fall 2016

issue 2

poetry

The Imaginary Conversation of Blue

Robert Beveridge

What arrived could be subscribed to.

--Robin Behn, “30 Windsor”

Shine. Shine outward
from your body. Make them
sing you in seven octaves.
This is not fantasy, it is
the Sunday morning worship
service, it is how “catholic”
in fact means universal, how
“orthodox” is more than just
a fifty-cent traditional.

There are different ways
to worship, most
of which do not involve
the act of awaking.
You do not have to rise
from bed, my savior,
you can stay right here.
The mourners
and the praise-singers
will come to you,
the procession, as always,
clothed in stained glass
and puppy fur. This
is immediate. This
is reactive. This
is stable yet unstable.
Quarks prove to us
there is no order in the universe, yet
our bodies stay coherent,
do not melt into one another
when I worship you. How is this?
I can wish to melt
into you. I can hope.
And each morning I can renew
my faith, perceive my skin
as ice.

Amphibian

Sarah Abbott

Home migrates, a nest cobbled from banitsa, books, and piles
Of autumn leaves. Now it’s gone again—I don’t know where.

These nighttime miles tick a requiem for every hitchhiking ghost.
My passengers were me once; I can’t strand them in Nowhere.

Winter silvers strands of my hair, summer dyes my skin dark.
Leased by the seasons, I’m always moving somewhere.

The cage of my body hurtles along its looped track. Upside down,
My spirit says you have to choose. Why can’t I choose everywhere?

Part grass and part river, you are a swamp. Snakes and crocodiles live in you.
Sarah, you are both and neither; amphibians don’t belong anywhere.

Omnivore

Erica Concors

Remember when I got pulled over twice in 38 hours?
Both times I was driving away from you,
the flashing lights grabbing at my neck.
They knew that if you had asked,
I would have stolen every stop sign in this volcano of a city
and thrown them all into the Schuylkill river
Because you hated four letter word
And the color red
Which remind you of the stain you left
On my new bed sheets.

That night wasn’t the first time
you’d felt like a wounded animal.
Except I wasn’t the lion you’d come to expect.
And when you opened your eyes, I wasn’t biting at your flesh.
I was licking at the tender place.
Already I could not tell
Whose hurt was whose.

See, I know the trauma of four walls and a wound with no origin:
My scars ache just remembering that Michigan winter,
when it hurt just to breathe.
When my chest expanding was itself
a violence.

Bringing you into my mouth
Tasting of honey-straws, patchouli, and still-warm gunmetal: 
This was pure instinct.
How a kiss became our survival.

The Afterlife of Ideas

 Carter Vance

If we have names,
given by stars, neighbours,
passports, plastic cards
there isn’t so much more
to give, to take, but
silence, but company of strangers.

If we have homes,
crests of rose-harp
and half-sarcastic maple,
cliff and burren shorn of all
but colonial signpost to mark,
what need we ferryboats?
If we have titles,
embossments made in tusk towers
to choose between a kindly construction
of worthless parchment transformation,
squeegee wash dish platters pushed,
are not we emboldened by them?

If we have capitals,
red brick lake places in hearty cheer,
celebration of frontiers unconquered,
empires deceased, imagined, decayed,
are ever-fleeting these joys as
passing stations, professorial notions?
If we have moments,
tenderness by Turkish candlelight,
the switching magnetics of traffic
din symphony, couch-bound war cries
for struggles ever-far afield,
what use is there in lifetimes?
And if we have long evenings,
spent in tradition revival of
intellects, lovers beyond ourselves

let them last,
echo.

The Window

Alison Angell

When we move to the high city, I cannot sleep for the tremor though my pillow. For years, the river feeds me color: boats of raincoats, herding lights of law, kayaks strung like beads. You did not tell me what they meant, the fire beams of propellers shone down the bridge. Tonight a new beam rests toward me, white rush without struggle remains through the tide. Across the river, the cement walls on four stories of a tall, dark building have been pushed out. All the light that fills the twenty floors below falls down to the water. And we think at night when it comes to us: this light is so like the moon. Here we will never see the lit circle slide off its base into shadow at the back of this building. In this window, a thousand rooms are the dust of stars or there are none at all. This is the moon’s light and the water is the sea, your breath that clouds the night all the warmth to me.

A TOWHEAD

JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON in the Pacific, imagined 1943 non-entry.

Keith Moul

Every enemy demands complete attention; the body switches to automatic.
If radar does not blip, a sailor daydreams hope for home and wife as a wave
Obeys its law in nature, co-opting duty, frozen in reverie, even its boredom.

Buddies talk life and death at every rank, not planning a lesson as a teacher;
Not the way a contractor schedules utilities before sheetrock or carpentry;
But more in the manner of a pastor’s obligation to guide members of his flock.

Rumors of action, ever specifics deficient, discussed aforesaid, then action
Confirmed certain by the tracers, enemy movement that penetrates the ship’s
Zone of readiness, Lex with a nod to Concord, jargon crying on every deck.
Planes, pilots and ammo in use or at ready: the carrier turns into the wind;
Sailors teeter on a rising slope; the fleet responds in unison; comes an order
Reckoning SNAFU; cockups in Navy letter and law; slicing away excess fat
In Man’s bureaucracy, irrelevant as leave at the burlesque house in Pearl.

Recent history: August 2, 1943, a male son, the first for sailor Ralph Moul
At sea and wife Margaret, home in St. Louis, was born, a towhead, Dennis.

Unspoken perhaps, unwritten: but he did think; he blurted “darling, darling”
Direct address to wind; or his military tone wavered a forlorn, universal “why?”
Or scuttlebutt hoisted the hope of covert repairs in the Bremerton channel; or,
Off-handedly he scribbled name and address of his best friend’s mom waiting
In Michigan.  A sailor accepts ignorance of events, of daily problems for wife
And child in Missouri, of frets memory-filled for parents home in Wisconsin,
To an older sibling in another theater of war, to irrelevancies of his childhood.

He returns to her.  Does she thrill darkly as the hulking ship ends its mission?
Can she find in him any hint of yawing seas?  Can she deduce the sea’s depth
Competently marked only by the newly dead?  Will she read a sailor’s catalog
Of a great armada pieced laboriously during fearful radar posting on the bridge?
What of a son’s future in rapt inquiry, listening for unspoken atrocities of war?

LOOSE LIPS

JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON 3/3-8/23/1944.

July 5, 1944: Made our last attack on Guam today.  We haven’t any bombs left.  Boogies (sic) to-night, about 5 of them.

Keith Moul

The crew growls at hunger.  The captain rations food, bullets, intelligence.

Ordnance spent on Guam shuffles defenders in hurried dances to Saipan.
Fuel vapor wafts the flight deck, burns the lungs, but engines will not fire,
Granting respite to the Marianas.  Pilots wander aft, both furious for battle
And hoarse for quiet seas, cursing their broken planes, empty bomb bays;
Proud wasp or falcon formations seeking easy pickings on Saipan.  A sailor
Aches to succor a warrior’s need; will give his life to right his carrier’s arc
Into void; to shoot the fix for bogies buzzing from that void; to bogies down
To obliteration, consumed, mindless of their suddenly improvised superiority,
Their caliber of advantage.  Tonight, a sailor writes from his contraband heart,
His artless note offering “aid and comfort” that if known (never that he could)
Spur from bunkmates hateful derision, the stink preceding his kind to the brig. 

No one aboard imagines, at home in the park, sycamores pods ripe and ready,
Adolescent girls sing a common verse: “loose lips sink our ships.”  Giggles
Attract the boys on the mound or at the plate to turn; their chests (the boys)
Inflate to prance the awkward species mating dance, preening brilliant colors

THE FACT OF CIRCLING LIGHT

JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON 3/3-8/23/1944.

July 5, 1944: Closed to 10 miles and our night fighter was over Saipan, helping them out.  They had an attack to-nite.

Keith Moul

A rotating light beam, sailor, serves you: as eyes to “see” the swell of ocean in all directions,
Two hundred thousand acres at a time; as eyes to “see” a fighter over Saipan, ten miles with
No clutter; as eyes to “see” a periscope plash in night’s dark swash; as eyes to “see” echoes
Of Lexington’s wash swirling around Guam, yesterday’s echo of independence, yesterday’s
Ghost with proud history.  In each day’s visions crawling eerily over combers, those heat Phantoms intensely seductive, your eyes “see” also too many wondrous alternatives to duty: Homecoming in dress whites, wife and child awed by your alertness, your contribution to Glorious victory over dark spirits dying for Japan, and the admiral’s salute acknowledging?

And what of coming generations amassing questions, some risking long stifled memory?
Your answers too often wide of the grisly mark, too grisly to confront, when the fact is your Return from war will birth more children and fantasies of forty dumb years of silent horror.

Lifelines

Kathleen S. Burgess

I wipe a silk from my shoulder. Who’s
coming? In the deep shade, a wobble,

a tilt from upright, and the speed 

reveal someone wheeling a bicycle. 
Then, a man.

One caterpillar descends
a silk thread of escape. White with black,

it must see the world from the zenith 

of youth broken free,
slipping into the unknown.

There were struggles to leave,
the habits, the inevitable hungers,

eyes blind to cyclists, walkers, robins.

Today dew sparks a thousand thousand lights.
A compound, then a short future looms.

Now other caterpillars rappel from trees.
Some hitch rides, land 

flattened to the pavement, or ripen wings.

Hickory tussock moth: the larvae sting. 
The barbs he’ll wish he’d never touched.

River Song

William Scott Hanna 

Four miles above
the valley of the Ohio,
from the sliding waters,
from silent currents, 
from the barge wake
lapping the shore,
I lie in bed. I am ten,
caught somewhere between
sleeping and waking, 
in the front bedroom
of the only house on the left.
            
Somehow, in winter,
and only in winter,
the sounds of the river
travel clear as ice
on the clean cold wind,
through the hollows,
their barren tangled trees, 
up over the ridge of Table Rock,
enwrapping the haunted steeple
of Lawrencefield Chapel,
down again into the hollow
and finally climbing the south slope,
settling behind my closed eyes,
where I can see its waves roll
over the land, traverse the full
four miles from the valley
caught somewhere between
sleeping and waking—
the song of the river
in midwinter.

Mappa Mundi

Jennifer A. McGowan

Legs
like bone trees
or trunk roads to nowhere.
Each knee a knot,
a congested junction. 

Hips:
major topography—rippling midlands, hills
and clefts; foothills to rising torso ridges.

Arms elegant
extensions of dirt tracks.

Blood trafficking
in ever-smaller
arteries. My heart
a henge, encircled. 
This blue-marked map of skin. 

Ompompanoosuc Gold

Jennifer A. McGowan

After watching your sister nearly drown
in a hotel pool, you were afraid
to go under. But summer called, its heat
and its rituals, and you would be driven
to the place where the river bent.

The Pompy washed sunlight ripple by ripple.
If you made it to the float, you were
old enough to be a cool kid, though ten years
later you knew the cool kids never swam—only
drank beer, smoked pot in stolen bongs
round the back of somewhere else.

Kingfishers darted a blue that nylon palely mimicked.
Killdeer flew overhead. You wrote letters
at midnight to made-up people. You tell me
it was freedom without threat: even the river
never dreamt of drowning. You tell me,
and your face lights with the laughter of water,
with the memories of a richer sun.

Monks

Seth Jani

The mushrooms lead nowhere
But into themselves,
Black stairways that end
In beautiful crevices,
Between damp rocks
And delicate hands.
When you hold them
Their whole drooping story
Fills the air.
You can almost taste them
Musting through your lungs.
It’s the language of deep existence,
Of being rooted to something so big
You don’t believe in edges.
It’s why they are the holy men
Of the forest,
Always humble,
Hooded in prayer.

Illegitimate

Joy Bowman

for the old man

I pocketed a couple of your letters
from one of your women.
I suppose I should feel guilty
since just this past winter,
the frozen ground took you into her raw mouth,
a muddy cavern of siltstone and loam.

It’s a wonder she didn’t get pregnant sooner, 
every night up  dirt roads, stirring in hollows
courted by the deafening rasp of crickets, 
you name it – you had taken her there.
She thinks it was a good time while it lasted, 
and you must have thought so too.

It sure is a funny thing, 
how even 72 miles away a cashier catches
me at the checkout, her phone flashing
an auburn haired boy,
You sure you don’t have family in Alabama, honey?

Even stranger is how your letters could have been mine.
I never told you but I brought a girl home once,
drove her out to the old tobacco field, mantled under the kindling
of rustling wings, where you shot blindly
at a boy for waking the rows of faded burley
leaves, ocher skirts buttering to touch
their neighbor’s sleeve.

It’s spring now, 
there are things I’ll always wonder,
but how they managed to till your grave
in that skin splintering cold, 
I’ll never know.

Hierro

Tom Darin Liskey 

The girl from Zacatecas
Wears sequins like starlight  
Slow dancing with the undertaker
—A man of some stature--
In his mirrored platform shoes.  
Most of the younger men in this club
With their American pistols
Want to dance to narco-corridos—
Prancing like circus horses
Drunk on mezcal and beer.
But she doesn’t hear the music anymore. 
Or the lurid whispers of these grubby norteños,
Just the lonesome whistle of La Bestia--
In the distance. An iron coffin
Barreling north to the river of drowned loves.

On Being Sober Five Years 

Sarah McCall

This morning the world is covered in dust—
thin curtain of yellowish resin settling on everything.
I see it falling to the earth in the shadows
of the hundred-year-old oak across the street,
I see it everywhere as I pedal my bike to work,
dust hanging in between houses and spilling
onto front yards.  It looks as if someone applied
one of those filters, the kind that makes photographs
look vintage or a little more worn.  How concerned
should we all be with false spring?  Birds arriving
ready to eat and breed, only the plants are long gone.
Do we not dance anyway, giddy, in spite of ourselves?   
I wonder if knowing better matters in the end, 
but this isn’t the end—here’s a cardinal, 
here’s a man sanding the hood of a rusted out convertible
in front of his storage space.  Here’s the copper yard
where three dogs used to be chained outside
in a circular fence with one dog shack for shelter.  
How I hated their bitter chorus of barking, but today
is silent and I tell myself they aren’t dead, only rescued.  
Who doesn’t feel regret or shame about the past?
Here’s spring, here’s my birthday, here’s to another year
and another in which I wake up and see more
of myself than I sometimes care to.  I lock
my bike to a metal handrail and blink back focus—
and when I say the dust disappears, which is exactly
like recognizing forgiveness—I know I am here.

creative nonfiction

Lipstick

Brittany Rogers 

“Make me look purdy,” my grandmother says in the bright glow of a crisp September morning. The word “purdy” falls off her lips in the same nonchalant way that Pap-Paw used to expel a plug of Red Man into the spittoon next to his easy chair. We’re sitting in her Pepto-pink bedroom surrounded by a collection of medical contraptions: a bedside commode, a nebulizer that she calls her “peace pipe,” and a humming, spitting oxygen tank that has become comfortable background noise in the old bungalow that Pap-Paw built at the mouth of the holler after the war.

Ha-Ha is eighty-six and bedbound, all of ninety-five pounds of her, ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis and COPD. It’s been years since Pap-Paw died—four, to be exact—and although she can’t remember much now, she’s never lost count of the days since he passed. Once, in a Steno pad, I found a note she scribbled after he died: “You been gone eight months. I cry every night. We was so happy all them years.”

For forty years Ha-Ha’s robust frame—built strong and certain like the old blue-green mountains just outside her window—has been disfigured by arthritis. It started with her finger, turned “as crooked as a jay bird,” then her knees and spine. When I’m far away and thinking about Ha-Ha, I see her as she lives in my memories: silver-haired, stringing beans and watching Days of Our Lives in a chair next to the woodstove. She is mangled but beautiful—an ancient, twisting oak in the forest—and like all old things that live in the mountains, she’s learned to adapt. When she’s done with her work, she stops to pull a tube of lipstick out of her blue-zippered makeup bag. Using the mirror from a compact of pressed powder, she dabs it on her lips, contorting her face in a way that makes me giggle. She hands me the lipstick and I dot it on my lips, too. “You look purdy, Sis,” she says, and we sit silently together in that room, unaware of the time that’s slowly ticking away, bound together by the idea that we’ll always be just as we are right now: grandmother and granddaughter, watching our soap operas in red lipstick. Pap-Paw walks in the room wearing work boots and a crisp cotton button-up, and he kisses Ha-Ha on the forehead. “Look at you, old girl,” he says to her. My grandfather is reserved, but when it comes to Ha-Ha, he’s unable to conceal the pleasure that flickers in his cheeks.

These days, Ha-Ha gazes at the old black and white picture that hangs on the wall at the end of her bed. In it, she’s wearing red lipstick, a polka-dot dress, and pumps that expose the tips of her toes. Pap-Paw stands by her side in his Air Force blues. The Appalachian foothills rise up around them, a cloak that shields them from the world. They aren’t yet aware of time, of the inevitable. They are young and healthy and in love, and as far as they know, she’ll always be Garcie, and he’ll always be Gene, and they’ll always be this version of themselves at the mouth of the holler off Hallburg Road.

Now, sixty-some years later, she wants to look pretty again. In preparation for today, she asked my aunt to buy her mascara and blue eyeshadow. Her whiskers have started to bother her, so I reluctantly packed up my wax pot and drove down route 77 from Ohio while a knot formed in my stomach. The truth is, after almost thirty years of loving my grandmother, I’m not ready to touch her face.

I sit on the edge of her bed and take a look at her in the electric light of the morning sun. “It’s not good, is it?” She asks, wide-eyed, as she waits for me to proceed.

I can’t breathe. Here she is, my Ha-Ha, all of her, right in front of me: the deep wrinkles in her soft yellow skin; her hazel eyes reflecting the tree limbs from just outside the window; the coarse hair poking out like wild ramps under her chin. I think of the corn in Stan Campbell’s garden down the road. It grows unnoticed every summer until one day I look at the jungle it has become and say to myself, “Wow, where has the time gone?” I stare at Ha-Ha’s face and take in the changes that I’ve refused to acknowledge. As I run my fingers across her skin, I’m lost in the intensity of now. I hear the familiar sounds of a cardinal chirping from its perch on the windowsill and a semi’s engine brake screeching down the interstate that was carved out of this quiet valley forty years ago. On deep black nights, I watch far-away headlights flicker with the fireflies as people from all over the country blindly whiz by this sacred place where my grandparents hoed roes, hung clothes, hauled water, and bathed babies. The place where they canned ’maters and ’taters, woke up at 5 a.m. for Sunday school, loved, and somehow, between all the tasks that made up a day, got old. The place where Pap-Paw, riddled with tumors, took off his work boots one day, kissed Ha-Ha on the forehead, and lay down to submit to the inevitable. Now, I feel myself succumbing as well.

I work on Ha-Ha’s face with conviction. I reach for the wax and start spreading. She closes her eyes as I start pulling hairs, moving swiftly across the velvety folds of her skin. After each pull, I look at the hair caught in the wax, the roots glimmering black like soil-covered radishes fresh from the ground, still warm and moist from the nourishment they received while planted in her body.

“You okay?” I ask.

She opens her eyes and laughs. “I guess,” she says. “I’m tough.”

When I’m done waxing, I pour toner on a cotton pad and smooth it over skin. She reaches both hands up and feels her face. “It it really me?” she asks.

Then, she pulls out the old, familiar blue makeup bag. Somehow, I know this will be the last time. “Don’t make me look like Tammy Faye,” she says with a deep, guttural laugh. Her lungs are filling with fluid again.

I line her eyes in black and smooth navy-blue eyeshadow over her paper-thin lids. The mascara is difficult to apply; as she looks up, I coat the ends of her short brown lashes with the thick black liquid. The whites of her eyes shine against her well-worn face. I tell her to grin so I can brush rouge on her cheeks.

“Don’t forget the lipstick,” she says as she passes her tube into my hands.

I feel my throat catch. “Wait a second,” I say. I go to the bathroom and find my makeup bag. I pull out my lipstick, purchased for way too much money at a department store cosmetics counter. Every morning, I pucker my lips in front of the bathroom mirror and apply it before I leave for work. On the best days, my husband kisses me on the cheek and tells me how pretty I am. I go back in Ha-Ha’s room and sit down on the bed. “Pucker up,” I say. She does, making the silliest face she can, and we both laugh. Carefully, I dot color on her lips—the top first, then the bottom, momentarily restoring all that’s been lost through time. Instinctively, she rubs her lips together, remembering after all these years the vestigial motions of primping. I pull out a mirror and hold it in front of her face.

“Well golly,” she says, her eyes moistening over. “I guess I’m still me.”

I toss my lipstick into her makeup bag. “Keep it,” I say. “You’ll need a touchup one of these days.” The pain burns my throat. I know I’m lying to myself, but I leave it anyway.

One month later, I receive a call in the middle of the night. Ha-Ha’s sick. The words “sepsis” and “heart attack” and “hospice” are tossed around like the leaves outside my house as autumn finally commences. I know I could stay here, let her live on in my mind like the lipstick I left in her bag. But this time I’ll accept the inevitable. I’ll pack my suitcase, drive back to the mountains, sit on the edge of Ha-Ha’s bed, feel her soft, warm hands in mine, and embrace time as it slips away.

Three Days

Lauren Jonik

“Read the directions again,” my mom pleaded. She navigated our blue Buick around the twisting, country roads. The heater’s fan hummed beneath her words.

“Turn left up here,” I responded while simultaneously looking at the folded white scrap of paper and trying to look for landmarks through the windshield. The familiar sensation of wanting to arrive coupled with resentment for needing to go welled up from my stomach. A forced deep breath managed to escape my throat.  “I feel nervous.”

“I know. We’ve just got to get there. Can you see what that sign says up on the right?”

“Wolfgang Smith, MD.” I knew the doctor’s first name, but it made me chuckle when I pictured him like Mozart in the movie Amadeus—complete with the silly, high-pitched laugh. I was in my late teens, but a part of my sense of humor hadn’t matured past age fourteen. The clock stopped at the moment of impact at the onset of Lyme Disease. Laughter was how I distracted myself. Moments later I would sit in another waiting room, filling out another long form, wishing I were somewhere else, wishing I were living someone else’s life.  Consulting doctors went from something routine I did as a child for annual check-ups and immunizations to something that filled me with dread. By the time I was 19, my collection of negative experiences with the medical community had grown to a heavy weight. Misdiagnoses, botched tests, misplaced results, disbelief when I told my symptoms, accusations of malingering when I didn’t get well, being spoken about instead of to when my parents were in the exam room with me and being interrupted when answering questions posed by the doctors themselves swirled in my mind. I began to suspect that this all was normal. I didn’t want this version of normal.

The myriad of drugs I had been prescribed tore my gut to shreds, stole my sleep and caused me to get hives as soon as I went out in the sunlight. I had done everything I was told like the obedient straight A “good girl” that I had cultivated during childhood. And, it pushed me so far into illness that it nearly killed me. My teenage rebellion was not a loud, raucous running away into the world, but a determined, deliberate turning inward. I knew there was something I needed to hear in the stillness. I had to listen. My life depended on it. 

What started as casual observations progressed into a game of connecting the dots. At 15, I noticed that eating red meat worsened my joint pain and increased my cognitive problems.  Huh, I had a hamburger for dinner last night and now walking up the stairs from the family room to the living room hurts. That happened last time too. By 16, I had gradually transitioned into becoming vegetarian.  Next, I read that vitamin C helps the immune system and began taking it. I didn’t catch as many colds that winter. Little by little, my interest in natural medicine, how the body worked and complementary healing options grew. I began browsing through health magazines. I took out books about nutrition from the library.  I experimented with different over the counter supplements like vitamin E, Echinacea and Pau D’arco. I started keeping a symptoms/supplement/food diary. If something could be quantified and analyzed, perhaps it could be better understood. I had to try. Seeing on paper daily data I gathered about my body proved to be more useful than blood tests, urine tests and spinal taps. While diagnostic tests helped me to understand what  I was dealing with, the daily minutiae of symptomology and remedies was teaching me how to deal with it.  More muscle aches might mean I needed an extra dose of magnesium. Fluctuations in my basal body temperature might have meant that my unpredictable menstrual cycle was entering a different phase. That might explain the twinge in my abdomen and lower energy levels. The more I understood about my body, the less I feared. 

In the 1990s, conventionally trained medical doctors received very little training in natural medicine, nutrition or supplements. Each doctor I saw was made aware of everything I was taking—I hid nothing.  When I asked questions related to how Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome could be addressed with vitamins and herbs, I usually was met with a blank stare.  

Every time my mom picked up a magazine at the health food store that listed local holistic practitioners, I hoped there would be one added nearby. Living in a semi-rural suburb had its advantages, but a plethora of complementary health care practitioners was not one of them. It was nearly impossible to find a local acupuncturist or yoga studio until the late 1990s.  When we heard about Dr. Smith around 1995, I had come close to giving up on doctors, but decided to give him a try.  I had heard his wife was a midwife. I imagined myself years from then having a baby with a midwife’s assistance. Already, I was projecting a future that didn’t include the conventional medical system. It would take years—and the evolution of the health care system—for me to understand that it would be possible to have the best of both worlds. But, at the time, I barely had even a sliver of one of these worlds at my fingertips. 

Dr. Smith’s waiting room was less austere, less sterile than what I was used to. The form the receptionist asked me to fill out included questions like “Do you ever feel fatigued after you eat? How many hours per night do you sleep? How often do you exercise? List any supplements you take.” I had never been asked these questions before on paper.  “Write down all of your current symptoms.” My mind stood still at this question every time I read it at a doctor’s office. Do I list everything? Or, do I pick the most pronounced symptoms? If I tell the truth, are they to just think I’m crazy or making something up like other doctors inferred? My brain feels like it is on fire. How do I explain that? Putting the experience of my body into words to present to people who would evaluate the information felt like a cry for help, plus a personal failure, plus an admission of guilt—even though the only thing I truly felt guilty of was getting sick with a misunderstood illness long before science would catch up and begin to understand.  

A slender, tall man with thinning hair and fiercely intelligent eyes, Dr. Smith was quick in his manner, but kind. He asked questions and wrote down my responses and whatever other notes he had. I always wondered what doctors actually wrote when they were busily scribbling away. He answered my questions and those that my mom posed with directness and clarity. If he didn’t know something, he said so. 

“I think you should go on a fast. It will be medically supervised. Your system is clearly overburdened from having had so many antibiotics. Fasting helps to give the digestive system a break,” he explained.

“What do you mean? How does it work?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting to be told not to eat.

“You gradually reduce your meals over three days until you get to the point where you don’t consume food for three days. Instead you will have a liquid protein supplement that aids in the detoxification of the body.  The gut and the skin are linked. The reason you’re having eczema problems goes back to the gut. Fasting should help.”

"So I only drink a supplement but not eat?” I wasn’t thrilled about this. 

“Yes.”

“How do I go without eating?”

Dr. Smith smiled and nodded.  “It is only for three days.” He seemed confident that I could do this—more confident than I was. Three days seemed like a long time, longer than the years I had already endured.

“Okay. . .” I reluctantly agreed, unsure about what would come next. 

“Marcia up front will give you a print out with specific instructions on what to do in case you forget. You drink the supplement for each of your meals. The goal is to cleanse gently and heal the body. The supplement will provide the nutrition you need in an easily digestible form.”

He handed me a paper to give to the receptionist with a diagnosis code checked off of a long list of ailments. As my mom and I walked back into the waiting room and to the reception window, Dr. Smith followed close behind.  My mom turned and jokingly said, “So, there’s hope yet for her?” I knew she wasn’t completely joking. She too needed reassurance.

Dr. Smith looked nothing like Mozart, but when he smiled there was a twinkle his eye. He looked directly at me and responded, “There is always hope.”

I walked out of the building and back to the car. My hand touched the cold metal of the car door handle in anticipation. As my mom unlocked the door, I realized that I had just been given a
new kind of medicine. 

Going Back

Mahdis Marzooghian

At Myrtle Beach, colorful resorts and hotels line the shore like pastel-colored candy tucked neatly in Easter baskets; neon signs light up the balmy night sky, crashing brilliantly against night’s endless deep-violet. The salty perfume of the ocean never changes over the years – it is the signature scent of summer at the beach. I have also tasted the sun. The omnipotent rays seep through closed lips and jerk the tongue to life with a slight tang of lemon pie; a perfect balance of sweet and sour. That’s what I like to imagine the sun tastes like. Nostalgia rises from this familiar earth, covering me in a transparent layer, and my senses are lovesick guides that take me back and try to help me wed my mortal body with the eternal bodies of the universe. My senses have hopelessly courted these beautiful, infinite bodies for years to no avail. Or so I think.

For the one week that we were at Myrtle, as my family lazily rose to tend to their individual morning rituals, I was always dressed and ready an hour before them. I usually headed out the door the same time my brother groggily headed for the bathroom. “The beach isn’t going anywhere,” my father said between yawns. “But the sun is!” I retorted, trying to rub sunblock over that one spot on my back I could never reach. I was armed with my enormous, sand-filled beach bag containing only my towel, iPhone, snacks, and a couple of frozen water bottles to keep my baking body hydrated.

I would only return to the hotel room for a bite of lunch and then it was back to the beach for tanning round two until sunset. No matter how much sunblock I would rub onto my skin every couple of hours, sunburn was inevitable after a whole day of sunbathing. It felt good to stick my hands inside the hotel ice bucket and place them on my feverish skin, burning hot from the sun’s rays captured inside my flesh. I pictured a molten, bright yellow liquid mixing with my blood and lighting up my veins like electroluminescent wire. When I turned off all the lights later that night, I was almost expecting my skin to radiate an eerie golden glow. I was half-disappointed when I didn’t glimmer like some golden god and wondered what it would feel like to carry that immense power inside me and momentarily smolder like the sun.

By morning, my flesh cooled down and was itching for another round of sun-fever. In the hotel hallway, I waited impatiently for the sluggish elevator with its load of people sporting vibrant bathing suits. The children seemed to vibrate with anticipation, plastic shovels and buckets in hand, as if going off to dig at a secret excavation site. Once the elevator doors opened with a cheery ding, everyone poured out, relieved that the uncomfortable ride was over. I stepped into the scintillating sunlight and the faint taste of lemon pie coated my tongue. The ocean’s eau de parfum filled my nostrils, the salty taste blending with the sweet and sour.

After a few hours of baking under the sun, I decided to cool off in the water. I pinned down my towel to the shifting, sinking sand as best I could with my bag and flip flops and hopped over to the water’s elusive edge, burning my bare feet on the sand. My ears were tuned to the sound of the waves – the sound of inconceivable, immortal might. The kind of sound that assured me I was fully alive and conscious and beholding a reality that left me reeling. It is the kind of sound that cannot be forgotten – archived in the primary auditory cortex and replayed clearly even when far away from the beach and sitting in the living room. It is the soundtrack to a day at the beach, where the water roars and crashes against the shore like the frothing mouth of a massive blue beast, coughing up the remnants of its shellfish lunch. It was exhilarating and overwhelming all at the same time and I took caution not to go too far, aware of its wild power. The night soundtrack, however, is much different; at night the water is calmer – purring and lapping along the shoreline like the smooth, salivating tongue of a massive black beast, ready to swallow me whole for dinner. It is soothing and alarming all at the same time – more dangerous. A cool invitation. The moon hangs overhead like a silvery ball ready to splash back into the water.

Now with the sun sizzling like an enormous egg yolk in the saucepan sky, I faced the ocean, only a few steps separating me from that watery hammock. The water was deliciously warm as I waded in. I felt like I had been given a large dose of anesthesia as every muscle in my body went limp. I was a puppet on watery strings. I was in the mouth of the blue beast, feeling small and helpless, trying to stay afloat and exist inside something that was so much greater than me. Is that why we are so attracted to the ocean? Do we love the danger and unpredictability? Does the idea that we could drown at any moment thrill us? Or is it a much deeper, older desire? I want to lay my ear upon the beast’s sand-encrusted heart and hear the rumblings of her ancient secrets.

I want to become lost in something that knows no time. Maybe we want to run away from time and tumble into something timeless. Or, are we just merely going back to where we once came from? There is a scientific theory that millions of years ago, the common ancestors of human beings adapted to ocean life. Do our origins trace back to the ocean? There is no denying that we share certain qualities with it. We carry the same salt in our bodies that the ocean carries; most of our bodily fluids, such as tears, blood, and sweat, contain salt. While this may all be purely coincidental, there is again no denying that we are drawn to the ocean and its ever-moving, salt-soaked mysteries.

I was about eight years old when my family vacationed at Myrtle for the first time. I spent the entire first day in the ocean, refusing to come out even for dinner. Back then, I wasn’t so interested in the tanning part – I only wanted to play in the water and find seashells. When my parents finally coaxed me out with the promise of pizza, my skin was so wrinkled that I shrieked with laughter and kept yelling that I was an old lady. My hunger finally caught up with me and I decided I was too starved to shower, so my mother helped me into my clothes and we drove over to the restaurant. Pretty soon the salt that I had marinated in all day started itching and stinging my skin. I started nagging my mother that I wanted to go back to our hotel to shower and wash the salty residue off me.

Back then, I could joke about being old and not be bothered by it, as if old age was a myth and something that couldn’t possibly happen to me. Back then, the ocean’s ageless salts seeped into my young skin, mingling with my own, and all I wanted to do was wash it off, unaware of what it meant to carry a small part of an eternal force in my flesh like fairy dust. Unaware that I already carried something similar inside my body since the day I was born – within the ever-moving blood flowing in my veins like ocean currents. But, unlike the ocean, I wasn’t an eternal being. The ocean is both young and old and I guess that’s the best way to describe something that is ageless. Even if it one day dries up and ceases to exist, it will still outlive me by several million years and that’s close enough to eternity for me. Now that I am older, all I want is to preserve a bit of the sun and the ocean within my expiring vessel and feel their timeless presence surging. I want to become one with these powerful, permanent bodies of the planet. But aren’t we already a part of this universe? Why is it that we feel like momentary visitors? Why do we rely on our senses and memories to take us back and help us belong to something we may already be a part of?

My family and I drove to a campsite on our last evening at Myrtle and as soon as the familiar smoky scent of firewood hit my nostrils, it triggered the vivid memory of a September night when I was around ten and went camping with my cousins. I had never seen so many stars in a single night sky before. The smell of firewood always makes me think of stars. It brings rushing back exactly what I felt in that moment on that September night fifteen years ago, when I looked up at the night sky pierced with those winking little lights, thinking that God himself had taken a giant silver needle to the sky and punctured countless holes into it for the light of heaven to peek through. I thought of the full moon as his thimble while he meticulously worked with that needle.

I remember wishing I could rise up into the air like the smoke from the dying flames and mingle with the ageless stars. But maybe I already have, because according to another well-known scientific theory, human beings carry within them the same elements that make up stars; the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms in our bodies were created in previous star generations around 4.5 million years ago. If this theory holds some truth, then mingling with stars wouldn’t seem like such an impossible task. I’d like to have faith in these theories; they help convince me that I am part of something bigger. The South Carolina night sky was also punctured generously with stars and I gazed up at them, placing a hand on my midsection and thinking how amazing indeed that I could be carrying inside me the same elements that make up those twinkling lights millions of miles away. Somehow, they didn’t feel so far and out of reach.

On our final day of vacation, we checked out of our hotel and spent the morning on the beach before heading home. “Take some pictures! You don’t want to forget these moments!” my mother commanded from behind her half-eaten watermelon crescent, handing me her camera with sticky fingers. I want to always remember her like this – sitting carelessly on the beach, laughing and eating a watermelon, her bare legs half-buried in the hot sand of the beach as if she is part of it. I imagine she is a mermaid, visiting the shore for the first time. But she will decide to stay on land forever, loving the feel of the earth’s solidity and the warm, dry sand on her body. Maybe that’s what our ancestors did millions of years ago – they visited the shore one day and decided to stay permanently. But that love for the ocean has never really gone away. It is deep within us and has soaked our memories, beckoning us to go back – if only for a little while – and allow our aging salts to mix with the ocean’s ageless salts. “I won’t forget,” I murmured to no one in particular and still half-heartedly snapped a few pictures to keep my giggling mermaid-mother happy.

But what can I resort to when old age wears out my mind and I do forget? It’s bound to happen, even if the blind arrogance and temporary invincibility of youth convince me otherwise. Can I then find temporary refuge in my muddled memories? Will I eventually come to terms with old age and death when my senses fail me and I no longer have my memories to escape into for a little while? When I can no longer remember those comforting theories? After all, our memories die with us. Is that when I can finally tumble into something timeless? In death, I will be buried in the ground where my flesh and bones will become one with the earth. My salts and stardust will mingle with the soil. In death, I will go back to the familiar earth.

fiction

The Orange Lawn Chair

Sharon Kurtzman

Sleet drummed against the bonus room windows as the garage door sprang to life. Maggie’s temples pulsed and she feared another migraine as she wrote out one more shipping label for a pair of socks. The backs of her hands reminded her of Manhattan subway maps, lines of bones and veins instead of the colorful 1 or A trains.

Old lady hands, she thought. “That’s because you are an old lady,” she said to the empty room.

She slapped the shipping label on a manila envelope and dropped that on the molehill of packages she’d drive to the post office later. It had been smart to list her home-knit creations on Etsy. Lucrative. She enjoyed the extra cash and welcomed the extra activity to mainly housebound days.

Downstairs the mudroom door opened and she braced. If only she could turn back the calendar. Two years would do the trick.

“Maggie?” Jerry called.

“Mom, we’re back,” said Brian.

The mudroom door closed and outdoor smells perfumed her cozy upstairs workspace with pine, ice and something minty. “Up here.” She laid her reading glasses on the desk, hoped she’d remember where she’d left them in an hour, or ten minutes.

Heavy footsteps climbed the stairs. Jerry’s footsteps. Forty-six years married to the man and she could have picked out his plodding gait from amongst a stampeding herd. She shivered. Until a few days ago, the temperatures had been mild for December in northern New Hampshire.

Jerry appeared in the doorway holding an orange lawn chair, the price tag dangling off its plastic arm like a surrender flag. To most, her husband seemed like any other senior citizen, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered, and movements deliberate.

However, to Maggie, Jerry appeared as tall and handsome as the day they’d met, almost fifty years ago, when he was the quick-witted young man telling stories at her cousin’s graduation party. He’d kept the group spellbound with oral snapshots from his life in the mailroom at the Boston ad agency, Bunker and Chase. There were about eight of them gathered around that sweltering summer day, either sitting on the grass or on plastic chairs that if you wore shorts it stuck to your legs. The evening air held sweet remnants of lemonade and meats charred on the grill. Jerry talked and his blue eyes repeatedly sought her out as if he’d saved all his best stories for their first meeting.

“There’s my beautiful bride. Sending out those scarves?” Jerry wobbled forward into the bonus room.

Her fingers combed a few silver strands off her face and she thought, here we go. “I’m shipping the socks today. The scarves were last week. Remember, we talked about that this morning?”

“Oh, right.”

She picked up a string of purple yarn, rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. “What do you have there?”

“I told you I’d replace the chair. It’s pretty close to the one that washed away from the beach.”

“Yes it is. You’re good to your word.”

“Should I put it in the garage?”

“No, I’ll take it.” She dropped the thread and eased the chair from him. “You know I like things where I like them.” As she pecked his cheek, needle-like stubble poked her lips. “We need to make sure you shave later.”

“Didn’t I shave this morning?”

“You didn’t want to, but we’ll do it before dinner.” She rubbed his flannel-covered arm and then pulled away after a quick static shock. Jerry didn’t notice. “Go in the den and I’ll bring you and Brian some hot chocolate.”

“Perfect.” He placed a hand on the rail and stayed tethered to it as he negotiated his way down the stairs.

Her knees ached as she carried the chair to the bonus room’s storage closet. A snow storm was headed their way and her knobby, psychic bones were better predictors than any of the boobs on The Weather Channel.

Maggie’s hand rested on the closet knob.

“Mom,” Brian said from behind.

She hadn’t heard him come up. There were purple shadows under his eyes. These weekly Home Depot shopping trips with Jerry took a toll on their son, but he insisted on being the one to take him. Jerry’s only other weekly outing was with her to the supermarket on Thursdays, where he insisted on holding the list, pushing the cart and announcing the things they needed while she gathered them. “I’m going to make Dad and you hot chocolate.”

“I can’t stay. Emily has a basketball game in a half hour. They’re playing Eastside again.”

She nodded. “Tell my granddaughter to play hard. I’ll try to get to next week’s game. And tell her not to take any crap from that big girl on the other team, the one with the pink braces.”

“You want me say ‘don’t take any crap?’”

“Clean up my language however you like.”

She knew his smirk matched hers, teeth framed by duck-shaped lips. “Did everything go okay at the store?” she asked.

His eyes traveled past her to the closet door. “Once they brought the chair out from the stock room he calmed down. I tried to explain that stores don’t keep lawn chairs on display in December.”

“How angry did he get?”

“Not too bad this week.” Brian tapped the handrail a few times. “I’ll call later tonight.” He thumped down the stairs in the same run-jump pattern he’d had as a kid.

Then Maggie opened the closet door where five orange lawn chairs lay stacked.

It had been thirty years since the orange chair that Jerry thought he was replacing had washed away. They’d been vacationing at the shore in New Jersey, leaving an umbrella, a blanket and the chair to walk along the beach, caramel miles of feet dipping in and out of the Atlantic, their sometimes loud exchanges drowned out by surf and gulls.

“I forgive you,” she’d said after an hour. His eyes were red and swollen, his nose raw, each feature matching her own.

Jerry’s affair had started the year before, one boozy night after landing a diaper account. Of all things, she’d thought, diapers. The woman was on the client team, some sort of marketing genius, also unmarried and flirtatious. He swore it had only lasted a month. Maggie never would have found out about the thing if six months after it ended she hadn’t been cleaning out worn luggage to donate to Goodwill. A letter from the woman was tucked under a stretch of torn lining.

When Jerry and she returned to their spot of beach still marked by their umbrella, the blanket and the chair had been swept away, the chair visible in a few flashes of orange.

“Should I go after it?” Jerry had asked.

“Let it go.”

“I’ll buy you a new one,” he said.

Now, thirty years later, he had kept that promise every week for six weeks running, his stroke-addled memory trapping him in a Groundhog-style Day of Atonement.

She opened the new chair, set it on the cream carpet and sat. The straps felt stiff, and the plastic armrests chilled her palms. With her eyes shut, she leaned back, thoughts transporting her to a different day on the beach, one that took place the month after Brian’s wedding. Jerry and she had vacationed for a week on the Cape, and this particular day the two of them had come to the beach for lunch. After eating, they’d stretched out on the blanket, him with The New Yorker and her with some bestselling thriller for book group. They were content and had been for some time. She knew her husband like nobody else, how he liked raspberry jelly with his peanut butter, farted every morning as he woke up, and that he didn’t give a damn about the hair poking out from his ears.

A single tear tracked down her cheek. “Damn silly old woman.” She wiped her eyes.

A crash from downstairs sent her to her feet, knees angry and bitching.

“Uh-oh. Maggie,” Jerry called.

“Coming.” Then she placed the chair on top of the rest and shut the closet door.

The Hour

Gregory Janetka

The headphones were old. They came with the cassette player his father had traded his credit card points for. Tim couldn't sleep without them, even though it confined him to sleeping flat on his back or face down, carefully positioned in order to keep him from suffocating to the sounds of silence. Despite the music, however, the ticking bled through. Ticking that could be muffled but not silenced. The clock was a century old after all, what could one expect?

Tim sat up in the bed that transformed into a couch during waking hours. Fine for when he was a college student, embarrassing for a man his age. He rubbed his face, clawing at two weeks worth of facial hair that he couldn't part with. The clock stared, smiling, ticking away, its cogs and mechanics doing what they'd always done - always with the exception of that period of three months in 1988 when a young boy hid his ill-gotten chocolate inside its works during the height of the humid Chicago summer. He could still see his hand dropping the candy inside, the first hidden place he had thought of, but the story had soon taken on a life of its own, been told so many times that his actions in the tale had as factual a relation as his current reflection did to that of the boy. The truth was there somewhere; hiding, hazy, rearranged.

Much like his mind this time of morning.

4AM. Again.

Part of time but existing outside of time. The hour the 9-5 crowd find themselves in only when something has threatened their wide green lawns and won't let go – the time the rest of us can't escape from. This is the familiar territory where Tim finds himself, wracked with thoughts of Dea. Dea, whom he met at work, whose eyes launched a million road trips in the hearts of dreamers. They laughed and joked and she was it. She was the dream. Then she left and became a real dream. His attempts to spend time with her were fruitless – “Yes,” she always said with a genuine smile and kitten glance, “I'd love to,” but last minutes always came, bringing something more important with them. Promises and apologies were made. “Soon,” she said, always soon, but soon never came to pass.

He tried to eternal sunshine her but failed. Everything, with the exception of that first grasp of the intangible about her, told him to let go, leave her be, she wasn't interested at best. And yet, he saw attractive women and knew they were attractive but his body remained unmoved, they weren't her. That had never happened before.

Forget it, forget her.

Yanking off the headphones, he rubbed his face again, swung his legs out from under the blue ocean of a sheet, attempted to stand, made it half-way, adjusted his glow-in-the-dark novelty ghost-themed boxer shorts that his ex had thought so funny and collapsed back on the thin mattress.

***

He wasn't told he had to move to Palm Springs but it was layered in his father's subtle lack of subtlety.

“Grandma June is on her last legs. She needs someone to stay with her. I'll try to get out there in the next couple months but you know how things are.”

“Sure, I know,” Tim said, but he never did know.

Tim's four siblings, all female, older and married, and busy being fully realized tax-deferring adults, left him no option. He'd followed their footprints, getting a degree in a professional in-demand profession that paid well. When it came time to commit to 45 years of three-color carbon-copy weekdays, he did the math - two weeks out of the year his own for 45 years gave him a total of 90 weeks, or less than two complete years, under his control – and he couldn't do it. One sunny April afternoon he played hooky to go to opening day at Wrigley Field, where he watched the Cubs lose. Afterwards he walked to the lake, found a spot without ice, threw his law books in and ran to fill the help-wanted position at Dexter Haven's, a dusty memorabilia shop, surrounding himself with trinkets of a bygone era he felt more a part of than his own.

And it was there that he stayed for years, inciting the ire of his father. Beginning as a torrent of cuss words, it soon settled into a continuous burn, staying just below the muck like Bubbly Creek, feeding off the chemical porridge of years of slaughtered animals.

It wasn't that Tim didn't want to take care of his grandma but he wanted a choice. He loved her. She was his confidant growing up and he, once she figured out what to do to entertain a boy, became her favorite. After she moved to California with Jo, she wrote every Monday, always enclosing a recipe clipped from the Sunday paper. After Jo died she began to slip – letters, words, notions of the real. Her last letter included a recipe for stuffed cabbage leaves. Tucked in Tim's lock box, safe from fire or any other worries, it remained unmade, always a possibility.

***

Wrenched from the couch-bed, Tim felt the rough carpet on his bare feet turn into to the cold, cracked linoleum of the kitchen. He pulled a mug from the drainer that read, “I Love You Beary Much” beside a picture of a teddy bear wearing a bow-tie, filled it with water from the tap and sat at his pressed-wood desk. His fingers ran over the uneven screws he'd added last week to re-affix the amputee's legs. He glanced at the clock. 4:07 AM. He wondered if he'd sleep better with no artificial light – no light from the L platform showing through the cheap blinds, no illumination from the street light on the other side, no light from the clock on the microwave, no light from the alarm clock, no light from the clock on the stove, no standby light on the TV, no ready light on the smoke alarm. Darkness. The thought shrank his heart and he pushed it away.

Once again stuck in this in-between hour, Tim goes to his computer to look for distraction, for conversation, connection. He stares at the gas-lamp-blue glow as it starts up. He signs in, lets the programs load and looks for Julie, his friend two time zones away who also suffers from insomnia, but she's not online.

But Dea is.

***

It was after 42 applications, six weeks and a great deal of desperation that Tim accepted a job at PS Pro Golf. He hadn't planned on staying in California after his grandma's inevitable death, but what was there to go back to? Dexter Haven's was gone, turned into a gourmet popcorn store with lines around the block. Besides which, he could get passive-aggressively bawled out over the phone just as easily as in person, and over long-distance he could at least get the dishes done.

With her insurance, plus Jo's pension, paying for everything, no one in the family had known how little money Grandma June had survived on. The will left unmarketable trinkets, those closest to her heart, to specific grandchildren. They and the other relatives who had flown out for the funeral left as soon as it was over, rushing back to their busy lives of rushing to keep their lives busy.

When the show was over and the programs, folded and wrung by sweaty hands, were tossed, Tim sat alone in the condo, surrounded by everything that had been hers. He was hungry. It was dinnertime. Her favorite program, Wheel of Fortune, was on. The answer to the puzzle was obvious - “Adam, Hoss and Little Joe,” but none of the contestants could see it. Everything was here, everything she owned. Everything he grew up loving, everything that she loved enough to pay great sums to lug 1,968 miles across the country but without her what the hell did any of it matter? He kept the photo albums, letters and hand-written recipes and sold the rest – except for the grandfather clock. The one that currently reads 4:17 AM.

Now, 4AM is also funny because it's a time where it becomes harder to lie – to yourself and to others.

“Aww, what the hell,” he says as he types out “Hey,” hesitates for a moment, then hits send. It would be the last time he would try. Just like the dozen last times, and the dozen more he knew would follow. The screen tells him she was last active five minutes ago. And so he waits, weary from chasing and with little expectation anything would change.

But he's forgotten one thing – it's 4AM.

“Hey,” comes the reply. “I was just thinking about you. I was listening to this song -.”

He clicks on the link. It's an artist he hasn't heard of. Mellow indie pop – not the sort of thing he listens to often but it was from her and anything from her took on magical qualities. He had once told her she was magical, which she deflected with a simple, “I know.”

Acoustic guitar over layered strings, the chorus repeated the intent not to fall in love with a particular person, chastising them for making her feel these things, making her care, making her fall in love.

He'd drempt about her often – mundane dreams, just walking and talking together. He loved talking with her, that feeling of intimacy, of shared space and time, of no time at all. A dream, a test, something had to be wrong, anything that could explain away the song ran through his thoughts.

The cursor blinks and seems to speed up. He writes out, and erases, several responses. Fearing misinterpreting things and making a fool of himself – well, a bigger fool of himself – he settles on a smiley face.

***

In the aftermath of the chocolate incident his grandmother began hiding things, little gifts, in the clock whenever he came to visit and he was glad because he liked surprises and because it meant that she wasn't angry and nothing could have been worse than that. It began simply enough with the appearance of the Easter basket the bunny always delivered to her house for some reason, but soon the clock turned into a magical cupboard, offering up something new every time, a tradition she continued as he wandered into adulthood – a new shirt, a toy from the dollar store, homemade cookies. He never looked until she suggested it, a game within a game that delighted both players.

Not once, however, did it contain chocolate.

In the early days the clock also served as his go-to for hide and seek. The wood, the ticking, the glass came together to render him invisible. It was one of those times he couldn't shake from his mind the day he arrived at her place in California. There was a Christmas present inside the clock. His eyes welled up - from the sweetness of the thought, yes, but also because it was the first of June and she had no clue.

The money Tim got from selling the rest of the furniture and the condo covered her funeral costs, his moving debts and a studio apartment for a month. The only surprises the clock holds anymore are treats for his cat, but the black-and-white fluffball still hasn't picked up on the trend and has to be led there every time.

***

4:22 AM.

Tim waited but Dea didn't respond. What was there to say to a stupid smiley face anyway? She must have hundreds of men pursuing her. That charm, that infectious charm - once caught what could one hope for but to see her again? And so he knew he'd keep throwing paper airplanes her way. He began typing, feeling the cat's judgmental stare.

“You want to go down to the water tonight and see the sand castles, or there's that new coffee place Susan mentioned the other day.”

“I'd love to but I already have plans. We should go to the coffee place sometime though – you mean Vermilion, right?”

“Yeah, that's the one. Okay cool, well, I guess I should try to get back to sleep. Have a good day.”

Another smiley face.

She didn't reply but remained online and active. “Why do I keep doing this to myself?” he said to the heavens as he headed to the kitchen, threw some oatmeal in the microwave and shook his head for once again getting his hopes up. Three minutes later he pulled the bowl out and sprinkled in some cinnamon for variety. That's what being an adult had become. He walked around stirring the oatmeal, waiting for it to cool. Less than three hours until work. She had made his day every day they worked together, just by being her. Then she moved on. She would've been right at home in Dexter Haven's – her and Tim and Audrey and Humphrey and Dick and Laura and George and Mary.

Tim placed the bowl on the desk and sat down to find a message sent at 4:37 AM.

“Hey, you busy now? You want to watch the sunrise?”

Twelve minutes ago.

“I'd love to. Where?”

“How about at the top of Adams Hill? That way my dogs can run around.”

“Sure. I'll head there now.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

She signed off and he laughed, lost in the glare of the screen. Rushing about he stopped to flick the light-switch on and off, then checked the numbers on the digital clock – two lucid dreaming methods to discern reality he'd learned long ago. Establishing the real as best he could he tried to finish the oatmeal but his shaking hand spilled a not inconsiderable bit of the congealing mass onto the glow-in-the-dark ghosts, alerting him to the fact he had forgotten they were all he wore. Throwing on clothes that would pass for work he opened the door and felt the damp morning on his face, followed by an almost inaudible meow - the fluffball's breakfast. Tim rushed in, grabbed a can from the cupboard, popped off the lid and dumped the entire contents into the bowl on the floor.

“Hey,” he shouted, “let's have a feast!”

Waving goodbye, Tim locked the door as the clock chimed five.

Insects

Kevin Phillips

1

I think my brain is eating itself.

I also think Sam is smiling. Inside her own head probably laughing too, yet still she concentrates. Hard. Focus is important right now. In the backseat of my Chevy Dually she lines out two rows of white girl on her cell phone with the precision of a surgeon. Dome light in the cab is off and I can’t see her full, beautiful lips. I wish I could. Her smile shakes the earth. Maybe she isn’t smiling. Her small and tan fingers guide the credit card back and forth, side to side; slow and smooth paint strokes on a dark reflective canvas made of touch-screen glass. She never takes her eyes away from the art. Not once and I’m jealous. I fantasize about becoming that lifeless device she’s using so much care and effort not to drop, and not the first time, either. My thoughts about her lately have transformed into vigorous passion; I cannot think about anything but her palm locked tightly around my edges, holding me with undivided attention until she finally inhales that precious, chalky dust.“Truth is dead; the internet killed it,” she says. “Haven’t you figured that out yet, Thomas? All lies.”

I want to respond the article concerning human brain cells devouring each other after snorting this shit was from a medical journal, but I don’t.

“Hurry up. We’ve been out here too long.”

She hands the phone over; I shake my head no. I’ve had enough. Enough of everything about our situation really, but a thought I don’t say aloud. We’re on our first sneaking-out-don’t-get-caught-by-our-spouses-excursion this evening, and I’m done.

“Fine,” Sam mumbles, pulling the phone back and snorting the rest. She licks the phone’s screen, a honey bee finishing up a pollinated flower. “Can’t feel my teeth. I shouldn’t have done that one. Thanks Thomas, you’re an asshole. Come on, quick, they’ll catch us.”

We make our way back inside the club and immediately separate. I never take my eyes off her. I stand near the bar in the back, away from the dance floor. My wife Tracy is somewhere on the salted hardwood with a stranger, sliding across to country music, not thinking about me. Sometimes I wish I’d get caught on a trip to the truck. So I knew she was paying attention. So she knew I existed.

The prettier waitress working this side of the building delivers the beer I’d ordered before sneaking out. Before scuttling off back into the crowd, she winks as if she knows every bad thing I’ve ever done in my life. Maybe she does by now. Sam and I have been “car-fairing” for almost two months. She likes to name everything and that’s what she calls what we do. Because we don’t have sex. We don’t touch each other. We meet up at this same bar and do coke until we run out on out Fridays and Saturdays in my truck while our significant others forget we’re significant.

We mainly talk about insects. Just bugs, but I love the conversation I’m not getting at home. And we’re both fascinated by them. Last week Sam told me everything she knew about the Luna moth—the big green ones I sometimes find on my screen door that never seem to move. When they rise from their cocoon they live for only a week. They have no mouth and don’t eat. Essentially, they are only alive to mate.

“Could you imagine a life like that, Thomas? Never eating? Never speaking? Do they make sounds? How do they find a lover?”

I watch as Sam sits at a table on the other side of the club. She looks sad, lonely, and silent—like me. We make eye contact and she smiles. I feel the ground underneath moving. Her husband is laughing and teaching two women behind her how to play pool; correcting them about the proper to way to shoot. Sam told me once that’s how she met him.

2

My wife decided to get in shape about six months ago. Lose some weight. Every night after dinner around seven Tracy went jogging. Thirty minute runs. Sometimes an hour. At first I admired the effort, and encouraged her.

“You should come run with me, Thomas. Get rid of that belly.”

I wanted to. I did. But work found its way back home with me, night after night, and after eating I was forced in front of the computer. I got so caught up finishing that I wouldn’t even hear her return. I blamed everything on my job, though I knew it was more than that. I’d become thick and heavy since our wedding four years ago.

“You don’t pay any attention to me. Always working; always in front of that damn screen; just sitting there getting bigger. It’s unhealthy.”

The words attention and bigger stung as if they were angry hornets tearing into my flesh. I’d felt the same way for a while too, like she’d forgotten me. And I knew I was overweight. I couldn’t fit into half of my shirts anymore. I felt if I could just lose a couple pounds, she might remember me like she used to. She might really talk to me, and know I was there. I’d do anything for that.

At work I began taking the stairs, thought the added steps might help shed some extra skin. I also asked a co-worker who shared a cubicle with me about how he’d lost so much, and so fast. He told me he was using an older South American diet, so I began trying that too.

But most importantly, I decided to give Tracy all the attention I could.

I first noticed she would stay gone longer than the usual hour run. I praised her for increasing her endurance. Tracy smiled and said nothing. I watched her undress and saw how skinny she had metamorphosed. The sight of her made me feel even more bloated. I started parking farther away at work—more walking, more exercise.

She’d leave the house at random times, sometimes not till nine when the street lights came on. Our neighborhood wasn’t known to be dangerous, but still, I worried. I mentioned bringing mace with her once and she just laughed.

I came home from work earlier than normal one afternoon and she wasn’t there. The Fitbit I’d bought for her to help keep track of her runs was still on the charger, blinking. She was never without the device so I decided to use the opportunity and find out how many miles she’d ran. I wanted to buy her that many flowers; surprise her; celebrate her hard work.

I discovered she wasn’t running very far. Maybe four or five blocks a night, if that. In a couple months she had ran a total of one mile. One.

When she came home I had her favorite dinner ready. A single rose stood in the middle of the table.

While eating I asked about her day, what she had done, had anything exciting happened?

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Same old, same old.”

I’d already finished my plate and was reaching for seconds, and she’d only eaten half. I stopped myself and put my fork down. I asked her what was wrong, was the food okay? She only grinned, and went to the bedroom to put on one of her running outfits. I felt fat.

I waited a minute after she took off for her run. Then I followed her.

3

Sam is sitting outside the grocery store on a coin operated toy-ride that resembles an exaggerated dragonfly. The front end has a face with huge eyes; one slightly covered by a piece of paper that someone has written in permanent marker—out-of-order.

She jogs to my truck, opens the door, and climbs inside.

Why tonight, I ask, it’s only Wednesday?

Sam instead replies, “Oh my God, Thomas. The Voodoo wasp. You’ve got to look it up—turns caterpillars into zombies . . . is that not the greatest? Eats their brains! Please tell you me you can top that?”

I shift into first and we take off. I’ve been too busy to look up insects. And I don’t see her car in the parking lot.

“I walked up here; I had to get away. I just can’t handle him tonight without any.” She lights a cigarette without rolling the window down. There are bruises on her inner arm. Light yellow with a circular brown border, coffee-colored and matching her wavy hair. “And,” she asks, watching the street lights pass by as we drive, “did you get any?”

Of course I did, anything for you I want to say, but don’t. I lower her window with a button on my side, just enough for the smoke to rush out. I reach into my pocket for the cocaine and toss the baggie over. Pieces of grass come out as well.

“That’s all? We’re going to need more than that.”

I’m not doing anymore, ever, I tell her. I can’t. I’m sorry.

“And the weekends? I can’t do them alone, Thomas.”

I’ll still be there, I promise her.

I drive her to the house where I buy the coke. So she can get it herself, I say, but she’s not happy. Sam doesn’t smile when she meets the guy, or when he promises her he’ll give her the same deal he gives me.

Driving back to the grocery store Sam is silent. I think about how we met. I was walking outside to my truck to get some fresh air, while my wife danced inside the bar with strangers. Sam was bent over near the dumpster, vomiting. Another drunk barfing in the parking lot. I decided to keep walking. I had my own problems. But then she dropped to one knee, struggling to stand up. Left hand was high above her head sticking to the side of the trash bin, and she wore a tight green dress; she looked like an injured praying mantis. I felt sorry for her. I stopped and asked if she was okay, did she need anything? She said she only wanted to be happy. And not drunk.

I told her I had something to sober her up, and she came to my truck that first time.

I park at the grocery store and turn off the engine. She lights another cig and doesn’t move to get out. A couple of kids are playing around the broken-down dragonfly. They dangle from its pink, dilapidated wings. Where are their parents, I ask first; then about her arm, about the bruises?

“Tied me up. He likes it rough, okay?” She pauses for a minute, waiting for reaction. When I don’t respond, she adds, “I do too. And this,” she says, holding the baggie. “This makes me numb.”

Finally again, she smiles. I can almost see the earth shaking through the dirty windshield as she gets out of the truck and starts walking. She begins twirling around in the parking lot, aimlessly as if a dancer without a floor. Bathed in the yellow tint of my headlights, she laughs into the starless city night.

4

Security lights flickered on as I followed my wife, staying far enough behind so that Tracy couldn’t hear me. She took long quick strides and kept a steady rhythm, and by the third block I was breathing hard. I was out of shape even though I’d been taking the stairs at work every day. I weaved in and out of parked cars, and remained out of sight. I watched as she turned right at the stop sign and kept advancing.

I moved as fast as I could, trying to keep up. She was fast. As I neared where she had veered right, I arrived just in time to see her take Allocosa Street at the next block. I hadn’t been down the road but once, as it eventually ended in a dead end. None of the houses in this area looked familiar, and we didn’t know anyone who lived in the addition.

I kept running until halfway down the block I succumbed with exhaustion and had to walk. I thought about what I would do if I did catch her with another man. Would I be in a condition to do anything really, as out of breath as I was? My legs were burning, and heavy like stones. I could barely lift them. My heart was pounding.

There were only two houses in the dead end of Allocosa, big and facing each other. They looked almost identical; both with massive glass windows in the front and lights on inside. I chose the left one, because of distance, and movement inside.

From outside on the street, I watched as my wife laughed and sipped from a plastic bottle of water inside the front room. I couldn’t see who she was laughing for. I snuck up the driveway, anger building, and hid behind one of the dark green bushes that littered the yard. As I moved into position, I could see the man she was talking to. I also saw his lover, for they had to be. The man was holding hands with another man, radiating unyielding attention for him.

I watched as the first man took my wife’s wrists, removed the Fitbit, and danced with her. Tracy moved with the elegance of a springtime butterfly, bright and pink in her running outfit, twirling around in circles. They continued until the music faded, and the other man adjusted the radio to start another song. They danced for an hour, gliding around and stopping here and there for her partner to explain different moves; to correct her. She looked the happiest I’d ever seen her. I loved watching her dance, and never took my eyes off her.

I pushed as far back into the bush as I could so that she wouldn’t see me as she took off to jog home. I waited until she disappeared down the street and then crawled out. The baggie of cocaine I’d forgotten about fell out of my pocket, and I could feel my heart still racing from the previous run.

For a moment I thought about leaving the stuff there, lost forever behind the dance instructor’s thick shrubs. I hadn’t lost as much weight as my friend from work had promised, and I felt sick and guilty. I knew I had to tell Sam I was done. I grabbed the bag along with a handful of grass, and forced it inside my pocket until I would see her again.

5

Friday night, and I’m standing in the bar near the back, waiting for the right moment. The building is packed as usual, and the heat from the dancers on the floor hits me in waves of warm breeze. I watch my wife dance with a stranger in a cowboy hat, sweat dripping from her forehead, concentrating on only the music and the rhythm of her partner. She moves with perfect, steady grace.

Sam stands close by with her husband. They’re on their way out, but I know she wants to watch my wife, too. She doesn’t acknowledge me, or say hello, and that’s okay. I nod to her anyway. Sam has one of the biggest smiles I’ve ever seen, and I can feel the earth below me shaking from the loud music. The prettier waitress on this side of the bar taps on my shoulder, and asks if I want a beer. I shake my head no. As she turns to walk away, I notice a Luna moth on the back of her shirt. They have no mouths, never eat, and discover love in silence.

When the fast song ends and a slow one begins, I meet my wife on the salty wooden dance floor, and grab her hands. I pull her small, tight frame to mine, and I can feel her against my large stomach. She looks surprised, but doesn’t say anything. We take steps in slow circles to the music, and I feel her palms locked tightly around my edges, holding me with undivided attention.

appalachian arts

ARTIST INTERVIEW

Gregg Oxley, a multi-faceted Mixed Media and Installation Artist, has been working in the Charleston, West Virginia art scene for over a decade. He has contributed to more than thirty Art Walk events, has had six solo exhibits, and worked on numerous commissioned pieces. More than 100 pieces of Gregg's artwork are held in private collections. Oxley’s current collection, Turnkey, highlights photographs, letters, news articles, and family treasures, sourced from friends, antique sales, collectors, and persons unknown to the artist to represent precursors from the past, and the possibilities of the future. Items used in the works represent their aged worthiness, in both appearance and content, while being interwoven by the artist into a form that is unmistakably part of the forward moving artistic landscape.

The term Appalachian has so many personal connections for those that identify as such; For you, what does it mean to be an Appalachian Artist?

I think it’s always important to tell others about Appalachia, especially West Virginia. Appalachian art doesn’t have to be quilts, and wreaths for your door and although, those can be breathtaking, I feel my work conveys a modern aesthetic while preserving the feel of our mountain culture.

Your most recent exhibit, at the Art Emporium in Charleston WV, is called Turnkey: Can you speak about what inspired the work and the title?

This collection is inspired by our homes. The houses we’ve left behind and the memories good or bad we’ve manifested within. You may notice a lot of "x"s in my work, I take inspiration from lots of things when i make this mark. They are inspired by the aftermath of flood disasters such as hurricane Katrina, and our own here in West Virginia. Marks left on doors and houses to let others know if anyone made it out alive. I take inspiration from the mark on a strong jug of moonshine, and the idea that this mark left on a tomb, could be used as a talisman to grant wished from the dead. The word "turnkey" could mean a house, ready to go without need of renovation, this word also could mean a jailer or a prison keeper. I like that idea that a place we imagine would be perfect might also be a place we may never leave.

Being a Mixed Media artist, what other artists and mediums inspire your work?

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, James Concannon, Bret Brown, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Jonak Kim, Andrew Wyeth--

With a question like this, I ccould compile a list as long as this publication. I’m constantly inspired by the work of my fellow artist friends. having them so close, and being able to call them or send a photo in a text and have an instant critique is an amazing resource. Working on this exhibit, I invited about 15 of these friends into my home for a "soft opening" type thing. we stayed up late and over food and drink, they gave me helpful insights to my work, helped me troubleshoot some creative blocks, and get together a price list. Seeing each of them grow into their styles and perfect them and show their work is amazing. I’m lucky. You can see a lot of their work at the Charleston Artwalk, the third Thursdays of each month at Romano and Associates 230 Capitol Street, where I curate monthly art exhibits.

How do you think your work speaks to the Appalachian Region? Do you think your work would be different if you lived outside of Appalachia?

I feel like my work speaks to this region in a familiar way, I use paperwork from this area, familiar texts, and photos of people in rural settings. I think my work would speak louder to an audience in a more urban area. the medium wouldn’t be so recognizable to most people. I would probably find a whole new world of discarded memories to build things out of.

A lot of your work has an element of collage and layering found objects: If you could have any one object to work with, what would it be?

I’ve always wanted to work with braille. So, maybe if I could get my hands on a Perkins Brailler. That would be neat. I could add another layer of text to just about everything.

Contributors

Poetry

• Robert Beveridge

• Sarah Abbott

• Erica Concors

• Carter Vance

• Allison Angell

• Keith Moul

• Kathleen Burgess

• William Hanna

• Jennifer McGowan

• Seth Jani

• Joy Bowman

• Tom Darin Liskey

• Sarah McCall

Fiction

• Sharon Kurtzman

• Gregory Janetka

• Kevin Phillips

Nonfiction

• Brittany Rogers 

• Lauren Jonik

• Mahdis Marzooghian

Appalachian Arts

• An Interview with Gregg Oxley