Two Thirds North 2012

TWO
THIRDS
NORTH
2012
TWO THIRDS NORTH
2013
editors
artistic editor
publisher
associate editors
Paul Schreiber, Adnan
Mahmutović
Armin Osmančević
Department of English,
Stockholm University
Jia Xu, Marius Hohlbrugger,
Laura Tomlison, Xiaoyang
Liu, Angela Mi Young Hur,
Hanieh Kakavandi, Tina
Zewde, Gül Bilge Han,
Jonas Persson
isBN 978-91-980395-0-4
Cover art copyright by Eleanor Leonne Bennett.
Printed in Sweden by US-AB.
www.twothirdsnorth.com
CONTENTS
Editor’s Forword, Paul Schreiber
6
IN MY BODY, IN MY WORLD
Bangladesh, Bethany Newman
10
Ten Exotic Ports of Call, J. J. Steinfeld
11
Shoe Gazing, Tim Liardet
13
Nocturne, Peycho Kanev
14
How To Decorate A Psychiatrist’s Office, Joseph Reich
15
Safeword, William Cordeiro
22
Ten Stories About the Girl Who Tried Not To Smile, 24
Myung! Joh Wesner
Alingsås, Tom Lavelle
31
Vespers, Luis H. Francia
32
Harvest, Sally Anderson
33
My Chained Faith, Sonnet Mondal
35
Thanksgiving in Fiji, Nick D’Annunzio Jones
37
Camp on the Little Missouri, Rodney Nelson
38
Construction Zones, William Cordeiro
39
Witches in Manhattan, Kyle Hemmings
40
Jewish Cemetery, Sally Anderson
41
Labor Day, William Cordeiro
43
Richard, Kenneth P. Gurney
44
Malignant, Andrea Brittan
45
An Incredibly Brief Morning Directory to the City, 52
Nicholas Y.B. Wong
FAMILY AND KIND
Folklorn, Angela Hur
58
If Plastic Blondes Could Talk, Scott T. Starbuck
78
Secrets, Carl Palmer
79
Your Pickled Parent, William Doreski
80
Presents, David Groulx
82
Riding the Ghostly Velocipede, Tim Liardet
83
Connections, Raymond Cothern
84
Flying Lessons, Kaitlin Solimine
86
Remember, I Love You, Marius F.B. Hohlbrugger
103
POINTS OF DEPARTURE
Mirr-man-or, Nicholas Y.B. Wong
110
Needle on Zero, Tim Liardet
112
When Dindi Lost, Kenneth Pobo
113
I Watch You Sleep, David Groulx
114
Harbor, Amanda Papenfus
115
A Swedish Cemetery, Tom Lavelle
117
The Spiral Nebula, William Doresky
122
In Absentia, Howie Good
124
The Song, Anna Britten
125
Last Words, Paul Schreiber
135
A Visit, Salma Ruth Bratt
137
THE WORD ARTIST
Grandma and Death, Adnan Mahmutović
143
Dear Publisher, Jack Granath
150
Watusi, David Lewitzky
152
IN FOCUS: Vanessa Gebbie
The Coward’s Tale novel excerpt
155
An Interview with Vanessa Gebbie
169
Editor’s Foreword
T
wo thirds north is someplace that is not fully there. It is
an orientation, somehow suggesting direction but vague
enough for us to get lost. If one were to orient by latitudes,
Stockholm, at about 60° N, is two-thirds the way between the
equator and the North Pole. But on that sphere one can imagine an infinite number of radians, from any number of points,
crossing here at a node of creative focus. And that is what this
publication is. This year we have radians – writers’ voices –
converging here from Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, India, the
Czech Republic, Bulgaria and the United States. And we have
submitting writers from around the globe who dwell here in
Stockholm, as well as natives of Sweden and this city.
There is an also impurity in our name, suggesting a fraction
or incompleteness that evokes a need for the next word, the next
poem or story. Here is a mixture of identities, nationalities and
conditions of existence, neither fully one thing nor another, and
many of us write out of that fractionality.
Two Thirds North is the initial volume of what will continue as
an annual anthology of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, memoires, interviews, graphics and photography. But it is not an orphan. It is an expanded vision of a history of literary anthologies that arose out of the creative writing courses offered by the
English Department at Stockholm University. The first of these
courses was taught by the Caribbean-British novelist Caryl Phillips in 1989. Since then the course has been co-taught by such
award-winning fiction-writers as Tim Pears, Matthew Klam, Xu
Xi, Vanessa Gebbie and Miriam Toews and poets Robyn Bolam,
6
Rika Lesser and Robert Dana. We invite you to see a larger
history and vision of the project at: www.twothirdsnorth.com.
Two Thirds North is edited and produced largely in the Masters
Program in Literature at the English Department by students in
a course on creative writing and editing, with additional help
from local writers and scholars.
This year’s submissions seemed to cluster themselves around
several distinct themes in the mind of this editor, themes we
have used to organize the volume.
IN MY BODY, IN MY WORLD gathers those poems and
stories that deal largely with experience of the world itself, either
as phenomenal perception, or as lived, in a real or imagined
world with its politics and sense of local place.
FAMILY AND KIND includes those works where family
relations, their powerful forces and ambivalences, dominate.
POINTS OF DEPARTURE is a collection that takes its
place amidst loss: of loved ones through death, of personal relationships, or simply beginning with the loss of a job.
THE WORD ARTIST pulls together those pieces whose
self-awareness as works of art seems more evident. This way of
organizing is, of course, subjective, artificial and perhaps flagrantly resistant to the intentions of the individual writers.
Paul Schreiber
7
Foxes
Elina Borg Björnström
in my body
in my world
Bangladesh
BETHANY NEWMAN
“B
angladesh,” he answered. I asked where he was from after
he told me that he’s been in Sweden for seven years. “I
come from the poorest country in the world!” He was proud to say
this, and did so several times. Suddenly I noticed how small the
man was. Not underweight, but petite and thin-framed. The only
reason I noticed is because earlier today I read an interview with
Japanese designer, Yohji Yamamoto, and he said that his generation of Japanese people are the smallest because food was scarce
after the war. They had nothing to eat, and so they were small. “It
still makes me angry!” Yamamoto said.
But the guy from Bangladesh was not angry at all. An enormous smile had unrolled across his face, and above it, his eyes were
as round and bright as full moons – that bewildered expression
in both eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.
“I come from the poorest country in the whole world. The whole
world. And now look!” He gazed down at his small body, then gestured toward the window. I looked back to see two young women
sitting at a table, a bottle of wine in the center, emptied, their
plates had been cleared, the sidewalk was quiet and concrete. Before I could respond, he was laughing, and although his laughter
was cheerful for the most part, a thread of derision ran through
the middle and carried it on for many seconds. “Listen,” he said
finally. “It would be like you going all the way to the moon!”
10
Ten Exotic Ports of Call
J. J. STEINFELD
You save for the best
part of a decade
soul-strangling job
spirit-ravaging routine
and go on a cruise
of a lifetime
two weeks, ten exotic ports of call,
passengers from the far corners
of the world.
The ship seems slow
but the days pass quickly
you cheat at shuffleboard
and an elderly woman from a city
you cannot pronounce
says if her husband
were still alive
he would slap your face
her blue-rinse hair
looking at least a half dozen
other colours in the strange
light of evening.
You can’t sleep
night after turbulent night
you find it difficult to think
of your past or the future
the days pass
11
and you are certain
the two weeks
and ten exotic ports of call
have passed
passed long ago
yet the ship
unobtrusively moves
through the sea
and no one answers
your questions about
the unending cruise
or the exotic destinations
or why the ghastly fish swimming alongside
look like from another planet.
12
Shoe Gazing
TIM LIARDET
McStein has a facial scar and mannerly sense,
Sol, so loud, in a perpetual lather;
Hodgkins’s sly, intelligent, furtive way
the counterpoint to Bradley’s manic brain;
Aziz, his inoffensive glissando of laugh;
Randals, infallibly drawn to the weak—
One by one, I dream them, whose crimes
rattle and bump behind them like a cortège of tin cans.
Their faces—I don’t know how to say this—
are turning into mine. That smile.
It started and now it cannot stop.
A potential is mirrored like a shadow. It falls, like rain,
in the spaces between assumptions
and threads the body’s interstices, goes into your bones.
Look. They have found my new shoes
and squabble, trying to read the label.
Into their white-as-sea-foam trainers, earned for good behaviour,
I slip an overcautious foot.
13
Nocturne
PEYCHO KANEV
In the corner of each wall there is a spider knitting
its own sticky mantle hidden in the dark.
Incredibly slow night, one of those when you
pray to the long hand to move just a bit.
“Gulp-gulp-gulp,” says the bottle to the empty
cup, and then, everything becomes quiet again.
Silent movies are showing on the dirty ceiling,
and in the breviary the angel’s tongues are cut off.
The house is taken under siege by the darkness.
Into the obscure pages of the night someone is
scribbling with a hazy quill your days to come and
the branches of trees bend over in expectation.
So unusual, this night! You can hear no barking about,
and the stars upon the lid of the world flicker mute.
It is so quiet and you wonder, if you light your cigarette,
what the silence will say.
14
How To Decorate A Psychiatrist’s Office
JOSEPH REICH
I.
Consider black & white pastoral prints
perhaps even cutouts or etchings
of some anonymous countryside
somewhere on some hillside
maybe in turn of the century
Russia, England, or Ireland
as you ascend a back set
of stairs somewhere in Autumn
then leave without symptoms
some time around twilight
casually drifting home
(dreaming of Whitman...)
some place around The Long Island Sound
where nightmares end and dreams begin.
II.
The only shingle you’ll hang
will simply say – “Eggs”
15
for when orange-blossom sun
comes and cranes fly away.
III.
Consider something between
a flesh-tone and bone
A gray or ghost
earth or wind-blown
Shadow and stone
dusk and dawn.
Somewhere between reality and fantasy lies the season
of your penetrating, palpitating, solitary soul, home...
IV.
When black crow
turns purple
and seagull
shade of blue
disappears to
the setting sun.
16
V.
[Psychiatric Notes...dx: Highly-intelligent
yet might present as simply good con-artist
His answer when put forth the question–
“How do you feel about family and friends?”
That they always appeared
hostile and jealous, threatened
as evidenced by their body
language and expressions
Could con or charm anyone.
Ma always said my tongue
would one day get me into
a whole hell of a lot of trouble
yet in fact got me in and out of
a lot of doors, seeing the world
(The stray dogs at the end
of the world on cold Winter
boardwalks of Coney Island
and Red Hook, Brooklyn
who first tried to frighten
and then fed them chicken and looked out together in silent snowfall
of dawn to the Statue of Liberty with just
17
the sound of chiming cowbells
then later on looked out for me)
and wouldn’t trade that
for all the tea in China.
Claims to sincerely be intrigued
by how accents came to be hypothesizing topographies, lay of the land,
patterns of weather, structures of cities...
By borders, straits of water,
when signs at train stations
naturally, gradually started changing
their language and letters, separating
very cultured, sophisticated
and mythological countries.
Claimed to be controlled and
manipulated much of his life
by an ungodly saint with a very
weak and fragile ego and identity
who tried to brainwash me through
tactics of guilt and pseudo-morality
(Now knows it to be
Munchausen Syndrome
18
and Narcissistic
Personality
and claims to have acted-out,
to have tested the limits
just to maintain
his sanity
and to try and avoid fulfilling
the self-fulfilling prophecy
constantly quoting the rock & roll band,
The Who–“Keep away old man, you won’t
fool me/You and your
history won’t rule me”)
feeling his whole life, cheated,
filthy and empty, challenging
every (go) figure authority
just to make a name...
Short-term and long-term goals for treatment:
To restore client’s self-respect, self-esteem, dignity
VI.
Peek through cactus
of half-bathroom
and close eyes
19
and imbibe
pure smoky breeze
cedar-burning chimneys
VII.
As one day you’ll look to suddenly
secretly collapse in your study
of blush
or coral
like the sun naturally falling
like some stray pile of leaves
while your wife discovers you
and simply goes for the rake
raking you up
dumping bones
final expressions
words and all
in the wheelbarrow
carting you off to cemetery
(Hey! where are you
putting those stickies?)
where you may finally rest in peace
20
eternally smelling biscuits & gravy
with a whole mess of wild stray
seagulls squawking above me.
21
Safeword
WILLIAM CORDEIRO
Tap-tap. A pinhole in the chamber.
Some light drips down the hatch.
I mean each word I fiddle back
into another crux. My face
disintegrates. My voice has cracked.
My voice gets auto-tuned. The idols
silhouette against their cage; backstage,
the rollers off their rockers trip.
You prattle, shut your trap. I moon
around and drink white Russians, take
a licking at roulette. And when the trigger’s
cocked, you say it’s up to me. Go figure
or go fish. The baiting of each switch
is what the upshot is. I’ve beat you
at your game, which you’ve stripped
down to locks. I’ve backtalked you
against this wall, and swallowed
every key. And more, more, more—
was that our safeword, then?
The doors revolve. I carousel and barrel
over. Each organ cranks a snatch;
a prankish prick-song catches like a pin
-drop down my throat. I throw down
another cool quarter. We’ve lost
22
the spare. The keep-safe rattles blanks.
You give me credit that I know the score:
No means no means no
more being sober. We’re on
the run. A run. Run down. I push
all in. You wish me luck. I kiss despair
farewell, my sleeveless lush welfare.
Go—go, ride each riddle to a gallop.
You’re in the saddle now, toss over
each brittle die. When the paddle breaks, keep
it up ‘til I forget each gap, and going,
each faithless word and leap;
the house rules are a gag.
23
Ten Stories About the Girl
Who Tried Not To Smile
MYUNG! JOH WESNER
I.
T
he left side of her face is always twisted up like it’s been sewn,
and people recoil when she laughs because she looks and
sounds like someone is pulling something rusty out of her side.
Sometimes she forgets not to laugh until she sees concern or disgust in the face of whomever it is she’s talking to. Then she can tell
that the person is ashamed of himself or herself for showing emotion like that without meaning to. Then she feels sorry for them.
II.
S
he goes to coffee shops to read a book or a magazine or to write
a letter to her sister. She has discovered that if she sits in a
crowd just the right size it is not possible to feel lonely. If too many
people leave all at once, she gets up and finds another coffee shop
to sit in. If there are too many people who come in and sit down at
the same time, she leaves very quickly, because when there are too
many people it’s worse than when there are none. One day she’s
reading a particularly good book and doesn’t notice that the coffee
shop is slowly getting crowded until it is too late. A very handsome
couple, an Italian man and an Asian woman, sit at the table next
24
to hers. The Italian man calls the Asian woman “darling” like he
means it. She closes her book and leaves her coffee, which is her
second cup and still hot, on the table, and walks out fast. As she
walks to the next coffee shop three blocks away, she thinks about
the word “darling.” She wonders if she could use it as a verb: He
is darling her cheek, her neck, her soft skin. It would be a very
pleasant verb.
III.
H
er father worries about her, which makes her worry about
him, because heart attacks run in the family and she doesn’t
want to cause him any kind of stress. Her mother is dead so her
father gets all her love. Since she has one sister, her father’s love has
to be split, and since there is only one parent, both she and her sister get only one-half the parental love. But her father is a very good
father, so he tries extra hard to make up for the half they aren’t
getting from a second parent, and that is why she worries about
stressing his heart: it already has to work exactly twice as hard,
and that is too much to ask of a single heart. Her father calls every
Sunday evening and asks how her week was. Usually she tells him
the truth, which is that her week was just like the one before it. But
other times, when his voice sounds tired or more concerned than
usual, she lies and says it was a terrific week and makes up something about why it was so good: a professor read part of her paper
out loud to the whole class; she won a printer in a raffle at church;
she bought a pretty dress on sale for fifty percent off. Sometimes
she worries that she is too good at making up believable lies. They
are so believable that when she hangs up the phone, she’s happier
for a few seconds, because for a few seconds her week has gone
from being just like the one before it to being a terrific week.
25
IV.
H
er sister, Lisa, is four years older than she is. She writes letters to Lisa instead of calling or visiting, even though Lisa
lives just uptown. Their phone calls are full of either silences or
interruptions, and their visits are always tense, but letters are better, because she can think up one or two interesting things to write
about every day, and then wait to send the letter until there are
enough interesting things in it. She likes folding up her interesting things very neatly and creasing the folds with her thumbnail,
sticking a stamp on the envelope, addressing it, and putting it in
a blue mailbox. It seems incredible to her that Lisa will be holding
it the next day, or maybe the day after that if she doesn’t send it
until after 10:00 AM. She knows that Lisa doesn’t like the burden
of feeling unhappy for her, every time she looks at her. She understands how Lisa feels, because to feel unhappy for someone is a
heavy burden for a person to bear, worse in many ways than when
you feel unhappy for yourself, and the more you love that someone
the heavier it is. But sometimes she can’t help getting angry at Lisa.
She isn’t unhappy and if Lisa wants to feel bad about the fact that
she’s unhappy (when really, she isn’t), then there’s nothing she can
do about it.
V.
A
t the corner store, she stands in line behind a man and his
small son, who are buying mint chocolate chip ice cream.
The man puts down the videotape he is holding in his left hand
and counts out exact change, and while he does this his son turns
around in line to stare up at her. He is very small, perhaps four
years old, and she has never seen bigger eyes, shiny eyes the size of
quarters. The man has paid and turns to take his son’s hand. When
he sees that his son is staring, the man glances up at her and starts
26
to smile but then very quickly the start of the smile disappears
like a little candle going out. He looks down at his son and scolds
him for staring, because staring is rude. She wants to tell the man
that she doesn’t mind, because she knows children like to stare at
people and at things, and that his son is adorable, but the man
mumbles something to her that she can’t understand and leaves
with his ice cream in one hand and his son’s wrist in the other. The
door has bells on it that jingle loudly when the door shuts behind
them. She is starting to put her milk and tampons on the counter
when the door jingles again and the man comes back with a very
red face. He forgot his videotape. He grabs it from the counter and
leaves again without looking at her.
VI.
S
he is taking a class about poetry taught by a dashing man in
his late fifties, a professor and a poet himself, who is from
South Africa. The professor’s voice makes her think of all the
places she has never been. His accent is like a British accent, except with more brutality and less polish. The professor is tall and
tanned, even his chest, which she can see because he always leaves
his top two shirt buttons undone, and he has long dark-gray hair
that’s white at the temples and waves back behind his ears. She
thinks she has never seen a more splendid man. The professor says
that poetry is a vessel that can carry her through the stormy and
dangerous waters of emotion and the id. She is not sure what this
means. But she is very sure that she would like to sail somewhere
with the professor on water that is as wide and deep as the ocean
but calm as a pond at night, and lay anchor in a strange land where
the native animals all have an odd number of legs and there are
fruits of a color that no one has ever seen before. This color will be
a secret that she and the professor will share, that no one else in
27
the world can share, even if she and the professor wanted to share
it with other people, which anyway they don’t.
VII.
D
uring her first year she lived with the roommate that the
college assigned her to live with. After the first week, she
hardly saw the roommate anymore; the roommate’s friends always
came by and whisked her away to one of their dorms, as silent and
efficient as royal attendants. The roommate was small and perfect,
a smaller-scale version of a grown woman, and neither kind nor
unkind. When she asked the roommate where she was going on a
Friday night, the roommate said that she was going clubbing, an
answer that held a violence that the roommate didn’t intend. She
would watch as the roommate put glitter on her bare shoulders and
pulled at the seat of her tight black pants before leaving the room.
The roommate’s perfume smelled the way a clean, empty hotel
room smells when she first enters it. Now she lives alone, which
sometimes she prefers and sometimes, to her surprise, she does not.
VIII.
O
n Sundays she goes to Mass at the Church of Our Lady of
Sorrows. She went once to St. Patrick’s, which is close to the
Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, but it was too big and there were
only a few tourists dotting the pews; there was too much empty
space above her head and all around her. Our Lady of Sorrows is
the right size, big but not too big, and at the afternoon Mass there
is just the right number of people. Also, the name “Our Lady of
Sorrows” is nice because it sounds sad but quiet and kind. In her
art and architecture class she learned that the main part of the
church is called the nave, which means ship in Latin, maybe because the vaulted ceiling looks like the bottom of a ship. She sits
28
at the back of the church and during the homily, which is maybe
about forgiveness or maybe about charity, she likes to look past
the colored light slanting in through the stained glass, look up
at the ceiling, and imagine that they are all underneath a giant,
upside-down ship. She sits with everyone under the ship while the
world outside floods, floods during the gospel, the prayers for the
departed, the communion of saints, the Eucharist, and the final
hymn; but after Mass everyone will stand on the pews and look
outside the windows, and they will see sunlight from above glimmering down through deep water, and fish like pieces of shining
bright metal, and a silent fleet of clear pink jellyfish slowly breathing their way across First Avenue. Everyone will feel safe and dry
then, under the safety of the upside-down ship, and they’ll understand what it means to occupy a space in the world.
IX.
S
he wants to smile and look friendly, but she cannot do those
two things at the same time. Her smile upsets people, and this
makes her feel like not smiling. If she does not smile, her face does
not upset people quite as much, but then she is sad that she cannot
smile when she wants to smile, and this also makes her feel like
not smiling. So in the end, she sees that everything works out for
the best.
X.
P
erhaps her favorite place to be in the world, though it’s true
she has not seen much of the world, is in a museum. She likes
the Met and the natural history museum, but the best is the Museum of Modern Art. She walks through the hushed galleries and
finds her favorite pieces, because she knows where they all are now.
There are the paintings of women with angular faces and eyes like
29
holes, or bruises; there are the small bronze sculptures of bodies that are stretched out very thin and long, long as shadows at
sunset; there’s the photo of an empty room filled with clear, lemony light. The painting she likes the most she always visits last.
It is a red painting. The paint is thick and clotted in the center
of the canvas; elsewhere, there are many tiny striations of brush
strokes, up and down, sideways, and if you get very close you can
see there’s green paint in it, and blue and violet and yellow, peering through from under all that red. She stands as close to it as
she is allowed and sometimes, on the days she needs to get closer,
the security guard tells her to move back. But most of the time
she moves forward until she can feel the heat of it, of the textures
and color, on her face like the warmth from a still, open mouth.
It makes her feel very close to something more than the painting
itself, only she is not sure what that is. When she is standing this
close to the painting, no one is in front of her to see her face, so she
smiles as much as she wants to.
30
Alingsås
TOM LAVELLE
In a mixed-up landscape of dreams, Walter
drives a car or rides a light-rail
commuter train, takes a left-turning detour
near the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh and arrives
in residential Alingsås, a quiet town of 20,000
he’s never seen with lawns and clapboard houses.
It could be IKEA causing confusion
naming sofas and hat racks after small cities
or the Stockholm years twisting life’s pathway
tighter than anyone knows. Walter himself
if asked would, like Scrooge on Christmas Eve
blaming digestion for his apparitions,
point to the pickled herring he’d eaten.
31
Vespers
LUIS H. FRANCIA
Where time becomes a wind I live.
For stretches the day’s plush fires head
West, now the birds wend to shelter,
Now the rain sends a root around me.
How stately that ball of fire,
It goes down in splendor that ripples
Through a shadow play on the
Horizon. The birds feed on seed, a
Cat stretches in the wind,
And I am bright brown, then
Exceedingly gold, then darkening
from head to toe, a misshapen god.
This is a fact and revelation I like:
Unencumbered, elegant,
Lux seized by the day
Sans serif and cedilla, spring
In a single wing—I, a solitary,
Neither of heaven nor of hell.
32
Harvest
SALLY ANDERSON
We rode the fields into the woods
the path moist and the grass
beginning to turn, all the green
blonde by October
There was a stench
about the expanse of space
that smelled like harvest
like a warmth beneath cool cotton
Forward with Salomeh, up
and down with the rise
of the forest before us
My body rocked and I remembered
pubic bone pressed to saddle
tail high
Her veins were like a web
pulsing under a tight coat
that shined when faint light
passed through heavy clouds
I traced blood along her neck
and heaving chest, across her girdled belly
and watched it smooth over her haunches
33
The memory came back with a scent
of sweet decay, apples rotting
below the browning trees and reins
fell in my palms like dreaming
My feet shook in the stirrups
until I pressed hard, clamping my legs
she felt me cling and took me
Knees to leather I hugged her
kept my head down
and watched the fields flow
from beneath her warm mane
In the woods she scraped my calves
and shoulders on dry birch
for a moment I saw us
reflected in studánka
but then she cantered home
34
My Chained Faith
SONNET MONDAL
The far-flung whistle of the colliery
and of the Calcutta-mail
calls me every day after dinner.
The train’s shrill echo and
rhythmic melody of wheels
form a sublime image of
the girl out of my dreams,
waving and smiling;
screaming and crying;
standing and waiting
just for me amidst gasses,
trees and hedges that wave
in solitude and hope.
The curvature of the lopsided land
plays hide and seek along with
the clouds and moon blurring realism.
My belief is incurable and so is
the facade of pleasure that I show
while I follow compellingly,
the whistle of the colliery.
35
My faith lies in the train,
in the wilderness and
the vaporous figure of my love
while my whims are chained
with famine and society
that may identify me as a mad
once I leave my job and run
into the hazy backwoods.
36
Thanksgiving in Fiji
NICK D’ANNUNZIO JONES
– Cartoon from The New Yorker
Texas tourist, sun drunk, kava numb, ‘Bula!’* weary,
nauseated by barramundi, longing for a butterball,
plops into an Alka-Seltzer Jacuzzi, the chlorine cure,
while pinguid tribesfolk, straw skirts, orchid ears,
palm husk pigment, watch blue tile kettle bubble
like cannibals giving thanks for a boiled cowboy.
* Locally ubiquitous Fijian greeting, Nadi, Fiji
37
Camp on the Little Missouri
RODNEY NELSON
the lands were not bad in a way
one late and not-gone summer with
orange high clinker-rock and dwarf
juniper and a turned leaf or
two in the air to see from the
tenting ground that heat had basined
a whim of wind seemed overdue
to bring up the cool river air
in the dun of evening or
clouding and at the idea
of weather front a matted horse
that had known no rider walked by
not whim but spreeing of wind in
the night and a few rain pellets
hit at the tent but did not wet
or topple a thing and the dark
went on too long to permit a
remake of cicada forenoon
what it was raining about who
knew the day that came with more than
a word of chill or whether to
do a man’s rain imitation
and weep over the muddy lands
which were bad in no other way
38
Construction Zones
WILLIAM CORDEIRO
A joist of rigid Ibeams, jutting bolts,
jolts within a fenced-off
pit—one technosauric
crane shuddering aloft
a cantilevered groin &
heft through vast, euphoric
air; each groan-punched guy
rope, riveting & last, o—
gear & tooth, spans this
stripped down greenspace
circumscribed by zip & grit
glint, lace; a borough’s hardware where the circuits trip
& mesmer, lit down avenues,
which sever as if barren
feats of several traffic’s fare,
each tricked & vista’d out
39
Witches in Manhattan
KYLE HEMMINGS
A
s a beautiful/ugly child growing up in some version of Brooklyn, she heard the story: A witch once lived in her house and
killed a thief of precious stones worn behind the eyes. She doesn’t
remember her father or from where she got the uncanny power
to memorize books by rote. She can recite whole passages from
Wuthering Heights to a disbeliever in her bed. Later, she dumps
him from some impossible height. He’s been falling ever since.
As a hotshot lawyer skating over technicalities, in love with the
antique mirrors of her own uncertain space in the West Village,
she defends women accused of inflicting mental cruelty on their
partners, of causing them to fall from artificial blue skies.
In the city, there is a rise in death threats, reports of U.F.O.s
over mid-town. She finds quick fixes for love in all kinds of closets. She tells an unsuspecting believer: Brooms are not necessary.
He will die in the heat or from gross negligence. She comes home
to an Art Deco styled apartment, listens to the ghosts who have
lived there before her. She greets her fish. Imagines the big one as
a left-eye flounder, Japanese or Imperial, the kind she’s seen in her
father’s old Zoology books, the father she only knows from photos.
She remembers that fish winking at her. Right from the page. She
knows this fish, the one gliding within glass walls, over colored
stones, will not live long. Lying on its right side, it is haunted by
what it cannot see.
40
Jewish Cemetery
–in East Bohemia, founded 1520
SALLY ANDERSON
So fresh grass grows up in the underbelly
of a walnut tree, the branches thin and reaching
covered in a moss that shines silver
against an evenly pale sky
All of you lay beneath me, calmer
than I’ll ever be
your stones lean right and left
but all face
east
A walnut, wet and wrinkled
rests cool between my jeaned knees
the material is soft and worn
my skin supple and fat beneath it
There’s sun on my head
it dances across my face
and my hair holds the heat
it has been dark for four months
but today the birds have come out
to call to each other
We watched them
in the empty orchard
41
cooing to the stone saints
someone had forgotten
among the shriveled fruit
A man on a plane told me
you are most at home
in the place your ancestors are buried
but some are drawn simply
to be there
for others
to remember those forgotten
The nut splits under my nails
like bark spreading from a tree
like the sound life would make
if we could slow it down and listen
With a sigh the shell pulls apart
and where I expect to see rot
a white nut, finally free
of its veiny film
glows up at me
I offer it to you, but you refuse, and leave me
feeling the soft meat melt under my teeth
Your face is as calm as the graves, white
in the sunlight
42
Labor Day
–Lewes, Delaware
WILLIAM CORDEIRO
Blunt sunlight’s nothingness: the hammering
inside the sea-sick bay’s snake-oiled oilslicks, which ooze and molt the zero mind.
I’ve walked the shard-fine powder-trail of shells
that crowds grind down, above which bullet-sized
black deerflies maze, small hovercrafts, across
rank bilge and sputum, up-turned helmets of
dead horseshoe-crabs, crushed cans of Schlitz and jagged shrift of Jack’s and J&B.
And so,
I’ve walked this far to have my stomach turned,
still half-way drunk by noon, and trying to
remember the taste of things I can’t let go . . .
A riptide’s blood-brown undertow sucks out
to sea its still-born amnion. Sun-burned,
I’m gazing out across the waves extinguished
over sand, through rippling haze out past
the sails that lace, the clouds that gloom the bay,
and can distinguish outlines of the power
plants in Jersey. Down beach-grass, slopes of dune,
to where the shore rubs smooth, and soon forgets,
I’ve come to wash myself in salt and foam,
absolved of all the burdens of my home.
43
Richard
KENNETH P. GURNEY
He held me up to the sky as it rained.
I could have been an offering
or a payment for an answered prayer,
but I was three years old
and laughed as the water splashed my face.
And while it rained
we rode the swings together
and not together and not so high
as to cause the chains to go slack.
And after the swings we ran down the hill
to the lake where the ducks and geese
ignored the splashing rain
as it hit the water’s tense surface
and we settled down on the wet boards
of the boat dock, but no boats
set mast up in the air to compete
with the pine forest beyond the far shore.
And I did not mind getting wet
nor did he, though he knew better than I
how much mother would rail
as she stripped us down
out of our wet clothes, our muddy shoes
and placed us in a hot bath.
44
Malignant
ANDREA BRITTAN
T
he icy lake boils. The young woman struggles; a complicated
dance of unchoreographed movements. The kicking legs, the outstretched arms – hands slapping the water – have one purpose.
It won’t take long, Chad thinks. She is tiring; her waterlogged
clothes are draining her strength. He crouches down and waits.
Her thrashing becomes less violent until she lays motionless, suspended just beneath the surface. He uses a branch from the undergrowth to drag the body nearer and lifts it out of the water. He cradles
her head in his lap.
The slide and click of magnetic bolts followed Chad and his minder into the room and joined the nine other inmates and guards.
Each pair was surrounded by the blue glow of electronic restraints,
which added a grimness to the room’s cracked panes and flaking
paintwork.
Two chairs and a trestle table, Formica chipped and lifting
at the corners, had been set up at the front. Above these, a TV
screen was showing A Second Chance – It’s In Your Hands. Theo
Steinberg and his co presenter Wallis Lang filled the first frame.
Chad looked away.
Some minutes later, Steinberg and Lang entered through a
door at the side of the room. The man’s open jacket flashed an
orange silk lining as he made a show of settling himself in front
45
of the men, while Lang’s pencil slim skirt and high heels drew
obscenities. Static crackled as the guards adjusted their electronic
restraints.
“Welcome gentlemen, to the pre-production briefing for ‘A
Second Chance.’” He shuffled papers, unable to look anyone in the
eye. “As you know you’ve all been selected because of the interesting circumstances surrounding your initial convictions. Some of
you were involved in well-publicised trials,” Chad felt Steinberg’s
eyes flicker briefly in his direction, “while others were selected because of the horrific nature of your crimes. By agreeing to participate in the show’s third season, you’ve already achieved financial
security for your loved ones. Now you have the opportunity for
your sentences to be commuted or even overturned. If our viewers
like your performance, of course.”
He turned towards Lang, her smile telegraphing it was more
than they deserved. Chad wondered at Steinberg’s use of the word
“agreeing.” It implied a choice but he was hard pressed to see what
choice he’d had.
Lang moved to hand round legal documents and waivers.
Steinberg continued.
“You’ll see that under the 2025 amendments to the Criminal
Justice Act, you are fully protected against any crimes committed
for entertainment purposes.” The words sat uneasily with his smile.
Chad tuned out, focusing instead on the small print. He didn’t
trust Theo Steinberg. He needed to be clear he understood the
implications of what he was about to do. But there it was, hidden
amongst the subclauses and footnotes, just as Steinberg had said.
The show’s hosts watched as the men scanned the lines.
“Please read all your documents carefully; they’ve been put together for your protection. Even convicted criminals have rights.”
Contempt laced Steinberg’s words.
46
“What about the rights of our – victims?” asked Chad.
Lang, frowning in Steinberg’s direction, said, “They’re all specially chosen: all Malignants. Their families have been fully compensated.” She shook her head to signal there was no need for them
to worry. The conversation was closed.
“You’re Chad Wheaton aren’t you?” It was Theo Steinberg
standing over him. Chad flicked his gaze upwards then returned
to his documents.
“I remember your trial: a bank job to fund experimental treatment for your daughter.” He pulled at his jacket, fussing with his
cuffs. Chad raised his head; the two men locked eyes until Steinberg shiftily looked away.
“A desperate man will do desperate things,” said Chad.
“Quite. And how is your daughter; Sadie isn’t it?”
Chad felt a warning shock as Abner, his minder, tweaked the
controls of his electronic restraint.
“She’s not good at the moment.”
“Tragic. And such a talented pianist.”
Chad pushed down the picture of Sadie’s wasted hands, withered to a living x-ray.
“So there’s no chance you’ll be backing out then. I mean, you
wouldn’t want your sentence extended for refusing the Challenge.”
Steinberg brushed imaginary fluff from the sleeve of his jacket.
“Let’s hope the treatment works.”
Individual sealed envelops were the last of the day’s paperwork details of each contestant’s Challenge.
Chad ran a finger under the flap and pulled out a piece of card.
The show’s logo was embossed in gold and underneath it was his
name, followed by one word.
He breathed, and said “Christ.”
47
Chad wasn’t sure how long he’d sat there after everyone had left:
quite some time judging by the dim light sliding in dusty rectangles down the wall opposite. He sat forward, elbows on his thighs,
regarding the envelope on the floor between his feet.
“There’s no rush to go,” said Abner. “When you’re ready.”
There’s a question – when would he be ready? When would he
be ready to coldly plan to kill another human being? When would
he be ready to carry it out with the same dispassion his father had
used to kill chickens on the farm? Would he ever be ready?
He was pleased that Abner hadn’t hustled him back to the
cells. He didn’t think he could face the rest of them just now. He
had too much to think about. He wondered what Gillian, Sadie’s
mother, would have thought about the mess he was in. For the first
time, he found himself glad that she was dead.
“You think they’ve got you by the short and curlies, but you
don’t have to do it, you know,” Abner tried again.
Chad grunted.
“And even if you go through with it, there’s no guarantee the
audience will be happy.”
“There’s no other way,” he said.
Abner shrugged and slumped back in his seat, folding his arms.
It didn’t matter how Chad looked at it, he only had two choices: go through with the Challenge and all the turmoil that that
involved, or back out and see his sentence doubled. But how could
he do that? How could he abandon Sadie when she needed him
most? His daughter was what kept him sane: thinking about her
took him out of his mundane surroundings, away from the brutality of prison life. But he worried about her constantly. How far had
the disease progressed? Was she able to take care of herself? Would
they ever lead a normal life again? He missed her so much: another
thirty years behind bars was not an option.
48
But what would she think if he did go through with it? What
would she think of her father who’d murdered someone else’s child
in an attempt to save his own? She’d stopped accepting his actions
long ago, yet she lacked the maturity to understand that life was
lived in a compromise of grey.
He exhaled deeply. He needed a drink. A cigarette. Something.
His teeth chatter. He tries to pull his jacket closer. Pins and needles
prickle his thigh.
The film crew will arrive shortly. Wallis Lang will lick her lips
before asking “What was it like? How do you feel?” He is bone tired.
Dragging her out of the water has made her skirt ride up, her
stick-thin legs encased in woollen tights. He repositions himself and
straightens her clothing. The sun’s last rays make her ashen skin look
waxy. He traces the M, the sign of a Malignant, tattooed on her neck,
strokes the soft lobe of her ear and gently tucks a lock of hair behind
it. There is something about her that reminds him of Sadie. The up
turned nose, or the long pianist fingers.
A man and a woman come crashing towards him, through the
stand of silver birch that borders the lake. The man carries a camera at
his shoulder while Wallis Lang speaks breathlessly into a microphone.
“Welcome back to ‘A Second Chance’: the game show where ‘It’s In
Your Hands.’ We’ve caught up with Chad Wheaton at the lakeside
where he’s just completed his Challenge. Chad - what’s it like for a
thief to turn to murder?”
A camera is pushed into his face. He rocks slowly back and forth.
Lang is embarrassed by the silence.
“Perhaps we can get some studio reaction, Theo?” Steinberg’s face,
shiny with sweat, fills the camera monitor. Chad can see serried banks
of seating rising upwards in a semi circle behind the presenter. They
disappear into blackness beyond the reach of the studio lights. A hos-
49
tile, baying crowd fills them; lager louts, hen parties, baby boomer
senior citizens, all looking for excitement and drama.
“Wow! That’s generated some feeling here, Wallis. We’ve got a mix
of thumbs up and down so I make that a fifty-fifty chance at the moment. But remember viewers - It’s In Your Hands.”
He turns to a man with a crew cut, waving a beer bottle at the
camera.
“Let’s get some initial response from our studio audience. What do
you think about Chad Wheaton’s performance?”
“What a coward’s trick – drowning! What’s entertaining about
that?”
“So you’ d have preferred a more violent murder?”
“Too right!”
Steinberg moves on to another section of the audience, thrusts his
microphone at random into the crowd. “How about you; what’s your
impression of this week’s contestant?”
A woman replies this time. “I like how he’s not leaping about,
bragging about what he’s done. Shows he’s got some … humility, I
guess.”
The studio camera pans back to focus on Steinberg. “There you are,
mixed feelings so far here at the studio. Wallis?”
“Thanks, Theo. Let’s see if we can get a comment from this week’s
contestant. Chad, how do you feel?”
As Chad watches the action in the studio, his senses return, his
heart races like a runaway car. The wind in the trees behind roars.
Eyes glittering, Lang prompts him again. “Chad, a word for the audience on how you feel now you’ve fulfilled your Challenge.”
He shifts his position again and moves the woman’s head from his
lap. He stands, brushes down his trousers, turns to face the camera.
“Actually, I feel fine, Wallis.” He shakes out his cramped legs. “After all, she was only a Malignant.”
50
A sly smile spreads across Lang’s face.
“That was Chad Wheaton and you’re watching ‘A Second Chance’.
Remember, ‘It’s In Your Hands’.”
51
An Incredibly Brief Morning Directory
to the City
NICHOLAS Y.B. WONG
outside subway stations | hunchbacked elders
gather | wanting not
the sense on jasper mountains
but sour newspapers we’ve read in trains
peach petals float | rubbish sells
news expires after transits
there are other skies and earths than those
in mortal postcards
how many times have their roses bloomed
none perhaps | poverty finds its way to populate
in this world of fair trade:
selling second-hand papers begets a few dollars
for a pack of yellowed cabbage
that they munch for meals like hamsters
where to have michelin dim sum | how to cross the harbor
when the harbor’s getting smaller
52
so mighty is the creator’s work
how to tell it’s morning when no one sleeps
at night | when there’s no window
in where you sleep | a coffin room as it’s called
a practical rehearsal of finality
hair fringed on forehead | face against
four dark walls | greet the termites and wood lice
greet this city that has spring | the year
is sinking west | over an alien land they roam
their footsteps silent as all the world thinks only of beauty
53
Owles and Peonies
Elina Borg Björnström
FAMILY AND KIND
Folklorn
novel excerpt
ANGELA HUR
The Story of Janghwa (Rose Flower) and Hongryeon (Red Lotus)
M
y sister was the first born as well as the first dead. It seemed that
all I could do was follow her – into life, into death, coming after her in everything including people’s hearts. But when Stepmother
came to sleep in Father’s bed, my sister became the most hated.
We could endure Stepmother, but when she bore a son and another
son as a cautionary measure to secure Father’s line, my sister installed
locks on our bedroom doors. It took Stepmother a full year before finding a key that would fit. After that, I slept beside my sister in her bed.
That’s where I felt safest over the following years as our brothers grew
bigger.
One winter night, while I hid behind the cows, I saw the younger
brother catch the rat in the barn and the elder skin it. But I knew it
was Stepmother who smuggled it into my sister’s bed. In the deepest
folds of night, when the home fires had gone out and the bare branches
of the tree outside our window stabbed at us whenever the wind blew,
Stepmother woke up everyone, shouting about a dream she’ d had:
“She’s ruined us! Her shame has ruined us all!” Her voice grew louder, and her silhouette, visible through the paper panels of our sliding
doors, became sharper and darker as she approached with her candle
58
in hand. She flung the doors aside. Her hair was disheveled, but the
various fastenings and cords of her gown were tied with severe precision. Father, hollow-eyed, stood behind her, his tilted candle dripping
wax onto the floor.
Stepmother tore off our blanket and uncovered us, me hunched in
a curve toward my sister’s back. I moved closer to her. Her nightgown
was stained red between her thighs. She sat up, screamed, and scrambled off the bed, dragging her body roughly over mine as though I were
nothing but a blanket pile. She crawled backward, her hands leading
the way, her bottom scraping along the floor as her feet tried to keep
up. Her face was turned toward the bed, staring as she scuttled away
like a frightened spider with head twisted around. She only stopped
screaming when her head hit the wall. There she huddled, still looking
toward the bed, with knees under her chin.
In the place where my sister had been was the dead skinned rat
soaking in blood. Its eyes seemed to be closed in prayer. I curled tighter
in the sudden cold as Stepmother shone her candle onto the thing
beside me, pointing her finger at my sister who cowered in the corner
of the room.
My brothers soon rushed into our room, and even the servants
gathered behind them, arguing among themselves, but Father stood
silent and still with his head bowed. I was trying to keep warm struggling to make sense of what was being said. What was the fuss over
this dead skinned rat, curled like me? The voices claimed my sister had
been unchaste, that she’ d shamed her family. Father could not move,
could not say anything.
My sister ran out of the house, and I rushed after her into the
woods. I pursued the red stain on her nightgown – that slashed gaping
mouth, stretching into a hideous yawn that grew wider and darker in
the moonlight. My nightgown got tangled in the bushes, and I fell onto
the ground, crisp with frost. The dried shed leaves beneath my cheeks
59
were brittle and crystalline. Straight ahead my sister had stopped at
the lake’s edge. The elder brother pushed her in. She hit the glass surface of the thin ice, her body frozen in collapse for a moment, before
she crashed through and disappeared from view. I got up and waited
for her to reappear. The servants found me at dawn, still waiting. They
wrapped me in blankets and took me back into the house. Stepmother
became even crueler to me. I didn’t tell anyone what I’ d seen, least of
all her, but she continued to abuse me.
My sister was the first to become a ghost. I was the first she visited.
She said, ‘You’ve always come after me, to be with me, what’s stopping
you now? Don’t leave me alone. I need you to die so we can avenge one
another, so we can justify all the killing we’re about to do.’
I didn’t follow her to the lake’s edge. She pulled me out of bed and
into the water with her. But nobody knows this. Not even when after
we killed so many mayors, not one of them asking why we wanted
blood, the magistrate sending one dullard after another, until finally
one young man simply asked what it was that we wanted – not even
when we showed him the spot where the dead rat was buried and he
dug it up and split its body with a knife to show our father that it was
merely a skinned rat, moving him to finally grieve for his daughters
and disavow his wife – not even when Father married a new woman
and our spirits were born into his two new daughters – not even then
did anyone but us know that my ghost sister had dragged me to the
lake and forced me to drown myself, so that her fury could be righteous, her agony something holy – so she could become my angel of
vengeance.
My friend pulled my hand toward the front door of the house.
“We shouldn’t,” I said. “It’s not safe out there. Let’s just play inside.” On some days my friend looked more like me than I looked
like me, and this was one of those days. Did that mean I was look-
60
ing more like some other little girl, and that little girl was looking
less like herself? Definitely not a good day to venture outside then.
What if I met this little girl on the sidewalk? What if we couldn’t
tell which one of us was really me?
“But we’re always inside,” said my friend, “and there’s not much
more inside for us to explore.”
“Things happen to us out there.” I pointed at the heavy wood
door. I thought about the girl who spat on my cheek as she pedaled
past me, not even bothering to speed away. The laughing teenage
boys circling around me not letting me break through. The fat
man speaking in Spanish, wiggling his fingers and baring his belly
at me. And all this on my neighborhood block, without me even
crossing a street.
“Actually, things just happen to you,” said my friend, which
didn’t help her case at all.
“Exactly, and when things are happening to me, I can’t protect
you,” I said. “I live in a dangerous house, but it’s worse out there,
and I only have one golf club and one shoe horn, and the shoe horn
is made of plastic.”
We lived in an L.A. suburb, but I had my suspicions. Our
block was wedged into the Harbor Gateway Strip. My brother explained that on the map the Strip looked like a finger of the real
city of Los Angeles, and this finger was jabbing into Gardena. We
lived on that finger. So even though our zip code was Gardena’s,
when we called the police we had to call LAPD. But it was useless calling the cops. We had a better chance being heard by God.
My mother’s wailing prayers woke up the local dogs, and my father’s shouting got the neighbors to scream back. So at least we
knew that we existed to somebody. If the cops showed up, it was
a couple days later to fill out reports. But nothing happened afterward. They never caught the robbers, the muggers, or the guy who
61
smashed my dad’s skull. So I figured early on that we weren’t part
of any real city, just a few blocks that were shoved aside. Maybe we
were technically not even part of California. Or even the United
States of America. Maybe that’s why my brother called our neighborhood “Little Mexico.”
“Then why don’t you let me protect you?” asked my friend.
“I’m bigger and stronger than you, and older and prettier.”
I didn’t say anything, though she was all these things and more.
“I just don’t want you getting hurt,” I said. “I like you too
much.”
The few times the cops did show up to take reports, I was
too eager to help them, ever the teacher’s pet. I translated for my
mother, elaborating for her, perhaps adding a menacing detail or
two. I pointed out my plastic jewelry box that had been dug out
of my dresser. They dusted it too, along with other spots that indicated broken entry. But after they left, dragging their gigantic
dirty shoes across our clean carpet, not minding that our small
Asian shoes were placed next to the door, my brother told me that
the dusting and reporting was all for show. The perps would never
be caught. They were still out there, running around. I checked to
make sure that the curtains were drawn.
“Actually, there is more inside for us to explore because we can
enter the other world’s version of this house,” I said. “I bet you
didn’t know that.”
“You’re so weird,” said my friend. “Like from another planet.”
I walked down the narrow hallway and into my mother’s room.
“What other world?” she asked, following me.
I picked up the gilt-framed mirror from my mother’s vanity
table, unlocking it from its stand. I’d discovered this before on
my own, but this was the first time I was showing it to my friend.
I hooked my fingers into the lacy gold edges, and held the mirror
62
at my belly like a tray with the reflecting surface pointed toward
the ceiling.
“So this is the window,” I said, “to the other house.”
“You’re going to crawl through it? We really need to get out of
here.”
“No, it’s like a viewfinder window. It shows us the other house,
and we can move around in this house and look into where we’d
be if we were allowed in the other world. Here, stand opposite to
me, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
We held the mirror between us, and I looked down into the
surface where my feet would be. But instead of my mosquito-bitten legs and the pink carpet between my toes, I saw the ceiling’s
creamy smooth surface.
“Keep looking down into the mirror,” I told my friend. “We
can’t see our feet, but that’s where our feet would be in the other house. Now follow where I’m going but keep looking down
through the mirror so you know where you’re going in the other
house. Step over that ledge, and now let’s squeeze through this
white corridor.”
“It’s just the ceiling over the hallway,” she said.
“Well that’s what it looks like,” I said, “but that’s because the
other house is upside down, so its ceiling looks like our floor.
Watch out for the trap door and the small light bulb tree. Okay,
let’s head for the glass sculpture in the big room. It has these really
cool blades that go round and round this fountain with sparkling
drops of water.”
“You mean the tacky chandelier fan that your Dad bought?”
“You just lack imagination,” I sighed.
“Um, if that’s the case, then how come you can’t see your legs
when you look into the mirror, but I can see mine.”
“What do you mean? That’s not possible.”
63
“When I look at this window of yours I see the white ceiling
and the stupid hanging lamp you call a little light bulb tree, but I
also see my legs and my feet and the marks they’re leaving everywhere.”
My suspicions had been proven true. My friend was from the
other world. That meant she had to be the other me. Would she
ever want to switch, just for kicks?
“Holy crap!” she said. “I’m just messing with you! You’re such
a dork.”
I smiled, then snorted. She cracked up, and we burst out laughing. I didn’t really care where she came from, so long as she continued to play with me. Sometimes she was meaner than I would have
liked, spoke about things I didn’t understand, but I overlooked her
flaws because she was always there when my father raged, when my
mother dragged me into the closet to hide beside her, or when the
walls were screaming.
“Oh I get it,” she said when we reached the glass fountain. “The
chandelier crystals look like frozen drops of water. Sort of.”
I wanted to show my friend something else I’d found in the
corners of this room where wispy weeds of cobwebs grew, but a
familiar voice shouted my name. I thought I was safe inside and
upside down, but I could tell from the sound of his voice that
things would get only worse if I didn’t come to him right away.
Still, I held on to the mirror, carefully looking through it, to
make sure I didn’t trip over any beams or light fixtures. But I was
moving so fast that my friend lost her hold and we got separated.
I was about to rush headlong into the wood door, but my friend
who was back in the home-house unlocked the deadbolts for me,
twisting the locks so that I didn’t have to figure out which way
to turn them. She opened the wood door and then unlocked the
outer metal door. I was about to step over the ledge that separated
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inside and out, but realized just in time that the screaming, now
joined by an unfamiliar voice, came from the home-house in the
home-world where my friend was all alone. Just as I passed over
the threshold, stepping off the ledge to fall into the blue empty
sky, I looked up and saw my father and a policewoman, her hand
reaching for the gun at her hip.
I dropped the mirror. It shattered on the pavement of our
driveway. My father rushed at me, but the cop screamed at him to
stop. I held out my hand to my side, focusing all my fear and blood
toward my fingertips. My friend caught my hand in hers, and we
stepped forward together, two girls instead of one.
My father yelled at me to phone my mother, and the petite
black lady with rounded hips, pearl earrings, and a forehead beaded with sweat politely told him to shut up. Our driveway was set
on an incline so that my father was at the bottom of the hill where
the policewoman kept him close to her, though his Oldsmobile,
with a new dent in it, had climbed halfway up with its engine still
running. The police car straddled the street blocking anyone from
coming or going.
The sun was sinking behind the apartment complex across the
way, and the orange streetlamps glowed brighter. Neighbors appeared on their front steps. Faces floated in the windows. Everything including the spindly palm trees and cramped cars seemed
to loom, but my shadow sister rooted me to the ground.
“What happened?” I asked my father in his language, using
the honorific form because we were in the presence of a stranger.
“Nothing! I hit a car, or something, and I drove away. I didn’t
do anything, and she came after me,” he said. “I didn’t run over a
person or anything like that.”
The policewoman spoke over the criminal language she did not
understand. “Is he your father?” Her voice sounded like the other
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ones at the hospital or the bank when my parents and the official
stranger turned to me, spoke through me, expected me to make
everything clear between them though I couldn’t understand what
was wanted in either language.
“Is he your daddy or ain’t he? Can’t you speak English?” asked
the policewoman.
I looked to my friend. She shook her head. But I didn’t know if
this meant she was denying their relation or directing me to deny
him myself. I considered the question carefully. The man standing
at the bottom of the driveway, looking up at me and expecting
me to help him, was wearing a white undershirt with work pants
cinched tight around his waist with a cracked leather belt. The
thin cotton of his shirt hung loosely on his skinny body. These
clothes looked familiar, but the fear in his eyes did not.
“Goddamn it, you stupid girl,” she said, “don’t you know your
own daddy?” She seemed to be pleading. “He sure looks enough
like you anyhow,” she said.
A bottom lip that hung heavy—ready to curse or spit at whomever displeased him. His tan face scarred with specks of burnt skin
scattered across his cheeks because he never used safety masks, not
even when using his spark tools. The folds of cut skin above his
eyes that drooped despite being surgically sliced for fashion and
status when he was young. Whenever people said I looked like my
father, I thought the world was a very mean place.
I took a step back, a mirror shard pierced the sole of my foot, I
saw the drops of blood on the glass, my father rushed toward me
again, my friend screamed, and the woman drew her gun, screeching at all of us to shut up and stay still. The gun trembled in her
hands, but she pointed it toward the car, the only thing making
any noise. “Just a small cut, she’ll be fine,” she said to my father.
“Just relax.” I placed the sole of my bleeding foot on top of my
other. It took most of my focus to stay balanced.
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“Explain to her, tell her that I couldn’t see anything,” said my
father. “The sun was in my eyes.”
“Goddamn tell him to shut up. I don’t speak any Chinese or
Japanese or whatever.”
I was about to say that we didn’t speak Chinese or Japanese either, but what I really wanted to explain was that my father could
speak English. He even studied it at his university in Korea, but
it tumbled from his mouth in confusing clumps, and he sounded
angry even when he was trying to be polite. Frustration hardened
his consonants, made stupid his vowels. His native language had
several levels of respect, each with its own conjugation depending
on the context and the person spoken to. Sliding up and down this
scale, he could invite or presume intimacy, insult with ironic use of
the honorific or demote and dismiss with the informal. His cursing, especially, was more vicious with his elevated diction. But he
worked all day and night, beating his tools against warped metal,
and he attacked his new language with the same blunt force.
“I should call my mother,” I said, to nobody in particular.
“She’s gonna go inside the house and call her mother.” The
policewoman explained slowly to my father. “And you’re gonna
stay right there until I figure out what I’m supposed to do with
you.” She reached for her walkie-talkie. The hand holding the gun
dropped by her side.
I left the door open so that the policewoman could see me
while I used the phone in the living room. I hopped on one foot,
keeping my bleeding foot from touching the carpet. My friend
came inside with me. My mother picked up immediately, as she
was waiting for my father at his auto body shop, just a block away.
I told her what little I knew, and she instructed me to explain to
the policewoman that my father was not right in the head. “Tell
her how his skull had been cracked open recently, by a black man
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stealing from him. Tell her how your father was beaten senseless,
left to die, and how he’s been different in the mind ever since.”
I did as I was told, running back with my friend onto the driveway to repeat what my mother had said, leaving out the part about
the stranger being black. I felt as though I were lying though it
was all true, but describing it to a stranger for the first time, in any
language, made it feel separate from me. I’d never summed it up
so neatly before. But the policewoman wasn’t impressed. She said,
“Well, if he’s not right in the head, then he shouldn’t be driving
out there in the streets. Not if he’s handicapped.”
I wanted to correct her, but didn’t know how. My father wasn’t
handicapped – not in the way she was talking about – but there
was something definitely different about him. The word my mother and others used in describing him – strange – seemed inadequate to me, though there were probably other shades to the word
in their language.
“Did you call your mom?” he asked. He seemed to be near collapse, his elbows buckling from the weight of keeping them above
his head.
“What’s he yapping about now?” she asked.
“He wants to know if I called my mother,” I said. “Yes, I called
her, she’s on her way now.”
“That’s good for you, but I can’t wait for your mom. I have to
take your dad to the station now.” She wiped her mouth with the
back of her hand. She finally returned the gun to her holster. “Ask
your daddy why he hit and run,” she said.
She walked up close to him, looked him in the eye and shook
her head once more. She motioned my father to turn around. She
patted her hands along his body, beating it gently with her wide,
pale palms. Then she took out cuffs and locked his wrists in them.
It was pointless to ask my father why he did anything he did.
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He was frightening because his anger made no sense, because his
rage had no reason. At least within our family, it translated to
power, but outside it looked more like fear. I gripped my friend’s
hand even tighter.
“You tell your mom that I had to take him in and report him
for a hit-and-run and resisting. She can pick him up at the station.
You explain to your daddy while I turn off the engine, ok?” She
reached through the car window and took out the key. She led him
to her car.
I looked down and saw that my foot was still bleeding, some of
the blood already drying, like a second skin. I looked up and saw
the floating faces in the windows across the street and how they
retreated into their rooms lit blue by TV screens.
“My daughter, she come too?” my father asked in English.
I pictured myself cuffed to my father, my friend cuffed to me,
and all of us driven to the place where they would punish us together forever and ever.
“Nah, I think she should stay here,” said the policewoman.
“Tell your mom to pick him up at the station. It’s downtown, next
to the library and the fire station. You got what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I know where that is.” I could have told her that I won
contests given by both the library and the fire station, for my reading and a fire safety poster. But what was the point when I hadn’t
won anything at the police station. And now my father was being
arrested.
“Tell her I could not see,” he pleaded, as he got into the car.
“You can speak her language. They can understand you.” He
looked at the woman, then at me.
“What’s he saying about me?” she asked.
I turned away from both adults and looked to my friend instead. She was gripping my hand so tight I wanted to scream out
69
in pain, but with her other hand clamped over my mouth, I could
not.
“So the daddy can’t shut up, and the girl’s just dumb,” said the
policewoman shutting the car door. “Well, let’s hope your mother’s got some sense, at least.”
They drove off leaving me in the driveway. The car that was left
behind was not humming anymore. The day I’d wished for had
finally come. My father was gone, but I was not as happy as I’d
expected. I grew worried instead and tried to remember what else
I had wished for – another family, another life, another self.
It was near night-time. The streetlights shone amber, casting
the shadows of the people loitering on the corners, kicking cracked
bottles off the sidewalk. Their silhouettes stretched and rattled,
lunging for me. I turned away from the driveway and started to
pick up the broken mirror. Luckily, there were only five pieces,
though one was a bit bloody. I considered the garden hose but
decided to clean it inside instead. If my mother was on her way, I
had to hurry.
I carried the shards and the frame to the bathroom and laid out
the pieces on the bottom of the tub. They fit perfectly. I plugged
the tub and turned on the faucet, letting the water rise. I wrapped
a hand-towel around my injured foot and dipped another towel
into the bathwater which had already covered the mirror, clearing
away the blood.
Hobbling on my bandaged foot, I cleaned the carpet stains.
The cut wasn’t deep, so there were no distinct bloody footprints,
unfortunately. It would have looked odd anyway, with a few left
foots going into the house and a few left foots going out. But
the marks I left behind were noticeable on the pink carpet, so I
squeezed the wet towel over them, diluted their color, and rubbed
them out, erasing my wayward single-footed tracks. My friend
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helped out mostly by pointing and staying out of my way.
We returned to the bathtub, now halfway filled. I unwrapped
my foot and checked the cut, then dropped my foot into the water
to clean away the dried smears, but instead of removing my foot
to dry it, I let it sit for awhile in the warmth. Then waited awhile
longer watching color bloom in the water. I slipped in my other
foot, which didn’t release any pink curling ribbons.
“What are you doing?” my friend asked. “You have to glue
those pieces together or hide them before your mom gets here.”
“But it feels so nice. The water’s so warm,” I said. “Try it, makes
you feel all cozy and drowsy.” I knelt in the tub, soaking the edges
of my skirt. My attention turned away from the blooming patterns
in the water to the sharp, glinting shards at the bottom of the tub.
“Oh look, the mirror still works. In the other house, I’m actually kneeling on a pale blue floor. I wonder if it works underwater
too.”
I sat on my heels and the warmth seeped to my waist. I bowed
and dunked my head underwater, but instead of the pale blue of
the other house I met a face that looked very much like mine,
except that it was cut up in jagged pieces. A voice, curvy and distorted, cried, “Stop it! You shouldn’t be doing this! Not now when
your father’s just been arrested.”
I looked at the face lying at the bottom of the tub and thought
that now when my father had just been arrested was the perfect
time to be doing this, whatever this was.
“You can’t get through to the other side. Not yet!”
Something yanked me from behind, grabbing me by my shirt
so that my collar dug into my neck. I was jerked out of the water
so suddenly that I started gasping for air, not realizing that I was
being pulled out of the tub and not through the mirror.
“What in God’s heaven are you doing?” cried my mother, grip-
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ping me by the arms and shaking me. “What are you trying to
do?”
She glanced at the submerged broken mirror, the gilt frame
set atop the toilet seat, the damp towels huddled on the bathroom
floor. The clammy, wet clothes on my body chilled on my skin, but
my mother kept me out of the warm water.
“First your father and now you – what am I supposed to do?
What’s wrong with you?”
“She went into the water before me,” I said, pointing to the
mirror. “I just followed.”
“What was that? Who went into the water? Who did you follow?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
My friend, standing behind my mother, crossed her arms and
gave me one of her cold, hard looks that made her appear so much
older, almost like a teenager.
“No, it wasn’t anybody else. I was just playing around, Mom.
Just pretending.” I wanted to add that I wasn’t the one she should
be yelling at. Sure, I broke her mirror, but I wasn’t the one who
got arrested.
She pushed the wet hair away from my face, pressed her hands
painfully at my temples so that I couldn’t look away.
“Elsa, darling, what made you do this?” she asked. “Tell me
the truth. I promise I won’t be angry. Just be honest with me dear,
did something or someone make you do this? Was it a feeling deep
inside or a thought that you couldn’t ignore?”
I couldn’t figure out what she wanted me to say.
“I was just pretending,” I offered.
“Pretending what?”
“That…that…” I looked at my friend for help, but she wasn’t
looking at me anymore. “I was pretending I was in a story, and in
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my story I had to save a girl who was lying at the bottom of a —.”
While I hunted for words and images, my mother listened intently,
nodding me on. I didn’t want to disappoint her. “She was lying at
the bottom of a swimming pool, and the lifeguard was busy doing
something else, like paperwork, so I had to dive in to save her.”
She relaxed her grip somewhat, but she didn’t seem satisfied
with my answer. She twisted my hair into a rope and squeezed
out the water, then lifted me out of the tub. She undressed me
and with a fresh towel rubbed me dry all over. I kept my foot out
of sight and with my toes edged the blood-stained towels into a
corner behind me.
“Was cutting your foot part of your story, or was it an accident?” she asked.
“Accident.”
“Was breaking the mirror part of your story, or was that an
accident too?” “Accident.”
“But you did take one of my things without my permission,
and I’ve warned you about this before.”
“Yes, mommy.”
She sat me on the toilet and examined my foot. From the medicine cabinet, she took out rubbing alcohol and a band-aid and
treated my cut. She told me to get dressed and meet her in the
living room. I assumed we were going to the police station together, so I picked out a respectable outfit, and one for my friend
as well. When we came into the living room, my mother took my hand
and led me to the antique Korean medicine chest in the corner.
Made of elm and bronze, it was composed of rows and rows of tiny
drawers, like the ones in the library with the cards that seemed to
reach to the back of the building. But this one didn’t hold squares
73
of yellowed paper. I dug my heels into the carpet, trying to pull
away from my mother, leaning away from the medicine chest, but
she wouldn’t let go of my hand. I reached out to my friend, but she
wasn’t strong enough to pull me back.
These drawers held all the bits and ends of our house – shoelaces, poker chips, spare keys, playing cards with pictures of naked white ladies, Dad’s lighters, pipes that belonged to my dead
grandfather, Mom’s secret cigarettes. I sometimes switched the
sliding drawers to confuse my parents, and I could have sworn the
number of them changed as well. But that was when I was alone or
with my friend. There was only one reason why my mother wanted
me to get close to it now.
“Find me the ruler,” she said.
I didn’t know which drawer to pull.
“Go ahead, you’re the one who snoops around the house,
playing with things that don’t belong to you. Where’s the ruler?”
It was like some cruel carnival game. If I found the correct
drawer, I’d get punished right away. If I pulled anything else, my
mother would only get angrier.
She yanked one drawer, then another, letting them all hang out
like lolling tongues. “You better find it before I find something else,” she said.
“But what about Dad?” I cried.
“He can wait in jail. You need your punishment first.”
I tugged at the brass handles and opened drawers in a row, then
jerked them at random.
“Oh never mind,” she said. “You never put things back where
they belong.”
From the huge celadon vase that stood on a nearby lacquered
table – both of them old-fashioned though maybe not authentic –
74
she reached for her usual switch. The long grass in the vase, slender
twigs painted sea green, was merely decorative and not Korean in
the traditional sense. But my mother found a use for them that
was.
I gripped the top edge of the chest, which was as high as my
shoulders, while my mother whipped my calves. With each swift
strike, my knees buckled and the brass handles on the drawers
rattled.
“I’m doing this so you’ll remember,” she said.
I stared at the unloosed drawers, willing them to shut, one by
one.
“Someday I’m going to get both you and me out of this story,
but I can’t do that if you’re playing into another one,” said my
mother. “You can’t give in so easily. You can’t just follow any whim
or fancy.” I could hear that she was crying as she struck me, but
each time the blade stung my legs, I forced another tiny drawer in
my mind to shut. “Never again pretend that you’re in some story.
Never again act out a fairytale. Never believe that you come from
another world. I know you can feel the difference. This pain is real.
Know that the stories in your head are not real. Kill anything that
isn’t.”
I turned my head to look at my friend, but she didn’t seem too
worried.
My mother slid the switch back into the celadon vase. She went
into the kitchen, came out with a knife, and headed out to the
backyard. I stayed where I was, but looked over my shoulder at
the bright pink welts crossing the backs of my legs. My mother
returned from the backyard with a cut aloe leaf. She sliced it open
and smeared their slimy coolness across my calves.
“Elsa, I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said as she rubbed
the aloe on my burns. “I can’t explain everything to you now, but
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you are getting older and smarter, and it’s important for you to be
careful. I need you to be better. Do you understand?”
“You want the better version of me,” I said, looking over at my
friend once more, but she was now at the other end of the living
room, sitting at the piano, looking at my music books as though
she couldn’t hear us.
Although my mother wanted me to stop pretending, she was
the one who’d created my friend in the first place. At first, when
I failed her, my mother compared me to the ideal daughters in
Korea, but it was impossible to be like them in this country. So
then she compared me to my unrealized other self, my superior
and rival. This being was created as a tool to shame me, so that
I would try harder at playing piano, washing the dishes, becoming a pretty girl. My mother would constantly say, “Your other
self would have done better. Your other self would be ashamed, or
would even want to be the other of another.” So I claimed her as
my own weapon. She became the stronger and truer me, and only
I saw the destruction in her play – the kitchen flooding with water,
the piano bursting into flames, my nose crawling across my cheek.
My mother studied my face for a moment before drawing me
into her arms.
“No, I don’t want the better version of you. I just want you.
You are the best version of me because you are my daughter. I just
need you to be…I just need you, Elsa. That’s all. I need you to stay
with me.”
“I was just playing around, Mom. I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.”
She sat down on the floor and pulled me to her, holding me
like a baby.
“You need to be careful what you say, and even more careful
about what you pretend.” Her breath was hot in my ear and she
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started to rock slightly. I was afraid that she was about to pray
in tongues, like she did when she was very upset or frightened,
clutching me so tightly and desperately that all I could do was wait
till it was over. I’d let my mind wander elsewhere until she finally
gave up and let me go.
“I promise I’ll be good,” I said. “I won’t pretend anymore.”
“You’re special, Elsa. We’re special. People like us – our actions
and words contain much more power than they do for others. So
you have to be more careful. Don’t trust your instincts. They will
betray you.”
Had her grief reached the usual crescendo, I wouldn’t have
been so alarmed. But her voice was quieter, almost steely and assured. She was convinced about something, and that frightened
me more than anything else.
“Please don’t worry about me,” I said. “I promise I’ll be normal.
I’ll be here.”
“Yes, you are here in this new country, a new life. Nothing can
touch you.”
As my mother held me and rocked me in her arms, I saw my
friend stepping away from the piano and toward the front door.
She twisted the deadbolts, first for the heavy wood door and then
for the outer metal one. She walked out, not looking back. Her
black braid hung heavy and long down her back. The end of this
rope of hair was tied with a red ribbon, and this was the last I saw
of her. It was safer for her out there anyway.
But my mother was wrong. I couldn’t feel the difference. The
pain of losing my one real friend hurt just as much as the stinging welts on my leg. In fact, the thing I couldn’t see burned much
brighter.
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If Plastic Blondes Could Talk
SCOTT T. STARBUCK
would they say silicon breasts
sprouted from insecurity
and depths of hunger beyond
unspoken echoes?
Would they say
all the attention in the world
won’t compensate for too little
or the wrong kind of love?
On the way to Cass Gym
I saw one drive a motorcycle
full-speed into a brick wall,
then, with bloody chin and arm
dump the bike, again,
and again, until a mechanic
reached through vodka
and gasoline scent
to remove a stubborn key
from the ghost hand
of her sex-crazed uncle.
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secrets
CARL PALMER
behind cupped hands
her whispers smile
in papa’s ear
79
Your Pickled Parent
WILLIAM DORESKI
Lit in a darkened living room,
an aquarium features common
sea creatures: crabs and starfish:
and your father nicely preserved
in his fishing togs, his open smile
affixed by chemical action.
Your other friends chat and rattle
tall glasses of iced tea and vodka.
They ignore the taxidermy plunked
in your three-hundred-gallon tank.
They ignore me also, my poverty
oozing from me like infection.
I stare at your pickled parent
while nibbling crab and salmon
hors d’oeuvres. When you approach
and take my hand and lead me
to the kitchen to wipe the sand
and tear mixture from my face,
I insist I saw a blue flash
of spirit, quicker than a wink.
You laugh because he’s good and dead,
better off and even happier
with his view of sea life enhanced.
Soaked in vicious chemicals
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so the crabs won’t nibble, he’s calm
and no longer sexually predacious.
He’ll never again taunt little girls
by roughing over their torsos
and scratching his initials where
their parents would never notice.
His actual drowning surprised him,
you explain, but taxidermy smoothed
his pain forever, his eyes wide open
underwater, starfish clinging
like medals of honor awarded
long after the war is lost.
81
Presents
DAVID GROULX
At this place where
my mother’s mouth
was wet with beer
was wet with her mother’s
sad inheritance
and her father’s old wrinkled hands over her mouth
silencing his secrets
There in the Harmonic Hotel
she is dancing
dancing with her mother’s shoes
and the shackles her father gave her
and tonight when she comes home
she will give these things to her children
82
Riding the Ghostly Velocipede
TIM LIARDET
It’s said that drowning can be beautiful
(…though the ones who said it were not the ones who had to drown).
The surrender, perhaps, to the arms of water
Shelley was gripped by–able to fly, but not to swim.
And this my bid to join the fellowship of the drowned–
more terrible than beautiful–these the fathoms striped
with a route-map of light, this my bicycling down and down
on the pedals of my feet with my arms thrown out wide
as if to steer through imploding water the velocipede
whose handlebars I tried to grip, but could not catch.
I was four, father, and washed too far from your reach
and I somersaulted several times with weed, with weed
around my neck, my feet, until you flashed me back to the light;
until you fished me out like a pup from the drowning bucket.
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Connections
RAYMOND COTHERN
Long ago (the past spread out ahead),
my father sees something of himself in me,
something I command from my mother,
something not allowed from rumors in the family,
grandmother birthing sons and turning away,
watching grandfather raising them.
Disagreements, misunderstandings,
feelings so difficult when young,
father abusive with anger,
so much around him not right,
sticking his face up close,
punching with whiskey-hard finger,
food for thought with each jab,
calling me titty-baby.
Years wanting the earth to swallow me,
erupting into anger so complete I am blind.
Grandfather’s cane
splintering across father’s broad back,
him crashing to the floor,
mother screaming to stop
as I hit him again and again and again.
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Years later, grandfather stroke-muddled,
roaming nightly around the house,
dropping a once new cane,
waking the house,
seeing again something of himself,
father straddles the old man in bed,
trying to slap him, accusing,
a baby wanting attention,
pulling his belt out of his pants,
grandfather grabbing at it,
getting buckle cut.
In the bedroom doorway watching,
recognition punching me
like my father’s fist.
More strokes and later still, old guy
blaming his son, explaining,
rubbing the invisible cut.
Nights when it is my turn to stay,
to help him sit up,
guiding his shriveled penis
in the glass neck of milk bottle bedpan,
listening to those loud ramblings,
knowing and the only one to know,
what connection has been made.
85
Flying Lessons
KAITLIN SOLIMINE
T
he airplane in straight-and-level unaccelerated flight is acted on by four forces – lift, the upward acting force; weight,
or gravity, the downward acting force; thrust, the forward acting
force; and drag, the backward acting, or retarding force of wind
resistance. Lift opposes weight and thrust opposes drag (fig. 1).
These four forces act on an airplane in any attitude of flight, but
for the purposes of our discussions in this handbook, we will deal
only with their relationships during straight and level unaccelerated
flight. Although these four forces are acting on the airplane in any
attitude of flight, only their relationship during straight-and-level
flight will be discussed. (Straight-and-level flight is coordinated
flight at a constant altitude and heading.)
– Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge
I.
You stand outside the Cessna and motion like an air traffic controller for me to approach the runway. You wear the leather bomber jacket from your time in the Air Force, replete with its golden
winged pin, no matter that you dropped out after a stint in Vietnam and call your years in the service ‘a time for contemplation,
not dropping bombs.’ Despite your conservatism you’ve never voted Republican. Not even for Reagan.
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Today, you know this isn’t just about my first solo flight. You
didn’t ask me to be your daughter, I know, but here I am. I nod to
you and call the tower to ask permission to take off.
“Good luck, Amelia,” Dispatcher Marty, your weekend companion to the races at Wonderland Greyhound Park, says through
the headset. “You’re gonna love it.” You don’t know that the only
reason I’m on the opposite side of the windshield for once is because there came a day when I couldn’t step foot on a plane. This
could have been a slow unraveling, but mine was abrupt halt,
about face. You know that in my work for that hedge fund you
hate, the one in San Francisco, I travel all over the world. Name
the frequent flier program and I’m a part of it, even have my own
platinum airplane pin to wear on my lapel. For me, flying was
something I did to get places, but three months back, on a cloudless flight to Shanghai, I didn’t trust the plane to bring me back to
earth. Looking out the window at a setting sun, I could sense the
thousands of miles between this flight and the vast blue Bering
Sea below like an unnatural gap that required – no, demanded –
closing. Perhaps it was because I had just lost my six year-old dog,
Yastrzemski, to stomach cancer, or because I had just met the first
love of my life, or because I was beginning to question the necessity of making so much money when I didn’t even have a family to
support, or, perhaps, it was because I’d never really liked flying I
was always the person who, like you, took the shortest route from
A to B. But then, without warning, I needed three Valium, which
a flustered Chinese stewardess handed to me outside the lavatory
before take-off, to keep me on the return flight to the US. When
I landed on terra firma in California, I didn’t go home to my Russian Hill apartment with that view of Golden Gate that you made
me photograph for you at sunset, but booked the next flight to
Boston, then called my boss Harold to request personal leave. He
muttered something about women.
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I called to ask you to ready a plane for my arrival – that I was
eager for those lessons you’d promised all those years ago – and I
could hear you smiling. From Boston, I took a C & J Trailways bus
to Portsmouth, and a taxi to your home, the same two-story Victorian farmhouse from my childhood, on the New Hampshire coast.
You were waiting for me at the door, Pilot’s Handbook in hand.
Three months later, I sit in the cockpit alone, waiting for Marty’s signal. A Cape Air puddle-jumper departing for Nantucket
pulls ahead of me, its propellers slowly gaining speed, wheels ticking forward and then the nose tips upwards, wheels aloft, and it
takes to the air like a blissful bird.
“Echo Bravo Right,” Marty instructs. I nod to myself. The
Cape Air plane is already a distant speck in the clear blue sky. I’m
grateful for the perfect August afternoon – not a streak of cirrus
and only a light five-knot wind from the south-southwest.
II.
Lift: Probably you have held your flattened hand out of the window
of a moving automobile. As you inclined your hand to the wind,
the force of air pushed against it forcing your hand to rise. The
airfoil (in this case, your hand) was deflecting the wind, which,
in turn, created an equal and opposite dynamic pressure on the
lower surface of the airfoil, forcing it up and back. The upward
component of this force is lift; the backward component is drag
(see fig. 9).
– Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge
III.
The first and only time we flew together was when I was eight. As
I sat in science class wondering why Jimmy LaSalle was so fascinated by my chest, my friend Rachel threw me a balled-up note:
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“Look outside.” You were leaning against an oak tree. You waved.
A burst of wind rattled the tree’s limbs and you fanned your hands
through the falling flame-red leaves like you were the winner of an
unexpected television show prize. I felt equally as lucky – I skipped
to my teacher Mrs. Clithero’s desk to tell her you were here to take
me to the dentist.
She nodded.
Rye, New Hampshire was a small town. Weeks earlier, you’d
been laid off by Eastern Airlines in a “strategic reorganizing,” but
really, the company was in the death throes. Our neighbors, the
O’Mara’s, placed an uncooked pot roast on our doorstep. Mrs.
Trish, the church organist who was both my piano teacher and
school bus driver cut the hourly rate of my lessons. Heating the
pot roast, Mom remarked that it felt like someone died. We ate
that meal three nights in a row with a side of canned string beans.
Within a week, Mom found a job at a travel agency in Portsmouth,
two towns over. You tried to tell her she didn’t need to work while
she folded laundry at the base of the stairs and while I practiced
scales on the piano. She’d never worked a day in her life, unless
you counted a winter after college teaching ski lessons at Mt. Attitash, but you’d married her because she was of Irish immigrant
stock and talented at pretending she could withstand hardships,
economic or personal, when really the Irish are amongst the weakest willed of all Europeans. Of course, I never told Mom this.
By the time I walked outside, you were in that powder-blue
1979 Chevy Camaro you loved like a child. You opened the door
and I got a brief whiff of your breath. Hot and spicy. Johnny Walker and Listerine.
“It’s time for our first airplane ride,” you said, climbing into
the driver’s seat and adjusting your caramel sunglasses. Aviators.
“What about Jason? Is he coming too?”
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“Nah, just you and me today.”
We followed Route 1-A down the coast, stopping at Moe’s to
pick up lunch. I got an Italian sub with “extra hots” from a waitress with half-crescent moons on her nail tips. We ate in the car
and the eating meant we didn’t have to talk.
At the airport, you parked in a handicapped spot, then jogged
over to a gate and unlocked it, motioning me through, tipping
your Sox hat like a parody of a gentleman greeting a lady.
“After you, Amelia.” You always used my entire given name,
not Amy or Lia, like Mom and Jason, and I assumed this was because it was Amelia’s legacy I was to inherit.
Inside the dark, dank hangar, our plane sat in the corner looking lonely. You’d talked about this plane for years. It’d been yours
since your earliest flying days when you taught flying lessons out
of Haverhill Airport. A ray of sun fell on the plane from a skylight,
illuminating the tip of its nose and I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“The airplane has a face,” I said, pointing to the airplane’s eyes.
“Indeed it does. A brain of its own too,” you explained, opening the door. “The only thing a plane doesn’t have is a heart. That’s
what a pilot’s for.”
“Cool,” I said as you propped me into the two-seater’s co-pilot
seat letting your hand linger on my lap and I smiled.
“Don’t tell your mother about this,” you said. I knew Mom
didn’t like that you flew this plane around New England on short
trips with Uncle Stevie – who wasn’t blood, but your best friend
from before I was born. I knew only a few stories of your early
days: your work with Stevie for that commuter airline out of Buffalo, Freedom Air; the trailer you and Stevie lived in with Mom in
upstate New York without the working heat – in winter, you slept
in hats and mittens and scarves. Unlike your softer demeanor, Ste-
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vie had the rugged handsomeness of a lumberjack or firefighter.
Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have him as a
father, but as soon as the thought popped into my head, I plugged
it down like hammering at a Whac-a-Mole.
“First we check right and left magneto. Next, suction. Then
conb heat.” You pointed towards the airplane’s nose. “See that
little silver needle? It tells you the plane’s speed.”
You pointed out more lights and gadgets, explaining their uses
in words I couldn’t comprehend – altimeter, barometric pressure,
fuel selector switch. Then you tapped on a W-shaped knob on the
panel between us, your hand lingering with a loving touch. “This
baby makes the magic happen. If we’re the heart, this is the pulse.”
You started the engine and taxied to the runway. Autumnal afternoon sun warmed the cockpit golden. Behind your sunglasses,
your light blue eyes looked like pool water in summer.
“Ready?”
I nodded.
Engine thrust glued us to our seats. Beneath us, the wheels
spun, humming. We became lighter. The altimeter ticked higher.
“Ten thousand feet,” you remarked casually. You leaned back
as if in a lounge chair and I knew, suddenly, with a twinge of jealousy: this was where you went to be wordless, wife-less, childless.
“What do you think?”
I gulped away a growing knot rising into my throat. But there
were words I needed to waste: “Why do you like flying so much?”
You turned to me with a devilish look, like you could see
through me, and smiled so big I could see your gold molar. “Fasten
your seatbelt, Amelia.”
Beneath the strap, my heartbeat knocked against my ribs. If
we’re the heart of this plane, then what is the heart of me? I wanted
to ask, but you gripped the magic knob and the plane tilted right,
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shoving my entire weight against the door. I worried I’d fall out,
that I’d go slipping downwards towards the ground and you’d be
left up here alone, howling with the pleasure of a maniac. Would
you even notice my absence?
“Open your eyes!”
I hadn’t realized I’d clenched them shut, that I didn’t want to
see the world running sideways below us, that I’d never questioned
the flat-planed existence of my daily life. Carefully peeling open
my lids, I watched as we traded earth for sky, sky for earth, and
back again.
As you righted the plane, you asked, “Did you like that?” You
still wore your aviators but angled sunlight made your eyes invisible – there was just my own face reflected, my jaw slack. Embarrassed, I tried to shake the fear from my expression. I wasn’t as
stone-faced as you could be.
You laughed loudly and the plane shifted again. The windshield
showed only a cloudless sky so blue I thought maybe we’d burst
through those layers of atmosphere Mrs. Clithero taught us:
Troposphere
Stratosphere
Mesosphere
Thermosphere
Exosphere
We flipped upside down briefly and below us: the dark Atlantic, peppered with gray crags; Jenness Beach, full of sandcastles in
summer; the Center’s arcades and fried dough stands. My childhood in reverse panorama. Although I wanted you to stop the
acrobatics, I didn’t know the words. In the distance, there was
the Northern Star rising into a descending dusk and somehow it
looked close enough to touch.
“Look,” you said, your thick arm outstretched, finger pointing.
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Following your arm past the star, I saw what you saw: Seven
swans in a V, like the seven angels from Sunday’s CCD classes at
St. Theresa’s, flying directly into our route, their white wings flapping solidly and proudly.
You flew towards them, unyielding, a game of chicken, but of
the sky, and the birds themselves looked as if birthed from air. One
swan’s feathers caught the propeller, bursting into a brief smattering of white leaves descending to earth and tipping our plane briefly sideways and I thought, Maybe we were meant to fly with them.
We dipped lower, following the flight path of the descending
swans, but as what was green became trees and what was gray
became roads, I heard the seven horns and the frightened squawking of a machine not remembering its purpose and your cursing
beneath your breath. There wasn’t time to pray, to think, to contemplate how much space is between sky and earth. Most of the
time, walking and sleeping and eating we live in three dimensions, but flight gives us a fourth dimension I couldn’t comprehend, but as we plummeted closer to the reality in which we lived
our days, I knew that this new dimension was one only some of
us have the privilege of grappling towards. My hands, gripping
the plane’s dashboard, looked small, sun-bleached, clenching at
something well-beyond their grasp. Maybe this was a feeling you’d
been grasping at ever since you were a kid bumping into parking
meters whenever you walked down the street because you were
always looking up at the sky.
Wings tipped downwards, our view of the earth expanded horizontally and we aimed at the shoreline, precisely at the point where
I knew the exact sound and smell of the Atlantic’s waves like I’d
been born on its beaches. You reached over, your hand on mine,
and I didn’t even need to turn to know the way your face looked.
The swans were around us, above us, beside us, and maybe we were
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one of them. I searched my mind for the words, but you knew
what I wanted to say. You squeezed the thin skin on the back of
my hand and in the windshield I saw our faces reflected, matching
smiles, matching wide eyes, a panorama of water, and sand, and
air screened atop us.
IV.
V.
Years later, when I finally learned how to fly, I’d know what to
call this maneuver: a power on stall. With the yoke pulled to the
right and the left pedal pressed too hard, the plane begins to slip
and then, if not corrected, the plane stops flying. It’s not always
dangerous.
When we landed, the airport’s manager was waiting for us. lee
was a tall man with pockmarked cheeks. He told you to follow
him and made me wait in the lobby with its cigarette vending
machine and Tab cola that came in red and white tin cans. You
patted me on the shoulders and asked me to stay there until you
returned. I sat on the floor, facing the window where I could watch
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the planes taking off and landing, the sun dipping below the trees,
lost leaves swirling in the growing wind. I counted the flight of
three hundred seagulls overhead, each unique and following their
own path from the marshes to the beach. When you returned
you held a stack of papers in your hand. Lee was gone. It was too
dark for any more take-offs or landings. We couldn’t see the leaves
twirling upwards towards the stars.
Because you smelled like alcohol, because you flew us without
first filing a flight plan, the FAA took away your license for seven
years. Without flying daily, you became even more quiet.
Mom picked up the slack, staying long hours at the travel agency, even weekends. Months passed and we grew accustomed to
your presence in the home, ignored the taunts that you were a
‘Stay at Home Dad,’ and even forgot to check the calendar for the
day you’d be able to apply for a new license. For us, time became
only a measure of how long we had until we were older.
I lived my days like this until one Saturday night when I was in
high school and you asked me to stay home to watch your favorite
movie with you – Cool Hand Luke. Jason was away at college in
Boston and Mom was at a conference in New York. I wanted to go
to my school’s first football game of the year.
You ordered Papa Gino’s pizza and we sat on the couch and you
seemed eager for the film to start, even though the VHS tape was
nearly shredded you’d watched it so many times. Whenever Paul
Newman’s character Luke said something, you leaned forward attentively.
During the scene when Luke eats fifty eggs, you patted my leg.
It was the first time you’d done so since that first and only flight.
“You hear that? If my boy says he can eat fifty eggs, he can eat fifty
eggs,” you repeated, then took my empty plate off my lap. “You
can eat fifty eggs, Amelia. Don’t ever let ‘em tell you otherwise.”
You went into the kitchen, and I watched the entire scene alone
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as you washed the dishes, but you laughed as the prisoners counted
up the number of eggs, and then you returned to the room just
before Luke swallowed the last one. You looked as triumphant as
if you’d done it.
In the final scene of the film, I bolted upright when the gun
fired, killing Luke. “A failure to communicate,” you said in unison with Luke then you leaned back and closed your eyes. Before
long, you were asleep on the couch and I watched your large belly
expanding and contracting. The VHS tape reached its end, a solid
blue screen that painted itself atop your face, washing every piece
of you in its vibrant color. I didn’t bother waking you, but tiptoed upstairs, and although I shouldn’t have been old enough to
slow down time, I knew that the hours that had just passed would
remain fixed forever, that for once I hadn’t wanted for anything
except to listen to you snore.
The day after I arrived in New Hampshire with the intent of starting flying lessons, you drove me to the shuttered Hampton Falls
airport, closed a decade earlier. The road in was overgrown with
dandelion weeds and oak ferns, but you thought I should see the
decommissioned planes rusting along the runway. We were alone
save for a seagull who teetered down the runway, following a tumbling plastic bag.
“I was hoping you’d want to fly one day. But then again, flying’s
the sort of thing that comes to you on its own.” You ran your fingers along the buckled varnish on an old prop. The plane reminded
me of an old man who’d once been an Olympic athlete, but now
could barely make it downstairs to his basement trophy collection.
I hadn’t told you about the flight from Shanghai, or how, for
the first time, I distinctly felt the distance between my own feet at
seven miles above earth and the solid, trusted ground below.
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You looked at a cloudy sky and ran your hand over your graying mustache. In all the years I’d known you, you’d never gone
without facial hair, said it was a protest against your years in the
close-shave air force. “Too many hours up there can make a man
lose touch with something,” you said, your head still tilted back.
“But I’m glad you decided to do this. It’ll be nice to spend more
time with you.”
“Ditto.”
You returned your gaze to earth. “There are a few good local
schools. Soaring Skies in Haverhill and Flying Angels in Portsmouth.”
“I was kind of hoping you’d teach me.”
You waved your hand dismissively. “You need someone who’ll
be tough on you.”
In the end, I spent the summer living at my parents’ place,
helping Harry out by working online, and taking lessons with the
Flying Angels outfit. You accompanied me to every lesson, saying
it was good for you to be around planes. But you never went up on
any of my training flights. You blamed it on “father bias” and my
instructor Ted laughed. Ted had retired as a captain for Delta and
taught for fun, whatever that meant.
After I’d flown along the New Hampshire coast for an hour
and then landed safely for the first time with Ted by my side, you
took me to B.J.’s Boat House for dinner to celebrate. Mom was still
working at the travel agency and had bought out the entire company a few years earlier. When I was younger, B.J.’s was my favorite
restaurant. There were still the clamshells of crayons on each table,
paper placemats with sketches of animated lobsters and oysters.
I ordered a Diet Coke. You took a Jack Daniels, neat. The conversation turned to my flight earlier that day and you looked out
over the reflected red on the intertidal. Lobster boats docked for
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the night, like when the sea supported the New England seacoast.
“Remember what I told you that day we went flying when you
were a kid?”
“You said a lot that day,” I said, perusing the laminated menu.
I decided on a basket of fish and chips.
“It wasn’t like I meant to do that to you. It was just a lot to deal
with. Being a dad…” The waitress stood over us, popping a bubble
as she clicked her pen. Broad-chested and bottle blonde, I knew
she was the type you liked, or so Mom said, but you didn’t look up,
just read directly from the menu like a scolded child.
After she left, I expected you to finish your thought but it was
as if something sacred had passed – there was no getting it back.
You ordered another Jack. Then another. We lamented the end of
the tourist season, voiced concern over Mom’s stress. You became
looser, louder, but you also listened better, attuned to me in a way
I’d never noticed before.
We were laughing about a joke we intended to play on Ted
when your mood shifted. The sun had set and we were the last
table on the deck. Mosquitoes buzzed the overhead fluorescent
lamps as if light alone could sustain them.
Without thinking, after you’d sipped your last Jack Daniels, I
said, “What really happened that day you took me for a flight?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why then? Why me?”
“A pilot doesn’t reveal his secrets,” you said, chuckling softly
as if to make me laugh and looking off into the dark bay. Moonlight made the boats look like skeletons. You rubbed your lips together and I wanted to know what you were thinking. For years,
I’d assumed it had something to do with the layoff from Eastern,
but maybe you’d lived with the expectation of great things and
that expectation had proved faulty. Maybe the remnants of Viet-
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nam still clung to you, those hillside villages with their plumes of
smoke, half-naked children, the destroyed civility.
Before I knew the question I needed to ask you, you waved to
the waitress and asked for the check.
That night, I drove your Cadillac home, feeling small in the big
leather bucket seat. We each went to our respective rooms, mine
with the pink floral wallpaper, school medals tacked to the wall,
New Kids on the Block poster taped to the door. Although I could
hear your snores, now louder than ever in old age, they weren’t any
consolation for the unease I’d felt since our conversation at B.J.’s.
I couldn’t sleep. My licensing test was the following week. I didn’t
want the day to come, didn’t want to return to work, to leave New
Hampshire. Before dawn, I drove to the old Hampton Falls airport
inspired by some manic intent to see an abandoned runway in the
haze of a morning sunrise. Never before had I been so romantic. I
didn’t know how much of you was rubbing off on me and hoped
that maybe for children there was a process of learned behaviors
too. I welcomed the thought as I pulled into the same spot where
you’d parked twenty years earlier, the handicapped sign now rusted. I slid beneath the old fencing, the planks falling out and leaning against one another like old friends. I sat on a grassy patch wet
with dew and waited for the sunrise.
Gray fog seeped through the forest at the runway’s edge. Beside me, the old hangar had lost its roof and starlings nested in
the exposed beams. The air was crisp. Summer relented slowly,
giving away its grip on the season. Never before had I missed the
turning of seasons more than in autumn, here, this day. I made a
vow to return to New England for good someday but I heard your
voice in my head: Really, Amelia? It’s a big world out there, and I
wondered why, if you always thought the world was so big, if you
could explore it from seven miles above the earth, you’d lived most
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of your life just thirty miles from the town of your birth and never
expressed interest in traveling.
On the horizon, the sun rose triumphantly above the trees, the
sky’s early pink washed with a mystical blue. Alone here, the quiet
unsettled me. The lack of planes flying above the runway felt eerie,
like the calm before a storm, and yet I understood how important
it is for us to reach an altitude where we are not meant to exist, and
then to return to earth with a new respect for the gravity.
I climbed back into the Cadillac and drove Route 1-A home
just in time to get there before you noticed I was gone. The house,
quiet and sunrise-lit, looked like it had a story to tell. I opened
the door, brewed a cup of coffee, and waited for the sound of your
heavy footsteps plodding downstairs, ready to take me flying.
VI.
Obviously a body of air as deep as the atmosphere has tremendous
weight. It is hard to realize that the normal sea-level pressure upon
our bodies is about 15 pounds per square inch, or a total of 20 tons
upon the average man. The reason we do not collapse is that this
pressure is equalized by an equal pressure within the body. In fact,
if the pressure were suddenly released, the human body would explode like a toy balloon.
– Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge
VII.
I’m staring at the Portsmouth runway, a blur of white and yellow dotted lines spanning an immeasurable distance ahead of me.
Marty’s saying, “Amelia. Earth to Amelia.”
I laugh and readjust my headset. “I’m here.”
“You ready to take off?”
“Yes,” I say, testing the engines and flaps one last time. I’ve cen-
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tered the nose-wheel along the dotted yellow line as Ted instructed
me countless times.
“Go ahead,” Marty says. Go ahead. So simple. I slowly press the
throttle and wait for the thrust to set the wheels moving. I watch
the control panel for any sign of a problem, but the lights turn on
as they should, the airspeed indicator spins upwards. At 65 knots,
I aim the nose of the plane towards open sky.
Even after months of lessons, my body still yearns for the earth
and all it represents: the metallic smell of fallen leaves; a game of
kickball and the smudge of damp dirt against your knees; the first
frost crunching underfoot. But in flight, all that disappears into
an odorless, ambivalent air. The altimeter clicks higher. I think of
your first flight, when you were only eighteen and had never left
the state of Massachusetts. How from up here the world below you
looked small, and yet the horizon spread infinitely ahead of you,
how you could reach out to the glass and yet not feel the air running beneath you.
Five thousand feet: per my flight plan, I bank right, pulling
the yoke and pressing the pedal in a coordinated action. This has
become so rehearsed, Ted’s bear-like hand atop of my own. I turn
east towards the glittering Atlantic. The horizon tilts.
Below me, the runway shrinks, the control tower the size of my
pointer finger. The New Hampshire coast stretches out in widescreen, the tide line forming a thin wisp of white between the navy
Atlantic and the salt marsh’s tobacco cattails.
I can barely make out your figure in the shadow of the airport
hangar, head tilted to the sky. What did you expect to see? What
vision? At this distance, your body looks like a fleck of dust. You’re
wearing the same tattered Red Sox hat, the sweatshirt from my
alma mater. You wave and I recognize the bear-like shape of your
wide, outstretched hand, recognize this the way one instinctively
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knows the words to a childhood book read aloud every night as a
kid, even decades later. I release the yoke and spread my own hand
ahead of me such that the shape of it shadows the windshield, my
own presence up here in the sky weightless but with weight. It all
depends, I realize, on one’s perspective. In my mind, our hands
touch and my fingers don’t even reach your third knuckle. I always
had your mother’s hands.
The engine hums happily. You can’t see me, but I know you
know I’m waving back. I know you’ll watch for my figure until I
disappear into the blue, until I’m no bigger than a star.
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Remember, I Love You
MARIUS HOHLBRUGGER
E
mily! It’s Mom. Listen! I’m on my way to pick you up. I need
you to gather all your belongings and put on your jacket.
No, listen, Emily! I am on the tube now. I am on my way to
pick you up and I need you to be ready, OK?
I know school isn’t finished yet. Just tell Ms. Jenny that you
have to leave earlier today and that I am coming to pick you up,
ok? And go to...
I know dad was going to pick you up, but we have decided that
I should pick you up instead. Now listen! Get all your stuff, put
on your jacket and go to our special spot, ok? I’ll come and meet
you there.
No, everything’s fine, honey. Just do what I say. Go to the spot!
Ok, see you soon.
John! It’s me. I’m on the tube. Listen, I am on my way to pick
up Emily. JUST LISTEN! Two men came to the office. They had
a copy of that newspaper. They showed it to Margareth. They were
looking for me. John, they found us. They have come to take her
away from us.
How could I know that Helen`s stupid picture would end up in
the fucking newspaper.
Well, someone recognized her, I guess.
They didn’t see me. I ran out the back door. Listen! I’m on
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my way to meet Emily at the spot. Come and meet us there. And
hurry!
No! Leave it behind. Just forget about all of it.
Ok. Hurry!
Emily! It’s Mom again. Are you on your way?
Who’s there? EMILY, WAIT! Before you hand them the phone.
Remember, I love you!
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Cups
Elina Borg Björnström
Peacocks
Elina Borg Björnström
POINTS OF
DEPARTURE
Mirr-man-or
NICHOLAS Y.B. WONG
Between my thumb and first finger, a pencil.
I gently moved it on a paper.
Two strokes, soft as hair, were about to fly.
That’s how I learned my first Chinese word 人 (man).
During Chinese lesson, Miss Chan gave me a riddle:
man in a mirror.
What is the answer, if not the self – a walking alveolus with
invisible folding for the daily exchange of denials?
But teachers were tricky, things wouldn’t be simple as you
thought.
So I drew a rectangle, in which I wrote a man: 囚 (prison).
She shook her head and said not all mirrors
in the world had corners.
In February 1988, Michael Jackson released the single
Man in the Mirror.
It ranked 21st top in the UK Singles Chart.
Critics blamed the title,
too symbolic – “We refuse to look at ourselves in the mirror
with music.” But the song denied,
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found fault in the mirror instead:
How can sound be reflected? You need to look for it
before you can look at it.
To prove its existence,
it breathed onto the surface, wrote its initial (a capital ‘S’)
on the ephemeral vapor. Seconds later, the mark wiped itself out.
Miss Chan revealed the answer: 入 (enter)
You lost your key, so you weren’t returning .
I said, we don’t need it to enter each other. Outside our heart
a trench of skeletons waiting to be reorganized,
but we’re too busy opening each other.
I’m a locksmith. Trust me, there’s never been a door.
Still, you left. My heart seemed more spacious.
But the absent content altered the form. Corners started
growing, it’s not an organ I wanted.
I gave it up for transplant.
I walked past a mirror shop. Miss Chan was right,
there’re mirrors of various shapes. My right arm lifted,
but the left one responded in the glass: 人 | 入.
It’s easy to go mad. All you need
is a mirror. Don’t blink, stare deep into it
until an imprisoned ghost shows you
the opposite of what you once thought you were.
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Needle on Zero
TIM LIARDET
The unexpected power cut left the clocks
regurgitating nought after nought after nought –
You are leaving. The train approaches. Things start to shake.
The number of days and of nights
and the number of hours and of minutes, rattle over at speed
like the destinations on the departure board.
Look. The old world snaps like a wishbone.
As easy as that, with hardly a protest.
It was the words you spoke, so few, which left
the marital home as rubble and a fine dust to descend
like snow onto your shoes, wiped to a half moon.
And you step out from it – while every fin
of your watch’s tiny universe begins to spin –
in new coat, high heels, your brilliant skin.
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When Dindi Lost
KENNETH POBO
her job as a maid at
the Holiday Inn,
Lois quit hers too:
We must stand together,
Lois said. The manager,
Mr. Beaman, said We’ ll
easily replace you.
Remember your health
benefits. As if Lois
and Dindi could forget-but they got rehired,
even a raise. Beaman
turned into stone
while on the phone
with Mrs. Clickteck,
his mistress. Guests came
and went, the computer
snuggled up against
new reservations. Mr. Beaman
became his own gravestone,
granite, impressive.
112
I Watch You Sleep
DAVID GROULX
I watch the little tv screen above where you lay
sleeping
the numbers change from 77 to 80
when your eyelids twitch the numbers move down
to 74
when your body moves the numbers go up
to 85
but mostly I watch you sleep
wait for you to open your eyes
I wonder about dying and all the
times we talked about it
I want you to be dancing
instead of dying
here with
and the nurse across the hall
the one you hate most
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Harbor
AMANDA PAPENFUS
C
hloe opens the bedroom windows and strips them of their
drapes. She wants to let in as much light as possible. Even the
shadows remaining in certain cervices of the room unsettle her.
The four walls are confining despite the room’s bareness.
She had picked out the “fresh meadow green” paint with her
lover. Now the room feels stale. She scrubs every wall so hard the
paint peels in spots, revealing the white base.
She scours the wooden floor but can’t get rid of the crimson
stain. It starts in the far corner, where he used to put his feet to get
out of bed, and trails across the room to the bathroom, where she
had found him.
She puts the scrub brush back in the bucket of water and wipes
her brow. This will have to do. Let the landlord carpet over her
lover’s blood and give the room a fresh coat of paint.
She’d tried to stay. But her stomach turned each night she lay
down. She got chills each time she set eyes on the stain.
The walls in her new bedroom are white and free of decorations. She has the same bed, but new yellow satin sheets. She likes
the way satin feels on her skin, and yellow is a color with no connection to him. At night, she climbs into bed and turns away from
his side. She hugs the soft pillow to her chest and rocks. The sun
rises. Her eyes sting from staring at the wall.
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She buys several bouquets of pink azaleas and places them
around the room. She leaves and comes back in, pretends she
didn’t know the flowers were there, pretends he’d bought them to
surprise her, pretends he’s just in the next room.
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A Swedish Cemetery
TOM LAVELLE
Much is familiar: rows
of stones, crosses, ornate
markers, paths curving
and cul-de-sacs that cluster
graves and shape plots
to hint each death distinct,
more than one loss more
in a line of losses. Traces
left by mourners – candles
and plants, floral wreaths.
Fainter traces in dates,
familiar tales of long
lives, spouses, lists
of offspring – silent
tales of infant deaths,
maternal deaths in birth.
Clear biblical names
engraved – Sara, Rut
Jakob, Adam and Eva,
Mattias,Lisbet, Ann.
All this walled off,
on Kyrkogårdsgatan
stonework, more stone
and wood fencing along
Engelskaparken where
117
the rare hawfinch and
cross-bills join
the common birds, mourning
doves, blackbirds,
a mix of tits and finches.
Wrought iron marks
the east edge and north,
edged with high hedges too
and lattice on Villavägen
shielding those homes
from graves. Like Bruegel’s
Icarus these collected dead
and their viloplats,
resting place, go
unnoticed or if seen stir
no concern, aren’t pondered
in a crowded bicycle town’s
bustle, as fenders rattle,
as spoked wheels turn.
Much too is new:
on tombstones and obelisks
stonecutters’ tools
record dates differently,
stars mark births
and crosses death dates.
Black granite or gray
inlaid in gold or white,
a nod to Nordic winters’
cold erosive strength.
Among names many
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patronyms – Andersson,
and Carlson common, Åkesson,
Erlandsson less. Names
from things carved often –
Sten, Björn, Iris –
the local stone, bear,
flower. From landscapes
in compounds or singlets
surnames take words
for stream, oak, mountain,
field, grove, heather,
They’re carved as Ljungberg,
Ekström, Ek and Feldt,
as Björklund and Kvist,
branch, Blixt, lightning.
Another naming rite,
soldier names, date
from 1690s when
Karl stocked Karl’s
army with men who’d march
on Narva, Düna, Thorn,
die at Poltava or freeze
near Trondheim in full retreat.
Dolk, Hjelm, Lantz
the state renamed them as
weapons of war or features
a good soldier needs –
quick, brave, strong,
as Rask, Modig, Stark.
Karin Svärd, sword,
her dates 1830
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1880, her name
an old soldier name.
Lars Ove Stolt
another, his attribute
proud, proud of his fortune
and factory, proud of his alderman’s
title, all engraved on his tomb,
for nearly half the stones
list job titles:
professors in scores, bankers,
retailers, gentlemen
farmers, lawyers, editors
in chief, county surveyors,
Lutheran pastors and bishops,
librarians and wives, “loving
wife,” “dearest wife,”
“beloved wife”, one
woman with a job
engraved Mia Lind
Speciallärare,
a special ed teacher,
born 1940
in 2009 dead.
New too are words of praise
addressed past the dead,
praising kin or friends
who paid a headstone’s
cost. Literally, “had
the monument raised,”
lät resa vården,
in language that echoes the etched
120
texts of rune stones,
of heirs and survivors whose
drive to mourn was public.
Under the grass and stones
familiar or new, the deepest
likeness lies still.
The Swedish dead, if they see
hells or heavens, learn
decay or eternity, they say
nothing and leave the living
to read chisel marks,
signs of crosses and columns,
foreboding profiles in bas
relief. Like those at home,
Swedish churchyards,
or kyrkogårdar, lie
silent save the crunch
of gravel underfoot,
birdsong above.
121
The Spiral Nebula
WILLIAM DORESKI
The cuddle of cat against me
suggests the spiral nebula
hurtling through absolute vacuum
as the universe expands. My
universe is not expanding. You
with your sour expression stand
on the lower cusp of a misty
crescent moon. So distant yet
almost within reach. The dark
gels in chilly layers too thick
for my dream-life to penetrate
so I might as well lie awake
and listen for horned owls tooting.
The cat purrs so deeply his body
vibrates like an eager machine.
The spiral he suggests rhymes
not only with the nebula but
the last tropical storm forming
122
south of the Cape Verde Islands.
It doesn’t rhyme with sea shells
or other static forms. Like you,
the cat embodies force contained
by will, more like a fist than
a fossil. I want to tell you
how admirable you look framed
by cosmic forms. But the straight
line your mouth forms whenever
I speak reminds me that scars,
however old, never quite heal–
that the universe, expanding
after all these millennia,
doesn’t care how the dark feels
as it fills my open pores.
123
In Absentia
HOWIE GOOD
1
I asked the pale child on the playground where you were. No answer. I went upstairs, but the bed was empty. If I closed my eyes
for even one moment, I was pestered by flies and terrible dreams. I
came back down. The new world suffered from the same impudent
weather as the old. I stopped every few feet to look around. Whole
weeks rushed past me. A stranger’s face quivered with emotion. I
thought I was dead. I wished I was dying.
2
Which would you take, the shortest route or the most scenic? My
poor mother! She wouldn’t drive on highways, but it was her humid and flaking heart that killed her. Small brown birds scatter as
I approach, unwilling to share their diseases. Something from last
night’s dream is caught in the bushes. I bend down to see what. A
mouth rimmed in salt presses against mine.
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The Song
novel excerpt
ANNA BRITTEN
Somerset, 1977
J
akub Widger was four years old when he first heard The Song.
It was after a trip to the butcher, at a quarter to eleven one Saturday afternoon in February, and the sitting room was so cold he
could see his breath against the brown wallpaper with the fuzzy
flowers. His mother was holding a new shoulder of pork under her
arm and still wearing her cossack hat and white knee boots – the
ones that made the butcher whistle and his customers stare.
Dorota Widger had purchased The Song in 1965, eight years
before Jakub’s birth.
Today she slipped it from its paper sheath as tenderly as if it
were gingerbread, and with the other hand lifted the teak lid of a
spotless cream Achiphon stereo. Jakub held his breath – his parents smacked his bum if he touched this precious box. Dorota
slipped The Song down into it, out of Jakub’s sight, and performed
whatever wizardry was required to make the black circle sing. For
the few trembling seconds before the music started they stood
there, smiling at each other, waiting. As the first few notes rang
out, his mother, satisfied, began humming and danced off to the
kitchen to put the pork in the fridge. As he listened, Jakub stared
at the sleeve, which bore a photograph of a young woman holding
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a guitar. She couldn’t be a real person – no one in Norton St Philip
had skin that brown, or teeth so, so white. And that hair – a coal of
such felt-tip intensity that Dorota had three weeks ago attempted
to emulate it with a bottle of Clairol Midnight Black and an iron.
She had failed – hence the cossack hat. With the pad of his forefinger Jakub tried to peel off the sticker reading Herrick & Goreham
1s/8d to add to the collection on his headboard.
There was bendy, grown-up writing above the photograph
which, being an enthusiastic reader, he set about decoding.
“Ah… cuh…”
Before he could get any further his mother returned, now with
stockinged feet, and the sleeves of her dress wrinkled up over her
elbows.
“Acey Convertino,” she read for him. “She’s American.”
She sighed. Then, because Jakub’s father, Edward, preferred her
to speak English at all times, whispered:
“Piekna…”
Jakub didn’t know what it meant, only that it was – like kochany, or sweetie - one of the few Polish words she still used, and
it came out whenever she saw someone or something that gave her
that happy-sad face.
With small fingers white as pork fat she took Jakub’s doughy
little hands and heaved him to his feet, and then – hup – up again,
so that he was standing on hers. She moved his right hand to her
waist and lifted his left aloft, their arms signalling in tandem towards that dusty corner of the ceiling where the spiders hid. And
then they were off: swirling across the sitting room, moving as one,
Jakub’s scrunched toes clinging onto the tops of his mother’s feet,
her ligaments rising and falling like piano keys as they danced.
Didn’t it hurt? He looked up at her for reassurance and she laughed
and la-lala-ed in reply. No, it didn’t hurt. To a boy with all his
milk-teeth The Song was an ode to every good thing the world
126
possessed. How could it not have been written expressly for them,
at that moment, in that cold room that now felt so warm? He was
four years old. If the planet was spinning just for them, then the
magic record on the stereo must be too.
No one knew this but The Song was not just an invisible noise.
Oh no. It looked like a massive shiny bubble, like the one around
the good witch Glinda in the The Wizard Of Oz – he knew this
because he saw it in his head and felt it in his chest as he listened.
Past the Achiphon they twirled, and the racing green nylon
settee, and the fuzzy wallpaper flowers, a blur now, and then right
underneath the spiders’ den. Now and then Dorota would spin
360 degrees, so fast that Jakub had to thrust his face into her belly
for stability, and then she said her back was aching and they would
have to stop.
Ciggie smoke and Youth Dew perfume loitered in his nostrils
for the rest of the day.
“Boy looks at me like a bulldog,” his father said to Dorota that
night over dinner.
Jakub crumpled. His underbite – which made his lower jaw
protrude beyond some imaginary norm, pushing his lower teeth
over his upper ones – didn’t affect his speech or his chewing, it just
made him look a little ferocious and canine. Or, as Dorota had it,
like a member of the Hapsburg dynasty, whatever that was. She’d
once said he could turn up at a European palace and claim kinship
with one grin.
“Leave him alone. I think it’s sweet,” she told Edward now,
lighting up her fortieth and final Lambert & Butler of the day.
“Can’t the dentist fix it?”
“We’ve been through this. It’s too expensive, too painful. Anyway, the dentist doesn’t need to fix it. It’s part of him. It’s what he
is. He’s my little bulldog.”
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“When I’m a man I’m going to have a beard and it will hide it,”
mumbled Jakub.
His father snorted.
Only as a teenager did Jakub question his assumption that he’d
been everything his parents required, progeny-wise. He’d been,
it emerged, a lucky late windfall for a couple in their early forties
who, presumably, had long since given up on passion (yuk) and
procreation and were now having sex purely for the cardiovascular
benefits.
One Spring day, the result of some dutiful Sunday night congress nine months earlier, Jakub had arrived like an unexpected
parcel from abroad. According to family legend, Dorota, who had
fled Poland as a child during the second world war, had been delighted while his father, Edward, a taciturn lab assistant, had been
so shocked he barely left his tiny box room study for a week after
his wife and child came out of hospital. Instead of folding nappies
and posting out announcement cards, he’d worked non-stop on
another academic paper – his two hundred and fortieth – that noone would publish.
It was the foundation stone of a sad, but not unusual, arm’slength relationship. Jakub regarded his father as others did their
great-uncles. Distant, dour, not to be rugby tackled however wet
the Sunday. For a long time he was utterly unaware of how alike
they were.
“Don’t forget your football cards,” Dorota called now from the
kitchen as Jakub rose to climb the stairs to bed. “I’ll be up in ten
minutes.”
“Cards? You bought him more blasted cards?” said Edward,
slamming his hand on the table so the water in the glasses jumped.
This exertion induced a brief coughing fit.
Dorota came in to slap his back, then wiped her hands on an
orange pinny that stretched below her mini skirt.
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“He gets a pack a month. It’s all he gets – it’s nothing compared
to his friends.”
“It’s plenty. What does he need more for?”
“You know why. You’d be the same if you were his age.”
It was his mother’s friends who pointed it out: Jakub had inherited his father’s mildly addictive personality. In the first week of
primary school he’d begun collecting football cards. Too innocent
to grasp the concept of trading, he pocketed with excitement the
charitable donations of older boys – creased, unwanted Burnley
wingers and substitute goalies from Wolverhampton Wanderers,
who he lovingly smoothed out, and sometimes begged Dorota to
iron or reinforce with sellotape.
Nobody was thrown away. As the term went on, star players
were painstakingly sought out, and trades made, slowly and deliberately upwards and onwards, until he had the thing he wanted
safely in the warmth of his palm.
“Collecting things is good,” Dorota said, slipping a finger inside each glass and lifting them with a clink. “It teaches you to
appreciate completeness – that nothing should be left out.”
Then a dreamy look came on her face. She put the glasses down
and meandered from the dining table towards the stereo, as if tethered by a rope whose length she was testing.
As the years slipped by, Jakub spent increasing amounts of time
with just the Achiphon and the radio for company, until finally, in
the year of his eighth birthday, they were the most reliable company he had. Dorota’s days had become entirely filled with the
care of Edward, who was now confined to bed with emphysema
and several dozen back issues of New Scientist, which took turns
slipping from the lemon candlewick bedspread to the floor whenever he shifted position. He was quieter than ever. After school,
Jakub would come in and, prompted by his mother, sit on the edge
of the bed and talk about his day:
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“Tell Daddy how the spelling test went.”
“It was OK. I got seven out of ten.”
“Say what you had for lunch.”
“I had cottage pie and semolina for lunch.”
“Tell him who you played with at playtime.”
“I played Doctor Who with Jamie and Nicky.”
A pause. Dorota smiling tightly.
“OK, kochany, you can go now.”
Throughout these daily staccato exchanges, his father kept his
eyes closed, and teeth gritted beneath the tissue-thin skin, possibly
aggravated by his son’s energy and questions.
So Jakub tried instead to remain downstairs, just him and the
hit parade, for long stretches of the weekend and the small parcels
of the week that weren’t occupied by school or clubs. He came to
think of the punks, the soul singers, the popsters, the DJs with
voices like fudge, and all the rest of the radio crew as his own personal entertainers, and his internal thoughts became infested with
song lyrics: “I fought the law and/The law won,” he’d tell himself
when another playground tussle ended up in the head’s office, and
“We get around round round round, we get around” as he sat in
the passenger seat of Dorota’s Beetle on the way to Tesco.
Songs nailed the world down somehow. They said all the
things you couldn’t. He didn’t know how anyone lived without
them. Sometimes he made the mistake of thinking others felt the
same way.
“Let’s get it on,” he said once to his teacher, Mrs McDonald, as
she handed him his anorak at playtime. Her mouth clacked open
like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“My coat,” he said. “I thought you were going to help me with
the arms.” He panicked. What else could it mean? Wasn’t that
what Marvin Gaye meant, a coat?
130
Well, if not someone’s coat then maybe their TV. A lamp?
That evening his mother pulled a crisp white envelope from his
satchel, read its contents, puckered her lips, and turned the radio
off.
The next morning, when Jakub came down for his Sugar Puffs,
it was back on again.
Dorota was standing at the back door smoking – she couldn’t
do it indoors anymore because of Edward’s illness. There was a lot
she didn’t do anymore – wear the white knee boots; invite Jakub’s
classmates over; make dens.
But there was one ritual they still shared. As soon as he began
to acquire pocket money, Jakub’s addiction for collecting had inevitably switched from trading cards to seven-inch singles. Every
Saturday morning, Dorota, Jakub and his fresh green one pound
note drove to the shops, to Herrick & Goreham Newsagents,
Gifts, Toys &
Records, which smelt of rising damp and had pasted to the wall
a Top Ten list that, if you leaned across the counter and squinted,
changed subtly every Monday. No matter what the shop assistant
had placed in the “Now Playing” holder on the counter, or what
his mother was humming that day, the final choice of disc was
always Jakub’s.
When they arrived home, the new seven-inch, still clinging
with static to its paper jacket, would be tenderly placed on the
stereo: by Jakub, who was now tall enough to peep inside the box,
and trusted to treat it with courtesy.
“Flick the switch to 45,” Dorota reminded him, even though
she found it as hysterical as he did, now and then, to play 45s at 33
so they sounded like an ogre, or at 78 so they sounded like Pinky
& Perky.
“Do you want to put the stylus on?” Funny how she knew
131
the English word for ‘stylus’ but still had to mime ‘thighs’ at the
butcher. He shook his head: to him the needle was a lethal weapon capable of wreaking irreversible havoc on his most precious
possessions. The noise it made was terrifying, like a space rocket
burning up as it hit the earth’s atmosphere.
“Keep the volume down low, Jakub. Always low. Because of
poor daddy.”
“OK, mum.”
His mother back upstairs on nursing duty, Jakub lay on his
stomach on the racing green nylon settee and listened to his new
record, a pool of melancholy forming somewhere around his navel
when the song ended and the stylus rubbed shhh in the closing
grooves and lifted itself off, covered in a tiny grey fluffball.
If he was lucky he’d get to play the stereo after school, too, a
pleasure which made the day soar. Records were like miniature
3D kingdoms that some wizard had hidden inside flat black discs
– full of heroes, horses, giant beanstalks, rainbows, mint condition
Kevin Keegan football cards. He could lift the lid of these kingdoms and stare at them, reach his hand into them, even shrink
himself and climb in, whenever he wanted. As long as his mother
was around to put the needle on for him again.
One autumn Tuesday just after his eighth birthday, he lay there
on his stomach a long time after the record had finished, waiting
for the comforting whoomph of Dorota’s slipper down the carpeted stairs. He waited so long that he grew hungry and, through
the window, started seeing neighbours returning home from work,
parking their cars and carrying their anoraks into amber-lit hallways. He realised it was growing dark in the sitting room. All was
hush. Shouldn’t it be bathtime?
He heaved himself onto his feet and tiptoed upstairs, afraid to
call out in case he disturbed his father who had now been in bed
so long Jakub could not remember the last time he’d seen him
132
upright. There was a light under his parents’ door. He pushed it
open, quickly, afraid.
On the bed lay his father, as usual, thin and white and looking
as old as the woodsman from ‘Beauty And The Beast’ in Jakub’s
illustrated book of fairy tales. His feet sticking out from under
the sheets and blankets were yellow. Usually Edward would raise
a grimace in salute but this time his eyes were shut and his mouth
as straight as a letter box. Dorota sat on the white painted wicker
chair next to the bed, her head resting on her husband’s pillow.
There was a cigarette smouldering in a saucer on the bedside table.
Smoking indoors? That was strange.
For a moment Jakub thought his parents were both playing
dead, for a joke. But then his mother lifted her head, black streaks
under her eyes like a clown in the rain, and crawled to him, whimpering, kneeling before him, clawing his trembling body to hers,
as if better to absorb its heat, its life.
“He’s gone, kochany,” she whispered. “It’s just us now, baby
boy.”
The next couple of days were a blur. He felt featherlight, a tiny
grey fluffball on the tip of a stylus - if you took him on the end of
your finger and blew he’d disappear forever. At one point he was
taken for an ice cream by one of Edward’s colleagues, a man in his
late 60s who talked at him nonstop about tax and the royal family
as if terrified of what Jakub might utter if he opened his mouth.
There was a small announcement in The Somerset Standard. Too
small, everyone said, but what can you do? It’s not like he knew
many people. After the funeral and wake at a nearby pub, at
which various strangers had given Jakub chunky fifty pences and
the Caramac bars he hated, two of Dorota’s friends came back to
the house. Jakub climbed the stairs unnoticed, lay on his bed and
clutched some of his favourite 45s to his chest to anchor himself
to the world beyond his house. Now and then he lifted them to
133
his nose to inhale their sweet, dusty smell, and rub the silky paper
against his upper lip. Daddy was gone. He whispered the fact to
himself and was afraid. It felt like the front wall of the house had
been blown clean off. For comfort, he thought instead about Debbie Harry, and about what songs to buy next with all the money
he’d been given that day.
The women’s voices rose through the floor like bubbles, and as
he dozed off, he felt the records slither one by one from his grasp
and onto his Snoopy rug where, he sleepily reassured himself, they
would remain unharmed until morning. He wished he could hear
The Song, just once. If Dorota, downstairs, played The Song…
everything would be all right. If Dorota played The Song, one
day he would do something amazing. One day he would do something to make her truly happy.
Some hours later, a sonic boom awoke him from a thick sleep.
The walls and ceiling were shaking, vibrating. He scrunched his
eyes, fumbled sleepily for his glasses as though they might somehow make sense of whatever was occurring, and gradually recognised The Song. It reverberated through the house until the streetlights went out, signalling dawn, over and over and over, not at low
volume anymore but louder than he had ever heard it before.
134
Last Words
PAUL SCHREIBER
There is no summary,
no parenthesis.
Words fail, gestures fail,
and yet I stand here,
ritual marionette,
slack strings and loose hands trying to suggest
a life, your life mother,
its weight, its circumflex tempus, it force and extension,
the ornate arabesques of impact
on those you touched and moved, eddies
multiplied and countless in the minute motions,
for you too were a hub of the wheeled universe.
Who can give account for all, give just sounds for just
this single life?
I try these words, but know that only
the accidental regurgitated grunt –
choked up like primal volcanic gas,
an anguished bubble burst from hot mud
can speak,
and then only of a lack, of a need for the next breath –
not your life, not those decades, the acts,
the generative urge of love.
But I will gesticulate this rite, at the limen,
135
feeling as mechanical as the doctor’s last somber judgment, but
recalling the smooth cool skin of your feet, your hands
on the last hospital bed,
your tiny wave goodbye towards the hospice door
in the noon winter light,
knowing my most honest syllables could never be spelled.
136
A Visit
Taroudant, Morocco, 2011
SALMA RUTH BRATT
W
hen they arrive at the gate, they pay alms to the women
outside; when they cross the threshold into the walled cemetery, they pay alms again to the men at the entrance. Daoud looks
for the men who will recite Qur’an for his father, but he doesn’t
see anyone.
This cemetery is very different from the place where Susan’s father is buried, with its carefully manicured lawns and ostentatious
headstones. In Islam, a grave should be modest and ephemeral.
The gravesites are simple and scarcely marked. Bodies are buried
in harmony with the natural world. Today it is difficult to find his
father’s place, as the weeds have grown high since the last rainy
season. They rely on memory rather than vision to find it.
Daoud smiles and takes his mother’s hand. He is overcome
once again by the joy of being this woman’s son, that woman’s
husband, another woman’s brother. He feels God has given him
more blessings than he could ever deserve. He looks again where
his father rests, and he says a prayer of thanks.
When he looks up, he sees the men who will recite the Qur’an
for his father. He walks to them, pays the requested alms, and
stands back to listen, tears coming to his eyes, as one after the
other the men take up the harmonious chant of Qur’anic verses.
137
He feels a stirring within him, and he is not certain of the source,
but he knows that he will never forget this moment, standing next
to his mother, feeling a sense of peace – not just a peace of warmth
and security, but a peace that is sharp and strong.
138
Frogs (partial rendition)
Elina Borg Björnström
THE
WORD ARTIST
Grandma and Death
ADNAN MAHMUTOVIĆ
I
n Spring 2008, while my American colleagues at the Department of English, Stockholm University worried who would be
the democratic candidate – Obama or Clinton – and whether either stood a fair chance in the upcoming elections, I walked the
corridors thinking how to ask my grandma to fake death.
Why?
For a film.
I always wanted to make a film. I tried pulling together a project a few years earlier, but no Swedish producer wanted to risk being ripped off by those Balkan types, by which they did not necessarily mean me, but the people in Bosnia where I wanted to shoot
it. And the story I had in mind was too … outrageous, I suppose.
Now I had a much simpler story I called “Gusul” which was
about two Bosnian immigrants in Sweden, a sick mother and her
only daughter, living alone after the father/husband was killed in
the war, which reduced the old woman to a silent, supine body.
Then, the only time the daughter hears her mother speak, is when
the mothers asks her for some traditional plum pie, a very curious
kind of dish that is really nothing like a pie. This seems to be a sign
of recovery, but then the mother dies, and the daughter decides to
perform the Muslim ritual washing, gusul. One last touch, one
last intimacy.
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An old friend of mine, Armin Osmancević, who ran an advertising agency WERK and a small film company called ARTWERK, proposed that he produce it. The story conveyed an immense intimacy between the women, and Islamic sentimentality
quite uncommon in contemporary fiction and film, far removed
from controversial and hyped-up bullshit.
Armin put together a team of people as diverse and culturally
unconnected to some elements of the film as possible, but each
cared about the kernel story. They all worked for crumbs. Our
budget was small and meant to cover the equipment, and the lead
actress Aida Gordon, who would come to give an amazing performance for half her usual rate. But we still needed to cast the
mother character.
I could not imagine anyone more perfect than my own grandma, but how to ask. She was a traditional woman, wearing a hijab
even though she had been in menopause since time immemorial
and did not have to. Although she shouldered some eighty years,
her back was stick straight, as if always at attention. I have never
seen her slouch in front of a TV like every single one of us from my
father’s generation on. She had the liveliest eyes and rosy cheeks as
if she’d pinched them too many times back in the day when she
was flirting with grandpa. I suppose they had to be quite red to
knock him off his feet when she peeked out through her window,
with only moonlight to play with. I never figured out her toothless
smile. It made her look either shy or smart. She hated commotion
and conflict, and she read he Qur’an deep into the night and early
in the morning and on hot afternoons in her cool corner where
the light was good and where her eye-drops had their proper place
and where she hid her blood-pressure pills. She was quite blind,
and deaf. She would sit ten inches from the TV-set, watch it from
it side with her good eye, and with her good ear turned to the left
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speaker. She had broken her left hip some twenty years earlier and
now that she was living in modern Sweden since the outbreak of
the Balkan war, she still refused to have it fixed, properly this time.
Needless, you know. Her name is Sena Mahmutović, and I had no
idea how much she loved me.
I not only needed her to fake death but also to strip naked to
get the ritual washing.
I could not do it, so naturally I told my mother, who told my
grandma, who in turn said, Yes.
No hesitation. Just a Yes. Plain and uncanny.
I got this feeling of electricity crackling on the surface of my
skin, and my lungs heating up. Yet, I still had my doubts whether
or not she could really make it happen. Did she really understand
what she signed up for? Again, I told my mother, and she asked
her, and she came back with the best answer.
The shooting was postponed from June to September.
When we finally had a date that suited everyone, 12-14 September, it coincided with Ramadan, the holy month of fasting,
when Muslims skip eating from sunrise to sunset. September days
in Northern Sweden are long, 4am-8pm. I told Grandma she was
old and weak, not in her best health, so she should not be fasting. I
said, “You’ve done your share of fasting and it’s plain irresponsible
to put such a strain on yourself.” But no, she had done it since a
young girl, and she was determined to keep fasting Ramadan until
she died. She would not stand us up, nor would she stand God up.
It was her first role. She was curious.
I do not want to complain about the ordeals of preproduction,
and as an afterthought I do not care about the hell of postproduction with burnt hard drives and mission-impossible rescues of the
material, and the CGI of grandma’s twitching eyes while dead. It
is the three perfect days of shooting that are the best days of my
life.
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Grandma lived with my parents in a city some 200 miles south
of Stockholm. I asked her to bring all the pajamas or whatever
she used to sleep in, so we could see what color was most suitable. She said she had nothing new and fancy and she feared everyone would laugh at her for that. That was not exactly what I
imagined she would be worried about. She had further worries her
hair would be messy and unmanageable, that she would forget her
cues, nothing unorthodox for any actress.
On Friday 12, we hired the equipment, and my parents brought
grandma in the evening. After dinner, I walked her through the
script, and was quite hoarse afterwards. She was deafer than six
months earlier. She did not show a trace of doubt that the film
should be made and that she was the one to do the “dying” job.
On Saturday, the first day of shooting, I forgot the keys to the
apartment we would be using, so the crew had the breakfast meeting on the sidewalk waiting for me to fetch the keys. The apartment
was my mother-in-law’s, a simple immigrant abode, run-down just
enough for the pathos of the story, but it had big windows and we
wanted a lot of natural light flooding the stage. My father-in-law,
who was cancer sick, spent the weekend at my place.
Aida Gordon, the actress playing the daughter took time talking with Grandma, and making a great first impression. They
charmed everyone, and created the perfect atmosphere of warmth
on a cold Swedish morning.
Grandma spent twelve hours in bed, getting up for occasional
visits to the bathroom. The make-up, camera adjustments, lights,
props, all that took an awful long time. The shooting was quite
quick. Grandma was anxious about wearing make-up, because she
had never used any such thing. The Swedish make-up artists, who
were paid in movie-tickets for the film festival, explained to her it
was not really a whole lot of mascara, eye shadow, lipstick and all
that jazz that she needed. She only needed some cover that killed
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the sweat flow, and consumed light rather than reflected it.
Grandma’s lines were the funniest. I lay on the floor, out of
sight, and prompt her, and sometimes when I tugged her sleeve or
something, she’d say, What do you want? Although she knew she
was only acting, she took everything literally. When we practiced,
I told her she should say, My feet are cold.
She got serious and said, Yes, that’s true, they are cold, all the
time.
Then, when the camera was rolling, and I prompted her to repeat the words, she said, Now they feel warmer.
She did not quite understand why she had to repeat the same
words over and again as we were shooting the same scene from different angles, or when Aida did not get the scene just right.
In another scene, we wanted her to drink water, or just pretend
to take a sip, and say that she wanted some traditional Bosnian
plum pie.
She said, I’m fasting.
I said, You won’t eat it, just say you desire some.
But, I don’t want any.
Just say it.
All right.
Now, she knew that first thing that morning we had already
filmed the scene when the daughter makes the pie. She said, But
she already made the pie, she doesn’t have to bother making another one.
We wanted the actress to prepare for the scenes where she is
immensely sad and tearful, but Grandma kept saying things that
made everyone laugh, and as the shooting went on there was an
expectancy that she would keep delivering these lines that would
do well in behind the scenes footage. There was none such footage,
of course.
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On Sunday 14, the fake death day, when we planned on filming
the scenes of ritual washing, I only slept a few hours. I got up at
4 a.m., drank a lot of water and carrot juice, but I could not eat. I
too would be fasting. I sat scribbling on my laptop, and watched
the sun play with old roofs of Stockholm churches across the narrow strip of sea between Skanstull and Hammarby Sjöstad, waiting for Grandma to wake. I could not stand waiting so I went out
for a run, imagining I fell into the cold, harbor water, getting out
all cool and fresh, between boats and wild-duck droppings, the
drowsy seagulls, swans and those red-beaked black birds I never
cared to find the names for. I kept thinking about Grandma and
what she was doing for me.
Grandma was tired, and hoped we could finish her scenes
quickly so she could go home. I did promise her she would not
have to work more than one day, but I underestimated the need for
rearrangements, rehearsals and retakes.
She had trouble mastering the art of keeping still when she
faked death, but otherwise she expressed no anxiety. I so wished
to know what was going on in her mind, and yet not. I kept at her
side as Armin was directing. She had no more lines to say, which
meant she would not make any funny mistakes, and that made the
washing scene even heavier, but at the same time she did peek or
wink or sneeze or sniff or lick her lips or asked questions about the
guys hiding behind lenses or microphones or lights. Ergo: many
retakes.
She was done by 4 p.m. dressed up and eager to go home.
I wanted to buy her something, a small token, anything.
She refused.
I insisted.
She laughed at me and slapped me on the chin.
I told my wife to find her some nice clothes, a new skirt, pa-
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jamas, blouse, anything. My wife thought Grandma had trouble
walking in long skirts, which got tangled up all the time with her
walking aid, or when she sat in narrow cars. She bought her a pair
of really nice, soft, and comfortable pants. She refused to even try
them on. She said, I’ve never worn pants in my life and I sure am
not going to start now.
Then she left. I went back to the set, thinking of her.
We had a telephone scene left to shoot, when the daughter
squabbles with the imam about doing the washing at home. I
could not focus. I ate the rest of the plum pie.
149
Dear Publisher,
JACK GRANATH
We pulled out
of Pig Kill City,
Missouri or something
like that early,
and first thing my girlfriend wants waffles.
She really wanted them.
She threatened to faint.
So I rushed us to a wafflerie
right off the highway,
and our waitress was named
Loretta. My girlfriend got
a huge kick out of that.
Loretta had fingernails
done up like strawberries
dipped in chocolate,
and she also wore
stretch pants and a ponytail.
We sat there in the secondhand smoke and the cold
and ate waffles and hash browns
and toast, and at one point
Loretta corrected my grammar.
So I guess it’s okay
that, according to
150
this postage-stampsize note I came
home to, you
appreciate my interest
in your journal
but regrettably
can’t find room
in it for my work
at this time.
Don’t feel bad.
Loretta calls to you
across the miles
of carbohydrates and
yellow curtains,
lifts her voice above
the clamor of
the great squirrel hunt of life,
and she agrees.
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Watusi (For Alison Desforges: In Memorium)
DAVID LEWITZKY
I recall when young, dancing the Watusi on a beach
Jumping for my maturity, grabbing at a social and inviting sky
I recall when younger yet
Ecstatic Sunday jazz concerts in the Town Casino Lounge
Digging Ray Barretto, an honest blue collar jazzman
Years before he wrote his one big hit, the El Watusi
(This poem’s like all my poems, a piece of history)
I know about Watusi Giants
A tall and stately tribe
They’re warriors, aesthetes and aristocrats
They’re gentry, leisured, used to running things
I think Watusi beauty is unparalleled, their dancing is
magnificent
Their carriage and their stature are an epic and an elegy
They’re titanic living, moving towers
(And their livestock have the longest horns in all creation)
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When I was young and hungry
Dancing the Watusi on the surface of this whirling world
I Thought I was constructing continuity, personality, memory
A nervy white man’s enduring neural architecture
(This poem’s like all my poems, the testimony of my being in the
world)
The Watusi are the Tutsi and when I was not so young
They were slaughtered by the Hutu, their servants once
Three months. Eight hundred thousand dead.
Must have been, I thought, a turning worm,, an aberration,
a genetic souvenir
(This poem’s like all my poems, a shaky signature in time)
Way back when, years before that storm
When carelessness was still my weapon, my defense
I Watusi’d on the shoreline of that sea of love
That narcissistic, tideless, lifeless sea
This was long before I knew
The hungry ghosts besetting us
Would feed upon Watusi, Tutsi, Hutu souls
Ray Barretto’s soul, and mine
153
In focus
Vanessa Gebbie
The Coward’s Tale
novel excerpt
VANESSA GEBBIE
By the Town Statue, Outside the Public Library
‘M
y name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward.’ Those words
have echoed through this town once before. And today,
they will be said again by Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, small and
grey now in his khaki jacket and cap to almost match, the beggar
who sleeps in the porch of Ebenezer Chapel on a stone bench, his
kit bag for a pillow and a watch with no hands dropped to the
flagstones next to his boots.
The words will be said outside the Public Library, to a boy
called Laddy Merridew. They will be overheard by the town statue
– a collier struck from a single block of granite, a tumble of coal
round his boots. Been there for as long as anyone can remember,
that statue, standing and dreaming in all weathers, eyes downcast
as though he is deep in thought. When it rains, like today, water
drips off his hair and off his chin in memory of colliers lost one
September day down the pit called Kindly Light, although it was
neither. Colliers whose names once lived for evermore until their
plaque was unscrewed by the town lads and thrown in the lake up
Cyfarthfa.
155
But before the words are said, the bus comes down the hill to
deliver not only the boy but Mrs Harris and Mrs Price with their
shopping baskets and their lists. Mrs Eunice Harris, her hair all
mauve and well-behaved under a net, steps down from the bus in
front of Mrs Sarah Price, for after all her husband is Deputy Manager of the Savings Bank and Mrs Price’s is not.
Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins is at the bus stop, not waiting for
anything in particular. He is reading the bus times to see if they
have changed since yesterday, and they have not, so he raises a
finger to his cap in welcome to Mrs Harris, who does not want
a welcome from any part of Ianto Jenkins the beggar, thank you
very much. The bus starts to move – then it stops. Someone has
forgotten to get off.
A boy of ten or thereabouts comes stumbling down the steps
of the bus, his socks round his ankles. His hair is very red and
very untidy. His fringe is too long and his glasses have slipped
right down his nose. There is no one to meet him. He is clutching a small brown suitcase to his chest, this bright-haired boy in
a stained school raincoat several sizes too small, its belt tied in a
knot as there is no buckle. He was dreaming on the bus with his
head against the window, a bad dream full of the bad words that
come up at night through the floorboards when his mam and dad
think he’s asleep.
The bus pulls away again. The boy tries to push the glasses
back up his nose, trips on a shoelace and falls before Ianto Jenkins
can catch him. The suitcase bursts open on the pavement, spilling out a wooden drum wrapped in a pair of pyjamas, a few pairs
of old pants, a toothbrush and a blue knitted jumper. The boy
looks at his hands. They aren’t clean. He’s skinned the palms, and
skinned his knees. He tries to rummage in his raincoat pockets
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for a handkerchief without hurting his hands any more than they
hurt already, but there isn’t one. Tears come, all quick and hot and
angry.
Mrs Harris and Mrs Price do not know what to do with a boy’s
tears. They both take a step back with their shopping baskets, and
Mrs Harris opens a black umbrella with a snap, mouthing words
that look like clumsy and boys and mess.
It is Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins who hands something that
might be a handkerchief to the boy and mutters words like never
and mind before gathering the boy’s things back into the suitcase,
not forgetting to give the drum a pat. The small sound echoes off
the library wall.
Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins starts to smile at the sound as he
clicks the case shut, and as he straightens up slowly, muttering,
‘Oh my old bones,’ but when he looks at the boy for the first time,
properly, the words fade. The smile dies.
The boy does not see any of this. He sits on the kerb, peers at
his knees and dabs at them with the thing that might be a handkerchief, then he takes off his glasses to wipe his face, leaving behind streaks of blood and pavement. Ianto Jenkins, still looking
at the boy, shakes his head as if to clear it. He coughs and points
to his own nose; the boy half-smiles and rubs at his nose with his
sleeve. Mrs Harris and Mrs Price tut, and the boy winces as he
pushes the old man’s handkerchief into his pocket. ‘Sorry. Thank
you. I’ll get my gran to wash it,’ then he stands up and cleans his
glasses on the hem of his raincoat. He pulls up his socks, and when
he straightens they fall back to his ankles as if they are more comfortable down there. He sighs and shrugs and looks at the clock
that says ten past two on the pediment of the Town Hall, next to
the library.
He says again, to no one in particular, ‘Sorry.’ Then he looks
157
back up at the clock, ‘Can you tell me the time? I thought the bus
got in at half past, and where has lunchtime gone?’
There is a muffled reply from another timepiece, on Ebenezer
Chapel down by the cinema, where the bell was once wound with
a rag not to wake the minister and no one thought to take the rag
away now there are no ministers left. Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins
taps at his watch with no hands, ‘Sounds like half past something
to me.’
Mrs Eunice Harris pulls back the sleeve of her good coat and
checks her good watch. ‘Indeed yes. Half twelve,’ and waves a
hand at the Town Hall clock as if it was hers. ‘Always ten past two.
Someone put a nail in the time years back.’
The boy doesn’t answer, just says, almost to himself, ‘Said I’d
meet Gran in the library at half past. She cleans it some days,’
and he bends for his suitcase. But before he can pick it up, Ianto
Jenkins is carrying it towards the library, and the boy is limping
behind, ‘It’s all right. I’ll take it.’
The beggar waits for the boy, and says something about the
boy’s hands being all scraped raw, and he doesn’t mind carrying
it to the library. Because after all, ‘Factual’ Philips the Deputy
Librarian has a kettle and he makes a good cup of coffee.
They pass in front of the statue of the Kindly Light collier with
a tumble of coal round his boots, and the boy looks up at Ianto
Jenkins, ‘Thank you very much.’ There is a pause before he says in
a small voice, ‘My name is Laddy Merridew. I’m a cry-baby. I’m
sorry.’
The beggar doesn’t stop walking, doesn’t look at the boy,
doesn’t really answer. Except to say, ‘And my name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward. And that’s worse.’
And the two of them, old man and boy, coward and crybaby,
disappear into the Public Library with the suitcase.
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***
Mrs Eunice Harris frowns and nods as if they needed her permission to leave at all, then she turns to Mrs Sarah Price, who is gazing up at the face of the statue, and she does not lower her voice,
‘Did you see that? Pants on the pavement?’
And before the good ladies wander down the High Street with
their baskets, they stand in the drizzle under a single black umbrella to contemplate the statue.
‘I am sure that is the Harris nose. I wake up with that nose
every morning.’
‘Aww indeed, it may be the Harris nose but it hangs above the
Price mouth, will you see? No mistaking the Price mouth.’
Mrs Eunice Harris sucks at her teeth, ‘Hanging in the front
room that nose is, sure as anything, in a photograph all tinted
lovely. And a real ebony frame as well.’
But whichever way they look at him, and whichever of the town’s
men he is like, the rain wets the statue’s head, and drips off his
hair and off his chin. Off the Price mouth and the Harris nose, the
Edwards eyes with their beetle-brows, always frowning. It pools in
the folds of the sleeves and catches in the crook of a bent middle
finger just like the finger of Icarus Evans the Woodwork Teacher
who broke his own on a lathe. The widow’s peak and curls are the
spit of the Window Cleaner’s, Judah Jones, the ears beneath the
curls could be Baker Bowen’s from Steep Street, and are those the
long fingers of the Bartholomews, Piano Tuners, or the Littles who
like their gardening, and is the way he stands just like Tutt Bevan
the Undertaker or more like Philip ‘Factual’ Philips, owner of the
Public Library’s only kettle?
Who is to say? But all over the town, on the front room walls,
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high in the half-curtained dark, the town’s ancestors watch from
their ebony frames, their noses, ears and mouths all mirrors of the
statue’s.
The beggar Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins comes out of the Public
Library smartish, leaving Laddy Merridew to wait for his gran in
the Reading Room under a sign that tells the world to be quiet.
There is no coffee to be had today for Mrs Cadwalladr the Librarian has appropriated the kettle for a meeting. Ianto Jenkins stops
to check the face of his watch with no hands and it looks back at
him all blank and hopeful. He taps that face to see if might tell
him anything different, but it doesn’t, so he turns away towards
the bottom of town, pulling his collar up against the chill. As he
does the Kindly Light statue seems to nod. Ianto Passchendaele
Jenkins nods in return. He waves to Icarus Evans the Woodwork
Teacher, pushing his bike and its trailer full of off cuts up the High
Street. Then the breeze blows the beggar all the way down to Ebenezer Chapel, its porch and his home, leaving the statue to wait
in the rain for something or nothing to happen.
The Woodwork Teacher’s Tale
B
ut sometimes, the breeze doesn’t get as far as the High
Street. Sometimes it stops to play with the sheep’s wool
caught on fences on the hill above the town. Sometimes,
it gets through broken windows into the farmhouse that once
owned the fences, and shivers the cobwebs on the bedroom walls.
It toys with the frayed ends of string tying the front door shut and
wheedles itself under the barn door to send years-old chaff rattling
against the tin walls. It shakes the windows of the caravan next to
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the barn, where the carpenter Thaddeus Evans, who the lads call
Icarus, may not yet have woken, for it is early. Then it gives up
playing with his windows, and ruffles the feathers of two chickens
crooning at the bricks under the caravan. No wheels, that caravan.
Never goes anywhere. Just sits and slumps on its bricks in the yard,
watching Icarus Evans coming and going to the school down the
hill where he teaches the lads to work with wood.
‘Mr Evans, Mam says can I make a new mahogany dining
table for her Auntie May up Penydarren?’
‘Of course – best learn to use a chisel first, is it?’
***
Icarus Evans will shake his head and smile to himself as he pushes
his bike back up the hill after school, with its trailer carrying off
cuts from Tutt Bevan the Undertaker, too good to waste. The town
is graced with those off cuts. A nursing chair for number eight
Tredegar Road, passed from house to house when four babies appeared exactly right. Sets of mahogany and pine dominoes on the
shelves of the Working Men’s Club at the bottom of the hill, and
perfectly matched bedside tables for the Deputy Manager of the
Savings Bank and his wife, but their bedroom floor is uneven so
both glasses for the false teeth go on one table, where they can
smile at each other until morning.
Making a boat, Icarus Evans is now, a rowing boat, its ribs sitting
bare on a pallet behind the caravan, each rib a different wood, each
plank for the sides. Mahogany, birch, hornbeam, ash, and all their
cousins. Covered with an old tarpaulin to keep off the rain.
Over beyond the caravan and the boat and the barn is the
single stony field left of the farm, for the rest have been swallowed
by the Brychan estate on the edge of town, and its noise. There are
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no sheep in this field now, all sold at market for mutton, but wild
ponies sometimes come to graze. And in the furthest corner, under
the roots of rowan trees fenced round by wire long rusted, there is
a spring. A spring that sends its water into a stream that once ran
free down the hillside to join the river in the valley, but now which
disappears into a stone culvert by the track. A spring where the
boys from the Brychan come at weekends to play and to watch the
growing of Icarus’s boat.
‘There’s lovely, Icarus, that boat. Who’s it for then?’
Icarus may not reply except to say, ‘Mr Evans to you, lads,’ and
will carry on planning and shaping the boat’s ribs as curls of wood
tumble across the yard.
And the lads will go laughing to drop pill bottles into the
spring. Little brown bottles that once held aspirin or something for
stomachs, half-forgotten behind packets of Paxo in kitchen cupboards, with no pills in now, but messages to girls they may never
meet: ‘Mine’s floating, going see? Going to Australia!’
Some are taken. Off to Australia they go, bobbing under the
tree roots and into the tunnels under the town for the water to
chuckle at their profanities. And others are swallowed, the words
never read except by the earth. They are sucked under when the
spring stops bubbling like it does now and then and goes still and
dark. Like the water is from a pulsing vein and there’s a halt in the
heartspring.
Then the lads run off back to their streets, leaving just one,
the new boy Laddy Merridew, who has not sent messages. He just
hung back to watch the rest, sent out to play by his gran when he
was happier not playing at all. He picked at the bark of a tree with
a dirty fingernail, then perhaps he waited behind to peer into the
spring to see what it might tell him. Maybe the water stopped bubbling again, and just looked back at the boy, reflecting not just his
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questions but the rowan berries over his head.
In the blear of morning, Icarus Evans may sit on the bench in the
yard with a mug of hot tea and some bread spread with jam from
the bullaces that grow near the spring. And when he has eaten, he
may go back into the caravan and return with a small cage made of
rowan twigs stripped smooth and green as fingerbones. A cage no
bigger than the cupping of his two hands. And he will be talking
soft, whispering to the cage while he sits with his bare toes drawing runes in the dust. Then he places the cage on the earth and
bends to unlatch the door, winding a thin string round one finger.
A string tied light but strong round the leg of a small bird.
Icarus Evans clears his throat, ‘Morning, Bird.’
Perhaps the bird will come out and stand with its head on one
side to think about how big it is, this new cage. And with one
wing dragging, in small runs and starts it will search the dust for
food. Maybe a few rowan berries brought for the purpose from the
spring. Icarus Evans will keep watch from his bench, letting out
the bird’s string, scanning the yard for cats, until there is the bark
of a dog on the track, ‘Come here, Bird,’ and he winds the string
in slow, then bends to take the bird up in his hand. It comes to
him easy, eye bright, and back in the rowan cage it goes as the dog
comes snuffing into the yard before running through the field to
the spring to find a drink.
Icarus Evans washes in that spring every morning, for it is the
only running water left at the farm. He will splash his face, his
beard, shaking like the dog shakes, then smoothing his hair down
neat for school. He will cover the boat with its tarpaulin, just in
case. Before tying up the door of his caravan with string, he will
look round inside. At walls covered in pictures of places he has
never been, cut out of brochures from the travel shop in the High
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Street. Paper palaces on paper canals and mountain cities hung
with flags that flap their messages to a paper wind.
Off he goes, pushing his bike across the yard to the track over
the culvert, where the water is chuckling this morning deep in its
own throat. And he will disappear down the track to the road by
the Brychan estate on the edge of town, on his way down the hill,
to school, a bundle of off cuts in his trailer and his head full of
small plans.
To school he goes, then, on his bike, and on the way he may pass
Tommo Price in his suit off to be Clerk at the Savings Bank.
‘Morning, Icarus.’
Or he may see the lads from the Brychan in the doorway of
the dressmaker’s trying to light a butt end found on the pavement,
‘Morning, Icarus.’
‘Mr Evans to you. Put that out, will you?’
Or he may pass Peter Edwards, Collier until they closed Deep
Pit a few months back, the last pit to close round here, too – sitting on the steps of the Kindly Light statue outside the library and
looking at his hands – but Peter Edwards just nods and says nothing, for there is nothing to say.
And at the school does Icarus go in with the other teachers, to
be all serious with black looks and exhortations to the lads not to
be lads at all but to be as old as they are themselves? He does not.
Round the back he goes, parks the bike in a rack, then takes the
bag of offcuts from the trailer and carries it to a hut with a locked
door. ‘Carpentry’ it says. And ‘Mr Thaddeus Evans’ in case he forgets he has a name other than Icarus. Through the metal window
with its cracked panes he can see his workbenches, his shelves, his
tools hung all neat on the walls.
In he goes and shuts the door, lifting his face to an air hanging
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full with the sweet smell of pine. He may raise his face and shut his
eyes, to breathe in the scents while the lads are still half-listening
in the Assembly Hall.
Under the workbenches there are pale curls and shavings, as
whorled as fingerprints with patterns that ran once under the skin
of trees. Icarus may pick up a few and stand there to uncurl the
wood, to feel the oils deep in the flesh. To see if the wood splits and
snaps in his fingers, or whether it uncurls easy and lissom. Those
that do not split he saves, and puts them in a box on his desk.
He checks the time, then looks at the shelves round the walls
of his workshop. At the boxes on the shelves, labelled for every year
Icarus Evans has been a teacher in this place. Thirty years. Thirty
boxes, on shelves that span floor to ceiling.
Icarus Evans watches the lads crossing the playground, new lads to
this lesson, all brave now, swinging their bags and play-punching,
most. He is wondering, maybe, if there is a real carpenter among
them, such as he has never been, for all the bedside tables he has
made, all the chairs, dominoes and benches. Not really. Not yet.
He listens to the lads’ chatter as they settle,
‘I’ll make a cart to ride down the hill,’
‘Or a box for secrets,’
‘A rocking chair for my gran,’
‘A set of wooden spoons,’
‘A boat like Mr Evans is making up the farm,’
‘A rocket, me,’
‘A wooden rocket? That’s daft…’
Then he tells them to gather round, and he takes down one box
from the shelves, one of the thirty. Lifts the lid to show the lads
what’s inside.
Is it a set of carved spoons? Loving spoons to show how clever
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the lads were with their hands, those who left a long time back to
work with numbers, letters, things that need no clever hands? Is
it blocks of different wood? Blood-red mahogany and the pearl of
hornbeam or the glow of pine, for the boys to feel the difference?
Not at all. The lads peer into the box to see nothing but a pile of
wooden feathers, fashioned from shavings gathered from the floor
and saved. Some delicate and others solid and ham-fisted.
Icarus looks at the lads, then, all of them: the boys who tried to
light the butt end outside the dressmaker’s shifting in the middle
of the group, another gang from the Brychan who come to drop
pill bottles into the spring, right to the red-haired boy in glasses at
the back trying not to be seen.
All new this boy Laddy Merridew, his glasses shining, hair cut special by his gran this morning with her dressmaking scissors to keep
it out of his eyes, his parting white as chicken meat. Bitten nails.
His school trousers mothball-smelling cut-off s from the back of a
wardrobe, belonging to a dead grandad. And that same grandad’s
shirt, its tail hanging out and smelling of more mothballs while
another lad inks ‘Stinker’ into the hem in blue biro. But Laddy
Merridew does not notice this as he is listening and watching as
Icarus talks.
‘Here’s the test, lads. To see the watermarks. To find wood that
is made to be feathers. There’s feathers made by every boy I have
ever taught, right by here –’ and he taps the side of the box to hear
the feathers settle with a whisper.
Icarus waves at the walls of the workshop, at the boxes with
their dates, at the thousands of feathers in the boxes. Then he goes
quiet. He picks one maybe two feathers from the box on his desk.
The best. And he calls the new boy forward, and asks his name.
‘Ieuan Merridew, Mr Evans,’ but his words are swamped by
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laughter when another boy answers ‘Stinker’ as well. ‘But they call
me Laddy back home.’
Then more shouts of ‘Stinker’ and ‘Mothballs’ and ‘Ginger’
follow him to Icarus’s table, but Icarus takes no notice, just smiles
at him. He gives the worked curls of wood to the boy called Laddy
Merridew and asks, ‘Are these feathers, then?’
‘Yes, Mr Evans. No, Mr Evans.’
‘Do they feel like feathers?’
The boy runs his fingers along the outer edge of the curls. ‘No,
Mr Evans.’
‘Ah. Sad, then. Do they behave like feathers?’
‘Sorry, Mr Evans?’
‘Will they float on the air like a feather will? Drop them and
see, will you?’
Here, Icarus Evans pulls out a chair and the boy climbs up in
his old trousers, his shirt-tail hanging out, and the others laughing but jealous for all that. Laddy Merridew waits for a moment
for the air to be right, and he holds first one and then the other
wooden feather high over his head and lets them go.
There will be a hush then. Despite themselves, the lads are
willing the feathers – made by older lads, their heroes – willing
them to find the smallest of up-draughts, willing them to fall a
little, willing their carpentry teacher to start a smile as one stops
– there! Like that. Magic! For it to pause in the air on that updraught like a hand has caught it, invisible. Willing it to catch the
movement of the air made by the breathing in and out of thirty
boys and one man. Willing it to float, gentle and swaying, willing
it to side-slip and be caught in the real ink-stained fingers of a boy.
There! Did you see? It floats!
But do any do this? Have any done this in all the years that Icarus
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Evans has been teaching the lads at the school? No. None. The
wooden feathers all fall straight to the floorboards to meet the
sawdust, for they have never stopped being wood, and are simply
going home. Not one, not a single one in all those years has ever
floated on the air like a real feather, for all the trying.
Just like these two feathers dropped by the new boy Laddy Merridew, who stands on his chair to hear laughter, and the magic
is broken, the ‘maybe’s have vanished and there’s a lad just here
holding his nose.
Laddy climbs down and Icarus Evans is saying, ‘There you are.
You have lessons with me for a year. And by the end of the year
maybe one of you will have made me a feather that will float?’
The lads all smile at one another and nod, and not one makes
plans to carve wooden feathers that float on the air. For such a
thing, as everyone already knows, cannot be done.
‘But will we make tables, Mr Evans? And chairs?’
Icarus Evans sighs, puts the wooden feathers back in the box
and closes it all up again for another day.
When he goes home at the end of the day, leaving the lads’ heads
full of plans for anything but feathers, does he stop at the Cat
Public House at the corner of Maerdy Street for a drink, or call
in at number eleven to see if old Lillian Harris has anything that
needs mending? He does not. He will call by Tutt Bevan the Undertaker’s, to ask if he has any offcuts today. He will take those
strips of mahogany or pine that were not born to be cob ns and
home he goes to the farm, to make himself a little supper, and after
supper to carve yet another feather himself. And then to work on
the rowing boat. To make another piece, another rib for the sides.
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Interview with
Vanessa Gebbie
by
adnan Mahmutovic
INTERVIEWER
Vanessa, it’s great to talk about your work again. The Coward’s
Tale is your first novel, after two short-story collections. Tell us
about it.
GEBBIE
Thanks Adnan – it’s good to be talking to you, and great to be
back in Stockholm, even if it is only on paper! The Coward’s Tale
took six years to write. It was the project that I returned to again
and again, whilst also writing my two collections of short fiction,
and a textbook. So it is my fourth book to be published, but was
probably the first one I started, if we’re talking chronologically.
INTERVIEWER
Tell us about your choice of characters.
GEBBIE
Each main character was based on popular images linked to the
men we know as The Twelve Apostles. That was part of my creative
process – to let those images provide the spark for each character.
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I also needed conundrums in each case – those issues that ensnare
them all at the start of their part of the narrative. Sometimes,
those issues are linked to the images. Sometimes not.
INTERVIEWER
Your characters are very real to me, and yet I cannot but be carried
away by their allegorical qualities. To what extent have you worked
with allegory?
GEBBIE
I have always enjoyed reading work that has many layers of meaning, not just a surface yarn, so naturally I may have been drawn
to creating the same sort of characters – ones whose actions illustrate some meaning other than the surface layer. Perhaps the
most obvious examples are the halfwit, Jamie ‘Half ’ Harris, and
the Deputy Bank Manager, Matty Harris. Without giving away
the story, for those who have not read it – there could be parallels
with the old Aesop’s fable ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’. I love those
old fables – they are so perfect. So right. Timeless.
INTERVIEWER
I love the idea of a beggar as a storyteller. There is something nostalgic about this hungry artist, who is honest about what he is, or
at least trying to come to terms with everything through these
tales.
GEBBIE
The character of the beggar, Ianto Jenkins, just appeared and took
over a backstory as I was writing, very early on, and he started
telling it as direct speech, as a story within a story. I did not deliberately, that is, consciously, create him, or that structure. I was
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trying to write it in third person, and limit the length - after all,
we are all taught to be sparing with backstory, aren’t we? However,
I believe in not ‘controlling’ creative writing, or it kills something
special - at least at first draft stage - so I let him have his head. And
he became so, so important! If this had happened when I was a raw
new writer, I’d have deleted him, or at least, tried to control his
contribution - and look what I’d have lost. When you say ‘Why a
beggar?’ the honest answer is ‘Because he took over...’ but I understand that you want more than that. I think he works better than
anything I could have consciously made up, first because he is an
outsider, and second, because I had no idea who he was, or why he
was a beggar, as I was writing the first drafts. From his privileged
position on the edges, he is able to look in on the town and make
his own judgments about people and their struggles.
The reader understands that he was at one point ostracised, but
does not know why – and that is how it happened for the writer
too. I just kept writing to find out what happened – so the narratives gradually reveal the why to the reader, as they did for me.
The boy, Laddy Merridew, is also an outsider. He’s been sent to
stay with his grandmother while his parents are sorting out their
marriage. He is lonely, lost, but stubborn, nobody’s fool, a spiky
little lad. Perhaps, for the first time, Ianto senses a kindred spirit.
And also, Laddy reminds him physically of his own brother – he
even gives him the same nickname, ‘The Maggot’ – and I wonder
if, when he is revealing himself, sometimes, whether he is really
addressing his brother, after all these years, not Laddy. There’s a
question...
INTERVIEWER
I know you talked about this novel as a collection, since each chapter is really a small stand-alone story. ‘Tale’ is the word you use.
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Each chapter is someone’s ‘tale’ that relates to a common past of
the characters, or the past of the previous generation.
GEBBIE
When it was an early work in progress, I thought of it as a collection of disparate pieces, all singing the same song, if you like
– but that wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want to produce a series
of interlinked stories that the marketeers could label ‘a novel’ for
sales purposes. So I worked for a year to undo the collection aspect of it, and create a backbone – deepening the relationship between Laddy and Ianto, for example. Allowing Ianto’s own story
to emerge and take on a significance that wasn’t there when the
Tales first emerged. So you can’t actually take any of the sections
out now – if you did, you’d have to edit heavily to remove those
parts of the greater story that make no sense without the greater
framework. Calling the sections ‘Tales’ not only added to a timeless quality (echoes of Chaucer, perhaps) but they also saved me
having to have chapters with numbers – I hate those – they hold
me up – too much of a roadmap.
INTERVIEWER
I agree with that. Numbers are just too cold, and your titles already set the stage. They function partly as opening lines. Your
story is anchored in history. I remember from a conversation a year
or two ago that you were concerned with the historical aspects of
the tale, the fact vs. fiction, the verisimilitude of places, characters,
etc. What decisions did you end up making? Do you feel you had
to sacrifice fiction for fact or fact for the sake of fiction?
GEBBIE
Although it is fiction, The Coward’s Tale certainly is anchored in
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reality on many levels, if not in actual history, if we’re being accurate. As far as the setting goes, it is grounded in my memories of
the town where I spent a lot of time as a child, Merthyr Tydfil, in
south Wales – the terraces, streets, houses, parks and hills. But a
child’s memory is faulty. Memories shift and change. Example – I
was absolutely sure that the library (where my mother first worked)
was a red stone building. I’d seen it many times. Been taken inside.
Visited it not that long ago. But it isn’t red at all. I’d invented that.
I was also told a lot of things by my late father, incidents from
his own childhood, as he’d recalled them. It seemed more respectful of the creative process to leave our memories intact, so I left
things exactly as I’d created them – and put in a note to explain
how I’d worked, at the end of the book. I didn’t want to upset
anyone living in Merthyr now. The town is not identified in the
novel. It is just The Town. But it would be obvious to anyone who
knows it – I refer to many real places. Including some that are
miles away, and I’ve shifted them closer because they needed to
be. Some streets don’t exist at all – I’ve moved whole mountains!
Some incidents happened – others didn’t. It doesn’t really matter
which is which.
Then there is the colliery, Kindly Light Pit, and the accident at
the heart of the history of the fictitious town. Kindly Light does
not exist – but is based on the many collieries, big and small, that
once peppered this part of Wales. I was very concerned that the
mining detail had to be correct. I wrote the sections to do with
the coal mining incidents, from my imagination and what little
knowledge I had from general life. Then I researched, after that
first draft was done, and changed what needed to be changed. I
didn’t want to weigh the story down with extraneous research. I’ve
read enough bad novels which don’t work because the author did
masses of research then decided it all had to be crammed in some-
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where, when actually it isn’t anything to do with the story. In
case it is of interest, I read the records of many mining accidents,
especially Universal Colliery at Senghennydd, which happened in
1913, causing over 430 deaths.
INTERVIEWER
You have one narrator, in a sense, but many tales. Tell us about the
intentions behind this choice. What did you want to accomplish
and what do you think the result was? Was there anything that
took you by surprise, something that didn’t work, or worked some
other way you have not anticipated?
GEBBIE
It was not a choice, not consciously. I wanted to write a book that
was not just a collection of short stories, and that was my only
intention. As far as the content is concerned, I wrote what I would
have liked to read, if I was the reader. Looking back, having one
narrator of the backstories and making him a different narrator to
the whole frame narrative, works fine. He delivers one man’s view
of events, one man’s understanding of the people, and who is to say
is he is 100% right? I liked that thought. The maybe, the what if....
As for surprise, so much of the detail took me by surprise as I
wrote. Nothing was really ‘planned’ as I’ve explained above, and I
do believe that if a writer isn’t delighted and surprised by the story
as it is born, why should the reader be? If I know what’s going to
happen, before I write, how boring is that? Why bother writing?
I know many writers do need to plot and plan, but I have never
understood that need.
Things that didn’t work? Oh yes, there were a lot of half-hearted attempts to start sections which then petered out, because I
was being too controlling. They lost the magic – I organised the
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lifeblood out of them, so I stopped once I recognised what I was
doing, deleted, and went back to where it felt right.
INTERVIEWER
This is of course a novel, but you try to create the sense of orality, of this older form of communicating that is really as open as
it is limited. Oral story-tellers didn’t care how large their audiences were. One person was just as good as a pub full of people,
or a circle of people around fire. They could also see the reactions
of their audiences. Is this something your thinking of when you
write? I’m asking because most your stories to me have the flow of
nice oral tale.
GEBBIE
The orality is surely a function of the voice of the piece? Once I
had a voice that felt absolutely right, I just wrote, not trying for,
or stretching for any effect other than to tell a good story. The
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voice is naturally the rhythms of the streets where my family came
from, and where I spent such happy times with my grandmother.
They are the rhythms of speech, the musicality and cadences of
the regional accent heard in my head as I wrote, that’s all. I didn’t
think about the reactions of the townsfolk, until after the draft
was done. It was also incredibly important for Ianto and for Laddy
to both experience the town’s reactions to the stories, and to react
themselves - that’s the most powerful thing.
INTERVIEWER
You use the conditional forms a lot, all these “may” and “will”.
In some cases they signal simultaneity of events and in some a future event that has not yet happened, but “may” happen, or “will”
happen. I get sense of cautiousness, as if we’re treading sensitive
grounds, intruding upon old ghosts and their sensibilities. What’s
the intention behind this?
GEBBIE
Hmm, as soon as the voice veered into the conditional, or the
future, bringing a ‘perhaps’ into the equation, I sat back and
thought, “I like that.” It added insubstantiality to the narrative
that felt right. It underlined that these were stories, and raised a
question as to their veracity. This was really pointed up when I
edited the drafts, I liked the idea, while I was polishing the manuscript, of playing with the reader, saying things like ‘rivers round
these parts never freeze in September’ for example, after leading
them through a story in which the Taff does just that. Who is
right? Me, or the reader’s imagination? Or history? (The Taff has
in fact frozen, but not in September, to my knowledge!) Or maybe
it is the story being in control of the writer, you see? Which is how
it ought to be...
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INTERVIEWER
I wonder about the function of repetition in your novel. This question is more like a short analysis, and I’d like you to comment on
my understanding of what’s happening in the novel.
While I know repetition is a technique, of course, I almost want
to speak about the “sense” of repetition, because one thing you
manage to do is repeat things without them standing out at the
moment of repetition. To give you an example, and this is perhaps
most common and striking in poetry, when the writer repeats a
phrase, it stands out and delivers an extra punch. Same happens in
your text except that certain repetitions are both frequent and so
much a part of a stronger flow of the prose that they are only semiperceptible. They help create this rhythm I like, but don’t poke
me in the eye, so to speak. Take for instance the chapter “In the
Porch of Ebenezer Chapel,” some hundred pages into the novel.
We get this story about the narrator and boots, and this short and
intense section is like an attempt at telling this thing about the
boots and how that defines the narrator, and inside that chapter,
things would be repeated, phrases, sentiments, feelings, thoughts,
facts, as if the narrator is unable to get there, to get at the source of
things, the essence he’s trying to convey. So he needs to get into
his mantra. Throughout the novel same things happen. Full names
of characters are repeated often and some characteristic facts about
them, as for instance Jenkins’s clock without hands, etc.
GEBBIE
Well, it’s just the voice of the novel, isn’t it? I’m not sure I can comment apart from observing that many readers find it poetic, or lyrical, and that’s partly due the rhythms of the prose, must be. When
I wrote, I went back and read absolutely everything out loud, over
and over and over, to make sure the rhythms were right, and rep-
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etition was an important part of that. I edited finally, right at the
word level, making sure each word really was where I wanted it
to be, many sentences start with ‘And’ for example – the beat is
as I wanted it – every time. Leave out the ‘and’ and you have a
very different rhythm emerging, more staccato. I wanted it to flow.
Compare the St James Bible. Read aloud it often has a mesmeric
effect on the listener because of the rhythms – no doubt intentionally – like a mantra, your word, but so right.
INTERVIEWER
Several reviewers have brought up Dylan Thomas as your influence, and you even have character by that name, Welsh and all.
What is your relationship to Thomas?
GEBBIE
He is a good drinking buddy ... And yes, he appears as himself in
The Coward’s Tale in Mrs Bennie Parrish’s shopping basket, and
why not? And the public house is called The Cat, it might well
have been The Captain Cat, but that would have been too much.
Seriously. I love his Under Milk Wood, as is evident. I learned a lot
from listening to it, and the cadences remind me so much of the
speech of my grandmothers and their neighbours, but, and there is
a very big ‘but’ here, I don’t do ‘pretty’. I am interested in the light
against the dark of things. There had to be more of a reason for me
to work on something for a long time, discovering a backstory, not
so much prettiness and whimsy.
I was probably more influenced in tone by In Parenthesis by
David Jones, who took a very serious subject, the progress of
WWI for a small group of Welsh soldiers up to one action on The
Somme, and related it as a play for voices/extended poem/novella.
Dylan Thomas knew it well, he acted in it in 1936 on BBC Radio.
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And then he came up years later, with the beautiful Under Milk
Wood, as a sort of exorcism of the darkness of the 2nd World War,
I think. And it IS beautiful, but if pushed, I prefer the deeper,
darker beauty of In Parenthesis.
It is very, very sad to see the David Jones now mainly relegated
to the dark and dusty corners of academia, and not enjoyed by
more readers. It is a wonderful, wonderful book, and dare I say
it, knocks Under Milk Wood into a tin hat. Here’s a section from
In Parenthesis, picked at random. This is after an action. R.E’s are
Royal Engineers – sappers, tasked with setting the wire, among
other things. Lewis refers to the Lewis gun, and bearers are of
course, stretcher bearers – but look at the raw and real beauty here:
And it’s nearing dark when the trench is digged and they
brought forward R.E.s who methodically spaced their picket-irons and did their work to and fro, speak low - catscradle-tenuous gear.
You can hear their mauls hammering under the oaks.
And when they’ve done the job they file back carrying
their implements, and the covering Lewis team withdraws
from out in front and the water party is up at least with half
the bottles punctured and travellers’ tales.
Stammer a tale stare-eyed of close shaves, of outside on
the open slope: Carrying parties, runners who hasten singly,
burdened bearers walk with careful feet to jolt him as little
as possible, bearer of burdens to and from stumble oftener,
notice the lessening light, and feel their way with more sensitive feet - you mustn’t spill the precious fragments, for perhaps these raw bones live.
They can cover him again with skin - in their candid
coats, in their clinical shrine and parade the miraculi.
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INTERVIEWER
That is really great. I never thought of it. Another question about
the importance of stories. At one point, the character Peter Edwards says, “Stories is bubbles” and the there is this exchange: “‘I
like stories, me.” “Me too. Nothing like a good story to pass the
time....”’ (310). I am quite curious about this. The ‘bubbles’ brings
back to mind your first collection Voices from a Glass Bubble, but
stories as ‘pass-time’ with the ellipsis right after, as if the thought
was not finished ... what are you doing here? I guess for a serious
writer like yourself, you do not want your stories to be mere passtime, but then maybe some of that pass-time quality of stories
must be retained as well.
GEBBIE
It was partly a tongue-in-cheek reference to my own book of stories, maybe, but also a raspberry to those who say that fiction is
meaningless. I don’t think it is – I think fiction is hugely important. And it is playing with the reader again, I suppose. They’ve got
to the end of the book, and it’s all air, mirrors, fiction – bubbles,
toys. Or is it? I know this Macbeth quote is selective, but it poses
a similar question: ”There’s nothing serious in mortality: All is
but toys...” But don’t ignore the effect of the stories, within the
novel. The last thing they are is ‘toys’. What effect have they had
on the townsfolk? They’ve liberated the main characters from the
clutches of the past. They’ve allowed the community to understand. They’ve exorcised the spirits. There is a healing power in the
stories: as someone says, “It is good to have it said.” And Ianto has
found redemption, if such is needed. He finds peace, at least.
INTERVIEWER
Thank you Vanessa. I wish you all the best with novel.
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Be Scanned and Procreate
FRANK ROGER
Contributors
Sally Anderson is a British American floating between the two worlds her double passports allow. She is connecting to her maternal heritage and gathering
material for a novel.
Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15-year-old photographer and artist who has won
contests with National Geographic, The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winston’s Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, and many
more.
Elina Borg Björnström’s favorite pastime are collages – assembled from cuttings or digitally made – and every picture is most likely to have her favorite
shape, the circle.
Salma Ruth Bratt is a professor of English and English pedagogy. She loves
her sweet and thoughtful children, traveling abroad, the theater of complex and
interesting playwrights, and the music of good listeners.
Andrea Brittan was born and educated in the UK and has spent the last twenty
years living in Hong Kong.
Anna Britten is an author and journalist from Bath. Her fiction has been broadcast by BBC Radio 4, published in the Bridport Prize Anthology 2010, the
Bloomsbury anthology Is This What you Want? and shortlisted for the Fish International.
William Cordeiro has previously worked as a NYC Teaching Fellow, a staff
writer at the theater magazine offoffonline, and an assistant editor of Epoch. He
has an MFA in poetry from Cornell.
Raymond Cothern studied writing at LSU under Walker Percy and Vance
Bourjaily. He is winner of the Deep South Writers Conference and the St Tammany National One-Act Play Festival and semi-finalist in the Playwrights First
Award.
William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most
recent collection is Waiting for the Angel (2009). In 2010 he won the Aesthetica
poetry award.
Luis H. Francia teaches literature at Hunter College and creative writing at the
City University of Hong Kong. His poetry collections include The Arctic Archipelago and other Poems, Museum of Absences and The Beauty of Ghosts.
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Vanessa Gebbie is the author of Words from a Glass Bubble, Storm Warning, and
A Coward’s Tale and a contributing editor of a creative writing textbook. The excerpt from A Coward’s Tale republished with the permission from Bloomsbury.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of
Dreaming in Red, The Devil’s Fuzzy Slippers and Personal Myths.
Jack Granath’s poetry has appeared in Poetry East, Rattle, and Confrontation
among other journals and magazines. He is a librarian in Kansas City.
David Groulx has published six poetry books: Night in the Exude, The Long
Dance, Under God’s Pale Bones, A Difficult Beauty, Rising A Distant Dawn, and
Our Life Is Ceremony. David is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, as
well as The Ontario Poetry Society.
Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque. He edits the anthology AdobeWalls
which contains the poetry of New Mexico. His latest book is This is not Black
& White.
Kyle Hemmings is the author of three chapbooks of poems: Avenue C, Fuzzy
Logic and Amsterdam & Other Broken Love Songs.
Marius F. B. Hohlbrugger, born in Stavanger, Norway, never meant to write
but an idea for a story caught him off guard after which he could not stop talking about it.
Angela Hur received an M.F.A. from Notre Dame University in Creative Writing. She is the author of the novel The Queens of K-town.
Nick D’Annunzio Jones is nom de plume for a former reporter for The New
York Times who teaches writing at Florida Atlantic University. His non-fiction
and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Details, Popular Culture and elsewhere.
Peycho Kanev is the Editor In Chief of Kanev Books. His works include a short
story collection Walking Through Walls and poetry collections American Notebooks, Bone Silence and Requiem for One Night.
Tom Lavelle, born and raised in Pittsburgh, lives in Stockholm. Since the late
1970s his poetry has appeared intermittently in literary journals in the US,
Canada, Ireland and Sweden.
David Lewitzky is a 72-year-old retired social worker/family therapist living his
sedentary life in Buffalo, New York. He has recent work in Nimrod, Red Wheelbarrow, River Oak Review and many other. “Watusi” was originally published
in Passages North.
Rodney Nelson has worked as a copy editor and lives in the northern Great
Plains.
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Tim Liardet has produced seven collections of poetry and is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University. His books received a Poetry Book Society Special
Commendation, short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and a Poetry Book
Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. The Blood Choir, his fifth collection
was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.
Adnan Mahmutović is a Bosnian Swede. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Stockholm University. His work includes Thinner than a Hair,
How to Fare Well and Stay Fair, and Ways of Being Free.
Sonnet Mondal is the author of six books of poetry and is the managing editor
of the Enchanting Verses International, editor of Best Poems Encyclopedia, editor
of Sonnets in the New Millennium and the Sub Secretary General of Asia Unit of
Poetas Del Mundo.
Bethany Newman’s creative work has been published in literary journals such
as elimae, in commercial publications, travel guides, and lately, she’s been
screenwriting for Swedish film producers.
Carl Palmer, nominated for the Micro Award in flash fiction and three Pushcart
Prizes, lives in University Place, Washington without wristwatch, cell phone or
alarm clock.
Amanda Papenfus earned her BFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State
University. Her poetry has appeared in Lyric: A Literary Chorus, Psychic Meatloaf, The Montreal Review and other publications.
Kenneth Pobo won the Qarrtsiluni 2011 chapbook contest for his collection
called Ice and Gaywings.
Joseph Reich has authored A Different Sort Of Distance, If I Told You To Jump
Off The Brooklyn Bridge, Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times Of
The Man Sawed In Half, Drugstore Sushi, Four Books Of Philosophy, The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians, All My Born Days, and Escaping Shangrila.
Frank Roger is a Belgian artist mainly doing collages and graphic work in a
surrealist and satirical vein, as well as a short story writer.
Paul Schreiber, lapsed minister and pilot, teaches poetry in the English Department at Stockholm University.
Kaitlin Solimine is from New England. She has recently placed her first novel
Empire of Glass with an agent.
Scott T. Starbuck is a Creative Writing coordinator at San Diego Mesa College.
His new poetry chapbook, Riverwalker, is forthcoming in 2012.
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J. J. Steinfeld is a Canadian poet, fiction writer, and playwright who lives on
Prince Edward Island. He has published ten short story collections, two novels,
and two poetry collections, the most recent ones being Misshapenness (Poetry,
Ekstasis Editions, 2009) and A Glass Shard and Memory (Stories, Recliner
Books, 2010).
Myung! Joh Wesner received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she also taught undergraduate fiction workshops.
Nicholas Y.B. Wong’s first poetry collection is City of Sameness. “Mirr-man-or”
first appeared in 580 Split. “An Incredibly Brief Morning Directory to the City”
in Poecology. (In this poem, the sources of italicized lines are: Li Po, “In the
Mountains: A Reply to the Vulgar,” Li Po, “Remembering the East Ranges,” Li
Po, “The Ballad of Ch’ang-kan” translated by Arthur Cooper, Tu Fu, “The Waterfall on Lu Mountain,” Luo Binwang, “On Hearing Cicadas in Prison,” Wang
Bo, “Farewell to Vice-Prefect Du,” Wang Wei, “A Song of Xi Shi.”)
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