimming weed. Just for a month, to keep us going, then I’d be back with them.
There I was, three months later, laying in the dark and watching buds dance across the skunky, nylon tent, listening, horrified, as my fiancé tells me his dead mother thought he chose me over her.
“I said I could do whatever I wanted. And you weren’t just ‘some woman.’ You were my wife,” Drigo said, defiant as ever. Though, I knew he felt just as scared as I did.
We were both 23. We’d met a little over a year before while traveling in Colombia. We didn’t even speak the same language, not really. We fell quickly, then painfully, in love.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Panic tightened my chest and hot tears stung the corners of my eyes.
He coughed into the receiver, “Well I didn't want both of you to be upset.”
* * *
I was afraid to return to Uruguay after Roma died. I’d spent the past few months lazily trimming weed, taking shots of tequila for breakfast, developing schoolgirl crushes on anyone who didn’t have blue eyes like Drigo, and attempting and failing to dodge crushing phone calls multiple times a day.
When she died, I hated myself.
I could see Drigo’s face in my head, clearer than ever. Sunken blue eyes, jaundiced face, skeletal body. I could imagine him trying to deal in secret with his sickly bowels, shitting constantly from the stress. Sobbing in the shower, the only private place he could find in the two-bedroom house, crowded with five people and the occasional nurse. I could feel the venom in him turning to salt and water.
I knew there was no way to make up for my absence at the time he needed me most. I knew there was no way to shake my guilt. I knew I never wanted to talk about the lies—how a month turned to three simply because I didn’t want to go back to the complicated movements of death, how I made up excuses to stay. Lies about waiting to get paid, issues with plant production, expensive flights. Things I knew weren’t true.
So, the best thing I could think of was to return to the boys and become everything they’d just lost. To console them as a mother would. I would cook and clean for them. I would use what little funds I made from weed trimming to help us survive. I would be with them this time and I wouldn’t leave. I would walk with them now, steadily, through grief.
The first step, buy a PS4.
On Black Friday, I stood outside of GameStop in Ventura, California, waiting for it to open. I knew how badly the boys wanted one. They loved gaming. They were at their friend’s house daily to use the new console, gesturing at the screen, excited by the hyperrealistic graphics.
I spent $322—a large chunk of my pot salary—on the PlayStation plus four video games I chose with tremendous anxiety that I hoped they would like: FIFA 2016, UFC, Farcry, and Tom Clancy’s: The Division. Tom Clancy was a disappointment in the end—the game required an internet connection, which they did not have in the house.
While I was on the plane to Montevideo, I thought about that PS4 tucked in my carry-on, stowed above my head. I couldn’t sleep. I was nervous about turbulence, the machine flying around, smashing against other luggage, a miniature factory with all its wires and fasteners, shaken loose. What if they plugged it in and it didn’t work? I almost got up to unzip my bag and hug the console against my chest for protection. I squeezed my eyes shut instead and rested my head against the cool, plastic window.
My mind wandered to Roma...
I’m dying and you take off with some woman. I’m your mother, the only one.
My eyes flew open, and I could feel my stomach tighten. I pushed the thought away. I stared at the frost fractals on the window and pretended they were one thousand tiny airplanes far away, all flying to the same place, noses pointed in the same direction, all with the same plan. Though I couldn’t imagine what it could be.
When I arrived at the airport, my hands were shaking, and I was exhausted. I hated flying. I glanced nervously around the crowded terminal, my eyes gliding over happy and hurried people until I spotted him. Drigo was leaning against a wall a few yards away, watching me.
It was summer here in November, so he wore tan khaki shorts, a black and yellow floral-printed shirt, partially unbuttoned, and a silver chain that I was sure one of his brothers lent him. In fact, I was sure his brothers helped him pick out the whole outfit. His electric blue eyes were on me, intense as ever. His curly hair was longer and wilder. He didn’t smile, just walked over, and pressed me against his chest until it hurt.
“Hola, caracol.”
Hello snail.
Now, it was my turn to break. I pressed my lips against his cheek and let the salty tears puddle into our mouths.
“Te amo, Drigo. Te extrañé.”
We linked our hands together and headed for the bus.
When we were settled for the hour-long trip back to his small, dirt-road town, Paso Carrasco, I hesitated before turning to ask him how he’d been. He didn’t look as sickly as I’d been imagining.
“Estoy bien,” he said and told me that his dad and his dad’s girlfriend moved into their town, a block away from their mom’s house, which someone else is now renting.
I was surprised. I hadn’t realized his dad had left his beach house to be with them. I asked him what it was like living with his father and his father’s girlfriend.
“Ella es una buena cocinera y papá es relajado.”
Relajado. Chill.
He looked out the window, indicating that the conversation was over. He squeezed my hand and kissed my knuckles. He pulled out his phone to show me some new songs he’d been listening to.
Danny Ocean- “Me Rehuso”
DUKI- “Rockstar”
Nathy Peluso- “Corashe”
Not Rock ‘N’ Roll. Reggaeton.
Fabian’s rental was newer than Roma’s. It had a small back patio with a grill and a can for cigarette butts. Roma’s Saint Bernard and Shih Tzu mutt were given away because Fabian’s girlfriend was allergic to them.
I’d met his girlfriend before. Much to Drigo’s dismay, I liked her. He once asked if I liked her more than his mom and I tripped over my words. I tried to explain it wasn’t a matter of liking, just that the girlfriend seemed more interested in trying to have conversations with me. More interested in speaking slowly or practicing her Spanglish on me. Roma never slowed her speech. Neither did Fabian. She’d take in my confused expression and belly laugh or pat my head like a child. Fabian just made fun of me to whoever was around, I was sure of it. Dumb gringa.
In reality, Fabian’s new girlfriend and I were similar in ways Roma and I were not. The girlfriend was jealous and desperately afraid of being unloved. Agreeable and weak but smelled and dressed nicely. Roma was fierce, independent, and didn’t try to be beautiful. Her long, thick hair and hourglass figure weren’t things she forced herself into having—she was like that, and she knew it.
The girlfriend once bought me a ring at a local marketplace. It was one of those small, silver spoons, heated and bent into a spiral shape. She had pressed me and asked if I liked it, if I’d wear it. I nodded and smiled, knowing it was a size too small.
But I wore it every time I saw her, and never when she wasn’t around.
Fabian’s girlfriend wanted my approval, which was funny because I meant the absolute least in the family. I think Roma suspected the girlfriend wanted my love as well. Before she died, Roma had seen the ring lying around the house and she never said anything about it. She knew where it came from but there was no competition in her head. Why fight over a woman?
After a few weeks back in Uruguay, living with Fabian and his sons in their new apartment, I began to question whether Roma had even existed at all.
They never spoke of her, except when Gaston, the middle son, got a tattoo of her name on the top of his hand with a rosary plunging down his wrist. We all told him it looked cool. He nodded and no one said another word about it.
The boys laughed and partied like always. Like before she got sick. They’d prepare for nights out by sipping cheap beer and trying on colorful shirts, jewelry, and shoes. They would tilt their heads thoughtfully, assessing one another’s choices, and give the sort of honest feedback only siblings can give without it being painful. It was always strange to watch. I had never seen a group of such traditionally masculine guys spend so much time on the right color belt to wear. I was always dazzled and made shy by this. My wrinkled backpacking clothes weren’t much to look at, but the brothers complimented me often, elbowing Drigo in the ribs, que linda.
Roma made fun of my baggy, conservative wardrobe and would often drag me to her room to try on a shockingly endless array of skimpy skirts, dresses, and bikinis. Easily a size or two smaller than what I wore. She was only in her mid-forties, about 5’3”, and known for being a beauty in her town despite the missing molars. She would swat my hand away as I stared at the mirror, mortified, trying to pull skin-tight shorts out of my ass. She wanted me to have her things when she got sick. She held close to her chest every neon-colored bikini and became choked up. A whole lifetime of raising boys, while her femininity stayed hidden in the upstairs closet.
After she died, Fabian stopped ordering his sons to do chores. Instead, he bought them presents and took them on trips around the coast in his car.
One weekend, we piled into his tiny blue hatchback and drove towards the Fingers of Punta del Este. We passed the maté from the front seat to the back, trying not to spill the scorching liquid on ourselves or each other while the car soared along the twisty road.
I sat on Drigo’s lap, my head pressed against the felt ceiling, neck craned the whole hour-and-a-half drive. But the coast was right there, and the sky was clear and blue. Diego, the eldest, and Franco sat beside us. With every turn in the road, our bare knees touched and then peeled apart, sticky with humidity.
When we finally arrived, the beach was crowded, and the sky had turned overcast. We laid our blankets down and tried to dodge the sand kicked up by the kids playing futball next to us. After surrendering to our gritty fate for half an hour, we finally got up and cursed the kids under our breath, gathered our blankets, and walked over to the famous sculpture of the giant hand rising up from the sand. We saw that the fingernails and knuckles were chipped and covered in spit stains and looked nothing like the pictures online. We stayed at the beach for a total of an hour, then left. It was all about the drive, anyway.
Beyond these impromptu day excursions, Fabian and his girlfriend loved to cook for the family. And no longer just asado. Every dinner was a new display: paper-thin and crispy milanesa, pork belly, pizza, hand-rolled gnocchi, buttery rice.
Fabian didn’t put himself at the center of things anymore. He watched his boys tell their own animated stories instead and chuckled like he was in love. He drank less. He kissed their heads often and doled out his attention evenly amongst his sons.
Often, I found Drigo sitting on the back patio sharing a cigarette with his father, speaking in hushed tones about the well-being of the brothers. Drigo became his father’s confidant. No one spoke of Roma, but Drigo could read his brothers’ moods, without them saying a thing. And these were the things Fabian wanted to know about.
It was around this time that Drigo stopped saying bad things about his father.
* * *
We all felt the absence of Roma together on Christmas.
Last year, we stood on the roof of her apartment and watched fireworks. Roma and the boys laughed every time I jumped up and pretended to eat the sparks. We howled at the sky and hugged her. It was the first time any of us had seen Roma so happy since she’d received her terminal diagnosis a month before.
On Christmas, to save money, each family member gave a present to just one person that they had all previously decided on. That year, they chose Franco. But after he’d opened his gifts, Roma grabbed my hand and led me up to her bedroom. She pulled a delicate silver ankle bracelet from her dresser and bent down to clasp it around my leg. It had a small tree of life pendant dangling from the band. We both giggled at each other for tearing up, and I promised to treasure the gift always. I hugged her and smelled her hair: saltwater and sweat. She was so much smaller than me.
Afterward, Drigo and I said goodbye to his family for the night and headed to one of the only popular clubs in the area. We met his friends on the walk over and drank vodka straight from little water bottles. Everyone looked sexy and hip. Tattoos, micro bangs, piercings. Drigo and his friends were a part of the local rap and graffiti scene. They called themselves “Pali Gap,” like the Jimi Hendrix song. Some of them even had those words tattooed across their chests, including Drigo. I was intimidated by them. My Spanish wasn’t particularly good, and I was afraid of sounding stupid. So, I usually got too drunk and hugged them instead of speaking. That night, I was feeling emotional. Christmas was a big holiday in my family. This was the first year I’d spent away from them. And even though Roma let me use her room for most of the morning to call my family, I felt insecure and alone.
When we got to the club, Drigo and I almost immediately began fighting. He was dancing too close to that woman. I was getting too drunk. He didn’t like the way I was hugging his male friends. We fought in the corner for hours, too drunk and hot-headed to even remember how it started, until the fluorescent lights were flipped on and revealed horrified, melted partygoers.
I told him to fuck off and ran out the door. Light blinded me. I had forgotten how late clubs stayed open here. It was 7 a.m.
I saw Drigo behind me, so I ran faster in the too-small heels I’d borrowed from his mother.
“Adonde vas?” he yelled.
I had no idea where I was going.
I skidded along in my skimpy outfit, drunk and tired and sad. Drigo was close behind me, I was sure of it, but there was no way I was going to turn around to see if I was right. I stopped for a moment before cutting into the woods to pee. When I kneeled down, I realized the ankle bracelet Roma had given me was gone.
I shouted for Drigo and started to sob loudly. He came barreling into the woods, his drunken feet snapping branches, every sound an echo in the early morning forest. He helped me search for the bracelet under what felt like endless piles of leaves until we gave up and walked home in silence.
I never told her I lost it, even when she’d ask where it was. I always made something up.
This Christmas, in their dad’s new home around the corner from their dead mother’s house, neither the brothers nor Fabian talked or laughed much. They looked down at their plates and solemnly passed the Fernet and Coca Cola around the table, even letting Franco take a few swigs.
I broke the silence and said I had a present for each of the brothers. They looked up, surprised.
Drigo eyed me curiously.
I went into the bedroom and came out with four wrapped items. I handed one to each of the brothers. They grinned and pushed each other, their faces turning pink.
They tore off the paper like children in a hurry, but when they saw the games they’d been gifted, they looked at each other uncomfortably. They said thank you and told me how nice I was, but these games weren’t compatible with their PS3.
I put my head down. Oh, I said. I’m sorry.
The boys started to arrange themselves back around the dinner table but before they could sit down, I leaned over the couch, and with all the corniness I could muster, said, “Wait, I think I found something guys...”
I handed the console, all wrapped in shiny blue paper, over to Drigo.
The boys glanced at each other but said nothing.
“Open it!”
The boys swarmed their brother, all taking a corner of blue paper and ripping it clean off the box. Their voices grew louder as they realized what it was. “No!” and put their hands to their faces, or reached out and grabbed each other by the shoulders, dramatically. They stormed me. All four of them at once. They picked me up and put me down, taking turns squeezing me and kissing my head until it felt like my hair would come clean off. When I finally pushed them away from me, they went over to the TV to set up their new PS4, fighting over which game to play and pointing out the unique features.
I melted. I finally felt useful, in the right place, at the right time. Absolved, if only for a moment.
I looked over at Fabian and realized he was staring at me. He walked over and kissed my head.
“Que bueno, Nikki. Gracias.”
* * *
“Abrelo.”
The four brothers were gathered around Fabian’s small kitchen table, staring down at the fake wooden box that contained their mother’s ashes.
“Hazlo ya.”
Do it already.
I don’t know how they got it in their heads to open the box. Maybe it was something someone said at Christmas dinner. A prayer or a blessing. All I know is that they’d had her remains in this cheap thing for months, unable to let her go as she wanted—sprinkled in the ocean near a beloved lighthouse. All the boys made excuses for not taking her out there, including their father.
Now here they were, out of the blue one afternoon, wanting to tear the roof off their mother’s new home.
Diego found a screwdriver and started twisting. He was the oldest, he said, so he’d do it. The room was silent except for the sizzling pan Fabian was cooking grilled onions in. He said nothing as his son attempted to pry open the tiny coffin. I watched, glued to the wall.
With some effort, he forced the lid off. A puff of ash escaped, and we all jumped. We laughed, looking at the ground and the corners of the room, avoiding eye contact.
The boys gathered closer around the table. Fabian, still holding the spatula, joined as well, pulled in by his morbid curiosity.
Diego slid his hand in the box and felt around. He gathered a fistful of ash, and we watched as he let it slide through his fingers like sand. Except it didn’t look like sand. More like gray dust with some large, white pebbles.
He pretended to snort a line of her, and everyone laughed.
He was good at diffusing tension like that.
One by one, each boy lowered their hand into the box. Franco looked both peaceful and confused, like a child with grown-up features. He didn’t say a word. Gaston started as if he’d been jolted by an electrical wire. He chuckled and backed himself against the wall next to me.
Drigo was last. He had said nothing while watching his brothers. Watching his father.
Fabian didn’t touch his ex-wife’s ashes but joked to keep the mood light, adding more onions to the burnt pan.
Drigo paced the length of the table. Smiling with his teeth, cursing, pulling at his curls, looking a little green, until he’d finally built up the courage to take his turn.
He took a deep breath through his nose and dipped his hand in the box. He left it in a moment before speaking.
“No es lo que pensé que se sentiría en absoluto.”
It’s not what I thought it would feel like at all.
The brothers nodded at this, and Drigo removed his hand from the ashes, blowing the dust off his fingers, an afterthought.
They screwed the lid back on. They placed the box out of sight, in a cubby they wouldn’t visit again for another year, when they would finally make their way to Roma’s lighthouse in Fabian’s little blue car. But by that time, I would be long gone.
Just four boys and their Rock ‘n’ Roll dad. Windows down, volume up.
Nikki Zambon is from a small, dirt-road town in Montana. She graduated with a degree in Journalism from the University of Montana. Her creative work has been published or is forthcoming in the Oval literary magazine, Scare Street, Ponder Review, and Witness Magazine. Her journalism has appeared in the Montana Kaimin, Missoulian, Billings Gazette, MTPR, and other publications. She lives in Missoula, Montana but runs to the ocean as often as she can.
Seating chart
Now is not the time to
raise your glass.
Perversely, you have placed me
and other divorced and
drunken members of this
wedding party in seats between
the newly betrothed couple.
As usual, I bring so little to
give that a prosperous-looking
guest near me, well-suited – and,
well – stoned, just asked someone,
“Man, where is this guy from?”
Do I know how to answer that question?
Does the Devil know how to row?
Please stay seated.
Put your glass down.
I’ve always left the calm and
slow chaos of Between
in order to live inside
ludicrous conditions of
sheer height and expanse.
When Between has crashed
shivering waves over
Rock, I’ve caught the
lovers’ talk knocking at
bright, sealed walls of shells.
I’ve worn them around my
neck, and brought them with me.
When Between has flooded
Hard, I’ve gathered
splinters of drowning
vows and sinking shards
of holiest holy ceremony.
I’ve brought them, too –
see how they fall from me?
I’m glad I could bring these
gifts in celebration of you.
(What else could I bring
but Will, that marital crevasse
between Unless and Until.)
Look at us. Look at them,
at our children’s daring choices.
Do not raise your glass.
This is not the right time.
deathintheair started following you 12 hr
When I have pulverized leathery orange
peels brittle egg shells vegetal stems have
whirred them until they are chips then
sand then fine as flour fine as leaf ash
I lift the lid and release the encores of
cloud that penetrate my face and hair and
cause me to laugh and cough to double
over and choke from lungs overcome
eyes occluded lips coated tongue
thickened my hearing hushed toward
hastened toward fruiting silences.
Where are the paintings of mulchers
watchers for the senescent moment
who hover to witness the putrefying
rankness of each crust beginning to
pulse to glow to darken as oily skins
blister craze uncover the rinds of faces?
Some artist somewhere should engrave the earthy
figures of mulchers who bring you more vegetables
than you can use or store or freeze or give who
grip your hand too long and touch the flowing
muscles of your arms and waists and hold your
gazes who reckon your splendid rates of expiration
in their gardens in their degenerate abundant gardens.
Ore
Tried out my
crutches in the river
last night late
slick steep bank
swift waist-high flow
light sleet needling my
bald spot bulls-eye
crash-boot rocking
forward and back like a
one-leg duck misleading
duck troop maneuvers
undercurrent untying my
other ill-fitting boot
cheap piece of shit
slipstream lapping
against my gut
straining my leather belt
forgot headlamp
forgot return route
remembered the unwrapped
lemon drop stuck
in my shirt pocket
fished it out to look
gave the elusive ore
coated in pocket lint the
lovingest kiss of my
whole existence
almost dropped that one
taste of happiness in the
merciless drink
losing – almost –
the treasure inside the treasure nest.
Kevin McIlvoy published six novels: One Kind Favor (WTAW, 2021), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo, 2018), Hyssop (Triquarterly, 1998), Little Peg (Atheneum, 1990), The Fifth Station (Algonquin, 1988), and A Waltz (Lynx House, 1981); a collection of short fiction, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf, 2005); a book of short fictions and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books, 2017); and numerous poems in national journals. He taught in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008, retiring as Regents Professor, and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program from 1987 to 2019. For twenty-seven years he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He died September 30, 2022.
Sexy
*Trigger Warning* This essay alludes to childhood sexual abuse.
“Once upon a time there was a leprechan (sic) princess. The princess lived in the woods with her Mommy and Daddy. The princess was very sexy.”
The Princess and the Pot of Gold
Assignment: Write a St. Patrick’s Day story
Author: me, age 7
Miss C. was my favorite teacher. She was young and engaged to be married, so she wore a sparkly ring on her finger. She was a brunette, as we said in 1982, a time when women were largely identified by their hair color, as if hair color could seep into the brain and affix itself to the female personality. Miss C.’s hair was perfectly feathered, parted down the middle. On this particular day, Miss C. called me up to her desk and pointed to a word on my paper.
“Do you know what this says?” she asked. The word was decidedly written by me, scratched in pencil on the thin, brown paper we used in second grade, the top half left blank for our illustrations (in this case, I had drawn a princess with yellow hair, a pink dress, and a pointy pink hat), the bottom half striped with red, blue, and dotted blue lines to help us remember the guidelines for capital and lower-case letters.
“Sexy,” I whispered. “That word says sexy.”
“What do you think sexy means?” asked Miss C.
My classmates were quiet at their desks, pencils scratching and erasers rubbing.
“It means pretty.”
“So you mean she’s a pretty princess?”
“I guess.”
“How about we find a different word,” Miss C. offered.
“Okay,” I said.
“How about….” Miss C. uncapped her red pen and crossed out the word “sexy.” “How about ‘attractive?’”
I was fine with “attractive,” although it was a long word and didn’t seem to pack the same punch as “sexy.” In truth, I was familiar with the word “attractive.” It was a word I heard whenever my grandfather came to visit us. Grandfather slept on the fold-out couch in our living room and walked around the house with a mug of coffee in one hand (brewed by my mother), wearing nothing but a bathrobe and a pair of boxer shorts, sparse, springy white hair sprouting from his chest and from the elongated testicles that frequently drooped out of the leg holes of his boxers. (Was I not supposed to notice?) Grandfather preferred to eat in restaurants, and he would treat the whole family when he visited. Night after night, my sister and I were expected to behave ourselves, sitting around a table in a dark, wood-paneled restaurant while glasses clinked and the grown-ups chewed their steak. My little sister and I would whine and cry in our room before dinner while we pulled pink tights over our knees and buckled our patent leather shoes— sitting around a table in a restaurant was boring—until finally our mother lost patience and hissed at us, “Girls!” Then she pulled us out of the house by our wrists and crammed herself between us in the back seat of our station wagon, which soon overflowed with her smell of dish soap, hairspray, and Chanel No. 5 perfume.
Our grandfather treated us at restaurants every time he visited, several nights a week. I’m still not sure what he loved more about going out to dinner: the food or the waitresses. Sometimes, he seemed to get them confused.
“Aren’t you an attractive young lady,” he’d say to the woman smiling at our table with a pen and pad in hand, his lizard’s tongue flickering between his thin, chapped lips. “A very attractive young lady. I think I’d like to order you. I’d like to take a bite out of you. You would be most delectable.”
* * *
“Sexy” was a concept I learned from the three soap operas my mother watched back to back every afternoon while she dusted and sprinkled sharp-smelling powder on the carpet and swallowed it up with the vacuum cleaner. All summer, I was allowed to watch her programs with her, and she would catch me up on who had a split personality, or a recently discovered evil twin, and who had escaped a kidnapping via helicopter. Summer afternoons were spent inside with the blinds drawn and lights turned off, our living room illuminated by the television as my mother made lunch for me and my sister, pre-sliced meat on white bread with mustard and pickles, food she could make without fear of cutting open a finger as she kept her eyes on the television.
The women of the programs lived dramatic lives. They hid in closets, they were ravished, they cheated on their husbands and were cheated on, they dressed in black bodysuits for jewel heists, they went into comas and stayed beautiful while comatose, and eventually they recovered. Then they disappeared for months on end only to reappear, alive after all and resurrected on the very day their loved ones had given them up for dead and wept at their funeral. There was plenty of sex, there were princess weddings, and there were plenty of funerals, mostly fake, preludes to resurrection. The women were pitied and taken advantage of when they were pure and sweet, and powerful when they were mean and bitchy. But more than anything, the meanest and the baddest and the most beautiful women of the programs were sexy.
When I asked my mother what “sexy” meant, she was quiet at first, then she named a list of her favorite characters, and then, finally, she said it meant “pretty.” As a seven-year-old in 1982, an observer of the world and an avid collector of Barbies, I understood the importance of being pretty. My Barbies were blonde and silky-haired and big-busted, and when I was given a Wonder Woman doll, black-haired and a head taller than the rest, she was immediately stripped of her patriotic unitard and stuffed naked into a plastic box, a storage box for Barbies that was sort of like a brightly colored coffin. Now and then, Wonder Woman would emerge from her soft plastic coffin to make appearances among the blondes as a witch or a cult leader. A woman or a girl or a doll needed to cram herself into a very narrow slice of existence in order to be pretty or sexy or even acceptable. My grandfather came around that year with his new girlfriend, who was blonde and thin herself, and who appeared to be younger than my parents, with her round face and even rounder eyes. She bore more than a passing resemblance to my Barbie dolls. Her name was Seal. It’s possible that her name was actually Celia and she was called Cel with a C for short, but at the time, as far as I was concerned, she was Seal—a harmless, smooth-skinned ocean animal. Or, as I would learn much later, a kind of prey. My parents were polite, but behind closed doors they seemed less than thrilled about the appearance of Seal. I liked her, and I couldn’t understand the problem. If she married my grandfather, I would have the youngest, prettiest grandmother in the world. Seal was a single mother with a teenage boy whom we never met because, eventually, she broke off the engagement with my grandfather. But not until after (as my mother pointed out) he bought her a brand-new car.
“Why did Grandfather want to marry her?” I asked my mother.
“Because she has big boobs,” my mother said.
Seal, in other words, like the women of the programs, was sexy. All sexy women had to do was go around with big boobs and blonde hair and people bought them cars. People bought them Barbie dream houses, too. I had a Barbie sports car, a plastic, purple Ferrari with a hot pink stripe, but I did not have the Barbie dream house, that airy glass-walled monstrosity coveted by every girl in the second grade. Instead of the dream house, I had the Barbie camper van, which my parents put under the Christmas tree in 1981 in lieu of the dream house, like a consolation prize. My Barbies lived a cramped life in a mobile home. When they needed space, I stacked two patio chairs on top of one another so the Barbies could have an upstairs and a downstairs. Skipper was always running away and stealing the car, and Ken was constantly screaming at Barbie, but sometimes they mashed their plastic pelvises together. Once in a while, Wonder Woman, naked but for a string of Christmas bells wrapped around her waist, appeared and put a love spell or a curse on Ken, but even Wonder Woman couldn’t conjure a dream house. Maybe my Barbies weren’t sexy enough, but I would be.
In front of the mirrored medicine cabinet or underneath the pink canopy of my bed, I practiced being sexy. Studying my mother’s programs taught me the four pillars of sexiness: droopy eyes, a butt and boobs that stuck out and wiggled (I was waiting on the boobs but sometimes I shoved rolled up socks down my shirt for effect), batting eyelashes, and hair that could be tossed over one’s shoulder. I practiced all of these until they were ripe and ready and decided to try them out one night when my parents invited another family over for dinner. The father of the family was a colleague of my father’s, and they had a son who was a year older than me who attended a different school. My mother had prepared me for the dinner by telling me that the boy was “cute,” and that I would be expected to be friendly and talk to him.
No problem.
Seated across from the eight-year-old boy who I was expected to either flirt with or befriend, I unleashed the power of my practiced sex appeal, batting my eyelashes on the offense, drooping my eyelids to half-mast, tossing my hair over my dinner plate (my mother slapped my wrist). The boy had no response. He just sat there, forking up his mashed potatoes. It was like seducing a blank wall. Halfway through dinner my mother caught me with my drooping eyelids and accused me: “You look like you’re about to fall asleep at the dinner table.” And even though I popped my eyes open wide, she banished me. I brushed my teeth and lay on top of the covers in the dark, a failure, even though the dinner party was still going strong right down the hallway, the boy and my little sister still wide awake, probably eating ice cream without me.
* * *
The one person who did find me sexy was my babysitter, R.
R. was a skinny fifteen-year-old with a big nose and glasses who lived a few doors down from us with his parents and three brothers. Sometimes, the older boys would babysit for us or take care of our dogs when we went out of town. One time, my parents caught them breaking into our garage to steal a value pack of chips and a carton of my dad’s Marlboros. My parents decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. They didn’t confront the boys or bother to tell their parents. I thought it was strange that the boys had broken into our garage when I was sure my parents would have given them the potato chips for free if they’d just asked for them. I overheard my father tell my mother that he’d done stuff like that as a kid, and they should just let it go. The boys didn’t get in any trouble at all, and they continued to visit our house often, sitting in the living room with my parents, eating potato chips and popsicles, drinking my parents’ Tab in tall glasses with ice cubes, teasing me and my sister. At some point, R. became the main babysitter, but even when my parents were home and he was off the clock he would visit me, sit with me in our backyard that smelled like dying leaves and dog shit while I went back and forth on my rickety metal swing set and talked on and on about Barbies. Sometimes, R. would play with our dogs, two woolly Airedales that bowed and play-growled and whipped across the yard when he riled them up. But it was all in play. He was around enough that even the dogs trusted him.
During the daytime, I sashayed across the living room, jutting my hips back and forth in an exaggerated way, and when my mother asked me what on earth I was doing, I told her R. was giving me sexy lessons.
“That’s ridiculous,” said my mother.
“I don’t want him to come over anymore,” I said. “I hate R.”
“Be nice,” said my mother. “R. is always nice to you. You should be nice to R.”
What I didn’t tell her was that one night when R. was babysitting, after my little sister had fallen asleep, I came out of my bedroom to find him lying flat on his back, right smack in the middle of the orange rug that lined our foyer, under the lamplight, directly by the front door my parents would walk through when they came home in just a few hours.
R.’s pants were pulled down around his knees, and his penis sprung out of a bushel of dark hair, alarming and stiff as a log.
R. stroked it like a pet.
“Come here,” he whispered hoarsely.
“You’re gross,” I said.
“Don’t you want to touch it? Kiss it. Be nice to me,” he said. “Don’t you want to be nice to me?”
I’ve told myself that I ran back to my room and slammed the door and climbed into bed until my parents came home, but the truth is that I don’t remember. It’s equally possible that I did kneel next to R. as he asked me to, that I did reach my seven-year-old hand out to touch his penis. It’s possible that he grabbed my hand or grabbed me by the hair.
Maybe I turned defiantly and swung my hips back to my room, flipping my hair over my shoulder, my heart beating high in my chest. Maybe I had a lock on my bedroom door. But I was only seven, so I doubt it.
Anything I say here is equally possible and impossible.
Anything I say here would not hold up in court. There’s too much doubt; memory is too foggy.
But the one thing I think we can all agree on, you, me, any jury, any reader—I was seven years old, and according to someone, I was sexy.
* * *
My grandfather had a special game for his grandkids when we were small enough to fit between his knees. He would bounce us up and down on one leg and then drop us, hooking his ankles together and shaking us back and forth. His legs were like bars made of stone, and we were stuck between them. I could not pry myself out of there, no matter how hard I tried. I could only leave when he decided it was over. But that might take a while. In the meantime, he laughed and laughed, delighted as he chanted: “You’re in jail, little girl. You’re in jail, you’re in jail, you’re in jail.”
Melissa Benton Barker's writing can be found in Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, Longleaf Review, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. She is the flash fiction section editor at CRAFT. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
“Milk Carton” oil on canvas on panel 17”x17” 2019
“Blue Tin” oil on canvas on panel 17”x17” 2019
“Yellow Box” oil on canvas on panel 17”x17” 2019
“Paper Bag” oil on canvas on panel 17”x17” 2019
“Paper Basket” oil on canvas on panel 17”x17” 2020
“Enamel Bowl” oil on canvas on panel 17”x17” 2020
Artist's Statement
I am interested in the visual and communicative potential of objects that are cast off, discarded, and over-looked. Inherent to still life is an engagement with the mundane and domestic, as well as the notion of an arrested visual experience. These subjects, their intrinsic intimacy, and working from life are rich with pictorial and conceptual possibilities.
I paint in a responsive manner directly from the motif, depicting objects at or near life-size and within reach of the viewer. I am drawn to certain objects for their familiarity, simplicity of form, and potential to connect with viewers through a shared experience of their use. At the core of my practice is a curiosity to uncover and reconstruct a visual order. Adjustments of proportion, tone, and color create an articulation of form and space built on extended observation. The paintings retain traces of these revisions, functioning as both image and object.
There is a sense of loss in something isolated, empty, or discarded. To engage with objects of this sort is an act of reanimation and an affirmation of their continued significance, regardless of age or condition. This is where the objects in my paintings operate metaphorically, representing the body, an individual, or most often myself.
Joe Morzuch is an observational painter currently residing in Starkville, MS. In addition to his studio work, which deals primarily with the still life and self-portrait, he is an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. In 2006 he received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has taught at the college level for nearly 20 years, teaching courses in foundations, drawing, and painting. His work has been exhibited nation-wide and abroad.
There are an average of 22 nonfatal drownings per day
Uprooted for the first time, I fend for myself during my seventeenth summer.
That summer, someone bumps the fender of my truck while I'm on lifeguard duty.
Lifeguard drills terrify me – I always struggle to flip the manager over my buoy.
On training nights, we ride our red buoys down the yellow slide at breakneck speeds.
My family visits the chiropractor weekly for whiplash after my dad crashes the truck.
Dad teaches me how to whip the truck around on snow in the church parking lot.
Driving my brother home from church, the truck skids on ice and we fly into a cornfield.
I take a flight to Peru with a church group to the orphanage my friends used to live in.
Behind the orphanage, my friends and I ride bodyboards down enormous sand dunes.
Dad shows me how to tack boards over the holes in the garden shed to keep out the rain.
As a lifeguard, strapping someone to a backboard is especially hard in a river current.
At swim meets, when the swimmers are at their marks, the whole crowd goes quiet.
In front of the congregation, I fill my lungs before I’m plunged into baptismal water.
I inhale before I am born and doctors must suck amniotic fluid from my lungs.
Until they cleared my lungs, Mom says it was terribly quiet in that hospital room.
Sarah Peecher is a second-year Creative Writing MFA student at Columbia College Chicago and a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Allium, Blood Tree Literature, FERAL, and an anthology from Santa Monica College. She also teaches writing at Columbia College Chicago.
The Peacemaker
Mulayim opened his eyes after practicing the azan. A scooter and a bicycle crashed on the street below, but he remained on his knees on the floor. The sun had just gone down and dyed the sky scarlet. Light ambled in through the window behind him and seemed to breathe fire into his small room’s green, cracked, sun-baked walls.
He turned, jumped on his cot and crawled towards the window. He poked his head out to look for the old lady with rust hair who lived two houses away. Her freckled face greeted him with a bare-toothed smile from her balcony. She swayed her doddering arms as she spoke. Her praise for his recital of the prayer call echoed in all the narrow, differently coloured houses packed closely on either side of the 7-foot-wide road. Mulayim couldn’t hear her, but he knew she always gave him her blessing when he practiced the azan.
The cot rocked as his sister joined him. “I’m having doubts about her hearing as well,” Ruhana said in sign language. Mulayim gave her head a soft smack. Ruhana stared at him with a grave expression and her piercing, hazel eyes. She was small even for an eleven-year-old but had the ability to transform her charming face into a manslayer’s in the blink of an eye. Mulayim also knew that her thin frame was deceptive. Her punches really hurt.
“Don’t say that. She’s a nice lady.”
“Maybe she’s too nice,” Ruhana signed. “She just wants to make you feel good about this silly habit of yours. She might be taking part in this charade out of boredom. You’re lucky you can’t hear. It’s painful to hear you sing every day!”
Mulayim turned away and grabbed his prayer cap. He caught her staring at him in the mirror as he adjusted the cap on his head.
“Why do you even sing every day?”
“It helps me keep up the practice and maintain my voice.” He bent down and slipped on his sandals.
Ruhana was exhausting her vocabulary and frowned. She looked at her hands and fumbled with her fingers. She shook her hands as if drying them and looked up. Mulayim slowly held out his palms and pointed to her lips and his eyes.
“Will Maulvi sahib really keep his word and let you recite the azan for prayer time?” Mulayim couldn’t hear, but she’d whispered this since it was too incredulous that her brother, who lost his hearing two years ago, would be offered the respected role of calling everyone to the mosque for prayer. Mulayim smirked. “Isn’t that taking advantage of his and muezzin baba’s goodwill in helping you ‘feel your voice,’ as you call it?”
He shrugged, ruffled her hair and walked out of the room.
“Wait, is that supposed to be today? You can’t go out today! Mulayim!” Ruhana yelled.
Before she got down from the cot, he had crossed the small courtyard, jumped down the steep narrow stairs that opened into the street, and ran out like a kid during recess.
The street was still littered with the remains of firecrackers from last night’s Diwali celebrations. The walled city area of Jaipur, with its packed housing and different neighbourhoods, invariably brought people together. Different communities that lived there came together to celebrate festivals of all religions with great fervour. Mulayim was glad he didn’t have to listen to the bursting firecrackers for hours on end now. The red and white paper flecks clogging the sewer lines and scattered on the road reminded him of the red he always saw behind his closed eyes when firecrackers went off, and the white he had seen when one had burst close to his ear two years ago.
He had been slightly hard of hearing since birth. But the blast robbed him of everything he had. It pasted salt and pepper gunpowder over his forehead, cheeks, and closed eyes. It had felt like sand when it was smacked on his face and tasted like a mixture of chalk and mustard seeds.
A cacophony of horror and shock had exploded from the crossroads and swallowed the booms and sizzles in the distance. It is the one night of the year on which dogs don’t bark and hide from the sound of explosions, but a few strays crept out of their corners and froze with their heads bowed and the corners of their eyes white. Ruhana ran up to her brother. Her face was whiter than the kurta he had received for his thirteenth birthday a month ago. The splat of black on the left half of the kurta colluded with the shadows on the right. He was clad in darkness. Sound, with all its music, deserted him.
For the first few days, he just stayed in his room. At times he turned the knob of the radio all the way in hopes that he might hear something. Then he took to gazing out the window or sitting with his head pressed to his knees for hours.
His neighbourhood had little experience with an impairment like his. The small community school did not have trained personnel who could help him continue his education. He couldn’t meet his friends there and didn’t go out to meet them in the streets. He didn’t know what to say. Perhaps they didn’t either and didn’t visit him for that reason. He hadn’t yet realized he couldn’t say anything, not the way he was used to.
Ruhana asked him to help her with her Hindi and English grammar as well as math homework. In the beginning, it was just a diversion from his agony. Written communication with her in the afternoons, finger-pointing, and Improv 101 with his mother throughout the day helped him get started. He tried to pick up lip-reading, but thirteen years of habit made it difficult to keep his eyes on someone’s lips instead of their eyes. On many occasions, it was difficult to see lips clearly since they would often be hidden under bushy moustaches, behind a burqa, or smeared with the red of betel juice. He made little progress. The family avoided sign language until his father brought a book on the topic a month later. They then spent their evenings learning the language together, trading teacher and student roles as they would the salt dispenser and food on the dining table.
Talking to others was only possible when his parents or sister acted as interpreters. It was as if he was born again and was still a toddler who couldn’t convey the zillions of thoughts he had. For people in his neighbourhood, it was similar to embracing a new tech device—the elderly found it difficult to wrap their heads around it, and kids didn’t miss an opportunity to give it a shot and had a merry time.
Mulayim made good progress in communication, but he ached for singing. It had always been liberating for him, and he needed that. He could interact with his family and a few other people, but he didn’t dare to sing. He often stitched together a few words to exercise his vocal cords, but singing was a barrier he didn’t have the courage to tackle. The Maulvi, who visited a few months into the New Year, helped him. He knew the young teenager had a good voice and had often expressed his ambition of becoming a muezzin someday. Asked to try singing by the Maulvi, Mulayim began with the apprehension of a child muttering a heartfelt apology. The Maulvi continued to lift his outstretched palm, urging him to sing louder. He let go. The Maulvi was careful not to wince when Mulayim’s voice got too loud too quickly, although he couldn’t withhold his smile as Mulayim struggled to not cry. He was even careful to speak as slowly as he could to help Mulayim see what he was saying.
“Coming to the house of Allah brings peace to people, and that’s why a muezzin is so important. Not just because he keeps a proper schedule of prayers, but because his prayer call is synonymous with peace. That is what you can do, son. Did you know that your name is also synonymous with peace?”
Mulayim nodded but shook his head a few seconds later. He frowned and pointed to his throat. The Maulvi put his big hand flat over Mulayim’s chest.
“That’s where your singing comes from. Not even a catastrophe can change a man’s destiny, but even a fool can help him fulfil it.”
He asked Mulayim to spend his evenings at the mosque, to find his voice with the help of an old muezzin. The old muezzin pointed to Mulayim's eyes and then to his own face as he started to sing. He then asked Mulayim to try. In time, Mulayim started paying attention to the tightening and loosening of his gut when he switched scales. When he put his hands on his cheeks like the muezzin, he could feel the movement of his jaws when his voice changed its volume. He even felt the strain on his throat when he sang higher notes. The old muezzin with his long index fingernails would always tap Mulayim’s knees with those fingers when he got a note wrong. In the beginning, he gave single flicks. There were times when he tapped so fast it tickled Mulayim’s knee. In the end, all that was left was Mulayim’s voice.
Mulayim ran past the closing shops. He didn’t see Sattu throw a batch of hissing jalebis in a paper bag without waiting for them to cool and thrust it into the customer’s hand. He didn’t see Ahmed unplug the battery and quickly reattach it to his customer’s motorcycle, assuring him that it had charged enough in just fifteen minutes and saying he could pay back tomorrow. Mulayim turned left, then right, and scaled the snaking road that bit into the crossroads where sound left him on Diwali two years ago.
People in the street attempted to get his attention. They called out to him, tried grabbing onto him. A couple of them ran after him. A girl even threw a pan at him, just to make him stop and see. Nothing worked. Mulayim was still the fastest runner in the entire walled city area of Jaipur.
A man pushed his moped from the street into his house. A lady picked up her little daughter from a group of kids about to play hide-and-seek. A middle-aged man, who had rolled down the shutters of his small grocery store, watched from his room upstairs as Mulayim ran past the house, oblivious to how various brothers from his neighbourhood were marching to the police station, where cops were holding a young couple for a simple traffic violation. The real reason to keep them there was for the cops to be safe from the public. The policeman who had caught the duo had allegedly assaulted the woman. No one knew what had really happened, but the cops knew that priority #1 was dealing with the crowd’s ire.
Mulayim was exhilarated to see so many people in the streets walking in the same direction he ran in. The congregation in the mosque would be greater, and everyone would have come because they heard him recite the azan! Mulayim’s chest was already swelling with pride. Some in the crowd watched him glide by and roared in appreciation of his zest to stand against injustice. It fuelled their fire.
When he turned towards the mosque, he was surprised to find the street nearly deserted. It struck him as an opportunity rather than something ominous. The Maulvi was not in his usual spot in the mosque either, which did seem strange to Mulayim. But he wanted to impress the Maulvi more than anyone, to repay his faith in him. He observed the second hand tick on his watch and headed over to the microphone.
He wanted to do everything right, down to the posture. He did a quick rehearsal: concentrated to pick up the signs of inflections in his voice, noticed his eyebrows knit and rise when he escalated to higher notes, felt for the sag in his throat when he descended towards baritone. His abdomen tightened and loosened in harmony with the lilt. Finally, he cleared his throat —as a precaution—and turned on the microphone.
The first notes of the azan dropped in the middle of the crowd outside the police station. Although just a flicker, they were audible nonetheless. One of the pelters threw a flaming bottle at a police van, which set it ablaze. The sizzling fire was slowly silenced by the rising sound of a humble strain. It swelled from under their legs, spread its arms around the collected mass and clasped them together. Ears pricked. Eyes bulged in bewilderment. Everyone panted as all other sounds dissipated. Even the policemen dropped their guard. All batons, stones, and sticks fell to the ground in a single, soundless clatter.
None of them recognized the voice. It didn’t seem like a boy’s. It wasn’t a man’s.
A few streets away an old lady with rust hair recognized it. She screamed her thanks and holy adulation to Allah, and it reverberated through the dense, tense streets. Its echo reached the police station, where people struggled to process their auditory input. The erstwhile ferocious mob stood as still as a meek cow in the middle of a road during peak rush hour. They heard a similar call five times a day every day, but this was different, like hearing for the first time.
Ruhana had stopped running towards the mosque to try and stop her brother. The voice was different from what she heard every day: different, yet familiar. It released a long suppressed, happy memory. She pictured her brother stepping down the stairs of the mosque with a timid smile. She dropped to her knees and bawled.
Chinmay Rastogi's work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, Kitaab, and Breadcrumbs Magazine, and his translation is forthcoming in Anuvad. He likes to add colour to the lives of those around him, just like his hometown Jaipur, and can often be found smiling or grumbling under a motorcycle helmet or behind a harmonica.
Sunflowers 2
There is a bright truth in the church of sunflowers.
A field of the faithful,
steadfast, dancing on the hem
of light.
I pause,
hallelujahs half-mast.
I am the center of the wreath,
absent, in full view.
For the first time in 40 years,
mine is the only heartbeat in the house.
I dead-man float
in an ocean of silence every day.
Sudden death forces you through
the freezing froth, foam, of shadows.
Memories are rafts.
How do you ride waves that ride you?
Who you were.
Who you are. Bobbing
at their whim,
like an empty
plastic bottle, turning,
turning in churning blue.
The world is not solid.
The world is not bright.
I yearn for a truth
of sunflowers, steadfast
in just the hem of light.
Rose Maria Woodson has been included in the anthologies, Wherever I'm At and Open Heart Chicago. Her work also appears in or is forthcoming in Revolute, Inkwell, Pedestal, Noctua Review, Folio, Litro, October Hill Magazine and elsewhere. She holds an MA in creative writing from Northwestern University.