Sandra Black

An Accident

We were coming up to where the roads cross, and I was looking out the window at the browning trees and undeveloped fields going by. There was a white van stood sitting in the middle of the junction. It looked like it couldn’t quite make it across the road, and had stopped to take a breath as the seconds that went by seemed to move slower. It seemed to pause, only for a moment, as time slowed to still, and when it moved, I saw you. A boy was lying in the middle of the road.

‘Oh my god. There’s a boy. There’s a boy lying on the ground. He’s not moving.’

Cars stood solitary surrounding him like an audience, their drivers looking on from outside their vehicles, one a car, another a bus, the other a van. Their mouths stretched in big round O’s aghast by the same masks they all seemed to be wearing. They stood spaced in a sterile circle, looking from the different junctions where their journeys had been interrupted, at a far and strange distance from the boy. He lay alone in his own blood where the road around him had been dyed dark red. And as I watched the cars drive around his body, and ours began to turn to do the same, it reminded me of how quickly life would move on without you in it.

Because now we’re home, and the television is going on, and everyone’s watching the weather report, and complaining about the dark grey pixelated clouds that will dictate the next three days. And Friends is on next, and hearing the studio audience laugh is too disgusting hanging heavy in the air, strained. It wasn’t long before phone calls were being made, and the ‘you’ll-never-guess what-happened-to-me’s’ were heard. You could hear through the phone their mouths in ‘O’s’, their eyes just as wide. It wasn’t long before you became a conversation piece.

And upon the discovery of news of your death that night, my mother’s comforts remind me of how yours will be up all this night. And my brain is wracked by her sobs as she is wrecked by the relentless self-interrogation as to why she ever allowed you that bike in the first place. It wasn’t difficult to discover. It was all over the news that night. And having heard it on the radio over the white noise of hissing pots and pans and the kettle whistling letting us know it was time for tea, your death was labelled a delay. The still of blue blinking lights flashing motionless in time was the late-night news report, and then discovering your name, Shane.

And now we’re arguing with the neighbours about the noise of their music, and they’re saying how ours is too loud when we both know it’s theirs that’s the problem. And there’s grumbling, and muttering and we both know how awkward it’s going to be next time we run into each other in the driveway, or at the bus stop, or perhaps as we find ourselves in a long line at the supermarket as we go about our fragile lives.

And the next day, the façade of brightly coloured balloons and flowers in their multitude lay witness in mounds to the crowds at the crossroads. Some people stood, some prayed, some younger ones cartwheeled round the sign posts at the grey junction that had been sprayed with pinks and reds and floating purples and blues. I wonder how soon it will take to forget. And how in the following weeks the teddy bears turned to mush, and the flowers to mulch, the crowds went from some of those first few, to one, to none. And reading your endless virtual condolences remind me how soon people will have to scroll through to see you. Your last photo will age, and your page, lie dormant. Now adorned with angel wings and heart emojis I wonder how quickly it will take to forget.

‘We have to do something,’ says a small, hollow voice, unrecognisable as my own. It bounces off the windshield sounding hollow as if echoing through a great cathedral. Small panicked notes rise to desperation as I realise what’s happening; we’re driving away.

‘We have to go back,’ and I begin to clamber over my head rest, wrestling with my seatbelt which doesn’t want me to turn to look at you, but I do. And in that second, I saw you lying there.

Flung in the middle of the road, your small skinny body lies on its back, your delicate limbs spread far from each other. A face sprayed with freckles, your head sprigged with red curly tufts, has been dipped in the maroon halo you lie in. The shiny plastic shards of your shattered helmet lie about you like broken glass and glow different colours in the slowly sinking sun; red, amber, yellow.

I watch where you lie lonely as the seconds stretch to fit the colossal time it takes to drive away from your body. The space around you is so vast. And as we begin to pass you by, I watch. Why was no one going over to you?

‘Why isn’t anyone helping him?’

A crimson tear dribbled down the side of your face. I watched as you lay there, in the space where the roads cross, arms outstretched, like a God. And then, we drove away.

---

Sandra Black lives in Dublin, Ireland. She graduated with a degree in English Literature and History and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Dublin City University. She works as a writer for Hot Press Music Magazine.

Rae Katz

ODE TO AN INSIDE JOKE

Once, fifteen years ago, I asked a stupid question. I was a rising college senior aboard a ferry boat, red-cheeked from a day at the beach. A group of friends lounged on the deck, high on the sweet, auspicious air of early summer, bare arms slung over shoulders. The late afternoon sun glanced off the waves and projected sparkles. Everything was wide and inviting ahead.

I wanted to know the plans for the night, so I turned to my friend Alex and said,

“So are you guys, like, partying later?”

The syntax and word choice were odd. I was a serious student, the type of person who would use the word “syntax.” Alex, a Ukrainian immigrant with an inborn instinct for comedy, mined some hilarity from my dumb question. He turned to the group and yelled,

“Hey, everyone, are we, like, partying later? Anyone, like, partying?”

The small group giggled and repeated my badly composed question—Anyone, like, partying later? I blushed a happy pink, the butt of the joke but also the queen of the joke. I’m a fiend for this kind of fond teasing. So? That would usually be the end of it. A silly, frivolous joke. Barely a joke, really.

But that year this phrase became a habit—Are you, like, partying later? If Alex and I encountered any discussion of nighttime plans, any mention of events on campus, indeed any use of the word “later,” he turned to me and said, Are we, like, partying? Later? The phrasing evolved—later, are we gonna, like, party?—and became truncated—later, wanna like…? Eventually the entire joke was contained in just a glance my way and a single word: party?

Other people began to reference the joke. I found myself in random groups of people talking about the coming weekend, and someone would turn to me and say,

“So, later, are you, like, heading somewhere with people imbibing alcohol?”

Oh, this insignificant, unsophisticated, artless, middling joke that we couldn’t stop telling.

***

Five years later we were twenty-five, and a group of these friends reunited at a concert. Dusk was falling and the stage lights were coming up, and for a moment everyone left behind the trials of early adulthood and became free: wearing cutoff shorts, covered in mud, stripes painted on our cheeks. A band dressed as aliens took the stage, and the crowd started thumping, bellowing the lyrics, shutting our eyes against the strobe lights, waving our hands in the deepening night. Someone grabbed my arm through the mayhem and yelled,

“Hey!”

I was tossing my long hair wildly and stomping on the muddy earth. I paused just long enough to hear a friend shout:

“Are we, like, finally partying?”
I’ve observed an inside joke before, tried to sort out its mechanics. I’ve seen it on a first date, when it is flimsy glue to connect us for a moment. I’ve seen how it works as a badge of having been there, “I was included!” woven into the retelling. I’ve seen how it helps define us and them, like a line in the sand washed away and redrawn, washed away and redrawn. But I’ve rarely seen an inside joke like this one, laid brick by brick, year after year, like a fortress.

***

Ten years later we were thirty, scattered across the country, involved in partnerships and health struggles and family building and consumed in our careers. We were still texting each other, “later? party?” Our husbands and wives and new friends told the joke. I still loved this silly thing, more than ever. That day on the ferry we picked out that random moment, put a stake in it, tied to it a flimsy string, and proceeded to carry that thread through everything that followed: through lazy senior spring and sickening goodbyes and moves across the country, through 3 a.m. New York City streets and dancing on tables and getting kissed by strangers, through bad diagnoses and breakups and our low backs beginning to ache, through red-hot early love and crimson later love, through the days we thought we wouldn’t amount to much and the days we felt like queens, through our pursuits of mastery, through failure after failure, through endless weary turns of the earth on her axis. We carried it through the whole immense decade of our twenties, a third of our lives.

We didn’t toss it aside, we wove it thicker, recruited other people to carry it with us, avoided the severing blade of time against all odds. What possessed us to go to these lengths for this rudimentary, immature, basic, unworldly, terrible joke?

***

It has been fifteen years now, and the joke has evolved to suit our mid-thirties. The party is now, we remind each other. As in: the party is, in fact, not later. As in: The party has been, in fact, happening all along. For example, we’re at the playground with our babies and feeling tired from endless daycare-induced colds, and the air is too hot and sticky, but the babies are shrieking with joy on the swings, and someone says, the party is now. Always with a shrug, like, whodda thunkit? All those years we were mistaken. The party is already happening.

Recently Alex showed up at a gathering and surprised us with his new tattoo: a stylized party hat, his personal reminder about when the party is. Our joke, set in dark ink in the skin of his abdomen forever.

This joke, my god. It is now a hot little orb of love. It has been forged by many hands, transformed by the alchemy of our friendships, fired in the kiln of time, willed into permanence through our bizarre devotion. This joke, not so stupid after all.

***

I imagine the joke told at my fiftieth birthday, at my eightieth birthday, by my children. At my funeral I imagine someone hobbles up to the podium with a cane and turns toward the guests, hands shaking, to deliver a short eulogy:

“At last Rachel is, like, partying.”

I have spent thousands of hours in offices toiling in pursuit of a certain kind of success. And yet it will be my greatest achievement if my epitaph reads:

Later Finally Came.

---

Rae Katz’s prose are published or forthcoming in Under the Sun, Steam Ticket, Stone Coast Review, and Talking River Review. She has written several articles for The Health Care Blog and has written and published Fowl Weather (Pyrite Press), a graphic novel illustrated by Stephanie Davidson. She co-founded Able Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company supporting better quality measurement in healthcare. Previously, Rae was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and a United States Fulbright Scholar to China. She holds a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University. Rae enjoys quilting, puttering in the woods, and being a mom.

Marc Vincenz

Subliminal Message

The left hand turns the key, unattached, artfully. The other sits in the pocket rubbing coins. Behind, the universe is streaming in, unpacked in all that matter. The mice are playing in the larder, searching for wholegrain flour, the cat is sniffing something like a breeze. Multiple moons cast their wary glances, autumn fields are ripe in berries. The bear ambles along as is his lot on a Thursday night. Each instant is a reality for him, each past, nothing more than a dream; mostly it’s the shrill sound of the gray tree frog that stirs him—oh, but nothing can keep him from the garbage, the discarded nappies, a scratching of leftover Andouille, and all the plastics in their glossy underbellies. Once the corn has been reaped, then the sun, then when the fields are bare and unbearable lightness rises from those leftover, it’s as if a frozen shadow sweeps across the earth, and all that is left is sleep.

---

Marc Vincenz is and Anglo-Swiss-American poet, fiction writer, translator, editor and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, World Literature Today and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing.

Kate Koenig

Dear X: A Letter to the Girl after Me

Dear X:

I’m writing to you because you deserve to know.

Because someone has to know what happened on an unremarkable day in Pittsburgh.

Because the burden of a secret so terrible and consuming is too heavy for one heart and mine has splintered irrevocably.

Because this is your story too, even if you don’t know it yet.

Maybe you’ll hate me for this monumental burden I pass onto you. But please understand that the truth is an arduous pain to carry alone. 

His name was [REDACTED] and he first killed me in November—my last day as a sixteen-year-old. The last day I remember what it felt like to be whole with lungs that inhaled feathered air. There was a time when I was soft before I came back.  

Again

and Again

  and Again.  

I didn’t want to return after the first time. I wanted to fade into that Pittsburgh autumn of overcast skies and burnt leaves that tasted like bonfire ash and secrets made behind cupped hands, but he resurrected me to his altar of unwashed sheets and cinderblock bed.

Again, I learned, is a terrible word. It’s an ache that aloe can’t soothe. It gnaws inside a shrunken gut.

It’s always November for me.

X, I hope you can forgive me. My ghost calls to you.

#

His name was [REDACTED] and his eyes were the color of furrowed bark on the pines enclosing Peters Lake Park. For a short time, he became what those woods were for me. A shelter for when I had nowhere—no one else—to turn to. There, we’d dip our toes in lake water and watch ripples pulse out into the greater body. There we could unwind ourselves bare.

But he was not a gentle breeze across water. He smelled like rich, dark brown earth— the origin of life itself. He was the soil—a home for decomposition underneath a surface that exuded life. Unfortunately, I learned this too late.

Something as beautiful and vibrant as pomegranate blood can hide decay.

#

We were alone when light first left his eyes. My moth-wing lungs fluttered, struggling in the sudden darkness. I should have run. And I should have run the first time he choked me, with flat and unseeing eyes. And I should have run when he pulled a knife, when he hit me, when he tied me up, when he shoved my face into the mattress, when he, when he, when he—

But I didn’t.

#

I can’t describe the first time it happened. As time moves on and trauma turns into jigsaw scar tissue, I forget how to rearrange my first life. This first death feels like a memory I borrowed from someone else, stored in peripheral whispers and crackling static.

I forget much except the sensation of falling through the canyon where two twin beds were pressed against each other, balancing on cinderblocks. That’s where he buried my spine. My converse, my jeans, my black shirt, and new peacoat to fight off the November chill were carelessly discarded on the floor.

I only remember he smelled like the deep forest, where no one can hear you scream.

#

Please don’t blame me for not fighting back. I did and I suffered for it. Some deaths, I’d learned, are worse than others.

He sneered and said nobody wanted to love someone like me. When I wouldn’t kiss him after this verbal abuse, he decided I needed to give more.

The price had suddenly tripled.

He and his friend—an accomplice in this crime—grabbed me by my ankles and wrists, and then hauled me upstairs to that stained makeshift bed. I thrashed so hard in their arms that his friend dropped me and the back of my head split open against tile.

My soul briefly left my limbs once my head cracked ground and I was lost to a field of multi-pointed stars shooting across my eyes. I floated in lifetimes I’d never get to see, visions of my future that never materialized by morning. I wilted as they carried me upstairs.

I returned to myself, to [REDACTED] straddling my stomach. My ankles were tied with rope; his friend was cutting into my skin with each loop. [REDACTED] wrapped my wrists with the navy tie he wore to our homecoming. When I looked him in his eyes, the light was gone, atmosphere returning only black holes.

I fought back, kicking his accomplice in the face. When he tumbled over, I twisted around and elbowed [REDACTED] off me, squirming the tie off as I crawled on my stomach across the floor. I grasped the doorknob, but a pair of hands grabbed my ankles. I held tight, but together they yanked me back. I was pinned, retied, and forced to endure his kiss.

Only a warmup for what would come.

My head lolled to the side and I stared out his bedroom window, wishing it was open, just a crack. I didn’t want my spirit trapped in this room with him. When someone dies, you’re supposed to open the window or else their soul will never be free.

I fought until he killed me again. My splintered bone was cradled back into the chasm no one could reach. Even as my spirit lifted away from my body and the hurt, I never stopped looking out that pane of glass, at the idyllic suburban view outside.

And so it goes.

I passed beyond into the shelter of nothing where I was nothing and no one. I came back to myself, hours maybe days later, hurt in new ways and recovering from the suffocation of a room with a locked window that showed possibilities I’d never reach.

Later, I thought about you amid my regrets. I always wondered, always hoped, someone opened the window for you.

#

Disassociation.

I didn’t know that there was a word for the sensation of departing from my mind and body. I hung like fog in the air, hovering alongside dust particles that glinted in the light beam over my corpse. Nothing was real for a time. My mind had to shed control of my form until it became a stranger, suspending my existence as a mercy.

If I left my body when he hurt me, then it wasn’t me who was hurting. It was just a body. He could never touch the tendrils of my spirit.

It’s why the memories—while sharp and metallic on my tongue—are so hard to spit out. When he touched me, I slipped out of that room and into the shell of my purgatory, far away from his smell, his smile, his obsidian eyes. I returned to the in-between each time it happened, torn from my body unwilling and unalive.

If I could have returned to the afterlife to stop his future destruction of you, I would have in a heartbeat.

#

I found the strength to leave [REDACTED], but his conquest continued. He gave me a black book, a diary of ruin with violent fantasies and the truth about what he did to me. He crafted it as a lure for me to come back, an excuse for madness, a petition for understanding. I read the pages and saw the crude drawings. He wrote about wanting to kill me, how he lusted to cause me pain.

I gave it back. Dear God, I gave it back. Why didn’t I turn it in? I dream about that book and imagine how it would have sounded slapped against the principal’s desk.

His ramblings read like a murder sentence, and you must understand, I was just beginning to live again. Learning to smile, to dream, to breathe.

When I talked to our principal a week after he slipped me his black book, I’d already given up the evidence, cooled my hands from the hot coals inside. A police report was my only recourse. My hands were tied like that day inside his room. There were no windows in the school office. I had to stay inside my body and mind.

She was asking me to relive my deaths and I couldn’t do it.

Please understand, I had no other choice.

#

Six months after I left, handed back his abuse and walked away from it all, I lost my footing. His damage left pockmarks in my life but he was not the only one who untethered me.

I came home from work late at night to a sterilized postmortem prep room. My father’s voice commanded me to the kitchen. It was a school night. “Death of a Salesman” waited dog-eared in my messenger bag upstairs. Mom paced, haloed in the singular light shining over the kitchen table, a loose bulb in an interrogation room.

My father threw down a stack of papers, highlighter gleaming off the ink. I read the first line and my heart sank low in my chest, pushed out into my limbs until I felt each beat in the tips of my fingers. It all flooded back: the scent of forest earth, dark soil and cedar, blood and salt and tears and decay.

Bound and highlighted, punctuated under glaring disgust were years of chat logs. Highlighted in yellows and oranges so bright they stunned me were my emotional wounds on full display: lost virginity and sex, self-harm, abuse, the aftermath of my suicide attempt. My own heart dissected in front of me.

My parents read about my rape and punished me for it.

Heat dissipated from my core and light dimmed in my eyes as I drifted above them, away from their anger. I disassociated as my father threw a cup across the room and called me a disgrace. My body sat there and refused to talk, to offer any explanation or apology for being raped. It came from a mouth that, at that time, was not mine—

No.

How beautiful, how painful that word. How little they listened.

I was floating away into the collapse of dying night stars.

When I returned, I’d become a prisoner of their house and I knew no authority could save me from either monster I faced.

At that time, I didn’t realize someone could have saved you.

#

You were doe-eyed and soft-cheeked. Just a few years younger, but the age gap felt like an ocean between us. You were someone who was beginning to bloom, something I no longer comprehended. Instead of my future, I dreamed of yours and the stars that twinkled in your eyes each time you laughed.

I watched you carefully. You were always surrounded by friends, an army of protection, I thought. You had so much of what I lacked: a family who loved you, who knew of your relationship with him, and friends who would stand up for you at the slightest hint of disrespect. It would be enough.

I wanted to believe it could be.

Social media was my only clue. I followed your every move. There were no fights, no name calling. Instead, you posted smiling selfies and giggling couple shots. I tricked myself into thinking he’d changed. He saw me as cracked and let me break, but you were different.

You had to be.

But we both know that’s not how either of our stories ends. I’m writing to tell you that you aren’t alone. That his abuse was never and could never be your fault.

I’m sorry for writing to you, X, sorry that this letter has to exist at all.

In the right timeline, I would have stopped him.

In the right timeline, it wouldn’t have happened.

From the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I don’t expect forgiveness. I only hope you read this letter and understand the choices I had to make. Above all, dear X, know:

I will keep the window open for you.

---

Kate Koenig (She/Her) is a queer writer and photographer living in Houston, TX. She is an MFA graduate of Creative Writing from The New School. Her writing and photography have been published in several literary journals and magazines in the US, UK, and Australia. Kate’s goal in life is to write stories for all lost girls looking to find a home. Find her on Twitter here: twitter.com/KateK_Writing and Instagram here: instagram.com/KateK_writing

John Talbird

Everything Is Connected

i.

Photographer Alison Rossiter’s recent work is made without cameras from expired photographic paper. In her show, Substance of Density 1918-1948 at Yossi Milo Gallery in NYC, she dates these abstract images both from the time they were created (2019, 2020) and the paper’s expiration date (the first half of the 20th century as referenced in the show’s title). For instance, the four small gelatin silver prints, positioned together in a rectangular frame, titled Density 1930s (Gevaert Gevaluxe Velours), 2019 run the gamut from a solid black rectangle to a floating white blob like a monochromatic Rothko painting. Rossiter’s images seem to channel abstract expressionist painters like Rothko who championed painting-as-subject matter as a sort of aesthetic purity. But in Rossiter’s case the subject matter is not photography-as-subject matter, but development-as-subject matter, the prime example of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. And yet, even as these works go through the motions of mechanical development, they produce singular artifacts grasping toward Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the unique artwork. So not only does Rossiter’s tetraptych connect the Great Depression and our own doom-laden times, but also modernism and postmodernism going so far as to name the now-defunct corporate brand of paper stock in its own title. These artworks reveal abstract expressionism’s limitations especially in the idea that an artwork can only be about itself.

ii.

Regardless of intentions, nothing stays itself for long. I think about the death of George Floyd. Unless you’re a monster, anyone who has watched this murder of a Black man by a white cop will not leave that viewing unchanged. It takes up the world with its horror. You can see why so many people—Black, white, brown, Asian—hit the streets to protest despite the fact that we were in the early months of a pandemic and had already watched another white man suffocate Eric Garner on video just six years earlier. In fact, since we all listened to the 911 call of a white neighborhood watch coordinator’s execution of an unarmed teenaged boy, Trayvon Martin, in a Miami suburb back in 2012, various lethal and non-lethal-but-repugnant events have been recorded and presented to us with astonishing frequency: a twelve-year-old Black boy, Tamir Rice, shot by a white cop for playing with a toy gun; a Black woman, Sandra Bland, threatened with a tasing and handcuffed on the side of the road after refusing to put out her cigarette; a Black teenaged girl, Taylor Bracey, body-slammed by an adult male cop in a math class. Somehow, though, the brutality and lengthiness of George Floyd’s torture and death did something to America and the world: Floyd’s mild demeanor, the fact that he never resists violently, the clarity of his requests for mercy and air, even calling for his mother in his final seconds while an officer kneels on his neck and doesn’t bother to look away from the cameras filming him, hands in pockets as if this murder is not shameful, just a casual affair, on his to-do list for the day. The crime both repulses and sucks in all similar crimes becoming a symbol for a country’s shameful history and that history’s manifestation in modern times. Within days, this murder was no longer just itself nor even all the other similar acts of state violence piled on top of it. The protests widened from anti-police brutality to defunding police departments to abolishing ICE to a more generalized frustration about COVID-19 and the unequal manner in which our citizens of color have suffered under that pandemic to, finally, a protest against Trumpism and all that that ideology entails: white supremacism, predatory capitalism, misogyny, xenophobia, cruelty, indifference.

iii.

Our previous president used white America’s fear of the urban (i.e. Black) landscape for the entirety of his campaign for president and his four-year term, constantly tagging these places as “crime infested,” “falling apart,” “rodent infested mess[es]” and so on in order to fire up his base. The pestilential quality of his descriptions was not simply to align uncleanliness with real estate and disrepair, nor was it just to lay the blame for this squalor at the feet of whatever Democratic politician he was trying to tar in the moment; it had the collateral damage of covering the residents of these neighborhoods in a residue of grime, pollution, blood, and other unpleasant matter. Trump didn’t create this line of attack, neither did the reactionary political party that he took over. It has been a political strategy at least since the beginnings of industrialism, and has been a fearful reminder of white America’s dominance of people who lived here before them, has even been filtered through mainstream entertainment for decades.

As a white latchkey kid who grew up in the mostly white suburbs of a college town, I watched a lot of TV growing up and nearly all crime shows are set in big cities. At some point, I realized that I feared the urban landscape although I had spent almost no time there. Once, in the 1990s, I headed into the streets of Washington D.C.’s Chinatown at night with my then-mother-in-law in search of a tea set. Unlike some Chinatowns, Washington D.C.’s neighborhood, at least at that time, was a dark, foreboding place for the tourist who has not spent much time on the streets of a city with more than 300,000 inhabitants. I asked my mother-in-law why she wasn’t scared to go traipsing into “unfamiliar” neighborhoods and she looked at me with a puzzled expression. “I go where I want to go. You can’t be ruled by fear.”

This was a bit dismissive, I thought, perhaps even naïve. But I shrugged and tried to keep up as she scurried through these dirty, but mostly deserted streets on her ultimately unsuccessful quest for the perfect Chinese tea set. It would be another decade, years after this trip and after my first marriage had fallen apart, that I actually lived in a city. I’ve now been in New York—first, Brooklyn and now Queens—for almost twenty years and rarely feel scared any more to be the only white guy on the train or in the street. I only feel scared now when I am confronted with the kind of toxic masculinity that sometimes emanates from a group of young men of whatever color traveling in a pack and I realize that it’s the same fear I felt when I lived in the smaller towns of the more segregated South, though then it was almost always white men that I was afraid of.

Not long after that trip to DC, I dreamt that I was walking alone there at nighttime, the streets peopled with the usual extras from noirs: junkies and drunks sprawled on benches, leering prostitutes, young men hanging out on corners regarding me with suspicion. It seemed that I was the only white person in the city and I was terrified even though no one accosted me. I didn’t know why I was in this section of town—Christmas shopping, I think, although no shops seemed to be open—but knew that I didn’t belong. Finally, my dad swooped in to rescue me and the dream shifted tone. He drove me to the nearby Virginia suburbs of DC where he went to seminary. Although he really did go to seminary in Alexandria, this is the only part of the dream that corresponded to reality. In the dream, the seminary is at the top of a steep hill where there is a party going on. Drunken white men and women run in front of my dad’s car in dress clothes and party hats. They seem very young and immature—more like high schoolers than seminarians—and throw cake, slapping the hood of Dad’s car as he cruises past. Some reach in the open window and honk his horn. Dad laughs good-naturedly, but I become unreasonably angry, enraged even. Ultimately, I end up shrieking obscenities at the bishop. It strikes me, now, reading this entry in my dream journal, how scared I was in the earlier part of the dream and how fearless I was in the second part even though it was only the white people who attacked me. Their whiteness somehow made them seem less dangerous, comical even.

iv.

Once, trying to find an image of child laborers during a class lecture I was giving, I did a Google image search of “child sewing jeans.” I got lots of images of mostly white children in jeans, some pics of just the jeans, and some sewing patterns. I did another search, adding the word “sweatshop” and this time there were a lot of images of boys and girls, many as young as eight or nine—not a single one that was white—sewing stacks of jeans. What was so striking about these images is that almost none of these kids seemed unhappy, many smiled at the camera to demonstrate their pleasure at the job they were doing. Perhaps they were afraid not to smile, maybe there was a foreman who would beat them or simply fire them once the camera person was gone if they didn’t put up a good front. Or maybe they were really pleased with the job. Maybe they competed to get it, maybe their older brother could no longer work after being killed by a drug dealer. Maybe it was what kept them from begging in the streets of their city. Maybe they had a younger sister at home starving to death.

Fast fashion, like fast food, has a high demand and a low cost. Americans, even minimum wage Americans, command too high of a wage to sew it. That’s why that happy little boy and his friends will always have work—at least until a needle goes through a finger or he develops some kind of repetitive motion injury or his place of work collapses on him. He and his friends will happily produce all the jeans, skirts, shirts and so on that we here in the so-called developed world demand. Although the demand for these products have a limited shelf life, like other forms of energy in a closed system, the clothes will never disappear. When we tire of these fast fashion products or when they fray and wear out since they’re made from substandard materials, we will ship them back to the developing countries of the world for the people there to wear. When they decay past the point of being wearable, people there will cut the clothing up to use as rags, some of it will get buried in holes, some of it will simply lie along the surface of the world becoming indistinguishable from the mud and other garbage. And the rest will go into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and float atop the ocean for the remainder of our days, a manmade island, pure and uninhabitable.

---

John Talbird is the author of the novel, The World Out There (Madville) and the chapbook of stories, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Potomac Review, Ambit, Juked, The Literary Review, and Riddle Fence among many others. He is a frequent contributor to Film International, on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and Associate Editor, Fiction, for the online noir journal Retreats from Oblivion. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife and son in Queens. More of his writing can be found at johntalbird.com.

Elijah Muller

Backyard

I look out over my mother’s backyard. The yard of my childhood. I remember heat.The concept of heat was born here. This yard. It’s sounds of cicadas and the central air unit humming in a coalescence of synesthetic swelter. The yellowing grass was in a constant cycle of waxing, overgrowth of neglect, and the waning, wilting of death. 

[The lotus flower grows in mud
Submerging itself in river water
To bloom once more
On the following dawning day]

At some point in the last few years, my mother had had the old shed torn down. The yard was larger now, despite feeling smaller the way that places from childhood often do. Creating a sensation almost like vertigo. Looking down from a new height to a not quite familiar expanse. Removing that old shed was for the best. It had never served any function I could remember. The dry rot wood floors and oxidized corrugated walls had served as warning enough not to explore. Though, once as a child, I crawled under those floors. Venturing into the arid dirt underneath the warped splintering wooden slats. I found toys there. Dirty and broken. A modest treasure, perhaps left by the child of a previous home owner.

[This was Sidharta’s final lecture
A single lotus flower
held aloft for his students to see
not a word spoken]

Or was that a dream I had once? I can’t recall. Some dreams from my childhood substantiate themselves just as memories fade. Leaving a swirl of colors and sounds that will at times feel real. And at other times leave only a sense of a small questioning loss. Hadn’t the shed just sat flush with the ground? There wouldn’t have been room to burrow beneath. Let alone space for a child’s discarded trove.  It didn’t matter. The shed was gone. And the toys. All I have left is the doubt.

[Doubt held in the heart
Held in the mind
Held close at hand
I have been asleep
And as I stir to wakefulness
I feel fear
Fear that I will not return to the forgetful mercurial life that had become so familiar
I am hubris.
Do you know what “Budha” means? The one who is awake. This is the spiritualist’s fear. That by walking the enlightened path you might one day get everything you ever wanted.]

I sit next to her now. My sister. She’s pale. Skinny. Her hair, naturally curled, frazzled, frayed, and damaged, rests in a tangle over the back of her chair. I don’t know how long she has been living here at our mother’s. I don’t know how long she has been sober. The weeks leading up to this moment are gone. The months. Flashes of memories. Minutes earlier I had been in the driveway. I remember that. Sitting there for too long. Staring at the back of our mother’s car. And then I was here.  Sitting next to my sister and asking her how she feels.

Pain. Withdrawals. She says.

These are the words I remember. The only words of this night that will manage to transcend time into memory.

[Is there a word for memory revisited without fondness? The opposite of nostalgia. A memory returned to, for the pain of it. A scab being reopened. Peeled back and exposed. Trauma? Where reality shifted with an intake of a breath. Where the heart of the world broke and then continued to beat on in arrhythmic patterns unrecognizable. Do you know what the word ‘repent’ means? To turn around. To change paths. Look elsewhere.]

I stare in silence at the place where the shed used to be. I don’t know where else to look. Why can’t I remember how I got to this point? Where are we? The backyard. Our mother’s backyard.

[The Mother. The sacred mother. There is mother earth. Gaia. The holy mother. Divine and nurturing. The giver of life. Sustenance. And then the mirror. The profane mother. The hag. Baba Yaga. The witch in the woods. Her house is candy but only to entice the children in. They are the sustenance.]

Memories play across my mind so fleetingly and brisk as to only leave the impression of their passing.

I’m standing at night in the hallway with the bathroom door in front of me. My hand raised towards the door knob. There was no light from beneath the door but I heard gentle crying on the other side. I didn’t understand anything then but for the guilt of not opening the door and returning to my bed.

I’m standing with my sister at our mother’s bedside. She would talk in her sleep. My sister and I would laugh and laugh repeating those sleep spoken words for days. Our mother took a lot of naps. I had clung to my sister then. Six years her younger. And she, a child herself, grasping lost.

The games me and her used to play. She was the architect. Always crafting roles for the both of us. Her favorite was to play school. She’d be the teacher and I would be the student. Assigning me little tasks at my little desk. I loathed that game. I’d sit there with some hastily drawn up worksheet wondering when did the fun start?

I must have had a bad dream. Scared, I went to my sister’s room who begrudgingly and half asleep allowed me to sleep in her bed. Some time in the night I wake and stare at the back of my sister’s head. My eyes adjust to the dark. And her curly hair looks like a nest of snakes. Vipers writhing. The scales shimmering ever so slightly with the dancing colors of visual noise that only occurs in the dark. I lay there too afraid to move. If I move then they will move. I knew that. If I move then they will move.

[Your wants and desires are not your own. Your thoughts are not your own. You strip the things away that make you who you think you are and all that is left is your view of the world. The whole world is full of shadows and lights. Unnamed colors and experiences unbound by the tyranny of language. The first time you see a dog, you ask your father what it is. He says that’s a dog. And you will never truly see a dog again.]

Why do you come back here?

She didn’t say these words
Here in the backyard
These are my words
My words in her mouth

Why do you always come back here
To this place
This memory
You used to have something to say
When you remembered the words we spoke
You’d come back and speak so eloquently
Words of reassurance
That you didn’t have in the moment
Now we just sit in silence

You stare at the grass
The little path, cut through the weeds
Down the center of the yard
Where the dog used to run

You stare at where the shed used to be

You stare at my hair
My face

I told you I was in pain and you stare
Why do you come back here

Do you have a cigarette?

I pull two from the pack and offer her one to her outstretched hand. I take the other for myself and begin to pat my pockets for an elusive lighter.

A flame flickers beside me
Her own lighter
A circle of light
Illuminating the red brown off red off brown brick wall at her back
And the greens and blacks of the blades of grass at her feet
Golden trails of light ribbon in and out of the brown curls at her head
And her eyes flash lightning
Her hands
Cupped to protect the flame
With head bowed
And smoke rising lost in the night
A circle of light
Briefly there
Briefly gone

Wordlessly she offers the lighter to me
I couldn’t find my own
The flame flicks in front of me
And then it’s dark once more

---

Elijah Muller was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes poetry and short stories when he's not bartending at Medieval Times. You can reach him at michaelmuller273@gmail.com.

Nicole Cifani Lehmann-Haupt

Big Questions

You have been asking yourself the big questions lately. For example: How should a woman be?

Let’s say your best friend, Lorraine, wants to go to a pool party in the valley. You areliving with your husband in a condo near the ocean at the time, having finished your second round of IVF and the suffocating feeling that your body is not your own. Let’s say you couldn’t understand how it had come to that, like a celebrity shaving her head and tap-dancing her way into rehab.

Let’s say you ask the universe, the gods, the trees, the wind, the rain, the fog, the waves crashing into coves, the wise crows, cliffs, and satellites how you should be. That is, your hope is to live a simple life full of meaning. You don’t want anything to change, except to be as iconic as you can be but without changing yourself so drastically that you are no longer you. Everyone would know that despite being childless, you were still serious about life, like a purple jelly donut, for example—that is, without needing to fill a space that isn’t meant to be whole.

Neither of you knew the pool party is meant for kids. Lorraine is wearing a low-cut swimsuit that draws attention from the dads. Let’s say you count thirty kids in the pool. Their shrieks pierce the air like hungry baby falcons, and all the splashing turns the water white. The water feels questionably warm on your toes, so you decide not to swim.

You and Lorraine are polishing off kid-sized fruit popsicles. You lick the sweet and sticky neon juice from the crevices of your fingers. Let’s say you ask Lorraine what she thinks about motherhood and she shrugs. “Meh,” she says. But how does a woman exist in this world without a child? You tell her that you won’t be any good at this stuff.

“What stuff?” she asks. She is looking at you, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Kids. I’m terrible with them,” you say, wiping juice from the corner of your mouth.

“Sitting here, I feel nothing. I wonder if I’m just selling myself into the idea because there’s nothing to celebrate.”

“Really?” she says. Lorraine wrinkles her nose in the way she does when she’s about to challenge you. “But you’re doing great with in vitro, your clients, everything. Is this fear talking?” A red plastic ball bounces off her head. She smiles politely, then tosses it over the fence.

“Probably,” you say. You watch a hawk circle overhead. A crow is chasing it higher and higher into the atmosphere. “I just wonder if I’m going through the motions,” you add. “Since we’re not all destined for motherhood.”

“Eh,” she says, shrugging. “Probably not. But you’ll be great. There’s no need to overthink your experience. Besides, all kids are shits anyway.”

Let’s say right then a child with chubby cheeks and a blue, floppy hat tipsily toddles over, smiles at you, and promptly face-plants onto a piece of pool furniture. His face crumples like a mylar party balloon and he begins to wail.

Let’s say Lorraine frowns, stands, and straightens her dress as the mother appears, covered in enough sunblock to resemble a ghost. The mother apologizes profusely to everyone in sight, especially the child.

Let’s say your friend grabs your wrist and points to a solitary shaded spot on the other side of the pool. As you both walk away, you say that it is a pretty stupid thing to cry about—falling, that is—but you both admit that you do not know anything about children.

As you hustle away it also occurs to you that this is the great power of being a woman—that you can decide on how you should be.

---

Nicole Cifani Lehmann-Haupt has been published in Active Muse Literary Journal, Mulberry Literary, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She earned a bachelor’s degree in information communication processes from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in visual and media arts from Emerson College. Nicole has attended the San Francisco Writers Conference and the Iceland Writers Retreat. She teaches creative writing at The Writers Studio founded by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz. Nicole grew up in Ohio, has lived in Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, and Tokyo, and now calls San Francisco home.

Chukwuebuka Uzochukwu

Ogbuife Arrives Lagos

The bus pulled up at the park entrance and Ogbuife made his way to the overhead compartment locker and tugged his hefty Ghana must go sack out of the crammed space.

Lagos didn’t have the authentic smell of earth like Mbaise. The breeze reeked of burning tar and unwashed armpits, but not the kind soaked with the sweat of farm work; it was the hustle of trying to eke out a living by every unjust means.

Ogbuife saw young and middle-aged men garbed in stained white shirts and gable green trousers racing against danfo* trucks and molues* with beams in their hands yelling “Owo my da?”*

Motorcyclists made rash maneuvers as they tore through tiny openings between ten foot trailers and high-rising footpaths.

“Crazy huh?”

Ogbuife turned and saw a white man behind him.

“What did you say?”

The white man pointed at the highway frenzy. “It’s quite a place.”

Ogbuife nodded, still taken aback.

“For what it’s worth, This city is a really noisy place. It’s not very easy to identify mentally ill patients, because here, madness is a survival skill.”

Ogbuife didn’t respond. He placed his sack on his shoulder and walked towards a bus station. It was mid-July and many of the roads had already sunk into a depression due to the rain; however, the cold didn’t stand a chance against the fiery heat of typical Lagos jostle.

A bus drove to a halt at the station and Ogbuife was about to climb aboard when two...three...six...eight...eleven—a mob. A mob knocked him out of the steel floorboard and he almost knocked his teeth against the door handle. His sack became a launching pad for a number of wild zippy younglings who leaped in through the bus windows.

At first, he tried yanking it out of the brewing melee but on second thought he refrained and let them have their way; for one, he couldn’t even do anything about it. More so, he was protecting his teeth from another unromantic kiss.

The driver revved the engine and the tumult turned to a united “Driver wait!”. The short-lived respite was enough for Ogbuife to grab his sack and be on his way. He walked past two more bus stations and the realization rocked him that he had no idea where he was going.

He simply received a mail to come to Lagos, and without inquiry, he picked his luggage and was about his way. Ogbuife paused at a bar and sat quietly. He gave little thought to his situation and let out peals of laughter. He wasn’t far from what the white man had described as being endemic to city life—to the streets of Lagos.

GLOSSARY

*danfo — a minibus for passengers.
*molue — a privately-owned commercial bus for passengers.
*Owo mi da? — Where is my money? (in Yoruba)

---

Chukwuebuka Joseph Uzochukwu is a fiction story writer and poet. He has an earnest desire to give voices to issues and people whose voices are, otherwise, drowned in the noise of traditional norms. He is currently an undergraduate student of Mass Communication at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Deron Eckert

What Was Left Unsaid

“What the hell is all this?” I ask, knowing he’s not going to answer since we held his funeral last week. I should’ve got over here sooner, like the real estate agent wanted, but it’s been a lot. I’m talking about dealing with the estate, bills, and endless paperwork and calls not the death itself. We hadn’t been on the best of terms since I heard him argue with Mom and say, “I wish to God we never had him.” I was “him,” and I was five.

I’d call him up on his birthday, and occasionally on Christmas, and talk for a few minutes before making an excuse to get off the phone. I wouldn’t have even done that if Mom didn’t insist. I’d do anything for Mom, but once the cancer finally caught up with her, I didn’t have any incentive to keep calling. I wish I could now just so I could tell him off for leaving me with this mess.

I’ve never been in this house. After the divorce, Dad got to keep all the junk Mom always made him throw away. He must’ve thought it was a silent protest against her because I can’t imagine any other reason he’d want to keep stacks of the local paper, the one that publishes weekly. “You must have thirty years of this shit, you bastard,” I say to his ghost, thumbing through the faded rags until I see the time Clinton rolled into town. I remember Mom setting up chairs on 15, so we could welcome his motorcade into town with smiles and waves that he likely ignored behind his tinted glass.

Dad would’ve been living in one of his apartments by then. I reluctantly visited the first a couple of times and stayed on the single bed in the empty room that I was told was mine. I don’t think I ever spent a whole night there. I wouldn’t cry in front of him. Instead, I’d wait until he went to sleep, sneak out to the living room, and call Mom. She’d put me in the car before she’d go back in to tell Dad that I was homesick. It was harder for him to refuse when he could see me pretending to be fast asleep in Mom’s backseat. I don’t remember how many times we repeated this charade before he got the message and left me alone, but I know I never saw his second apartment or his third.

I hope he bought the La-Z-Boy Mom never would let him have before he moved into this house. I’m about the same age now as he was when he moved out, and I’d like to think he struggled getting this monstrosity down three flights of stairs, like I am with these three steps. I have no doubt that someone will pick it up off the curb before I finish clearing this place out. Bad taste never goes out of style, and Dad was a connoisseur of it.

“See you never grew up, Peter Pan,” I say, as I throw away shelves of movie memorabilia, action figures, and comic boxes. I half-ass flip through the long boxes to make sure he didn’t leave anything worth a damn behind, knowing he would’ve sold off anything that would’ve bought at least a pint of just-right whisky, the stuff that’s okay enough to drink alone but not something you’d leave sitting out for people to see. Not that dad was a social butterfly.

The folding table in the living room still had his and his buddies’ cards, cigarette buds, and empty beer cans on it before I carried it out, not bothering to push the legs in. But other than those idiots he played poker with every week or so, I don’t think anyone else has been in here since Lucy left him. No use in me trying to guess how long ago that must’ve been because I refused to meet my stepmom. “Must’ve pissed her off something good because she didn’t even come to your funeral,” I say with a smirk, as I dump the bedside drawer full of underwear, she must’ve left behind in the rush to get away from him.

“What pisses me off the most is that Mom would’ve been front and center at the damn thing, even after you left her. You had woman after woman, and she never dated a soul. Said all she needed was me. I remember at least a dozen times that we had to rush out of a restaurant because you came in with one of them on your arm and that shit-eating grin on your face, like you were anything more than a free meal.

You even had the nerve to bring one to my pool party at the Pavilion. Probably didn’t even notice Mom stayed in the restroom until you left, which thankfully didn’t take long. You were always good at that. Even now, you went and died before I could tell you what a right piece of shit you were. See all these pictures of your mom and dad and sister? They’re going straight in the trash with everything else that could remind this world that you ever existed,” I say, as I slide frame after frame off the bedroom dresser into a thick garbage bag until I stop on the one closest to Dad’s side of the bed that holds the photograph of the day he taught me how to swim. It’s the happiest my father and I have ever looked. I was six.

---

Deron Eckert is a writer and attorney who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His writing has been published in Sky Island Journal. He is currently seeking publication for his Southern Gothic, coming-of-age novel, which explores how personal experiences change our preconceived notions of right and wrong.

Eli Evans

Two Adornos

The name painted in black letters on the red mailbox was Adorno; but whereas Theodor Adorno, who invented the influential philosophical procedure known as critical theory in an effort to adapt Marx’s analysis of the commodity to the cultural and economic conditions of late capitalism and the so-called “culture industry, was a German-Jewish émigré who died of a heart attack in Switzerland in 1969, Gregory Adorno, who lived alone in the tumbledown house at the other end of the gravel driveway and had scrawled his name on the mailbox himself in leftover autobody paint, worked as a security guard patrolling the grounds of the nearby paper plant (which had been out of business for at least a decade, but someone still had to keep the window-breakers and other mischief-makers off the property) and tossed back Buds at Jack’s Red, White, and Brew on Route 5 every Friday and Saturday night. The locals, needless to say, were well-aware of the difference between their Adorno (alive) and the other (not), but from time to time some desperate Ph.D. student from out of town would show up at Gregory’s door, greasy-haired with bloodshot eyes and a satchel of overdue library books slung over one shoulder, begging him to please, please, please help them understand critical theory before their upcoming qualifying exams.

“Honestly, I don’t know a thing about it,” Gregory would have to confess.

As a security guard, on the other hand, he knew quite a bit about how to wield a Billy Club, something several of the students who visited him subsequently discovered was at least as useful, when it came to passing their exams, as the ability to analyze the portrayal of the mechanization of leisure time and the mass production of consumer desire in Siegfried Kracauer’s Georg.

---

Eli S. Evans has been littering the internet with his work for twenty years. A small book of small stories, Obscure & Irregular, can be purchased via Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera, and a larger book of even smaller stories will be forthcoming from the same just in time for the holidays (though at this point, we're not sure which holidays). He'd also like to do a chapbook or small book consisting entirely of stories in which someone is run over by a truck, so if you dabble in printed matter and would like to collaborate, get in touch at elisevans@gmail.com

Amy Marques

My Father’s Burgundy Pajamas

The first time I saw my father in pajamas was that time he didn’t die.
My father always dressed properly: undershirt and button-down neatly tucked into belted pants
that were expertly hemmed and ironed.
He was wary of public spaces where people wore skin-revealing clothing, hearts on their sleeves.
And he rarely acknowledged bodily functions—even sleep. He apologized for sneezing and was
mortified when his nose ran. I don’t think he would have survived a public fart.
That one time he didn’t die was when his own father passed. After weeks of sleepless nights in a
sickroom, unwilling to call his boss and acknowledge a death in the family, he decided to
postpone grief and drive to his quotidian meeting.
He never made it to work.
He fell asleep at the wheel and awoke by the wrong side of a country road. He had no
recollection of crashing or even climbing out of a car so smashed nobody could find an
unmiraculous explanation for how he made it out alive, let alone unharmed.
A week later, I saw him in a pasture talking to a cowhand while wearing burgundy cotton
pajamas. I wondered if he’d hit his head. Maybe the crash had dislodged his personality.
When I find myself cinching belts and tucking away unconventional aspirations, I remember
what he said in response to my cautious inquiry as I examined pupils that showed no sign of
abnormality: Life is too often wasted on the living.
That’s what he said, his burgundy cotton pajamas sticking out like a giant misplaced flower in a
green field, that one time he didn’t die.

---

Amy Marques grew up between languages and cultures and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She penned three children’s books, barely read medical papers, and numerous letters before turning to short fiction. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in anthologies and journals including Star82 Review, Jellyfish Review, MoonPark Review, Flying South, Streetcake: Experimental Writing Magazine, and Sky Island Journal. You can find her at @amybookwhisper1 or read more of her words at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.