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Fiction, Issue 5.2 Summer 2016

Beth Sherman

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Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her poetry has been published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Hartskill Review, Lime Hawk, Synecdoche, Gyroscope and The Evansville Review, which nominated her poem, “Minor Planets” for a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction has been published in Portland Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, KYSO, Sandy River Review and Panoplyzine and is forthcoming in Delmarva Review and Joyce Quarterly. She has also written five mystery novels.

 

Between

Say you’re on the Downtown IRT – one of the new trains that stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see, lurching along underground like a demented caterpillar, and it’s so crowded people are pressed up against each other and you happen to see a man reach his hand into the Michael Kors bag of a woman standing to your left. You know it’s a Michael Kors because your ex-wife is a publicist whose firm specializes in accessories and one of the perks of her job, which doesn’t pay much and entails long hours, is getting freebies from overpriced fashion companies: Burberry wallets. Calvin Klein scarves, Marc Jacobs belts. Your ex-wife would walk through the door, carrying her latest acquisition and you would look up from your laptop and grin because you were damn glad to see her. Maybe you’d run her bath water or pour her a glass of Chardonnay, the expensive kind because she liked the taste of money.

You can’t identify the precise moment when things changed. There was Before, when she still loved you. And After, when she left – on a Tuesday evening in April when you’d come in from playing softball in Morningside Park, with mud on your cheek from sliding into second base too hard. You noticed the mud when you went to hug her goodbye and some of it got on her forehead. Before and After. But the part that really mattered happened in between.

If you could go back you would search for it in the hollow place in bed where she slept next to you, her stomach curled against your back like a question mark. You would look in the spaces between her smiles. You’d examine the silences that you once took for quiet compatibility but now flash like traffic lights you sped right through. You would have had a beautiful life together. The life you envisioned on your wedding day, standing under a chuppah in the Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel surrounded by 250 people, the men in black tie, the women in tight black dresses, listening to the rabbi saying the two of you were bashert, meant to be, and trying not to worry about how much the evening was going to cost.

Now you question everything. What you see with your own eyes, what you fail to see.

The man on the train reaches into the bag and you’re thinking you could call him out and be a hero and maybe the woman would be so grateful she’d offer to buy you coffee and the two of you would hit it off and start dating and fall in love, the whole process starting again but cleaner this time, more satisfying.

The man’s hand disappears and appears again. You never see the wallet.

At the next stop, the woman gets off the train and so do you, keeping her in sight amid the horde of commuters, like a birddog beginning the hunt.

Issue 5.2 Summer 2016, Reviews

Fabienne Josaphat

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Fabienne J. Dancing in Barron's ShadowDancing in the Baron’s Shadow
by Fabienne Josaphat
The Unnamed Press
Pages: 256
Date: February 23, 2016
Reviewed by: Kelsey May

 

Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow:
An Action-Packed, Emotional Debut from Fabienne Josaphat

Walking the line between historical fiction and adventure novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow explores the mid-regime world of 1965 Haiti. The story follows two brothers: Raymond, a taxi driver and father of two, and Nicolas, a professor at a prestigious law school and a father of a newborn daughter. The entire nation lives in a violent, fear-stricken state under the rule of “Papa Doc” and his Tonton Macoutes, gun-slinging brawlers who punish anyone who speaks or acts out against the regime.

The story begins on an average evening. Raymond is waiting for his passenger to finish visiting a brothel when a handful of Macoutes roll up in a Jeep. They’re after a popular radio show host, Milot Sauveur, who spoke out against the government’s public killing of a hospital patient. In a split second decision, Raymond agrees to help Milot and his family flee. A high-speed chase ensues, and Raymond loses his fare for the day but gains a friend.

When he returns home, his wife, Yvonne, is outraged at his lack of sense. With two young daughters, he cannot afford to risk his life for strangers, she argues. Besides, they’ve fallen on tough times, thanks to the Macoutes’ strict enforcement of an early curfew, which cuts Raymond’s prime taxi hours short. Yvonne demands that he ask his brother, Nicolas, for a loan, and Raymond must swallow his pride to do so.

Meanwhile, Nicolas is facing his own battles. He has secretly compiled an entire manuscript of carefully researched evidence linking Papa Doc and an infamous prison guard to the death of a respected journalist. He is seeking to publish the manuscript abroad, but he stirs up some trouble when he lectures a little too aggressively against the government in his classroom.

Several chapters later, Nicolas is sentenced, without trial or bail, to prison to await execution, and Raymond must choose between following Yvonne and his daughters out of the country or saving the brother who always looked down on him. Josaphat weaves a lyrical tale of betrayal, secrecy, and, how loyalty strives against all odds to protect and heal the broken bonds of brotherhood. The gruesome portrayal of prison life and life under a tyrannical ruler grips readers, yet the tale is balanced with tender moments, such as Raymond’s precious scene with his niece, Amélie:

Amélie rested her face against Raymond’s chest and he sighed. He missed Adeline and Enos. He held her closer as if to compensate for their absence. Amélie was round and chubby, her skin almost as delicate as a spider web. She was different from his own children, who were frail like small twigs and black like the night; his children, who smelled like the lemongrass leaves they stirred at night in their tea when there was nothing to eat for dinner. He felt overcome with a wave of grief.

Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow places itself elegantly on the shelf with other Caribbean and Latin American historical fiction novels set in countries ruled by dictators, such as In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz’s masterful The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Looking for a fast-paced, emotionally turbulent novel? Josaphat’s first novel is a short, thoroughly satisfying story on how family can outwit the enemy in even the most desperate circumstances.

––––––––

Kelsey May is a member of the Diatribe collective and a regular contributor to SkipFiction. She is passionate about social justice and activism and is beginning a series of essays about community policing. Her work has recently appeared in Broken Plate, Pine Hills Review, and NonBinary Review. She has also received numerous grants and awards, including a nomination for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. She is excited to get outdoors this summer by hiking, kayaking, canoeing, swimming, and maybe, if she really gets her act together, camping.

Issue 5.2 Summer 2016

Issue 5.2 Summer 2016

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

"Try All Balloons" by Sue Clancy
“Try All Balloons” by Sue Clancy

"Suddenly my Hair was Performance" by Sydney Tayler Colbert.
“Suddenly my Hair was Performance” by Sydney Tayler Colbert.

“Love Offers the World” by Sue Clancy

Poetry:
(Guest Edited by Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz)

M. L. Brown | When Girls Swim
Alexis Groulx | An afternoon with Cal
Rage Hezekiah | February Cove
Gopika Jadeja | Newsprint in the dark
Les Kay | Reprise, Nachtmusik
Barbara Krasner | Bei Mir Bistu Shayn
Laurie Macfee | Bone Music
Elisabeth Murawski | Never from Here
Leonard Neufeldt | Letters from the Ghetto
Valery V. Petrovskiy | On a town street
James Prenatt | Can I, may I?
Wesley Riggs | Even If
Beate Sigriddaughter | Bricks
Joseph Somoza | Natural Poetry
Jamie Wendt | When Amma had Four More Months

Fiction:

Beth Sherman | Between
Meg Tuite | Hollow Gestures

Nonfiction:

Terry Barr | When the Truth Is Found
Stacy Lawson | It’s Just Sex
Kelsey Lahr | Coyote Nights
Zach Marson | They Knew the Land Was Beautiful

Translations:

René Agostini | Walking along the Rhone | **June Sylvester Saraceno
Anna Akhmatova | After 23 Years | **Don Mager
Shatha Abu Hnaish | Alienation | **Francesca Bell & Noor Nader Al Abed
Jóanes Nielsen | Burnt Out Light | **Matthew Landrum
Rasool Yoonan | Fire and Human | Try | **Siavash Saadlou

Book Reviews:

Fabienne Josaphat | Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow | Review by Kelsey May
Lucia Cherciu | Edible Flowers | Review by Donelle Dreese

Spotlight on a Press:

Glass Lyre Press | Review by Nettie Farris


**Indicates Translators

Fiction, Issue 5.2 Summer 2016

Meg Tuite

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Meg Tuite is author of two short story collections, Bound By Blue (2013) Sententia Books and Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale. She teaches at Santa Fe Community College, and is a columnist at Connotation Press and JMWW. Her blog resides at: http://megtuite.com

 

Hollow Gestures

Beth takes the bus to a workshop on setting boundaries. Shoes are lined up outside an entrance with a wooden sign that says, Tae Kwon Do. She slips off her gray slippers, walks inside. A group of ten women sit on pillows in a huge, open warehouse. She slides down on a pillow, looks around. Some of these women are antiques: dusty, hidden treasures, but for the smell of mothballs. They are lost in their bones, hands that detour, divert around a mosquito bite they can’t quite locate. They must have a hard time with maps like her. One girl is the border patrol. Her head bobbles a full-on affirmative every time the therapist speaks. She writes in a notebook as though the circumference of her being will slip away if she doesn’t frame it in print. One girl verges on a barbed fence of tears that rim her weary, pink eyes. The therapist begins another landmark statement on how to climb over the so-called ‘dead limbs’ that have stifled them in their past and mark their new terrain, piss on it. One girl’s perimeter closes into a knife of a smile as pee that was in her bladder changes its mind and sucks back into her kidneys.

The therapist says they are going to perform some exercises. The first exercise is to stake the fence. When he gets too close they should say ‘stop’, but not just some half-assed stop, more like screeching up to a yellow light just as it turns red instead of a stop sign. He says, hold up your hand, belt it out. He lays his hairy fingers, spread eagle, on his belly and blasts it out in operatic baritone. STOP! Bark it out like a dog protecting his territory, he says. The women stare at him. He paces back and forth, his storm cloud getting larger as his gestures bank the walls of any frontier, conducting an explosive outpost that frightens Beth as she battles the inner prison that withers her. Don’t be shy, he says. This is a safe place to explore those core emotions of rage, grief and fear. He lifts his tufted knuckles, curls them at the group, lifts his chin and howls. The women snicker and wheeze on either side of Beth. A strange sound like a person dying gurgles from her throat. Okay, the therapist says. Who’s going to go first? Border patrol is still writing notes. The rest of them look around the radius of the group without making eye contact. They remain still, sacks of rice. The massive room smells of unwashed bodies and terror. The therapist lifts his impressive eyebrows, beastly strands long enough to cover the empty patch where a hairline should have been, and studies each one of them. Come on, ladies. This is going to change your lives, he says as he claps. The eyebrows waver.

I remember I was scared shitless, walking on the ice across Lake Michigan in the middle of February with my friend, Joyce, and my little sister, Eliza. We followed Joyce’s rocky lead as she screeched at us, ‘It’s going to change your life.’ Something her dad always said. He was a fat, old lawyer with a swollen face and body, mean as hell. “You,” he’d say, pointing at me. “What are you going to do? Make pancakes for the rest of your life or become something?” I didn’t know what he meant. My mom made my pancakes. I was only twelve at the time. What was I going to do? Probably die before I got to high school hanging out with his daughter. Joyce had dared me to jump across three-story roofs, pretend I was blind, run into people on the street, shoplift and once I even stole a hubcap off of a cop car just to hear her frantic high-pitched giggle. God, I loved her.

Beth’s hand raises itself slowly like some fucking flag on the Fourth of July.

Great, come on up, says the therapist. Her head shakes as she takes her place beside the excited man and looks out at an expanse of glassy eyes that flicker in and out of vision. He smells better than he looks; some kind of incense permeates him. She wonders if he’s a Buddhist. Remember, this is about boundaries. Is there anyone in your life that you haven’t been able to say no to? Was he kidding her with this? She nods, hears that demented cackle of Joyce’s again. Okay, she says. Let’s do this.

The therapist walks away from Beth across the wood floor. He is talking as he recedes. Try to visualize that person in your mind. Forget about everything else. She hears scratch marks of Border Patrol’s pen. The rest of them barely breathe. When he is around 50 feet away from Beth he stops, turns toward her. Her heart palpates around the periphery of the building as she huddles inside the fog of her body. She can’t feel her feet under her when this man starts to run.

Joyce pushes me, giggling, and I push Eliza. “Come on,” Joyce says, “let’s get to Michigan.” It’s all thunder. Blinding acres of white sky and storm sheen glazed ice as far as I can see and I’ve got the whole day to get to Michigan. I’m an explorer. Few have barely touched the frozen shoreline and never come close to passing the buoy. The three of us are well beyond that. Eliza is all breath, complacency and silence in her shiny parka and matted hood. Joyce and I don’t wear hats. We stuff them in our pockets as soon as we are past parental range. Joyce’s ears are purple rafts on either side of her white pigtails. I can’t feel my ears, and snot has frozen little spitballs in my nose. The wind is one long, empty moan. Everything is glass, muffled grunts, moldering dead fish and wind that feels like it could gut me. I see some jaggedy, thin spots of ice that look like you could fall right through. Joyce talks but her words are weathered blind. We are in Antarctica, the lone survivors of a ship caged in and swallowed by two icebergs. We are down to two Snickers bars, a pack of Doublemint gum, and four Kents I swiped from Mom’s purse. We will have to eat snow when we are thirsty. The globe is all-invading and disfigured. I wonder if we should turn back. It’s a long way back to land. Eliza hasn’t said a word. She looks numb. There are no curves except Joyce’s mouth, still a dripping stalactite of gutted insults. Patsy wets her bed; Ellen has like fifty teeth in her mouth, have you noticed? Jesus. And Cynthia? You think her or her brothers know anything about soap? Joyce keeps tabs on her traitors. They rarely thwart her, but the worst actually have the nerve to ignore her. She is her own continent.

I hear the crack. Eliza drops like the branch of a tree. She is under ice. I scream, grab at her sleeve with the red mitten dangling from its clip. Her face is murky and gray under frozen water. I see bubbles. I bite my tongue until it bleeds, catch a hold of her parka and pull. A sagging handful of blue cloth breathes the air, steam rises off of it as the face beneath fogs into quivering ripples. The reek of black, stagnant water and the poison stillness gasps as the water starts to win. The blue coat is heavier, darker, slithers between my throbbing, pathetic grip. Eliza echoes from the shores of Chicago all the way to Michigan over and over. Eliza, I scream, but there is no world out there that answers back. Is she okay? Joyce asks. I look up into a splotchy red, under-animated face.

The man breathes hard in front of me. Why didn’t you say stop? he asks. The man sighs as if I’m an imbecile. Didn’t you hear my instructions? Why didn’t I say stop? Why did I ever go? I slap him hard across the face. Red garnishes the surface across his cheek.

The stifled room begins to erupt. Ladies unchain from whatever hems them in. They jump up, growl and yell. Beth sees their mouths open, one cavernous hollow that will never be filled. They’re all hopped up on adrenaline surging new life into them. Beth is feeling it, too. She can hear curses pelting her as she staggers out the door.

Eliza was only seven when she drowned. The splintered parts of Beth scream for vodka. She still hears rumbling, animated voices coming from inside the seminar. She sits down on the bench, studies the crowd of shoes, picks out purple sandals with some jewels on top and a two-inch heel that actually fit. To hell with the ratty, gray slippers. She buckles up these beauties and admires them. Maybe a pedicure would help. She gets up and wobbles off to the Owl Liquor store trying to remember how to walk in heels over concrete, click, click, wobble, wobble.

Beth buys ten tiny airplane size bottles and loads her purse with them. No matter who’s behind the counter, Beth is told that the larger bottles are much cheaper. She’s not an idiot. Hide the evidence. She knows she will drown, as well.

Fiction, Issue 5.1 Spring 2016

Mercedes Lawry

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Mercedes Lawry has published short fiction in several journals including, Gravel, Cleaver, Garbanzo, and the previously named, Newer York. She’s published poetry in journals such as Poetry, Nimrod, & Prairie Schooner and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.

 

Sooner or Later

Mama run away again. Pap says she is high strung and she’ll be back when the strings loosen. Gram shakes her head and gives me a shave of chocolate. I don’t cry anymore cause I’m big now and I know things just is. I think about going out to pester Pap’s old yellow dog, Hy, under the cottonwood tree, but he don’t always like being woke up and he might nip me and it ain’t worth that. I might go down by the creek but I gotta be back to do chores for Gram before dinner and it’s easy to forget time down the creek. I start dreaming or pretending and when I’m late, Gram’s mouth is one straight line and she looks disappointed and I feel bad. If it wasn’t for her and Pap, I’d be in an orphanage and Mama would be locked up in a crazyhouse or even jail. The world doesn’t take kindly to the high strung, Pap says.

Sometimes Mama is sweet and calls me her best baby even tho I ain’t a baby but I like it when she’s nice and holds on to me. I wish she would be that way all the time, I wouldn’t mind the baby calling. Gram said I had a brother once but he died before I got here. I’m not allowed to talk to Mama about him but I know where he’s buried. I wish he wasn’t dead cause he could help with chores.

Mama gave me a secret. After I found the knife under the bed she said this is our secret. I couldn’t tell Gram or Pap. I found it when I was putting my treasure box under there – some stones and shiny buttons and a bird’s bone head with the beak and all – Pap called it a skull. Don’t they need the knife, I asked her, Gram and Pap? It’s not their knife, Mama said. It’s ours. I don’t know how she got a knife, maybe one of those times she run off.

The thing is, she took it with her. Maybe she needs it to get food in the woods. When she comes back, I’m gonna ask her did she kill a squirrel? Maybe it’s in case somebody tries to hurt her though I don’t want to think about that too much. She would stab them dead fast as lighting – that’s how I see it.

After he finds the paper with the scratch marks remarking how many days Mama’s been gone, Pap cautions me not to worry, she’ll be back like she always does. I consider telling him about the knife but I don’t. I wonder does the knife make a difference on when she’ll come back – sooner or later? If she don’t come back, I’ll tell about the knife.

Fiction, Issue 5.1 Spring 2016

Heather Dewar

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Heather Dewar LangnerHeather Dewar is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, New South, The Dirty Napkin, Utne, The Common Review, and the Chicago Reader among others. She lives in Minneapolis.

 

ID

“It’s usually the easy answer.”

Billy looked up.

The girl sitting next to him smiled. “It was just that you seemed worried.”

He thought she might be making fun but her smile looked like she meant it. Billy opened his mouth to speak.

“No helping.” A man frowned from behind the front desk. Billy turned back to his screen. He was here to replace his license. He had been living in Chicago six months. Three weeks before, he had been walking home, late, when a man with a gun stopped him on the street and demanded his wallet and phone. Billy emptied his pockets onto the pavement. Afterwards, he vomited into the street.

The girl slid out of her desk. Billy watched her walk to the counter. He wondered how she had known he was nervous. He furrowed his brow when he was tense. Sometimes, he jiggled his leg. Now, he put his hand on his thigh to stop it.

A picture of two cars colliding appeared on the screen. To avoid an accident you should know where your vehicle will be in: a) 5 to 10 seconds; b) 10 to 15 seconds; c) 15 to 20 seconds. Billy chose answer “a.” Since the mugging he couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes the night replayed. The gun at his chest, the bile in his throat, the feeling that someone had kicked in his knees. They found the guy who did it. They picked him up at an ATM. The detective who had been working on the case called to tell him. One more asshole off the street, he had said, but Billy didn’t feel better.

He read the next question. When driving in a fog you should use: a) fog lights only; b) high beams; c) low beams. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the girl. She was standing behind a white line on the floor, smiling for her picture. In college he had played a game with his friend, Pete, called ID. When you saw a girl, you had to remember everything about her: the color of her hair, her eyes, her skin, how tall she was, the size of her boobs. You had to be able to pick her out of a line up. Billy got so good his nickname was Photo. After the hold-up the police had asked him for details. Anything you can tell us, they said. What did you see? Billy remembered only the gun.

The driving test came to an end. Billy stood and pushed in his chair. He walked to the counter. A man in a blue work shirt told him to stand behind the white line for his picture. “On three,” he said, when Billy was ready, and Billy stood and waited for the flash. There were things he remembered about the night of the mugging. The walk from the train had been cold. He’d wished he’d had gloves. Snow had been falling, silent and fast. He had come from a bar that was noisy and full and as he walked he’d felt glad for the silence, for the sudden feeling of space. He’d put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky.

“We’ll call your name when it’s ready,” the man said, and Billy walked to the end of a row of blue plastic chairs. The girl was leaning against a counter now, scrolling through her phone. That night he had felt a slow certainty, of himself, of his life. The gun had emptied his confidence onto the pavement.

The girl straightened up from the counter. She glanced in Billy’s direction.

“Okay Photo,” Pete said, each time they played. “What do you see?”

Billy thought of the fast falling snow. He thought of the cold and the silence and the open night sky.

“William Sims,” the man said, and Billy stood to retrieve his ID.

Issue 5.1 Spring 2016

Issue 5.1 Spring 2016

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

"The Man Who Fell to Earth" by Carla Ciuffo
“The Man Who Fell to Earth” by Carla Ciuffo

The Artist At Work by Carla Ciuffo
The Artist At Work by Carla Ciuffo

"Pandoras Jar" by Carla Ciuffo
“Pandoras Jar” by Carla Ciuffo

Poetry: (Guest Edited by Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow)

Matthew James Babcock | The Fall Olympics | Sexual Limbo
Roy Bentley | Sugar Ray Robinson Leaning against His 1950 Pink Cadillac
Lynn Marie Houston | Jealousy | With Love to California, Now that I No Longer Live There
Lynn Levin | Spending Small Change | On Knowing One’s Goblet at the Banquet Table
Hillary Kobernick | Springing
Patrick McCarthy | Suspicion
Kendall Pakula | The Good Guest
Erin Redfern | Graduate School
Rakhshan Rizwan | Partition
stephanie roberts | People Believing Badly
Gerard Sarnat | 67% Hopperized Bathos

Fiction:

Michelle Elvy | Black and White and Grey
Mercedes Lawry | Sooner or Later
Heather Dewar | ID

Nonfiction:

Susan Bloch | The Mumbai Massacre
Lisbeth Davidow | You Have to Get over the Color Green
Steven Wineman | Tear-Water Tea

Translations:

Ivonne Gordon Carrera | Tiger | **Cindy Rinne
Cesarco Eglin | Connotations | **Scott Spanbauer
Pablo Neruda | Past | **Domenic James Scopa

Book Reviews:

Paul David Adkins | Stick Up | Review by A.J. Huffman
Margaret Lazarus Dean | Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight | Review by Carla Sarett
Matthew Lippman | Salami Jew | Review by Neil Silberblatt

Spotlight on a Press:

Two of Cups Press | Review by Nettie Farris

**Indicates Translators

Fiction, Issue 5.1 Spring 2016

Michelle Elvy

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Michelle Elvy is an editor and writer based in New Zealand. She edits at Flash Frontier and Blue Five Notebook, and is on the editorial teams of Flash Fiction International and the Best Small Fictions series. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in numerous print and online journals. See http://michelleelvy.com/

 

Black and White and Grey

In the gloaming she sees his tall shape across the street, hunched shoulders under a black coat slumped to worry. She steps off the curb and hurries to him. She wants to ask him how was your meeting, did you get the red wine for dinner, do you remember that the Lamberts are coming but it’s cold and the wind hurts her teeth so she lifts her head slightly to the left instead and as she slips her palm into his she feels him grip her small hand and squeeze tight.

In the gloaming he sees her silhouette crossing the street, small neat steps with white socks peeking from under tailored trousers. He wants to tell her they read my father’s will today, my brother says my sister won’t come, I forgot to get the red wine for dinner but he feels a chill on his spine and in the moment that she tilts her head toward him he knows he doesn’t love her but he squeezes her hand anyway and notices that her grey felt cap looks just right.

Issue 4.3 Fall 2015

Issue 4.3 Fall 2015

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

"Bus in Pieces" by Dean West
“Bus in Pieces” by Dean West

"Ballerina Legs" by Caroline Allen
“Ballerina Legs” by Caroline Allen

"Blue on Green" by Kellie Talbot
“Blue on Green” by Kellie Talbot

Poetry: (Guest Edited by W.F. Lantry )

Gail C. DiMaggio | Girls in Pictures
Rosie Prohías Driscoll | Colando Café
Jeff Hardin | A Short Distance from Mountains
Ed Shacklee | Elephant Ear Plant
Mary Ann Sullivan | St. Catherine of Siena
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming | The Space Between The Rain
Lonnie Monka | my mistake
Ashley Parker Owens | Itch
Sophia Pandeya | Mona Lisa Postcard
Jane Wayne | His Shirt

Fiction:

Neil Carpathios | The Man with No Future
Katie Cortese | Quitting Time
Sherrie Flick | Now
Philip Kobylarz | What’s On The Other Side Of Doors

Nonfiction:

Melissa Grunow | White Spirit
Rick Kempa | Honing the Edge
Sandell Morse | The Crossing

Translations:

Kurt Drawert | Personal Pronoun | **Paul-Henri Campbell
Louise Dupré | Stone Hands of the Tomb Figures | **Karen McPherson
Gili Haimovich | Signing a Place | What Lights Up the Sky | **Dara Barnat
Moyshe Kulbak | from Songs of a Poor Man | **Allison Davis

 

Book Reviews:

Sue Eisenfeld | Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal | Review by Donna M. Crow
Jeff Klima | L.A. Rotten | Review by Ginger Beck
Sandra Marchetti | Confluence | Review by Danielle Susi

 

**Indicates Translators

Fiction, Issue 4.3 Fall 2015

Katie Cortese

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Katie CKatie Cortese is the author of the collection Girl Power and other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Publications, 2015). She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Florida State, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Willow Springs, and The Baltimore Review, among other journals. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University where she also serves as the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

 

Quitting Time

Allie shouldn’t call the house and hang up when he finally answers. She shouldn’t cruise by after work to make sure he’s brought in the mail, slowing to judge by the slit in the curtains if the living room light is on. She shouldn’t worry if the house is dark. He’s probably just sleeping. Or out walking the dog, the rangy retriever who’ll need hip surgery in another year, and whose breath always smelled to her of hot dogs.

She knows she shouldn’t Google Map his address either, those familiar numbers that used to be hers. The site hasn’t been updated for their town in a year and a half and the car in the satellite picture is her gray PT Cruiser. She shouldn’t linger on the webpage in the den while down the hall and around the corner, Gregory hums over his ratatouille in the kitchen. She knows it was her decision to leave. It wasn’t quitting, they told her. She was just rebooting her life for the happier one she deserved.

Allie shouldn’t keep a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment, or sneak puffs in the driveway, facing her new house like a prowler scoping out the easiest point of entrance. After each cigarette, she tells herself she’s quitting, right then and there. Sometimes she does, until something else reminds her. The triggers are unpredictable. It’s not always the apple-cheeked babies in the life insurance commercial. They’re simply other people’s children. And the terrible one about whooping cough with an asthmatic wheeze for a soundtrack—that one makes her nauseous, on principle—just not in a personal way.

But at least once a week, something triggers a memory, sharp as a blade, of her life in the blue ranch on the corner of Liff and Persimmon, the one where now the hedges go untrimmed. Last week she woke up to “Shake, Rattle and Roll” on her radio alarm and sat up in a panic: no cry had woken her in the night for feeding or a change, or just the touch of her hand. She’d thrown the quilt off her legs and had made it to the hall before she remembered where she was, where she’d lived for a year now, a Cape Cod on Jubilat, with Gregory, who was a good man, and patient with her grief.

Tonight it was an email, just an automated reminder from the pediatrician’s office about shots her son no longer needs. Tomorrow, I’ll quit, she thinks, stubbing out her cigarette in the driveway. Her same old promise; not quite a lie, since tomorrow never comes to collect on all she’s owed. The charred end of the Marlboro leaves a dark blemish on the smooth concrete. She spits on it and scuffs the spot with her toe, but only spreads the ash around.

Inside there is a fire in the woodstove, it’s chilly enough to need one now. Inside there is a man who never met her infant son, the child who no longer sighs sour milk into his jungle-themed sheets. Inside are shelves and shelves of books and the lingering smell of supper. Inside is peace, if she wants it, and sometimes she does, but still she feels for her keys in the pocket of her peacoat, slides behind the wheel of the Cruiser her former husband had mocked when she bought it, though if given the choice, he’d take it to the store instead of his Camry.

Automatically, she puts the car in reverse. Just a quick look, she thinks, adjusting the heater, and then tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll quit.

Fiction, Issue 4.3 Fall 2015

Sherrie Flick

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Sherrie FlickSherrie Flick is author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness, the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting, and the forthcoming short story collection Whiskey, Etc. (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016). She lives in Pittsburgh.

 

Now

The coffee shop is full, or full enough. I hide in the back, wait. My maybe-date doesn’t show. “The alarm clock didn’t go off,” he says to me when he calls. To get to the coffee shop on time, I sprinted through my morning brushing of teeth like a comedy routine, throwing on clothes, making hasty decisions, pissing off the dog and the cat and my neighbor, Jim. But still. I’m polite on the phone, as he talks about late nights and the need for a new, better alarm clock.

I do doubt the problem is the clock, but I encourage him to, yes, buy a new one. I say it’s okay, because it seems he will not stop apologizing until I do. I hate that I’m bullied into forgiving him, and when he calls to reschedule I pretend like I’ve accidentally deleted his message. There’s a kind of joy in fooling yourself and then lying about a mundane detail.

“Oh, I didn’t get that message.”

And I take joy where I can; these tiny moments add up. As I’m walking my dog I think about all the missed opportunities, all the rushing. What if you got that back—like a time refund?

And today there’s my near-date, in fact, sitting in a different cafe on a different day talking to a different woman as I walk by. I turn, walk by again. I turn, walk to the plate glass and tap. Tap-tap. Wave. He looks up, touches the woman’s hand to stop her mid-sentence, nods to me and then heads out into the cold without a coat. I’m bundled tight and ready to wait this out. The dog sits, sensing this will be a long one, deciding to be a good boy because perhaps he remembers that this particular cafe has doggy treats inside by the register.

“Hey,” the almost-date says. “I tried to call you to hook up again.”

“Oh, hey,” I say. “I didn’t get that message. Weird.”

“Weird,” he says. We both look at the dog, who looks across the street, his main focus being sitting like a good boy. Shoulders back. Ears up. “So,” he says. “Let’s reschedule?”

I look inside the cafe at the woman with her back to me, sipping on a cup of tea, fiddling with the paper flag attached to its string. Her fingers are fine and beautiful. Her hair looks nice from the back, auburn and wavy and lush. I wonder how many people he has in his life. I know I don’t have very many to meet up with these days. I feel homesick for something. I suddenly feel so much at once.

“I just can’t bear to be stood up again,” I say. “So let’s just call it that, okay? It was a date and now it’s run its course without even starting up. Efficient.”

He looks inside the cafe, perhaps thinks the woman’s hands are beautiful too. Maybe this is the moment that he falls in love with her? In a few years they will marry, this man and the woman with the tea. They’ll walk arm in arm around the neighborhood and smile at me in the dwindling light. They’ll get a dog of their own. A beagle who eagerly sniffs my dog’s ass.

For now, my own dog has decided his good dog time is up. He whines a little and then lifts off his haunches and pulls gently on the leash. “Okay,” the man says. “I didn’t know you were so sensitive.”

“Not sensitive, really. Just pragmatic,” I say. “Plus, you don’t know me at all.”

He sighs then, looks across the street at the rows of houses lined up and quiet in the mid-afternoon city street their window boxes stuffed with dying flowers. He says, “I’ve seen you around this neighborhood for months. I always thought it was beautiful, the way you stepped carefully with your dog. I loved watching you walk and walk around the blocks around here. I loved that you smiled at me. Just wanted to let you know that.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, touched my arm. “I also know,” he says quietly, “that sometimes I can be an ass.”

I nod. I say, “Thank you.” The dog pulls steadily now and barks once. I smile at the man. “Thanks.”

I think about all of this later, of course. After he’s married. I think about time stretching and bending and moving in other ways instead of this one. I imagine him showing up at the coffee shop. I imagine ordering tea, playing with the tea bag while he talks to a woman for too long on a cold fall day, outside the cafe, my back turned to him and her, but feeling the heat of their conversation through the window. I imagine waiting patiently while conversations inside murmur all around me. I imagine turning to look out the window, as this beautiful woman does just now, and seeing him with her, touching her hand then hugging.

I wonder which woman I want to be.

Fiction, Issue 4.3 Fall 2015

Neil Carpathios

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Neil CarpathiosNeil Carpathios the author of three full-length poetry collections and various chapbooks. Fictions have recently appeared in: The Ampersand Review, Underground Voices, Mayday Magazine, LitroNY Magazine, Miracle Monocle, and Lime Hawk Quarterly (which nominated my short story, “Poets and Scholars” for a Pushcart Prize). He also recently edited an anthology of regional literature, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2015). Carpathios is an associate professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.

 

The Man with No Future

Nathan had just finished his pork fried rice and spring roll when the waitress brought him the bill and complimentary fortune cookie. He cracked the cookie in half but nothing was inside. He checked to see if maybe the tiny slip of paper was jammed in one of the cookie’s crevices, but there was nothing. This had never happened before in his life, let alone at Chang’s where he stopped for lunch a couple of times a week. He called the waitress over. He pointed to the broken cookie. He explained.

The waitress apologized, reached into her deep apron pocket, and handed him another one. He broke the new cookie open—and once again, there was nothing inside. He stared down at the yellow cookie pieces, then became self-conscious and wondered if anybody at a nearby table noticed. Did they see his puzzled face, or was it scared, or maybe even a little relieved, as he looked at his watch then balled up his napkin and stood up, starting to walk, peeking one more time over his shoulder at the shards like ancient relics in a museum on his plate?

As he stood at the register paying, he imagined that somebody who witnessed the scene thought it was like a one-act play called “The Man with No Future.” This made Nathan smile to himself. He handed the waitress, who now was the cashier, a ten and told her to keep the change.

There really was nothing strange about all this, Nathan thought. In fact, what was strange is that this had never happened until now. Surely mistakes were made in factories where fortune cookies were produced. He pictured an assembly-line of cookies shaped like small seashells, Chinese workers in white smocks quickly stuffing them with fortunes. The workers start to gossip, get distracted, and miss a few here and there.

The next afternoon, Nathan went to open the mail box slot with his apartment key. He hated these cramped mailboxes; the mail usually jammed and twisted the letters to fit. There was one envelope. Nathan reached in, squeezed it out. He flattened it against the wall with his palms to crush the wrinkles. It was addressed to Blake Graham, his birth name before he started going by his middle name, Nathan, and his mother’s maiden name, Hercules. It was twenty-odd years ago when his father committed suicide and he felt compelled to shed his skin, to take on a new identity—at least in terms of his name. He was a teenager and thought the pain and confusion might die away if he could imagine being a brand new person. His mother, who despised his father and was divorced from him, encouraged Blake to discard his father’s name and was pleased with Nathan as well; her husband had decided on Blake, which she never liked much.

Odd, Nathan thought. He had not received any mail with his birth name for longer than he could remember. Everyone, even bill collectors, knew him as Nathan Hercules.

Nathan didn’t wait to get back into his apartment. Standing there in the hall in front of all the other mail slots, he opened the envelope. Before he could pull out the paper, a woman in slippers he didn’t know although he’d seen her a few times walked up to get her mail. She used her key; the little metal door opened like a small safe. She coughed, nodded to Nathan, and then he waited for her to leave along together with a trail of cigarette stench.

Alone again, Nathan pulled out the paper which was neatly folded. It was clean white stock, nice quality. He unfolded and looked: the page was blank. Not a mark.

“What the hell?” Nathan thought. There was no return address on the envelope.

“Shit happens, I guess,” Nathan told himself as he walked back up to his apartment.

A few days later he was walking on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building on his way to the drugstore. He was out of band-aids and had another paper cut—occupational hazard from handling the hundreds of papers his college students turned in. With his index finger wrapped in a napkin, he took long strides, wanting to quickly walk the three blocks there. He nearly stepped on something. He looked down. In the middle of the sidewalk was a small bird’s nest. Nathan picked it up. There were no trees anywhere nearby, so how did it get there, he wondered. The nest was empty.

It wasn’t until the weekend when he was at Walmart buying new socks, he picked a bargain CD out of a bin for $2.99, “Johnny Cash Greatest Hits”— which was his father’s favorite artist, and his own, because as a kid he’d stand in the driveway watching his dad work with tools on a truck’s engine while “A Boy Named Sue” or “Ring of Fire” floated in the air from inside the garage—Nathan got inside his car in the parking lot, peeled off the tight plastic wrapping, opened the CD case eager to pop in some music, and found the case empty. He couldn’t ignore the strangeness any more.

The next morning before heading to the college he pulled a dictionary off his shelf. He looked up the word coincidence. “Exact correspondence in substance or nature” and “a concurrence of events with no apparent connection.” The word that jumped out at him was “correspondence.” Nathan looked up the word correspondence. “A close connection. A similarity. A communication or message sent or received.”

His father and mother divorced when Nathan was twelve, so amidst the normal chaos of adolescence the emotional earthquake of a family split intensified teen tectonics. His father moved away, took a job somewhere else. Nathan rarely saw him, and his mother discouraged long-distance visits. She also worked on her young son’s mind to create false memories and paint a portrait of a negligent, hard-drinking, and callous father. And when his father let the train run over him in the middle of a September night, and Nathan’s mother explained what had happened, Nathan felt more than just an earthquake. He couldn’t help imagining what it felt like to have a train crushing your body or why anybody would choose to die that way. For years after, the quaking, exploding, tremors— whatever word might come close—kept him awake nights and tortured him into self-destructive behavior such as drinking and drugs, and eventually pushed him toward the decision, nudged by his mother, to replace his name. He buried Blake Graham in a deep hole inside his chest.

For the whole week, Nathan was distracted. He had trouble getting through his classes. He couldn’t grade papers. He felt as if he were sleepwalking through the days. He hardly slept, didn’t have much appetite, and kept noticing other things: a plastic water bottle in a twenty-four pack he’d bought at the grocery without any water; a malted milk ball he bit into with just chocolate and no hardened milk center; a peanut shell he cracked open sitting on a stool at his favorite bar, Rocky’s, without a nut.

Nathan’s father was a simple man, he thought. At least those were his memories of him. He worked on cars, smoked cigars, and watched football. He had been a landscaper in summers and snow remover in winters. Manly stuff. Nathan remembered how his hands were always cracked and creased, black grime permanently lodged under his nails. His mother used to scold his dad about it.every morning during coffee and every night during supper.

“Damn, Leo, can’t you at least clean your hands! It looks like you’ve been digging crud your whole life.”

He remembers his father lifting coffee to his lips, thick fingers wrapped around a white mug. “Well, sweetest petunia, these hands are what bring home the bacon. Besides, a man should have a little grit and grime on him. Or would you rather I manicured and held my cup with a pinky sticking out like some fruitcake?”

His mother would sometimes let up, just huff, but sometimes not.

“Come on, Leo. It’s disgusting to look at when we’re trying to eat. Conjures all sorts of disgusting thoughts.”

“Like what, for instance?”

Now they’d be looking right at each other, eyes sending out beams of searing anger like death-rays in some science fiction Martian movie.

“Like you scratching up deep somewhere in private where the sun don’t shine. Or wiping without toilet paper. Or you…”

“Shut up. The boy is sitting right here between us. Do you have a brain in your head?”

The landscaping and snow removal business had been declining every year. There was just too much competition. Nathan remembered his father taking part-time jobs, once giving him a ride in a taxi when he briefly filled-in driving for a sick friend. This increased tensions between his parents, the squabbling intensified. Lack of money, dirty fingernails—it all added up.

Then one day, the talk when they sat him down.

“Son, your mother and I have decided it would be best for me to move out. We just don’t get along, I know you know. We’re nicer when we’re apart. Hell, two angry birds need their own space to fly so they can maybe turn nicer. It would be best for you, too. You must be sick of all the squawking around here.”

“Yes, Blake. Your father is right for once in his sorry life. And it has nothing to do with you. Don’t you ever think that. This is between your father and me.”

So it went. Like so many other families all over. Nathan knew that the settings might be slightly altered, the key players different, but the basic drama was universal. Most of his own friends had come from divorced families. Then his father moved out. Moved from upstate New York to southern Ohio to take a job with an old pal who owned a tire repair shop. Then his pal’s business went under and his father was hired at a local grocery store loading and unloading food delivery trucks.

For a while, Nathan received letters, cards, and packages from his dad. In fact, his father seemed more expressive than he had ever been when he lived in the same house. Maybe, Nathan thought at the time, the old truth was in play—how a person who loses something suddenly tries hard to get it back. Maybe his father felt guilty about leaving. Maybe his father was doing it all just to feel better about himself. At first, Nathan would sometimes call and thank him, once even wrote a letter back. But then Nathan started to resent how his father ran out. He should have stayed to fight it out, he thought. The correspondence slowed down, eventually stopped.

Nathan remembered the last thing his father had sent him. It was a small box with muscle car magazines, candy bars—and one strange item: a fortune cookie. In the enclosed note, his father wrote:

They were handing out fortune cookies at the store, promoting some new Chinese noodle lunch packs. I took one and thought of you. My future doesn’t matter much, but yours does. I hope it’s a good one!

Nathan tore open the plastic wrapper, then broke the cookie open. He pulled out the tiny slip of paper and read: Freedom is not the bird’s flight, but its decision whether or not to fly. Nathan remembered not understanding, thinking what a stupid fortune. Of course, now he only vaguely recalled it having something to do with a bird, or flying. He crumpled the paper and crammed the tasteless cookie chunks into his mouth, crunching. A week later, his mother greeted him at the kitchen table with the news.

Nathan was not superstitious, but if his dead father was trying to send him some kind of message, trying to correspond after all these years, what was he trying to tell him? Empty things, things missing, things suddenly turning blank or silent. Or was it something other than his father trying to connect with him? Was he crazy to even consider such notions?

It was a little after nine in the morning, a Saturday, and Nathan sat drinking coffee on his couch that he had strategically placed to face the small window looking out onto the street. The window was round unlike most windows, like the porthole of a ship. He wondered if the architect had been a naval man. From outside the round windows gave the building a uniquely odd appearance. He listened to the muffled sounds of passing cars and gazed up at a dirty gray sky. The view was lousy but he was grateful to at least have this small opening which he sometimes imagined was the apartment’s eye or nostril or ear from which inside the room’s skull he peeped out. He was a prisoner of the apartment’s brain, he’d think to himself, trapped behind bony walls. He’d leave the apartment and continue the little drama, pretending to escape, finally free, standing on the sidewalk looking back at the apartment building which resembled a hulking brick beast.

Nathan gulped the last of his coffee, grabbed his leather jacket, and headed out. He did not stop this time, but did look over his shoulder at his small window, that today resembled a pore in the bricks’ skin allowing the beast’s rust-brown body to breathe. Then he looked again, and noticed it may have been the blow-hole of the building, the kind a whale has. He thought if this were a one-act play it might be called “The Man Who Thought Way Too Much about a Window.”

He probably thought way too much about everything. That was his problem. So what that his parents divorced? So what that his father killed himself? So what that things happen without any real explanation? Maybe that was the message his father was trying to send him: to stop trying to make sense of it all, just let the mystery of living unfold. Maybe that was the real fortune in those cookies written on invisible paper in invisible ink. He just couldn’t see them. Then he caught himself thinking about the blank paper in the envelope, the nest, the TV, the radio, the other things. “There you go again, asshole,” he actually said out loud to himself as he strode looking down at sidewalk cracks. “There you go like an obsessed lunatic.”

Or maybe, he thought, he was just not smart enough to figure out little clues that most people would easily decipher. He imagined his father orchestrating the recent doings, starting with the fortune cookies, getting frustrated that his son wasn’t “getting it.” He saw his father rolling his eyes somewhere, probably thinking his son would have to be hit over the head with a hammer before he understood.

Nathan slapped himself on both cheeks with the palms of each hand. “Stop thinking, dammit.” He looked up and saw a crow on a phone line looking down at him. “My dad disguised to spy on me.” He slapped himself again.

Outside Chang’s, Nathan stopped to look into the big front window. It was still early for lunch and he watched workers setting tables, one sweeping with a broom. The special today, hand-printed with red ink on poster-size paper behind glass, read: Sweet and Sour Fortune Cookie Chicken and Orange Sesame Fortune Cookie Cupcakes. Nathan moved closer to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. He read more: In honor of National Fortune Cookie Day. It was September 13. He had never heard of such a holiday. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said out loud. In smaller print at the bottom: The first fortune cookie was invented in 1920 at the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, California.

“Wow, my dad is using that hammer now,” Nathan thought. “OK, dad, you want me to do something, what is it? Go inside and order the special? Or is this a test? Let’s see, you want me to keep walking and forget about it? You want me to have lunch but resist the temptation of anything having to do with fortune cookies and order something else? You want me to go to Walmart and buy another Johnny Cash CD? You want me to say I’m sorry? You want me to forgive you?”

The door of Chang’s opened and a young Chinese man with blond-dyed hair and a stud earring poked his head out. “We’ll be open in a few minutes. Happy Fortune Cookie Day!”

Nathan nodded. Then he looked back to the crow, but the crow was gone.

“A group of crows is called a murder,” Nathan thought. “Maybe a single crow is a suicide.”

A young couple came up and paused looking at the poster in the window. The man in a black beret and woman with one long ponytail read, then simultaneously looked at each other and said, “National Fortune Cookie Day?” They broke up laughing, then looked over at Nathan.

“If this were a one-act play, what would you call it?” Nathan asked the couple. They looked at each other again, slightly confused. Then Nathan walked away, passing shops, crossing streets, weaving in and out of bodies on sidewalks, sometimes looking up at the phone lines wondering about that crow, not sure where he was going, but the day was crisp and the further he walked his head felt—at least for now—suddenly clear.

Fiction, Issue 4.3 Fall 2015

Philip Kobylarz

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Philip Kobylarz has been published in Connecticut Review, Basalt, Santa Fe Literary Review, New American Writing, Poetry Salzburg Review and has appeared in Best American Poetry. His book, Rues, was recently published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. His collection of fiction, Now Leaving Nowheresville has been recently published and his book-length essay “Nearest Istanbul” is forthcoming.

What’s On The Other Side Of Doors

You always hurt the one you love, so they say. Maybe they meant the one you love is always hurt. For some, it’s like trying to write a letter in the rain. The kind of rain it rains when the sun is shining, tucking in and out of grey weather clouds. The kind of rain that feels cold at first, then becomes warm as it soaks into the skin, like a bitter liquor falling down the throat. Maybe it’s more like gardening with someone like a sister: bending down, getting dirty, digging holes, with nothing to say to each other about that vague conception called a family, plans for the future, sibling small talk and advice, and simply working some good fingernail clogging, back breaking work that’s more about the spaces created between stalks and holes in the ground than the growth of something flowery and green. Or it’s like waiting for the mailman on a day when there’s nothing to do—knowing his name (only the first) and about the time he comes, knowing he’ll be wearing the same clothes that he is by law required to wear, knowing he’ll look just like he did yesterday only a little less or a little more tired, knowing that someone maybe he doesn’t even know or care to delivers his mail and wondering if he makes the same types of gestures, on Saturdays, to him, a forced hello how are you, a smile that says you have something that’s important for me to want, then to watch him go to the next house, and the next, in an unending series of lawns, shrubbery, sidewalks that finally results in his own, to a kiss from a hardworking lover and a few gurgled cheers from a baby almost old enough to talk, and a pile of bills, flyers, car payment booklets, summons to court, alimony checks, subscriptions to paper-covered magazines all sent to the wrong address.

Fiction, Issue 4.2 Summer 2015

Ashley Cowger

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Ashley CowgerAshley Cowger is the author of the short story collection Peter Never Came, which was awarded the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and she is an Associate Editor for Bound Off. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Learn more at www.ashleycowger.com.

 

Public Access

“I just thought you should know,” is what the woman says, her voice smug. “If I were you, I would want—” and then Lenny disconnects her.

May watches as the little red light on the camera goes dim. Carl must have signaled Mike to stop shooting.

“Sorry, May,” he says into May’s earpiece.

May offers a put-on smile and shrugs. “No biggie.” But she can see by the reaction of the crew that this is not the appropriate response. “I mean, it isn’t your fault, Carl.” May can feel little beads of sweat forming along her hairline. The lights seem abnormally strong today.

“Let’s, uh, why don’t we take a minute, huh? To regroup,” Carl says, not to May, but to the crew.

Mike leaves his post, walks swiftly toward the bathroom, and Melissa approaches May with that little bowl of face powder she always seems to have on the ready. “Touch up?”

May forces a smile. “Oh. Sure.”

Melissa swirls the giant brush around in the powder, then dabs it all over May’s face and neck. “What a bitch, huh?” Melissa says.

“Who?” May asks.

Melissa snorts. “Right.”

“Oh,” May says.

“Mahhhgaret,” Melissa says, taking on the caller’s faux British intonation. “You can just tell by the way she says her name she’s a bitch.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to judge,” May says.

Melissa doesn’t seem to have heard. “I can’t believe she would call you on the show like that.”

“Melissa,” Carl says. He sounds like a stern father, like he means business.

Melissa, who is still of an age where a stern father means trouble, jumps.

“May looks fine. No more makeup.”

Melissa walks away without argument.

Carl leans in with his stale coffee breath, puts his lumpy hand on May’s shoulder and squeezes. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“’Cause if you need to take some time, we can just call it a day and pick up fresh next week. Show a rerun.”

May thinks about it for a moment, but shakes her head. And do what? she wants to ask Carl. Go home and face Sam? He probably knows she called. She probably told him. “I’m fine,” she tells Carl.

Carl squeezes her shoulder again, then lets go. “Show must go on, right?” He lifts his hand up, and for a second she thinks he’s going to hold it out for a high five. Thankfully, he just runs it through his thinning hair. “Soon as Mike gets back then, eh?”

“Sounds good,” May says. She crosses her legs and folds her hands neatly in her lap. She is wearing a yellow dress today, yellow with brown dots. She feels attractive, summery. Sam bought the dress for her last summer. It’s probably the only time he’s bought her a dress that she actually likes and fits well, both. He loves her in the dress, tells her every time she wears it. Wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her, May knows, if it weren’t for Margaret, whose name May didn’t know before now.

It worked well that way, not knowing her name. She was just a shady figure in the background of their lives, one it was easy to pretend away. Sam had been so much happier these past few months, and May didn’t have to deal with his constant groping. She could make dinner now, brush her teeth, without him coming up behind her and nestling his dry lips into her sensitive skin. She didn’t have to come up with excuses anymore—headache, backache, exhaustion, arthritis pains. On top of that, Sam had been extra giving in other ways, out of guilt, May assumes. A few times, she’d suspected he suspected that she knew, but she played dumb and he bought it, and he would buy her a ridiculously expensive bouquet of flowers afterwards, or take her to dinner at Chez Pierre.

But now, all of that is over. Now she’s heard the woman’s voice. Now she knows her name: Mahhhgaret. Everybody on crew knows it, too. Everybody knows that May knows. Sam probably already knows, and if he doesn’t, he’ll find out soon enough. Her blissful life of feigned ignorance is over. And she doesn’t know what to do.

Mike comes back from the bathroom, a sheepish grin on his face, probably for having taken so long, which he always does.

“Everyone ready?” Carl asks.

Mike readjusts the focus on the camera and gives a thumbs-up.

“May?”

May nods.

“Let’s see some teeth, hon.”

Fiction, Issue 4.2 Summer 2015

Emily Kiernan

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Emily Kiernan is the author of a novel, Great Divide (Unsolicited Press, 2014). She writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West, and places that aren’t the way she remembered them. Emily is a graduate of the MFA writing program at the California Institute of the Arts. Her short fiction has appeared in Pank, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, decomP, The Good Men Project, Dark Sky, Redivider, JMWW, and other journals. Her work has received mentions and awards from Unstuck Magazine, A Room of Her Own Foundation, Wigleaf Magazine, and others. She resides in Berkeley, California with her man and her dog.

 

Enola Gay

In the belly of the dark the bomb is dreaming. The bomb is dreaming about a woman in a brown dress. The bomb imagines her in fits and starts. It imagines her falling into rhythm with the fits and starts of the darkness that surrounds it, which is sometimes pierced with light. The darkness is jostled and pierced in a light rhythm. The jostling rolls the bomb lightly—but only lightly—against the mechanisms that hold it. As it rolls and jostles, the bomb imagines the woman in the brown dress singing out a little rhythm. She is singing out a little song, as if to soothe it, and it is soothed, rocking so very lightly in the mechanisms that hold it. The bomb does not know the woman who is singing, as it does not know anyone, least of all the men who built its mechanisms. The bomb does not know sorrow, but the look on the woman’s face is sorrow as she is singing, and the song is a sorrowful song about the little body that will not be soothed. The woman’s voice is rising and rising, never failing. In the woman’s face is sorrow about the men who built the mechanisms that hold her from her rising, and who built the unsoothable body she holds, unfailing. The bomb does not know that it is dreaming as it imagines rising up from the mechanisms. It knows the singing face of the woman, and where there were mechanisms there is a screaming, unsoothable body rising up and up and up. The bomb is rising up, and the woman’s face is looking up, away, and they are light and rising. In the jostling, rolling dark, they have never dreamt of falling.

Fiction, Issue 4.2 Summer 2015

Charlie Sterchi

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Charlie Sterchi is an MA candidate in creative writing at Auburn University. He serves as an assistant editor at the Southern Humanities Review and Fiction Editor at Kudzu House Quarterly.

The Running Dog

Grandpa’s on suicide watch, but I’m not allowed to watch him anymore. Not by myself. Not after the incident involving his Buick, a smashed retaining wall, and the manually disengaged passenger side airbag. Grandpa’s on suicide watch, and here I am in the bosom of his creaking home, in his bedroom, by his window that looks out over the hills stacked one on another like the layers of dung and rotten cabbage in a compost heap, watching him with his breathing tubes and the shudder of his breathing machine; his pills and his bag of piss and his skin like spent wax paper; the smell of diarrhea and applesauce and the smell of vintage tweed from the open closet. I am not alone, but with my sister who’s brought her cello down from Maryland to watch us both and to join in our perspiring. Decades of daily use and nightly disuse have rendered the air conditioning busted.

“Does that thing have a quiet setting?” I say.

My sister says, “The breathing machine? Don’t be stupid.”

My sister wipes her brow with one of grandpa’s monogrammed paisley hankies.

“Sister,” I say. “Fetch me a drink, won’t you?”

“And leave you alone with grandfather?” she says. “I don’t think so.”

I look out the window and watch the dog running circles in the yard.

Grandpa says, “Cathy always told me, ‘Take what you can get, Johnny.’ So, I took what I got and I made an ice-cream of it.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

My sister says, “Very good, Grandfather.”

“Grandpa, you’re unintelligible,” says I, “and, oh, how those pills make you slobber.”

I receive a merry wink from the old man.

*****

I go downstairs and pour my own drink. On the other side of the kitchen window, which is open, the dog still runs, his tongue dragging across the dirt where he’s trod and he’s trod again.

Grandpa used to take the dog and me hunting. We’d shoot doves from behind the mulberry bushes. Then the dog would disappear into the scratching of the marsh reeds. We’d listen to the fading bustle of the dog. Often, all traces of the dog would disappear into the fog. We’d wait without exchanging a word, without stomping our boots to keep out the cold of morning, and I would wonder how we’d find all of those dead doves if the dog never came back. The dog always came back. Its name is something like Sally-Go-Home-Lucky VII or Cyrus of Westover. I don’t remember.

I become aware of my sister’s cello sliding down the banister. It’s playing something from Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, which opens up the air in these halls. It breaks up the curtains of dust, sends a breeze through the structure, and I inhale as if with the assistance of a brand new, third lung. I rattle the ice against the walls of my glass in a counterclockwise motion because it amuses me to do so.

I watch the dog for a while and I wonder if the dog will ever die, or if instead the dog will continue running circles in the yard, dragging its tongue and sniffing around for dead doves beyond the time at which my grandfather joins the soil and manifests in the pears from the tree by his waiting grave, beyond the time at which I, too, manifest as a sheet of tears dropping from the same pear tree to rot or to be eaten by deer, beyond the time at which the pear tree dies, and the deer die, and the dove marsh and its doves become no more than a film of dust on the earth’s fallow crust, beyond the time at which all else – the strip malls and the golf courses, the Taj Mahal and the Little Ceasar’s Pizza on Chapman Highway, all else – has fallen to the great yellowing gyre of the sky. It strikes me as probable that even in the second scenario the dog, having borne the weight of perpetuity, will cease to lick the dirt and will in turn be licked by the dirt.

Fiction, Issue 4.2 Summer 2015

Rahad Abir

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Rahad AbirRahad Abir was born and bred in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is a fiction writer. His short stories have appeared in The Penmen Review, Aerodrome and Toad Suck Review. His wining short story ‘‘I am in London’’ is appearing in an anthology from England. He has worked as journalist, university teacher and interpreter. Currently he is working on his first novel.

 

Johnson Road

He knew it was simply unfair to go out on a date with his student’s mom. It involved risk too. But he said yes when she asked him. He was confused and fascinated and lost. The relationship was about three months of old, mostly talking and texting over the phone. Every evening he visited her home to tutor the second grade boy, and she hardly ever seemed to take any opportunity to talk to him then.

On an early somnolent afternoon in July, he waited by Curzon Hall gate of Dhaka University, and his roving eyes fell upon every rickshaw and CNG auto-rickshaw (little semi-taxi) that appeared at the gate. He endeavored not to notice the beggars—either elderly or kiddies—who only walked up to the passengers at the very moment they reached their hands for wallets or purses to pay fares so that it’d be psychologically embarrassing for them to refuse their request for alms.

She turned up around half an hour late. A leg, so light-skinned, and then another, slipped out of a CNG auto rickshaw, he watched. A small woman, wearing a black sari, approached him with short steps. Four eyes met for a moment. A smug smile came out of her crimson lips. He smiled her back.

The dating spot on his mind—Curzon Hall pond—by that mid-afternoon, got almost full of people sitting by the pond’s edge. Fortunately, an unoccupied concrete bench was found.

‘‘You look gorgeous,’’ he said.

She gazed into his eyes.

‘‘Well—’’ he looked at her—her hair, her black dress, which she had put on for him. His eyes tried to read hers—her beautiful light eyes, twenty-seven-year-old olive skinned face, full crimson lips. Shortly, a naughty grin appeared on her face.

He remembered the same grin over that face, when one evening the young pretty mommy of his pupil brought a tray of snacks in the middle of their The Very Hungry Caterpillar studies; but whilst leaving the tray she, unlike the other days, looked into his eyes and grinned, ‘‘Have a nibble.’’ There was something else in that look, the way she grinned—everything thrilled him.

Later that night he received a ‘‘you’re so handsome’’ text on his phone from an unknown number. The following night the same text buzzed, at the same time. He called the sender, however, no one answered. Weeks after, one late night his call was received. But the receiver was completely silent. His voice turned impatient, ‘‘I know it’s you, it must be you; if you like me why’re you scared of talking to me?’’ And, that night, she spoke.

Later, he would imagine that it was not him, it was her who killed him, and he would remember the same grinning face with disgust, and curse himself, in the last and long five minutes of his life. He was a soft sort of guy—sentimental.

‘‘Why not we take a rickshaw ride instead?’’ she said, holding his arm.

He glanced at her, rolling his eyes from the water striders in pond. Her hand was soft and warm and real. He figured that she wanted more intimacy. Shortly, as two bums squashed into a rickshaw, the warmth of her body ran through his, but her face didn’t glow, changed no color. She asked if he was uncomfortable being with her because he’d not held her hand yet. He blushed, grasped her hand straightaway, and in a moment as her breast erratically touched the back of his arm, he trembled. He trembled again, after the dark fell, being with her in a CNG auto rickshaw, on the way home. This time he put his arm around her waist. For the first time in his twenty-two-year life, he couldn’t resist the temptation to rub a woman’s naked fat little tummy and she couldn’t stop drawing her face to his, and finally the lustful lips met, carefully escaping the driver’s eyes.

Beyond this intimacy, beyond this heading for home, beyond this purposeless rickshaw riding he bought her green coconut juice from a street vendor. While nibbling Chinese nuts he talked about his Hindu upbringing, his old family house, and his ties with relatives living in Kolkata, India. Likewise, he learned from her that she made up a story to her mother-in-law about her whereabouts this afternoon. What’s more, he learned about her unhappy relationship with her husband, whom at the time was working in Dubai. Although not being a devout Muslim, he, during the early months of their marriage pressured her wear a burka which she refused. He also learned about her first-and-only unsuccessful love affair (here she chuckled since the second attempt was turning out to be wonderful) before getting married.

Another late afternoon, they met at British Council on Fuller Road. Unlike the first day, he hired a rickshaw to Elephant Road, where he’d arranged to have use of his friend’s flat for an hour. During the rickshaw ride, he held her hand. Though, his hesitant hand tried to be convinced that the age difference between them was not evident. His roving eyes searched for any familiar eyes on street. Somehow, later, his fear would come true when a pair of eyes would fall upon them on Johnson Road, just for a moment, without his knowledge.

They met in a small shared flat, under a naked hundred-watt Philips bulb. On a yellowing, tatty bed-sheet. This happened again. While, another day, her mother-in-law was picking her son from school.

Traffic was always crazy and awfully slow on Old Dhaka narrow streets. To get out of it, some drove wherever it was possible to drive—lest it was the pavement or the opposite wrong route—resulting in more traffic. Being stuck in English road traffic for twenty minutes in a CNG auto-rickshaw, while heading back home together in one evening, he worried because she was running late. Glancing around he then remembered that Dhaka’s largest brothel once operated a block away, set up by the British. During his school days, as he passed the brothel street one day, many strange-behaving and odd-looking women of different ages, standing by the outside doors, waved at him. Laughed at him. He was both charmed and unnerved.

The CNG auto-rickshaw reached near the Judge Court on Johnson Road. Here he should have left. She grasped his hand tightly. He looked into her eyes. She blushed, and laughed, and said, ‘‘I love you.’’ He shuddered. Her lips moved, saying something. He slowly walked down the street, not knowing that this happened to be their last and final meeting.

A little later, he walked into the apartment for the tuition. The living room’s light wasn’t turned on, and instead of the little boy, the grandma emerged. She looked cranky and her voice sounded hysterical. ‘‘He’s not feeling good tonight, we’ll call you when he gets better.’’

The very next day he got a call. ‘‘You bastard Hindu, son of a bitch.’’ The unknown voice began swearing all at once. Before he could swallow the bubble of shock and say anything, the unknown voice apparently tried to grab him over the phone and shred him to pieces. They found out everything, must have seen them last evening, he feared. He went cold. Forgot to breathe. Sweating like a pig.

He never contacted her. He changed his mobile number the day after. For three weeks he mostly stayed home, telling others that his finals were coming. He worried about her, wished she wouldn’t have been in big trouble.

The air began to get dry from mid-November and there was a whiff of winter. Looking through the only window from his tiny room, he thought of her. Thought of a pair of crimson lips.

Two months after, in one night at about nine thirty, his mother told him that someone came to see him, waiting in the stairway. His heart sank when he saw the boy, who was member of a so-called street gang.

‘‘I’ve an urgent need to talk with you, can you come outside for a moment?’’ the boy said.

He scanned the boy’s face in the dimness of plaster falling old yellowish walls, glanced over his left shoulder down the stairs. The main door of this two-storey building, over a hundred-and-fifty years old, remained open till eleven at night. Two ground floor rooms were rented to a book-binding factory.

‘‘What’s it about?’’ He asked, ‘‘Say here.’’

‘‘It’s private. Just come out for a minute, bro.’’

‘‘I got my finals, I’m busy.’’ And to his surprise he saw another boy climb the stairs. ‘‘OK—’’ he was about to close the door.

‘‘Bring him down,’’ a voice burst out, following the second boy.

The first boy grabbed his hand.

‘‘Leave him!’’ his mother screamed.

Momentarily, a small crowd gathered there. His mother, father and his younger sister managed to free him from their hands, obstructing the three guys from entering.

‘‘Do you want us to break into your house?’’ the man roared, ‘‘Bring him here now.’’

‘‘Tell me what happened,’’ the father repeatedly asked.

Crowds had already filled the stairway. ‘‘Your bloody son slept with a married Muslim woman,’’ someone blurted out, ‘‘Hand him over to us. We’ll figure this out’’

The news incited a sudden excitement in the crowd. He could feel this even shrinking into a corner of his room, locking the door well. Out there, there were overheated arguments, shouts, broken swearing at his father. The crowd threw bricks into their street-facing windows. Later, when everyone had left, he learned that they grabbed his old father. Slapped him. Ripped off his shirt. For a moment, a burning fire inside him wanted to take the big knife from kitchen and go after the scoundrels in the street.

But that night he neither opened his door nor went out nor went in front of his father. His mother cried. She swore at him sitting by his room’s door. Moaning how he put the whole family at risk. Why did God still keep her alive? To see all this disgrace? To see her husband beaten by young hooligans? If she knew this before, she’d have choked him to death when he was a little boy.

His best friend called and informed him that his student’s mom was in the hospital and fighting for life. She had become pregnant, taken drugs to abort the baby that resulted in nonstop bleeding. He also told him to stay safe. If possible to go into hiding somewhere for a few weeks.

It was not only about his safety, his father, and especially his sister should take care, too. Father in no way would agree on leaving the house vacant. The local commissioner had long been trying to evict them and grab the house. But above all, the reality was he had brought shame for his family. How could his father, an upright man, go out in the neighborhood now? Who’d want to marry his sister now? ‘‘Blood will have blood,’’ he shivered with fright. If he could, he’d have slipped away into a CNG auto-rickshaw by night and never be seen again.

With this thought, he jumped up out of his chair momentarily. He looked for something hurriedly in the closet. The second shelf from the top belonged to his sister. A long scarf came to his hand. His eyes watched the spinning ceiling fan. Spinning, round and round. Winter was not that intense in the old part of Dhaka. He made a loop at one end of the scarf. He turned off the fan and tied the other end around it. Then he wept.

He stood on the top of the bed head, facing the loop-end that waited for his neck to embrace. He took it. Now, just a little jump, and everything would be over. A bit of smile crossed his lips. How would her baby look if it had survived? He wished he’d have believed in God. ‘‘Please, let there be another world after death,’’ he said. He imagined his hanging body from the ceiling fan; still, calm like the serene morning light. The light had slipped through the window, and in the middle of the room he was hanging; hanging by a long scarf. He took a long breath, and glanced at the wall clock. Seven to two in the morning. He gasped as the big thinnest red hand neared the last minute. When it was ten seconds to two, he counted every move of the red hand. ‘‘Fifty one, fifty two, fifty three, fifty four, fifty five…’’

Issue 4.2 Summer 2015

Issue 4.2 Summer 2015

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

“Man on the Metro, Downtown LA” by Alexis Rhone Fancher

"Old Man Walking After Midnight, Downtown L.A" by Alexis Rhone Fancher.
“Old Man Walking After Midnight, Downtown LA” by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Sandra Meek. Portrait Pisac Peru
“Portrait Pisac, Peru” by Sandra Meek

Poetry: (Guest Edited by Jason Koo)

Madeleine Barnes | In Harmonium
Emily Blair | The Deadly Years
J. Scott Brownlee | Ascension
Falconhead | I Have Set My Face Like Flint or The Misanthrope Goes Into Town
Peter Cole Friedman | The Perfect Phospholipids
Julie Hart | Resting Bitch Face
Tim Kahl | Tasking the Guardian
Christine Kitano | Lesson: Chicken Soup
Debora Kuan| Teen Ghost
Justin Maki | Watch
Derek Mong | An Ordinary Evening in San Francisco
Laura Plaster | Candids
Erin Redfern | Photograph of a Drugged Giraffe
Chris Roberts | What ever happened to the compass?
Sokunthary Svay | At Least Prostitutes Bring Home Money
Ed Toney | The Baptist Growl

Fiction:

Rahad Abir | Johnson Road
Ashley Cowger | Public Access
Emily Kiernan | Enola Gay
Charlie Sterchi | The Running Dog

Nonfiction: (Guest Edited by Suzanne Cope)

Robert Boucheron | Snowmelt
Ruth Z. Deming | We Look Out Windows
Sarah Pascarella | Swimming Lessons
Laura Rankin | Natural Neighbors


Translations:

Guillaume Apollinaire | Sadness of a Star | **Rebekah Curry
Javier Etchevarren | Lungs | **Don Bogen
Agustín Lucas | General Flores without Flowers | **Jesse Lee
Kercheval Dimitra Kotoula | Case Study V (on Ethics) | **Maria Nazos


Book Reviews:

Lowell Levant | A Poet Drives a Truck: Poems by and about Lowell A. Levant | review by Thomas Dukes
Michele Battiste | Uprising | review by Kayla Haas

**Indicates Translators

Issue 4.1 Spring 2015

Issue 4.1 Spring 2015

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

"Station 14" Art by Jean Wolfe

“Station 14” Art by Jean Wolff

"Books and Dreams" Art by Jean Wolfe
“Books and Dreams” Art by Jean Wolff

 

Poetry:
(Guest Edited by Judy Juanita)

Eugene H. Davis | Howl No More
Arika Elizenberry | Red Summer, 1919
Bridget Gage-Dixon | Hew Paints Crickets
Gail Goepfert | Revivify *runner up in our 2014 short-ish poetry contest*
Karen Greenbaum-Maya | My Uncle the Perfectionist
Kamden Hilliard | Hong Kong, Summer
Lowell Jaeger | A Salesman’s Song
David Kann | The Language of the Farm *runner up in our 2014 long-ish poetry contest*
Issa M. Lewis | The Catacomb Saints
Joel Lewis | Looking For Soup
Noorulain Noor | Chronology of Evil Eye
Jennifer Raha | Perennial | Resupination
Maryann Russo | Joe Redota Trail
Eva Schlesinger | With You in Hildesheim
Benjamin Schmitt | We were radicals
Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong | Mother | A Day in British Hong Kong

Fiction:

Gordon Ball | The Breaking *runner up in our 2014 flash fiction contest
Marie Mayhugh | An Old Cowboy’s Dirge
Eliana Osborn | Turning Japanese

Nonfiction:

Caroline Allen | Little Woman
Sharon Goldberg | Let Us (Not) Pray
Grace Mattern | Granite
Lisa Romeo | Not Quite Meet-Cute

Translations:

Charles Baudelaire | The Clock | **Lola Haskins
Cyrille Fleischman | Monsieur Lekouved’s Revolt | **Lynn Palermo
Imanova Günel | Untitled | **Arturo Desimone
Marcel Lecomte | The Schoolmaster | Number | **K. A. Wisniewski

Book Reviews:

Robert Cooperman | Just Drive | review by Barry Marks
Justin Hamm | Lessons in Ruins | review by Karen J Weyant
Jamaal May | Hum | review by Susan Cohen

**Indicates Translators

"Sphene" Art by Jean Wolfe
“Sphere” Art by Jean Wolff

FlipBook

“Flipbook” Art by Jean Wolff

Issue 4.1 Spring 2015, Translations

Cyrille Fleischman

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Translator’s Note on Cyrille Fleischman’s Work:

I fell in love with Fleischman’s work the first time I read it, probably twenty years ago, while perusing short story collections for possible use in my undergraduate French courses. I loved his light touch, unpretentious style, and the humorous compassion with which he treats his characters, who exhibit human foibles which we have all experienced. For me, they also brought to life the Jewish Marais, a neighborhood in which I had lived while doing research in Paris. Individually, Fleischman’s stories seem at first anecdotal; then suddenly, with a twist of a phrase, they rise to embrace the universal. When read collectively, themes of being and identity and their fragility emerge. One of the reasons that “M. Lekouved’s Revolt” appeals is that it is such a joyful affirmation of being. A great challenge in translating Fleischman’s work into English is maintaining the delicate humor, tenderness, and subtle depth; in other words not letting his stories become merely comic in translation.

 

Cyrille Fleischman (author) was born on February 3, 1941, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, home to a large community of Ashkenazi Jews. Fleischman studied law, but while practicing, began writing short stories portraying Yiddish characters of the Marais in the 1950s. He published his first collection of short stories in 1987, but is best known for the three volumes centered on the neighborhood of the Saint-Paul metro station. The focus of his thirteen short story collections, like their author, would always remain in the Marais. Fleischman has been compared to Isaac Bashevis Singer, even Marc Chagall for his portrayal of Yiddish culture in the Marais. In 1995, he was awarded a Prix d’Académie by the French Academy, and in 2002, the Max Cukierman award for the promotion of Yiddish language and culture. He died in 2010 after a long illness.

 

Lynn Palermo (translator) is an associate professor of French at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. She has published the translation of another story by Cyrille Fleischman in World Literature Today (Sept/Oct 2010), as well as academic translations. She recently translated four academic essays for a special issue of Dada & Surrealism focusing on the Romanian surrealist movement (to appear in 2015). She is collaborating on a translation of one of Fleischman’s short story collections, while working solo on a novel by a contemporary French author and short stories by other writers of the Francophone world. Her research focuses on the literature, art, decorative arts, world’s fairs and cultural politics of period between the World Wars.

 

Monsieur Lekouved’s Revolt

Alexander Lekouved gave a big, friendly wave, as the waitress deposited two slices of meat on his plate, next to the mashed potatoes.

-Who are you saying hello to? asked the waitress, looking around, Nobody’s here yet at this hour.

-I’m greeting this veal roast! I think it’s the same one as yesterday. And the day before. Maybe even last month. I feel like we’re old friends by now.

The waitress shrugged and went back to the kitchen.

Alexander Lekouved had been taking all his meals at this restaurant since becoming a widower. He always arrived around eleven-thirty, a habit that predated his retirement, when he used to eat lunch at home before traveling out to a suburb to tutor students in philosophy—students who had failed the high school graduation exam. And despite maintaining a friendly rapport with this waitress for weeks, he had just become her enemy. He acknowledged this without regret.

The waitress brought him the next course—fruit compote—which she practically threw onto the table, and before he could order coffee, she had already scribbled his bill on the paper tablecloth. He had barely paid before she cleared the table, tossing the paper tablecloth into a big wastebasket over near the counter. When he left, she did not say au revoir.

The weather was lovely. Monsieur Lekouved slipped a hand into his vest pocket to check his watch. Still not yet noon and the whole day stretched before him with nothing to do. He breathed deeply in the breeze and decided to cross the street to a café with sidewalk terrace.

He would take his coffee there.

He chose a table, sat down, and stretched out his legs. A waiter hurried over to him. Since he was only ordering coffee, could monsieur please take a seat inside the restaurant? At this hour, the terrace was reserved for customers ordering a meal.

The waiter looked like one of Monsieur Lekouved’s former students, the type who repeated the last year of high school several times without ever graduating. Lekouved tilted his head back to take a better look at him.

-Are you telling me that I have to sit inside when I prefer to have my coffee out here, on the terrace?

-Oui, said the waiter, growing annoyed and snapping the white cloth on his shoulder toward the front door, Inside!

Lekouved raised his hand for quiet.

-Tell the owner that I’d like to speak to him.

-Perhaps we should put our policy in writing, and have it stamped and notarized for you, snorted the waiter. I’m telling you, the tables on the terrace are reserved for people having a meal.

-That’s the problem. I’ve already eaten. Across the street. So, just bring me a cup of coffee.

-I said, no! Now move! The waiter was downright aggressive.

Alexander Lekouved did, indeed, move. He rose to his feet and grabbed the waiter’s right ear. Slowly, calmly, he twisted it until the waiter tore himself from his grip. Then Monsieur Lekouved sat back down.

-Bring me a coffee, please!

People passing on the sidewalk had stopped to stare. The waiter rubbed his ear, stammering, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it…”

Lekouved insisted gently, “A coffee, if you please.” Then roared, “Bring me a coffee, or else I’ll take care of your other ear, too, the one that’s so big you could blow your nose on it!”

The waiter was thunderstruck. He retreated into the café to tell everyone sitting at the counter. Five minutes later, the owner himself strode toward Lekouved, a cup of coffee in hand, which he set on the table in front of him.

-You had no right to…

-Yes, I certainly did have the right to! interrupted Lekouved. Don’t you know the stipulations of the paragraph of the statute of the municipal law governing the sale of coffee on café terraces?

The owner argued no further. This pain-in-the-neck might have connections down at city hall. He just shrugged.

The people who had been watching the scene, wandered off. Lekouved drank his coffee, glanced at the cash register receipt left by the owner, and left a few coins on the table.

He felt good. He even had a revelation: it felt good to rebel!

He stood up, did a few calisthenics to get his blood circulating and, since this was a day of revolt, decided to go visit his brother-in-law who owned a clothing shop not far away. Three years earlier, his wife’s brother had borrowed two candlesticks that he had never returned. Alexander hadn’t needed them since his wife died. He no longer hosted family reunions at the holidays, but still, that was no reason…

He walked slowly, deep in thought, but before he knew it, he was standing in front of his brother-in-law’s shop. Which made him think maybe he should spruce up his wardrobe. Upon entering the shop, the first words that flew out of his mouth were, “I stopped by to say hello and buy a few shirts. At the same time, you can give me back those candlesticks you never returned.”

The brother-in-law, who had smiled upon seeing him, stiffened.

-What candlesticks?

-The two candlesticks that you borrowed from your sister, three years ago when she was still alive.

His brother-in-law laid his hand on Alexander’s shoulder.

-You mean the candlesticks that your wife had inherited from my mother?

-Of course! I’m not talking about chandeliers from the Opera House!

The brother-in-law frowned. “Forget it. They’re a memory of my sister.” He changed the subject. “What kind of shirts are you looking for? Solids? Stripes?”

-I’m not sure if I understood you correctly, interrupted Lekouved. Are you saying that you are not going to return my candlesticks?

Without even waiting for an answer, Lekouved went behind the counter, glanced up and down the rows of shirts organized by size, and calmly removed ten white shirts, size 39, and ten fancy vests. Whatever he could reach. Alexander Lekouved put the ten shirts and ten vests into two large plastic bags from a stack on the counter and walked out of the shop. His brother-in-law, at first spellbound, chased after him out to the sidewalk.

-Where are you going with those? You’ve got a fortune in clothes there, not even counting the shirts!

Alexander Lekouved stopped, his two plastic bags dangling. “When you return my candlesticks, then maybe I’ll return the vests. But I’m keeping the shirts!”

Lekouved left his dumbstruck brother-in-law standing on the sidewalk. Happiness welled up inside him. As he walked away, several people nodded to him. Acquaintances, probably, he wasn’t sure. He had done so much for this neighborhood! Rendered service to so many people! Before becoming a teacher in the suburbs, he’d worked in one or two private schools not far from here, he’d acted as secretary to a politician in the arrondissement, he’d been copy editor at a Yiddish publishing house. He’d…he’d… above all, he’d been polite and affable. Yet, in none of those capacities had he felt as much satisfaction as he did today.

With his two plastic sacks full of clothes, Alexander Lekouved strolled along, humming under his breath. He wasn’t far from home, now. He raised his eyes to the blue sky. For a moment, he was tempted to give thanks. But at his age, one no longer bothered to thank the heavens for so little. He continued down the sidewalk in the sun, a little spring in his step. At seventy-two years of age, Alexander Lekouved, retired school teacher, honorable but not honored, belated but enthusiastic rebel, felt that at last he was going to start having fun.

Fiction, Issue 4.1 Spring 2015

Eliana Osborn

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Eliana Osborn is a mother of two, wife of one, who works part-time as an English professor at Arizona Western College. She is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has been featured in Blood and Thunder, Dash, Segullah, and many other journals. She has commercial work in venues including the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and many others. She’s at work on her first novel about the Chinese-Mexican population on the US-Mexico border.

 

Turning Japanese

When his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness she gave up her Buddhism, then everything about being Japanese. There were no more chopsticks in the house; macaroni in a blue box instead of soft formed squares of udon. Pictures of a blonde Jesus instead of an ancestral shrine. They wore shoes inside, sat on straight backed chairs at the dinner table.

He was forbidden from saying gaijin, even if it was true. By the time he left for college his middle name, Mori, was just an oddity from the past. His mother had dropped it and went by Kathy Morris.

His father was dead, his mother a math professor. He was stranded with straight black hair, student loans, and a neighbor who wanted him to join the Asian American Student Association. He made up excuses but she kept dropping by.

“This is how you network Nolan. You meet some people, spend time with them, then when you’re looking for a job after grad school you have connections. You can’t trust outsiders with your future—in AASA the alumni look out for us.”

The next week she brought some Japanese girls with her. One was short and round with bangs cut too short, leaving an inch of forehead above her glasses. Another was shorter still and wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.

Nolan raised his eyebrows, wondering how this group of three awkward Asians could possibly be the best and brightest, the thing that kept America running ahead of the rest of the world.

Mickey Mouse giggled when he said ohaiyo but wouldn’t explain why. Bad Bangs stuck out her hand formally and gave a surprisingly strong shake.

“Melissa Kazuko, glad to meet you.” She nodded and stood back at attention waiting for the interview to begin.

“So why don’t you want to join the association? I don’t get it.” Melissa stared right at him. He tried to keep her gaze but finally looked away and made busy work adjusting the band of his watch.

“No-lan,” his neighbor began in that disturbing southern drawl, “we need you. The dances are so bad right now, you don’t even know. Everyone told me college would be different, that boys wouldn’t be scared of smart girls. But there’s five times the number of girls as boys among us Asians. I had to dance with some Hmong guy for every slow song at homecoming. All he could talk about was his parents on some boat. Hello? This is supposed to be romantic?”

He considered what it would be like to date an Asian girl for once. Or even better, to be in a club with desperate women.

“I’ll do it.”

There was a stunned silence then Mickey Mouse giggled and covered her mouth. The neighbor smiled broadly while Melissa simply nodded her head, turned, and walked away.

Nolan felt a twinge in his groin and wondered if maybe he liked girls with bangs. He’d have to pay closer attention now that he had options.

Fiction, Issue 4.1 Spring 2015

Marie Mayhugh

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MMayhughMarie Mayhugh is a writer and poet. She received a BA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is an intern a BkMk Press in Kansas City. She is also a writing tutor at Longview Community College in Kansas City where she engages students with her love for the written word.

 

 

An Old Cowboy’s Dirge

Weston and his grandpa with dirty suede skin sat at the DMV. Weston’s eyes darted between his phone and the Now Serving digital system. The clerk behind the counter consistently announced the numbers over the speakerphone.

The old man leaned close to his grandson, who thumbed his phone.
You don’t need no license, the old man said. I got you a quarter horse.
I don’t have a quarter, Weston replied.
His sire’s New Ash.
I told you, I don’t have cash.
Name’s Blue Okie.
Okay.

The old man removed his hat and poked his grandson with its rim.
Say, you know I can pull my own teeth out, the old man said.
Please don’t, Weston said. He tucked his phone inside his right denim pocket.
Got your attention, the old man said. He snickered and patted Weston on the shoulder.
Weston slid his chair over.
It takes guts for a man to lose his teeth, the old man said, but more courage to wear falsies.

Weston hunched and rested his elbows on his knees. The old man put a cigarette between his lips and patted his fringe-leather jacket for his lighter. The clerk behind the counter called on him to notice the No Smoking sign. He sighed, crumpled the cigarette, and put its remnants in his pocket.

I thought you’d want to be a rugged man like me, the old man said. He lolled in his chair and spread his arms, an eagle’s wingspan, resting each arm on top of seat backs on either side. His shaved head flinched as it rolled back against the icy window.

Outside, a Dodge pickup, with the word Ranger branded on its side, parked. Two officers hurdled out of the truck and strolled into the DMV.

They ain’t Rangers, the old man boasted.
Weston shook his head. You don’t know what you’re talking about, he said.

Sure I do. That’s a truck, the old man said. Those men hold their steering wheel at the ten and two O’clock. Real rangers ride saddleback and steer their horse with reins. They keep fists parallel and thumbs near for best rein control, similar to the way you hold your phone some of the time.

Weston glimpsed at the old man.

If you knew anything about your great-great-granddaddy, the old man said, you’d know he was a real cowboy. Cowboys keep both reins in their lead hand that rests on their lap, but their other hand remains free.

Weston reclined back, pulled his denim jacket’s collar up, and slid his hands inside his pockets. But the old man was just getting warmed up.

You can’t lasso your target or fire your Colt from a car, the old man said, both hands have to be on the wheel. He moaned as if he begun a wail. It takes a man to ride a saddle. Cowboys knew their range and how to ramble the land. Show me any place on a map, and I’ll tell you how many strokes it’ll take to get there. Cowboys don’t need no GP, or whatever you call it, to find your way. We went solo.

That’s GPS, Weston said.

No GPS for me, the old man said, but maybe a girl pretty on her saddle.

Weston sighed. He flicked his floppy hair over his eyes. The clerk behind the counter called number twenty-six.

Maybe, if you walked like me, the old man said, you’d have hard soles. He pointed at his own right thumb. You see there, that’s a nice clean thumb from hitching rides cross-country. He rested his left foot on his right knee and began to tug at his boot. I’ll show you my feet, they’re blistered from travel.

Please don’t, Weston said. He drew his right hand out of his pocket with his phone, and began to single handedly tap it.

The old man fingered at his grandson’s phone. You see there, the old man said, you’re holding your phone in your lead hand, but your other hand remains in your left pocket. It ain’t free.

Weston didn’t respond, but checked the digital number on the board. Only a few people in the waiting area read or remained quiet.

Who you calling? The old man said.
I’m texting, Weston said.
Okay, who?
Rose.
Is she pretty like one?

Weston shrugged.

Hey, did you ever hear from your brother?
Yeah.
Well, how’s he getting along in Florida?
Fine. Weston sighed.
I hear he’s got himself a Lassie from Tallahassee. The old man chuckled.

Weston shrugged.

The old man leaned back in his chair. He put on his hat, lowered its rim, and said, You want to be alone, but you’re just like your own. He slipped his hands inside his pockets.

Fiction, Issue 4.1 Spring 2015

Gordon Ball

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Gordon Ball’s story is from a volume of short fiction, On Tokyo’s Edge: Gaijin Tales from Postwar Japan. He lives and teaches in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

 

The Breaking

It was Tokyo l950, before the end of the American Occupation. In the parents’ bedroom closet stood a Russian submachine gun, in the father’s dresser lay an unfirable German Luger, trigger melded into housing. Five hundred miles away raged the Korean War, the source, through multiple hands, of the Soviet weapon.

The boy had seen Russians once or twice from afar in the hotel across the street from his father’s office building. They were always men, and though in coats and ties and overcoats-even “western” hotel lobbies were cold-they seemed rougher, gruffer than other grownups: Americans of commerce and finance; French and Germans and British of many years’ experience in Eastern trade; wiseacre tieless young journalists just arrived from the States or Singapore or London; self-effacing Japanese in brisk, herring bone double breasted business suits who worked with-for-his father. “They are Russians,” someone would say. Their faces, with their heavy eyebrows, looked vaguely asiatic, like his father’s.

Sometimes after school the boy would play by himself at home, ten miles from Tokyo’s hotel and business center, in the shadowy side yard bordering their white stucco French colonial house. There, crepe myrtle trees and aucuba bushes abounded, making for his small frame a forest to stalk in. With his toy rifle he’d hunt enemy soldiers-the enemies being American-through the bushes and trees, and around the small tool shed adjoining them at one end. The Russians were not involved, but it excited him to imagine himself a Chinese Communist, calves wrapped in layer upon layer of cloth leggings as he’d seen in photographs.

At the same time, he’d draw pictures of American war heroes, celebrating their exploits and the numbers of Chinese and North Koreans they’d killed in a single encounter. He’d get this information daily on Armed Forces Radio. “Why don’t you draw something constructive?” his older brother, serious with horn-rimmed glasses, asked as he looked at the boy’s drawings.

The boy didn’t know the meaning of “constructive” nor of the shadows of branches he’d see on his pale wall at night, but the patterns frightened him. He was even more frightened one evening when he heard loud voices from his mother and father’s room, where Luger and machine-gun were stored. He didn’t know if the machine-gun had bullets but it was so heavy he couldn’t imagine anyone using such a thing-yet he knew they did every day in Korea.

“I’d rather be strangled than kept here,” he heard his mother wail at his father one evening. “I want to go back to Marietta!” Their door was open, but he was afraid to draw close. It was dark and the only light was broken by bony configurations of branches on the wall.

The next day two friends of his parents, Major Grimes and Mrs. Grimes, came to visit. She was carrot-haired and he had big ears that stuck out from the sides of his head, reminding the boy of Sad Sack in the stateside funnies they’d be able to get every once in a while.

Major Grimes and his wife lived in the U.S. Army compound at Pershing Heights. They brought him a gift for his birthday, a khaki U.S. Army overseas cap and various gold and blue and white insignia. “Where are you from, young man?” the Major asked.

“The world,” the boy responded.

“What do you like to eat?”

“Food,” he answered.

He behaved like that for several minutes before leaving the room, then after the guests were gone he overheard mother and father talking there, in the space between the white mantle and the large brown metallic gas stove from whose dusty white porcelain teeth blue flames flared. It was near the very spot where he’d lain on the carpet some evenings, staring at the pictures in a strange, large, heavy and musty book by a man named Hogarth. He’d taken it from the glass bookcase, and as he looked he’d wondered if those people with their intestines falling out were real. “I think he needs a spanking,” he heard his mother say.

The next day was Saturday and there was no school. The squat little tool shed that bordered the shadowy place with the acuba bushes and crepe myrtles had a sliding door with windows of translucent glass about a foot square. Inside were various old tools and contraptions he’d rummaged through before; this morning he slid open the door and took one of them, a small short-handled dusty axe with a dented blade. Then he slid the door closed and broke every window on it, and every window to its left and to its right. “I know this is wrong,” he said to himself, with every stroke.

Issue 3.6 Fall 2014

Issue 3.6 Fall 2014

Theme Issue: Far From The Maddening Crowd

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

Schoolbus
“Schoolbus” Art by Holly Burnside

Seattle 2
“Seattle 2” Art by Angel Lacanfora

Cases
“Cases” Art by Angel Lacanfora

Poetry:

Paul David Adkins | Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan Experience a Night Thunderstorm while Stranded on Nikumaroro Island
Aaron Bauer | Unnamed Woman—State Hospital, Michigan
Francesca Bell | Burdens
Susan Cohen | We Bones That Are Here | Reading Fernando Pessoa in Portugal
Donelle Dreese | Sophrosyne | The Surrender Tree
Anthony Frame | When Rain isn’t Rain
Karen George | Alaskan Cruise Haibun
Kathryn Gessner | Cargo
Tom Holmes | At L’Estaque
Lori Lamothe | Intersection with Edward Hopper | Greylock
Sandra Marchetti | Swing | The Language of Ice
Jean Nordhaus | A Jew Returns to Cairo
Michael Spring | Ghazel for Music | Bear Totem
Maranda Stewart | For Birds

Fiction:

Katherine Bell | The Sulphur Sink
Kevin Finnerty | Rachelle Hates Wearing Clothes

Nonfiction:

Marlena Maduro Baraf | La Misa
Therése Halscheid | Into the Iceberg
Anne Liu Kellor | Sky Burial
Linda Saslow | The Shiksa Sisterhood

Translations:

Rivka Basman Ben-Haim | Doves Speak Yiddish | **Zelda Kahan Newman
Yves Bonnefoy | He Is Leaving | **Susanna Lang
Hafez | Ghazal 6 | **Roger Sedarat
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi | Untitled | **Roger Sedarat
Avrom Sutzkever | From Diary Poems | **Zackary Sholem Berger
Carmen Vascones | How lonely love remains | **Alexis Levitin

Book Reviews:

Helène Aylon | Whatever is Contained Must be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist | review by Lenore Weiss
Tarfia Faizullah | Seam | Paul David Adkins
Sue William Silverman | The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as A White Anglo-Saxon Jew | review by Kelly O’Toole

**Indicates Translators

Issue 3.4 Summer 2014

Issue 3.4 Summer 2014

Click on a title to read an author’s work(s) and bio. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page and on Twitter using #BlueLyra. Also, consider leaving a comment for everyone to read.

"Think" Art by Tommy Ingberg
“Think” Art by Tommy Ingberg

"Passage" Art by Tommy Ingberg
“Passage” Art by Tommy Ingberg

"Hollow" Art by Tommy Ingberg
“Hollow” Art by Tommy Ingberg

Poetry:

Isaac Black | Hiroshima
Charlie Bondhus | Jeffrey Dahmer Talks to His Father
Bill Brown | Ladders
Ruth Foley | Benthos | Consolation
Risa Denenberg | Tisha B’av
Anthony Frame | Everything I Know I Learned from Kermit the Frog
Denise Low | Garden of William Burroughs | Crop Duster Plane
Cindy Hunter Morgan | Columbia, 1859
Elisabeth Murawski | The Birthday Party
Jean Nordhaus | On the Road to Qumran
Lee Slonimsky | Pythagoras’s Bees | Mid-Autumn Languages of Trees
Cheryl Snell | Reinventing the Wheel

Fiction:

Migara de Silva | Of Fences-
Mike Koenig | The Lost Ones
Robert Joe Stout | A Big and Wonderful Now
Leslie Santikian | An Old Fashioned Voice

Nonfiction:

Kurt Caswell | Haboob
Sigrid Erro | Bones
Danusha Goska | Star Tattoo
J.W. Young | Big Dumb Baby

Translations:

Katrine Marie Guldager | The Car Accident | **Lindy Falk van Rooyen
Fernando Valverde | Snow Covered Landscape | ** Liam Walke

Spotlight on an Artist:

Richard Tuschman

Book Reviews:

Christopher Lowe | When You’re Down By The River | review by B. Kari Moore
Jake Marmer | Jazz Talmud | review by Shlomo Liberman
Jake Adam York | Abide | review by Simon Seamount

**Indicates translators

Issue 3.4 Summer 2014, Translations

Katrine Marie Guldager

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Translator’s Note on Katrine Marie Guldager’s Work:

As an innate writer of poetry, Guldager’s prose fiction has a strong lyrical resonance of immense depth, while still retaining a simplicity and clarity that is characteristic of Danish fiction. In her autobiography Lysgrænsen [The Border of Light] (Gyldendal, 2007), Guldager writes that she was torn between becoming a psychoanalyst or an author, but during one of her many travels to Africa, which has had a strong influence on her poetic imagination, she realised that her fascination with the intricacies of family ties is best expressed in the language of literature.

Guldager’s short story, “Trafikulykke” [The Car Accident], is from her second collection of short stories, Kilimanjaro (Gyldendal, 2005). In an interview in the magazine Udvikling [Development] 1 Febr./Mar. 2013 about her writing and the significance of her three years in Zambia as a child, she remarks:

“We know very well that we cannot save the world. We turn off the TV, because we cannot bear to see the pain and suffering we see there. But how often can we continue to do this, without losing something of our own humanity? There is no definitive answer to this question, but this is the conflict I write about [in Kilimanjaro].”

All eleven stories in Kilimanjaro are independent, and set in Copenhagen and the capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, yet they are connected by a subtle intertextuality in order to demonstrate the fragility of the arbitrary connections between our lives.

 

Katrine Marie GuldaKatrine Marie Guldager, born in Hillerød north of Copenhagen in 1966, is one of Denmark’s most acclaimed authors, and has published several collections of poetry, short stories, children’s books and novels since the appearance of her poetic debut, Dagene Skifter hænder (The Days Change Hands), in 1994. She is a graduate of the renowned Writer’s School in Copenhagen and holds an Masters of Philosophy from Copenhagen University. Her works have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, and German. Her first collection of short stories, København (Gyldendal, 2004) [Copenhagen, BookThug, Toronto] was published in English in 2011.

She is currently writing a family chronicle stretching from the Second World War to 2012-about a fictional family living in suburban Copenhagen. The first three volumes, Ulven [The Wolf] (2010), Lille Hjerte [Little Heart] (2012), and Den Nye Tid [New Times] (2013) have been published by Lindhardt & Ringhof (Egmont), Copenhagen, and the fourth volume Peter’s Død [Peter’s Death], is forthcoming in 2014.

Van RooyenLindy Falk van Rooyen (translator) was born into a multi-lingual family (Danish/English/Afrikaans) in South Africa. She studied Law at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and worked as an attorney in Cape Town until she emigrated to Copenhagen in 1998. After living and working in Denmark as a commercial translator and legal liaison for four and a half years, she moved to Hamburg, Germany in 2002. She holds an LL.M in Commercial Law and an MA in Scandinavian and English Literature from the University of Hamburg. Her book on Virginia Woolf’s fiction, Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf’s parodic approach to the art of fiction in ‘Jacob’s Room’ (Diplomica, 2011) is an adaptation of her MA thesis. She is a freelance writer and has been working as a literary translator since 2012.

 

The Car Accident

If Kilimanjaro is Africa’s roof, then Dar es Salaam is its damp, teeming floor. A man and a woman drive past Ubungo and down into Dar es Salaam via Morogoro Road. There is a teeming crowd on the streets and a throng of boys who are trying to sell everything from ragdolls to automobile equipment. It is hot. The man and woman drive down United Nations Road and cross over Selander Bridge. The woman casts a wistful glance over the Indian Ocean that is lying in waiting like a serene queen. They stop on Haile Selassie, and the woman buys some flowers; the boy selling them has some difficulty in hiding his surprise. He hands over her change without looking up.

The man turns the car onto Haile Selassie. He is looking forward to getting home, feels the wind in his hair. He is driving too fast. At the junction of Haile Selassie and Chloe Road there are always a lot of people: people, who stop and shop; drivers, who stop and wait. The man is still driving too fast, and he doesn’t notice a woman about to cross the road approximately fifty meters farther ahead. The woman is carrying a little bundle in her arms. A bundle, which may very well be a child, but the man is oblivious.

The man breaks as hard as he can. The car swerves and very nearly rams into several other cars. People grab onto their neighbors, and jump for their lives. But the damage is done: The little bundle which the woman had been carrying has rolled under the car. People close in, people gather round the car; engulf it. Two men emerge from the mass. They talk to the man in Swahili, wave their arms in the air, and fish the bloodied bundle out from underneath the car. Now people emerge from everywhere. They swarm around the car from all sides, rest their hands on the hood; their eyes scour the car’s interior.

One woman cries out that the child has been killed, and the cry is planted from one mouth to another like an echo. The crowd isn’t agitated, yet. The man gets out of the car and walks over to the child with the intention to take responsibility for his actions. The question of money had just entered his mind, when his path is barred by the woman who had initiated the cry. She looks at him with eyes that seem to say: you’ve done enough harm already. The man wants to go over to the child, wants to see the woman who had held it in her arms. But the crowd won’t allow the guilty party to meet the victim; on the contrary, the victim is cordoned off.

Without knowing what prompts his sudden unease, he realizes that the mood is about to change, and he casts his eyes downwards; he doesn’t turn his back, but retreats to the car. The woman is still sitting inside. The further he retreats, the greater the crowd’s animosity. The man is like a foreign object that must be expelled from the body.

The man gets into the car, slams the door, and thinks that, perhaps, under the circumstances, it is best to drive home and call the police. The woman doesn’t say anything­–she is too shaken to say anything­–she has lost her power of reason. She doesn’t know what they should do. She just says:

“Drive!”

*****

They drive back to their home, hoot at the port, and leave the car standing with doors open wide. They discuss what should be done. Their maidservant is home, but they don’t notice she’s there. They cannot agree. The man wants to call the police and explain what has happened­–tell things the way they are­–but the woman is more cautious. Perhaps it’s the shock. Perhaps it’s best not to do anything: They must think about the consequences. The man cannot understand why she won’t take responsibility for their actions. They were, after all, driving too fast, way too fast. He should have seen them. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. The man is overwhelmed by emotion; he feels a lump rising in his throat. Was it really a child wrapped in the bundle? How can he live without knowing the truth?

The woman doesn’t say anything, and, in the interval she doesn’t speak, the man decides to call the police and lay all his cards on the table. He would like to explain that he had tried to help the injured party. He would have liked to drive the injured child to the hospital, but the crowd was so agitated that they wouldn’t let him anywhere near. He imagines explaining everything to a friendly policeman, but, before his call is answered, he puts the receiver down: His wife is right. If you involve the police, there’s no telling what the consequences would be.

*****

It is the woman who suggests that she drive her own car back to the scene of the accident. She will try to find the woman with the child, ask her what she needs and offer compensation. Surely the sight of the man would merely give rise to hostility, but if it were the woman who tried to help? This would be best for all parties concerned. Perhaps they could call the police afterwards. First and foremost they should concentrate on finding the woman; find out what happened to the child.

The junction at Haile Selassie and Chloe Road exudes peace and quiet. The shopkeepers are standing in the doors of their shops and looking out onto the streets in anticipation of a good deal. Cars stop; people pile out of them and buy fruit. There is no hint of the accident that took place less than an hour ago. The sea is calm; the waves have flattened themselves out. The woman parks the car next to the taxi stand and walks down Haile Selassie to the place where the woman had sat with the bloodied bundle. Not a trace. She looks into the shopkeepers’ faces, tries to discern whether they recognize her, but the shopkeepers’ eyes mirror neither a white woman, nor a car accident. Confused, she walks over to the other side of Haile Selassie. Can that be? Is it really possible that a child can die here, at this junction­– less than an hour ago­–and every discernible trace of it is gone? The woman observes the shopkeepers who are stacking bananas, oranges, and coconuts in bags; she sees white people fishing in their bags for money; she sees tired drivers flipping open the daily papers. Life goes on as before.

The woman drives home to the man, hoots in front of the port, and drives into the carport. Before she gets out of the car, she glides her head into the nape of her neck, allows it to hang suspended there; she closes her eyes to ward off the incredulous sense of irreality. This morning, they had woken up peacefully in a hotel in Ruaha, tired from the Safari they had joined at dawn. Now everything had changed; now, they were the kind of folk who hit and ran. The woman goes into the house and explains to the man that everything was utterly peaceful on Haile Selassie. It seems as if everything was just an evil dream. The maidservant is listening from the kitchen. She can hear what the man and women are talking about, but she doesn’t dream of interfering. She doesn’t consider what would be the right thing to do at all. Even so, she feels a rising sense of disquiet. What if the man and woman don’t go to the police? Perhaps she should go to the junction and make some enquiries. Perhaps­ after the working day is done.

Fiction, Issue 3.4 Summer 2014

Leslie Santikian

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Leslie Santikan photoLeslie Santikian has an MFA in fiction from CSU, Fresno. Her work has appeared in the Santa Clara Review and San Joaquin Review. She lives in Fresno, where she teaches college composition and rhetoric and fiction in CSU, Fresno and Fresno City College.

 

 

An Old Fashioned Voice

I perform in a lounge in the Central Coast every Wednesday and weekend, a place constructed of wall-length windows that make it look like a transparent, breakable jewel box. Right now, I forget the words to a song. It’s old, from the 60s, and involves drinking brandy in the morning. I knew the words an hour ago. I rub a finger along the edge of Mike’s piano, and to make things extra hard on myself, try to remember what the brandy represents in the song—heartache? A way to stop sadness? I know the words to most songs by now, since my profession, last time I checked, is “singer.” I adjust the mike.

Outside these windows, the ocean churns, choked by clumps of seaweed and bright streaks of foam. If I look to the right, past eucalyptus and fragrant red dirt, I see the smoke that curls from the chimneys of the lounge’s adjoining hotel, the Highwoods Inn, where each room has a fireplace and logs to burn. A lot of couples honeymoon here. When I think about that, it reminds me that forgetting the words to a song isn’t the worse thing I could do. I could be married and stuck in a bedroom with someone when I really want to be alone.

Tonight, I’m not drunk, despite the fact that it’s Saturday and I’m sometimes drunk on Saturdays. Alcohol hasn’t yet sunk in, its sharp, clean scent wafting from my skin like an invisible fence, like a warning, similar to the way skunks use their smell to scare away predators. In other words, I look better than usual tonight. My hair, combed then curled with an iron, looks good. My dress with its strips of emerald fabric and sequins—a torn mermaid look—was like this when I bought it. Despite what Louis, the manager of the hotel and my boss, may think, I didn’t tear my dress while in a boozy rage before coming to work like I did with that white dress I loved last summer.

The smeared lipstick, though, is newer for me. It happened a few minutes ago, when I was making out in a bathroom stall with Jeff, a waiter seventeen years younger than my 41. We make out a lot: in the bathroom, in the kitchen when the cooks go home and turn off the lights. He plays the drums in a band and calls himself a musician, though I think he still has some growing to do. Jeff’s one of the few things in my life that’s both easy to start and easy to end. We made out for half an hour tonight, and then I walked out here, ready to “perform.” Ready to be on. I need a drink.

Mike catches me staring at the piano.

“About ready, Gabby?” he says, his voice amused. It tells me I don’t have a choice in my answer. His eyes are gentle, though. He’s always been good to me, Mike.

He’s been my piano player for a few years. We’ve been together so long—Gabby and Mike—that I know he checks his reflection in the mirror and smoothes his hair, still dark and thick despite his middle-aged years, before every performance. I like having him around because he doesn’t comment on my life, and talks music with me. A father figure, you could say, since my dad left and mom is dead. She’s been dead 10 months ago today. Pancreatic cancer. I remember the last time I held her hand in the hospice. It was as if her bones were strung together with air instead of skin, hollow like a bird’s.

“Yeah, I’m ready.” I do a little flourish with my hand, as if I were saying “ta-da” in a magic show. “Warm up the keys.”

Mike laughs. “Sure, kid.” He knows I’m good, even if I can’t remember the brandy song words right now. I’m a soprano, know all the good big band songs old people, or young ones who romanticize the past, like. I sing about moonlight or stardust, “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” I know all the good songs. What I don’t always know is how sober I’ll be, but I’m working on it.

Despite what people—Mike, Jeff— try to make me believe, it’s not a simple thing to be an alcoholic. It’s not easy. I used to think I was a social drinker, before I got smart and accepted the truth. Two bottles of wine with dinner when I’m eating alone. Gin or vodka with tonic, scotch on the rocks in one of my mom’s aluminum cups from the 30s. Amaretto or sambuca when I want to pretend that alcohol isn’t a drug but a dessert, something I could drink with friends late into the night. This assumes I have people like this in my life, which I don’t. Just Mike and Jeff. And the audience. Songs aren’t people, though, and nothing new happens when I sing them.

With me, it’s the same information. Sometimes, I sit up in bed and all I want to do is carve open my chest and pour some alcohol inside. It’s humiliating, being so weak.

Talking and laughing, the sound of heels on the floors and booze being poured, hums all around me. It’s deafening.

I look at the clock: 8 p.m. Time to start. I want a gin and tonic to ease my throat into singing, but Mike’s watching. He’s been harder on me these past few months since I’ve stopped rehab. I’ll take a sip here and there, especially if someone cocky and handsome in the audience buys, but nothing serious. I need a paycheck to make rent, buy groceries. It’s not like Mom can give me money anymore.

Mike nods to me, his fingers hovering over the keys.

“Well hello, ladies and gentlemen,” I say to the crowd. I force my voice to sound husky—the opposite of frustrated.

I still can’t remember the words. In my head, I panic. My body feels sluggish.

Forget the brandy song, I tell myself. I’ll just start with something else.

I adjust the mike until it’s even with my mouth. Tonight’s crowd is a mixture of newly-wed or engaged couples (the Highwoods Inn boasts a reputation for elegant weddings and receptions); old patrons with old money to spend, a few out-of-town travelers, some of them families.

One of those families sits a few feet from me, and all of them have the glazed look of people used to getting what they want: a mom and dad, three girls of different ages. Two of the girls have a cocktail in front of them—a French Peach Bellini; a Kiwi Lemon-Drop, rimmed with sugar—so I assume they’re 21 or older. Still, I could be wrong. Most of the people who come here have money and are returning clientele, so the lounge doesn’t deny them, or their offspring, anything. Same for spouses, partners, etc.

The third girl with a cocktail holds a wine glass with either water or vodka, and crushed ice. Condensation runs down the sides, drips onto her dress like weak rain, leaving splotches.

“I’d like to begin with a love song,” I say. “It’s called ‘Time after Time’.”

As I sing, grasping the gangly body of my mike, I look towards the back of the room and see Jeff lowering a platter of buttermilk-batter calamari onto a table where three pristine old women sit, glasses in their hands. He’s wearing his black pants and pressed white shirt that creases in all the right places. His hair looks shorter; neat, clean. Did I tell him that I like men with short hair? I might have said something last week, when he was clearing dishes from tables and everyone was gone, and I leaned close to his ear and whispered “Hi.”

The song’s finished. People clap. I say the requisite couple of words—“Thank you”—and start another song, this one about being on a train and missing someone. It’s a tear-jerker with the right crowd, especially for those who’ve seen combat.

A couple sits close to each other in the front, near enough to throw things if they wanted to. Newlyweds—I’m sure of it. Their faces have the same dumb look, and they hold hands like they’ll evaporate if either one of them lets go. I smile at them so they don’t think it’s odd that I’m staring while I’m singing, and they smile back. Then I notice that the guy is no longer listening to me.

Instead, he rubs his nose against his wife’s neck, rubbing his lips all over the soft place behind her ear. The wife looks like she wants both their clothes gone and the varnished wood and glass and light from this room to melt into a bed, sheets, moonlight, darkness. I want a gin and tonic so much that I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next song.

I tell the audience I’m taking a break. The husband lifts his face long enough from his wife’s neck to call me over. My emerald dress sashays a little, but my body’s buzzing and uncomfortable. I don’t want to deal with this “please the customer” thing now. When do I ever want to deal with a “please the customer” thing?

“You were so great,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. Not a bad looking man, kind of like a young William Shatner with darker skin. Muscles, too. I can tell.

“Oh yeah,” says his wife. “I really love these old songs.” I nod. She looks a good ten years younger than me, with one of those blonde bobs that almost no one can pull off, including her.

“Thanks so much” I say, my smile stretched tight. Their compliments and clean, grateful faces kill me. Customer kindness, even when sincere, is always patronizing. Thanks for wowing us with your old-fashioned voice! Thanks for being our night’s entertainment! Thanks for giving us the opportunity to applaud or not depending on our mood, thereby reasserting our power over your self-worth! My body’s buzzing again.

“So, when did you guys get married?” I say. I can feel Mike watching me, shaking his head in amusement at my attempt to be civil with this couple.

“Two days ago,” says the wife. She’s beaming. “Or, should I say, two nights ago?” She laughs low, and eases her hand into the crook of her husband’s arm. “We got married at night.”

“Aw.” I want to mean it. I do. Or not.

“Hello again. Would either of you like more champagne?” Jeff’s next to me, holding both his hands behind his back and standing straight. His voice is a wonderful tenor, a smooth, warm sound. He’s trying to act like the perfect waiter to make me laugh. I smile down at the floor, holding it in.

The couple says yes, and Jeff goes to the bar to get it. I have ten minutes left of my break, so I follow him.

“Well, that was nice,” I say.

“Better than you were.” He grins, leaning against the bar cut out of one giant redwood. He’s waiting for Tony, the bartender, to open a fresh bottle of champagne—the stuff with the nice label that slides down like water, too good to give you a hangover. “Even I could tell you didn’t want to talk to them.” He touches my waist with his hand, his touch so light that if I close my eyes, I almost wouldn’t believe I was feeling anything.

“How do you know? Maybe I did.”

“Did you?”

I shrug, tucking a curl behind my ear. “Not really.”

“Is anything wrong? You’re acting funny.” His eyes are bluish-green, like seaglass. They make me want to look at him more than I already do.

“No, I’m fine. Just tired I think.” I smooth my dress with my hands while Jeff watches, even though the fabric is wrinkled on purpose. It’s the look.

Jeff grabs the two glasses of fresh champagne and places them on his tray. “Well, just keep it real up there. Maybe we can do something after.” He runs his fingers down my waist to my thigh, touching it with his fingers before breaking away. The heat from his hand disappears instantly. “You know, I didn’t want to talk to them either. But it’s my job.” He sounds playful, but the implication pisses me off.

“Right.” My throat feels dry, like cracked earth. I ask Tony for a glass of water, and drink it in four swallows. I wipe my mouth, and gesture to the warm golden champagne in two crystal flutes, which Tony poured and put on Jeff’s tray. “Hey, sneak me a glass of that.”

He looks at me, then laughs, as if anything I just said surprised him. “Right, Gabby. I’ll give you champagne.”

“That’s the spirit,” I say. I sound like the woman in her 40s that I am. Like I’ve seen it all.

I walk back to the piano and the rest of the show.

The first time Jeff and I made out, we were in a stall. That’s the clearest memory I have. Arms, lips, and the small, confined space that felt oddly comforting.

He sat on the toilet in his waiter’s uniform while I straddled him in a black dress with diaphanous see-through sleeves. We’d locked the ladies room door so no one, not even the older women with their heavy perfume and propriety, would come in.

It was my first week working in lounge—about eight months ago, a time when I still wanted to give up drinking and rehab was an option.

He kissed my collarbone. I grabbed his hair as my legs clenched around him.

Part of me wanted to push him back, away from me, that I remember; but I needed something for the feeling that I was disappearing. That numbing feeling, the not drinking-cold. It was as if everything tangible about me—skin, bone, muscle, hair—was evaporating into a fine mist over my head. I’d only been sober a month.

Jeff kept my body there. He kept me in my skin.

I moved his face up from my chest and kissed him, my hands clutched around his face. Towards the end, I wanted to cry. The kisses weren’t working, and I knew what would.

My performance ends. The last song—“Moon River”—finished, I take a bow and let the applause surround me. It doesn’t come in a tide like it would in the movies, but at least there’s enough that I can feel it vibrate the air.

Mom used to love “Moon River.” It’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s fault. Mom was a romantic. She owned a used bookstore in Mountain View that she started with my dad, which she kept for 20 years after he left her. She watched Travel Channel, then planned trips for us to places like Tokyo and Croatia. She went antique shopping one day, and came back with a locket that had someone’s hair in it. She even wore the thing.

Sometimes when I drink, it’s like I’m telling her I’m trying to care about the world again. She’s dead and I’m still telling her things in my head.

I can’t start crying now.

Jeff walks by, so I grab his arm. Some patrons look at me.

“Hey,” I say. Under my eyes, my eyeliner feathers to the edge of my dark circles. I know what my liner does after a night of singing.

“Hey,” he says. I swallow.

“So we should—after we’re done here tonight. Do something.”

He looks at me like he did before, when I wanted the champagne: like he understands some, but not all, of the words I’m speaking and has to translate it all in his head before answering. Like he’s afraid of getting it wrong. “Uh, sure. Sounds good to me.”

“We can go out, find a place.” I lean closer. “We can be even more alone than we are right now.”

“Cool.”

He thinks I’m crazy, but I know what I’m saying. I leave him to the audience, then walk to the bar, where I ask Tony to pour me a gin and tonic. I fight to keep the brokenness out of my voice. A strained voice needs lubricant, so I’m getting it. Tony doesn’t need to know about strain: he can just take my money. I have twenties in my clutch.

“You’re sure?” asks Tony.

“Yes, please.”

I get the drink into my hands and sip, and a lushness falls over me. My skin feels extra smooth, like velvet.

“I’ve widened my repertoire, did you notice?” I say. My lips are rubber and can say anything. “Gershwin and Porter, Mancini.”

“That’s some good stuff. I was getting tired of the older tunes.”

I finish my drink then ask for another.

“Wait a bit, sweetheart. You know. Give it time.”

I slide a twenty on the counter, and my cheeks hot. It feels so good to have someone call me sweetheart that I fight the urge to cry all over again.

I want to grab the bottle from Tony’s hands and run in my stupid heels to the bathroom—no Jeff to kiss, no bodies or mess. Now I’m crying for real, and Tony freezes, not knowing what to do.

Mom called me sweetheart, at a time when my hair still curled on its own. I remember her taking me to Golden Gate Park for my fifth birthday, when she bought me a soft pretzel and let me ride the merry go round horse with rusted knobs of gold on its bridle. A band played in the park that day, and I sat in her lap on the grass, listening to drums and voices and trumpets, watching the people dressed in red and white stripes like candy. She called me sweetheart then. Be careful, sweetheart, walking with me to the playground. Riding down the slide’s hot metal. Getting ice cream. Ten months, and I still can’t let her be gone.

I’m having trouble breathing. “Oh God,” I say. Voices swirl around me—people talking to other people, glasses being clinked. I couldn’t care less if they exist or not. I reach into my clutch, dig another twenty from inside. “Tony, come on. I’m paying you double.” He hesitates, but eventually starts pouring, like I knew he would. Jeff’s probably behind me somewhere, watching my glamorous torch singer meltdown, the tray shaking in his hands.

Tony slides my gin and tonic to me without a sound.

I down this one, too. My fingertips melt into the wood.

“I need to tell Mike something,” I say, talking to no one in particular. I meant to say Jeff, but the names of the men in my life—father figure, fling—get jumbled. I don’t even know what I want to tell Jeff. But I need to talk while I’m drinking. I need to talk to someone and not be alone.

Jeff’s in the kitchen, I guess, because when I turn around, I don’t see him. I don’t feel lush anymore, or strong, or whatever I thought drinking would make me feel. My liner’s everywhere, streaked down my cheeks.

“Stay calm,” I say to myself. “Be cool.”

I fall onto a bar stool, but don’t quite make it. My body hits the ground, hard. I’m on my back.

I don’t care who sees me. Look at this, audience.

Ten months ago. Mom in the ground, a cold dead body. Mom, in the ground. It hurts too much to breathe.

I need to stay calm, so I picture all my bottles at home, pretty in their cart. I think of what I’ll do with them while playing some blues, and the thought overwhelms me. I want the idea of going home to be like Christmas morning, so I focus on the bottles. Christmas without candy or lights strung along the house, winking through trees. Christmas alone, the opposite of Christmas when I was little. Mom not there to make me go to bed early, making me wait for the good things I stayed up all night for.

Fiction, Issue 3.4 Summer 2014

Migara de Silva

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Migara de Silva is a 25 year-old Barrister, educated in London but currently living in Sri Lanka, who dreams of living in Manhattan to write. She is in the process of trying to get her first novel published. Her interests include but are not limited to Manchester United, Louis de Berneires, the Rolling Stones, and being generally unencumbered. This is her first publication.

Of Fences-

There was a fence and it separated two lands. “Good fences make good neighbors”. I never understood that. There were two trees that grew on either side of the fence. They were the exact same tree except they were different trees. There was a house on either side of the fence. Sidath lived on one side and Maya lived on the other. They loved each other with a fire red. In short they were in love. They were at that place where everything is sexual and everything is a temporary madness. There were endless hoards of “I love you’s,” sighs like furnaces and pledges of death if the other should ever leave.

Then Sidath had to leave for a year to make his fortune. The goodbye was tender and the passion was intense like the sun. Off he went and Maya felt a pleasure in the amount of tears she cried. She was in love with him. She cried all day. And the next day. But the day after that she went back to trying to look pretty. “One must always look pretty while one is” she would say. She was as beautiful as the day is long, her limbs, also as long as the day is long glistened in the hot tropical sun. She did not want to be robbed of her youth.

She had many admirers. At first she wouldn’t even allow them to talk to her, she was in love. But eventually she yearned for compliments and breathlessness. So allowed them to visit her and bring her gifts. She never had the slightest intention of leaving Sidath for any of them, but what she thought of herself depended only on what everyone else thought. She needed to feel beautiful. It wasn’t enough to be beautiful. It never is. The men brought gifts and rumors of Sidath’s sexual escapades. Gradually they got to Maya. Even her best friends were talking about it. The village was alight with gossip. Her parents muttered in corners.

A year passed. Maya fell out of love. She married the richest man in the town. Sidath was unfortunate enough to come back on their wedding day. He moved into the house in which he had lived before he left. Maya’s house was demolished and replaced by a concrete monstrosity. The only thing that remained tying that land to the earth was that tree.

The years passed like flowing water. Sidath never married. Maya hated that tree. It reminded her of Sidath. She did not want to think of him. He slept with whores and he never denied it. But she also never asked him. They hadn’t spoken in 50 years even though the lived next to each other. “Good fences make good neighbors” and Maya’s husband had erected the best fence.

Maya could no longer bear the sight of that tree. While her husband was at the brothel she asked the servant boy to cut it down. It took him the best part of five hours to do it. The tree cried and screamed and then fell and splintered. The whole ground shook. As Maya’s tree fell so did Sidath’s. She looked up towards his house to see him standing on his doorstep, tears in his eyes. Maya’s heart broke.

“You were in love with me. Being in love is something any fool can do. As the saying goes, love is what is left when being in love has burnt away. You were in love with me but I love you. To me it was inconceivable that we should part and that’s why I never moved. Our roots, like these trees have become too entwined. There is no one without the other. It seems like you have discovered too late, what I always knew. This was one tree and not two.”

Fiction, Issue 3.4 Summer 2014

Robert Joe Stout

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Bob StoutRobert Joe Stout’s books include The Blood of the Serpent: Mexican Lives, “a rich chorus of voices, which produce not a song but an energetic discussion and argument about the soul of Mexico,” according to Publishers’ Weekly; Why Immigrants Come to America, the novels Miss Sally and Running Out the Hurt, and the poetry volume A Perfect Pitch. A graduate of Mexico City College (now the Universidad de las Americas) he has won national journalism awards for spot news writing and his fiction and poetry have been anthologized in a variety of publications, including New Southern Poets and Southwest.

A Big and Wonderful Now

That Alison went alone to the women’s health center and told Yoshio afterwards shoved something unwanted into their relationship. Not that the relationship was clearly defined: Neither he nor she had given it a name or described themselves as belonging to it. Something sparked between them when they were introduced by a mutual friend and they made excuses to see each other afterwards. Yoshio went to hear her sing with a little jazz group entertaining in a hangout near the university campus; she made a point to be near the finish line when he completed the lake-to-lake half-marathon a week later. Conversations led to a dinner date and the dinner date to a night—and many nights afterwards—in her little north Austin rental. They became an “item,” happily involved in each other’s presence. Then despite their precautions, Alison missed her period. The visit to the women’s health center confirmed that she was pregnant.

And not for the first time. Alison’s daughter Lisa was eleven; Yoshio’s seven-year-old son lived in San Antonio with his ex-wife. He and Alison talked about their kids but not about a kid-to-be. That is until Alison, in her flat Midwestern way, confirmed, “Well the news is yes, I’m pregnant.”

Yoshio responded, slowly, by embracing her and received a cold and rather rigid response.

“So, what do we do?”

We. A term they used frequently in conjunction with meals, weekend trips, dancing. This was different. “So what do we do?” Alison repeated and Yoshio, instinctively, “What do you want to do?”

“Me? So it’s up to me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You sure as shit did.”

Invariably that’s how their arguments began. And invariably Yoshio, the serious one, professional, security coordinator for the city of Austin’s government employees, reframed whatever they were arguing about to give Alison space to win small victories or gracefully give in. But having a baby—or getting an abortion—wasn’t about small victories and graciously giving in. Either way it was a life-changing event, one that could have disastrous consequences for their undefined relationship.

Yoshio didn’t like disastrous consequences—he’d seen too many of them—so he cajoled, “I asked because ultimately you have the right to choose. It’s your body—”

“That’s a cop out.”

“No. I want to be part of the decision. But I want to make sure that what we decide is best for you.”

“What if there’s no ‘best’?”

“In any situation there are better choices and choices not so good. We didn’t expect this but we have to deal with it. Decide—”

“Don’t lecture me! I’m not seventeen!”

“So what do we do?”

The retort flashing across Alison’s broad features made her recognize that he was repeating her phrase. Jerk! The word, mouthed but not audible, culminated in a snort of laughter. Head averted she groped for his embrace.

“We could go make love. I sure as hell can’t get more pregnant than I already am.”

Yoshio knew he had to be careful. Alison was the best thing that had happened to him since the initial months of his first marriage and he didn’t want to make a mistake. He knew it always was possible to make a mistake but he hated mistakes made out of stupidity, lack of investigation, lack of honesty.

Alison, instinctive, flippant, spontaneous and sometimes irrational, had retreated into exaggerated bluster to cover her evasions but hormonal changes already taking effect made her edgy, cross, inappropriately exuberant. Carefully Yoshio listed points he needed to make and noted them in his pocket agenda. Sunday’s was:

“It’s time to tell Lisa.”

“Tell her what?”

“That you’re pregnant.”

“That we don’t know what to do about it?”

“That we’re trying to decide and want her input.”

“Do we?”

“It might help.”

“Shit!” But with a you’re probably right sigh. “I’ll—we’ll,” she amended, “do it.”

Without looking up from her cell phone, “So you decided to tell me,” Lisa winced in her pre-teen that’s-all-we’re-having-for-dinner worldliness.

“It was that obvious?”

“Either that or the two of you were planning to assassinate Obama.”

Yoshio laughed. Alison cursed. Then grimaced, “So how many others know?”

None of them had that answer.

Next on Yoshio’s agenda was consulting a marriage and family therapist.

“So she can tell us what to do?”

“It’s a way of processing. A third party asking questions, sifting answers that we’re stumbling over.”

“I’m stumbling over,” Alison corrected but admitted she was a tumble of doubts, wishes and fear and agreed to a consultation.

The therapist, a pudgy fiftyish pipe smoker with an affable countenance but grumpy voice: “You’ve talked about it with each other? And these conversations? Can you describe them?”

They could and couldn’t. And they could and couldn’t articulate how either decision would affect them. Yoshio, carefully, explained that his main concern was for Alison, what either decision would mean to her.

“How can I know? There’s too many if’s! Twenty more years as a single mother?”

“We’d be togeth—”

“What if you leave me? What if he’s ugly? What if—?”

She stopped abruptly. “Well,” she turned to face Yoshio. “Japanese-Norwegian?”

“She could be devastatingly beautiful,” he replied.

Not that the decision was airtight. Alison fretted; Yoshio gritted his teeth. The future that for years had been short-term stretched towards eternity. “It’s not what either of us imagined,” he confided and Alison hiccupped, “What did we imagine?” When he didn’t answer, “Making love again tomorrow”—that and only that. A big and wonderful now! Now the present was a mere particle, incidental. Everything was future, exaggerated as the end of the first trimester passed and the decision became irrevocable. “Don’t expect me to babysit!” Lisa warned. Then, “It’ll be nice to have something besides stupid adults around the house.”

The house. They would need something larger than Alison’s little rental. A three-bedroom apartment. Yoshio calculated its impact. Despite a good salary and job security he’d be paying child support for ten more years. Travel, restaurant meals, spontaneous gifts would diminish. Alison fretted and pulled away. Arguments flared. Finally after cabernet sauvignon on lawn chairs in the little backyard, “You’re about to leave me, aren’t you?” Alison pouted.

“No, I want to be with you. For a long time.” Although it was two weeks before the date he’d marked on his agenda, “There’s something we need to talk about. Consider.”

Her what? was a mere whisper.

“Marriage.”

“What?” voice running up scales to a high b-flat.

“I want you to marry me.”

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Inward gasps directed to herself not him. “Yos-Yoshi…” she spluttered, “I, I, but—” Her toe caught the leg of the lawn chair as she lunged to her feet and she stumbled, the wine from her glass gushing across Yoshio’s face. “No!” she wailed, lips twisted downwards and tears filling her eyes. “I, I, I…” Yoshio, laughing, daubed his cheeks, wiped his glasses and beckoned for her embrace. She stumbled into his grasp, spluttered coughing interrupting her attempt to laugh. Head against his neck she wiped her tears on the short sleeve of her dark cotton blouse and panted, “Okay, okay, Iloveyou, yes, but jesus it’s, I mean, so frigging much, a baby, marriage, I never—I mean, it’s, it’s—”

“Scary,” he finished for her.

“Shit yes. Yoshi, I don’t, see, we—we’re not talking tomorrow, next week, this is long-term stuff, I can’t even pict—”

“Maybe the therapist?”

“Shit! He’s not involved! This is me, you, the rest of our lives!”

Yoshio nodded. He’d already calculated the odds: Marriage gave a sort of stability—fragile perhaps, disruptive perhaps, but identity, a base. Remaining single with two kids to support: Intolerable. And detrimental to a career: Divorce and child support is one thing, divorce and support for two from different mothers indicated emotional instability. Emotionally unstable Yoshio was not.

“Besides there’s Lisa!”

“I could be a good fath—.”

“Yeah but she—!”

“We should ask her.”

Ohshit! He heard under her breath. And I haven’t said yes for Christ’s sake! But she assented—because, he knew, she’d put consideration for Lisa on the table and couldn’t back down.

Thumb running images across her cell phone screen Lisa listened to her mother’s abrupt and he’s talking I mean, wants us to get married… and shrugged.

“Should be better’n you going it alone.”

“Could you stand me as a father?” Yoshio interrupted what he could see was going to be Alison’s retaliatory thrust.

Thumb still moving, “Could be worse,” Lisa shrugged. Then, peering directly at Yoshi, “I just hope I do so well when it comes to having a man.” A quick glance at Alison, then back to the cell phone, “And if I do, unlike my mom, I’m going to realize how frigging lucky I am.”

She slammed the cell phone cover closed.

“Now any idea which of you is fixing supper? I’m hungry.”

“We’re ordering pizza,” Yoshio confirmed. “And maybe champagne for three.”

Fiction, Issue 3.4 Summer 2014

Mike Koenig

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Mike Koenig received his MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore. He currently lives in Columbia, Maryland and works for Discovery Communications. His fiction can be seen in Phoebe, Quiddity, Clover, and The Tulane Review.

The Lost Ones

“There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you,” Doctor Johnson said, looking up from his charts. “Medically speaking, you should be able to have a child.”

Emily was hoping this doctor, this expert, would be able to offer her some news about her condition. She had gotten used to the words seem and should. They were terrible words that offered no comfort because they came with no cure. No matter what the tests said, Emily knew, as any woman would, that three miscarriages don’t just happen. The situation wasn’t just unfortunate; it was scary. And without a definitive medical reason, her miscarriages were terrifying. Statements like: this is just one of those things, or the bad end of statistics didn’t give Emily any consolation. Neither did Dr. Johnson’s assurances that Emily was as capable of having a child as anyone else. She was a completely healthy twenty-nine-year-old woman with many child-rearing years left in her.

After the appointment Emily met her mother for lunch.

“Did he say anything different?” Emily’s mother, Lauren, asked after hearing about the appointment. “Anything helpful?”

“Not really. He said it’s a good sign that I’m able to get pregnant and that I should keep taking the fertility pills Dr. Kumar prescribed.”

Lauren shook her head. “This is just awful what they put you through. Just awful.”

“All we can do is keep trying,” Emily said, lifting her glass of water.

“What does Tom think?”

“About what?” Emily asked. She was looking around the restaurant more than she was looking at her mother.

“Did you tell him what this doctor said?”

“No,” Emily admitted, “he doesn’t know about this appointment.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Lauren said, with an all-too-motherly furrowed brow, “You shouldn’t sneak off to a doctor without telling Tom.”

“I know. He’s just not much for second opinions, much less fourth.”

“Still, you should tell him. He is your husband.”

“I’ll tell him tonight,” Emily said.

*****

The first pregnancy had been Emily’s longest. It lasted about ten weeks, long enough that she could feel the baby kick, or at least Emily thought she felt the baby kick. It was just as likely some indigestion mixed with wishful thinking. Emily and her mother had started planning the nursery. It was going to be a gender-neutral yellow color with teddy bear wallpaper. Emily, who taught second grade, was determined to finish the room before her summer break was over. She spent a week priming and painting the room with her mother, and another week cutting out and pasting the teddy bears along the wall. The room was golden yellow and when the windows were open light bounced around, giving the eyes of the teddy bears actual life.

The Friday they finished they went to the mall for a celebratory lunch, both looking and not looking at baby items. They ended up buying a mahogany rocking chair with a soft white cushion. The chair had flat legs instead of round ones and swung more than rocked. Emily felt it was a good reading chair. She planned to start reading to the child in utero. And since the chair came with free delivery, it seemed the perfect deal. It arrived the same day it was purchased and Emily was set up and reading by the time Tom came home.

“Wow,” Tom said at the doorway.

“What?” Emily said.

“You look like a real mother.”

Emily gave a playful frown.

Tom kissed her, first on the forehead then the stomach. “You look beautiful.”

“So you like the chair.”

Tom nodded.

“Good, cause it’s non-refundable.”

Emily listed the things she had seen that day. She particularly liked a stroller that could fold into quarters. It was only twenty pounds but very stable. She also thought the crib should be placed away from the window, so the sun wouldn’t bother the baby in the morning, and the changing table could go near the door and the rocker in its current spot because it seemed the focal point of the room. Emily talked so fast that there was hardly a space between the words for Tom to agree or disagree. He just smiled and took in Emily’s excitement.

“So what do you think?” Emily offered at the end.

“I think you might not need me at all. You and your mother have this whole thing worked out.”

“Well, you helped,” Emily said, patting her still flat belly. “A rather enjoyable help at that.”

“Is there anything else you wanted to do before you go back to work?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I was just thinking,” Tom was rubbing Emily’s shoulders as he talked, “maybe we could take a few days, just for ourselves at that cottage at Castle Lake. We might not be able to get a real vacation next year with the baby.” Tom was now kissing Emily’s neck between words, “How’s that sound? A couple of days, just us?”

*****

The night of Emily’s fourth opinion, Tom came home around eight. Emily had left him a pork chop and green beans on the kitchen counter with the note, “went for a jog.” Tom was watching TV and napping when Emily came back and didn’t hear her until she started drying her hair with the electric blower.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, when Tom sat up.

“No, I was up.”

Emily was combing her brown shoulder-length hair.

“I like Patricia if it’s a girl and James for a boy,” Emily said.

“I thought we liked Andrew and Julie,” Tom responded.

“That was for the last baby.”

Tom got up and took off his dress shirt and pants, hanging the pants neatly in the closet.

“So,” Emily asked in a slightly high-pitched voice.

“What?”

“Do you like the names?”

“I don’t know why we have to pick new names—I like Julie, Jules for short.”

“We can’t use that name.”

“But we never told anyone. No one will know.”

“I’ll know,” Emily said, putting her brush down.

Tom went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. When he came back he said, “Why don’t we just wait until we get pregnant before picking out names?”

“Okay,” she said, “but they have to be new names.”

Tom agreed to this condition and apologized. It was easier than fighting. And he supposed Trish was as cute as Jules. He kissed his wife. And remembered how he used to pick fights with her when he was in law school just for the chance to make up with her later. Back then she bought underwear at Victoria’s Secret, surfing the online catalog late into the night. He hadn’t seen a colored bra in what seemed like years. It was just standard white Hanes these days. He caressed his wife, first on the stomach but then moved upwards.

“I’m not ovulating,” Emily said without moving. Tom stopped his playful advances and rolled to his right. They were back to back, separated by a foot of clean white sheets. “Next week,” Emily whispered.

Tom could remember a time before babies when sex was fun. When his wife coming out of the shower was a call to action, when she’d slowly remove her towel and perform a small dance before ripping off his clothes in passion. He remembered a time when waiting five minutes was excruciating, and if they touched each other’s hand at dinner, they’d race to the bedroom. He remembered sex that was full of moans and looks of ecstasy, a feeling of connection with his wife that was now easily postponed with the words “next week.” This of course was only a promise of intercourse, not passion, not sex. After the act, they didn’t kiss or hold each another anymore; they didn’t even talk. Emily would immediately move into some yoga position that supposedly helped conception, often chanting herself into a trance that would remove bad energy from her body. At this point Tom would be unneeded, and he’d retreat to the basement.

*****

“Did you tell your parents, yet?” Emily asked.

“Tell them what?”

“About the miscarriage.”

“They didn’t know we were pregnant.” Tom didn’t turn his head from the road; he didn’t need to turn to feel his wife’s glare. It was their fifth miscarriage, and Tom had decided to stop talking about the pregnancies until they got to the second trimester. This pregnancy, Baby Susan, because Emily was sure it would be a girl, had only lasted three weeks from the positive pregnancy test to the pains that sent Emily to the bathroom.

“I just didn’t want to tell them in case this happened again,” Tom finally said, still feeling his wife’s glare.

“Whatever’s easier for you,” Emily said.

They drove in silence the rest of the way. When he pulled up to the church, he asked Emily if she was sure she wanted to come.

“She’s my niece too,” Emily said.

“I just wasn’t sure if you. . . I can make an excuse if you don’t want to see everyone.”

“I’m fine,” Emily said with a plastic smile.

They walked together to the church, but separated once inside, as Tom, the godfather-to-be, was needed in the annex.

After the priest gave some brief instructions Erin, Tom’s sister-in-law, offered Tom the baby to hold. Lily’s eyes opened wider when passed to Tom and she gave a soft coo that made Tom smile in a sad clown sort of way. His eyes were glossy, not quite wet but full of wanting. Tom pulled Lily a little closer, feeling each light exhale against his lap.

“You and Emily have any luck?” Tom’s brother, Jim, asked.

Erin shot him a look.

“What?”

“You don’t ask such things,” Erin said.

“He’s my brother,” Jim said.

“It’s not polite,” Erin replied.

“We lost another one,” Tom said, letting Lily grab his finger.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Erin said, putting her arm around his shoulder.

“Three days ago. We weren’t going to tell anyone.”

“Is Emily doing okay?” Erin asked. “If you guys don’t feel up to . . .”

“I told her she could stay home. But she wanted to come.”

“I feel terrible,” Jim interrupted, “Lily was an accident. And you. . . ”

“She wasn’t an accident,” Erin said, “She was a surprise.”

“I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense that they’re trying to have a kid and can’t and we’re not trying and have one.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Erin said.

“I feel bad, is all. It’s like we took his kid.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom said, “one has nothing to do with the other. We’re just unlucky.” Tom pulled Lily into a hug against his chest. “But for the sake of my wife, let’s try not to let anyone bring it up at the party.”

*****

“Honey,” Tom said, coming back to the living room, “did you move my stuff?”

There was no reply, so Tom went to the kitchen. “I had some adoption pamphlets from this guy at work. Did you see them?”

Emily looked at the kitchen trashcan.

“I go to the bathroom and you throw out my papers?” Tom asked.

“I’m just not ready to give up yet.”

Emily turned her attention to the onions, cutting them in loud thuds.

“It’s not giving up. It’s just looking at options.”

“That’s not an option,” Emily said, still focused on cutting vegetables.

“Well, it’s like a three year process, so I thought we should at least look into it now. I thought you wanted more than one child.’

“I’m not ready to raise someone else’s baby.”

“It would be our baby.”

“Do we have to do this tonight?”

Tom stopped talking and poked his head over the trashcan. He saw the pamphlets at the top, but knew better than to fish them out. Instead, he returned to the living room couch and flipped through the channels, never settling on a show to watch. Emily’s cutting continued for about ten minutes, until she went to bed without cooking anything or saying goodnight.

*****

It was at Castle Lake that Emily had lost the first baby, Justin for a boy, Nancy for a girl. She had had bad cramps for hours before saying anything to Tom. The nearest hospital was a two-hour drive, and Emily was screaming as Tom drove. About twenty minutes before they got to the hospital a calm feeling came over Emily, some type of relief. Tom didn’t ask if she felt better or not and didn’t point to the blood that was seeping through her sweatpants.

When the doctor reported the baby was lost, that there was nothing anyone could have done, Emily slapped Tom across the face. “Why did we leave home? This wouldn’t have happened at home.” Then she turned into her pillow and cried. Tom’s own body had gone numb with the news; he reached out to touch her shoulder but Emily pulled away. For a few minutes he tried to think of something to say, something comforting, but the words never came. He finally sank into a chair and watched as Emily emptied herself through tears.

Emily was discharged from the hospital, and they went back to the cabin to collect their luggage. It was a quiet ride with neither music nor conversation, just the sound of the engine. There was a small blood spot on the passenger’s seat that forced Emily to sit in the back. She stared out the window as they drove. The trees were still green, and the sunlight of the day made everything look alive and feel terrible.

Within a week Tom would sell the car rather than clean it. But for now they had to avoid the spot. About an hour down the road Emily put her head next to Tom’s headrest.

“I’m sorry for what I said at the hospital.” Emily’s voice was soft, “I know this wasn’t your fault.”

Tom gave her a kiss on the cheek. “We’ll get pregnant again soon.”

They didn’t say much after that, but the car ride didn’t feel as eerie. For a while Tom even put his right hand between the seats so he could hold Emily’s hand as he drove. That was enough to make him think things would be all right.

*****

“This calls for a celebration,” Lauren said upon hearing of her daughter’s pregnancy. “I’ve been waiting three years for this.”

Tom smiled at his mother-in-law as she got the champagne glasses from the top cabinet. She had been asking for grandkids since she first heard that Tom had proposed and now the promise of their arrival gave Lauren a pregnancy glow all her own.

“I was so worried about you guys. Three years.”

“Well, we weren’t exactly trying all this time,” Tom said.

“Mom had trouble conceiving,” Emily said, “she assumes everyone else does.”

“It took us six years,” Lauren said, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not anyone. But when you feel that first kick, when you feel the baby growing inside, that’s when you really know what love is.” Lauren gave Emily a Hallmark smile that made Tom snicker. “I almost feel sorry for you men,” Lauren continued, “You’ll never know what that’s like.”

“Well,” Tom answered, “from what I hear labor is no picnic. So I’m quite happy to not be the pregnant one.”

“Don’t you listen to him,” Lauren said, “it isn’t that bad.”

Lauren poured two glasses of champagne. “I wish your father were here,” Lauren said, handing a glass to Tom. “I hate to celebrate without him.”

“Hey, where’s mine?” said Emily.

“You can’t have alcohol,” Lauren said.

“I don’t think a sip of champagne is going to matter, Mom.”

Lauren grudgingly poured a third glass much smaller than the first two and offered a congratulatory cheer before the three drank.

*****

When Tom entered the bathroom, Emily was on the floor holding her stomach. “Call an ambulance,” she said. Tom knew immediately the baby was lost. As they waited for the ambulance to come he got on the tile floor with her, holding her hands in his. It was the way he used to hold her when they were first married and spent Saturdays lying in bed together.

“Why can’t I be a mother?” Emily asked.

Tom kissed her on the forehead. He couldn’t comfort her anymore than that. That was the third miscarriage, the Andrew or Julie miscarriage.

In addition to seeking her second, third, and fourth opinions about her physical condition Emily also started going to church after that miscarriage. At first it was just an occasional Sunday, but then it became more regular, and finally included bi-weekly counseling sessions with Father Mark.

“Am I being punished,” she asked the priest, “somehow tested like Job?”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” the priest answered.

“But the doctors tell me I’m healthy. They can’t explain why I keep losing these babies.”

“We must always have faith in His plan,” Father Mark said. “We can’t always explain it, but we must have faith that it is right.”

“My husband thinks we should adopt.”

“I’d be more than happy to recommend a good agency; Catholic Charities does wonderful work.”

“Could you really love a child as much, knowing it wasn’t actually yours?”

“I know many people who have adopted,” Father Mark answered, “and they are just as loving as any other parents.”

It was the answer Emily expected, the argument Tom had always provided. But there was something inside of her that doubted its truth. And in the wake of her “good health” she couldn’t see how adopting was the right solution, even if adopting a foreign child, as Tom now suggested, sped up the process. She couldn’t see herself loving at first sight the way her mother had loved at first feel.

*****

Tom didn’t recognize his refrigerator anymore. There used to be soda and beer and nacho cheese on the door. The peanut butter used to be Jif with pieces of peanuts in it. Now it was some Whole Foods goo, the oil rose to the top and needed to be stirred for twenty minutes to make a sandwich. Tom used to get 2% milk and white bread; now there was only soy milk and whole wheat multigrain. Tom never brought his lunch with him to work anymore. It was the one chance a day he got to eat what he liked.

But it wasn’t just the food that had changed. Emily herself had. She did yoga in the morning, waking at five to do her stretches before school. She also went to the gym in the evening, for light calisthenics. There was only about an hour a day when he could actually sit and talk with her. But even that was difficult because all she wanted to do was talk babies. There were no more “how was your day” pleasantries, no more funny stories about what her kids had done in class. It was all business. We need to try this or that. She read medical journals like a pharmacist and knew which pills she might consider trying next. After her sixth miscarriage, the Daniel/Danielle miscarriage, she found a doctor who would prescribe Cervexus, an experimental drug that strengthened the walls of her uterus, one potential cause for miscarriages, though he noted like the doctors before him, that her uterus did not seem particularly weak. Still, the drug gave Emily a new sense of accomplishment and her regimen of exercising, cleaning, dieting, existential breathing, and researching made her feel in control.

The house was different too. It had been clean before, but now it was spotless. Emily ran the dishwasher every night, not wanting any germs in the house, and scrubbed the tile of the kitchen floor and bathrooms religiously. Since no one could tell her exactly what was wrong she wanted to eliminate any possible cause of her unhappy life. Cleanliness became a calling for her. And the house was almost a museum where Tom couldn’t touch or use objects because he was not as clean as them.

But the most jarring change for Tom was the crucifix that hung over the bed. It was a testament to Emily’s new life as a devout Catholic, a promise that if she was deemed worthy enough to have a child, she would raise it in the Church. Tom didn’t mind the religion entering her life. He too was Catholic, if only in name. What disturbed him about the crucifix was how Emily looked at it with unwavering intensity, offering it small prayers before they had sex.

What had started as understandable eccentricities for a woman under stress had developed into an insane routine. Tom no longer saw the woman he married in his wife, and when she looked at the cross as they made orgasm-less love, he had no idea who she was.

*****

Emily locked herself in the bathroom. They had a full-length mirror on the door and she was looking at herself with her T-shirt rolled up. She was a thin thirty-two-year-old, merely three days pregnant, or at least it had been three days since the positive pregnancy test. Emily arched her back and tried to make herself look fat. Not satisfied with the reflected image she rolled down her shirt and pushed her stomach out. In a few months she’d look this big.

She continued playing in the mirror, trying to imagine herself in the third trimester. The door handle jiggled.

“I’m in here,” Emily said.

“Is everything all right?” Tom asked.

“Yeah.”

Emily fixed her shirt and splashed some water on her face before coming out. Tom was sitting on the edge of the bed, a pale look on his face.

“Is everything okay?” Tom asked, nodding toward her stomach.

“Of course.”

“You were in there for forty minutes.”

“I was just— you know women in the bathroom.”

Emily sat next to Tom on the bed gently rubbing his thigh.

“I thought. . .” Tom stopped his words.

“What happened at the lake isn’t going to happen again. We’re going to be fine,” Emily said, giving Tom a kiss. “I feel so much better this time.”

Tom smiled. It would be another week before he’d get called to meet Emily at the emergency room.

*****

For Tom’s fortieth birthday Emily had the whole extended family over for dinner. It was a light fare of lemon chicken with brown rice and carrot cake for dessert. It was great to eat dinner with the whole family. Tom had two nephews, Andy and Scott, and two nieces, Lily and Brittany, whom he loved but rarely saw.

“How old are you, Uncle Tom?” asked his five year-old niece Lily as Emily started lighting the candles on the birthday cake.

“I’m this many,” he said flashing all ten fingers four times.

“How old?”

“This many,” he said and flashed his fingers up again.

“You’re old,” Lily said, still unclear of his exact age.

“I know,” Tom agreed, “I think I need help blowing out the candles.”

As the family began singing Happy Birthday, Tom lifted Lily to his knee. He filled his cheeks with air anticipating the amount needed to blow all the candles out. Lily mimicked her uncle, and when the song was over they worked together to get all forty candles out.

“Did you make a wish?” Tom asked.

“Yeah.”

“What did you wish for?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot.”

After cake Tom let Lily open the gifts for him. She tore through the paper in seconds, barely looking at the contents, mostly shirts and books, before moving to the next package. As Lily played with the discarded paper Tom looked at his wife, hoping to share a moment. But there was a bleakness in Emily’s eyes, as if she were in her own world far away from Tom and Lily.

After the guests, left Tom and Emily went to bed. As Tom took off his shirt, Emily lay on the bed, seductively calling him over with her index finger. Tom slid over the top sheet then kissed his wife on the neck and shoulders. After a few minutes of kissing, Emily got up and gave Tom a little strip show. He took off his own clothes, remembering his honeymoon and sex before pregnancies. He thought tonight would be like the old times, but as Emily climbed back in bed she wasn’t staring at Tom, but rather at the crucifix that hung over the bed.

Tom laid Emily on her stomach and stood behind her.

“What are you doing? This is not the ideal position for conception,” she said, wiggling to her back.

“I thought tonight could just be about us. Maybe we can mix it up. You know like we used to.”

“I don’t want to waste my most fertile days.”

“Do you really think position matters that much?”

“The experts say it helps.”

“Well, can we just do it for real. . . You know, for my birthday. I mean, do you have to just lie there?”

“I have to focus on my breathing, create an inviting space for the baby.”

“I’m just saying once a year, can we have sex like people who love each other, not people trying to create a baby?”

“We only get one good chance a month. Shouldn’t we do everything possible to get pregnant?” Emily said.

“You really think staring at that crucifix and breathing every six seconds matters? Our problem isn’t getting pregnant. We’ve always been able to do that.”

“This time it’ll be different. I’m on those pills now, and we’ve started a new hormone treatment. It’s going to happen, I deserve it.”

Tom was sitting on the bed now. “Deserve it,” Tom repeated.

“I know I can carry to term,” Emily said, “I know I can. Once we get pregnant it’ll be different. You’ll see. We’re going to do it this time. We’ve been doing everything right—diet, exercise, prayer, everything.”

Tom turned to Emily, “And what if it doesn’t happen?”

“It will,” Emily said.

“It’s not a question of deserve. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.”

Emily was silent.

“I don’t know what our problem is,” Tom continued, “but I don’t think our milk and bread has anything to do with it. I don’t think position has anything to do with it.”

“What harm does it do to try everything?” Emily asked.

Tom looked at Emily, “I think you need to start seeing a therapist about this.”

Emily laughed, “I talk to Father Mark once a week.”

“No, I mean a real therapist.”

Emily was silent.

“What harm could it do to try one more thing?” Tom asked.

They didn’t have sex that night or the next day or the day after that. They skipped two more of Emily’s cycles, and Tom spent most nights in the guestroom. Emily didn’t want to see a therapist and still wouldn’t talk of adoption. Her only reason for denying both requests was that it wasn’t time to give up, though she wouldn’t say, even now entering her late thirties, when the exact time to give up would be.

*****

They were married in Jamaica in 2000. Emily wore a strapless white wedding gown that flowed with the breeze coming off the ocean. Her hair had small curls, and she took deep breaths to keep herself from crying.

Tom wore a light hemp pants suit with a cotton button-up shirt and no tie. He wasn’t moved to tears, but he couldn’t help smiling and couldn’t look away from Emily. She was captivating even through the deep breaths that held back happy tears.

As Tom repeated his vows the world seemed to slow; he could feel every movement of his mouth and feel Emily’s hands tighten around his. The justice of the peace then turned to Emily whose voice was barely a whisper as she spoke, yet unmistakably happy. As soon as she got the words out, she jumped into a kiss before a pronouncement of marriage could actually be made. The justice of the peace made a small joke about Emily’s excitement that seemed to take away her tears. Or maybe it was just Tom’s arms around her waist.

Tom thought about that day often when preparing the paperwork for the divorce. He would let her keep the house and gave her more of his personal assets- 401K and stocks- than she’d ever think to ask for. He loved her despite everything, which made signing the divorce decree difficult. She hadn’t looked at him directly in any of the meetings with the lawyers, which made leaving easier. Had he seen her face, her eyes, he would have been tempted to sink with the ship.

*****

As the plane rolled toward the runway, Tom closed his book and looked out the window. It was his first flight ever without someone he knew beside him: his ex-wife, his brother, his father. It was a twenty-hour flight to Vietnam, and the return flight would be just two days later. Just enough time to sign forms and make everything legal.

As the engines geared up, Tom felt both nervous and excited. His whole world was about to change. And the roar of the plane gave the trip the feeling of reality. The flight attendant went up the aisle checking everyone’s seatbelts. It was a full flight, so the process took several minutes. But Tom didn’t care. It was a bright cloudless day; nothing would stop the trip now.

Some fifty miles away in the home they once shared, Emily sat alone in the Teddy Bear Room. The room was still empty save for the chair that sat by the window, in which she quietly rocked. In her hand was a rosary, and as she recited her Hail Marys, she watched the neighborhood kids play touch football in the street in front of her house. Johnny, who lived three houses down the street, was playing quarterback for both teams and threw dead-on spirals as he marched the opposing squads up and down the field. Emily smiled as they celebrated the latest touchdown and tried to wave at the boys, but they didn’t see her. So she turned her attention back to the rosary, falling into a slight trance as she prayed. Everything was going to work out. If nothing else, Emily was sure of that.