ISSUE 14 - FALL 2022

fiction

BEND, DON’T BREAK

 “You can spend your whole life trying to bend something your way, but in the end it may be better to break it.” That was the last thing my mother said to me the night she left us. Ok, maybe those weren’t the very last words, but they may as well have been. I guess she said all the usual things that night. That she loved us. That none of this was our fault. That she wished things were different. Frankie and I were confused and groggy with sleep, but when we heard the screech of the screen door, we chased her out into the night. A late autumn storm raged. We couldn’t see much through the rain, but the lightning flashed bright over the water. White caps reared up over the surface like it was an ocean and not just the river that wound sleepily through our town. The thunder swallowed up our calls like it knew they would never reach her anyway. We ran right to the water’s edge, but still we couldn’t see her. I snatched up Frankie’s arm as he started to wade in. He was certain he’d seen the yellow of her blonde hair somewhere down the current. I knew, though. Knew that whatever he saw, it wasn’t her. Knew that we could stay on that river bank all night and we’d never find her. Not if she didn’t want to be found.
Later, after they pulled her from the river and laid her in the ground, I realized that she wasn’t wrong when she said sometimes things need to break. Life was different after she was gone. We stopped needing to explain unexplainable bruises at school. We started eating dinner together as a family. My father took Frankie fishing in the summer and I perched on the hill above the water, reading and getting sunburned. One hot night, after we’d eaten the trout Dad and Frankie caught, my father poured all the liquor left in the house down the kitchen drain. It burbled and puddled before exiting our slow draining pipes. I watched the brown liquid swirl against the stainless steel sink and thought of the river when the water is low and looks shiny and clear as glass. When you can see the silver glint of fish, and the mud in the riverbed is silky and soft and begging you to take a step in. And then you do and the mud clouds the water and it ripples out from your ankles and you can no longer see the bottom. I thought about the river a lot in those days.

Ok, ok. Honesty time? Almost none of that story is true. Look, I know we’re here to talk about our pain and our grief and whatever else makes us so angry, but the truth is just so mundane. My mother did leave us, but there was no river, no burial, no closure. She just left and didn’t come back. That thing about bending and breaking? I read it in an old Cosmopolitan at the doctor’s office. And there were no bruises. It’s important you know that. It’s not really fair to my dad. It does give her a reason to go, though. A good one. Better than the truth. That we simply weren’t enough. So, yeah, I embellished what happened. I bent the story a little out of shape. But it’s my story now. I’ll do with it as I please. And isn’t that all a part of the process anyway?

You want the truth?  I remember almost nothing about that night. Maybe there was a storm. Maybe there wasn’t. Did the screen door really screech when she left? I don’t remember. What I do remember is her hand on my forehead, her face close to mine, and the taste of salt as she pulled away. Then I rolled over and went back to sleep, never doubting for a minute that she’d be there when I woke up.

—Alexandria Faulkenbury

FATHER’S DAY

Vida left her wife and kids at home for this, as she did every year. She put on her coat and slipped outside into the quiet, cold air of predawn. By the time she drove her car through the spiked metal gates of the cemetery, the sky was orange to the southeast.

Her feet made a hushing sound as she walked across the neatly trimmed grass toward their graves, still wet with dew. No one else was in the cemetery yet. She preferred to do this alone.

She brought a single flower, as always. A single flower was like a wish, a hope, a child’s memory, and it wilted in days. She didn’t plant anything the way other people did. Nothing permanent made sense to her in the face of such loss.

There were three tombstones in two plots. Two were the same large, blocky rectangles as most of the others in this part of the cemetery. The third was sandwiched between them unofficially, an ordinary rock she’d paid to have carved. Unlike the graves of her parents, her baby brother’s grave didn’t have a body below it.

Vida kissed his stone first, pressing her lips to the cold damp stone the way she had once pressed her lips to his cold forehead when he’d died of internal bleeding in the hospital so many years ago. That’s when all of this had begun, or perhaps, when it had all ended.

Vida placed the flower she had brought on her father’s grave and knelt in the wet grass, not caring for the dampness that quickly touched her copper skin through her jeans like the fingers of the past. She pressed a hand to her heart, feeling rising up beneath it like the slow steady waters of an ocean tide.

There had always been problems in their house, even before she was old enough to remember, but children have an incredible ability to love their parents unconditionally. She had managed to adore her parents until she was seven. Until the day her father had come in and said she was old enough to be punished with a belt. Until the day her mother had watched as cold as a statue while she screamed.

She rolled up her sleeves to see the tattoos winding their ways up her wrists. Flames led up to a phoenix on one shoulder: a reminder of who she was and what she’d been through. The flames were only mostly metaphorical—they covered up some of the scars from the day her father had gotten creative with a fire poker.

Vida began to sing quietly as the sun broke over the horizon, weaving peace into her breath, the wind, the world of the cemetery. It was a lullaby, one that she sang to her own daughters. One that her mother had never sung to her.

A tear slid from her closed eyes and down one cheek, dropping onto the flames of her wrists, and she found herself surprised that she could still have tears left after all this time.

The first time she had come on Father’s Day, it was to have someone to yell at, someone to vent her hate and heartbreak at for why she couldn’t celebrate this day and why she’d never really had a father. But after nearly fifteen years of therapy, of healing day by day through the beauty of Shahira and the children and their teaching her the lessons she should have learned so long ago, this day had come to commemorate what she had lost instead. The father, the mother, the family she should have had. And a beautiful little girl who had been absolutely perfect.

Vida brushed her fingers over her baby brother’s stone, gentle as a breath, and murmured, “I love you.” The stone said only Beloved Brother, with the dates for his short eleven years of life. Perhaps putting his stone between theirs didn’t make sense, but maybe too, it was the only place it could have gone.

Where his real ashes were, Vida didn’t know. After the four years of foster care that had followed her father’s death, she had gone looking for her mother. But her mother had died and her brother’s urn was lost. It had broken her ravaged heart all over again, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Not from the mother who had cremated her beautiful brother to save money, when she had plenty. Not from the mother who had held them and told them it was for their own good while her husband had beaten them within an inch of their lives. Not from a mother who had known nothing of love.

Nothing else would have broken her as her father beating her brother to death had, when Vida was only fourteen. Nothing else would have driven her rage, her hate, to the extreme needed to turn on the person she feared more than anything, and yet had still, somehow, loved. Nothing else would have twisted that tendril of evil out of her battered, lonely heart, and made her truly want to do him harm.

But her father’s evil had felt like hers, too, like something she was part of just by being his daughter and living in his house. And maybe by stopping him, she could redeem something of that evil inside of her. Maybe she could protect someone, as she hadn’t been able to protect her beloved baby brother.

I killed him, she had said to Shahira so many years ago, after sharing with her then-girlfriend her favourite picture of her brother. She hadn’t meant to just blurt it out like that, but even then, only months into their relationship, she had wanted Shahira to know, to understand her, to forgive her, even, if such things were possible.

Your brother? Shahira had asked, confused.

My father, Vida corrected quietly, vulnerably, with a shake of her head, half-sure that Shahira would leave that instant and never come back. When he killed my brother. I shoved him down the stairs. I didn’t…I didn’t think it would kill him. I just wanted to stop him, to hurt him, to save—” her voice had caught “—my brother, but he didn’t get up.

She had been staring down at her hands, held palms up in front of her, as she had the day her father and brother died. Staring at them in horror as the shadows consumed her, and wondering if she had only made a new monster by killing the first.

But Shahira hadn’t run. She had taken Vida’s nut-brown hands in her darker ones, and looked back with more empathy than Vida had ever seen. Maybe, Vida had reflected later, that moment had opened the door to her healing more than anything else had. Maybe that was the moment she first began to forgive herself, and to learn how to truly love.

Vida wiped the tears from her face and stood, humbled by the beauty of the dawn, by second chances, and by a life that kept going so far beyond the nightmares she had once thought were all she would ever know. She hummed Amazing Grace as she walked back through the rows of the dead to her car, sitting waiting for her like some loyal old dog. Waiting for her like her real family waking up back home, the loves of a life she had somehow managed to build out of the wreckage of her childhood, impossible stone by impossible stone.

She slipped back into her car, and took a deep breath. Before her, the sun had fully cleared the horizon, blinding and huge and red and beautiful. She breathed in the memories, and as she exhaled, she let go one more time of the man and the tragedy that had defined her life so completely, and turned her thoughts instead to the people she chose.

Her body filling with a bone-deep gratitude—to have survived, and to have somehow, impossibly, created a life full of love—Vida shifted into drive and headed back out into a better world, leaving her ghosts behind to the whispers of the dawn.

—Frances Koziar

THROWING LIGHT

The boy’s parents sat on a leather sofa beside the boy. They touched his brown hair at times and at other times did not. They occasionally rubbed his back. The boy groaned when they did this. He traced the tan cracks of the sofa with his finger.

The therapist wore a white blouse with decorative folds and fringe that lined the sleeves. She disliked the fringe because she thought it called attention to her arms, which it did. Her arms were a kind of milky white, with blotches of pink rosacea. She had told herself that she would show her arms, because they were just arms, after all. There was nothing concerning about them, the arms.

She was recommended to the boy’s parents by the boy’s teacher, who had voiced concerns about the boy’s attitude. The boy, she had said, had seemed a little glum. She had used that word: glum. The boy, in her view, was grappling with serious negativity. The boy had brought up the likelihood of contracting Hepatitis C and the ongoing war twice in the same week. Any teacher would be concerned. Then she had leaned in, perched her elbows on her knees, and asked if everything was okay at home. The boy’s parents had assured her that things were great, but they, too, had noticed a certain glumness in his demeanor. They asked if the teacher had any suggestions for the boy’s glumness. The teacher had said that they should practice positive reinforcement and affirmation. She had also said they could see the conversation therapist.

The therapist had been working with the boy, whose name was Edgar, for upwards of two weeks. They had met four times. The parents, being loving and devoted parents, had insisted on being in the room to hear the conversation. Edgar did not like going to see the therapist. The room was too big, he had said. He felt small in the room. The room felt like it was meant to hold bigger people and not him, Edgar. He had said it that way too. The boy’s parents had cooed and rubbed his head. They told him that no room was too big for him.

The therapist was determined to get to the bottom of the boy’s negativity. She had told the boy that he had no reason to be negative. In fact, she had said, the negativity was actually damaging the relationships he cared about.

The parents nodded. They agreed that the boy’s negativity was problematic for them. They were both in finance.

The boy stared out the window at the firmament lidded with gray. A damp, dark branch spread weblike across the window, framing the murky sky in oblong fractures. The therapist pulled at the hem of her pencil skirt, shifting her weight from side to side.

“Let’s do an exercise.”

The boy looked to her and then down to the polished cement floor. His father rubbed the boy’s back. He had a goatee and a cleanly shaved head. His friends called him Dan, but his name was Scott. The boy adjusted the red-and-blue striped shirt, pinching fabric at his shoulders. He felt bunched up.

“Let’s start with ‘Hi, how are you?’”

The boy looked at her again. She had a face that was seventy-percent cheek, it seemed to him. Her lips were painted with a pale pink lipstick. The blue in her eyes never seemed to diminish. He expected that it would disappear sometimes, like behind a lid or what-have-you. But every time he looked at her, she was looking at him.

“What do you say?”

“I say.” The boy coughed into a tightly balled fist. “I say I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

“A-hah,” the therapist said, “There you are with that ambiguity. We’ve talked about ambiguity.”

“Now, Edgar,” the mother said, “We need you to be clear. Completely free of ambiguity.”

This structured a double-bind for Edgar. If he was totally free of ambiguity, he would be negative, but to be not negative, he would have to be ambiguous, which was a word he had learned two weeks ago and sounded out every night under glow-in-the-dark stars.

“I’m great,” Edgar said. “It’s a truly blessed day to be alive.”

His father made a ticking sound with his mouth, shaking his head. “I apologize.”

“We don’t know where the sarcasm comes from,” said the mother.

This was another new word for Edgar, though he knew the concept. Of course, being eight years old, he just thought it was lying, that he was just not telling the truth, which was also wrong.

“Well, let’s try it again. Hi, Edgar. How are you?”

“I’m good.” He tried to drop his voice an octave or at least to a fourth below its resting pitch.

She drew the sides of her mouth back. “And?”

“Right, right. How are you?”

“Edgar, I’m well. Thank you for asking. How is school?”

“I’m learning a lot.”

“No, but how is it?”

He smiled. “It’s good. I’m pleased with the material, the faculty, and the afterschool activities afforded to me.”

The therapist looked back to the mother and father, who looked a little glisten-eyed.

“I’m glad to hear it. I hear you’re doing sports now. What are you playing?” She crossed one leg over the other.

“I play soccer twice a week. It’s marvelous. I love the uniform.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re being sarcastic. How long have you been being sarcastic?”

The father tussled the boy’s hair. “You almost got away with it. Focus up.”

“What do you like?” The therapist asked.

“I like rainy mornings. I like the last sip of milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl. I like stories where no one dies but we learn a lesson from a small change in the character’s behavior.”

The therapist looked past the boy to his parents. His mother sighed and nodded, covering her mouth with her hand.

“It’s worse than I thought,” the therapist said.

“We thought he was fine.” The mother said, dabbing at the bottom of her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “We thought he was just a reflective child.”

“You were right to come to me. We need to meet three times a week.” 

*

It was a high-aperture spring day when the boy arrived. The world felt pastel-hued and enormous and squirrels wove spirals around thickbarked trees. His parents knelt on one knee beside the car and hugged the boy, tucking their chins into the crook of his neck. His pupils were dilated beyond recompense. They said it would only be a little while. Then they got back to the jeep and kicked dust clouds up as they sped away. The sun sat at sixty percent, way out in the distance.

He met Jerry in the front office. Jerry had hair that scooped back like an ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. He wore a uniform of tan canvas material that he was constantly touching and readjusting. He ended every sentence with friendo. He was tall and chipper and had a wide gait. Edgar decided fairly quickly that Jerry was a doofus and probably lacked the capability for polysyllabic thought. But Edgar couldn’t say that, obviously. Not only was that rude, it was downright negative.

Jerry brought Edgar to the Getting to Know Each Other Bonfire Jamboree. Edgar sat at a picnic table and ate a wienie that slipped out of the bun into the dirt. Like most everyone else, Edgar did not get up and Connect with His Peers, opting instead to stare at a blonde girl across the many rows of tables, counting how many times she pushed her glasses up her nose until she caught him and scowled at him with green eyes hugely magnified.

When the light became dim and pale, Jerry took Edgar to a cabin made of felled trees and splintered plywood. Inside were three-stack bunkbeds that required an industrial ladder to get to the top of. As luck would have it, Edgar drew short straw. Edgar’s roommates were named Caleb, Anthony, Donny, Mike, Johnboy, and Cheese. It was unclear whether or not Cheese was his Christian name, but it was best not to pry. They all slept facing the wall and said very little to each other.

The following day, they were awakened by Jerry, who stood in the doorway making himself hoarse trying to sound like a rooster. He wore tan shorts and a mole on his leg that all the campers talked about. The boys wiped sleep, debris, and impatience from their eyes. Today was seminar day, they were informed. They had much to look forward to. On the program was: “It’s a Beautiful Day” with Bill Boyle, “Green Grass and Blue Skies” with Martha DePalma, “The Lord as Thy Beacon” with Reverend Wallace, and “Your Vision, Your Choice” with Steve Gilmour. The campers split themselves into pairs and went off toward designated stages built at the edges of the campgrounds. None attended Reverend Wallace’s clinic.

Edgar and Cheese settled themselves on the top of aluminum bleachers, just as the sun began to warm them. Cheese was a slight boy from Iowa with pitch-colored hair, light blue eyes, and a perpetually runny nose. Sometimes, Edgar learned, Cheese would get so sick of the sputum discharge that he would cram twisted toilet paper or tissues into each nostril, just to get a break from the taste. Cheese didn’t talk much, but spent a lot of time reading pocketbooks on God-knows-what, as he did now. He’d slip them out and attempt to conceal them in the palm of his hand, shifting his face to abstraction to make it look like he was looking at the creases in his skin or something. Cheese would not say what got him here.

Cheese slipped the book back into his pocket just as Bill Boyle came shuffling out in a white suit. He looked damp, and his thin, mousy brown hair was pulled back into a deflated pomp. He did a kind of running-in-place, David Byrne dance to center stage and spread arms wide to all eleven campers.

“How are we doing, campers?”

A brief moment of silence, then, “good,” disjointedly.

He came back with “I said, ‘How are we doing?’”

 “Good,” the campers said, with maybe 3dB more volume.

“That’s great. Real good.” He paced toward the edge of the plywood stage. “Let’s talk perspective. Does anyone know what perspective is?”

“It’s how you see things,” one girl ventured.

“That’s right. Good job. Real good job.” He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at his brow. “Perspective is important. It is the single most important thing in life. Because with perspective comes gratitude. Does anyone know what gratitude is?”

A hand shot up before Cheese, who looked at it with vague disdain. Boyle pointed at it.

“It’s being happy with what you have.”

“Good job. That’s right. Does anyone know why gratitude is important?”

Faces drawn back reflectively.

“I’m here to tell you. Gratitude makes you feel secure in life. Feeling secure is what allows us to talk to each other. To communicate.” He dragged the handkerchief down his whole face. “And communicating—being with other people—is the very best part of being alive.”

Edgar raised his hand. Boyle threw a sideways fingergun at him.

“But shouldn’t we be able to talk about our fears too? Isn’t anger a valid emotion?”

He looked down to the worn planks on the stage and shook his head, making a tsking sound. “See that’s why you’re here. You need to change your—” he made a rainbow in thin air with a sweep of his hands “—perspective.”

“Isn’t that dishonest?”

“What’s your name?”

“Edgar.”

“So, listen, Edgar. We’re not saying you have to lie or should lie. No, no. Not at all. We’re saying you should try to see things differently.”

“That’s stupid.”

“What did you say?” The handkerchief was balled in his hand, folds splaying out between his fingers.

“That’s stupid. Dumb.”

“Eddie,” he pointed to a sandy-haired man in tan canvas, “Take him to the Shun Tent.”

Edgar stood and bounced down the bleachers to the young man’s side. The young man gave him half a grin and started walking, leading him behind the main building of camp. They stood before a six-foot teepee. The boy looked at it and then at Eddie.

“Go on,” Eddie said, throwing his arm limply in the direction of the tent.

“What, in there?”

“Yeah,” he said, taking a step and spitting in the dirt.

“To do what?”

“When you bring negativity to camp, you have to be shunned.”

“You’re giving me a timeout.”

“I’m giving you a chance to think. Don’t think of it as a punishment, think of it as an opportunity for reflection.”

“When can I come out?”

“We’ll let you know.” 

*

So Edgar sat in his own sweat for upwards of an hour, reflecting. Earlier in the month, a neighbor boy had had a huge blowout birthday party. All the neighborhood children had been there. There was a clown, a bounce castle, a petting zoo, four cakes, two tables of presents, and a table for gift baskets. Voices were keening and shrill, the children chased one another. Parents stood with low alcohol content punch and talked, keeping a loose eye on their kids. Edgar sat in his living room, trying to watch TV. Two months prior, Edgar had told the neighbor boy that shark attacks were exceedingly common which, in turn, made the boy reticent to go to the beach and subsequently, to give up surfing with his dear old dad. And the boy’s father was annoyed with this turn of events and had confronted Edgar’s very own dad about Edgar’s behavior and Edgar’s dad had said he would take care of it. But the boy’s father wasn’t going to take Edgar’s very own dad at his word and told him that Edgar could not attend the boy’s birthday party. And Edgar’s very own dad had said come on, Ben, don’t be cruel and the boy’s father said there’d be no more playdates between the two boys, he’d make sure of it. And he was right on all fronts. Playdates ceased and Edgar wasn’t invited to the boy’s party.

Eventually, though, Edgar didn’t want to watch TV anymore, being as he could hear high-octane screaming and fun being had by all. So he went to the backyard and stood on a crate that he had overturned beside the fence, looking at the fun being had, the llamas, and the clown making custom Dali balloons. And he caught the neighbor boy’s eyes for one moment, with his head perched there on the triangles of the slatted wooden fence, and the boy gave him a long look, like he felt bad for not giving Edgar access to the shrill, keening fun. Edgar shrank away, stepping down from the crate and going back across the patio, through the sliding-glass door, and back to the couch to watch TV.

And Edgar thought of this here, in the Shun Tent. He declared that he would no longer be negative and he would change his perspective. He actually sat up and mashed the heel of his balled up fist into his other flatted hand and said “no more.” He shook his head in affirmation. And so now full of resolve, he sat and waited to be retrieved. He peaked outside the flaps of the tent and saw nothing. But he heard a rustling. He took one step outside of the tent and saw it there, almond-shaded and hulking. It moved in terrifying mechanical grace. And by God, it was heading straight for camp.

He stood for a moment, one leg in the tent and one outside. He made a decisive move: he began to run around the opposite side of the building, the sweat building upon his brow. And he began to shout. And all the campers were confused, and the seminar leaders turned to him with concerned looks, and the counselors cocked their head to thirty degrees and waited for explanation.

But all Edgar could do was scream, “My God, what beautiful fur” over and over again until they stopped looking at him and began to look around to find the referent. And it was Eddie who eventually spotted the bear and shepherded the campers into the building, locked the doors, and performed an all-hands-on-deck head count, noting all campers present. And from the windows of the building, they watched as the bear tore into all of their neatly packed lunches for an hour or so, rolled in the dirt, and batted plastic Ziploc bags around until he was finally satiated, and left the camp for good.

Jerry knelt now, got right down to eye level with Edgar and expressed his most sincere gratitude for not only alerting them to danger, but also bringing positivity to the situation. And Jerry reflected that Edgar had, in fact, done some serious reflection in the Shun Tent, verbalizing that that was always its purpose here at Camp Positivo: to encourage reflection on one’s own communication. Jerry grabbed young Edgar by the shoulders and gave thanks in such an earnest way that Edgar was slightly uncomfortable with the whole situation.

Nonetheless, Edgar was awarded the MVC trophy just three short days later and his parents expressed unbounded pride in their little boy when they picked him up. And arriving home, Edgar’s very own father went out and purchased a glass case for display of that very trophy. And so it stood, gleaming, throwing light in all directions—just as his boy had.

—Matthew Wood

contributors

Alexandria Faulkenbury holds an M.A. in literature from East Carolina University. Her work has been featured in Front Porch Review and The Bookends Review. She lives in central New York with her family and can most frequently be found writing at the kitchen table while the baby naps. She is currently revising her first novel.

Frances Koziar has published work in 80 different literary magazines and outlets including Best Canadian Essays 2021 and Daily Science Fiction, and has also served as an author panelist, fiction contest judge, and a microfiction editor. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more at https:/franceskoziar.wixsite.com/author.

Matthew Wood is a writer of fiction and poetry. He is a cum laude graduate of CSULB’s creative writing program. He has had fiction published in El Camino College’s Myriad and has been awarded the Tom Lew Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.