An Ongoing Conflict About Equilibrium
Gone away again to break the self of self. My id alighted
from its heaviness, flipped back its thick black hair and asked,
are we willing? Onward, eager for a while, I kept drying the knives
to a whisper, watching monosyllabic green in small trees. But I agreed
and now am here in some silly romance with serial storm
and foamy crests, leaning against a coastline or ridge
or another. Home is my left-hand margin but I’ve drifted to the porch
of a marsh, to kinship with distance. After the black matter
of eulogies, a sky with its long song of planets. Forgive me. At first
pleased in a scumble of darkness, I set out a chair to see the moon
ride its only canoe and Venus loop lazy over it. A drink and a few
nibbling birds. I’m kneeling to these temporary loneliest edges. I’ve made love
with the disposable incandescence, and remained unbodied until it came
time to face backward, watching for when to root myself home.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Waxwing and The Los Angeles Review, and has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic.
Condensed Milk
The word armour (British) or armor (American) originates from the French language word armure, which is derived from Latin armature meaning “arms.”
//
We look at our parents as torchbearers and pioneers, superheroes with God-like ability to solve all our problems. As children, we live under a spell. Then one day, the spell breaks. In 2017, my mother became critically sick. She had been running a fever for some days, which nobody took seriously until one day when her glucometer started displaying an error message. She spent the next year coming in and out of intensive care units of multiple hospitals.
//
My mother has a habit of putting off her health, like most Asian mothers (or maybe mothers in general). Women are conditioned to put off their own needs for the needs of their family, even if it destroys them. Their sacrifices are praised, and their suffering is brushed off as the burden of motherhood. We are expected to suffer to be good mothers. Does our suffering make us holy? In Islam, it is said that Jannat (paradise) lies beneath mother’s feet. When I was a kid, I used to imagine a celestial world with dark blue clouds and pink stars under my mother’s feet.
//
At first, the doctor decided to keep my mother under observation in an intermediate intensive care unit where patients were supposed to get better by the morning. An insulin pump was set up to stabilize her blood sugar levels by morning. We were supposed to take her back home where she was supposed to recover.
//
At 4 a.m. my mother woke up complaining about breathlessness. An hour later, she started hallucinating. She screamed at me, “Stop your father, he is leaving.” In my half-awake, half-asleep state, I looked around, but there was no one there. That was the first time I felt fear. I called for my father. My mother continued blabbering like she was in a dream. I wasn’t scared of her hallucinations, but I feared for her life. My grandmother had hallucinated just before she died. I was ten years old. In my head, hallucinations preceded death. When my father came, he took my mother in his arms and said, “I’m not going anywhere.” She fell back to sleep.
//
Watching my father cry broke me. I had always looked up to him. In my eyes, he was the epitome of a strong male presence. Every time I had a breakdown, I’d run to my father. I had cried in his arms when my childhood best friend betrayed me for a boy, and I had cried in his arms when I was among the top scorers in my school. To me, his arms were a safe space, always ready to take me in. Outside in the hospital waiting room, my father cried in my arms and said, “This is how Ammi died. This is how she will leave, too. I can see it, Samia.”
//
To see him broken down like that changed something in me and between us. On the inside, I felt like my life was going to crumble. On the outside, the opposite happened, I felt a surge of responsibility, which made me even stronger. I saw my father hand over the baton of family responsibility to me. Somehow, a family tragedy resulted in a power shift.
//
Nobody was able to diagnose what was happening to my mother. She was slowly creeping towards multi-organ failure. I saw her get weaker with every needle that penetrated her body.
//
During one of the endless days in the ICU, a nurse came up to me and said, “Please sign these papers. We need to do an emergency procedure on her.” My father wasn’t around, and that is why she had decided to ask me instead. When I asked her what the paper was, she said, “It’s just routine paperwork. If she dies during the procedure, it wouldn’t be the hospital’s responsibility.”
I hesitated. “Can you please wait for my father?” I asked. She said no. I signed the papers with shaking hands.
//
When I was a kid, my mother used to sit with me as I recited poems and spelled words. Every time I made a mistake, she’d hit me. I cried but continued reciting between sobs. Every slap angered me even more. And in that anger, I worked harder. Her strictness made me a hard worker. I did not know back then that she was making me strong. Her wrath made me want to become the best in whatever I did.
//
Armors are often decorated. The desire to decorate an armor comes with the need to celebrate power and important life-saving duties like obtaining food and protecting the kingdom. But lower-ranking soldiers never wore embellished armors. It was only kings and high-ranking officials that received the honor of wearing beautiful ornamental armor.
//
Later that day, I told my father about the paperwork. He listened to me patiently while saying a prayer under his breath. Those days, he was constantly praying. Then he said with a smile, “You’re a brave daughter.” I wanted to weep until I had no tears left. I wanted to crumble on the floor, my legs and arms flailing like life had been sucked out of them, and I wanted to stay like that for as long as possible. I did not feel like a brave daughter.
//
I had gotten so used to the rhythmic beeping of ICU machines that even after I went home at night, I could still hear them. The smell of hospital cleaning bleach had become as familiar as a lover’s scent. The cold air of the AC, under which I used to sit the whole day, pierced my skin. I imagined it making me stronger. I imagined an armor forming around my body with every bit of bad news we received.
//
During winter months, street vendors sell warm condensed milk at night. This milk is special. It is cooked for hours, sometimes throughout the night, until it becomes pale and, under the intense heat, develops a sweetness of its own. Then the street vendors garnish it with cashews, almonds, and pistachios.
//
My father, with deep dark circles under his eyes, showed me multiple reports and test results. “That means the infection is still in her body. Her body is trying to fight it,” he’d say. They still couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
//
One day, a miracle happened: a diagnosis. For us, that was hope enough. My father continued to monitor her numbers every morning in the hope that, one day, she would get a normal reading. He was holding onto numbers for hope.
//
Every day when I went home, I would take off my imaginary armor and cry. Next morning, I would put on the armor again.
//
My mother’s non-invasive ventilator was the loudest machine in the ICU. The machine was breathing on her behalf while her lungs rested and recovered. She was under heavy medication. She was—finally—recovering. Living in the ICU for so long had made me certain of one thing: one mistake and everything could go bad again.
//
One time, my mother’s cousin visited her. She was doing better; her non-invasive ventilator made her strong enough to talk to visitors. He shared stories about my mother’s childhood. He told us how my mother used to ask him to collect leftover cigarette butts as a child, and how she used to roll her own cigarettes using leftover tobacco. We laughed over it for a bit until my mother’s cousin started crying, which triggered my mother, and she started crying, too.
//
I remember the day, years before the ICU, when I woke from a nap to find my mother sitting next to me. She was very, very angry. She said she had gone through my phone, and she read the messages I had sent to my friend where I talked about us smoking together. I was angry at her for invading my privacy, but that did not matter to her. In her head, I was a fallen woman who smoked cigarettes for fun, and if I smoked cigarettes, that meant I did other things, too. She questioned me, accused me, and at the end of the conversation, left me feeling ashamed. She was visibly disappointed in me. For me, her disappointment was worse than her anger. I had to make a lot of promises before she trusted me again.
//
The ventilator sat heavy on my mother’s face. To my eyes, the machine looked like an alien had latched onto her face. To me, the machine was sucking life out of her. I would constantly ask her if she was in pain because of it, to which she’d say, “No, this is nice.”
//
On one of the good days, my mother’s siblings had come to visit her. When it was time for me to leave, I started packing my things and said goodbye to my mother who was about to go back on the ventilator. Then one of my uncles said, “We can drop you home.”
It was an early winter night, and there was a chill in the air—the kind that makes you want to cover your shoulders with your arms. My aunts and uncles were huddled together chatting. When my uncle saw me, he said, “Come, we’ll treat you to some warm milk.”
I was handed over a glass of condensed milk by one of my cousins, I looked at the heavy milk, pale as chalk. The thick part of the milk—the cream that had formed from cooking it for hours— was floating on top of the glass. I could see the pistachios and almonds. I took a sip from my drink and tasted relief. There was a strange comfort in its aroma—an earthy smell, like the smell of wet soil after the first spell of rains.
On an especially cold day, the dark days, this glass of milk provided respite to many, a protection or an armor, perhaps. I thanked my uncle for the treat, and as I entered home later that night, I felt my body breathe a sigh of relief like it was telling me that everything was going to be alright.
Samia Ahmed is originally from Bhopal, India but now lives in New York where she is enrolled in the PhD creative writing program at Binghamton University. Her work can be found in The Kenyon Review, Coffin Bell Journal, Barzakh Magazine, deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, The Chakkar, and Indus Woman Writing. She holds an MFA from Old Dominion University. She believes in breaking stereotypes and continues to practice it while petting pretty black cats and sipping chai.
Rock or Feather
We were told to make a board game
or any game with or without a board.
I choose an egg carton and therefore,
ask for eggs I can crack, plastic ones
that I can fold in questions.
But they have no eggs.
What’s left on the table is a purple
pom-pom and a bolt, as a way to label teams.
Players advance around the board until
they get to 30 but the only way
to earn passage is by answering a question.
Are you a clothes line or a kite string?
A pogo stick or a roller skate?
When I turned 30, I celebrated
in the basement of a ruddy
Moroccan bar. My father had just died
after I explicitly told him not to.
It was one of those premonitions
on the way back to the airport,
both of us crying for no reason,
getting lost in traffic on a boiling
day in Florida. He says, “ok”
but knows he’s lying.
There was a flaw in my strategy,
the one-sided card, the other forgotten traveler.
When you get to 30, the end, what happens?
On one side of the card I write,
feel the glory, on the other, go back—try again.
Mary Lou Buschi holds an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Master of Science in Urban Education from Mercy College. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals such as Radar, MER, The Laurel Review, The Shore, Gyroscope Review among others. Her second full length collection, Paddock, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021.
God's Broken [Body]
God give[s] us a long winter, ¹
he runs the shotgun down my sternum.²
His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year.³
What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse.⁴
My life had stood […]⁵
In silence / wild.⁶
[…] The dead can also yearn / for wild trajectory,⁷
as if death is / the disguise hiding your wings.⁸
After a moment of extreme […]⁹
you, constantly, […]¹⁰
your fingertips throb […]¹¹
[…] I have loved you with two loves—¹²
[…] making yourself into an angle.¹³
1. Adam Zagajewski, “A Flame”
2. Terisa Siagatonu, “Deserving”
3. Audre Lorde, “Afterimages”
4. Raymond McDaniel, “No, You Shut Up”
5. Emily Dickinson, “My Life has stood— a Loaded Gun (764)”
6. Cecilia Vicuña, “Jungle Kill”
7. John Sibley Williams, “Eulogy”
8. Reginald Dwayne Betts, “For the City that Nearly Broke Me”
9. Heather Dohollau, “Hölderlin à la tour / Höolderline in the tower”
10. Reginal Dwayne Betts, “For the City that Nearly Broke Me”
11. Olga Broumas, “Caritas”
12. Rabi’a Al-Adawiya, “Love”
13. Eugène Guillevic, “Acute Angle”
Clayre Benzadón received her MFA at University of Miami and is a Split Lip Magazine poetry reader. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith” was published by SurVision Books. Her full-length collection, "Moon as Salted Lemon" was a finalist for the 2021 Robert Dana-Anhinga Poetry Prize and Semifinalist for Sundress Publications' Open Reading Period. She has been published in places including Academy of American Poets (2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize winner), Anti-Heroin Chic, Grist Journal, Olney Magazine, and SWWIM. Find more about her at clayrebenzadon.com.
Milk Tooth
Amelia’s mother loved to tell people she was born perfect, save for one small, sharp tooth. "It wasn’t just sharp,” she would say, “but pointed.” She would pause. “Amelia was the most perfect baby. She slept like a dream, never cried, but when she nursed—" and here the listener would flinch, especially if they were a man— “she would bite me! Can you believe that? She bit my breast!”
Amelia would wait for the unwilling audience to give in, to say No or Wow or How did you handle that? They usually did.
“She drew blood,” her mother said, shaking her head. “There was blood in my milk.”
The person would flounder for a response, sucked into her mother’s glowing eyes that were so much like Amelia’s own. They would say Huh or Wow or Hmm!
“The doctor explained it was a milk tooth.” Her mother’s voice warmed. “The tooth was not fully developed, it had a weak root.” Her voice trilled on root in a way that made Amelia flinch, even though she’d heard the story a thousand times. “He explained that I could bring her in to have the tooth pulled out, but I wasn’t going to pay for that, oh no.”
She paused again. “We were very poor when Amelia was young. Her father had recently decided he was not interested in being part of our life. Isn’t that right, Amelia?”
Amelia would nod. She had no memory of her father and did not mourn him—she had once told her mother she couldn’t be sad about someone she didn’t remember. Her mother had told her how cruel and cold she was, how maybe someday she would learn to feel something to her incredible depths, which made Amalia feel funny and bad in a way she couldn’t describe.
“I was a poor young mother. I wasn’t about to pay for a doctor’s visit! And the tooth was so tiny. I found my jewelry pliers and pop! Out it came. Amelia cried and cried, but she was right as rain within the week. And now look at her.” Her mother stroked Amelia’s long, auburn hair, the opposite of her own coal-black curls. “Obviously she gets this hair from somewhere, who can say, but otherwise, she’s my spitting image. It’s like I birthed myself!”
No one could deny that they looked alike. Gray-blue eyes and ski-slope noses and skin so pale Amelia struggled to find foundation in the makeup aisle of the drug store, not that she was allowed to wear makeup. Outside of her mystery hair, Amelia was Rose Red to her mother’s Snow White.
Beauty like theirs must be protected. Her mother was serious about this. They weren’t whores like the tan, golden-haired girls Amelia had seen during that one month of free cable, cavorting across the television and frolicking in the sand to the beats of a buff DJ. Their beauty was of a rarefied sort.
“We’re not like other people,” her mother would say at least once a week, “We can’t do the same things.”
Amelia had never been allowed to leave the house uncovered. It wasn’t like she had to wear headscarves like the girls that lived down the block, but before she opened the door she had to put on a big hat, long sleeves, long pants, socks, and closed-toe shoes, even in the dead heat of Texas summer.
If Amelia even looked at a pair of cutoffs or a tank top, her mother was quick to turn her towards a mirror. Sometimes it took a minute to see herself, her reflection a photo negative that gradually flickered and became solid.
“Look at yourself,” her mother commanded. “Look how pretty you are.”
Amelia obeyed. She was pretty, she supposed; that’s what people told her. Her fifth-grade teacher, a thin woman who wore the same blouse in different patterns, had told her she’d be a real stunner someday if she watched her figure and didn’t get knocked up. Her classmates said nothing, or if they did, she didn’t know.
She hadn’t had a friend in a long time. It was hard to have a friend when you weren’t allowed to go over to other people’s houses. Her mother didn’t even like it when she was in school pictures, but she allowed it.
That night over dinner, Amelia handed over the big Lifetouch envelope. Her mother made a face.
“Who’s this in the front row? The one with the horrible purple hair.”
“Casey.” Amelia swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “She’s new.”
“Casey!” Her mother’s sharp teeth flashed, pink with Big Red. “What kind of a name is that?”
“I don’t know.” Amelia said.
“That’s not a name for a girl.”
Casey looked like a girl to Amelia. She was olive-skinned and brown-eyed, with long, mauve hair growing out dark at the crown. She wore black jeans and big t-shirts and sometimes got sent home for dress code violations. The white kids said she was half-Mexican, and the Mexican kids said she was blanquita loca. Casey said nothing. She was quiet in class, though often in trouble.
“You’not like her,” her mother said, reaching out to touch Amelia’s pale cheek. “You’re never going to ruin yourself. You’ll have your face forever.”
*
Eighth-grade graduation meant a field trip. It used to mean a camping trip, legend had it, with cabins and s’mores and singalongs by the Guadalupe River, but years of budget cuts had downgraded it to a trip to Dinosaur Valley State Park and Dairy Queen.
“What is Dinosaur State Park?” Amelia’s mother said when she got the permission slip. When she didn’t like something, she enunciated each word like she’d never heard it before.
“It’s a state park with dinosaur tracks in it,” Amelia said. She had been practicing her response for weeks. “There are lots of rest stops and shaded areas throughout the park. I should be fine.”
“It’s a lot of time outdoors. We weren’t made for that. You know this.” Her mother adjusted her glasses.
“I’ll wear sunscreen and cover up completely, I’ll even wear a scarf over my face.” Amelia said, then: “I don’t think they have a plan for anyone who’s not going on the trip.” She willed her voice to be cool and even. If it sounded like she wanted something, it was a surefire way to seal the want in a tomb, crystallize it forever in a no.
“Amelia,” her mother’s smile was powdery and wide, “Someday you’ll understand why all this needs to be the way it is. I know this trip seems very big and important now, but your emotions are high. They will cool with time.”
Amelia played her last card. “I think it’s on the same day they do inspections at the hospital. Don’t you have to be there for that?”
Her mother’s face twisted, and for a moment Amelia could see every crack and line.
*
It was already hot when they pulled up to Dinosaur State Park. Amelia sat and listened to Ms. Thompson, the trip chaperone, and tried to forget that Casey was two rows behind her.
Ms. Thompson was young and chatty. She wore tight white pants and high wedges and joked about how she was playing with danger, Aunt Flo was coming to town any minute now. Amelia was horrified and fascinated.
“Now baby, your mama said you both have a medical condition, is that right?”
“Yes.” Amelia had her answer practiced. “We have a variety of xeroderma pigm-“
Ms. Thompson cheerfully interrupted her. “Is that like albinism?”
“No.” Amelia was surprised she knew that much. “My hair and skin have color.”
“Oh, right. Such a pretty shade of red. But you and your mama both have this condition?”
“Yes. That’s how it works.” Amelia was starting to feel warm. She moved away from the sun shining through the window.
“Oh sure, I just didn’t know. Not everything is passed on. Like my mama has Type 1 diabetes, but I do not, knock on wood.” Ms. Thompson tapped the side of the bus, which was definitely not wood. “But I’m sure you know all about genetics, you must go to the doctor all the time.”
Amelia couldn’t remember ever going to the doctor.
They walked into the park, following the trail along the river, which flowed lazily behind a fence. Occasionally the guide would stop and point out dinosaur tracks, giving an explanation for each type. He explained that some were large elephant-like tracks believed to have been made by Sauroposeidon proteles, whose name was Greek for “perfect before the end.” And of course, the guide said, there was an end.
“Why did the dinosaurs die?” someone asked.
Casey answered before the guide could: “An asteroid.”
The guide nodded enthusiastically.
“You are correct, young lady. It was an asteroid. The asteroid hit the earth and set off a chain of global catastrophes that killed the dinosaurs and 80% of life on earth.”
“What survived?” said Amelia. Casey turned towards her. Amelia became aware of a drop of sweat gliding down her back, making its way toward the top of her tailbone.
“Little louder?” The guide craned his head.
“SHE ASKED, WHAT SURVIVED THE ASTEROID?” Ms. Thompson was tiny, but her voice was a bullhorn. Amelia quietly wanted to die and wondered, if she took off all her clothing and started walking into the noonday sun, if she would turn to ash before anyone could catch her. Her mother had told her that sun exposure would kill them—not right away, but very fast.
“Mostly birds were left. Frogs, snakes, lizards. Mammals,” the guide said. “The dinosaurs were too big. They needed too much in the way of resources. Their life was unsustainable.”
A kid coughed “Boring!” into his hand. Ms. Thompson shot him a look of death, and he returned it with a leer.
“Hey.” Amelia felt rather than saw Casey next to her. Her hair brushed Amelia’s arm. She smelled like the suntan oil her mother always sneered at in Target. That will not protect you. You will burn.
“Hi.” Amelia tried to remember to breathe.
“Do you want to go to the river?” Casey said.
“We can’t do that.” Amelia said. The sun beat down. She reached under her sunglasses and wiped her face, eyes burning with salt.
“Why do you have to wear all that clothing?” Casey said. “Are your parents religious?”
Amelia laughed in spite of herself. She couldn’t imagine her mother submitting to Jesus, or anyone. “No. I have a skin condition.”
“Ms. Thompson!” Casey yelled, “I’m going to take Amelia to the restroom, we’ll catch up with the group after.”
“Okay!” Ms. Thompson waved her hand distractedly. “You girls call my cell if you need anyth– “
Casey nodded enthusiastically as the numbers were lost on the arid breeze.
Casey walked to the restroom and Amelia trailed behind her, terrified but exhilarated. She could always claim they got lost.
In the cool dark of the bathroom, Casey pulled a gummy bear out of her backpack and bit it in half. She held the other half out to Amelia.
“Want a weed candy? I stole it from my brother. They’re really weak, don’t worry. You won’t freak out.”
“Okay.” Amelia pocketed the gummy when Casey turned away.
Casey popped the rubbery green glob in her mouth and leaned back, chewing. “Let’s walk to the river.” As if reading Amelia’s mind, she said, “We can catch up with the group when they go to the Opossum Site.”
Amelia could feel her blood thrumming under her skin. “How do you know where they’ll be?”
“I’ve been here before. Come on.” Casey started walking, and after a moment Amelia followed.
They walked past trees and trails and a visitor’s center.
“Duck down,” Casey said. Amelia obeyed without thinking, and they scuttled below the sightlines of the two employees inside.
Casey walked to a wire fence with a small break in the bottom. She made a pleased noise.
Amelia stopped. They weren’t just wandering off. They were, as her mother would scream through the glass door at the kids who occasionally ran through their backyard, trespassing on private property. She wiped her eyes again.
“Go first, I’ll hold the gate for you,” Casey said.
Casey pulled back the gate and looked back at her. Her eyes were flecked with gold, which seemed to brighten in the sun. Amelia could see the outline of her bra through her tank top, moving up and down slightly as she breathed. They had walked fast.
Amelia held her breath and walked through, placing the gummy bear in her mouth as she did. If they got caught she could claim Casey drugged her, that she had no idea what she was doing.
The hill leading down to the river was steep and rocky. Amelia fell and then fell again, and what she got up her pants were streaked with dirt. The second time she just sat, letting the dust rise around her. She wasn’t hurt, but something was moving in the pit of her stomach. Her heart felt as tense as an egg with a baby sauroposeidon inside, trying to claw its way out. She breathed in and out, and when she looked up Casey was holding out her hand.
“We’re almost there.”
“Are you going to make fun of me?” Amelia blurted.
Casey shook her head. “You’re weird. I just didn’t want to go on the field trip. Ms. Gutiérrez will believe you if we say she got lost.”
“Oh.” Amelia was relieved and disappointed at the same time, both new and slicing feelings. Usually her heart beat flat and smooth and slow, following the rhythms of her mother’s car, and home, occasionally pattering faster at her mother’s rage or twinging when she saw a movie. But the quickening always faded.
Amelia got up and wiped her glistening face, realizing too late that she was leaving streaks of dirt on her cheeks.
“Shit,” Amelia said.
Casey laughed. “You’ll be fine. It comes off.” Her hand was still outstretched, her palm facing up. She took her hand, feeling the dust mix with her sweat. They walked down to the river together. Amelia worked to concentrate on the path in front of her and not the smooth yet rough texture of Casey’s palm.
The riverbed was slow and still and shallow. Through the murk, Amelia could see rocks and small plants growing at the bottom.
Casey took off her sandals and walked back and forth in the water, tilting her face to the sun.
“I need to go sit in the shade,” Amelia said. She was dizzy and her chest was tight.
“Okay,” Casey did not open her eyes but continued to walk back and forth, kicking forward slightly to make ripples.
Amelia found a tree and sat under it, making sure she was out of the sun. Without thinking, she rolled up her sleeves and her pant legs.
“Hi,” Casey’s face was suddenly close to hers. “Do you like it down here?”
“It’s quiet,” Amelia said.
Casey nodded, satisfied. “That’s why I like it. Everything is so loud, sometimes.”
Amelia nodded, feeling every centimeter of skin between her shoes and pants. She glanced down. Her white skin looked luminous in the shade.
“Do you have to wear those sunglasses?” Casey said. Her breath smelled like the gummy, green and sweet and slightly sour. Amelia’s mouth felt soft and full. She spoke to give herself something to do with it.
“Yes. I have very light eyes.”
“Why do you live in Texas? Why doesn’t your mom move to like, Maine or somewhere the sun doesn’t shine 365 days a year?”
“I don’t know.” Amelia had thought about this but didn’t dare ask.
“Sorry.” Casey turned to the river. “What color are they?”
“My eyes are blue,” Amelia said. In the nine months she had been in class with Casey, she had memorized the contour and color of her pupils and retina, empirical knowledge gained from flicked glances when she thought no one was looking. Usually no one was—her classmates treated her like the walking dead, which had let her map the way the sunlight settled in the hollows of Casey’s cheekbones at a certain point in the afternoon.
“I think I knew they were blue,” Casey said, as if reading her thoughts, though luckily not completely. “I try not to look at people in class.”
For the first time in her life, Amelia’s words matched her thoughts completely, a hot wire of neurons crackling between brainpan and mouth.
“You don’t want Jenny Rizal to call you a dyke.”
Casey laughed, a sharp, sweet bark that made Amelia’s stomach clench. “She loves to say that! What the fuck is up with that? She’s probably a dyke. I mean it’s okay to be a dyke. My aunt’s a dyke. A lesbian. Whatever.” Casey kicked at a rock. “I’m going to go walk in the river in a minute.”
“I’m going to sit here.”
Casey shook her head. “You’re funny.” She looked at the river but did not move.
Amelia’s limbs felt heavy, and her mouth was dry, but she was not unhappy. She stole another glance at Casey, who had pulled her purple hair on top of her head. Casey’s shoulder settled against hers, her skin warm and shockingly soft. Amelia swallowed, trying to sit as still as possible.
“I think the gummy is kicking in. Do you feel it?” Casey said. Amelia didn’t speak, she did not trust her mouth. It felt too good to sit there in the sun.
The sun. The sun. The sun had moved while she was sitting. She rolled down her pants, tucking them into her socks for good measure, and then her shirt sleeves, making sure everything was covered. She started to take her emergency gloves out of her backpack, but then Casey’s was hand was over hers.
“You okay?” Casey said. “Are you freaking out?” Amelia felt the world tilting beneath her. She crooked her elbow to brace herself from falling into the river and drowning, becoming bones with the fossils and trilobites.
“It’s okay,” Casey said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Amelia nodded, not believing her but wanting to.
Casey glanced at her phone. “Come on. Let’s go find the group, they’re probably starting to look for us.”
They were still holding hands when they walked into the visitor’s center. The woman working behind the desk gave them a look, her magenta upper lip twisting faintly.
“Yes?” she said.
“We’re lost,” Casey said confidently. Amelia tried not to laugh and almost succeeded. Casey’s lips quivered but she continued, “We’re with Plum Creek Junior High.”
The woman eyed them. “They’re almost done with their tour. Just wait here.” She disappeared into the back. They could hear talking.
“Put on your sunglasses,” Casey whispered. “Your eyes are all red.”
Amelia hadn’t even realized she had taken them off. She reflexively touched her eyelids. No burning. No scorched-out retinas. She could still see. Everything was very bright.
“They should be back in a few minutes. They were looking for you.” Her gaze lingered over Amelia’s long sleeves and dark glasses. “Do you need anything?”
“She has a medical condition,” Casey said, too loudly.
“But I’m fine,” Amelia added, trying desperately not to giggle. It was not funny. It was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She felt like she was going to throw up.
The woman gestured to a bench by the restrooms.
“You can sit there. I’ll wait with you.”
They sat for what seemed like a small eternity, then their class burst into the visitor’s center in a gaggle, talking and laughing. Ms. Thompson sighed big when she saw Amelia, and for a moment Amelia felt bad. Mrs. Guittierez’s face was flushed.
“We got lost,” Casey said.
“Is that true?” said Mrs. Gutiérrez. “Amelia?”
“Yes. We got lost but we’re fine. We’re sorry.”
“I am so sorry, Marina, I turned away for a second—“ Ms. Thompson said, but Mrs. Gutiérrez waved her off.
“We’ll figure this out later. They seem fine. Let’s get on the bus. Please keep a better eye on her at Dairy Queen, I do not want to hear from her mother.” As the park disappeared behind them, Amelia had realized she was no longer invisible. She had sat in the sun and traded her magic for it.
Her soft-serve swirl was the best thing she had ever tasted, a miracle of sweet and cold. She ate it too slowly, savoring each lick, and then it started to melt, and she had to eat the rest too fast, adding ice cream to the dirt on her clothing. Her mother was going to kill her. She shuddered and bit into the cone, which broke with a delicate eggshell crunch.
“Brain freeze?” Ms. Thompson said, her face softening. “I get that every time.” Amelia nodded, surprised that adults could have sympathy for your mistakes.
She practiced her excuses on the ride back. I got lost, I got lost, I got lost. Once her mother saw she was okay, she would have to be okay too. Maybe she’d be happy that Amelia was less sensitive to the sun than her. I got lost, I got lost, I got lost.
Home seemed darker than usual. Amelia resisted the urge to pull up a window shade, gripped by the desire to see what their street looked like from the living room. It probably looked just the same as it did when you were outside, but for some reason she craved it.
She walked into to the kitchen. Her mother sat at the table, glowing white in the shadows of the kitchen and staring straight ahead at the small television she kept in there. It was not on.
Amelia took a deep breath, but her mother’s voice floated out before she could start.
“Mrs. Gutiérrez called me after the field trip. She said you ran off with that Casey girl.”
Amelia felt the air leave the room. “We got lost.”
Her mother didn’t move so much was at the table then in front of her, grasping her hands with her long nails until Amelia gasped with pain. She bent down until her dry mouth was level with Amelia’s face. Her breath was cold and smelled like old meat.
“We aren’t like other people.”
She tightened her grip. Amelia could feel her breaking the skin, digging into the meat of her palms. She tried to stop the tears that sprung up at the corner of her eyes.
“We don’t spend time with white trash who’s going to end up in an early grave, and we don’t go in the sun. Did you go in the sun?”
Amelia shook her head no. Her mother’s eyes raked her face, then she pulled back and Amelia inhaled, trying to swallow her gulping sobs. When she looked down, her hands were punctured and glistening. Her mother looked matter of fact, standing there with blood-stained claws.
“Clean up and go to bed. We’ll go see the doctor in the morning. You can call your teacher before we go and tell her why you’re missing class.”
Amelia nodded and ran to the bathroom, washing her hands and placing Band-aids over every sliver of a cut. The box was expired; she’d never needed them before.
She brushed her perfect, white teeth. Her mother turned on the news in the other room, soaking up her nightly IV drip of fear. Amelia walked into her room and shut the door, stripping off her clothing. As she crawled under the cool sheets, she noticed an itchy warmth on her ankles and wrists.
Sunburn. Her heart pumped hard and fast. She ran her hands over her new skin, giddy with the knowledge that she was very much alive.
Rosamund Lannin has been writing in Chicago for over a decade; during that time, she has published speculative fiction, personal essays, and investigative journalism in places like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Vice, Broccoli, The Counter, and Tor.com. She is currently working on a YA novel about live action role-playing. You can find her most places on the Internet @rosamund, or riding her bike around the weird northwest side.
the train in motion
unweaves me from childhood town
I am outside old familiarness
a gallery of moving images call me
like august by july and september
to fill the blank between them
I am there facing the sunrays
crawling over walls like red ants
tempted by sugar cube scents
the early remembered dirt on hands
more simple, my hands buried in dirt
like looking for the god who makes
the seed burst at correct times
now as I stare at this memory
I have the true feeling of being found
after centuries of vagabondness
like a comet that passes by earth
in span of every 276 years
how I mistake this as longing
on surface of past that obliges dust
of time relax on it like naked recognition
even after years arranged inside my tiny body
the dirt refused compromise with maturities
the latter making of me a species of bird
flying to yonder to nest in a tree where
cold rules the way doubt on voice of heart
in throes, slowly the freeze lines beginning from middle
though the fix remained brittle where
old dirt breath mingled with mass...
the mass of my mother's body, now
I carry as mine
Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand ,India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DASH View magazine, Bayou Review, Long Con magazine, Hive Avenue and elsewhere. She secured second position in Singapore-Unbound Time-Regime Contest in 2022.
Ardor
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid
answer—so when I ask about the word
“ardor” and get the 9 of Swords (body
bolt upright in bed, face in hands), I see
I may have asked the wrong reference.
There are roses on the coverlet. Ardor
is related to arson. An arbor is
a structure climbing roses might scale.
Arson is a bad thing to happen to your arbor.
If one is ardent, one is burning. Argent
is a color an ardent knight might have
on his heraldry—it is “silver, interchangeable
with white.” Silver is a thing and an idea
I am ardent toward. The swords on this card
are silver-colored, of course. A card of woe,
a dream of nine swords—not vines fruitful,
not plowshares, they are ardent for one
thing only, know one or two weighted
words. The arbor will burn, but the keep
won't miss the wine, the people of the keep
will be sleeping, sleeping in the wine
of their own making.
Rosalynde Vas Dias has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, West Branch, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her first book, Only Blue Body, was awarded the 2011 Robert Dana Prize by Anhinga Press.
Lionel
Jeffrey Dahmer stalked Milwaukee’s gay bar scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He preferred Black and Asian men—always young, always handsome. As he leaned in to speak to them, he’d drug their drinks. Then, he’d take them back to his grandmother’s house, or later, when he was living alone, to Apartment 213 on 924 North 25th street. He’d overpower his chosen victim, perhaps striking him over the head with a lampshade. Often, he’d encourage them to slip on a set of handcuffs. A game, the young man might have thought. How kinky. But soon, they’d realize that Jeffrey wasn’t playing as they felt his rough hands encircle their throats.
Killing wasn’t enough for Jeffrey. He cannibalized his victims. He drilled holes into their skulls. He boiled organs and preserved them like jellies. By the time police raided fly-infested Apartment 213, 17 men were dead. But before Dahmer was known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, he was an Ohio son.
Jeffery—or “Jeff” as his family called him—grew up in Bath, a township fifteen miles outside of Akron. He was an extremely shy child, preferring to keep to himself. His parents enrolled him in tennis and soccer, hoping he’d make friends with his teammates. Jeff joined 4-H and raised chickens and lambs.
“It wasn’t a terrible childhood,” Jeff said in a 1994 interview. But his parents fought frequently, and both Jeffrey and his father agreed that there was a lot of yelling in the house. “I would sulk, brood. I wondered why they had to have such a rough relationship,” he said. To escape the noise, he fled to the woods behind his home. There, he slapped at the trees with his bare hands. I can easily imagine the frustration, remembering how I beat pillows in my bedroom after fights with my mother when I was a teenage girl. I felt like I was forcing a lid on a roiling tea kettle.
By the time Jeff was a teenager, his parents had divorced. He cruised the neighborhood on his bike, searching for roadkill—maybe a flattened raccoon or a cat. He dismembered the animals’ bodies and scattered the bones in the woods near his family home. His classmates at Revere High School described him as an “outcast” and a “loner.” They noted that Jeff frequently turned up to school drunk. The booze made him bolder; Jeff acted out in class when he discovered that his pranks could draw approving smiles from the peers who had previously shunned him.
Jeff said that starting when he was fifteen, he “had a reoccurring fantasy about meeting a hitch-hiker on the road, and taking them hostage and doing what [he] wanted with them.” Three years later, in 1978, just a few weeks after high school graduation, Dahmer had his opportunity when he met 19-year-old Steven Hicks. Hicks asked Dahmer if he could hitch a ride. Jeff had the house to himself; his mother was out of town, and his father was living at a hotel following the divorce. Jeff said, “I thought to myself, ‘should I stop and pick him up, or should I just keep on going?’ I wish I’d just kept on going.”
Instead, Steven Hicks and Jeff drank beers at Jeff’s house and hung out, but when Steven asked to leave, Jeff strangled him. He dismembered Steve’s body and dumped his remains in the same woods where he’d strewn dog and possum bones.
In 2003, Jeff was dead, and I was an awkward seventh-grader at Wadsworth Middle School, just a few miles from where Jeff had grown up. Mr. Swift “taught” my seventh-grade science class, which I had for sixth period every day. Most days, he just wheeled in an ancient, flickering television set and played episodes of Bill Nye: The Science Guy. Usually, by the afternoon I was exhausted, finding it nearly impossible to stay awake in the hot, dark classroom, where spitballs whizzed by my head and Tony Jewell regaled us with stories about his father and grandfather who had both robbed the same gas station downtown, but at different times. When we filled out Punnett Squares, studying our own inherited traits like hitch-hiker thumbs or widow’s peaks, Tony asked Mr. Swift if he thought robbing the Marathon station could be genetic.
“No, that’s a choice,” Mr. Swift said, narrowing his eyes as the class snickered.
One day, as I filed into science class, I noticed a strange man seated at Mr. Swift’s desk. He was small in stature, but he regarded us with such a piercing stare that he seemed to grow taller.
After the bell rang, the man explained that he was a substitute teacher. Although he took attendance and called us each by name, he didn’t introduce himself, and he hadn’t written his name on the smudged chalkboard behind him.
“What’s your name?” a classmate asked.
“You don’t need to know that today,” the man replied.
This rankled the class, and an excited murmur rose among us.
“I know who you are,” said Tim Holliwell, who sat in the back of the classroom, typically with his head flat against his desk. I swiveled around in my seat to see why this silent boy was finally speaking. “You’re Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad.” A few of my classmates gasped, and whispers grew louder.
“Who?” I asked the girl sitting beside me, but she said she didn’t know. The substitute rose from his chair. He grabbed an eraser from the tray at the base of the chalkboard and clenched it in his hand.
“That isn’t any of your business,” the man thundered. “Don’t you know that you can hurt people’s feelings?” He flung the eraser across the room, and it landed on the floor, leaving a trail of thin white dust on the speckled brown tile. He sent Tim to the hallway, where troublemakers were banished. The substitute stalked to the television set and pressed play before dimming the lights.
At dinner that night, I recounted the events of sixth period to my parents.
“Who’s Jeffrey Dahmer?” I asked.
My mother said nothing, but my father spoke. “He was a serial killer—one of the worst. He was a cannibal.”
“John,” my mother warned.
“He ate people?” I asked, eyes widening. But I knew that was all I was getting out of my father. Sado-sexual cannibalistic killers were typically an off-limits subject of conversation at the dinner table. “Do you think that really was his dad?”
“I don’t know,” my dad said. Why else would our substitute teacher have been so enraged if what Tim said hadn’t been true? Otherwise, he would have laughed it off, joking with the class that yes, he’d raised a son who made meatloaf from ground human flesh. I thought again of the way he’d clutched that eraser in his hand, his knuckles whitening. Had he truly imagined that no one would recognize him? And why would the father of such a notorious killer subject himself to perhaps the cruelest environment there is—a middle school?
Jeff briefly attended Ohio State University in Columbus, but he flunked out. After killing for the first time, Jeff found his compulsions increasingly difficult to control. Jeff said that he used alcohol in hopes of muting his obsessive thoughts about completely controlling another human being. He longed for the perfect romantic partner—a man who could never leave him and never tell him “no.”
At his parents’ behest, Jeff joined the military in 1979, and although he was initially regarded as an average soldier, his heavy drinking began to impact his performance. Jeff was honorably discharged in 1981, and eventually, he was sent to live with his grandmother in Wisconsin after being arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.
In Wisconsin, Jeff began to give in to his violent compulsions. He was arrested for indecent exposure at Wisconsin State Fair Park. Several years later, he was arrested again for masturbating in front of two children. During this time, Jeff worked at a chocolate factory and began going to bathhouses, where he met men and had sex with them. But Jeff wasn’t content with consenting partners. He wasn’t interested in their pleasure or needs. Jeff began drugging the men at the bathhouse he frequented, and he was eventually expelled when men complained to the owner.
In November 1987, Jeff met Steven Tuomi at a gay bar.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I imagine him asking while caressing Steven’s back. Although Jeff looked nerdy in his oversized glasses, he wasn’t an unattractive man. And he certainly didn’t appear dangerous.
“Sure,” Steven must have said, smiling, resting his hand on Jeff’s knee.
“I can get us a room at the Ambassador Hotel. Finish your drink.”
And Steven would empty his Budweiser, unaware that when his back had been turned, Jeff had slipped date rape drugs into his beer.
At the Ambassador Hotel, Steven passed out in the bed, and Jeff undressed his limp body. Over the next few hours, he sexually assaulted him.
When Jeff woke up, he tried to rouse Steven. His eyes darted around the room, realizing the walls and dingy shag carpet were covered in blood. Steven was dead, and Jeff couldn’t remember killing him.
In a panic to cover up his crime, he returned to his grandmother’s house, borrowed a suitcase, and then removed Tuomi’s body from the hotel. In his grandmother’s basement, Jeff dismembered and disposed of Steven’s body. He kept one souvenir: Steven’s severed head.
Jeff had successfully controlled his desire to kill for almost a decade, although it had been a constant struggle. Now that he had acted on his urges again, he knew he’d never be able to stop. Over the next four years, Jeff went on to murder fifteen more men.
Not long after that afternoon in Mr. Swift’s class, I learned that what I’d already suspected had been true: my substitute teacher had indeed been Jeffrey Dahmer’s father. His first name was Lionel and he was a retired chemist. Despite how he’d responded to our science class, he was surprisingly open about his identity. He hadn’t changed his name or moved from the area where he lived with his second wife. “I’m proud of the name ‘Dahmer.’ I haven’t done anything wrong,” Lionel explained in an interview. His other son, Jeff’s younger brother, had changed his name and lived anonymously in Arizona.
Lionel had even written a book about his relationship with Jeffrey, A Father’s Story. The local library had a copy, which I skimmed, although what I remember most was staring at his author photo on the back cover, still somewhat incredulous that the same man had been in my classroom.
Over the next few years, Lionel frequently subbed at my high school. When I was a junior, my chemistry teacher, Mrs. Mosely, announced that she would be taking maternity leave.
“You’ll have a long-term sub,” she said. “And there’s something you should know. It’s Mr. Dahmer, Jeffrey Dahmer’s father. I trust that all of you will be respectful.”
By this point, most of us were aware that a serial killer’s father filled in occasionally. He never addressed his relationship with Jeffrey, and typically, he avoided telling students his last name. One friend recalled that Lionel had told the class to call him “Mr. Blue.”
“I don’t understand why the school lets him around us,” a girl named Kara said when we gathered in the lab at the back of the class. “Clearly, he’s a bad guy or else his son wouldn’t have turned out like that.” A few of our lab partners agreed. The previous year, I’d developed a fascination with serial killers, perhaps inspired by my proximity to Lionel, but more likely because I believed that having an interest in the subject would make me seem edgy and unique. I knew from my research that almost every known serial killer had been raised in an abusive household, witnessing violence at an early age. The odds were that Jeffrey, too, had been a victim before he’d been a perpetrator.
On July 22, 1991, Tracy Edwards agreed to pose for some nude photos for Dahmer, and in exchange, Jeff promised him $100. Once inside Apartment 213, Tracy noticed a foul odor, which Jeff brushed off. A short time later, Jeff attacked Tracy with a knife, pressing the blade against Tracy’s chest. “I’m going to eat your heart,” he had reportedly said.
The two men struggled, and after punching Jeff in the face, Tracy fled the apartment building and promptly led police to Jeff. The police discovered seven skulls, two human hearts in Jeff’s refrigerator, a dismembered torso inside the freezer, severed hands and penises, and Polaroids documenting many of the murders. One of the first investigators on the scene recalled how, upon discovering a human head in the refrigerator, he’d been convinced that the head was screaming. The shrill screams he’d heard had been his own.
Jeff was caught, and he confessed to it all. News of Jeff’s crimes spread, and the media dubbed him “The Milwaukee Cannibal.” The details were sensational—a gay killer had murdered almost 20 people. He’d performed crude lobotomies on his victims, hoping to turn them into “living zombies.” At his competency hearing, all of the grisly details about Jeff’s secret life had emerged. No one had been more shocked than his father, Lionel. Although Jeff may have appeared insane to some, the court ruled him sane at the time of the killings. He pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to sixteen life terms.
On the first morning after Mrs. Mosely’s maternity leave began, we sat at our desks apprehensively. Lionel stood before us, wearing a plaid flannel shirt and cuffed khaki pants. After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and listening to the morning announcements over the fuzzy intercom, Lionel spoke, fixing his steely gaze on us.
“As you already know, I’m Mr. Dahmer,” he said. “But I’d like it if you just called me ‘Lionel.’” We’d never been allowed to call a teacher by his or her first name before, but this seemed like the right decision. We wouldn’t have to call him a hokey fake name. Nor would we need to constantly repeat the notorious last name.
Lionel took attendance, studying our faces and parroting our names back to us.
“Katherine,” he called out my name.
“I go by Kat,” I said.
“You know, I have a cat. Her name is Mrs. Debbie,” Lionel said. “She’s the one who will be grading your tests and quizzes.”
The class laughed, and Lionel seemed to relax, his shoulders losing their tension.
Lionel finished calling roll. “Well, I suppose we’d better get started.”
During my year-long fixation on serial killers, I’d been intrigued by Jeff, who seemed to be an anomaly in many ways. Although my classmate, Kara, had voiced her suspicions about Lionel’s parenting, Jeff maintained that Lionel had been a loving and involved father. He wasn’t like John Wayne Gacy or Aileen Wuornos, who’d both been abused by their fathers. His parents’ divorce had been acrimonious, but roughly half of my friends’ parents’ marriages had disintegrated. None of them, as far as I knew, were dissecting dead cats or fantasizing about murder. Was it possible that Jeff hadn’t been shaped by trauma, but was simply destined to be a killer?
Jeff seemed to want to help science understand why he’d felt compelled to kill, and in prison, he volunteered to be studied. However, on November 28, 1994, just two years into his life sentence, another inmate attacked Jeff and murdered him. Some question the circumstances, wondering why such a high-profile prisoner like Jeffrey had been allowed to mingle with other inmates unsupervised. Lionel felt that, with Jeff, an important opportunity to learn about why he’d been compelled to kill had been lost. “I really believe we might have found out [answers] had he not been murdered,” Lionel said, a note of frustration in his voice.
Jeffrey’s remains were released to his family nearly a year after his death, and his parents cremated his body and divided his ashes. Jeff’s mother, Joyce Flint, was furious. “Now is everybody happy? Now that he’s bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?” she asked the media. But of course, no one was happy. Joyce and Lionel had lost their son. Science had lost an opportunity to learn. New serial killers stalked had violated new victims. And most significantly, 17 innocent men had been killed.
I was never an especially gifted science student, and this was true even after Lionel filled in for Mrs. Mosely. Because science didn’t come naturally to me, I grew bored with the subject. I’d earned average grades in chemistry throughout the year, and contented myself with Cs and Bs.
Lionel, on the other hand, was brilliant. He’d earned a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State, but he didn’t ask us to call him “Doctor.” Lionel was certainly far more engaged than Mrs. Mosely, who seemed largely disinterested in our class. Like Mr. Swift in seventh grade, she frequently used class time to show films, many of which were only tangentially related to chemistry. Otherwise, we crowded in the lab in the back of the classroom, struggling to light our Bunsen burners. We spent more time flirting with each other and gossiping than we did studying chemical reactions. We weren’t Honors students, nor did we require remedial instruction. We were the most average bunch, but Lionel didn’t see us that way. “You’re not a bunch of journeymen,” he constantly reminded us.
“He was one of the best teachers I ever had,” a former classmate named Hillary said when I’d asked her what she remembered most about him. “He forced me to think for myself and helped me to prove what I knew instead of handing me answers.” Other classmates echoed Hillary’s story, and many remarked that Lionel encouraged his students to develop as critical thinkers.
A friend, Alexa, remembered that Mr. Dahmer had been a regular customer at the Taco Bell where she worked. In our class, he was never seen without a bottle of Mountain Dew soda. These small details humanized him. Yes, Lionel had a son who had killed people, but he also enjoyed shitty fast food tacos. He loved animals. In addition to Mrs. Debbie, the pet cat he’d mentioned on the first day, he’d told another class about how he’d once rescued a litter of kittens that someone had been trying to drown in a river.
One of my friends, Morgan, described a day when Lionel listed a bunch of science websites on the blackboard. “He said, ‘there’s more out there; think for yourself.’ It was quite encouraging and motivating to have a teacher place that belief in students that we could think for ourselves,” she recalled. Most of the full-time faculty encouraged conformity, but Lionel had earned our respect—precisely because he invited us to work independently and question everything.
Jeff gave just one television interview in 1994 before his death. The 90-minute documentary featured a joint interview with Jeff and Lionel, hosted by Stone Phillips. I first saw the show when Lionel was my teacher. My friends Matt and Bryan had come over, and we sat in my living room, snacking on Doritos and guzzling cherry cola. It was late at night and nothing much was on TV, so we settled on MSNBC which sometimes aired reruns of shows like Lockup and To Catch a Predator.
“We’ll take you inside the mind of a notorious serial killer,” Phillips promised, as the camera panned to Jeffrey’s face. I was struck by how similar he and Lionel appeared—both sharing the same strawberry-blonde hair. Lionel, although visibly younger, appeared largely unchanged, wearing a flannel button-down shirt similar to those he wore to teach. Like Lionel, Jeff was soft-spoken. I could imagine that one might have easily mistaken Jeffrey for Lionel on the phone, the same way that relatives frequently confused my mother and me. Stone Phillips noted that Jeff’s handshake was “weak,” which didn’t surprise me.
In the interview, Jeffrey peered through thick glasses. This wasn’t Ted Bundy—all dangerous charm and white teeth. And unlike Bundy, Jeff didn’t appear to savor the attention lavished upon him. Unlike other serial killers who seemed to relish toying with interviewers, Jeff appeared to be honest about his motivations. He didn’t brag about his crimes, and he seemed uncomfortable discussing the details. I exchanged glances with Matt and Bryan. Matt dug deeper into the bag of Dorito’s, orange-cheese dust coating his fingertips.
“This is really weird,” Bryan said.
Jeffrey described his childhood at length, and Phillips asked him directly if he’d committed the murders to get back at his father.
“No, it was to control them and keep them with me for as long as possible,” he explained. This accounted for why Jeff had injected his victims’ skulls with hydrochloric acid. He’d believed that in keeping his victims in a trance-like state, they’d never be able to leave him. When Stone questioned Jeff about why he’d eaten some of his victims, Jeff gave a similar response. “It made me feel like they were a permanent part of me,” he said. Why did Jeffrey feel such an overwhelming desire for control? In relationships, everyone experiences insecurities, and—at one point or another—we likely all fear that our partners will leave us. Jeffrey never seemed to have much trouble convincing men to have sex with him, but I never found any record that Jeff had seriously dated anyone. Was he so ashamed of his sexual orientation that it had never seemed like an option for him? Had he been so afraid of rejection and abandonment that he’d been unwilling to even try?
In what was perhaps the most shocking part of the documentary, Lionel revealed that he’d had his own obsessions when he was a teenager. He’d been mesmerized by fire and explosives, and he’d had fantasies of murdering a neighborhood bully.
“Wait, so he wanted to kill people too?” my friend Bryan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t think it sounded as sensational as Stone Philips wanted it to be when he asked, “Why did a father murder in his dreams and a son murder in real life?” Hadn’t we all at least thought fleetingly about hurting someone who’d tormented us physically or emotionally? Instead of serving as an explanation, I saw Lionel’s confession to be a weak—but noble—attempt to take some responsibility for his son’s crimes.
Before ending the interview, Stone Phillips asked Lionel what he saw when he looked into Jeff’s face. Lionel, his hands draped over Jeff’s in a show of love and support, thought hard before answering. “I’m a naïve parent,” he said. “I still see an innocent, shy child. A defenseless, vulnerable child who I wish I could help.” It was a rare moment where Lionel seemed to lose his composure. Stone Phillips had noted Lionel’s stoicism earlier in the interview. Lionel explained that his background in science shaped him to be a very analytical person. “People might think I look unemotional or remote, but they don’t realize that I have very deep feelings inside,” he explained.
But that evening, watching the special, Bryan, Matt, and I did realize the depths of Lionel’s emotions, and we recognized Lionel’s impossible task of separating his love for his son from Jeff’s horrific crimes. As the show closed, we saw the resignation on his face deepen; Lionel—who believed that science held the key to all of life’s mysteries—realized that the answer to why Jeff had killed would always elude him.
Mrs. Mosely returned from maternity leave to a lukewarm reception. We missed Lionel, but he occasionally subbed in my other classes. He always greeted me warmly in the hallway, even though I’d been a mediocre student. When I recently asked my former classmates to share what they remembered about Lionel, I wasn’t searching for a consensus, but one seemed to emerge. Almost everyone described Lionel as a “sweet” man—both fragile and resilient. For some, Lionel’s teaching style had been unforgettable. For others, like me, his kindness and courage had been his most enduring lesson. My classmate Carolyn said, “I hoped Lionel knew most of us appreciated him. I admire him for just putting himself out there in middle and high school classrooms full of students who didn't all know yet how badly real tragedy could hurt. I'm sure getting ready for school in the morning required some degree of courage every time.”
When Lionel first subbed for my seventh-grade science class, I’d wondered why he’d be willing to subject himself to teenagers, a group almost unparalleled in their cruelty. But it was clear that Lionel must have felt a calling to teach. It was the only explanation that made sense. Maybe, in front of a classroom, Lionel stopped reflecting on what he had done, or hadn’t done, or could have done differently. When he graded our sloppily written lab reports, perhaps he forgot—just for a few hours—about Jeff’s crimes. Instead, at his desk, with Mrs. Debbie curled up in his lap, he corrected our exams and focused on us—the ones he could still help.
Kat Saunders lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and works as the assistant editor at Kent State University Press. Her essays have previously been published in Hobart, Harpur Palate, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a memoir-in-essays about growing up in Rust Belt Ohio.
Lungs, 2022, Handwoven plant fibers, petrochemical-derived dyes and monofilament, 86” x 112” Photo credit: Rebecca Heidenberg
Left: Lungs Right: Breath Plastic, 2022, Handwoven plant fibers, petrochemical-derived dyes and monofilament, 86” x 109”
Memories of Future Fires: Traces, 2021, Handwoven plant fibers, petrochemical-derived dyes and monofilament, 83” x 88”
Artist's Statement
In my newest work I interweave petrochemical-derived materials, plant materials, and landscape imagery to draw connections between climate crisis, fossil fuel extraction, and the buildup of toxic plastics in the earth, water, and our bodies.
Forest fires; smoke inhalation; microplastics in our ecosystems, blood, and lungs; loss of homes past and future. The hand-woven pieces in “Memories of Future Fires” each start with photos I took in a fire-decimated landscape in the Pacific Northwest. I reduce the trees in these landscapes down to their fundamental shapes before rematerializing them with petrochemical-derived monofilament. As I look to connections between the life-sustaining circulatory systems that are both internal and external to the human body, the abstracted tree forms also begin to evoke hearts and lungs.
This project was supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Tali Weinberg’s work is held in public and private collections and is exhibited internationally. Exhibitions include the Griffith Art Museum, 21C Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, University of Colorado Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, Center for Craft, Form & Concept, and Dreamsong gallery. Her art has been featured in the New York Times, onEarth Magazine, Surface Design Journal, Fiber Art Now, and Ecotone. Honors include a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Serenbe Fellowship, Windgate Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, Lia Cook Jacquard Residency, SciArt Bridge Residency for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and a residency at the Museum of Art and Design, among others. She has taught at California College of the Arts (CCA), University of Tulsa, and Penland School of Craft. Tali holds an MFA from CCA and a BA and MA from New York University. She is currently a 2022 Illinois Artist Fellow.
Lucy the Teenaged Werewolf Sometimes Just Sits Around Watching Reruns of Buffy.
No wait, that’s me. It gets muddled between seasons, like that time
Buffy was so heartbroken over her rock-jawed
vampire boyfriend that she wrote this song about him, only
the song was haunted and everyone who heard it got possessed
by the spirit of the girl who owned Buffy’s ukulele before
she died. Every teen in that high school was the same girl inside
and they stopped each other in the hallways to say hey,
you should know you look really pretty today. I wish I had
been kinder to you. There was a lot of hugging and crying—
nobody died. It was one of Buffy’s more boring ghost-busts
but I can’t stop thinking about it, rewind to the scene where
this hulk from the wrestling team is getting his nails painted
by a marching band guy and he’s quietly trying to work out why
he thinks his brain doesn’t work quite right—too many impacts or
something his dad said—and he can’t lift his eyes off the sticky
blue gloss and the other boy’s slow delicate painting until it’s done
and then he holds up his fingers in front of him, ten big square nails
blue as 2 a.m. TV screens, and the band guy, as he’s twisting the cap
back on the bottle and tucking it like a pearl into his clarinet case
says beating yourself up about things you can’t change
won’t fix anything. And the big guy with blue fingernails
fans his eyes a little and smiles before the camera pans away
to Buffy gymnastically arranging talismans around the campus
and singing her song backward until everyone starts glowing
and I start to wish I believed in ghosts and hauntings, my house
was pierced with strange creakings, whispers, mysterious writing
under the wallpaper, I wish I saw a face behind mine in the mirror,
familiar, asking me for some last service, an errand, anything at all.
Gin Faith Thomas holds an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she still lives, writes, and occasionally teaches writing. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Hobart, and a few other journals. She is currently seeking a publisher for her full collection of poems about grief, social strictures, werewolves, and the perceived monstrosity of teen girl bodies.
In n' Out the Flying J
Detective Gerdulon walked down the truck parking lot at the Flying J Travel Plaza in Davenport, Iowa, tucking lost boy flyers under the cab windshield wipers. A gloomy drizzle had been falling since morning but not heavily enough to require umbrella or raincoat. As he walked from truck to truck, Mr. Gerdulon felt the box he held under his left arm grow heavier by increments, to the point where he knew he should not have brought the whole box along. He should have taken just a dozen or two loose flyers with him, and, if more were required, he could have simply gone to his car for more. The afternoon had been a full one: two hamburgers at Denny’s, a half a dozen cold calls to hospitals and jails inquiring about the runaway boy he’d been tasked to track down, and now, this truck-to-truck drizzly-chilled slog. All in all, a boring day. After the first few trucks they began to blur together—he’d stopped noticing the nameplates of each cab—Freightliner; Mack; Kenworth; Volvo; Peterbilt; International; International; Peterbilt; Kenworth; Freightliner—and began taking more detailed notice of how the wipers varied from truck to truck. Some were long. Some were short. Some pulled away from the glass easier than others—though in general the drizzle made it hard to slip each flyer under the raised blade—the thin paper sought adhesion to each windshield but eck eh, it may have been the damp windshields seeking adhesion to each flyer—but actually it got to where there was only one truck with one window, one set of wipers, and one drizzle settling softly all around, and—one left arm nearing an unbearable ache—one brown box of flyers growing heavier by the second—yes puzzling yes all puzzling, ‘cause, should the box not be getting lighter with each flyer being removed, and this being repeated flyer after flyer, and, ah, flyer Freightliner wiper wetglass tuck under step over ah flyer Mack wiper wetglass tuck under step over ah, Sir, hold it, flyer, Kenworth wiper ah, flyer wiper wetglass, tuck under say, Sir, hold it, wait up, wetglass tuck under wiper Peterbilt, Tell me more about this flyer, hold it, wetglass tuck step under step over, I might have something for you come here—Peterbilt—what? Who—Mr. Gerdulon surfaced from the work and turned ‘round, eh, someone’s there calling me, yes, he was, so—Uh, what? Why, what?
A wide man with a bright white bald head stood before him, saying, See this? waving a flyer—I got to talk to you about this.
Mr. Gerdulon pushed out a hand, saying, Listen, hold it, I got approval from the truck stop manager to put up these flyers—go in and ask him, he’s right inside over there.
No, no, it’s not that, said the man, waving the flyer’s face at Mr. Gerdulon, then stepping closer. It’s this kid. I think I might have picked up this kind of kid, a couple days ago.
Really? Okay, here. Can we go inside so you can fill me in? I need to jot down the particulars of this. Come on.
Mr. Gerdulon shifted the box from his left arm to his right and waved the man to follow him toward the Denny’s, thinking not that this would be his first solid lead, but it would be a welcome break to escape the drizzle, get relief from the crushing weight of the box, order two hot coffees, and go through every detail of what this big bald man knew—but, the man said, No, hold it—we got to talk in my truck. I got it running to charge the battery. Don’t like to leave a running truck alone in a place like this. I could lock it and leave it running, but a professional truck hijacker can blow through a lock like it was jelly. Come on. I’m second from the head of the line. Okay?
Sure. Lead the way.
In moments they sat in a softly idling maroon Mack. Mr. Gerdulon relaxed in the pleasant warmth, idly glanced at the intricate silver-and-gold softly wound necklace hung from the rear-view mirror, next to the six-inch-tall Bob’s Big Boy figurine leaning precariously atop the dash. Pulling his notebook from his breast pocket, he gripped tight his pen while the driver pushed buttons on the dash. Mr. Gerdulon turned slightly to the driver, saying, Okay. Let’s start at the top. Why do you think this is the boy you picked up a few days ago?
The kid I picked up, oh yes—yes, he had clothes like that. And a backpack.
Oh, sure. What else about him?
Yeah, oh, there was some more stuff, but it was really the backpack stuck with me. Red, white, and blue—and it looked so new—I never saw one like it before. You know? It reminded me of Buck Owens’ guitar—hey. You ever heard Buck Owens? Singing and playing that big red, white, and blue guitar? Here—get this. Let me show you. The kid’s pack reminded me—I had to play it again. Can’t hear this one too many times. That’s for sure. Okay here it is.
Listen.
From a huge steel grill in the dash came “Cryin’ Time” by Buck Owens—causing the driver’s right leg to pump in time and causing his foot to tap the gas pedal. So much so that after a few bars the engine, truck, and driver were bobbing and surging along to the music. Mr. Gerdulon held back from what he began saying to himself as the song rolled on mournfully—I can tell by the way, sang Buck—this is not what I came here for—you hold me darlin', this is extraordinarily rude, I should say something, but wait, two wrongs, that it won't be long, don’t make a right, before it's crying time—Buck droned on and thank God came to a close and—mercifully the bald-headed driver pushed the dash, killing the music. He turned to Mr. Gerdulon, saying, yes, yes—but yes. Your boy and his red, white, and blue backpack—that hooked him to Buck Owens, for me. I mean, how many guitars are there like that backpack, how many boys singing songs like that? But anyway—let me think. I’m—I’m not sure actually, eh—hey, help me out. What was the question again?
God.
The boy you picked up. I asked you why you think he’s the boy on my flyer.
Oh. That boy. Yes. It was the red, white, and blue backpack. Of course.
Okay—Mr. Gerdulon quickly wrote in his pad and as he looked up, the bald driver spoke.
Like—you know, that backpack, ah—I almost—I almost—well you know. You know, like I said.
No, I don’t know. What else besides the backpack. Maybe—he said something to you, or whatever? Something that might give me a clue?
I, uh, no, well—yes, but; eh listen. Anything reminds me of Buck. Like—I mean Christ almighty! Buck’s so damned good, eh—c’mon. get into it. Here.
Again he punched up the radio into “Cryin’ Time,” play low, play loud—play p-p-Oh, they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, swooned Buck; eh, see there, detective, absence—see, tears are only rain to make love grow—leg pumping—horrible how the poor boy left home—by the way you hold me, darlin', e-e-eh, his lost Mother who used to hold him, love him, eh, there’s all kinds o’ love, uh; it must be a horrible feeling for a child to leave Mother—engine throbbing—it won't be long, before it's crying time, ‘cause, I never had to run away myself, but; Mr. Gerdulon realized his hands were on fire from wringing, listening, waiting o-o-oh—that tears are only rain, to make love grow—this guy is whacko yep; blue, blue, clothing, yep. Leg pumping engine throbbing in time, got to get out—I sure can tell, by the way you hold me darlin’, but; Mr. Gerdulon’s eyes flicked out through the windshield large man in a red hunting jacket running at the driver’s side—Huh!
Latch clash; door flying open; light burst over and ‘round the shiny-headed driver. Mr. Gerdulon froze as up, over ‘round the shiny-headed driver swarmed a larger man punching down the music, yanking the bald man into the drizzle and down to the ground, yelling, Why the hell are you in my truck? You and your buddy there—hey, sit tight asshole, he yelled at Mr. Gerdulon—I’m coming for you next—this a-hole I know, I seen him hanging ‘round here, but who the hell are you? What’s in that box? You ransacked shit out from my truck into that box? Sit tight, genius. Sit right there. After I give this asshole two black eyes, I’m coming for you. You—okay—and he fell down on the bald man, fists flying.
Gerdulon moved fast—in the sound of hard punches landing on the screaming bald man in the sloshing mud—he leapt out the passenger side, the box tilting spraying a half dozen flyers out to the ground, and ran through the splash, cutting right, running faster, not noticing the nameplates of each cab sliding by: Freightliner; Mack; Kenworth; Volvo; Peterbilt; International; Peterbilt; Kenworth; Freightliner, but—now came splashy fast steps chasing him, but thank God, far back—he could make it—had to make it. Had to.
Hey! Come back here, creep—it’s your turn—ah Gerdulon’s legs pumped ‘n cut right ‘tween the trucks—come back here, creep! I got some for you, too—what’s in that box, stop right there—my stuff’s in that box, stop—and Mr. Gerdulon ran like hell, ‘cross the lot, to his Ford, ‘n leapt in thinking he lost the big man. Turn the key, power up, yes, must have lost him, thank God, and—the Ford powered out past the Flying J Truck Stop sign—where the cold drizzle continued, unabated, the entire rest of the day.
Jim Meirose’s work has appeared in numerous venues. His novels include Understanding Franklin Thompson (JEF), Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection (Mannequin Haus), and No and Maybe - Maybe and No (Pski's Porch).
Scarf
I saw you in a dream. You were smiling.
I waved hello. You didn’t see me.
I called your name. You didn’t hear me.
I ran closer. I waved bigger.
I called louder. Now here I was.
Flapping my arms. Squawking
into your mouth. Sobbing
into my own. I sealed my eyes.
I threw my arms around you. I peeled my eyes.
I was wearing my own limbs like a scarf.
Erik Moyer is from Hillsborough, New Jersey. He holds a BS from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He will begin attending the University of North Texas's creative writing PhD program this fall. He currently works as a data scientist and lives in San Diego.