Melissa Mason

Italy, Latium Region, Tomb of Lioness // G. DAGLI ORTI / De Agostini Picture Library / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

I remember how it was before he left. The sun was shining a brilliant gold, the way that it does in late afternoon on a day somewhere between summer and autumn. The sky was a light shade of blue with those big fluffy clouds that change shape the longer you looked at them, the kind that when they traveled over the sun you could see its rays glimmering through.  We were lying perpendicular to one another underneath a tree whose leafy shadow covered our bodies with a funny speckled pattern. There was a gentle breeze dancing through the treetops and whispering over our bodies. I remember the grass not only being a vibrant green but also soft, not the feeling of being freshly mowed, but more as if it had been mowed two days before. The breeze was telling jokes to the grass, causing the blades to bend over in silent laughter and tickle my bare feet.  My head was resting on his chest and I could hear his slow breathing and beating heart, I couldn’t help but smile whenever there was an irregularity in that beating. The only sound apart from the dancing leaves was the crisp, quick rustle as we turned the pages of our books. We didn’t speak much that day, the majority of our communication was through the quiet smiles we shared and the way his free hand stroked my arm. It wasn’t that we were angry with each other, or that we had nothing to say to one another, it was that we didn’t need to say anything to know what the other was thinking. I closed my eyes and inhaled through my nose as he brought his hand away from his mouth and let the smoke twist up and weave its way through the gentle breeze. He smiled as the last of it escaped his lips; he knew how much I loved the smell.

That was the first time we danced. He stood up abruptly and pulled me to my feet with him. The air had a thick amber glow as the sun inched closer to the horizon. He grabbed my hand and spun me, then pulled me close. We didn’t know the steps to any fancy ballroom dance so he made up his own silly waltz, holding me tight, making sure I never got left behind. He dipped me and I laughed, a full laugh, the kind that makes your whole body shake, the contagious kind that makes anyone within earshot laugh with you. I felt light, like that feeling you get after two glasses of red wine. In fact that’s how I felt, I felt like red wine. I was filled to the brim with warmth and delight. I could feel my cheeks burning, becoming a color that matched the way I felt as the veil of night fell over our made-up waltz. He went to dip me again, but this time I fell, pulling him with me and we both laughed, our faces taken up entirely by the idiotic grins we wore. We lay back down, nuzzling against each other as the stars sparked into existence. He pointed out his favorite constellations; he even dedicated one of the stars to me, the brightest one at the corner of his favorite. We fell asleep in that spot, with the crescent moon promising she would protect us through the night. That was the last time we danced.  

Melissa Mason is a senior English major at UMass Amherst with a specialization in Creative Writing. She plans to enter the world of publishing as an editor but her ultimate goal is to be a fantasy novelist. 

Photo credit: Italy, Latium Region, Tarquinia (Vt), Etruscan Necropolises, Tomb of Lioness, 6th century fresco with couple of dancers, she wears a transparent vest, he’s naked with an olpe of wine, premise of an orgiastic dance. Photopgraphy. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/126_3750512/1/126_3750512/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

Moeko Noda

Top hat, magic trick, tap and money purse on black background / Tom Kelley Archive / Retrofile RF / Getty Images / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

The asphalt on the street radiated heat, causing beads of sweat to collect on the Magician’s forehead. It was a summer day in central Tokyo. The sweat dripped onto the flags he was pulling out from his mouth. He stood behind a portable table set up on the street. He had been there for an hour, entertaining audiences that came and went, as he kept pulling out flags one after the other.

Once, he had wanted to be an athleter. He remembered the summer of the first Tokyo Olympics a generation before. It was similarly sweltering. Each afternoon the Magician would run to his neighbor’s house, which was the only home with a television, with a small gang of boys. They kicked off their sandals as they hurried to the television, already surrounded by men cheering and women gossiping. He huddled up to sneak through the adults to the front. With knees tightly pressed together, the Magician looked up into the screen where the female volleyball team ran and hit, ran and hit. Though the court must have been boiling with heat, the rough pixels of the television screen did not betray the sweat and the grind of the players, only their steady receives and attacks. Yes, the Magician remembered now: he wanted to be a volleyball player, not a baseball player. The lean female figures in the screen attracted him in ways that were still unknown to him, the stretch of their arms and the bow of their bodies reaching for a spike magical and dazzling. In that Olympic games the Japanese female volleyball team smashed opponents, winning the finals against the Soviet Union after a grueling game as the nation cheered in front of their respective communal TVs. The team was nicknamed the “Witches of the Orient.”

But did I really want to be a volleyball player? The Magician thought again, as he slipped his hands beneath the table to feel the pigeon that he would soon produce and then make disappear. Sure enough, she was there, safely blinded in a black box that confined her beneath the table. Volleyball, he remembered, became a girl’s sport after the gold medal of the Olympics. TV series and comic series featuring starry-eyed girls playing volleyball attracted girls nationwide, creating a huge surge in the popularity of the sport. But the Magician was never a part of it. Throughout elementary school he remained silent about his attraction, secretly dreaming of volleyball but never actually playing it. Baseball was the sport that he played in the open fields after school. 

Baseball was a fine sport, but the Magician never wanted to be a professional like all the other boys. Once in high school, he quit his team and spent most of his time at the library. Sitting alone in the rustic room where dust flew with each touch of a book, the Magician read Dostoyevsky and Stendhal; Mishima and Soseki; he drank them down. He lost his childhood tan from playing baseball, but sunburnt the left side of his face by sitting in the same seat in the library every day. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to be in the future; his only vision was to have a solitary and literary life. So when the time came to go to college, he went where he got in. Magic, the Magician thought as he pulled out the pigeon from the box through his hat on the desk, was nowhere in his life back then. The closest he got to magic was Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But he did like to watch the college volleyball team. It  was far from the Olympic team that had captured the eyes of the nation; many of the girls were round, healthy, and happy, and none of the stoic sportsmanship that ruled the court that summer was present in the old, sweaty college gym. Laughter bounced on the walls whenever the girls took a break. The Magician, now a tall, lean young man, liked to read on the stands while the team practiced. The toss of the ball, the yells of the girls, their sweats that the television screen never captured, all amidst the philosophical musings of Virginia Woolf, consumed him. Inhaling the stale air of the gym, he felt that he was in two worlds at once: the carnal reality of his childhood dreams and the spiritual realm of the philosophers. Skipping classes, he sat quietly in the back of the empty stands, reading away as the hours ticked by. A slight change occurred to this daily routine when the Magician’s eyes caught a particular girl in the court. She was the tallest and visibly more serious about the game than the other girls who were there for fun. The arch of her body was like a long, lean bow, and the ball her arm hit pierced the empty spot of the opponent’s court with a straight trajectory. The Magician fell in love. The balance between the two worlds shifted; his gaze would lift off the pages and fall on her. They dated for a while, but the girl dumped him after a few months for not paying enough attention to their relationship.  He stopped going to the gym.

The Magician fell into deep despair. In his small apartment, he lay down on his futon and wondered about life. He had never known despair like this; none of the masterpieces of literature had taught him how the wounds of love hurt. After two weeks of solitude, he woke up. He decided that books never taught him anything: only hard-earned experience can. He even felt grateful for his girlfriend, for teaching him this truth.The Magician started to work part time jobs. On Mondays he tended bar; on Tuesdays he built houses in the rapidly expanding suburbs; on Fridays he organized rows of fish at the Tsukiji market. The rest of the week he filled in with one-time gigs.

Out of the myriad jobs that he tried, he most liked being a magician’s assistant. The job came to him unexpectedly, one day, on his way home from another one of his part-time jobs. He spotted a handwritten ad on a utility pole that said, “Looking for assistant to magician. Will teach how to do basic magic.”

When he rang up the number on the ad the next day, an old man answered. The man spoke softly and modestly, and the Magician, who had expected something like a pigeon popping up through the phone, checked the number on the note on the desk. But he was talking to the right man. Hearing that the Magician was interested in the assistant position, the old man’s voice brightened: “You are the first one to call!” he said, “I had almost lost hope. I am making an overseas trip to India next month, and I urgently need someone to work in my place while I am gone.”

The training process was much more arduous than the Magician had anticipated. The Master, who preferred to be called Master Ismail, taught him how to handle cards and control the audience’s attention, step by step, in his old apartment that was cluttered with elephant statues. He was a good teacher; he never got irritated by his pupil’s mistakes, and went over the same tricks again and again until the student perfected it. Except for his weird fascination with India, the Magician liked his master very much and trusted in his skills. Sometimes he was tempted to point out that Ismail is an Islamic name rather than Hindu; but out of love and respect, he never did, and sent his master out having surely mastered the basic magic tricks that he were to perform while the master spent six months traveling “forgotten magical tribes” in India.

Now the Magician had truly become a magician. He worked at the  birthday parties of wealthy children, did tricks in the toy sections of department stores, and sometimes performed on the streets to advertise his work. Most of his audiences were children under the age of twelve; they beheld the cards that flew and the pigeons that disappeared in pure wonder, giggling and screaming with joy. As the Magician became more accustomed to his work, he realized he had graduated college. He only noticed this when, receiving an offer to perform at a wedd
ing, he saw that the date conflicted with his graduation ceremony. He didn’t mind too much; the only person from college that he ever really talked to was his volleyball-playing ex-girlfriend, and he did not care to meet her again. He accepted the offer and added a rabbit vanishing trick during the wedding ceremony as a personal celebration of his graduation.  

Months came and passed. Master Ismail never came back; the Magician assumed that he had extended his stay in India, possibly having found his retirement destination in one of the magical tribes. The Magician was not in a hurry to hand back his position anyways. He had become a full-time magician upon graduation, expanding his network of customers. He met many people during his work; he congratulated arrivals of newborns, celebrated the coming-of-age of twenty year olds, and pulled out from his hat smiling photos of the deceased. One of the most surprising encounters during this time was with his ex-girlfriend from college. The Magician was asked to perform at a birthday party of a five-year-old boy for a hefty pay, and when he arrived at the doorsteps of a large western style house, she opened the door. The Magician recognized her right away: the quiet smile, the lean build of her body, the seriousness at the edge of her mouth. She did not recognize him, however, and invited him in with welcoming ease. The husband was not present for his son’s birthday party, but had made sure that the house was handsomely decorated by professional party planners, an uncommon practice. The air of restrained passion that she carried with her in college was gone, her eyes now tinged with fatigue. But the Magician was a professional; he was never to speak about personal matters with his client. As he steadily performed his routine, the Magician’s ex-girlfriend watched his tricks with a curious smile, paying more attention to her son’s reactions rather than the show. After he received the pay and left the house, the Magician never saw her again. Such was the way it was with most customers. People came and went, leaving behind traces of memories, a hint of laughter, a sparkle of the eye, but never a permanent connection – except for one serious eyed girl, who eagerly asked to be the Magician’s assistant one  summer day, soon after the encounter with his ex-girlfriend. She later became his wife.

Years came and passed. Not much changed for the Magician; he performed his tricks in professional solemnity, visited birthday parties, and celebrated marriages. The venue today was on the street. As the drumroll from the CD speaker rolled, the pigeon vanished under the desk, successfully concluding his finale. The drumroll finished with a dramatic thud. The children, after a beat, clapped in wide-eyed wonder.

Moeko Noda is a senior in Swarthmore College, where she studies Comparative Literature. She is from Tokyo, Japan. 

Photo credit: Top hat, magic trick, tap and money purse on black background. Photography. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/115_3876433/1/115_3876433/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

Melissa Mason

Flowers under blue light / ANDREW LAMBERT PHOTOGRAPHY / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

Nobody knows that I come here at night, every night; nobody even cares enough to notice. I sneak out of my uncle’s cabin before he is even asleep, while he is still sitting like a fat drooling dog in front of the TV drinking his tenth beer. He doesn’t care about me, he barely even knows my name, but he loves my mother and would do anything for her. Uncle Earl adopted me every summer for the past three years while Mother went on “work trips,” which is code for her going on tropical cruises and getting shitfaced with boys who are closer to my age than hers. This summer though she didn’t come back to get me. She sent a text to Earl telling him about her “new young love, we are moving to Greece, tell Amy to study hard.” That was it. No I love you, no goodbyes, just study hard. Fat lot of good that did. Earl forgot to register me for school this year. He messed up his leg a few years ago working construction, and since then he’s been living off disability claiming that his leg never healed right. He sits day in and day out in front of his static-y TV in his tiny three-roomed cabin in the middle of the woods.

Most people my age find the woods  a terrible and forsaken place. I think it’s magical–the soft carpet of the emerald moss that curls around my bare toes as I bound away from Earl’s place, the sweet rainbow leaves that blow all about in the wind and tickle my face

I found this place at the beginning of my third summer dumped at Earl’s. That first day was the only day he was sober, just to impress his sister. As soon as she left he chugged five beers and retreated to his chair, forever imprinted with his walrus butt.

When I was sure that he was good and drunk, I went exploring. I was traveling along a path in the woods when I tripped on a root, got caught in indigo vines and crashed into a clearing, smacking my head on the ground. I have no idea how long I was unconscious for, but when I finally awoke, little cobalt lights darted into the trees. I untangled myself from the vines and gasped. How had I never seen this part of the woods before? The leaves on all of the trees surrounding the clearing were a brilliant red, a velvety red sort of like that of blooming roses, but warmer. The tall grass, which was softer than the moss and logically should not have even existed in this shaded space, reached a shade of green to rival a jade stone, the same kind that was on the ring Dad was buried with. All openings in the trees were obscured by the indigo vines I was caught in.

I lie in the middle of this field now, as I have every night since the day I found it. I lay here and I watch the cobalt lights flitter about. Because they are not just lights, they are creatures. They float through the air and live in the red trees. They dance in the grass to the sound of the stars. They have grown accustomed to my presence; in fact I think they have begun to look forward to my visits. They look like fairies but they are not, they may not even be alive. I thought they were until the day three of them floated straight through my stomach. I didn’t even feel them, I just watched them enter from my front and leave out the back. As I lie here they swarm in and around me. One has placed herself on the tip of my nose. She is eerily beautiful. My little lights, that’s what I call them, and they respond to it so they must like it. They have accepted me and care for me and provide me with warmth even on the coldest of nights. Maybe one day I will be able to join them, flitting about without a care in the world, becoming a little cobalt light myself. Until that day comes I will continue to sit here and watch them.

Melissa Mason is a senior English major at UMass Amherst with a specialization in Creative Writing. She plans to enter the world of publishing as an editor but her ultimate goal is to be a fantasy novelist. 

Photo credit: Flowers under blue light. Photograph. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1185781/1/132_1185781/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

Tabitha Sanders

William Blake (British, 1757 – 1827), / Satan Exulting over Eve /  British, 1795, Graphite, pen and black ink, and watercolor, 42.5 × 53.5 cm (16 3/4 × 21 1/16 in.), 84.GC.49 / Getty Open Content

Olive struck the ground with her foot as she drove her scooter over and over the same patch of sidewalk in front of her house. It was her car, and she was driving it to work; she must take care to stop at all of the stoplights and to never go above the speed limit. Her little sister, Amy, had decided to quit the  game, but the disappointment was only temporary. She had her imaginary friends to play with, and they made good playmates.

When they left, though, things did get a bit lonesome. Worse still was when her friends would withdraw, leaving little Olive with the enemies. She knew that they were only visions, that they weren’t really there. The man with the long white-hair was likely a figment from a dream, and the devil voice a secret sadness within her. The other enemies would often come and go, torture her and then leave forever. But these two stuck around for an awful long time, and Olive knew that they could stay forever if they wanted to.

The two enemies had made the decision, it seemed, to disturb and make miserable every aspect of her life. The white-haired man, who would so often appear in her mind and then flash away just as quickly, was in the habit of whispering things of past that had never happened.

As the white-haired man would confuse and distort the world she lived in, the devil voice would demand of her the payment of every second of her life. Any action she strove to do, be it turning her scooter around, picking a Tupperware cup to drink out of from the cabinet, speaking, was to some extent controlled by the devil voice. She would decide to turn her scooter around clockwise instead of counterclockwise, and the voice would change her action: If you don’t turn it counterclockwise, you will be trapped in a different time continuum. While wanting to choose the large blue cup, the voice would rebuke her: You’d better choose the small green cup, or else I will go into your heart when you drink. If about to say hello to someone: Keep your mouth closed or you’ll go to hell.

The battle, was continual. Perhaps it was made worse by the third enemy, the enemy who was real, her new stepfather.

He was a strange man, strange in his appearance, strange in his manner, and strange most of all in his preference for love from children. His acts shook the ground and broke it apart, leaving the shards of restlessness on which her family stood to drift away from each other.

Olive felt that the situation would have been easier had it not been for the visions that haunted her. But, no, the white-haired man would visit her and fill her waking dreamland with  his version of reality; the devil voice would prohibit any freedom and terrify her beyond belief.

The girls went into a kind of years-long trance. No amount of consolation or screaming and yelling could snap them out of—not a bit of cajoling from their mother or cruel mind games from their stepfather would rescue them from it. It tied the two sisters together, each a source of comfort for the other.

They would talk to each other of the brutishness of their stepfather. Perhaps that was why her sister had left their game today so early on—the conversation had come up again. And with it had come an argument-turned-agreement.

Her sister had asked, “Do you think we need to tell someone?”

Olive felt a surge of panic.

“No, only if it happens again. And then we need to tell each other first.”

“But it did happen again, last night,” said Amy softly.

No, Olive, don’t you dare give in. You know it’s better kept a secret. Don’t tell… or else. The devil voice. You really don’t want to find out what I can do to you.

“Well,” Olive faltered again. Inside, she argued with the voice. Amy was crying. “Well. what if we promise each other something? If it happens even one more time, we will tell each other and then give each other a month to tell someone.”

Amy seemed to follow what she meant. “Is it really a promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

The two shook hands like adults and looked each other in the eyes. “Okay. Who are we going to tell, then?”

“I don’t know. We should probably tell mom. But remember, only after a month if it happens again.”

Olive wondered if she find the courage to uphold that promise. And over the next few days she noticed that the devil voice was growing quieter, yet gaining strength in anger. Then there came a new voice, softer, clearly feminine.

Olive. Olive stared at the vision that began appearing, similar in ghostlike appearance to the white-haired man. It was a girl though, and much older than Olive. Olive. May we talk?

As much as Olive desired an escapade conversation, she had to decline the offer for fear of a permanent attachment to this potential enemy. “No. Please go away.”

I’ve come a long way to get here, little Olive. There are some things I need to tell you. Think of me as an older sister. The vision was becoming more vivid as the words grew clear.

“Fine, then. Go ahead.” It would be best to get this spiel out of the way before figuring a way to dispel this vision from her life.

The vision gently led her towards the backyard, where the two sat on bulging tree roots in the mossy shade.

I left you years ago. I am Olive.

Olive studied the figure. It certainly looked a bit like her, but it was too old. It was too different. “You aren’t really me.”

I’m you in the future, when you’re eighteen. I know I’m different, and it’s my fault that you came to be this way. When I left you, I found hatred and selfishness. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how much I left you alone to suffer. I thought I had done myself a favor, and therefore done you a favor, but the deeper into life I got I realized it wasn’t true. It seems that for every thing I left you alone to suffer, a reflection of it has shown up in my own life. Now I know your pain, and I am so sorry.

Olive looked down at the thick grass surrounding them, and kept herself quiet for a time. Without the devil voice here to interject its threats and commentary, she found it difficult to judge the veracity of this conversation. The vision seemed patient in that respect, and her silence brought Olive the encouragement to consider. “I really don’t know if this is real, but I forgive you.”

Thank you. Thank you ve
ry much. Her vision took a moment to examine the yard, as if remembering. May I ask you something?

Olive nodded.
You need to tell someone. It’s hard, but it’s important.

Olive murmured her agreement.

Don’t leave yourself behind. Always stay with yourself; help yourself grow. Don’t hide, and do all you can to keep goodness in your heart.
The vision was fading, and the different volume levels of the voices all mingled again. Her vision was gone, and again the devil voice came and scolded her on her belief of that vision. The white-haired man found evidence against her from his undocumented wealth of knowledge of time.

Upon returning inside, the sound of the swamp cooler overwhelmed her, and the sight of her stepfather slumped on the couch clutching his container of peanuts angered her. She walked quickly, silently, down the hallway into her shared bedroom, where she found Amy curled helplessly onto her bed. The music on the radio was turned low to her sister’s favorite band, and the beats and tunes of emotion mingled with her sobs.

“I just want mommy to come home from the store,” she sniffled. “I’m afraid of daddy.”

Olive climbed up onto the bed with her sister. “I am too. She’ll be back soon.”

Amy looked up at her face. “Do you still promise? Really promise?”

“Yes, I promise. Do you?”

“Yes. But,” Amy sat up, trying to gain composure. “I’m really afraid of telling.”

“I am too, Amy. It’s okay. I promise it’s okay.”

Tabitha Sanders graduated from Chino Valley High School, Arizona, in 2016 with the strong inclination to become a writer. Her dream is to support herself with writing while living in an RV.

Kelly Lett

Gutted house at the corner of 8th and C streets, NE. / Tom Williams / Roll Call Photos Inc. / Newscom / Universal Images Group /Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

Miss Denise’s favorite spot was the left corner chair on her front porch.
Most of her life she had sat there watching the neighborhood. Often she would sit well past sundown, giving the breeze time to dry the day’s humidity caught in the creases of her brow. The August sun didn’t set until near 10pm, but the day’s heat stayed caught inside houses where every movement was a battle against the air itself as it licked at exposed skin, causing a feverish chill. It felt as though the air pushed back , stopped you from moving freely, forced youinto stuffed chairs that, while comfortable in the winter, became soggy, sticky traps in the summer. For all these reasons Miss. Denise longed to sit out on her porch tonight. Instead she stood in the doorway, staring at the faded lawn chair, imagining the cool air in her lungs.
But that relief was just out of reach. Working against the moldy screen door were a legion of mosquitos. They buzzed against the door, seeking any small cut or hole that would allow them access to the old woman’s blood filled arms and legs. This was Michigan in the summer.
“The Devil’s own,“ Miss Denise sighed, swatting at a bug that had gained entrance and started feasting on her arm. Its death left a small splatter of blood on the old womans delicate, thin skin.
Forced by nature to seek relief, Miss Denise stood in the doorway, avoiding the bugs, greedy for the cool air. She looked out across the street, staring at what had once been the Freemans’ house. The foundation was still intact, strong and solid as ever. Like all the houses on this block it had been built well. Michigan weather tested houses and humans alike; striking against them with biting winds, freezing rains and thick snow in winter then turning it all around in summer with unrelenting temperatures and humidity so high a person could swim to the store.
Some of the front porch was still there, wooden beams rising up towards a missing roof. The rest of the house was nothing more than broken glass and charred wood. The Freemans had left ten years ago, nobody had wanted their house, so it sat ready to be stripped for saleable scraps, torn up by vandals, and burned to the ground by unknown shadow figures who came and went at night.
The neighborhood turned 100 this year, but it had started dying at 90. Miss Denise had been born and raised in that neighborhood, in the very house whose doorway she now looked out from. She certainly never thought she would be the only person left in the last house standing on a once lively block.
“Blight!” Miss Denise huffed, “An even uglier word for cancer.”
But houses don’t get cancer, so they call it something short and nasty. It spread like cancer though, leaving little behind except shelters, stray cats, and drug addicts.
A breeze picked up. Closing her eyes she heard it moan through the glassless windows. Far back in her memory a child yelled ‘wait up!’ as bikes whizzed by. She smiled.
“You be careful now!”
Catching herself Miss Denise opened her eyes. The memory faded as she stared out at the remains of the Kibber house. Another memory shoved its way up, overwhelming Miss. Denise with the smell of ribs coming off the grill. Sam Kibber and his ribs! It was a two day process of sauce boiling, meat smoking, biscuit baking, and finally wood fire grilling. The Kibbers never sent out party invitations, they just opened their kitchen windows.
The Kibbers had left eight years before. Their house sat empty, another cancerous tumor for all to see. Finally a mysterious fire had burned any hope of a new family filling its rooms.
Fire took the Greens’ house, too. The Greens had arrived in the late 90’s to a block that was still very middle class. Mr. Green mowed that lawn every week, trimming every edge to symmetrical perfection. He planted flowers so early each spring that a late frost shriveled leaves and froze roots more than once. But the next weekend he’d be back with another flat, all those bright reds and yellows.
Once the blight began, nobody wanted a house on this block, so they had emptied, one after another and bit by bit they were taken apart. Thieves always arrived first, pulling copper pipes from walls, carting appliances to scrap metal yards, taking doorknobs, lighting fixtures, stained glass windows; anything.
The thieves were followed by squatters and drug addcts. Fights became common in what had once been a peaceful neighborhood. And Miss Denise was certain that the Greens’ house had last been used for murder. From her front porch she once heard such awful sounds.
Cursing, crashing, flesh smacking against flesh; it bothered her so that she had run inside, slamming and bolting the thick wood door. Still she heard screaming, until very suddenly she heard nothing.
She had called the police, telling what she saw and heard, but they never bothered to show.
“Just a torn down neighborhood with a scared old lady, what they gonna do?” she asked nobody.
And so it was up and down the street, memories tied to the remains of homes in a once proud neighborhood. The only keeper of those precious memories, an old woman standing alone in the doorway of the last house left standing.
Sometimes in her mind she saw the Williams Christmas light display, each year it grew bigger and brighter until it went dark three years ago when the Williams took the twinkly bulbs to Georgia.
Once the cancerous blight took hold, the flights of fear began. One after another they had departed, leaving only an old woman in an old house, paid off by her father long before she took over.
Anger rose in Miss. Denise’s throat, “I told you not to get another mortgage! Factories been closing for 30 years, I said. Interest rates go up, I said. That house is yours! It’s paid for, I said. But you all wouldn’t listen to some dumb old woman. Blue skies and sunshine that’s all you damn fools saw. Well I saw the clouds gathering. Saw the rain a coming, and it came and it fell, like it always does ending good times, like it always does.”
Weii, maybe they all hadn’t taken out second and third mortgages, but enough had. Pensions were squandered trying to fend off foreclosures, but those bright yellow bank notices always ended up tacked on doors.
And if the mortgage man didn’t get you, the tax man did. Nobody cared that when the car parts factory closed it took your dry cleaning customers with it, the city still wants revenue.
“They’re just waiting on me.” Miss Denise shifted her focus back to the frenzy of mosquitoes outside her door. “They’re all just waiting on me. Bloodsuckers.”
She hit out at the screen door causing a small, living cloud to burst away backwards. For a moment they took each other in, the old woman and the buzzing little cloud. The mosquitoes waited, hovering, on the other side of the rotting door. Miss. Denise backed away leaving the cool night breeze for the bugs as the oven-high heat of her living room swallowed her up.

Kelly Lett recently moved from Los Angeles to Detroit to pursue her writing career. Thanks to the internet she is able to tell stories while enjoying a much lower cost of living.

Photo credit: House. . Photography. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/142_2303727/1/142_2303727/cite. Accessed 12 Aug 2016.

Grace Imbesi

Studio shot of mixture of paints / Visage / Stockbyte / Getty Images / Universal Images Group

Maude Mabel was particular. Maude always kept her room spotless and her fur clean. Her clothes were all folded neatly in her dresser drawers, and her coats and dresses remained hanging in her closet with the hangers all facing in the same direction. Her closet shelves were neatly lined with boxes of crafts and other storage bins. Maude always brushes her teeth for the recommended three minutes, and makes sure to floss every time. She only uses eight squares of toilet paper in the bathroom. Never seven, never nine; Maude felt more comfortable with even numbers.

Maude went about every morning in the same way: she made her bed, put on the day’s favorite dress (unless it happened to be a Friday, and then she put on her favorite purple, polka-dotted shirt), ate a hearty breakfast of cheesy scrambled eggs and toast with strawberry jam — never letting the two mingle, gathered her school things in her old backpack with the flower patches sewn into it, and left the house for school at 8 o’clock sharp.

Her schooldays remained almost the same from day-to-day. She started the day with a simple social studies, and continued on with math- she liked math, because everything had a right answer, unlike her next class: English. After English her class took a snack break, and then had gym. Gym was followed by lunch and then recess, which was spent mostly on the swings, where she would swing no more and no less than sixty times. She then had Spanish, music, and finally, her favorite class: art.

Maude liked that art was her last class of the day, so she always had something to look forward to. Whenever her teacher gave them some free time to work on whatever they pleased, she always chose her favorite way of expressing herself: painting. All of her paintings included her three favorite things: the bright yellow sun, a tall, lush tree- always with an owl hole, and herself wearing, of course, her favorite purple polka-dotted shirt. Every time, though, she would change something about the painting. Sometimes there wouldn’t be an owl in the owl hole, or sometimes, depending on the season, the leaves would be orange and red, or not there at all. Some paintings would have more flowers than others, and she often painted herself with blue or pink ribbons in her fur.

One rainy Friday afternoon, there she was, painting her same painting with the purple polka-dotted shirt and her pretty pink ribbons, when the clumsiest boy in class, Jackson Spivey (who Maude Mabel tried to avoid as often as possible) swung his arm around and accidentally knocked over a bottle of green paint, making one large splat right on top of her artwork, landing right where she had just painted her perfect, purple, polka-dotted shirt. Jackson Spivey froze in embarrassment as Maude Mabel froze in frustration. Her stomach started filling up with thunder and lightning that was just as anxious as the storm brewing outside, just as it always does when she’s forced to stray from her routines, but then something funny happened… The rain outside started calming down, and so did her stomach…

Maude stood staring at the painting, confused. She couldn’t explain why, but she actually sort of liked the way the green splat looked on her purple shirt. Maybe it was the way the two colors looked together, or maybe it was how the splat was so simple that it added just enough crazy to actually look cool. Whatever it was, it changed Maude Mabel’s perspective and she hugged and thanked the messy boy who she had hated all year.

After this art class phenomenon, Jackson and Maude became best friends, and he showed her how to live life in a more fun, carefree way. At recess, he showed her that you don’t have to stop swinging once you reach sixty, because seventy, or even eighty, can also be fun, and you don’t even have to count at all!

At home, during dinner time, Maude saw her brother mixing his mashed potatoes with his meatloaf. At first, she was disgusted at the thought of food touching, but he seemed to enjoy it, and so she thought she would give it a try. She took her fork, mixed away, and threw a heaping mouthful of mash onto her tongue. She was delighted by how it tasted and could not believe she hadn’t discovered this sooner.
After these little discoveries, Maude wondered what other little secrets to happiness were hiding behind the routines she had spent so long perfecting, and she decided to get a little crazy… Maude took all the arts and crafts boxes out of her closet and spilled its contents all over her desk, hoping that she would in time become more creative. She opened up her sock drawer and tossed around rainbow handfuls until striped socks rested with polka-dotted socks and pink socks hung around with orange socks, because who doesn’t like a little mixin’ and matchin’? She tore up all of her gel-pen lists, neglecting any and all routines she had planned for the night, the next day, and all the days after that. Maude went back to her closet and mixed everything up, no longer feeling the need for her dresses to be color coordinated. After tiring herself out from all the excitement of new experiences, Maude decided to go to sleep early, at 8 o’clock instead of 9 o’clock. She changed into mismatched pajamas, climbed into bed, and, soon,  Maude Mabel was resting soundly with hangers pointing every which way.

Grace Imbesi, aspiring poet and children’s author. English major at Russell Sage College of Troy. New York.

Photo credit: Studio shot of mixture of paints. Photography. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/115_3959718/1/115_3959718/cite. Accessed 11 Aug 2016

Michael Colbert

Moeller, Otto Friedrich Theodor von (known as Fyodor Antonovich Moller in Russia); 1812-1874. “The Kiss”, 1840. Oil on canvas, 59 x 65cm.

We used to stay up late, sitting on the campus quad and talking about friendship, the direction of America, or film. We’d sit there for hours, talking and listening until her feet felt numb from the cold.

We first met at orchestra auditions. She wore glasses she didn’t need and her hair was long and curly, something she always complained about to curly-haired friends like my floormate Fanny. I sat on my saxophone case. She asked, “Why are you auditioning for orchestra on the saxophone?” She doesn’t remember that this was the first time we met.

We met again later freshman year, and she was Fanny’s cool friend. My only friends were my roommates and some people who lived on my floor like Fanny, so Fanny bringing a girl from the outside conferred some sort of status upon them both. Well, at least to me it did.

She and Fanny would come back from orchestra rehearsals together and talk on Fanny’s bed. I’d come by the room to say hi to Fanny and there she was. I recognized her by those cool, transparent, circular glasses.

And then she was part of our floormate group. She started as a novelty. Somebody that everybody tried to lay claim to so that they had friends from another dorm. She fueled it, organically, by always showing funny videos to different people or talking about that cover she’d heard. Then I’d hear my floormate, one of the random ones, blasting it in the shower after I’d just stopped listening to it.

Soon she wasn’t just a novelty but our friend. All of us knew her, and she made us all laugh. I started listening to her music and making her jokes.

“I just assumed that everyone’s high school English teachers were Canadian because mine was,” she said.

Nothing made sense except for that feeling that she made you feel. But that didn’t make sense either. She had us watch The Talented Mr. Ripley and I thought that movie nailed it until Matt Damon killed Jude Law and then I knew I still couldn’t explain it. Magnetism? Longing? Obsession? MPDG?

I decided to name the feeling a crush. She made out with other guys at parties and hid her hickies with turtlenecks.

                  ***

We made out. We were drunk. I grabbed her ass on the dance floor. A redhead girl grumbled next to us. The night ended with everyone in the girls’ bathroom on my floor, holding back our Other Film Friend’s hair as Other Film Friend thought she might vomit. Her floormate Chuck–she was bringing her external friends into our insular, floormate group– was there too, texting.

“I had a lot of fun,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you want me to walk you home?”

“I’m okay.”

We said we’d go on a date but we didn’t. She disappeared for a bit and I made out with someone else, and I thought she got jealous and weird. Now I know when she said, “I’m happy for you,” she’d been looking for an undamaging way out. The other girl and I ended the next weekend. I realized I couldn’t be into another girl if I was still after her even though that door had been closed.

                  ***

Summer came. The last night of the semester we all went to a concert. Iron & Wine. Burlington. We called for him to play “Upward Over the Mountain,” but he didn’t. When Other Film Friend and I were leaving to drive back to campus for the night and she was staying in the city, she chased after the car like in the movies. But it was a quiet neighborhood, so it was different. Other Film Friend and I laughed and she laughed and we didn’t see her until the fall.

That summer I told her how I’d gotten really into Iron & Wine.

“That’s a really intense thing to get really into.”

I started talking about film as art. Philly, where she was from, was suddenly a cool city I wanted to live in after graduating.

We saw her back at school. She lived with Fanny and Other Film Friend, and I lived with Chuck. Chuck and I would walk from campus through the cemetery to their apartment, drinking coffee brandy I’d gotten older friends to buy us.

She made out with my old roommate. Other Film Friend’s semi-boyfriend from the year before. We all stopped seeing her, and she felt alone. I forgave her quickly but decided to let my old roommate fall away. He’d been my best friend, and he knew how I felt. How I didn’t know how to feel about her.

                  ***

She went abroad for a year alone in Copenhagen. We all met up. A weekend in Barcelona to do a college-friends-in-Europe weekend. She told stories about the summer program she did in Cape Town making movies and the Italian friend that she’d met there. She played with a bouncy ball and took pictures, asking Other Film Friend if she wanted to use her camera. Other Film Friend still felt weird about her since last fall’s makeout incident, but Other Film Friend also had the same kind of feelings about her as I did, so I watched as she explained all she learned in South Africa while Other Film Friend had been working at an ice cream shop in Burlington.

We meant to go out to a club our last night in Barcelona, but Chuck had to Skype his mom because his dog died, and she and Other Film Friend disappeared for an hour or two in the bedroom to talk. I talked to Fanny who was studying biology at the Budapest program. Fanny laughed and played bad music and told me stories about times she got drunk. I did the same. Other Film Friend came out of the room, eyebrows high and eyes big. Then she followed behind, one of her subdued moods, eyes looking kind of high and cheeks blotchy. “Hi,” she exhaled.

Our group tried to go to the club but we couldn’t get in because not everyone was twenty-one. Were those the rules? Wasn’t that why college juniors went abroad? We went back to our rented apartment but missed the first subway back because she got crepes from a drunk-food stand with a tall Spanish girl. We didn’t get back until five in the morning, and I told her to wake me before she left for her eight o’clock flight.

     &
nbsp;            **

I was back at school in the spring. She wasn’t. I got over her. I got over the girl I was seeing while I was studying in Italy. When I got drunk, I’d say I missed either of them. The name I said depended on the night.

                  ***

She came back. She came out. She’d been dating a Danish girl since September, since before I saw her in Barcelona. She talked about all her bad experiences with men. We talked about Hitchcock in our American Film class together.

American Film was good. It was just the two of us again for or the first time since it was just the two of us on the dance floor. But it was different. We were less distant, better, and older. And there was no grumbling redhead next to us.

I’d never been in love, but what did this feeling count for? Isn’t yearning a kind of love? Doesn’t longing count?

She got a new girlfriend after the Danish girl cheated on her. They were always together. I lost her again and watched through the library window as they studied. I shared the dinner table with her and her girlfriend, and I watched as they talked and said things without talking. She was in love. We didn’t see her, and she saw her girlfriend’s friends.

But one day the rest of us saw her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s friends. We were all in her apartment, all ready to go to a concert. We were on the couch as the girlfriend’s friends whirled through. They laughed at things, cards she had kept from her mom, found when a dark-haired friend looked for clothes to “style” her for the concert. She came out, sleek and cool and vintage and sad.

The dark-haired girl opened a jar next to a picture of her with her late dog. She was in high school then and looked like she did when I first met her, except without the glasses. She was an only child, and I understood dog mourning.

“What are these?” The dark-haired girl asked.

I’d never seen them, but I knew she shouldn’t have asked.

“Her dog’s ashes,” her girlfriend said. She took a shot of tequila and went into the bathroom to adjust her backwards hat.

“Oh my God.”

“Why do you have these?”

“That’s gross.”

“And we were going to play with that Ouija board here?”

“I feel so gross now.”

“Are you coming?”

“I’ll meet you outside.”

They were gone. They didn’t come looking for her. The five of us from the hotel in Barcelona, Other Film Friend, Fanny, Chuck, she, and I sat. We all felt the need to say something to her but didn’t. Her face was blotchy and her eyebrows high but eyes tired. We’d later fantasize confrontations with the Dog Ashes Asshole, but those never went through.

But we sat, we five and her dog’s ashes. She got up and left to find her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s friends at the concert.

                  ***

In the last weeks of school, how much did she think about the dog ashes? Did her girlfriend’s friends make fun of her for them? Was she still thinking about them as much as I was? Were there even dog ashes in there? I sneaked into their apartment to see for myself. She surprised me there. I’d opened the jar when she came out of the bathroom.

“It’s not what it looks like. I just had to know.”

The lid was in my hand.

“You take them,” she said.

“But I never knew your dog.”

“You did in spirit.”

“Have I met his ghost?”

“Don’t be dumb.”

“But I couldn’t,” I said.

“Now they’re yours.”

I imagined the ashes in my house. I’d put the pieces of her I’d collected into the jar. The keychain she gave me for my birthday and the Iron and Wine CD I bought after freshman year would crumble into the jar. Dog soot would fill the crevices until they were unrecognizable, and they too became ashes.

Neither of us did anything. We just stood there, she and I and her dog’s ashes.

Born and raised in Westborough, Massachusetts, Michael is a recent graduate of Bowdoin College, where he studied Italian and Spanish. He’s written his own travel blog, Misadventures with Michael, for over three years. Currently, he is teaching English at a high school in Japan.

Photo credit: Otto F.T. von Moeller, This Kiss.. Photo. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/109_227958/1/109_227958/cite. Accessed 11 Aug 2016.

Kacper Niburski

Yellow banana on a grey background / Ingram Publishing

“Knock, knock.”

“I’ve heard this one a million times, Bob.”

“No, not this one. It’s different. Come on.”

“Alright. Fine. Who’s there?”

“Banana.”

“Why would a banana be at my door?”

“Because it’s part of the joke.”

“But how would a banana knock?”

“Well, I guess the same way we do, by bobbing back and forth.”

“Sure, but what would make the banana bob?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is important stuff to know. If there’s a banana at my door that somehow knocked, I’d be more interested in the banana itself. Like, for example, how big is it?”

“It’s a regular banana.”

“Yellow, green, black—is it rotten?”

“It’s just a simple, fresh banana. Imagine a banana and then that’s it.”

“I usually eat tiny bananas, so I’m imagining them.”

“That’s not the banana in the joke.”

“So there is a specific banana, then. How can I get the joke if we are imaging different things?”

“Come on, Frank, just go along with it.”

“Okay, sure, but again—how did the banana knock?”

“It just did.”

“What is the door made of?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Well, how thick is it?”

“Why does this matter?”

“Because if you’re saying a banana—a regular, handheld yellow banana—produced enough of a force to be heard, then the least I should know is the type of door I have.”

“Fine. Hardwood. About the same thickness of a two-by-four.”

“And the banana made an audible knocking noise?”

“Exactly.”

“See, I don’t understand. Did someone throw the banana?”

“No. I’ve told you three times already—it just knocked.”

“But things don’t just happen. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t have to. It’s a joke.”

“No, no. It does or else I won’t get it and then it won’t be funny and isn’t that a joke’s point?”

“Fine. Sure. I guess.”

“So you’re going to tell me how a regular banana knock-knocked then?”

“Ya. Let’s just say it was standing up—”

“The banana?”

“Yes, the banana. It was standing up—”

“By itself?”

“Yes, by itself.”

“Who put it there?”

“No one.”

“So the banana got there by itself?”

“Sure.”

“You’re telling me the banana made it to my door by its own means?”

“Why not?”

“So, Bob, this is a motile banana.”

“What?”

“This is an evolutionary wunderkind. It’s a self-moving banana that can balance and stand erect.”

“Okay …”

“And with its mushy, moving interior, it somehow also evolved the ability to forcefully knock.”

“I guess.”

“This makes much more sense now.”

“Okay, sure, can I continue now?”

“Wait, Bob, wait. Didn’t it also answer ‘Banana’?”

“I guess …”

“Oh my god.”

“What is it, Frank?”

“This is a sentient banana.”

“Excuse me?”

“This inexplicably moving banana can also speak. That means it has some cognitive ability as it not only uses a door with all the common societal expectations of it—knocking politely, waiting until an answer is given—but it can mimic speech. It can form words, and more importantly, recognize what it is: a banana. No more. No less. A banana that walks, talks, and knocks.”

“Uhm.”

“Bob, I wouldn’t want a conversation. I would have the responsibility of calling NASA, universities, everyone and everything. Who knows? This banana may be the first alien.”

“Frank, it’s just a banana.”

“That does everything we do, if not better. A little thing can make such a loud noise. Imagine what else it could do. Do you think it can dance?”

“It’s a banana, Frank.”

“Can it dance, Bob?”

“No.”

“Yet it has mastered our social constructions, hearing my answer and developing a response.”

“Okay …”

“So, maybe it can also hear rhythm in music. I wouldn’t put it past the banana.”

“A dancing banana?”

“Exactly. It would put a new meaning to the phrase banana split.”

“Isn’t that a dessert?”

“It is, but you bring up an important point, Bob.”

“I did?”

“The most important, I’d say. I can’t believe I’m so stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Here I am answering the door when it could …”

“It could what?”

“Want revenge.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean if it is really as smart as you seem to suggest …”

“I didn’t suggest anything, Frank. You have this whole time.”

“No, no, you told the joke. I’m just extrapolating.”

“Fine. Sure. Go ahead.”

“And if it is as smart as you say, with its penchant for abstract thoughts, social norms, and speaking patterns, it might realize what we have been doing to all the other bananas on Earth.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Bob, we eat them whole. We eat the banana’s people. We put them on our damn ice cream.”

“Ya, but—”

“But nothing. This banana might strike against us and I might be its first target.”

“No. It’s just knocking.”

“How do I know?”

“Because it’s knocking on your door.”

“But robbers can knock too before they plan to jump me in my own home.”

“It’s a banana. Not a robber.”

“And yet, it’s so much more than any banana before.”

“So what then?”

“Well, I’m at my door, right?”

“Ya.”

“And the banana has already knocked, right?”

“Ya.”

“And I’ve answered?”

“Get to the point already, Frank.”

“Well I’d be incredibly cautious. I’d look through the eyehole and seeing nothing—because it is a regular, small banana at the base of my door—I’d be immediately suspicious. Scared even.”

“So what would you do?”

“I’d have to play it smart. I’d cough and puff my chest and before I opened the door—who knows if I would anyways—I would say, ‘Banana who?’”

“And the banana?”

“I’m not sure. If it’s harmless, it may repeat its name because that answers the question.”

“I see. And if it’s not?”

“If redemption is in its blood, or glucose, or whatever, then it may employ the same tactic. ‘Banana,’ it’ll say in a cold, hard manner. The banana may be a master of subterfuge after all.”

“And if it said that then?”

“I’d keep sharp, keep the banana on edge. Show them the human spirit with a, ‘Banana who?’”

“Smart, Frank.”

“I think so too, Bob.”

“So, what then?”

“It’s the banana’s move. Either it can peel away, or keep going.”

“I see.”

“Exactly. Who knows—it could very well knock again and we’d be back at the beginning.”

“So, Frank, you’re saying it’s the banana’s show and we’re just monkeys in the middle.”

“Yeah, Bob.”

“Well.”

“Well is right. Good we got that out of the way.”

“Ya.”

“So what was the joke anyway?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Oh.”

“That’s alright. It’s over now.”

“I’ll say.”

“Well after it all, I’m glad at least it wasn’t an orange. Imagine that.”

Kacper Niburski is a twenty something year old pretending he’s thirty who writes like he’s fifty about things that happened when he was ten. He’s been published in Stoneboat Poetry, Ars Medica, and others.

hoto credit: Banana. Clip Art. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/186_1626436/1/186_1626436/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

James Prenatt

Photo by David Kinney

“Are you excited?” Mom asks.

Mandy won’t show it, but she is.

Her mom drops her off at Lee’s Airpark, just off Route 2, where she’d seen planes take off and land almost every day, but never dreamed of seeing up close. It was bigger and more intimidating than expected.

Her mom walks with her across the tarmact. It’s a sunny day, perfect and blue, like her eyes, He says. He’s leaning up against the white plane, almost as tall as it, that short dark hair blowing in the wind, aviators on, and no one could be as cool, as sexy. He waves to Mom and Mandy holds back her smile until it hurts. He hugs her, but does not kiss her.

The takeoff is the hardest to stand. She’d flown before, but you feel it more in light aircraft. She’s scared, almost pees herself, but once they’re in the air, He puts his hand on her knee and she calms down. He soars, swoops like she never knew a plane could move so quick. Beats model rockets in Dad’s backyard. Look at that sky. Look at this man next to me who loves Mom better than anything. Will he say he loves me too? It’s so bright. I’m so high.

                    ***

Euphoric, after days of waiting for Him to come back from his most recent flight, she watches the kite glide through the humid August breeze and wants to go up in the air again. Only next time she wants to be in control.

He walks through the yard, finally back and she wishes she was wearing something sexier than too-big jeans and His worn out Katastrophe t-shirt she took from the laundry when Mom wasn’t watching. What if he gets upset she stole it? Oh, I hope he says I look good in it. He doesn’t say anything though.

Instead, without words, He reaches his arms around her from behind and puts His hands on hers in order to show her how to do it right. The kite twists involuntarily, free but controlled. She likes it this way, him holding her close and showing her the way through the wind.

In that calm time as the sun sets orange, almost vermillion over the River Lethe, Mandy, Mom and Him eat dinner on the back porch as he tells stories of his journeys. He once flew to Venezuela just for the hell of it and stayed there for some time, living out of a rental van and learning to cook Tequenos and serenading pretty girls (an eyebrow raise at Mom). Maybe he’ll fly me and Mom there sometime, or the Caribbean or Europe or why not Canada or California? She was told to help put away dishes and when Mom sees how entranced Mandy is, she lets it go. They get along and that’s a blessing. He has a politician’s way of looking at no one and everyone as he tells a story about almost crashing his first time in the air and having to do his first landing by himself because the man teaching him had a stroke.

He could teach me guitar, too, Mandy thinks. He and Me and Mom and can get out of this. She makes a request, Katastrophe, please and he chuckles a bit. He plays the opening riff of “Trazodone” and sings the chorus as Mandy tries hard not to smile. Once he gets to the end he doesn’t really sing it, but whispers in a way: I like it, I’m not gonna leave. I like it, I’m not gonna leave…

                    ***

She’s adult and normal and bored now like everybody else, off duty and going back up in the air soon. She’s in the grocery store, trying to decide which bag of chips to buy, a thousand flavors and brands in front of her. What was once so simple an affair now seems an overwhelming duty.

Across from the snack aisle, she spots Him placing ground beef in his cart. His dark hair now a salt and pepper white, His high and taut face, now sagging a bit, the crows feet more noticeable from so much glinting in the sun, but still as handsome as the day He took her up in the plane. She positions herself next to him, too scared because what if it isn’t him?

He makes eye contact and smiles. She smiles back, a middle school girl again.

“They really charge you an arm and a leg nowadays, huh?”

As if it’s her first time being flirted with, she’s not sure what to say and instead shrugs.

“Quiet one.” He looks at her uniform. “Naval Academy?”

She nods.  

“I’m a pilot myself, actually,” he says, like it’s a question and even though she knows He’s still the cocky man He used to be, comfortable with His cool, but unimportant station in life. She still loves that sly humility. “Small cargo and personal passengers mostly. Amateur stuff, really. It’s not the same as The Blue Angels, but I have a good time. Hey, you look familiar.”

That’s when he’s greeted by a woman ten years younger than Him and prettier than Leah, now going by her middle name instead of that childish first name. With the woman is a child, a girl of maybe seven.

She does not remember her response, but she gets out of the conversation and leaves Him to hurt someone else. How dare you leave mom and me. How dare you not remember me. You flew away and never came back. It takes time to admit it, but more than anger, she’s flattered and glad He saw her make it in the air.

Up there it’s just blue. Up there, you’re a god. The takeoff used to be the hardest part, but now it’s just the landing she struggles with. A few more months and she’ll have it down perfect. If only they’d let her go where she wanted. If only they’d let her fly until she’s out of oxygen. She once thought I could die up here, His hands around hers, guiding the way. High. Bright. High.  

James Prenatt has published in Crab Fat Magazine, Cactus Heart Magazine, and 34th Parallel. He lives in  Baltimore with his dog, his thing, and a little human. He graduated from Towson University with a degree in English and an OK GPA.

by Tom Matthews

By Sirimiri at English Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons

Eddie Florence usually wore the peacoat. It was his best winter coat, a Christmas present from his his mother. He never left the house without it on.

Eddie got off his train at Union Station and took the city bus to his house. He climbed up the steps of his family’s modest two-floor home and burst through the front door.

“I’m home!”

No reply. A bit surprised, Eddie placed his bags on the living room floor. He walked out into the kitchen and hollered. No answer. Not wanting to waste a minute of break, he grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down a note: “Going out. Call if you need me. -Eddie”

Eddie called up Sally and asked her to pick him up, and  minutes later he heard a car honk outside. He threw on his peacoat and hurried outside. Sally was parked in front of his house, checking her makeup in the rearview mirror.

Eddie climbed in. “Long time no see my friend, how are you?”

“I was awful, but now I’m great because it’s break and I get to see you, but mostly because it’s break.”

“Ah, but you said it, so you mean it.”

“Yes, Eddie, I was just dying to see you.”

He put his hand to her forehead, “Ms. Hayward, you are looking rather ill and could faint any second now, please, let me treat you.” He quickly leaned over and kissed her.

“I forgot to tell you I have mono.”

Eddie rolled his window down and spat.

“Looks like you’re gonna die with me.” She  winked at him.

They headed toward downtown.

“I can’t remember the last time I ate today,” he said.

“What do you mean you can’t remember?”

“I don’t know, but please pull in somewhere before I pass out.”

“No. You are a prisoner in my car now. We aren’t going anywhere. Except for a really long drive until you pass out, and I can throw your body in a ditch somewhere.”

They pulled into the parking lot of The Fix, a small 50’s style burger and shake joint. They were seated at a red booth across from one another.

“I want a chocolate shake,” she said.

“Just a shake?”

“Yeah, I’m not too hungry.”

“Are you sure? I don’t wanna hear you whine later.”

“Yes, I’m sure and shut up!”

Sally ordered her shake. Eddie ordered water and a burger with American cheese, lettuce, mustard, and ketchup. He stood up to take off his peacoat and hung it up on a hook attached to their booth.

He sat down and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. He put it to his lips and raised a lighter to it slowly.

“Eddie, stop! You can’t smoke in here!”

“Why not? I thought this place was like the 50’s.”

“You can’t smoke in here! What are you, crazy?!”

“Relax, Sally-boo, I was just messing with you.”

“You are such a jerk.”

“If you don’t relax we really will have to call up a doctor.”

Their waiter, a tall, burly man, who showed no sense of urgency, brought their food.

“Anything else?” he asked insincerely.

“Yeah, can we get an EKG for this lovely lady?”

“Stop it!” Sally blurted as she playfully hit his hand.

The waiter let out a sigh, mumbled, “Good one,” and walked away.

“Gosh, you’re an idiot. You can’t even make a waiter laugh, and they get paid to pretend to like you.”

“That guy probably doesn’t laugh.”

Sally mumbled, “Mhmm,” as she stirred her straw around in her chocolate shake.

Anyways, how are you? I mean, how’s school and all?”

“It’s good, I mean it’s, you know—school.”

Eddie was putting his burger away quickly. Sally noticed him eating aggressively and warned, “Slow down before you choke.”

Eddie looked up and nodded.

“Anyways, how’s school going for you? And please, don’t talk with a mouth full. Chew first.”

“It’s okay.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Uh. Not really.”

“Okay. Let me call Jake West, he’ll talk to me.”

“He’s a douche.”

Sally struck a stern face at Eddie and looked him in the eyes.

“Okay, okay, I’ll talk. But he’s still a douche. Anyways. I hate school. It’s awful. I’m surrounded by all these pseudo-intellectuals, and I can’t stand it. I mean, you can’t have a normal conversation with any of these guys. They all think what they have to say is the most prophetic, earth-shattering jargon to come out of a 20-year-old.”

Sally sat silently. She watched as Eddie became more and more excited with his words.

“They all walk around in their Oxfords and peacoats as if what they’re doing is so important.”

With a confused look on her face Sally interrupted, “You wear a peacoat.”

“What?” Eddie snapped.

“You wear a peacoat. You wore one here.”

“Seriously, Sally? My mother gave that to me for Christmas. You know how she takes gifts so personal. What, am I not supposed to wear it?”

“No, but why are you criticizing other people for wearing one?”

“Because they wear it for a different reason. They wear it because they think it makes them look important and that it accentuates their pseudo-intellect.”

Sally recoiled at  each word.

“Okay, whatever, Eddie. I was just asking how school was, I wasn’t looking for a rant.”

“Rant? Who’s ranting? You asked me how school is and I’m telling you.”

“Okay.”

“Am I not allowed to have an opinion? Am I supposed to think everyone is great? Is that what you think? Everyone is great? Everyone is just so damn funny and smart and nice?”

“Eddie, can you please stop. You’re causing a scene.”

“You think this is a scene? This is a conversation. We’re talking.”

“No. You’re being obnoxious.”

Eddie starting laughing in a high-pitched hysterical laugh.

“You think I’m obnoxious? Hahahaha!”

Sally was turning red. She stared at her shake.  She lifted her purse from the booth and put the strap over her left shoulder.

Eddie took a loud sip of water and finished it off.

“Are you gonna finish that shake?”

“No.”

Sally’s phone rang.

“Hello?”

Eddie sat there with a bored look on his face. Sally pulled the phone away from her ear and mouthed “sorry” to him.

“I’m at the Fix with Eddie…who’s there?”

Eddie got up and put his peacoat on and headed to the men’s room. Walking with his hands in his pockets and a pissed off look on his face, he replayed in his head Sally telling him she wasn’t looking for a rant. He kicked the door open and stormed in. “Rant! That wasn’t a damn rant. I can rant if you want!” He shouted to himself.

He walked up to a sink and turned on the cold water. He cupped his hands and let the water fill them and splashed it on his face. He grabbed a paper towel, and dried his face. He stood briefly staring at a picture of a jukebox hanging on the wall. He started thinking about how many fights jukeboxes must have caused when someone used the last quarter on songs no one else liked. He walked back over to the mirror and looked at himself for a few seconds. He punched the mirror. The mirror shattered instantly, and his hand started bleeding, dripping blood on the black and white tiled floor. He walked over to the paper towels and ripped a bunch out to wrap his knuckles. He took his peacoat off, walked over to the trash, and threw it in. He crouched down and frantically started trying to pick up pieces of the broken mirror.

The bathroom door swung open, startling him. It was their waiter. Trying to collect himself and not look too spooked, Eddie said, “Scared me there,” and walked out.

Sally was off the phone, and was sitting at the table reading the back of a ketchup bottle. Eddie walked up to the table.

“I don’t feel so hot, let’s go.”

The waiter opened the bathroom door and hollered, “Hey, kid!”

Contributing Editor, Thomas Matthews, is a Senior at Clark University where he majors in English, specializing in Creative Writing and Journalism.

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by Emma R. Collins

                                                                                                                                      Helix Nebula / Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech

    The day she died, I became a man of God.

    All my life, ever since Dad went up with the Jupiter missions, I was a child of science. I grew up truth-seeking. I was all-knowing. There was no myth nor legend that could escape my inquisitive, ever-probing mind. I hollowed out the world one line at a time between the pages of books upon books upon books. All the planet was a wonder to me. I marveled in the majestic and fragile beauty of circumstantial chemical bonds.

    When Earthly wonder became mundane I turned my lusting to the stars. It was only natural that as an adult I found myself stepping into Dad’s silver boots. Twenty-two years later, I watch over the Genesis Project, a lone, benevolent engineer drifting through the infinite emptiness. I am inside the womb of the Eden shuttle. I am her child, we are her children, cradled so lovely within her titanium and steel. She is a good shuttle.

    My shuttle.

    Yes, it is mine, all of it. All of them, my cosmic siblings in utero. They sleep in their artificial wombs, sleeping while I drifted, while I watch.

    I became a man of God the day she died.

    I look out into the thunderous black beyond Eden’s sound womb and hold the edges of the viewport with white knuckles. I am still sick in the seat of myself, that place where hot things go when you feel good, and cold things when you don’t. I am pale around the edges of my jaw and lips, but it had been at least twenty-four hours and the vomiting was finally over. There is nothing worse than vomiting in zero gravity. I try to collect the mighty calm of the universe from that small, insignificant window, breathing slowly, tasting Eden’s faint, metallic breath. It will take me several moments to slow the rapid beating of my human heart.

    A tear wells in the corner of my eye, rippling free with the faintest trembles. It is a tiny silver pinprick of glinting life that catches the light of God’s Eye as it drifts before the view port. That’s what I have decided to call the nebula that came into view off the starboard wing over a month ago. For a long time I called the roiling blue dusts that haloed the core of brilliant gold Draco’s Eye, but now, remembering her rubies, I know what it truly is.

    God watches me.

    I gaze into the brilliant shimmering of that omnipotent nebula as though I could take it into my skin and dissolve into its dust. I want nothing more than to return to that place of peace, the place we all must come from, and to which we all must return. That is where Eden is taking me. I close my eyes to force away the last of the tears. They drift from me and I must turn from them, because the sick feeling is back, and I need to distract myself to make it stop.

    But I cannot keep the memories from resurfacing. I am not God. I am not strong enough to face this on my own. I need His grace to hold me and protect me from myself. I move slowly as my body drifts through Eden’s hollow. I try to keep myself busy with the electrical system. There had been a few shorts recently and I know that if I don’t keep a close eye on them, Eden may turn on herself. But even as I sift through the and fibres and tracts, I cannot stop it.

    I am not God.

    In hot, heavy flashes my chest tightens and I taste something at the back of my throat. I am thinking of her, how she was before. I am thinking of the smell of her hair, of the way it moved in the sunlight. All the women on the mission cut their hair, but she had kept it long. She had kept it long even through training, even when she was no more than a sailor on a ship. She flew for the Navy, that’s why they wanted her. Pilots, it was always pilots. They kept a close eye on the men and women who dared to do what God had not intended.

    But maybe it was just because she was beautiful.

    To me, there were no other women. From the first moment I saw her face, to the moment they put her away in Eden’s womb, I was in love with her. I am still am, in love with her, even though I must bear the burden of her absence now. The space she left in the fabric of the universe is a festering pit in my chest.

    Alone.

    I am completely alone.

    Her name was Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn Eve. She was kind, intelligent. She spoke to me sweetly, even though the others thought me odd. I like to keep to myself, and to the people who are strong and sought out for these kinds of things, keeping to oneself is odd. But, that was one of the reasons they had picked me, because they knew I could be alone.

    But now, I am so completely alone.

    I strip a wire to fix a connection, but my mind is no longer with Eden. I am back in the days when I would watch over her as she slept. I was her guardian, her protector. I was charged with the responsibility of her life, all their lives, but hers was the most precious. Every day I went to see her, every night wishing her peace before I slept. I grew to know her even in her silence. No man could have loved a woman more.

    But it was lonely.

    Is lonely.

    I am so completely alone.

    To think of it now will only make me sick. But I can’t help myself. I should have seen it coming. Humans are not meant to be alone, even if they seek it. Humans are not meant to be left with only the sounds of their thoughts to keep them company. You see, our thoughts, our racing whispers that spin and spin and spin in the infinite emptiness of the universe, are louder than a rocket’s roar. I was drowning in the sound of my own mind. And she was there, my riptide, my unrelenting tsunami, washing over me and taking me under.

    Gwendolyn.

    She dragged
me down, down, down into the darkest reaches of man, until the unraveling of loneliness was more than I could bear. I remember it as a daze, but I know I was completely awake. It was no dream. It was no fantasy. I was in charge of every flicker of every fibre of my body. And still, I did not stop it. The surging and crashing in my mind were too great, and I had been drowned too deeply by her undertow.

    I didn’t think she would wake from the stasis. They’re aren’t supposed to unless Eden tells them to. That’s the beauty of technology, the beauty of God’s plan. Because even as I held her, kissed her, I never thought she’d wake. I was blind.

    It happened in the midst of my drowning. I was gasping for air and suddenly her eyes were on me, eyes like brilliant sapphires. I could see all our world, all myself in them. I saw God, and He saw me. He knew me, knew what I had done, and so I knew what I had done, and suddenly the tides fled and my oceans dried up. I became parched and barren. All that was left was the weight of my sin.

    Blood in zero gravity looks exactly like rubies.

    As it drifts through space, it catches the artificial light, magnifies the star light. It sparkles, brilliantly. It is one of the most beautiful things you could ever see.

    She screamed. She wasn’t supposed to be awake.

    Her body was fragile, my sweet Gwendolyn, after sleeping for so long. What I did is unforgivable. Her heart seized from the shock. All I had wanted was to love her. I tried to bring her back, tried to force Eden’s pulse into her. But Eden would not have her. She was aborted and my hands were red. With every shock she convulsed hideously and I think that was when I first vomited. I couldn’t do it. I am not God. She was gone, and I had killed her.

    And God had watched me do it.

    I gave her back to Eden’s womb, because I could not bear the idea of her body being lost.  She would go with them, wherever it was they ended up. They would take care of her and I would go to God.

I must go to God,there is no other place left for me now.

    But first, I must fix the wiring.

    I slip the panel back into place and check the circuits. Everything works. There is no illness of Eden’s that I cannot cure. I just can’t bring the dead back to life. I am not God. I wipe away more tears as the memories begin to subside. My hands are shaking as I return my tools to their bag. I need to check the panelling in the upper compartments. If I don’t keep myself busy I know today I will go to God.

    But she’s there.

    Gwendolyn.

    My Gwendolyn.

    Here.

    I cannot breathe. I am frozen, holding on to the wall so that I don’t drift away like a fool. I cannot speak. I can only stare.

    As naked as the day she was born, she is more beautiful than any goddess. Her hair is undone. I undid it. I set it free. It moves softly around her face, as though in water. I grimace, catching my breath then. Her face, her beautiful, gentle face, it is a mask of rage. There is a darkness in her soft blue eyes, one that fills me with a cold, hollow feeling. I swallow back the sick of my guilt, the tears floating away from me in great numbers now.

    “Gwendolyn,” I gasp. I want to reach out to her and beg her forgiveness. Dear God…please. Let me repent. But my body refuses to move.

    I do not see what she holds in her hand.

    When the pain goes in between my ribs, it is short and quick and makes me give a little gasp. At first I do not understand. And then I see them, all around me.

    Brilliant, beautiful rubies.

    I look down to see the utility knife buried in my chest. She has made no sound, her jaw tightened up in an ugly snarl. My rubies float slowly towards her as my pulse forces them out. They splash against her bare skin. She screams and the moment is shattered. She has killed me and she sobs now, trembling, heaving, shaking in her birth throes. She comes alive now, violent, thrashing and screaming. She is so unlike my Gwendolyn that I am scared, not for my death, but for her rebirth. What have I done?

    I try to speak, gasp. She slaps me and screams again.

    I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…

    I see God in her eyes. I see His wrath, feel it plunged into the chambers of my punctured heart. My rubies go everywhere in Eden’s womb. They splash and break across her smooth, plastic surfaces, slithering little ounces of me into her. Gwendolyn is still screaming, a ragged, terrible sound.

    I reach out a hand to soothe her and she slaps me again, hard. I see flashes of white, my head twisting to look now out of the view port. It has grown dim. My world grows dim. But I want to see it. Just one more time. I want to see God’s Eye.

    I reach for it, but the rubies are all around me. I am sick.

    I feel small.

    I am not God…

    I am not God…

    I am…

    …God…

Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.

by Anashua Madhubanti

                                                                                                                                                      photo by sasha kohan

The day I finally find myself visiting a sequence of past events in my life, Mother had slipped into a coma, where I imagine her surroundings are darkness, as opposed to the bright, sterile light of the waiting room, where I sit without feeling, unable to distinguish where the hard edge of the chair ends and my thighs start, where one more hour of a machine beeping and the vapid reports of a subordinate doctor will push me farther into the numbness of my own mind. The hospital glass is dark with specks of light that shine like stars, and I look out, trying to find another space in time, only to be drawn back to the reality of my own existence, the stars burning into my reflection. Mother is distant from me now, more distant than she has ever been, more distant than the day in March when I heard her hushed voice on the phone with the doctor, more silent than the silence in the ultrasound room when the core of the curve of my belly was projected onto the screen for the world to see in the first of a series of violations to come.

That day in the doctor’s office, my life really started. Before, everything swam in a haze of incoherence. But after those few minutes in that office, I achieved a new awareness – the awareness of my womb, which held the capacity to be the size of a raspberry and a cavern, all at once. Suddenly, in a moment, those narrow confines of muscle, mucous, and liquid made room for a lifetime of dreams, possibilities, and unbearable losses, each the size of blue elephants. A whole sea of submerged marine animals filled up the space in my womb. There were trees whose trunks were hung with yellow and green mosses, and an undergrowth alive with creatures that looked strange and smelled strange and hummed darkly.

With the knowledge of the new universe I carried within me, I walked out of the doctor’s room, and the world outside became remote to me. I saw everything from a distance; it was as though my feet did not touch but merely glided over the crowded streets of my city, Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. I heard the usual noises, the cacophony of cars honking, the chicken seller’s coarse calls rising out of the bazaar. But over the din of it all, I could not recall anything I heard. They meant nothing to me.

It was spring and the sun was still making its way to the tropics. The day was warm but not unbearable, and when I reached home I found father sitting on the front porch, drinking sweetened milk tea and eating digestive biscuits. Avoiding his eye contact, I crept into the bedroom, closed my door, cried, and made the call to break the news to D. We were both silent for a long time, because we did not know what to say or do, and the silence was comforting. When I saw him in the afternoon, I knew I had changed, but though he could feel that I had changed he could not define what had changed. ‘Why do you have your thousand yard stare,’ he asked, and all I could think about was something I had read in a book, the name of which was lost to me then. If two people meet after a long time, they both imagine themselves to have changed greatly, but neither can perceive the other to have changed very much. To him, I remained the same person that I had always been.

That afternoon, D and I made love unhurriedly, slowly, painstakingly, as though it was the most important thing in the world. But it would be wrong to say that D and I made love, for, really, the three of us made love. The whole ecosystem that had grown out of my womb made love with us. The tops of the trees bristled together, the tall elephant grass danced in the wind, a tidal wave rose from within the sea and swept over everything. And afterwards, the three of us were together on his big, white bed which seemed to rock like a boat.

Later, we reached a decision. Or rather, a decision was reached. “It would be stupid,”’ he said, “And what about college?” I agreed, for life was long, and we were just at the start. He stroked my hair as the last of the sun seeped in and warmed his bed. ‘I never noticed your hair was brown,’ he said.

After a while, I asked him, “Should I tell Mother?” “You have to,” he replied.

That’s when it started, the silence. Silence when I told her, silence afterwards, it was as though her voice was silenced. Even on the phone she whispered. And I, sitting in my room, put together all the S-words I knew like a string of pearls. Silence. Shame. Society. Seclusion. Sex. Silence. Shame.

One day soon, she said, “Come, Daughter, we have to go. Tell your father we’re going to your aunt’s.’” But I sat in my room, not in any hurry to get moving, and I stared at the open pages of a book before me. At some point, my tea turned cold, someone came in to put fresh laundry in the drawers, and finally, the shadow of my father crossed the door. ”What are you reading?” he asked me. ‘Siddhartha,’ I said. Father talked at length about his dislike of Herman Hesse and words streamed out of his mouth, of which I only caught a few. My father looked old in the light. He had missed shaving spots of his beard, which were grey specks against his dark skin. His was a life that had no time for mysticism or romance. Having come of age in a decade of wars, he was truly modern, and the specifications of bombers interested him more than magical realism. The images of burning Buddhist monks were burned into his mind, and he had quit Eastern mysticism altogether. Though I felt immense affection for the man, I also knew that if he knew my situation he would never forgive me.

My mother entered the room in haste, made excuses about where we were going, and soon I found myself in the car, the unreality of the city rushing by. Though she sat only a seat away from me, the distance between us was so great that I could not touch her, even if I had reached out for her. The rest of what passed between us that day remains hazy to me, for all I remember are the cold whitewashed walls of the medical facility and waking from a deep sleep with a start, only to confront a hollowness that resounded within me. The calm waters with landscapes of hills underneath had disappeared; now there was the tremendous crashing of waves on barren sands. And I found myself more alone than I had ever felt. Everything I had imagined was no more, the name that was so real to me now sounded laughable, and I felt my worth as a person to have lessened. I was without purpose. I found myself stringing together S-words once again. Silence. Stillness. Sanity.

At that time, one thing I had not wondered was why she had helped me, especially when that meant going against her morality, religion, and honor. It had meant days spent making excuses for my appearance, as intrusive relatives had asked her one question after another. “Why does she look so sickly? Why did she lose so much weight?” What had happened to me, asked my father, unable to put together the connection between my sudden emotional withdrawal from the world and my hourly physical withdrawals into the bathroom. Many other things surfaced to me at that time, the most ironic realization being that I was only beautiful when I was sickly. Relatives, fat aunties in monstrous hair buns, snickering cousins in skin-tight jeans, suddenly took it upon themselves to comment on how much weight I had lost, and how beautiful it made me look. As they complimented me and suggested new clothes that I was now worthy enough to fit into, all I could think about was the dead-chicken smell I carried in my nostril everywhere like a bane, that would make my stomach turn when faced with food.

Mother, Mother, I had always wanted to ask, why are you still here for me? For the next five years, neither of us ever mentioned what had happened. I moved on with my life, broke things off with D, flew ten thousand miles to painfully separate myself from my roots, changed house, found bits and scraps of paper that were clues to my Mother’s life, of which I took no notice in the perpetual hurry I found myself in. Yet, sitting in the waiting room, I had begun to piece my mother’s life together.

I recalled the love-letters, hidden away from prying eyes for many years, containing illicit conversations with boys, testimonials to the subversive South Asian teenager that existed within the Mother figure I had always known. I thought of the imprints upon the notebook pages where her first rose must have been, and I thought of her first kiss, which must have echoed from her feet to her breasts. I imagined her marriage at eighteen, a hasty affair, pushing her forward into a societal role that she was not braced for, only to be solidified by her first and only pregnancy, me.

I had always held Mother in such reverence, that I too had been a part of the societal forces that shaped her. My own secret was so taboo that I had to tuck it away and forget it, in doing which I had to put away a part of my own history. It left many gaping questions that I should have addressed, except both our selves had been shadowed over by the same system of shame and silence. In the waiting room, for the thousandth time in my life, I was putting together S-words. Shame. Silence. Suppression. Subversion. Self. The list would keep growing longer in the years to come.

It was only when faced with impending loss of such magnitude that I could put into perspective the other great loss of my life.

Anashua Madhubanti, a geography major at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., is from Bangladesh, but believes home has no geographical location.

by Scott David

Ian Grimm wanted to be part of the Boston Marathon bombing.  

“We’re all victims, Marcy,” he told his wife. “You, me, anyone who was touched by this.  As much as those poor bastards who actually got limbs blown off.”  

“If I were you,” his wife advised, “I wouldn’t tell anyone about this.”

But it was too late.  Ian had already begun experimenting. He had started with non-Bostonians, of course, those sweet yearning souls who had reached out from the West Coast and Budapest and Auckland to see whether the Grimms were OK, persons whose concern was gratifying and touching, but ultimately based on the same impulse Ian had: to be a part of something greater.  

To satisfy the needs of this audience to feel connected, Ian had fabricated a few details that exaggerated his personal involvement: shrapnel embedded in his backside; ringing ears; blood-spattered forearms; and the shrieks and wails of the dying nearby.  None was precisely true, but his sister in Cleveland was especially grateful for these particulars, because she had desperately wanted to talk about the incident with someone who would understand Boston’s draw on native daughters like herself. The bombing, she said, had literally changed the course of her life. She could offer no sympathy for the killers (mercy was not hers to authorize), but she had experienced a profound and renewed sense of gratitude for her own health, her children’s brilliance, the lack of a military draft, the first ripening tomatoes in her garden, and the relative peace of Cleveland Heights.  

“Thank you, Ian, for your service,” she whispered.  

Unable to retreat from his inventions, Ian doubled-down.  He protested that he had only done what anyone in his shoes would have done: rescued a grown man with a leg wound by putting his fingers three inches deep into the man’s femoral artery.

“You’re so brave,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it.”

“Sometimes,” Ian said, “when you’re tested, you learn things about yourself.”

Having achieved such a gratifying connection with his sister, Ian turned to studying the genuine victims’ first-hand accounts of their experiences.  According to most accounts, there were 275 wounded, and he pored over the account of each and everyone of them and purloined only the best details.  When he had the facts sufficiently committed to memory and had polished and developed his story for a local audience, Ian tested a provisional version on select Bostonians.  

The feedback was good, the commiseration most gratifying.  

“I had no idea,” most of them said.

“Yes,” Ian confirmed, “I had come down to see Marcy finish, with the girls in tow. Had it been a moment earlier….”

“You’re lucky.”

“Thanks be to God,” Ian agreed.  

Patiently correcting people when they got the facts wrong, Ian variously positioned himself and/or the girls near the first bomb or the second, outside the Forum Restaurant or at the finish line, or, finally, looking out for his beautiful bride on the catwalk above the finish line among the press and paparazzi.

Marcy, who had in fact been stopped just short of Kenmore Square by the cops and told the race was over, initially hoped Ian’s story would quietly go away if she ignored it. Later, she shot him dirty looks, and yet, when his interlocutors at a dinner party politely involved her in the telling, she offered very careful, very noncommittal answers so as not to give Ian away.  

She was the first to agree the experience had changed him.

She was the first to say he was not the same man.

Ian loved her for these concessions.  For her restraint. If she hadn’t truly loved him, Marcy never would have humored him and indulged his storytelling.

At the prompting of well-meaning friends who heard his tale, Ian set up a foundation. It was nothing formal. The funds he collected he just deposited in his own bank account and tracked them in a separate spreadsheet until his Kickstarter and Facebook pages went viral and he lost count.  

Soon after, at a dinner with Marcy’s extended family, Ian solicited additional donations from her relatives.  Marcy’s brother the lawyer was present.  Playing idly with his smartphone, he asked whether the foundation had applied for and received nonprofit status from the IRS, and he politely suggested that Ian again recite the facts of that terrible day so that all might be edified by his example.

Gratified, Ian launched into his account.

Marcy’s brother let him rattle on for half an hour, before he took one of the story’s inconvenient loose threads and pulled.  

“How exactly was it,” the litigator asked, “that you saw the bomb explode and yet shrapnel hit you in the ass?  Not the front side.  The ass.”

“Well, it was sort of on the ass.  I was kind of turned sideways.  You know what I mean?”

“On the catwalk?”

“Right.”

“Shrapnel shot a half block down the crowded street and hit you standing twenty-five feet in the air on a catwalk.  On the ass.”

“Exactly.”

“Show me the scar.”

“It healed nicely.  There’s hardly any ….”

“Show me.”

Marcy begged her brother to stop, just stop, and her mother repeated, “Stop, just stop,” and someone spilled a gravy boat, and Marcy’s brother zeroed in for the kill.

“Pull down your pants, you son of a bitch!”

With great dignity, Ian loosed his belt and pulled his pants and underwear down about a quarter inch.

The litigator snorted derisively.

“There was no shrapnel, was there, Ian?”

“Not exactly.”

“And you don’t have a press pass, do you?”

“No.”

“So you weren’t on the catwalk?”

Ian hiked up his pants and buckled his belt.  

“More like, sort of close by,” he admitted.

“In fact,” the litigator said, as if delivering a closing argument, “if I had to guess, at the time of the blast you were actually holed up in a bar in Southie nursing your fifth beer and complaining to anyone who would listen that Marcy had decided to run without inviting you to join her. Isn’t that right?”

“Well…”

Her brother pounded the table. The spilled gravy boat jumped.

“Isn’t that right?!” he shouted. 

Ian gaped and stammered and finally said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say that you are a liar,” the litigator suggested politely, “trying to fleece your own family for a few bucks.”

“Stop it!  Just stop it,” Marcy cried. “I wish this damn bomb had never happened.”

She looked directly at Ian.

“I wish,” she said, “I had never married you.”

After the dinner, which Marcy’s family would be talking about for years to come, Marcy begged Ian to give his story a rest.  

“For God’s sake. Turn the money over to the OneFund.  If you really want to do something for the victims, run with me next year, OK?  Isn’t that enough?”

 “Run?  The marathon?”  Ian was aghast.  “I couldn’t even consider running.  Not anymore.  Don’t you understand, sweetheart?  I thought you understood.  The bombing traumatized me.  Crowds — they skeeve me out.”

“I understand that right this minute I’d love to loop a shiny pair of New Balance around your neck and pull the laces tight.”

Despite his wife’s misgivings, and despite his grand humiliation at the hands of her brother the litigator, Ian persevered in telling his story.  He had no real choice in the matter.  There were greater truths than what could be proved by some pompous windbag.

Besides, Ian had spent much of the foundation money. Though he had tried valiantly to meet expectations of the donors by spending on things and causes he believed anyone would support, like for example, a bomb-free marathon (with a bit on the side to pay himself a small salary and housing allowance, of course), Ian eventually siphoned some funds to support causes equally worthy but perhaps not equally universal (e.g., casino gambling in Massachusetts, in which he had a small stake as a real estate broker). Ian had reasoned that the giver was happy and the recipient more so.

    Moreover, the genuine fraudsters, who were in Jersey on the day of the attack but filed for recompense from the OneFund on behalf of a dead aunt formerly resident in West Roxbury, made Ian’s claims to having been present positively benign by comparison.  Unlike them, Ian’s heart was in the right place.  And, truth be told, it could, after all, have been Ian.  He hadn’t been in New Jersey that fateful day.  As Marcy’s brother had so skillfully gotten him to admit, he had been in a bar in South Boston complaining loudly about his wife.  Not ten blocks away.  Well, maybe ten.  Or twelve.  But the point was, it had been mathematically possible for Ian to have been present at the finish line.  Had his luck been different.  Had he been, for example, more supportive of Marcy.

Accordingly, as the pain of Marcy’s brother’s cross-examination faded, Ian quietly shored up some of the more obvious contradictions in his account.  He retold the story frequently, and he told it well, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.  Indeed, though he didn’t reveal this conceit to anyone, Ian considered himself to be the unofficial poet laureate of the bombings.  None other had yet emerged, except the unnamed bastard who fashioned the phrase Boston Strong but failed to trademark it.  

And no matter what Marcy’s brother had to say about it, Ian was now a better person than he had been.  A kinder and more patient father.  A more empathetic lover.  A more engaged citizen of the Commonwealth.  Now, for example, Ian genuinely welcomed — even craved — another municipal emergency, so he could respond to it with the same grace and courage with which he had imagined responding to the bombing.  He was absolutely certain that he would rise to the occasion.  Or, maybe not certain, but part of the thrill was not knowing whether he’d run from the blast of toward it.

In the next few months, while waiting patiently for that next municipal emergency to present itself, Ian steeled himself against intervening with bullying parents or abusive boyfriends too much in their cups.  Such injustices simply weren’t a big enough stage for his ambition.  He only cheapened his connection to the bombing by getting involved in these essentially domestic matters.  So he didn’t respond to people who called his bullshit.  Or those who tailgated him or called him a faggot or treated his wife or children badly.  

At the bombing’s anniversary, while Marcy gave a second shot at completing the marathon, Ian brought his girls to the crime scenes.  He explained the physics of the pressure cooker bomb (which he called the Crockpot Bomb, because he thought it was endearing). Together, he and the girls recited the names of the dead and injured.  Not all 275 claimants, which number seemed preposterously high to Ian relative to the twenty or so actual victims.  Just the principal injured.  He wasn’t accusing anyone of faking it, but in Ian’s humble opinion a booboo on the knee couldn’t compare to a prosthetic limb.

“Isn’t that right, girls?” he asked.

As they had been taught, the girls loyally agreed that only bona fide amputation could elicit their sympathy.  (Their mother’s road blisters, for example, would earn only studied contempt.)

Outside the Forum Restaurant, Ian and the girls left a pair of sneakers.  They were a child’s size five, which not only made them more pathetic and cute and entirely devastating, but also would deter homeless people from taking them, and they’d be therefore more enduring and more likely, for example, to be preserved in the future bombing museum.

When Ian learned authorities were no longer allowing backpacks at the Marathon, but instead requiring all belongings to be carried in clear bags, he trained his eagle-eyed daughters to spot non-conforming bags.  As they identified likely suspects, he personally hacked apart several such packages with an axe he had brought along because you never know when you are going to have to cut your way through police barricades or temporary viewing stands to reach the victims of some civic disaster.  

The judge who presided over Ian’s case let him off with a mild warning and a fraternal fistbump, after Ian testified to his intimate connection with the bombing and his still fragile mental makeup and his adorable girls and his plucky wife, who had finished the course in record time, all of whom he loved so very much.  

Years later, Marcy would make jokes at Ian’s expense, saying, “I stayed with Ian because after the whole bombing fiasco I
felt I had seen the worst of his character.”  

Everybody laughed at her wry recollections, and Ian was OK with that.  He had nothing to prove.  He had been in the right, and he knew what it took to be a hero, and he knew what it was like to be in the shit when the shrapnel was flying. And when you’re right and a hero and have been deep in the shit, it was OK when people laughed and called you ridiculous.  When it came to questions of homeland security, Ian would rather his wife and his girls rested easy and stayed unafraid and remained blissfully unaware of the dangers that lurked in backpacks and crockpots and the terrible things men had to do to keep the enemy at bay.

Under various pseudonyms, Scott David has published dozens of short stories, a memoir, several novels, and a guide to wine and cocktails.  He lives in Boston and Provincetown, Massachusetts.  For more information, go to scottdavidboston.com. Scott David is a Featured Writer and welcomes correspondence from Journal writers.